The uptake of broadband and WiFi has been immense over the past 6 or so months. Where before I had no problems with WLAN coverage as mine was the only one on the street, now there's one eminating from every home. Just in the few surrounding roads there are dozens of wireless networks in place, and hardly any have even changed the SSID, let alone disabled broadcasting of it. Only a handful use any form of actual security, such as WEP.
Even the people that should know better, such as my neighbour that claims to be an IT professional (if you're reading this, no. 14, TURN ON WEP AND CHANGE THE DAMN SSID!) have left their connections wide open.
This isn't just a security issue though. It becomes a real annoyance when my PDA wants to connect to any of the unsecure networks within range, and won't even detect my own. Consumer WAPs should have SSID broadcasting off by default - it's only necessary for public access points - and consumers need to be made aware that these devices should not just be plugged in and used without putting in place decent security measures. The initial setup wizards should leave them with a far more secure network, because the reduction in performance from using WEP is nothing compared to having me use your ADSL for bittorrent downloads.
The Internet, to many people, holds some promise of being able to make absolutely anyone a world wide celebrity - that somehow a tiny idea can spread through the tangled maze of routers and fibre optics and afford its thinker-upper immortality. It probably started when everyone noticed just how much fucking money those Google guys made, or that kid that earned a metric fuckton playing Internet stock.
Unfortunately, this mentality means that absolutely everyone throws around bullshit ideas. Also unfortunate is that any event within the Internet is desperately reported on by the mainstream media without it. So terms such as 'Podcasting' - which comes down to putting an MP3 on your iPod, as though that was some novel use for it - get seized upon and thought of as useful to society.
Fuck it, I've got a new idea. I call it 'ShitZineing'. I came up with it when I used the Times Style section to wipe the excrement from my behind after I ran out of toilet paper. Obviously this idea can't take off without the iPod somehow being involved, so I figure I can Podcast a weekly show on the best pages to use from each week's Sunday magazines when you're out of TP and have a dire cling-on problem.
There we are, throw that one out through the Blogosphere and come back to me with a big fat cheque when someone wants to make it commercially viable.
It seems like both sides just say "There's all this evidence that supports my view", without really explaining what they have. Has there been any real research on this subject, that doesn't rely on presenting correlation as cause? Is there any evidence to support either side that comes from a party without an agenda to push? Both sides seem to be bogged down in worthless statistics and name-calling, and the whole argument lacks the necessary foundations of credible evidence.
Not that any of that is relevant, as the whole argument is pointless. Adult entertainment belongs in the hands of adults, and the industry has already made a good effort of ensuring that their output is suitably rated. If retailers stick to those guidelines, and parents take enough of an interest in their child's development to ensure that they are exposed to appropriate content, then there's no problem here. The entertainment industry will provide content for its entire audience, and that means there will be M-rated games on the shelves along with the E-rated ones. It's up to the parents to make the decision as to which ones will be appropriate for their children, and the retailers to ensure that the parents aren't overruled on this decision by the child.
Beyond that, we just need to fix society so that we don't feel the need to be violent towards each other. I think that might be a tougher problem to crack, though.
The TV companies have made a noticable improvement in getting American shows over here in the UK earlier. The Simpsons is now often shown on the Sunday after it is shown in the US, although Fox's annoying random breaks cause it to bump around a lot. Episode 5 of 24 is on next Monday, the CSI family of programs have all started new series (I think), and Battlestar Galactica was shown here first. So it seems like this TV 'piracy' has actually made the companies involved change their ways and give us what we want. It's obviously not the best way to instigate change (as it is still breaking some law/s, I assume), but it seems to have been very effective.
I've got a Loox 720, which has a fabulous VGA screen. Except, it may as well not have one, because everything is just double the size for compatibility's sake. PocketIE just doubles the size of all graphics, making web browsing a real chore on non-mobile-optimised sites. There's a workaround, that involves using SEVGA or OzVGA to eliminate this pixel-doubling, but that breaks a lot of applications, and just looks ugly in others. Better support for VGA devices is crucial if whatever's left of the market is going to go anywhere, as the increased resolution adds so much functionality to these devices - web browsing, email, even Office functionality such as viewing spreadsheets becomes feasible. MS really dropped the ball here.
Has anyone had any luck with other apps? I'm using PIE with MultiIE, which is a great addon, but it's annoying having to soft reset every time I want to do some web browsing.
Yeah, I've been doing the same. I pay for the BBC and Sky, yet everything is delayed at least 6 months before it reaches here. I wouldn't mind if we had a lot of good TV to keep us entertained, but it's mostly the American stuff that's entertaining. To be fair, the Beeb does put out a lot of good programming, but it's mostly documentaries and such. Sky Plus is a great service, but it's quantity rather than quality of channels, and I still can't find anything to watch on a Wednesday night. However, I stopped downloading episodes of The Simpsons when I saw that Sky One has them the week after they're on Fox in the US. Thing is, even though I'm not downloading them, I'm still not watching the adverts. I watch it when I want and skip past them. I guess Sky can survive with this as they make very little programming themselves and just buy it from others, so my monthly fee covers them for the most part, but when these new series cost many millions and the advertising revenue isn't there anymore, where will the money come from?
I know there's all the Windows hating going on here, and I think it's adorable sometimes, but there's a lot going for Windows that means I won't be giving my parents some flavour of Linux for a while. I know, I know, "an unpatched Winblows box will be hax0red in 30 seconds!!!111", but the fact is it won't be unpatched because of the auto-updates. I stuck it behind a Netgear Router/ADSL modem/WAP/Firewall and put some AV software on there. There's been no problems. They don't even get spam, and I don't mean they don't get it after going through Bayesian-Freudian-Pseudomatronic filtering, I mean they just don't get it. Unless the occasional monkey-drinking-own-urine email from an acquaintance is considered spam, and I like to think it is. Even if they need to do something really difficult, like install new drivers, it's just a double click on the setup file. I tried installing ATI drivers in Mandrake a few months ago. I'll let you all know how it went when I figure out how to get X working again. I can't even get my parents off IE and onto something much better, like Firefox, because it's still not quite there. Example: My Mum had to fill in this great big form to submit an offer to a potential client, and Firefox couldn't do it because of the javascript involved. Okay, that's probably shoddy coding on the form's part and nothing to do with Firefox, but my Mum doesn't care about who's in the wrong when she's got to do something vital for her business and it won't work. My dad has been working for what was ICL in the 70s and he's still got limited, at best, technical ability. But when he gets into Excel or Visio he knows how to do all the graphs and charts, so who am I to take that away from him? How's he going to figure out how to do an organisational chart in calm pastel management colours in something else? I know I could use Crossover Office or something, but why go to all the hassle of setting up Linux to emulate Windows, when I can just use Windows without a problem. I don't like MS all that much, and they get up to some pretty dodgy stuff sometimes, but there's a reason why everyone keeps buying their stuff aside from the fact that they bought up all the competition. Some of it is actually fairly good.
"Badgers badgers badger badger badgers," is a legitimate sentence, according to the wonderful Boris Johnson. And he's a politician, so it must be true.
I'm struggling to see the problems too. I can see the objections to having to carry around a card and produce it when asked to - who has the authority to ask you to prove your identity? The police? Your milkman? - but I don't understand the civil liberties problems, just that people are objecting to this. What are the problems? All the information apart from an iris scan is already stored elsewhere, so I don't understand how a card suddenly makes this a problem.
Unless of course you're the kind of person that says "Do you know who I am?" when you try to make a reservation at a restaurant.
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The uptake of broadband and WiFi has been immense over the past 6 or so months. Where before I had no problems with WLAN coverage as mine was the only one on the street, now there's one eminating from every home. Just in the few surrounding roads there are dozens of wireless networks in place, and hardly any have even changed the SSID, let alone disabled broadcasting of it. Only a handful use any form of actual security, such as WEP.
Even the people that should know better, such as my neighbour that claims to be an IT professional (if you're reading this, no. 14, TURN ON WEP AND CHANGE THE DAMN SSID!) have left their connections wide open.
This isn't just a security issue though. It becomes a real annoyance when my PDA wants to connect to any of the unsecure networks within range, and won't even detect my own. Consumer WAPs should have SSID broadcasting off by default - it's only necessary for public access points - and consumers need to be made aware that these devices should not just be plugged in and used without putting in place decent security measures. The initial setup wizards should leave them with a far more secure network, because the reduction in performance from using WEP is nothing compared to having me use your ADSL for bittorrent downloads.
The Internet, to many people, holds some promise of being able to make absolutely anyone a world wide celebrity - that somehow a tiny idea can spread through the tangled maze of routers and fibre optics and afford its thinker-upper immortality. It probably started when everyone noticed just how much fucking money those Google guys made, or that kid that earned a metric fuckton playing Internet stock.
Unfortunately, this mentality means that absolutely everyone throws around bullshit ideas. Also unfortunate is that any event within the Internet is desperately reported on by the mainstream media without it. So terms such as 'Podcasting' - which comes down to putting an MP3 on your iPod, as though that was some novel use for it - get seized upon and thought of as useful to society.
Fuck it, I've got a new idea. I call it 'ShitZineing'. I came up with it when I used the Times Style section to wipe the excrement from my behind after I ran out of toilet paper. Obviously this idea can't take off without the iPod somehow being involved, so I figure I can Podcast a weekly show on the best pages to use from each week's Sunday magazines when you're out of TP and have a dire cling-on problem.
There we are, throw that one out through the Blogosphere and come back to me with a big fat cheque when someone wants to make it commercially viable.
I was wondering how Brown was going to afford those bus passes for the elderly. He's a sneaky one, that Chancellor.
I wish I only snored... I woke myself up last night laughing in my sleep. Apparantely it's kinda dangerous.
It seems like both sides just say "There's all this evidence that supports my view", without really explaining what they have. Has there been any real research on this subject, that doesn't rely on presenting correlation as cause? Is there any evidence to support either side that comes from a party without an agenda to push? Both sides seem to be bogged down in worthless statistics and name-calling, and the whole argument lacks the necessary foundations of credible evidence.
Not that any of that is relevant, as the whole argument is pointless. Adult entertainment belongs in the hands of adults, and the industry has already made a good effort of ensuring that their output is suitably rated. If retailers stick to those guidelines, and parents take enough of an interest in their child's development to ensure that they are exposed to appropriate content, then there's no problem here. The entertainment industry will provide content for its entire audience, and that means there will be M-rated games on the shelves along with the E-rated ones. It's up to the parents to make the decision as to which ones will be appropriate for their children, and the retailers to ensure that the parents aren't overruled on this decision by the child.
Beyond that, we just need to fix society so that we don't feel the need to be violent towards each other. I think that might be a tougher problem to crack, though.
The TV companies have made a noticable improvement in getting American shows over here in the UK earlier. The Simpsons is now often shown on the Sunday after it is shown in the US, although Fox's annoying random breaks cause it to bump around a lot. Episode 5 of 24 is on next Monday, the CSI family of programs have all started new series (I think), and Battlestar Galactica was shown here first. So it seems like this TV 'piracy' has actually made the companies involved change their ways and give us what we want. It's obviously not the best way to instigate change (as it is still breaking some law/s, I assume), but it seems to have been very effective.
"...only a little more authoritative than phrenology..."
Of course you'd say that, you have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter!
I've got a Loox 720, which has a fabulous VGA screen. Except, it may as well not have one, because everything is just double the size for compatibility's sake. PocketIE just doubles the size of all graphics, making web browsing a real chore on non-mobile-optimised sites. There's a workaround, that involves using SEVGA or OzVGA to eliminate this pixel-doubling, but that breaks a lot of applications, and just looks ugly in others. Better support for VGA devices is crucial if whatever's left of the market is going to go anywhere, as the increased resolution adds so much functionality to these devices - web browsing, email, even Office functionality such as viewing spreadsheets becomes feasible. MS really dropped the ball here. Has anyone had any luck with other apps? I'm using PIE with MultiIE, which is a great addon, but it's annoying having to soft reset every time I want to do some web browsing.
Yeah, I've been doing the same. I pay for the BBC and Sky, yet everything is delayed at least 6 months before it reaches here. I wouldn't mind if we had a lot of good TV to keep us entertained, but it's mostly the American stuff that's entertaining. To be fair, the Beeb does put out a lot of good programming, but it's mostly documentaries and such. Sky Plus is a great service, but it's quantity rather than quality of channels, and I still can't find anything to watch on a Wednesday night.
However, I stopped downloading episodes of The Simpsons when I saw that Sky One has them the week after they're on Fox in the US.
Thing is, even though I'm not downloading them, I'm still not watching the adverts. I watch it when I want and skip past them. I guess Sky can survive with this as they make very little programming themselves and just buy it from others, so my monthly fee covers them for the most part, but when these new series cost many millions and the advertising revenue isn't there anymore, where will the money come from?
I know there's all the Windows hating going on here, and I think it's adorable sometimes, but there's a lot going for Windows that means I won't be giving my parents some flavour of Linux for a while. I know, I know, "an unpatched Winblows box will be hax0red in 30 seconds!!!111", but the fact is it won't be unpatched because of the auto-updates. I stuck it behind a Netgear Router/ADSL modem/WAP/Firewall and put some AV software on there. There's been no problems. They don't even get spam, and I don't mean they don't get it after going through Bayesian-Freudian-Pseudomatronic filtering, I mean they just don't get it. Unless the occasional monkey-drinking-own-urine email from an acquaintance is considered spam, and I like to think it is.
Even if they need to do something really difficult, like install new drivers, it's just a double click on the setup file. I tried installing ATI drivers in Mandrake a few months ago. I'll let you all know how it went when I figure out how to get X working again. I can't even get my parents off IE and onto something much better, like Firefox, because it's still not quite there. Example: My Mum had to fill in this great big form to submit an offer to a potential client, and Firefox couldn't do it because of the javascript involved. Okay, that's probably shoddy coding on the form's part and nothing to do with Firefox, but my Mum doesn't care about who's in the wrong when she's got to do something vital for her business and it won't work. My dad has been working for what was ICL in the 70s and he's still got limited, at best, technical ability. But when he gets into Excel or Visio he knows how to do all the graphs and charts, so who am I to take that away from him? How's he going to figure out how to do an organisational chart in calm pastel management colours in something else? I know I could use Crossover Office or something, but why go to all the hassle of setting up Linux to emulate Windows, when I can just use Windows without a problem.
I don't like MS all that much, and they get up to some pretty dodgy stuff sometimes, but there's a reason why everyone keeps buying their stuff aside from the fact that they bought up all the competition. Some of it is actually fairly good.
"Badgers badgers badger badger badgers," is a legitimate sentence, according to the wonderful Boris Johnson. And he's a politician, so it must be true.
I'm struggling to see the problems too. I can see the objections to having to carry around a card and produce it when asked to - who has the authority to ask you to prove your identity? The police? Your milkman? - but I don't understand the civil liberties problems, just that people are objecting to this. What are the problems? All the information apart from an iris scan is already stored elsewhere, so I don't understand how a card suddenly makes this a problem.
Unless of course you're the kind of person that says "Do you know who I am?" when you try to make a reservation at a restaurant.
But that's because the L-39's are fairly cheap and come with free home delivery.