Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1732 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"It is a case of being between a rock and a hard place for the MPC. Given the SE of the UK and London, in general, subsidise the rest of the economy of the UK and contain the largest part of the economy it makes sense to target rates for that area."
Why does SE England subsidise the rest of the UK? Because it earns more money. But could it be that the only reason they earn more money is that the economy revolves around them? If the economy in Newcastle or Manchester or Cardiff or Belfast or Glasgow or Inverness is constantly being battered by changes made to suit London and its neighbours, then other parts of the Union aren't going to be given the opportunity to pay their way.
Except that this subsidy stuff is a bit of a myth anyway. Which makes me wonder -- is SE England actually holding back the UK? Is it actually the *least* productive part, and if we controlled the economy to suit the rest of the country, might we all be richer...? (And we wouldn't all have to emigrate to London to look for a decent job.)
BBC Alba is a channel on a shoestring budget -- and at launch this was £14 million. If I recall correctly, that 14 million paid for: satellite bandwidth; listing on the Sky EPG; listing on the Freesat EPG; 2.5 hours of news content weekly; 2.5 hours of original non-news content weekly.
The budget has now increased slightly, but only in order to pay for the Freeview bandwidth. 5 million -- I suspect that this is calculated on the market rate of bandwidth costs alone, but who receives the bandwidth cash? Her Majesty's Chancellor of the Exchequer.
So it's a zero cost that they can claim is 5mill in "opportunity cost" (from not being able to sell the whitespace), but then it will increase the value of other whitespace licenses through scarcity, and besides, most whitespace use will be unlicensed networking because the regional patchwork of frequencies makes whitespace fairly impractical for anything other than a longer-range-than-usual WLAN.
Superman is a dinosaur, a relic of a more innocent age. He's a messiah in a cape and silly tights, a Big Brother Is Good figure who absolves us of responsibility for our own actions. His continued success is down to the same self-sustaining celebrity that sees talentless nobodies like the Kardashians able to generate such huge amounts of cash.
Film writing is a discipline that relies on tightly crafted stories, and Superman just doesn't give much leeway for good stories (at least, not on Earth, but Superman-in-space only works in the comics because you already know Superman from Earth, and cinema-goers would need a decent Earth-bound story or two to generate context). Alternatively, you could just commision Michael Bay and replace the plot with high-speed 3D combat/chase sequences. Superman racing against a pyroclastic flow to save a family of 4, in full 3D? After he saves the family, he could fly on, but the camera could stop and get engulfed in a cloud of flying rocks. That might confuse the audience long enough that they don't realise there's no plot until the Bluray version comes out....
The car allowance analogy is kind of flawed. At the start of this century, the car allowance morphed into a cost-savings dodge. It was used as an alternative to pay-rises post-tech-crash-and-9/11.
In the office I worked in at the time, it didn't change anything for the people who didn't already have a company car -- they would use their own car whenever practical beforehand, and claim mileage against the project, and they continued to do so. When impractical, they'd get alternative transport and charge it against the project. But that was in a Scottish office of a London-based company. Down at HQ, it led to the situation where people who would normally have used public transport to get about were told they had to use their cars, and it took them longer to get to many places. It reduced choice, thus reducing the ability to be flexible to specific needs, and thus hampered operational efficiency.
My last employer tauted the idea of a laptop allowance a year before I left. The general feeling among the employees on the discussion boards was that it was a Bad Idea.
Having personal responsibility is all well and good, but if we're all buying individually, the company loses economies of scale, and compatibility testing becomes impossible for even the most important core business software. Does a lowly helpdesk operative have to buy a second PC out of his own pocket if the ticket-logging software crashes on his machine?
Secondly, the coverage of support. For a mobile workforce, there is really only one place you would be able to guarantee UK-wide coverage: PC World. So in order to have somewhere to go whenever your PC breaks down, you would be squeezed into buying from one of the UK's most expensive suppliers, and getting your support from a company who happens to have an notably poor reputation for quality of support.
Until computers are reliable, consistent and 100% commoditised, companies will continue to need to buy direct and in bulk.
And lets face it -- that's never going to happen
Ok, so you can shift volume on a smartphone... IF you're one of the lucky 0.00001%
Have you seen how many also-rans there are in the smartphone world? There's a sea of casual games and it's easy to get lost in the crowd.
Also, what does Angry Birds have to do with what Carmack said? Casual games just don't need the sort of computing oomph sported by current consoles.
It currently says "Mediaspring", but there are several companies going by that name.
In interesting move for a URL squatter...
If NI want it free, they'll get it free through a simple domain name dispute. But they might just want to keep their heads down and but it for a couple of grand just to keep things quiet.
Oh yes, real consequences. The poor grunts at ground level are out on the street while the woman in charge of it all is still sitting in her executive post.
Oh yes, real consequences. News International gets an excuse to introduce redundancies and institute cost savings by running fewer newsrooms. There will almost certainly be a Sunday Sun in a couple of weeks' time, and it will save NI thousands.
There haven't been any consequences.
What we need to see is the editorial staff in prison.
We need very heavy fines, amounting to the entire profit of the paper for as long as they were hacking phones.
And we need a court order banning News International from *any* expansion for a substantial time period. No new newspapers, no new Sunday editions, and certainly no new acquisitions. For at least 5 years.
Anything less isn't punishment, because NI will still be up on the deal....
"Schools are actually teaching kids to write their talk out in condensed bullet point, 'PowerPoint', format *first*, and then extrapolate the details out *later*, 'on the fly', when they present the talk.
You only need half a brain to know that's backwards. "
Well, I'm doing an Open University degree, and I did another degree ten years ago, and I went to school in the 80s and 90s, and that's basically what I was always told to do -- they called it "writing a plan". The open secret is that no-one writes a plan and no-one writes pseudo-code, and if the teacher demands to see it, we write it *after* finishing the body of the assignment.
My current degree is in languages, and for our spoken assignments, we're asked to write in notes only, and there's no discussion about writing the full speech then summarising it in notes. But everyone on the course writes the full script -- another open secret.
So it would appear that PowerPoint is worse than I thought: it implements the worst flaws of the UK education system in software....
@AC,
Accounts are the very last place we should be seeing spreadsheets, because you are effectively writing a database.
You are coding a database:
A) without documentation
and
B) without any data constraints
and
C) without automated backup strategies.
Spreadsheets give users enough rope to hang themselves... from the moon.
AC,
You might want to get a hold of the essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" by Edward Tufte. He demonstrates how PowerPoint itself encourages certain behaviours on the part of the presenter.
If it's a hammer, it's a hammer that comes with the instruction: "also functions as a screwdriver. Hit screwhead several times to drive screws into wood, plastic, rubber or cows."
It's not a name, it's an identifier, and that distinction is more important than it may sound.
The initial plan was for a descriptive identifier -- jones.co.uk = UK Company called Jones.
In China, there's a problem because too many people have the same name. There aren't enough names in the world to go round, so we need identifiers (eg National Insurance number) for official purposes.
Lots and lots of companies have the same "name", so treating URLs as names causes a massive problem.
The article points out the high volume of single-word internal names that leak out of corporate LANs and onto the internet every day.
A significant part of the problem (not explicitly mentioned in the article) will be corporate laptops, because a lot of software isn't set up to check whether it's on your WAN or not before attempting to do anything -- it just fires off a request to the server and sees if it gets a response.
While the most common examples won't be sold, that doesn't prevent more targetted attacks.
Imagine you're in a major crime syndicate and you find out that a major global bank uses the name "piggybank" for its main accounts server. What do you do next? You set up a dummy financial services company called "PiggyBank Global Services" and just harvest all the data you can, then pass it on to your black hat IT department who start transferring funds out. And you just so happen to have a financial services company set up and ready to launder that cash. A defaulted loan here, an insurance payout there et voilà, you're several million better off.
It's a daft idea, but an inequitable one.
One internet for the rich, with any name you choose, and another for us plebs. It favours the big companies over small ones, the haves over the have nots. It also reaches into the future and sticks its fingers up at nations not yet in existence, because what's going to be left for them as their national TLDs?
There's already an IR scheme in use: some cinemas now have IR LEDs beside or above the screen. This serves the double purpose of reducing image clarity and messing with active autofocus.
IR has the side effect of increasing the temperature of whatever it hits, though, so it degrades the experience for the viewer....
Acid comes in "tabs" -- little bits of paper that have been steeped in the drug. These tabs are produced in sheets, and so individual doses are marked out with a little design. Strawberries are a traditional favourite -- Strawberry Fields Forever is thought to refer to a sheet with a grid of strawberries on it. Imagination not required. The "acid man" smiley was a favourite during the acid house movement, but while people often claim the symbol means acid, that's usually denied by the people who were there, saying that the design only ended up on tabs *after* it became popular.
So no, "tab" is not short for "tablet".
But actually, in traditional pharmacology, "pills" and "tablets" were different. A pill is a ball of sugar and an active ingredient, and the pharmacist would roll it on a slab. A tablet was made by placing a similar mixture in a tray and then punching out oblong lozenges. This I learned on the Antiques Roadshow -- I kid you not! Someone brought in a fully-equipped "apothecary's bureau" and got given the full history.
Modern drugs are generally produced by squirting stuff into little molds, so the distinction is irrelevant now
The problem is that even if you don't consider porn "art", it certainly falls into the category of "cultural artefact", and as such can transmit attitudes.
The problem is, it's not just "porn" that objectifies women, but even the "porn lite" in mainstream cinema. Most films play their rape scenes for titillation, and all too often the women make rather pleasant squealy noises. Compare with the French film "Irreversible", which has (by design) the most distressing rape scene ever to get a general cinema release, where Monica Belluci is screaming and wailing in a very upsetting manner.
So it's hard to make a conclusion from the figures. They don't say conclusively that "porn is good" -- it could simply be that once porn is allowed, you need to saturate the market; it could be that porn moulds the fantasies and desires that lead to sexual violent, and that once this genie is out of the bottle, you've got to keep feeding the beast to make sure it doesn't dine on the villagers....
"Whe I needed a permit in Malta the DVLA faxed back their response to the query the same day. Some countries are not as helpful. Having said that the fax did have a typo on it so my Maltese ticket had an extra consonant in my surname."
Anonymous Choward?
Anonymous Cowhard?
Anonymous Cowarde?
"Anyone else a little concerned that they only spotted this coming our way a few days ago?
...
You don't have to think hard what would've happened if it was a little bigger..."
No, you don't, do you.
If it was a little bit bigger, if would have been spotted a little bit earlier. This cow is small, those ones are FAR AWAY,
So no, you don't have to "think hard". Maybe just "thinking" would be enough...
"Murdoch's paywall isn't a paywall. It's a vain hope that everyone's browsers comform to Murdoch's rules. Guess what? They don't!"
Look, some of us have been saying that DRM is a bad thing because it generally degrades the product and breaks it on non-standard systems.
What NI have done is produce a very simple DRM that doesn't
A) install a rootkit
or
B) degrade the quality of the end-product by "watermarking"
or
C) degrade the quality of the end-product by lossy compression
or
D) stop us using the product on anything other than their platform of choice.
We ask the music biz to trust us to stick by the rules (or enough of us that they make money anyway) and we get a decent product as an end result.
Now while I wouldn't call Murdoch's output a "decent product", is it too much to accept that as DRM schemes go, this isn't really that bad or unfair?
The paywall isn't about web-browsers, it's about slabfondlers and phone fiddlers. Free internet access to the news was a threat to the marketability of subscription-based apps for the iPhone when the iPhone was really taking off, hence Murdoch killing it.
The standalone app may not be making much money yet, but once the Apple Newstand opens and magazine and newspapers are easier to find, the money's going to start coming in, and soon enough magazines and newspapers will turn a profit off the casual (virtual) coin.
The sad part is that the Reg will probably want in on the action... :-(
There's a difference between
1) throwing your hands up in righteous indignation and calling someone unfit for public office
and
2) childish playground insults.
Childish playground insults allow you to be stereotyped as being... well... childish. It also suggests you have no valid argument to offer.
So while a small minority pro-gay activists are all congratulating each other on dealing a bloody blow against right-wing, neo-conservative fascism, they're really only fuelling the attacks against themselves.
Clever. Yeah, clever.
Well, why not have people stand up as witnesses for each other?
I mean, many self-publishers will know each other through writers' groups, conventions etc. Any complaints against a crooked publisher would be reflected in the writer's trust rating, which would make it impossible to recommend further friends and in extreme cases could result in loss of chart positions or expulsion from Kindle entirely.
Well sadly the spam problem doesn't extend simply to e-books, but also the paper book market.
Take this book for example:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Illustrated-Dictionary-Specially-Beginners-Including/dp/1152659359/ref=sr_1_23?ie=UTF8&qid=1308584815&sr=8-23
They've taken the OCRed version of a bilingual dictionary off archive.org and made it a print-on-demand edition.
OCR doesn't cope with dictionaries at the best of times, as they're peppered with abbreviation and there's barely a single complete sentence in them.
Couple that with a relatively minor language like Gaelic, which hasn't received a great deal of attention from the OCR side of things, and you have the recipe for a typographical car-wreck.
So, yeah, paperbacks and hardbacks are in the same situation....
Yes, I agree that most of that animation is noticeably animation, and not real video. I'd also like suggest that the animation on that short clip is really absolute state-of-the-art to the point that it is so expensive that you couldn't produce a whole animated film/series at that quality without making a mind-blowing loss.
He was playing *while walking* and his heart rate was above resting. That's... normal.
He played it in a car, and felt sick. Ohmygodsomebodythinkofthechildren -- carsickness... in a car! The 3DS is 3v1l incarnate!
And what's this nonsense about a sustained heartrate of 85 causing circulatory problems? My heart rate never drops below 120 during a sustained workout (including half-day cycle rides). This is to be expected.
I think the good^H^H^H^Hcrap doctor is confusing cause and effect. People with certain cardiovascular and/or circulatory problems may have high heartrates, but having a high heart rate at a given time doesn't indicate cardiovascular or circulatory problems.
@AC
" RSA terminology has a lot to answer for here - tell people to think of a PIN and they immediately think 4-digit number, when in fact it can be alpha numeric and longer than 4 digits - they used the wrong words, they should have called it 'password' which is what it is. "
It's not just that -- long-term SecurID users will remember the limit credit-card sized SecurID tokens with an onboard keypad for PIN entry, and the PINs were therefore restricted to 4-digit numerical PINs.
Even when overhauling technology, there's an attempt to paint it as the same thing -- RSA presumably didn't want to scare people off by changing the process too much and making it seem like something new....
