Posts by dreadful scathe 106 publicly visible posts • joined 4 May 2007
Further to the other cries of prior art, I used to use RAD disks with the Amiga OS - load your 3 disk game or whatever into RAM (as a RAD device) do a soft reset - result = almost instant boot and fast access from then on. Wikipedia has a section on "RAM Disk" here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS
aha brilliant. How is pointing out that humans are flawed any sort of revelation? Surely this piece is pro-Google or certainly pro-technology. I thought so, but then again I'm only human.
Can I sign up to the google list for the gbody yet? I want my brain uploaded into the android gbody when my current one becomes useless. This is obviously what google are really working toward. :)
"Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95% of data customers aren't negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users," Verizon said.
It is not the fault of the 5% that the other 95% may be affected - they are only using the service they were provided in a normal way. And of course with Verizons logic, even if all customers do not use the service to download very much at all, there will still be a top 5% for them to abuse. Maybe Verizon could just sort out their service, theres an idea.
I cant help but read any complaints from CEOP about companies not doing what they say, as blatant self-publicity for political reasons. Jim Gambles constant complaining about companies disagreements being "beyond logic" and that there is "no legitimate reason" not to do what he says, simply sounds arrogant and offensive to companies like facebook who do take online protection and complaints seriously. Does facebook handle 'protection' issues better than CEOP? Should we just assume no ?
patents = stupid
US patents in particular it seems what the rest of the world needs to do is make a point of completely ignoring such silly patents.This one is particularly obvious , if you want to advertise a local service, you are unlikely to target someone who lives in another country, hey - local ads for local people? what an original idea (<- sarcasm)
identical, eh? hmm, i expect <insert laptop manufacturer here> will have every previous manufacturer proclaiming they are "very angry and suprised" when their new laptop comes out with an IDENTICAL keyboard, and a screen THAT ICONS APPEAR ON, and ports SO YOU CAN PLUG THINGS IN...my goodness me....the horror. Similarities there are obviously some, but rip off? er...no!
echoing others as usual but while "The defendant made nearly £200,000" - yes, so? how much do you think Google makes from ads despite allowing people to search for torrents, warez, mp3s or anything else where the destination you are sent to may not be entirely legitimate? A tad more than that I am sure. :)
Well done that court.
I think we can safely assume that this was a multiple choice survey with ridiculous answers to ensure that those that; don't care, think its funny or occasionally don't know ,will pick them. Thus 1 in 20 believe Steve Jobs played division 2 football...no, they don't.
Still at least 25% of people did not recognise Sir Tim Berners Lee as the founder of the internet - because he wasn't. Shame on the other 75% though, but what can they do when there is no correct answer?
Surveys, bah!
terrible idea - even with a free laptop, broadband costs money, then there's support, and if the laptop runs windows - you can expect them to be next to useless after a few months of steering through the sea of malware and viruses that is the internet to the uninitiated. A far better idea would be more machines within schools and libraries and out of hours access and tutoring.
Of course the other issue is - the government thinks broadband is very important for everyone to have, even going so far as to say it was "as important as electricity" - yet they are still prepared to get behind a "three strikes and you are out" anti-piracy rule to cut people off.
Question for you all - is a family who can not afford a computer or broadband and manage to get one for nothing under this scheme, more or less likely to always pay for downloads ?
XP works fine for an office desktop machine and will for many years to come. So the reason for upgrading to a new OS is...er... "because Microsoft want you to", which isn't good enough for most businesses.
Hopefully many businesses will realise that Ubuntu works just as well for desktop machines and use that instead ;)
I agree with the 'barking mad' comments.
"If I was to nick your car, which is worth £10,000, say, I could go to jail," Baylis told the BBC.
"But if I were to nick your patent, which is worth a million pounds, you'd have to sue me."
You can't "nick" a patent, you can only be caught doing something covered by it - so for the car analogy to be accurate you'd have to sell people tickets to ride about in your car, which just happens to look a bit like Trevors. :)
um...colour me slightly confused by "provides customers with unlimited mobile broadband usage ... in addition to a 1GB, 3GB or 10GB monthly download cap.".
hmm...unlimited usage with a cap. Clearly either "unlimited" or "cap" are defined slightly differently than normal- so, being an optimist, I'm assuming that you get a baseball cap with a choice of logo - mines the one with the "10gb" on it :)
" I always thought that the point of a trial was to establish truth, rather than simply take the word of the complainant or the defendant. "
Well of course there should be a trial, but whats wrong with a trial in this country ? Has McKinnon even visited America before ?
"I'm willing to bet that public perception would have been different had McKinnon been a conservative Muslim."
There would a different public perception in a change to the entire circumstances? Well...er...yes! Your point isn't very pointy.
" The crime was committed both here and in the US. Had the US authorites made a complaint to the police in the UK then perhaps he would have been tried in the UK. However that's not what they did, they applied for extradition on the basis that the crime was committed in the US. "
er... so you agree they were wrong? As you say the crime was also commited here, yet they didn't even notify the UK police. Sounds questionable to me.
@dr.mouse : good points.
According to the bbc (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8177561.stm) :
"The director of public prosecutions refused to order a UK trial, saying the bulk of the evidence was located in the US."
So by that logic, the DPP would find it perfectly acceptable to send someone to <made-up-country> to face the death penalty for, say, posting on a web site in <made-up-country> a post that advocated a public display of support for Tibets freedom ?
its an automated system and surely if mistakes are made a company cannot be made to give away free money?
Its understandable if people get sent the goods and refuse to give them back; a perfectly legitamate transaction has taken place , but if Dell notice in time and don't send the items (that the customers have not paid enough for anyway) then fair enough - refunds and apologies are all that is needed for these Taiwanese Delltards (ooh do you see what i did there...)
Now i do understand that not everyone has the same experience, but my Virgin Media 20mbps service does get very close to exactly what is advertised (about 19.2 or so) this is with the old cable modem I got from them, the new cable modem I got on moving house is clearly not as good, the speed drops to about 18.6. Add a router and speed drops again etc...simply put, there is a slight speed loss on your side of the network from everything. As the report states that the testing hardware was added "direct to the router (see section 4.7)" there will be a substantial drop in performance from both cable modem and router, whether this is a substantially bigger drop than the performance drop for an all-in-one adsl/router/modem supplied with non-cable isps, i don't know, but it will certainly differ by equipment. This also means that virgin dont have much to answer for here without this being taken into account, compared to adsl which struggles to be much more than half as fast as advertised. Some of the VM complainers may well disagree from personal experience, but the report does show 80-90% of full speed for VM. It appears VM should not even be on a comparison list being as borderline as they are - they are as much off their advertised speed as Hard Drives manaufacturers are off their advertised capacity - not close to half the advertised capacity...so the issue really is with adsl generally and its downright lie of "up to 8mbps". No I am no Virgin Media fanboy (let me tell you about my horrific set-up story over a period of 8 months) but I don't think they have the same case to answer.
As a government employee who builds a lot of intranet pages and rolls out other companies web front ends (apparantly they are all the rage donchaknow) i cant tell you how bizarre it is that every other IT system is on a more up to date release than the main client tool used by everyone. It is 8 years old...there are 2 new versions. Luckily our virus checking software is not treated the same way.
One thing I have noticed about Chip and Pin is it makes it far easier to commit fraud where the cardholder is present. The cardholder could be anybody e.g. when i get a train ticket from rail staffs handheld machines that do not support chip and pin and you have to sign, the staff NEVER check the signature on the back. They used to prior to chip and pin, why not now? it makes no sense.
Also, once when I paid for petrol at a BP station I got the pin wrong 3 times. The teller accepted it anyway on the grounds that her machines keypad was "playing up". Only later did I realise it was the wrong card entirely and therefore the wrong pin I persevered with. So in some cases, with a queue building up behind you, you do not need a pin at all.
And of course if you do happen to find out the pin and get the card, you will never be questioned or suspected...even if the name on the card is clearly not yours i.e. a 6 foot bloke called Geraldine - staff do not even touch the cards anymore.
ah people. Aren't they funny. At least Indonesia are consistant, when they bird flu scare happened they destroyed all non-indonesian birds either flying into their air space or imported live or as food.
But, I would worry for the indonesian tourist industry if the flu was renamed "North American Flu"
have been with telewest/VM since 2000 and switched to Gmail years ago for all my mail needs - google offer a much better email service (and yes you can easily get all your messages offline if you wish) not that VM are "moving" to gmail the web app (lol at the thought) - it will still be up to you what client you use when you use googles mail servers instead of virgins.
@ Simon Langley
"I was a satisfied Blueyonder customer and then they were taken over by Telewest. I was a satisfied Telewest customer then they were taken over by Virgin. "
Slightly confused aren't we? Telewests broadband was called "cableinet", they rebranded it as "blueyonder", they then merged into VirginMedia. Simple as that. I agree though, there is no doubt VM is a very badly organised company.
But for me, other than the fairly rubbish customer service (they managed to delete ALL my email accounts and mails in a house move and it took a week just to get them to reinstate one of them due to an "illegal" name) there is little downtime (on avg theres a few hours per year) and i do get the full broadband speed as advertised (last 2 being the only important things to me)... by reading some comments though, i think i may just be lucky :)
good point. The whole concept of the courts ruling on whether they think you were sexually aroused by a cartoon and therefore guilty of a crime is distinctly Kafkaesque. What evidence can "prove" what someone is thinking ? I'd like to have that technology...but of course I would use it only for good :)
"blah blah blah a portable book-shaped viewer...blah blah".
This silly patent was awarded in 2007 ? this is a joke right ? (sadly it isnt) Are American Zoos raising some extra capital by getting their primates to work for the patent office - it does rather seem that way.
Also, the Kindle - is it book-shaped ? its both thinner and bigger than your average book (which would be a paperback). You can argue that books come in all shapes and sizes - especially childrens books - sometimes they are triangular, circular etc... which leaves you with the realisation that they have patented "any shape" and got away with it.
exactly why did the BBC feel the need to pay for a real botnet, when the creation of one as a test would have served just as well and be an example of the ease of creation.
I'm looking forward to the next BBC documentary on Drink Driving, where a reseacher gets pissed and weaves dangerously through the streets.
"Was there a single reason they could advance as to why all new PCs should not come with optional porn filters on as default?"
Yes. Its a misunderstanding of technology to suggest such a thing, but the principle is sound.
A PC may or may not come with an OS. The OS is likely to support connecting to the internet via an ISP. If you are going to use a "porn filter" then surely it needs to be at the connection to the ISP level - it being your "gateway" to anything dodgy. There nothing wrong with the concept of some sort of expansive "white list" or "black list" used by optional DNS - if you don't want anything blocked, use the normal DNS. Only thing remaining is to use decent OS security to prevent users changing DNS addressing. Sorted. People who want to keep vulnerable people safe get to pick filtering - people who want unrestricted, get it. I would say the choice should always be given to the owner of the connection, the one who pays the ISP bills.
Its not rocket science is it ?
Of course the question of who maintains the white/black/mixed lists is a seperate issue and one that goes beyond individual ISPs in scope. But it would be nice if broadband purchasers, from schools to businesses to individuals, could choose an open standardised filtering system - or not :)
""The aim of this trial is to enhance the way we do this, limit the number of people who have their speeds moderated and ultimately improve the service we deliver to all our customers,"
hardly "all" customers. Perhaps the majority, but if Im a heavy downloader (and why shouldnt i be, its an "unlimited" service after all) and get restricted, i am hardly going to see my service improve am I ?
oh dear.
"The EP report also proposed to make providing online chat rooms and forums where pedophile activities take place a crime."
so by extension, all parks should be made illegal because pedophile activities take place there?...er...as said already "speaking to people" is not a crime in itself and i think perhaps it should remain that way. Harrassment, lewdness etc...are surely already crimes in a real or virtual environment ?
"anyone who does speak Gaelic is perfectly fluent in English too"
not true - certainly there are still places where the first language is Gaelic and the children first pick up English when they get to school - and from TV of course, so wouldn't it be better if there were more Gaelic channels :)
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