Posts by Jeremy Sanders

BBC bins pricey Windows Media, Audio Factory goes live

I don't mind about losing WMA, but it wasn't nice of the BBC to just kill the AAC shoutcast streams with no warning. It wouldn't be so bad if they actually published the URLs of the new streams themselves, but we have to rely on radiofeed.co.uk to find the MP3 stream address.

Ed Miliband brands Google's UK tax avoidance 'WRONG'

Tax them to be fairer to smaller businesses and taxpayers

It's all very well not paying tax when politicians have decided that they want to encourage this (e.g. ISAs). It's not ok when you go through tax legislation to find tiny loopholes and use artificial and otherwise bogus structures to avoid tax. International corporations should be assessed as a whole and they should pay tax on profits based on the fraction of sales in a particular country. There should be laws against artificial structures to avoid tax and if you go against the spirit of legislation, then that is wrong.

When international corporations can avoid tax like this it makes it much harder for smaller businesses to compete with them, and we're left with the corporate high street we have currently. For example, small coffee shops have to pay tax, when the likes of Starbucks can avoid it.

The Lynx effect: The story of Camputers' mighty micro

Bank switching

The Amstrad PCW had bank switching, but you could switch any of the four 16kB chunks of memory, so you didn't have switch the block the CPU was executing from.

The Oric-1 is 30

I remember them well

My best friend at school had one of these. I remember the many minutes waiting for Manic Minor to load. The sound quality from the Oric was very good, particularly the hall of the mountain king and the blue danube.

Kernel hacker Alan Cox quits Linux, Intel

Knighthood

Alan Cox is a serious monarchist:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.acpi.devel/53429

Users decide Fedora 17 will be 'Beefy Miracle'

Not voted for by users of Fedora, but developers

This article is partially wrong - the name was voted for by developers and contributors of Fedora primarily. You need to be a member of the contributors group to vote: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2011-October/003000.html

Stallman: Jobs exerted 'malign influence' on computing

No...

CUPS was in Linux before it was Mac OS X. Apple bought the company producing CUPS after CUPS became the standard Linux printing software.

Scientists unravel galactic spaghetti monster

Re: Space Craft

I'm one of the authors of the paper. The object at the top left is actually a star. The image was created by subtracting the diffuse light of the galaxy from the red image to show the filaments. Unfortunately this doesn't work completely for saturated objects like bright nearby stars, so you're left with residual features.

If you'd like to see some more pretty pictures (or the paper itself), go to http://www-xray.ast.cam.ac.uk/papers/ngc1275/