Posts by Nic Gibson 13 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
Hmmm. Yes, but my house is visible on Google Maps. You can't even find my town on Apple's satellite imagery. Even back in the early days of Google Maps the town existed (on the actual map it appears to be about 5miles east of the right place). Ho hum. Looking at London Bridge station I'd say Apple decided that 3 year old imagery would be just fine.
In various jobs over the last twenty years, I've been involved in hiring programmers several times. We advertised for a graduate role at one point. We received six hundred CVs for one job. Obviously, at that point you have to find some sort of winnowing method. We chose "proofread the covering letter" as our approach. Basic errors got rid of about 250 CVs that way. We did specify that writing skills and the ability communicate with clients were a priority for us. Ho hum.
I'm not sure about the casual dress issue. It does indicate to some extent how much importance the applicant places on the interview. On the other hand, I'm generally looking to employ someone based on their programming skills and their ability to interact with coworkers so it's not exactly an issue for me.
I met a chemical engineer the other day who told me that communications and writing skills are now part of many chemical engineering degrees. Is that the case with CS these days?
And there was I thinking that the most interesting phrase was "will assert that the rights of citizens come before those of criminals". Assuming El Reg have that straight, I assume the govt is planning to strip citizenship from those convicted of a criminal offense. I suppose that's one round the ruling that prisoners must get the vote.
Your Sony Reader does this thru an Adobe hack to the EPUB spec which won't be carried forward into newer versions. Most publishers have already dropped the trick used as it stops the EPUB working on various other environments (due to failing validity checks). The page numbering it displays without the publisher including the page mapping file is based on counting 1000 characters and calling it a page - nothing to do with physical pages
@Anton Ivanov - there are already citation rules for eBooks where no page numbering is visible - take a look at a recent Chicago Manual of Style.
Probably the biggest problem is that Amazon have announced this feature without actually bothering to tell us (the content creators and publishers) how to do it. Most Kindle files are generated from EPUBs these days. I don't hold out much hope that they've used the page location support in the EPUB spec but it would be nice.
OK, so the comments on the show were fairly offensive even though obviously intended to be funny (there must be a certain sense of humor there). Gotta say that reading these comments makes me feel that the Top Gear team are probably slightly less xenophobic than the average El Reg reader.
Given that we're a fairly new industry, isn't it likely that the average age will rise over time? Given a working life of, say, 20-65 and the growth of the IT industry over time, the odds are that the average age is going to rise over time unless people move out of the industry as they age.
Well, that would really depend on what you bought it for. Yeah, it would suck for surfing pr0n but I find Vodafone Broadband perfectly acceptable for reading mail and sshing to remote boxes.
Of course, I'm running osx leopard and Vodafone's config software makes a right pig's ear of that.
They did pretty well exactly that to me about six years ago - three years after I cancelled my orange account I received a letter from Moorcroft demanding three years' line rental. Orange denied that I'd ever closed my account, couldn't explain why they'd not billed me for three years and only backed off when I faxed them a copy of the letter they sent three years previously to confirm my account closure.
Funnily, I've never been a customer again
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