Set James Dyson on the case. Combine a toilet with a vacuum cleaner and some sort of composting facility. Actually this sounds rather like an aeroplane toilet. Either way use suction to "flush" the toilet down pipes into some sort of facility that composts the excrement.
The thing I like about landlines, at least in the UK, is that they just work. They don't crash, they don't have silly ringtones, they don't have network unavailable messages (unless there is a bomb or something), you don't have to reboot your phone. It is one of the few bits of technology that just works year in year out.
Sites that suffer the/. effect do so because they are not expecting the traffic. In the same way that very large enterprise websites that suddenly release XYZ bit of software for download by the marketing department who never told the IT department also suffer a similar/. effect. It isn't always the language or the programmer or the scaleability of the website. It all depends on what level of traffic is expected.
As a Brit I find it hard to understand how the US has managed to end up with such a backward mobile phone infrastructure. Here in the UK I find it more difficult to find a place with no reception than to find a place with reception and the opposite appears to be true in the US. I would guess that most phones are aimed at the 2.5G GSM market because that is where most phones are being sold.
If I were in any UK highstreet this Saturday and pointed at a random person I can almost guarantee they would have a GSM mobile on them. I know of very very few people who don't have a mobile of some description. Secondly alot of those people will change their phone once a year if they need to or not. Ever since '98 when I became a mobile user I have changed my phone each year usually because it is subsidised upgrades by my contract provider.
While the UK is very densely populated and has relatively little land mass I found that even while driving across France earlier this year there was almost constant service including in the most rural locations. France is not what you would describe as having a dense population.
I believe that in the US the poor mobile infrastructure is the fault of both the poor regulation of the mobile market and the service providers who are unwilling to cover the entire US in a useable service.
Doesn't matter. By law any vehicle in the UK has to display a vehicle registration plate that isn't covered in mud or obscured by other methods. If it is covered in mud you are expected to clean it.
IIRC those sorts of things became illegal across the UK when we first started taking pictures of vehicle registration plates for the purposes of identifying speeding drivers.
Do you *REALLY* need a backup of your.mp3 collection?! Probably not...
Agreed. I can get away with backing up all my personal data and settings in about 4CD's at the moment. House insurance is there to replace CD collections that I have converted into mp3 (although re-encoding them would be 'fun'), there to replace any propriatory software I may have bought. In a home environment I do not need the machine to recover from data loss in a short amount of time - I am quite happy to reinstall operating systems and applications when I am at home. It is only ever the personal data that I worry about. The stuff that really can not be replaced. Things like digital images I have taken with my digicam, audio I have created, documents I have written.
Dan.
Yea, I have actually heard the same for both O2 and Vodaphone phones. I have been on contract for the past 3 years and upgrade once a year anyway. If I were to change to a different provider I would probably change phones at the same time so it isn't that much of an issue for me.
Assuming that the phone you buy is a dual or tri band phone then locking the phone to a specific network is done to stop people from buying a pay-as-you-go phone on network A and then using a sim card from network B which has a cheeper tariff.
All the mobile phones sold in the UK that are either pay-as-you-go or on a monthly contract are subsidised by the phone company. You can see this by asking about the phone only cost (between £200 and £400) when the phone, when bought with a contract, may cost you anything between £0 and £150.
Almost all Nokia phones can be unlocked using a data cable and some software. I would imagine that other brands of phone can also be unlocked.
Before we launch into the conspiracy theory (government/cable company control of what you think etc...) I would just like to say that the UK has had this kind of interactive box for a while now... and they work really well. Both cable and satellite users have a digital set top box that not only allows them to watch TV but also interact with the programming. It lets them view different camera feeds, participate in polls and quizzes, interactive TV schedules that can be linked to hard disk recording, not to mention the ease of buying stuff with those home shopping channels. Just pressing the red button the remote control when watching a news program brings up a wealth of background information.
Granted the boxes are provided by the cable or satellite company, and yes they do decide what you get to view... but hasn't this always been the way with television?
You can't run two phones on the same account by giving them the same IMEI number. You would need two SIM cards and get the phone company to link them. The SIM card controls the billing and stuff (indirectly) and if you put the SIM card from one phone into another then you can use the second phone on your account, you just can't use the first phone at the same time because you only have one SIM. The IMEI number is just a serial number for the phone, not the SIM card.
"A trade mark is any sign which can distinguish the goods and services of one trader from those of another. A sign includes, for example, words, logos, pictures, or a combination of these." - http://www.patent.gov.uk/tm/definition.htm - "distinctive for the goods/services for which registration is sought".
Therefore MegaSoft can be used by both a company selling rather limp plastic and also a company selling computer software. Not only that but you could have a company in France called MegaSoft selling computer software and a totally different company in Japan also called MegaSoft selling computer software. There are exceptions, under UK law, for example you couldn't register Pepsi if you are a carpet salesman because Pepsi is already, in the eyes of the public, associated with a specific product.
I guess that a solution would be to have a.tm top level and then have specialisation under that for specific countries, and then within a country if someone already had your name registered for a different product or service then tough luck!
Microsoft would have microsoft.*.tm because they are pretty much globally known, where * is any country code.
boots.uk.tm because, as far as i know, everyone in the uk will associate boots with the chemist company but i don't think they have much of a global presence.
As would I, however as a lazy bastard I also like the concept that a website written in flash looks exactily the same in any browser with the flash plugin. However, I neither use flash or want to - it was just an example.
As a lazy developer I am quite happy to be totally standards complient - however I also have to take into account that users still need to see the sites I make and, currently, the two are still divergent goals without putting in alot of work and using client detection and other goodies.
What I really want to see is everyone using the standards compliant browser of their choice where the browser really does stick to the standard. Alot are coming close and some are very very very close (abet still putting their own propriatory stuff in) however we now need to convince the user base to drop things like NS4 which just do my head in on a daily basis.
Thats fantastic. I also looked at the source just before posting an earlier comment. HA HA.
On a serious note... do we really have to use HTML 3.2 in order to be almost totally cross browser complient and even then resort to small hacks to make it look nice? It makes me wonder if Macromedia were on to a good thing with Flash that, as long as you have a plugin, looks pretty much the same on everyones screen? Granted I could easily live without Flash;)
While your post is quite blatent flame bait i find myself nodding along. I claim to be a web developer however usually end up doing the job of graphics artist (which i stink at), designer (which i also stink at), developer (no comment) at the same time. I find it increasingly hard to marry my geeky side (wanting to be standards complient) with my lazy side (wishing I could go down the pub). It is *very* difficult to produce a standards complient site without either locking out NS4 or providing client detection and alternate html/style sheets based on the numerous platforms and browsers available.
Most standards complient (I usually mean XHTML 1.0 Transitional or Strict) sites will, with minimal tweeking, work very well in IE5+, NS6+, Mozilla, and Opera - however NS4 just makes me want to give up and become a marketing droid at points. I often end up hacking around a site that started out being totally standards complient to work around $browsers $bug.
While i can't agree that W3C is a joke I do feel that they are often hitting their heads against a brick wall when it comes to getting users to upgrade to a fairly standards compliant browser.
Also, I found that it isn't just MS that drops in propriatory things, have a look at:
Assumption: people get to choose their security level and are running a palladium system.
1.) Bill sends Bob a file called seegirlnude.jpg.exe 2.) Bob tries to run seegirlnude.jpg.exe 3.) Computer goes "NNK" because seegirlnude.jpg.exe isn't trusted 4.) Bob really wants to see the nude girl so he right clicks on seegirlnude.jpg.exe and tells the computer it is now trusted because earler in the day Bill sent Bob accountsprogram.exe which was untrusted BUT Bob phoned Bill and Bill said it was fine - same as the day/week/month before. 5.) Bob just got himself a virus!
I agree, it is difficult for a standard home user to tell if an advert came from the origional site or from Gator. Who are they likely to complain to even if they have some idea what the Gator software does? It is likely to complain to the website owner. Same goes for if the Gator software were to change some of the content of an article on a news site and not just adverts without showing that a change has taken place, it would be the news site that would have to spend time and therefore money when a disgruntled viewer goes and complains. While I agree that when a website leaves a server and arrives at the users desktop the user can do (within the bounds of law) whatever they like to it - however I do not beleave that a standard home user is aware, even if they are told, of what the Gator software does.
Oh, but isn't Fred going to get a tad pissed off like some of the people posting here because he is not getting all the bandwidth that his connection to the community network can provide?:)
What happens when Fred round the corner plus all the people in his house start leeching so much that they use all the bandwidth on your community fat pipe? Do you:
a) change him a higher monthly fee because he is using more bandwidth than Jim?
b) bandwidth limit Fred so that when he starts leeching his transfers get slower and slower to the point where he would be better off using a modem?
c) cut him off?
d) none of the above because, lets face it, he has a right to use all the bandwidth. doesn't he?
Through the cunning use of http://www.nic.uk I have determined that theregister.co.uk has been detagged:
http://www.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=thereg is ter.co.uk
.co.uk domains are linked to an isp by tags. the isp then sets things like the name servers and stuff. Detagging happens when you no longer want a domain, your isp is crap, or there is some sort of contract/legal dispute going on. Lets hope it was just the isp being crap.
I look forwarding to reading theregister's first article once their site goes live again. Last time they had problems (with a router iirc) the article about it was the best laugh i had in ages (sad i know).
--dan
ps. the parent may be offtopic but this post is not offtopic as a reply to its parent:o)
Slashdot Mirror
Set James Dyson on the case. Combine a toilet with a vacuum cleaner and some sort of composting facility. Actually this sounds rather like an aeroplane toilet. Either way use suction to "flush" the toilet down pipes into some sort of facility that composts the excrement.
The thing I like about landlines, at least in the UK, is that they just work. They don't crash, they don't have silly ringtones, they don't have network unavailable messages (unless there is a bomb or something), you don't have to reboot your phone. It is one of the few bits of technology that just works year in year out.
Sites that suffer the /. effect do so because they are not expecting the traffic. In the same way that very large enterprise websites that suddenly release XYZ bit of software for download by the marketing department who never told the IT department also suffer a similar /. effect. It isn't always the language or the programmer or the scaleability of the website. It all depends on what level of traffic is expected.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/ cmbills/045/2006045.htm
As a Brit I find it hard to understand how the US has managed to end up with such a backward mobile phone infrastructure. Here in the UK I find it more difficult to find a place with no reception than to find a place with reception and the opposite appears to be true in the US. I would guess that most phones are aimed at the 2.5G GSM market because that is where most phones are being sold.
If I were in any UK highstreet this Saturday and pointed at a random person I can almost guarantee they would have a GSM mobile on them. I know of very very few people who don't have a mobile of some description. Secondly alot of those people will change their phone once a year if they need to or not. Ever since '98 when I became a mobile user I have changed my phone each year usually because it is subsidised upgrades by my contract provider.
While the UK is very densely populated and has relatively little land mass I found that even while driving across France earlier this year there was almost constant service including in the most rural locations. France is not what you would describe as having a dense population.
I believe that in the US the poor mobile infrastructure is the fault of both the poor regulation of the mobile market and the service providers who are unwilling to cover the entire US in a useable service.
Doesn't matter. By law any vehicle in the UK has to display a vehicle registration plate that isn't covered in mud or obscured by other methods. If it is covered in mud you are expected to clean it.
--dan
IIRC those sorts of things became illegal across the UK when we first started taking pictures of vehicle registration plates for the purposes of identifying speeding drivers.
Yea, I have actually heard the same for both O2 and Vodaphone phones. I have been on contract for the past 3 years and upgrade once a year anyway. If I were to change to a different provider I would probably change phones at the same time so it isn't that much of an issue for me.
--dan
In the UK:
Assuming that the phone you buy is a dual or tri band phone then locking the phone to a specific network is done to stop people from buying a pay-as-you-go phone on network A and then using a sim card from network B which has a cheeper tariff.
All the mobile phones sold in the UK that are either pay-as-you-go or on a monthly contract are subsidised by the phone company. You can see this by asking about the phone only cost (between £200 and £400) when the phone, when bought with a contract, may cost you anything between £0 and £150.
Almost all Nokia phones can be unlocked using a data cable and some software. I would imagine that other brands of phone can also be unlocked.
Anyway, that is why it is done in the UK.
--dan
Before we launch into the conspiracy theory (government/cable company control of what you think etc...) I would just like to say that the UK has had this kind of interactive box for a while now... and they work really well. Both cable and satellite users have a digital set top box that not only allows them to watch TV but also interact with the programming. It lets them view different camera feeds, participate in polls and quizzes, interactive TV schedules that can be linked to hard disk recording, not to mention the ease of buying stuff with those home shopping channels. Just pressing the red button the remote control when watching a news program brings up a wealth of background information.
Granted the boxes are provided by the cable or satellite company, and yes they do decide what you get to view... but hasn't this always been the way with television?
--dan
Not sure how relevent this is... however there was a /. story on an amendment to the UK's Computer Misuse Act (1990):
"This bill is an amendment to the Computer Misuse Act 1990 which bans Denial of Service attacks by name"
--dan
You can't run two phones on the same account by giving them the same IMEI number. You would need two SIM cards and get the phone company to link them. The SIM card controls the billing and stuff (indirectly) and if you put the SIM card from one phone into another then you can use the second phone on your account, you just can't use the first phone at the same time because you only have one SIM. The IMEI number is just a serial number for the phone, not the SIM card.
--dan
I doubt they would track you by the IMEI number, they would more likely track you by the SIM card number :)
burn her^H^H^Hthem!
mmm monty python
"A trade mark is any sign which can distinguish the goods and services of one trader from those of another. A sign includes, for example, words, logos, pictures, or a combination of these." - http://www.patent.gov.uk/tm/definition.htm - "distinctive for the goods/services for which registration is sought".
.tm top level and then have specialisation under that for specific countries, and then within a country if someone already had your name registered for a different product or service then tough luck!
Therefore MegaSoft can be used by both a company selling rather limp plastic and also a company selling computer software. Not only that but you could have a company in France called MegaSoft selling computer software and a totally different company in Japan also called MegaSoft selling computer software. There are exceptions, under UK law, for example you couldn't register Pepsi if you are a carpet salesman because Pepsi is already, in the eyes of the public, associated with a specific product.
I guess that a solution would be to have a
Microsoft would have microsoft.*.tm because they are pretty much globally known, where * is any country code.
boots.uk.tm because, as far as i know, everyone in the uk will associate boots with the chemist company but i don't think they have much of a global presence.
and so on.
Any other solutions?
As would I, however as a lazy bastard I also like the concept that a website written in flash looks exactily the same in any browser with the flash plugin. However, I neither use flash or want to - it was just an example.
As a lazy developer I am quite happy to be totally standards complient - however I also have to take into account that users still need to see the sites I make and, currently, the two are still divergent goals without putting in alot of work and using client detection and other goodies.
What I really want to see is everyone using the standards compliant browser of their choice where the browser really does stick to the standard. Alot are coming close and some are very very very close (abet still putting their own propriatory stuff in) however we now need to convince the user base to drop things like NS4 which just do my head in on a daily basis.
--dan
Thats fantastic. I also looked at the source just before posting an earlier comment. HA HA.
;)
On a serious note... do we really have to use HTML 3.2 in order to be almost totally cross browser complient and even then resort to small hacks to make it look nice? It makes me wonder if Macromedia were on to a good thing with Flash that, as long as you have a plugin, looks pretty much the same on everyones screen? Granted I could easily live without Flash
--dan
While your post is quite blatent flame bait i find myself nodding along. I claim to be a web developer however usually end up doing the job of graphics artist (which i stink at), designer (which i also stink at), developer (no comment) at the same time. I find it increasingly hard to marry my geeky side (wanting to be standards complient) with my lazy side (wishing I could go down the pub). It is *very* difficult to produce a standards complient site without either locking out NS4 or providing client detection and alternate html/style sheets based on the numerous platforms and browsers available.
;)
Most standards complient (I usually mean XHTML 1.0 Transitional or Strict) sites will, with minimal tweeking, work very well in IE5+, NS6+, Mozilla, and Opera - however NS4 just makes me want to give up and become a marketing droid at points. I often end up hacking around a site that started out being totally standards complient to work around $browsers $bug.
While i can't agree that W3C is a joke I do feel that they are often hitting their heads against a brick wall when it comes to getting users to upgrade to a fairly standards compliant browser.
Also, I found that it isn't just MS that drops in propriatory things, have a look at:
-moz-opacity : 0.5;
as a style attribute
--dan
I agree.
Assumption: people get to choose their security level and are running a palladium system.
1.) Bill sends Bob a file called seegirlnude.jpg.exe
2.) Bob tries to run seegirlnude.jpg.exe
3.) Computer goes "NNK" because seegirlnude.jpg.exe isn't trusted
4.) Bob really wants to see the nude girl so he right clicks on seegirlnude.jpg.exe and tells the computer it is now trusted because earler in the day Bill sent Bob accountsprogram.exe which was untrusted BUT Bob phoned Bill and Bill said it was fine - same as the day/week/month before.
5.) Bob just got himself a virus!
I agree, it is difficult for a standard home user to tell if an advert came from the origional site or from Gator. Who are they likely to complain to even if they have some idea what the Gator software does? It is likely to complain to the website owner. Same goes for if the Gator software were to change some of the content of an article on a news site and not just adverts without showing that a change has taken place, it would be the news site that would have to spend time and therefore money when a disgruntled viewer goes and complains. While I agree that when a website leaves a server and arrives at the users desktop the user can do (within the bounds of law) whatever they like to it - however I do not beleave that a standard home user is aware, even if they are told, of what the Gator software does.
--dan
Oh, but isn't Fred going to get a tad pissed off like some of the people posting here because he is not getting all the bandwidth that his connection to the community network can provide? :)
--dan
What happens when Fred round the corner plus all the people in his house start leeching so much that they use all the bandwidth on your community fat pipe? Do you:
a) change him a higher monthly fee because he is using more bandwidth than Jim?
b) bandwidth limit Fred so that when he starts leeching his transfers get slower and slower to the point where he would be better off using a modem?
c) cut him off?
d) none of the above because, lets face it, he has a right to use all the bandwidth. doesn't he?
--dan
Through the cunning use of http://www.nic.uk I have determined that theregister.co.uk has been detagged:
g is ter.co.uk
:o)
http://www.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=there
.co.uk domains are linked to an isp by tags. the isp then sets things like the name servers and stuff. Detagging happens when you no longer want a domain, your isp is crap, or there is some sort of contract/legal dispute going on. Lets hope it was just the isp being crap.
I look forwarding to reading theregister's first article once their site goes live again. Last time they had problems (with a router iirc) the article about it was the best laugh i had in ages (sad i know).
--dan
ps. the parent may be offtopic but this post is not offtopic as a reply to its parent
to be jolly! fa la la la la, la la la la.
Over in the UK we did the present unwrapping hours ago... waiting for some christmas lunch now.... I can smell it so it must be almost ready! YAY!
HAPPY CHRISTMAS!!!!
--dan