Posts by Jon Green 412 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
Re mirrors: you're a muppet, then. When you don't have rear-view mirrors, you get incidents like the one I saw a few days ago: biker filtering between lanes 2&3; car in lane 3 doesn't bother checking mirrors and gets within inches (literally) of wiping out a biker he'd never known was there. Would have, too, if the rider hadn't almost stood his bike on the front wheel.
At least if there _are_ mirrors, there's a chance that Volvoids might use them.
Tell you what, Andy, you just go ahead and enjoy one-hour drama that's teaser-ADVERTS-act1-ADVERTS-act2-ADVERTS-act3-ADVERTS-act4-ADVERTS-epilog(ue). Oh, and some more ADVERTS before the next hour's teaser. For a total of about 42 minutes' actual drama in each hour.
I've written to that format. It's a bitch. You've got to contrive some kind of plot twist every few minutes to time with the ad breaks, because you need to make sure the viewers stay and watch the ads - that's where your pay comes from - and come back for the next act, because that keeps the sweeps+ratings alive, and that's where your next season's (or part season's) paychecks/-ques are coming from. Never mind about the story, never mind about the talent, never mind about the setting, the arc or the production values, just so long as the ALMIGHTY DOLLAR keeps turning up.
You criticise UK drama compared to the US product, but that's because you've come to expect material written to US constraints. British drama doesn't play well in the States, unless it's been written with export in mind, because its pacing doesn't fit well with commercial station broadcast structure, so it ends up on PBS or similar. That's changing. I notice that productions like Sherlock are now written to be broken to US structure; British TV writers are learning.
Yes, the top tier of US TV drama has really improved beyond all expectation in the past 15 years, maybe 20, led by some screenwriters who really cared about quality writing, and some producers and studios who recognised - at LAST! - that if you produce good product, you get ratings and income. But the vast majority of the rest is still ghastly stuff, utter tripe that plays to loyal niches with low expectations that are duly met (near enough). Setting the top-flight programmes of both countries to one side, the general run of British TV is and always has been massively superior to the US (Jeremy Bloody Kyle notwithstanding).
Clue to the clueless: so Facebook updates your mobile contacts.
Then the changes get synced back to your Gmail contacts.
Then the changes get synced with your Outlook address book.
At which point Facebook has inveigled itself into all your contacts data in a way you'd be VERY unlikely to have wanted, and will get copies of all emails you send via their addresses. Now, I don't know where you come from, but in the UK that could very well fall under the Computer Misuse Act and earn its perpetrators solid jail-time.
I showed it (now at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA) to my science-mad nine-year-old daughter. She flipped between horror, dumbstruck amazement and raucous laughter, but couldn't believe the EU could produce such a disastrously bad video. Ah, the naivety of youth...
She couldn't think of anyone she knew who'd be attracted to science by that piece of crud.
I guess there's your answer.
Whether or not Rex Mundi broke laws by obtaining the data they did is beside the point: their criminality was in attempting to blackmail for cash. If they had asked for evidence that their "idiot tax" was paid to an internationally-recognised charity - perhaps one that helps people in debt - it's possible they could have got away with it. Now they're looking at what will probably be years of being _very_ careful how they pick up their "dropped" soap in the prison showers. Extortion for certain. Federal wire fraud, maybe. More fool them. Perditus Mundi, more like.
On the other hand, whilst I don't know nearly as much about American data protection laws as I do about UK and European legislation, I should imagine that the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and/or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (both Federal authorities) will be taking a very close look indeed at AmeriCash Advance and its staff, and the probity of their management of customer data.
Probably the smaller planet was knocked out of stable orbit, and was captured by the gas giant. That, or it formed out of a condensate disc around the giant. (Think about Saturn's rings, but a lot lumpier.)
Either way, I'd suggest it's in effect a moon, just vastly larger than we're used to thinking of them.
Firstly, "a short time" for a commercial website is 5, 10, at a stretch 20 minutes. Not 12 hours.
Secondly, did it not occur to anyone in their management chain to run a site test simulation before rolling out the new features live? It's not like it's that difficult to do, or difficult to secure so that can't be seen "in the wild" before it's launched to the public.
What bugs me is that I run a small consultancy, and I wouldn't allow _our_ new site live before it's tested thoroughly and the content proof-checked. TfL ought to be big enough and ugly enough to have that as part of its routine rollout procedure.
Amazing. Just when I was actually starting to like MS again (after decades agin), they fall back on their old bad ways.
The antitrust lawyers will have a field day with this, MS will be stomped on from on high in the US and European courts, and end up paying a fortune and opening out the OS again, just as happened with the Windows Browser Wars.
It is Profoundly Not Clever. MS's middle market (desktop and laptop PCs, particularly in business) is under a major squeeze from Android, iOS and Mac OS devices, and they are very late to the table, or rather the tablet. If Microsoft is to reinvigorate its market, and get back into a race that's in danger of leaving MS in its dust, it absolutely must operate as open and inclusive as possible, else developers will simply deploy their limited resources where they're more profitably employed - and buyers will buy devices that they have the widest scope for adapting to their own needs.
Time for a change at the top at MSFT, before they squander the rest of their share value. Their market capitalisation's been on a slow slide over the past ten years, in marked comparison to Apple and (since 2004) Google - and a huge new antitrust exposure won't help things at all.
"Quite what the hawkers of Singapore’s fabled food markets think about one of their most famous creations being associated with a life-threatening illness remains to be seen"
Well, the better-informed ones, or at least the ones familiar with astrology, would know that the Latin word "cancer" means "crab", so it always was associated thus!
The irony, of course, is a crab-inspired technology being used to cure that illness.
I've a long association with Linux - I started with kernel 0.12 - so I've tried most of the distros at one time or another. I'd settled on Ubuntu in recent years, as it was stable, effective, and wasn't "needy": I could just install it and get on with it.
Unity changed that. 11.04 was nigh-on useless for a power-user, and 11.10 didn't improve things that much. Classic worked for me for 11.04, but with 11.10, Gnome3 was profoundly broken against my pretty extensive desktop settings. I switched back to Unity, and forced myself to use it for almost a whole week (work time, so 8h/day), but it ended up as a survival contest between Unity and my remaining molars, and I'd like to keep my teeth.
In desperation, I switched to Mint Debian Edition. Ye ghods, what a (minty) breath of fresh air! All my old settings worked exactly as they should, and it was actually nicer to use - and quite a lot faster - than pre-Unity Ubuntu.
Canonical's going to have to do something pretty remarkable to win me back. I've been talking to their people at CES and one or two other trade shows, and I have the impression something's brewing, but I rather doubt it'll be enough.
Canonical's metatarsal target practice will be its downfall.
"Ultrabooks currently offer 1280 x 800 or 1366 x 768 screens."
Let's not forget the Asus Zenbook UX31 series, and their much nicer 1600x900 13" panels! A bit of a shame that their rivals don't seem to have anything to answer with, right now - some price competition would be nice.
Nmap is an open-source project. Nmap's licence terms (http://nmap.org/svn/COPYING) state: "To avoid misunderstandings, we consider an application to constitute a "derivative work" for the purpose of this license if it does any of the following: [...] * Integrates/includes/aggregates Nmap into a proprietary executable installer, such as those produced by InstallShield."
So, c|net's proprietary executable installer is a "derived work", falls within the GPL (under which Nmap is published), and thus c|net MUST publish the installer's sources.
Oops.
...since folks in Ubuntu's previous main market - desktop Linux users - are, in their myriads, running away from Unity towards Linux Mint and Debian.
What was intended by Canonical as a bright new direction has become a desperate last roll of the dice.
For some time now, I've felt that patents have been over-used and over-priced - and heading for a big fall, not just in value.
They're being used not just to obtain value from invention - as was always the way - but now to stifle innovation, and - worse - also to set out deliberately to destroy companies. See Jobs' recently-published quotes on Android, and Apple's outspoken intentions towards Samsung, if you're in any doubt.
It feels like we're on the eve of a war. I think we probably are, but it will come from an unexpected direction.
In China, India and other emerging economies, patents don't hold back progress in the way they do in established economies. Sooner or later, the biggest Western governments will realise the potential consequences. At some point - and it may happen sooner than we expect - there must be moves to weaken patents.
That could come from a number of directions. The entry barrier to patent enforcement litigation could be raised by having the litigant place a large bond (say, three times the compensation/penalties sought) in court escrow, to be released to the defendant if the case fails.
Given that a lot of patents are spurious, the defendant could be granted a pre-hearing opportunity to overturn the patent by submision of proof of prior art or lack of inventive step - meaning that any litigant could be faced not only with the potential of financial disaster in failure, the risk of having their patents ruled invalid.
The actions of the court in enforcing the patent could be limited: an upper limit on claim size; a strictly limited window of opportunity to file claims (in effect, a statute of limitations on patent violations); the restriction of recourse to retrospective establishment of a court-set reasonable licence fee; with the removal of any powers to ban sales of infringing items except where the defendant has failed to pay the retrospective licence fee after a reasonable period.
One way or the other, the current patents system has to be fixed, and on a worldwide basis - and not just to protect business interests. Otherwise the human race's dying words could well be, "We couldn't shoot down the meteorite, because the patent court grounded the weapon system."
Yes, it is (an OFCOM class licence exists), and yes it is, most particularly where it can interfere ("undue interference") with lawful - meaning licensed, or licence-exempt - transmissions.
Even if OFCOM granted a licence for the radio under WTA 2006s.8(1), use of it to interfere with lawful transmissions would still fall foul of s.8(5), under which any use to cause undue interference is illegal.
I'm not a lawyer, blah, blah, but that's how I read the Act. I don't think I'm too far off-beam.
...but that "winner" is...is...is an abomination!
Funnily enough, if you put the contents of every paint tin in the shop into one big plastic dustbin, and stir, you don't get a nice colour.
I assume that the judging team were "professional" in the sense that they knew (collectively) how to wear a tie.
Nokia are doomed.
That's fantastic! Puts us balloonatics in the shade, really.
@Pete2 - you can't put the genie back in the bottle(-rocket). It was _always_ the case that anyone with the knowledge could make amateur munitions, including rocket munitions. More than seven centuries ago, any Chinese hick with access to gunpowder could pack a load of black powder into a reinforced bamboo tube and launch it at their enemies. The propellants have changed a bit, we've some fancier materials to play with now, but essentially there's no big technological leap here.
We can sit and fear and be sheep, or go and do and be great.
Jon
STARS Project, http://stars-project.adeptium.com
As an employer, I'm quite lenient about qualifications, I'm more interested in proven ability and I'm prepared to some of the recruiting myself - but that puts me firmly in the minority. If you don't have a computing-related degree, you WILL be at a disadvantage in the current market, compared to those who do.
It's not just employers at fault. If it will save them some effort, recruiters will tend to set "silent" additional requirements of their own, and the ones who use automated CV filtering a lot - that's most recruiters, remember! - will have dropped a lot of non-degree-qualified candidates before the prospective employer ever gets to see the list. And that can happen even if the employer explicitly stated they were prepared to consider non-graduates.
So I'd take opinion polls of potential candidates along with a couple of packs of Maldon's finest, because the candidates only see half of the picture, at best. I'll put this to the nay-sayers: just for giggles, when you're next looking for a job, try putting together a CV replete with your top-notch job history, but miss out the qualifications - and see how far you get. You might feel differently after the 50th "Unfortunately, on this occasion..." response.
Here's a better way to do it that doesn't require direct Governmental interference in the process:
1. An independent (from publications) oversight body can ban journalists for a range of periods - 6 months, 1, 2 or 5 years, and so on - for any of a list of specified offences.
2. Corporate liability insurers are not permitted to offer cover for claims arising from the actions of journalists banned by that body at the time of the offence (including any who are in an appeals process against an existing ban).
And that's it.
Big publishers would therefore accept unlimited financial liability if they make use of banned journos. There's no list of "permitted" or "chartered" journalists, just a blacklist of banned ones. The Government can't use the process to pervert the freedom of the Press, or to bring about career death for a journo writing stuff the Government doesn't like - it would have to apply to the oversight body just as any other person or organisation would.
To be fair, LOHAN doesn't need hydrogen; it ought to get enough lift from helium. We're only looking at hydrogen for STARS-1 because we're marginal on payload weight, and the small added lift makes a significant difference for our flight time (see my comments to Malcolm, above).
In any other circumstance, I'm never going to complain about helium as lifting gas, because the added risks of hydrogen usually outweigh - pun semi-intended - the advantages, and the 2-4 cubic metres of helium used really doesn't make a large dent in the world's remaining reserves.
@mittfh - the LOHAN project might want to look at the UKHAB's ideas for cutaway devices (http://ukhas.org.uk/ideas:flight_support?s[]=igniter). On the advice of a pyrotechnician, we're going to experiment with variations using slightly more kinetic material to ensure a successful cutaway. First musing are on the "Links" page of the STARS website, and we'll update soon with results of our experiments. Once we've picked the shrapnel out, and bandaged... :) And for anyone wondering, the cutaway's going to be some distance from the balloon, which will have ruptured and released its gas (upward) in an oxygen-depleted (well, atmosphere-depleted) environment before the cutaway fires.
Hi Malcolm! That's exactly correct. We'll be doing our damnedest to ensure that atmospheric gases don't get into the fill - apart from everything else, it'll reduce the lift. The effective lift gain's small but if you run the numbers through the CUSF lift calculator (http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~cuspaceflight/calc/), using a payload weight of 1kh, you'll find that using hydrogen cuts half an hour from the ascent phase.
That's not trivial: every minute saved makes it less likely that we'll need a boat for the retrieve, and more likely that there will be power to all components for the mission duration. Mind you, if any reader here knows a UK-based supplier with 1500gm/1600gm balloons in stock, please get in touch! We'd love to have the (roughly) 75 minute ascent phase that we originally wanted.
Oh, and Neil: we considered that option, but the Swedish guy got his reactor built first, and the publicity messed it up for the rest of us. Plus, the IAEA clearances process would take too long. :)
Fresnel's about right - once we'd got the Hindenburg images out of our heads, we realised that the main risks will be during the fill. We might well have a small crowd watching, so keeping them well away from the fill-and-launch area will be the most important safety factor, of course. We'll be observing electrostatic discharge precautions, and minding the other obvious risks.
Once the balloon's sealed, things become a lot safer: we just need to avoid getting the balloon anywhere near a heat source before we release.
Pic: oops...
"Windows Vista, where [Microsoft's] big guns laid out major new features, only for Microsoft to retreat as the delayed operating system was re-architected."
I think you mean "de-architected" - if there's such a term. By the time Vista went gold, just about every really interesting and innovative technology feature had been eliminated, leaving people with just a buggy beta of a resource hog and no clear reason to "upgrade".
It will be interesting to see if any of the features scrubbed from Vista make their way into Windows 8, but I'm not holding up much hope.
I bought a G4 Mac Mini back in the day, to try out MacOS on the cheap (on the recommendations of trusted colleagues), and test the waters of Mac development. I liked it, and it became the workhorse admin computer of a previous company. The price:performance ratio was quite decent.
But £529 for an Intel Mac Mini that's not much different internally from a mid-market laptop (which - please note - would also include a screen, keyboard and a bunch more ports, not to mention inbuilt UPS)?
Not on your Nelly.
If it were more like £359-£399, I might punt the money - but at its current price, there's no benefit.
Which part of MOVING-PARTS MEMORY IS BAD is the industry not getting?
_Anything_ that has to microstep a bunch of heads into the right position, then twiddle its electronic thumbs waiting for the right bit of a spinning platter to rock up under the heads, whilst the OS has to find something else useful to do in the tens or hundreds of millions of cycles until the hard disk Telexes back its reply, is still living in the computational Stone Age of drum memory, thermionic valves and punched cards.
Motorised memory lives in the milliseconds world. Processors live in the nanoseconds world. It's like harnessing Dobbin to the Porsche and taking it on the M25.
Nurse, where are my dried frog pills?
...it would have shut the casinos or poker rooms in Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and West Virginia, not to mention those on Native American reserves.
But of course, when US citizens gamble at offshore sites, that's cash flowing out of the US economy. Expect actions against PartyPoker, 888.com and pkr.com in due course, as soon as a suitable case can be worked up.
Rather a biased article, which fails to note the effects of the evacuation zone and partial quarantine around Fukushima. Those who stayed are finding it hard (to say the least) to obtain food and potable water, and hospital supplies within the area are running critically low, as there is little aid entering the region.
The reactors may not have caused the widespread distribution of radionucleotides originally feared, but the consequences of their failures are still killing people.
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