There's a number of aspects of what you said that are inaccurate, and I believe the approach you're taking is deficient in a number of areas.
Let me cover a few of these off:
1. Cloud access does not lead to wasting time with flash games.
Firstly, I think you are confusing cloud computing with Internet access. Leverage a cloud service (e.g. Google Apps or some SaaS based learning service) is completely different to unfettered internet access to play flash games. If your school chose to use Google Apps or Office 365 it doesn't all of a sudden mean a deluge of flash games.
2. Chromebooks can be managed with Chrome Management Console
With the Chrome Management Console you can control a vast array of policies - such as URLs that can be visited, what can be installed etc. All reasonably similar to the level of control you may have now on your windows machines. However, Chromebooks go beyond this as it is much harder for a student to bypass the controls that Chromebooks have as they is so locked down and have TPM for verified boot etc. So your statement that it's easier to "curtail games on your system" is probably false. For a brief summary, look here: https://www.google.com/chrome/... there's a whole lot more info on the detailed policies if you search for it.
3. The hidden cost and inefficient of managing your own onsite storage and backup.
You're almost spending more money than you need to managing your own infrastructure. Your cost of storage is certainly an order of magnitude higher than Google's due to their scale. You're doing backups - but it sounds like they're on site. Where's your geographic redundancy? Google will store your data across multiple geographically separate datacentres and manage all the infrastructure for you.
4. Your unjustified fear of losing control
You seem to still believe that Google is mining kid's information to serve them ads - yet Google Apps for education doesn't serve any ads. (http://www.google.com/edu/trust/) You also seem to believe that using the cloud means you don't know who will access it. In fact Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. all make it pretty clear the controls they put in place regarding security and privacy - and back these up with SLAs etc. I'd have a lot more confidence in their security and privacy controls than in your own IT team. This is probably most contenious area, but you could start by talking to other schools who have made the shift to see how they overcame these kind of concerns.
I get that change is scary - and there's a lot of cloud FUD out there. But I'd really suggest you take the time to understand as it is fundamentally shifting how the vast majority of IT systems are delivered. I also think that keeping on doing things how you've always done them isn't a sustainable strategy in the long run.
Another thing to keep in mind is that since Type 1 is genetic, you've got it from birth...
Not quite true - whilst it does seem to be genetic to a large degree, having Type 1 at birth is very rare. The average age of diagnosis is 6 - 7 years old. That said, having personally managed Type 1 in a 1 year old (and ever since) - you're absolutely right that a 10 day injection and I assume reduced blood glucose monitoring in between would be a great thing.
> Only instead of VT102 escape codes we are using HTML5 on much more capable terminals Awesome false analogy...comparing a terminal to a web browser experience.
> But it is the same siren song, users with computers is dangerous, expensive, etc. Let US take all that away... for low monthly payments
If you've ever worked in a large enterprise you'll have seen the cost that businesses spend on trying to manage and maintain their IT assets. Personally, in the days when things can be accessed via a browser, I prefer the approach of bring your own device and none of the corporate IT lockdown - but most businesses aren't quite ready for that.
I look around my office now and see half the people working in nothing but their browser all day (Email, CRM) - they wouldn't even notice the switch except for being pleaed about the faster boot time. But as I said in my early post - this isn't for everyone. The other half of my office would be hamstrung I gave a Chromebook to them to do their job.
It's a pity you can't take a small amount of time to understand the niche that Chrome OS fits into and respond to it based on that.
I think you're missing the point. Chrome OS is not really for consumers - it's for Enterprises and Educational institutions.
These groups want a device that is highly secure, low / no maintenance and can be given to any random employee / student without much thinking about it. Add in the Enteprise controls that are available through a simple Web GUI and you can massively simplify the management and operation of your IT assets.
Is it something you give to your accountants or marketing team - no. Is it something you give to people working in the field or call centre staff or students - yes it is.
When you think of it this way, then Chrome OS is quite a unique solution and not worth the slamming that everyone here is giving it. There are some valid questions about how much of this could be folded into Android - but at present it has value, just probably not to you.
a language that less than.0002% of the people in the world would recognize does that mean a TM is invalidated?
By my rough calculation our 4 million people gives us 0.057% of the world's population recognising the phrase:-)
The basic fact is that this is an extremely arrogant move. A company is taking a "common word", which ironically means gift, and using it for commercial gain for open source software that was created in the very country they're applying their trademark in.
The Maori meaning of "koha" is more complex than Gift - and if you start to understand the moral obligation that underpins true "koha" - you really feel that these guys are a bunch of knob-ends.
That said, our intellectual property office recently let a large brewery trademark the term "Radler" - http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10738427 - so unfortunately they might be needing their legal fund to try and get Koha back out of corporate hands.
Good response. I do own a honeycomb Tablet - the Acer Iconia A500, and I also write mobile apps from time to time.
I haven't really found my use of the device has suffered due to a lack of honeycomb optimised apps. The main reason being that the browser is good enough that you don't really need them. I use the in-built apps predominantly, and then a twitter app, a Google reader app and ConnectBot (ssh access). Angry Birds looks brilliant on the device, so that's the main thing.
So, from my experience, my summary of the issues are:
- there isn't a big need to create tablet optimised apps as the browser is good enough in most cases
- the Honeycomb emulator is very slow making development and testing more painful than it should be.
- not being able to search for tablet optimised apps in the Android Market means you can't tell if it's a honeycomb app or not.
A while ago I wrote an app that collects business KPI data from a site we run so that we could do diagnostics more easily on the go. I ported the 2.1 app across to Honeycomb, and used fragments to build it up in a tablet specific fashion. It was easy enough to do - but the end result was unecessary, as the same data is accessible from a web browser for no effort. It was a good learning exercise - so I'm glad I did it - but the resultant app wasn't useful.
So in summary - I own an Android tablet, and I'm happy.
There was somthing call 'pig sushi' that I heard about a while ago, that had pig Beta cells wrapped in an coating that stopped the immune system from getting at them.
I havn't heard any more on that, but it did tackle the problem head on.
The trials are continuing as we speak here in New Zealand. The company concerned is Living Cell Technologies
It's a very clever solution that solves the rejection issue. The main questions are on how much insulin can be produced and over what time period. The reality is that anything that introduces at least some reasonable level of insulin production - even if not enough to eliminate injections - should reduce the extreme blood sugar highs that cause the most long term damage to Type 1 diabetics.
It will be fantastic if this can succeed (like all of the other potential cures to this disease).
Here's a quick rundown on how Txt-a-Park works in NZ for those who are interested...
First point is that it is "pay and display" parking (i.e. the machine vends a ticket that you place on your dashboard) - which is the standard parking meter model in most NZ cities.
Each machine has a built in GPRS modem. The customer presses the "Txt a Park" button on the machine, the modem checks it can communicate, then instructs the user to text a specific numeric code to 7275 (PARK). The numeric code identifies the parking machine and the time duration the customer wants. When the system receives the customer's text it checks they have enough credit and then initiates communication with the vending machine to ask the customer to confirm the purchase (this ensures that the customer is in front of the right machine!). They confirm and it vends the ticket. The customer receives a text confirming receipt of funds from their mobile account credit balance. The entire transaction usually takes six to ten seconds.
The 50c transaction fee is the same as what you receive if you put your credit card in the machine, so it's the standard fee for a non-cash transaction.
Interesting things to note about this solution:
- billing is not done by having differentially rated text messages as other systems do, it's straight against the billing system. This means that if the customer texts the wrong code etc. they haven't just blown $4.
- the modem inside the machine also allows for credit card processing and machine health checks.
- it would be possible to add in reminders etc. if desired, but the whole thrust was to keep it as similar to the normal "pay and display" user experience as possible.
I like the fact that Kazaa is number 2, and then spybot comes in at number 4.
Anyone want to hazard a guess that an urgent search for "spybot" comes not to far after a successful install of number 2....
Of course the fact that less people are searching for (and therefore installing) spybot than kazaa perhaps indicates the blissful ignorance of many kazaa users.
Oh well, off to Christmas with a CD-R full of spybot, adaware etc. to cleanse relatives PC's of all those "extras" gained from furtive searches for Britney and friends.
Thanks for that - I'd been hunting for an update feature for about 5 minutes before I found your post.
Interestingly, my settings were set to do "automatic updates" but no update had run for the last the few months. I clicked the "update now" and it's chugging away downloading the update as we speak.
Hopefully the latest version's "automatic update" is a bit more automatic than my current one!
Where "gen" stands for "general" stuff (or more precisely "Individuals and other organisations not covered elsewhere"). The purpose being that anyone with a personal website can set themselves up correctly.
Of course this is country specific to nz, and not a TLD, but I guess it's a step in the right direction.
Of course when you say your email address is someone@somewhere.gen.nz most people haven't heard of it and get confused - '.jen,.gem...huh? Surely he meant.co.nz - I'll send it to that...'
I guess it might be better off going for.geek.nz instead.
If you change to error pages instead of dialog boxes this problem should be solved for you. Details are on the Firefox Tips and Tricks page: Use error pages instead of dialog messages
You can be pretty certain that when "Johnny Law" does enter your info the underlying data store is going to be a Relational Database (unless the system was built over 20 years ago).
RDBMS's are fast - their use by large organisations all over the world for fast data retrieval is a testament to this. It certainly is possible to create a relational database that has incredibly poor response, but with good design and some straight forward tuning you can get great results.
Of course, when I talk about relational databases I'm talking about implementations such as Oracle. The article talks about how these aren't really RDBMS's, but I'm sure that your "Wise Man" was talking about the real world implementations such as Oracle, Informix etc.
It wasn't a joke - but re-reading my original post I can kind of see how you could think I'm some extremist nazi boss who only wants corporate drones working for him (which I don't think I am!)
To give some more context - from reading his site it was clear that his attitude to work wasn't the kind that a professional software developer should have. The comments I read made it apparent that club music was his life and his primary focus.
Basically for this guy, I wasn't sure about whether he was worth interviewing from his CV, and his site tipped the balance in favour of not interviewing him. If he'd had a "I've got to interview this guy" CV then I would definitely have got him in and asked him about his music in the interview.
Basically, from someone's personal website you can develop a much better idea of personality than from their CV. If the vibe from their site is wrong for you, then they're less likely to get an interview. And to get a job you've got to get the interview first.
Why shoot yourself in the foot with your own site?
We've been recruiting recently and I always do a quick google search to see if I can find the person on the net.
I think about 10 - 20% of the candidates that we've seen have had their own sites, and I can say that on the whole it doesn't help them at all.
You can tell quite a bit about a person (particularly in the ubiqutous "My Pictures" section that every site seems to have) - and there have been a couple of candidates whose "extracuricular" activities have made me decide against interviewing them.
For example, there was a guy who it transpires was a dead keen club DJ who spent most nights of the week working in clubs on a freelance basis and clearly was partial to the odd pill to get him through his set - I decided that this wasn't the kind of guy I wanted working in my development team.
That said, I'm pretty open to people doing whatever with their life, as long as it doesn't affect their work.
As I mentioned in my comment above you can view your usage history at any touch screen ticket machine.
When I viewed my history it listed my bus trips (inluding the Bus Number and even the stop I think) as well as my tube trips.
Of course you could jump on an old Routemaster bus as they don't have readers fitted - last time I caught one the conductor looked at my Oystercard as though I was a dumbass showing him a bit of plastic. I tried explaining that it was the new smartcard that was supposed to be used on all public transport, but he didn't get it. He must have decided it was too hard and just kept on walking up the bus checking other tickets.
I assume they'll bring out a portable card reader sometime soon for these poor saps.
request from London Transport a copy of all information they hold on their computer systems about you and your travel movements
Or you could just do it yourself at a ticket machine.
Walk up to any of the touchscreen ticket machines and swipe your Oystercard near the big yellow card reader thingee.
Up pop a couple of options mainly to do with renewing your card - however there is one to view your usage history. I was quite interested when I saw it - as I wondered how much they tracked - so I swiped the card and got a nice list of all my trips over the last week - bus, train and tube - all with dates/times.
At least if they're logging it you can actually see for yourself what they're logging without a big effort.
Does anyone know if this trip information is stored on the Oyster Card itself, a server, or both?
Personally I like coffee for the taste, the caffeine is also an added reward.
Some people want to have de-caf for health reasons. Fine...no problem there, to each his own. But these guys are hoping on to tap into this market with Genetically Modified coffee!
In my experience the people who go for the healthy alternative also want their food to be GM free. Also a lot of restaurants/cafes promote themselves as being GM free.
I think they may have sliced off a chunk of their potential sales market.
Oh well, not my problem...time for an espresso.
Re:3G is a pathetic disappointment...
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Is 3G Irrelevant?
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· Score: 1
I was given a 3 phone to trial for 3 months or so, and I can only agree that it is a complete disappointment.
I agree with the comments about connection speed, but for me the biggest killer was the immaturity of the handsets. I had an NEC 606 (the most common 3G phone that they offer) and it suffered from the following problems:
- No battery life. None. If you charged it, and then left it switched off (that's right off, not on standby) if you came back after 3-4 days it would be flat! Even if you used it straight after charging, you'd be lucky to get more than 2 hours of use out of it before the battery went flat.
- You can't use the phone whilst it's charging (somewhat of a problem when the phone is constantly flat).
- Navigation through the menus of the phone was painfully slow, and made you feel like you were using a phone from 5 years ago.
Admittedly these are problems directly with the phone, but I think it's somewhat symptomatic of the entire 3G offering here in the UK - rushed to market with an immature technology set.
Also the fact that you couldn't surf the Internet (thank's for turning of that feature 3!) and install Java apps on it took some of the interest away.
Whilst Video calling was interesting for about 3 miunutes, it isn't really that useful day-to-day. One of the great things about telephones is not looking at someone's ugly face! Would be good for people in long distance relationships I suppose - and certainly 3's adverts in the UK are pushing the adult line of interest.
On that point - A friend of mine also had a trial phone, and after some weeks of downloading video clips of football goals and comedy acts, he found the phone's true killer feature (at least for some) - soft porn. He had five grainy 1-minute glips of naked women downloaded on his phone. Amusing when you're at the pub with the lads, but not really worth it at the end of the day.
So all-in-all, I'm extremely glad that I didn't pay for the phone (in fact it's sitting under my desk waiting for the courier to pick it up to take it away).
However, good luck to 3, I hope they are able to have some success and find their niche in the market. I might have another look when the next generation of handsets come out, but until then it's 2G for me.
Err... all of London's trains are the same height... Well, at least, on the Picadilly, Northern, Victoria, Circle, District, Jubilee, and Central lines. Don't know about the Metropolitan or otherwise lines, though.
Just compare a Piccadilly line train to the District line train it rolls alongside on part of the line from Heathrow and you'll see that they're not at all the same height. All doors open to the same platform level but that's about it really.
Circle, District, H&C and Metropolitan lines are all about the same height (i.e. you can stand up in them).
The Victoria and Bakerloo seem to be similar to each other, and are smaller than the circle etc. However, You don't need to bend your head if you stand near the doors.
Jubilee is slightly smaller, followed by the Picadilly then the Central line, which has the smallest of the lot. If you get jammed up near the doors on the Central line or Piccadilly line and you're over 5 foot 10 you'll definitely know about it.
Essentially, the older the line, the older the tunnel. The older the tunnel, the smaller the tunnel. The smaller the tunnel, the smaller the train has to be.
which is less than it takes me to buy a single ticket on the London Underground
Speaking of London Underground, I think that they are planning on introducing a similar system very soon.
Those of you who catch the tube may have noticed those little yellow/black things being added to the top of most ticket machines recently. These are the "contactless" ticket scanners like the ones they mention in the Hong Kong article. My understanding is that they've done a trial and are now looking at rolling it out across the network (knowing LU this could take a while!).
I doubt it would have the same 95% takeup as in Hong Kong, but it would be pretty good for us regular Underground users. Even better if you can use them to make payments at supermarkets etc.
Re:The heart of the web?
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Heart of the Net
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Just to be a pedant, Wellington doesn't have trams, it has trolley buses. These are electric buses which get their power from overhead wires, but are steered just like a bus (of course they can't stray too far from the wires!). There's also a cable car as well in Wellington, but no trams.
Onto the point I was going to make...I remember a few years ago they were talking about taking out all the trolley buses because the buses were in need of replacement and it would be too expensive to replace them - normal buses were the desired replacement. Bit of a bummer for CityLink if they did tear down all the wires.
I hope they keep the buses, because it would seem that lots of other cities ripped up this kind of network in the 70s and 80s only to start regretting it later.
As I'm living here in London I may as well offer my two pence. I'd have to say that you wouldn't be able to go anywhere without being seen, at least certainly not in Central London. There are cameras absolutely everywhere both public and private. Trying to find the "path of least observance" wouldn't be viable IMHO.
On my commute to work (including traveling via the Tube) I would have to pass in the order of 100+ cameras (and those are just the ones I can see).
It seems like a bit of a waste of time to me...but then I guess I'm not that paranoid.
Q. What happens after the trial?
A. At the end of the trial ntl will evaluate your feedback and decide on whether to continue the service or not. If the service is continued then you will be contacted and asked if you would like to become a customer. If you do, you will be charged the standard high-speed access tariffs (currently £34.99 per month). Installation fees will be waived. If you choose to discontinue the service we will make an appointment to remove the outdoor equipment and retrieve the cable modem and you will owe us nothing.
so perhaps not as cheap as the original poster suggested. Hopefully the uptake will be sufficient to keep it going. However I have heard pretty bad things regarding customer support from people who currently use NTL.
I'm quite interested in this since I live in London and fall into a "service is likely" postcode. Anything would be better than my crappy BTInternet dialup service at the moment
...now if I can only convince my landlady to let me install the box on the outside of our house...
Slashdot Mirror
There's a number of aspects of what you said that are inaccurate, and I believe the approach you're taking is deficient in a number of areas.
Let me cover a few of these off:
1. Cloud access does not lead to wasting time with flash games.
Firstly, I think you are confusing cloud computing with Internet access. Leverage a cloud service (e.g. Google Apps or some SaaS based learning service) is completely different to unfettered internet access to play flash games. If your school chose to use Google Apps or Office 365 it doesn't all of a sudden mean a deluge of flash games.
2. Chromebooks can be managed with Chrome Management Console
With the Chrome Management Console you can control a vast array of policies - such as URLs that can be visited, what can be installed etc. All reasonably similar to the level of control you may have now on your windows machines. However, Chromebooks go beyond this as it is much harder for a student to bypass the controls that Chromebooks have as they is so locked down and have TPM for verified boot etc. So your statement that it's easier to "curtail games on your system" is probably false. For a brief summary, look here: https://www.google.com/chrome/... there's a whole lot more info on the detailed policies if you search for it.
3. The hidden cost and inefficient of managing your own onsite storage and backup.
You're almost spending more money than you need to managing your own infrastructure. Your cost of storage is certainly an order of magnitude higher than Google's due to their scale. You're doing backups - but it sounds like they're on site. Where's your geographic redundancy? Google will store your data across multiple geographically separate datacentres and manage all the infrastructure for you.
4. Your unjustified fear of losing control
You seem to still believe that Google is mining kid's information to serve them ads - yet Google Apps for education doesn't serve any ads. (http://www.google.com/edu/trust/)
You also seem to believe that using the cloud means you don't know who will access it. In fact Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. all make it pretty clear the controls they put in place regarding security and privacy - and back these up with SLAs etc. I'd have a lot more confidence in their security and privacy controls than in your own IT team. This is probably most contenious area, but you could start by talking to other schools who have made the shift to see how they overcame these kind of concerns.
I get that change is scary - and there's a lot of cloud FUD out there. But I'd really suggest you take the time to understand as it is fundamentally shifting how the vast majority of IT systems are delivered. I also think that keeping on doing things how you've always done them isn't a sustainable strategy in the long run.
Another thing to keep in mind is that since Type 1 is genetic, you've got it from birth...
Not quite true - whilst it does seem to be genetic to a large degree, having Type 1 at birth is very rare. The average age of diagnosis is 6 - 7 years old. That said, having personally managed Type 1 in a 1 year old (and ever since) - you're absolutely right that a 10 day injection and I assume reduced blood glucose monitoring in between would be a great thing.
> Only instead of VT102 escape codes we are using HTML5 on much more capable terminals
Awesome false analogy...comparing a terminal to a web browser experience.
> But it is the same siren song, users with computers is dangerous, expensive, etc. Let US take all that away... for low monthly payments
If you've ever worked in a large enterprise you'll have seen the cost that businesses spend on trying to manage and maintain their IT assets. Personally, in the days when things can be accessed via a browser, I prefer the approach of bring your own device and none of the corporate IT lockdown - but most businesses aren't quite ready for that.
I look around my office now and see half the people working in nothing but their browser all day (Email, CRM) - they wouldn't even notice the switch except for being pleaed about the faster boot time. But as I said in my early post - this isn't for everyone. The other half of my office would be hamstrung I gave a Chromebook to them to do their job.
It's a pity you can't take a small amount of time to understand the niche that Chrome OS fits into and respond to it based on that.
I think you're missing the point. Chrome OS is not really for consumers - it's for Enterprises and Educational institutions.
These groups want a device that is highly secure, low / no maintenance and can be given to any random employee / student without much thinking about it. Add in the Enteprise controls that are available through a simple Web GUI and you can massively simplify the management and operation of your IT assets.
Is it something you give to your accountants or marketing team - no. Is it something you give to people working in the field or call centre staff or students - yes it is.
When you think of it this way, then Chrome OS is quite a unique solution and not worth the slamming that everyone here is giving it. There are some valid questions about how much of this could be folded into Android - but at present it has value, just probably not to you.
a language that less than .0002% of the people in the world would recognize does that mean a TM is invalidated?
By my rough calculation our 4 million people gives us 0.057% of the world's population recognising the phrase :-)
The basic fact is that this is an extremely arrogant move. A company is taking a "common word", which ironically means gift, and using it for commercial gain for open source software that was created in the very country they're applying their trademark in.
The Maori meaning of "koha" is more complex than Gift - and if you start to understand the moral obligation that underpins true "koha" - you really feel that these guys are a bunch of knob-ends.
That said, our intellectual property office recently let a large brewery trademark the term "Radler" - http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10738427 - so unfortunately they might be needing their legal fund to try and get Koha back out of corporate hands.
Good response. I do own a honeycomb Tablet - the Acer Iconia A500, and I also write mobile apps from time to time.
I haven't really found my use of the device has suffered due to a lack of honeycomb optimised apps. The main reason being that the browser is good enough that you don't really need them. I use the in-built apps predominantly, and then a twitter app, a Google reader app and ConnectBot (ssh access). Angry Birds looks brilliant on the device, so that's the main thing.
So, from my experience, my summary of the issues are:
- there isn't a big need to create tablet optimised apps as the browser is good enough in most cases
- the Honeycomb emulator is very slow making development and testing more painful than it should be.
- not being able to search for tablet optimised apps in the Android Market means you can't tell if it's a honeycomb app or not.
A while ago I wrote an app that collects business KPI data from a site we run so that we could do diagnostics more easily on the go. I ported the 2.1 app across to Honeycomb, and used fragments to build it up in a tablet specific fashion. It was easy enough to do - but the end result was unecessary, as the same data is accessible from a web browser for no effort. It was a good learning exercise - so I'm glad I did it - but the resultant app wasn't useful.
So in summary - I own an Android tablet, and I'm happy.
There was somthing call 'pig sushi' that I heard about a while ago, that had pig Beta cells wrapped in an coating that stopped the immune system from getting at them.
I havn't heard any more on that, but it did tackle the problem head on.
The trials are continuing as we speak here in New Zealand. The company concerned is Living Cell Technologies
And there is an article describing it here
It's a very clever solution that solves the rejection issue. The main questions are on how much insulin can be produced and over what time period. The reality is that anything that introduces at least some reasonable level of insulin production - even if not enough to eliminate injections - should reduce the extreme blood sugar highs that cause the most long term damage to Type 1 diabetics.
It will be fantastic if this can succeed (like all of the other potential cures to this disease).
Here's a quick rundown on how Txt-a-Park works in NZ for those who are interested...
First point is that it is "pay and display" parking (i.e. the machine vends a ticket that you place on your dashboard) - which is the standard parking meter model in most NZ cities.
Each machine has a built in GPRS modem. The customer presses the "Txt a Park" button on the machine, the modem checks it can communicate, then instructs the user to text a specific numeric code to 7275 (PARK). The numeric code identifies the parking machine and the time duration the customer wants. When the system receives the customer's text it checks they have enough credit and then initiates communication with the vending machine to ask the customer to confirm the purchase (this ensures that the customer is in front of the right machine!). They confirm and it vends the ticket. The customer receives a text confirming receipt of funds from their mobile account credit balance. The entire transaction usually takes six to ten seconds.
The 50c transaction fee is the same as what you receive if you put your credit card in the machine, so it's the standard fee for a non-cash transaction.
Interesting things to note about this solution:
- billing is not done by having differentially rated text messages as other systems do, it's straight against the billing system. This means that if the customer texts the wrong code etc. they haven't just blown $4.
- the modem inside the machine also allows for credit card processing and machine health checks.
- it would be possible to add in reminders etc. if desired, but the whole thrust was to keep it as similar to the normal "pay and display" user experience as possible.
I like the fact that Kazaa is number 2, and then spybot comes in at number 4.
Anyone want to hazard a guess that an urgent search for "spybot" comes not to far after a successful install of number 2....
Of course the fact that less people are searching for (and therefore installing) spybot than kazaa perhaps indicates the blissful ignorance of many kazaa users.
Oh well, off to Christmas with a CD-R full of spybot, adaware etc. to cleanse relatives PC's of all those "extras" gained from furtive searches for Britney and friends.
Thanks for that - I'd been hunting for an update feature for about 5 minutes before I found your post.
Interestingly, my settings were set to do "automatic updates" but no update had run for the last the few months. I clicked the "update now" and it's chugging away downloading the update as we speak.
Hopefully the latest version's "automatic update" is a bit more automatic than my current one!
Here in NZ you can get a .gen.nz domain name.
.gem...huh? Surely he meant .co.nz - I'll send it to that...'
.geek.nz instead.
Where "gen" stands for "general" stuff (or more precisely "Individuals and other organisations not covered elsewhere"). The purpose being that anyone with a personal website can set themselves up correctly.
Of course this is country specific to nz, and not a TLD, but I guess it's a step in the right direction.
Of course when you say your email address is someone@somewhere.gen.nz most people haven't heard of it and get confused - '.jen,
I guess it might be better off going for
If you change to error pages instead of dialog boxes this problem should be solved for you. Details are on the Firefox Tips and Tricks page: Use error pages instead of dialog messages
Good luck...
You can be pretty certain that when "Johnny Law" does enter your info the underlying data store is going to be a Relational Database (unless the system was built over 20 years ago).
RDBMS's are fast - their use by large organisations all over the world for fast data retrieval is a testament to this. It certainly is possible to create a relational database that has incredibly poor response, but with good design and some straight forward tuning you can get great results.
Of course, when I talk about relational databases I'm talking about implementations such as Oracle. The article talks about how these aren't really RDBMS's, but I'm sure that your "Wise Man" was talking about the real world implementations such as Oracle, Informix etc.
It wasn't a joke - but re-reading my original post I can kind of see how you could think I'm some extremist nazi boss who only wants corporate drones working for him (which I don't think I am!)
To give some more context - from reading his site it was clear that his attitude to work wasn't the kind that a professional software developer should have. The comments I read made it apparent that club music was his life and his primary focus.
Basically for this guy, I wasn't sure about whether he was worth interviewing from his CV, and his site tipped the balance in favour of not interviewing him. If he'd had a "I've got to interview this guy" CV then I would definitely have got him in and asked him about his music in the interview.
Basically, from someone's personal website you can develop a much better idea of personality than from their CV. If the vibe from their site is wrong for you, then they're less likely to get an interview. And to get a job you've got to get the interview first.
Why shoot yourself in the foot with your own site?
We've been recruiting recently and I always do a quick google search to see if I can find the person on the net.
I think about 10 - 20% of the candidates that we've seen have had their own sites, and I can say that on the whole it doesn't help them at all.
You can tell quite a bit about a person (particularly in the ubiqutous "My Pictures" section that every site seems to have) - and there have been a couple of candidates whose "extracuricular" activities have made me decide against interviewing them.
For example, there was a guy who it transpires was a dead keen club DJ who spent most nights of the week working in clubs on a freelance basis and clearly was partial to the odd pill to get him through his set - I decided that this wasn't the kind of guy I wanted working in my development team.
That said, I'm pretty open to people doing whatever with their life, as long as it doesn't affect their work.
As I mentioned in my comment above you can view your usage history at any touch screen ticket machine.
When I viewed my history it listed my bus trips (inluding the Bus Number and even the stop I think) as well as my tube trips.
Of course you could jump on an old Routemaster bus as they don't have readers fitted - last time I caught one the conductor looked at my Oystercard as though I was a dumbass showing him a bit of plastic. I tried explaining that it was the new smartcard that was supposed to be used on all public transport, but he didn't get it. He must have decided it was too hard and just kept on walking up the bus checking other tickets.
I assume they'll bring out a portable card reader sometime soon for these poor saps.
request from London Transport a copy of all information they hold on their computer systems about you and your travel movements
Or you could just do it yourself at a ticket machine.
Walk up to any of the touchscreen ticket machines and swipe your Oystercard near the big yellow card reader thingee.
Up pop a couple of options mainly to do with renewing your card - however there is one to view your usage history. I was quite interested when I saw it - as I wondered how much they tracked - so I swiped the card and got a nice list of all my trips over the last week - bus, train and tube - all with dates/times.
At least if they're logging it you can actually see for yourself what they're logging without a big effort.
Does anyone know if this trip information is stored on the Oyster Card itself, a server, or both?
Personally I like coffee for the taste, the caffeine is also an added reward.
Some people want to have de-caf for health reasons. Fine...no problem there, to each his own. But these guys are hoping on to tap into this market with Genetically Modified coffee!
In my experience the people who go for the healthy alternative also want their food to be GM free. Also a lot of restaurants/cafes promote themselves as being GM free.
I think they may have sliced off a chunk of their potential sales market.
Oh well, not my problem...time for an espresso.
I was given a 3 phone to trial for 3 months or so, and I can only agree that it is a complete disappointment.
I agree with the comments about connection speed, but for me the biggest killer was the immaturity of the handsets. I had an NEC 606 (the most common 3G phone that they offer) and it suffered from the following problems:
- No battery life. None. If you charged it, and then left it switched off (that's right off, not on standby) if you came back after 3-4 days it would be flat! Even if you used it straight after charging, you'd be lucky to get more than 2 hours of use out of it before the battery went flat.
- You can't use the phone whilst it's charging (somewhat of a problem when the phone is constantly flat).
- Navigation through the menus of the phone was painfully slow, and made you feel like you were using a phone from 5 years ago.
Admittedly these are problems directly with the phone, but I think it's somewhat symptomatic of the entire 3G offering here in the UK - rushed to market with an immature technology set.
Also the fact that you couldn't surf the Internet (thank's for turning of that feature 3!) and install Java apps on it took some of the interest away.
Whilst Video calling was interesting for about 3 miunutes, it isn't really that useful day-to-day. One of the great things about telephones is not looking at someone's ugly face! Would be good for people in long distance relationships I suppose - and certainly 3's adverts in the UK are pushing the adult line of interest.
On that point - A friend of mine also had a trial phone, and after some weeks of downloading video clips of football goals and comedy acts, he found the phone's true killer feature (at least for some) - soft porn. He had five grainy 1-minute glips of naked women downloaded on his phone. Amusing when you're at the pub with the lads, but not really worth it at the end of the day.
So all-in-all, I'm extremely glad that I didn't pay for the phone (in fact it's sitting under my desk waiting for the courier to pick it up to take it away).
However, good luck to 3, I hope they are able to have some success and find their niche in the market. I might have another look when the next generation of handsets come out, but until then it's 2G for me.
Err... all of London's trains are the same height... Well, at least, on the Picadilly, Northern, Victoria, Circle, District, Jubilee, and Central lines. Don't know about the Metropolitan or otherwise lines, though.
Just compare a Piccadilly line train to the District line train it rolls alongside on part of the line from Heathrow and you'll see that they're not at all the same height. All doors open to the same platform level but that's about it really.
Circle, District, H&C and Metropolitan lines are all about the same height (i.e. you can stand up in them).
The Victoria and Bakerloo seem to be similar to each other, and are smaller than the circle etc. However, You don't need to bend your head if you stand near the doors.
Jubilee is slightly smaller, followed by the Picadilly then the Central line, which has the smallest of the lot. If you get jammed up near the doors on the Central line or Piccadilly line and you're over 5 foot 10 you'll definitely know about it.
Essentially, the older the line, the older the tunnel. The older the tunnel, the smaller the tunnel. The smaller the tunnel, the smaller the train has to be.
which is less than it takes me to buy a single ticket on the London Underground
Speaking of London Underground, I think that they are planning on introducing a similar system very soon.
Those of you who catch the tube may have noticed those little yellow/black things being added to the top of most ticket machines recently. These are the "contactless" ticket scanners like the ones they mention in the Hong Kong article. My understanding is that they've done a trial and are now looking at rolling it out across the network (knowing LU this could take a while!).
I doubt it would have the same 95% takeup as in Hong Kong, but it would be pretty good for us regular Underground users. Even better if you can use them to make payments at supermarkets etc.
You mean it isn't porn either??
Just to be a pedant, Wellington doesn't have trams, it has trolley buses. These are electric buses which get their power from overhead wires, but are steered just like a bus (of course they can't stray too far from the wires!). There's also a cable car as well in Wellington, but no trams.
Onto the point I was going to make...I remember a few years ago they were talking about taking out all the trolley buses because the buses were in need of replacement and it would be too expensive to replace them - normal buses were the desired replacement. Bit of a bummer for CityLink if they did tear down all the wires.
I hope they keep the buses, because it would seem that lots of other cities ripped up this kind of network in the 70s and 80s only to start regretting it later.
As I'm living here in London I may as well offer my two pence. I'd have to say that you wouldn't be able to go anywhere without being seen, at least certainly not in Central London. There are cameras absolutely everywhere both public and private. Trying to find the "path of least observance" wouldn't be viable IMHO.
On my commute to work (including traveling via the Tube) I would have to pass in the order of 100+ cameras (and those are just the ones I can see).
It seems like a bit of a waste of time to me...but then I guess I'm not that paranoid.
From the NTL website (emphasis mine):
Q. What happens after the trial?
A. At the end of the trial ntl will evaluate your feedback and decide on whether to continue the service or not. If the service is continued then you will be contacted and asked if you would like to become a customer. If you do, you will be charged the standard high-speed access tariffs (currently £34.99 per month). Installation fees will be waived. If you choose to discontinue the service we will make an appointment to remove the outdoor equipment and retrieve the cable modem and you will owe us nothing.
so perhaps not as cheap as the original poster suggested. Hopefully the uptake will be sufficient to keep it going. However I have heard pretty bad things regarding customer support from people who currently use NTL.
I'm quite interested in this since I live in London and fall into a "service is likely" postcode. Anything would be better than my crappy BTInternet dialup service at the moment
...now if I can only convince my landlady to let me install the box on the outside of our house...