Technorama

These callbacks are becoming more and more common. Every time I call Scotish and Southern Energy I get the automated callback with robot woman voice asking me to give her some data.. no doubt they calcuate metrics.

Every time I have given poor ratings, they have never followed up and offered to solve the problems. Seems a big waste of time.

Vodafone do the same, but they spam out txt messages. Shame I can't forward it to their own spam block address!

Amazon UK appear to have no way to switch off the nuisance dispatch emails they keep sending me.. I ordered 5 CDs, and I get around 15 emails confirming the various stages of processing. I'm happy to not have any.

Ebay does the same nuisance emails. Also called Bacn, half way between genuine email, and spam!

Since upgrading to latest Ubuntu my Firefox text and pages have all appeared tiny. Probably because my display is not 72 or 96 DPI..

Quick fix is the NoSquint addon for Firefox, and then setting to 120% globally :)

Saves setting a min font size - which then usually breaks various website layouts!

Noticed an upsurge in the number of nuisance spam emails I'm reciving. It seems like every company is not complying with Electronic Communications Regulations - Regulation (22)(3).

At the point of collection, the individual should be given the option to opt in to marketing, or not. Companies aren't allowed to default add people's personal details to marketing lists.

I feel this needs the Office of Fair Trading, the Information Commissioner and Ofcom to get a grip of the situation and start enforcing :) It costs me around 4 hours a week to clear out the nuisance email i receive from companies that I've got insurance policies with and such like.

Today's example: Admiral Insurance - "Make sure expensive repair bills don't catch you out!"

London mansion houses are so noisy! Because grade II listed, they can't have double glazing. Government need to relax the rules, it's a real pain being woken up by police cars!

There is a battle of compilers waging, between the old stalwart GCC and the new LLVM compiler sponsored by Apple and Google. GCC is currently in the lead, but LLVM is fast catching up, and I predict in 2013 it will overtake GCC - after which, GCC will never recover its top spot again.

• FreeBSD is now compiled by LLVM by default
• 71% of Debian can be compiled by LLVM
• Apple use LLVM as their development tools

How long till Redhat or Ubuntu switch from GCC -> LLVM?

Ask the LLVM team why it exists, and they will tell you it's because GCC is not modular, it's not made of re-usable components, its a big lump, you take it all, or nothing. The absolutist stance has pushed away a lot of people and big companies like Apple and Google. (LLVM team explain in more detail.)

GCC's anti-interface, anti-library, anti-reusability has pushed a whole team of people to write their own compiler - and a very well designed one LLVM is. GCC have done this, to cloud the licensing IMHO. It's fair to say, this position has backfired for the GCC team - so what next?

GCC could remain top dog if:

• Meets the requirements the developers are looking for.
• Accepts those external stake holders on the steering committee.

-- Is it too late already though? Needs some rapprochement between the parties.

Visiting the Museum of London last weekend, I noticed they have hazardous pieces of plastic inserted into sockets - oops!  I'm going to email them and will update if they reply.

Labels: FatallyFlawed