Posts by Jonathan McColl 120 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2008
No, MS can count, but they've been running two streams:
Personal: Win 3, Win 95, 95 OSR2 (=96), 98, 98 2nd ed (=99), ME (=2000, cos they couldn't merge it with NT like they thought, but had already handed over the year number)
Network: NT3, NT4, Win 2000 (= NT5), XP or 2002 (=NT6), Windows 7 hooray in 2010 (=NT7)
I remember when Win 95 was launched, the advertising told us we'd never need another Windows OS because they'd issue patches forever hahahahahahahahahahaha
Maybe I'm unusual, but I generally try to avoid using my office mailbox housed in my employer's servers to send all my sex-related emails.
Certainly not during the day anyway, the night-time ones are probably OK cause there's no-one in the office to read them at night.
Oh and I don't use the office system for my bringing-down-government ones, or Majestic 12 ones, or all the other stuff that the CIA-GCHQ combine is watching out for.
(Sorry, my sarcasm button got stuck)
You lot keep saying 'Gaelic' which I never heard said when I was doing my growing up. The language was 'Irish' if you said it in English and 'Gaeilge' (pronounced 'gayl-geh') if you said it in Irish. Here in the Highlands of Scotland they'll say 'Gaelic' and pronounce it gah-lic in English. And if anyone says 'Erse' (whether pronounced 'urss' or 'air-sheh') they'll need their blocks knocking off in either country.
And it's not an 'acute' accent in Ireland, it's a 'long' accent, or fada.
God knows why I should care after seeing what they've done to St Patrick's Day in Ireland when it used to be sensible and now it's all green plastic-paddy nonsense ...
Cá bhfuil mo chóta?
One chap up there said the SPECS camerata weren't on 'country' roads: that shows you have never driven the thirty (30) miles to Stranraer on the A77 under their golden eyes. There are stretches when one can hit 80 (in theory, that is, for how could I know?) but I have never managed the journey in half an hour or less, so I prefer these ones to the other kind that catches you in a snapshot at a weak moment.
As for a solution I could live with I'd rather be trusted not to drive inappropriately and have National Stupidity Cameras set up to catch the idiots, or have what appears to be the French policing system of making the law obvious but only deal with you when you bust something and then throw the book at you pour encourager les autres. No: work it like First Aid certification and membership of professional organisations, and link appropriate behaviour to continual lifetime training and membership of the AIM with the papers available to show a policeman who stops you. Not that you'd be stopped if you were that good!
[One cannot but be saddened by the unimaginative use of pejorative language by the gentlepeople who contribute to your comments.]
I'll miss Gris--he's made the whole set for me. The Vegas series still uses science and deduction to keep it in the same frame as all the other detective stories I've been watching and reading for so much of my life. CSI Miami has gung-ho armed starsky-and-hutches in its lab, and all their events are at parties made up of 96% young women in bikinis that H can look sideways at. CSI NY uses science too (thank goodness) but all of its murderers are amazingly, wackily inventive. I'd prefer to murdered in Las Vegas.
But their computers! Glass-walled rooms full of 40" plasma screens showing identical screens tied to the single computer that the operators have no mouse for so it needs rattling of keystrokes to magnify pictures to read serial numbers refined from two pixels in the middle of a photograph of the reflection in someone's eye. Someone else mentioned all those databases of carpet-fitters or treebark-converters they can access, but not the way they query those databases by entering window sizes in feet and inches; oooh the IT in CSI is worth a list programme of its own!
Degenerate Scumbag is right! A database this expensive that covers every person in Britain should be made to cover its own costs by charging something to the beneficiary, that is, every person in Britain, and that's why we have taxes. So that's OK then. Next we should have the greatest possible efficiency of use, so throw it open to scope creep into the National identity Register. And that cool new idea of recording every phone call and email. And the road-charging. And the ANPR cameras hanging off every motorway bridge. And HMRC's list of all of us too. Don't keep repeating data, just have one master version of each. Private businesses have one staff register and tie salary and disciplinary info to it, why can't the whole UK? The Ministry of Love can look after it for us.
As usual, it's the ordinary people who suffer, not the blackhats. This is all good training for 21st-Century computerate wicked terrorists who will enter the country with clean smiling laptops, download their plots and plans from the internet and hatch them while safe inside the borders. Post-hatch, these guys can upload the new data they've thought up (all the spreadsheets and Word files and stuff) and wipe the computers again before flying out to one of their hotbeds. Of course, if I were a terrorist, I might even come into the country with no computer whatever and buy one there. Along with a few new PAYG mobiles and a weapon or two, but what do I know?
(I'd like to stress that that isn't my real name)
The moviemakers ruined The Avengers, and The Saint, and radically changed Mission Impossible, and I expect little of Blake's 7. Maybe Z-Cars or Last of The Summer Wine? No I have it: Doomwatch! I want to see those boneless fishes again. And the plastic-eating thing that eviscerated aeroplanes. But the Murkins would make the scientific advances that Dr Quist fought against all come from Terrorist plotters, instead of well-meaning scientists. Maybe better to keep them in my memory rather than risk that.
After the hyped arrival is the rather underhyped departure. Remind me where it's said that Big Companies care about anything that does not relate to the profit margin? They will have taken into consideration that this will not help Dell's sales in Canada: that's dozens of orders just thrown out the window.
Still, as the Indians (in India, not First Nations) get paid more and more, maybe the jobs will return...
The Shirley McKie case that made large headlines in Scotland seems rather ignored or forgotten elsewhere.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4967160.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/5112568.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/6363185.stm
[etc, etc, etc]
At least we know that we are safe with our British law enforcement system, can't say the same about Johnny Foreigner's. Or perhaps our government-after-next.
Let's pretend it's a little way into the future and we all have our pass cards, sorry ID, and we have just entered our fiftieth door or police check or credit card payment: just how many people have had a chance to copy that fingerprint? With keyloggers maybe, or even sticky tape for that matter?
When we have our über-database for the ID system it's a good thing we can trust that none of our zillion government employees will ever look in it for politically-sensitive, or celebrity-sensitive, or racially-sensitive, or anything-elsely-sensitive stuff. I'm so glad I live in a free country.
A long time ago I got my CNE from Novell, when Microsoft NT was an interesting new competitor, small and inefficient compared to us Big Boys, but interesting. Now MS rules so we need an order of magnitude more servers and all the power they consume. Yeah, I know, if pigs had wings they'd be pigeons.
I'll just get my coat and a very strong umbrella...
Another bit just shook itself at me: the 2011 census may be the last and the Government had planned the ID register would replace it. I don't remember that one in the list of earlier reasons, but there were a lot like entitlement to benefits or instant removal of terrorists. The National Register being kept up to date in real time would be cool, especially if it could be tied in with road-pricing cameras. We won't need to go to report in to the police stations when we want a pass to travel. I feel safer already.
If only I hadn't used my real name in this forum.
Feeling like a fool.
Which should I get upset about first? The American Department of Homeland security+Patriot Act+CIA stealing the UK (51st State) census data that tells them where I am and what my children are called and what my job is; or maybe HMG that will keep my medical problems and NI numbers and iris scans all in one file and post it on a CD somewhere so that my identity may be stolen more easily than by rooting through the shredded receipts in my compost bin?
Maybe I should just refuse to fill in the next census. Ah, but that carries a major fine. Right, when form-filling I no longer do anything in an industry that might be 'sensitive' one day to our American masters, I mean brothers: I will become an Agricultural Labo(u)rer like my ancestors in all the earlier censuses. But GCHQ will still be recording my phone calls. If you aren't paranoid, you haven't fully grasped the situation.
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