I take a cellphone out when I go windsurfing in the sea.. one that the AquaPac burst and the phone was left swimming around in salt water (with the fully charged battery still attached) for about 2 hours. Got back home and took it to pieces, soaked the bits in fresh water for a while and then left it to dry out for a couple of days - works perfectly.
Same cellphone got drowned about twice since then by rain: once it was in my pocket while I was standing in pouring rain, the other time I accidentally left it in the boot of my car with the boot open while it was raining heavilly. Same procedure to fix it and it works just fine.
I'm pretty amazed at how rubust that phone is... Of course I won't be dropping my P900 in the sea any time soon.:)
And the problem you were trying to address is actually quite easily solved by simply disconnecting individual ports for increasing timespans (1h, 2h, 4h...) when worm signatures are detected. There appears to be little incentive on the
Not quite - just disconnecting individual ports leads to many support calls ("why has XXX stopped working?"). Making it clear that someone can't get full internet access anyway because of their history is likely a lot easier. I also favor outright banning people instead of blocking individual ports (redirect all web requests to the website with the fixes on, block everything else) because it'll make people pay more attention.
ISPs side to implement such a system, tho. Maybe because traffic is what they are living on and less traffic would mean less bills...
The ISP doesn't charge it's customers on a per-megabyte basis, they don't make any more money out of viruses. They do, however, have to spend more on their peering bandwidth, etc.
Nifty idea. Which billionaire,who holds controlling market shares in major technology and communications companies, would you like your politicians to put in charge of this inherently incorruptible system?
I don't understand why this is any more of a problem and any more corruptible than the current "credit rating" system (and a bad credit rating could screw your life a lot more than a bad "internet rating").
The ISPs can work together to form a single database, and in the long run this will save them money: 1. How much bandwidth do you think ISPs have to buy to support virus traffic? 2. How much support do they have to give to people who have been compromised?
If you disconnect people for having infected boxes you remove their only way of fixing the problem.
Not really - it isn't rocket science to redirect all web accesses to a page that contains the fixes and block all other IP traffic.
Distributing CDs for every security update is highly impractical.
I don't see that - WinXP Professional is about 220ukp in the shops (yes, I know that microsoft have their dodgy contracts with the OEMs, but that's their problem). The cost of pressing a CD is negligable, but lets say 10 pence for the sake of arguement (it's actually a lot less). Lets say postage is also 25 pence (again, bulk discounts would make it a lot less). so, 0.35ukp per update per customer. Assume that MS keep with only doing 1 update a month, that's 4.20ukp a year. And now lets assume that we consider the product life to be 5 years (which is probably longer than they would actually consider supporting it for), that's 21ukp for the whole life of the product. The cost doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me.
You know that whole dail-up patch thing is really annoying. if you pay per minute charges you are not going to be online long enough to for a trojan or DDOS to do much harm to you or anyone else from you.
Wrong - admittedly I don't use Windows, but a few years ago my old RedHat 6 box got compromised over a pay-per-minute 33k6 dialup (ok, I admit it, I had been lazy and not kept it up to date). A few weeks ago one of my colleagues did a fresh XP install, forgot to enable the firewall and he was virussed within 4 minutes. My linux server at home gets various virus scans every few seconds - if it was an unpatched windows machine it'd be compromised immediately. Ok, so on a modem the amount of damage you can do to others is limited, but the amount of damage done to yourself is still plenty.
of course that assumes the patch doesn't break your favourite application.
I think patching systems need a "rollback" ability so if a specific patch breaks something it should be easy to undo the fix (at least temporarilly until someone fixes the patch).
surely though the decrease in driving ability due to use of a hands-free kit would be pretty much the same as say talking to a passanger, which itself is meant to be less dangerous than driving even slightly tired, driving while under anxiousness or stress is meant to also be dangerous at times.
I've heard research that suggests using the phone is more dangerous because a passenger will see that there's a problem on the road and shut up whereas someone on the phone won't. Talking to a blind passenger or a chile (who won't be caring about what's going on on the road) is probably as dangerous as using a phone though.
Also, you say smoking a cigarette is more dangerous, which it may or may not be
I don't think I suggested that smoking a cigarette is more dangerous - as far as I can see they're probably as dangerous as eachother - in both cases you have one of your hands full.
Also in the UK most people still buy stupid manual cars for some reason and then every 100 metres when they have to change gear, one hand needs to operate the gearstick, one hand is holding the phone... whats going on with the steering wheel?
I for one would never like to drive an automatic - maybe it's a control thing, I want to tell ym car what to do instead of it guessing for itself... but I dunno about you - I don't change gear every 100 metres while cruising down the motorway:) In any case, driving with no hands on the wheel is dangerous driving and should be treated as such nomatter what the reason.
we were all bombarded with informatry ads in the month or so leading up to the ban
I don't remember seeing any actual TV ads (maybe they only bothered to run them on terrestrial TV? I don't watch that coz it's full of crap). I do remember lots of conflicting "informational" news reports though.
Before you ask: I only use my phone while driving very infrequently, IMHO using it all the time and treating your car like a "mobile office" is a really stupid idea, and yes I have a bluetooth headset for the occasions I do use the phone. I can see very legitimate reasons for using a phone while you're driving though: "I'm stuck in traffic, I'm going to be late", "They've closed road XXX, don't come this way", "I'm completely lost can you give me directions please?", etc.
The problem with patches (and this goes for the linux world as well) is that people who don't have DSL are stuffed - how am I going to convince my dad to download all 70 meg of WinXP-SP2 over his pay-per-minute 56k dialup?
(and no, "White Knight" viruses are not the answer)
If ISPs start taking a hard line against exploits instead of ignoring them then people might pay more attention - it's not rocket science for the ISP to detect the signatures of worms scanning the network and automatically pull the plug on anyone compromised. I favor a "internet rating" system in the same way you get a "credit rating" - if you're shown to repeatedly get compromised then it's clear you can't run a secure system and no ISP should allow you full unrestricted internet access.
I'd also like network-connected software you pay for (e.g. Windows) come with free updates _on CD_ for a reasonable life of the product instead of requireing you to download it. If my car has a fault (e.g. the brakes don't work under some conditions) then the manufacturer writes to me and fixes it at their own expense - they don't quietly put a notice up somewhere out of the way saying that if I want to I can send off for the replacement part and then wait for the media to actually publicise it after a few people crash coz their brakes didn't work.
Before anyone complains, the whole on-CD updates idea wouldn't apply to free linux downloads like Fedora since you're not paying for it in the first place, but quite rightly it should apply to stuff you do pay for like RedHat Enterprise, etc.
You're falling into the trap of assuming that driving is merely a physical activity. Good drivers also employ their brains.
Yes, there's plenty of evidence that talking on a handsfree kit is dangerous because you're not concentrating on the road. But I wasn't arguing that in the first place - reread what I said: "no evidence that a wired or bluetooth headset is any more dangerous than a proper car handsfree system" - i.e. yes, talking on handsfree may be dangerous, but using a bluetooth headset or wired headset is exactly as dangerous as using a professionally installed handsfree kit.
Why is using a headset any different to using a proper car-kit? In both cases you're concentrating on the phone conversation and in both cases your hands are free, so they both seem to be as safe (and as dangerous) as eachother. The concept of making one system legal and another system illegal when both systems have the same result (the only difference being the price) would seem rather stupid.
However, I think the UK law is too lax in one respect (the evidence shows that talking on your handsfree kit while driving is dangerous... although not as dangerous as holding onto a handheld phone), but too strict in another respect (if I'm going at 5mph in a traffic jam, is it really dangerous for me to pick up my phone and use it to tell someone I'm going to be late?)
Perhaps the point of that law in the UK was to really get the point across that using a Cellphone and driving at the same time is unaccpetable.
Hasn't really worked though. And part of the problem is the huge amount of confusion surrounding the law - some media were reporting that any handsfree kit was legal, others were reporting that you had to get a professionally installed handsfree system in your car.
It is infact the case that all handsfree kits are legal under the new law, but they were seriously considering banning them too despite there being no evidence that a wired or bluetooth headset is any more dangerous than a proper car handsfree system (and why would it be?).
I'd also love to know why chatting on a cellphone is more dangerous than hanging onto a lit cigarette while driving (and then inevitably not paying attention while attempting to extinguish the burning ask that you just dropped in your lap). I've got no problem with banning hand-held cellphones while driving, but I'd also like to see bans on that sort of thing too.
The thing here though is that at some level the CPU's need to talk the same language, at least for initialisation at boot, although we are presuambly talking about 2 completly new cores so ever that is within the realm of possibility.
Whats stopping them putting 2 BIOSes onto the motherboard and then just switching between them depending which CPU you have in the box?
If the Americans are going to take the "we can't trust foreign software that we can freely examine" then it seems about right for the rest of the world (yes, there is something outside of the US that Bush hasn't bombed into oblivion yet) should be asking why they're trusing American software that they're not allowed to see.
I also suspect they aren't using EGNOS at all (at least almost certainly not an especially high proportion of the time). You need a good view of the equatorial horizon to use SBAS (Satellite Based Augmentation System - i.e. WAAS or EGNOS) since unlike the GPS satellites, the SBAS satellites are geostationary. I very much doubt that these guys have a consistently good view of the southern horizon, especially given the mountainous terrain they're on.
At that point, VCRs had gotten common enough that people just taped one and watched the other later
Ah, but we're back to square one these days - with satellite you can only receive as many concurrent shows as you have decoders and LNBs for.
Thankfully these days I run MythTV and there are anough reruns of a show within a short space of time that it's usually able to reschedule the recordings so they don't collide (even if it's having to record stuff at stupid-o'clock in the morning)
Not to mention that it was on at the same time as Farscape, the only other decent sci-fi show on TV at the time, IMO (sorry, Enterprise fans). How's that for splitting your audience? If it had been just one hour later I wonder how much better it would've done.
Actually this is something that I've noticed TV companies doing (certainly here in the UK). They seem to intentionally show programmes that will attract the same audiance at the same time. e.g. Sky One used to show Alias at the same time as BBC 1 showed Spooks (ok, they're fairly different but they're both spy dramas so will attact similar audiances). They seem to be under the misimpression that "our channel's better - everyone will watch us all the time" rather than the more true "people will watch the sort of shows they like nomatter what channel they're on". So the channels battle eachother for audiances for the same types of show instead of staggering their schedules so the viewers can watch both channels. The result - you have to choose which one of the shows you're really interested in you want to watch and then spend the rest of the evening or week with nothing to watch.
Try the Sci-Fi channel (except for "Crossing Over" and the UFO conspiracy shows).
Whilest we do have the SciFi channel in the UK, it doesn't carry very high profile shows (to it's credit, it did premier FireFly, and it actually did the complete series in the right order). Happilly we don't have to put up with Fox, but Fox still does affect us by cancelling production of good shows.
"Stargate SG-1" is pretty good.
SG1 runs on Sky One here and is currently between seasons.
"Stargate Atlantis" is too new to judge yet.
Looks like we might get Atlantis sometime towards the end of September (why oh why can't the UK and America show the same stuff at the same time?) Although I guess if I get really bored I can go download some episodes of Atlantis and see what they're like.
"Twilight Zone" reruns abound.
Ugh, never got on with the twilight zone
Speaking of BBCA, "Black Adder", "The Thin Blue Line"
They appear frequency on UKTV Gold... seen them to death (although they're worth watching if there's nothing else to do).
And don't forget "The Simpsons" on Fox.
Sky One is "The Simpsons Channel" here in the UK.. 50 million reruns a day... [yawn]
and "Monty Python's Flying Circus" are all in reruns.
Never got on with Monty Python...
Finally, "Question Time" on C-SPAN (where Tony Blair and his adversaries trade verbal abuse) is pretty amusing.
Bah, have to put up with Tony Blair enough on the news already.:) There was an amusing comment made on the radio the other week.. Think it was "It's Been a Bad Week" on BBC Radio 2... They were talking (with the Thunderbirds theme playing in the background) about that new film where "a puppet living on an island off the coast of Europe goes around helping forign presidents out of trouble" (I thought it was funny anyway:)
And then consider the people who dont even watch TV, they must think you're an idiot for not cracking open some good books.
Umm.. but I do.
In other words, glass housing is relative and you're setting yourself up for a fall defending some show, especially when TV entertainment is so very subjective.
I'm not defending some show, I'm complaining that there is very little on TV worth watching - hell, we have more mindless reality shows than practically any other genre at the moment because people watch them and they're cheap to make. It's just not something I want to watch so I get a bit annoyed when they cancel stuff I want to watch to make way for yet more of the same mindless drivel.
I have the same problem with football (soccer) - when it's football season the channels clear their schedules and put on nothing but football. I don't want to watch it, I'm not in any way interested in it, so why should wall-to-wall football replace the (quite broad) collection of genres I'm interested in for weeks at a time?
Similarly I doubt I'd be especially happy if all the channels did wall-to-wall scifi - I'm interested in other things too and don't want them cancelled to make way for more and more of just one type of show.
Oh wow, a comparison of a 6 year old OS to a modern one on their ability to support obscure hardware. One of the reasons for a new operating system, Windows or Linux, is to add new driver support.
I wasn't making a comparison, I was expressing my annoyance with Windows 98's crappy installer. Although it should also be noted that *both* Windows 98 and RedHat 5.0 fully supported all the hardware in the machine, it's just that Win98's installer seemed incapable of installing the machine properly while the hardware was in the box.
Also, 6 years ago not all cards were bus mastering. Most of them still required an interrupt. Most motherboards did not have a separate interrupt for each card...they would share interrupts, and unless both the hardware AND your drivers supported this, neither card on a shared IRQ would work.
I'm afraid this is wrong - not all cards are bus mastering these days, machines still don't have a separate interrupt for each card. PCI cards have always been able to share interrupts and regularly do and I've never seen a driver for a PCI card that doesn't support this (it's part of the PCI specification, not supporting it would be truely broken). ISA cards have never been able to share interrupts (ok, in very rare circumstances they can but it's not usually a good idea)
But in any case, this has no bearing on anything I described - if the cards were all working fine and I erased the OS and reinstalled it without changing any hardware there's no reason they shouldn't still be working fine afterwards (ISA cards are jumpered onto the right IRQs and addresses, PCI cards are configured by the BIOS).
It was tough. But this wasn't Windows 98's fault!
I'm sorry, when the only thing on the machine has changed between it working and it not working is the software, there is nothing to blame but the software. There is no way I should have had to rip out every additional bit of hardware before reinstalling Windows. I should also point out that getting all that hardware working in RedHat 5.0 did not involve ripping the machine to pieces or rebooting 500 times.
It got cancelled after 1 complete season because Fox insisted on showing the episodes out of order in a timeslot that many other shows had already died in.
Since it hit DVD, it stuck at Amazon's number-1 slot (a pretty spectacular accomplishment in itself) and is perhaps one of the alltime best selling DVDs.
Seriously, go grab the first couple of episodes off a p2p network and if you like them buy the DVDs. The stories are entertaining and often insightful, the photography is excellent and the CGI is probably the best I've ever seen - you really do forget that the CGI scenes aren't real. (The CGI is all rendered as if it's shot with a handheld video camera, which fits in perfectly with the rest of the filming which is all done on handheld cameras - it really does make you feel like the camera man is right in the middle of real action.
But maybe he thought that a western in space was cooler?
Just because something could be done differently doesn't mean it necessarilly _should_ be done that way, and I also think that the spectacular CGI really enhances the story, and thats something that just wouldn't fit into a plain western.
He had a vision of what the future might be like and I for one find that more interesting than looking back at the past. He has also managed to capture a much bigger fanbase that I would expect a western to get - most scifi fans probably wouldn't watch something that was listed in the TV guide as a western.
Infact I have yet to talk to anyone (IRL) who's seen it who doesn't like it. Fox just seem interested in the cheap-but-popular reality shows. Unfortunately it seems that most of the population are happy sitting infront of reality crap and soap operas leaving those of us with more than 2 braincells with nothing worth watching. I'm afraid I have more interesting things to be doing that don't involve the TV if all that's on is mindless reality TV.
Does this mean that the Japanese government is going to take up wardriving to look for violators?
Unfortunately that's exactly what we get in the UK from the TV Licencing authority - they drive around in detector vans looking for anyone watching TV who doesn't have a licence.
They also have the assumption that _everyone_ has a TV and target households who don't have a TV with threatening letters and billboard adverts, even if they don't have a TV.
A few years ago after I moved house I didn't have a TV for a few months - I got a threatening letter from the TV Licencing Authority with "YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW" printed across the _outside_ of the envelope in big letters. If I had any money at the time it would've been interesting to sue them for libel.
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what type of phone was it?
Nokia 7110. Although these days I use a 5130 as my "disposable" phone because the 7110 was a pain to operate inside an AquaPac.
I take a cellphone out when I go windsurfing in the sea.. one that the AquaPac burst and the phone was left swimming around in salt water (with the fully charged battery still attached) for about 2 hours. Got back home and took it to pieces, soaked the bits in fresh water for a while and then left it to dry out for a couple of days - works perfectly.
:)
Same cellphone got drowned about twice since then by rain: once it was in my pocket while I was standing in pouring rain, the other time I accidentally left it in the boot of my car with the boot open while it was raining heavilly. Same procedure to fix it and it works just fine.
I'm pretty amazed at how rubust that phone is... Of course I won't be dropping my P900 in the sea any time soon.
And the problem you were trying to address is actually quite easily solved by simply disconnecting individual ports for increasing timespans (1h, 2h, 4h ...) when worm signatures are detected. There appears to be little incentive on the
Not quite - just disconnecting individual ports leads to many support calls ("why has XXX stopped working?"). Making it clear that someone can't get full internet access anyway because of their history is likely a lot easier. I also favor outright banning people instead of blocking individual ports (redirect all web requests to the website with the fixes on, block everything else) because it'll make people pay more attention.
ISPs side to implement such a system, tho. Maybe because traffic is what they are living on and less traffic would mean less bills...
The ISP doesn't charge it's customers on a per-megabyte basis, they don't make any more money out of viruses. They do, however, have to spend more on their peering bandwidth, etc.
Nifty idea. Which billionaire ,who holds controlling market shares in major technology and communications companies, would you like your politicians to put in charge of this inherently incorruptible system?
I don't understand why this is any more of a problem and any more corruptible than the current "credit rating" system (and a bad credit rating could screw your life a lot more than a bad "internet rating").
The ISPs can work together to form a single database, and in the long run this will save them money:
1. How much bandwidth do you think ISPs have to buy to support virus traffic?
2. How much support do they have to give to people who have been compromised?
If you disconnect people for having infected boxes you remove their only way of fixing the problem.
Not really - it isn't rocket science to redirect all web accesses to a page that contains the fixes and block all other IP traffic.
Distributing CDs for every security update is highly impractical.
I don't see that - WinXP Professional is about 220ukp in the shops (yes, I know that microsoft have their dodgy contracts with the OEMs, but that's their problem). The cost of pressing a CD is negligable, but lets say 10 pence for the sake of arguement (it's actually a lot less). Lets say postage is also 25 pence (again, bulk discounts would make it a lot less). so, 0.35ukp per update per customer. Assume that MS keep with only doing 1 update a month, that's 4.20ukp a year. And now lets assume that we consider the product life to be 5 years (which is probably longer than they would actually consider supporting it for), that's 21ukp for the whole life of the product. The cost doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me.
You know that whole dail-up patch thing is really annoying. if you pay per minute charges you are not going to be online long enough to for a trojan or DDOS to do much harm to you or anyone else from you.
Wrong - admittedly I don't use Windows, but a few years ago my old RedHat 6 box got compromised over a pay-per-minute 33k6 dialup (ok, I admit it, I had been lazy and not kept it up to date). A few weeks ago one of my colleagues did a fresh XP install, forgot to enable the firewall and he was virussed within 4 minutes. My linux server at home gets various virus scans every few seconds - if it was an unpatched windows machine it'd be compromised immediately. Ok, so on a modem the amount of damage you can do to others is limited, but the amount of damage done to yourself is still plenty.
of course that assumes the patch doesn't break your favourite application.
I think patching systems need a "rollback" ability so if a specific patch breaks something it should be easy to undo the fix (at least temporarilly until someone fixes the patch).
surely though the decrease in driving ability due to use of a hands-free kit would be pretty much the same as say talking to a passanger, which itself is meant to be less dangerous than driving even slightly tired, driving while under anxiousness or stress is meant to also be dangerous at times.
I've heard research that suggests using the phone is more dangerous because a passenger will see that there's a problem on the road and shut up whereas someone on the phone won't. Talking to a blind passenger or a chile (who won't be caring about what's going on on the road) is probably as dangerous as using a phone though.
Also, you say smoking a cigarette is more dangerous, which it may or may not be
:) In any case, driving with no hands on the wheel is dangerous driving and should be treated as such nomatter what the reason.
I don't think I suggested that smoking a cigarette is more dangerous - as far as I can see they're probably as dangerous as eachother - in both cases you have one of your hands full.
Also in the UK most people still buy stupid manual cars for some reason and then every 100 metres when they have to change gear, one hand needs to operate the gearstick, one hand is holding the phone... whats going on with the steering wheel?
I for one would never like to drive an automatic - maybe it's a control thing, I want to tell ym car what to do instead of it guessing for itself... but I dunno about you - I don't change gear every 100 metres while cruising down the motorway
we were all bombarded with informatry ads in the month or so leading up to the ban
I don't remember seeing any actual TV ads (maybe they only bothered to run them on terrestrial TV? I don't watch that coz it's full of crap). I do remember lots of conflicting "informational" news reports though.
Before you ask: I only use my phone while driving very infrequently, IMHO using it all the time and treating your car like a "mobile office" is a really stupid idea, and yes I have a bluetooth headset for the occasions I do use the phone. I can see very legitimate reasons for using a phone while you're driving though: "I'm stuck in traffic, I'm going to be late", "They've closed road XXX, don't come this way", "I'm completely lost can you give me directions please?", etc.
The problem with patches (and this goes for the linux world as well) is that people who don't have DSL are stuffed - how am I going to convince my dad to download all 70 meg of WinXP-SP2 over his pay-per-minute 56k dialup?
(and no, "White Knight" viruses are not the answer)
If ISPs start taking a hard line against exploits instead of ignoring them then people might pay more attention - it's not rocket science for the ISP to detect the signatures of worms scanning the network and automatically pull the plug on anyone compromised. I favor a "internet rating" system in the same way you get a "credit rating" - if you're shown to repeatedly get compromised then it's clear you can't run a secure system and no ISP should allow you full unrestricted internet access.
I'd also like network-connected software you pay for (e.g. Windows) come with free updates _on CD_ for a reasonable life of the product instead of requireing you to download it. If my car has a fault (e.g. the brakes don't work under some conditions) then the manufacturer writes to me and fixes it at their own expense - they don't quietly put a notice up somewhere out of the way saying that if I want to I can send off for the replacement part and then wait for the media to actually publicise it after a few people crash coz their brakes didn't work.
Before anyone complains, the whole on-CD updates idea wouldn't apply to free linux downloads like Fedora since you're not paying for it in the first place, but quite rightly it should apply to stuff you do pay for like RedHat Enterprise, etc.
Wrong.
And wrong.
You're falling into the trap of assuming that driving is merely a physical activity. Good drivers also employ their brains.
Yes, there's plenty of evidence that talking on a handsfree kit is dangerous because you're not concentrating on the road. But I wasn't arguing that in the first place - reread what I said: "no evidence that a wired or bluetooth headset is any more dangerous than a proper car handsfree system" - i.e. yes, talking on handsfree may be dangerous, but using a bluetooth headset or wired headset is exactly as dangerous as using a professionally installed handsfree kit.
Why is using a headset any different to using a proper car-kit? In both cases you're concentrating on the phone conversation and in both cases your hands are free, so they both seem to be as safe (and as dangerous) as eachother. The concept of making one system legal and another system illegal when both systems have the same result (the only difference being the price) would seem rather stupid.
However, I think the UK law is too lax in one respect (the evidence shows that talking on your handsfree kit while driving is dangerous... although not as dangerous as holding onto a handheld phone), but too strict in another respect (if I'm going at 5mph in a traffic jam, is it really dangerous for me to pick up my phone and use it to tell someone I'm going to be late?)
Perhaps the point of that law in the UK was to really get the point across that using a Cellphone and driving at the same time is unaccpetable.
Hasn't really worked though. And part of the problem is the huge amount of confusion surrounding the law - some media were reporting that any handsfree kit was legal, others were reporting that you had to get a professionally installed handsfree system in your car.
It is infact the case that all handsfree kits are legal under the new law, but they were seriously considering banning them too despite there being no evidence that a wired or bluetooth headset is any more dangerous than a proper car handsfree system (and why would it be?).
I'd also love to know why chatting on a cellphone is more dangerous than hanging onto a lit cigarette while driving (and then inevitably not paying attention while attempting to extinguish the burning ask that you just dropped in your lap). I've got no problem with banning hand-held cellphones while driving, but I'd also like to see bans on that sort of thing too.
The thing here though is that at some level the CPU's need to talk the same language, at least for initialisation at boot, although we are presuambly talking about 2 completly new cores so ever that is within the realm of possibility.
Whats stopping them putting 2 BIOSes onto the motherboard and then just switching between them depending which CPU you have in the box?
If the Americans are going to take the "we can't trust foreign software that we can freely examine" then it seems about right for the rest of the world (yes, there is something outside of the US that Bush hasn't bombed into oblivion yet) should be asking why they're trusing American software that they're not allowed to see.
Is the abbreviation for Windows CE, WinCE, is one of the worst ever in the history of computer product names or what?
:)
You know that CE stands for Crap(per) Edition right?
I also suspect they aren't using EGNOS at all (at least almost certainly not an especially high proportion of the time). You need a good view of the equatorial horizon to use SBAS (Satellite Based Augmentation System - i.e. WAAS or EGNOS) since unlike the GPS satellites, the SBAS satellites are geostationary. I very much doubt that these guys have a consistently good view of the southern horizon, especially given the mountainous terrain they're on.
At that point, VCRs had gotten common enough that people just taped one and watched the other later
Ah, but we're back to square one these days - with satellite you can only receive as many concurrent shows as you have decoders and LNBs for.
Thankfully these days I run MythTV and there are anough reruns of a show within a short space of time that it's usually able to reschedule the recordings so they don't collide (even if it's having to record stuff at stupid-o'clock in the morning)
Not to mention that it was on at the same time as Farscape, the only other decent sci-fi show on TV at the time, IMO (sorry, Enterprise fans). How's that for splitting your audience? If it had been just one hour later I wonder how much better it would've done.
Actually this is something that I've noticed TV companies doing (certainly here in the UK). They seem to intentionally show programmes that will attract the same audiance at the same time. e.g. Sky One used to show Alias at the same time as BBC 1 showed Spooks (ok, they're fairly different but they're both spy dramas so will attact similar audiances). They seem to be under the misimpression that "our channel's better - everyone will watch us all the time" rather than the more true "people will watch the sort of shows they like nomatter what channel they're on". So the channels battle eachother for audiances for the same types of show instead of staggering their schedules so the viewers can watch both channels. The result - you have to choose which one of the shows you're really interested in you want to watch and then spend the rest of the evening or week with nothing to watch.
Try the Sci-Fi channel (except for "Crossing Over" and the UFO conspiracy shows).
:) :)
Whilest we do have the SciFi channel in the UK, it doesn't carry very high profile shows (to it's credit, it did premier FireFly, and it actually did the complete series in the right order). Happilly we don't have to put up with Fox, but Fox still does affect us by cancelling production of good shows.
"Stargate SG-1" is pretty good.
SG1 runs on Sky One here and is currently between seasons.
"Stargate Atlantis" is too new to judge yet.
Looks like we might get Atlantis sometime towards the end of September (why oh why can't the UK and America show the same stuff at the same time?) Although I guess if I get really bored I can go download some episodes of Atlantis and see what they're like.
"Twilight Zone" reruns abound.
Ugh, never got on with the twilight zone
Speaking of BBCA, "Black Adder", "The Thin Blue Line"
They appear frequency on UKTV Gold... seen them to death (although they're worth watching if there's nothing else to do).
And don't forget "The Simpsons" on Fox.
Sky One is "The Simpsons Channel" here in the UK.. 50 million reruns a day... [yawn]
and "Monty Python's Flying Circus" are all in reruns.
Never got on with Monty Python...
Finally, "Question Time" on C-SPAN (where Tony Blair and his adversaries trade verbal abuse) is pretty amusing.
Bah, have to put up with Tony Blair enough on the news already.
There was an amusing comment made on the radio the other week.. Think it was "It's Been a Bad Week" on BBC Radio 2... They were talking (with the Thunderbirds theme playing in the background) about that new film where "a puppet living on an island off the coast of Europe goes around helping forign presidents out of trouble" (I thought it was funny anyway
And then consider the people who dont even watch TV, they must think you're an idiot for not cracking open some good books.
Umm.. but I do.
In other words, glass housing is relative and you're setting yourself up for a fall defending some show, especially when TV entertainment is so very subjective.
I'm not defending some show, I'm complaining that there is very little on TV worth watching - hell, we have more mindless reality shows than practically any other genre at the moment because people watch them and they're cheap to make. It's just not something I want to watch so I get a bit annoyed when they cancel stuff I want to watch to make way for yet more of the same mindless drivel.
I have the same problem with football (soccer) - when it's football season the channels clear their schedules and put on nothing but football. I don't want to watch it, I'm not in any way interested in it, so why should wall-to-wall football replace the (quite broad) collection of genres I'm interested in for weeks at a time?
Similarly I doubt I'd be especially happy if all the channels did wall-to-wall scifi - I'm interested in other things too and don't want them cancelled to make way for more and more of just one type of show.
Oh wow, a comparison of a 6 year old OS to a modern one on their ability to support obscure hardware. One of the reasons for a new operating system, Windows or Linux, is to add new driver support.
I wasn't making a comparison, I was expressing my annoyance with Windows 98's crappy installer. Although it should also be noted that *both* Windows 98 and RedHat 5.0 fully supported all the hardware in the machine, it's just that Win98's installer seemed incapable of installing the machine properly while the hardware was in the box.
Also, 6 years ago not all cards were bus mastering. Most of them still required an interrupt. Most motherboards did not have a separate interrupt for each card...they would share interrupts, and unless both the hardware AND your drivers supported this, neither card on a shared IRQ would work.
I'm afraid this is wrong - not all cards are bus mastering these days, machines still don't have a separate interrupt for each card. PCI cards have always been able to share interrupts and regularly do and I've never seen a driver for a PCI card that doesn't support this (it's part of the PCI specification, not supporting it would be truely broken). ISA cards have never been able to share interrupts (ok, in very rare circumstances they can but it's not usually a good idea)
But in any case, this has no bearing on anything I described - if the cards were all working fine and I erased the OS and reinstalled it without changing any hardware there's no reason they shouldn't still be working fine afterwards (ISA cards are jumpered onto the right IRQs and addresses, PCI cards are configured by the BIOS).
It was tough. But this wasn't Windows 98's fault!
I'm sorry, when the only thing on the machine has changed between it working and it not working is the software, there is nothing to blame but the software. There is no way I should have had to rip out every additional bit of hardware before reinstalling Windows. I should also point out that getting all that hardware working in RedHat 5.0 did not involve ripping the machine to pieces or rebooting 500 times.
It got cancelled after 1 complete season because Fox insisted on showing the episodes out of order in a timeslot that many other shows had already died in.
Since it hit DVD, it stuck at Amazon's number-1 slot (a pretty spectacular accomplishment in itself) and is perhaps one of the alltime best selling DVDs.
Seriously, go grab the first couple of episodes off a p2p network and if you like them buy the DVDs. The stories are entertaining and often insightful, the photography is excellent and the CGI is probably the best I've ever seen - you really do forget that the CGI scenes aren't real. (The CGI is all rendered as if it's shot with a handheld video camera, which fits in perfectly with the rest of the filming which is all done on handheld cameras - it really does make you feel like the camera man is right in the middle of real action.
But maybe he thought that a western in space was cooler?
Just because something could be done differently doesn't mean it necessarilly _should_ be done that way, and I also think that the spectacular CGI really enhances the story, and thats something that just wouldn't fit into a plain western.
He had a vision of what the future might be like and I for one find that more interesting than looking back at the past. He has also managed to capture a much bigger fanbase that I would expect a western to get - most scifi fans probably wouldn't watch something that was listed in the TV guide as a western.
Infact I have yet to talk to anyone (IRL) who's seen it who doesn't like it. Fox just seem interested in the cheap-but-popular reality shows. Unfortunately it seems that most of the population are happy sitting infront of reality crap and soap operas leaving those of us with more than 2 braincells with nothing worth watching. I'm afraid I have more interesting things to be doing that don't involve the TV if all that's on is mindless reality TV.
Does this mean that the Japanese government is going to take up wardriving to look for violators?
Unfortunately that's exactly what we get in the UK from the TV Licencing authority - they drive around in detector vans looking for anyone watching TV who doesn't have a licence.
They also have the assumption that _everyone_ has a TV and target households who don't have a TV with threatening letters and billboard adverts, even if they don't have a TV.
A few years ago after I moved house I didn't have a TV for a few months - I got a threatening letter from the TV Licencing Authority with "YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW" printed across the _outside_ of the envelope in big letters. If I had any money at the time it would've been interesting to sue them for libel.