Posts by alain williams 2918 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
I agree that they are fantasists but that is completely missing the point. We have two friends (the reason for their friendship is completely irrelevant) who want to get together for a celebration. The S A government does not have the balls to stand up to the Chinese because there is a lot of Chinese investment going into S A.
They do not understand that each time that they give in to a bully they make it harder to stand up to them the next time.
From what I gather the objection is to the inclusion of certain historic data. A century ago different cities often had their own clocks that depended on their longitude and could be, say, 35 minutes out from the next big city. This sort of data has been collected by the astrologers since, to them, the exact time of your birth is important.
What I find odd is that the first thing that David Olson knew of it was a court order. Any reasonable person would have sent a letter first before taking action. This suggests that Astrolabe are either after extracting loads of money from *NIX people or that it is another MS initiative designed to nobble the opposition.
Good news indeed, does this mean that Tesco can try to overturn the High Court ruling that stopped it importing jeans from cheaper parts of Europe. The two cases seem somewhat at odds with each other.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2163561.stm
What annoys me is that big companies seem to be allowed to use globalisation to their benefit but individuals/small_business cannot.
The oldest song listed is Brown Eyed Girl of 1967. There are huge numbers of catchy songs from before then, eg: 'Land of hope and glory', 'Happy Birthday', 'Rudolph the red nose reindeer' (& similar), 'Hello Dolly', 'My old man's a dustman', lots of music hall stuff,... quite appart from being entirely English language biased!
I get annoyed with this sort of shock statistic, it is not meaningful unless compared to the other costs that we have in normal living. So how much does the average Brit spend on: food, fuel, housing, getting divorced, ... ? Unless we have a comparison we cannot judge if it might be excessive!
as a way of not continuously downloading the same image/... but getting a new version if it changes. So disabling ETAGs effectively makes the Internet run more slowly for you since your browser won't cache so well.
What I really dislike about this is the cross site tracking. I can accept a site remembering me while I visit it but don't want the next site to know anything about what I did elsewhere.
Most people don't need vast horsepower on a laptop, but the journalists who review these things seem obsessed with how fast they are. As long as it is fast enough to: browse the web; run a word processor & other such tasks then I would much rather have the extra battery life than useless speed.
Please can we have real people review these things in future.
I get the impression that politicians of all colours hate having to kow tow to the man & agree to help his business interests. They now smell blood and seem to be united enough to rid themselves of the Murdoch yoke. The country will be the better for it - as long as they don't allow someone else to wear the mantle.
I know that for many items there is a while to go, but what happens when you get something that is DRM encumbered and keep it for a few years ... once that song/book/film/... goes out of copyright you should be able to give it to all of your friends. But if it is DRM encumbered it may be technically hard to do so -- will whoever sold it to you give you the key to unlock it ? I doubt it.
I suspect that DRM means copyright in perpituity.
I thought that the purpose of a netbook was something light to carry round with a long battery life, so why a dual core cpu ? Also why a hard disk - a SD/flash of 16 or 32GB is more than enough ?
There seems to be the idea that you run your life off this sort of thing and not a portable thing to compliment what you have at home.
Can I get it without an OS so that I can install Ubuntu or Fedora ?
may well be willing to sign up to all sorts of EU inspired data protection agreements, but if uncle Sam come mentioning the 'patriot act' then they will all just fold and give them a copy.
If it is sensitive - don't let it near the USA.
Mind you, I don't know how much safer European providers really are ...
if the google sponsored SPDY extension to the HTTP protocol comes in. (This is the thing that is supposed to make a 50% improvement in downloading a web page.) SSL is integral to SPDY, ie google is trying to make everyone use SSL all the time -- the speed improvement will be a strong motivator for most people.
Google has published a full spec of the protocol, this means that others are capable of implementing it fully and compatably. If you choose to not use SPDY things will still work, albeit not so quickly.
The MS way is to extend a standard in a way that is not completely documented, then fail interoperation if the extensions are not used.
Note that it is still under development. I would hope/expect to see an RFC come out of this at some point.
''For prior art, you have to show that it was commonly performed before the patent filing date, not today.''
Prior art means that the technique was known before the filing date, no one needs to have actually done it. Actually in the USA it is 1 year before the filing date.
Both sides of a mirror on the same disk ...
Multi file tar backup to the rewind (not norewind) tape device, all except the last archive over written ...
Sysadmin working in the machine room at the weekend, felt a little cold so turned the air con off. On monday the servers were fried ...
Top sysadmin and deputy are the only ones who understand things. They fall in love, give 9 months notice of round world trip. Company starts looking for replacement three days before they leave ...
Raid 1 is backup isn't it ? Don't need anything else. Until a user error deletes a file. Cos it is raid 1 both copies go ...
Backup up to tape, read verify it, all the files seem to be there. Disks blow up, restore from tape. Why is the data 6 months old ? Because 6 months ago the tape write head failed, the y had been verifying old data ...
The ''news release'' of today claims that it is ''clear'' -- but not for me. I wrote to the ICO 2 weeks ago, they have not bothered to answer, so today I have asked them again -- I am not holding my breath while waiting for a reply.
What is worrying is that the ICO comments on their own web site now suggests that session cookies are covered by the new rules:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/current_topics/website_changes_pecr.aspx
Previously I understood they they were not as they were ''essential to the site operation''.
How on earth can we be expected to follow vague rules? Those responsible for setting them seem to be clueless; they have the ability to generate vast amounts of meaningless waffle while carefully avoiding any specifics. Are they waiting for the courts to provide the interpretation and then tell us that that is what they meant all along -- wallies :-(
So presumably the USA govt will thus be all to willing to extradite Obama to Pakistan when they decide that he ordered a killing mission into their sovereign territory withough first seeking agreement from the Pakistani government.
I also note that it is illegal for the president to order someone's death, but that the USA govt lawyers jumped backwards summersaults to say that this was OK.
The trouble with this sort of report is that they measure volume in terms of dollars. This weighs an expensive operating system more than a cheaper one and both more than one that is free. So how should you count: number of new installs, the amount of use (whatever that means), transactions, or ... ?
Distro watch works by counting visitorsOK for desktop operating systems, and puts Ubuntu at about 6 times RedHat: http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity
What about the operating systems that you dont see, the ones in your broadband router and other embedded systems ?
But Gartner is paid to do research by the big boys, the ones who sell operating systems, so it is natural that they will want to make their customers look good.
given the religious views of his followers this is probably one of the most damaging things to al Qaeda morale that they could find, guaranteed to turn the greatest number of his followers away from the cause.
This is why I take this announcement with a huge shovel full of salt. I am not saying that it was definitely not there but that if it wasn't then its existance is something that the USA analysts would/should invent to support their cause.
I have been looking to do this for some time. Internally my machines run IPv6, my machines out in the Internet also do, my ISP will (it was a major part of the reason for me changing ISP), but I can't find a sensibly priced ADSL modem that will do it. The best suggestion that I have received is to put OpenWRT on a Buffalo router ... some maybe time when I have a day or so to spare.
Until the hardware manufacturers step up to the plate - this won't happen. This ought not be an option, it should be a standard part of every new modem. However that would probably add 30p to the price, so it won't happen until customers scream for it, which won't happen until there is lots of content only reachable by IPv6, which won't happen until there are lots of potential customers who are able to access it over IPv6, which won't happen until ....
ABORT [[ Infinite recursion detected ]]
that they are examining Bin Laden's computer -- ''Guys, he has been encrypting his data, we are gonna need some powerful computers to decrypt it -- just to keep you safe you understand, we would not think of using this do decrypt friendly communications''.
It would be really interesting to hit Apple with a Data Subject Access Request - it would cost you £10 and Apple would have to give you a copy of all the data that it has on you within 40 days. That would show up if any of this data ends up on Apple's servers.
I don't think that Jobs would be too pleased with this, but it is a right that we have in the UK.
I don't own an iphone so I can't do it.
Any of you tried it ?
A few years ago at a (nameless shop) I was buying ink jet cartridges. There was a 10% offer if I bought 2. So I decided to stock up and bought 4 - so the shop assistant offered me a 20% discount!
I wonder how many people read agreements on web sites ? A year ago I got a new VAT number, this involved ticking a box to say that I had read the adjacent link. Only trouble was that the link was broken -- it took me 3/4 hour on the phone to report the fault abd be told where the agreement was. I doubt that it stopped people signing up.
