Posts by Peter Galbavy 374 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Feb 2010
"If I have seen further is was by standing on the shoulders of giants." - How perfectly apt for my feelings today.
I actually shed a tear when the news sunk in earlier. A great man and a great contributor to our world. Without him much of what we do - I mean those of us reading El Reg - would not be doing it. Simple as that.
... are that if you do something wrong, nothing happens in the uncivil service.
Unless the "lessons learnt" are: "You make a serious mistake with people's personal information = you get fired" then there will be no reason for these complete incompetent fuckwits to change their behaviour.
As a happy Dell Streak user I am happy to see someone continuing this size phone. Good to see the screen density growing, just hoping it can be charged using a non proprietary connector - my only real hardware bugbear on the Streak.
Might just become the replacement once the initial premium price drops.
I have had a Streak since November last year and it's been great. I am not a small lad, so having a big screen is fine for fat fingers and bad eyesight. Upgrades have been a mess, but luckily there is enough of a community out there to get updates "fixed" to a point that the Dell releases are foced to work.
As for portability, fits fine in a shirt pocket, even if it's a little tall in some. It it very thin and so doesn't feel bulky even in the plastic case.
I might keep an eye out for a spare - since I am so used to it.
Well, to go back to basics, if insurers based their premiums on micro-grained risk assessment so that they could get an accurate risk for individuals that would wipe out the need for insurance - because all you would be doing is paying into a savings account against a future event PLUS a hefty profit to the insurer to manage it. Which they do anyway.
Surely, in an idealised world, for a particular class of events all premiums should be identical and the risk spread evenly across the board. People who took the piss (i.e. acted recklessly) would fall afoul of the small print and the rest would have a shared pot to actually benefit from when things went wrong ?
Other things which could be useful to help us pick a "good" insurer (no such thing): Require insurers to publish audited figures of claims - how many amde and how much for, how many refused, average and std dev of processing times, complaints (that's already published I think) and so on.
What bothers me is that companies are allowed to submit patents for using the functionality of a standard in a way which that standard is meant to be used. See the many XML patents (mainly in the US), this one in the story - the GSM specs have included prioritisation of calls since day 1 - and so on. It's neither novel nor inventive.
While the academics and the clever folk put lots of work into developing new languages and the frameworks/ecosystems they live in, to me the user's of these new systems always seem to go through a very specific cycle; Namely, the "wannabes" rush to every new thing in the hope that it will contain the secret that prevents them from having to learn, think and do.
It's the new Philosopher's Stone. The kiddies all think "this will make my code into gold!! ... nope, sorry. Education, experience, hard work. The language is a tool not a magic rock.
As per Richard P's first post, none of the media - inc the normally well informed Reg - pick up that having high termination charges which effectively cancel out as the networks cross-charge each other means that they get to charge customers more for calls while locking out competition, like 3, because a new entrant is more likely to make calls to other networks than terminate calls from them - at least until the business develops. Then they become part oft the cartel and voila!
"Hello and blessings on you,
My name is Frederick Smith of the FBI and you computer has been identified as one which is under attach but we have stopped it! To fully clean your computer for the noxious virus please install the software from this site: ..."
Apologies for not speaking 419 fluently.
Oh dear.
like why do any of these top tier companies need to farm out their "opt-in" spam to an external company? what's so difficult about running your own mail gateways and keeping your customer data secure - well, more secure anyway through the simple expedient of not shipping it off site en-masse ?
I got to page 4 of the comments, so excuse me if this is a repeat of someone else...
In the UK, the HSE site has a good page: http://www.hse.gov.uk/radiation/ionising/radon.htm
I like this quote: "Radon is now recognised to be the second largest cause of lung cancer in the UK after smoking. Lung cancer is also the biggest cause of cancer related death in the UK and only 5% of all lung cancers are curable."
Ban granite now.
The *real* reason for not handing over the data for fear of publication and reuse is that the paying consumer will get more information in helping make informed choices about who to hand over money to.
Imagine having access to an independent coverage map to help you decide if you can move from one crappy network to another in the four common locations you spend time in (office, home, pub, girlfriend ... whatever) ?
It's not really in the network operators interest to reveal how poor they actually are. Especially with the Nothing Nowhere consolidation going on...
Well, the latest B&Q own label 21W CFLs I bought are actually quite good - 3 seconds to full light and they are quite bright.
That said, it's all a con anyway - just a way for the patent holders to push the public domain traditional bulb out the picture. Why, when the concern is about 100W bulbs when a "normal" installation of GU10 halogens in a room use maybe 300W ?
I assume that the study was actualy a confidential one sponsored by a leading (insert name here) global brand company that wanted to make sure that 11 years olds were just as wide eyed and gullible as before the internet - to make sure their marketing will continue working.
I'd much rather listen to what VJ has to say over the self-promoting marketing folk like Cerf. The real 'net was built by a small handful of people and this guy is one of those. Notice how quiet most real engineers and inventors are ? It's a pleasant suprise to see him pop-up again quite so publicly.
The problem is the differences between requirements and expectations.
Today's "computer" courses, from the primary school all the way up, are for learning to use them - the driving lesson approach, if you like. That's great, but they are not what the industry needs.
The need is for people who can build, maintain and fix the "cars" - the engineers, if you like - and those courses are simply not taught on a formal level. Even in the late 80s, doing a BSc in "Computer & Communications Systems", most of us were self-taught through tinkering and BBS life.
Like that story linked in the Daill Snail and the comment by John Mills, until there is official back pressure and/or court cases forcing schools and other self-serving institutions (or is that institutions run by self-serving agenda driven twats ?) to not over react and to be "sensible" nothing will change.
This is just a tactic by the media corporate interests to distract people from the underlying problems of surrendering all control of your purchases to their whim. When I buy a CD/DVD/Bluray I get some media and it last for a long time. I have some CDs that have succumbed to bit rot, but hey. If I surrender my media interests to Microsoft/Apple/Sony/whoever then they get to choose when and if I am allowed to access it.
What happens when a company dies ? When they decide you are a security risk (see Microsoft blocking XBox360 owners they meely suspect of hacking their consoles) without legal recourse ?
Without adequate legal safeguards in place, this is a dangerous path of conflict of interest to allow these global monopolies to walk down...
Surely everyone has by now worked out that the whole push behind GMO is not the publicly touted reasons of better yield, disease resistance etc. but rather the intellectual property approach, the patent portfolios and the need to buy the next crops seed direct from Monsanto and their friends.
So this proposal is even less likely to get any traction (pardon the pun) from the agro interests already in place. In fact I expect quite a lot of lobbying against.
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