Posts by Rob Telford

Hmm

Blimey! Maybe they have taken notice? Or is that being too generous?

As of a few seconds ago, this is what I get when attempting to connect

https://motoring.direct.gov.uk

"Service not available

Sorry...

The Driving Licence Online service is temporarily unavailable due to system maintenance. If you were in the middle of a transaction, any information you entered was not saved and you will not be charged. Please try again later. DVLA apologise for any inconvenience this may cause."

And there was me thinking the story was about the Port of London Authority...

Re the illustration at the top of the article: I think El Reg needs to upgrade from Mac OS X 10.2.

So what do we make Apple's advice to replace XServes with Mac Pros now?

http://images.apple.com/xserve/pdf/L422277A_Xserve_Guide.pdf

Two years later and it seems I am reduced to a Mac Mini only for OS X servers?

Poop.

So was she exporting it or not?

Reg report: "However, Shabet says she lives in America and has no intention of exporting the device."

Linked TV station report: "The iPad was to be a gift for her cousin who lives in Iran"

Unless she thinks that sending it to her cousin in Iran somehow doesn't count as exporting it to Iran?

Sounds like the Apple Store employee probably made the right call if he overheard her saying she was sending it to Iran.

Ever known?

"Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft ever known to have visited the outer planets Uranus and Neptune"

Is this to cover the possibility that LGMs have visited Uranus and Neptune, or that NASA, the Soviets or China sent some undercover space missions there that we haven't been told about yet?

Did anyone arrest John Betjamin

for his ode to Slough?

Apostrophe

At 22p a pop, you think they could have afforded an apostrophe in their publicity material

What they have in common

They've all been subjected to English imperialism?

[/non-IT angle]

:-)

@Anonymous Coward

> They frequently break the law regarding how many ride abreast (It's a maximum of two -check out

> rule 66 of the Highway code for cyclists > http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Highwaycode/DG_069837)

Amazingly, riding more than two abreast is not actually illegal. If you care to read the link you provided it's an advisory note ('should not' rather than MUST NOT) as explained in the introduction to the Highway Code.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Highwaycode/DG_070236

The Highway Code also suggest that cyclists 'should' wear a helmet. You might know that it is not illegal to ride a bicycle without one.

Maybe you should re-read your copy and understand its language this time.

Sure, it may not help your chances when establishing liability in the event of an accident and it's not something I would normally do myself, but it's not breaking the law to ride more than two abreast.

Red light jumpers do piss me off, though.

CCTV

Strange that. I wonder what the Home Office's own researchers say?

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors292.pdf

"Furthermore, it has become evident that following the introduction of CCTV, support for its use decreased. This was shown not to be the result of concern over issues relating to civil liberties and privacy, but there is a suggestion that support has declined in step with reductions in people’s perceptions of the camera’s effectiveness; fewer respondents believed the cameras would reduce crime." [p58]

"In short, [CCTV] was oversold – by successive governments – as the answer (indeed the ‘magic bullet’, Ditton and Short, 1999) to crime problems." [p116]

"Assessed on the evidence presented in this report, CCTV cannot be deemed a success. It has cost a lot of money and it has not produced the anticipated benefits." [p120]

Disney

So where does this leave the (in)famous Disney porn cartoons dashed off out-of-hours by studio draftsmen?

How old are Mickey and Minnie really? Is it depicting zoophilia and illegal from January?

Jef Raskin

Jef Raskin, co-creator of the Macintosh interface, was speculating about using model aircraft for terrorist uses after 9/11 attacks.

http://jef.raskincenter.org/unpublished/next_time_can_be_worse.html

iTunes DRM

@ Anonymous Coward

> just drop the price drastically of the DRM free variant

[cough]

Er, they already did that last year. Non-DRM tracks from the iTunes Music Store are 79p too.

Another full iPod

My iTunes Library is nudging 100 GB with everything ripped at 192 kbps AAC, like the AC earlier, it's all ripped from CDs that I own [hint: second hand CDs are often quite cheap].

I'd surely love to be able to keep that lot in a non-lossy format on my iPod, which hovers with less than 100 MB free a lot of the time.

1 TB should just about do it.

Why it's never been a major problem

The default behaviour in all versions of Mac OS when dragging files between volumes is to *copy* files (i.e. leave the originals in place), not move them (i.e. copy to the target and then delete the source).

I'm fairly sure this dates back to the Finder that shipped with the Mac 128K in the mid 80s.

Most Mac users would drag the file onto another volume and then delete the original afterward to make space on the source drive.

If true, it's not a pretty bug, but the number of people who even know that you can Command-drag and move (delete the originals) still less those who use it regularly, must be fairly small. The subset of those who actually encounter the bug and suffer data loss must be tiny.