Re: X-51

Great, another device to blow us all up faster, more accurately and cheaper than before!

Ahhh this is a good excuse...

... to move to a smaller ISP which does not block any websites!

Good news, probably worse connection, but worth it for net neutrality!

Nuke for the destruction that Sky taking over will cause to O2's customer numbers! Bye bye, RIP a great connection for years... now to take the plunge to find another.

Surface more profitable than iPad

Great! Now all they have to do is actually sell one...

Booze and caffeine cocktails reduce likelihood of risk-taking behaviour

... er isn't boozing and drinking caffeine itself a risk-taking behaviour?

Is this statement not an oxymoron?

Fail.

Nice careful wording

"We are aware that an isolated group of personal banking customers had intermittent problems accessing Online Banking for a short time earlier today. We are sorry for any inconvenience this caused and we can confirm that this has been resolved"

In other (exaggerated) words:

We have been told by all of our users that a very small group of a small section of users had very rare problems with a small section of our website which only shows itself for a very short period and in rare occasions when the moon is blue and the earth is at 200degress and the solar system has collapsed, for a very small period of time.

Fail. Tell us you have been hacked, go on! I am moving mortgages and paying huge sums of money out of my account - you have picked a great time :-)

This will probably now get outvoted as they have managed to do something much worst, start censoring the web (which satisfies those lobbyist (such as the BPA)).

In theory, there is no need to deal with this expensive legislation any-more.

At least, that's what I hope they think. But then it is a sensible approach, so probably they wont :-(

“Although we performed a series of tests to account for the impact of various uncertainties, we found no evidence that simultaneous warming of the upper layers of all seven seas can be explained by natural climate variability alone. Humans have played a dominant role,”

But what about unknown unknowns? Surely there is a billion of those, due to human ignorance and arrogance. E.g. Sun radiation, moon cycles (i.e. 19 solar years), astoriods etc etc and they are just solar, what about earth tectonic plate movement etc?

Does this guy think he has studied everything (in the universe) and he has enough evidence over billions of years (to get a fair stat)? I don't think so IMO!

“a dozen different models used to project climate change”, making it “the most comprehensive study of changes in ocean heat content to date.”

But what if they are all wrong? :-)

What proof do we have that they are accurate for so a period of a million years?

Sorry, I don't like all of these conflicting reports coming out - they are just conflicting global warming pandering and propaganda. Believe what YOU want to believe,,,

God I hate these enquires.

Generally nothing happens after any of them except a scapegoat is found and slaughtered while all those who were actually involved or were responsible get away with it and the politicians promise they had nothing to do with it.

Politicians and the people involved should have a special exception when giving answers - they use a lie detector so we know they are not supporting perjury. This should only apply to cases where public interest is high and everyone votes to do this. At least that way, I feel we would have some proper justice.

Bah

It will be interesting to see a graph of sales of hard drives when they start properly blocking torrent sites (other than just one), I bet sales will plummet as people have nothing to fill their 2TB hd's with (as it would cost a fortune on iTunes to fill)....

So in other words, they are shooting themselves in the foot by not taking as much profit right now (which you can do if you lower your prices you know!)

"BSA president and CEO Robert Honeywell reckoned: "Governments must take steps to modernise their IP laws and expand enforcement efforts to ensure that those who pirate software face real consequences."

Yes - by going open source!

pensions deal to CSC

Oh good, looks like no one will get paid then!

CSC are frigging useless from my experience. They make 100's of obvious mistakes and then charge you, the company (who is paying for their service) for that. I swear that was their business model - keep within SLA's but go over the SLA 90% of the time because it means more profit.

Good luck to them, guess they don't want to pay civil servants in normal ways anymore.... time to find a new social club ;-)

Er - obviously I am missing something

But if the internet is near impossible to regulate, what is this organisation actually doing?

I don't seem to see any consistency with VoD or IPTV (even the names are not regulated) - so it seems to be there is no regulation.

So are they doing anything or have I missed something?

Mixed messages from the report?

So they say they want people to be careful when talking to media etc and they don't want to post any details online BUT they have said '...they would not be forced to do so'. Surely this is a oxymoron?

If someone does blab then the uk gov might go after them, but if they have been advised they CAN blab then how can anything happen later on to that person?

Just make them sign a security clearance form and be done with it. Although this might be at cost, it can be reduced by having someone on-site who can process the forms.

As for cost and cynicalism, I think people have a right to this view. We are going to have to go through mega amounts of adverts mentioning the Olympics 24/7 and we are going to get sick of it, not to mention the retarded mascots which will be everywhere, and that's before the opening ceremony where borris falls over setting fire to his hair....

It's going to be embarrassing and enormously costly to the tax payer and very profitable for the few. It's the contradiction that every government states the Olympics none-profitable and makes a massive loss and yet someone has made a massive amount of money thanks to VISA and other firms who have monopolistic opportunity during the Olympics....

I don't want it but I had no vote. I have a right to moan due to this fact alone!

Man I hated using quicktime in the past. It was bloatware yes, and in the really old days it used to be about 25meg, which when you had your 500mb disk that was fairly huge.....

It was a toss-up between this and realMedia (realmedia had 1000 options you had to disable to stop it connecting to the web if you remember), so it was a really dark time for media.

realMedia also became bloatware fairly quickly.... but I always kept my old version (think it was real5 or something).

But thankfully everything was solved when winamp allowed you to play video and now obviously we have vnc or mediaPlayerClassic if you have to use windows.

Anyway - why do we have a report about this piece of software alone? It would of been good to have the entire story involving all the companies (real, winamp, windows media player etc) and comparing players. Instead we have something which feels like the work of mac fan boys saying Apple made video first....

No?

poorly written, but I thought quite good..

(not saying I am brilliant at English language structure (this for example) but I think I have a right to point out that this report needs smoothing over!)

anyway, continuing from the header.

... and I have been thinking of the idea of the death of Java for a while. Not since Oracle took over but only recently with all the companies bitching patents at each other, with Java being a core part of many physical (none-java) objects and software it's likely that because of the patent war we could all loose out (due to cost of using it or getting sued - THANKS ORACLE!)

So is C# the answer? I hope not, I hate M$s way of thinking a lot of the time purely because it always contradicts itself and I have OCD of consistency in code.

But as one poster put - 3 days and you can learn the syntax of a new language, 3 months and you should be confident, especially if your in industry as your 'life' depends on it.

So while there is demand, stick in that field until it starts to dwindle. While there is demand, you may as well keep switching jobs every couple of years until things start to dry up. You should of made many pay rises to keep you happy, then if there are less/no more jobs in that field then stick with what you have for as long as you can until the project dies, then just update your CV with the new language you have learnt in that less-intense time of the project and move on....

At least that's the way I have planned it.

IMO, specialist jobs are good/great money but are in poor/less locations so I would not advise to jump to that without serious consideration. You could end up at a dead end where for your next job they ask what have you been doing, then you state X, which they have never heard of and chuck your CV in the bin. So nice idea, but I would be a bit cautious... but if it's a custom open source JVM then I think your probably in an even better place... maybe,... how long is my string method?

"We need to move on from a top down approach and instead provide information systems driven by local decision-making."

Err, wont this be worse if you have a bunch of local managers with no/little IT experience deciding contracts to small contractors/suppliers? Wont this lead to many small expensive problems rather than one big expensive problem?

Surely it should be contractually defined by small group of IT people (and staff, no managers except for the cost) for the whole of the NHS then outsourced to a local software warehouse with well defined scope and requirements? No? Am I in a dream world?

Onto the next project failure at huge expense to the public....

...on a side note, is it not true that conservatives always create white elephant projects that last about 10 years and go tits up with one of the future governments, but not before a few people have made a huge sum of money...?

So what do they do with the data for the scanned in fingar print?

Does that go on a database or is that uploaded? If uploaded, innocent until proven guilty is becoming eroded.

DNA next. Rather have finger print than DNA though - DNA's my secret and my IPR! I own me!

Time to wear some funky latex gloves with anonymous finger prints... well in public anyway :-)

Mind you, if bought from the net could be already linked to a crime - whoops...

Who pays who now?

Detica bearing any unforeseen costs?

Isn't Detica owned by BAE? I am confused as to how the finances work with this one...

So MoJ (MoD) pay BAE which then sub-contract to detica who make profit and give back to BAE? I never quite got this dodgey sounding 'sky high' umbrella accounting... can someone help?

pro's and con's

It's a nice theory to have all data in one, very secure place.

One password to rule them all etc....

Pro:

- only one organisation has your information. No more of your details getting hacked from several sites.

- easier to remember and therefore less frustration

- cheaper for us all.

Cons:

- this is another quango isn't it? Thought the conservatives said they would have less quangos? Oh yes - they are called con-tradication party where they do the opposite of everything they said they would/wouldn't do. Well except be a bunch of rich ponse's only looking out for the rich - that hasn't changed!

- is if that system is not secure, your very private and accurate (no one lies to the gov and gets away with it eh?) information is up for grabs. This is worse than a normal website where you can try to keep real info to a minimum.

- one gateway to hack which probably makes it less secure. Hit it hard enough and it could be taken down.

- DDoS problems - 1 target = easy target

- you cannot access these services if you are banned from the internet (BPA three strikes rule)! Is this against your rights if your banned that you cannot access gov websites?

No system is secure over time and I fail to see how any government of this country would be able to keep ahead of exploits in time because of a lengthy change control process.

Vinyl is better now...

...so don't worry about that. They seemed to have sorted the crackling out too - which is nice.

OMG a new Radiohead album - woo! At lest this one only took 3 years rather than the previous 4.5....

And it's this week! Hurrah!

I was waiting for the law to catch up with the internet...

..and it seems things have started.

The youTube stuff seems like a test case for me. If you think about it if they allowed this to stand (and not throw it out straight away like it should do) then that pushes that it's a criminal intent to look at content - i.e. premeditation before a crime - but proof when you actually comment that you have intent.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think you can get into trouble if you are seen to have criminal intent - e.g. go to a gun shop, look at guns, talk about shooting people, etc.

This is a bit of a problem however because surely you are allowed to say 'hey that's cool' or 'omg!' without getting in any sort of trouble. You don't watch Mafia/Action films where they show killing people and when you comment on it, you have no intent of going though with anything - you just say it's cool (which is ironic isn't it mr sony aka MPAA? Circular suicide potentially :-) ). Also you may just be looking for PS3 material and land on this page - there is absolutely no intent there. Also a lot of people wont understand the full implications of what is being displayed, and a lot of people are minor's and therefore there is no contractual meeting of minds. In fact I bet 99% of PS3 owners have not read the latest terms and conditions and 100% agree even though they are effectively being blackmailed (i.e. agree or you cannot play this anymore, you cannot sell it for the same value or refund it ether outside of warrantee)...

I think this feels to me that it is not an intent issue and therefore the case should be thrown out. A couple of things - you buy hardware, you have a right to do what ever you want with it after. You don't rent the device, your not under contract so you should have the right to modify however you see fit (so rooting should be allowed if your capable); just because people comment does not mean it is real (sometimes it's a showing off type thing - the internet is less tangible so comments are likely to be more extreme and that should be taken into account).

Big coorp's and now gov's (thanks to Tunis/Egypt, gov's are now scared) will want to quash things as much as possible. Enjoy the freedom while you can....

They seem to have the opinion that the line must be drawn with the free, intangible internet. It does seem worrying that the line is getting closer to being a small circle of what you used to be able to do but cannot any more. Take twitter blogging - they are closing the freedom of speech down.

Nothing wrong with SSH tunnels and international proxy's, let alone anonymous web browsing and firewall stealth modes...

Because I have commented here, does that mean I could be sued? I have no intent - I don't use a PS3 for the main reason that it is too closed. A little linux box under the tv does the trick for me.... but because I have a viewpoint that is in disagreement with a big coorp, I now must hide :)

nice info - thanks

cheers for your reply Oninoshiko, very helpful indeed.

Anyone got a complete list of all the latest forks?

So Oracle has lost openOffice and hudson recently but in a step to try and keep myself up - are there any are the other forks we should all know about? Is there a complete and official list?

For e.g. mysql has been forked many times all with slightly different purposes. I would like to know if this has since been forked with the original purpose still in mind (i.e. an official fork with the same team of people that started the whole thing).

Java has forked but I am confused as to which version is like an official.

So basically if there is a list of the following tech and what they have or are turning into that would be very useful!

Mysql > ? MariaDB?

Husdon > Jenkins

Java > OpenJDK?

VirtualBox (worried about this one - it's a great bit of kit) > ?

Glassfish > ?

OpenSolaris (I think this is dead but please update me) > ?

Any others???

Size isnt everything...

...but if thats all your after, there are much larger archos tablets and other brand tablets. This device really seems it's competing with ipod's rather than a video unit.

Why bother with this one? (imo!)

Bought, played, annoyed then I gave in...

Being a guy who doesn't usually follow the pack and also wanting flac support, this device appealed to me a lot. Until I realised several things!

1) I did not know all the andriod app's were not availible for this device. That was a big hitter and I could not find bearly any useful app's I wanted. You can get around this (sort of) by following this link - http://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=42067

Obviously not all the app's work and some crash the device. Look at it on an app by app basis.

2) The sound quality, imo was rubbish. I wanted this device to replace my recently blown up creative zen vision which had great sound quality but sadly no flac support (grrr to transcoding but for everything in 320kbs VBR mp3 it was great). This on the other hand had no real 'presense' of sound, it was lacking bass and reasonable mid-range which to me felt like it was tinny. It sounded (metaphorically) to me like a cheap stero rather than seperates, and that is not on.

3) The responsiveness of the screen was - annoying. I suppose you get used to these things but I just could not. Having played with iPods in the shop, everything scrolls as you want and there is no repressing/rescrolling when things go wrong. This has a big problem scrolling - particually the app menu. Once you have opened and if you have many apps to scroll up and down, half the time it would scroll far, far too much and others not the right amount.

So in the three days I had this device, I found three major annoyances. I gave up, took the device back and spent the extra £70 to get an iPod touch 32gig. Sound quality is much better and even better than my old mp3 player, app's are great fun and the size is suitable.

If you need the size, go for the classic.

Hope this helps you all - I would of only given this 30% at most, as the main thing it has going for it is the tv out and the great quality video.

Privatisation anyone?

As the annoyamous coward that posted on the 11th October 2010 16:17 GMT, it's all the managers which have muffed it all up and that was thanks to the tory paperwork that still remained under Labour!

It feel's to me that the gov are simply going to privatise everything under a wastage banner - however the only problem with that is short term savings but long term expense. Look at defence, sub-contracts after sub-contracts and a massive lack of communication between the MoD and private companies. The same will probably happen with the NHS which is not too far off that, if not already there. I don't feel this is the answer.

What they really need to do is bring a well trained manager to basically demolish all other management. However these should not be outsourced, these should be the guys who are actually doing the work. This means a plan of training for current staff and allow them to make the changes to operate the public sector, much like David Cameron's big sociality except it is not run by the rich. Let those people define their own paperwork (or computerise most of the processes with very small software teams), let them solve the problems.

The only issue with this idea - some of the people may no want to do that, however I am sure there is a fairly large employment pool seeing as a larger and larger amount of people are becoming unemployed (more if the gov has it's way with the public sector).

Why sack all front line staff and increase the amount of wastage by leaving a far greater percentage of managers*?

*on a sub point, if they want to stop people becoming so dependant on benefits and get people back to work, why are they doing the opposite by culling the staff of the public sector? Privatisation anyone?

/end cynical rant

This in turn will empower people and lead to much lower costs in the future.

Privatisation anyone?

As the anonymous coward that posted on the 11th October 2010 16:17 GMT, it's all the managers which have muffed it all up and that was thanks to the tory paperwork that still remained under Labour!

It feel's to me that the gov are simply going to privatise everything under a wastage banner - however the only problem with that is short term savings but long term expense. Look at defence, sub-contracts after sub-contracts and a massive lack of communication between the MoD and private companies. The same will probably happen with the NHS which is not too far off that, if not already there. I don't feel this is the answer.

What they really need to do is bring a well trained manager to basically demolish all other management. However these should not be outsourced, these should be the guys who are actually doing the work. This means a plan of training for current staff and allow them to make the changes to operate the public sector, much like David Cameron's big sociality except it is not run by the rich. Let those people define their own paperwork (or computerise most of the processes with very small software teams), let them solve the problems.

The only issue with this idea - some of the people may no want to do that, however I am sure there is a fairly large employment pool seeing as a larger and larger amount of people are becoming unemployed (more if the gov has it's way with the public sector).

Why sack all front line staff and increase the amount of wastage by leaving a far greater percentage of managers*?

*on a sub point, if they want to stop people becoming so dependant on benefits and get people back to work, why are they doing the opposite by culling the staff of the public sector? Privatisation anyone?

/end cynical rant