Reminds me

... of my university days.

During my first year of an electronic engineering degree I was told that "Your lab book is for your use alone. It can be a mess, but put anything in that you want, so long as you get the details in so you know what you've done". They asked that our lab books were handed in once, to make sure we WERE getting all the data we needed in them, but told us they wouldnt do that again, it was our responsibility.

I then took a year out, moved universities, and changed to mechatronics. About a month into my first lab, we were told to hand in our lab books. I didn't have any time to change what was in there, and was marked down for bad language (at the end of one session I had realised I had made a mistake in one calculation right at the beginning, so the entire 2-hour lab session had been wasted, including the start of building the circuit, so I had written something like "WASTED THE WHOLE F***ING LAB BECAUSE OF ONE MISTAKE! AARGH!").

In short, they told me that it WASNT just for my benefit, employers wanted the books in case you get hit by a bus, so you end up having to assume that EVERYTHING you write down (in a lab book, code comments etc etc...) will be read by your boss, and his boss, and the CEO of the company, and the client... Irritating, but the way the world works.

Sometimes...

I surprise myself at how much of a geek I really am. I stormed straight to this comments page to vent my frustration that you were calling the amiga an 8-bit machine...

only to find I had been beaten to it! Glad I'm in good company, POWER TO THE GEEKS! :)

Finally!

"users not wanting random punters to use their bandwidth should just secure the connection in the first place"

Finally someone is making sense! Basically, they are saying "If you are too stupid/lazy to click a couple of button, tough shit if you get hijacked!"

@Morely Dotes

RE: "Better overall performance"

They quote 100MB/s read and 40MB/s write, so the read speed is already being quoted as quicker than a regular 7200rpm hdd. Writes are a touch slower, but a desktop spends more time reading than writing.

It's access times which should be at least an order of magnitude better. I have run desktops with slow compact flash cards through a CFIDE adapter and the reduced access time makes a hell of a difference.

Would like to know though how much they will cost and when they will go on general release.

LOLololol....

I have had vista as a secondary OS for a while now, and I have to say I just do not like it. I have an up to date PC, not top of the line, but good enough (x2 2GHz, 7800GT, 3GB RAM) and it just runs like a pig.

I am not saying that it is a horrible OS, but everyone can see it is bloated.

On the otherhand XP runs pretty well, and Linux runs like a dream.

Anyone who complains about driver support for Linux should think again. I have not had driver problems since I got my last-but-one motherboard, where the kernel included with Fedora 5 didn't include support for the SATA RAID. Apart from that (plus a small problem with my latest mobo where windows turned off the GB lan on shutdown, and the linux driver didnt know how to switch it back on) everything has just worked. The only problem is software support, mostly games, but then most of those I want to run work under either WINE or Cedega, and work better than in XP.

I know I'm gonna get flamed for being a linux fanboi, and I am, but I am a fan BECAUSE it works. And if I want to run it on older hardware, fine, I just use a less flashy desktop, and everything STILL works great.

So why can't MS do the same?

Hate to be pedantic...

erm, actually no that's a lie, I LOVE being pedantic, it's everyone else who hates it :)

Anyway back to my point, it's E=mc^2 (superscript 2, not subscript 2), and to be precise it is in that case (upper case E, lower case m and c) if I remember my physics correctly.

It is SO true though. Myself, I prefer Freecell, but there is nothing more anoying than someone trying to help you when playing solitair

@ Flash HD wear out-how?

Have a read of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

It's fairly accurate and esplains the basics. In short, each write damages the structure slightly. You do not need moving parts. Think of it like a lightbulb, every time you turn it on you damage it ever so slightly, and it gets a little damaged while being used. Eventualy it cant take it any more and goes bang.

I know this is very simplified, but it is a fair analogy.

RE: an incredibly amusing mental image

@Greg Williams:

"an incredibly amusing mental image of a missile with cats ... stuck all over it"

:D

Why...

...did it take you so long?

A friend of mine's boyfriend bought a brand new top of the range HP laptop, which came with Vista. He liked the flashy eye-candy on Vista, so declinded his girlfriend's offer to "down"grade it. Her response? "Within a week you'll change your mind, let me know when you're done playing".

A week later, he had taken to swearing at his laptop all day long while waiting for it to do the simplest opperation, and decided to get Gem to downgrade it. A couple of hours later, he was given it back, and his first comment was:

"I thought you were putting XP on it"

That's right, it was XP but looked exactly like Vista, with all the eye-candy. She had installed Vista Inspirat. Everything was much faster, but it looked (almost) exactly the same.

Unfortunately it has been back to HP twice so far, and each time (in spite of her pleading for them not to reinstall vista) it took another couple of hours to reinstall XP and all his apps. Worth it to get a top-end laptop to stop running like a P90 with 8Mb RAM though....

@shalz

There is a way round this which doesnt need MS and Sun to get a room... Don't use windows servers. Almost everything you can do on windows can be done on Solaris (or some flavour of Linux). There will even be Active Directory available on them soon, and if you don't want to wait a better solution can be created using a mixture of Samba, LDAP and a few others anyway. Use of IMAP and LDAP can replace exchange, MySQL and PostgreSQL are much better than MS SQL (Faster, lighter weight...) the list goes on.

I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, and I sound like another Linux/Unix fanboy, but I realy do not see the need for Windows servers. I hate them with a passion, as they make everything more difficult. I see a point for windows on a workstation, but a server?

Paris Hilton because she's not bloated

Got bored

I got bored with all the comments about how stupid the government is. We know they are stupid/corrupt/ignorant.

But one thing I was told many year ago springs to mind. It doesn't QUITE work anymore, due to the advent of mainstream wireless communications, but assuming you rule that out...

* The only way to ensure true security is a 6-inch air gap *

ie. as soon as there is a connection to a network (and a human being could easily be considered a network connection) the machine is no longer secure. End of.

To me this boils down to a completely secure server being burried in concrete, not powered up, and generaly being useless. As soon as you use it it is possible for the thing to be hacked. Anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.

So to have a useful database like the ID card one, it is impossible to make it 100% secure. Surely someone has told our politician friend this? Most likely they did, but she ignored it and decided to tell the sheeple what they wanted to hear. And the sheeple will bleet "YAY!", and rejoice in their shiney new ID-card database which is impossible to hack, and will stop evil imigrants from taking our jobs or blowing us up, and usher in a whole new age where the roads are paved with gold, it never rains, and we all live in a state of pure bliss....

... Until it gets hacked, or someone blows up one of the new hydrogen powered busses, or stubs their toe. Then everyone will be shocked that the sweet and innocent government lied to us.

LOL

OK, this is a standard case of PEBKAC. The sort of thing I get all the time at work. In fact, so often that my users actualy know what PEBKAC means.

1) The users in question obviously had no brains if they can't even remember an email address.

2) The admins were idiots as, as soon as this started to happen, they could easily have blocked the domain and bounced the emails informing the sender of the correct domain to use.

3) The guy in question INFORMED them of their mistake. He is certainly not the only person to use a catch-all address. I know I do with my personal domain. I have my regular email addresses, several auto-responder and/or automaticaly processed addresses, plus a catch all just in case someone misspells my name. I trawl that once a week or so, just in case.

4) The flight plan of air force 1 was sent in a cleartext external email?!?! Do these guys klnow nothing.... oh, shit, forgot they are Yanks :P

RE: The top-heavy ONE

I beg to differ, the Asus girl is just the right balance :)

I would have to say that both models probably have their advantages, depending on the situation. On the beach, or chilling in a fancy cafe or bar, I think the asus is far sexier. The elonex would be great for everyday use though.

Hmm... Was I thinking about the girls or the machines there. AAARGH, get me my coat, the thoughts are getting mixed up and I am am now getting turned on by a frickin subnotebook! HEEEEEEELP!

Not currently viable?

So you are telling me that a guy working night shift at a petrol station for minimum wage, with a little expertise in electronics, would not consider it economicaly viable to put a small, inexpensive microcontroller and support circuitry with a small flash chip or card slot on a breadbord (prototyping circuit board for those who dont know) and hook it up the the chip and pin device, then disappear on a cheap return flight to eastern europe, withdraw cash from a load of cloned cards, and fly back to buy that new BMW he always wanted? Or even just disappear with the (possibly) hundreds of thousands of pounds

It would not be difficult to do, not be expensive to do, and not be that risky to do. And the reward could be a life of luxury in eastern europe for the rest of his life if done right.

@AC RE: Galactic pr0n???

ROFPMLMFAO!

We should carry on killing the earth then. It's a dirty *******, only one thing on it's mind. What if the sun doesnt want to be entered? Is that Solar Rape?

However it is comfortin to know that even the earth knows that Fatties are the way to go, so it's going to wait untill the sun becomes a red giant (probably close to the size of the average american woman :P )

@Gareth RE: RAM Doubler

I think you have misread.

This doesnt increase the capacity of an existing DIMM. It allows more DRAM chips to be fitted onto a single DIMM.

This means that, for the same capacity DIMM, you can buy more, lower capacity, cheaper DRAM chips. Alternatively you could buy the higher capacity chips and fit more of them on the DIMM, giving a higher capacity DIMM that would otherwise be possible.

With the products listed in the article, you can see an 8GB DIMM for £100!

I actualy looked into a design for something similar myself, but it was horribly complicated and not worth it for me (I would have been using an FPGA, performance would've been shonky!)

So, there are 2 important questions: 1) is there any way to shoehorn 4 of the 8GB modules into my server (an AM2 athlon64), and 2) can I scrape the £400 together to do it?

RE: Chewbacca Defense

The Chewbacca defense was shown in South Park, used by a high paid lawyer in the case of the record industry versus Chef. Chef wanted to be acknowledged for his earlier work, a song called "Stinky Breeches", which was being sung by Alanis Morrisette. The boss of the record company has him sued. The lawyer argues "Why would Chewbacca, a 6-foot wookie, live on Endor with the Ewoks? It does not make sense! Why am I arguing about Chewbacca when a mans life is at stake? It does not make sense! if it does not make sense, you must find in favour of my client!"

Put simply, it was all about confusing a jury, bamboozling the stupid people who weren't even smart enough to get out of jury duty.

Anyway, back to the real topic in hand, Google's argument doesnt make sense in todays day and age. A broadband supplier must have enough IPs for all customers, as it is an "Always On (tm)" connection. The only reason they dont supply free static IPs is that they CAN charge for them. An IP address does, for the majority of people, identify them, as their IP is unlikely to change for weeks, if not months or even years. Also the number of people with static IPs is increasing, and they are then definately uniquely identifiable. Unless of course someone is using an anonymising technique. But why should it be up to the user to anonymise their IP?

Also, if the EU find in Googles favour, that throws a lot of the record industries techniques out of the window. If the EU say it is not a unique ID of the user, how then can the record indistry say "Your IP downloaded this file, I'm gonna sue you"? For this reason I hope that the EU makes the stupid descision on this one.

@Michael Jolly

I certainly do know a 'Jeff'. Unfortunately he happens to be one of my genetic donors :(

I still rememeber a conversation between him, myself (a mechanical and electronic engineer, and a car buff) and my brother (a mechanic from VW) in which we were discussing turbo/super-chargers and nitrous injection. It didnt help that it took about an hour to explain the rincipal involved in these (ie more oxygen=more power, simplified), after which he couldnt understand why we didnt carry around oxygen tanks for increasing power, and was convinced that he could make a fortune doing so. In the end my brother and I gave it up as a bad job and went out for a cig (or 3, it was very stressful). In everything he does, he is right. Always. If you use a different method to what he would do, you are wrong. If you suggest an alternative approach, you are wrong. If you have an idea, he has a better one, and you are wrong.

OK, enough bitching about my dad :)

Well done BOFH, removing another bullshitter from the human gene pool. Darwin would be proud!

(Oh and last week obviously worked wonders, the boss seems to have caught on)

RE: pedantry! :)

"Beating someone to death with a PC would be misuse i.e. not the use for which it was intended"

I like that!

Oh and I completely agree, a computer's purpose is to access and manipulate data. She used it to access (read) and manipulate (delete) the data on the companies mail server, exactly what the computer was designed for.

I think that its blatantly correct for her to be done for this, but the size of the fine is right too. £500 is not so much. It's basicaly a slap on the wrist. The company was stupid not to change the password, and I have no sympathy. However, WHY THE HELL were they using a single email account which multiple employees had access to. Do you think that, if she'd had access to a company pool car, they would have left her with a copy of the keys?

The entire nation needs educating about basic computer and information security. It would help in so many ways, from preventing the spread of virii to reducing identity theft.

But then we can't expect any help from the govt on this one, they can't even teach their own ministers/doctors/civil servants to be careful with their data.

PH because Nannies Inc. have shown a level of intelligence very similar to the girl

What about...

...things which have already passed the 50-year period? Will they get the extension too? If so, what about the derived works which have already been done?

Also, assume track X is going PD next week, but they bring in this extension tomorrow. What happens to the hard working artist who has made a derived work for release next week, spent the last year making it, and suddenly cannot use it.

Or consider that an arrangement of said track X is scheduled to be used in an amateur dramatics performance, or a school play. They have spent well over a year in the planning, and months rehearsing, and now cannot use it without paying the (often extortionate) royalties on the track.

The term has been set. It was an implied contract at the time the artist wrote the piece. Terms should not be changed on this.

The only change I beleive it would be OK for them to implement would be that works produced FROM THE DATE OF THE CHANGE are subject to a new term. And, lets be honest, who is going to want to listen to the commercial, manufactured shite being produced now in 10 years time, let alone 50, or 70?

It would be funny...

...if it wasnt for the fact some poor lass was going to die.

Firstly a witch could, surely, just bewitch her way out of it, couldnt she? I seem to recall a bit from one of the Harry Potter books about how witches just cast a simple spell and felt a slight tingle when being burned.

The fact the appeal courts said they cant kill her, then lower courts overuled her, whats that about?

The world is a mess, and the sooner we blow ourselves up the better

@Solar power in deserts

OK then, we have just built said solar plants, and nature kicks us in the teeth making that land into non-deserts.

By working carefully, we can help it out. We are generating energy AND helping the land to regenerate itself. So, once that starts to heppen, we will have less of a worry about CO2 because there will be vastly more vegetation to use the CO2.

It's saving the planet... AND saving the planet.

Of course the down side is the limited lifespan of the solar plants but, hey, by then we may have a better alternative anyway.

Sorry for my earlier comments ignoring desertification, I didnt even think about it, but the only down side seems to be the limited life of the power plants. Still buys us time doesnt it.

A possible solution?

We already ship crude oil all over the world in big tankers from the few places whilch can supply it. Well, there are certain places on earch which can supply vast amounts of renewable energy.

Deserts are vast wastelans, virtualy uninhabitable by mankind and therefore mostly uninhabitted. Large solar arrays (probably solarpowered steam turbines, or something similar, would be preferable to photovoltaic cells with current tech, but this could change in future) could be spread accross these wastelands, and the energy used to process the CO2 & Water (obviously either the water or elecy must be transported, as theres little water in the desert). This can then be shipped back to "civilisation".

There are also places with a lot of geothermal power available, which could be harnessed (although I would be worried about what effect sucking vast amounts of energy out of the earths core would do). There are large rivers, very windy sites, and other similar phenomenon all over the world.

I think the desert idea is great myself, using land which is unusable for any other purpose, and this way you just transport from, say, the sahara instead of the middle east. Negligible difference in transport (the main difference being you must transport both ways, however the fuel is also already processed rather than in need of refining, which may offset the difference).

Just my two pence worth (I've been thinking about it for a while, for production of hydrogen, but hydrogren + extremely high temparatures doesnt sound like the best plan to me :S )

@Joel Stobart & Alex Read

RE: "FF3 is QUICK, Small (>7Mb)"

I assume you mean <7Mb? < is Less than, > is Greater than.

Maybe you didnt, maybe it is bigger than 7Mb, but it doesn't make much sense to say >7Mb

I always remember it as the small end of the arrow is the small number, large end large number. Or it "points" at the small number.

RE: "When Vista's service pack was released in a test mode so scores of users could test the company's product rather than them elongating a release date or spending extra cash employing more professional software testers there was uproar!

"Where are all the open source fanatics now - not posting the same remarks just because this story isn't on an MS product??"

Anyone who complains that a company releases a beta product is a fool, whether it's from Microsoft or an Open Source project. Beta testing is required. There is no way that a product can be tested on the infinite number of possible combinations of software and hardware that exist by any organisation, even one as large as MS. So this "outcry" is from eejits, and should be ignored. Your message shows either similar knowledge of the subject to these fools, or maybe that you are just sick and tired of these dimwits praising Open Source without the fundamental intelligence to understand the arguments. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the second.

The problem is that MS release beta quality software (see Vista, the "compelling number two"* that it is, and just about every product MS have ever made when it was first released) as a product. It then lets paying customers test it for them untill they have it right, when they release a service pack to fix the problems that should never have existed in a release product in the first place.

This product is clearly marked as a Beta, therefore there is nothing to comment about. As it is open source, the situation is different again. For a start, it is free. Secondly, if a user happens to be a developer, he will often fix any problem he finds, then send the fix back to the developer.

There is a lot more to think about than open source vs microsoft (which isnt the battle anyway, but people have started to think of it as such). Personaly, I do not like MS products, and I tend to find there are better alternatives. Some are open source, some aren't.

Mainly, though, a company is quite right to release Beta software, as long as it is clearly marked as such and warnings such as "Not suitable for casual users" or "Experimental software - this may fuck up, we are still testing the bugger" are applied.

Then again, most people who have any sort of experience take the words "New Microsoft Product" to mean the second warning above :)

*for more info on this quote from Ballmer, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/11/microsoft_still_wants_yahoo/

And for anyone who doesn't get it (I have had to explain it to a few mates already, the thickos), the number two in his quote refers to a second place in internet search and advertising, but I have taken it out of context to mean Poo/Shit/Excement, as in "going for a number two".

Simple way

Just like in any system, there is a simple way of sorting this.

People don't trust computers. They are used to windows, which consistently ****s things up. They will not trust anything, anyway, until it is proven.

So how about this. Set up a touch-screen voting system. When you have selected, and confirmed, your choice, the kiosk:

1) Prints out a slip of paper (or cardboard), which is machine readable (set font, big black mark next to the candidates name, etc), and asks the voter to confirm again and place the slip in a box, and

2) Once it has been confirmed, saves the data to local storage, prints it on a printer in the back office, and sends the results to the revelvant systems which require it.

Once the election is over the first time, do a full manual audit based on paper records and all points at which the results were stored, by multiple independant auditors and the parties themselves. This allows more time to analyse the results, and will give the voters confidence in the system (or flag up any problems).

If everything runs smoothly, a random sample audit can be performed in subsequent years.

Both main e-voting problems are solved by this: Unreliable systems and public confidence

Re: A bit of everything

OK, I'll take these bits one at a time.

Unions: Although I admit they have done a lot for workers rights etc, at the company I am currently working for a militant union is threatening the company, which threatens my job. Yes, they are peeved that the company is abolishing the final salary pension scheme, but if keeping that would cause the co to close and them all to loose their jobs, which would they prefer? Unions need to be run propperly, with a rounded view of the whole situation. I wont say they dont have a place in todays western society, just that they have a different place.

The article: Basicaly GO FOR IT @ the Open Source attitude. I just hope they dont get gobbled up by Google or the like. It is just what we need.

Open search engine: Sounds like a fantastic idea! A peer-to-peer search engine thingy, where we can avoid google, would be great. Build up stats, privacy is kept as you only share data you want to, noone can just BUY an entry at the top of the list... I'm gonna have a look into that. BRING DOWN ALL THE BIG BOYS AND BUILD A BETTER COMMUNITY-DRIVEN SOCIETY FOR US ALL... well, maybe just bring the web back to the free-to-do-what-you-want philosophy.

Welcome back...

...amanfromMars! How I've missed your ramblings :D

Everyones got an oppinion...

and heres mine.

The spirit of this descision is very good, but I do agree with AC's post "Typical response from failed politicians". This blocks the path to better ways, if any, when they are found. Take for instance subsidies for 'greener' cars. You can (or at least could a few years back when I looked into this) get a subsidy to convert a car to run on LPG. You could not get such a grant to convert to electric, it was up to you. I can see similar things happenning here.

Another point is that climate change DOES happen. Without the involvement of humans. Just look at the ice ages that have been. The world is in a natural state of flux. This is undeniable, however so is the fact that humans ARE having an impact. I havent seen all the facts, so I am unsure of how much effect each is having, but both factors are having an effect, and anyone who says otherwise is a fool (either that its ALL our fault, or that its ALL natural).

To be quite honest, I think what we need is either a world war or a global pandemic. If we cut the worlds population in half, we will cut our carbon emmissions. After that, some form of population control.

LOLololol....

/me picks self up from the pool of urine on the floor

This is hilarious!

I, personaly, was a big fan of the Action mod for Quake 2 (Although I wasnt very good). I actualy ran a gaming league in the IT dept of my high school, using all proceeds to upgrade the computers (so we would get better frame rates... I mean to improve the students learning experience).

I got shut down because I made a map of the school... Well actualy because I made a map of the school and placed models of my most hated teachers dotted around, and one of them walked in when a load of us were shooting her. Anyway, I could not understand it then and I cant now. Neither myself nor any of my fellow gamers were doing any more than having a laugh, none of us started being violent (IMHO the games let you sate your violent nature in a controlled environment), and the school lost out (especialy when we started playing it on the net anyway)

And you cant say that tactics in any computer game are like the real world. ITS A GAME FOR CHRISTS SAKE, STOP WHINGING!

He went too far...

... but I completely agree with his sentiments. Firing them was OTT, although I'd just have told em "like it or lump it, you knew the smoking policy when you started!" There is only one minority you can still discriminate against, and thats smokers.

Back to the smoking ban debate, I actualy think it's part of a clever ruse by the government to get rid of the local pubs in "working class" areas. I know that my local, and many other pubs in brighouse, have suffered greatly by the smoking ban. They have lost most of the through the week trade. People used to come in for a pint + a chat, but now stay at home through the week. The majority of the pub-going public in our area is smoking. And where are all the non-smokers who were supposed to start going to the pub because they werent smokey anymore? There arent any. So my local is struggling to stay open, the landlord is pissed off because he can barely afford his lease, he's had to lay off staff... Cheers. If this continues most small pubs will end up closing.

And when they add the extra tax on beer "to stop kids buying it"... thats gonna be the end!