In the past year I have bought two Dell Studio 1737 laptops from http://www.uklaptops.co.uk/ (no relationship other than a happy customer)
The refurb industry is pretty much based upon new laptops "distance sold" that are returned to the vendor unused for various reasons.
The refurb companies of course do not have any deals with Adobe / Google etc, so you get a vanilla install of Windows (Vista Ultimate on both of my Studio's) plus of course the appropriate Dell drivers, and that's it.
The first thing I did was re-partition and do an dual boot install of OpenSuse (OpenSuse handles the 1920 x 1200 screens on the Studio better than any other distro).
This methods has got me two basically brand new Dells, with zero crapware, for slightly less than half Dell price, what's not to like?
Of course with time you get experience, dry joints tend to follow power tracks on a PCB, and by gently flexing you can hear them tick.
Swapping out is the ONLY way.
I have systems with intermittent (heat activated) dry joints on a mobo, partly duff RAM, and partly duff (rebranded at higher clock) CPU. ONLY swapping out will find it.
Smith Electric Vehicles in the UK has been making electric vehicles for 70 something years straight, the current range runs from "sub compact car/van" size right up to articulated good vehicles.
One of the better sellers is based on the Ford Transit, a 3500 Kg GVW van, which has a running cost of only 2p per mile and a purchase cost far far far far cheaper than a tesla, and it will earn you a living.
In today's money they were maybe equivalent to an desktop Epilog CO2 laser machine.
If every other desktop laser engraver is proprietary, cash only, an Epilog doesn't stand out.
If Epilog start doing credit purchase as the standard way of buying, and offer a 5000 buck trade in for any other desktop laser, before you know it the only second hand lasers are Epilog, and they are all worth 5k, and before you know it "sewing machine = Singer"
There are lots of clones around, my mum has a clone treadle made in India, and a Singer, both work, both have interchangeable parts, but the Indian machine is a make you never heard of, because it wasn't sold on easy credit and it did not represent a scrapped singer...
Interestingly the proposed UK solution to the economic crisis in the car industry follows the Singer model, we will pay you to scrap your old car.
The Secret of Singer's success was...
on
The Sewing Machine War
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· Score: 5, Interesting
two fold...
neither reason had anything to do with how good the machines were, Singer failed miserably to make it a viable business until he took a lawyer on board, and the two unique business methods were implemented.
1/ Singer sewing machines introduced the idea of buying a sewing machine on credit, and pushed this as the preferred way to purchase.
2/ The list price of each machine was extremely high, but you got a huge discount for trading in your old machine.
What this means was that everyone traded in, they would even buy an old used machine specifically to trade it in... Singer scrapped every single machine that was traded in.
So on the one hand they were the only company who offered easy credit, and on the other hand they were wiping out the market of competing marques as second hand machines.
I've been around this scene since the 5.25" floppy days, and there were always leechers who would sell you something, and true warez people who would give or trade you something.
Tony won't have been cracking anything, creating anything, "value added" anything, Tony is a leech.
It's easy, always was, beige box FTP server on a decent pipe and start couriering, what Tony was trading on was usenet and a stack of dupe burners, and don't forget to take other groups work and rebrand it with your own nfo file tone....
I applaud the fact that another leech has bitten the dust, and can no longer make an easy living selling the fruits of other people's works to noobs and lusers.
Great, first thing you need to do is grab yourself a realistic concept of scale and numbers. You mind cannot hold or comprehend the idea of just how BIG the galaxy is, in both terms of distance / time and number of objects.
By the time you spread far enough to be human eye visible on a football stadium sided holographic display of the entire galaxy, homo sapien has evolved into something that is no longer homo sapien, nor homo habilis / Neanderthal / cro magnon etc
If you could travel at relativistic speeds, eg 0.999 light, it would still take you 100,000 years to cross, not counting acceleration time, and the same time again to send a message back to earth.
2/ Remain on Earth
Just sit here and do nothing, still won't stop random events like the mexico gulf impact, or darwinian evolution, so even if we sit here and do nothing, and even assuming we aren't, aided by scientific meddling, already due the next increment in human evolution, there aren't going to be any humans left as we know them in 100,000 years, at the outside, maybe as little as 5,000 years just due to evolution alone.
3/ Become extinct
Well, we will anyway, dinosaurs become chickens and birds, homo sapiens is just DNA's current best way of making more DNA, if it can drive us off planet to spread the DNA further and wider DNA wins again.
Human extinction is a certainty, and within a time span that might be as short as my lifetime due to a catastrophic event, or a time span that I can envisage in my head, say 100k years at the outside, 5000 generations, just due to evolutionary processes.
A more intelligent question would be will there be any DNA in the distant future that has me as its ancestor?
4/ The whole stupid paradox thing itself.
Only a hairless monkey can dream up a language that makes idiotic constructs such as these, or "the next thing I say is true, the last thing I said is a lie" and waste any time thinking about them.
Stupid, even more stupid to think that anything so stupid could remain unchanged long enough to colonise a galaxy.
Space is already known to be full of the building blocks of life, amino acids etc, earth is regularly doused in this material, only a stupid and arrogant naked ape could believe he was the nadir of perfection and destined to inherit the universe.
Bet your ass the Neanderthals had a god complex too, and no doubt god made them in his image too.
I'll lay odds the next iteration who look upon us as we look upon Neanderthals will be just as dumb and believe god made them in his image too.
Users removing fans and heatsinks while the CPU is operating, no, fans failing and even heatsink clips failing while the CPU is operating, yes.
Opteron does NOT have equivalent thermal monitoring and control as the equivalent Intel chip, anyone who says different is either lying or does not know the subject.
As for the stability of AMD, it's just a gut feeling.
You can blow your "incredibly complicated software" and "my lack of PC knowledge" out of your ass.
When I install an OS and software and that OS is Windows I do not have an option to compile for one CPU over another, therefore one must assume that as far as Windows is concerned they are equal. if this results in issues then they are Microsoft issues, not mine.
Lack of PC knowledge, I didn't build an Altair because a/ they were too expensive and b/ I had access to a DEC, anyway, only an idiot would assume that "lack of pc knowledge" would allow simply swapping an AMD on Abit for an Intel on Abit, which, being bloody windows will require a complete OS reinstall anyway, is going to generate some instability because I forget to realign the dilithium crystals and twizzle the foo foo valve.
In your own words, you RECENTLY outfitted your entire org with 250 AMD desktops and laptops.
RECENTLY, yet you still feel qualified to take a pop at people who have such experience under their belts, not once, and not recently.
IMHO based upon decades of experience, Intel is a better buy in the long run, more expensive, yes, at purchase time, but years down the line the quality wins out. I have never come across an Intel CPU that died in normal service, not one, ever.
I have come across a mere handful, literally, of AMD CPUs that died in normal service, two of them took the mobos and hard disks (via pwm) with them, one of them triggered the smoke / fire system in the rack, and cut power to the entire rack.
I am not at liberty to name names here, but the discussions afterwards were about the 4000 pounds saved on that rack by going amd instead of intel, versus the 9000 pounds the downtime cost.
Buying cheap you save money ONCE.
buying quality you save money every single time nothing happens.
What measures the temperatures: "There are two independent thermal sensing devices in the Pentium 4 processor on 90 nm process. One is the on-die thermal diode and the other is in the temperature sensor used for the Thermal Monitor and for THERMTRIP#. The Thermal Monitor's temperature sensor and the on-die thermal diode are independent and physically isolated devices with no defined correlation to one another. Circuit constraints and performance requirements prevent the Thermal Monitor's temperature sensor and the on-die thermal diode from being located at the same place on the silicon. The temperature distribution across the die may result in significant temperature differences between the on-die thermal diode and the Thermal Monitor's temperature sensor. This temperature variability across the die is highly dependent on the application being run. As a result, it is not possible to predict the activation of the thermal control circuit by monitoring the on-die thermal diode." From the above statement it's clear that the Thermal Monitor is used to control the processor temperature by activating the TCC (Throttling) when the processor silicon has exceeded its maximum operating temperature. The TCC reduces processor power consumption as needed by modulating (starting and stopping) the internal processor core clocks. Other than the Thermal Monitor Intel placed a thermal diode on-die to give end users a way to monitor temperatures of the core. How the temperature is figured:
"The processor temperature is determined through an analog thermal sensor circuit comprised of a temperature sensing diode, a factory calibrated reference current source, and a current comparator (see above image). A voltage applied across the diode induces a current flow that varies with temperature. By comparing this current with the reference current, the processor temperature can be determined." The temperatures we see using MBM5, ASUS Probe, and other monitoring programs come from the on-die thermal diode. Thanks to a thermal sensor (ie: Super I/O chip) located on the motherboard the data from the thermal diode can be used to monitor the die temperature of the processor for thermal management. This thermal diode is separate from the Thermal Monitor's thermal sensor and cannot be used to predict the behavior of the Thermal Monitor. What influences the reading: Every processor has different amounts of leakages and is therefore unique. Since each processor is unique the readings between two processors should never be the same. One of the parameters used in the equation to determine the CPU temperature is the Diode Ideality Factor (A.K.A. the Non-Ideality Factor) which describes the behavior of the diode relative to a theoretically perfect diode. The ideality factor depends on the characteristics of each individual processor and will vary slightly from one chip to the next. According to the data sheet the range of ideality for the Prescott ranges from 1.008 to 1.0137. The temperature calculation should take this range in to account in order to improve the accuracy of the reading. One other variable that influences the temperature accuracy is the "'Series Resistance", which is a measure of the resistance in the traces leading up to and away from the thermal diode. The Prescott data sheet shows that this ranges between 3.242 and 3.594 ohms. Some diode sensors have the ability to adjust for the temperature error caused by the resistance, some do not. Lastly, cross-talk from high speed signals to the thermal diode traces might also introduce an error.
The day you can remove the fan and heatsink from a running AMD CPU and it will simply carry on running throttled down until the fan and heatsink are replaced, they will be ready for "professional" use.
You only have to see one or two CPUs go up in smoke because the HSF failed or whatever, taking the mobo with it, and blowing the PWN thus frying things like hard disks, to never ever ever fit anything but Intel to a "serious" machine.
I recently swapped from 3.5 GHz P4 to AMD 3200, both on A-bit, by way of experimentation.
Allegedly these are similar CPUs.
In practice, the AMD is slightly faster at some things such as gaming.
Overall the Intel, thanks to hyperthreading, felt faster.
The AMD was slightly unstable, while the intel needed the windows xp driver updates to achieve best performance, the amd needed them to achieve stability, as without them it has a *slight* tendency to reboot.
One of the reasons AMD were cheaper, bang for buck, is they left out all the extra stuff Intel did not, like on chip thermal management so it didn't catch fire when the heatsink / fan failed. Penny wise, Pound foolish.
Articles like this are a lot like the television licence (http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/) or road fund licence (http://www.dvla.gov.uk/) FUD, (incidentally if you google "road fund licence" the increasingly irrelevant google search will give ebay as an option...) which goes along the lines of local ad campaigns saying "we know there are 14 houses in Letsby Avenue with no TV licence" cos their database says so, I don't have a TV, but the presumption is that everyone does have a TV, and anyone who doesn't is a liar and a licence fee dodger.
In the Uk as far back as 1980, so before everything except mainframes in any meaningful sense, Banks were obliged to notify the tax man of any ammounts you had if balances or individual transfers were over 300 pounds.
While these articles are FUD "we know what you are doing on e-bay, so pay up before we nail you", which will collect some people along the way, the reality is the system as advertised cannot work, my ebay handle is not my name, my ebay address is my mothers house (when I signed up for ebay I was moving, just not sure where, and have never bothered updating) and most of my transactions have been in cash, and I have bought and sold expensive capital items like vehicles on ebay.
Far Far Far easier to simply crawl ebay for completed sales, total amounts, large capital items, and then match these amounts and dates to bank accounts, aha, ebay user "taxfreetrader" is Joe Bloggs.
Of course a huge number of transactions are paid via paypal, so there is an electronic record with an even better method of searching and matching.
People who regularly deposit 1000 bucks and over for single items may get busted, people who regularly transfer 1000 bucks and over from paypal may get busted, people who believe this crap will turn themselves in, everyone else who is smart and deals in cash or equivalents such as Postal Orders will not get busted, except perhaps second hand from the person you sold to or bought from getting busted, and them grassing you up.
The other things they are looking for that this can help to detect is VAT (http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/T axes/BeginnersGuideToTax/) carousel fraud (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/economic_tr ends/ETAug03Ruffles.pdf)
The average guy on the street like me with 150 feedback spread over 3 years has fuck all to worry about.
So even if you were able to wave a magic wand and put every porn website on a *.xxx TLD, you have not addressed the problem of the link adverts / banners / clickthrus.
Pulling a number out of my ass, probably half of the websites out there that rely on advertising / banners and clickthrus to exist in the first place do so with "normal" adverts, ebay, amazon, x10 webcams etc.
Which means half of them rely on porn adverts, so you will have half the commercial websites out there, on.com.net and so on TLDs featuring adverts / banners / clickthrus from.xxx TLD domains.
What are you going to say to these websites? Sorry guys, you are going to have to shut up shop or secure VC funding?
Porn marketing is the same as any other kind of marketing, they WANT to get their message out, the do not merely do not want to be filtered out, they will actively oppose it.
Look at it like this, I can type all kinds of searches into google, and chances are extremely high that I will get TOTALLY irellevant sponsored links to amazon and / or ebay in the results, and I mean TOTALLY, you abso-fucking-lutely KNOW that there is no such item for sale on ebay, and no such book for sale on amazon, but the link is still presented to you.
___NOT___ because it is relevant, but because MONEY WAS INVOLVED.
This is why you will never ever "solve" the "problem" or porn, any more than I can solve the problem of advertising, personally I like to see none, ever, ever again.
The united states dollar, along with the united kingdom pound, and most other currencies, is no more than virtual money, with as much true innate value as linden dollars or any other virtual money.
we live in a fiat economy, the chinese discarded it a thousand years ago, the problems they had then are rearing their ugly heads yet again, with the same end result, more than likely.
Very, very, very, very few windows applications install nicely and uninstall 100% leaving a system exactly as it was before, registry bloat ensues.
If your point of view were true, there would not be several commercial applications designed specifically to ensure that windows does not pick up cruft, very expensive commercial applications that are fairly widely used in anger in commercial enviornments.
Microsoft's own knowledgebase is replete with pages detailing how to uninstall Miscrosoft software that does not uninstall properly
powershell is an example of this, an MS product that MS Vista cannot upgrade over, and cannot uninstall or simply ignore. Not a Symantec product, or a Macromedia product, or a creative product, that MS cannot uninstall, but a MS product.
The motoring analogy to your comment is "I would not employ you as a motor mechanic if you are rebuilding your car every six months." Amongst others, you would exclude all the top mechanics the world over who are constantly tuning and tweaking their vehicles, and to whom your bog standard sedan would be a piece of cake.
I wasn't very clear, perhaps I should have said...
"to the best of my knowledge linux still does not have a font manager that produces broadcast quality font anti-aliasing, irresepective of backgrounds and other variables, etc."
Yes, Linux has anti aliasing, so does windows (cleartype etc) but they both suck when compared to what RiscOS managed to achieve.
This is largely subjective, but I can read easily and with more clarity with the RiscOS anti-aliasing than anything I have seen in linux or windows or mac up to just before OSX (not played with OSX)
It was common supposition that Pace bought the ARM RiscOS technology not for the cool running lower power CPU, but because of the broadcast quality font manager, even when reproduced on a TV display.
I applied for a contract job a day or two ago, desktop rollout engineer, ello, all things being given this likely means MS Windows Vista rollout engineer, and / or MS Office 2007 rollout engineer.
Being a diligent sort of bloke I downloaded a release candidate version of Vista Business edition from the usual sources and proceeded to test it on the main box.
The "main box" is currently an AMD 64 bit jobbie, A-bit mobo, 2 gig of Mushkin, WD raptor HD, so not the absolute latest and greatest, but no slouch either.
In common with all versions of Windows this install (XP SP2) picks up "cruft" and after about 6 months the only real cure is a reinstall of Windows.
Knowing it was a dying install I thought I'd play with AutoPatcher, which patched everything sure enough, but made things around the edges even more flaky, and in particular made the ethernet connection unstable, this then was the candidate for Vista.
Installation / Upgrading was NOT straightforward, I had to manually uninstall Kaspersky anti virus, Spybot S&D, and two MS windows updates, one was powershell, I forget now what the other one was.
I tried a virgin install as opposed to an upgrade, rather than uninstall all the above, and got a BSOD at the first installer reboot, clearly a hardware / driver issue.
Nota Bene, this is hardly exotic or just released hardware, nor is it obsolete hardware, so immediately the tables are turned between Windows and Linux, Debian will simply install, Vista will not. Don't even ask about trying to get hardware drivers for Vista
So I went back to the upgrade path, uninstalled the software that Vista was moaning about, and tried again.
Well, it worked, but.......
This installer very clearly said on the splash screens two extremely worrying sentences.
During install your computer will restart several times - it did.
Installation may take several hours - it took about 2.
This is NOT Linux, so taking the upgrade path and the multiple reboots mean you cannot use the computer for anything during the upgrade process. I am not a coder, but the fact that Vista STILL requires several reboots during installation speaks volumes about the fundamental workings of Vista, this is not a "professional" Operating System.
The astonishingly slow upgrade times, bear in mind this is a 64 bit AMD CPU on a good A-bit mobo with 2 gig of Mushkin (best memory money can buy) and 10k RPM Western Digital Raptor hard disks, beggars belief, XP SP2 will install on this box in 25 minutes, Debian + about 1000 applications will install in about 15 minutes, Vista took TWO BLOODY HOURS, and I must say again, unlike Linux, totally rendered the box unusable in the interim.
So, eventually, the Vista upgrade / install is complete, and it boots into the OS.
Before I go any further, I must give this some perspectiive, I have been using computers since whenever, punched card on mainframes, 8 bit DIY stuff at home, not quite Altair but damn close, and I've used most operating systems too, the various DOSes, the odd bit of CP/M and OS2, Sinclair speccies, Tandy TRS 80, Commodore PET, Apple ][, the 16 bit NMS machines from the likes of Philips, Atari, BBC and Acorn RISC, MIPS based Cobalt servers when they came out, DEC, etc etc etc.
The point of this comment is to reassure the reader than the mere sight of something different does not give rise to "oh noes! this is the suxxor!" shit, different is "OK, let's see what you've got." and of course assuming that whoever wrote this OS will, like me, have some idea of what went before and therefore have a good idea about what are good ideas, what works, what doesn't, etc etc etc.
In 1995 the Acorn RISCOS 3.5 had full screen font anti-aliasing so you could read 8 point text on a 14 inch CRT, it had a Pause and Resume dialogue button on the file copy / move function, and would not fall over as soon as it encountered a file that could not be copied or moved, and would simply get on with moving or copying the rest
and there is the problem.
I'm lucky, I grew up late enough to see the new technology and get to grips with it, but early enough to predate it, so it wasn't much of a challenge to poison the well my staying out of databases as much as possible, and stuffing them with false and conflicting data whenever the opportunity presented itself.
However, as time passes more and more of these things are going to be linked to databases.
It is not, for example, about ID cards, I grew up with ID cards, what we are talking about now in the UK are ___NOT___ ID cards, but tokens called "ID cards" that are just front ends for databases, the databases are the problem, not the front ends.
It has already passed to the point where poisoning the well of the database is considered a crime, this tells the enlightened citizen all they need to know, the importance of the database is paramount, the importance of the citizen is always subsumed to the database.
The writing was on the wall decades ago with "corporate individuals", who despite being "individuals" under the law could argue that subdivision x did something naughty, but head office could not possibly keep track of all this and must not be punished, the human individual analogy is do not throw me in prison for pinching girls backsides, it was my fingers, specifically this finger and this thumb, and it would be wrong to imprison me in any way when the rest of my body has done no wrong.
At present the bandwidth required for decent quality CCTV cameras, the storage space for the streams of data, and the processing power required all put these devices out of contact with the database, it takes human reviewers to make the connection.
This is not the case with RFID of course, especially when the tags are provided for free by your local consumer goods retailer.
As soon as any technology makes the leap from requiring human monitoring and control to fully electronic management it is ready to be interfaced directly to a database.
As far as the databases themselves are concerned it is trivial to create a new one which interfaces to half a dozen existing ones and create a whole new set of data points about each subject or citizen.
The retailers and credit card companies and banks already have frighteningly (frightening to anyone who is not a student of Freud and Bernaise and who does not understand human psychology) accurate and predictive databases on the vast majority of the population, they know what goods to promote next week in response to the weather this week, or sports news this week, or entertainment news this week.
This is their holy grail, to accumulate this data, correlate it, and then mine it and thus identify swing voters, potential terrorists, political activists, paedophiles, etc.
They will do this not knowing or caring about similar attempts in the past based upon the shape of the skull or ethnicity etc etc, it doesn't matter if these efforts fail, creating the infrastructure opens a slew of new pandoras boxes.
= = = = = = =
At the risk of saying something that will go down like a lead balloon on a predominantly US site.
9/11, if you had asked anyone anywhere on the planet what targets you would choose to strike at the symbol of america, 99.9% of them would have said "fly the planes into the statue of liberty, the white house, and the golden gate bridge" because these were the symbols of americana.
I do not know ANYBODY who would have chosen the WTC, if you had suggested the WTC to me I would have said "why, they are nothing but a bunch of banks and accountants and technology companies", but that is the point, the attacks were NEVER targeting the USA of the american people, they were targeting the financial complex, and please don't be so naive as to think that they are the same thing or even related.
What all this "you ARE what the databases say about you" means for us as people is the following.
1/ The instruments used to monitor you will be as fine and accurate as the programmers make them, or as loose and inaccurate.
2/ the data itself will hold more value th
No, I live in the UK, CCTV capital of the world
on
What to Watch for in 2007
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· Score: 4, Interesting
To be specific, I live in a small city called Exeter, in the southwest of the country.
About six months ago a city woman was found wandering in the early morning, naked, confused and injured, she has been beaten and raped, since then she has had 159 days of hospital treatment and still ain't "right"
We have these privacy invading CCTV cameras all over the shop, and the local paper and national press has been posting images from them, here is the attacker walking behind the woman in sidwell street, here is the attacker in paris street, here is the attacker in high street, basically there is 15 minutes video of this guy from every angle you could hope for.
In CSI land they simply press the "enhance" button and keep zooming until you can see the suspects DNA.
In reality, despite it being a high profile crime, CCTV produces images that make drunken 1st generation camera phones look high quality, except instead of being taken at arm's length from the face, which is what we use to identify people, it can easy be 100 yards away up a pole.
Even if you could force pedestrians to walk slowly in a line underneath cameras focused on their faces, the analogy of the CCTV camera used to catch speeders on the road, or London congestion charging etc, it still would not work, because OCR is one thing, matching faces to identities is another.
For example, it is trivial to OCR a vehicle number plate and flag a stolen car, or add a congestion charge, or a speeding fine, but this is not identity. You get the fine because your name is linked to the vehicle ownership, and the vehicle is linked to the registration number, which is all well and good, but if I see you driving into London every day in your Ford Ka (blue) while driving my Ford Ka (also blue) then all I need to do is use a copy of your number plate.
CCTV is a lot of things, but the barriers to it being a serious curb on privacy or anything else are HUGE, 1080i CCTV cameras anyone, what you going to store the date stream on? what you going to process the images with?
RFID does the job a lot easier, with a lot less computing power, a lot more redundancy, a lot more accuracy, lot less bandwidth, and it can be done today, cheap.
The above long range blurry CCTV example, or the OCR of vehicle registration, is a feeble and distant cousing of.
Subject is wearing sneakers bought by john smith with john smiths credit card subject is carrying mobile phone registered to john smith etc subject is carrying packet of mints and newspaper bought by john smith 10 minutes ago subject is wearing underwear bought by john smith subject is wearing prescription spectacles worn by john smith
it won't pick up the acme disguise kit, stick on beard, trenchcoat, fedora, latex gloves, or anything else.
Total bandwidth required, dunno, doubt it would saturate a 14.4k modem though, total processing power required, negligible, total cost, fuck all, after all the consumer goods vendors already provided the RFID tags, you already have the network, just need readers and some new software.
The blurry CCTV will still be used.
if the image looks like you it will be used as evidence, "see, it is john smith" if the image doesn't look like you it will be used as evidence "see, john smith is clearly wearing a disguise"
If you had ANY idea how close they already are to real time with simply correlating credit card data and mobile phone cell lock records, you'd shit yourself.
AT PRESENT the sheer volume of data, bandwidth and processing power means that this data is only actually processed AFTER the event, to identify terrorists and their final movements.
It is a race between the increasing use of things like ID cards to provide more data that can be used for tracking, and technologies like RFID, in reality I suspect BOTH will complement each other, so to paraphrase Scott McNealy all those years ago, "Privacy, no such thing, it ALREADY doesn't exist"
The Exeter rapist is still at large because we don't yet have RFID, and the shops were shut so not way to tie him into a credit card purchase, no cameras on hole in the wall cash machines and the only businesses open, pubs and takeaways, use cash.
he suffered a brachial plexus lesion after a motorcycle accident, and eventually opted for amputation some 3 years later.
luckily for him his wife is medically well qualified and teaches nursing, and well connected medically, and he is a determined sort of bloke.
"phantom pain" he told me it felt like his not present arm was dipped in hot chip fat, so eventually last year he ended up in an MRI scanner under a doctor who was researching this subject, and they discovered that the pain is in fact not phantom or imagined but quite real.
I'm not in the least medically qualified, but the impression I got was that when the BPL occured and the nerves were torn out of the spinal column, some of them were activated and sending "PAIN" messages, and what is happening now is even though those nerves are no longer there, the upstream spinal column nerves "remember" the last message and just keep sending it.
I would not suggest telling an amputee that the pain they are feeling is a figment of their imagination, they may well hit you with the remaining limb(s).
For sure, MS Windows and MS Office are closed source so "we" cannot analyse them.
However, Debian (which I am running here) and Open Office are not closed source.
Simple logic will tell us that someone or someones in MS are tasked with keeping a close eye on open source and how it compares with MS own operations, hell, this is MS core business strategy, just ask Jobs...
MS aren't likely to tell anyone else these results, but, we can maybe infer them from MS actions.
eg
"Vista sucks" ---> MS ain't worried about Debian / KDE
or
"vista allows you to pause and resume multiple file transfers, and don't abort the whole list on one error" ---> MS is very worried about *nix in general coming to the desktop
1/ I first got DSL from British Telecom, we were in the pilot area so one of the first in the UK, it worked OK, but one day we decided to change the billing name from her to me. BT said that involved cancelling our existing contract and starting a new one with a new set up charge, 60 quid or so, and meant new phone number and new e-mail address.
2/ I took cable from Telewest / Blueyonder, similar money, similar speed (512/256) no issues, no set up fee, so broadband and telephone package (never had any interest in television, cable or antenna)
3/ About 6 months later I decided to move, took phone number and email address with me, no charge, changeover took one morning.
4/ It's now 4 years later and we're moving again, phone number and email moving with us, offline again for about a morning, oh, and for sticking with them first 3 months in new address is at half price.
5/ Currently pay (all in UK pounds) 10 per month for the telephone, 30 per month for the 10 mbit cable, and 3 per month for refusing to pay by direct debit because I don't grant anyone access to my bank account.
6/ Downtime in 5/6 years have been a total of 3 incidents each one repaired within 24 hours, one the cable modem died, one the local box in the street suffered loss of dB through corrossion of the connectors, one was a technical hitch. Each time I got that month free when I complained mildly about it.
7/ Latency is and always has been very good, only bug bear is upstream at 400k, too asymetric, sometime I have large (ISO size) files I want to make available to friends. Apart from the 3 times mentioned above though uptime has been 100%.
8/ No DSL so no contention ratio, never seen any kind of speed decrease related to my network.
9/ THE BIG ONE, no capping of any kind, unlimited means unlimited, I can pull 50 gigs a day sometimes, a few months ago I downloaded the entire 80+ gigs of wikipedia in 15 odd hours for a friend.... THIS COMPANY GETS IT, they are selling you a pipe, not container space on a ship.
In short, the service is so good and reliable as to be invisible, I'm not conciously aware that it is there, every computer in the house basically has "teh internet" waiting at 10 mbit at the end of the CAT5 I plug in, in much the same way as the power sockets have 240 VAC @ 50 Hz "waiting" for me to plug in.
This, cable, in this area is a monopoly, don't like it go to DSL, DSL is their competitors.
I know this reads like an advert, but I have NO connection with Telewest/Blueyonder other than as a customer, and YMMV if you are in a different area.
Slashdot Mirror
In the past year I have bought two Dell Studio 1737 laptops from http://www.uklaptops.co.uk/
(no relationship other than a happy customer)
The refurb industry is pretty much based upon new laptops "distance sold" that are returned to the vendor unused for various reasons.
The refurb companies of course do not have any deals with Adobe / Google etc, so you get a vanilla install of Windows (Vista Ultimate on both of my Studio's) plus of course the appropriate Dell drivers, and that's it.
The first thing I did was re-partition and do an dual boot install of OpenSuse (OpenSuse handles the 1920 x 1200 screens on the Studio better than any other distro).
This methods has got me two basically brand new Dells, with zero crapware, for slightly less than half Dell price, what's not to like?
Swapping out is the ONLY way.
I have systems with intermittent (heat activated) dry joints on a mobo, partly duff RAM, and partly duff (rebranded at higher clock) CPU. ONLY swapping out will find it.
HTH etc
Smith Electric Vehicles in the UK has been making electric vehicles for 70 something years straight, the current range runs from "sub compact car/van" size right up to articulated good vehicles. One of the better sellers is based on the Ford Transit, a 3500 Kg GVW van, which has a running cost of only 2p per mile and a purchase cost far far far far cheaper than a tesla, and it will earn you a living.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52
I suppose, rather than just sitting there are re-printing PR fluff handed to you.
The 4th estate has long since abandoned its post.
Nobody said they sucked...
In today's money they were maybe equivalent to an desktop Epilog CO2 laser machine.
If every other desktop laser engraver is proprietary, cash only, an Epilog doesn't stand out.
If Epilog start doing credit purchase as the standard way of buying, and offer a 5000 buck trade in for any other desktop laser, before you know it the only second hand lasers are Epilog, and they are all worth 5k, and before you know it "sewing machine = Singer"
There are lots of clones around, my mum has a clone treadle made in India, and a Singer, both work, both have interchangeable parts, but the Indian machine is a make you never heard of, because it wasn't sold on easy credit and it did not represent a scrapped singer...
Interestingly the proposed UK solution to the economic crisis in the car industry follows the Singer model, we will pay you to scrap your old car.
two fold...
neither reason had anything to do with how good the machines were, Singer failed miserably to make it a viable business until he took a lawyer on board, and the two unique business methods were implemented.
1/ Singer sewing machines introduced the idea of buying a sewing machine on credit, and pushed this as the preferred way to purchase.
2/ The list price of each machine was extremely high, but you got a huge discount for trading in your old machine.
What this means was that everyone traded in, they would even buy an old used machine specifically to trade it in... Singer scrapped every single machine that was traded in.
So on the one hand they were the only company who offered easy credit, and on the other hand they were wiping out the market of competing marques as second hand machines.
From a business perspective, brilliant.
So of course it is dead easy to turn around in 2012 and claim that yet another published target has been met.
I've had 20 mbit down / 1 mbit up for 50 quid a month for nearly 2 years now.
Tell me I am not the only one who read that and wondered if Google also employ I P Nightly etc
Tony won't have been cracking anything, creating anything, "value added" anything, Tony is a leech.
It's easy, always was, beige box FTP server on a decent pipe and start couriering, what Tony was trading on was usenet and a stack of dupe burners, and don't forget to take other groups work and rebrand it with your own nfo file tone....
I applaud the fact that another leech has bitten the dust, and can no longer make an easy living selling the fruits of other people's works to noobs and lusers.
Colonise the Galaxy.
Great, first thing you need to do is grab yourself a realistic concept of scale and numbers. You mind cannot hold or comprehend the idea of just how BIG the galaxy is, in both terms of distance / time and number of objects.
By the time you spread far enough to be human eye visible on a football stadium sided holographic display of the entire galaxy, homo sapien has evolved into something that is no longer homo sapien, nor homo habilis / Neanderthal / cro magnon etc
If you could travel at relativistic speeds, eg 0.999 light, it would still take you 100,000 years to cross, not counting acceleration time, and the same time again to send a message back to earth.
2/ Remain on Earth
Just sit here and do nothing, still won't stop random events like the mexico gulf impact, or darwinian evolution, so even if we sit here and do nothing, and even assuming we aren't, aided by scientific meddling, already due the next increment in human evolution, there aren't going to be any humans left as we know them in 100,000 years, at the outside, maybe as little as 5,000 years just due to evolution alone.
3/ Become extinct
Well, we will anyway, dinosaurs become chickens and birds, homo sapiens is just DNA's current best way of making more DNA, if it can drive us off planet to spread the DNA further and wider DNA wins again.
Human extinction is a certainty, and within a time span that might be as short as my lifetime due to a catastrophic event, or a time span that I can envisage in my head, say 100k years at the outside, 5000 generations, just due to evolutionary processes.
A more intelligent question would be will there be any DNA in the distant future that has me as its ancestor?
4/ The whole stupid paradox thing itself.
Only a hairless monkey can dream up a language that makes idiotic constructs such as these, or "the next thing I say is true, the last thing I said is a lie" and waste any time thinking about them.
Stupid, even more stupid to think that anything so stupid could remain unchanged long enough to colonise a galaxy.
Space is already known to be full of the building blocks of life, amino acids etc, earth is regularly doused in this material, only a stupid and arrogant naked ape could believe he was the nadir of perfection and destined to inherit the universe.
Bet your ass the Neanderthals had a god complex too, and no doubt god made them in his image too.
I'll lay odds the next iteration who look upon us as we look upon Neanderthals will be just as dumb and believe god made them in his image too.
Ok, I'll bite
Users removing fans and heatsinks while the CPU is operating, no, fans failing and even heatsink clips failing while the CPU is operating, yes.
Opteron does NOT have equivalent thermal monitoring and control as the equivalent Intel chip, anyone who says different is either lying or does not know the subject.
As for the stability of AMD, it's just a gut feeling.
You can blow your "incredibly complicated software" and "my lack of PC knowledge" out of your ass.
When I install an OS and software and that OS is Windows I do not have an option to compile for one CPU over another, therefore one must assume that as far as Windows is concerned they are equal. if this results in issues then they are Microsoft issues, not mine.
Lack of PC knowledge, I didn't build an Altair because a/ they were too expensive and b/ I had access to a DEC, anyway, only an idiot would assume that "lack of pc knowledge" would allow simply swapping an AMD on Abit for an Intel on Abit, which, being bloody windows will require a complete OS reinstall anyway, is going to generate some instability because I forget to realign the dilithium crystals and twizzle the foo foo valve.
In your own words, you RECENTLY outfitted your entire org with 250 AMD desktops and laptops.
RECENTLY, yet you still feel qualified to take a pop at people who have such experience under their belts, not once, and not recently.
IMHO based upon decades of experience, Intel is a better buy in the long run, more expensive, yes, at purchase time, but years down the line the quality wins out. I have never come across an Intel CPU that died in normal service, not one, ever.
I have come across a mere handful, literally, of AMD CPUs that died in normal service, two of them took the mobos and hard disks (via pwm) with them, one of them triggered the smoke / fire system in the rack, and cut power to the entire rack.
I am not at liberty to name names here, but the discussions afterwards were about the 4000 pounds saved on that rack by going amd instead of intel, versus the 9000 pounds the downtime cost.
Buying cheap you save money ONCE.
buying quality you save money every single time nothing happens.
This is still not the same as Intel
Intels own words
What measures the temperatures:
"There are two independent thermal sensing devices in the Pentium 4 processor on 90 nm process. One is the on-die thermal diode and the other is in the temperature sensor used for the Thermal Monitor and for THERMTRIP#. The Thermal Monitor's temperature sensor and the on-die thermal diode are independent and physically isolated devices with no defined correlation to one another. Circuit constraints and performance requirements prevent the Thermal Monitor's temperature sensor and the on-die thermal diode from being located at the same place on the silicon. The temperature distribution across the die may result in significant temperature differences between the on-die thermal diode and the Thermal Monitor's temperature sensor. This temperature variability across the die is highly dependent on the application being run. As a result, it is not possible to predict the activation of the thermal control circuit by monitoring the on-die thermal diode."
From the above statement it's clear that the Thermal Monitor is used to control the processor temperature by activating the TCC (Throttling) when the processor silicon has exceeded its maximum operating temperature. The TCC reduces processor power consumption as needed by modulating (starting and stopping) the internal processor core clocks. Other than the Thermal Monitor Intel placed a thermal diode on-die to give end users a way to monitor temperatures of the core.
How the temperature is figured:
"The processor temperature is determined through an analog thermal sensor circuit comprised of a temperature sensing diode, a factory calibrated reference current source, and a current comparator (see above image). A voltage applied across the diode induces a current flow that varies with temperature. By comparing this current with the reference current, the processor temperature can be determined."
The temperatures we see using MBM5, ASUS Probe, and other monitoring programs come from the on-die thermal diode. Thanks to a thermal sensor (ie: Super I/O chip) located on the motherboard the data from the thermal diode can be used to monitor the die temperature of the processor for thermal management. This thermal diode is separate from the Thermal Monitor's thermal sensor and cannot be used to predict the behavior of the Thermal Monitor.
What influences the reading:
Every processor has different amounts of leakages and is therefore unique. Since each processor is unique the readings between two processors should never be the same. One of the parameters used in the equation to determine the CPU temperature is the Diode Ideality Factor (A.K.A. the Non-Ideality Factor) which describes the behavior of the diode relative to a theoretically perfect diode. The ideality factor depends on the characteristics of each individual processor and will vary slightly from one chip to the next. According to the data sheet the range of ideality for the Prescott ranges from 1.008 to 1.0137. The temperature calculation should take this range in to account in order to improve the accuracy of the reading.
One other variable that influences the temperature accuracy is the "'Series Resistance", which is a measure of the resistance in the traces leading up to and away from the thermal diode. The Prescott data sheet shows that this ranges between 3.242 and 3.594 ohms. Some diode sensors have the ability to adjust for the temperature error caused by the resistance, some do not. Lastly, cross-talk from high speed signals to the thermal diode traces might also introduce an error.
The day you can remove the fan and heatsink from a running AMD CPU and it will simply carry on running throttled down until the fan and heatsink are replaced, they will be ready for "professional" use.
You only have to see one or two CPUs go up in smoke because the HSF failed or whatever, taking the mobo with it, and blowing the PWN thus frying things like hard disks, to never ever ever fit anything but Intel to a "serious" machine.
I recently swapped from 3.5 GHz P4 to AMD 3200, both on A-bit, by way of experimentation.
Allegedly these are similar CPUs.
In practice, the AMD is slightly faster at some things such as gaming.
Overall the Intel, thanks to hyperthreading, felt faster.
The AMD was slightly unstable, while the intel needed the windows xp driver updates to achieve best performance, the amd needed them to achieve stability, as without them it has a *slight* tendency to reboot.
One of the reasons AMD were cheaper, bang for buck, is they left out all the extra stuff Intel did not, like on chip thermal management so it didn't catch fire when the heatsink / fan failed. Penny wise, Pound foolish.
Articles like this are a lot like the television licence (http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/) or road fund licence (http://www.dvla.gov.uk/) FUD, (incidentally if you google "road fund licence" the increasingly irrelevant google search will give ebay as an option...) which goes along the lines of local ad campaigns saying "we know there are 14 houses in Letsby Avenue with no TV licence" cos their database says so, I don't have a TV, but the presumption is that everyone does have a TV, and anyone who doesn't is a liar and a licence fee dodger.
T axes/BeginnersGuideToTax/) carousel fraud (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/economic_tr ends/ETAug03Ruffles.pdf)
In the Uk as far back as 1980, so before everything except mainframes in any meaningful sense, Banks were obliged to notify the tax man of any ammounts you had if balances or individual transfers were over 300 pounds.
While these articles are FUD "we know what you are doing on e-bay, so pay up before we nail you", which will collect some people along the way, the reality is the system as advertised cannot work, my ebay handle is not my name, my ebay address is my mothers house (when I signed up for ebay I was moving, just not sure where, and have never bothered updating) and most of my transactions have been in cash, and I have bought and sold expensive capital items like vehicles on ebay.
Far Far Far easier to simply crawl ebay for completed sales, total amounts, large capital items, and then match these amounts and dates to bank accounts, aha, ebay user "taxfreetrader" is Joe Bloggs.
Of course a huge number of transactions are paid via paypal, so there is an electronic record with an even better method of searching and matching.
People who regularly deposit 1000 bucks and over for single items may get busted, people who regularly transfer 1000 bucks and over from paypal may get busted, people who believe this crap will turn themselves in, everyone else who is smart and deals in cash or equivalents such as Postal Orders will not get busted, except perhaps second hand from the person you sold to or bought from getting busted, and them grassing you up.
The other things they are looking for that this can help to detect is VAT (http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/
The average guy on the street like me with 150 feedback spread over 3 years has fuck all to worry about.
So even if you were able to wave a magic wand and put every porn website on a *.xxx TLD, you have not addressed the problem of the link adverts / banners / clickthrus.
.com .net and so on TLDs featuring adverts / banners / clickthrus from .xxx TLD domains.
Pulling a number out of my ass, probably half of the websites out there that rely on advertising / banners and clickthrus to exist in the first place do so with "normal" adverts, ebay, amazon, x10 webcams etc.
Which means half of them rely on porn adverts, so you will have half the commercial websites out there, on
What are you going to say to these websites? Sorry guys, you are going to have to shut up shop or secure VC funding?
Porn marketing is the same as any other kind of marketing, they WANT to get their message out, the do not merely do not want to be filtered out, they will actively oppose it.
Look at it like this, I can type all kinds of searches into google, and chances are extremely high that I will get TOTALLY irellevant sponsored links to amazon and / or ebay in the results, and I mean TOTALLY, you abso-fucking-lutely KNOW that there is no such item for sale on ebay, and no such book for sale on amazon, but the link is still presented to you.
___NOT___ because it is relevant, but because MONEY WAS INVOLVED.
This is why you will never ever "solve" the "problem" or porn, any more than I can solve the problem of advertising, personally I like to see none, ever, ever again.
The united states dollar, along with the united kingdom pound, and most other currencies, is no more than virtual money, with as much true innate value as linden dollars or any other virtual money.
we live in a fiat economy, the chinese discarded it a thousand years ago, the problems they had then are rearing their ugly heads yet again, with the same end result, more than likely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency
Do you routinely use all these boxes as development boxes, installing and uninstalling one or more different applications each day?
nope, cos if you did you would know that Windows does indeed pick up "cruft"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruft
Very, very, very, very few windows applications install nicely and uninstall 100% leaving a system exactly as it was before, registry bloat ensues.
If your point of view were true, there would not be several commercial applications designed specifically to ensure that windows does not pick up cruft, very expensive commercial applications that are fairly widely used in anger in commercial enviornments.
Microsoft's own knowledgebase is replete with pages detailing how to uninstall Miscrosoft software that does not uninstall properly
powershell is an example of this, an MS product that MS Vista cannot upgrade over, and cannot uninstall or simply ignore. Not a Symantec product, or a Macromedia product, or a creative product, that MS cannot uninstall, but a MS product.
The motoring analogy to your comment is "I would not employ you as a motor mechanic if you are rebuilding your car every six months." Amongst others, you would exclude all the top mechanics the world over who are constantly tuning and tweaking their vehicles, and to whom your bog standard sedan would be a piece of cake.
I wasn't very clear, perhaps I should have said...
"to the best of my knowledge linux still does not have a font manager that produces broadcast quality font anti-aliasing, irresepective of backgrounds and other variables, etc."
Yes, Linux has anti aliasing, so does windows (cleartype etc) but they both suck when compared to what RiscOS managed to achieve.
This is largely subjective, but I can read easily and with more clarity with the RiscOS anti-aliasing than anything I have seen in linux or windows or mac up to just before OSX (not played with OSX)
It was common supposition that Pace bought the ARM RiscOS technology not for the cool running lower power CPU, but because of the broadcast quality font manager, even when reproduced on a TV display.
I applied for a contract job a day or two ago, desktop rollout engineer, ello, all things being given this likely means MS Windows Vista rollout engineer, and / or MS Office 2007 rollout engineer.
Being a diligent sort of bloke I downloaded a release candidate version of Vista Business edition from the usual sources and proceeded to test it on the main box.
The "main box" is currently an AMD 64 bit jobbie, A-bit mobo, 2 gig of Mushkin, WD raptor HD, so not the absolute latest and greatest, but no slouch either.
In common with all versions of Windows this install (XP SP2) picks up "cruft" and after about 6 months the only real cure is a reinstall of Windows.
Knowing it was a dying install I thought I'd play with AutoPatcher, which patched everything sure enough, but made things around the edges even more flaky, and in particular made the ethernet connection unstable, this then was the candidate for Vista.
Installation / Upgrading was NOT straightforward, I had to manually uninstall Kaspersky anti virus, Spybot S&D, and two MS windows updates, one was powershell, I forget now what the other one was.
I tried a virgin install as opposed to an upgrade, rather than uninstall all the above, and got a BSOD at the first installer reboot, clearly a hardware / driver issue.
Nota Bene, this is hardly exotic or just released hardware, nor is it obsolete hardware, so immediately the tables are turned between Windows and Linux, Debian will simply install, Vista will not. Don't even ask about trying to get hardware drivers for Vista
So I went back to the upgrade path, uninstalled the software that Vista was moaning about, and tried again.
Well, it worked, but.......
This installer very clearly said on the splash screens two extremely worrying sentences.
During install your computer will restart several times - it did.
Installation may take several hours - it took about 2.
This is NOT Linux, so taking the upgrade path and the multiple reboots mean you cannot use the computer for anything during the upgrade process. I am not a coder, but the fact that Vista STILL requires several reboots during installation speaks volumes about the fundamental workings of Vista, this is not a "professional" Operating System.
The astonishingly slow upgrade times, bear in mind this is a 64 bit AMD CPU on a good A-bit mobo with 2 gig of Mushkin (best memory money can buy) and 10k RPM Western Digital Raptor hard disks, beggars belief, XP SP2 will install on this box in 25 minutes, Debian + about 1000 applications will install in about 15 minutes, Vista took TWO BLOODY HOURS, and I must say again, unlike Linux, totally rendered the box unusable in the interim.
So, eventually, the Vista upgrade / install is complete, and it boots into the OS.
Before I go any further, I must give this some perspectiive, I have been using computers since whenever, punched card on mainframes, 8 bit DIY stuff at home, not quite Altair but damn close, and I've used most operating systems too, the various DOSes, the odd bit of CP/M and OS2, Sinclair speccies, Tandy TRS 80, Commodore PET, Apple ][, the 16 bit NMS machines from the likes of Philips, Atari, BBC and Acorn RISC, MIPS based Cobalt servers when they came out, DEC, etc etc etc.
The point of this comment is to reassure the reader than the mere sight of something different does not give rise to "oh noes! this is the suxxor!" shit, different is "OK, let's see what you've got." and of course assuming that whoever wrote this OS will, like me, have some idea of what went before and therefore have a good idea about what are good ideas, what works, what doesn't, etc etc etc.
In 1995 the Acorn RISCOS 3.5 had full screen font anti-aliasing so you could read 8 point text on a 14 inch CRT, it had a Pause and Resume dialogue button on the file copy / move function, and would not fall over as soon as it encountered a file that could not be copied or moved, and would simply get on with moving or copying the rest
and there is the problem. I'm lucky, I grew up late enough to see the new technology and get to grips with it, but early enough to predate it, so it wasn't much of a challenge to poison the well my staying out of databases as much as possible, and stuffing them with false and conflicting data whenever the opportunity presented itself. However, as time passes more and more of these things are going to be linked to databases. It is not, for example, about ID cards, I grew up with ID cards, what we are talking about now in the UK are ___NOT___ ID cards, but tokens called "ID cards" that are just front ends for databases, the databases are the problem, not the front ends. It has already passed to the point where poisoning the well of the database is considered a crime, this tells the enlightened citizen all they need to know, the importance of the database is paramount, the importance of the citizen is always subsumed to the database. The writing was on the wall decades ago with "corporate individuals", who despite being "individuals" under the law could argue that subdivision x did something naughty, but head office could not possibly keep track of all this and must not be punished, the human individual analogy is do not throw me in prison for pinching girls backsides, it was my fingers, specifically this finger and this thumb, and it would be wrong to imprison me in any way when the rest of my body has done no wrong. At present the bandwidth required for decent quality CCTV cameras, the storage space for the streams of data, and the processing power required all put these devices out of contact with the database, it takes human reviewers to make the connection. This is not the case with RFID of course, especially when the tags are provided for free by your local consumer goods retailer. As soon as any technology makes the leap from requiring human monitoring and control to fully electronic management it is ready to be interfaced directly to a database. As far as the databases themselves are concerned it is trivial to create a new one which interfaces to half a dozen existing ones and create a whole new set of data points about each subject or citizen. The retailers and credit card companies and banks already have frighteningly (frightening to anyone who is not a student of Freud and Bernaise and who does not understand human psychology) accurate and predictive databases on the vast majority of the population, they know what goods to promote next week in response to the weather this week, or sports news this week, or entertainment news this week. This is their holy grail, to accumulate this data, correlate it, and then mine it and thus identify swing voters, potential terrorists, political activists, paedophiles, etc. They will do this not knowing or caring about similar attempts in the past based upon the shape of the skull or ethnicity etc etc, it doesn't matter if these efforts fail, creating the infrastructure opens a slew of new pandoras boxes. = = = = = = = At the risk of saying something that will go down like a lead balloon on a predominantly US site. 9/11, if you had asked anyone anywhere on the planet what targets you would choose to strike at the symbol of america, 99.9% of them would have said "fly the planes into the statue of liberty, the white house, and the golden gate bridge" because these were the symbols of americana. I do not know ANYBODY who would have chosen the WTC, if you had suggested the WTC to me I would have said "why, they are nothing but a bunch of banks and accountants and technology companies", but that is the point, the attacks were NEVER targeting the USA of the american people, they were targeting the financial complex, and please don't be so naive as to think that they are the same thing or even related. What all this "you ARE what the databases say about you" means for us as people is the following. 1/ The instruments used to monitor you will be as fine and accurate as the programmers make them, or as loose and inaccurate. 2/ the data itself will hold more value th
To be specific, I live in a small city called Exeter, in the southwest of the country.
About six months ago a city woman was found wandering in the early morning, naked, confused and injured, she has been beaten and raped, since then she has had 159 days of hospital treatment and still ain't "right"
We have these privacy invading CCTV cameras all over the shop, and the local paper and national press has been posting images from them, here is the attacker walking behind the woman in sidwell street, here is the attacker in paris street, here is the attacker in high street, basically there is 15 minutes video of this guy from every angle you could hope for.
In CSI land they simply press the "enhance" button and keep zooming until you can see the suspects DNA.
In reality, despite it being a high profile crime, CCTV produces images that make drunken 1st generation camera phones look high quality, except instead of being taken at arm's length from the face, which is what we use to identify people, it can easy be 100 yards away up a pole.
Even if you could force pedestrians to walk slowly in a line underneath cameras focused on their faces, the analogy of the CCTV camera used to catch speeders on the road, or London congestion charging etc, it still would not work, because OCR is one thing, matching faces to identities is another.
For example, it is trivial to OCR a vehicle number plate and flag a stolen car, or add a congestion charge, or a speeding fine, but this is not identity. You get the fine because your name is linked to the vehicle ownership, and the vehicle is linked to the registration number, which is all well and good, but if I see you driving into London every day in your Ford Ka (blue) while driving my Ford Ka (also blue) then all I need to do is use a copy of your number plate.
CCTV is a lot of things, but the barriers to it being a serious curb on privacy or anything else are HUGE, 1080i CCTV cameras anyone, what you going to store the date stream on? what you going to process the images with?
RFID does the job a lot easier, with a lot less computing power, a lot more redundancy, a lot more accuracy, lot less bandwidth, and it can be done today, cheap.
The above long range blurry CCTV example, or the OCR of vehicle registration, is a feeble and distant cousing of.
Subject is wearing sneakers bought by john smith with john smiths credit card
subject is carrying mobile phone registered to john smith etc
subject is carrying packet of mints and newspaper bought by john smith 10 minutes ago
subject is wearing underwear bought by john smith
subject is wearing prescription spectacles worn by john smith
it won't pick up the acme disguise kit, stick on beard, trenchcoat, fedora, latex gloves, or anything else.
Total bandwidth required, dunno, doubt it would saturate a 14.4k modem though, total processing power required, negligible, total cost, fuck all, after all the consumer goods vendors already provided the RFID tags, you already have the network, just need readers and some new software.
The blurry CCTV will still be used.
if the image looks like you it will be used as evidence, "see, it is john smith"
if the image doesn't look like you it will be used as evidence "see, john smith is clearly wearing a disguise"
If you had ANY idea how close they already are to real time with simply correlating credit card data and mobile phone cell lock records, you'd shit yourself.
AT PRESENT the sheer volume of data, bandwidth and processing power means that this data is only actually processed AFTER the event, to identify terrorists and their final movements.
It is a race between the increasing use of things like ID cards to provide more data that can be used for tracking, and technologies like RFID, in reality I suspect BOTH will complement each other, so to paraphrase Scott McNealy all those years ago, "Privacy, no such thing, it ALREADY doesn't exist"
The Exeter rapist is still at large because we don't yet have RFID, and the shops were shut so not way to tie him into a credit card purchase, no cameras on hole in the wall cash machines and the only businesses open, pubs and takeaways, use cash.
he suffered a brachial plexus lesion after a motorcycle accident, and eventually opted for amputation some 3 years later.
luckily for him his wife is medically well qualified and teaches nursing, and well connected medically, and he is a determined sort of bloke.
"phantom pain" he told me it felt like his not present arm was dipped in hot chip fat, so eventually last year he ended up in an MRI scanner under a doctor who was researching this subject, and they discovered that the pain is in fact not phantom or imagined but quite real.
I'm not in the least medically qualified, but the impression I got was that when the BPL occured and the nerves were torn out of the spinal column, some of them were activated and sending "PAIN" messages, and what is happening now is even though those nerves are no longer there, the upstream spinal column nerves "remember" the last message and just keep sending it.
I would not suggest telling an amputee that the pain they are feeling is a figment of their imagination, they may well hit you with the remaining limb(s).
For sure, MS Windows and MS Office are closed source so "we" cannot analyse them.
However, Debian (which I am running here) and Open Office are not closed source.
Simple logic will tell us that someone or someones in MS are tasked with keeping a close eye on open source and how it compares with MS own operations, hell, this is MS core business strategy, just ask Jobs...
MS aren't likely to tell anyone else these results, but, we can maybe infer them from MS actions.
eg
"Vista sucks" ---> MS ain't worried about Debian / KDE
or
"vista allows you to pause and resume multiple file transfers, and don't abort the whole list on one error" ---> MS is very worried about *nix in general coming to the desktop
1/ I first got DSL from British Telecom, we were in the pilot area so one of the first in the UK, it worked OK, but one day we decided to change the billing name from her to me. BT said that involved cancelling our existing contract and starting a new one with a new set up charge, 60 quid or so, and meant new phone number and new e-mail address.
2/ I took cable from Telewest / Blueyonder, similar money, similar speed (512/256) no issues, no set up fee, so broadband and telephone package (never had any interest in television, cable or antenna)
3/ About 6 months later I decided to move, took phone number and email address with me, no charge, changeover took one morning.
4/ It's now 4 years later and we're moving again, phone number and email moving with us, offline again for about a morning, oh, and for sticking with them first 3 months in new address is at half price.
5/ Currently pay (all in UK pounds) 10 per month for the telephone, 30 per month for the 10 mbit cable, and 3 per month for refusing to pay by direct debit because I don't grant anyone access to my bank account.
6/ Downtime in 5/6 years have been a total of 3 incidents each one repaired within 24 hours, one the cable modem died, one the local box in the street suffered loss of dB through corrossion of the connectors, one was a technical hitch. Each time I got that month free when I complained mildly about it.
7/ Latency is and always has been very good, only bug bear is upstream at 400k, too asymetric, sometime I have large (ISO size) files I want to make available to friends. Apart from the 3 times mentioned above though uptime has been 100%.
8/ No DSL so no contention ratio, never seen any kind of speed decrease related to my network.
9/ THE BIG ONE, no capping of any kind, unlimited means unlimited, I can pull 50 gigs a day sometimes, a few months ago I downloaded the entire 80+ gigs of wikipedia in 15 odd hours for a friend.... THIS COMPANY GETS IT, they are selling you a pipe, not container space on a ship.
In short, the service is so good and reliable as to be invisible, I'm not conciously aware that it is there, every computer in the house basically has "teh internet" waiting at 10 mbit at the end of the CAT5 I plug in, in much the same way as the power sockets have 240 VAC @ 50 Hz "waiting" for me to plug in.
This, cable, in this area is a monopoly, don't like it go to DSL, DSL is their competitors.
I know this reads like an advert, but I have NO connection with Telewest/Blueyonder other than as a customer, and YMMV if you are in a different area.
HTH etc