Salt the Mine

If the Chinese are so keen to sniff round why does no one resort to 'salting various mine shafts' to give them something interesting to read and keep them off the streets? To make it interesting mix real names and false addresses and false names and real addresses. Data could come from any public data source, e.g phone books, diplomatic lists, etc. with the details slightly re-arranged. An electronic version of The Man Who Never Was.

Stealth???!!!

There might be a lot of ways to call this but stealth is NOT one of them.

I am no fan of fraud sites or their owners/operators, but the stupidity of 'turning off the power' to stop a minor crook is in clear sight it is stupid. Still the NORKS use power breaks to track and trace illegal activities so expect others to follow . In the short term, they might do worse than give the task of stopping the intended cr*p to an average class of 12 year old school kids. They will certainly do a better job than your average dumb clutz, political hero who was not so much a 'has been' as a 'never was'.

Have MS Created the Spife?

The Spife is a combination of the spoon and the knife.

Unlike the spork the spoon part works, but its sharply ground knife edges cut everything that they contact.

This makes it hard to use for eating as the food slips out of the now lacerated mouth; additionally when you drop it in pain, it cuts everything else, especially wildly optimistic estimates of its popularity. If dropped in the wrong way it may also decimate future population forecasts!

Fireworks Anyone

In pyrotechnics a flash is something that blows up with a visible and sometimes audible result. Is this what Adobe want with their idea of 'flash' .

I totally agree that their 'product life cycle management' is total rubbish and worthy of the Financial Service Industry. The bundling of cr*pw*re with updates should be outlawed by law.

(Thought, can we get apple to patent the stupid idea of sending out cr*pw*re with patches, so that it gets blocked that way. Then people would applaud not mock apple's patent activity.)

If Only They Made usable Telephones For a Sensible Price

Since the touch rubbish came along requiring two handed fumbling usability went out of the window.

I do not want to have to handle the damned thing just to make or receive calls. Why does that silly mob insist that people should stare at the silly thing, it is not as though it is worth looking at with its copy of a 1870s school slate form factor.

What Price Quality Of Life?

Most jobs come with a package of ups and downs. The up is hopefully the pay, but this can be split up into several reward packages, so much for anti social aspects, so much to cover travel costs, perhaps so much for dealing with the throwback in charge, etc. After a while everyone starts to look at the math. Are those compensation factors worth the agro? At one time, many years back I was working 7 days a week and often from 6 in the morning to well past sane people's bed time - I was paid for the hours and made more money than the most senior guy in the company location -yippee.

Things improved and the crazy hours became optional, funny how soon I stopped the overtime and accepted the drop in cash.

Why Care About The OS?

Why does anyone care about the operating system used on a mobile telephone?

It used to be that you bought a phone that suited your finances, pocket or handbag size, needs, reception in your normal area and had the features you required.

Do people really buy a phone based on either who made the stupid thing or what operating system it runs? Perhaps that is why so many phones cannot do basic phone tasks very well..

Personally I do not care who made it or what operating system it runs, I just want it to have the features I need. Sadly this appears to be impossible to achieve with 'modern' devices which appear to celebrate the fact that they either cannot do what I need or do it so appallingly badly as to be useless.

Shame is I have an elderly phone that already does precisely what I need. Long may it keep working.

I just hope that the idiots in OFCOM do nothing to stop it being used.

Crap Rules, Crap Rulers

Given the dramatic drop in both TV quality and choice perhaps the idea is to close down all TV service in favour of morons with 'mobile devices' wandering about with glazed looks on their faces and nothing going on in their enfeebled minds, tell the world they are walking/sitting/eating/lost/drunk/whatever.

I recently had a mobile upgrade foisted on me, the upgrade is now in a rack and I am back on the 8 year old telephone as it is the only one that does what I NEED. The new one might have Facebum or some other twaddle about which I could not care less, but it was crap at making telephone calls the way I need. I have no idea if it was 1g, 2g, 3g, or GG it was useless. Just like they want to make the expensive non HD TV collection I now appear to have.

Oh anyone spotted that you will only be able to watch IP TV for about 2 days a month given the data caps?

Who Is Doing The Street Cleaning

Wow, no one lives there, the rubble is still lying where it fell yet the streets are cleaner than in my nearest (inhabited) towns near me here in UK.

Not Surprising Really the Law of Offsets applies

Given that the for most people the question is; will I have a job and/or an income tomorrow - both rely on the economy. So clearly if they are asked about various life factors they will rank those that directly affect them most highly as being top of their agenda.

Given that the politicians want to use the environment as an excuse to raise taxes, it is not an easy sell.

Many green lobby/environmentalists, etc. keep saying that we have to live like people in some long forgotten past to save the environment, but most 'main stream' people will rank survival, i.e. the economy above many, if not most environmental issues. Comfort considerations will also drive the 'green agenda' further down the list since the green agenda appears to most to suggest we all live in unheated homes and walk everywhere either through direct force or via excessive costs.

The comments about smoking are so irrelevant to be at best laughable and to show only a lack of grasp of the context. Relatively few would have been economically affected in any negative way by stopping smoking and, given employment statistics at the time, most would have easily found another job, e.g growing food for the starving.

Now the situation is radically different, loose your job and standard of living because something might happen at some point somewhere distant is not an easy sell. Even more difficult iwhen there are vast unknowns.

Crossed Lines Too Many Causes to Number

I am sorry but crossed lines well pre-date the use of cross bar and other 'modern developments'. They could be caused by dropped solder on jumper frames, un-recovered wiring on jumper frames and other inter tag bridging on the frames. Then there were the mechanical issues, broken 'P' wires on switches, faulty wipers bridging, crossed joints in cabinets or joint chambers and so on, then there were the issues of water ingress and a few times deliberate actions, think illegal home made wire taps. This 'wonderful' variety made it so 'interesting' to fault find.

Modern switches such as cross bar and some, (probably more than 'some') digital switches introduced their own twists on the crossed, i.e. unwanted multiple connections. All of these could be either one way 'taps' or both-way 'taps' allowing both parties to be heard. Some times the 'added value' could be free of charge and sometimes not...

Of course some of these caused service loss, so you might only be able to listen into other people's calls when you would probably have more incentive to complain. In other cases you might never get the same callers twice.

Dose of Reality?

At the moment the EU is subsidising all sort of dead or dying traders to live on life support. this money comes from those who can still work as they have a job 'doing something useful' The budget was not cut it was held at a previously agreed level so that less was taken from the living. If you want to pay something towards sunrise industry fine, but someone, (hint the French), are going to have to agree to change their agriculture so it is no longer a workfare scheme with little or no value. The money thus released might then go to help sunrise industries rather than destroying what little hope the current tax payers have of a life free of growing debt.

Too Many Fools Destroy Cash Values

A few years back it was all the vogue to prudently manage, i.e. horde cash mountains, it was mainly done by older operators who had built up the company. Then the younger prats came along and blew the lot on stupid special dividends , daft risky purchases of failing or otherwise useless companies. So the once proud company failed, the only growth about town was unemployment.

Now I hate Apple and think that are a loud mouthed of fashionistas selling over priced rubbish - personal feeling you do not have to agree with me. However, the one thing that I can agree with is for Apple to keep their cash and let Einhorn's mistake ride, up or down. No one forced him to invest, he knew the company so more power to their treasury function.

Another do not want pile of rubbish

What gives with these modern bricks? They force feed only rubbish?

As a set top box it might do as a door stop and nothing else.

I was recently sent a new phone, it remains unused with its wonderful feature set of complete cr*p. It has a fixed unmovable list of 'Bookmarks', all totally useless items. Most of them I have never heard of and all of them I have no interest in ever using.

Can it do anything I need? No, of course not.

So I still use my 8 year old mobile telephone as at least it works and does what I need..

How About A Really Polite One

The Junkies who make some of the stuff on this site need to buy their next fix. Please buy their material rather than downloading from here and making them go cold turkey.

He Should Have used a CD

His mistake was distributing the game via unapproved methods.

Had he used an unencrypted CD and sent it in the mail then everything would have been OK, after all the HMRC does it all the time and no one really cares - and they use real customers data, lots of it!

Another Reason I'm Glad

Not to be on Backside-book.

Call Lenth vs Call Cost

I did a lot of work on this in the 1970s, (not in the UK) automating the production of average call duration distribution data when calls were metered rather than computer recorded.

My studies found that the more expensive the call the longer it lasted, this rule was across all call classes, even international.

During down turns the pattern was even more marked and it became easier to see what happened.

Un-metered calls (or calls that were part of a package) were a don't care element. If you wanted information you made a call, sometimes for a few seconds hung up and called again later.

If times were tight, you made a list of items, then made a call, often towards the end of the day and asked all that you wanted to ask before getting the information and hanging up.

Traffic was often crammed into a shorter period of time towards the end of the international overlap causing the busy period to be far busier and later than normal. It played hell with the economics of dimensioning back then so congestion often resulted. Perversely, when things improved, we had more paid time and less congestion as traffic was better spread out.

Is There A Reason To Pay For ever For???

I guess I am now using the last version office that I shall ever use. Office is getting more expensive, over complex and does not do anything more for me than 2000 used to do. Perhaps in ten years I shall have learned enough of 2007 to make full use of the package.

I have never believed in renting, TV, cooker, house, its money down the toilet as far as I am concerned.

I know that MS almost agree, - as long as they are the toilet into which the money goes!

123 Fun

In the 1980s I used Lotus 123 a lot though not so much for financial working. The macro facility was hugely helpful allowing quite unskilled staff to input data and achieve 'professional results'. At one point I was writing macros to write macros for some of the more complex routines. Nested commands ran nearly the full 256 character limit in a line and reached from close to the top of columns to the bottom of the spreadsheet. some sheets had ten or twenty such 'program columns'.

I also used to collect, or rather I wrote programs that in near real time collected telecommunications data, live from switches. It automatically built databases, processed the data into sub reports which were passed parameter like to an automatically booted copy of Lotus 123 which would run to churn out graphs which were saved. Then an automatically booted copy of Lotus Manuscript to embed the graphs into automatically generated CCITT reports.Everything made use of a range of conditional processing to insert or omit paragraphs or reports according to the data available. I left the whole lot running 24 hours a day. If there was enough data collected, someone simply sent off the fully formatted and printed reports that were generated overnight.

It all worked well within 640KB of memory, those were the days

Richard

Please correct the name Do you mean the ATC?

Clearly the Domestic Trade Commission of the USA is wrongly named it should either be the DTCUSA (Only) or perhaps more accurately the Apple Trade Promotion Commission either ATC or ATPC?

Halon Rocket Fuel

One place I worked was being developed and the spare Haylon devices were in the builder's store.

The builder's store took fire and one of the Haylon globes warmed up, and up, and up. In the end the outlet seal ruptured and, Werner Von Braun eat your heart out, the rocket was launched.

It went through several walls on its way to stardom, though not to the stars. The police investigator was not amused when he was told that the flying cylinder was an extinguisher.

A severe sense of humour failing followed