Posts by Steve

@Ross

Personally I'd rather see my tax money spent on SETI than on more discussions about the acceptable radius of curvature of an EU-standard banana, or whatever. If we're going to have aliens immigrating to us in hordes anway, we might as well have *real* aliens. With luck they won't want to pinch your cellphone, and it would make Saturday nights at the pub a lot more interesting...

Not a good day

So, on the day when everyone is playing with their new PC/laptop/webcam/VoIP service, and internet traffic is crawling at a snail's pace (the old World Wide Wait again), the Beeb want to officially launch a streaming media service?

Either they haven't a clue, or they want a ready-made excuse when everyone says "iPlayer's useless, the performance sucks"

line quality

Let's not forget that when much of that buried copper was installed it was only ever expected to be used for voice - the original data specifications for GPO lines required them to support 200 BITS/second. The fact that the technology now allows 20 MEGABITS/sec is hardly reason to complain that no-one installed suitable equipment 30 years ago. If people want better lines, find an ISP who'll dig up the street and lay them, or lay fibre.

Oh yes, you'll be expected to pay a teensy bit more for that..

That's the core of the problem, people expect to get everything and pay nothing. Last weekend I had no ADSL for 97 hours. I complained to the ISP, and two days AFTER the service was restored they finally got back to me to ask for details of the problem! I am very glad that my service is not unbundled, at least I could still check my work email, even if it was only on a 40kbit/s dialup link.

My ISP? "Free" in France, often used as an example of what BT could be. Don't fool yourselves, if you want professional quality of service, expect to pay for it. You won't get it for 20quid/month, from BT or Free.

Ironic, isn't it

that eBay was founded by a guy born in Paris...

Oxymoron

Surely when someone is *defined* by being a celebrity, they are inherently completely pointless anyway?

Revenue?

Hardly anyone bought handheld TVs when they just needed a one-off payment & being based on simple analogue broadcast would work pretty much anywhere, albeit with a mediocre picture sometimes.

Why do these suppliers think that anyone's going to pay a monthly sub and per-minute charges for a service that offers even less?

@Lou Gosselin

> IDEALLY Company X WOULD MAKE the SALE, but only because they

> produce a better product for a better cost in a shorter time frame than

> the developers could have achieved on their own, otherwise Company X

> doesn't deserve the sale, patent or not.

If the developers can make it better and faster than Company X then they are surely doing it differently, and so won't infringe the patent held by Company X?

Then they patent their improvements, license the basic technology from Company X, and get rich selling the improved version...

The problem with patents, software or otherwise, isn't their existence. It is that they are all-too-often granted for ideas which are too broad, by examiners who don't understand the technology and so aren't qualified to judge either prior art or obviousness.

fast?

They want it to be fast with a good user perception, and they still put flash on the front page? Cretins.

VAXen

Highlander. Couldn't agree more, even if I'm stuck with Unix these days. About 20 years ago in the UK a vacuum cleaner company started selling a vac called a VAX. "Nothing sucks like a VAX" was their slogan, and the DEC field service guys used to get really fed up going into customers' labs and seeing full-page newspaper adverts with big headlines, taped to the front door of the blue boxen. It was funny the first few times, but after 20... :)

E8

Typical. Life, the Universe and Everything, and it turns out to have an E-number.

Just pass me that string vest as I go.

flight simulator

"the check of compatibilty always seemed to be whether Flight SImulator ran on it."

Ah yes, I wonder how many other purchasing departments signed off on POs for "compatibility test software", all unknowingly...

And there was always Battle Chess to test the graphics.

Diesels?

"zap all the microcircuitry, so shutting the motor down."

Compression ignition engines like diesels don't need electicity to run. Just use an old diesel with mechanical injection, the worst that'll happen is the CD player gets fried...

@Matt Bryant

"how would their airlines fly European routes without it, let alone how would their military operate!"

Their airplanes don't use it. Indeed, it is only very recently that aircraft have even been allowed to use GPS as a secondary navigation system, never mind a primary one.

'TeeCee' is right, Galileo is just more global willy-waving, with my tax money

Lily who?

I had to look her up. Not that I'd ever accuse wikipedia of being a reliable source, but it does have some interesting snippets...

"After her family went to Ibiza on vacation ... She earned money by ... dealing in ecstasy."

"Allen was rejected by several labels, which she attributed to her drinking..."

"Allen studied horticulture with the intent of becoming a florist but changed her mind..."

"I really want to explore the acting route more, but nothing which involves me taking my clothes off. ... I just want to do proper cool stuff. I definitely feel the time is right to explore acting"

Proper cool stuff. Oh dear, oh dear, what has Dr. Who come to. Next thing he'll be reincarnated as a west indian rapper with gold chains...

On the positive side, though:

"She has also called Bob Geldof a "cunt""

"She also said that everyone who bought Paris Hilton's debut album should be killed off"

but even so :(

Re: ITT 2020

It wasn't botched, it was a "europeanised' Apple ][

The extra memory bit was added deliberately, I think for the 60Hz/50Hz frame difference between US and Europe so UK-spec displays could be used. There was extra RAM added for the extra bit required, but it was 'on the end' of the display space. Official ITT software, and things which didn't bypass the monitor (the BIOS, for the youngsters), worked fine. It was the Apple-specific programs, especially those which wrote directly to video RAM, which had every 9th bit blank. I vaguely remember at least one chess program like that. The 'official' software knew where to get that 9th bit's value from.

I remember a friend who went to the US on holiday to buy an Apple ][. Compuer + holiday cost him less than just buying the computer in the UK. A few years ago I was in a surplus store in California, where there was a big cardboard bin full of Apple ][s, going for $15 each. Sad...

I also know of one large UK Telco that, back in the early 80s, used an Apple ][ as the main link between a VAX and a telephone switchboard in their call centre. The switchboard console was connected via a serial line at some weird bitrate, and the apple serial card was the only thing they'd found that could be easily programmed to match it. It sat there for years without a problem, with the lid off to keep it cool, converting between 9600bit/s RS232 and the switchboard console.

And about time too

Won't be the same without Alexandra Bastedo though. Wonder who they'll choose? Oh, god, no, not... PH? Or even worse, Billie Piper?

@cameron

"surely a line at -110V is at a higher voltage (albeit negative) than one at -10V?"

No. In order to be + or - there must be a reference of zero, and relative to that reference -110V is a lower voltage than -10V.

Whether either of them is a *more dangerous* voltage depends entirely on where you are. If you're sitting on a metal plate at -110V then touching a wire at -110V won't be a problem, but touching one at -10V (or +10V for that matter) would be most unpleasant, to say the least. High doesn't inherently mean dangerous, it just means, well, high. When I stepped out of bed this morning I realized that I was 900m up above sea level.

Fortunately so is my house.

Foreign chips

Some things never change. At one point during the cold war, the US SAGE air defense system was being kept operating with spare parts from the Soviet Union. It was the only place still making the thermionic valves [tubes] that SAGE used...

@Richard Neill

To suggest that a patent is "a bogus monopoly wrongly granted by the State" is to fundamentally misunderstand the reason patents exist.

Prior to the creation of patent licensing, anyone who came up with a new design from which they wished to profit had only one option: to keep it secret. If it became publicly known then the inventor's competitors could make use of it and profit (at little cost) from the (often long and expensive) work put in by the original inventor.

Trade secrets like that, however, tend to prevent innovation. In almost all cases, once someone has come up with a new design, others soon see how to improve on it. That is how the technological and industrial world makes progress, not by locking away new ideas as "top secret".

The idea behind a patent is that it is a bargain. In return for a limited period of protection from copying, during which time the original inventor can use and/or license the idea and hence profit from his/her own work, (s)he *MUST* publish it, so that others can see how to improve on it.

I'm not saying that this system is not abused, by people who trade on the patent office's inability to understand the complex details of modern technology, but the basic concept was, and is, sound.

French icon?

It would have to be Jeanne d'Arc, surely?

Sonic booms - @ A. Lewis et al

Lots of interesting stuff about sonic booms at the NASA website, e.g.

http://www1.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-016-DFRC.html

"Overpressures of 1 to 2 pounds are produced by supersonic aircraft flying at normal operating altitudes. Some public reaction could be expected between 1.5 and 2 pounds.

Rare minor damage may occur with 2 to 5 pounds overpressure."

* SR-71: 0.9 pounds, speed of Mach 3, 80,000 feet

* Concorde SST: 1.94 pounds, speed of Mach 2, 52,000 feet

* F-104: 0.8 pounds, speed of Mach 1.93, 48,000 feet

* Space Shuttle: 1.25 pounds, speed of Mach 1.5, 60,000 feet, landing approach

so even at 50,000+ ft it can still be a problem. I remember the original Concorde trials, flying supersonic up the Irish sea. Great fun 'til the spoilsports with smashed greenhouses complained :)

Connected?

IMAP doesn't require a user to stay connected. If you use thunderbird, for example, you can download some or all messages & then choose to work offline. Next time you connect all replies will be sent and new mail downloaded. IMAP with SSL connections also avoids the tedium of VPNs, you can securely read mail from anywhere.

@Stu

Don't forget that most US homes are suplied by overhead lines from a pole-mounted transformer. Those lines will carry live & neutral twisted together, so when a set of small teeth completes the circuit, bye-bye Tufty...

Still don't know how it ended up in the engine compartment, though.

@Kurt

The DVD-Dual is a DVD/CD rewriter. As far as I can tell all the workstations can be ordered with DVD-RW drives, or you can just swap-out a CDROM for a strandard DVD-RW.

Re: lets just have visas

Last time I checked, citizens of countries covered by the visa waiver scheme couldn't get visas ("there's no need, Sir") unless there were special circumstances, like commercial business travel.

Frankly it takes longer, and is more hassle, to get through Heathrow domestic security these days than to go through US immigration. I'd sooner avoid Heathrow than the US.

Bombs?

A question to those worried about people then being able to use bombs triggered by mobiles. Do you really think that anyone willing to put a few kg of semtex in a 747 cargo hold will be held back by current legislation forbidding them from putting an operating phone on an aircraft?

@Kamal

"VME - the best operating system (mainframe or not) ever."

I preferred George IV

"Stomps all over IBM/*nix dross."

Don't most things (non-Microsoft things, anyway)?

Clarification

A little trawling around French consumer websites turned up the info that phone operators are not allowed to refuse to unlock your phone, but if you are still within the first 6 months of a contract they can charge you for the unlock code. I have no idea if there is a limit to such a charge. After the 6 months they must give you the code, free, on demand. Most have 12-month minimum contracts anyway, so the unlock charge could conceivably be the remainder of your 12-month subscription.

Of course IANAL and YMMV

Fake photo?

Interesting how everything in that publicity shot casts a shadow...

...except the PC :)

@Robert Long

+1

Well said.

@Mark_T

Well said.

You'll never be able to stop random attacks on civilians, even when you introduce unnacceptable levels of restrictions on civil liberties. Such attacks only become terrorism when people are terrorised, so standing up to them is the only option.

Contrast the reactions of the post-9/11 refusal of Americans to get on aeroplanes with the post-7/7 reactions of Londoners who insisted on going back on the tube the next day. I remember watching US TV coverage of that, and the combined astonishment/admiration of the TV reporters that Londoners weren't cowering under their beds and refusing to take the train.

There aren't enough suicide bombers to destroy the economy of any western country by themselves, but all they have to do is frighten ordinary people into doing their work for them. We wouldn't let them do that in NI (I am Belfast-born), and it is clearly the only way to win such a conflict. Overreaction by government does more harm than good.