With all the spamming and phishing going on, I don't understand why more businesses don't use the *.ltd.uk and *.plc.uk domains which can ONLY be registered by the legal owners of the Limited company or Corporation, preventing people from domain squatting and adding a level of trust similar to https.
I just checked the details on our town council and it says: "The Council has adopted a scheme of Members’ Allowances, under which members are paid £680 per year towards the performance of their duties."
That is just £13 a week! and could easily be used up just in transport/petrol costs getting to various meetings and events.
At the town council level, they are pretty much volunteers who give up their own time to help their local community. The problem is many people are not aware of the democratic process. When local elections come along, they vote for a national party instead of for a local person to represent them, or they don't bother voting at all. They also prefer to complain rather than be part of the process and stand for election themselves. If you don't vote or you are not prepared to stand for election yourself or propose someone else who you do agree with, then you have no right to complain.
Can someone mod the parent post of this one up... as it describes a real world situation where this is a big problem.
We develop java applications and games for mobile phones. There are thousands of handsets all with different capabilities, screen sizes, limitations, key-scan codes.
When the user wants to download a product from a wap site, they just want to click a link and get the correct version for their phone which has graphics the correct size, responds to the correct key codes, has sound in the correct format for that phone, includes handset specific features. Many users don't even know the model of handset they own! And there are significant differences between phones even of similar model number, eg. Nokia 6230 has a different screen size than a Nokia 6230i (128x128 and 208x208 respectively).
The mobile java libraries (MIDP) are very simple and do not have features such as image resizing; some phones have absurdly small memory limits (eg. 64K) which mean you can only afford to squeeze in graphics of the correct size and cut out features on those phones. eg. You can't make an application that looks good on a 352x416 sized screen (eg. Nokia N80 with several megabytes of memory) and a 128x128 screen (eg. Nokia 7210 with 64K file size limit).
Thus it is impossible to make a good quality non-trivial application that will run on all phones. We typically have over 50 different builds to support the several hundred handset models required to cover the most common phones used in Europe.
Using the user-agent in conjunction with databases of handset specifications such as the wurlf.xml file allows this to be automatic in most cases. If the user-agent is stripped out then this is impossible and you have to resort to something like asking the user what handset they have.
Another problem is trying to make network based applications mobile phone java applications. Many phones do not support Socket Connections in their MIDP implementation so the only solution is to use HTTP connections. Even on newer phones with Socket Connection implementation it doesn't work on all operators depending on calling plans, so HTTP is the only common fall back protocol. For a network based application you need the data that is included in the body to be what your server sent or else it will break the application.
When Vodafone turned this system on, instead of getting back our data from a HTTP GET request, it sent a Vodafone HTML page telling the user about the gateway.. of course my handset app had no idea how to handle this as it was expecting the data our server had sent it! If the user has previously agreed to the gateway, then all your data has vodafone headers and footers around your own body.
There are ways to disable the gateway, eg. setting cache-control header or setting the content-type to something other than text/html... but this should not have been neccessary.
The danger is now that other operators will do something similar, and each one will have a different work-around required, or it will be a full time job applying to be in white-lists. There are hundreds of operators around the world and we can't keep up to date with every quirk of their systems.
UK income tax: Rate: 22% + (1-3% for National Insurance) Income Band: £2,091 - £32,400 ($4k - 60k)
I don't know where you get those NI figures from... it is actually 11% employee's + 12.8% employer's contribution... thus we are effectively paying 45.8% tax on most of our earnings [up to ~£32K.. then the income tax goes up to 40% and the NI goes down to 1%] (if there wasnt an employer's contribution you'd be able to have a higher salary)... on top of that is council tax which is aproximately 4% for a single income household on average salary... so I am paying 49.8% tax... then of course there is 17.5% VAT on anything you buy, petrol tax, alcohol tax, insurance tax, capital gains tax, stamp-duty on buying houses, stamp-duty on buying LSE shares... wonder we have any money left to buy anything with.
Perhaps if mankind finds 100% proof (through SETI) that intelligent life exists out in space, us humans might actually try to live in peace with one another
Just like when the European's discovered life in America and all stopped fighting each other?
This is silly. We should be advancing forwards not going back to the world of text only terminals and line printers. The majority of people are reading their email on desktop systems with high resolution colour graphics, so why shouldn't emails be able to take advantage of these capabailities? If we could rely on this feature more then we could also reduce the number of documents that are sent as attachments when there shouldn't really be any difference between an email body and a document.
3) Ban the address book
This also seems a backwards step. We should be moving towards applications working together. For example instead of keeping seperate address books for use by your office program and another for email and another for yourt contact manager, etc... surely it is better to have one single database of contact information that any compatible application can share.
While your suggestions might be good in terms of combatting spam they seem like they push us backwards in terms of usability and the future of desktop computing. I don't see why the minority (spammers) should force the majority (normal users) to suffer inconvenience and not use computer technology to its potential.
Errm... XP does have an automatic update facility, which can be set to automatically download critical updates... you can choose whether to be prompted before downloading and again and before installing... of course many people disable this because they don't want Microsoft installing stuff on their machines without them knowing.
Or, manually, you can simply click "Windows Update" in the start menu/programs, which will determine what patches are available and allow you to select/deselect which ones you want to download and install.
I'm not really sure how it could be much easier???
This seems to support the view that declining sales may be due more to the high costs of CDs than to file sharing... ie. lower the price and sales go up.
erm... the article is about the UK government not US. The problem is that Britain is in danger of losing another industry in which it currently excels.
On the negative side, the Dankort makes things difficult for foreign visitors to Denmark. Many shops such as grocery stores only take Dankort and cash... they don't take Visa or Mastercard.
When I was temporarily living in Denmark I found myself using cash for almost everything, and having to carry thousands of Krone around with me. I was unable to get a personal Dankort from a bank because I didn't have a CPR number (the equivalent of a US Social Security Number).
I don't think the hot water you would get straight from the pipe would be hot enough. A cotton wash is done at very high temperatures, probably more than what is coming out the pipe (depending on your water heater and how far away the washing machine is from the heater)
Plus you need to maintain the high temperature during the wash cycle, so my guess is that even US washing machines would have a heater and thermostat built in.
I believe some European washing machines only have a cold water pipe... this means you can install it in a garage or somewhere where hot water is not available.
You can recirculate the wort during the mash, and I believe most commericial breweries stir the grain and recirculate water during mashing.
This will help keep the temperature more or less constant throughout the grain instead of having hot and cold spots.
German lagers often use a complicated temperature cycle, starting at cool temperatures and having a rest at various different temperatures on the way up, to allow different enzymes to do their work.
This is very difficult to do using some other home brewing methods, and require adding measured amounts of hot water and restirring at various times, or mashing in a mash tun with a thermostatic heater control.
The washing machine would also have the benefit of the drum acting as a grain filter, so just run a controlled rinse cycle to do a good sparge.
Surely, the point is you shouldn't need to obfuscate your email address when posting it in a public place, or to set up fake hotmail accounts.
For example, If I advertise sometime in the classifieds of the local paper I can put my real phone number and don't expect to get added to any direct mailing lists because of it.
If I put my real physical postal address on my web site I won't get inundated with extra junk mail.
But put your real email address anywhere on the web/internet and you start to receive spam in a very short time, the majority being for illegal items (if not they should be, e.g. fake univerity degrees) or things that are not applicable in the country I live (e.g. refinancing loans).
Whats the point of a pager when you can receive SMS messages instead [see slashdot a few days ago]?
What we need is simply for phones to have a built in way of being forced into silent mode when in the proximity of a special transmitter, then SMS messages can be received silently, and vibrate can be used for ring tone.
Your chilton manuals are in the garage, your cookbooks and recipe boxes are in the kitchen or dining room, your computer books are by your computer
What about my book on herbs that includes information about how to grow them and how to cook them and medicinal uses? Do they belong in the kitchen with recipe books or with gardening books or in the medicine cabinet?
Many things have multiple ways to categorize them, and it is not obvious where to store it.
Also some things change category during use, e.g. I might have/projects/brainstorm/takingovertheworld/ but when one of the brainstorms becomes a real project with a client paying for it, then it would belong in/projects/clients/suckerPlc/mindcontrol/ but I wouldn't want to just move all the old brainstorm documents into a new folder, because they may contain other ideas and thought processes that still belong in brainstorms.
I'm glad its not just me who doesn't know what "dragonball" is, I would look it up on the internet, but it would just bias the popular search request chart even further.
Nokia's SDK phone emulators and development tools only run under Windows, so even if Symbian remain the dominent mobile phone OS, Microsoft will still benefit from all the developers needing Windows for their development tools.
I was also thinking the same... When I read "I would have liked to have seen the dB rating for each fan- I've had some fans that really were great, provided I was wearing noise cancelling headphones while sharing a room with them", it conjured up surreal images of someone in the corner of the room shouting Klingon battle cries at me while I work.
No... Slashdot does not specify a character set. This means that browsers should use the default (iso-8859-1)which maps to the first sections of Unicode, in which a_grave is 0xe0 and not 0x85 as others on this thread were trying to say.
Slashdot Mirror
The petition was actually set up several weeks before the referendum by someone on the leave side... http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
With all the spamming and phishing going on, I don't understand why more businesses don't use the *.ltd.uk and *.plc.uk domains which can ONLY be registered by the legal owners of the Limited company or Corporation, preventing people from domain squatting and adding a level of trust similar to https.
I just checked the details on our town council and it says: "The Council has adopted a scheme of Members’ Allowances, under which members are paid £680 per year towards the performance of their duties."
That is just £13 a week! and could easily be used up just in transport/petrol costs getting to various meetings and events.
At the town council level, they are pretty much volunteers who give up their own time to help their local community. The problem is many people are not aware of the democratic process. When local elections come along, they vote for a national party instead of for a local person to represent them, or they don't bother voting at all. They also prefer to complain rather than be part of the process and stand for election themselves. If you don't vote or you are not prepared to stand for election yourself or propose someone else who you do agree with, then you have no right to complain.
Can someone mod the parent post of this one up... as it describes a real world situation where this is a big problem.
We develop java applications and games for mobile phones. There are thousands of handsets all with different capabilities, screen sizes, limitations, key-scan codes.
When the user wants to download a product from a wap site, they just want to click a link and get the correct version for their phone which has graphics the correct size, responds to the correct key codes, has sound in the correct format for that phone, includes handset specific features. Many users don't even know the model of handset they own! And there are significant differences between phones even of similar model number, eg. Nokia 6230 has a different screen size than a Nokia 6230i (128x128 and 208x208 respectively).
The mobile java libraries (MIDP) are very simple and do not have features such as image resizing; some phones have absurdly small memory limits (eg. 64K) which mean you can only afford to squeeze in graphics of the correct size and cut out features on those phones. eg. You can't make an application that looks good on a 352x416 sized screen (eg. Nokia N80 with several megabytes of memory) and a 128x128 screen (eg. Nokia 7210 with 64K file size limit).
Thus it is impossible to make a good quality non-trivial application that will run on all phones. We typically have over 50 different builds to support the several hundred handset models required to cover the most common phones used in Europe.
Using the user-agent in conjunction with databases of handset specifications such as the wurlf.xml file allows this to be automatic in most cases. If the user-agent is stripped out then this is impossible and you have to resort to something like asking the user what handset they have.
Another problem is trying to make network based applications mobile phone java applications. Many phones do not support Socket Connections in their MIDP implementation so the only solution is to use HTTP connections. Even on newer phones with Socket Connection implementation it doesn't work on all operators depending on calling plans, so HTTP is the only common fall back protocol. For a network based application you need the data that is included in the body to be what your server sent or else it will break the application.
When Vodafone turned this system on, instead of getting back our data from a HTTP GET request, it sent a Vodafone HTML page telling the user about the gateway.. of course my handset app had no idea how to handle this as it was expecting the data our server had sent it! If the user has previously agreed to the gateway, then all your data has vodafone headers and footers around your own body.
There are ways to disable the gateway, eg. setting cache-control header or setting the content-type to something other than text/html... but this should not have been neccessary.
The danger is now that other operators will do something similar, and each one will have a different work-around required, or it will be a full time job applying to be in white-lists. There are hundreds of operators around the world and we can't keep up to date with every quirk of their systems.
I don't know where you get those NI figures from... it is actually 11% employee's + 12.8% employer's contribution... thus we are effectively paying 45.8% tax on most of our earnings [up to ~£32K.. then the income tax goes up to 40% and the NI goes down to 1%] (if there wasnt an employer's contribution you'd be able to have a higher salary)... on top of that is council tax which is aproximately 4% for a single income household on average salary... so I am paying 49.8% tax... then of course there is 17.5% VAT on anything you buy, petrol tax, alcohol tax, insurance tax, capital gains tax, stamp-duty on buying houses, stamp-duty on buying LSE shares... wonder we have any money left to buy anything with.
Just like when the European's discovered life in America and all stopped fighting each other?
The operating system in the Atari ST was known as TOS (Tramiel Operating system). Although this link says it was The Operating System
2) Ban Dynamic Mail
This is silly. We should be advancing forwards not going back to the world of text only terminals and line printers. The majority of people are reading their email on desktop systems with high resolution colour graphics, so why shouldn't emails be able to take advantage of these capabailities? If we could rely on this feature more then we could also reduce the number of documents that are sent as attachments when there shouldn't really be any difference between an email body and a document.
3) Ban the address book
This also seems a backwards step. We should be moving towards applications working together. For example instead of keeping seperate address books for use by your office program and another for email and another for yourt contact manager, etc... surely it is better to have one single database of contact information that any compatible application can share.
While your suggestions might be good in terms of combatting spam they seem like they push us backwards in terms of usability and the future of desktop computing. I don't see why the minority (spammers) should force the majority (normal users) to suffer inconvenience and not use computer technology to its potential.
Errm... XP does have an automatic update facility, which can be set to automatically download critical updates... you can choose whether to be prompted before downloading and again and before installing... of course many people disable this because they don't want Microsoft installing stuff on their machines without them knowing.
Or, manually, you can simply click "Windows Update" in the start menu/programs, which will determine what patches are available and allow you to select/deselect which ones you want to download and install.
I'm not really sure how it could be much easier???
Same story also reported on BBC News
This seems to support the view that declining sales may be due more to the high costs of CDs than to file sharing... ie. lower the price and sales go up.
erm... the article is about the UK government not US. The problem is that Britain is in danger of losing another industry in which it currently excels.
On the negative side, the Dankort makes things difficult for foreign visitors to Denmark. Many shops such as grocery stores only take Dankort and cash... they don't take Visa or Mastercard.
When I was temporarily living in Denmark I found myself using cash for almost everything, and having to carry thousands of Krone around with me. I was unable to get a personal Dankort from a bank because I didn't have a CPR number (the equivalent of a US Social Security Number).
I don't think the hot water you would get straight from the pipe would be hot enough. A cotton wash is done at very high temperatures, probably more than what is coming out the pipe (depending on your water heater and how far away the washing machine is from the heater)
Plus you need to maintain the high temperature during the wash cycle, so my guess is that even US washing machines would have a heater and thermostat built in.
I believe some European washing machines only have a cold water pipe... this means you can install it in a garage or somewhere where hot water is not available.
You can recirculate the wort during the mash, and I believe most commericial breweries stir the grain and recirculate water during mashing.
This will help keep the temperature more or less constant throughout the grain instead of having hot and cold spots.
German lagers often use a complicated temperature cycle, starting at cool temperatures and having a rest at various different temperatures on the way up, to allow different enzymes to do their work.
This is very difficult to do using some other home brewing methods, and require adding measured amounts of hot water and restirring at various times, or mashing in a mash tun with a thermostatic heater control.
The washing machine would also have the benefit of the drum acting as a grain filter, so just run a controlled rinse cycle to do a good sparge.
Surely, the point is you shouldn't need to obfuscate your email address when posting it in a public place, or to set up fake hotmail accounts.
For example, If I advertise sometime in the classifieds of the local paper I can put my real phone number and don't expect to get added to any direct mailing lists because of it.
If I put my real physical postal address on my web site I won't get inundated with extra junk mail.
But put your real email address anywhere on the web/internet and you start to receive spam in a very short time, the majority being for illegal items (if not they should be, e.g. fake univerity degrees) or things that are not applicable in the country I live (e.g. refinancing loans).
Whats the point of a pager when you can receive SMS messages instead [see slashdot a few days ago]?
What we need is simply for phones to have a built in way of being forced into silent mode when in the proximity of a special transmitter, then SMS messages can be received silently, and vibrate can be used for ring tone.
Your chilton manuals are in the garage, your cookbooks and recipe boxes are in the kitchen or dining room, your computer books are by your computer
What about my book on herbs that includes information about how to grow them and how to cook them and medicinal uses? Do they belong in the kitchen with recipe books or with gardening books or in the medicine cabinet?
Many things have multiple ways to categorize them, and it is not obvious where to store it.
Also some things change category during use, e.g. I might have /projects/brainstorm/takingovertheworld/ but when one of the brainstorms becomes a real project with a client paying for it, then it would belong in /projects/clients/suckerPlc/mindcontrol/ but I wouldn't want to just move all the old brainstorm documents into a new folder, because they may contain other ideas and thought processes that still belong in brainstorms.
I'm glad its not just me who doesn't know what "dragonball" is, I would look it up on the internet, but it would just bias the popular search request chart even further.
Excellent... Just off to download it now.
Nokia's SDK phone emulators and development tools only run under Windows, so even if Symbian remain the dominent mobile phone OS, Microsoft will still benefit from all the developers needing Windows for their development tools.
I was also thinking the same... When I read "I would have liked to have seen the dB rating for each fan- I've had some fans that really were great, provided I was wearing noise cancelling headphones while sharing a room with them", it conjured up surreal images of someone in the corner of the room shouting Klingon battle cries at me while I work.
I just found this page that lists all their old Spectrum games.
No... Slashdot does not specify a character set. This means that browsers should use the default (iso-8859-1)which maps to the first sections of Unicode, in which a_grave is 0xe0 and not 0x85 as others on this thread were trying to say.
Hex dump of this message:
30 78 38 35 20 69 73 20 e0 20 20 28 61 20 67 72 : 0x85 is à (a gr
61 76 65 29 2e 20 20 53 6f 20 65 76 65 72 79 6f : ave). So everyo
6e 65 20 69 6e 20 46 72 61 6e 63 65 3f 0a 09 09 : ne in France?...
one gigabyte on each side, dual-layer
2 sides * 2 layers = 4 surfaces.