Posts by Martin

Ley line interference

So it's their ley lines that have been giving me headaches and a slipped karma.

I demand that they are turned off until they have received proper testing.

@What i want to know is...

It's automatic, google takes rather a lot of pictures to go through them manually one-by-one.

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/05/street-view-revisits-manhattan.html

It also protects horses and hub-caps as well.

Similair interesting technology for CCTV http://inhardfocus.com/2008/05/more-cool-privacy-tech.html

@The man is clearly very stupid

Really?

A junior minister you have never heard of is suddenly plastered over the torygraph and the BBC with a 'standing up for decency and the children' banner.

Any cabinet reshuffles in the offing? Might such a well known brave defender of the public now be in consideration

@title

>Never really heard of a home cinema system lose abilities as it gets older

Ever had a home cinema system that needs online updates?

Anything stopping a Blu-ray player refusing to play a DVD movie once the the Blu-ray version is out?

Use a satellite

These are terabit cables, satellite links can't handle anything like enough data.

That's why you have two cables as redundancy - of course if they both go into the same exchange on the same beach you are stuffed.

Like the boss putting the backup server next to the main server on the same power strip underneath the same leaky airconditioner.

@Bah

It's only the name and the board artwork they can claim - you can't copyright game rules.

Anyway all you have to do is add a couple of new cards like - "bank error - collect $700bn"

@why

It's paid for by the foreign office.

As to why the foreign office is wasting money on foreigners - who knows.

So what about the poor users?

This is why utility/grid computing isn't going to catch on.

If I happened to choose Sun for my company I am now royally ......ed

It's not a utility service when you have to spend a year reimplementing everything if your power supplier changes power station.

Fast PR response

Oddly these stories all came a day after a blog posting by the boss of Tesla saying that $25Bn in grants to develop advanced transport technology that were promised in Sept shouldn't be redirected to bailout Detroit.

Manned fighters

And the reason for manned aircraft, rather than drones, to patrol around a carrier battle group is?

Obviously the air force have to have pilots otherwise the whole thing could be run by a few garage mechanics but surely the senior service would be happy to get rid of the handlebar moustached contingent?

@Factual errors in this story

>The UK media's reporting of this incident has been utterly lazy and incompetent.

Careful, if the editor of The Sun reads that and kills himself - you could go to prison!

CCTV

Why not just install CCTV on all the street corners in afghanistan - it magically cuts crime by just being there.

@A long-overdue move

Encryption doesn't help - this is doing traffic analysis it doesn't care about the content.

So you happen to read your encypted mail on a hotmail server. The next user is a terrorist suspect that happens to get load balanced to the same server - you are now linked to the terrorist suspect.

Your cell phone aquires a new base station as you come out of the tube. A second earlier a terrorist suspect turned off their cell phone. You are now linked to the terrorist suspect because they might have been swapping phones.

You go to a download site that has a page counter linked to an adult dating site on another server. That other server also hosts extreme pron for another site. You are now linked to downloading extreme pron.

Reason to lease batteries

The reason for leasing batteries is to put some profit back to the dealers.

Dealers don't make much on selling you the car, they make it on charging you for regular servicing - changing the oil every 3000mi - on a new car if you want to keep the warranty.

The problem with leccy cars from the dealers point of view is that you can't take an extra 10-20% off the buyer for wiping an oily rag over the engine every 2 months for the first three years.

It's going to be hard to justify service intervals on a leccy car.

@why ?

Cos the kids are listed on system A that you inherited from the dept of health and the nurseries are on system B which used to be administered by the dept of industry before they were merged, renamed, split up and reorganised.

There is no way to transfer information between them, you no longer have an IT dept who could knock up a quick SQL query cos it got outsourced. You could ring up IBM/EDS/Fujitsu/Cap-Gemini or whoever now runs you, but a simple SQL query will end up costing a couple of £M and take 10years.

So you do it the way 90% of data processing is done. You copy it so a usb stick, dump it all into Excel and spend a day cutting and pasting columns around.

>good stuff

What about all the ones that were turned down for a job but were never told it was because of a CRB and so never got the record changed.

This is only the rate of false positives that knew about it, and knew how/cared enough to get it fixed.

@ How many composers of great music have had flawed personalities

Wagner is still on the GCSE syllabus.

Some very naughty boys were big fans of his.

The real question

What does this mean for IPV6 adoption?

RE: Wow!

And you wouldn't have noticed it anyway.

Stars are small and rather far apart - galaxies coliding is like two puffs of smoke going through the same aircraft hanger.

Tell sid

But if the goverment takes it over then it could sell shares to us!

Nationalise banks + privatise air traffic control; did somebody get their notes the wrong way round?

A cunning plan

If you pass a law stopping EU citizens coming to Britain, even if they have a right to do so, could you extend it to stop Scots coming to England?

Might be a good way of promoting yourself to number 10?

Available from

The edited version is availale from all good railway station bookstores - the secret version will be available for free from all good railway carriages.

Match names and date of birth

So they know the names and birthdays of all these terrorists but still can't catch them?

A national database is the answer

Is there no problem that can't be solved by a national database?

I could knock something up in 5mins on a C64 that would store all British tennis champions then we would be assured of a Wimbledon win!

E-parliament

> Whenever you ask a slightly complex question, elbot either ignores you or spouts nonsense, > and if you ask it to clarify the nonsense it tries to change the topic.

So you only have to add the ability to say "the severe end of severe" and you have a cabinet minister!

Remember SLS and 32 floppies?

Type your comment here — plain text only, no HTML

@There is an alternative to pirated software

"Just think about the fact that as long as someone is giving away pirate copies of Microsoft Office for little more than the price of a blank CD, there is effectively *zero* chance of anyone making a success of selling for £50"

You don't think thats why there is no real protection in MS-office do you?

But that would be an abuse of their monopoly position and MS would never dream of that.

Sneakernet

Surprised about the link.

We had a much smaller system years ago only doing 72Gb/night and the only way to handle it was to post hard drives home.

Sun are part of the data processing consrtium so MySQL is probably a given.

@Maybe there's further similarity ...

"They did what!? They designed a f*cking SRB with multiple f*cking 'click-on' sections sealed with f*cking rubber O-rings!? What the f*ck were they thinking!?"

Which worked perfectly if you launched in the temperature range they spec'ed.

It's like saying they designed this f*cking server with f*cking parts that fail just because the watermain bust and put our machine room under 6ft of water.

@so what

>US policy makers found that kitchen knives can be used to stab people. chefs get ready to

> apply for a new knife-wielding permit that we won't give out.

No they would just ban pictures of knives!

I'm waiting for UHDV

Blu-Ray only gives you 1080p, I'm waiting for UHDV-TV at 7,680 × 4,320

@james

Theres also no favors from vendors by buying more of an existing product.

If you want a nice retirement directorship or a bit more pork barrel funding you have to propose a bold new initiative. It doesn't matter if it is never delivered or doesn't work, you will have left by then with a record of initiating bold new initiaves.

No link to IT projects obviously.

@Computer Vendors?

These are machines returned to the Vendors for disposal. Under WEEEEEEEE you have to take back and recycle or safely dispose of any electricla equipment you make.

Recycle generally means shipping it to somewhere cheap without any enviromental laws.

the poor child excuse

They weren't using skype they were using a regular phone supplied by the cable company. It may have been using VOIP inside the companies network, but so does BT's system X.

The problem was that the phone company hadn't dealt with their change of address properly - it was sending the bills to the new address but had the old one on file. This would have happened if they were using Voip/ATM/carrier pigeon.

Apart from obviously being a way for the phone companies to lock out competition - how is this suppsoed to work? Suppose I install SIP at home to call into my office, do I suddenly need to provide 999 services to myself.

This is EXACTLY what will happen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwqPYeTSYng

@Juicy Target

>Or are they hoping to be fighting an enemy whose ground-to-air defences and

>aircraft are completely shattered, but who still maintain a nearby ICBM threat?

Yes it assumes they have a permanent escort of interceptors and some ground attack aircraft have knocked out all the SAM sites around the ICBM but decided not to hit the ICBM itself.

Presumably there is a similair navy project where a remote control kamikaze drone crashes into the side of a ship and a small robot ejects, climbs down the hull and attaches a limpet mine under the water.

Textbooks

Simple solution, do a deal with universities to make the required text books only available on kindle.

Everybody has to buy the device and the $200 textbook. And because of the DRM you don't have the problem of people selling used copies at the end of the year or using the library.

Plus you don't have to think up a way to change an algebra textbook every year to justify a new edition.

@I can hardly wait

They said I were mad to build a rocket on a swamp, but I built one anyway - it sank into the swamp.

So I built another one, that fell over burned down then sank into the swamp.

...

In this case it's just an excuse

The republican governer reduced salaries, the democrat councillor refused to implement the cuts. There was a law suit, the council lost and now they have come up with a "The dog ate my homework" excuse to prevent them carrying it out.

You can bet that if there was a need to raise salaries they would find a solution pretty quickly.

@dough!

"but anyone who runs a mission critical server in a VM is just asking for trouble"

Anyone who runs a mission critical server on bare metal that can't be immediately snapshotted and migrated to another piece of hardware is asking for trouble.

The screw up was nothing to do with VM, it could just as easily have happened in the OS or DB - and frequently has.

@The London transport system has changed

To be fair the CCTV has reduced the levels of cannibalism to an acceptable level -

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068458/

From the bleedin obvious dept.

"donor who died shortly before the surgery"

Got that the right way round then!

Not medieval

Paying people to leave would be medieval

"That he which hath no stomach to this fight (or goverment)

Let him depart; his passport shall be made

And crowns for convoy put into his purse:"

Henry V scene III