The reason is they hardly have to do any work for Itanium; they just have to QA a 8-core system instead of a 4-core one. The original port was done over a decade ago. With 20/20 hindsight it was a wrong move, the right one being presumably to tell Intel to shove it and wait a few years for the x64.

Someone that has a 2 or 4 core processor Itanium system already. If anything is a non-starter it's the x86 version.

Yes, of course. I was making a joke. Obviously not a very good one.

However, those that haven't passed the exam won't be allowed to sue; Tisias must be laughing in his grave. Seriously, though, the whole online examination business needs a shakeup.

As well as being entirely untrue, of course, given the number of incompatible format changes Office has gone through over over the years.

They will sell you a .66U spacer, or a 13U box that fits three of them. It may be a dumb idea but not that dumb.

If it doesn't it's time to switch supplier. If they all hold their prices, then they risk being investigated as an illegal cartel. So, maybe not immediately but it creates a downward pressure.

If he had 10 million dollars, he wouldn't need to.

As far as London taxis go there are two sorts of taxis: the familiar black cabs, and minicabs. Black cabs have the privilege of being able to be hailed by a passing passenger, whereas mini cabs need to be booked through their firm.

The main public interest in this distinction is that booking minicabs means that a third party will have a record of the passenger and driver, if the police need to come looking to see what has happened to the passenger. It takes years of training to know London well enough to get a taxi licence, so it's something of a barrier to someone with criminal intent.

The thing about Uber, is that it provides a very efficient way of linking up minicabs with passengers, whilst maintaining the record that the law requires. However, the taxi drivers have got used to the inconvenience of having to book the competition as their competitive advantage.

Thank you for posting this. I'm rather tired by the constant stream of posts here that claim if we just switched to Thorium/Helium-3/Unobtainium, we would have all our energy problems solved by the end of next week. It's good to see an intelligent discussion of the real engineering problems involved for a change.

Sorry, but that's grade A nonsense. There isn't any chemical that is completely harmless to humans.

I think the appeal court got it largely right: API design is a creative process. Anyone with any experience in programming knows that some APIs are well designed, others are bad ones. I think it's a nonsense to claim the API is a fact.

I don't like Oracle, and I don't really like the consequences of this ruling. However, Google really pushed the boundaries of copyright law to the limit here. And if people choose languages that are explicitly free to reimplement in future, that's a good thing.

Then the seed companies would lobby for laws to make sharing seeds illegal. If you think that is being paranoid: it's already happened. http://permaculturenews.org/20... (it didn't pass - that time).

Er, no. The special theory deals with inertial frames, you need the general theory for non-inertial frames. According to the general theory, you can't tell the difference between gravity and acceleration. So, you can claim that you were stationary on a roundabout and the rest of the universe swirling about you caused space to warp in such a way as to cause you to fall off. That's a perfectly valid interpretation according to general relativity, if a somewhat egocentric one.

I don't think a random MP or MEP saying something particularly intelligent or unintelligent counts as news. MPs or MEPs will be found talking to almost every lobby group you can imagine at some point. And, because they are elected by proportional representation across a variety of languages and cultures, MEPs in particular will have a very diverse range of views.

To be honest, I would be happier if /. didn't run any such stories, because on average politicians say a lot more stupid things than sensible ones. Actual policies would be different.

Much more than that, obviously. You don't replace the operating system, reinstall and develop specialist applications for £5 a PC. Of course, paying for extended support doesn't move you forward, so you have to some sort of migration next year.

And really, as a taxpayer (IMHO), you (and I) should be wondering how the NHS managed to piss £10 billion away on a failed IT project, and how we can avoid them doing it again. £5 million across the whole of government is fairly small beer to keep existing systems going, compared to the amount you could blow on a load of migration projects.

  It sucks that some departments are going to miss the deadline but the questions I'd like to know the answer to are 'what are their migration projects for next year?' and 'are they on track to be completed before the extended support runs out?'. Have they got a credible plan, and it's just slipped a little, or is it a total fuck up? That, to me, is the big money question.