Posts by Tom 38 4344 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009
I pay £15/month for unlimited 3G internet, 6000 minutes, unlimited texts. I use on average between 300MB and 3 GB a month, with a peak usage of 8 GB, mainly subscription music and TV services. Watching TV on my phone for around 6 hours a day - I like to have the cricket on at work - uses about a GB of data.
No-one is reading what I am posting, clearly.
Well, in that case, and even looking at your latterly posted "Noddy example", how about we let the police go to the courts and ask for permission, based on suspicion and/or evidence, to monitor the communications of these people to see if there is any link between them?
Bomb goes off, we know who set it off, we want to know who they have been communicating with. Lets start that monitoring! Oh wait…
We could even have a special name for it... what might one call an 'order' from the 'court' I wonder...
No shit Sherlock. I fully agree that access to this information should require a court order. However, if you aren't collecting that data, you can't access it.
We currently collect communication logs from phones, store it, and can access it with a court order. We currently don't store communication logs from internet devices, and so can't access it at all. I don't want the police randomly searching my internet history, but if they need to randomly search my internet history, as decided by a judge, then they should be able to.
So you feel that it is proportionate to have every website site you've ever visited, including the millions that you've never heard of but your PC has probably wondered off too, recorded in a form which can easily be searched by large numbers of people.(Dazed and Confused)
How would me wanting the police to have that information logically expand into wanting you to have the information?
Logic, it's a priceless tool.
Also:
I agree fully on limiting dissemination of the information, and would limit access to this new information to the same people who can currently peruse phone records. (Tom38)
Reading comprehension, also a priceless tool.
There is no published case where having these "new laws" would make a difference to the outcome of the case or the evidence presented.
Do you want to revise that? How precisely do you enumerate the number of cases that could be proven by collecting new evidence, without collecting the evidence. Not many people leave court and then say "Hah! Suckers! If you'd had my IM logs, I'd be doing porridge right now".
Eg, (noddy example) currently if plod think A. Burglar sold a stolen phone to A.Fence - but there is no phone records linking the two - they can't proceed due to lack of evidence. The two communicate frequently on MSN, but there is no evidence of that - there is no way for the police to see that.
With the new system, plod can see that the two talk about this stuff on IM, and could charge them - but without knowing what the data is, how can you possibly say that?
I agree fully on limiting dissemination of the information, and would limit access to this new information to the same people who can currently peruse phone records.
So what you're saying is that the existing laws enabled the authorities to connect these people to each other and the crime through their communications?
Yes, they could in this case. The point is that in this case, the existence of communication records between the defendants was what caused the conviction. It was dumb luck that the defendants chose to use phones to communicate, if they had chosen email or IMs, there would be no record of the communication, and they would have walked.
In that case, you've just undermined the need for the new law straight away haven't you?
This loophole is what the police and CPS currently have to deal with. The purpose of the new law is to allow police to investigate any communication method - email, IM, phone, VOIP - as they can currently investigate phone communications, and to close this loophole, so no, rather than undermine it, I think I've stated the case quite clearly.
PS: I don't agree with the law in it's current form either, I don't think I made that clear.
Because you've not needed it for the last 2000 years and there's no reason to suggest it would have helped in any recent incident, conviction or operation
Steady on there. Until very recently, very few conversations took place on the internet, the intent of this law is to give police the ability to do the same thing they can currently do if the conversation took place by phone.
I recently did jury service, and the key thing that connected (and convicted) the defendants was their copious phone communications and locations as reported by their phones (combined with their insistence that they didn't know each other). It is clear to me that this information is genuinely useful to convict criminals of their acts.
Witness the player's frustration at Nataliya's tendancy to get shot or walk in front of his gun, whist endlessly chirping "We need to go to the control room!" before she gets stuck walking into a door frame.
I loved that game, but babysitting that daft bint as she continually fails to walk to the computer almost made me break my N64 controller in rage. She'd stand outside the control room, you inside, doors open, all the windows blown off, repeating "We need to get to the control room". NYARRGHH.
Perhaps they could have referred to some sort of officail Australian reference source?
Did you miss that the location they are reporting for 'Mildura' is the co-ordinates that the State of Victoria supplied as the location of 'Mildura Rural City' - it's literally the central point of a massive area of nothing. IE, this comes from official government sources.
It's a universal truth, data is shit until you've spent too long sanitizing and verifying it.
Suggesting that defense against Israel is a good reason for Iran to have nukes is absolutely absurd.
Israel refuses to admit it even has nukes, and if it did admit it had them, it would not give them up as it sees them as a last defence against Iran. See how that argument works?
Israel has very little motivation - read "none whatsoever" - to out-of-the-blue attack Iran just for the hell of it.
Really? It didn't take much motivation for Israel to out of the blue attack Syria over perceived nuclear ambitions.
PM Netanyahu stated just 3 months ago that he has "red lines" over Iranian nuclear development, at which point risk for Israel is "intolerable". Netanyahu and Barak have been reported by the former heads of Shin Bet and Mossad as having "belligerent" and "messianic" impulses over Iran.
When the the whole football team is threatening constantly to kill the tiny class nerd and he gets a baseball bat, do you advocate that the 300lb lineman get a bat also to 'protect himself' from an unprovoked attack? Seriously?
To clarify, Israel and the US are the tiny class nerd, and Iran is the 300lb lineman? Some mistake surely? Military spending (2009): US: $663bn Saudi Arabia: $33bn Israel: $13bn Iran: 9bn (note some of US military spending is aid to Israel).
do you really subscribe to moral equivalence between Israel, the US, and Iran
Yes, pretty much actually.
I think the State of Israel is the 21st Century's Third Reich. Its degrading treatment of it's citizens, whose only crime is to be Muslim, is shocking. The conditions in Gaza are truly repugnant. The only similar situation to Gaza in the last century was the Warsaw Ghetto. That a people on which so much horror was foisted can so quickly be doing the foisting themselves is an irony of the human condition.
Iran is a rabid theocracy, with very few freedoms for it's people, I wouldn't like to live there.
The US is morally bankrupt. The poor starve whilst the rich live out their gilded lives. I've been all over the world, and I've never seen so many people eating out of bins as I saw in three weeks in Chicago.
Half the nation thinks that paying for healthcare for the less fortunate is somehow "wrong", whilst they spend more on military spending than anyone else in the world, so that they can promote their democracy and value system around the world by projecting military force.
Two of these countries have nukes, and you're a liar if you've never heard the expression "turn Tehran into a parking lot". In the current scenario, at some point - any point - Netanyahu may decide he's had enough, and nuke Tehran. Israel would be condemned, but Iran would not be able to respond back in any meaningful way. With both sides having nukes, that equation changes such that neither side has a reason to use them.
This is how Iran sees the west involving itself in this:
US: Here, look Iran, you can't just go enriching uranium.
Iran: What? This is our Uranium, we dug it up here, what do you mean we can't use it?
US: Naah, don't be mental, it's far too dangerous to let your lot have any of it. Here's some the French have made
Iran: French uranium? Why would we buy french uranium, we've got our own! What if we do something you don't like and the French cut us off?
US: Hah! Don't be silly, we'll never hold the supply of fuel over you.
Iran: OK, there's just the small Israel problem.
US: Israel problem?
Iran: Yeah, you gave them a bunch of nukes, and they keep threatening to level Tehran. Not cool bro.
US: Pfft, they'd never do that, trust us.
Iran: So we can build some nukes too? MAD is required for equilibrium.
US: Crikey no, you can't have nukes because you signed the NPT, Israel never signed it, so it's fine for that right wing theocracy to have nukes - what could possibly go wrong?
A subscription warez service? I doubt it. One of the points of warez is that it is software that you are not prepared to pay money for, and so I doubt how successful such an enterprise would be.
Plus, if this was the golden age as you describe it, warez was everywhere - kickme.to/fosi - no-one was paying for it, let alone a subscription.
You sure this guy didn't just have a personal FTP server hooked up to his shiny network connection? 'Back in the day' the number of dodgy FTP sites covertly run by sysadmins on commercial networks was obscene.
100 TB is a lot more than your average guy, but it's not that much really. It's also probably not 100TB of actual storage, but 100 TB of storage with no redundancy.
I have a simple setup here with two 16 disk JBOD arrays with SAS expanders plugged into one server. Currently I have 18 disks in there, for a total of 36 TB 'headline' storage, which comes down to about 30 TB of redundant storage. If I filled the remaining bays with 4 TB drives, that would be another 80TB, easily bringing me over 100 TB - although there is no way I'm paying £50+/TB.
The JBOD arrays were second hand, only cost me around £70 each plus postage from the US.
Without going for an external chassis, you can get quite a lot of disks just by cramming them into a decent full tower case. Before I had the JBODs, this is what I had, a tower case filled with 12 disks.
You can easily find motherboards with 7 or 8 onboard SATA ports and multiple PCI-E x8 slots, and you can buy cheap 8 port SATA LSI cards from ebay for around £100, or cheap 2 port cards for around £15.
The worst downsides to doing this is that a case crammed with disks needs proper airflow, or your disks die real quick, and when a disk does die, you have to dig around in a powered off case to find the broken one.
If the GPL forbids only one thing, why does it take 5644 words to do it?
If you were going to answer that one, you could also follow up with why the GPL forbids the inclusion of CDDL licensed works, when the CDDL license is so open that it can be included along with BSD licensed works?
Please, if GeoIP even gets the right country I'm impressed. Doing Geo IP on my phone will return the same location each time, and never anywhere near where I actually am. Doing it on my home connection shows says that I'm in the Netherlands, and from work it says I'm in Germany.
We pretty much all agree on space exploration, boobs and a dislike for Oracle.
Actually, there are a few frothy right wingers on here who think that space exploration is a waste of tax dollars (and that tax is somehow immoral or thievery). So mainly just boobs and Oracle.
Why[sic] does "supported" mean to you?
People continue to write and update apps for it, which apparently has already stopped happening for WP8.
Eg, most of my music comes from Spotify. There is a WP7.5 spotify app; it's buggy as hell. Here is what a user of it says:
Hey guys! How about a update to this bleepty music software, actually you can't talk about it as music software, but we do not mind to wait forever and ever for updates. In other words this app just not work, actually there is much more bugs than working things. So Spotify and Microsoft how about a update that fix all those bugs and adds all those improvements? source
Allegedly, the WP7.5 Spotify app was written by "some guy" at MS, not Spotify.
Fuck it, WP7.5 is dead, I'll get WP8, that must have a decent Spotfiy app. Oh wait…
If I buy an Apple phone, then I know I will get support for the phone's software for years. I know I will still be able to get the latest apps when I want them.
If I buy an Android phone, then I know I will probably, depending on manufacturer, get support for the phone's software for years. I am fairly confident that I will still be able to get the latest apps when I want them.
If I buy an MS phone, I know that I probably won't be able to upgrade it to the 'next' version, and that as soon as the 'next' version comes out, I won't be able to get the latest apps for my phone as they are only available for the 'next' version, MS want another license payment for their new OS, and the only device that will run it is a new one.
Not just this, but it is also going where nothing man made has ever gone before, exploring parts of space that we can only speculate about their behaviour. Soon, this thing will be outside of the solar system's influence, into real space, and we will get a better glimpse into what is beyond.
Personally, I think it will be as Jayne says in Serenity - "Oh, hell. I've been to the edge. Just looked like more space"
Somehow you missed that I was only talking about Windows NT, so you get a fail icon. I'm sure, seeing how you know its all tiresome incorrect bollocks posted by morons, that there are two families of Windows.
XP I did miss off, since that is NT 5.1, and simply a better shell for Win 2k.
I still don't understand why you all think this is bollocks [possibly because of instead of saying why it is bullshit, you've gone straight for the ad hominem. Who is the moron again?]. Are you saying I am wrong because Vista and 8 are awesome, or that Win2k and 7 are shite?
But, you have a really crap 4 year old iphone, compared to your friends with up to date high spec Android phones
I know plenty of android fans who literally cannot wait to throw their money at Samsung or Google. There's a guy in the office here who has been through a Nexus, Galaxy S, Galaxy S2, Note, S3, and he's now got a Note 2. For his tablets he's bough a Xoom, a Galaxy Tab and a Nexus 7.
Despite all this, he still regularly has digs at me being a "sheep buying the latest ifads" - I've had an iphone 3G, an iphone 4 when I accidentally tumble dryed that, and an original ipad.
I think I'd rather have a nice pair of Sennys than this. Then you aren't constrained by "This is the Motorhead over ear model" and can actually choose the acoustic characteristics you prefer.
Personally, I have a lovely set of open backed, over ear, Sennheiser HD 558s, cost about the same as this.
The "can't tune a fish" quote came from 4.4BSD, it was present in any OS based on that until taken out. It's never been taken out of FreeBSD, for instance:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tunefs&sektion=8#HISTORY
http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sbin/tunefs/tunefs.8?view=log
It wouldn't have ever been in the Linux manpage, I don't think.
Eg:
> $ calendar -f calendar.lotr -A 10
5 Dec Death of Smaug
> $ calendar -f calendar.computer -A 10
8 Dec First Ph.D. awarded by Computer Science Dept, Univ. of Penna, 1965
> $ calendar -f calendar.music -A 10
30 Nov George Harrison dies at 13:30 in L.A., 2001
4 Dec Frank Zappa dies in his Laurel Canyon home shortly before 18:00, 1993
5 Dec Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart dies in Vienna, Austria, 1791
6 Dec The Rolling Stones play Altamont Speedway near San Francisco, 1969
6 Dec First sound recording made by Thomas Edison, 1877
7 Dec Harry Chapin is born in New York City, 1942
8 Dec John Lennon is shot and killed in New York City, 1980
8 Dec Jim Morrison is born in Melbourne, Florida, 1943
9 Dec The Who's "Tommy" premieres in London, 1973
Any reg types reading this, you need to sort out the line spacing in PRE blocks :/
When I was at uni, my zip drive was essential. There was no LAN or net connectivity in dorms, and not enough computer labs for the people who needed em. I could do all my work in my dorm, put it on my massive 100MB Zip, and rock on down to the lab at 2 am, when there was a chance of a seat.
The manufacturer has no obligation to obey EU rules on consumer sales. So whilst you are right, all goods sold to consumers in the EU have 2 years warranty, that warranty comes from the retailer.
If the drive fails after the manufacturer warranty has expired, but before the EU mandated warranty expires, the manufacturer has no obligation to replace your broken drive (and will not), you would have to get a replacement via your retailer. Good luck with that.
Wish the HD manufacturers could break through the barrier of reliability. You only have 4 choices for cheap spinning rust these days, WD, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba. WD and Hitachi have 2 year warranties, Toshiba and Seagate only offer 12 month warranties.
12 months. Yes, you read it right. Seagate want you to buy a 4TB hard drive, but they don't think it will last much longer than 12 months. Mmm, my data feels safe with you Seagate.
HD manufacturers have been gouging us on price for over a year, and now they produce shit product.
Moving on. "You have to buy cases". Er no you do not, but if you feel you must use a case, why not set it as a task for woodworking or metalworking (or materials technology or whatever high faluting name it is called these days). Or why not set it as homework for each child to design a case out of lego.
Is this some sort of joke? If you didn't put them in cases, they'd all be broken within 2 weeks. You couldn't possibly have the kids make cases out of wood or metal for them - that would be 3 terms of work, only 10% would actually function correctly, and most schools have no CDT provision.
Lego is possible, but the thing with lego is you can disassemble and reassemble as required, so see earlier statement about breakage.
In fact, your entire post is largely bollocks. You've sorted the display problems by sourcing a load of second hand CRT monitors and forking out for HDMI->RGB adapters. Never mind that no-one has stacks of CRT monitors sitting around waiting for someone to say "Oh, on the off chance, do you have 30 spare 19" CRTs I can have?", you've completely missed where the actual cost is - where the fuck are you going to put all these monitors?
You've brought the per-seat cost down to £25+8, but neglected to include the cost of building a new ICT suite. Which is significantly more than £8 per seat.
Once they realised that they had such a big market AND they could flog coprocessor upgrades to the people who brought them they begun to take DX chips and disable the FPU in order to sell them as "lower" speck cheaper units
Do you actually remember how crazy expensive the DX was? The SX was at least affordable.
When you first start making a particular chip, you bin them according to their quality. This is why faster chips (higher bin) cost more than slower chips (lower bin). Say in the first month, only 12.5% of chips test as valid at the quality mark. Do you absorb the cost of the other 87.5% of failures, or sell at a slightly lower spec?
Over time, as processes get better, the proportion of chips ending in each bin shifts towards the higher bins. If everything in a batch actually ends up getting binned towards the higher end of the spectrum, then potentially each could be sold as a high end chip, but the demand is mainly for low end chips.
So you have a choice then. You can leave most of your stock on the shelves as too expensive, you can cut the price of your high end stock, or you can ship high end stock as low end stock.
If Intel didn't do things like this, processors would cost significantly more than they already do. So take the already crazy price of a DX, triple it, and take away any option of buying an SX instead.
ack - better than grep
ack does the things that grep -r should do. It searches only the files that are relevant, where as grep -r will dumbly search every file. If you're a programmer, and you've ever used grep to find other uses of a variable/function/class etc, you have to try out ack. It's just miles better.
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