Posts by mccp

Who made up the rule about only using one OS or computer manufacturer your whole life?

Surely the whole point of the article is that you should avoid believing anyone's dogma and instead use your own brains to be flexible.

Eh?

At the risk of making a mistake on the fag packet (1978 vintage Casio fx-39 actually) I reckon that half a petabyte would need 250 GB of checksums, assuming that your checksum is 32 bits and your block is 8 KB.

So maybe, if you have smaller blocks, or you use longer checksums to improve the chances of not having the same result for two different blocks, that you may do have to do a bit more work.

"Also, how can students learn to program without being administrators of the computer, and the last thing you want is a bunch of 15 year old boys with administrator level rights!!!"

The last thing you want anywhere is programmers with elevated rights. I've lost count of the cock ups that have occurred when testing software that will only run with domain admin rights simply because a programmer couldn't be arsed to figure out how to do it properly.

Our developers are now only about one step up from a standard user on their own desktops and at the same level as a standard user elsewhere.

Have to agree with Matthew 17

I always thought that if someone has physical or trusted network access to your computer, you're pretty much pwned. The details may vary according to to OS, but pwned you are.

@ DJ2

PHP would be fine, then maybe in a few years I would be able to hire a PHP developer who knew about MVC and OO.

Right now I can barely find any PHP developers of any type around Cambridge.

@ dogged

Presumably because of some wheeze that meant that you paid less tax than an equivalent full-time employee? In my experience HMRC don't give a hoot about your employment status, unless you are using it to deny them revenue.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

It's the way he tells them.

VAT at 17.5% ?

Keep up - we're at 20% VAT nowadays.

I'm convinced that they made a big mistake here - most people found it non-trivial to work out how much tax they were paying when it was 17.5%. Now it's 20%, it's simple for most to work out that their new £499 TV includes £100 tax.

In France the VAT rate is 19.6% and loads of other countries have the rate set at 18%, 19% or 21%. I'm sure that obfuscation is the name of the game here.

@ juice

The capacity of a road varies according to the average speed of the traffic on the road. That's why when the number of drivers on the road increases, the average speed comes down. I believe that it has something to do with the distance between cars reducing as the average speed comes down so you can fit more cars per mile of road.

As far as the A14 is concerned, I've found that driving on the Cambridge->Godmanchester stretch is slightly less frightening since they switched on the average speed cameras. That said, the road is an abomination and short of digging it up it's hard to imagine how the new cameras that are being installed will improve it.

It is actually available for free

http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.222.0-200605-I

That is the ITU recommendation for H.222 - also known as MPEG-2/ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007.

All ITU recommendations are free to download courtesy of the EU. As are standards from ETSI.

Shame that our UK standards bodies and others like ISO/SMPTE/etc aren't more into the free (as in speech) distribution model.

Lucky

Try sticking to one brand - HP Compaq. I have five, all less than 4 years old, all use different charger connectors. Not only that, but the mains inlets are IEC, figure-8 or cloverleaf. Arghh.

UI paradigm fail

Why should a square mean “stop” when the road sign is hexagonal?

Because the STOP primarily applies to media motion control and the square relates to the stop button on a media player - going back to cassette players in my humble experience, but probably further than that.

No

Fairly common, but incorrect use of an apostrophe. Sorry.

Mixed case TLAs? I suppose that if you had to use one as a plural and the plural s was ambiguous, then perhaps you shouldn't use the TLA in that case.

Less title

You can use the Apple keyboard with Vista/W7 64-bit.

In fact I have a Macbook here running W7 64-bit under boot camp, with a wireless keyboard to use when I at my desk. It works very well.

However, the issues (not mentioned in the review) are:

If you have the US keyboard, you don't get a £ sign, (as you would expect). The UK version has £, but no #, CTRL-ALT-3 works in most applications, but not Outlook 2007.

On the UK keyboard, € is CTRL-ALT-2 (and marked on the key), but again, this doesn't work in Outlook 2007.

Many keys are not in their usual PC places, which is fine when you're used to it, but a pain if you have to switch from one layout to another.

Otherwise, it's a great keyboard and I find it really nice to type on.

Eh?

"They do not innovate, save after the fact and are well behind the curve..."

Probably true, but this has served them pretty well for over 20 years, what has changed?

Oh dear...

I seem to have jangled a nerve slightly.

It just doesn't seem right to me that a significant population of comentards who pop up to jeer (in a possibly troll-like manner) whenever a smartphone 'feature' is exposed don't have a label whereas others (and I include myself in the mactard/fanboi/ifan/jesusphone category) do.

That is all.

Further maths

I don't know when you did your A-level maths, but the AQA A level that my son is currently taking is about a third statistics. The remainder is pure maths and mechanics.

"For example, how many people know what constitutes a "serious injury" in road accident statistics?"

I've no idea, but where is your evidence for your bald statement: "a mild case of whiplash may be recorded as a serious injury".

It's all very well critisizing the use of statistics, but if your are going to make your own claims, they would be more compelling if you backed them up.

A title is not required

Well probably loads. I've just bought a new TV, FreeSat receiver and BluRay player (Samsung, Humax & Sony). Each one can have its firmware upgraded from a USB flash drive plus Ethernet, DVD-R and over the air. In fact, all were delivered with out of date firmware.

Copyright

And what exactly has that got to do with classified documents that are protected under completely different laws to copyright?

+1

Crimble sounds like some perverted liaison between Christmas pud and apple crumble.

Everyone no that Sandy Claw comes at Crimbo.

How?

To block your cellular and not your GPS, FM, etc, you simply make the cell phone jammer from a femto cell. You phone registers with the femto which then refuses any calls. It would also be possible to make it relay emergency calls and to disable itself if the car decides it has crashed.

Simples.

New word not needed...

For at least 50% of Facebook 'friends' the existing English word 'stranger' would probably be more appropriate.