Posts by jonathanb
1250 posts • joined Friday 14th August 2009 18:08 GMT
The web != the internet
I have 3 .uk domain names. If you go to the websites for them, you won't find much of interest, but that doesn't mean I don't use them.
If the BSA calls, tell them to get lost
If the BSA wishes to claim damages for copyright infringement, they have to prove that 1) they own the copyright to the works in question [see ACS::Law], and 2) that you have infringed them.
You are not obliged to assist them in obtaining this evidence, so if it went to court, all the BSA would have to rely upon in evidence is the say-so of a disgruntled ex-employee.
Remember, the BSA are not the police, HMRC, or trading standards. They have no more powers than a door to door salesman.
Yes, you have lost count
Firefox 4 was released in March 2011. The current stable version is 8 and 9 is on the way before the end of the year. That makes 5 new versions so far this year.
Posted in Renault Fluence ZE
I would expect electricity to go up by at least as much as a percentage of todays cost as diesel. One of the reasons for that is that pretty much all of your electricity bill is energy cost, whereas most of your diesel bill is tax. The tax element of your electricity bill is more likely to increase in the future due to renewables obligaions, feed-in tariffs and so on.
WiMAX is a 4G technology. LTE is the other. At some point after the analogue switch off and the resolution of the various court cases between the mobile telcos and OFCOM, there will be a 4G spectrum auction.
Sounds impressive, but how does it compare?
If you had a two page write-up on the security of a chip & pin card, it would probably sound even better. You need a metal-on-metal connection to the chip before anything will happen which means physical possession of the card, and you need to know what the pin is - 2 factor authentication rather than 1 factor. Of course it also has the encryption stuff that NFC cards offer which may or may not help with security.
17GB is about 14 hours of HQ iPlayer per month. If you watch all your television on demand, as I do, you can go through that pretty quickly. I'm guessing that if you buy films from the iTunes store, the bandwidth requirements are pretty similar to that. I don't think iPlayer or iTunes are hard core geek things. iTunes in particular is not, as the hard core geeks probably know about other cheaper places to get their movies.
Think they've got it wrong
Facebook, Bebo et al don't require much bandwidth. In fact a 3G connection provides enough bandwidth for that. iPlayer and Bittorrent are the sorts of things you need superfast broadband for.
But I do agree on the competition aspect. I got a letter from BT a couple of days ago saying BT Infinity is now available in my street. I won't be signing up because it is BT that is providing it. If my existing ADSL provider were to offer the service, I might be tempted.
How to know
If a 19-year-old cutie who happens to look great in a bikini has to approach random strangers on the internet to get a date, there must be something seriously wrong with her.
Still a heck of a lot faster than getting a reply back from EDF's customer services department in Exeter.
Posted in Compact Disc death foretold for 2012
You don't need a USB port, just a 3.5mm audio in socket. Even my car has one of those.
Posted in Compact Disc death foretold for 2012
Sanity considerations have never stopped record companies in the past.
Seemingly a lot more frequently than their OS. I don't think I've seen Windows crash since I installed SP1 on Windows 2000 many years ago. Maybe they are running it on Windows ME Cloud Edition?
Posted in The Great Smartphone OS Shoot-out
In the UK, recording a call is legal if *one* of the parties to the call is aware that it is being recorded. That means you can record your own phone calls without telling the person at the other end, but you can't eavesdrop into someone else's phone call.
At the call centres, the boss may record the calls without necessarily telling the employees, so by telling you when you phone up, they comply with the law.
As far as a call recording app is concerned, it would be illegal to install it in someone else's phone and have it record all calls with out letting the person using it know, but if it has a record button you have to press to commence recording, it could never be used illegally.
Posted in The Great Smartphone OS Shoot-out
I have a weather widget on my Android home screen. To other commentards, yes I know I can look out of the window, but that doesn't tell me the temperature, also I can tap on it to get a forecast for the next week.
Posted in BOFH: We don't need no stinkin' upgrade
Firefox is a different story though. Currently v7.0.1, but it will probably be about v9 by the time the moderatrix comes back from the pub and approves my comment later this evening.
Free as in freedom
Are you free to change those programs if it doesn't quite work the way you want it to? Are you free to write your own programs for it.
No. You have to get Apple's permission before you can run anything on your iPod, or alternatively you have to jailbreak it.
Actually, when your brain is on the way out, you do get those sorts of visions.
If you have an unlimited data plan with no "fair use" restrictions. TV Catchup, like all streaming video services, uses rather a lot of data.
Maybe, but
can you get email that way? Firing up the web browser and visiting gmail.com or hotmail.com doesn't count.
Posted in Apple shouldn't bother with TV...
Don't knock it until you see it
Wait until you actually see the product before you declare it to be useless and too complicated. It depends what new ideas Apple has come up with. Possibly it is something that nobody has even thought of before.
People said the iPad would be useless, but Apple's shareholders certainly aren't complaining about it now.
As far as content is concerned, there's already a lot of stuff in the iTunes store, so the challenge of getting it onto a new TV product is not insurmountable.
The DLR doesn't have doors on the platform, and is driverless. The train captain does close the doors and press the button to send the train on its way to the next station.
DLR train captains get paid a lot less than the £50k tube drivers get. They can also check tickets and generally keep order on the train. That's where the savings come from.
How much truth in this?
I would be surprised if someone in Cupertino wasn't working on such a thing. Of course, we already have an Apple TV product, but nobody queued down the street for it when it was released.
I would be interested to know how you can add an interface for live broadcast TV and keep the simplicity Apple is known for. No doubt at some point someone will show me why the top people at Apple are millionaires and I'm not.
7 manufacturers?
Who are they? I count 3 or maybe 4.
Toshiba, who only make 2.5" drives, They took over Fujitsu's hard drive division in 2009.
Western Digital, who recently took over Hitachi
Seagate, who took over Maxtor in 2006, and I believe are taking over Samsung's hard drive division. If that hasn't happened, then Samsung are manufacturer no 4.
That won't happen until the polar ice caps have completely melted. Until then, global warming will make the British Isles colder. At the moment, it is a lot warmer here than other places a similar distance north such as Moscow and Hudson Bay because of the gulf stream, which brings warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. The cold water from the ice caps will push the gulf stream further south, meaning we will no longer be warmer than those places.
Posted in TfL wheels out digital bus info upgrade
And try at 6pm when journey times are less predictable due to the roads being busy.
At 4am, the roads should be pretty quiet apart from the last of the staggering drunks, and buses /should/ run on time.
Trademark problems?
Surely if Paris applied for her own domain name, the hotel franchising company formerly owned by her grandfather and now owned by Blackstone Private Equity would object on trademark grounds?
Posted in Groupon IPO could be as soon as Monday
Today's offer is two tickets to see Britney Spears at Wembley for £60.00. Clearly she didn't sell out in 2 seconds on Ticketmaster like popular acts do, so Groupon will help fill the seats. That gives you an idea what the point of it is.
The bit about the foot in the door applies to court appointed bailiffs, not debt collectors. Debt collectors have the same rights to enter and take property as door to door salesmen.
Posted in TfL wheels out digital bus info upgrade
I use the Pubtran app for android which tells me when the bus is supposed to be at the stop rather than when it actually is. It takes its feed from the timetable data adjusted for known service changes, not bus location data. Still very useful for getting around.
Remember the old VideoPlus adverts? "It's so easy that even a grown up can use it." Nine year olds do tend to be better able to figure out how to use gadgets.
I have a 60 year old PHB who needs to ask for help every time he tries to read or send a text message on his iPhone.
Posted in My Council Services
If you don't like this app
You could always try fixmystreet, available for Jesus Phones, Android and Nokia. They are a charity who provide free (en_rms) | open source (en_esr) software, and all reports are publicly available on their website. I reported a few things to my council using it - bins not emptied, fly posting, broken traffic lights, and they fix the problem pretty promptly.
Posted in Voda in 3G blackhole probe by ASA
I've never had a problem in Reading with O2. Oxford is a different matter altogether. I am quite often unable to get a signal of any sort.
Looks nice, but will it work?
In the photos of all the other pylons around the world, you see the cable suspended from the main pylon structure with ceramic insulating disks. I'm not an electrical engineer, but I get the feeling that attaching a 400kV cable directly to the metal structure is not a good idea. I'm pretty sure that attaching a 400kV directly to a metal structure that has 400kV cables from different phases is even less of a good idea.
Secondly, don't pylons normally carry 7 cables or groups of cables? Two cables for each of the three phases on the sides, plus earth running along the top. This one has 8 cables.
I am also not a structural engineer, but this design looks like it is a lot more likely to topple over in high winds than traditional designs.
I think the problem is that while most people do wash their hands, they don't do it properly, and in particular they don't dry their hands afterwards. If you just dip your hands under the running tap for a second, and don't dry them properly, that is actually worse than not washing them at all.
Ideally, you should wash your hands thoroughly with soap and hot water, dry them with a paper towel, then dry them a bit more in a hand drier, then use an alcohol gel to kill any remaining nasties.
"Hello everybody out there using minix -
"I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
"I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and
I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
"Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
"PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(."
He did announce just that, and started with the kernel. After getting the kernel working, other people ported the GNU system to work on it - it had pretty much everything working except the Hurd kernel which still even today isn't considered ready for production use.
Posted in Amazon Kindle 4
Get the apple charger, which is even smaller than the Amazon one, or the Gear4 version of it, which has slightly less curvy corners to avoid the wrath of Steve's ghost, and is a lot cheaper.
Slight correction?
Have a very large working population (about 260,000 people) in a small area. St Davids, Wells, Ely etc are very small cities, but I'm not sure it would work so well there, because their daytime population is roughly the same as the night time population.
Not going to work
I don't put shopping trips in my diary, and they aren't that predictable. It is quicker to walk than drive to my local supermarket, so routine shopping does not involve the car. I take the car if the weather is really bad, I am going to take something heavy home, or I go somewhere other than the local supermarket; and I don't put any of those things in the diary.
Also, I might wake up one weekend day, look out and see that the weather is very nice, and decide to go on a day trip somewhere.
Besides, just in case anyone forgot, electric cars were around before diesel and later petrol cars were invented. They were very popular in the 1920s and 1930s in the days when diesel engines took about 30 minutes to get going with a starting handle, and were very noisy and smelly. In other words, they are old obsolete technology which is unlikely to come back any time soon.
Posted in Google loses battle for goggle.com
A dictionary word
I guess the problem is that goggle is a dictionary word, and nobody had heard of google back in 1998 when they registered the domain name. Alta Vista and Yahoo! were the market leaders back then, and Google came to the fore much later.
Posted in Royal Navy halts Highlands GPS jamming
When they send out a distress signal, they presumably give the GPS co-ordinates of where they are located to help the coastguard reach them more easily, and they won't be able to do that if GPS is jammed.
While what you say is true, if you drive at 10mph in the right hand lane, or even the left hand lane, and you are not doing it because you are stuck behind something else, then you can expect a more severe penalty than someone doing 90mph.
Driving in the wrong lane could also mean driving on the wrong side of the road on a single carriageway.
There is already an extremely accurate method of carbon taxing which we already use, which is to charge tax per litre at the pump. It is much more accurate than any other method because you know exactly how much carbon there is in a litre of fuel.
Truck drivers already have tachometers to measure and record their speed.
It won't work
It won't work. Given that a lot of phishing sites use things along the lines of
www.barclays.com.accountlogin.ahsdjfkahjdkfh.ng/verify.php
I'm sure they can swap the .com for a .bank in there.
Please ignore Aimee
I come here for some light hearted relief from the drudgery of work, and this is exactly the writing style I like to see. If I want boring sensible stuff, I go elsewhere.
They didn't get a patent, they got a trademark, in the same way that they have trademarks for most of their product names (Word isn't trademarkable, but Microsoft Word is) and their logos.
I believe the plan, if it hasn't been abandoned, was to sell pcs that don't have the usual cr**ware installed to slow everything down and pester people with messages to upgrade it to the full version. People might queue up for that.
Posted in Skye IT goes titsup
A further clue
They filed "total exemption small" accounts, meaning they are exempt from audit.
That means they meet both the turnover and balance sheet criteria.
If for example they met the turnover and staff criteria, but not the balance sheet criteria, a common situation in property companies (big property asset, turnover is rent about 3% to 10% of the value of the property, 1 part time member of staff to bank the rent cheques and pay the mortgage), they would be able to file abbreviated accounts, but would have to have them audited.
Of course abbreviated accounts show the balance sheet and not much else, so you always know if they meet that criteria.
