Heh, go to the manufacturers website and you should be able to find out exactly where has this system. If they don't display this info, then they must know that this tracking is a significant turn-off for a non-negligable section of shoppers.
Oh look.... pathintelligence.com don't display the shopping centres at all. And the right wing, Murdoch owned, pro-business Times only names 1 shopping centre with the system, though there are more:
It has already been installed in two shopping centres, including Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, and three more centres will begin using it next month The business behind this seems to be a small business based in Portsmouth, so I should think that the first sites to get this will all be quite local to them (i.e. Southern England). Portsmouth has this already, and I think there is quite a new shopping centre in Southampton too that would no doubt be a desirable location for this system (bigger that P'mouth most likely, still local etc.).
Does anyone have any info on where else has this shitty system?
One way to find the mobile page for a web site is to load the main page using a mobile device. Most of the time, you will get a client side redirect to the mobile page. Then email that page's URL to yourself and use that URL from your desktop. For example,/.'s mobile page is http://slashdot.org/palm/ and Yahoo's mobile page is http://us.m.yahoo.com/
Another way to get to the mobile pages easily from your desktop is to change your browser's user agent, the string sent to a web server to let it know what browser you're using.
This is quite a nice little FF extension to allow quick switching: http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/. The user agent for IE6 on Windows CE is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE)", and there's lots more about if you google.
But on the other hand, if you go to a country with different mains sockets you can take a different cable rather than an extra adapter.... but in reality you're going to want your home country's cable too, just incase.
You're gonna want to make sure you block *urchin.js* too with adblock, and I think */_ga.js* since some sites have the Google javascript in a different file. I think the way Google spy-alytics works is that a bit of JS runs from the domain you're browsing, either in a file called urchin.js [1] or directly on the webpage, and when combined with another script from google-analytics.com it then phones home with your habits.
Also block third party cookies.... I have never seen a site break when you block third party cookies, and they're only used for nefarious purposes anyway. An add-on for FF might be needed to make changing this option easier, but an add-on will also allow management of other cookies: I recommend totally blocking 3rd party cookies and accepting first party as session only, and allow longterm cookies for sites you trust or you know aren't trending.
Oh, and modify your existing adblock filter to catch http and https! My bank (Barclays in the UK) have third-party based tracking on their online banking, and the spy-scripts and graphics are served by https (only to be blocked by adblock!). I'm pretty sure I've seen trending crap served up by https on other sites too.
Keyboard entry word processing was supposed to have been supplanted long since by voice recognition technology, which is another technology which always seems to be "5 or 10 years away". <tinfoil hat="on">
That's because governments employ all the people that are good at coding stuff like that for the automated monitoring of public voice networks. This means that Dragon (or whoever does voice recognition these days) has to pay megabucks to get good employees.... and they can't afford that, so consumer voice recognition is still shit.
</tinfoil>
A solution I favour is to first of all cut off all benefits to any household whose members have more than 2 arrests or convictions between them and force them out to work in something like what used to be referred to as the workhouse. They would also have to all wear distinctive marks advertising the fact they were low life scum and incorporating the same sort of things you see on lorries saying "Hows my driving, call..." so the decent citizens could report them for any sort of anti social behaviour at all. For example if they're on the way to the workhouse and you bid them good day in the street and they didn't reply courteously you would ring the number and they would then have some sort of punishment, say a birching or restriction of rations or something.
This has got nothing to do with class domination, whatever that is, and everything to do with generations of people being too fat and lazy to earn their own living honestly.
I'm sure the same justifications were used in Dickens' time too. It didn't work then and there's no reason it would work now. No, I don't know how to solve society's problems, but repeating what failed in the past isn't a solution.
There should be technology that can be easily adapted so that we can detect the relative speeds of the cars ahead of us and give the driver the head's up when there's a stop 4-5 cars ahead so they can adjust accordingly.
We have these. They are called eyeballs and brake lights. The reason why hypergreatthing forgot about those is that those two things are useless when you are driving too close to the vehicle infront. Leave a bigger gap, and not only are less likely to have to brake hard to avoid problems, you can see further in the first place!
Its always a BMW because they think they own the fucking roads. They also rarely indicate, and if they do it'll be incorrectly.
Mercedes drivers are awful too, but has anyone noticed just how much of a wanker the average Audi driver seems to be these days? Many car buyers are fashion victims, and I think some of the "cooler"[1] BMW drivers are moving to Audis.... I don't think its a co-incidence that the newer Audis look more aggressive than the BMWs.
Flat panel screens are next to all that's available on the market for one reason you missed: they are one fuck of a lot more profitable than CRTs.
CRTs are very big and very heavy. This makes distrubution very expensive. TVs and monitors have been in the market place for many years now, so the price for a certain sized screen had been settled long ago. But with the advent of flat panel screens, all of a sudden manufacturers could distribute many screens for the price and space of 1 CRT.
If consumers were buying 32" CRTs for x dollars, when LCDs came along they were priced at about the same price, maybe even a bit more because its a newer tech that will sell. Any manufacturer that didn't switch quickly from CRTs to flat panels would miss the profit-frenzy boat, and so they all started selling flat panels at once, all the time downplaying flat panel's short comings (slow screen redraw, poor viewing angles, shit picture at non-native res...) and bigging-up the advantages (size, weight).
DSL competition is a fucking joke in the UK. Almost all the DSL services you can buy are still over BT's hardware, and BT charge other ISPs by the byte transferred: this means that unless you use an ISP that has their own kit in exchanges you will be playing by BTs rules. And even those ISPs that do have their own kit in exchanges barely undercut BT because charging/byte is very profitable.
I should think there are a few towns in the UK that maybe do have some real competition and inturn good fast 'net access, but for most people the choice is BT, someone else over BT (like me on Zen), or an unbundled ISP..... like fucking Murdoch's Sky!
It probably would have played in a normal CD player. The way this copy protection works, I think, is the WMAs are on a second session, with the music in the disks first session. I think they then purposefully corrupt the info on the CD about the session layout.... in a normal CD player the error correction corrects the session info, and finds the music. But a computer CDROM sees only the second session, so the user can only find the data: horrible low quality DRM'd WMAs.
I think the way around it is with software that can find that first session. Exact Audio Copy under windows has an feature to do this: action menu, detect TOC manually. Then you can rip the audio to WAV files or MP3s and ignore the data session at the end of the disk.
...your unsecured AP? That's just asking for trouble. You wouldn't leave a loaded gun lying around for anyone to use or a running car unattended for anyone to drive off with, so why would you leave an access point unprotected?
Oh please!
Cars and guns in the wrong hands can lead to injury or loss of life. An insecure AP can't.
And the prevalence of CP is blow up by the press to help sell papers. Stop parroting their bull shit. The chances of a CP surfer using your connection, and law enforcement noticing, are probably between slim and none.
I think a lot of BS that we see in the consumer electronics field is simply the PHBs making decisions. Maybe Linksys had what they thought were an abnormal amount of support queries relating to DHCP reservations? So they simply removed the features that complicate their DHCPd: you now get a choice of "fully auto" or "manual" and Linksys don't have to explain to users what a MAC address is, what a DHCP reservation is, what a static IP is, what an IP is... etc..
Another funny binary patch story -- the patch to get DOOM 3 and Quake 4 to run on Win9x is two bytes. Seems that only one function name (GlobalMemoryStatus / GlobalMemoryStatusEx) got changed. Replace "Ex" with NULs and the friggin' game runs just fine under 9x. Forcing an application to only run on certain platforms means you only have to support those platforms. id making those games non-9x could have been a business (or common sense!) decision to save the costs of supporting knackered old 9x boxes.... the way cruft used to build up and lead to stupid problems on 9x was shocking!
The eject button has always bugged me. You need to approach the player to retrieve or exchange the disk. Why, oh why, have that button on the remote?
Cos its a pain to change the DVD, sit down, and only then realise that like an idiot you're not pushed the tray in..... but the play button (or any function that needs to look at the DVD) could close the tray if it is open.
Cos the missus can't find the eject button on the front of the player, and you don't want to get up;)
Cos the competion has an eject button.
Cos the market research said that consumers want an eject button... ignoring the fact that the consumers were asked "Should there be an eject button on the remote?", and will just say yes to a leading question like that.
Over here in the United Kingdom we've had terrorist problems since the 1970s. We've also had a few attacks in the past few years, and the police and security services claim to have prevented several more. We don't fingerprint and iris scan visitors as a matter of course. One thing to remember is that in the days of the cold war it was the free west vs. the "guilty until proven innocent" east. Policies that get implemented these days in western countries would never have been suggestable 30 years ago, as things like finger printing all visitors would have been something those dirty commies did!
CFL are good for seedlings, but you can also get not so compact CFL lamps that can do full sized plants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:CFL-grow-light-dual-spectrum.jpg. I dunno how well they'd scale to a bigger set up, and ideally you need two different colour lamps for the vegating and flowering phases.
My phone's called "Free Porn. Pin 69", and only once have seen another person try and pair with it. That was when I was waiting at Heathrow airport, where there's lots of bored people who might be playing with their mobiles (or thier cock, but I'm going to ignore that choice!).
(The PIN isn't really 69, my phone prompts everytime a pairing is done).
Is it just me or wouldn't this allow bad people to track children as well? Yes, but its OK, the system will have a password. Teachers are well known to be fully technically competent people, and never would have the password written down on paper on a pull-out bit of desk.... I think the current one is PENCIL though;)
Its all in the eye of the beholder then, as in my experience all mobile phones available in the UK are glitchy. I have not ever used a phone where I have thought the menus or features (like button presses!) responded in a timely manor - but they have gained colour screens and higher res, but they are still awful to use. And they've gained the startup and shutdown times of a fucked install of Windows 98! But people will live with and defend shit when they have paid a lot of money for it...
I haven't seen a recent phone (since the advent of 2 or 2.5G phones) that doesn't lock up or become unusable over time. Discussing this with people, some have tried to counter this statement, but I have discovered that the people who think that their phone doesn't crash tend to be the people who fiddle with their phone all the time (like disassembly/assembly), or they tend to forget to charge it regularly, so the phone does get power cycled sometimes.
My nokia sometimes need power cycling sometimes because I'll plug in the charger, and even though the battery should be nearly dead, it'll say "battery full". Unfortunately I have been conditioned by too much use of Windows that my line of thought is "if in doubt, reboot", so when my phone does this I just reboot it. I don't want my phone to not charge because the software is being retarded.
A mate's got a new touch screen sony thing, and it doesn't notice when outgoing calls are made, but only sometimes! This is a basic fucking feature with a huge bug..... It may be addressable, but it'd mean jumping through hoops no doubt to correct.
I know this is all anecdotal evidence, but to say phones aren't glitchy is simply wrong! But if they didn't have annoyances then people would have reasons to ever "upgrade".
An open platform (and I hope it is actually properly open, not marketing speak "open") would hopefully open a route for the development of phone software that isn't like a horrible bespoke proprietry application you might see at a business: you know the kind of shit I mean, VB front ends to access databases or IE only active-X intranet sites. Awful to use, but the only way of getting stuff done.
I had a run in with a Disney DOOVDE a few weeks ago, Toy Story.
Unsurprisingly the copyright notices were unskippable, and on the screen long enough for the average Disney viewer (i.e. a kid who can't pronounce/understand most of the words) to be able to read! The trailers started, and they were unskippable, but you could fast forward through them. I still could not use the menu button to jump to that, the trailers had to be viewed, or FF'ed through! And there were a lot of trailers compared to what I'm used to seeing.... but as I stopped buying products with DRM when I realised what a fuck-you to the customer DRM is, I think I might be a little out of touch with hollywood's latest tricks.
Hell, even home-users are annoyed. My wife runs Vista, but ain't really much of a MS-fan, Firefox and Thunderbird otherwise. So, she'd removed IE and put FF on the "quick-start-bar" or whatever the hell the thing is called. Over the last 6 months, IE has reappeared 4 times, whenever she's let windows update some stuff, it seems.
Yes, she can remove it. That doesn't excuse the obnoxious behaviour though. Yeah, I think those icons are re-added by IE or OE updates. Have you noticed that the files are also read only, so when you delete them you different message to the usual message you'd get when you delete a shortcut?
Normally when you delete a shortcut file on XP+ (that's on the desktop, startmenu or quick launch) on Windows it give you some patronising message about how to uninstall apps, though you can still click "delete shortcut". To the n00b, this might be helpful (once or twice), but when the message changes to a warning that the file is read only, this will be a stumbling block for the n00b, and they may not delete those IE and OE icons.....
Slashdot Mirror
Oh look.... pathintelligence.com don't display the shopping centres at all. And the right wing, Murdoch owned, pro-business Times only names 1 shopping centre with the system, though there are more: It has already been installed in two shopping centres, including Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, and three more centres will begin using it next month The business behind this seems to be a small business based in Portsmouth, so I should think that the first sites to get this will all be quite local to them (i.e. Southern England). Portsmouth has this already, and I think there is quite a new shopping centre in Southampton too that would no doubt be a desirable location for this system (bigger that P'mouth most likely, still local etc.).
Does anyone have any info on where else has this shitty system?
Another way to get to the mobile pages easily from your desktop is to change your browser's user agent, the string sent to a web server to let it know what browser you're using.
This is quite a nice little FF extension to allow quick switching: http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/. The user agent for IE6 on Windows CE is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE)", and there's lots more about if you google.
Not any more, its a two piece power supply now. It looks like a figure-of-8 mains connection to the transformer, rather than a "kettle cord" or a clover leaf.
But on the other hand, if you go to a country with different mains sockets you can take a different cable rather than an extra adapter.... but in reality you're going to want your home country's cable too, just incase.
You're gonna want to make sure you block *urchin.js* too with adblock, and I think */_ga.js* since some sites have the Google javascript in a different file. I think the way Google spy-alytics works is that a bit of JS runs from the domain you're browsing, either in a file called urchin.js [1] or directly on the webpage, and when combined with another script from google-analytics.com it then phones home with your habits.
Also block third party cookies.... I have never seen a site break when you block third party cookies, and they're only used for nefarious purposes anyway. An add-on for FF might be needed to make changing this option easier, but an add-on will also allow management of other cookies: I recommend totally blocking 3rd party cookies and accepting first party as session only, and allow longterm cookies for sites you trust or you know aren't trending.
Oh, and modify your existing adblock filter to catch http and https! My bank (Barclays in the UK) have third-party based tracking on their online banking, and the spy-scripts and graphics are served by https (only to be blocked by adblock!). I'm pretty sure I've seen trending crap served up by https on other sites too.
That's because governments employ all the people that are good at coding stuff like that for the automated monitoring of public voice networks. This means that Dragon (or whoever does voice recognition these days) has to pay megabucks to get good employees.... and they can't afford that, so consumer voice recognition is still shit.
</tinfoil>
This has got nothing to do with class domination, whatever that is, and everything to do with generations of people being too fat and lazy to earn their own living honestly.
I'm sure the same justifications were used in Dickens' time too. It didn't work then and there's no reason it would work now. No, I don't know how to solve society's problems, but repeating what failed in the past isn't a solution.
We have these. They are called eyeballs and brake lights. The reason why hypergreatthing forgot about those is that those two things are useless when you are driving too close to the vehicle infront. Leave a bigger gap, and not only are less likely to have to brake hard to avoid problems, you can see further in the first place!
Its always a BMW because they think they own the fucking roads. They also rarely indicate, and if they do it'll be incorrectly.
Mercedes drivers are awful too, but has anyone noticed just how much of a wanker the average Audi driver seems to be these days? Many car buyers are fashion victims, and I think some of the "cooler"[1] BMW drivers are moving to Audis.... I don't think its a co-incidence that the newer Audis look more aggressive than the BMWs.
[1] shallower or wankerer
Flat panel screens are next to all that's available on the market for one reason you missed: they are one fuck of a lot more profitable than CRTs.
CRTs are very big and very heavy. This makes distrubution very expensive. TVs and monitors have been in the market place for many years now, so the price for a certain sized screen had been settled long ago. But with the advent of flat panel screens, all of a sudden manufacturers could distribute many screens for the price and space of 1 CRT.
If consumers were buying 32" CRTs for x dollars, when LCDs came along they were priced at about the same price, maybe even a bit more because its a newer tech that will sell. Any manufacturer that didn't switch quickly from CRTs to flat panels would miss the profit-frenzy boat, and so they all started selling flat panels at once, all the time downplaying flat panel's short comings (slow screen redraw, poor viewing angles, shit picture at non-native res...) and bigging-up the advantages (size, weight).
DSL competition is a fucking joke in the UK. Almost all the DSL services you can buy are still over BT's hardware, and BT charge other ISPs by the byte transferred: this means that unless you use an ISP that has their own kit in exchanges you will be playing by BTs rules. And even those ISPs that do have their own kit in exchanges barely undercut BT because charging/byte is very profitable.
I should think there are a few towns in the UK that maybe do have some real competition and inturn good fast 'net access, but for most people the choice is BT, someone else over BT (like me on Zen), or an unbundled ISP..... like fucking Murdoch's Sky!
It probably would have played in a normal CD player. The way this copy protection works, I think, is the WMAs are on a second session, with the music in the disks first session. I think they then purposefully corrupt the info on the CD about the session layout.... in a normal CD player the error correction corrects the session info, and finds the music. But a computer CDROM sees only the second session, so the user can only find the data: horrible low quality DRM'd WMAs.
I think the way around it is with software that can find that first session. Exact Audio Copy under windows has an feature to do this: action menu, detect TOC manually. Then you can rip the audio to WAV files or MP3s and ignore the data session at the end of the disk.
...your unsecured AP? That's just asking for trouble. You wouldn't leave a loaded gun lying around for anyone to use or a running car unattended for anyone to drive off with, so why would you leave an access point unprotected?Oh please!
Cars and guns in the wrong hands can lead to injury or loss of life. An insecure AP can't.
And the prevalence of CP is blow up by the press to help sell papers. Stop parroting their bull shit. The chances of a CP surfer using your connection, and law enforcement noticing, are probably between slim and none.
I think a lot of BS that we see in the consumer electronics field is simply the PHBs making decisions. Maybe Linksys had what they thought were an abnormal amount of support queries relating to DHCP reservations? So they simply removed the features that complicate their DHCPd: you now get a choice of "fully auto" or "manual" and Linksys don't have to explain to users what a MAC address is, what a DHCP reservation is, what a static IP is, what an IP is... etc..
Cos its a pain to change the DVD, sit down, and only then realise that like an idiot you're not pushed the tray in..... but the play button (or any function that needs to look at the DVD) could close the tray if it is open.
Cos the missus can't find the eject button on the front of the player, and you don't want to get up ;)
Cos the competion has an eject button.
Cos the market research said that consumers want an eject button... ignoring the fact that the consumers were asked "Should there be an eject button on the remote?", and will just say yes to a leading question like that.
CFL are good for seedlings, but you can also get not so compact CFL lamps that can do full sized plants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:CFL-grow-light-dual-spectrum.jpg. I dunno how well they'd scale to a bigger set up, and ideally you need two different colour lamps for the vegating and flowering phases.
Or use compact flourescent lighting, which doesn't kick out as much heat as discharge lamps.
My phone's called "Free Porn. Pin 69", and only once have seen another person try and pair with it. That was when I was waiting at Heathrow airport, where there's lots of bored people who might be playing with their mobiles (or thier cock, but I'm going to ignore that choice!).
(The PIN isn't really 69, my phone prompts everytime a pairing is done).
No, your employer knows when the RFID chip is in the building....
Do you wear clothes in public?
If someone confides their emotions with you, do you keep it quiet if they want you to?
You're a troll, aren't you? Or are you really that short-sighted?
Its all in the eye of the beholder then, as in my experience all mobile phones available in the UK are glitchy. I have not ever used a phone where I have thought the menus or features (like button presses!) responded in a timely manor - but they have gained colour screens and higher res, but they are still awful to use. And they've gained the startup and shutdown times of a fucked install of Windows 98! But people will live with and defend shit when they have paid a lot of money for it...
I haven't seen a recent phone (since the advent of 2 or 2.5G phones) that doesn't lock up or become unusable over time. Discussing this with people, some have tried to counter this statement, but I have discovered that the people who think that their phone doesn't crash tend to be the people who fiddle with their phone all the time (like disassembly/assembly), or they tend to forget to charge it regularly, so the phone does get power cycled sometimes.
My nokia sometimes need power cycling sometimes because I'll plug in the charger, and even though the battery should be nearly dead, it'll say "battery full". Unfortunately I have been conditioned by too much use of Windows that my line of thought is "if in doubt, reboot", so when my phone does this I just reboot it. I don't want my phone to not charge because the software is being retarded.
A mate's got a new touch screen sony thing, and it doesn't notice when outgoing calls are made, but only sometimes! This is a basic fucking feature with a huge bug..... It may be addressable, but it'd mean jumping through hoops no doubt to correct.
I know this is all anecdotal evidence, but to say phones aren't glitchy is simply wrong! But if they didn't have annoyances then people would have reasons to ever "upgrade".
An open platform (and I hope it is actually properly open, not marketing speak "open") would hopefully open a route for the development of phone software that isn't like a horrible bespoke proprietry application you might see at a business: you know the kind of shit I mean, VB front ends to access databases or IE only active-X intranet sites. Awful to use, but the only way of getting stuff done.
I had a run in with a Disney DOOVDE a few weeks ago, Toy Story.
Unsurprisingly the copyright notices were unskippable, and on the screen long enough for the average Disney viewer (i.e. a kid who can't pronounce/understand most of the words) to be able to read! The trailers started, and they were unskippable, but you could fast forward through them. I still could not use the menu button to jump to that, the trailers had to be viewed, or FF'ed through! And there were a lot of trailers compared to what I'm used to seeing.... but as I stopped buying products with DRM when I realised what a fuck-you to the customer DRM is, I think I might be a little out of touch with hollywood's latest tricks.
Yes, she can remove it. That doesn't excuse the obnoxious behaviour though. Yeah, I think those icons are re-added by IE or OE updates. Have you noticed that the files are also read only, so when you delete them you different message to the usual message you'd get when you delete a shortcut?
Normally when you delete a shortcut file on XP+ (that's on the desktop, startmenu or quick launch) on Windows it give you some patronising message about how to uninstall apps, though you can still click "delete shortcut". To the n00b, this might be helpful (once or twice), but when the message changes to a warning that the file is read only, this will be a stumbling block for the n00b, and they may not delete those IE and OE icons.....