Posts by mittfh 416 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Feb 2008
OK, so you'll have to search around to find a decent notebook without Windoze pre-installed, but chances are, if you do, you may be able to get it significantly cheaper than one with. And you don't get half the HDD filled up with 30 day trial versions of software designed to make the "Software Bundle" look impressive.
...used this icon in this article yet? :)
But as others have said, you need your mobile turned on for the tracking system to work. So all you need to circumvent the system is to scout out the area beforehand, then mug someone for their mobile in a CCTV blackspot, before dumping the phone in the nearest bin. Of course you'll be wearing gloves during the process, so you don't get any of your DNA on the phone...
Forgive me if this sounds stupid, but WTF would anyone want to download and view films on a tiny 3" screen? YouTube I could understand - but those videos tend to be relatively low quality (ideal for a mobile device) and only last 10 minutes tops, whereas a film really demands a decent size screen, decent audio equipment, and a decent amount of time. Neither of which you're going to get on a mobile phone. Which should primarily be designed for (shock!) making phone calls to people, and (even bigger shock!) text messages.
Also, with the increasing use of touch screens, how long will it take before the screen is covered in a thick layer of finger grease?
Can't see it converting lovers of either the iPhone or Android...
Wikipedia is a useful starting point - but as Mike Finn has discovered, the reliability can be variable - so it can't be relied on as the sole source of information.
However, within a few minutes you can get an idea of how accurate / reliable the article is:
a) [citation needed] - check the sources / references used! If they're from respectable sites, then quote directly from them. (Easiest way to grab extra sources / references for a project / dissertation / write-up - find a Lit Review, then quote from the articles reviewed - maximum sources for minimum effort <grin>)
b) Check the Talk page - is there much controversy amongst Wikipedians on the article?
c) Check the Edit history - has there been a flamewar / much vandalism?
If the majority / all of the sources used in the main article are reliable, the article itself is fairly stable (i.e. hasn't had oodles of edits recently), and there hasn't been much (if any) debate over its contents, then the article is probably fairly reliable. Although if you quote the sources used to create the page rather than the page itself, you'll earn more kudos :)
That bookshop is bizarre...
Pub open: Books for amnesty
One click: Books for amnesy
Two clicks: Books for amnest
Three clicks: Books for amnesty
I'm sure it's got something to do with this temporal matrix thingy, and nothing whatsoever to do with their photo-stitching software...
Aside: Surely they could have afforded to buy a decent package that does a proper job of stitching (unless the cameras need adjusting to allow greater overlap) and eliminates such undesirables as ghosting (mainly in the form of disembodied car bits).
Start --> "net stop uxsms"
Cures a variety of Vista performance woes (i.e. kills Aero DWM) Kill the sidebar while you're at it, then disable indexing.
Alternatively, for a more radical solution, download and burn a Linux ISO (or few), then reboot. If the sight of a command prompt doesn't scare you witless, then you may actually grow to like Linux...
...besides which, it's free, largely open-source, generally stable, works with most hardware, the built-in updater will download, install and update most software you're likely to need, oh, and did I mention, it's considerably more secure than anything Redmond offer - to the extent of not really needing an antivirus / antispyware product...
...just steer clear of a distro with PulseAudio (unless you enjoy the prospect of the computer mangling volume levels across your speaker setup, leaving you with only a single master volume control to play with...)
Why the grenade? Best thing to do with a Windoze partition :)
As Graham said, it's an ad for a Sat Nav, that presumably also has some form of GSM capability.
So once your 3 month trial is up, your £250 Sat Nav will increasingly become out of date unless you pay them a further £8/month.
With Sat Navs starting to add mobile phone type features, it'll only be a matter of time before they'll offer to answer your phone with "Sorry, I'm driving at the moment, but I'll get back to you when I reach my destination in approximately 8.5 minutes" - or if the caller presses a few buttons to indicate it's urgent, the Sat Nav will automatically redirect you to the nearest safe place to stop...
But even then, what's the betting the mapping will be less than perfect, and Sat Chavs will still willingly follow its soothing tones into a 4' deep ford, or to the edge of a cliff, or down a narrow lane / footpath with nowhere to turn around...
Then again, at least the ad showed the functionality in real time, unlike the "Sequence shortened and steps removed" ads for the "There's an app for that" phone.
I'm following Graham with the tombstone icon - you're supposed to offer cynical reviews of technology, not blindly post manufacturer's ads for the product...
Imagine the scenario...
The software to infect the multiple machines would presumably have to be open source, and would have to throw up dialogs along the lines of "Do you want to install this on your computer?" - plus for added legal protection "Are you sure?" and ""You do realise what you're doing, don't you?", plus an EULA describing exactly what the software would do. Due to this process, you'd probably have to wait a few years to "acquire" sufficient machines to carry out the attack; then once the attack was over the software would presumably have to uninstall itself.
Or of course you could pay your lawyers enough money to find a legal loophole to do it the quick way...
He gets around...also spotted at Trafalgar Square (unblurred, of course!):
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?layer=c&cbll=51.507258,-0.127481&panoid=ZX7jlmg9lV4npvbYU3uBUw&cbp=12,289.26,,1,10.89&ie=UTF8&ll=51.507434,-0.127995&spn=0,359.985859&z=16
At first I thought he'd been digitally inserted, but you can also see him from the opposite side of the roundabout.
Surely it would be easier to...
20 PRINT "(C) 3D REALMS 1997-2017"
Of course, what they're not telling you is the title is a contraction of:
Duke Nukem ( - it'll take) Forever (for us to get this game released)
Now it's not unheard of for software companies to delay release of a title because the CEO thinks of new things to add to it, or they decide to restart development on a different software platform (a synonym for "the view from behind a pane of glass" springs to mind), but usually the marketing department reminds them that it's generally a good idea to get it released *before* the developers retire...
If TS3 turns out to be anything like its predecessors, EA will probably make far more money by releasing a never-ending stream of expansion packs for the game than the game itself...
Besides which, this may even be doing them a favour by getting some advance publicity - (a) for the game itself, and (b) that it doesn't install any nasty DRM stuff...
I've noticed Google visits a BBC blog where I'm a regular at least once an hour. So taking that as a benchmark, it's probably safe to say that anything published online for at least one hour may not be able to be permanently deleted. In the case of personal websites (NOT social networking profiles - proper websites), you may be able to get away with up to a day or so (i.e. if it's rarely visited, so search engines won't find it in a hurry), but after that the information is likely to exist on your hosting provider's backup tapes long after you've deleted it.
There's one simple rule to follow: if you wouldn't be happy for the information to be displayed on a billboard in your town centre, don't publish it :)
They'd probably be much better at it!
IT projects would still overrun their allocated time and funds, but there would be no leaks.
Why? Put it this way - the following day, the relevant paper's headline story would be a about a courier / senior civil servant being involved in a nasty and fatal RTA outside their (the paper's) front door...
Flames, as inevitably the evidence of financial impropriety wouldn't survive the impact...
Is the global climate warming? Probably. (I certainly don't recall us getting the amount of snowfall we had back in the early '80s)
Is it warming faster that any time in recorded history? Possibly. I'd imagine estimates of global temperature rises and falls from several thousand years ago can only be resolved down to a few hundred years, so we'll need to wait and see.
Can we stop it? Probably not. I remember reading somewhere that even if global pollutant emissions halted overnight (admittedly a daft scenario), the effects would still be felt for decades as they tend to 'hang around' in the atmosphere that long. So it might be worth researching what's likely to happen over the next few decades / centuries, and start developing techniques to enable as much biodiversity as possible to survive. By that, I mean not just humans - we just happen to be at the top of a rather complex food chain / web. Cut out anything below us and it could have potentially serious effects.
But what can we do? By all means invest in renewables and reduce your energy usage. It won't have much of an impact upon the climate, but it may eventually have an impact on global resource usage. The human population continues to expand, so the amount of earth's resources available per capita reduces. So reducing your usage of resources before you're forced to makes good sense...
While it's true that microwaves use 2.45 GHz non-ionizing radiation, that radiation is generally (or rather, should be!) confined to the interior of the oven. The metal of the case should prevent it leaking, and the reason for the metal grille in the door is that the holes are significant smaller than the wavelength of the radiation, which should prevent its escape.
Surely "see something you like the look of, develop a clone in-house, then deal with any legal issues later" is the American IT business's MO. I seem to recall Microsoft and Apple doing that...
Some people / companies might be able to be bought by offering them a few million to sell them the name, but if too many name disputes result in a suing, then some people/companies might be tempted to refuse the offer, persuade a judge to slap a court order on the big company, then sue them for using the name in the hope of getting significantly more than the initial offer...
If the personal allowance was raised to £11,500 as some people are suggesting, how would the government recoup the lost income?
A few months ago (before the recession hit), Radio 4 did some analysis of where all the extra money pumped into the NHS has gone. About 1/3 went on increased costs, 1/3 on salary increases, leaving 1/3 extra investment.
The Tories seem to have got the impression the public sector (or "quangocracies" as they seem to have termed it) is stuffed full of senior managers earning vast quantities of money. In reality in the bulk of the public sector (i.e. schools, hospitals, local government offices), there are many tiers of management, and I suspect it's only a few thousand people that earn vast sums of money in the public sector. Pruning them wouldn't save much money.
Then there's the notion of protecting "front-line workers" (but presumably only if they agree to a pay freeze in the next settlement) - but what about the armies of support staff, without whom the front-line staff couldn't operate? Public sector pay settlements have been less than inflation for many years now, and the concept of "Best value" has become embedded in the culture.
However, there are some ways the government could potentially raise extra money:
* scrap the upper limit on NI.
* clamp down on the loopholes that allow those earning significant quantities of money to avoid paying tax on a large proportion of it.
* when the VAT cut expires, don't renew it.
As for benefits for the unemployed, I read AC's comment above with envy. As a single person living in a rented 2 bed flat, I'd be lucky to get my £525/month rent paid by the state, let alone the £130 utility bills (soon to rise as my gas DD apparently isn't enough)...
Way back in the dawn of time (well, late '90s), I created a website there, then forgot about it for five years before rediscovering it. Now you'd think that as it was virtually contentless, nobody would have visited in that time. So either (a) it did receive the occasional visitor, or (b) they weren't very good at maintaining their deletion policy...
Just spotted in a comment on Radio 4's PM Blog (author: RxKaren):
Periodically throughout the past 5 years health and social care providers (PCTs, Hospitals, Social Services, Councils, etc) have got together for tabletop exercises where they pretend that there's been a disaster and shuffle the Playmobil figures around to cope with the crisis to see where the gaps in the current provision are. I've been told that it's a bit like Time Commanders without the fancy graphics and satellite view. Apparently they're quite good fun (I've never been on one).
(Additionally, since there's been discussion of potential new comment icons, how about a Playmobil one?)
I suspect many of these government IT projects are designed from scratch - but as ever with the government, they keep revising the requirements over time.
So how about finding an existing piece of distributed large-scale database software, then approaching the company concerned with your big wad of cash and ask very kindly if they wouldn't mind sparing a few staff to customise it to your needs?
Or is that far too logical for government to consider?
-oOo-
Meanwhile, with all the delays to both this health database and ContactPoint, even if a future government decided to launch the ID card project, we'd probably have to wait 5-10 years before they could be introduced because it would take that long to develop the database to store the info...
Does that include or exclude explorer.exe and svchost.exe? :)
Perhaps it can do a bit more, but they're downplaying as a major hint to manufacturers to avoid the Vista Basic fiasco (an OS which is still widely shipped on cheap 'puters).
Meanwhile, if versions are already starting to appear on torrent networks, it'll give hackers plenty of time to perfect WGA circumvention by the time the real thing ships :)
Oh, and the whole "back everything up and reinstall from scratch" tickles me...about six months ago the Mandriva 2008.1 --> 2009.0 update was offered over Software Updates (and hopefully in about a week's time, 2009.0 --> 2009.1). A couple of hours later, with virutally no user interaction apart from one reboot at the very end, and I'd got a new version of the OS on my box. Somehow I can't imagine MS offering Win 7 --> Win 8 over Windows Updates...
Never mind the fact that "Windows 7" is pure marketing hyperbole - only this time they armtwisted the developers to extend it into the internal version number. From what I've seen in reviews of milestones to date, it's really 6.1 under the hood...
Sure The Red Party have mucked up the country, but then again, so did The Blue Party when they were in power. Besides which, until the recession hit, The Blue Party were all in favour of increased deregulation for banks. Oops. Then they moaned at the government's life support package. They still like moaning about Welfare to Work schemes that encourage the long term unemployed to undertake further training or take up subsidised three month work trials.
Now they seem to have returned to their mantra of tax cuts. Which is strange since the local councils they run like moaning about the decreasing amount of money they're getting from central government.
Ideally The Red Party could do with one term in opposition, to take a break, regroup and reinvigorate their policies. However, give The Blue Party too much free reign and they'll make things even worse (they may want to protect "front line" jobs, but what about all the background staff that handle all the admin, IT, finance etc.?)
So when the election comes, a hung parliament or narrow majority to The Blue Party - perhaps coupled with a very stormy election day to make turnout abysmal...
Imagine this for a movie plot:
They tell you you're playing a simulation game...
You notice the images and the blood look very realistic for a game...
But you just put that down to a very good effort on the part of the developer.
But there's a reason why they look so realistic...
They *are* real...
What they haven't told you is you're actually flying the real thing...
Just wondered, because close examination of the headers on all the phishing attempts autofiltered into my Junk Mail folder appears to reveal they originated with Optusnet...
Or (perhaps more likely), someone on Optusnet hasn't been keeping their anti-malware protection up to date...
Now you've reminded me of the title of Episode 4, I do remember reading it...
I can't help but wonder what the Boss will do if/when he eventually realises how far he's been strung up in his e-Dating (or should that be iDating nowadays?)
But then again, given the number of traps that have been set for the boss to date, it won't be long before the company will have to appoint his successor...
Two RTAs in one episode - and the Boss is still dimwitted enough to believe they'll restore the original CCTV footage of him in the office...
But surely it doesn't take this long to write an episode? Last year there were 40 episodes - we're 1/3 of the way through 2009 and we've only had 4-5 - at this rate there'll be less than 15 episodes by the end of the year :(
Given the amount of time and effort the media moguls have invested in trying to shut down one torrent tracker (and failed, if the site continues to operate while its founders are in jail), I don't think isohunt, torrentz, torrentscan, torrent-search-bar, torrent-finder and all the other sites returned by entering the phrase "torrent search" into a well known general purpose search engine have much to fear.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if someone decides to set up a distributed open-source tracker network, spread across different servers in different countries, owned by different people. That would be almost impossible to shut down as if one node 'failed', all the others would still be operational.
Personal email archives? What's new about that? Lotus Notes has done it for years!
I suppose the main "feature" of Office 2010 will be more "collaborative working" features - i.e. the belief that everyone in the office wants to work on the same document at the same time without physically meeting each other...
As for the web version, what's the betting it will be slow, buggy and not compatible with Moonlight? I'm also sceptical about their claim it'll run on any browser. I wouldn't be surprised if certain features are "optimised" for IE8, and running it on anything else will be a nightmare...
Black chopper because it's another step on Microsoft's mission to rule the (online) world...
Someone had to mention it :)
Whoever originated the phrase is shrouded in mystery (there's no evidence it was Benjamin Disraeli), but the gist is true enough - as is the phrase "You can prove anything you want with statistics."
Just take a quick flick through Darrell Huff's tome, or read Wikipedia's article on "Misuse of statistics". And it shouldn't come as a shock that the government manipulate statistics for their own purposes - the opposition do it as well, as do most media organisations trying to prove a point.
For example, I could state that there are more burglaries in towns with numerous health food shops, therefore health food shops cause people to burgle premises. Of course, I'm missing out the linking factor - the size of the town! Generally, larger towns will probably have more health food shops than smaller towns; and as both the population and town centre are larger, are likely to have more burglaries than smaller towns.
You would have thought that after the Jo Moore email leaked back in 2001, that Labour peeps would have got the message that emails are about as insecure as a postcard.
Evidently not.
How many more scandals will it take to get it into their thick skulls that you do not send controversial stuff around the office via email? Especially as NuLabour is so unpopular at the moment that many journalists, Tories and even Blairites are constantly on the scrounge for even the merest hint of scandal. So the last thing NuLabour need to do is hand them a story on a plate...
Here's a novel idea - instead of propagating fake stories about their rivals, why don't NuLabour play them at their own game by sniffing their rivals for genuine signs of sleaze / corruption / division / whatever.
Sidenote: I initially misread the domain "theredrag" as "there drag" rather than "the red rag"...
Perhaps the public perception of the OS following screenshots showing a very similar UI to Vista and media reports of increased DRM plus a dodgy attempt to fix UAC (i.e. internally looking suspiciously like Win 6.1 dressed up as a major release) has finally reached the perception of Microsoft's marketing department...
Although it wouldn't surprise me if once Win 7 is released, most new and upgraded releases of software from MS will state they're only suitable for Vista and higher...
The TV license is used to pay for all the BBC's UK services - TV as well as radio. At some point in future they may be able to adopt a subscription model, but because they're still the UK's premier PSB, they could only do so if free subscriptions were handed out to the poor / elderly etc. who couldn't afford the £200+/year (accounting for inflation and a bit extra for those that decide not to subscribe) - besides which, you can't easily do encryption on analogue services.
As for the alternative - allowing advertising - one of the reasons those who like the BBC like the BBC is that programming isn't interrupted every 10 minutes by 5 minutes of advertising. OK, so they fill the space between programmes with about 5 minutes of trailers, but that's a policy also followed by the majority of TV / radio channels - including non-BBC commercial offerings (e.g. 4Music / TMF).
The BBC currently has to walk a very narrow tightrope between PSB commitments (which politicians like but only attract a small audience share) and populist programming (which politicians hate but attract a much larger audience share) - hence the recent 'brainwave' of wrapping science documentaries up in dramatic reconstructions, thus killing two birds with one stone. But one thing the BBC can do much more quickly than a commercial broadcaster is interrupt the schedules when there's an event of major (inter)national importance (e.g. WTC attacks, Di's death), because they don't need to worry about losing revenue from the adverts in between programmes that have been dropped.
With the recent controversy over BBC Worldwide (err...how big is Lonely Planet's market share amongst travel books? How could the BBC owning it impair competition, when competition presumably wasn't impaired when it was in other hands?) they could perhaps stop advertising BBC Worldwide publications on air, and / or if necessary increase the price of some magazines to make them less competitive (e.g. the Radio Times is significantly more expensive than most other listings magazines - but then again it is a more weighty tome than most...)
Bear in mind that the license currently costs a meagre £11.88 / month or 39p / day - significantly cheaper than most subscription packages, and you get 9 TV channels, 10 national radio stations, 9 regional radio stations, and numerous local radio stations.
Although controversy and non-payment could be significantly reduced if it was possible to buy a license to cover all residents in a house of multiple occupation (e.g. student halls of residence) - evidently the cost would be higher than a standard license but it could be recouped by an extra few pounds on the rent :)
And just before I sign off, another potentially good idea: charter renewal should be carried out by a completely independent body rather than the government of the day. The BBC is supposed to be independent of government interference, but as its charter is renewed by the government of the day, it tends to toe the government line in case their charter is meddled around with too much at renewal time (e.g. forcing them to hand over part of the license fee to rivals - the fee is already subsiding digital switchover).
Ever heard of proportionality? While I do not wish in any sense of the word to condone the actions of Islamic hotheads, there is a grim statistic which is borne out by recent conflicts.
1:100 - The ratio of Israeli deaths to Palestinian deaths.
For every civilian killed by Palestinian rockets, one hundred Palestinians will be killed via Israeli attacks. The ratio of civilian to militant Palestinians is probably impossible to even estimate - the whole point of guerilla warfare is that the militants blend into the community, so until they actually wield their weapon, it is impossible to distinguish militant from civilian. As for why people are tempted into militancy, perhaps the 80+% unemployment rate in Gaza plays a factor. After all, if young local men were gainfully employed in full time jobs, would they be able to spend as much time building rockets and firing them North or East?
It's also worth remembering that Israel has had numerous UN resolutions proposed against it since 1948, pretty much all of which have been blocked by Israel's most powerfully ally - the US.
However, despite all the gestures to the media, neither side appears interested in peaceful co-existence. Each side has distrusted the other since 1948 (and I suppose for the past few thousand years, as evidenced by a cursory glance at the Judeo-Christian religious texts) - and documentaries have shown that schoolchildren on both sides are taught that the opposition is evil / subhuman / no right to live on the land etc.
Israel has consistently refused to legally define its borders, and many politicians have gone on record as desiring a larger area than that defined by the UN 'Green Line' - from the relatively conservative line being marked out by the "Security Fence" to politicians wanting the Gaza Strip and West Bank to be part of a unified Jewish state, to those (mainly from previous decades) wanting the whole of Transjordan as well.
Similarly, many Palestinian politicans have gone on record (and received more media attention) for wishing the exact opposite - a (conservative) Islamic state.
Fatah have adopted a more moderate line recently, but many Palestinians associate them with being corrupt and inefficient . Besides which, when they had democratic elections a few years back (which IIRC were certified as free and fair), Hamas won.
It has to be remembered that Hamas isn't just a bunch of military hotheads - one of the main reasons they have such high levels of support amongst the population is their extensive social welfare network. Which has caused problems for several charities working in Gaza and the West Bank - Israel and the international have often shut them down even though they are not associated in any way with Hamas, on the merest (unsubstantiated) suspicion that funds may find their way into the wrong hands.
Due in part to their history, many Israelis are paranoid about their state - as they have been engaged in numerous conflicts with their neighbours over the past few thousand years they regard any attack on their territory as a direct threat to the very existence of their state. Their ideal scenario for surrounding states is for them to be either demilitarised or run by puppet governments who will always back Israel's stance on any issue. Check out their vision for the Palestinian half of the "two state solution" - completely demilitarised, with Israel retaining some settlements and "strategic corridors", some internal checkpoints remaining, and definitely checkpoints at all points of entry into Israel.
The other fallacy of a two state solution is Gaza - how could the Palestinian administration in the West Bank effectively administer a satellite territory to which they wouldn't be able to access?
...I seem to recall a certain online encyclopaedia which doesn't make any net profit...
All they'd need do would be to make everyone automatically follow something like @twitter, and remind people a few times a year that the service needs users' donations to survive. If it works for WP, it could possibly do so for Twitter...
OK, so MS-PL isn't perfect - but then again, MS aren't exactly used to building open-source stuff, so they'll probably need to take baby steps to change their attitude.
Remember, this is a company that got worried when IE dropped below 90% market share, so hastily started work on a new version "inspired" by its main rival.
How many more journalists are going to get caught in the act of being pig ignorant of Street View? A cursory glance at that image reveals that the cut-off occurs at the boundary between two of the cameras - an artifact which is even more obvious on the full image shown on the Telegraph site, and can be reproduced on many Street View images.
They even mention the area is used for television filming (e.g. Torchwood), so is it not possible the woman concerned is a very-much-alive actress taking a break from filming?
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