Posts by GettinSadda 615 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2007
At 8 or 10 you may be able to follow a simple radio circuit and get it to work, but there is no way any but the most gifted is going to be able to design one - it's just join-the-dots-with-a-soldering-iron!
I would expect that an intelligent 8 or 10 year old could grasp the basics of programming in many of the simpler systems and write their own code from scratch.
Unfortunately something similar was my first thought
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18398146
"BBC Middle East bureau editor Paul Danahar, who visited Homs with a team of UN observers earlier on Monday, said the Syrian army appeared to be using an unmanned surveillance drone to select buildings as targets for shelling. "
Although I have built a few small web-facing systems, these have pretty much all used standard CMS tools.
I have written one web app from scratch and that only ever had me and one other person access it. From day one that app stored salted hashes of passwords.
Either I am over-qualified, or someone needs to spend some time experiencing the BOFH cattle-prod!
This update has broken my iPhone with the dreaded "itunes cannot read the contents of the iPhone" problem. Reluctant to force a factory reset as although I have an almost up-to-date backup, there are a few items that I changed after the backup that I don't want to lose. Currently no idea how to fix, so iPhone-less!
The picture Mr Orlowski paints of weeping children being frog-marched into compulsory coding classes owes more to his overheated imagination than reality.
Well I agree with RCJ here - compulsory coding lessons would be no worse than compulsory reading, writing, maths, geography, French etc. lessons. Does Andrew really think that kids are frog-marched weeping into those lessons too?
The clue here is in where it was announced: The National Association of Broadcasters show. This product is designed for long-term archive of large items (such as films and television programmes) rather than a for off-line storage for normal IT users. The companies buying products like this are far more interested in how likely they are to be able to retrieve the contents in tens (or even hundreds - seriously) of years down the line than in cost per GB or speed.
If Sony can show that the contents will last for two or three times as long as tape or hard-drive, and that degradation or damage can be reversed more easily, then this may sell well. I work with some of the groups that develop archiving systems and it is a different world. The sort of thing that you might expect to find in a modern archiving system (but nor your standard disc store) is the ability to periodically scan the media for early signs of degradation and copy the contents to a new cartridge before errors happen. I see this being easier with optical media than magnetic - but I may be wrong.
I have six sites using various off-the-shelf (free) CMS systems such as Drupal, phpBB and WordPress. I have no idea how the law applies to these - especially as some of them show Google or Amazon ads.
Unless I can figure out what I have to do to comply with the new law I can only assume that on 25th May I must replace all of these sites with a static page showing "Site closed down due to EU Cookie law"
It's not about proof it's about a threat. It's like hearing an asteroid is heading our way and people are demanding proof that it will hit us and bemoaning that studies only "imply it" will hit us as if therefore it's a non-threat.
So you seem to be saying - if the claim is big enough, the level of proof required is negligible?
I think there may be a flaw in your logic
"Mr Dyke said on Sunday that everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet."
The problem seems to be that there is a word missing from that sentence if you want it to be 100% explicit. You seem to think the sentence means:
"Mr Dyke said on Sunday that everyone would in future be able to download all BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet."
Whereas I expect that what he meant was:
"Mr Dyke said on Sunday that everyone would in future be able to download some BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet."
But of course you are not quoting Mr Dyke's speech - you are quoting a report about the speech. So it is useful to check the original text to see what was actually said. Oh yes...
"We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes."
Reading the report, this seems poor science.
The method used exposed one set of mice to active mobile phones making a call 24/7, and the control were exposed to deactivated phones. They then concluded that electromagnetic radiation in the 800-1900MHz range was the cause of any differences between the two groups. Unfortunately there are a lot of differences between a phone making a constant call and a deactivated phone. One will be using quite a lot of power, producing heat, emitting various chemicals due to heating, charging a battery (or at least keeping it charged while being used) quite possibly there are audio frequencies that we don't hear being produced.
OK, lets try comparing...
Looking at the main SKY Movies available:
Senna: Not available to stream on LoveFilm, Netflix will not even tell me if they have it without my credit card details
Faster: No stream on LoveFilm, Netflix can't find out without giving credit card details
The Green Hornet: No stream on LoveFilm, Netfilx = same again
HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban: LoveFilm = no stream, Netflix = not even bothering
The Help: LoveFilm = OMG! LoveFilm have this one!
Breaking Dawn, Pt 1: LoveFilm = no stream
Love and Other Drugs: Lovefile = no stream
The Roommate: LoveFilm = no stream
Insomnia: LoveFilm = no stream
Eat, Pray, Love: LoveFilm = no stream
The Dilemma: LoveFilm = no stream
Let Me In: LoveFilm = no stream
Gave up looking after that
That sounds a bit steep per episode!
I went to Amazon and searched for BBC series box sets at random and the first I found was something called "Playing the Field" - not sure I have ever heard of it and not my sort of thing I'm sure! However, seasons 1 and 2 (13 episodes in total) for £4.99. That works out at £0.38 per episode. Watching this on the iPlayer would cost £24.57 - and then I dare say the same again if I want to watch them again.
...or is this story as clear as mud?
Does this mean that if I buy a film on iTunes it won't be delivered to me at all? Is this only true if I am an HBO customer? Is this only a problem if I have downloaded it before, but have lost the local copy and want to download it again?
Any ideas?
Just tried it, the local prices of my nearest stations are:
* 98.9p/L (as of 17-3-2009)
* 138.9p/L (as of 24-5-2011)
* 138.9p/L (as of 9-7-2011)
* Unknown
* Unknown
* 135.9 p/L (as of 16-10-2011)
* 134.9 p/L (as of 23-1-2012)
{{ by this point they are further away than I could be bothered to drive for fuel }}
The most up-to-date price shown is 19th February 2012 - wow, only 18 days out of date!
Here's an idea that would make me seriously consider getting an e-reader.
I have hundreds of books at home that I would be interested in reading again, and I do re-read some of them very often. This is the big thing stopping me going for an e-reader - I can't format shift my existing library.
So, how about I send my paper books back to Amazon (I would have to pay the shipping) and in return they give me a 75% or so discount on the Kindle version of the same book. They can then pulp the books if they want (so there are the same number of copies of that book in existence, one less paper and one more electronic) but they have made 25% of the cost of the e-book. Alternatively they could re-sell the book as a second-hand item in their own marketplace.
This would require some interesting deals with publishers, but if anyone has the muscle to make this sort of deal happen, it is Amazon.
When pretty much every Ultrabook that I have seen has a 1366 x 768 screen, it reduces them to the same pigeon-hole as this laptop. Sure, the screens are physically a little larger, and you get a more powerful CPU, but I doubt that there is much that you would actually do on an Ultrabook that this can not do fine for a third of the price.
I am starting to wonder if this differs depending on which network you are on. I am in the wilds of Scotland where there used to be no Three coverage. I suspect that they may have fixed this by sharing the T-Mobile network (which has had coverage here for ages). I wonder now if this means that I get my Three bandwidth via T-mobile and they have a blanket 1Mbps cap.
No, they don't try and capture the details with a payment and then duplicate - they wait for you to log into your bank account and redirect your browser to a "copy" of the bank's website and at the same time they internally visit your website. When you type your Pin Sentry code into the fake website they use this to log into the real website; now it is them logged in not you. They may present you with a "this page is down for maintenance for the next 30 minutes" message or something else, but meanwhile they are using their validated log-in to empty your account.
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