Liddle Thoughts

I read an article by Ray Winstone the actor today in the Sunday Mail supplement ‘live’ - I’m not going to make any comments, just post a few snippets of his opinions about the UK…..

“Every time I get on a plane the thing I love is that moment when the captain announces we’re flying over England. You open the shutters on your little window and you look down at all those miles of green fields and think ‘this is is. This is England. This is the greatest, most beautiful country in the world…”

“But it’s just not great any more, is it?…lets be honest. This country isn’t going to the dogs. It’s gone to the dogs. We’re a mess.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you could actually see something being done with all the money they take off in taxes. But I don’t see any more police on the streets. I don’t see schools or hospitals being built. What I see is no one on the streets and then a legal system that doesn’t support the coppers when things finally get to court. There are criminals getting off every day in this country.”

“I see people going into hospital ill and coming out worse with an MRSA bug they’ve picked up from an unclean ward. And I see so many people coming into this country that we can’t cope.”

“As far as knife crime is concerned what’s wrong with getting tough ? First offence, a warning. Second offence, five years and third offence life.”

“I’m happy for anyone from any other country to come here if they want to work, but I’m not happy to support everyone for nothing. I don’t want anyone taking the p**. If you’ve come into our country and you commit a crime, you should be deported. End of story”

“We’ve got a working class in this country that doesn’t want to work anymore. As I see it, you make a choice. Sit on your backside, laze about, and claim benefits or work you b**** off and pay most of what you earn in tax. There is no sense of pride, no sense of unity, no sense of people wanting to make this country a better place to live.”

Raymondo, my man, you talk so much sense it’s scary…..ever thought of going into politics ?

The recent CloudCamp event in London was well put together and it was interesting to view new propositions, new entrants (Microsoft) and in general seeing the cloud market gathering pace. As usual the best presentation of the night was Simon Wardley’s ! If you want a full detailed review check out Gojko Adzic’s blog entry here.

If you’ve followed my blog before you will have followed me talking about the EC2 offering by GigaSpaces which takes the GigaSpaces Scale out, low latency platform into the cloud (check out also the cloud tooling built into the 6.6 GigaSpaces release). Recently I have had more direct experience of moving existing GigaSpaces customers towards the cloud and bringing new GigaSpaces customers to the cloud. It’s interesting that the reasons for doing this are diverse and not the same, namely:

It’s that time again. Cloud Camp London is scheduled for November 13th. CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas, and if you were there last time you will know what to expect, if not come along and get acquainted. It’s a great event to see new technologies and get to grips with the paradigm shift that is occurring.

I had a problem with CODA, that great IDE for the Mac recently in which the file browser just disappeared. It took a while to figure out what the problem was, but in a nutshell is that if this happens to you, fire up terminal and type in: defaults delete com.panic.Coda sourceSplitPercentage. This will restore the browser.

Now never in my wildest dreams did I think I would end up writing so many political blog posts, maybe it’s age

Flicking through the paper gives a good snapshot of the UK and a sense of my frustrations. Pretty soon Britain will end up being a country more spied upon than communist East Germany under the Stasi. Sound exaggerated ? Well we already have more CCTV cameras than all the other countries in the EU put together. We have a DNA database of 4 million people, of which more than 50% committed no crime. And now we have proposal unveiled by Jaqui Smith, the home secretary, of a database that will hold every email, every text, every phone call made in the UK. If this has been proposed 10 years ago no-one would have believed it. For me, even now, after ten years of creeping surveillance it still seems incredible. Labour over the last 10 years have been obsessed with reducing people’s privacy and flying in the face of centuries of of values which this country stood for. And all this when it is clear from many losses of data that they are not competent to keep this data secure anyway. The government says this is to prevent terrorism. Now, what really annoys me is when we are trotted out something that the government feels is hard to argue with so they can push through their Draconian measure. Yes I am against terrorism, but I am also for values of freedom and believe that if we curb these then the terrorists have won anyway.

The councils are using the same excuse to turn off street lights at night despite the proven link to dark areas and street crime. It is so “the government can meet the UK C02 emissions guideline” we are told. Rubbish, its all about shaving off money and damn the consequences. If the government were really serious about cutting C02 emissions they would never have approved the 50% increase in flights at Stanstead and approved the new runway at Heathrow which will account for more than 10% of UK C02 emmissions.

We are now in a situation when our banks are being nationlised with public money. This when we find that all our utility companies, public infrastructure, postal services have been privatized. Now I believe that a country should own its own infrastructure. Certain things are there to provide a service to the citizens of the country and are core and should not be sold off for a quick buck. This is why we find ourselves, as a country, in the situation where we cannot control our energy prices, or our airports, or our rail services. The postal service has been removed in thousands of areas as it has been privatised and is not profitable. That is despite this service being key for old people to get pensions, post letters, visit postal banks etc. It is pat of a social infrastructure, that, thanks to the government, has broken down.

Want more ? An armed robber carried out a violent raid on a post office whilst on day release from prison, holding down an £18K job, and also getting conjugal rights in prison. Yeah, great job, that is what I call getting tough on crime. In the same paper a bus thug got 27 months of which he will serve half the time for killing a 60 year old man for objecting to him shouting and sweating at his wife on public transport. Makes me sick to my stomach. The bottom line is that between a combination of human rights (if ever a word was an oxymoron this is it) and the fact that our prison system is full be because over the past 10 years we did not invest in new prisons Britain finds itself in a situation where regular citizens are viewed as tax cash cows and genuine criminals have never had it so good.

Want to talk about Social crime and the total breakdown of the social fabric of families ? Now, call me old fashioned, but do you think it may just be a combination of a total lack of means of disciplining children (no cane, crime to smack your own child etc - there is that human rights rubbish again), 24 hour drink laws, legalizing of cannabis, soft on crime etc ?

Okay, rant over, I could go on and on. The bottom line is that I fear for the future of our country and I think all of us in Britain are too accepting of the total bulldozing of what it was that Britain stood for. I don’t know whether the next political party will be better than this one, but its time to find out.

There are many things about the country I live in and the government that fill me with dismay for the times we live in and the future, but the worst of it all is the nanny state and the Political Correctness that has become prevalent in the last decade. In the press today there is the report of a Mr Stephen Toth whose wife, suffering from cancer, was shouted at with vile abuse by a 13 years old boy. Of course Mr Toth did what many of us would have done and shepherded the boy back to his mother, at which point the boy ran off, and Mr Toth was given a mouthful by the mother, the police were called and he was arrested for common assault.

What is unbelievable is that this went all the way through our criminal prosecution system, costing us the taxpayer good money, whereby at which point Mr Toth was given an absolute discharge, but still given a criminal record. Unbelievable……and so indicative of our society today. He was told by the judge that next time he must walk away. Yes, Mr Toth, if I was you I would walk away, right out of the door of Britain to some other country, like so many others of your countryman are doing (1 in 2 of every taxi driver I meet are either selling up or have sold up to ‘escape’ the country).

Our youths in Britain today are feral. I see them on the train F**** and Blinding, feeling that they can do whatever they want and no-one can stop them. Other countries laugh at us. There is no discipline left. Children cannot get caned or smacked for doing wrong so they grow feeling they can do whatever the want. It is the blight on our society that has turned our youth culture into one of knives, swearing, binge drinking, and the blame lies squarely with our despicable government.

Nvidia is releasing CUDA 2.0, a new version of the C language development environment for its graphic processing units (GPU’s). Nvidia GPU’s have in recent years been widely used in the HPC ecosystem, with the Tesla GPU computing products representing an exceptionally well-thought out solution for achieving HPC acceleration. The original launch of the CUDA C-compiler and development environment was the key to unlocking the potential of the GPU as a massively parallel computational engine.

Interestingly Apple hopes to takes advantage of this on an OS level with the forthcoming OS release, Snow Leopard, which will support an emerging standard called OpenCL.

Whether you work from home or an office, if you do quite a bit of client calling from a landline you have have probably suffered the frustration of having to find a number then dial it. I know I have. It always seemed a little bit nonsensical to me that you could not sync your landline phone like you sync your mobile.



Anyway once I started thinking about this more and eventually found a solution. The Siemens S675 is bluetooth and USB equipped and it is able to sync with Microsoft Outlook. Admittedly not much use to me as a Mac user ! Luckily there is an application called Landline which allows you to use it to sync with a Mac also . So there you go, job done !

In the Sunday Times today there is an article about the government spending £12 billion monitoring Internet browsing, telephone records, texts and emails of everyone in Britain. Now I’ve long considered this current labour government the actual embodiment of Orwell’s dark vision of a government in his book ‘1984′, and this latest endeavour, at a time, when the country should be saving all the money it can, just confirms it.

The government it seems will not be happy until it has stripped every last vestige of privacy from the individual. From having more CCTV cameras than the rest of the European countries put together, microchips in bins, to proposals to have inspectors coming around your house to see whether you should pay more tax because you have a nice view.

And I won’t even get into the complete lack of trust in the government to manage private data, something they clearly have shown they cannot do.

Remember the government are in power because we elected them. They are supposed to represent us. They clearly do not, whether it is single handedly causing the slow down in the housing market by introducing HIPS, to breaching the mandate in which they were elected by denying a referendum before signing the mastricht treaty. So what can we do ? When it comes to the next election, show them what you think - I don’t care who you vote for, just make sure it is anyone but Labour.

My young 12 year old music playing nephew played his first Gig recently - did an awesome job ! Well done Eric !