Posts by Russell Long 39 posts • joined 21 May 2008
The objective IS to reduce energy consumption. A five-minute trawl of most 'green movement' articles in the Grauniad will show you that the Green movement is ideologically wedded to reducing energy consumption, presumably because it believes in a mythical pre-Industrial past where the world was perfect and hobbits danced.
They are serious if they convince people to part with money or compromise their personal details.
It's easy for you to be smug and tell people they 'shouldn't be using a computer unsupervised' but in the same way that most people couldn't fix their car if it went wrong, because they just get in it and use it, most people can't fix their computer. That's quite normal, and we - the geeks - are the aberrant ones.
Further, since 'everyone knows Apples don't get viruses', if your Apple tells you to do something, you can trust it. That's the thinking that's been engendered.
The article states that XP's infection rate is 14 per 1,000 PCs. WIn7's is 4 per 1,000 PCs. That does make it, by a fair margin, 'the most secure Windows ever'.
I can't say I'm surprised that Java is the problem. The ENDLESS F***ING UPDATES for it mean that even I get fed up to the back teeth with them and stop bothering. The article does compare favourably with my experience, which is that Win7 machines get infected when teenagers get a Facebook update that says 'OMG CLIK HEAR 4 TOTALLY SHKOCING THING!!!!!ONEONEONE' - and inevitably they click on it.
Can't wait. New socket type, so time to redesign motherboards, so new RAM, new cards, new PSU with different power requirements, and so on for ever.
Changing the blasted socket every 9 months isn't progress. It's a royal pain in the bum. It's getting to the point where you can't get parts for a 2 or 3 year old machine.
Take immigration, for example. A government could say "We want the country to have 50 million people in it by the end of the 21st century", and limit permanent inward migration to 50,000 per year for the lifetime of its parliament. It would be up to following governments to keep to the policy if they chose to, but certainly some indication of long-term planning wouldn't go amiss.
Other examples might include long-term plans infrastructure development or a clear vision of the role and purpose of education.
Even some indication of thought beyond the most primitive cerebral activity would be nice from most of our MPs.
What's the point in having a Processor Of Doom when it's spending 80% of its time trimming its nails waiting for the slug-a-bed HDD to wake up? I'm sure that drive's in there instead of a 7200 drive to save battery life, but a grand for that?
I think you do have to compare on price, because that's what normal people buying a normal computer do. I think you have to say to Apple "You must be pulling my plonker if you think that's worth £1000".
That reason is that the Soviets stole the plans and designs. Just as they did with their Harrier equivalent and their Concorde equivalent. However, stealing the plans isn't the same as having the skills and engineering to design, build, test and operate a successful Shuttle, which is why the Buran never came to anything but the US Shuttle did. The same applies, of course, to Concordski and their Harrier copy.
I set up new PCs for clients. Most of the time the client doesn't want the old PC so I agree with them that I'll take it to a local charity. They're much less snotty than the big names about what they get. They've a furniture warehouse and they have a part-time geek who builds the computers up and sets them up and sells them on. The machines go without hard disk drives in (those go back to the owners) but they all have an XP licence sticker on the side. Bung in a hard drive, install XP, and you've got a serviceable machine.
Have a look around and see whether you've any local charities that will do that kind of work.
They've retreated to that safety zone of the Left, which is the shouty abusive protest. The TPA are all evil, tax-dodgers, millyaniayriees, thieves, spivs, banksters - they're probably even Thatcher.
Insulting your opposition doesn't work. Proving them wrong does. Before the TPA came along there was nobody - literally nobody - prepared to talk about value for money in the public sector or the need to cut public spending. The discussion on value for money needs to take place because it's our money, not the government's.
Is it right that taxpayers' money goes to groups which then lobby government? Some people might say yes, some no, but that conversation needs to take place and the information needs to be available for that conversation to take place.
Unless and until the people who object to the TPA's work analyse its numbers and tell me why they're wrong, they've nothing of value to add. I find it particularly worrying when a site like the Reg, which I rather assumed was read by rational people who were good with numbers, appears to have in its comments section the same group of incoherent media studies graduates who roam across the forums at the Guardian.
The FT gets away with it, AFAICT, because they have a specific market that they're targetting and they produce original, high-quality copy. The Telegraph does not. There are interesting commentators - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Cassandra of the Telegraph, is a good read - but the quality of the actual news they publish is atrocious. If they stick up a paywall, who's going to bother paying to read the same unresearch, poor-quality guff they can read on every other site?
A couple of reasons that I can think of:
The size of balloon required to shift the radar platform, the time to inflate, the strength of the winch and the thickness of the cable required to keep the balloon under control, and the storage space required for all of this.
Further, the balloon can only float above the carrier, and since it's a huge, visible radar signal what it's basically doing is advertising to the enemy the precise location of the enemy carrier group, whereas an aircraft can stand 100 miles or so away.
No, the Guardian's comment pages attract just as many nutters, Marxists, ecomentalists, people who believe we should eat more trees (no, I'm not making it up), female supremacists, apologists for mass murder so long as it's in the name of socialism....same stories, different nutters, that's all. The Independent, of course, has hired the nutters and gives them weekly columns.
The increasing distance between public servants and the public they serve is the problem here. In the case of the police they have become increasingly centralised and increasingly remote. Fifty years ago there was a police house in every village and policeman in every village. Now, my town of 30,000 doesn't even have a permanent police presence. The station is closed at night, because, of course, no crime ever happens at night, does it? Officers have to come from 9 miles away.
A centralised police computer system (another massive public sector IT project, of course) isn't going to resolve the core problem with policing which in my opinion is that police are too far divorced from the communities they are supposed to serve.
This IPPR report is par for the course for them, unfortunately. New Labour apparatchiks to a man and woman (and, of course, funded by generous donations from the willing taxpayer), they believe that greater control over the public services will improve the quality of those services. Of course, the more they tighten their grip, the more services will slip through their fingers...
The ID database and ID card is a European project and not a British one. I doubt we are in a position to decide which system to pick. The database will be EU-wide and therefore it'll be a single system.
Unfortunate, but that's what you get with dictatorships.
I ordered a Belkin wireless USB dongle, and received it in a box 4ft long by 2ft wide by 2ft high. A consequence, I assume of stuff being shipped now being priced according to weight rather than bulk (due to changes in EU postal legislation which also led to the closure of thousands of post offices in the UK).
""Most jobs will go on the infrastructure side - IT, finance and operations, where there is overlap between the two companies," Thain said."
Surely there are also overlaps at the top? Both companies have boards of directors, for example. Of course that wouldn't occur to them. Big bonuses all round, boys!
The point to be made about this action should be, surely, that the EU constitution (on which France, amongst others, voted no), explicitly stated that the EU would have its own flag, anthem and motto. It explicitly recognised the EU as a legal entity. This statement was removed when the 'Lisbon Treaty' was rolled out. Now it's been put back in.
I can't say I'm surprised. The mendacity of these utter cunts never surprised me. True to form, the EU grinds mercilessly onwards. "The more you tighten your grip, the more countries will slip through your fingers."
By The Cube-"The problem is the heavy vehicles on the road which offers us a very simple solution, ban everything over 1500kg from all cities during daylight hours. This will do wonders for fuel economy (the Polo is good primarily because it has been on a diet), pedestrian and cyclist safety, emissions, in fact almost all vehicle related problems. Even better it will permanently rid us of the sort of inbreed who thinks they need a 4x4 to do the supermarket and school run."
So no commercial vehicles would be allowed on the roads during daylight hours either? Great thinking! Cities aren't a fucking playground. They run on commerce. Banning everything over 1500kg means nobody can do any work and your city grinds to a halt.
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