Posts by Gulfie 749 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2007
I have a two word phrase for you - "tax avoidance". As a nation we should be working to provide efficient services at a competitive price, onshore. Not poor services at a cheaper (?) price offshore and allowing the companies contracted to conduct tax avoidance (I am not suggesting that Capita specifically are involved in tax avoidance).
Out of curiosity has the council even twigged that the people being put out of work will be the same new claimants turning up in their own job centers for unemployment and housing benefits (ironically using the systems they helped write/run)?
Are we therefore saying that as a nation it is a net financial gain to offshore our jobs and pay unemployment instead?
Down tools one and all, your job can go offshore and you will be paid to sit at home and watch Jeremy Kyle! Bring it on!
Ok where to start. You didn't mention the cloud music service.
Device manufacturers are now commiting to roll out updates more proactively, we saw a list including vodafone, samsung, htc... The basis is that all new devices will get all updates for at leadt 18 months.
Usb stuff is big, 3.1 supports lots of usb devices not just keyboards. I can plug my DSLR into my new Samsung galaxy tab, upload pics and stick them on the net.
I have my hands on the proto board and ok no bluetooth now but it is in development.
This is all good stuff and competition for in particular Apple. What's not to like?
If Sony were in the position you suggest they are, nobody in Legal or PR would have suggested spinning a 'firmware cracked, dev network hijacked' story as a 'massive data theft affecting every PSN user, possibly including credit card details'.
At least chesh420 (the handle of the original poster at reddit) has the decency to say, at the start and the finish of his post, that he is SPECULATING.
Having sniffed around for related information, all I can find is a bunch of speculation and no hard facts - i.e. independent verification by a white hatter of the claims that Rebug does indeed provide unfettered access.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you can't make these assertions without providing a source that independently confirms them.
Are Nintendo in denial? New portable gaming platform launches in very tough economic situation, wonders why people don't rush out to buy it... personally if I didn't have a smartphone already it would be cheaper to buy a good Android hanset and get some of those very cheap games on offer. Oh, and the device does everything a 3DS does and more except... well it isn't 3D is it, but then...
(tumbleweed)
Good luck with that then!
I host my Tomcat-based web site on my own hardware, in my own house, on my Zen internet connection. Zen gives me 8 fixed IP addresses and 50Gb of bandwidth for £25 a month (I think the packages may have changed a bit now). I use a Mac Mini as host running (primarily) Tomcat 6 and MySQL (I pay for email hosting elsewhere). I use the Mini because of it's super-low idle power consumption of < 15W.
The whole set-up cost < £700 in current money and will do for several years. When I looked at Amazon, once you're out of your free year, the basic cost is £50 a month - that's a new Mac Mini every year! I rarely have a power cut, but I have a cheap UPS with enough juice to keep things going for long enough that the mains will normally return before the batteries get critical. It's all quiet, and doesn't generate much heat.
I've been running this way for about three years, the set-up is super-reliable (Tomcat or the web site may crash, but the host just keeps on going...) and so far my average cost is probably around £15 a month, it gets cheaper every month and I have total freedom. My Mini is a 1.8GHz machine running Leopard, cost £450 when new, I also needed a clever modem/router to handle the multiple IP address routing, the UPS and batteries.
SDK version of Honeycomb has no hardware support at all, so most of the ports so far can't interact with any of the device hardware. Anybody who succeeds in bridging that gap will have a very unstable platform indeed because they're integrating "sight unseen" Honeycomb with very low level device driver code written for a different version of the OS. Good luck!
Its somewhat disappointing at this stage that the article chooses to stoke the fires rather than lay out the facts. It is clear that Honeycomb will be released once it is ready - this means capable of running on phones as well as tablets. Google have made it clear why there is a delay, and that it is just that - a delay, not an intention to never release the code. The Android model has been well established, including code blackouts, its just that this one is a little longer than we'd all like.
As for Skyhook, it would be more accurate to say that their complaint against Google is to do with the tactics it used to persuade phone manufactures to drop Skyhook's services from their phones. Nothing at all to do with the openness of Android or the delays to Honeycomb.
All in all a fairly confused and slightly misleading appraisal of the situation. 6 out of 10, must try harder.
Dear god let this new series be several factors of ten funnier than the three episodes they did a couple of years ago... either that, or let them never see the light of day.
If there's ever been a good demonstration of the maxim "quit while you're ahead" that series was it. Truly dire, and I speak as a big fan who watched from the very first episode.
Wikileaks could have been a good thing. Now the only story in town is about the man trying to control it all, and the more this drags on the less credibility he has.
Can't somebody have a quiet word and explain how foolish and paranoid he looks? I appreciate he needs to defend himself against (a) extradition to Sweden (b) Sexual assault claims (c) the Yanks but to keep making unsubstantiated claims against anyone who he thinks crosses him is starting to make him look, well, a bit unhinged...
In my experience the best way to avoid a repeat offence by a business is to take action against the perpetrator. A big fat fine - hit them where it hurts and they damn well won't do it again.
Fail, CPS - Fail.
I look forward to explaining my misunderstanding of IR35 if I'm ever found in breach, should go down a treat, that. After all I paid for advice, and I have the documentation to show I was acting within my understanding of the rules...
... with the sales pitch. Radio Shack are aiming high, shooting from the hip and generally having a blast. Good on them.
(tumbleweed)
OK, coat.
PS on the positive side I bet they make damn sure customer are satisfied. I know I would if I was giving away a free firearm with every purchase, don't want an irate and newly armed customer coming back into the shop to complain...
Call me boring but I don't see the point of rushing to put anything in this spare bandwidth. We have more TV channels than we know what to do with, most of the non-mainstream ones seem dedicated to repeats and shopping.
I used to work in student radio. Which was tremendous fun but nobody kidded themselves we were running a professional operation. I can't see how local community TV stations would be any better. They're also going to cost a lot to run, the content will be poor, the viewing figures likely to be lower than S4C... why?
I'm assuming what we have here is a push to make money, to sell the spectrum or at least rent it out. Can't we just accept that pushing more channels, especially as content can be more cheaply provided over the 'net, is a very short term viewpoint and apparently pointless.
If the government wants to promote community 'TV', surely it would be more forward-looking to make it 'net based (no costly transmitter infrastructure), and a basis to drive bandwidth improvements between the exchange and the end-user? At least then we could see that thought had been put in beyond 'make money' to 'drive to enhance infrastructure'.
Our national infrastructure seems to be stagnating. Nothing is done unless it can (a) somehow put money in the government coffers or (b) be done in such a way as to excessively line the pockets of big business. Power generation. Telecoms. Transportation. Water. Health. Education. Infrastructure problems can't be sorted quickly but there is no excuse for not developing and applying an intelligent long-term strategy to any of these areas.
I can see it now... I'm browsing the web and I get two adverts side by side. One is pushing sports cars because I've looked at too many BMW Z4 and Lotus Exige pictures, the other is from Google Bank saying "go on, you know you want one, we've already pre-approved your loan, credit checked you, and we also know you're not currently thinking of changing job..."
Well that's not exactly news in the root and flash community (hur hur), you take your life in your own hands when you do this. Devices that appear from the outside to be the same tend to get tweaked over their lifetime, especially in the most sensitive areas - such as radio firmware.
My rule of thumb is to not flash a phone using a set of files + instructions unless I can confirm that everything on the device I'm intending to flash - especially the radio firmware - is identical to the one used to create the instructions. Otherwise there is *no* guarantee of anything working but a greater probability of owning a £500 brick.
I don't mind a small one-off 'processing fee' but what people seem to forget is that an online purchase costs the vendor much less to fulfill than one made over the counter at a ticket office, or over the phone. The end-to-end process doesn't need any manual intervention: sales, fraud checking, payment, ticket printing, envelope stuffing - right up to the point the postman collects a bag of envelopes pre-sorted by postcode to get a better postage rate. It can all be done hands off (OK granted we need to load blank tickets, envelopes, ink).
The ones that really irritate me are those that make the charge 'per ticket' regardless of the method of payment, delivery, or place of purchase. All the big west end shows seem to rake, sorry, take this approach, it's just a way of being able to advertise one price and then cover all your admin costs by adding 'one last thing' as you check out.
The mark-up on a touted ticket is related to the underlying demand for the ticket, not its price. Using a Dutch auction doesn't tackle the supply/demand problem at all, if anything it just means that everybody pays more. Take Google I/O. Tickets would have sold for much more than the $450 Google asked for if a Dutch auction had been in place. And still there would have been a lively second hand market because of the ratio of demand to supply.
The solution to this problem must:
- make it easy and cheap for people to return tickets they can't use,
- provide a fair way of redistributing returned tickets, and
- make it hard for somebody not directly related to the original purchaser to use them.
This invariably leads us back to identity - personal or financial.
A fair percentage of kids are playing their parents (or their own) 18-rated FPS games. How scary will it have to get for them to hide behind the sofa? Or is some middle-class North London definition of scary I've not been told about yet?
Cybermen had to be the ultimate scare really, a humanoid form with no emotion. Sofa every time.
"We want to work with software developers and employers to help us deliver the new system" - so excuse me, but who exactly is being paid to do the systems development on this project? Will HMRC be releasing the code for public review? Will these developers be paid?
On the other hand, this kind of thing will seriously piss off at least one ex-colleague who works on the account. "Your code isn't good enough, we're calling in anybody who wants to try their hand..."
RSA the company must accept full responsibility for this breach. Their policies and systems failed to prevent it.
Start from the premise that all software is buggy, that from a security perspective (the number one perspective for a company like RSA) things are going to get through despite everybody's best endeavours.
If you have data you really, really don't want to be stolen the solution is simple. Physically isolate it from the company network. What's worse - some inconvenience in operating, or a complete and public trashing of a business model?
If systems need to be linked to facilitate day-to-day business then there are physical and logical measures that can be taken. Here's two: physically isolate the hardware holding sensitive information and provide only one network connection. Through a dedicated firewall (or two, or three). That only allows traffic when certain authorised users are logged in and actively using systems that need the data. Make it as hard as possible for traffic to access the server from just anywhere. Heck, install software to exchange data over serial links instead of a normal network, that'll slow a trojan down somewhat.
If RSA's business model has been trashed, it's because they did not properly risk assess. They should have started by saying "OK what happens when (not if) a virus gets established and we're not aware of it?" and build their data security from that point.
Security analysis fail. If I was deploying RSA 2-factor authentication I would now be running on the assumption that it is broken. I imagine RSA are frantically trying to find a way to quickly adapt their architecture to nullify the data breach, and then they will come clean. Too late... trust takes time to build and a moment to destroy.
Privacy. Offer equivalent services at a low, low price and guarantee complete data privacy (within the law). No processing of user data, no selling on of anything. No advertising.
Just your data, just your eyes, and your choice what man and dog gets to see.
Where to start. radioplayer.co.uk doesn't resolve to a web site while www.radioplayer.co.uk does. That's just sloppy. Then once you get in well yes it's OK - but I've read the FAQ and ironically for something that is supposed to be 'open' it actually feels very proprietary and closed.
I don't want a player foisted on me, especially one that doesn't officially support anything other than a desktop computer. I want open standards so that I can choose from a range of players that can all use the same data, and, oh I don't known, a .org site that provides the metadata for each station that provides a stream in the standard format.
I guess that's Tunein then. OK so a load of companies have spent a six figure sum of money to develop a web site/player that is eclipsed, on day one, by a number of other services. Way to go...
To be fair, the term Personal Computer wasn't common parlance when IBM trademarked it. There were a fair few hobby computers around, but nothing comparable to the PC and certainly nothing that the phrase Personal Computer was associated to.
I played with Research Machines and Newbrain hardware at the end of the 70's, they were Computers or Microcomputers, or Single Board Computers (oh heady days), nobody used the phrase Personal Computer. The IBM hardware showed up in '82, and the only obvious pre-reference I can find is the now defunct magazine Personal Computer World - and even then the machines they covered weren't referred to as Personal Computers.
I don't know if RIM have trademarked Blackberry. But I bet they have. Here's why it isn't a problem. Trademarks are recognised as applying in a context. A good example is Apple Computers and Apple Records. For many years the two have existed side by side because they operated in completely different fields, attempts by Apple Records to claim infringement (as Apple dropped Computers and got more into music sales) have failed, because confusion of the two brands is highly unlikely.
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