Posts by A J Stiles

Stereo? Why?

There isn't a lot of point having a stereo amp and speakers on a DAB radio, unless it also has an analogue FM tuner. Most of the DAB streams are mono.

And while charging rechargeables in situ looks like a nice idea, it's still just a teeny weeny bit pointless. Either there's a power point nearby where you're going to be listening (in which case you can just use the mains) or there isn't (in which case you have to move the whole radio rather than just swapping out the batteries).

But worst of all, it's styled after a machine for making absolutely lousy toast! Even if you do manage successfully to find the few fractions of a degree between "raw" and "burnt" on the dial, an electric toaster still makes electric-tasting toast.

@ Patrick

It's not just Windows boxes; Samba servers also show up as "blue screen of death" on a Mac.

@ Michael H.F. Wilkinson

Actually, Betamax is a scaled-down version of U-Matic.

And Beta definitely has the edge over VHS on picture quality. I know from experience -- having turned on subtitles while playing back a cassette at the home of a friend, who had a Teletext TV and Betamax VCR and got them coming through just fine -- that Betamax recorders actually record the Teletext signal along with the picture.

The textbooks say that VHS won out in the end because it was preferred by the rental industry as it had fewer moving parts and so made repairs simpler, but that's only half the story. Betamax required licencing, even just to stock spare parts -- and that, and the thought of long paper trails and the possibility that spares might dry up on the whim of the manufacturers, made it unattractive to the porn industry.

@ Tony Barnes

Nothing has to be passed to the browser that would give it any clue what the images are about. Here, for information only, is how it works:

1. The server sends a cookie to the browser when a login session is established. That cookie is a filename (or a key within a database) on the server. The file (or database record) contains the actual price to be disguised.

2. When your browser asks for the images showing the prices, it sends back the same cookie along with each request..

3. The server looks up the price in the appropriate file or database, renders the text as an image and returns the image to the browser.

Not that I condone such practices for a minute. I actually think Expedia are doing EasyJet a favour by sending customers their way ..... but no doubt EasyJet will have to mention out loud in court whatever it is that they think they are being deprived of.

It's like cigarettes

(remember cigarettes?)

You buy a pack of 20. If you offer them around, then you might only end up smoking a dozen of them yourself; but you will still end up getting eight back from the people who smoked yours. If somebody doesn't give you back the one they owe you, then you just make sure not to give them another one next smoke break. How unpopular must someone end up feeling, if even other smokers are shunning them?

It's the same with telephony. For every call that arrives into your network from someone else's network, you'll end up having to route one from one of your own callers out across someone else's network. And it all evens itself out in the long term.

Anyway, pay-to-receive will never fly. Does anyone remember when the banks tried to charge customers for withdrawing their money via other banks' cash machines -- and how long that lasted?

@ Hywel Thomas

It's easier than that. Just have a kid get naked in front of a CCTV camera. Legally, the recordings from the camera are now child pornography, and everybody in the control centre is a paedophile. So submit a Data Protection Act request for the footage, and stand well back .....

@ Lee

How nice of you to declare in advance your refusal to bleed when your neighbour is cut.

If I ever meet you, and you're on fire and I'm busting for a piss, I'll make sure not to get a drop anywhere near you. As a favour to everyone else.

Thought this had already been done?

I thought this had already been done ..... wasn't that the point of 1992, or 1993, or whenever it was that all trade barriers were supposed to have been removed within the EU?

Where I believe there damn well *should* be import restrictions, is that goods which were manufactured under conditions which would not be acceptable in the EU (child labour, unsafe working practices, lack of workers' rights, poor environmental practices &c.) should not be allowed to be imported into the EU.

Some questions

What lessons were learned from the transition from MW and LW broadcasting to FM? How could these be applied to the transition from FM to DAB, and what is *not* applicable?

Is there any component of a DAB receiver that, due to "intellectual property" encumbrances, is not available to the general public?

Easy way to avoid malware

Using software whose Source Code has not been independently verified by experts is *the* best way to get your computer infected with malware.

Even if you aren't a competent programmer yourself, insist on the Source Code anyway. The supplier doesn't know ..... And you can always show it to a programmer later.

If someone wants to keep their Source Code to themself, then let them keep the binaries to themself as well! They obviously don't care about the integrity of your computer, and thus don't deserve your business.

@ AC

Why do you want a BSD-licenced version when there is already a GPL version?

You can build GPL modules into the BSD kernel; you just can't legally distribute the result in any form except Source Code.

Since the only thing the BSD licence allows that the GPL does not is for you to take someone else's hard work that they intended to be for the benefit of all of humanity and then cage it up so that only *you* benefit from it, one should be highly suspicious of anyone who asks for BSD-licenced code.

Or do what I did

Or you could just do what I did. Build a Debian mirror (it helps if you have a "spare" ADSL connection you can max out without anyone noticing). Download Netinstall CD image. Install one workstation, get it exactly how you like. All "apt-get" and other statements you used are now in command history. Write shell script to automate installation procedure and place in /var/www/ on mirror, where it can be grabbed with wget.

If you're doing hundreds of workstations, it'd be worth modifying the supplied tasksel. But for a couple of dozen or so, the shell script method works fine.

Did anyone else spot this .....

"Therefore, if government assurances that the new law criminalised nothing that was not already illegal to publish, those attending the demonstration should be safe."

If the new law really "criminalised nothing that was not already illegal" then why the f**k do we need to have a new law? Why not just ..... oh, I don't know ..... enforce the existing ones?

And if there was some problem with enforcing the existing laws, then how is merely creating a new law going to help?

Interesting idea

One of the problems with communism has always been that that when the bolshie workers control the means of production, the poor sods who only have to buy the product end up losing out (think British Leyland). And one of the problems with capitalism has always been that when a bunch of faceless shareholders exhibiting borderline-psychotic selfishness control the means of production, the poor sods who only have to buy the product end up losing out (think ..... well, pretty much any privatised company really).

Now, if the means of production were controlled by the people who purchase the product .....

@ Detritus Emeritus

"I'll bet the code is one huge mess. A big pile of spaghetti buried underneath dirty diapers inside a landfill that's got happy-feely open-source buzzword flowers growing on top."

Well, why don't you go and have a look and see for yourself then? And what makes you think Windows is any nicer internally anyway?

The thing about writing Open Source code is, knowing that people will look at the code you've written, you try very hard to write the kind of code that people will not want to laugh at. Whereas when you write closed source code, you can think "nobody will ever see this anyway, so I'll just see what I can get away with". If you don't believe me, look at the Source Code for the very first ever OpenOffice.org release (which was just the old StarOffice codebase, given a bit of a light dusting.)

You pay for it all anyway!

If you actually look at what makes up the bulk of your rubbish (remember that *recycling* will still be picked up free) you'll notice that it is all stuff that you bought and paid for.

The solution is surely simple: throw less away! (Never mind that there is no such place as "away".) You'll save money in the long term too!

Why, when I buy a litre of milk in a supermarket, am I forced to buy a brand-new plastic container at the same time? Even although it's HDPE and therefore recyclable, energy is still being wasted melting it down only to make it into another one just the same -- especially given that it is potentially useful as a container for much longer than the lifetime of its contents. Why isn't there just a pump dispenser that squirts out an accurately-measured litre of the appropriate grade of milk (skimmed, semi-skimmed or normal) into my own container (which I have either brought with me from home -- remembering to bring containers would hardly be any more bother than remembering to bring a wallet -- or bought brand-new, at a price which will definitely make me remember to bring it with me next time) placed under the appropriate nozzle?

Broken

And there's me thinking that an operating system where privilege separation was just bolted on like a bad afterthought was as broken as it could get.

Then I discovered pay-per-click advertising. People actually pay money for the mere fact that someone has downloaded some content?!

I used to be content with just blocking adverts and actively trying to avoid any product or service for which I have seen even a single advertisement; but now, I think I'll write me some code that, in the background, will follow the links in advertisements and download the linked content straight to /dev/null (as if I saw the advertisement but never went on to buy the product).

I'll feel strangely better knowing that someone stupid lost money on that.

Paying to receive calls?

Do. Not. Want.

Opera - yuk

I'll maybe think about installing Opera when I get the Source Code, and not before.

Till then, Konqueror suits me fine.

What is often forgotten

What is often forgotten is that every programming language is, in and of itself, a generality-of-purpose abstraction layer.

If you try to make something too general-purpose, it **always** gets bloated. Sometimes it's better to write a piece of code that just does what it's supposed to do well. If you ever need to make it do something else later, then it can be modified as and when the need arises. And if you don't, then you didn't waste time the first time around.

Definitely getting it back

..... although TBH I'm not really sure he ever lost it.

So how long do you reckon before someone writes an Asterisk module to do exactly this?

@ Patrick O'Reilly

"Dustin the Turkey" ? Is that a euphemism?

@ Matt Thornton

If you think only women can have multiple orgasms, then you're obviously not trying hard enough.

Just think "abstraction".

@ Allan Dyer

The only reason why you can get a shock from touching one side of an AC power line is that the other side is joined to Earth (always at the substation; and, in urban areas, also at your meter), and your body is capacitively coupled to Earth. (BTW, a small child has less surface area and therefore less capacitance, so a higher reactance and therefore receives less current than an adult.) Note that this coupling involves the *whole* body, not just the soles of the feet.

As long as your UPS output is *not* earthed (and not sharing a neutral terminal with the real mains), and all wires are kept short, it should be safe to touch only one side.

In some countries, the neutral side of the mains is not connected to Earth at all -- meaning, in theory, that you should not get a shock by touching only one wire. However, the distribution lines from substation to house are capacitively coupled to Earth; so you can end up getting a shock touching *either* wire!

Toast

No toaster for me -- I cannot stand the taste of electric toast!

I always slip a couple of slices of my own homemade bread under the pre-heated grill; not at the same time but with an interval between them corresponding to how long it will take to butter the first slice when toasted, so the second slice will be ready for buttering as soon as the first slice is done. Then serve with real butter that has been allowed to warm up to room temperature and spread while the toast is still hot, taking care to load the knife sufficiently so that it need not be returned to the butter while dirty with toast crumbs.

fish analogy

So, that's it then.

The old saying "Give a person a fish and they eat for a day. Teach a person to fish and they eat for life."

has been subverted into

"Sell a person a fish and you have sold one fish. Teach a person to fish your way and you can sell them expensive, proprietary bait and tackle for life."

IMHO it was a bad idea to use an 80x86 processor in the first place. They should have based it on a first-generation ARM architecture, which is no longer encumbered by patents. Although this has traditionally been considered space-inefficient (requiring a whole 32 bit word for every instruction!), the low price of RAM and storage (caused by the even more inefficient 80x86 architecture) have negated this objection. And then, with the machine physically incapable of running Windows, Microsoft wouldn't have been able to get their dirty little hands anywhere near it.

Linux Wireless

Proper wireless support in Linux is not down to the kernel developers, but the hardware manufacturers who are sitting on the information required to write a driver as though it were an important trade secret, rather than part of the instructions necessary for making full use of one's own property. (I have old printer manuals which include not only the control codes to enable graphics mode, double-width printing &c., but interface timing charts -- STROBE must be asserted within so many µs. after D7-D0 are latched and for so many µs. to guarantee that the character is received, kind of thing -- and suggested schematics for interfacing to then-popular processors!)

We need to write to our elected representatives and demand a change in the law, which would make manufacturers provide this information or ban their products from sale.

Legislation is required because otherwise, manufacturers will just mumble something unconvincing about competitors stealing their secrets (as though they aren't all *already* reverse-engineering one another's cards); if they were all forced to do it at the same time, none of them could gain any unfair advantage.

Yes, publishing this information could enable people to misuse wireless networking cards and create interference elsewhere in the spectrum -- but there are already laws in place against that.

Set the tone

It went riduculously over budget and was delivered late. So, it pretty much set the tone for every public sector IT project since .....

@ AC

"Why doesn't the AV folks include these apps in their virus scanners??"

Because they are being paid not to, is why not!

All anti-virus firms accept bribes from malware writers not to detect their latest offering. Every malware authoring team has their own "preferred partners" in the AV industry, to whom they are paying bakshish to stay undetected. There is nothing noble or heroic about what the AV industry does; they are every bit as corrupt as anyone else involved with the capitalist machine. All they care about is making money. Keeping your computer secure is *not* part of the game plan; because if your computer was secure, you wouldn't need them!

If the AV industry had the slightest shred of integrity, they would make their products Open Source -- and recommend actively and loudly against Microsoft Windows, which enables malware by design which is too bad to be attributed to mere incompetence.

@ Various

I'll grant that Nokia phones are ugly and getting uglier, while Sony Ericssons are nowadays things of beauty.

But really, there is never a good reason to eat McDonalds. Get yourself a Greggs pastie instead! Just don't forget your handy pocket salt cellar; the last few pasties I've had from Greggs have been hyponatrous to the point of inedibility.

Texas

Hmm ..... isn't Texas one of the states where "paraphernalia" -- bongs, chillums and even king-size Rizla papers -- is banned, thus forcing people to be creative in choosing substitute articles?

Good job there are no pictures on this site, 'cos they'd probably constitute some kind of "extreme pr0n" and be illegal.

Makes me wonder why

It makes me wonder why a card reader wasn't made mandatory for all digital terrestrial TV receivers in the UK, when the decision was first made to transition from analogue (PAL) to digital (DVB-T) broadcasting -- surely the biggest change in television broadcasting since the transition from 405 lines to 625 lines. This could have been used to enforce the TV licence without the need for bully-boy tactics -- no card, no picture.