Ahhhhh

So we know this AC is called Dave. Sarah, you're guilty of leaking information! Quick, phone the Data Protection Registrar.

I think we often forget that the moderators can see the real usernames (and mail addresses) of all of the contributors. So much power for blackmail.......

Damn, think I've just shot myself in the foot. Quick, what past comments have I made as an AC?

@Chris Collins

Don't understand your comment.

The ponies belonging to my wife, written as 'My wife's ponies'. I'm fairly certain that my apostrophe usage is correct. Or are you thinking that I should have capitalized wife? I don't think it is a proper noun in this context. My grammar is not good enough for me to be certain that I have capitalized it correctly here, but then whose is nowadays (damn, that's probably wrong too).

The comment had nothing to do with the toilet habits of my spouse, who is definitely human, and I cannot see how you could think it did.

Anyway, the ponies live, quite properly, in a field. The comment switched track from the ring of fire, to what ponies (and possibly sheep) might consider palatable. Sorry if you could not keep up. Try some coffee to wake you up.

Learn what goes into curry!

Ah, I think the "ring of fire" is probably caused by the the chilli and pepper, nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin and turmeric, which are all rather less, um, active. And the flatulence may well be a result of the large amount of protein in the meal, as well as the lager already commented on.

If my wife's ponies are anything to go by, something with a little more flavour than grass may well go down well with the sheep. Garlic (which keeps the flies away) goes down a treat, and they like dried stinging nettle a lot.

Not sure about dairy cattle, though. I've had milk from a cow that ate raw onions. Not good on cornflakes!

Off topic but...

In these days of frame-buffers and digital TV panels, is there any reason why 1080p is likely to deliver a much better picture than 1080i. I know that you get a full frame at a time rather than the alternated scan lines per frame that interlace provides, but we are not using CRT screens any more.

With CRT's, it was necessary to display each set of scan lines as they were received, which led to a significant flicker due to interaction with mains frequency, and also an apparent vertical twitch of the picture on a TV with a fast phosphor.

With today's digital TV's, you will never draw the scan lines as they arrive, you will just write them into the frame buffer and then switch FBs. If you receive an interlaced picture, you wait until the alternate lines are drawn in, and then display the picture, avoiding the flicker and twitch. The only problem I can see is that the alternate scan lines may be coming from adjacent frames, which would account for the jaggedy look of diagonal edges if you freeze an interlaced picture from a DVD. But software deinterlace techniques appear to be quite good at fixing this.

Once you apply this, then the only noticeable effect will be a halving of the frame rate. As the motion picture industry has decided on 1080p24 (24 frames a second) as a digital mastering format, having a transmission frame rate of 25 rather than 50 or 60 will not gain you a better picture (you could claim that 1080p60 as a transmission frame rate would allow less noticeable frame adjustment (twelve extra frame every 48, rather than the 1 extra every 25), but this would be a trivial distinction, and anyway, you would just use 1080p24 (in the HD ready 1080p spec) to match.

I'm sure that I have heard it said that once you get beyond about 22fps, the human eye is not capable of detecting the difference. And I don't want people saying that they can detect flicker on their CRT TV's, as this is almost certainly them seeing the strobing interaction of the TV with the mains lights, or possibly them detecting the blanking interval of the flyback and colour-burst phases of a PAL TV signal, neither of which are present on digital TV's.

If anybody can see the flaws in what I am saying, could they please correct me.

Boundary firewalls nearly always NAT.

The main reason is so that inside the firewall, you can run private IP address ranges, otherwise all of your internal systems have to have IP addresses obtained from ICANN.

Only so called 'personal' firewalls, that are really connection filters on your PC do not.

There are a type of so-called 'transparent' firewalls which firewall without NAT.

Generally speaking, pure IP routers never NAT. That is not their function.

Thanks for the clarification

I'm intrigued. Is the 32 times actually a documented figure, or from experience. I just took the MTBF at face value.

I still see far too many electronic devices with leaking capacitors. Maybe the designers *are* numpties, or just too cheap to build things properly.

In an amazing co-incidence, an hour after my previous comment was posted, my father called me saying "My Dell computer has just stopped working." One 3300uF 6.3V later (and much swearing after failing to clear the solder from the through hole), it's running just fine again.

Real techies

are so busy being techies for their living rather than a hobby that they don't have time for the frequent disruptions of major Fedora releases for their own systems, so use Ubuntu LTS releases instead.

And why not netbooks if they work well enough. Damned useful devices. If I could afford one, I might get an android phone to replace my Palm Treo, and use that instead, but until I do, my EeePC is more portable than my Thinkpad, and runs a full Linux distro just fine.

Amateurs.

Capacitors

Unlike solid-state devices, most general purpose capacitors have a MTBF measured in '000s of hours (I've just looked at Maplin, and a so-called long-life electrolytic capacitor has a MTBF of 2000 hours).

Now this may seem like a long time, but with modern devices having always-on power supplies (identified by no physical switches) that contain electrolytic capacitors, then we are actually only talking 83 days being either on or on standby before you would expect a failure from this type of device. It's amazing they last so long.

When this type of capacitor was first invented, it was expected that any device would only be on for a few hours a day. But now we expect everything to come on at the touch of a remote control, everything is different.

I have talked to a Sky box specialist repairer (when my 1st gen Thompson Sky HD box failed due to capacitors in the power supply) and he said that these boxes were not expected to last more than about two years before failing. They sell hundreds of capacitor kits to repair this very fault. This explains why the after-market Sky insurance services are so prevalent.

The simple fact is that anything using cheap electrolytic capacitors must be expected to fail after a few years unless the manufacturer has made special efforts (such as using new technology solid-state capacitors). Unsurprisingly, this costs more money, and is unpopular for all but the most expensive devices.

As a sideline, all of the devices I have repaired by replacing the capacitors in the last year or so have all, without fail, had the failed devices branded as CapXon, who appear to make a significant number of the capacitors in electronic devices coming from China! Good thing everything is so cheap that it can be replaced.

Not tanks,

other types of AFV (Armoured Fighting Vehicles). I don't believe we have any MBTs in Afghanistan.

When the term 'Tank' is used in the context of defence reviews, it means "Main Battle Tank" like the Challenger 2. This is what they are referring to when they talk about the Tank division.

Other tank-like (to the uninformed) vehicles ate things like the Scimitar, which is an Armoured Reconnaissance Vehicle or the Saracen, which is an Armoured Personnel Carrier, or the Warrior which is an Infantry Fighting Vehicle. Someone has written a useful page describing them all on Wikipedia.

You may regard this as pedantic, but to the soldier in the field and the command structure, it makes a huge difference.

@Mike Hanna

My wife, who has a significant sight disorder, actually says that she dislikes HD TV, because she says that it is 'grainly'. I actually worked out why this was recently.

She has variable short-sightedness across her vision due to very strong astigmatisms, that means that even with glasses, only a part of her vision is clear at any time when looking at anything over about 10 feet away. This means that in real life, large parts of what she sees is a blur, she has no usable peripheral vision, and also means that even with today's optically dense glass, has very heavy spectacles.

When watching HD TV, the screen is within her visible region, so she can see all of the distant detail on screen that she cannot see in real life. This should be a benefit to her, but because she is not used to seeing it, it upsets her.

I guess what this shows is that you can't please everybody. And means I'm stuck watching everything in SD on my HD capable TV and Sky box if I don't want her moaning!

RE: RE: 3D Without the Glasses

The problem with parallax barrier technology is that it only works if you are in the right place in relation to the screen. This makes it suitable for games consoles and computer displays, but not for the living room or the pub.

Why not? Because they are not American

and he probably does not have Chinese patents that cover this. I do not believe that there really is something as simple as a World-Wide patent, it is only applicable to those countries that have signed up to WIPO. This is not the whole world.

He may be able to get infringing devices blocked from being imported to the US, and maybe Europe, but that is all.

MBR is just a bootstrap

plenty of prior art there, so I doubt it is patented, at least not by Microsoft. PDP/11's used second-stage bootstraps in the 1970's, before the PC was invented, and I'm sure they weren't the first.

What is more important is the disk label which dictates the partitioning. I believe that Microsoft invented this, although there are other partitioning formats out there. Probably about time it was re-worked. 4 primary partitions, one of which can be a kludge to make it a container for extended partitions is lame.

I presume that 2/100 CAD is 2 Canadian cents. Never seen it written like this, but then I am a Brit.

Missing a step

In your analogy, you've missed out a step, and that is turning on your tape recorder to record it so that it could be re-played.

But in principal, I agree with what you say. If you walk around with a directional microphone recording parts of everything you can hear, is this currently illegal?

My firewall records the first couple of hundred bytes of every stateful connection that runs through it. Am I likely to be sued by my kids because I can see some of their IM sessions? If someone illegally uses my wireless network, and I capture their credit card details, are we both guilty of illegal actions?

The problem is that the law cannot keep up with the speed of technological change. The result is that the courts are asked to rule on outdated laws, ruled on effectively by technology outsiders, and are asked to make reasonable precedent judgements.

It may be that it is not illegal to not encrypt your access point, and that it may not be illegal to receive unencrypted traffic (I hope this is the case, because an unintended consequence of using your network is that it will read the headers of all packets in order to know whether to discard it) but it is illegal to record it, but it must be seen as being pretty foolhardy to not take reasonable steps to secure your access point.

There is merit on almost all of the arguments made on this forum, but it is quite clear that the whole situation has so many ambiguities that a reasonable consensus cannot be achieved.

@Trevor Pott

I cannot claim anything like the amount of expertise you appear to have, but having read your comment, I am not sure I totally agree with your conclusions.

Yes, it would appear that representatives of these cultures are attempting to use the western originated international tools, but I don't think that they fully understand them..... yet.

One of the primary cultural differences is that Islam is without borders. Muslims have allegiance to their god above all other things. This leads them to think that if they consider something an absolute wrong, it must be wrong anywhere in the world.

If they totally understood the western world, they would also understand the futility of the action that they are taking. Whether this would stop them, I don't know, but it shows that they have a way to go.

What scares me, and I am not trying to in any way be biased against any person, religion or philosophy, is the slow infection of western style democracy by a creeping change. It would appear that this could extend all the way to the International bodies like the UN. Until recently, I felt that the UN was primarily a forum for discussion, but with the actions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, it has become more heavy handed, with individual countries trying to force the UN's to take specific actions. This is a mistake, and if the UN becomes heavily influenced by Islamic states, could backfire on the so called western countries.

What also worries me is that the world of Islam is fragmented, and this can often cause frictions even in Islamic states (think of the Shi'a and Sunni tensions in Iraq). Having this happen on a world scale could be disastrous.

I do not want to live under Sharia law, and I don't want it imposed on me by any external body or agency. Could I paranoid? It's possible, but I don't think so. Could this be an irrational fear? I think that this article answers that question. Am I becoming radicalised, I hope not, but I am beginning to get worried about my own state of mind!

Stop the World! I want to get off.

@AC re. Microsoft Free

What does Microsoft have to do with either USB or WiFi. They are industry standards developed by Intel and the Wi-Fi alliance respectivly.

I do not use ndiswrapper for my wifi, the code is native Linux. Ditto the USB support. The same is true for the printer and CIFS support. No Microsoft code anywhere.

I suppose that you could mean the FAT filesystem on a USB storage device (which is not necessarily written using Microsoft code), but that presupposes that the FAT patent preventing re-implementation is beyond challenge, and in actual fact you are using FAT on your USB key at all. It is perfectly possible to format your USB key with a different partition table, and put Ext2 on it, or use it un-partitioned, again with a non-FAT derived FS on it.

As far as I am aware, the only Microsoft software running on my laptop is the Windows instance inside VirtualBox. This is my choice, and I can completely remove this when I want. I also have a system at home built from recycled bits of other systems that as far as I am aware has exactly no Microsoft code on it. It has no VM or Wine, nor does it have the WMV codec's or MS Core Fonts. If it does have some MS code, then I could be in trouble, because I do not have a Windows license for it!

I suggest that you actually read about what MS make.

@Giles Jones re. 8 or 9 yo OS?

Yes the OS is this old, but even if you consider Vista GA as being the point when vendors stopped shipping XP (which it wasn't), there are computers less than three-and-a-half years old that were shipped with XP. This is not old for a consumer device, and is less than the accounting depreciation period for some companies.

MS cannot, if they have any morals (debatable), stop supporting XP without providing a reasonably priced upgrade option. (I believe that they leagally have to provide support for 10 years after ship date for any kit shipped to the US DoD or other government agencies anyway)

Also remember that for non-gaming users, the amount of computing power required by ordinary home or office users topped out at around the 1.8GHz Pentium D. Beyond this, the extra power is just providing gloss. This means that many people with 2+GHz Pentium 4 or Athlon XP 2000 have perfectly usable systems that do not need to be replaced yet, and with the correct maintenance and care, could run for many more years.

Any other line is just buying into the *blatant* consumerism that is driving the retail electronics market at the moment, leading to increased consumption and greater waste disposal and recycling problems that we face.

I think the image is changing throughout the day

Earlier is was an aerial picture of a field of flowers.

I must admit that if they continue to do this, and force you to create a google account to fix the background, I might revert to Altivista as my default search engine!

@AC

I was talking about the number of typed characters, rather than the number stored in memory.

I had thought of using auto and the abbreviated commands, but thought that would just be too geeky!

If I remember it correctly, it should be:

AUTO

REP.

*M.ON

*M.OFF

UN.FA.

<ESC>

R.

Not hyperspace

The beer and peanuts were for the matter transference beam that got them onto the Vogon Construction ship.

"... is green, yes."

@JEDIDIAH

...in this case postscript, PDFs younger brother

No. Older brother, or possibly even father.

@myself

In re-reading the license (link in my last update), I suddenly noticed the following in the licensing costs section.

"For (a) (1) branded encoder and decoder products sold both to end users and on an OEM

basis..."

and also

"For (a) (2) branded encoder and decoder products sold on an OEM basis..."

In both cases, the operative word is "sold". Does this mean that an H.264 codec *given away for free* escapes this licensing condition?

If it does, then this gives the Open Source community a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Of course, it still leaves the media providers conditions in place.

@rhoderickj. Read the license!

Your Open Standard is open provided that you can prove that your codec (specifically the encoder part) has not been distributed more than 100,000 times in a year. Once this has happened, someone has to start paying license fees to MPEGLA (see the license at http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf). This is regardless of how it is distributed (direct download, torrent, viral spread). I believe that the important term here is 'branded', which will identify a particular implementation of the encoder for license purposes.

They will almost certainly come after the project owner(s) on SourceForge or whatever repository they have used, to collect.

Anybody engaged in such an "Open Source" implementation of an H.264 encoder, once it hits 100,000 copies in a year should be prepared either to disappear, or fork out large amounts of cash if their code becomes popular.

This means that although the writers may consider it open, MPEGLA almost certainly don't, and have the right to collect or prosecute in the US.

Of course, it may be possible to have an open source decoder, and make that a separate product from the encoder. This would enable the decoder to be downloaded for personal use as many times as needed, while being able to control the number of people using the encoder. The onus would still remain with the project owners to track and if necessary limit the number of uses of the encoder.

Additionally, it is possible that if you host the project in a country that is not encumbered by software patents, you may just be able to evade the US legal system, but you had better not be a US citizen, or resident in a country that has a 'special arrangement' extradition treaty with the US!