You manage to pick up on the wrong points and ignore the rest of the stats...
If Jean Charles de Menezes was armed and shot the police he'd have been shot for killing a Police officer at worst, and would've managed to kill a few Police and been seriously injured at best? That would happen in the US too surely? How many people get away with shooting the police for any reason? If anything, he'd have managed to kill a few Police and yet still be shot dead (and would be plastered over the news for shooting a Police officer along with the rest of the story). After the 7/7 attacks police were highly on edge on the Underground and there were a second wave of attempts on 21/7. I'd be interested to hear the stats about US shootings of innocent civilians too. I think the Police have killed less than 10 people in the last 10 years in the UK.
Would the armed adult really have been able to stop the guy with a handgun? If i were going to kill people at a school i'd target the one guy that's in charge of a load of kids first, then go on the rampage. Element of surprise would succeed very strongly. Reading the reports about Dunblane you wouldn't have stopped the first attack (walked into the gym and shot a single class and their teacher) and may have managed to have saved the life of one of the pupils in the playground (the only one to have died outside the gym).
But you managed to miss this is the only school shooting i can even think of that's happened in the UK, how many have there been in the US since 2000? I can't even count. I heard the news of this and thought alongside the tragedy "it's happened again".
What is very interesting is the way the press are reporting it.
The British press are not reporting it as "US is shooting themselves again, guns kill people" or "US School shooting, gun free zone increases death count". It's the fact that the police were inept at dealing with the incident, absolutely nothing is being reported about gun crime comparisons at the moment.
In 1999-2000 the US had 3.97 gun killings per 100,000 population, "England and Wales" (frequently England and Wales are grouped together for stats) had 0.14 per 100,000. In 2001/02 there were no "seriously injured" or killed Police officers by guns (on a scale of slight, serious & fatal), only 10 counted as slight.
But lets ignore the gun-crime stats for a second. The most serious UK school murder was the Dunblane Massacre (which was handgun based) in 1996. This was the deadliest attack on children in the UK killing 16 kids and 1 adult. This is almost a unique situation in UK history. This did result in even tighter hand-gun regulation (as others will tell you) from 1997.
Gun-crime in the UK is minimal and we don't have anywhere near as many school shootings. Since 2000 wikipedia has well over 20 school shootings listed, there must be some significance in that.
I gave Dvorak a good 1 year trial and frankly found it made no real difference at all.
I've got one of those IBM spring-loaded keyboard that my mum got from work with an old PC, so i could re-arrange the key caps (not even the physical keys, but the cap with the letters on) to Dvorak. I even changed the Qwerty keyboards at school to the Dvorak settings (which should help my learning as i can't do hunt-and-peck at the keys). And never noticed anything useful.
Now it may have been in part that i would every-so-often have to use a Qwerty layout (such as a friend's keyboard and hence wouldn't change it), but Dvorak made fuck all different to any typing skills, sticking to Qwerty is so much easier...
I also used the Dvorak switch to learn to type properly (when i use Qwerty i only use one finger on my right hand, fucked up, but it works as a typing style and is damned quick no matter what anyone says). So from that i should have learned to type faster, because not only was i using Dvorak, but typing in the proper style (4 fingers on home keys and such). But it never helped my typing speed.
Finally, no-one should spend that much on a keyboard. We've got 3 IBM spring-loaded keyboards probably worth a good £50+ each, but they're worth so much more to keep any type on compared to any new keyboard:p
Hmmn, idea forming. If i were to go to http://slashdot/ i should get all the sites registered at slashdot.tld appear as a list, perhaps with a small preview thumbnail/description. That way i could plainly see that http://www.ati.co.uk/ isn't the site i want whereas http://www.ati.com/ must contain a UK section (under/uk).
I am starting to get to a stage where i'm not sure which TLD i need. With two banks i have online banking facilities. However one has http://www.nationwide.co.uk/ whereas the.com is a US site. The other uses/advertises/redirects to http://www.natwest.com/ (although in this case.co.uk works too).
If i remember correctly it was based on the fact that IBM's manufacture of the Cell processor resulted in huge numbers of chips which didn't have the full 8 functioning cores. I remember figures of 40% being thrown about that weren't functioning properly. Now if you say that you only need 7 of the 8 cores functional then you're saving a lot of money.
Of course, it's not fair for a PS3 to have 7 or 8 cores and nor is it easy to manage, so ensure that all PS3s have a 7 core limit.
The more they get used to them and the more a part of the landscape they are the less people will mind having them around. Then some idiot will start wanting it in his/her house "just in case"
Why do people spout this absurd idea? Just because you get used to CCTV in public does not mean that you'll have CCTV in your own damned home!
I did a local paper round and on that round there were a couple of houses with signs up saying "Warning CCTV in operation" (this is by no means common) or somesuch, although THEY operate the CCTV, it's not some government organisation! All CCTV must be clearly signed too.
There's CCTV on every London bus (or that's the plan) and CCTV on the tube too. I wish it reduced graffiti you can find on most double-decker busses on the top floor, although the local free paper has "Shop a yob" campaign with local vandals on the cover for people to ID, that's a good system. CCTV means we know a lot about 7/7 and 21/7, video evidence is being used a lot in the 21/7 trial, with footage of the would-be bombers fleeing the seat where their bomb failed to explode.
CCTV has uses, it doesn't mean we'll have it in our fucking homes.
"What I want is a mobile device about the size of a credit card and as thick as a CD jewel case. You unfold it two or four times (depending on how much screen real estate you need ATM), and rubber keys magically inflate to give it some tactile feedback goodness."
Where do you plan on keeping the electronics and battery!? Or is it "Magic powered" and needs a recharge from a magician every 12 hours?
When i first installed Vista it all worked great, sleep worked perfectly and i could come out fine.
Now since i installed something (I believe my new GFX Drivers) it won't sleep. It'll turn the monitor off, but when i nudge the mouse or hit the keyboard it'll turn the monitor on and it'll be at the lock screen. According to powercfg it does support S3 sleep, strange.
"Happy Slapping" is a strange phenomenon come about in the era of the camera-phone. It involves a group of Chavs (crap) that attack an innocent bystander whilst on camera. Presumably started with a basic slap round the face (Similar to the "You've been Tango'd" adverts, but it's progressed to serious and violent crimes.
It's a nasty social thing that's developed recently, it was in the media months back in the UK. Not that it's something to expect to happen to you, it's become reasonably prevalent.
I can see why they'd have wanted such laws to come into effect to prevent "Happy Slapping" specifically, although it's probably one of those things that you just can't get right in legaleese.
PC World in the UK have a similar option. The website often has (clearly marked) "Web Exclusive" prices, and will allow you to reserve that item online, pick it up instore and pay that price as long as it's on the same day. If there's more than 3 in stock, it reserves one.
Our intranet price list which is nothing like our website (plug in product code and brings up specs, price, items included etc.) has the instore prices on. We have a link to the external website too and that's normal and we frequently reserve items for people on there if it's a better offer (it's also instant). However it's we know the "Price List" is instore pricing and actually only use it to print off a spec for a customer, we just scan it for a price check.
If someone walks in and says "I'm sure it was online for cheaper" we'll go online and check online for them. However, those online offers are not under our "Customer Offers" button on the till, so if someone doesn't have a reservation (our stock report was wrong online or something), we manually discount it under "Price match", "PC World".
I've been running Vista for about 4 hours now (came back from the pub), played a few hours on the C&C 3 demo, browsed the net and got a few things running in the background:
469MB of RAM in use and it's running fine. As others have mentioned, it's caching all your frequently used files and programs. Word loads up in 3 seconds, PowerPoint in under 2 and excel, calendar, filezilla and the rest are basically instant.
Now i'm using 575MB of ram with all that stuff loaded (Firefox, Thunderbird and Media player too) and it's running pretty damned quickly. It feels more responsive than XP and runs damned well. This install is over a month old (free copy of Vista Business from Uni) and when i load XP it seems slow. This is on a reasonable machine (P4 HT 3.4Ghz, 1GB RAM, Radeon X800 128MB) with an Experience Rating of 4.4.
Okay, PC World is not a lovely company that's nice and whatever, but i'd buy from them any day over Dell. I've been working in a store for 1 and a half years (Student job, nice pay for retail) and i know where they're dodgy and where they're not. Yes, you can get a lot of stuff really cheap online, but like Amazon, they don't have the overhead of real stores. The PC margin is small, often no more than 10% which may not even cover the time paid to the guy helping you, the profit does come from stuff like cables, inks and peripherals, but that's how the PC market has worked and still works.
Let's just say: £80 network cards (that was apparently the cheapest) I've been selling £7 NICs for ages, most expensive i remember was a Gigabit card that cost about £20.
£20 USB cables (again, the cheapest) Nope, cheapest is £10, although the standard 2.1 metre cable is £14.99. I agree, that's expensive but you can just go to Maplin and buy them there, i often tell people about that. Cables are the place where you get ripped off most, with network cables costing £9.99 for 1 metre and most people can spend well over £20 on a long cable.
£1,200 PCs. They stock cheaper ones but I've never met anyone who ever bought one You what? We only have 1 PC at the moment going for £1,200 and it's a beast by Packard Bell, it's trying to be like a custom-PC with a side window and lockable front and case. Frankly, 90% of the PCs i've sold are under £600 with quite a lot of people going away happy with a £300-£400 PC.
And extended warranties which cost 70% of the value of the PC, yet are serviced by spotty 16 year olds who wouldn't know a PC if it dropped on their head. Extended warranties are PAYG and about £8/month, now i know that's not cheap but it does cover anything that goes wrong with the thing. With that your PC gets taken away and repaired by proper techies, you don't get the guys that work in the store servicing PCs under the warranty.
I'm a computing student at Imperial College London, i got my friend hired who's also a computing student, his cousin works there (again into PCs), and the tech guys actually know what they're talking about. Now our store might be a wonderful exception to the norm, but come in when we're on shift and you won't get bullshitting from us.
Windows "Okay, i need to install my ATI drivers, lets see. Go to their website, see what's there. Oh look, Drivers, Windows Vista, the box said it was a Radeon, X800, and download. Clickthrough the install, next, next, next. Ah, done, no restart."
Linux "Go to Synaptic (I'll assume it's obvious this is where to go to add things), settings->Repositories (A whatnow?), why do i want restricted proprietary drivers? Where's it say ATI?"
You can't compare the process as being just as easy. Once you've hit the ATI website, it's easy to get through it. I wouldn't have a clue that i wanted "Proprietary drivers for devices (restricted)" or "linux-restricted-modules-2.6.10.5-1". Hell, the word restricted would put me off thinking i'm fucking about with something major.
You may be aware that the UK is ahead of everyone else in terms of CCTV surveillance. This doesn't mean that the UK has a lower crime rate though, nor does it mean that they are on top of terrorism or gun crime. There has been a lot of publicity in the UK recently about gun crime
Yes, we're far ahead when it comes to CCTV, and 95% (okay, arse figure there, but it's not controversial) of the population really don't care about this and are quite happy with them being there. I've previously posted how CCTV has pieced together the events of 7th July and 21st July (including being a large part of the prosecution when it comes to the latter).
When it comes to gun crime, i find it interesting that a grand total of 5 murders involving guns within a month in London (which isn't common) causes a 2000 person march and such a large response, as it's plainly clear we're not really used to this scale and really aren't happy with it.
Actually, the search is really useful, especially the start-menu builtin search.
I always used Winkey-R and typed in the location of my program, damned fast and really simple, although regular users wouldn't do that. Now i hit winkey, type in the program name (firefox) and up comes a search list, at the top Firefox is there, below it will be any files with the word firefox in the name from my profile and then the file-text search.
I agree the actual menu sucks compared to the old one in many ways, but i've almost never needed to navigate the menu itself, all the programs are in the builtin (instant) search and therefore i don't need to remember "Did i shove it in Accessories, who MADE the program or is it under the program name? Oh wait, Firefox comes under Mozilla Firefox...".
Indeed, i'm perfectly happy with Vista and have been running it for almost a month now. It seems to network better with my XP laptop than XP did, runs at the same sort of speed as XP and i've not hit anything that's a problem. I prefer the way things seem a bit more rounded and easier to use. Control Panel has a search, type in screen resolution and it'll link to where to change it!
I wouldn't pay for this upgrade, but running Vista Business for free from my Uni's MSDNAA scheme means i get the upgrade for free and personally don't miss XP.
Uh-hu, and the UK is the second biggest economy after Germany in the EU (or up to 2 places behind in the world dependent on your figures). Most of the foreign bodges of having an earth dates back to backwards compatibility of adding an earth to the system and yet allowing old electronics to operate.
I'm sure Germany has a large number of the laws mandating earths in products that we do, products that are double-insulated (see other replies) don't require an earth, and i'm sure German products without an earth are frequently double-insulated.
I recently got a PC from a chain that buys EU based products. I refused to use the PC kettle plug provided as it was just a plastic mold and 3 pins, but obviously no fuse. Swapped it for a proper UK kettle lead though, never used the other even for an old printer that took the cable.
Uh-hu, you can shove something in the earth pin to open the socket, although if you're clever enough to do that then you probably won't be shoving a finger into the live socket (or if you're stupid enough to, you probably can't do both at once), either way it's safer than a lot of other plug sockets used around the world because of this one feature.
Power adapters often breach legal things such as earthed products. Any decent power adapter should hook up the earth pins to the earth on the socket as you'd expect. Any foreign product without an earth can be hooked up without an earth, although if it's safe enough to use abroad you can hardly blame us if you use it in the UK without an earth (especially as it never came with an earth to bloody hook up!).
I'll repeat, you are entitled to have a non-earthed product (with a plastic pin opening the socket) as long as the product is double-insulated. That means that the product has no physical conductive component (like screws) going from the inside to the outside without a barrier in the way. Often in double-insulated electronics a screw will fit a plastic mount in the other half of the casing.
This means that even if there were a leakage to the casing there can't be any physical connection that is conductive to the outside world (unless you bash it with a hammer and want to get a shock).
Okay, not really, but shouldn't happen in the UK. According to the article:
"The latest word is that VG's own problems were solved by springing for a three-pronged grounded power adapter"
You can't get a non-earthed plug in the UK, the earth pin is physically required to open the plug socket. This can be a dummy pin, but you're only able to do that if the unit itself is double-insulated.
Sorry, what? I've never heard of such a scheme. The closest i've got is an ID swipe card for Uni with my photo on. It allows me access to labs, the Department of Computing, library, gym and my halls. No fingerprints or DNA though.
The UK is kinda a bodge at the moment. Road signs and speed limits are all in miles per hour but that's based more on the awkwardness of converting signs. Pretty much all other aspects are legally metric: Price per kilo at the grocer's. Filling up the car with litres of petrol. Prices at the supermarket quoted in £s per kilo.
There's a few exceptions to this, namely buying a pint in a pub and road usage. I want roads to go metric, i grew up being taught metric and haven't a clue about most imperial units.
Slashdot Mirror
You manage to pick up on the wrong points and ignore the rest of the stats...
If Jean Charles de Menezes was armed and shot the police he'd have been shot for killing a Police officer at worst, and would've managed to kill a few Police and been seriously injured at best? That would happen in the US too surely? How many people get away with shooting the police for any reason? If anything, he'd have managed to kill a few Police and yet still be shot dead (and would be plastered over the news for shooting a Police officer along with the rest of the story). After the 7/7 attacks police were highly on edge on the Underground and there were a second wave of attempts on 21/7. I'd be interested to hear the stats about US shootings of innocent civilians too. I think the Police have killed less than 10 people in the last 10 years in the UK.
Would the armed adult really have been able to stop the guy with a handgun? If i were going to kill people at a school i'd target the one guy that's in charge of a load of kids first, then go on the rampage. Element of surprise would succeed very strongly. Reading the reports about Dunblane you wouldn't have stopped the first attack (walked into the gym and shot a single class and their teacher) and may have managed to have saved the life of one of the pupils in the playground (the only one to have died outside the gym).
But you managed to miss this is the only school shooting i can even think of that's happened in the UK, how many have there been in the US since 2000? I can't even count. I heard the news of this and thought alongside the tragedy "it's happened again".
What is very interesting is the way the press are reporting it.
The British press are not reporting it as "US is shooting themselves again, guns kill people" or "US School shooting, gun free zone increases death count". It's the fact that the police were inept at dealing with the incident, absolutely nothing is being reported about gun crime comparisons at the moment.
In 1999-2000 the US had 3.97 gun killings per 100,000 population, "England and Wales" (frequently England and Wales are grouped together for stats) had 0.14 per 100,000. In 2001/02 there were no "seriously injured" or killed Police officers by guns (on a scale of slight, serious & fatal), only 10 counted as slight.
u k_gun_crime/html/1.stm )
Arming people to the hilt isn't always the answer. All stats from BBC Online ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/03/
But lets ignore the gun-crime stats for a second. The most serious UK school murder was the Dunblane Massacre (which was handgun based) in 1996. This was the deadliest attack on children in the UK killing 16 kids and 1 adult. This is almost a unique situation in UK history. This did result in even tighter hand-gun regulation (as others will tell you) from 1997.
Gun-crime in the UK is minimal and we don't have anywhere near as many school shootings. Since 2000 wikipedia has well over 20 school shootings listed, there must be some significance in that.
I gave Dvorak a good 1 year trial and frankly found it made no real difference at all.
:p
I've got one of those IBM spring-loaded keyboard that my mum got from work with an old PC, so i could re-arrange the key caps (not even the physical keys, but the cap with the letters on) to Dvorak. I even changed the Qwerty keyboards at school to the Dvorak settings (which should help my learning as i can't do hunt-and-peck at the keys). And never noticed anything useful.
Now it may have been in part that i would every-so-often have to use a Qwerty layout (such as a friend's keyboard and hence wouldn't change it), but Dvorak made fuck all different to any typing skills, sticking to Qwerty is so much easier...
I also used the Dvorak switch to learn to type properly (when i use Qwerty i only use one finger on my right hand, fucked up, but it works as a typing style and is damned quick no matter what anyone says). So from that i should have learned to type faster, because not only was i using Dvorak, but typing in the proper style (4 fingers on home keys and such). But it never helped my typing speed.
Finally, no-one should spend that much on a keyboard. We've got 3 IBM spring-loaded keyboards probably worth a good £50+ each, but they're worth so much more to keep any type on compared to any new keyboard
Hmmn, idea forming. If i were to go to http://slashdot/ i should get all the sites registered at slashdot.tld appear as a list, perhaps with a small preview thumbnail/description. That way i could plainly see that http://www.ati.co.uk/ isn't the site i want whereas http://www.ati.com/ must contain a UK section (under /uk).
.com is a US site. The other uses/advertises/redirects to http://www.natwest.com/ (although in this case .co.uk works too).
I am starting to get to a stage where i'm not sure which TLD i need. With two banks i have online banking facilities. However one has http://www.nationwide.co.uk/ whereas the
If i remember correctly it was based on the fact that IBM's manufacture of the Cell processor resulted in huge numbers of chips which didn't have the full 8 functioning cores. I remember figures of 40% being thrown about that weren't functioning properly. Now if you say that you only need 7 of the 8 cores functional then you're saving a lot of money.
Of course, it's not fair for a PS3 to have 7 or 8 cores and nor is it easy to manage, so ensure that all PS3s have a 7 core limit.
The more they get used to them and the more a part of the landscape they are the less people will mind having them around. Then some idiot will start wanting it in his/her house "just in case"
Why do people spout this absurd idea? Just because you get used to CCTV in public does not mean that you'll have CCTV in your own damned home!
I did a local paper round and on that round there were a couple of houses with signs up saying "Warning CCTV in operation" (this is by no means common) or somesuch, although THEY operate the CCTV, it's not some government organisation! All CCTV must be clearly signed too.
There's CCTV on every London bus (or that's the plan) and CCTV on the tube too. I wish it reduced graffiti you can find on most double-decker busses on the top floor, although the local free paper has "Shop a yob" campaign with local vandals on the cover for people to ID, that's a good system. CCTV means we know a lot about 7/7 and 21/7, video evidence is being used a lot in the 21/7 trial, with footage of the would-be bombers fleeing the seat where their bomb failed to explode.
CCTV has uses, it doesn't mean we'll have it in our fucking homes.
"What I want is a mobile device about the size of a credit card and as thick as a CD jewel case. You unfold it two or four times (depending on how much screen real estate you need ATM), and rubber keys magically inflate to give it some tactile feedback goodness."
Where do you plan on keeping the electronics and battery!? Or is it "Magic powered" and needs a recharge from a magician every 12 hours?
£180 about 6-9 months ago:
Pentium 4 HT 3.4Ghz
1GB RAM
400GB HDD
Radeon X700 Pro 128MB
Wifi, Digital TV Tuner, DL DVD-RW
There are bargains to be had!
When i first installed Vista it all worked great, sleep worked perfectly and i could come out fine.
Now since i installed something (I believe my new GFX Drivers) it won't sleep. It'll turn the monitor off, but when i nudge the mouse or hit the keyboard it'll turn the monitor on and it'll be at the lock screen. According to powercfg it does support S3 sleep, strange.
"Happy Slapping" is a strange phenomenon come about in the era of the camera-phone. It involves a group of Chavs (crap) that attack an innocent bystander whilst on camera. Presumably started with a basic slap round the face (Similar to the "You've been Tango'd" adverts, but it's progressed to serious and violent crimes.
It's a nasty social thing that's developed recently, it was in the media months back in the UK. Not that it's something to expect to happen to you, it's become reasonably prevalent.
I can see why they'd have wanted such laws to come into effect to prevent "Happy Slapping" specifically, although it's probably one of those things that you just can't get right in legaleese.
PC World in the UK have a similar option. The website often has (clearly marked) "Web Exclusive" prices, and will allow you to reserve that item online, pick it up instore and pay that price as long as it's on the same day. If there's more than 3 in stock, it reserves one.
Our intranet price list which is nothing like our website (plug in product code and brings up specs, price, items included etc.) has the instore prices on. We have a link to the external website too and that's normal and we frequently reserve items for people on there if it's a better offer (it's also instant). However it's we know the "Price List" is instore pricing and actually only use it to print off a spec for a customer, we just scan it for a price check.
If someone walks in and says "I'm sure it was online for cheaper" we'll go online and check online for them. However, those online offers are not under our "Customer Offers" button on the till, so if someone doesn't have a reservation (our stock report was wrong online or something), we manually discount it under "Price match", "PC World".
I've been running Vista for about 4 hours now (came back from the pub), played a few hours on the C&C 3 demo, browsed the net and got a few things running in the background:
469MB of RAM in use and it's running fine. As others have mentioned, it's caching all your frequently used files and programs. Word loads up in 3 seconds, PowerPoint in under 2 and excel, calendar, filezilla and the rest are basically instant.
Now i'm using 575MB of ram with all that stuff loaded (Firefox, Thunderbird and Media player too) and it's running pretty damned quickly. It feels more responsive than XP and runs damned well. This install is over a month old (free copy of Vista Business from Uni) and when i load XP it seems slow. This is on a reasonable machine (P4 HT 3.4Ghz, 1GB RAM, Radeon X800 128MB) with an Experience Rating of 4.4.
Okay, PC World is not a lovely company that's nice and whatever, but i'd buy from them any day over Dell. I've been working in a store for 1 and a half years (Student job, nice pay for retail) and i know where they're dodgy and where they're not. Yes, you can get a lot of stuff really cheap online, but like Amazon, they don't have the overhead of real stores. The PC margin is small, often no more than 10% which may not even cover the time paid to the guy helping you, the profit does come from stuff like cables, inks and peripherals, but that's how the PC market has worked and still works.
Let's just say: £80 network cards (that was apparently the cheapest)
I've been selling £7 NICs for ages, most expensive i remember was a Gigabit card that cost about £20.
£20 USB cables (again, the cheapest)
Nope, cheapest is £10, although the standard 2.1 metre cable is £14.99. I agree, that's expensive but you can just go to Maplin and buy them there, i often tell people about that. Cables are the place where you get ripped off most, with network cables costing £9.99 for 1 metre and most people can spend well over £20 on a long cable.
£1,200 PCs. They stock cheaper ones but I've never met anyone who ever bought one
You what? We only have 1 PC at the moment going for £1,200 and it's a beast by Packard Bell, it's trying to be like a custom-PC with a side window and lockable front and case. Frankly, 90% of the PCs i've sold are under £600 with quite a lot of people going away happy with a £300-£400 PC.
And extended warranties which cost 70% of the value of the PC, yet are serviced by spotty 16 year olds who wouldn't know a PC if it dropped on their head.
Extended warranties are PAYG and about £8/month, now i know that's not cheap but it does cover anything that goes wrong with the thing. With that your PC gets taken away and repaired by proper techies, you don't get the guys that work in the store servicing PCs under the warranty.
I'm a computing student at Imperial College London, i got my friend hired who's also a computing student, his cousin works there (again into PCs), and the tech guys actually know what they're talking about. Now our store might be a wonderful exception to the norm, but come in when we're on shift and you won't get bullshitting from us.
Windows
"Okay, i need to install my ATI drivers, lets see. Go to their website, see what's there. Oh look, Drivers, Windows Vista, the box said it was a Radeon, X800, and download. Clickthrough the install, next, next, next. Ah, done, no restart."
Linux
"Go to Synaptic (I'll assume it's obvious this is where to go to add things), settings->Repositories (A whatnow?), why do i want restricted proprietary drivers? Where's it say ATI?"
You can't compare the process as being just as easy. Once you've hit the ATI website, it's easy to get through it. I wouldn't have a clue that i wanted "Proprietary drivers for devices (restricted)" or "linux-restricted-modules-2.6.10.5-1". Hell, the word restricted would put me off thinking i'm fucking about with something major.
You may be aware that the UK is ahead of everyone else in terms of CCTV surveillance. This doesn't mean that the UK has a lower crime rate though, nor does it mean that they are on top of terrorism or gun crime. There has been a lot of publicity in the UK recently about gun crime
Yes, we're far ahead when it comes to CCTV, and 95% (okay, arse figure there, but it's not controversial) of the population really don't care about this and are quite happy with them being there. I've previously posted how CCTV has pieced together the events of 7th July and 21st July (including being a large part of the prosecution when it comes to the latter).
When it comes to gun crime, i find it interesting that a grand total of 5 murders involving guns within a month in London (which isn't common) causes a 2000 person march and such a large response, as it's plainly clear we're not really used to this scale and really aren't happy with it.
Actually, the search is really useful, especially the start-menu builtin search.
I always used Winkey-R and typed in the location of my program, damned fast and really simple, although regular users wouldn't do that. Now i hit winkey, type in the program name (firefox) and up comes a search list, at the top Firefox is there, below it will be any files with the word firefox in the name from my profile and then the file-text search.
I agree the actual menu sucks compared to the old one in many ways, but i've almost never needed to navigate the menu itself, all the programs are in the builtin (instant) search and therefore i don't need to remember "Did i shove it in Accessories, who MADE the program or is it under the program name? Oh wait, Firefox comes under Mozilla Firefox...".
Wait, 5 months and it's out of warranty? WTF?
Here a product should be good for an expected lifetime for that product. Most electrical items must have a 1 year waranty, if not more.
Indeed, i'm perfectly happy with Vista and have been running it for almost a month now. It seems to network better with my XP laptop than XP did, runs at the same sort of speed as XP and i've not hit anything that's a problem. I prefer the way things seem a bit more rounded and easier to use. Control Panel has a search, type in screen resolution and it'll link to where to change it!
I wouldn't pay for this upgrade, but running Vista Business for free from my Uni's MSDNAA scheme means i get the upgrade for free and personally don't miss XP.
Uh-hu, and the UK is the second biggest economy after Germany in the EU (or up to 2 places behind in the world dependent on your figures). Most of the foreign bodges of having an earth dates back to backwards compatibility of adding an earth to the system and yet allowing old electronics to operate.
I'm sure Germany has a large number of the laws mandating earths in products that we do, products that are double-insulated (see other replies) don't require an earth, and i'm sure German products without an earth are frequently double-insulated.
I recently got a PC from a chain that buys EU based products. I refused to use the PC kettle plug provided as it was just a plastic mold and 3 pins, but obviously no fuse. Swapped it for a proper UK kettle lead though, never used the other even for an old printer that took the cable.
Uh-hu, you can shove something in the earth pin to open the socket, although if you're clever enough to do that then you probably won't be shoving a finger into the live socket (or if you're stupid enough to, you probably can't do both at once), either way it's safer than a lot of other plug sockets used around the world because of this one feature.
Power adapters often breach legal things such as earthed products. Any decent power adapter should hook up the earth pins to the earth on the socket as you'd expect. Any foreign product without an earth can be hooked up without an earth, although if it's safe enough to use abroad you can hardly blame us if you use it in the UK without an earth (especially as it never came with an earth to bloody hook up!).
I'll repeat, you are entitled to have a non-earthed product (with a plastic pin opening the socket) as long as the product is double-insulated. That means that the product has no physical conductive component (like screws) going from the inside to the outside without a barrier in the way. Often in double-insulated electronics a screw will fit a plastic mount in the other half of the casing.
This means that even if there were a leakage to the casing there can't be any physical connection that is conductive to the outside world (unless you bash it with a hammer and want to get a shock).
Okay, not really, but shouldn't happen in the UK. According to the article:
"The latest word is that VG's own problems were solved by springing for a three-pronged grounded power adapter"
You can't get a non-earthed plug in the UK, the earth pin is physically required to open the plug socket. This can be a dummy pin, but you're only able to do that if the unit itself is double-insulated.
Sorry, what? I've never heard of such a scheme. The closest i've got is an ID swipe card for Uni with my photo on. It allows me access to labs, the Department of Computing, library, gym and my halls. No fingerprints or DNA though.
The UK is kinda a bodge at the moment. Road signs and speed limits are all in miles per hour but that's based more on the awkwardness of converting signs. Pretty much all other aspects are legally metric:
Price per kilo at the grocer's.
Filling up the car with litres of petrol.
Prices at the supermarket quoted in £s per kilo.
There's a few exceptions to this, namely buying a pint in a pub and road usage. I want roads to go metric, i grew up being taught metric and haven't a clue about most imperial units.