Posts by Ian Ferguson 1368 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Sep 2006
I imagine the professional photographers who currently contribute to Getty are extremely careful about rights... Flickr amateurs less so. How do Getty authenticate that a Flickr photo is an original? What about permission of people and property in photos? (laws vary across countries)
'Can' and 'worms' spring to mind.
and there was me thinking our sysadmins must have blocked me from running my ongoing book on 'Who's sleeping with who in the office'.
A good point though; if my documents had been a little more business critical, I wouldn't have had even an old backup to access. It's all very well backing up every thirty seconds to an ultra-secure remote server in Alaska, but if the backup IS the source document, what do you do when the connection goes down?
I'd like to see an automatic local backup built into Google Docs. Just like the automatic remote backup I've always wanted built into Word (and no, Sharepoint doesn't count).
Yes, you'd need a new drive - but (I presume) you could use existing DVD-R and CD-R media. These cost mere pennies compared to the £10ish for a single Blu-Ray disk - making this technology very cost-effective indeed.
Being able to use an existing format as media is a fantastic idea - the problem with new formats is the media cost for early adopters, before mass production returns cost, but this approach effectively bypasses this major hurdle.
However, this technology will never get off the ground. Why? Because all the manufacturers make so much money off shiny new media like Blu-Ray - CDs and DVDs are old hat. A shame really, as this would be a very efficient way forward.
None of the companies I work for bought a job lot of XP to put on all their machines - it was implemented with upgrades only, either OEM with a new computer, or a fresh install if a machine had a major rehaul. There are still some machines I know of running 2000 - because they are fulfilling a specific task which has not changed in years, and the operating system is perfectly adequate for that task.
So saying 'we will not roll out Vista' is a bit of FUD, to be honest. Despite disliking Vista myself, I think it's unfair to assume that because everyone isn't instantly upgrading, it's flawed. Yes, it's a failure in that Microsoft should have made it more desirable and compelling, but no, businesses aren't actively ignoring it, to my knowledge.
On a consumer level though - yes, people are actively ignoring it. Even my girlfriend, who bought a laptop to use Word and IE exclusively, and doesn't have any technical skills or desire beyond that - has dumped the laptop on me, asking to have XP instead of the "slow annoying Vista thing".
Fantastic - if we tag all criminals (and persistently reoffending victims) with GPS / RFID chips, and ask them to text a premium rate number whenever they commit a crime, we can have a state-of-the-art live crime map online for all to see!
Better still, could they also plot the locations of police officers so the public can know in advance what the likely response time will be? And maybe borrow the 'choose-and-book' technology from the NHS, so we can choose to be responded to with the ordinary bobby, highway patrol, community support officer or bomb disposal squad of our choice?
Who knew technology could be put to such good use.
So 3% of their customer complaints are not resolved within a month? That's a frankly worrying statistic - I'm not going to book with them, on the off chance that I have a problem and find I have around a one in 33 chance that they won't have sorted it out by the time I get to the airport!
Could the Criminal Law Justice Unit please explain a 100% foolproof method of completely deleting and/or destroying digital data to us? It occurs to me that if I own an image which is now illegal, merely telling Windows to delete it will not remove it completely from my hard drive; and I could still technically be prosecuted for it.
My first web email address - circa 1996? - was at rocketmail.com. A few years later Yahoo!!1! swallowed them and I lost the rocketmail address (I think I got the same word at yahoo dot com but gave up on it). I wonder if I can get it back?
Ymail, on the other hand, seems like a blatant attempt to keep up with Google Mail. I quote gmail.com rather than googlemail.com, but my address is valid on both.
It sounds like Yaho0!!!!! are taking a slightly different approach and allowing somebody@yahoo.com to be a different person than somebody@ymail.com - sounds a bit dodgy to me, confusion will abound.
Not to mention that people with existing yahoo.com addresses will probably be quick to grab their equivalents - just like when a new TLD is released, with lots of arsey gumpf about how it will open up more addresses - all that really happens is companies splurge out even more on protecting their existing brand.
I'm running FF2. I go to Help - Check for Updates. It tells me there are none available.
I'm guessing they haven't made it automatically update yet, but wouldn't that be an obvious way of hitting 2 bazillion downloads or whatever they're aiming for? If everyone running previous versions of FF had been faced with a message saying 'download FF3 now' yesterday morning, they would have been sorted.
PR stunt, nothing else. And like all PR stunts, it's all fluff and no news. A bit like the 'save the earth by turning off your lights hour' - in Southampton the council and shopping centres announced they would turn off their lights for an hour during the night (as if that would make the slightest iota of difference) - then didn't actually turn them off. FAIL.
...to rile up the fanboys. Why should I care that your browser is open source? I use both open source and closed source software, and have yet to notice any personal advantage in the open source kind. I am not technically skilled enough to fix any bugs, or have any desire to (if a piece of software is buggy I tend to dismiss it and find an alternative). Frankly, I tend to come across less bugs in closed source software, as quality control is stricter.
Also; I see many people saying Firefox is better because it's free, and Microsoft alternatives are not. Hello? Have you noticed that IE is also free? As far as I remember it always has been, unlike Opera.
To be fair; I use Firefox because it is downright *better* than IE. And that's the only reason people will.
I'm glad I got the original.
And no, I'm not worried that I paid over the odds for it; the 3G contract is bound to be more expensive, and I'm suspecting that the new low price has something to do with that (I reckon they've bowed to operator pressure and will be subsidising the capital cost).
The one thing I'm hoping is that it has similar processing capabilities as the old one; I'll hate it if all the good apps are for the 3G version only.
Having had a look at their website, I also suspect that they've done to GPS what they did to Bluetooth; supporting it in the most basic way possible. The blurb says that your location can be found with GPS or triangulating using Wi-Fi spots and GSM towers; why would they need to do the latter if the GPS is fully-featured? Sounds a bit dodgy to me.
It all seems a bit of a damp squib. Why haven't they upgraded the camera or storage space, or made it thinner? Where are the other cool new features to keep it up to date with the competitors? But then... I'm probably just trying to justify my purchase of the original. It's no worse than the original, so it'll be just as lovely to use, and continue to polarise opinion.
My brother is a mechanical engineer, and *was* working in the nuclear industry - but got out because it's dying on it's arse; people being made redundant all over the place, projects bogged down in beaurocracy, focus on cost-saving rather than innovation, etc.
If it was an enticing career, I'm sure there'd be plenty of applicants. Moral politics aside, what the nuclear industry needs is the go-ahead for new power stations, rather than simply attending to the dodgy old ailing stations built in the seventies that were designed to be decommissioned by now.
...I'm just about to start home working. I could have years ago, but I was waiting for our software to be Mac compatible. If I'm gonna work from the garden, I want to do it in comfort :-D
Our financial director is encouraging remote working as a cost saving, not an added expense. Assuming, that is, that we do actual work when at home...
They really are getting desperate now, aren't they.
I nearly went back to a cinema recently. The local Odeon was showing the Monaco GP live on the big screen - great, I thought! Possibly worth the cost of a cinema ticket!
Then I saw how much tickets were - £15. Sod that, I'll put it towards a big LCD screen of my own.
I fail to see how taking my interests and suggesting more crap which I may or may not be interested in is 'filtering' - sounds just like cross-marketing to me.
True filtering would be ONLY displaying content relevant to the interests I have given - ie. if I say that all I'm interested in is Lost and Madonna, it'll give me results from the web and news relevant to Lost and/or Madonna, Lost DVDs, Madonna CDs, etc. There's a name for this system - 'Google'*
(*although to be fair, this could still do with better filtering)
I love FON - in theory. I nearly signed up, but then realised I would be one of two users on the Isle of Wight, the other user being in a housing estate in Shanklin; not desperately where I'd want to hang out with my iPhone.
If FON had hotspots along beaches, in parks, in business estates, city centres, train stations etc., I'd jump at the chance. But the intrinsic flaw in it's business plan is that these are exactly the places that it doesn't have hotspots - as they're not residential.
I suppose BT Openzone is a start - but I'm not entirely convinced, as I'm meant to have free access to them as part of my O2 contract, but have yet to figure out how to achieve this - every time I've tried, it's insisted I log in, or sign up and pay. Hmm.
All computers I've seen from HP and the like have all kind of branded crap on them (such as a HP logo on the desktop, which many users will never bother to change). It's like the logo on the front of the machine - you could tape over it if you really wanted to, but why bother?
If anyone is really concerned - it only takes a few clicks to change the homepage and default search. At least the Microsoft live wotsit page is more useful to the end user than the HP homepage - I've seen users blissfully unaware for years that Internet Explorer doesn't necessarily have to open at the manufacturer's homepage.
It's called marketing, and without it nobody would sell anything. Hell, even Linux comes with bundles of free applications - you could argue that the authors are getting wads of free advertising from Linux installations and Linux distros should be completely unbranded and not come with anything bundled - I know it's all optional, but without anything attached it's pretty useless ;-)
I can understand sex.com going for a lot, because it's pretty much a brand in itself. America dot com would only sell to someone who wants to establish a brand called 'america dot com' - it doesn't have such an obvious application as sex.com, clothing.com, carhire.com, theatre.com etc.
And yes of course there's a global downturn, and businesses are tying purse strings - this would almost certainly be a relatively frivolous purchase.
I find it astonishing that because we've had one major instance of a plane-related terrorism incident, so many people assume that it's the ONLY way terrorists can attack. I've had enough of the ridiculously over-the-top security on planes, and have decided not to bother flying again (although environmental concerns contribute to this decision too).
And this kind of technology worries me because the makers will start looking for other applications if it is useful. How about installing it on every work computer - the built in webcam could monitor us for signs of boredom, disobedience, or distraction?
Ooh, and how about in cars - it could cut the motor if the driver looks stressed and angry?
The phrase 'terrorist tendencies' makes me laugh too. What's the betting that the first 'terrorist' this system bags is someone who is scared of flying - sweating, looking around, stressed, getting up and walking around regularly... quick, shoot him!
Please could they extend this to trains, ferries, buses, offices, anywhere with air conditioning. I have breathing problems and have difficulty staying alert unless there's enough oxygen entering my lungs; I have my bedroom window open all night and can barely sleep in hotels with air con and locked windows. I've fallen unconsious on a ferry before that insisted on keeping the air con on despite being packed to the seams with people for an hour.
When will people learn; cool air does not equal healthy air.
Please can someone explain why BA told her she had to leave the flight? I presume it wasn't because they'd mislaid a bag, was it because she started on the crew when told about it? The way it's reported makes it sound like she was kicked off the flight BECAUSE they'd lost her bag, which frankly would make me a bit irritable too.
Very interesting, even if I don't live in the US, I suspect whoever is chosen will have an enormous impact on IT issues globally.
I'm tempted to become a fan of Chuck Fish simply because he has such an awesome name, but his theory of letting business do what it wants won't go down very well with IT-savvy voters (take the slashdot crowd as an example) - Microsoft-style monopolies, anyone?
Internet services populate a unique market, in that they are truly global; and so the winners rise to the top very quickly, and monopolies are more the rule than the exception; take as examples Google, eBay, IMDb, PayPal. This suggests to me that IT requires more regulation than other industries, not less.
Weitzner seems to me to be far more qualified for the role, and much more clued up than the Republican representative. Again, I can see the Slashdot crowd loving this guy - he even knows what open standards are! (as opposed to thinking they're ways for terrywrists to control US infrastructure)
So we're back to the new equivalent of radio stations... complete with ads. If I recall correctly, radio stations survive, and indeed profit, from selling advertising space between tracks.
And now the equivalent, completely customisable streaming music, is so much more tempting to people's ears - I don't blame the industry from trying to monetise this the only way it knows how, through advertising.
They'd better be quick, while there's still people who aren't sufficiently tech-savvy to know better. And while people's moral perception is still against listening to music for free (although to be fair they might be too late on this one).
To be quite honest though, the industry claiming that technology will kill music is very shortsighted. The radio didn't kill concerts, the TV didn't kill radio, the internet didn't kill newspapers, home taping didn't kill music, video didn't kill the radio star. Media formats change; public requirements change; technology changes, and commercial interests will all change to fit.
The reaction of the majority of Register readers is entirely predictable (see comment number two for an example) but this is good thinking on Asus' part. The beach babe with Eeeeee is attractive to nerdy men, who are also attracted to the latest, most expensive gadget; not Asus' core audience.
Aiming the Eeeeeeeetooo at the housewife is a marketing no brainer, and the new one is a much friendlier, wholesome image. Kudos to them.
That said, it doesn't mean I won't miss the old one.
And that said, I wouldn't complain about the new one...
I'm sure he's a lovely guy and all but he really has churned out some tripe. Funny how the only episodes worth watching are the ones he wasn't involved in.
It's a shame they didn't push him before he eventually got round to jumping...
Can they replace the casting director next pleeease?
What do you expect from a service that tries to handle massive numbers of financial transactions, but has no prior experience in banking.
Don't trust Paypal, they're cowboys. Just because they (and eBay) are famous names, doesn't make them efficient or trustworthy. It's like allowing Amy Winehouse to look after your pet mice, assuming she'll be a good pet sitter because she's famous...
Careful now... you won't be reimbursed if somebody pays you with stolen credit card details - the card victim's bank will claim the money back with a chargeback, leaving you out of pocket; and you can't expect any sympathy (or in my experience, even a reply) from Paypal.
Don't use Paypal for anything other than small transactions that you don't mind losing out on.
That's not exactly unusual for a pope, shurely? It'd be slightly more surprising if he expressed opinions *against* intelligent design.
I seem to remember similar waffle about aliens from a Church of England spokesman, saying there may be aliens, and Jesus might have visited them in their form and died for their sins etc. If I was still a Christian I'd be pretty skeptical about the concept, that God created humans as unique special friends of his, and didn't happen to mention that he created some other unique special friends... (a bit like having a secret second family, *ahem*)
But I'm not Christian any more, so I have the distinct pleasure of watching church spokespeople squirming in their seats as they try to apply increasingly outdated moral beliefs to changing public attitudes.
So a product in beta has a bug? Pretty poor reporting to jump to the conclusion that the entire product is rubbish. Unfortunate, yes, but a little harsh. I think we've all been spoilt by Google's definition of beta - 'fully working but we might tweak it to make it even better'
Unfortunately I won't be able to try it out as I only have Macs - but it's entertaining that Microsoft are endorsing Boot Camp.
I remain to be convinced by Fon - according to their website, there are no other Fon spots on the Isle of Wight, where I live, and only a couple in Southampton, in housing estates. I'd hoped to be able to use the network while lounging in the sun or around town on business, but due to the business plan, it seems only residential areas are likely to have hotspots. I don't fancy stopping outside someone's house and pulling out my PDA :-/
I'll be interested to see the price of getting the 3G version. Not the phone itself - but the contract. Although I'm a little uneasy about having bought the first version when it came out, as it will almost certainly date quickly, I have a feeling I'll be happier when I see how much the new contracts are :-)
I'm going to get a 1112, if the local chavsda still has one - as a backup to my iPhone. As much as I love the Jesus Phone, I don't like taking it on certain trips (riding bike, texting while walking down dark alleys, etc). It's a bit ridiculous I know, and probably points out how small the target market for the iPhone is, but it suits me. Meh.
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