Posts by Tom 38 4344 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009
He does have a point though, the reason the S5 has a fingerprint scanner is so that when a thicko chooses a phone, he doesn't choose an iphone just because it has a fingerprint scanner and the S5 does not. Sales people also like tickboxes as product differentiators.
Admittedly, the fingerprint tech in the 5S works quite well, I'm sure it also will in the S5
City datacentres are for the city boys with their financial data, or those who are too rich to care. Everyone else is either in docklands or in a real cheap DC on the outskirts of town, Park Royal, Slough, Gatwick - that sort of area.
PS: Looking at munin in the iphone browser is not an iphone app.
With the health data, we get some benefit from the selling of the data (cash), but the overall benefit should take in to account (hopefully) the new and improved drugs that can be produced from researching the data, which should give "us" a net benefit; we'll be healthier for longer.
Not as much of a benefit as the owners of the biotech companies buying the data I suppose.
Way to miss the point AC. I didn't say people needed to write the damn thing themselves, just that that should be the source of the software. Many easy to use mass market consumer electronics have at their base open source software, the people using them do not know or care (as evidenced by your delightful musings).
Belkin (+many others) only care about selling little boxes, so the software will be poor quality and just good enough to ship.
Something like this deserves an open source solution, where a bunch of nut jobs¹ who obsesses about home automation and security has spent thousands of hours perfecting the stack.
¹ I use it affectionately, I'm also a nut job, just not about home automation..
It is sort of outsourcing:
It was signed in 2004 with Siemens, valued at £2bn, but transferred to Atos when it acquired the Solutions and Services unit in 2010.
Siemens Solutions and Services is/was BBC Technology, the unit that Tony Blair forced to be privatised in his attempt to gain control of the BBC. In effect, they keep just giving the contracts to "BBC Technology", whoever owns it at the time.
Really? I wouldn't trust most of the people I went to university with to code their way out of a paper bag. The cheap US workers that Tata will hoover up will be of similar competence to the cheap Indian workers that Tata hoover up.
Their respective cheapness is not a coincidence, they lack either the skills, intelligence, experience or opportunity to command a higher wage.
So, if an employee of that bank were to abscond with your money, to a country without an extradition treaty with us, you would expect the government to step in and nuke them for you? Didn't think so.
No, I expect the government to give me my money back.
The point is, bitcoins aren't backed by anything. GBP is backed by the british government. Deposits of GBP are covered by GB banking regulations, which provide security.
Their idea of ICT is teaching them to write a (poorly designed) webpage in Dreamweaver and make a web-movie, or (and I still can't believe this), how to write a game in Python.
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There should be more concentration on object orientated programming (.NET, Java, C++ etc.)
Hate to tell you this, Python is a real language, perfectly suitable for teaching people how to write a games engine, has proper OOP features and commands good salaries in the industry.
I couldn't think of a better language in which to start programming. Teach kids C++? Fuck off, teach them python and if they need C++, they can learn C++.
I liked the segue in her brain from "Coding is really easy. You can make a website in an hour even if you've never done it before" to "I'm the director of a 'teach kids to code' charity, and I plan to at some point in the next year learn how to code". Haven't had a free hour yet I suppose.
Quite. If cops have cameras attached to their faces all the time when on duty, then that should be recorded, stored and made accessible to all pertinent parties.
For instance, if you are arrested or searched by an officer, you or your attorney should be supplied with the footage from all officers who arrested/searched you.
If misconduct complaints are raised against an officer, this system should be made available to review their actions in the period in question.
If they roll out this without doing any of these things, it would be a sham. I have no problems with honest upstanding cops, but they are public servants whom we give a great deal of power, their actions should be accountable to us. Too frequently when one cop does something wrong, the rest clam up and cover ranks, they should be gagging for a system that records precisely what events occurred.
Nothing says "this town is a shithole" like ten boarded-up shops in a row...
In that, yes it is awesomely great and powerful, and you can make gloriously beautiful code with it.
The most important word in that sentence is "can". Most users of JS don't, however.
The style of JS is largely driven by the framework you are using. JS written for Prototype will look wildly different to JS written for jQuery, which again will look wildly different to "stock" ECMAscript.
If the "cyber warfare capabilities of China and Russia rival those of the US" as you say, then that implies that one must be even more careful when in the US.
Well done, you got the joke!
There was me, thinking "gosh, that's a bit subtle, wonder if anyone will get it"...
The internet is basically three components: Consumers, ISPs, and Data. The purpose of the ISP is to connect the other two, indiscriminately.
Bit of a simplification, don't you think? Sure, the ISP exists to connect the consumer to the data, but the data is not local to the ISP. The ISP has to have outbound connections to the data providers, and different data providers will need different connections, which may have differing costs.
The ISP has to determine which of those connections are necessary, and what speed to run it at. Your ISP may prefer to spend a lot of money on a fat pipe to the BBC if that is where the demand is, that does not mean they have to provide an equivalently fast connection to BobsBargainAmmo.com - they have to discriminate based upon destination.
Kickstarter campaigns don't sell anything, they allow you to invest in the company in return for potential rewards. The difference is that investors are contributing money in the hope that the companies business plans will succeed and they will be rewarded - there is no contractual obligation to provide whatever is listed at any pledge level.
BBC (Technology) used to be staffed by underpaid hard working techies who invented bloody brilliant things as and when they could. In ~ 2001-2002, BBC (Technology) was outsourced to Siemens, in house tech was then done by consultants who say they will be cheaper but inevitably are not.
iplayer has some impressive technological underpinnings, but it is essentially a well understood problem with a bunch of well understood solutions, that was implemented by a small team that knew precisely what they were doing.
So, hiring consultants to define the project, check, poorly understood requirements leading to constantly redefining the requirements, check, poorly defined deliverables and success criteria, check.
I am surprised you know the dates, also no way was I going to sign up for a year for one programme.
I had never even heard of the programme, wikipedia listed all the dates, when it aired in US, when it aired on Sky, when it aired on UK FTA..
C5 as well has that moronic 5 in the corner.
Well, they did pay for it..
And I saw it before Murdoch vision showed it.
So before Murdoch bought it, you had already seen it, and this is Murdoch's fault that you couldn't watch it on FTA?
And I had the DVD before C5 showed it.
Impressive - UK DVD release was after 5 aired it.
Basically, you love the show, but there is no way you'd pay anything to watch it, including just waiting for a FTA broadcaster showing it and then watching it (which increases viewers for the channel, increases the value of their ad slots, increases revenue and allows new shows to be commissioned or bought.)
Fucking Murdoch ruining your shows though, amirite?
My first ever torrent was Farscape Peace Keeper Wars, after watching 4 series on BBC2. This introduced me to torrents.
Farscape (the TV series) was cancelled because not enough people watched it, and they couldn't make enough money selling it to foreign networks to make a 5th series.
When they realised there was some latent interest in it, a subscription TV channel, Syfy, commissioned a mini-series. They could afford to produce this by selling it to interested networks around the world.
So, you complain about Sky "screwing up the FTA broadcaster", but your example is shitty - the show was cancelled before it went on to Sky, and the follow up mini series that you "had" to torrent could only come into being because of the existence of commercial channels like Sky which could buy it.
PS: You didn't "have to" torrent it. You could have subscribed to Sky if you absolutely had to watch it the very day it was broadcast. You could have not watched it all. You could have waited the 51 days between Sky broadcasting it, and 5 broadcasting it on FTA.
But probably for not much longer - I get it for cricket, rugby and F1. Rugby is all going to BT - the clubs are refusing to play in the tournament Sky have rights to, and will set up a new competition televised by BT, F1 has been going steadily down hill since they banned refueling thus eliminating most of the tactics and strategy, and the less that is said about the cricket at the minute the better.
I'm really not keen on continuing to spaff £60+ a month, particularly when the vast majority of that cash is ending up subsidizing the Sky-BT football rights fight.
If your eyes are not looking at the road, you will crash.
Utter, utter bollocks. You should be constantly checking various bits of information when driving, your eyes should go from road to mirrors to dash to road regularly.
In short, you should be always aware of all information that is pertinent to you being aware of what is coming up ahead and behind you, where you are and what speed you are going.
If some of that information was moved from a physical dash to a heads-up dash, looking at the heads-up dash would not be negligent, it would be good driving.
There can't possibly be enough traffic between London and Ipswich to warrant building a direct and exclusive cable route.
Funnily enough, there are actually several direct trunks to BT's main research facility. Almost like they would push all their daily traffic up there to test stuff. Crazy.
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