Posts by Dave

Opting Out

I agree with the others that Google is a different case. I can see that at some point they will become an issue, but at the moment I've got Firefox with NoScript and AdBlock configured to block most known Google ad traffic. It's interesting to see how many sites use googleanalytics and other stuff. Those who think that not passing their data to Google is a matter of avoiding Google's public sites need to look a bit more carefully.

As for NebuAd, if my personal information is that valuable then perhaps I'll sell it to you if you're prepared to pay me enough money, where the ISP is your agent, not mine (i.e. you pay the fee, not me). Taking it without my permission is theft and you definitely don't have that. Making sure that my information is not passed to your servers should not require me to do anything or store anything on my computer.

Working from Elsewhere

I leave my work desktop PC on 24/7 because I often connect to it remotely via the company VPN. There are certain jobs where you just can't beat having a machine inside the high-speed network rather than on a bit of wet string, especially when moving files between directories on the server, or where I realise that I forgot to save a file on the network and it's on the local machine drive. I also leave machines at home running 24/7 because once again, I connect to them remotely. However, it might be worth looking at setting up a WoL for some of them, triggered by a request from one that does stay awake all the time.

@I'd just like to say thanks

Note to people who find things funny: please remember to pause for breath while laughing (aka insert a space) every few dozen iterations. Do it more often if you're laughing in bold or loud manner.

Out at Five

I always used to leave pretty much at 5pm on the dot to make the point. Occasional late days are OK, but it has never been the norm. Now it's a bit more fuzzy, in that some days it's as late as 5:30pm, but then I sort of make up for that by making arrival time fuzzy to compensate. The time from when I get home to my son's bed time is family time, the reason I usually give for the prompt departure, although I have been known to sit down and telework in the evenings after that time (it's usually more interesting than the TV and a lot more efficient than daytime work because there are no interruptions).

I did once work for a company that had a general policy that flying to North America from the UK should be done on Saturday because they saved money on flights compared to flying on Sunday (airline fares were cheaper if the stay included Saturday night). I just told my boss that I'd fly on Sunday for no extra charge but if I had to give up the whole weekend then I'd have two days off in lieu when I got back from the trip. I never had to fly out on a Saturday...

@Chris Morrison

It sounds as though they forgot to put an important box on the form if ETS ticked all the right ones that were there.

Apple Label

I can see an opening here for the Beatles record label to get their own back. Just lend their name (for a fee, of course) to a computer hardware manufacturer and it's all legal.

Coursework

I finally cured my nephew of surfing dodgy sites when it screwed up his computer to the point where some bit of malware blocked Firefox (but would allow IE, except I'd hidden it), presumably because it couldn't do its dirty tricks with FF. In fixing it, I 'broke' his P2P software by taking out the nasty bits, then gave him the option of putting it back so he could share dodgy music files or leaving it cleaned up so he could do his school coursework (letting him know where I'd hidden IE wasn't an option). As he was in his GCSE year he chose the latter.

First good use I've found for coursework...

Urban Preference?

Surely the best use of fibre is out in the rural areas where we're all languishing on lossy and long copper pairs (or aluminium, for the really unlucky) that struggle to get more than a couple of megabits/s? A decent fibre run from our local (i.e. 3km away) exchange to the village would suddenly put the entire village within 400m of the copper endpoint, most of it within 200m.

Labour Costs

No, not the government (although it's true...)

The significant cost for many items is the cost of the labour to put it together, the cost of the extra 10% of materials for the larger size can be quite small. Look at the cost of kids' clothes compared to adults. Once you account for the VAT difference, the costs will be close.

Alternatives

I agree with Tom, the K800i was really good. I still have one, although I'm currently using a P800 because I'm in the US and my K800i is locked to a UK network. I've had colleagues who've had an N95 experience and from the swearing I've heard, it hasn't been a satisfactory experience. I have yet to discover a phone with WinCe/Mobile inside that I'd trust to work reliably. All the phones I've had have crashed occasionally, but as a rare event rather than something to get used to. The current smartphones seem to do it once every two or three battery cycles (and the way they eat batteries, that's not long).

I did wonder about getting a Linux smartphone, just so I could see if I can come up with my ideal mail client, browser, etc instead of what the manufacturer decides. However, such phones have a way to go before I'd expect to see one in the top ten.

@kns2c

Of course he's a yank, he gave it away by use of the term "soccer" instead of football. For the unenlightened, football is a game played primarily with the feet. Any modifications to the rules require use of a descriptive prefix such as "rugby", "gaelic", "American", etc.

In a dark attic...

I might still have a machine with it on somewhere in the loft, I've got some old 386 and 486 machines lurking up there. Most will boot to DRDOS if they still work, but it's possible that there's still a Windows shell. For comparison, there's even still a BBC B Micro and an Archimedes up there.

As for OS/2 Warp, I'm afraid I still have that running on a machine. It's my home mailserver and I have yet to port the custom and highly tuned spam filter program (that still occasionally rejects mail from Reg Hacks) to Linux and hook it into Sendmail or Postfix.

@Adrian

Sounds like you're the sort ideally suited to Win XP. We don't want Linux to become a monopoly lest it suffer from poor quality like Windows so I guess we need some people batting for the other side.

Having said that, I never really got on with Ubuntu either, I've always tended to use RedHat/Fedora, but that might be because it's what I learned first. At least I get chance to run the same thing in a different manner that suits me, rather than have the OS decide/insist because it knows best.

Pots, Kettle &c

Using lies and myths to trash the competition. Now I wonder where Apple might have learned such techniques?

Cost Barriers

Given the cost of the price plans, it may well be that 10-20 phones per store is more than enough to meet Canadian demand.

IRS

I love it that they do him for tax evasion for not declaring his illegal income.

It just goes to show that the British had the last laugh after US Independence, because they ended up with the IRS instead.

Quotas, anyone?

Once upon a time we produced enough food for our own use. Then along came the EU quota system and told us we couldn't do that any more, we had to buy it from somewhere else. Now, if the somewhere else had been cheaper, we'd have done that anyway. British agriculture was once probably the most efficient in the world but now it's being totally screwed.

Fortunately my local farmers have shops at their farms, so we can buy local meat, potatoes, fruit and veg and not have to trouble the local Tesco at all unless we're buying cleaning products or other similar things. I get to pay less than supermarket prices, the farmer gets more money than the supermarket would have paid him, so none of the important people lose out.

TWA?

Anyone remember TWA? You might find a certain name associated with its demise.

Bad Example

Surely it's not a good idea to mix drivers with alcohol? You ought to be OK on Vista though, that probably doesn't have a driver.

Independence Day

As Friday is the day the Americans celebrate independence from Britain, perhaps it's fitting to ask whether they got the best of the deal or whether the Brits have the last laugh. After all, they now have the IRS to deal with (self-inflicted as well!), and that must be far worse than HM Tax inspectors.

A Lateral Thought

Perhaps if people bought Google T-shirts and/or put a Google sticker on their camera then they could claim they were merely doing fill-in pics that the car didn't quite get if they are stopped by the police.

@Andy Kay - it's illegal to use a phone while driving, but I don't think it's a specific offence to use a camera, they'd have to get you under existing due care and attention regs for that one. My camera phone actually takes very good quality pics (K800) so quality doesn't necessarily prove anything.

@Morons

"Papers please"

I chose not to work in any of the industries where I need a background check or anything like that. At the moment I have that choice, you're trying to take it away from me. I accept that when it comes to driving, I'm in control of a dangerous piece of machinery, and in return, I let the government have my name and address for a licence (given that other bits of government already have it, that's not a great loss). However, I've still got one of the old paper ones, so they haven't yet got my photograph. The only things that will make me swap are if I move house or they threaten to require even more information. Those that would trade liberty for security deserve neither (thanks, Ben)

Oh, and you can fight some types of fire with gasoline.

Competition

As far as I'm concerned, Sky lost the competition when it got owned by Murdoch. I don't see any reason to contribute to his coffers, and I wish the football fans would grow a collective pair and all refuse to pay his subscription for a season's coverage just to give him a reality check. Sky works on the principle of paying silly money for exclusive rights and then screwing the viewers to pay for it (more fool them). I just find something else to do with the money.

Misguided Bus

The Cambridgeshire MisGuided Bus is a wonderful example of arse-about-face thinking. There are miles of guided busway out in the fields, bypassing all the villages with hardly any traffic on their roads yet, when the busway reaches the edge of Cambridge, the buses get dumped out onto the main roads right into the peak traffic flow.

The buses are really good on the routes that run from somewhere you don't want to start, to somewhere you don't want to go, but are crap on all other routes. On the bright side, they do appear to have got the wizardry working so you can tell how late your bus is going to be, courtesy of the electronic signs at bus stops (there, an IT angle!)

Benny Hill

I've been known to use Yakety Sax as my phone ringtone before now. Especially good to assign to your boss or other annoying person, so at least you've had a laugh at the music before having to deal with him.

@Jeremy

There's actually close to 60 million in the UK now, then add on Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and as mentioned, India. More people, bigger geographical area and a lot more timezones. A win every way.

Oh, and how about ZED? The only excuse I can think of for the US pronunciation is the alphabet song, where the correct version doesn't rhyme.

Can we have a mushroom cloud icon? Ideal for unwinnable on-line wars.

Not just websites

I looked at my firewall log and the number of packets blocked from the 24.64.0.0 netblock exceeds the number of blocked packets from all other IP addresses. So on a sample of 1, 50% of blocked packets are attempts at messenger spam (ports 1026,1027,1028) from that netblock. Perhaps Shaw Cable could address this issue. Certain other specific blocks also feature frequently, so they're not the only ones.

Users named Michael

Perhaps they'll only sell it to people who can provide ID with the name Michael on it?

Will it hook into the cruise control so I can go to sleep and let it drive?

Language?

Would our US readers even know what a fag packet was? Or, for more entertainment, explain what they think it means...

Re: I just don't understand the issue...

I don't care what the law says, if a dog attacks me then I'm must saving the court's time if I kill it, because they then don't have to rule on whether it should be put down.

As for Staffies, my sister has two and they are both scared of me despite me never having done anything to them apart from come into their presence with a bigger dog (who did flatten one of them when challenged).

As for pocket poodles, yes they are a menace, although the standard poodles are nice dogs because they don't have anything to prove.

BBC

The BBC site is very resilient to heavy load, but it's had the occasional broken stint because I remember emailing them about it. It was serving up some content, but generally not working properly.

As for FF3, I don't intend to install it for a while but I guess I've got some spare bandwidth to use for downloading it to help their ego trip.

Jilted John was Right

(for those that remember his song).

I have a laptop with one of those annoying fingerprint scanners on it. It keeps popping up boxes complaining that it couldn't read my finger print if I rest my hand on it so I finally got annoyed enough to go look up how to disable the damn thing.

Anyone remember the chap with the Mercedes where the crooks just chopped his finger off and used it? Or the Mythbusters episode where they totally fooled a fingerprint lock?

I think we need a steaming turd icon.

What about the other way?

So what happens when AP quotes from a blog? Perhaps they ought to be required to desist? I guess the only trouble with that approach is that the blogger ego effect takes over and they actually want AP to give them the publicity.

Bin Scales

I think I'd invest in a suitable set of scales so I could weight the bin when I put it out, then dispute any difference if the council claimed it weighed more. And that's after I'd invested in something to zap RFID chips. I can see a market for such a device, with the RFID technology becomine ever more prevalent.

@Fred - SEC, @AdamV

Fred:

That might be true in the US, but we don't have the quarterly nonsense in the UK (half-yearly is more relaxed), and you're assuming malice where (based on past history) it's almost certainly incompetence.

AdamV:

It took a long time before our electric company caught up with us in correctly overestimating usage, so we were running a debit for several years. Now they've caught up and owe us money, about to be made worse by the fact that certain events such as firing electric kilns won't be happening again this year so they'll owe us bigtime before they work it out.

@John Robson

It's actually only a requirement to report hitting a dog to the police within 24 hours. Even then, if the dog didn't die at the scene then plod isn't interested. I discovered this the day a dog ran out of a pub car park, bounced off my car and ran back in. By the time I had managed to get out of my car (busy main road) and checked the car for damage (dog owner can be liable), couldn't see dog, car not visibly damaged, I got in and went home. Called the local copshop that evening, who wanted me, with all my insurance and registration documents, to attend a manned station, but lost interest when I said the dog had run off. So I went in and reported it anyway (minus documents) just so they'd have some paperwork to do. And also in case the owner ever reported an incident.

Bring back the Vulcan

How about a carrier capable of launching and landing a squadron of Vulcans? I reckon one of those with a decent set of fighter-like weaponry could take on most modern stuff, especially if they got to argue at 40,000ft. If nothing else you'd probably deafen the enemy.

@P. Lee

I see your 6310 and raise you one 6210, which doesn't even have Bluetooth to turn off. It does have IR, but that is turned off.

Chocolate Tepots

Someone attempted to verify the utility of a chocolate teapot once, seeing as we use it as a measure of uselessness...

http://www.plokta.com/plokta/issue23/teapot.htm