I live around 100 yard from Ripon Cathedral in England. It features every style of architecture from the 11th to 16th centuries, as it was extended and rebuilt in what was then the current style. The main tower has two rounded arches (north and west) and two pointed ones (east and south).
I believe it's the only catherdral in the UK to feature all such braches of architecture.
Well, I worked for a software house that developed a web-based collaboration program, which, due to very browser-centric Javascript coding, would only work on IE 4.0 (it was some time ago). I was responsible for testing and supporting this thing.
They released press releases to various UK trade magazines claiming various apects about this product, many of which were clearly not true. One was a list of client platforms that the product ran on, and this included various Windows, Mac and UNIX browser clients that had not been officially tested in any way. All were simply fabricated. Other claims about the product, such as the list of platforms that the server ran on, were equally false and untested, and due to a certain core third-party library only being available as a Windows DLL at the time, not possible to implement for at least another 6 months, if at all.
All the UK press printed the release notes without one even bothering to review the software.
I walked out of the company in disgust a few days later. They ceased trading a year or two later, after concentrating exclusively on the product at the expense of other core revenue streams.
Some commercial companies would rent pages of Oracle for display purposes, and these would have page numbers like these, inaccesible from most domestic handsets. I remember Dixons (a high street retailer, well known for their ignorant staff) having a custom page once that they'd show in their shops. I've no idea how they accessed it, though.
The Pace box is slower than some of the other DVB-T boxes out there, but even so getting to the right infomation can be tricky. Plus the football results don't seem to get updated whilst being viewed.
Re:Ceefax is cool but dated....
on
Ceefax Turns 30
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The performance is far faster on DVB-T, at least on the lastest decoder boxes. I was shocked when I saw the performance on a friends Sky box a few months ago.
I came across a commercial Windows application once that had a terrible memory leak. The developers of this app knew there was a leak, but hadn't or couldn't find it. It was some form of email system that cycled through all mailboxes at a regular interval running various tasks, and only for the users not currently logged in.
However in their wisdom one of the minor updates added a command line switch to reboot after a defined number of passes. They never introduced any other fixes, and documented this switch as the solution to this problem.
The reboot actually did a full reset via the BIOS, and not a full shutdown (it was back in the days of Windows 95 - due to network OS API issues it would not run on NT 3.x); hence often this reboot caused disk corruption.
Strike another one off the list - I worked for a company that developed a product called Vmail.
Probably no-one has a copy of it now. The mail server it ran on is just about defunct, and they didn't seem to sell many (if any) copies. In fact if I remember correctly we were running Windows 3.11 as a client OS at the time it was being developed.
At least in the UK, there are already phones out there that can play back audio from a memory card. Over a year ago I saw a collegue uploading MP3 files to a 64MB memory card which he then inserted into his phone, giving him enough music to listen to on his short train journey home. I'm not sure which make of phone it was, though.
The only difference is that this one will allow the playback of Apple's DRMed AAC files.
I've never had that problem with Fink myself, and I've run many different versions of XFree under Fink.
I wonder if you attempted to install during the re-organisation of the XFree86 virtual packages? During that period it was feasable that something could go wrong. Anyway monitoring the various Fink mailing lists and/or the Fink homepage would have given you a solution to this problem.
The copyright law being mentioned here is the one regarding mechanical copyrights, i.e. the rights to a physical recording. These rights in the UK apply 50 years after the end of the calendar year in which the recording was first issued, no matter where in the world that recording was first issued. In the case of a recording that has not been commercially issued, the mechanical copyright expires 50 years after the end of the calendar year in which the recording was made.
There are numerous record companies in Europe issuing compilations under these rules. For example last week I went looking for a Charlie Parker compilation, and I must have seen around 10 different such albums, all containing similar tracks, in one store alone. The packaging and annotation of these issues varied accordingly, from very shoddy (misspelt titles and no cover photograph) to a 40 page illustrated booklet with full session listings.
There are a few labels with a reputation for making quality album, some even better that the label with the full rights to such recordings - labels such as JSP for Blues, Proper for Jazz, Blues and Country, and Naxos Historical for Classical. The original label, though, have the advantage as the alternate takes usually expire many years later, as their original year of issue was usually many years after the initial recording.
I believe the law in Spain is slightly different, as there's a Spanish label called Definitive who have recently issued some recordings from 1954. These have appeared in some UK stores, even though their contents don't expire until the end of the year.
The copyright rules regarding music publishing expire 50 years after the composer deaths, so the composers' estates will still be getting paid.
Or if in my case, you had a CD drive but there was no driver in the then Linux kernel to support it. Installing meant using DOS to make copies of the base installation floppies. Then installing was done via my DOS partition, usually a set of packages at a time.
And then there was the time taken to uncompress the packages and install them. Mind-numingly slow on a 386SX-25 with a slow Conner hard drive. Eventually a kernel driver appeared for my CD-Rom, which had to be installed via a kernel patch. It took hours to recompile it!
The majority of IT departments in the UK are filled with ignorant buffoons without any regard for true security, as I've had to deal with a lot over the years. The "If It's Working At All, Then It's Working" mentality is a constant problem I had to deal with. Customers just wouldn't install critical patches on systems, no matter what the circumstances were. Even in one case someone failed to install a critical update bundled with the base OS media, and shipped placed in an envelope with the words "IMPORTANT - Please Install" printed on the outside in big red lettering.
There seems to be a great deal of technical ignorance in UK IT. I'm out of work at the moment, but actively looking, and I've not yet had an interview where the interviewer has submitted technical questions. Other worthless factors (psychometric tests) seem more important to these morons.
Anyway enough of my ranting; I'm off to shout at another recruitment consultant who refuses to handle my application as a database admin because I've not worked in the public utility sector, which seems to be more important that actually being able to admin the machine.
I once had to spend 2 days working in one company's machine room, transferring data from one fileserver to another via tape, in an office building a company had recently move to.
The machine room had been built for the previous occupants, a regional office of British Gas, and the room had handled a number of mainframes and other large equipment. The air conditioning system was still configured for this operation, even though the room only contained two medium sized Compaq Systempros, some hubs and a router.
It was close to freezing in that room. I couldn't leave the door open for more than 5 seconds, as the alarm system would start to go off.
Luckily the work was little more than waiting for the tape units to back up and verify, and therefore I had to spend little time in that room actually working.
Same with UK elections. As well as Parliament and the European Parliament, there can be up to 3 levels of local government to vote for (County Council, Borough Council, Parish Council), plus the possibility of the occasional referendum on local issues. Most of these require a single vote, but Parish Councils can have more candidates. Typically these are staggered so that different elections take place at different times, but I have known 3 take place on the same day.
Our solution? Different coloured paper for each ballot if there are multiple ones!
Pen? We use thick pencils, with fairly soft cores, attached to the polling booth by a long piece of string! No change of the ink drying up, and little chance of the pencil breaking.
I can't believe all the fuss that this has created.
The ITC, the body that oversees all commercial UK television output, has strict rules enforcing what can be said in a commercial. Apple's one, made in the US under where regulations are not as strict, simply transgressed these rules and got banned. In fact I was suprised to see it air in the UK last week making those claims. It will probably appear later with some modifications. Advertisments get amended all the time for such transgressions.
The ITC regualations (and those of the preceeding bodies the IBA and ITA) are fairly complicated, with some products and services banned outright and others strictly regulated. These rules keep changing with the times - for example it was only in the last few years that comparisions with specific competitor's products were allowed. The complaints were probably put in by others working within the advertising industry.
There are other UK bodies controlling other forms of advertising - press, cinema, radio, billboards etc, also with their own individual rules and regulations.
However the ability to read data directly off the drive using CD-DA mode, needed to rip data, appeared some time after the introduction of multi-session drives. I doubt that there are any CD-DA capable single-session drives out there, unless a drive can be made single-session via a jumper option.
At a previous employer, one of our customers had their main Netware server stolen during the working day.
Two men dressed as couriers wandered into the reception, said that had a faulty machine to pick up, were let into the machine room, and walked out with the 3000 file server.
It took the network admin over an hour to realise that the server had been taken - they had even logged a fault call with us stating that users were having problems accessing their data.
The UK emergency services used to use the FM band at one time, at around 98-100 MHz, but they moved elsewhere sometime in the mid 1980s when the FM band was opened up to more radio stations.
Slashdot Mirror
I live around 100 yard from Ripon Cathedral in England. It features every style of architecture from the 11th to 16th centuries, as it was extended and rebuilt in what was then the current style. The main tower has two rounded arches (north and west) and two pointed ones (east and south).
I believe it's the only catherdral in the UK to feature all such braches of architecture.
Well, I worked for a software house that developed a web-based collaboration program, which, due to very browser-centric Javascript coding, would only work on IE 4.0 (it was some time ago). I was responsible for testing and supporting this thing.
They released press releases to various UK trade magazines claiming various apects about this product, many of which were clearly not true. One was a list of client platforms that the product ran on, and this included various Windows, Mac and UNIX browser clients that had not been officially tested in any way. All were simply fabricated. Other claims about the product, such as the list of platforms that the server ran on, were equally false and untested, and due to a certain core third-party library only being available as a Windows DLL at the time, not possible to implement for at least another 6 months, if at all.
All the UK press printed the release notes without one even bothering to review the software.
I walked out of the company in disgust a few days later. They ceased trading a year or two later, after concentrating exclusively on the product at the expense of other core revenue streams.
Some commercial companies would rent pages of Oracle for display purposes, and these would have page numbers like these, inaccesible from most domestic handsets. I remember Dixons (a high street retailer, well known for their ignorant staff) having a custom page once that they'd show in their shops. I've no idea how they accessed it, though.
The Pace box is slower than some of the other DVB-T boxes out there, but even so getting to the right infomation can be tricky. Plus the football results don't seem to get updated whilst being viewed.
The performance is far faster on DVB-T, at least on the lastest decoder boxes. I was shocked when I saw the performance on a friends Sky box a few months ago.
I came across a commercial Windows application once that had a terrible memory leak. The developers of this app knew there was a leak, but hadn't or couldn't find it. It was some form of email system that cycled through all mailboxes at a regular interval running various tasks, and only for the users not currently logged in.
However in their wisdom one of the minor updates added a command line switch to reboot after a defined number of passes. They never introduced any other fixes, and documented this switch as the solution to this problem.
The reboot actually did a full reset via the BIOS, and not a full shutdown (it was back in the days of Windows 95 - due to network OS API issues it would not run on NT 3.x); hence often this reboot caused disk corruption.
Strike another one off the list - I worked for a company that developed a product called Vmail.
Probably no-one has a copy of it now. The mail server it ran on is just about defunct, and they didn't seem to sell many (if any) copies. In fact if I remember correctly we were running Windows 3.11 as a client OS at the time it was being developed.
Not a full 64-bit OS, at least at the moment.
At least in the UK, there are already phones out there that can play back audio from a memory card. Over a year ago I saw a collegue uploading MP3 files to a 64MB memory card which he then inserted into his phone, giving him enough music to listen to on his short train journey home. I'm not sure which make of phone it was, though.
The only difference is that this one will allow the playback of Apple's DRMed AAC files.
I've never had that problem with Fink myself, and I've run many different versions of XFree under Fink.
I wonder if you attempted to install during the re-organisation of the XFree86 virtual packages? During that period it was feasable that something could go wrong. Anyway monitoring the various Fink mailing lists and/or the Fink homepage would have given you a solution to this problem.
The copyright law being mentioned here is the one regarding mechanical copyrights, i.e. the rights to a physical recording. These rights in the UK apply 50 years after the end of the calendar year in which the recording was first issued, no matter where in the world that recording was first issued. In the case of a recording that has not been commercially issued, the mechanical copyright expires 50 years after the end of the calendar year in which the recording was made.
There are numerous record companies in Europe issuing compilations under these rules. For example last week I went looking for a Charlie Parker compilation, and I must have seen around 10 different such albums, all containing similar tracks, in one store alone. The packaging and annotation of these issues varied accordingly, from very shoddy (misspelt titles and no cover photograph) to a 40 page illustrated booklet with full session listings.
There are a few labels with a reputation for making quality album, some even better that the label with the full rights to such recordings - labels such as JSP for Blues, Proper for Jazz, Blues and Country, and Naxos Historical for Classical. The original label, though, have the advantage as the alternate takes usually expire many years later, as their original year of issue was usually many years after the initial recording.
I believe the law in Spain is slightly different, as there's a Spanish label called Definitive who have recently issued some recordings from 1954. These have appeared in some UK stores, even though their contents don't expire until the end of the year.
The copyright rules regarding music publishing expire 50 years after the composer deaths, so the composers' estates will still be getting paid.
Or if in my case, you had a CD drive but there was no driver in the then Linux kernel to support it. Installing meant using DOS to make copies of the base installation floppies. Then installing was done via my DOS partition, usually a set of packages at a time.
And then there was the time taken to uncompress the packages and install them. Mind-numingly slow on a 386SX-25 with a slow Conner hard drive. Eventually a kernel driver appeared for my CD-Rom, which had to be installed via a kernel patch. It took hours to recompile it!
The majority of IT departments in the UK are filled with ignorant buffoons without any regard for true security, as I've had to deal with a lot over the years. The "If It's Working At All, Then It's Working" mentality is a constant problem I had to deal with. Customers just wouldn't install critical patches on systems, no matter what the circumstances were. Even in one case someone failed to install a critical update bundled with the base OS media, and shipped placed in an envelope with the words "IMPORTANT - Please Install" printed on the outside in big red lettering.
There seems to be a great deal of technical ignorance in UK IT. I'm out of work at the moment, but actively looking, and I've not yet had an interview where the interviewer has submitted technical questions. Other worthless factors (psychometric tests) seem more important to these morons.
Anyway enough of my ranting; I'm off to shout at another recruitment consultant who refuses to handle my application as a database admin because I've not worked in the public utility sector, which seems to be more important that actually being able to admin the machine.
I once had to spend 2 days working in one company's machine room, transferring data from one fileserver to another via tape, in an office building a company had recently move to.
The machine room had been built for the previous occupants, a regional office of British Gas, and the room had handled a number of mainframes and other large equipment. The air conditioning system was still configured for this operation, even though the room only contained two medium sized Compaq Systempros, some hubs and a router.
It was close to freezing in that room. I couldn't leave the door open for more than 5 seconds, as the alarm system would start to go off.
Luckily the work was little more than waiting for the tape units to back up and verify, and therefore I had to spend little time in that room actually working.
Same with UK elections. As well as Parliament and the European Parliament, there can be up to 3 levels of local government to vote for (County Council, Borough Council, Parish Council), plus the possibility of the occasional referendum on local issues. Most of these require a single vote, but Parish Councils can have more candidates. Typically these are staggered so that different elections take place at different times, but I have known 3 take place on the same day.
Our solution? Different coloured paper for each ballot if there are multiple ones!
Pen? We use thick pencils, with fairly soft cores, attached to the polling booth by a long piece of string! No change of the ink drying up, and little chance of the pencil breaking.
I can't believe all the fuss that this has created.
The ITC, the body that oversees all commercial UK television output, has strict rules enforcing what can be said in a commercial. Apple's one, made in the US under where regulations are not as strict, simply transgressed these rules and got banned. In fact I was suprised to see it air in the UK last week making those claims. It will probably appear later with some modifications. Advertisments get amended all the time for such transgressions.
The ITC regualations (and those of the preceeding bodies the IBA and ITA) are fairly complicated, with some products and services banned outright and others strictly regulated. These rules keep changing with the times - for example it was only in the last few years that comparisions with specific competitor's products were allowed. The complaints were probably put in by others working within the advertising industry.
There are other UK bodies controlling other forms of advertising - press, cinema, radio, billboards etc, also with their own individual rules and regulations.
However the ability to read data directly off the drive using CD-DA mode, needed to rip data, appeared some time after the introduction of multi-session drives. I doubt that there are any CD-DA capable single-session drives out there, unless a drive can be made single-session via a jumper option.
Audio systems have got more complicated these days, with many able to read ISO-9660 formatted discs.
My DVD stereo system can handle MP3 and WMA CDs as well as Audio CDs, DVD-Video and DVD-Audio (and some other image related formats as well).
The odds on such a system not playing back the audio tracks and instead playing back the WMA content may be quite high!
Excatly. A past employer of mine put on training courses for Banyan VINES.
We had brochures made up by a PR company that used clip-art to publicise these courses, and all workstations were running LanManager instead.
At a previous employer, one of our customers had their main Netware server stolen during the working day.
Two men dressed as couriers wandered into the reception, said that had a faulty machine to pick up, were let into the machine room, and walked out with the 3000 file server.
It took the network admin over an hour to realise that the server had been taken - they had even logged a fault call with us stating that users were having problems accessing their data.
Just change it to a photo of the Iraqi minister for infomation.
The UK emergency services used to use the FM band at one time, at around 98-100 MHz, but they moved elsewhere sometime in the mid 1980s when the FM band was opened up to more radio stations.
Um, it's the UK, dipstick!
Err, not tried a pair of Sony MDR-EX71SL earbuds then?