chrisjsmith

Oh pedant, I thoroughly apologise for my ignorance. May my vegetables all die, my breath smell for eternity and my armpits flood with hair and engulf the earth.

Does it matter? Governments are bullies.

http://www.vvsss.com/grid/xkcd-on-crypto.gif

Here in the UK, we already have to hand over our keys or be chucked in jail.

As far as we know. The Russians weren't always that honest about who they blew up by accident.

If these are the problems you are trying to solve, just don't buy something with iOS on it.

That looks painful. I'd rather like to move it to an SOA and split it into logical feature partitions and use service composition and windows workflow to integrate it all. Typically, I don't think anyone wants to pay for that though.

"Vista Security 2012". It can't touch the root certs as you need elevated privileges to do that. The entire thing hijacks the user's shell via the registry. You can log in as another user on the machine and it appears not to be infected.

Quite well designed really :-)

Agree about Notes being as awful. I had to suffer that from '99-'02. Looked like it improved after that but you can't polish a turd as they say.

I've watched SharePoint go with a spectacularly large boom when some muppet renamed the AD domain... That was a fun two days of my life reverse engineering it believe me. Thank goodness they did write it on top of the CLR as it's easy enough to decompile then to work out what the hell is going on.

VS2010. Mainly the fact that the user interface is painfully slow[1] (either that or I'm unreasonably fast which is rediculous as Vim can keep up with me) and it just dies about 5 times a day on a good day. It might be the solution size though - it's got about 0.5 million lines of C# in it. Still it should work.

[1] On a quad core Xeon with 12Gb RAM, SAS disks and ATI FirePro card.

Fair point. I'll give you that.

Visual Studio is an awful product. It's bloated, performs badly, expensive and extremely unreliable.

Don't they run Django? Is there something we should know about?

Forget the UI. It's not important.

It MUST be common user functionality both for private and corporate users.

People have completely unjustified trust for these cloud-based services when in the face of it, they screw people's data up all the time. You should be able to maintain an offline archive of all of your data to guard against vendor failure.

To be 100% honest, at least here in the EU, I think they should legislate to make sure that a) you can get your data back when you so desire and b) the data should come back in an open format.

Because there are consultants. That is the only reason!

SLL certificates bring nothing other than a false peace if mind. I've seen fake antivirus software that goes to great lengths to provide verified (!) SSL encrypted pages to steal your credit card details.

I'd say that's not necessarily an advantage. Sharding is incredibly complicated to get right considering all factors such as balancing and recovery.

I'd rather partition the data based on function onto distinct clusters, you know like eBay do.

You can update the indexes in a transaction too, so that's not necessarily an issue. MySQL has problems with this due to locking but the MVCC implementation in PostgreSQL allows much better concurrency.

You HAVE to buy Outlook to get the PST file out by syncing your local outlook with the Exchange Live server which is unacceptable. You can't access the data any other way.

That will end up in pain and tears for thousands of students and staff alike.

My trial of Office 365 lasted 45 minutes i.e. until I realised how much pain it is to get data back out of the Outlook and Sharepoint implementations. They just don't want you to do it.

It's the WORST lock in I've seen in any product.

The irony of this is that it's actually quite easy to build a document store on top of PostgreSQL that performs very well indeed. I tried it. I used a similar approach to the one described at [1]. You get the advantage of years of experience (never underestimate this!), MVCC, transactions, consistency and replication as well.

(yes I know it doesn't "perform" as well as the other NoSQL stores but performance is not without tradeoffs [2])

[1] http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql

[2] http://www.caradvice.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/Ferra...

I think the rediculous thing is more that he spent that much time making a blog post because he made a mistake whilst obviously trying to do something quickly without thinking.

I think the blogger was being an idiot. You should check the authenticity of what you are downloading, not just snag it.

It's like eating a kebab dropped in the street.

Interesting - thanks for the link.

Centralised DNS = bad. That's the issue.

Yes the DPA does cover you on the same basis that linked parties on a credit file can be obtained under the act.

Stored lists of related individuals are covered by the DPA 1998, just not their personal details other than their name. This is not explicit but implied by the fact that related people on a credit file can be obtained under the DPA setting a precedent for access.

This has been demonstrated a few times in court but I can't be bothered to dig around for references.

And you believe the mind and its internal processes are capable of surviving that long even with no ageing?

As with all chaotic processes, I reckon it will decay faster than our no longer ageing meat containers [1]...

[1] http://baetzler.de/humor/meat_beings.html

A lot of assumptions there.

Most of us die old bar any Darwin award entries. We're just redefining the term/symbol "old" when looking at anti-ageing.

Circumventing "mother nature" will just get us fucked another way. I reckon the first will be due to the social divide and emotional problems caused by those who can afford to live substantially longer.

My hypothesis is that population is self-regulating in some way, be that socially or evolutional.

Personally, I really do think the fact that people put their careers before reproducing, therefore leading to problems later on is why there are fertility problems amongst developed nations. A huge number of people here in the UK don't have children until very late on and then have to rely on IVF which is not a flawless process.

The less "developed" (which is ironic) nations have less of a fertility crisis [1].

At the risk of sounding like some crazy hippy, this is all down to the short-sightedness of capitalism and globalisation self-destructing under its own rules. I think the article you linked neatly describes the arrogance that people should be able to control fertility rates.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...

* edit - cite your sources!

You are welcome :-)

I'm against life extension. I think science has the wrong end of the stick.

Whilst death looks like a scary thing and the primary motivation is to avoid the scary bit, people need to keep dying or the population increase caused by them not dying is going to make the standard of living for everyone very low. It's pretty selfish really.

It's better to had a prosperous and happy existence than live 5x as long and suffer through it.

Anything which is not tactile is bad if you ask me. That means capacitive buttons, touch screens etc. Even Star Trek shot themselves in an episode when a blind person had to use a panel:

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tactile_interface

Now I'm not partially sighted, but I'm not always looking at the display.