Posts by Richard Gadsden 219 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2007
Google licence (some of) their map data from various national mapping bodies, e.g. Britain's Ordnance Survey. Google's licences from those mapping authorities don't allow them to use the maps for satnav, so Google have to restrict their licencees.
If you want to complain, then it's national government (cf Guardian's Free Our Data campaign) that you should be complaining to, not Google.
The problem with combining things like a fluid interface or watching films with e-books is that the e-Ink screens don't do motion well, but backlit LCD/OLED screens don't come close to e-Ink screens for reading books and battery life.
At the moment you have to pick one or the other; either e-Ink for good reading and battery life, or a more conventional screen for a multi-purpose device that is noticeably not as good for reading.
Maybe Jobs can square that circle, but I can't see how.
Right, you get ODMA (a published standard!) working in OpenOffice and then I can start looking at using it with a proper DMS.
Then you need to write a DMS that works on anything other that Windows.
Then I could look at migrating the rest of the proprietary software that one small law firm uses....
If Microsoft would provide an API for their Automatic Updates system so third parties could distribute software updates as easily as Microsoft can, then a lot more people would have up-to-date software.
If I look at my home PC, I have services from Apple, Sun (Java), Microsoft and Adobe (Flash/Acrobat) all running at once to slow my machine down / check for updates regularly.
Why can't that be a single update service, like apt-get on Debian/Ubuntu or rpm on Red Hat?
TV and film took years to learn that basic principle; I'm impressed that MMOs have got that far already.
Having a limit on how much text you can put in helps to prevent it getting too exposition-heavy.
In a written medium, it doesn't matter whether an event is presented directly (through third-person narrative) or indirectly (as a narrative told to one character by another or through a flashback) but in a visual medium, there is a difference between one character telling you what happened and seeing it directly - and in an interactive medium, you're even more constrained as you can't change the narrator.
Take, for example, Lord of the Rings. There's a whole narrative about Gandalf being captured by Saruman that you only pick up on in the book after the arrival at Rivendell, when Gandalf tells it to Frodo. Because written narrative is written narrative, that's equally immersive as presenting it in the usual third-person omniscient. But in the film, you really wouldn't want 20 minutes of exposition from Ian McKellen. So the films show the events in their proper time-sequence, and that's a scene you get to watch directly. In a game, you would have to either change the POV character to Gandalf, or skip that scene altogether. And MMOs don't let you change POV.
When you're creating an original narrative in a game, as is the case for MMOs, then the writer is totally tied to a single POV, and to events, not internal thoughts. That removes so many narrative modes - no flashbacks, no switching POV, no epistolatory, no internal narrative, no narrating exposition from character to character - that it presents a great challenge to the writer.
Since you also have "Show, don't Tell", you end up with great plot simplifications - but you don't get to write the principal characterisations, either, so that's another great lump of text that disappears.
Probably not, but that's not a reason to criminalise it.
I'm sure most of Girls Aloud don't much like teenage boys jerking off over their posters, but you may be sure that teenage boys do exactly that. Does that mean we should lock the teenage boys up?
As for "fire in a crowded theater", that's an example of incitement, not of obscenity. Incitement requires the words chosen to be appropriate to the particular situation and to lead reasonable people to act criminally. At least the basic incitement law did, before the incitement to racial hatred and incitement to religious hatred nonsenses were piled on top. [What we should have is "incitement to violent hatred against a group" - ie if you incite your followers to beat up any member of a group of people, e.g. any banker, then you've committed that offense, even though you haven't incited a specific case of assault].
Getting back to obscenity, frankly, I'd like to abolish the general offence of obscenity and replace it with a series of very specific, narrow offences. I'd only ban a publication entirely if legalising it would create a legal market for work that can only be created by the commission of a crime (e.g. child porn with actual children in, rape porn involving actually raping people, etc). But even within the present law, this prosecution seems pretty flimsy - asstr is not somewhere that people accidentally stumble upon, and it's *very* clear about what it's about. You're not going to read that story unless you want to read a story about mutiliating and killing pop stars. I think it's hard to argue that someone who wants to read that kind of stuff is going to be further depraved and corrupted by actually reading it. Really hard to argue that, actually. I hope the jury kicks this out.
I can't wear in-ear phones; any suggested alternatives? I use Sony clip-ons (MDRQ66 and MDRQ68) which are OK, but they pack in after a year or so - either the ratchet for the cable spool fails so the wires hang out all the time, or one ear gets a loose connection.
They are nice, but they leak quite a lot of sound and don't isolate well from noise.
I've found that a lot of users don't like carrying a laptop around everywhere - they'd rather have a Blackberry and have desktops in the office and at home.
The people who want laptops are the ones that travel on trains; the drivers generally prefer being provided with a desktop at home, especially a "nice" (looking) one.
Of course, the people I'm dealing with are lawyers, who, you'd think, would want a laptop to edit the hundred-page contract that is being negotiated; but, in practice, they don't want to edit live; they want to agree the changes (which you can do with a red biro and a stack of paper) and then get them typed up by someone who understands Word's automatic numbering well enough not to screw the document up - and the correlation of Word skills with legal qualifications is pretty slim.
If users are given too much freedom, they tend to get machines with Windows Vista Home Premium on, and employers end up having to purchase Vista Ultimate upgrades in order to be able to join them to the domain.
One good policy I've seen applied is similar to a lot of company car schemes - give the user a budget and if they want something more expensive, then they fork out the difference from their own pocket.
No, turning up for debates is not what they get paid for.
They get paid for representing their constituents, which mostly means helping people who have approached their MP for help with a problem they are having with the public sector. Also voting, but they don't have to sit in the chamber to vote - they can sit in their office listening to the debate and doing something useful and then run through the lobbies if there's a vote.
"...there are hierarchies of laws and rules about what is legal, there are constraints on the powers of parliaments, there are structures for challenge to law makers on, natural law, human rights, constitutionality etc."
No, there really aren't. Actually, of course, there's no need to breach contract law - just introduce a 100% windfall tax on revenues from these contracts. But if Government wants to ride roughshod over the law of contract then it can; might have to leave the EU and the WTO to do it; might face sanctions from the rest of the world, but the Crown-in-Parliament is sovereign and can do anything it likes.
Short of a revolution or military invasion from the outside, of course!
Getting back to the point, in practice, what any new goverment should do is to establish a proper in-house IT operation, refuse to do any big projects for ten years and build up the capacity of the in-house IT so that in ten years' time you can deliver on some of these big projects (the ones that aren't a total waste of time) without needing the consultancies.
Large-scale public-sector IT is different in kind from private-sector IT, and the UK government should recognise this and build up a proper in-house operation, since none of the externals can deliver. Of course, this probably means creating an entire Department from scratch, and I wonder if the Civil Service would settle for having a Permanent Secretary who could write code. Imagine having someone who knew what they were talking about! That would never do!
If you want a big IT project that would really help a lot of people, try integrating the tax and benefits systems into a single one where you tell it how much your earning and your other circumstances (married, living together, kids, child-care costs, housing, etc) and it then did a single calculation to either demand taxes or pay out benefits. Would make everyone's lives a hell of a lot easier, by only having to hand over one set of information to one office, rather than ten different sets to ten different sets of people who then adjust how much you get of benefit A depending on how much you were awarded of benefit B, and then the benefit B people cut that because you got benefit A awarded, so the benefit A people put their amount up to compensate and then you have to pay taxes on your benefits, and then benefit B is increased so you can pay your taxes, but that cuts benefit A and this is about the point that you realise you're a character in a Kafka novel.
There are only two reasons to put Kelly Brook in Doctor Who, and that's already been done with Peri (Nicola Bryant). Caves of Androzani was a great episode but we don't need a remake.
Lily Allen? We've had a mockney ex-singer already, try something different.
Rachel Stevens was in S Club; while the TV and film didn't demand much acting talent, they did demand enough to demonstrate that she didn't have that much.
UDP was not "intended for real-time data transfers such as VoIP that typically move small amounts of data with a low tolerance for delay".
It's intended for applications that perform their own connection management and therefore a missing packet isn't problem. TCP ensures a reliable connection, where UDP exposes the underlying unreliablity of IP itself.
Since Torrent does its own connection management, UDP is the correct protocol; the TCP overhead is not necessary.
Nothing wrong with paper and a pencil, but you'd have to have something the size of a Harry Potter novel - and not one of the early ones - to have one ballot paper for each of the positions in a typical US election.
In Britain, we complain about how much extra work and time it takes when we have two elections at once; our system would collapse under the strain of the forty-odd that the Americans generally manage.
The unedited register is given (yes, given) to political parties, which seems relatively unobjectionable to me. I know that their data security measures are awful, as you might expect for a bunch of amateurs - the people who do the actual campaigning are all volunteers, plus a handful of really badly paid staffers. But each one of these only has one constituency's worth of data; about 70,000 voters, or 50,000 households.
The real problem is that the whole unedited register goes to the credit rating agencies (Equifax and the like). I really object to that, and there's nothing you can do about it.
And therefore it's probably wrong, that an acre is the area that can be ploughed by one team of oxen in a day. The strip of land is one furrow-long (furlong) long, which is how far the oxen can plough until they need a rest, then you turn them around and plough the next furrow. By the end of the day, the width of the area you've ploughed is a chain, so the whole strip is one acre.
So, anyone still ploughing a field with teams of oxen has a legitimate complaint that the hectares are going to be a problem. Rest of you, keep your gobs shut.
Paris, cos she likes having her fields ploughed.
I've tried several times to give saynoto0870 a complete copy of our call plan, with geographic equivalents to nearly a thousand 0845 numbers - and they aren't interested. I'm not typing in a thousand numbers, but we agreed that I'd email a spreadsheet - which I did over a year ago and the numbers are still not up on their servers!
The revenue we get from 0845 is negligible, but having non-geo numbers is really handy as they can be easily moved to a different line when BT have disconnected one of our offices again. Geographic numbers can't be switched outside their geographical area (that's an Ofcom regulation).
Is a good question. Anyone who has ever tried doing a legal contract with automatic numbering - and with all the insanities that lawyers put into contracts - will appreciate why most decent-sized law firms have a suite of VBA code that manages Word's paragraph numbering for you.
OpenOffice's numbering is nothing like powerful enough. I can't comment on Symphony, but SmartSuite wasn't up to the mark either last time I looked; WordPerfect is, which is why so many lawyers still use it.
The money is not being spend on the c-charge - it's going on the public transport. There's 35km of tram lines, plus a load of extra buses.
The thing that really annoys me is that the big public transport improvement that's needed isn't getting done - the long-promised widening of the Manchester Loop to four tracks instead of two. At the moment, there are only two tracks (one in each direction) crossing Manchester, which makes through services almost impossible. The problem is that they've allowed a load of crappy flats to go up either side of the line, so widening will mean CPOs on those flats, and then demolishing them all. Last time I asked, it was costed at over £5bn in land acquisition alone - and then they have to build a four-track viaduct for a couple of miles across Manchester. All because they didn't get off their arses when the Hacienda closed and buy it all up cheap.
As a result, there aren't enough trains running into the city, so people have to drive or get crushed. No amount of c-charge is going to fix that one.
Curtis Crowson is probably an American. The standard UK layout has the |\ key between left shift and Z and a two-row Return key. There are also a number of other differences:
Shift - 2 is " not @
Shift - 3 is £ not #
There is a #~ key to the right of the ' key
Shift - ' is @ not "
Shift - ` is ¬ not ~
The net effect is that there is one extra key, and the two additional symbols are £ and ¬
Feb 29 GMT?
GMT is a mistake; it should read UTC. If the OS date-time was Feb 29 in UTC, then Exchange and SQL wouldn't start; if it was Feb 29 local, but Feb 28 or March 1 (depending on timezone) UTC, then it would start. If it was Feb 28/March 1 local but Feb 29 UTC, then it wouldn't.
If it was already running, then it stayed running.
I've noticed that NTSC countries have moved to HDTV much more strongly than PAL countries - perhaps because NTSC's lower picture quality has meant that they had much more incentive - not to mention that widescreen SD NTSC is unwatchable, while widescreen SD PAL has been very popular.
This is holding down HD penetration in Europe, as compared to the US - DVB-T PAL in 16:9 is already "good enough" for many people, especially people with middle-aged eyesight.
Blu-ray and HD-DVD sales rely on HDTV penetration getting high. Ask Sky about the sales of Sky-HD, and you'll soon see how poor HDTV penetration really is.
The question you need to ask is how big does the screen need to be before a 50 year old can tell the difference between upscaled DVD or upscaled SD broadcast and real HD, and will they be prepared to give houseroom to a screen that big?
If the answer is, as I believe: "too big", then HD is going to penetrate very slowly. That makes download a much stronger competitor to physical media, as the bandwidth of download just goes up and up. Don't forget that cable networks can already do VOD downloads, albeit on a limited library. What happens when they have the network capacity to stick a complete set of major studio films (not just recent releases, but the full archive) on the VOD systems for a quid or two a time?
If BD doesn't get established before there is a replacement HD infrastructure for downloads, then this whole format war goes to the same place as SACD/DVDA did.
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