Posts by Christopher Smith

Microsoft: have it your way on IE 8

Its already here

I updated 4 vista boxes on Saturday, two prompted for IE8 install with that screen.

Apple updates full desktop Mac line-up

@Rip Off Britain

Your math is awry - you've applied the exchange rate to the uk price. Actual figures are 489 v 499.

599 x 0.71 * 1.15 = 489.08.

We need cheap, abundant energy. Here's how

Take off those rose tinted glasses

Huge money has been spent on energy research - into Nuclear Fusion. After 50 years, its still 20 years away. 20 years means, "I'm not going to figure it out, the next guy might, but don't you worry I've got a well paid job for life".

Sexy science gets the money. Nuclear fusion. Global Warming. Large Hadron Colliders. Get your hands dirty engineering gets very little. Where is the money for power sources where the science is understood but the engineering is still a challenge - hot rocks, wave & tidal power to name three. And how does it compare to that given the glory science?

The scientists with the chutzpah to sell science to politicians don't want to sell those things, they would rather sell the big dreams, the terrible nightmares and the big ticket items.

ISO rejects Office Open XML appeal (redux)

Another objection

I thought there was a third objection. That its a poorly written standard that provides insufficient information to be able to render/handle the document accurately.

Dell's dinky designer desktop

Odd marketing

Not available via the Office part of the site. Not available with Vista Business edition (or XP), no option for a 7200RPM hard disk.

Intel UMPC chip enters service as server CPU

Marketing Pap

Bleh. Mythic Beasts has been offering Apple TV dedicated servers - running linux for ages - at nearly half that price. They also offer Mac Mini (proper C2D cpu, not an underpowered, overhyped atom) dedicated servers - again running linux - still cheaper.

Boffins prove the existence of jet-setters

I'm with Steve Roper...

"In most cases, they approximated customer movements by pinpointing the cell towers routing their various calls and texts."

Pinpointing location to the nearest cell tower doesn't seem terribly accurate or terribly threatening to me.

Although to be fair, the data could well have been truly anonymised - phone identified by a unique and unattributable number, all location information transformed to some random ground zero within the geographical area covered. Dates removed and replaced with offset from day zero. So ...

#1 N5.1km+/- 2km, W1.8km+/- 2km, Day #1 7:30am

Its not as if we're not talking supercomputers here...

Microsoft officially 425 years behind the times

Bigger than that

I reckon its much bigger than mentioned. I doubt very much the programmers on any of those apps have done any date programming or testing. Like everyone else they are using a library for their dates. They'll test basic interaction with the library, good data, bad data, but not all possible dates. The library 'should'(tm) have been had been tested and quality assured.

So what library of date functions can't handle leap years and what other software by M$ or anyone else uses that library. What's the odds its underlies .NET?

Broadband big boys waiting on data pimping

let the move to Zen and PlusNet begin ...

PlusNet is BT (since a year or so ago).