Posts by deshepherd 252 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
I knew someone who used to work for Sun and was based there .... and the best thing he said was when he was allowed to "hot desk" at another Sun office closer to his home instead of having to go into his "proper" office (after all, the network is the computer, or was that vice versa).
I assume it a case of wanting a big building on the bay shore line so that they can be just like Google.
The $79/£89 comparison is not really valid since the $79 US version is the version that displays ads and special offers on the screen savers etc ... the version which doesn't (and thus is equivalent to the UK version) is $109 - which is £70 at todays exchange rate ... add on 20% VAT and you get £84 so then its pretty close to the UK price.
Probably does seem like more since the 15-30secs at either end of the ad break where there's a "sponsors message" (e.g. sport on ITV brought to you by KIA, Home and garden brought to you by B&Q etc) don't count towards the advert quota. That said ... the new VM TIVo has a "skip forward 30secs" and you can keep pressing to increase the skip in 30sec increments - I find that Ch4 breaks are invariably 4 mins (8 skip button presses) long and with 4 breaks per hout that seems like 16mins to me!
VM have just rolled out a software update to the TiVo and one of the changes is that there is a better integration between iPlayer and the backwards EPG ... you can now select a BBC program from the backwards EPG and it takes you direct to that programs iPlayer page and with another button press you can start playing it. I think they couldn't do the more intuitive method of starting to play when you select from the backwards EPG since the BBC insist that everything is (seen to be) done through iPlayer thus effectively offering a link direct to the releavant iPlayer "page" is the best they can do.
Well, I remember around that time (late 70s) as a sixth former being able to bootstrap a Data General Nova from front panel switches then install its OS to disk (a single platter 12 or 15" solid disk that probably had capacity measured in kBs) from dozens of trays of fanfold paper tape!
Almost 30 years ago I did a course on Error Correcting Codes as part of my Maths degree and sure I recall the lecturer talking about communications with the Voyager probes (which were then in between Saturn and Uranus) as being an example of how communications were being pushed to their limits - a tranmission of less power than a dim light bulb from millions of miles away.... and to think they are still in contact when Voyage is ~4x further away is amazing!
An "English Pint" is a weird hybrid measure as it is 20 US fl oz's ... thus is marginally larger than a Imperial Pint! (as 1 US fl oz is marginally bigger than 1 Imperial fl oz)
At least its not as bad as the "ye olde englishe pubbe" style of American drinking establishment that maintain that the true english measure for ale is the yard!
But assuming PG&E have not changed in the 12 years since I was in California then before "smart meters" you would have had accurate bills because they come round to read your meter *EVERY* month (seemed to be no concept of an "estimated" bill) .... side effect of this was in the house we rent was that we had to leave the side gate to the house unlocked at all times to ensure PG&E had access to the meters ... fortunately this didn't matter as in Cupertino crime seemed non-existant (well, apart from one armed robbery at the bank at the end of our road!)
Haven't used the K4 so can't tell how different the page turn buttons are ... on the K3 they are very easy to use ... but this also means I quite frequently press them by mistake!
Loss of keyboard is no big deal for me - I think I'd see it as an improvement. The number of times I use the keyboard on my K3 is minimal - and if I am using it I tend to need the symbols as well which is a on screen select by arrow keys affair and in any case the keyboard isn't suitable for any serious typing.
Not getting an AC adapter - hmm, my Kindle charger is now my micro-USB charger of choice as its (a) very small (basically a 13amp plug with a USB socket) and (b) is a different colour (white) from all the other chargers I need to take anywhere so its easy to find in the "charger bag"!
That said, there's no need to "upgrade" from my K3 to a K4 ... but if the Kfire arrives, that might be different.
Lets hope that they fix the current "glitch" in 2G sharing where if you roam onto an Orange signal from TMobile (probably vice versa as well I'd assume) then everything is ok for voice and text but to use the signal for data then in Android you have to enable "international data roaming" (there is a "national data roaming" option as well but you have to enable the international one for it to work).
Problem is that some seemingly "safe" apps ask for the same wide permissions ... I'm fairly sure that Google Tracks or Maps asks for similar - I was certainly surprised that one of the Google apps was asking for permission to make calls but its possible that that may be to enable you to find a location (e.g. a restaurant) on a map and phone it directly. As a result its sometimes difficult to work out why an app is requesting certain permissions.
Possibly a solution would be to require apps to state the reasons why they need each of the permissions which you could browse before deciding to accept/decline the install ... clearly this is not 100% foolproof but migh give some guidance.
What I think the implication is that the "tipping" point in the UK for people to buy a tablet is £250, however if Amazon maintain the same price point for the Fire relative to the iPad then that yields a UK price of around £130 ... also using price ratio from e-ink kindles to fire in the US yields price of around £150/160. I.e looks likely that Kindle Fire will launch at well below the price people seriously consider buying a tablet so sales could be huge.
Never mind if £89 = $79 or $109, I like the look of the new entry level Kindle as a pure ebook. I've got the current v3 Kindle and the keyboard is just an annoyance ... takes up space that you use perhaps once every week or two ... and even when you do since it has no numbers or symbols you still end up using arrow keys to find the symbol you need on a pop-up menu. That said, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the Fire arrive in the UK, hopefully at a "sensible" price ... given $->£ conversion on the current 3G Kindle then I'd assume something around £150-160 seems to be what to expect.
When I was at school 30-ish years ago we had a visit from one of the Astronauts who'd been to the moon who gave a lecture about his experiences. In questions afterwards someone asked him if he'd brought any moon rock as a souvenier for himself and he said no that hadn't been allowed and in any case "moon rock just looks like rock ... I show you a piece of rock I said I brought from the moon but you couldn't tell whether that was true or whether I'd just picked it up out of my garden as it would look the same"
"Imagine if FIFA suddenly deemed that football’s throw-ins were to become kick-ins"
They actually did ... well, they thought it might improve the game and ran a trial for a season in 2 or 3 different leagues - think the "Conference" (i.e. whats now the BlueSquare Premiership) was one of the leagues that ran the trial. Result wasn't what they expected - think they thought kick in would result in quick short passes to bring ball back into play but instead, I assume, resulted in large numbers of throw-ins turning into slightly different versions of corners with long flighted crosses and lots of delay and barging around in the penalty area before it was taken. So the result of the trial was that the idea was dropped.
"if you came to trading from the back office, where those systems exist and are devised, you may well know how to beat those systems. As Leeson did."
Think the same applies to the current case and the one in France last year as well ... person responsible for the fraud had moved from back office to front office and thus probably understood what would and would not be spotted by the back office checks
There was an item on the R5 "wake up to money" program last week (n.b. I listen to the podcast - I'm not awake at that time of day!) about a company that was laying a new dedicated cable across the atlantic for a finance company ... by having their own direct transatlantic connection they reckoned that they'd get data between NY and London 10ms faster than at present and that for every ms gained they thought they'd get a return of something like $100million. So speed definitely is important!
So basically sounds like they use the unix adjtime command
int adjtime(const struct timeval *delta, struct timeval *olddelta);
Description
The adjtime() function gradually adjusts the system clock (as returned by gettimeofday()). The amount of time by which the clock is to be adjusted is specified in the structure pointed to by delta.
Only potential "novelty" seems to be from the description that rather than starting to adjust the time from the point where adjtime is executed they instead specify an future time point at which the adjustment is to be completed.
Not such a good result for me ... its suggestion for the "quiet" route home for me goes via the Cribbs Causeway shopping centre and associated M5 junction! Admittedly the route is still described as "quite busy" whereas the route which mostly follows the route I take down the A38 is described as "very hostile"! Especially strange as the "quiet" route takes you down a section of 50mph dual carriage way while the "very hostile" A38 is 40mph with a bike lane!
Same at Bourton-on-the-water. There's a model of the the village, and in that there's a model of the model village which in turn contains a model of the modle of the model village ... again they give up after 3 levels of recursion(plus last one isn't particularily accurate!)
Though, of more interest to my then 4-ish year-old son when we went there was the motor museum around the corner which is the home of "Brum"
Having lived for a few years in California and then back in the UK struggled to get wifi to work in an old Victorian house I've always taken the view that the people who design wifi hardware think all houses are like the (admitedly good for earthquakes) houses in Silcon Valley which are basically a single story wood frame divided up by plasterboard walls... so issues over penetrating brick/stone walls ceilings, floors etc had never occurred to them.
If you go to the original NZ articles then it seems clear it is a hovercraft ... mentions of him test hovering it at home, comments on building hovercraft kits from person from NZ hovercraft club. Also the article suggests that the accident was caused by a failure on the bolts that held the frame containing the propulsion fan to the body of the hovercraft ... assume if this happend when fan was running then the frame would have moved forward at speed (propelled by the fan) hitting the unfortunate pilot standing/sitting in front - probably was killed by the frame etc hitting him rather than the fan itself.
"I'd leave out the milk"
Yes but the hint is in "research - funded by dairy Cravendale Milk" .... missing out the milk would get the same reaction as I had couple weeks ago at the Bath&West show when I asked for a black coffee at what I hadn't realized was the Jersey GoldTop drinks bar!
"One thing they did get right, at least is the need for English tea to be brewed with boiling water,"#
As opposed to a cafe in Portugal which responded to my wife's request for "tea with milk" (in our best approximation of portugese) which arrived as a tea bag floating in a cup of hot milk!
I was a long time TiVo user and also already on VM XL TV so as far as I'm concerned the VM-TiVo is well worth the £149 install (intro deal for existing TiVo owners) and £3/month. From my perspective its very similar to the old TiVo in usage and as it has its own tuners there's no longer the issue of an IR blaster in front of the STB to do the channel changes which seemed to have a ~5% failure rate!
Couple of niggles which I hope will get sorted out in upfates
- would be really helpful to have a "global padding" option so that the default recording options could be "start 1 minute early, end 3 minutes late" to cope with the vagueries of BBC schedulung where early start/overrun is often "intentional".
- parental control system is, I think, designed for the US situation where broadcasters are, I believe, legally required to provide age ratings for everything so in the UK when it probably gets no age ratings it falls back to a default "after 10pm could be rated 18 so assume that it is" setting.
Anyway, should succeed in the UK this time ... TiVo haven't made the mistake this time of partnering with a company that's about to bring out a competitor (the original TiVo was marketted by Sky and came out about 6 months before Sky introduced Sky+)
I've used this on an occasional basis for most of the year or so I've had and android phone. Most amusing use was when I recorded a track when we did the hedge maze at Longleat .... looked at the track when we reached the centre to find quite how lost we'd been trying to get there ... seem to have managed to cover most of the area of the maze while searching!
I've been slightly suspicious of the distance it records when walking at times .... especially as (doubtless due to GPS inaccuracies) often see a very zig-zag track when walking in straightline down a road but other than its great.
Only caveat is that when you install you have to agree to a huge list of things to allow (including, IIRC, the ability to make phone calls - why?) ... I suspect that many of these may be for features I'll never use and I suppose its from a "reputable source"!
Given the way Government departments, Local Government areas etc all now seem to have to attach some pseudo-babble "mission statement"/"corporate branding" to their name (my favourite from a few years ago was "Mid Beds District Council - striving for unitary status") then a first glance at this website might seem to reveal the new UK Government branding of
"UK.gov - there may be errors, inconsistencies and inaccuracies"
My 11-yr-old son has the PS3 version and he and his 15-yr-old brother have been playing it in two player mode ... I think there's a major upgrade here in that unlike the previous versions where the two characters could not move off the same screen (or, worse, one character could cause screen to scroll and other character would get pushed in same direction by opposite screen edge and as a result fall off a ledge - cue major inter-sibbling squabble) now it seems to cope with split screen + its a dynamic split screen which can rotate from left/right through above/below to right/left as the two characters move there relative posiitons around - looked quite clever the way it worked + the way the split moves was also very reminiscent of the scene cuts in the original SW films!
N.b. I suspect that if (like my son) you've seen every episode of SW:TCW several times then the game may make a lot more sense!
Was about to say the same myself!
However, tjhere is, I gather, another provision which allows a country to apply to the EU abolish this relief for specific types of goods from a specific location if it can be shown that goods being routed this way are distorting the market ... apparently Denmark have already invoked this provision in the past to close a VAT loophole where magazines were being imported via the Aland islands to avoid Danish VAT.
I suspect what will happen is reduction of exemption rate down to the lowest value (i.e. around £8.50-9.00) along with an intention to seek an exemption for LCVR being applied to the Channel Islands for items not produced their (i.e. to avoid affecting the dairy and flower trade which is why the channel islands exemption was initially set up) if these imports get any bigger.
"So to answer your question yes you can opt out, by NOT going in to the settings and enabling experimental features then turning on smart tabs..."
... I expect google will still be scanning all your emails (isn't that the deal for getting the "free" service) and the choice you have is to enable the "look what we've found" option.
We used to have a Samsung as our main TV where you pressed the "input" button on the remote and it cycles through the different sources. We then got a newer one last year and on that when you press the "input" button you just get a menu and you have then got to select from that. (Worse, we've just acquired a VM TiVo box and its remote can control the TV - including the "input" button signal - but while this brings up the menu you can't actuallty select anything from the menu or even dismiss the menu without the Samsung controller)
I wish Samsung would do a firmware update to bring back the "cycle through the inputs" behaviour!
Moral of the story: you can't please all the people all the time!
"Allegedly men tend to do more miles on average.
More miles = more exposure to other road users = greater chance of an accident."
Quite probably correct ... that's one of the reasons why some of the coverage yesterday was suggesting we'd have to answer a lot more questions on the sort and amount of driving we do before we'll get a quote.
BTW, someone else mentioned Sheila's Wheels being discrimantory - actually I think that they will quote for men and in any case most articles I've seen about them indicate that women can normally get a better deal elsewhere! It probably relies on female customers assuming that it is (a) only insuring women and as a result (b) must be giving them a better deal!
"Having said that, I'm sure I read somewhere that designers of competition sports venues deliberately try and 'tweak' the design within the rules in order to maximise the possibility of records being broken at that venue, as this attracts more media attention and revenue."
Quite true ... remember at time of Beijing Olympics there were some articles on the design of its swimming pool. They'd used several new techniques to try to eliminate the waves generated by the swimmers from reflecting back into their paths. Pool was, I think, a bit deeper than normal race pool to delay the effect of any pressure wave which bounced off the bottom, lane dividers consisted of lots of discs that would absorb the wave rather than floats that reflected it and as well as the empty lane on either side the water level was flush to the side of the pool so a wave would simply go over the edge into drainage rather than relect. Apparently any distubance on the surface of the water makes some difference to the times so all these effects gave the conditions (along with the advances in swimsuit technology) for super fast times.
I think there were similar considerations to the athletics track. Seem to recall that Usain Bolt saying in the 200m he didn't slow down to celebrate like he did in the 100m as he realized that the track was so fast that he had the opportunity to better Michael Johnson's world record which had stood for years and some people thought to stand for many more.
> However, link #3 is Wikipedia page which in the summary you can see from the google search results (i.e. you don't even need to follow the link) includes the word Hoax.
... but then my son's schools have started to teach children to employ a degree of scepticism over Wikipedia articles (due to the number of well known hoaxes there) and as a result the fact that Wikipedia says this is a hoax might actually make them believe the story to be true!
> A sad day for those of us who cut our teeth on the PDP.
while not a PDP, I started off in that era when we had a Data General minicomputer at school and I used to be able to program in the initial bootstrap via the front panel switches from memory - and it wasn't just the "green screens" that you used to access them ... there were teletypes as well!
I also rember, probably 20 years ago, listening to a radio program featuring DEC and Ken Olsen where one of the things I remember was Ken's (at least initial) insistence that his sales force were paid a standard salary and not commission on the basis that he wanted them to sell what was going to be best for the customer and not oversell to inflate the salespersons commission.
reminds me of an entry in the comp.risks newsletter years ago of how on one of the first generation computer controlled jets a test pilot decided to see what would happen if he selected "raise undercarriage" while stationary on the ground ... needless to say the next generation of software added an "if (undercarriage_loaded) ignore_command();" clause to the relevant routine.
Prices for new games (apart from a few top titles) also drop fast .... my son want Fallout NewVegas on PC for Christmas so I ordered it for what seemed like a reasonable price of £25 in november ... by mid december I could have got it for £15 and its just £13 now.
I wonder if Which? compared 2nd hand price versus the "current" new price rather than initial RRP.
Pedant alert:
Correctly
> Zero:
> 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
should be +Zero as opposed to
-Zero:
1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
I'll get my coat - its the one with a copy of IEEE754 in the pocket
Nor here either. My elder son has just started GCSE's this year (and so we we've discovered the world of bite-size units, continual project work, controlled assesments, regular exams etc). I happened to pickup his physics revision notes book the other night and was somewhat surprised to find that major topics in GCSE Physics topics now are Plate Techntonics (wasn't that Geography) and Astronomy (and in attempt to "keep dwn wiv da yoof" each page has a jokey line at the bottom like "the milky way ... its not just a chocolate bar")
The final straw came when I looked for anything about maths that might be relevant for GCSE physics (n.b. Newton's laws didn't qualify for a name check in the index ... possibly dead white guy syndrome) and found a small section which said (and I think this is a pretty accurate recollection of what it said) "you may need to use some maths in paper 3 where the questions tend to be more physicsy (sic)".
At least in the mock exam he's just taken he's being assessed as A* potential ... not sure wether this says more about him or the exam!
The Virgin V+ box already has 3 tuners ... all they are doing is ensuring that this new box matches this on spec.
Also, the monthly cost for XL package with TiVo is only £3 above the normal XL price so in effect its £3/month to get the TiVo features.
As a VM (XL TV) user and someone whose had TiVo for ~10 years then I can't wait to get one of these! Only possible issue is whether the 2 vs 3 tuner deal is due to hardware or software restictions - i.e. is the "3 tuners coming in new year" just the result of a software uprade or is it really a new rev of the box hardware
Remember back in BBC micro days buying an adventure game that boasted that it was the biggest game of its type with "over 9000 rooms" .... turned out it was set on a space shiip which had 10 storage segments, each segment had 10 floors, each floor had 10 sectors and each sector contained 9 rooms - and each set of 9 rooms was identical to every other apart from, I think, 2 - the one you woke up in (think its was transporting cryogenically frozen people) and another you eventually followed clues to which had another dying person who gave another clue before expiring - then there were a few dozen other rooms at the control end of the ship where all the real action happened. So ... it had over 9000 rooms, though 8982 of them were utterly irrelevant
1>. Why are candidates (and their reps) allowed to even see any votes before they have all been cast?
Technically the postal votes they saw already had been cast. Candidates/agents get to see/monitor the counting of all votes to enable the process to be considered fair - so if postal votes start to be counted early then they need to be able to observe this.
2>. Why are postal votes even opened before the ballot is complete?
Becuase in the UK we still have this idea that we want the election to be determined as soon as possible - we expect to know the new PM on the next day and this time having to wait 4 or 5 days was seen to be quite a problem - there were real concerns over how markets might react when there was no decision by monday morning.
3>. Why do postal votes even exist if we cant verify the eligibility of the voter?
Postal votes have always existed and the verification techniques now, I think, are a lot more robust than they used to be (e.g. a signature that can be matched to the application is required). They are much more widespread now because it was seen as a way to get many more people voting. N.b. "in person" votes used to be pretty insecure - just turn up at 8am at a poling station with a name and address from the electoral roll and you'd get a ballot with no need to prove identity - not sure if its still the same as I've voted by post for the last several years!
Again, because we want the result "quickly" we need to have a system that allows postal votes to be "verified" quickly ... there is provision to challenge a result later in the courts but that only overturns a result at a later date.
The alternative is exemplified by an exchange during the 2000 US election between a BBC reporter and a UK representative of one of the US parties. As the result became so close in Florida (and before the "hanging chad" issue had been raised) the US person commented that the result might have to wait until the "absentee ballots" were certified - the BBC person asked how long that would take clearly expecting an answer along the lines of "by lunchtime" and was stunned to be told "in 21 days time" ... because under Florida election law the parties had 21 days to challenge any postal votes and the result was not finalised until that time was over - normally the number of postal votes would be less than the victory margin so it wasn't an issue but in this case it was (and, I think , this also contributed to the courts ruling out the hanging chad debate on the basis that a decision had to be ratified after 21 days).
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