Posts by The Cube

Re: Academics vs businesspeople

You missed out the option that the government and their corporate donors would prefer you to take;

6) Try to create a business, jobs and economic growth with your idea but don't patent it because you can't afford it. Before you ship your 100th product discover that an established party donor ^h^h^h^h company in the sector has ripped off ^h^h^h^h miraculously simultaneously invented your idea and patented it and is now suing you out of existence for having the temerity to bring a better product to market and disrupt their milking of customers with second rate crap.

Re: Shall we start a book...

Yep, I'll go for;

- Less than 1% tax

- More than £1million donated to the party currently in government to make sure we have to pay the tax they don't want to.

Re: Argh!

Didn't you know, since the clandestine meetings where it was all decided for us the BBC only has Green journalists, anyone saying anything else is burned at the stake for witchcraft and heresy.

Advocate criminal charges against anyone who loses a company USB stick

Stop trying to pretend this is equivalent you muppet.

If you want to phrase the question appropriately then we could try;

"Do you advocate criminal charges for repeated and systematic failure to implement or follow processes to control personal data, the release of which is likely to cause a direct threat to the lives, reputations or employment of those concerned?"

Or are you the sort of daily mail reading tosser who thinks that everyone "investigated" by the Plod is guilty of something, they just haven't found the evidence yet?

And for the record, yes, I think that if, say Experian, were this careless with data then the responsible parties should be dismissed for gross misconduct and then face investigation for possible criminal charges. The fact here is that because it was Police the worst that will happen is that the IPCC will make a show of pretending to investigate and then back off like the puppet it is as soon as the Plod union barks. After which the employees responsible can go back to beating up suspects and trawling through our personal data under RIPA without a warrant, oversight or due process.

Stats fail aside he has a point

Many users still naively believe that "search" is supposed to find relevant pages related to your search term, quaint I know.

Unfortunately, when they search for common terms that marketing worms have used the ironically named "Search Engine Optimisation" on or worse google / bung have sold crapwords for the results are page after page of sponsored utter shite.

Try searching for "Product Name review" and you'll get Google Shopping (or the Bung equivalent), endless content copying scam sites (sorry, useful content aggregators who shouldn't all be bombed with agent orange), page after page of generic ecommerce sites with the product out of stock and zero reviews etc. etc. etc. Of course if you fall for the "Google shopping" most of those links will also be to content aggravators who are just another bloody pile of links to somebody, in some other country, who at some point in the past or future might have the product in stock for $3 plus $100,000,000 shipping.

Search engines ceased to be useful for many things quite some time ago, spotting the difference between the external "link poisoning" and that done by the search engine operator is rather hard.

Re: Iran - FFS

PANIC ! PANIC ! THE HOMERSEXUAL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT TERRERISTS ARE COMING !

FFS you moron, your description is also perfect for the United Kingdom and the United States of America, many other cultures and countries consider our leadership to be crazy Christians, one of us has actually nuked another country, both of us sell weapons to anyone whose goals temporarily align with ours irrespective of human rights or anything else. Our politicians do whatever they need to do to support the perceived security and prosperity of the voters they need to re-elect them in a few years time, any ethical objections find themselves sidelined by other considerations well before the election for the vast majority of politicians. Go ask Ollie North if the good ol US of A has ever dealt with terrorists, or even better, ask if they have sent the NORAID senators who funded the IRA for decades for trial in the UK. (Not USA bashing, BAE and our Govt are just the same, they do what is expedient at the time.)

If you believe the story spouted by western politicians about Iranian weapons then you presumably also saw with your own eyes the massive stockpiles and factories for NBC weapons we found in Iraq which were ready to launch in 45 minutes...

Go back to hiding under the Daily Mail

Re: Sooner this is done

You have clearly never had the good fortune to deal with the ITU if you think they would be any less bad at this than the US.

The ITU is populated by telecom companies working to prevent any risk of competition or consumer choice with a light sprinkling of government representatives working to make sure no progress at all is made. The organisation is entirely political and about as much value for normal people as a G8 summit.

Re: Sorry but no

You've never had a set of balanced armature headphones have you...

The headphones you list are barely better than what comes in the box with most players. I used a set of CX-300 for about a week before moving on to something which did less mangling of the recording I was listening to.

As another has already commented though, at this price you are close to a pair of Shure or Westone IEMs and the TDK will have to be very good to compete with those. I personally found the Shure 425 to be feeble and thin, great for female vocal but utterly useless for rock or anything with bass. The westone 3, if you can get a seal blows away anything I have ever heard from Sennheiser, Klipsch, Shure etc. etc. Oh, and please don't even mention "farty bass by Dre" those horrors should result in a criminal conviction for grievous harm to audio.

Got that the wrong way around

We could equally well say that what is lagging behind is the power efficiency and power management technology to provide the capabilities. If you look back over the history of battery powered compute devices such as mobile phones and laptops you'll see that most of the gain has come through reduction of energy consumption rather than increase in energy storage.

Re: Headlines

Chris,

I really do hope that G-Cloud works.

Having worked in places which fed from the teat of government programmes and seen how my tax gets spent I can vouch for why things cannot continue as they are. I am not just bashing the suppliers here, the fault seems to be fairly equally distributed between incompetent procurement on the part of the government departments who all want a custom everything because, you know, they really are a unique special snowflake and the suppliers who tend to be greedy and inept as an organisation. The rule of thumb was that if a government project needed "secure" then you charge 3 times what you charge commercial customers for exactly the same service. Again, not all supplier greed, the government customers will keep moving the goal posts and obstructing your delivery because they haven't got a clue what they actually need and can't write a service definition or specification.

As for not allowing individual SLAs, whoohoo! a voice of sense and reason is heard for once! Keep it up! I distinctly recall a project where the procuring department insisted that the service must meet a very high availability target to manage risk to life. I had to break the news to them weeks before go live that the contract they had negotiated and signed gave the requested availability excluding rather than including scheduled maintenance windows and that we would expect to see at least one less nine net service availability and maintenance outages of several hours.

Forcing the contract length down is another master stroke, no more low-bid and milk it all back with change request charges and additional fees over the 5 year lock in.

Again, I really hope you succeed with G-Cloud, buying IT services should not be stuck in the Victorian era, I do hope those who benefit from the current waste of public money don't manage to derail or distort the project too much.

I think you are missing some cultural telco issues Andrew

Telcos tend to be bloated bureaucracies full of unproductive staff who have very poor motivation levels due to an inability for anyone to achieve anything or to change the internal culture which stops them achieving. Many got this way by being a de-facto or royal chartered monopoly across large chunks of the globe and the mind set has not changed. Telcos are not a meritocracy where the innovative and productive get promoted, they are spat on and undermined by the herds of bovine wastrels who are still there because they can't get a job anywhere else and don't want to be shown up as useless and unproductive. The senior execs stay long enough to get a golden parachute and the good ones are gone well before it becomes obvious that their "changes" reinforced rather than addressed the underlying chronic issues.

In a telco, the investment case will be based on a 10 to 20 year lifecycle, the culture does not allow anything shorter than this, thus the need for uber standards that take ETSI or GSMA 5 years to bugger up, sorry, refine. You need standards like this if you are going to live with them for 20 years. This problem does not exist in the land of Twitter and Salesforce.

In a telco the management exist in a binary state of either;

a) No investment in new services, particularly non core, use all value added services to drive core network and billing traffic, that is our core business

b) We can't afford to be just a big dumb pipe, we must extend into the value added services, our pipes give us the competitive advantage over everyone else.

Clearly, these two result in an oscillation within the organisation rather than any sustained progress, any employee who could innovate and drive the dinosaur forward will leave in < 1.5 cycles or simply lose the will to live. Again, in an app store world this problem doesn't exist as the lean and agile app store vendor knows what they want to do and if they don't the other 5 just like them do and will out-compete them.

Data doesn't even need to be routed back to the UK ???

Unfortunately you are quite wrong here.

The mobile carriers have to route all the data back to the home network for two important (not to the customer) reasons.

1) So that your government can be sure they can snoop on you without a warrant or your permission, how are they going to do that if all your traffic doesn't go through a facility within their jurisdiction?

2) So that the mobile carrier can dick about with your data and do things like embed you mobile number in the HTTP headers so they can get in the billing stream. If they are not in the billing stream how are they going to keep their dirty little paws in your pocket? If you just "get to the Internet" then you have realised their worst fear and turned them into what they really are, just a dumb commoditised pipe.

The fix to this is easy, I have a wallet full of local PAYG SIM cards for all the countries Vodatheft want to rob me for (i.e. those that Ms Reding didn't fix such as the USA). I put the PAYG with the local number (which all the people there want to call me on anyway) into my "smart" phone and put the VodaSIM into a cheap Nokia dumb phone so people can still call my UK number.

What about the astroturf then?

Whilst I appreciate the issue that some people like Microsoft and others prefer Fruity tin and you don't want fanboy flame wars (that is what ZDnet is for) you cannot be seriously trying to say that there is no astroturf on el Reg?

I have read (and commented on) quite a few articles which look suspiciously like the stuff that my corporate PR agency pay "journalists" to write and then pimp round various outlets. These are very easy to spot once you are familiar with the method, they talk about a technology or a product category without any reasonable balance and in entirely credulous and uncritical terms (thinking of a particular article on retail payment tech here). The article will only obliquely name the sponsor, if at all, but will clearly be trying to create the impression that the sponsor's product or service is meeting a deeply important and necessary need and should be welcomed with open arms.

As for the infestation of "corporate reputation management" slime in the comments, it is well above zero and we all know this, when will el-Reg face up to this obvious reality and provide an astroturf icon for these posters to be clearly labelled with, tis easy, just add to the Vote Up / Vote Down a "Vote Astroturf" option then it takes a reasonable number of people rather than just one basement dwelling fanboy...

John, you've clearly never been involved in procurement..

In any large corporate or government funded org the way procurement works is that the sales gimp for the vendor humps the leg of the budget holder in the target customer until they give in and say "I need to demonstrate how this investment will yield cost savings". The sales gimp then goes round the target org and finds all the expensive inefficiencies they can and makes up completely unrealistic ways in which their magic tech could, in another universe, downhill with a following wind, reduce these inefficiency costs. These costs, by the way, are guessed at by the sales gimp because the corporate / government funded agency is completely unable to explain any of it's costs, it is too busy being an inefficient corporate (or in the case of the Met killing civilians and evading prosecution). The sales gimp then adds up the total guess (erm cost) and this is presented as the "saving".

Fast forward a couple of years and shock, horror! none of the savings have materialised but the sales gimp has his / her commission and the purchasing budget holder has moved on to another job based on the enormous imaginary cost savings they "achieved" in their previous role, having carefully legged it before anyone realised there was nothing behind the curtain.

The fact that the NAO finds any improvement should be cause for celebration for anything that has gone through government procurement, look on the bright side, they could have spent all that money with Capita....