My main one is using this plugin: http://www.viemu.com/ :)

I think the Lib Dems should go only for proportional representation, as their only demand. If that goes ahead, their views can be considered in line with their vote share for every future election. That has to be a great result, even if it means for this (most likely short lived) parliament, they are sidelined once more.

But if you look outside of southern England, the accepted wisdom in many areas, particularly Scotland, is that the Conservatives aren't going to win a seat. I think a lot of voters in these areas vote Lib Dem or other parties as their way of voting for not-Labour.

As it is, there's little point voting Conservative if you know they'll only get 10% of the vote. They just won't win the seat, and your vote will mean very little. I wonder what the real Conservative vote would be in Scotland if people thought their vote would count.

Definitely. I live in Rochdale, which previously had a Lib Dem MP on a very slim majority. The constituency was changed to move a solidly Labour ward from a nearby solid Labour constituency into Rochdale. It worked perfectly. We now have a Labour MP on a narrow majority. And the nearby consituency is slightly less solid Labour, but still Labour. Nice result for the Labour government.

Supposedly, the constituency boundaries are independantly set, but strangely they always seem to favour one side.

I am very optimistic of the potential of a hung parliament. For the last 13 years, it seems barely a single Labour MP has had the backbone to vote outside of the party line. Law after ridiculous law has been passed without proper debate. Time and again, these laws have been badly worded and badly scoped. But it just doesn't matter because all the Labour MPs vote according to their party position. Perhaps a dozen seem to actually engage their brain and vote as they believe, but the parliamentary majority was big enough that it made no difference.

The media always seem to portray the Conservatives in a very negative light for their internal disagreements on policy. This for me is one of the more attractive features. They have many more MPs who have strong beliefs they are willing to argue for publicly, that don't necessarily go along with what the overall party believes. Assuming people vote properly for their local MP based on that persons views this is a very good thing.

I'm really hoping that in this next parliament, controversial and unpopular laws are going to be unpassable, at least without a proper discussion of the merits, and attempts to remove or minimise the possible deleterious effects. Even the Conservatives + Lib Dems will have a smaller majority than Labour had, and so I hope the laws that do get made will be far more sensible than the ones we have had these last 13 years.

I'd never heard this one before, guess it's the American version! The one I was taught was a complaint by a pub landlord to their sign writer:
You've left too much space between pig and and and and and whistle

It's really easy to deal with a world in black and white. Of course the real situation is that this guy producing code has various generic libraries that help him to produce a website. Those weren't developed as part of the 'Write X' task but are completely integral to it. Your scheme only allows for off the shelf software, and stuff developed right from first principles, which is ridiculous.

Most core business software just wouldn't fit into either model. I wonder if anyone has some insider knowledge here, but for systems like SAP, there always seems to be an extremely long and expensive configuration and commissioning phase. Words like programming are not used, but I'm assuming that really, that's mostly what happens during that phase. Because the fact is that every business has its own unique little characteristics and foibles in the way the business is run, and I just don't believe SAP have somehow written software that can handle them all without additional programming.

So when you buy just about any big piece of software, you are going into this big grey area where you're buying a mixture of off-the-shelf and custom code, where either component by itself is useless, and the combination is the only possible way of getting the job done.

One other factor is causation. The fact is that on this subject there are some studies that seem to show correlation, drowned out by ones which don't. But so far, there is no known method for this radiation to affect living tissues. Maybe if anyone could get anywhere describing a mechanism for causation, then serious scientists would take another look at the extremely weak correlation.

Well said. I think a lot of people forget all the things that go into making a piece of software than pure programming, and pretty much everything in the article is just describing some of the things in that list. Personally, I didn't even think it was all that comprehensive.

I've thought about going it alone myself, because when it comes down to coding stuff, I'm pretty self suffficient now. It's still very useful to be able to easily go and ask an AIX or Oracle expert when I don't know stuff, but I can mostly figure it out myself. Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a salesperson, and not a people-person in general. And to be honest I'm just not that interested in the business side. I'd be bored senseless dealing with that side of things.

The other difference with plumbers and many similar occupations is that self employed plumbers get a lot of business from individuals. On a person-to-person basis, a whole load of overhead of dealing with companies tends to just disappear; other than a one page overview and a receipt, there's almost no paperwork for my new bathroom. But individuals don't have that much use for custom software, so as an independant developer you're not really in the same type of business as an independant plumber anyway.

My approximately 6 year old motherboard has PCI-Express and will still take brand new graphics cards as PCI-E v2 is backwards compatible. That's socket 939, which was primarily for single core chips, although the Athlon X2 was launched towards the end of it's lifetime (I upgraded to an X2 4200+).

But either way, the poster above already convinced me I was wrong with the Steam survey data. I guess it's mainly down to the difficulty of programming part rather than install base.

I think the main reason we have so many bugs in software is quite simply that no one really cares. Of course everyone complains about it, but when you look past the words towards the actions, you can see it more clearly.

Everyone still buys the cheap software with tons of features. A simple bridge with a few modifications to an almost cookie cutter design costs a lot more than a very complex piece of custom business software with far more potential points of failure. And that's about right. If the bridge fails there's a good chance someone will die. If business software fails, someone might lose some money. So when you're looking at the risk of bugs in business software, paying for a lot of people to do detailed design, design reviews, code, code reviews, QA testing etc. etc. Well it just doesn't add up. The cost of getting it right is higher than the cost of dealing with the bugs.

The reason this contract is fundamentally stupid is because a vendor following it will have to increase the contract cost by an order of magnitude. Probably some more as well to cover the risk of litigation. Then the customer will have to weigh up the costs and risks, and realise their older contract might actually be more sensible in the real world.

I've never seen that survey before. It's got some very interesting data. The methodology looks pretty sound for getting average data. I'd suspect Steam users on average are a bit more into the enthusiast camp than the entire market, and so the machines may be slightly more up to date, but it's been around for long enough that it shouldn't be a huge difference.

From this data it does really look as if by the end of this year, single core CPUs will not be that much of a market sector for gamers.

The other point that really surprised me in the Steam data was active gamers by game. Counterstrike is still right up there, so presumably a lot of the single core users are playing older games and therefore not really part of the new sales market.

Hopefully the engine developers are more up to date on hardware trends than me and already have got into gear building proper multi-core optimised engines!

I believe you're right - except about timescales. Because you're saying single core CPUs have now been almost phased out - and that's not quite right. They have been almost phased out of new PCs, but in terms of the overall install base of PCs, there are still a lot of single core machines out there. In fact I'd suspect the majority of actively used computers are still single core. I work at a software company and I'd guess about a quarter of the PCs here are still single core.

There are overheads involved in multi-threaded or multi-process programs so on a single core machine it will run slower. And realistically, it's those single core machines that you need it optimised the best for since they're the ones that will really struggle. Optimising games for multi-core processors could well rule out a big chunk of potential market. And so considering the engineering investment needed to do it right, I suspect no one wants to really take the plunge just yet. And even once the engine developers have, it will take a couple more years to filter through to the end game developers. I suspect we'll see a lot of people complaining how hard it is to code for this architecture, in a similar way as has happened for the PS3.

I suspect a majority of games won't be taking full advantage of multi-core processors until 2012 or 2013.

You're considering traction on the front wheels vs traction on the rears.

The point is traction works differently at different speeds (particularly stopped vs moving). There's a lot more traction on stationary wheels, so with the front wheels planted nicely into the tarmac, it's very easy to spin up your rear tyres in a rear wheel drive car.

On a front wheel drive car (which I believe the affected ones mostly are) you're looking at the power coming from the engine and the braking force on the same wheels. The tyre traction never plays a part in this.

LiPoly doesn't currently have the power-to-weight ratio of some battery technologies, which is a big factor for car batteries.

I was looking for a definite reference for this, but I can't see many LiPoly specific references. The Wikipedia page says 7.1kW/kg, which seems stupendously high and, I suspect, completely wrong. The Wikipedia entry for Li-Ion says 250-340 W/kg, which is more reasonable, while NiMH shows as 25-1000 W/kg. Both of these ranges are easily found elsewhere. LiPoly runs similar chemistry so the results should be similar.

Taking middle of the range figures for each battery type - say 300 W/kg and 600 W/kg - your NiMh car will have twice the bhp of the LiPoly car.