Posts by Dazed and Confused 2390 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2007
how long till some judge decides to extend a super injunction to blocking - say twitter and then say google and Oh look you can still find out the big secret of who kissed who (like anyone gives a s*1t) and blocks the whole damn network.
ring ring... Support here, can I help you?
*&^%*(()
Sorry, did you say your network connection does work?
)^%£$^&*&%^
I'm very sorry but I'm not allowed to tell you why
The idea of broadcasting the signal out once so that millions of people can all watch it a very efficient usage of bandwidth. The thought of 10 million people in the UK all hitting the same streaming service at the same time to watching something is just plain scary unless someone comes up with a damn efficient multicastting system. As a web administrator how much bandwidth do you have? If a teli program needs about 2.5Mb and there are 10 million UK views do you have 25Tb of available bandwidth?
Perhaps the idea that 10M people want to watch the same thing at the same time is a bit 20th century, but how would you suggest dealing with live events?
My little darling haven't reaching the facebook stage yet....but, I expect to cross this bridge later this year.
We'd talk before they had the account.
If they then rejected me, they bloody soon find that my routers were rejecting all their damn packets.
It's simple.
And since they expect me to pay their mobile bills (or at least to provide the money they pay for them with) that can be cut off too.
But talking first might help.
(PS, please can we have a "Won't somebody think of the parents!" icon. There won't be any equality in this country till there is a NSPCP (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Parents).
Brilliant, perhaps this will lead the world away from the circa 1990 style 1920x1200 spec video we've been forced to suffer all these years. If they get 1536 x 2048 out as a common format (plus the wide screen version with even more lovely dots on) then maybe the suppliers of monitors will be embarrassed into joining in.
I first worked on 1920x1200 res screens on Sony's Unix workstation in 90 or 91. Which is 20 years ago, so some progress would be nice. My 2003 Dull laptop was 1920x1200 and 150dpi. A move to more dots is long long over due.
Do I remember, Yes.
10Mb faster than average home broadband? I wish, actually I'm visiting South Korea at the moment and my friend here has 100Mb, but the contention ratio is so bad he rarely gets 2. So perhaps my 4ish isn't so bad.
Do we want 100GB? Yes
When? NOW, if now last week. And run to my home please, at reasonable contention ratios so I actually get close to it at times. Fibre all the way would be nice to drop a whole chunk of the latency I see in my broadband connection, the exchange in 3ms not 20.
The
> Mic>Scrambler>Skype>Internet>Skype>Unscrambler>speaker
process would require a fairly lossless transmission. Just look at how badly Skype handles touchtones to realise that the scrambler/de-scrambler would need to have a very intimate knowledge of the encoding used by Skype to ensure that the process would work OK.
I wonder whether Skype's move to a new SuperNode structure has anything to do with plans for "lawful" intercept. I would have thought that a widely distributed model would make it much more difficult. On the other hand there new architecture doesn't seem to be working half as well as their old one. I now frequently see inconsistencies in Skype's reporting of online/offline states.
The problem, as others have pointed out, with this type of digital interception is that anyone could then use it. With a conventional POTS system, the signal goes from your house to the phone exchange. Follows the phone companies links to the remote end and goes down the wire the calls recipients. The intercept has to take place somewhere in this route. Sure if a crim wants to tap they can go to the green box in the street and hook into your circuit. But they need to get off their arse and doing this.
With this new scheme, a crim anywhere in the world could potentially hit the buttons which would then turn on the interception of my packets.
Also if I'm in the UK, the POTS system the legal intercept to another user in the UK would require the active connivance of the either BT or the UK gov (both fairly untrustworthy, but there none the less). What safe guards could be put in place to prevent say the Chinese gov turning on the intercept of users in other parts of the world.
First they'll ban the copyright infringers,
then they'll ban the critical sites,
then the courts will order super-injunction style bans on anything someone with money doesn't like
And once the gubberment get used to the idea that ideas can be banned...
Welcome to the new Iran/China/...
Freedom of speech is really at risk here.
The technically competent (El Reg readers) will have no problems circumventing it, but the masses will be caught in a politically correct vacuous Interweb of the powers that be's choosing.
Anyone else reminded of a certain Pink Floyd song.
Remember when there is no one left for them to come after, they'll come after you.
Has been available on the vast majority of Itanium systems systems since before the launch of the Monticito chip, HP's later Madison based systems already had it. Works out nice and cheap too because it just uses the 2 spare ECC bits that memory manufactures have been giving away free and unused for years as they were too lazy to make 6 bit wide chips just to handle the ECC stuff.
If you stick your DIMMs in 4 at a time, you get 8 spare bits which gives you the capacity you need to handle a second erroneous bit in a 256bit wide "word".
This would tend to agree with the research that suggests that while men are genetically programmed to try and procreate with as many females as possible, women are similarly programmed to find a good man to father and help them bring up their offspring and a strong/powerful/successful man to sire them.
Signs of wealth would indicate good breeding stock.
New government, same old total lack of any brains at all.
Besides the obvious point that what they want is technically impossible.
Why the h**l should this be the ISPs problem? I presume it is because on the whole they are UK based companies that the government think are OK to hit with a stick, where as, say the OS vendors, tend to be big, American and would either tell them where they can stick it, or wouldn't bother to reply at all.
You, or I, as a consumer exist purely to put money into the pockets of the manufactures.
Allowing us to upgrade our systems means that we do not buy new systems as fast as they need us too. If you run the standard spec on the kit you will probably be forced to upgrade within 2 years.
If they let you upgrade the memory (2 generations on my experience) and the hard drive (I seem to do this 3 times in the life of a laptop) then your might not fulfil your primary - ney Only, function for as long as 7 or even 8 years.
Where's the point in that?
How are these poor people going to make a decent living?
With the move to touch screen the screen size becomes really important. If you're fingers are too big it becomes really difficult to type on the screen. Blokes I know with iPhones complain that their pinkies hit about 4 letters at once when the screen is used in portrait mode. Similarly I can't type reliably on my son's Orange San Francisco in that orientation. A larger screen is helpful for large pinkies.
It doesn't make sense to assume that bigger is better, you need to choose a phone that works for you, and size will be one factor in deciding. A phone with a 10" screen might make it better for typing, it would make it better for viewing webpages, but it wouldn't fit in your pocket and you'd look a total plonker holding it to your ear.
It's about bloody well time.
I've been using 1280x1024 displays since the mid 80s.
Sony kindly lent me a 1920x1200 display in the very early nineties when everyone was arguing about what resolution HD would be. Sure made a nice monitor on my Sony MIPS powered Unix workstation.
Well that was damn near twenty years ago. Isn't it time for some sort of progress?
Hell you were slagging a damn phone off the other day because it only had a lousy 8MP camera, so surely it's time for the marketing droids to convince us we need more than a 2MP HD TV - you'd laugh at a 2MP camera, so why not demand your screen keeps pace?
Do I need a bigger teli, no. But when Tesco's are selling 8MP TVs for a couple of hundred notes I'll be able to buy a 8MP monitor, which I do need.
I wasn't employing the builder I was buying a house from them, very different situation. When talking to new house builders, some would let you come in and lay network cabling, others wouldn't. At the end of the day you have to buy the house from the people who are selling it. Fully wired networking isn't the only consideration. Besides in hind sight I wouldn't have put it past them to have found a way to wreck any cabling I'd put in.
On the other hand, when the front garden was re-done, I had conduit run from the study to the garage so all the noisy UPSs and server stuff could be moved from the house. CAT5 is for whimps you really want fibre around the house not just fibre too the house. Now if only I could get BT to pull their damn fingers out.
drilling wholes all over the house and installing cat6 cabling (it'll be cat7 next year, then cat8... , just like it used to be cat5) and then making good all the walls, re-plastering and re-decorating isn't exactly going to be easy is it now.
Sadly the builder wouldn't let me come in and lay network cabling all over the house before they did the plastering, otherwise it would have been really easy.
PLT kit might be a total PITA, but it is certainly easy.
Besides DAB doesn't work around here too well anyway.
I can't remember whether it was Bill or Dave who once commented "Any fool can buy market share". Why would Apple be worried about their market share? Apple have made a brilliant, profitable business by selling as a premium brand. This allows them to make a good margin and a good return on investment and hence a nice tidy profit. Apple are a business, profits are what they are interested in. That they are being outsold by products that in some cases cost between 10-20% of theirs is hardly surprising. The important question for them is who makes the most profit, Apple or the likes of ZTE.
During most peoples life times it has been a good idea to upgrade their analogue equipment once. When most things moved from AM to FM. The problem with any digital technology is that it is likely to be obsolete before you've ever managed to get home from the shop. Unless someone finds a way to keep broadcasting last weeks technology while also broadcasting this weeks flavour they are constantly going to be having this battle.
DAB is suffering from being an early technology. But will punters accept throwing away their new DAB kit to buy DAB+ today? Probably not going to be a popular move. Tomorrow someone will come up with a better CODEC and we'll have proponents of DAB++, given a few weeks DAB+++ will be posited as the answer to everything... but for how long?
Do we want to live in a throw away society?
Manufactures would obviously love us too, but...
that was my point entirely. The boss of Renault instructed the marketing department to pull all advertising from the BBC in retaliation for a review, only to be told by the marketing dept. that would be a little difficult since the BBC didn't do any advertising.
As I said this was back before the days of Clarkson, so no magazine, no iPlayer and not the global mega sales the program enjoys today.
Nokia doesn't really want to stop Apple products being imported into the US.
Nokia wants Apple to sit up and take notice.
There is a large patent pool you need access to make a mobile phone, Apple refuse to pay anyone anything for any IP.
The idea of asking for an import ban is that it stops the arguments running through the courts for donkey years. As it stands at the moment, the longer the infringing party can spin out the court case the longer they have to wait before coughing up. So there is every incentive to take as long as you possibly can.
By being granted a import ban it forces the infringing party to pay up fast, coz they are out of the business till they do pay.
It's just all about the money.
I think that Apple have also asked for all Nokia products to be banned for import too.
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