Posts by Richard Gadsden
158 posts • joined Tuesday 6th November 2007 12:36 GMT
Re: This will be useful...
You're insufficiently cynical.
You were getting pushed up by other people abandoning the call. When you got to "next", you had to wait for the one person actually answering calls to finish with the customer in front of you to get pushed up.
Re: Is this a defence?
"If i tell my wife that a work colleague told me that his boss likes hairy dwarves and someone overhears am i liable for slander for reporting what someone else has said?"
Yes.
Indeed, if you didn't believe it to be true, then that's an aggravating factor.
Back of a laptop?
You could make a laptop with a big flexible screen across the back - make the hinge snap into a lock when it's fully open and you've got a big flat surface covering the back of the screen and keyboard.
Or, on a smaller scale, clamshell mobile with the eInk across the back as a reader and then open it up into a communicator-style mobile.
Re: Who cares about flexible?
They could even back-to-back on a phone with a conventional LCD / OLED display so you have the fast display on one side and the slow one on the other.
Re: "Innumerable people"
There are a lot of very intelligent people who believe (and will vote on the basis of) some very stupid things.
Well, I guess he did count more beans than other beancounters
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Posted in The UK's copyright landgrab: The FAQ
Could metadata stripping be defined as a copyright infringement?
Thus hosting a photo with no metadata is copyright infringement, and therefore the whole of Facebook, Flickr, etc. are copyright infringements...
Sport
Live sport, specifically.
Why do you think sports' rights fees have gone through the roof?
Because people watch sport live and will put up with adverts rather than record-and-watch-later.
No-feedback sensitivity
That discussion you linked to appears to be someone who's being skeptical about the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
Denying basic physics is a bit much, even for climate skeptics.
1C per doubling is the straightforward number, which gets the temperatures of the moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury right (a useful observational check on the theoretical physics).
The feedbacks have always been the toughest part of the climate models.
Complaint-handling
I wonder if Amazon's problem is to do with complaint-handling; if there's a complaint about the content of a book (eg copyright, obscenity, libel), then they will want to check over the book to make sure that complaint is valid before pulling the book. If they don't have anyone who can read Welsh, then that's going to be a problem, whereas Amazon probably does have someone who can read Klingon - at least, well enough to be able to chuck out completely groundless complaints.
One thing that could be done would be to require any image that has been licensed, in exchange for a fee, for public use to be entered into a copyright database. And make that an obligation on the licensee, not the rights-holder. If it's a private photo, you don't have to enter it (though you can); if it's available to the public for free then you don't have to enter it (though you can).
As for orphan works, the easy solution would be a hugely-inflated escrow fee for use of an orphan work. Set it at "at least triple the usual commercial fee for work of the highest quality, but of the same nature". Instead of having a regulation on how much searching they have to do to find the rights-holder, just make it a lot more expensive to use orphan works than to pay the legitimate owner.
Orphan-preservation would be fine (what's the normal commercial license fee for a library making a second copy of something they have in storage? Not much; three times not much is still not much) but commercial use of orphan works would be sufficiently expensive that it would only be used when the legitimate owner really can't be found, and not just when the newspaper is too lazy.
When the owner turns up, they can claim the amount from escrow.
In addition, orphan use of anything in a copyright register would be infringement.
Re: To further calms the nerves
Energy depends on the mass of the meteorite, which goes as the cube of the diameter.
My lovely Sony PRS-300 is just fine thanks
Bought lots of e-books, but not any new e-readers in ages. I might, eventually, get one of the side-lit screens, if anyone made one that I can read with my gloves on.
Really, designers - I want a light on my reader so I can read on the way home when it's dark. If it's dark when I'm going home, it's also probably winter. And cold. Which means I don't want to have to take my gloves off to turn the page!
Re: Powershell is nice, but creating GUIs on powershell scripts is really stupid
GUI over scripts?
You mean like SQL Server Management Studio?
Works well there. Not a PowerShell guy myself, but SSMS works brilliantly.
Doubt it includes volume licensing with software assurance
Else everyone who had SA for Windows 7 - which (a) you need for Enterprise Edition, which you need to get BitLocker and (b) is mandatory if you want an Enterprise Agreement or an Enterprise Subscription Agreement - will have been counted as having bought a Windows 8 license.
That would be an awful lot more than 60 million VL Windows 8 licenses.
Re: Some comparison...
You're still supposed to pay sales tax on out-of-state purchases.
Just you pay it, not the supplier. Take a look at your filing forms.
Re: ARM? No way
Intel could change that. Buy ARM. The market cap is about 10 bn, which Intel has in cash on hand.
Reminds me of the Allianz Arena
Bayern Munich's football stadiu,
The generator is on the roof
But you can't have fuel tanks above a certain size that high because of the fire risk
Re: "What about Montgomery ?"
Park is a great idea. Also William Slim, or Andrew Cunningham. That's one from each service too.
Award for best headline of the month?
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Re: Software costs?
If you have a volume licences for Office with SA, then the commercial use licence for Office RT is already included, which was all I needed to know.
It's the small businesses that will get killed on this.
Not true any more
Councillors get a basic allowance, have done since 1991.
Most councillors have to go part-time at their proper jobs while they're on the council; if you have to go to a three or four day week (with the consequent 20% or 40% pay cut) then the allowance compensates for that.
The amount varies: parishes pay only expenses, and often none of those; at the other end, Birmingham pays a basic allowance of £16,257.
Special Responsibility Allowances are usually a lot more - Birmingham's Leader (a full-time job) gets about £50K on top of the basic; £30K would be more typical for an urban (large) council, and rural (smaller) councils pay a lot less in general.
Councillors are part-time
With a handful of exceptions, local councillors are part-time and have a real job too. They don't get paid to work full-time.
Camden pays £9,654 basic allowance, and the cabinet members get an extra £15,954.
That's just over £25K.
Better politically correct CAPTCHAs
Use them to explain to third-world sweat-shop workers how to run a trade union.
Component price spikes
We've had two huge component price spikes from natural disasters in the last decade or two, one in memory, and the other in hard drives.
I'd have thought that building a bunch of factories in one far eastern country and then dropping a "natural" disaster on all your competitors would be a good Bond plot.
Re: Hmm, should this have ever gone to court?
This is why strict liability offenses (which this was) are so harmful - you can't be found not guilty due to a lack of mens rea if you performed the actus reus - and he unquestionably did perform the actus reus.
You'll note that they didn't get the conviction overturned. He's still on the sex offenders register (for, I believe, 14 years) and still has a criminal record. He's never going to pass an enhanced CRB check, which means he can't ever work with children again, so he's lost his job and will need to find a new career.
The licence doesn't restrict you
But the salesman will - these are corporate volume licences and you need to sign a contract; they will base pricing on the registered company address. If you have a US parent company, they can buy licenses for a non-US subsidiary, but a US subsidiary can't buy licenses and use them in their parent company.
One trick is to create a UK company, then create a US subsidiary, then create another UK company as a subsidiary of the US company. The third company is the actual trading entity, but the top-level company is the one you sell shares in. The intermediate US company can buy at US prices from a US registered office. Shell out a couple of thousand a year for it to exist (to rent a registered office address).
Of course, if the pound goes back up to $1.80 or so, then you'd be out of pocket.
You had to ask, didn't you?
"Microsoft Windows Server Standard Single License/ Software Assurance Pack OPEN 1 License No Level 2 PROC"
What does that gibberish even mean?
"Microsoft Windows Server" - Windows Server
"Standard" - Edition
"Single" - An individual license, not a multi-license pack
"License/ Software Assurance Pack" - this purchase includes software assurance; being Open, that's three years of upgrades until it expires
"OPEN 1 License" - the agreement type; open agreements are individual orders, rather than a multi-year contract; this is a single-license order, so you could get bulk discounts if you ordered other things with it
"No Level" - Open agreements can come in several levels if you buy enough stuff; this is "no level", ie no buik discounts You could get a single order on level C if you had enough points accumulated from previous orders and that would be cheaper.
"2 PROC" - Two processor license (this is the usual for Windows Server Standard - if you want more than 2 processors then you just buy multiple licenses).
Note that this doesn't say "Windows Server 2012 Standard" because it's L+SA, and it includes future versions; if you looked at the License only SKU, then you'd find it did mention the version and would be cheaper.
Well, you asked.
<blockquote>It would cost a fortune to screen all patents up-front when they are applied for</blockquote>
That's how the patent system is supposed to work.
If someone isn't examining patent applications, then you've just identified what's wrong with the patent system.
Patents require careful expert examination - that makes them, or should make them, expensive to acquire. Once acquired, though, they should require little defending in court because the patent office will have subjected them to a careful examination.
The whole process is wrong - the cost should be stuck into the examination process, not the courts.
Re: Puzzled
Tracker funds.
Facebook is still big enough to be in lots of indexes, so all the tracker funds are buying.
Betterplace
"you go to a service station and they remove the dead battery pack and replace it with a fully charged one. Afaik no one has come up with either."
Look up BetterPlace and you'll know that someone has come up with that one.
Re: Methane and Global warming
"Incidentally water vapour is an even more potent greenhouse gas than methane, but the atmosphere is naturally pretty much saturated with the stuff."
The atmosphere's capacity for water vapour depends on temperature; increasing atmospheric water vapour due to warming is one of the positive feed back effects that make CO2 emissions so concerning.
With no positive feedbacks, you can compare the mean temperatures of the moon, Mars and Venus and get 0.7C per doubling of CO2 concentration, which would mean we'd be looking at less than 2C between 1900 and 2100. But there are positive feedbacks, lots of them.
Isn't it obvious how YouTube doesn't get downgraded?
All the complaints to Google Search about YouTube get passed to YT, get processed, removing the video, and then when GS goes to look at the video, it's already gone, so their process determines that YT doesn't have any bad videos in the first place.
Re: Forgive me for stating the obvious
We already have Internet#2, it's called 4chan
Re: Problem, Reaction, Solution ... Conditioning behavior.
"Man I hate Justin Beiber, he's such a conceited twat" [is] libel
No it isn't. That would have the defense of honest opinion.
It would also be adjudged to be "mere abuse" rather than defamatory.
Re: Disagree @Ledswinger
You could buy it right now. Call up BT OpenReach and ask them for a quote for installing the backhaul and you can run your own DSLAM.
Of course, the problem is that it would cost more than your car.
Re: Belgian
Dutch - NOS.
And the coverage - the camerawork and direction - was good. They mostly had the motos in the right places (and "mostly" is pretty good). Shame they couldn't use a heli on Box Hill, but the trees couldn't be cut back enough to make that possible. Perhaps not quite as good as France 2 during the Tour, but much better than the complete shambles Spanish TV made of the Angliru climb on the Vuelta last year.
The problem was the data. Without gap info, a peloton/breakaway chase is tricky to follow. Without the GPS data, the auto-id of riders in a group was also missing, which left you with the commentary to ID the groups. Even the best commentators make mistakes; you should get the teams right nearly always, but until you see the number or a close-up, you can't be sure of that many individual riders.
But the BBC commentary was terrible. Porter was a complete waste of space, which kept Boardman busy identifying riders and correcting Porter's errors, leaving him no time to analyse. I suspect that Boardman would do fine in the Paul Sherwen/Sean Kelly if he had someone as good as Phil Liggett or David Harmon alongside him.
Now doing it even worse
I'm seeing someone else's detailed responses if I'm logged in, but not when I'm logged out.
Looks like there's only one account on the system and we all share it!
Built-in apps
The other built-ins that aren't purely Apple are:
YouTube (Google, obv)
Weather (Yahoo)
Stocks (Yahoo)
YT is basically a client so they don't have to run Flash - now that YT is HTML5, they probably don't need a specific client for it.
Weather and Stocks seem to be things that are common for search engines - Yahoo, Bing and Google all have them, so Apple might switch those to a search engine provider.
Re: Missed the Venus solar flyby?
Dear NASA. Your next Mars rover: please design the bloody thing so you can watch this, unlike the 2005 Mercury transit which you didn't have a good enough camera to see!
And yes, the transits of Deimos and Phobos are cool. But have you seen how rubbish the pictures are?
The "send a decent camera to Mars" campaign starts here.
Re: Order of application
That would mean an inevitable first-minute rush instead.
Which would result in badly-written applications to get a headstart on everyone else.
Subscription IPTV
Subscription IPTV hasn't exactly taken off in the UK so far.
If there's a standard target platform in YouView and each broadcaster can run their own packages, rather than being limited to whatever channels BT Vision or TalkTalk.TV choose to bundle, then it could take off, especially if most new TVs have YouView bundled and so do many new FreeView/FreeSat boxes (especially all the PVR ones)
I can get Eurosport player for £2.99 a month to watch the cycling (niche market, yeah, but there's lots of niche markets around the world; this is the Long Tail in TV).
I can run that from a computer to my TV, but that's still a hassle compared to getting it to run inside a YouView box, or even a YouView app running in a media centre like XBMC that has a proper 10-foot interface and works with a remote.
It also will completely unbundle Sky and Virgin. If you can get any channel on YouView direct from the broadcaster, rather than buying a package from Sky / Virgin, then why not do just that?
Sure, the Sky channels are still bundled with each other, but it opens up a route to market for all the other channels. If I'm a minority sport where there's TV already being made (i.e. popular somewhere outside the UK), then all I need to do is take an existing English-language feed from another broadcaster and drop it to YouView - the subscriptions are pure profit. Even if there isn't an English broadcast, paying two commentators and a producer won't cost that much to slap a commentary onto existing pictures.
500ml servings of beer would make all the glasses oversized
Which would be nice, and CAMRA should be on-side - if every beer glass in the country was instantly oversized then we might get served the amount we paid for, but with a head on.
Re: facebook
It might just be www.facebook
Re: Punishment
Aloud.
Posted in Sony optical disk archive
Would be nice if the disks *were* Blu-rays
If this is long-term archiving, then one of the big challenges is reading the archive in a few decades' time.
The most likely problem over the long-term is that the disks degrade, but let's be nice and assume they don't.
The number two problem is that you'd need to find a working Sony drive to read the disk cartridges.
But if the disks are actual Blu-Rays, then you'll be able to crack the cartridge open and drop the disks into a standard BD-ROM drive, which are being manufactured in the millions at the moment, and there's a pretty good shot at there still being a functional one in a few decades' time when you need it.
Of course, that also means that the format has to be such that you can stitch together the content of the drives without fancy Sony software/firmware that no longer exists in 2050, which seems unlikely to me, but you never know, Sony might actually be thinking about this sort of thing.
Posted in Ten... Bedroom Gadget Treats
My favourite bedroom gadget isn't listed
http://www.resmed.com/uk/products/s9_escape/s9-escape.html
