Posts by Colin Millar 1241 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
I should think so - it doesn't actually do anything.
If you can write html you can do any of that stuff without some Adobe tool getting in your way and then ending up with files a hundred times larger than they need to be cos of all the pseudo-proprietary crap and tons and tons of standard generic code specifying default values they will bung in just to start with.
If it ends up being only as bad as MSWord doc>html tool I would be very surprised.
Hopefully HTML5 will signal the beginning of the end for Flash - now lets get PDF firmly in the sights.
Looks like the lawyers all got paid and nothing changed.
If a UK court tells BT to do something they will do it - great - what's new?
Whatever BT does or doesn't think about this hardly matters - ISPs have continually tried to dodge any sort of responsibility for anything and if they end up inside some complex, expensive and unsuitable legal/regulatory system it's their own stupid fault (although we will all end up paying for that).
And why do the rights associations think this sort of move is of any use at all? Their current business model is based on a monopolistic approach which every other economic sector has written off as failed. They need to move into the 20th Century (or even the 19th would do). Their economic and trading strategy is pretty much straight out of the British East India Company handbook.
Not in the way this is being interpreted by some on here
The real correllation is ONLY that people with lower IQs ("individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale ") are more likely to be using ie - NOT that people with higher IQs are likely to be using something else.
Anyone who jumped to such a conslusion based on no evidence whatsoever is as dumb as a bag of hammers.
You are missing the point.
A headline is not a fragment - it is an entire element that is created completely as a single entity.
Further - even if it was a quote frrom a larger element that would still be copyright protected, and rightly so, except for fair use purposes. There is nothing about headline scraping that falls within any definition of fair use (i.e. criticism, comparison, exemplar).
No need to get the vapours about setting precedents as the judgement itself is very narrow in scope and, quite properly, addresses itself to the particular circumstances of the case and makes it clear that it doesn't apply to individuals
The webscrapers in this case were using the outcome of other people's creative processes to gain a commercial benefit to themselves. if the web is ever going to emerge from its own primordial ooze and become something worthwhile then it needs to protect the rights of people who add value and not those who simply leech off of everyone else.
My guess is it's in Pakistan next door to where they found Osama.
@Destroy all monsters
"Not only were the data processed and calibrated in no time; they were also validated and analyzed basically overnight."
So - plenty of scope for backtracking built-in - that's the way I like my analysis - not too definite
What is most telling about this stuff is the piddling amounts it appears to cost to buy the British establishment. Its embarrassing. I can just see the Feebs having a right laugh when the do their FCPA investigation - "Call that corruption? - No wonder none of you can afford proper dentists"
Is not a certainty - it's one of the most succesful form factors ever and looks set to continue for some time yet.
The Cloud doesn't even know what it is yet and has a long way to go before some thin client/cloud setup is even a practical solution for day to day laptop replacement never mind a marketable alternative.
The real need for quad core has to be marginal or non-existent for most laptop users given the lack of current software than can actually take advantage. The practicality of using the power of a quad in most laptops likewise doesn't pan out and you could probably shorten the life span of the unit with the extra heat which is a significant factor in the laptop form.
However, if the price differential falls (which it always does) then the shift to quad is as inevitable as the shift to dual.
Surface area and temperature differential is still all that is involved.
Bringing more hot surface area into contact with cooler air.
Seems to me that this device gets its efficiencies from higher speed airflow which improves the differential.
Be interesting to see the actual for energy usage (with some proper controls).
Noise presumably won't be that much of an issue as this is currently a long way from the domestic market.
I could see a domestic application using a slower rotating heatsink passing through an air flow - the major price there would be space.
Of course with space to trade in a domestic box you could always increase the heat sink surface area by using both sides of the mobo
So leave it to that point and not before - in fact - do a cost benefit on all the options and see if you can do without the new add-on.
MS point about time to replace something that is good enough with something that is better is not going to chime with how many businesses are feeling right now - in fact "good enough" would be a luxury to a lot of businesses who work with not quite good enough equipment and software because they can't afford even "good enough" never mind being amongst the aspirational acquirers of the latest and greatest.
Or is Dave looking a bit pale?
Having been pushed into an inquiry and then pushed into starting it before hell freezes over and now saying that BskyB decision will be delayed I think he might be getting a bit worried at how much further Rupe will allow this to run before venting his displeasure in some way.
Big Brother - now outsourced to people who get their kicks rummaging through your underwear
You CAN fool all of the people all of the time - all you need is a government that is totally opposed to any form of localism or decentralisation.
Big Brother can't be arsed watching you today - please video yourselves for the next 24 hours and hand in the recordings at your nearest police station.
A bunch of people stand up publicly and ask other people to vote for them. The one's that get voted for to do stuff on behalf of their community do so by taking decisions in public which can be challenged through appeals processes and judicial processes (again - in public and accountable). If the people that get voted for take decisions that piss off their community they can be not voted for next time round.
Now, in the real world we all know that there's lots of stuff that makes this elected representative system less than perfect.
However, whatever its flaws, replacing it with a bunch of anonymous, unaccountables who may or may not have any actual connection to the community affected has got to be about the dumbest suggestion I have ever seen from a commentard on these boards.
And as any regular knows, the standard around here isn't exactly high.
............and the avalanche won.
Standard methodologies are just that - standard - the terminology doesn't suggest mandatory and indeed suggests non-universal by definition.
There is no point at which standards become mandatory - the two concepts are utterly alien to each other. The standard way of doing things may become the legal way of doing things but it is false logic to see the latter as an extension of the former.
It makes it worth 4.8bn?
In the middle of a massive recession where whole countries are collapsing into economic ruin it's worth it so that you don't lose your precious GPS signal?
And where is the money coming from - oh yeah - the agriculture budget - not that food prices have been spiking recently or anything.
I am sure there's loads of Greek people at this very moment cheering at the prospect of a more accurate satnav.
Derivative Is the model they are aiming for but they haven't worked out what their angle is so they are not attracting the scale needed to provide stability. They need to tell the punters what the bet is and get them to the table in large numbers.
They need to have a market thousands of times larger than any event which can be trigerred by an individual in the market or they will never be stable. It doesn't matter whether or not the event was malicious - a market shouldn't have to make that distinction - in fact it isn't a market if it is capable of making that distinction.
And letting the real sharks continue rob us blind.
Endowment mortgages
Payment protection insurance
Arbitrary bank charges
Small print designed purely to provide denial of claims
Financial regulation authorities have happily sat back and ignored (and even endorsed) these scams for years. Financial services companies rely on jargon and opaque terms and conditions to hoodwink their victims so they want to see the comparison sites shut down.
"Terms and conditions of insurance policies are often too complicated to expect customers to disclose all the relevant information to the insurer, and to ensure that they have bought an appropriate policy, the regulator warned."
Don't ever make the mistake of thinking that FSA is a consumer protection body - its purpose is to promote confidence in the UK financial services sector and it does this by applying liberal amounts of lipstick.
Identifying empty properties has never been that difficult.
Identifying areas of housing need - ditto
The difficulties in returning empty homes to use is not an inability to identify them.
Generally the problems are
a) the completely distorted housing and property market
b) property developers and their lawyers
c) the expectation amongst (b) that after a bit of a recession the nature of (a) will reassert itself early in the recovery
d) a complete lack of any real powers for local authorities to do anything about any of it
Still - I bet it all looks pretty cool with all those overlays and GIS tagging. Maybe it could get a layer in Google Earth.
" individual (local) authorities could be influential in determining the services to be offered"
I like that "could" just slipped casually in there - translation "could, if hell freezes over,
Looks like this is just a continuing exercise in lining up ducks anyway.
Big brother would be watching you but he's got some pencils to sharpen right now.
A website can comply with the cookie law by relying on browser settings?
But you can't regulate browsers to make sure they offer the necessary functionality.
So how this going to work - maybe websites will refuse to work with non-defined browsers - remember those bad-old days "You need {browser} to view this website"
Maybe the EU will introduce some law requiring browser standardisation - that should be fun to watch.
Pass me the UKIP membership form.
Such an astounding gulf between the EU organisation and its citizens is quite depressing really. We are used to patronising politicians telling us that we reject their policies because we don't understand them. We accept that Government will always waste public money on monolithic projects designed to line up their soldiers more neatly. We know that their idea of democratic engagement is them telling us about jam tomorrow and us just getting on with the constant upheavals of education, social services, health care, transport etc.
But a billion being blown on stuff like this? At this particular moment in the economic life of our plant?
Their contempt for their supposed citizens grows clearer by the day.
Has nothing to do with individuals though - just the rights of the other 2 estates which was converted to parliamentarians by reason of their provenance as clergymen and nobles - comoners never got a look in.
The point at issue isn't parliamentary privilege - it is a misapplication of a public interest test which is creating out of nothing a de-facto judicial oversight of the press.
@Graham Marsden
I am not referring to a behavioural norm - if there is such a thing.
We shouldn't even be considering the public interest when someone publishes something UNLESS someone is claiming that it is in the public interest to suppress the information. The press should not have to show a public interest in publishing anything - it should be for the censors to show the damage to the public interest - that is the norm that I am talking about.
In other words the question should be "Why should we not allow publication?" but the question being posed is "Why should we allow publication?" - a presumption of suppression that runs directly counter to the principle of freedom of expression.
A public interest test should be applied when one is planning to step away from the norm.
We don't have a bill of rights in the UK and the pols and judges tell us there is no need because we live in a permissive society (i.e. you can do anything you are not specifically prohibited from doing). If this is true the rule should be that anyone has the right to publish anything unless it can be shown that it is in the public interest to suppress.
What the judges are saying is that you must show that it is in the public interest to publish.
Right now they are basing this on some interpretation of the adoption of the Human Rights Act and applying it to individuals but we have a history (and indeed a common law) which allows corporations to be treated as individuals.
See where this is going yet?
Yeah - we used to have that - the nuance was called intent and it used to appear in all good laws.
Problem is zero-tolerance makes for better sound-bites while completely failing to address the actual problems.
And as we all know - no-one gets elected these days by prioritising substance over style.
I would have thought that the courts are using it the wrong way round. Usually you use a public interest test to see if you should stray from the normal course of action.
So I am assuming that the judges are saying that our current laws establish a norm which is to suppress information.
Looks like judges and politicians using freedom of expression in a game of handbags at twenty paces.
Not really - What you get is their price for pretty much a fixed product - I was looking for some element of bidding against each other in the mix and a shift in emphasis from supply push to demand pull.
Maybe car insurance isn't the best example because it is one of the more transparent financial products but one of the reasons why the financial services industry was allowed to blow up the world was that very few people understood the products they were buying.
GP commissioning won't make a hoot of difference to the strategy free zone that NHSIT has been for some decades now.
Still - at least when the GPC model utterly fails and we get to where we are really aimed at the IT industry will have some nice insurance companies and accountancy consultants to deal with - should be a bit more comfy for them.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
