Posts by Graham Dawson 2678 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
When IIS came around the web was already well established enough that it wasn't going anywhere, so the market was able to bear a license fee, which would only ever take a minority position against free alternatives. With Gopher, unless I'm misremembering, there wasn't the same entrenchment, WWW was already there to compete and there wasn't any alternative to the licensed server. So it died.
Where am I?
On the internet
What do you want?
Information.
Who's side are you on?
That would be telling. We want information, Information. Information.
You won't get it!
By hook or by crook, we will.
Who are you?
The new Social Media.
...
And it sort of breaks dwon there. Oh well.
It's true. The issue is energy density, something that fuel cell, hydrogen and battery advocates always either ignore or prefer not to talk about.
Currently the most efficient form of energy storage for road vehicles is petrol simply because it packs the most energy into the smallest space without the need for expensive, dangerous active storage facilities. Hydrogen can leak from even the most perfect of seals because it's so small and requires extreme compression to achieve even remotely the same energy density as petrol, which then requires expensive and dangerous cryogenic storage. Hydrogen fuel cells are marginally better but still suffer the same basic storage and transport problems as hydrogen. Batteries? They're largely dead weight. Look at the average battery powered car and you'll see that they're essentially useless. People complain about a phone that lasts less than a week, how will they act if they have to "fill up" their car every day? I'd only have to fill my car every day if I was doing a daily commute all the way from lands end to john o'groats.
The only solution I can see is artificial petroleum produced in some sort of high intensity centralised facility (ie not one that requires the use of vast tracts of arable land and food crops). Everything else seems to be a waste of time and effort with very little energy returned on energy invested, especially given the fundamental rebuilding of a large chunk of our infrastructure and economy that always seems to go along with them.
It's the long and curly outer coat of the Lesser American Lingual Sully. The Lingual Sully (Soliens Lingua Destructor) also known as the Typographical Sully, the Dictionary Eater and the Vowel Vermine, is a tiny mammal approximately seven eighths of an inch from nose to tail, covered in tightly wound fur often referred to as "sulfur", which is capable of expanding by some thirty thousand times, making the Sully appear to be a huge elephant in the room. Its primary habitat is libraries, where it has a peculiar habit of eating ink from the pages of books, leaving a trail of misspellings and typographical errors in its wake. By "sullying language" in this way it earned its primary name. It is also sometimes referred to as Websters Muse.
Related Species
S. Apostrosplatidown (aka Grocer's S'ully)
S. Dinkum Justii (The Australian Sully)
S. Puerlargum Innitii (The Essex Sully)
You're kidding, right?
Our ozone layer isn't "totally hosed", it's still almost entirely there and it is constantly replenished by higher frequency electromagnetic radiation interacting with O2. But never mind that, you're apparently claiming that an "intact" ozone layer would prevent a gamma ray burst from doing anything to us?
Bull.
We aren't talking a dribble of light here, we're talking the entire output of the sun hitting us in moments. The ozone layer wouldn't stop a tiny fraction of that. In fact it'd probably be blown away in the first second.
Just for once, look past the sort of petty vindictiveness that tries to blame humans for everything and realise that the universe is far bigger and more powerful than we could ever hope to comprehend.
Wrong. They have a reduced percentage. The ozone "hole" is not a hole as you seem to believe, it's a thinning, like the hair on my head, or the credibility of your posts each time you make a new one. Still there, not as much as before, and it's highly variable as well.
In the frozen north, people didn't celebrate the winter solstice. They feared it. They feasted because they might never see the sun again, and they did everything within their power to convince the gods to bring it back.
Ok, so maybe it was a n excuse for a piss-up, but it wasn't a celebration...
It was, however, the main festival of the north-europea pre-christian calendar. All that dancing around stone henge in the summer is a modern invention, a creation of ppeole too pansy-arsed to do it properly. The *original* pagans did it in the winter. Naked. And then they killed things. bring back that good old-time religion I say!
Well, lets see, in the last several months I've booted various family computes from a USB drive several times, and from a CD numerous times as well, to either repair an existing installation or to install something new. I do it quite regularly. A lot of people do it quite regularly. More than enough to make something like this a huge problem.
As for importing keys, surely you can see this renders the entire concept pointless? If you can import keys, so can other people. In that case all you have is a needlessly complicated additional step to getting a working system. It's rather like government bureaucracy in that respect.
Or swedish. The wife's name was over 30 characters long (not including spaces) before we married and, due to Swedish conventions for naming, she kept her surname as a middle name with mine tacked on the end. Believe it or not, a 40+ character name with accents is not something you can just brush off as an edge case. It's very common.
We've had no end of trouble with idjits who can't comprehend a slightly foreign name. She's been called all sorts of things on paper, from minor misspellings, to using the wrong name as her first name, to the unforgettable Mr Omordlinap in one case... it's fun waiting to see each new permutation.
5 minutes on google
http://sondreb.com/blog/post/showdown-of-slate-tablet-pcs.aspx
O course, given the entire complaint by apple is about *design*, there are also plenty of design examples about that predate the ipad. Apple did not invent this look, they followed an existing trend, so take your smug attitude and get off your high horse.
Seriously?
pop quiz. how many photogr0hs were released for publicity puposes? how many were actually taken? IF you are a real photographer and not just an idiot with a camera you will know that they will have taken hundreds and used perhaps a dozen that turned out well enough. the "perfection" issue is only an issue to those ignorant about photography. I'm not even going to dignify the rest with a response.
photographer. right.
When the councils were set up, they had one, single job and were called local water authorities. The one thing they did ws manage water quality and supplies in that order. Everything else was handled by parishes, incorporated towns and all the little councils that have been slowly but surely erased. Perhaps we should go back to that instead? One advantage is, they wouldn't have a big enough budget to splurge surplus on iToys. They'd also have to be more responsive to local problems rather than spending all their budget on follies and bridges named after the council leader.
also, I'm starting to think we're like the Hitchens brothers. Only more sane.
I wouldn't say that.Honeycomb 3.2 is actually very good at being a laptop OS on my eee pad. It even recognises mouse-over events in the browser.
Were it possible, I'd be tempted to chuck a copy on my old toshiba just to see if it worked. I expect it might, but until google opens up the relevant bits again it's unlikely.
TV here is just as crappy as TV there. You only get the bits considered to be the very best, we get the full flavour shite in every shade from white to brown to that weird and disturbing ruddy-black stuff that you should probably go and see the doctor about.
Our news is the same as yours too. Especially the BBC, who have even abandoned vox pops in favour of reporters interviewing each other in nice safe studios.
What I'm trying to say is, your tv isn't uniquely awful. Sorry.
I've been itching to answer this one all day but I've been a bit busy.
Democracy is not just elections. Democracy is, at it's base, holding those in power to accountin order to limit their ambitions to serving the people. A mere election is usually the most efficient way to choose who those in power are going to be but it is not the essential element of a democratic system of government. The House of Lords, prior to being stuffed with government-appointed stooges and tripped of its ability to prevent the cabinet exercising untrammelled power, was more democratic than our current "system".
When a democratic system comes apart, it becomes mob rule and a sort of soft totalitarianism (fascism is actually the merging of state power with private capital, with the state totally directing the use of capital without actually taking ownership, but who's counting?) but by dint of that failure it stops being democracy - those in power are no longer held to account, the system no longer prevents their excesses but encourages them. A functional democracy prevents mob rule.
Secular means, amongst other things, an event that lasts a long time or that happens, or is celebrated, once within a century (or other long period).
What Apothekar means is that, within the consumer PC space, there is a movement that is at once long-term, highly notable and has nothing to do with relig- wait...
The motivations for the EU were post world war 1, and the solution to preventing war was to make sure that no European nation (or, more accurately, Germany - the EU was proposed by a frenchman, never forget that) could have all the necessary resources to make war. However, in the aftermath of world war 2 most of the justification quickly disappeared, as Europe transformed from a series of fortresses into an open market almost overnight. The EU is late to the game and, on current form, trying to implement a counter-productive solution.
The EU is not like the US. The US constitution specifically states that any powers not granted to the federal government by the constitution are retained by the states or the people which, until relatively recently, meant that the federal government had very little actual power. Strictly speaking it still has very little actual power, but it has arrogated a great deal to itself following the american civil war and the subsequent war powers acts and various inter-war acts that granted it "temporary" power during the world wars. Nevertheless, the states are still able to legislate freely in all areas except foreign affairs and, to a lesser extent, military spending. They can't create legislation that interferes with inter-state commerce, but that doesn't actually prevent much. Meanwhile, federal laws become laws the moment they are signed by the president, without any froo-farah or re-implementation by the states.
In the EU, the situation is quite different. Member-states have very little sovereignty these days. Instead here there is a concept of subsidiarity: When a directive is created in a specific legislative area, that entire area becomes off-limits to member-states, except where the EU specifically allows them to continue legislating. An example is road safety. The EU has created certain directives on road safety in order to harmonise road safety practices across the entire union. The up-shot of that is that member-states are no longer allowed to legislate in that area, with the result that when, several years ago, a proposal was put forward in Parliament to require more and more visible reflective markers on trucks in the UK, it was shot down because that area of legislation was an EU competence.
Were the EU to allow member-states to exercise subsidiarity in that area, it would have included wording to that effect in the directives that had granted it competence over that area of legislation.
Also worth remembering that, unlike US federal legislation, directives (not including technical and regulatory directives) have to be implemented into law by the member-states' own legislatures, which leads to what may be politely referred to as fuck-ups, as amendments and translation issues introduce little caveats and minor but significant differences - and worth remembering, too, that each country has it's own legal system that has to be taken in to account when drafting legislation to implement a directive, which leads to some instances of law that directly conflicts with existing legislation.
Now, of course the issue is a german court, rather than the german legislature. The courts are also rather peculiar. There are no equivalents of the US federal court circuits, nor any direct equivalent of the supreme court, with the closest being the European Court of Justice (and please remember that the European Court of Human Rights is not an EU institution - something I often forget in my rantings). Member-state courts function as both "state" and "federal" courts, but there is a horrible amount of overlap due to the aforementioned subsidiarity and competence issue. If a german court were to rule on a purely german legal issue, it would have no effect outside of germany. If, however, a german court ruled on an issue that had become an EU competence, there is currently no clear measure of where that court's jurisdiction ends. Does it merely rule on the german law implementing the directive, or against the directive itself? Do directives grant german courts jurisdiction over the entire EU when ruling on that particular competence? It hasn't been decided yet
Then the issue becomes, what to do? On one side you'll have people who say "the system must be clarified, streamlined and simplified". They would favour tighter integration and harmonisation, with the EU becoming more of a unitary state. Another side would say "we need to loose, and rationalise", turning the EU into a federal model similar to the United States circa 1880, with very little power residing in the central government. A third group would say "lets call the whole thing off", desiring an admittedly messy divorce and a restoration of national sovereignty, along more holding our own politicians to account. All three would solve the issue of lack of clarity in different ways. I favour the latter, though I'd also be able to live with the second option, but whichever side of the issue you stand on it's pretty clear that the way things are at the moment is a complete and utter mess and that some clarity would go a long way.
There are other arguments too (one being that the EU is largely useless, as the majority of it's activity is to be merely a rather meddlesome middle-man between the member-states and the various ISO committees) but this post is going on far too long.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
