Posts by Tim Brown 1 328 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
BBC-bashing article from The Reg in as many days? The Corporation is far from perfect but compared with their commercial rivals they do give very good value for money and provide largely ad-free output.
I am at a loss to think of any occasion when the BBC has seriously abused its monopoly position, if only the same could be said of the other large media organisations.
What suggestion is there that the BBC do not intend Canvas to be used as an open standard?
Small correciton to the article, Channel 4 HD is not available on Freesat only as Free to View if you have a Sky HD box and card. It is broadcast encrypted.
Hopefully it will become available on Freesat at some point, but as far as I'm aware no plans have so far been announced.
maybe the problem was the 'expert' rather than the tools.
Doing a word frequency breakdown on the various leaders responses does tell is something about their approaches, if you just interpret the information you're given in the right way.
let's take just the first word Rowlett picked out for each leader.
'got' for Brown - Rowlett reckoned this was a mistake. No it wasn't, it tells us that Brown likes to emphasise what we have, what we've 'got', i.e. what he believes Labour has given us, and also indicates that he likes to use the imperative a lot 'we have got to do this' - or so he believes.
'country' for Cameron - he likes to view issues from a national rather than international angle.
'old' for Clegg - he wants us to do away with the 'old' parties, the 'old' system and he kept emphasising that
The piece didn't work because Rowlett didn't put any effort into it, not because there is anything inherently wrong with word frequency analysis (and a tag cloud is simply a visual representation of that).
if I happened to be a real web-2.0-enlightened terrorist and wanted to let my terrorist mates know to go ahead with our plan via Twitter so posted "deliver the package to the airport at 6pm next Monday as arranged" I assume the authorities wouldn't be interested, cos that's a 'normal' thing to say...
I do hate statistics like "11,000 lines added" they are used as headline grabbing numbers that very rarely relate directly to the point being made, soon get into folklore and quickly get distorted by repeated re-use.
In this case, only a third of a quote has been taken "I just looked it up, and we add 11,000 lines, remove 5500 lines, and modify 2200 lines every single day.", immediately cutting the headline 11,000 additional lines in half, but even then without proper context those numbers are themselves meaningless. Was that an average over a month? or perhaps the figures on a single day when some large changes were submitted? Maybe some source-code reformatting is going on and a bot is going through the files changing every occurrence of
} else {
to
}
else
{
Who knows?
I installed the RC under VirtualBox just to take a look at it, and really couldn't see a compelling reason to upgrade any of my XP machines. One small change that I particularly dislike is that the network taskbar icons no longer show network activity.
As an experiment I didn't bother going through the activation process and after a while it started putting 'The copy of WIndows is not Genuine' on the desktop. That always struck me a slightly amusing since it had been downloaded direct from MS. The fact that no one could be bothered to make a more appropriate message ('This copy of Windows requires activation' for instance) I think speaks volumes about Microsoft's whole approach to development.
I will periodially boot up Virtualbox to take a look at this whole shutdown malarky.
... they will need to come up with a better name for it than 'Project Canvas'
Freeview and Freesat are brilliant brand names, because, like that well-known advert reminds us, 'it does what it says on the tin'
Project Canvas as a name is bland, meaningless and, dare I say it, blank?
How about instead "youchoose tv"?
(Just send the £Ms in consultancy fees to my usual address)
"Windows Vista was... [a] redesign the mother ship from the ground up"
Except that of course it wasn't really was it? More like knocking down a few internal walls, (including the odd supporting one, whilst forgetting to stick an RSJ in) and then buying a cheap kitchen that looked good but where half the drawers didn't work properly and the sink leaked.
(c) Bad analogies are us 2009.
"Unless your account has SERIOUS money in it, why bother?"
Shheesh, you haven't watched many heist movies have you? He probably had some major expenses before the job. There'd be the getaway car, the false passport, the stick on moustache...
And besides, he stole cash... until he's had chance to spend several evenings at the casino in Monte Carlo, he'll need to live on his own money so that they don't trace him via the serial numbers.
His cracking application might be able to handle 9.36 billion keys per hour but what real-world server will process even a fraction of that many login attempts per hour? Even assuming no anti-hacking measures swing into action, I would suggest that even 100 attempts per second would tax most server applications.
So his actual EC2 bill is going to be several orders of magnitude bigger than his theoretical calculations.
If simply having your CV enables someone to steal your identity then no-one anywhere is safe.
What's more, all I have to do is post a fake job ad in a popular industry (media for example) asking people to send in their CVs to harvest a few hundred identities.
Our society is getting more and more paranoid by the hour.
1) Create suitably bordeline ad
2) Get reported to the toothless watchdog that is the Advertising Standards Authority (having members of your Ad agency ring in to complain can help with this)
3) Pull the ad anyway because you don't want to spend more money on it.
4) Get lots of free coverage of the ASAs decision (whichever way it goes), in the tabloids.
Paris just because.... oh you know the rest.
I'll probably get shouted down for this, but I've given up running anti-virus software completely in the home. I DON'T advise this if you're the sort of user that clicks any exe you see in your email, (or uses IE as your main browser).
However if you're the sort of person with a clue (and you read The Register, so you probably are), then relying on your own common sense and a GOOD firewall (one that notifies you of unauthorised outgoing connections) will protect you just as well as relying on some dubious AV software.
Unlike some other commentators, I won't pass judgements on the other browsers, such as Firefox, Chrome or Safari since I don't use them on a regular basis.
I DO use Opera, every day, for all my email and almost all my browsing. I find it fast and reliable and I like the way that I am able to set it up exactly how I like it. That said, I do fear they are fighting a lost battle against IE in the desktop market.
Since (if I remember from my schooldays correctly) it's a cornerstone of physics that energy/matter is neither created nor destroyed but merely changes form, where does all the power that's pumped out by transmitters end up currently?
I guess it mostly ends up as heat in various places. Hmmm maybe carbon emissions aren't the only thing heating the planet up!
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