Posts by Tom 38

Re: An MP was shocked

Hodge's stock position on everything these days is to be shocked or appalled. If you're looking for a good sound bite about something that is shocking, Margaret Hodge is your go-to girl.

Companies paying all tax they owe, but not more than they have to? HMRC are "appalling"

Not getting enough restitution from convicted organized crime bosses? "Pathetic and appalling"

Queen's roof falling down? "Shocked by complacency of palace staff"

MoJ fines capita for poor quality of interpreters? "Appalling"

Public sector gagging clauses? "Shocking"

Frankly I'm amazed that there is anything left on this good earth that can even mildly surprise the woman.

Ultimately this just leads to less and less money in your own pockets, you would be better off asking the government not to promise anything and in return keep more of your money.

This argument plays very well to people who have some money in their pocket and are aggrieved they don't get to keep more of it. It doesn't play well to people who have no money in their pocket and need some help.

If Sky is £30 a month now, and the BBC would be £11, then Sky then would be £41 a month, assuming you didn't opt out of BBC channels.

XL always makes people feel more significant

Except when it's on your t-shirt.

Re: Martin Gregorie Anon Cluetard Boston Marathon Bombing

That explains the collection of Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone data, doesn't it? By collecting her data they aimed at disrupting and tracking groups such as Al Qaeda?

No, that is just just straightforward old fashioned espionage - countries want to know as much as they can about other countries and usually have agencies to do espionage.

Not exactly a new thing, and even if they stopped mass surveillance the same agencies would still be interested in that data.

I'm not saying it is right, just that it has always happened. If you think the BND don't monitor people like Bronislaw Komorowski you are naive.

This is something truly good, a gift from God

No, it isn't. It was invented by human beings.

Are you talking about God or the internet?

Re: Great

This has nothing to do with "making your broadband faster". This is about increasing the speed of pre-existing links by upgrading the bits at the end, so they get network upgrades without having to actually upgrade (much of) the physical network.

The point is to ease congestion on POPs/exchanges that have reached capacity and yet have no commercial incentive to upgrade. Its not to make your ADSL go fast in a little village somewhere.

Plus, if you ever did want your little village to have fast internet, then the backbone within the UK would have to be much much faster. Hence working on things like this, rather than trying to lay 50x as much fibre on trunk links.

I agree, that's why I use chromium.

Re: Just a simple question.

I've tried to answer this a couple of times, it's best to go to an expert:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html

Re: Seagate

My little home ZFS server (16TB and counting) uses these drives:

1 Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA632 ML6OA580

10 SAMSUNG HD154UI 1AG01118

1 SAMSUNG HD204UI 1AQ10001

1 ST31500341AS CC1H (Seagate)

Currently, the only drive with any issue at all is the seagate...

The 2GB Samsung was to replace an identical failed Seagate ST31500341AS...

Shame you can't get Samsung anymore - no great speed, but very quiet and very reliable in my experience.

Re: If Baidu and Renren are any indicator...

No, he is commenting on the fact that in the 18th and 19th Century, America ignored all international conventions on copyright and patents in order to advance their economy.

100 years later, you all bridle with fury at China doing it to you.

Re: broad implications

The constitution applies to citizens; foreigners have less rights.

Re: Many a debt?

No it isn't. Some parts of FreeBSD's userland are imported, the kernel and most of its interfaces come from MACH.

There is plenty in FreeBSD that comes from Darwin too - libdispatch comes directly, llvm and clang (FreeBSD 10's default compiler, no more GCC) are heavily worked on by Apple, all of the auditing from TrustedBSD...

TBH, I thought his political career would have been done once he got caught bunging free shares as bribes to his missus - apparently in India such wrong-doing means you have to sit on the naughty step for a year or two before sitting down to play at the top table again.

Re: Wanna really contaminate the med ad dbs...

Google show you ads based upon who wants to pay the most out of all the people interested in advertising to people like you, so searching for "knitting" a lot is unlikely to result in lots and lots of knit based ads.

There will be some "knitting" ads, but the ad spend of Big Knitting is not particularly large, you'll mainly be shown other ads.

Now, instead search for something that is extremely high value (so only requiring a small number of leads converted to make money) - "laser eye surgery" for instance. Search a few times for that on google, and the ads will follow you for months and months - the advertiser is so desperate for leads and conversions that they outbid most other ads in google, and so you see mainly eye surgery ads.

Other common "high value search terms" that can skew your ads: flights, computers, phones.

Guinness is Irish not British

Technically, Irish is British, Ireland being one of the 6,000+ islands that make up the British Isles.

Although I'm sure anyone who considers themselves Irish would vehemently disagree.

Re: circumventing the heavily regulated systems

They are only circumventing the heavily regulated system of taxis, they are not escaping the heavily regulated system of private hire vehicles. These are not unlicensed cabbies, they are fully licensed to pick up passengers at point a and transport them to point b for a charge.

The taxi drivers are upset because modern technology has meant that a person walking down a street can reliably and simply arrange for a private hire vehicle to come collect him, where he is. If the average joe can do that, then he no longer requires the expensive taxi service.

PS: Licensed cabbies are no guarantee of a safe ride - see Worboys.

So, for instance, Google Image Search?

XP was hated when it came out too but it went on to be a great success. I think most of the public are starting to come around to Windows 8 too.

No it wasn't. XP was massively desired, it added some glitz and features that windows 2000 didn't have, it didn't crash like 98/ME and had a newer version of DirectX. It was so popular that they literally had to invent Bittorrent in order for enough people to download it from the scene (this is not true).

User satisfaction (yes, I hate that too) with IT has risen more than 8% in a year since the rollout.

You gave everyone new machines with bags of RAM and user satisfaction rose? Must be down to Windows 8!

13% is not a huge market share, but it continues to grow, even in these times where many companies don't need to run the latest and greatest, and that is no disgrace.

It continues to grow due to obsolescence of existing PCs and not being able to purchase a windows PC that does not come with windows 8.

Quite. We used to have one number, easy to remember, which was free.

Directory Services was never free, and whilst we had one number (two actually, 153 for international inquiries), each operator had their own system with different levels of quality and cost.

Re: 4K is possible.

Look,

A lot of your points are completely batshit-insane and/or wrong.

You can reasonably steam 4k over broadband. I can stream it over my current broadband..

Multi layer bluray is stop gap measure that doesn't make any sense? Must be why it has been here since bluray launched, bluray being a dual layer disc in the original spec.

Lets go back to the 80s, and pretend we all want to pop along to Gumby Videos to pick one of your videos to watch. The problem with video stores was clearly that no-one liked the small, plastic, inexpensive to produce disc you could rent, what the people REALLY REALLY WANT is a ROM cartridge to rent.

We can build the cartridge out of a tech that doesn't exist yet (hint: when companies "come out of stealth" and still do nothing, it's because they have nothing). Plus, the cost for this new tech will be comparable with that of a pressed BD per unit, and have 40 times the capacity.

Sounds AWESOME and REALLY QUITE LIKELY

Re: Riding the internet, bareback

Sasser's vector seems to be through vulnerable MS network services. If you don't expose those services externally, or to other windows machines, I don't see how you could catch that.

Re: Haven't you seen Fringe ?

The sniffer dogs are to make you feel uncomfortable if you are doing something wrong, the guy holding the leash is then supposed to spot people looking uncomfortable and ask leading questions.

Re: Fair's fair

These bus stops are normally reserved for public transportation, as in buses that anybody can ride on. If the tech companies want to use these bus stops, it is normal that they pay for their use. I understand that generally, an event happening on a public square requires renting that square from the town, e.g for putting a circus tent. This is no different.

It's completely different. They could stop their private buses anywhere that it is legal to stop a private vehicle, and do pick ups there, it is just more logical and less inconvenience for everyone else to use a regular 'stop'.

We're not talking about them renting or using bus stations, these 'stops' are poles by the side of the road.