Comments on: Lotus announces Burn sponsorship

By: Jonathan Gee

Jonathan Gee — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 11:27:05 +0000

What goes around, comes around . . . Remember Coca-Cola sponsoring James Hunt and Gerry Birrell in F2 in the early 1970s?

By: John (other John)

John (other John) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 04:16:19 +0000

Just checking again, never do something wrong unless you check it’s still wrong a few times. . . these WordPress things are built on two not superb tested technologies: PHP and MySQL. The former is glorious if you want to kludge together things that “work” under about zero formal test cases, and the latter, a misnomer except the SQL standards committee never got anything standardised, is a database outfit who started by ignoring or rejecting every thoroughly well tested piece of theory applicable to keeping things nice and clean with a database. Does it work? Mostly enough to give much satisfaction. Would I bet any business on it? Only when the odds are stacked against the costs of fixing things on the fly. Just about every major website based business glitch or failure can be pointed at, if not these two same outfits, then at the lack of methodology they applied.

By: John (other John)

John (other John) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 03:23:01 +0000

Incidentally, unless this comment nests nicely indented below my other, I think we might have some good old fashioned database fail, and it might be worth checking it doesn’t portend worse. Either way this goes, please backup your database, Joe!

By: John (other John)

John (other John) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 03:16:33 +0000

I don’t figure that. That was almost a iconic drink at one point in programming culture, I mean, why did Gosling name his language “Java”? (Mountain Dew is a kick up the bum of caffiene, and programmer culture idolises long hard undistracted coding sessions) and there’s often been a high proportion of geeks into F1, by my reckoning. Those that are not playing computer games, anyhow. Okay, I know one who sadly got addicted to “gaming” but is now back to watching the races and more human things. I do over emphasise my perspective on this. Just like the F1 fan on your plane the other day may have been doing a great job selling the sport, he was (random guess) doing a lousy job selling himself to the lady in the seat next to him. So I’d rather concentrate on bigger names to keep the engines running.

By: John C.

John C. — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:43:55 +0000

I’m not so sure. It feels a lot more like the team (i.e. employees of the entity based in Enstone) realising that hitching their wagon to the diaphanous fantasies of sponsored monikers for the last couple of decades has actually left them in a bad place. Had the team maintained one identity since Ted’s time perhaps we (and sponsors…) would now be appreciating their heritage rather than thinking of them as some sort of ersatz, plasticated, product placement shell. I think we might see a name change, but changed to something stable rather than driven by dollars. It took Frank Williams a few false starts to realise that an ever changing litany of Politoys, ISO Marlboro or Wolf chassis wasn’t actually doing him any good in maintaining a stable business year-on-year. When he set up in earnest he went with the neutral “Williams” team name. This model has worked very well for him and McLaren, so I’d be surprised if those whose bums fill seats in the Enstone facility aren’t trying to position themselves in a more comfortable place should Lopez et al. decide to offload the company.

By: John (other John)

John (other John) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:26:26 +0000

Hurry! Run! Trouble!

But that is just explaining a friend’s experience of HRT . . .

I always preferred a lovely friend’s view (he became a notable doctor) that medicine was a running experiment, and that that you could be confident that whatever you took might save someone else’s life.

By: John (other John)

John (other John) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:17:25 +0000

Very rarely do the words “sophisticated” and “PR” go hand in hand. The reason is that at the best of the game, what you get is only how certain people think they might con themselves. The moment it’s reflexive, or clever, it ceases to be PR. Basically any good message is simply and clear to all. Someone from the next PR department to read this message is about to pull out their ray gun and zap me back to the stone age. But hey, I’ll feel more comfortable.

By: John (other John)

John (other John) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:13:20 +0000

It’s F1, they don’t have to prepend the word Cash before the Burn.

By: John (other John)

John (other John) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:11:17 +0000

That’s like privatising the Department Of Trade.

Oh, oops, pointing that out was the reason my pal, a very senior hatchet man with 30+ years diplomatic attachment in the old DTI got the push . . .

System. Broken.

By: BlackJackFan

BlackJackFan — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:01:49 +0000

Nice one Toleman fan…
I just knew this thing would never go away…
Thanks to you I’m having to re-evaluate my thoughts.