Re:Oh the names they can come up with...
on
Project Eden
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Those stupid glass balls cost £86 million. In the first 12 months they generated approx £120million of increased spending in the region. Check here if you don't believe me (sorry couldn't find a geocities link).
The project was aiming to bring in tourists from all over the globe (and has) so a simple name that easily translates was probably the best way to go. Not particularly origonal but it doesn't seem to be putting people off visiting.
I don't doubt you at all, infact I know a few longtime nerds who choose IE. I personally chose mozilla.
In my experience working with home users most of them probably will just use whatever comes with the PC. Many may not realise that there are alternative browsers available. Probably 90% of the people I saw didn't care really what software they were running, they just wanted it to work. Since IE does work they'll stick with it. Many people don't even realise that windows is an "optional" part of their computer system, or what functions it does perform. These people will not be upgrading their browser and they probably represent the majority of the market in the UK.
They don't care about standards and most are too busy to give two craps about monopolies. They just want to turn on their computer, send some email, type letters, play some games, read some websites then get on with the rest of their lives. I can't really see any way to convince these people to convert to mozilla (or anything else) short of bundling it with their PC's when they buy them.
According to this page the IE for solaris/HPUX does actually include bits in the installer script for linux_x86 so it looks like they might be preparing it for a linux release. I couldn't be bothered to download it and check. I don't miss popups that much:)
"All of this appears to have been delayed however, whilst the Broadcasting Commission wait to see if anyone else is interested in purchasing those licences."
ahh, waiting for ****echelon auto-munge**** to cough up the backhander eh;)
On the subject of BBC News 24 - I still have my onDigital box.
yeah this is what I was getting at. The channels are being broadcast but unless you brought an ondigital box you can't actually see them. I was under the impression that the all the UK TV transmission was moving onto digital to free up bandwidth for mobile phone companies. So why can't I find a digital decoder anywhere except with a monthly subscription fee?
I may just be ranting pointlessly, I do live in the South-West so it may be that digital decoders are on sale but not here yet. Any other UK'ers seen a non-ITV/onDigial box on sale?
I kinda suspect that we're gonna end up having to pay the BBC's license fee's and a subscription fee to some digital provider just to get any TV.
And lets not forget the same Rupert Murdoch has just been allowed to bid for one of the five *main* channels in the UK (channel 5).
Kind of offtopic but the most interesting question posed to me by the whole UK digital TV fiasco is what the hell happened to non-subscription digital TV?
I remember all the hype about how they're planning on closing down non-digital terrestrial transmissions and move everyone onto digital reception (by 2005 was it?). Apparently in Scotland they recently started to advertise a digital decoder without smartcards but the only ones I can see on sale in the UK are subscription based deals.
There were quite a few extra digital channels that were non-subscription (there are even more now itv digital has gone under) so why is nobody selling a normal digital decoder box to watch them? It seems to me the only people with access to these channels are people who paid for ITV/ondigital boxes. Or is it just because I don't live in London or Manchester that we can't buy them.
It's also annoying how my friends in Holland get to watch bbc news 24 for free whereas I pay for it (tv license fees) and can't see it except in a 2" square at 2fps via their website (and I have to pay British Telecom for this pleasure).
Is digital TV going to help define ripoff Britain? I really hope not.
apart from the time taken to delete all these would it be possible to make a case against spammers for the emotional stress caused?
Enough people have heart attacks/various conditions brought on by stress in the workplace and having 30 emails of utter crap each day must create quite a lot of annoyance. Maybe there would be an angle here to get some unions involved to pressure for better anti-spam legislation.
I run several reiser systems both desktops and the nameservers at work. All of them have been shutdown uncleanly without any problems at all. I never bother shutting my dekstop down properly any more as it's never had any problems at all. Why wait for it when you can just power straight off? (yes I do backup my work:) )
With ext2 I've had all sortsa problems, the worst being when fsck "fixed" my disk by putting the old ppp chatscript with the per-minute charged ISP phone numbers back on. That's my anecdote and it cost me a fortune. Long live reiser!
erm I dunno about america but thats exactly how copyright is in the UK (valid until 70 years after death of author) unless it's film/sound recording in which case it lasts 20 years. Oh, and if you create whatever it is while at work as part of that work, the copyright belongs to the employer. Not that different:)
there appears to be, if you have the CD handy its in:
/bootdsks.144/usb.i
or if you wanna download it:
ftp.chello.nl/pub/linux/Slackware/slackware-curr en t/bootdsks.144/usb.i
replace slackware-current with whatever version you have so you get the right kernel version, chello.nl only has upto slack 8.0 and slack current atm. I couldn't get onto ftp.slackware.com.
I made a Linux From Scratch install a few years back to learn about linux. What I ended up with after I'd got everything exactly how I wanted was basically slackware without the packaging system. Now ima slack junkie:)
I'd highly recommend trying the LFS project if you wanna learn about linux. The list of world mirrors for the site is http://www.linuxfromscratch.org
although this directly against the data protection act, which states that personal data must not be stored longer than is necessary for its purpose, an EU ruling would overrule UK law. Unfortunately us in the UK alone cannot veto it from going forward. The data protection act does great things to prevent companies from passing on personal data for advertising purposes and various other scams and now it's going to be voided by this moronic crap from people who send out their official documents in microsoft word format.
Seriously...thanks for explaining, I hadn't realised their cache wasn't actually caching. Thats very dodgy.... I'll stop defending the capitalist bastards now:)
I'm not sure what you're gettting at. You say you detected no use of proxies? Forgive me if I'm missing the obvious here but couldn't they have just added one recently? or maybe since you're geographically isolated it doesn't make economic sense for them to proxy the traffic from your part of the network.
The main problem I have with this is that the entire evidence that they are using this data for marketing purposes seems to come from a single email on a mailing list that is here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of big companies....but so far this looks like a well orchestrated flaming campaign against comcast. Can someone actually paste some links with any kind of proof other than that they use proxy servers, which 90% of the rest of the ISP's in the world also use?
...that comcast is simply using this proxy system to reduce its external traffic and attempt to make web-browsing faster for its users rather than as some part of some great conspiracy?
You need something like the data protection act in the UK:)
One part of it is that when storing personal data:
Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorized or unlawful processing of personal data and against acidental loss or, or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.
Simplified in non legalese this means: You must keep personal data secure
So I'd think this would give you some comeback in situations like this one....I'm not overly sure though, as far as I know no cases like this have come up in the UK courts so far.
ooops sorry...that was the " MSN® Hotmail® Tip of the Month" in one particular email (from msn)
full text:
MSN® Hotmail® Tip of the Month
Be aggressive against spam At Hotmail, we know spam is a chronic problem, and we are doing everything we can to help you keep spam out of your Inbox. That's why we developed the Junk Mail Filter. But there are other things you can do to decrease the amount of spam you receive.
Never respond to junk mail or follow an "unsubscribe" link, since this will only confirm that the spammers have a live address. Also, do not use your e-mail address when participating in chat rooms. Finally, you should carefully review a Web site's privacy policy when performing online activities such as shopping and banking, to ensure that your e-mail address will not be shared with a third party. Keep in mind that MSN does not sell, rent or lease its customer lists to third parties.
"Don't rely on email for your communications. Use IM from your home PC to stay in touch during the evenings."
I'd agree, we use IRC to keep in contact with a team spread all over Europe and America. One major bonus of using IM/IRC/chat clients would be that people often find it easier to understand typed english than listening to it. It may also help you understand them if their accent is not so good.
Unfortunately if you're in the USA and your team is in India (which is what...12 hours ahead?) I'd guess the timezone effect may make using realtime chat very tiring:)
Email does get around this...but emails tend to go unanswered when people are busy. The solution we use is to employ mainly insomniacs who don't mind being awake at odd times to check in.
"During last Perlgolf season famous Perl hacker Jerome Quelin submit such inconceivable masterpiece and now he published expanded explanation of his solution"
And that got you a +4 insightful? -1 gibberish more like.
Unfortunately sir, British Telecoms Plc have already patented this idea under our new scheme to raise more cash. By speeding up the universe 10 millions years would pass in an instant and we could straight away bill all our customers for that time . We can even get the double whammy by holding back the UK's DSL install by an entire TEN MILLION YEARS. Imagine the dialup revenue *drool*........
Anyway cease and decist or I'll own all your hyperlinks.
Slashdot Mirror
Those stupid glass balls cost £86 million. In the first 12 months they generated approx £120million of increased spending in the region. Check here if you don't believe me (sorry couldn't find a geocities link).
The project was aiming to bring in tourists from all over the globe (and has) so a simple name that easily translates was probably the best way to go. Not particularly origonal but it doesn't seem to be putting people off visiting.
I don't doubt you at all, infact I know a few longtime nerds who choose IE. I personally chose mozilla.
In my experience working with home users most of them probably will just use whatever comes with the PC. Many may not realise that there are alternative browsers available. Probably 90% of the people I saw didn't care really what software they were running, they just wanted it to work. Since IE does work they'll stick with it. Many people don't even realise that windows is an "optional" part of their computer system, or what functions it does perform. These people will not be upgrading their browser and they probably represent the majority of the market in the UK.
They don't care about standards and most are too busy to give two craps about monopolies. They just want to turn on their computer, send some email, type letters, play some games, read some websites then get on with the rest of their lives. I can't really see any way to convince these people to convert to mozilla (or anything else) short of bundling it with their PC's when they buy them.
According to this page the IE for solaris/HPUX does actually include bits in the installer script for linux_x86 so it looks like they might be preparing it for a linux release. I couldn't be bothered to download it and check. I don't miss popups that much :)
thanks man :)
"All of this appears to have been delayed however, whilst the Broadcasting Commission wait to see if anyone else is interested in purchasing those licences."
;)
ahh, waiting for ****echelon auto-munge**** to cough up the backhander eh
On the subject of BBC News 24 - I still have my onDigital box.
yeah this is what I was getting at. The channels are being broadcast but unless you brought an ondigital box you can't actually see them. I was under the impression that the all the UK TV transmission was moving onto digital to free up bandwidth for mobile phone companies. So why can't I find a digital decoder anywhere except with a monthly subscription fee?
I may just be ranting pointlessly, I do live in the South-West so it may be that digital decoders are on sale but not here yet. Any other UK'ers seen a non-ITV/onDigial box on sale?
I kinda suspect that we're gonna end up having to pay the BBC's license fee's and a subscription fee to some digital provider just to get any TV.
And lets not forget the same Rupert Murdoch has just been allowed to bid for one of the five *main* channels in the UK (channel 5).
Kind of offtopic but the most interesting question posed to me by the whole UK digital TV fiasco is what the hell happened to non-subscription digital TV?
I remember all the hype about how they're planning on closing down non-digital terrestrial transmissions and move everyone onto digital reception (by 2005 was it?). Apparently in Scotland they recently started to advertise a digital decoder without smartcards but the only ones I can see on sale in the UK are subscription based deals.
There were quite a few extra digital channels that were non-subscription (there are even more now itv digital has gone under) so why is nobody selling a normal digital decoder box to watch them? It seems to me the only people with access to these channels are people who paid for ITV/ondigital boxes. Or is it just because I don't live in London or Manchester that we can't buy them.
It's also annoying how my friends in Holland get to watch bbc news 24 for free whereas I pay for it (tv license fees) and can't see it except in a 2" square at 2fps via their website (and I have to pay British Telecom for this pleasure).
Is digital TV going to help define ripoff Britain? I really hope not.
apart from the time taken to delete all these would it be possible to make a case against spammers for the emotional stress caused?
Enough people have heart attacks/various conditions brought on by stress in the workplace and having 30 emails of utter crap each day must create quite a lot of annoyance. Maybe there would be an angle here to get some unions involved to pressure for better anti-spam legislation.
I run several reiser systems both desktops and the nameservers at work. All of them have been shutdown uncleanly without any problems at all. I never bother shutting my dekstop down properly any more as it's never had any problems at all. Why wait for it when you can just power straight off? (yes I do backup my work:) )
With ext2 I've had all sortsa problems, the worst being when fsck "fixed" my disk by putting the old ppp chatscript with the per-minute charged ISP phone numbers back on. That's my anecdote and it cost me a fortune. Long live reiser!
erm I dunno about america but thats exactly how copyright is in the UK (valid until 70 years after death of author) unless it's film/sound recording in which case it lasts 20 years. Oh, and if you create whatever it is while at work as part of that work, the copyright belongs to the employer. Not that different :)
there appears to be, if you have the CD handy its in:
r en t/bootdsks.144/usb.i
/bootdsks.144/usb.i
or if you wanna download it:
ftp.chello.nl/pub/linux/Slackware/slackware-cur
replace slackware-current with whatever version you have so you get the right kernel version, chello.nl only has upto slack 8.0 and slack current atm. I couldn't get onto ftp.slackware.com.
That bbc story (about water on mars) is a coupla days old.
it appeared on slashdot here
I made a Linux From Scratch install a few years back to learn about linux. What I ended up with after I'd got everything exactly how I wanted was basically slackware without the packaging system. Now ima slack junkie :)
I'd highly recommend trying the LFS project if you wanna learn about linux. The list of world mirrors for the site is http://www.linuxfromscratch.org
although this directly against the data protection act, which states that personal data must not be stored longer than is necessary for its purpose, an EU ruling would overrule UK law. Unfortunately us in the UK alone cannot veto it from going forward. The data protection act does great things to prevent companies from passing on personal data for advertising purposes and various other scams and now it's going to be voided by this moronic crap from people who send out their official documents in microsoft word format.
Man I'm going to New Zealand.
I see *zip* its call coming back to me....
:)
Seriously...thanks for explaining, I hadn't realised their cache wasn't actually caching. Thats very dodgy.... I'll stop defending the capitalist bastards now
I'm not sure what you're gettting at. You say you detected no use of proxies? Forgive me if I'm missing the obvious here but couldn't they have just added one recently? or maybe since you're geographically isolated it doesn't make economic sense for them to proxy the traffic from your part of the network.
The main problem I have with this is that the entire evidence that they are using this data for marketing purposes seems to come from a single email on a mailing list that is here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of big companies....but so far this looks like a well orchestrated flaming campaign against comcast. Can someone actually paste some links with any kind of proof other than that they use proxy servers, which 90% of the rest of the ISP's in the world also use?
...that comcast is simply using this proxy system to reduce its external traffic and attempt to make web-browsing faster for its users rather than as some part of some great conspiracy?
You need something like the data protection act in the UK :)
One part of it is that when storing personal data:
Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorized or unlawful processing of personal data and against acidental loss or, or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.
Simplified in non legalese this means: You must keep personal data secure
So I'd think this would give you some comeback in situations like this one....I'm not overly sure though, as far as I know no cases like this have come up in the UK courts so far.
Or are you just a double agent trying to twist his truthful words...god where does it end!
A conflicting article at the Center for Stating the Bloody Obvious this week stated that infact:
Humans are the weakest link. Without them there would be no need for passwords.
ooops sorry...that was the " MSN® Hotmail® Tip of the Month" in one particular email (from msn)
full text:
MSN® Hotmail® Tip of the Month
Be aggressive against spam
At Hotmail, we know spam is a chronic problem, and we are doing everything we can to help you keep spam out of your Inbox. That's why we developed the Junk Mail Filter. But there are other things you can do to decrease the amount of spam you receive.
Never respond to junk mail or follow an "unsubscribe" link, since this will only confirm that the spammers have a live address. Also, do not use your e-mail address when participating in chat rooms. Finally, you should carefully review a Web site's privacy policy when performing online activities such as shopping and banking, to ensure that your e-mail address will not be shared with a third party. Keep in mind that MSN does not sell, rent or lease its customer lists to third parties.
Still, I guess this was yesterday...
When I login at hotmail it still says this in the bit about the junk filter when you view a mail:
Keep in mind that MSN does not sell, rent or lease its customer lists to third parties.
"Don't rely on email for your communications. Use IM from your home PC to stay in touch during the evenings."
:)
I'd agree, we use IRC to keep in contact with a team spread all over Europe and America. One major bonus of using IM/IRC/chat clients would be that people often find it easier to understand typed english than listening to it. It may also help you understand them if their accent is not so good.
Unfortunately if you're in the USA and your team is in India (which is what...12 hours ahead?) I'd guess the timezone effect may make using realtime chat very tiring
Email does get around this...but emails tend to go unanswered when people are busy. The solution we use is to employ mainly insomniacs who don't mind being awake at odd times to check in.
doh...thats what it did read...I stand over-caffined and underslept...sorry, maybe I should apply for an editors job.
so you want it to have read:
"During last Perlgolf season famous Perl hacker Jerome Quelin submit such inconceivable masterpiece and now he published expanded explanation of his solution"
And that got you a +4 insightful? -1 gibberish more like.
Unfortunately sir, British Telecoms Plc have already patented this idea under our new scheme to raise more cash. By speeding up the universe 10 millions years would pass in an instant and we could straight away bill all our customers for that time . We can even get the double whammy by holding back the UK's DSL install by an entire TEN MILLION YEARS. Imagine the dialup revenue *drool*........
Anyway cease and decist or I'll own all your hyperlinks.
Yours insincereley
Paul Acman.
Executive for Sarcasm
Bastard Telecom PlC.