Posts by Pat O'Ban 32 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Aug 2007
Are you disappointed/surpised at the number that actually get passed on? The worst was my Apple email, which I could be 99% sure no other entity has, but since the mega-leak recently, I got so much spam that I changed it. Never had to do that with anyone else.
Whilst you do have the right to refuse a Smart meter, you can not refuse a replacement of an meter that is past it's end-of-life. At that point "your" meter will be replaced by a Smart meter. It may be a decade or more away in some cases, but for safety reasons there will be no choice, mainly because "dumb" meters will no longer part of the operator's inventory.
The worst customer experience I have had was with Virgin. They stalled and lied at every level of management. In the end I gave up pursuing my complaint (of causing significant damage to my property), as it was costing me too much in lost time on the phone. They have much faster broadband here than BT, which I would like, but I'd rather stick with BT (yes BT).
I was given a Poqet PC after I pulled an all-nighter fixing the server software of a well-known courier. I loved the fact it ran full MS-DOS on 2 AA batteries, so I could work on the train and so on, although I mostly used it as a terminal emulator to log on to Unix servers. The modem was bigger than the PC! A few years ago I gave it to the Computer Museum in Cambridge. I have no idea if they now have room to display it.
"rather than pursue natural-language query, he's trying to understand what eBay's 97 million registered users are looking for through greater analysis of the data they create while conducting their searches."
Google's Peter Norvig eloquently talks about the benefits of this approach in a 2004 podcast
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail382.html
Take a look at http://www.archive.org/about/about.php. They're still scanning, with the help of many libraries that have refused Googles terms, and some are using the kit that MS donated when it abandoned their scanning project. You may like to do a piece on this, they deserve the publicity. Happy New Year.
Sun bought StarOffice so it didn't have to pay license fees to Microsoft for Office/Windows. Prior to this, Sun employees had dual boot Solaris/Windows machines. Windows was not allowed to touch Sun's network, so to read a Word attachment, they had to download it using Solaris, then reboot to Windows.
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