Daniel Eran has been spamming uk.comp.sys.mac for weeks now, ignoring every polite request for him to stop. He shows no sign of engaging with the group (beyond calling us "a hateful bunch of queens"), just spams links to his blog against charter and then swans off again.
Get the Wii. I'm a parent of three - a four-close-to-five year old girl, a three year old boy and a 14 month old boy. I've just spent quite a lot of the day playing Wii Sports baseball with the three year old, watched the four year old playing pop-the-balloon type games and air hockey, then watched the the two of them play cow racing against each other.
They love it, and frankly so do I. Although it must be said I'm utterly useless at the baseball game...
I'm running this beta build right now - have been doing all day as I do the exciting task of catching up with my accounts (Quicken UK, Windows only). There's some graphical improvements to the interface - I like the better laid-out screen for picking the VM. There's still some interface no-nos (ok button on the left? Nope, shouldn't be the case on OS X) and I think the dock icon is trying just that bit too hard when it turns into a dancing egg timer as you save a machine's state, but overall things are better and things are fine.
I upgraded from a previous install, which means I had a disk image of Windows installed rather than a real partition. What I'm wondering is how Windows would cope with being booted for real on MacBook Pro hardware one moment, then booted again in Parallels another moment. Surely that would kick Windows activation into life?
I gave someone a quote of £175 to fix their laptop. They preferred instead to spend £339 on a new one. Even if the cost is lower for repairs people still prefer to buy new (which doesn't make much sense to me).
£339 - £175 = £164. £164 for an upgraded laptop starts to sound ok, doesn't it. Now take broken'ish laptop and put on ebay and you reduce that £164 figure still further, depending on age and how broken it really is. Suddenly the choice is obvious - unless this laptop is a current model, you're as well geting rid and buying something more up to date.
...Let's say that you put your savings into a bank in 1955. Should "society" have free rights to that money after 50 years? After all, you should have still have been working, right?
It should not have free access, regardless of whether I'd been working or not. But I'm not suggesting taking artists' money, they too will have their money in the bank from the savings account they opened in 1955, and I am not suggesting anyone gains free access to it. The artists keep their money, of course they do. What they lose is an indefinite period of time for their income stream.
Trust me, I'm not fan of ridiculously long copyright periods, but saying that you have the right to take my property just because I was unwilling or unable to duplicate my previous success doesn't sound fair to me.
It's a fair point and one worth debating. The argument here is that I am not taking your property, and also that the law defined in advance what you could expect as a time-period for that kind of work and that you made those recordings anyway. The refutation of the extension is exactly that - refutation of an extension, not a rejection of the entire idea. It basically says "You knew at the time you were getting fifty years out of this, and you're not changing it now".
The write-up says that surveys say the UK public supports extending copyrights. But then he says in reference to the MPs refusing to extend copyrights: "Looks like the government is realizing that the public are the ones that vote 'em in or out."...so which is it?
The survey in question is a beautiful piece of work, which never actually asked the question "how long do you think copyright should be?". Instead, the question offered was "Do you think UK artists should be afforded the same protection as US artists?". To which my answer would be "yes, but..." meaning that US copyright should be reduced to 50 years, not UK extended to 95.
From the article: 'Music journalist Neil McCormack told BBC Radio Five Live it was a blow to the industry..."You can make a record in 1955 and have been getting royalties... been living on that and suddenly they're gone."'.
Well yep - honestly if you haven't done anything else in 50 years it probably should be gone too. In a not especially long amount of time, some Beatles stuff will be coming out of copyright. Now I'm no Beatles expert, but it seems to me that absolutely all of them went on to do more work elsewhere and didn't just sit back living off their early work. I see that statement as a good thing, not as a 'blow to the industry'.
Be interesting to compare and contrast with film - what's the UK limit on film copyrights?
I can imagine this being nice to have if you're a heavy user of virtual machines. For example, I run OS X. It would be nice to have a standard OS X layout, then switch to a Windows install in Parallels and have the keyboard switch to having a Windows key. Then switch to Ubuntu and see a Gnome-like foot for the menu. Or KDE and have a big K, or...
You get the idea. Price is somewhat hefty though, especially for something that isn't going to have the side keys. I'll wait until I read reviews about how well it feels before I consider splashing out the daft quantities of cash required. Don't get the wrong idea, I wish them well. I'm just not going to be pre-ordering, that's all.
Cheers,
Ian
"Macs aren't more expensive..[shipped] with an OS"
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 3, Informative
From the article: Macs aren't more expensive because Apple ships them with an OS, just as Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer does not raise its cost for Windows. Windows would not be cheaper if the company removed IE, just as Apple wouldn't save any money by shipping Macs without Mac OS X.
Err...well, yes Macs are more expensive because Apple ships them with an OS. That's because Apple has to recover the cost of developing that OS through sales of Mac hardware. Note that I'm not comparing the cost of Macs and PCs here, I'm talking about the cost of a Mac as an absolute. A Mac would be cheaper if Apple didn't have to develop OS X. Whether it would be worthwhile for them to do that I leave as a (rather obvious) exercise for the reader.
Having worked indirectly, contracting for a few UK banks, I can't say this is a huge surprise. The people that work at these places aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the box, and quite frankly, they can't attract anybody with any intellect.
Ah, the 'I know everything better than you do' type of genius. Tell us, oh great one, of how your towering intellect dwarfs the mere minnows you have dealt with in the past.
I too have contracted around various UK and foreign-owned but UK-based banks. Some of the people I met there were fools. Some were amongst the brightest people I've known. As ever, and particularly in organisations that huge, there's a large mix of people involved. There are also a number of bright people in banks who's area of expertise isn't computing - they're banks remember?
There may well be an issue of education, and also I'd like to know why these things didn't have full-drive encryption installed. Then again, we don't know that it didn't - despite the article summary, Nationwide have refused to give any details. That's any details, whether positive or negative, nor have they confirmed any numbers. 11 million is just the number of customers they have, not necessarily the ones on the laptop.
I do indeed. I remember working at a company which used the net for commercial purposes in about 1993. We formatted and transmitted journals to the IEEE, and used ftp to do it.
The whole thing had to be kept pretty quiet on both sides, as it was a near certainty that if the net-powers-that-be discovered we were using the internet for sordid commerce then there would probably be hell to pay and access to lose.
The web was something I seriously misjudged at first. I remember seeing the X11 Mosaic floating around and thinking...err....yes? And? Then I'd point to the much more advanced Hypercard. I just didn't see the real significance until about 1994 when I finally bought my own modem (Linelink 144e, imported from the States to the UK for a breakthrough price of $99) and decided to swallow the vast phone bills that came with it.
Finally 'web'n'walk' is web only - it's not all ports and protocols
I know they limit VoIP, but I'm happily using ssh/sftp, ftp, iChat (AOL's IM client protocol, Jabber, iSync etc.. It's not purely a web service, just VoIP that's limited as far as I know. Not perfection, but compared to £1 a meg I'm prepared to overlook quite a few flaws...
The problem is prohibitive data prices - at £4 a megabyte from Orange, I literally can not afford to use it.
You might want to investigate T-Mobile's Web'n'Walk plans. I've switched over to them from Vodafone, for specifically this reason. i pay about £7.50 more per month that I paid under Vodafone, but I have a 2gig data transfer limit instead of paying £1 per megabyte.
As a consultant, your client is the company itself and not that company's customers. You've informed the company, now document it to make sure that's known. Ensure the right bit of the company is informed (ie. compliance, not just your local boss), document and you're done.
Now, if the real question was "should I inform the company's customers because I think this is very important to them?", well you're on an entirely different path and ultimately only you can decide that. Without knowing the details of what might have been disclosed, no-one here can even give you an informed opinion let alone a set of instructions. But as far as what you must do is concerned, then see paragraph one.
When Arthur and Ford get picked up by the Heart of Gold, how does Zaphod know that Ford is now called Ford? and what was he called before??
Utterly making up an answer on the spot, perhaps Zaphod doesn't call him Ford - perhaps the Babel Fish just lets Arthur (and by implication the reader) think he's said Ford.
Just to go briefly to the original source for a moment, William Franklyn died this week. William Franklyn was The Voice Of The Book in the Tertiary to Quintessential phases of the radio series - and did a superb job of picking up from where the equally lamented Peter Jones left off.
Purchase any version besides home, and your wish is their command! link [macdailynews.com]
No, it isn't. Although I can run up the OS in that, they're restricting what I can do with it - specifically the viewing of media files. Since just about the only reason I've personally got to think of moving to Vista is its media support, that means I'm completely locked out.
This is a good first step and Microsoft are to be applauded for taking it. Now on to the other issue - virtualisation. I'd like the ability to install into a VM please, and I'd definitely like to view any form of media I choose whilst inside the VM. If consumer pressure worked once, perhaps it can work again.
It's my son's first birthday on Tuesday and I'll be singing Happy Birthday to him. That's a copyrighted song, with royalties payable on public performance I believe.
Would be a nice touch to put that one into the public domain.
Twenty years or so I bought my copy of Skool Daze from Dixons. It requires you to flatten teachers, punch other kids or knock them over with a catapult and the objective is to steal your school report from what I remember (might be your exam results).
A lot of people I talk to regard PDF as an 'open' standard when the only part that's free is the ability to decode it--not encode it.
Not so - witness OS X. It encodes PDFs with wild abandon without paying anything to Adobe. The PDF standard is published and can be implemented by anyone.
I've honestly no idea why Microsoft backed down against Adobe. Perhaps it's because of the monopoly status or something, but what they wanted to include in Office seemed perfectly reasonable to me. after all, I'm used to doing the same thing with NeoOffice/OpenOffice and also with any application that prints on a Mac. Linux uses could say the same thing, and I'm sure I remember a freebie printer driver on Windows that creates PDFs as well.
Feels very strange to look at their web site though, somehow to me the name just doesn't click in the modern era. Here's what Commodore are doing today. As I understand it, a company bought all rights to the name and launched themselves as Commodore. Via the Retrobits podcast I heard an interview with a US salesman for them - apparently they're quite serious about the Commodore name, and want to revive the spirit and attitude of working rather than just the name.
Having read about the way Commodore worked I'm not especially certain that's a great strategy, but it'll be interesting to hear what happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Daniel Eran has been spamming uk.comp.sys.mac for weeks now, ignoring every polite request for him to stop. He shows no sign of engaging with the group (beyond calling us "a hateful bunch of queens"), just spams links to his blog against charter and then swans off again.
Daniel Eran. Just Say No.
Cheers,
Ian
Get the Wii. I'm a parent of three - a four-close-to-five year old girl, a three year old boy and a 14 month old boy. I've just spent quite a lot of the day playing Wii Sports baseball with the three year old, watched the four year old playing pop-the-balloon type games and air hockey, then watched the the two of them play cow racing against each other.
They love it, and frankly so do I. Although it must be said I'm utterly useless at the baseball game...
Cheers,
Ian
It's a function of the driver - there are drivers for both Windows and Linux however, and they both support the right-clicking functionality.
Cheers,
Ian
I'm running this beta build right now - have been doing all day as I do the exciting task of catching up with my accounts (Quicken UK, Windows only). There's some graphical improvements to the interface - I like the better laid-out screen for picking the VM. There's still some interface no-nos (ok button on the left? Nope, shouldn't be the case on OS X) and I think the dock icon is trying just that bit too hard when it turns into a dancing egg timer as you save a machine's state, but overall things are better and things are fine.
I upgraded from a previous install, which means I had a disk image of Windows installed rather than a real partition. What I'm wondering is how Windows would cope with being booted for real on MacBook Pro hardware one moment, then booted again in Parallels another moment. Surely that would kick Windows activation into life?
Cheers,
Ian
I gave someone a quote of £175 to fix their laptop. They preferred instead to spend £339 on a new one. Even if the cost is lower for repairs people still prefer to buy new (which doesn't make much sense to me).
£339 - £175 = £164. £164 for an upgraded laptop starts to sound ok, doesn't it. Now take broken'ish laptop and put on ebay and you reduce that £164 figure still further, depending on age and how broken it really is. Suddenly the choice is obvious - unless this laptop is a current model, you're as well geting rid and buying something more up to date.
Cheers,
Ian
...Let's say that you put your savings into a bank in 1955. Should "society" have free rights to that money after 50 years? After all, you should have still have been working, right?
It should not have free access, regardless of whether I'd been working or not. But I'm not suggesting taking artists' money, they too will have their money in the bank from the savings account they opened in 1955, and I am not suggesting anyone gains free access to it. The artists keep their money, of course they do. What they lose is an indefinite period of time for their income stream.
Trust me, I'm not fan of ridiculously long copyright periods, but saying that you have the right to take my property just because I was unwilling or unable to duplicate my previous success doesn't sound fair to me.
It's a fair point and one worth debating. The argument here is that I am not taking your property, and also that the law defined in advance what you could expect as a time-period for that kind of work and that you made those recordings anyway. The refutation of the extension is exactly that - refutation of an extension, not a rejection of the entire idea. It basically says "You knew at the time you were getting fifty years out of this, and you're not changing it now".
Cheers,
Ian
The write-up says that surveys say the UK public supports extending copyrights. But then he says in reference to the MPs refusing to extend copyrights: "Looks like the government is realizing that the public are the ones that vote 'em in or out."...so which is it?
The survey in question is a beautiful piece of work, which never actually asked the question "how long do you think copyright should be?". Instead, the question offered was "Do you think UK artists should be afforded the same protection as US artists?". To which my answer would be "yes, but..." meaning that US copyright should be reduced to 50 years, not UK extended to 95.
Cheers,
Ian
From the article:
'Music journalist Neil McCormack told BBC Radio Five Live it was a blow to the industry..."You can make a record in 1955 and have been getting royalties... been living on that and suddenly they're gone."'.
Well yep - honestly if you haven't done anything else in 50 years it probably should be gone too. In a not especially long amount of time, some Beatles stuff will be coming out of copyright. Now I'm no Beatles expert, but it seems to me that absolutely all of them went on to do more work elsewhere and didn't just sit back living off their early work. I see that statement as a good thing, not as a 'blow to the industry'.
Be interesting to compare and contrast with film - what's the UK limit on film copyrights?
Cheers,
Ian
I can imagine this being nice to have if you're a heavy user of virtual machines. For example, I run OS X. It would be nice to have a standard OS X layout, then switch to a Windows install in Parallels and have the keyboard switch to having a Windows key. Then switch to Ubuntu and see a Gnome-like foot for the menu. Or KDE and have a big K, or...
You get the idea. Price is somewhat hefty though, especially for something that isn't going to have the side keys. I'll wait until I read reviews about how well it feels before I consider splashing out the daft quantities of cash required. Don't get the wrong idea, I wish them well. I'm just not going to be pre-ordering, that's all.
Cheers,
Ian
From the article:
Macs aren't more expensive because Apple ships them with an OS, just as Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer does not raise its cost for Windows. Windows would not be cheaper if the company removed IE, just as Apple wouldn't save any money by shipping Macs without Mac OS X.
Err...well, yes Macs are more expensive because Apple ships them with an OS. That's because Apple has to recover the cost of developing that OS through sales of Mac hardware. Note that I'm not comparing the cost of Macs and PCs here, I'm talking about the cost of a Mac as an absolute. A Mac would be cheaper if Apple didn't have to develop OS X. Whether it would be worthwhile for them to do that I leave as a (rather obvious) exercise for the reader.
Cheers,
Ian
Having worked indirectly, contracting for a few UK banks, I can't say this is a huge surprise. The people that work at these places aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the box, and quite frankly, they can't attract anybody with any intellect.
Ah, the 'I know everything better than you do' type of genius. Tell us, oh great one, of how your towering intellect dwarfs the mere minnows you have dealt with in the past.
I too have contracted around various UK and foreign-owned but UK-based banks. Some of the people I met there were fools. Some were amongst the brightest people I've known. As ever, and particularly in organisations that huge, there's a large mix of people involved. There are also a number of bright people in banks who's area of expertise isn't computing - they're banks remember?
There may well be an issue of education, and also I'd like to know why these things didn't have full-drive encryption installed. Then again, we don't know that it didn't - despite the article summary, Nationwide have refused to give any details. That's any details, whether positive or negative, nor have they confirmed any numbers. 11 million is just the number of customers they have, not necessarily the ones on the laptop.
Cheers,
Ian
The original post is an Apple troll.
...and the parent post is a Tandy troll(!). The standard microcomputer for business at that time was the Commodore PET. Hah, take that Tandy! :-)
Cheers,
Ian
Commercializing the internet?
I do indeed. I remember working at a company which used the net for commercial purposes in about 1993. We formatted and transmitted journals to the IEEE, and used ftp to do it.
The whole thing had to be kept pretty quiet on both sides, as it was a near certainty that if the net-powers-that-be discovered we were using the internet for sordid commerce then there would probably be hell to pay and access to lose.
The web was something I seriously misjudged at first. I remember seeing the X11 Mosaic floating around and thinking...err....yes? And? Then I'd point to the much more advanced Hypercard. I just didn't see the real significance until about 1994 when I finally bought my own modem (Linelink 144e, imported from the States to the UK for a breakthrough price of $99) and decided to swallow the vast phone bills that came with it.
And now? Well, it's a part of my life.
Cheers,
Ian
Finally 'web'n'walk' is web only - it's not all ports and protocols
I know they limit VoIP, but I'm happily using ssh/sftp, ftp, iChat (AOL's IM client protocol, Jabber, iSync etc.. It's not purely a web service, just VoIP that's limited as far as I know. Not perfection, but compared to £1 a meg I'm prepared to overlook quite a few flaws...
Cheers,
Ian
The problem is prohibitive data prices - at £4 a megabyte from Orange, I literally can not afford to use it.
You might want to investigate T-Mobile's Web'n'Walk plans. I've switched over to them from Vodafone, for specifically this reason. i pay about £7.50 more per month that I paid under Vodafone, but I have a 2gig data transfer limit instead of paying £1 per megabyte.
Cheers,
Ian
As a consultant, your client is the company itself and not that company's customers. You've informed the company, now document it to make sure that's known. Ensure the right bit of the company is informed (ie. compliance, not just your local boss), document and you're done.
Now, if the real question was "should I inform the company's customers because I think this is very important to them?", well you're on an entirely different path and ultimately only you can decide that. Without knowing the details of what might have been disclosed, no-one here can even give you an informed opinion let alone a set of instructions. But as far as what you must do is concerned, then see paragraph one.
Cheers,
Ian
When Arthur and Ford get picked up by the Heart of Gold, how does Zaphod know that Ford is now called Ford? and what was he called before??
Utterly making up an answer on the spot, perhaps Zaphod doesn't call him Ford - perhaps the Babel Fish just lets Arthur (and by implication the reader) think he's said Ford.
Cheers,
Ian
Just to go briefly to the original source for a moment, William Franklyn died this week. William Franklyn was The Voice Of The Book in the Tertiary to Quintessential phases of the radio series - and did a superb job of picking up from where the equally lamented Peter Jones left off.
Cheers,
Ian
Purchase any version besides home, and your wish is their command! link [macdailynews.com]
No, it isn't. Although I can run up the OS in that, they're restricting what I can do with it - specifically the viewing of media files. Since just about the only reason I've personally got to think of moving to Vista is its media support, that means I'm completely locked out.
Cheers,
Ian
This is a good first step and Microsoft are to be applauded for taking it. Now on to the other issue - virtualisation. I'd like the ability to install into a VM please, and I'd definitely like to view any form of media I choose whilst inside the VM. If consumer pressure worked once, perhaps it can work again.
Cheers,
Ian
It's my son's first birthday on Tuesday and I'll be singing Happy Birthday to him. That's a copyrighted song, with royalties payable on public performance I believe.
Would be a nice touch to put that one into the public domain.
Cheers,
Ian
"He at least had the good sense to skip Windows ME."
That's implicit in his statement. He said he took every upgrade...
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
Not so - witness OS X. It encodes PDFs with wild abandon without paying anything to Adobe. The PDF standard is published and can be implemented by anyone.
I've honestly no idea why Microsoft backed down against Adobe. Perhaps it's because of the monopoly status or something, but what they wanted to include in Office seemed perfectly reasonable to me. after all, I'm used to doing the same thing with NeoOffice/OpenOffice and also with any application that prints on a Mac. Linux uses could say the same thing, and I'm sure I remember a freebie printer driver on Windows that creates PDFs as well.
Cheers,
Ian
Feels very strange to look at their web site though, somehow to me the name just doesn't click in the modern era. Here's what Commodore are doing today. As I understand it, a company bought all rights to the name and launched themselves as Commodore. Via the Retrobits podcast I heard an interview with a US salesman for them - apparently they're quite serious about the Commodore name, and want to revive the spirit and attitude of working rather than just the name.
Having read about the way Commodore worked I'm not especially certain that's a great strategy, but it'll be interesting to hear what happens.
Cheers,
Ian