I read somewhere about the idea that the trolls of Scandinavian folklore had their roots in human interactions with the remnants of the Neanderthals. I quite liked that idea, even if it's almost certainly not true. The troll under the bridge was one of the scariest stories I was told when I was wee. I hated crossing bridges over burns for a long time after that.
There was an interesting fictional documentary programme on a couple of years ago about an archaeologist who was uncovering evidence that dragons had lived alongside the dinosaurs, and survived up until relatively recently. I wish I could remember the name of it.
Mikael is right to say that proportional representation is working in Scotland. Approval ratings for the Scottish Government are on the rise; compare this to the approval ratings of the Labour government in Westminster, which are in free-fall.
The problem is that Labour know that they will lose seats in parliament if they introduce proportional representation (this is not because PR gives an unfair advantage to small parties, as some would say; it is because the current first-past-the-post system gives an unfair advantage to large parties). Even before they lost power in Scotland, they had gone cold on the idea of proportional representation after they were forced to endure coalition government in both Scotland and Wales.
This Hansard excerpt, dated 2006 (while Labour was still in coalition government in Scotland), is very telling of Labour's disregard for the wishes of the electorate (emphasis mine):
I suggest to the Minister and the Secretary of State that we start to adopt the same type of policy and look at things on the basis of party interest, otherwise we will be in great difficulty. The measure now proposed by the Scottish Parliament--the single transferable vote being introduced for council elections--is like turkeys voting for an early Christmas.
- Brian H Donohoe (Ayrshire Central, Labour)
If proportional representation was introduced to this House, would not there be a danger that disreputable minority parties would claim the credit for the good things that this Labour Government have done, in the same way that they do in the Scottish Executive, particularly in respect of the Dunfermline by-election?
- Jim Sheridan (Paisley & Renfrewshire North, Labour)
So getting proportional representation essentially requires Labour to be voted out, and I don't believe for a second that the Tories would be any happier with the prospect of a voting system that diminishes their advantage.
It's true that in general, when an iPod goes into freefall, it stops working very quickly. Maybe some idiot has just taken that rule of thumb, true on Earth, and applied it to space?
To me, it's a sign that an AppleTV version isn't imminent. The BBC had two options for getting their content onto the iPhone platform:
Put programmes on the iTunes Store for free, as rentals. This allows them to do all the expiry stuff that they already do on the Windows download iPlayer. It also means that at a stroke, their content is available on all Macs, iPhones, iPods and AppleTVs, as well as available to Windows users under a second media player platform.
Create a streaming solution for the iPhone platform only, which doesn't use DRM and would be easily streamed to other devices unencrypted.
Despite option 1 being the better option by far for both the BBC themselves and consumers (the proposal has received an overwhelmingly positive response), they've gone with option 2. That tells me that there are problems with implementing option 1, and I'm guessing that it's to do with whatever fees Apple would want to charge for such a system to be put together.
It's actually quite interesting to see 720p HDTVs appearing in many homes, but without any form of HD content being played on them. I suppose the driving factors are the form factor and general aesthetics, as well as the need for integrated Freeview boxes for the digital switchover (which happens in my region this year).
I'm less convinced that picture quality has improved dramatically, from an SD source. My parents have a 32" Samsung LCD with an SD Sky box, connected via SCART. The screen is 'good' enough that the encoding artefacts of the MPEG2 stream rear their ugly head. Not only that, but the inadequacy of the SCART connection starts to show, with diagonal lines showing on dark patches of the screen.
What I have found, though, is that DVDs played through the HDMI port look much, much better than DVDs played through the SCART socket. I notice that a lot of modern DVD players have an HDMI output built-in, so I suspect tha
You can have a computer screen without a television licence. From the TV Licensing website (emphasis mine):
You need a TV Licence to use any television receiving equipment such as a TV set, digital box, DVD or video recorder, PC, laptop or mobile phone to watch or record television programmes as they're being shown on TV.
Currently, you only need a TV licence for a PC if it has a TV tuner in it, which enables you to receive a live broadcast.
It's so that when he starts stealing the office computers, and his superior demands to know why there are computers missing from the offices, and states, "They didn't just get up and walk away, did they?", he can reply:
"Well actually..."
GPRS is designed around the idea that you'll probably go out of coverage while using it. The network will try to maintain your connection with whatever you were accessing while it waits for you to come back into coverage. Sometimes this method works well, and other times it has a tendency to break things.
This is as opposed to WiFi, where if you lose reception, you lose your connection. WiFi is only really good on a train if the train itself has a hotspot (I think GNER has them, but you have to pay extra for access), and that access point could easily be replaced by a 3G femtocell in the not-too-distant future.
PCs are much more suitable for playing FPS and RTS games, I agree. But the keyboard and mouse setup absolutely sucks for just about every other genre. Sure, you could buy a control pad, but then (coming back to the point of the article) you could always upgrade your graphics card as well. The fact that these two things are missing from the standard PC setup is one of the reasons that PC gaming is in decline.
A controller not being quite as good as a keyboard and mouse for FPS gaming isn't the deal-breaker for the vast majority of people that PC gamers seem to think it is.
Not quite. As I understand it, the SDK is free, and you can compile apps and beta test them on an iPhone connected to the dev machine with the standard cable. If you pay $99, you can sell your apps through Apple.
But your big unanswered question still stands, and is one I'm going to be putting to the test once I get to grips with the SDK.
It could have something to do with Nokia being based in Finland, and SOx not applying. Although they're listed on a bunch of different stock exchanges including the NYSE. I'm not sure what the rules are when you're listed internationally.
It is a small amount of money for a digital signature that lets you load your application onto a mobile phone. And with Apple, you're getting the guarantee that your signature will continue to work on future iPhones. And you're getting a delivery system that is easy to use for the customer.
Compare this to J2ME signing. There are several signing authorities, each charging several hundred dollars to sign a single version of an application. So, when version 2 comes out, you have to cough up again. And one signature won't work on every single J2ME phone, because of different signing authorities. Hell, it won't even work on every single phone from a given manufacturer, or of a single model. My company was stung once because we bought a signature for a particular Motorola model. Half way through the model's production life, Motorola switched to a different signing authority, so our customer's phone did not understand the digital signature we had bought. If I remember correctly, that was roughly £400 down the drain.
I'm not comparing like-for-like, of course, because you can run J2ME apps without them being signed. But you get annoying permission requests every time you try to use a 'restricted' API (reading/writing files, using GPRS etc.)
Ownership of vast swathes of land by single, often absentee individuals, with the right to sell the land from underneath their tenants... that's a pretty right wing idea. We had one instance recently where a whole village came close to being evicted as the land they lived on was put up on the open market. Fortunately it never came to that, due to local government intervention. The stranglehold these individuals have over the land is beginning to be broken with a combination of legislation and community buy-outs.
You can't just say that belief in ownership is a right-wing idea. It depends on who's doing the owning.
Criticisms of speed limits on motorways and dual carriageways is perhaps more justified than those of single carriageway limits. Although speeds over 60mph might seem safe on a single carriageway, you have to take into account that, due to traffic travelling in opposite directions, combined speed means that it is possible to have a crash at 120mph, far higher than is possible on a dual carriageway. I'm actually quite surprised that most countries have a relatively small differential between the two types of roads.
Regarding 'accuracy', I think you were getting at something different but I thought I'd point out that your car speedometer consistently over-reports your speed. There is an inherent error in the instrumentation, exacerbated by the fact that tyre pressure changes due to ambient temperature and wear. Speedometers must never under-report by law, so the differences between measured speed and actual speed can be quite large due to manufacturers being on the safe side with their calibration.
You can test this by measuring your speed using a GPS unit, or by collecting data from your car's OBD port. What I've found is that the over-reporting seems to be due to a built-in 'fiddle factor' in a vehicle rather than being factored into the actual calibration, so the speed reported by the OBD port will be higher (and more accurate) than the speed reported by the speedometer.
The upshot of all of this is that, while you might be travelling at what your speedometer tells you is 80mph and thinking to yourself, "This is perfectly safe," in actual fact you could be travelling as slowly as 75.
One of the reasons that I'm almost decided on buying an iPhone as soon as a 3G version comes out (and given that there's now a 16GB version) is that I already own an iPod Touch, and absolutely love it - but it frustrates me that when I'm out and about a lot of the features become useless due to the lack of any WiFi networks available.
My boss has a Nokia N810 and an N95 (the original, not the 8GB). The N810 automatically detects the N95's presence and will use its 3G connection over Bluetooth with the minimum of fuss, which may be the best way to get a decent UI (which IMO, the N95's isn't) and a 3G connection to anybody that doesn't mind carrying two devices.
The lack of ad blocking doesn't bother me on Mobile Safari as much as it does on the desktop. I tend to double-tap and zoom in on divs, which essentially obscures most ads. I'd actually like to see the same zooming feature on desktop browsers, maybe with the option of auto-resizing the window rather than zooming.
Of course you then have the problem of ISPs over selling their service - I've heard that at the moment the UK cable operators are providing really slow connections, and this is because their backbones just can't handle the amount of bandwidth being used by their customers.
This might be true, I don't know.
But a lot of the controversy has surrounded the sale of 'Up to 8mb' connections, where ISPs will essentially provide a connection as fast as the user's line and telephone exchange will allow. The positive side was that users could take advantage of exchange upgrades as soon as they became available. The problem was that, once it was publicised that it was very hard to actually achieve the maximum advertised download speeds (due to the exchange/line/contention ratio etc.), you got a lot of indignant users complaining that they were paying for 8mb, therefore they should get 8mb (completely disregarding the terms and conditions of their service I might add).
It didn't help matters when the Gadget Show, broadcast on Channel 5, ran a programme about this, and provided a 'broadband speed analysis tool' on their website to help viewers check how fast a connection they were getting. Of course, their site was swamped by viewers all using the service at the same time, and so the speeds that were reported were vastly lower than in reality.
Ian Wild, a PlusNet employee, left the following comment on TFA:
It would make no difference whether we had the content stired on our network or whether it is served directly by the BBC. We have great peering links with the BBC and the cost of transferring the data from them to us is effectviely zero, a well a being very fast. The bottleneck is within the BT Wholesale network and your line speed.
All of the ISPs costs come from the BT Central pipes, which link the exchanges around the country with the ISPs network. Because each customer has their own 'tunnel' through this network there is no further significant efficiency to be had with the current infrastructure as provided by BT.
Not entirely sure what the implications are for caching solutions, but it sure is interesting.
If you're using any device that communicates over a serial port (Telit GT864-PY for example), you're going to use parts of the Hayes Command Set. Not necessarily all of it, but it's certainly not obsolete.
And as for 'Changing the battery of a Sega Dreamcast VMU'... isn't that just a case of unscrewing the cover, removing the battery, and popping in a replacement? The Dreamcast VMU might itself be obsolete, but I just went through that exact procedure yesterday while changing the battery in my car's central locking remote.
I'm not taking the list too seriously though, seeing as 'sex' is on it...
Indeed. When you're waging war, gaining support back home is much easier if you can dehumanise those that you wish to kill. It's not a new tactic, for example the Destroy This Mad Brute poster of WW1.
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I read somewhere about the idea that the trolls of Scandinavian folklore had their roots in human interactions with the remnants of the Neanderthals. I quite liked that idea, even if it's almost certainly not true. The troll under the bridge was one of the scariest stories I was told when I was wee. I hated crossing bridges over burns for a long time after that.
There was an interesting fictional documentary programme on a couple of years ago about an archaeologist who was uncovering evidence that dragons had lived alongside the dinosaurs, and survived up until relatively recently. I wish I could remember the name of it.
Mikael is right to say that proportional representation is working in Scotland. Approval ratings for the Scottish Government are on the rise; compare this to the approval ratings of the Labour government in Westminster, which are in free-fall.
The problem is that Labour know that they will lose seats in parliament if they introduce proportional representation (this is not because PR gives an unfair advantage to small parties, as some would say; it is because the current first-past-the-post system gives an unfair advantage to large parties). Even before they lost power in Scotland, they had gone cold on the idea of proportional representation after they were forced to endure coalition government in both Scotland and Wales.
This Hansard excerpt, dated 2006 (while Labour was still in coalition government in Scotland), is very telling of Labour's disregard for the wishes of the electorate (emphasis mine):
So getting proportional representation essentially requires Labour to be voted out, and I don't believe for a second that the Tories would be any happier with the prospect of a voting system that diminishes their advantage.
It's true that in general, when an iPod goes into freefall, it stops working very quickly. Maybe some idiot has just taken that rule of thumb, true on Earth, and applied it to space?
To me, it's a sign that an AppleTV version isn't imminent. The BBC had two options for getting their content onto the iPhone platform:
Despite option 1 being the better option by far for both the BBC themselves and consumers (the proposal has received an overwhelmingly positive response), they've gone with option 2. That tells me that there are problems with implementing option 1, and I'm guessing that it's to do with whatever fees Apple would want to charge for such a system to be put together.
It's actually quite interesting to see 720p HDTVs appearing in many homes, but without any form of HD content being played on them. I suppose the driving factors are the form factor and general aesthetics, as well as the need for integrated Freeview boxes for the digital switchover (which happens in my region this year).
I'm less convinced that picture quality has improved dramatically, from an SD source. My parents have a 32" Samsung LCD with an SD Sky box, connected via SCART. The screen is 'good' enough that the encoding artefacts of the MPEG2 stream rear their ugly head. Not only that, but the inadequacy of the SCART connection starts to show, with diagonal lines showing on dark patches of the screen.
What I have found, though, is that DVDs played through the HDMI port look much, much better than DVDs played through the SCART socket. I notice that a lot of modern DVD players have an HDMI output built-in, so I suspect tha
You can have a computer screen without a television licence. From the TV Licensing website (emphasis mine):
Currently, you only need a TV licence for a PC if it has a TV tuner in it, which enables you to receive a live broadcast.
It's so that when he starts stealing the office computers, and his superior demands to know why there are computers missing from the offices, and states, "They didn't just get up and walk away, did they?", he can reply: "Well actually..."
GPRS is designed around the idea that you'll probably go out of coverage while using it. The network will try to maintain your connection with whatever you were accessing while it waits for you to come back into coverage. Sometimes this method works well, and other times it has a tendency to break things.
This is as opposed to WiFi, where if you lose reception, you lose your connection. WiFi is only really good on a train if the train itself has a hotspot (I think GNER has them, but you have to pay extra for access), and that access point could easily be replaced by a 3G femtocell in the not-too-distant future.
PCs are much more suitable for playing FPS and RTS games, I agree. But the keyboard and mouse setup absolutely sucks for just about every other genre. Sure, you could buy a control pad, but then (coming back to the point of the article) you could always upgrade your graphics card as well. The fact that these two things are missing from the standard PC setup is one of the reasons that PC gaming is in decline.
A controller not being quite as good as a keyboard and mouse for FPS gaming isn't the deal-breaker for the vast majority of people that PC gamers seem to think it is.
Not quite. As I understand it, the SDK is free, and you can compile apps and beta test them on an iPhone connected to the dev machine with the standard cable. If you pay $99, you can sell your apps through Apple.
But your big unanswered question still stands, and is one I'm going to be putting to the test once I get to grips with the SDK.
Can you provide a link? I can't find any reference to this anywhere.
It could have something to do with Nokia being based in Finland, and SOx not applying. Although they're listed on a bunch of different stock exchanges including the NYSE. I'm not sure what the rules are when you're listed internationally.
It is a small amount of money for a digital signature that lets you load your application onto a mobile phone. And with Apple, you're getting the guarantee that your signature will continue to work on future iPhones. And you're getting a delivery system that is easy to use for the customer.
Compare this to J2ME signing. There are several signing authorities, each charging several hundred dollars to sign a single version of an application. So, when version 2 comes out, you have to cough up again. And one signature won't work on every single J2ME phone, because of different signing authorities. Hell, it won't even work on every single phone from a given manufacturer, or of a single model. My company was stung once because we bought a signature for a particular Motorola model. Half way through the model's production life, Motorola switched to a different signing authority, so our customer's phone did not understand the digital signature we had bought. If I remember correctly, that was roughly £400 down the drain.
I'm not comparing like-for-like, of course, because you can run J2ME apps without them being signed. But you get annoying permission requests every time you try to use a 'restricted' API (reading/writing files, using GPRS etc.)
Infinite recursion, surely?
Democratically elected government or not, dropping cluster bombs into residential neighbourhoods to kill people is terrorism, and the people who commit terrorism are terrorists.
Agree?
Ownership of vast swathes of land by single, often absentee individuals, with the right to sell the land from underneath their tenants... that's a pretty right wing idea. We had one instance recently where a whole village came close to being evicted as the land they lived on was put up on the open market. Fortunately it never came to that, due to local government intervention. The stranglehold these individuals have over the land is beginning to be broken with a combination of legislation and community buy-outs.
You can't just say that belief in ownership is a right-wing idea. It depends on who's doing the owning.
Criticisms of speed limits on motorways and dual carriageways is perhaps more justified than those of single carriageway limits. Although speeds over 60mph might seem safe on a single carriageway, you have to take into account that, due to traffic travelling in opposite directions, combined speed means that it is possible to have a crash at 120mph, far higher than is possible on a dual carriageway. I'm actually quite surprised that most countries have a relatively small differential between the two types of roads.
Regarding 'accuracy', I think you were getting at something different but I thought I'd point out that your car speedometer consistently over-reports your speed. There is an inherent error in the instrumentation, exacerbated by the fact that tyre pressure changes due to ambient temperature and wear. Speedometers must never under-report by law, so the differences between measured speed and actual speed can be quite large due to manufacturers being on the safe side with their calibration.
You can test this by measuring your speed using a GPS unit, or by collecting data from your car's OBD port. What I've found is that the over-reporting seems to be due to a built-in 'fiddle factor' in a vehicle rather than being factored into the actual calibration, so the speed reported by the OBD port will be higher (and more accurate) than the speed reported by the speedometer.
The upshot of all of this is that, while you might be travelling at what your speedometer tells you is 80mph and thinking to yourself, "This is perfectly safe," in actual fact you could be travelling as slowly as 75.
One of the reasons that I'm almost decided on buying an iPhone as soon as a 3G version comes out (and given that there's now a 16GB version) is that I already own an iPod Touch, and absolutely love it - but it frustrates me that when I'm out and about a lot of the features become useless due to the lack of any WiFi networks available.
My boss has a Nokia N810 and an N95 (the original, not the 8GB). The N810 automatically detects the N95's presence and will use its 3G connection over Bluetooth with the minimum of fuss, which may be the best way to get a decent UI (which IMO, the N95's isn't) and a 3G connection to anybody that doesn't mind carrying two devices.
The lack of ad blocking doesn't bother me on Mobile Safari as much as it does on the desktop. I tend to double-tap and zoom in on divs, which essentially obscures most ads. I'd actually like to see the same zooming feature on desktop browsers, maybe with the option of auto-resizing the window rather than zooming.
My laptop screen resolution is 1280x800. 720p resolution is 1280x720.
This might be true, I don't know.
But a lot of the controversy has surrounded the sale of 'Up to 8mb' connections, where ISPs will essentially provide a connection as fast as the user's line and telephone exchange will allow. The positive side was that users could take advantage of exchange upgrades as soon as they became available. The problem was that, once it was publicised that it was very hard to actually achieve the maximum advertised download speeds (due to the exchange/line/contention ratio etc.), you got a lot of indignant users complaining that they were paying for 8mb, therefore they should get 8mb (completely disregarding the terms and conditions of their service I might add).
It didn't help matters when the Gadget Show, broadcast on Channel 5, ran a programme about this, and provided a 'broadband speed analysis tool' on their website to help viewers check how fast a connection they were getting. Of course, their site was swamped by viewers all using the service at the same time, and so the speeds that were reported were vastly lower than in reality.
Ian Wild, a PlusNet employee, left the following comment on TFA:
Not entirely sure what the implications are for caching solutions, but it sure is interesting.
To be fair, this also applies to ADSL connections. Most residential ADSL users (in the UK at least) are subject to a 50:1 contention ratio.
If you're using any device that communicates over a serial port (Telit GT864-PY for example), you're going to use parts of the Hayes Command Set. Not necessarily all of it, but it's certainly not obsolete.
And as for 'Changing the battery of a Sega Dreamcast VMU'... isn't that just a case of unscrewing the cover, removing the battery, and popping in a replacement? The Dreamcast VMU might itself be obsolete, but I just went through that exact procedure yesterday while changing the battery in my car's central locking remote.
I'm not taking the list too seriously though, seeing as 'sex' is on it...
Indeed. When you're waging war, gaining support back home is much easier if you can dehumanise those that you wish to kill. It's not a new tactic, for example the Destroy This Mad Brute poster of WW1.