Like a lot of the stuff Commodore put out back then, it was before it's time. Windows still hasn't learned from some of their innovations.
The disk format used on the 1541 and its predecessors (1540, 4040, etc.) was a technological marvel of it's day. Only thirty-five tracks, single sided, variable number of sectors per track, and the directory in the middle on track 18. Each sector was written in GCR format, allowing far higher data density than acheived on the IBM 9-sector format.
If they developed it further, we'd have had 82-track, double sided, double density floppies, holding more than a megabyte, and the 3.5" floppy might not be here today.
The wonderful thing about GCR as opposed to MFM encoding is that MFM wastes an awful lot of space with phase changes. GCR records more actual data, but each group code (the five bits that translate to four bits of actual data) is designed such that you never get more than eight 1-bits in a row, or more than two 0-bits in a row. This way you are guaranteed a phase change within a certain period, so the signal from the read head is kept 'moving'. The practical upshot of all this is that you can crank the GCR encoded data out onto the diskette at a faster rate than plain old MFM.
Putting the directory in the middle of the disk, along with the block allocation bitmap, lowered the average seek time, as the head a less distance to travel. The Amiga continued this, putting the disk home block, from which everything grew outwards, onto track 40.
Variable sectors per track (ranging from 21 on tracks 01-17, 19 on tracks 18-24, 17 on tracks 25-30, and 16 on tracks 31-35 (I'm guessing a little here)) allowed for greater data density without compromising data integrity on the inner tracks by exceeding the amount that could be reliably stored there. Hard disks today use a similar method, which is why the number of blocks on a disk might not equal the multiplied up values of cylinders, heads, and sectors. (LBA mode vs. CHS mode).
Of course, the thing about the CBM drives that made them the most fun drives to play with was the onboard 6502 processor with its 2k of memory, allowing you to download and execute code in the drive, speeding it up, flashing error messages in morse code on the LED, or even playing music using the stepper motor. (Actually, we used to do that with RL02's too, but it's equally unrecommended;-)
One of the problems, atleast over here in the UK is that the recording companies are also the major record distributors, and virtually no high street shop (Woolworths, WH Smith, Our Price, Virgin, etc.) will deal with people outside of these select few companies.
While the internet revolution will undoubtedly get small-time musicians a channel to get their work out to a new audience, the traditional audience, whose only connection with the internet is via a closed set-top-box that just happens to do Email, will not be able to buy these records unless they are taken up by the big distributors.
So, the barriers to entry into the music market, which as an artist, is probably the only way to make a living at it, are still very firmly in place.
Apparently (according to some documentary or other on the Discovery channel UK tonight, which I didn't really take in, being too busy with other stuff), the moon is slowly receding from us. In a few million years we'll lose it. This is due to gravitational friction, caused by the effect the moon's gravity has on earth's oceans.
There's some more on the receding moon here Be warned that the site that URL points to is an anti-creationist site. Not that you'd find me sharing any daft ideas with creationists, but its probably blocked if you live in certain less than enlightened states of the USA.
One way of fixing this is to dam the worlds oceans. That's one heck of a barrier..
An alternative would be to steal a moon off another planet. Scientists have pointed at Europa as a 'suitable' satellite.
Personally I don't plan on being about when they try and insert Europa into Earth orbit; if they miss, the results could be, err, sorta messy.
We all know that if you take enough low-powered machines, of the sort that anyone can get hold of, such as low-end pentiums, even 486's, etc. and stick them in a big enough warehouse, you can build machines that will out-compute any commercially available off-the-shelf single supercomputer. You only have to look at the Stone SouperComputer to see what is possible.
Hopefully, Saddam hasn't got the hang of/bin/bash yet...
Well, you could always apply to a certain IT company in the UK. Currently rewarding their staff for their loyalty by asking them to volunteer colleagues for the sack, to be replaced by cheaper labour from outside the UK. Successful volunteering is rewarded by a GBP 1,000 bonus.
Sorry, no useful links, but you'll get the general idea here
After a great deal of mucking about, the general situation in europe is that numbers outside your local area start with '0', followed by an area code and a local number.
Numbers outside your local country start with '00' followed by a country code, an area code, and a local number.
Of course we do it differently over here to the way the USA does it, but I think that atleast the '00' seems more logical.
It follows that when dialling other planets, one should simply dial '000' followed by the planet code, country code, area code, and local number.
Galaxy-wide that becomes '0000' (assuming inhabitants of other galaxies have ten fingers/tentacles/etc. or we WILL be counting in hexadecimal)
However, the area codes in the UK have been playing silly b****rs over recent years. Down here in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the area code was once 705, so dialling Portsmouth from, say, London was 0705 xxxxxx.
The first major change was to change the London '01' code to 071 and 081; depending on whether you were in inner or outer London (071 for inner london), this left the 01 prefix free.
The second major change was to add a '1' to the front of the vast majority of area codes in the UK, so Portsmouth went from 0705 to 01705. Some cities opened up new codes starting 011, such as Bristol, where 0272 became 0117, and to keep the length of all national dialled numbers constant, the local numbers were extended from their old 6-digits to 7-digits, by sticking a '9' on the front of existing numbers. So 0272 654321 became 0117 9654321.
Next up, as local number ranges started to run out of numbers, as everyone got second lines for internet use, and the number of local telco's, each with different number block assignments exploded, some areas started to run out of numbers.
One of the affected cities was Portsmouth, and together with Southampton, they were allocated the new area code 023, with local numbers being prefixed with 92 for Portsmouth, and 80 for Southampton, so we had to put up with two number changes in just a few years. Old numbers like 0705 654321 became 023 92654321.
At the end of the day, it's not particularly difficult to remember, and lots of publicity went into the changeover, although that was local to the UK. I dread to think of the number of misdialled international calls; a number of countries charge for unconnected international calls. Ouch.
Anyway, the UK telephone system now appears to approaching some sort of consistency. National area codes now all begin 01xxx, or 02x, with room for expansion into 03x. Special rate numbers start 08xxx, and premium rate (some as high as GBP 5.00/minute) are 09xxx.
Over here is a list of all of the information you never wanted to know about UK telephone code assignments, but were too bored to ask.
I just went to the media cabinet here at the office; our current stock of CD-R's are Sony CDQ-74CP's.
These particular discs are allegedly 'Full Colour Printable', and say on the back of the jewel case 'Full colour printing possible with ink jet printers with water-based ink'.
Erm. right. We have seven different types of inkjet printer here in the office, but none of them have a sufficiently straight paper path to avoid snapping the CD, or scratching the data face to death, not to mention what taking those expensive ink cartridges for a scrape across polycarbonate would do for the budget.
Flexible CD's? Now you're talking. With any luck, these will even go around the bends in the Deskjet 690C.
We log all incoming and outgoing email, although we only log headers, not content. We deliver all mail ourselves if we can, dispatching it directly to the MX for the domain, which seems to work out a little faster than letting Demon Internet do it.
Some ISP's in the UK, particularly FreeServe, force all outgoing port 25 connections to connect to their own mail servers, so you don't have an option to route mail yourselves. Because FreeServe use dynamic IP's, this may well be justified, as a number of sites are particularly unwilling to take mail from any IP which is listed in the ORBS Dialup list, and quite a lot of SPAM gets sent that way.
Try it for yourself. Telnet to the MX host for a domain, such as punt-1.demon.co.uk, port 25.. i.e.
$ telnet punt-1.demon.co.uk 25
If you don't see
220 punt-10.mail.demon.net Server SMTP (Complaints/bugs to: postmaster@demon.net)
then your connection has been redirected, and your ISP is probably logging all of your direct transfers too.
There were moves underfoot to make ISP's log all transfers to and from their customers. I don't beleive Demon Internet implement that at this time, but I'm sure they could, if they wanted to. At the end of the day, who is going to pay for the storage.
When space gets tight on the mailserver, the logs are the first thing that nuked. We only keep them incase there is a problem and we need to trace back.
Some time ago in the UK, the government planned to introduce a levy on the price of blank audio tapes, on the grounds that it would help make good the shortfall on revenues caused by people taping music. As far as I am aware, there is no similar tax on blank CD media, even though it is obviously used for pirating music, and not for making software distributions, perfectly legal linux CD's, or exchanging the fruits of your labors with others.
There was an article in 1992 in Wired magazine, as annotated by Richard Stallman here which looks at a similar tax on digital media.
I was working on the basis that you typically get ten (rounded down quite considerably) audio CD's on a CD-R with MP3's, which is 10x80 minutes = 800 minutes in 700Mb, so if 800 minutes is 700Mb, 81,000Mb = 64.25 days. Oh bugger, I did get that a bit wrong didn't I.
Oh friend computer! The commies have got to my calculator already!
Assuming a typical (at 128kbps) compression of around 10:1, and a typical 80 minute CD holding 700Mb (I know that's not an exact match), thats 157 hours worth of music on a disk, or slightly under a week's worth.
How long do you plan to drive with that thing on?
Re:UK voter details are public, but is your vote?
on
Voter Records Exposed
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· Score: 1
> Online voting will change all that...
Some sort of data will need to be retained, if only to prevent ballot stuffing. However, I think that any change of constitution that allows for on-line voting MUST ensure that not even the government can access records of who voted for who, and ideally, that these records must be destroyed once the election results have been accepted as valid.
Neither of us live in a police state, atleast not officially. What with the regulation of investagatory powers act, etc., we're getting very close over here, but political freedom is still not against the law, despite my comments above.
If the UK used mechanical voting booths, we'd get far faster results, but the whole process is steeped in so much needless tradition that shows no sign of changing anytime soon, that whatever abuses are possible, they will continue to be possible for some time now.
Personally, I'd like to see electronic voting in the UK parliament; this business of piling members of parliament through 'Aye' and 'No' lobbies is about 200 years out of date. However, you suggest they should change this, and you get laughed at. This comes from the same group of people who refuse to have toilets labelled appropriately. (Most of the toilets in the houses of parliament at Westminster are labelled 'Members Only' and are for men only). Hopefully, the new speaker of the house will drag the house kicking and screaming into the 20th century.
UK voter details are public, but is your vote?
on
Voter Records Exposed
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· Score: 3
In the UK, the electoral register is a public document which is compiled by the local authority every year around this time. (The final version is supposed to be published on November 1st).
Anyone can inspect the electoral register, and copies are available (for a fee) for any company wanting it, in machine readable form, so that they can, for instance, check you are not giving them dud details on a credit application. It contains your full name, house address, and also date of birth for persons between 16 and 18 years of age.
As your date of birth is one of the standard security questions asked by credit card companies when calling in to their telephone service lines, that strikes me as a security risk.
Each voter gets a number in the register, such as J 4572. This is printed on your poll card which you take to the polling station to cast your vote (you don't need it, they have printed copies of the register there, and can look up your voter number there).
Most people assume that elections are private matters between the voters and the ballot box. The totals are obviously public information, but can you tell how a particular person voted?
The answer in most cases is no, however the polling station staff write on their register the number of the ballot paper you are given, which means it is, in theory atleast, possible to trace who voted for which candidate.
At this time it isn't a crime to vote for any candidate, and anyone who has sufficient support and pays their election deposit can be a candidate, hence the number of crazy candidates from parties such as The Official Monster Raving Loony Party and other less than serious candidates.
Kind of makes you wish there was an official monster raving loony running for the US presidency eh? [They are both fully paid up members - Ed]
I have a huge pile of DEC Sources, everything needed to build from scratch a VAX/VMS system (versions 2.0 up to 4.4). I also have piles of technical information and design information for buckets of DEC PDP/11 and VAX hardware. All of the above has been acquired lawfully over the past 20 years.
Am I therefore prohibited in using my personal knowledge to benefit open source software? Do I have to seek Compaq's permission to release open source software?
On a wider note, as I work with closed source software all day as part of my normal job, does this also disqualify me participating in OSS projects? I don't think so, because if it did, a lot of people on the linux kernel credits list would be in trouble for a start.
What if any Microsoft programmers, who have presumably legally seen sources, joined an OSS project? Would Microsoft be able to stop them? The possibility for nasty legal precendents is rather alarming.
I lose count of the number of times I have to go and reset user preferences on the internal web at work when an installation of MS Internet Exploder that the user has somehow acquired and installed resets options like 'Always check for Internet explorer updates', and stops the user seeing our internal home page when they start up.
Yes, on our internal net, do not adjust your computer, we are in control of what you see and do during the next half hour!
Presumably, this is hard coded into the software or a registry setting somewhere then? Perhaps it can be overwritten? Word Macro anyone?
With microsoft HTML generator's idea that means 'default font size' and not "Why, hello netscape, please render this font as an unintellible series of dots", how much can they fit on 150 pages? Do legal documents have to be a particular number of words per page? Presumably they are on 'legal' paper (how do I know, I'm from Europe where we have highly descriptive paper sizes like 'A4'). Will MS lawyers be able to resist using all those new truetype fonts all over the page?
Here I go, thinking aloud again. Someone reach for the volume control...
Talk to most people who consider themselves proficient computer users, and they will be horrified at the sort of thing you can find lying around on disks.
How many times have you allocated a large file on disk without writing to it and found all sorts of interesting things lurking in there with 'strings'?
There are of course many ways that users and programmers can prevent information leakage on multi-user systems this way. Erase on allocate, erase on delete, etc. However, how many word processors are in the habit of doing the same with memory, doing the equivalent of mlock() on the document pages, (the techniques employed by MS word seem to be to gobble all your memory, thus leaving nothing to allocate;-)).
I've noticed, that when we ran our product on windows NT, a simple fopen()..fseek(several hundred megs)..fwrite()..fclose() took forever, because it seems to insist on writing all the intervening blocks. Could this be a security thing (and how do I turn it off? or is it a bug).
Back to the subject, Joe public would be horrified to find that his data doesn't go away when he thinks it does. Methinks encrypted filesystems are the answer (different file, different key).
Finally something interesting on Radio 4. (Atleast more interesting than the shipping forecast, which was about as good as it got after they mashed 'Week Ending', and is about the only thing on when I'm up and hacking)...
Catch this really great line from the last show:
Bailey: Cyclonic become northwesterly 7 to severe gale 9 decreasing 5. Showers. Moderate or good.
But 11AM, that's like, in the morning when I'm due to be asleep at my desk at the office. No repeats. I could try and tape it, as I can get Radio 4 off Astra 2A on the digital service, but they don't build a timer into that thing on the grounds that "You can watch what you want, when you want to watch it". Either I haven't found the tardis controls, or nobody has told the broadcasters that!.
As I understand it, if you are not a common carrier, you are wide open to legal action from your customers.
For instance, I go to www.verynastystuff.org, and I'm offended by what I see. Do I complain to postmaster@verynastystuff.org, or do I sue my ISP for delivering that content?
This could mean that ISP's will become paranoid, and you, the customer, will only be able to see what they feel will not alarm you.
> No, I'm sorry. The only way to get an A+ is to do everything without records in a haphazard fashion, without even knowing why you're doing it yourself.
So why do government departments score D-? Most government departments don't know why they do what they do..
Courtesy of the Regulation of Investagatory Powers bill (otherwise known as RIP), many government departments in the UK don't know why they have to intercept communications by people they don't know on subjects they don't care about, using technology they don't understand. This scores A+ by government standards. Why?
It makes a change for someone not to jump onto the nearest 'internet' bandwagon that comes their way.
However, news agencies such as Reuters are paid good money by many news broadcasters (BBC, NBC, ITN, CNN etc.) - I doubt very much that the likes of Yahoo! get Reuters newsfeeds for free.
This raises the question of who owns news. Once any 'authorised' news broadcaster has revealed who, say, won the long jump competition, it becomes public knowledge. How can you prevent a web site reporting that? People who are interested (some people are, I suppose) in sports results will talk about it. To prevent that sounds like excessive restraint on free speech.
A simple answer to prevent the judicial system overloading is to create or appoint an agency, which sues a spammer in bulk (just like they offend in bulk).
Incedents are pooled, and complainants get $9 out of their $10 gains, and the agency keeps the remaining $1; Amounts may of course vary, but given a large enough audience, someone can make a small profit while stamping out the spam.
(Hopefully this makes sense, it's been that kind of day..)
Thankyou for contacting us regarding the incorrect charges to your credit card from Porn-O-Matic Inc.
According to the new code of conduct aggreed to by the internet sex industry, you should only have been charged for six hours viewing, and not the seven hours charged.
We trust that the matter has been resolved to your expectations.
May we also take this oppertunity to inform you of our member discounts from Grabbit, Floggit, and Leggit partners, Divorce lawyers.
Sky Digital, who are responsible for the bulk of channels on the Astra 2A satellite, a full list of which can be found here already has, on transponder 25, 60 channels of nonstop no-DJ no-Ads channels of digital music. I guess it's not bad if you like that sort of thing, but I'm willing to put up with short commercials if there's a decent DJ who can liven up the programming.
About 15 of these channels are part of the standard SKY Digital subscription with the remainder being a pay-for add on option. I don't see any figures showing how many people actually take them up.
I'm happy with the programme content of that system, but I'm sometimes vigen to wonder what happens to all the data that their 'free' recievers collect. To get a free dish and box, you have to agree to have your box connected to the phone line for 12 months, and each week, the box sends back a list of what you have watched. If this is compiled for advertising revenue ratings purposes, fair enough, but the possibility for abuse is huge.
Finally, if you want inane background music for shops, it's also there. A number of stores use satelite radio for their background muzak. ASDA (a UK supermarket group) have their Asda FM on the Astra 1 analogue satelite, and Costcutter (a smaller UK chain) use Astra 1D.
Slashdot Mirror
Like a lot of the stuff Commodore put out back then, it was before it's time. Windows still hasn't learned from some of their innovations.
;-)
The disk format used on the 1541 and its predecessors (1540, 4040, etc.) was a technological marvel of it's day. Only thirty-five tracks, single sided, variable number of sectors per track, and the directory in the middle on track 18. Each sector was written in GCR format, allowing far higher data density than acheived on the IBM 9-sector format.
If they developed it further, we'd have had 82-track, double sided, double density floppies, holding more than a megabyte, and the 3.5" floppy might not be here today.
The wonderful thing about GCR as opposed to MFM encoding is that MFM wastes an awful lot of space with phase changes. GCR records more actual data, but each group code (the five bits that translate to four bits of actual data) is designed such that you never get more than eight 1-bits in a row, or more than two 0-bits in a row. This way you are guaranteed a phase change within a certain period, so the signal from the read head is kept 'moving'. The practical upshot of all this is that you can crank the GCR encoded data out onto the diskette at a faster rate than plain old MFM.
Putting the directory in the middle of the disk, along with the block allocation bitmap, lowered the average seek time, as the head a less distance to travel. The Amiga continued this, putting the disk home block, from which everything grew outwards, onto track 40.
Variable sectors per track (ranging from 21 on tracks 01-17, 19 on tracks 18-24, 17 on tracks 25-30, and 16 on tracks 31-35 (I'm guessing a little here)) allowed for greater data density without compromising data integrity on the inner tracks by exceeding the amount that could be reliably stored there. Hard disks today use a similar method, which is why the number of blocks on a disk might not equal the multiplied up values of cylinders, heads, and sectors. (LBA mode vs. CHS mode).
Of course, the thing about the CBM drives that made them the most fun drives to play with was the onboard 6502 processor with its 2k of memory, allowing you to download and execute code in the drive, speeding it up, flashing error messages in morse code on the LED, or even playing music using the stepper motor. (Actually, we used to do that with RL02's too, but it's equally unrecommended
By 'eck. Them were t' days.
One of the problems, atleast over here in the UK is that the recording companies are also the major record distributors, and virtually no high street shop (Woolworths, WH Smith, Our Price, Virgin, etc.) will deal with people outside of these select few companies.
While the internet revolution will undoubtedly get small-time musicians a channel to get their work out to a new audience, the traditional audience, whose only connection with the internet is via a closed set-top-box that just happens to do Email, will not be able to buy these records unless they are taken up by the big distributors.
So, the barriers to entry into the music market, which as an artist, is probably the only way to make a living at it, are still very firmly in place.
Just my 2
Apparently (according to some documentary or other on the Discovery channel UK tonight, which I didn't really take in, being too busy with other stuff), the moon is slowly receding from us. In a few million years we'll lose it. This is due to gravitational friction, caused by the effect the moon's gravity has on earth's oceans.
There's some more on the receding moon here Be warned that the site that URL points to is an anti-creationist site. Not that you'd find me sharing any daft ideas with creationists, but its probably blocked if you live in certain less than enlightened states of the USA.
One way of fixing this is to dam the worlds oceans. That's one heck of a barrier..
An alternative would be to steal a moon off another planet. Scientists have pointed at Europa as a 'suitable' satellite.
Personally I don't plan on being about when they try and insert Europa into Earth orbit; if they miss, the results could be, err, sorta messy.
Not that I can think of a better one right now.
/bin/bash yet...
We all know that if you take enough low-powered machines, of the sort that anyone can get hold of, such as low-end pentiums, even 486's, etc. and stick them in a big enough warehouse, you can build machines that will out-compute any commercially available off-the-shelf single supercomputer. You only have to look at the Stone SouperComputer to see what is possible.
Hopefully, Saddam hasn't got the hang of
Well, you could always apply to a certain IT company in the UK. Currently rewarding their staff for their loyalty by asking them to volunteer colleagues for the sack, to be replaced by cheaper labour from outside the UK. Successful volunteering is rewarded by a GBP 1,000 bonus.
Sorry, no useful links, but you'll get the general idea here
After a great deal of mucking about, the general situation in europe is that numbers outside your local area start with '0', followed by an area code and a local number.
Numbers outside your local country start with '00' followed by a country code, an area code, and a local number.
Of course we do it differently over here to the way the USA does it, but I think that atleast the '00' seems more logical.
It follows that when dialling other planets, one should simply dial '000' followed by the planet code, country code, area code, and local number.
Galaxy-wide that becomes '0000' (assuming inhabitants of other galaxies have ten fingers/tentacles/etc. or we WILL be counting in hexadecimal)
However, the area codes in the UK have been playing silly b****rs over recent years. Down here in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the area code was once 705, so dialling Portsmouth from, say, London was 0705 xxxxxx.
The first major change was to change the London '01' code to 071 and 081; depending on whether you were in inner or outer London (071 for inner london), this left the 01 prefix free.
The second major change was to add a '1' to the front of the vast majority of area codes in the UK, so Portsmouth went from 0705 to 01705. Some cities opened up new codes starting 011, such as Bristol, where 0272 became 0117, and to keep the length of all national dialled numbers constant, the local numbers were extended from their old 6-digits to 7-digits, by sticking a '9' on the front of existing numbers. So 0272 654321 became 0117 9654321.
Next up, as local number ranges started to run out of numbers, as everyone got second lines for internet use, and the number of local telco's, each with different number block assignments exploded, some areas started to run out of numbers.
One of the affected cities was Portsmouth, and together with Southampton, they were allocated the new area code 023, with local numbers being prefixed with 92 for Portsmouth, and 80 for Southampton, so we had to put up with two number changes in just a few years. Old numbers like 0705 654321 became 023 92654321.
At the end of the day, it's not particularly difficult to remember, and lots of publicity went into the changeover, although that was local to the UK. I dread to think of the number of misdialled international calls; a number of countries charge for unconnected international calls. Ouch.
Anyway, the UK telephone system now appears to approaching some sort of consistency. National area codes now all begin 01xxx, or 02x, with room for expansion into 03x. Special rate numbers start 08xxx, and premium rate (some as high as GBP 5.00/minute) are 09xxx.
Over here is a list of all of the information you never wanted to know about UK telephone code assignments, but were too bored to ask.
I just went to the media cabinet here at the office; our current stock of CD-R's are Sony CDQ-74CP's.
These particular discs are allegedly 'Full Colour Printable', and say on the back of the jewel case 'Full colour printing possible with ink jet printers with water-based ink'.
Erm. right. We have seven different types of inkjet printer here in the office, but none of them have a sufficiently straight paper path to avoid snapping the CD, or scratching the data face to death, not to mention what taking those expensive ink cartridges for a scrape across polycarbonate would do for the budget.
Flexible CD's? Now you're talking. With any luck, these will even go around the bends in the Deskjet 690C.
We log all incoming and outgoing email, although we only log headers, not content. We deliver all mail ourselves if we can, dispatching it directly to the MX for the domain, which seems to work out a little faster than letting Demon Internet do it.
Some ISP's in the UK, particularly FreeServe, force all outgoing port 25 connections to connect to their own mail servers, so you don't have an option to route mail yourselves. Because FreeServe use dynamic IP's, this may well be justified, as a number of sites are particularly unwilling to take mail from any IP which is listed in the ORBS Dialup list, and quite a lot of SPAM gets sent that way.
Try it for yourself. Telnet to the MX host for a domain, such as punt-1.demon.co.uk, port 25.. i.e.
$ telnet punt-1.demon.co.uk 25
If you don't see
220 punt-10.mail.demon.net Server SMTP (Complaints/bugs to: postmaster@demon.net)
then your connection has been redirected, and your ISP is probably logging all of your direct transfers too.
There were moves underfoot to make ISP's log all transfers to and from their customers. I don't beleive Demon Internet implement that at this time, but I'm sure they could, if they wanted to. At the end of the day, who is going to pay for the storage.
When space gets tight on the mailserver, the logs are the first thing that nuked. We only keep them incase there is a problem and we need to trace back.
Some time ago in the UK, the government planned to introduce a levy on the price of blank audio tapes, on the grounds that it would help make good the shortfall on revenues caused by people taping music. As far as I am aware, there is no similar tax on blank CD media, even though it is obviously used for pirating music, and not for making software distributions, perfectly legal linux CD's, or exchanging the fruits of your labors with others.
There was an article in 1992 in Wired magazine, as annotated by Richard Stallman here which looks at a similar tax on digital media.
I was working on the basis that you typically get ten (rounded down quite considerably) audio CD's on a CD-R with MP3's, which is 10x80 minutes = 800 minutes in 700Mb, so if 800 minutes is 700Mb, 81,000Mb = 64.25 days. Oh bugger, I did get that a bit wrong didn't I.
Oh friend computer! The commies have got to my calculator already!
Shut up Jim!
Assuming a typical (at 128kbps) compression of around 10:1, and a typical 80 minute CD holding 700Mb (I know that's not an exact match), thats 157 hours worth of music on a disk, or slightly under a week's worth.
How long do you plan to drive with that thing on?
> Online voting will change all that...
Some sort of data will need to be retained, if only to prevent ballot stuffing. However, I think that any change of constitution that allows for on-line voting MUST ensure that not even the government can access records of who voted for who, and ideally, that these records must be destroyed once the election results have been accepted as valid.
Neither of us live in a police state, atleast not officially. What with the regulation of investagatory powers act, etc., we're getting very close over here, but political freedom is still not against the law, despite my comments above.
If the UK used mechanical voting booths, we'd get far faster results, but the whole process is steeped in so much needless tradition that shows no sign of changing anytime soon, that whatever abuses are possible, they will continue to be possible for some time now.
Personally, I'd like to see electronic voting in the UK parliament; this business of piling members of parliament through 'Aye' and 'No' lobbies is about 200 years out of date. However, you suggest they should change this, and you get laughed at. This comes from the same group of people who refuse to have toilets labelled appropriately. (Most of the toilets in the houses of parliament at Westminster are labelled 'Members Only' and are for men only). Hopefully, the new speaker of the house will drag the house kicking and screaming into the 20th century.
In the UK, the electoral register is a public document which is compiled by the local authority every year around this time. (The final version is supposed to be published on November 1st).
Anyone can inspect the electoral register, and copies are available (for a fee) for any company wanting it, in machine readable form, so that they can, for instance, check you are not giving them dud details on a credit application. It contains your full name, house address, and also date of birth for persons between 16 and 18 years of age.
As your date of birth is one of the standard security questions asked by credit card companies when calling in to their telephone service lines, that strikes me as a security risk.
Each voter gets a number in the register, such as J 4572. This is printed on your poll card which you take to the polling station to cast your vote (you don't need it, they have printed copies of the register there, and can look up your voter number there).
Most people assume that elections are private matters between the voters and the ballot box. The totals are obviously public information, but can you tell how a particular person voted?
The answer in most cases is no, however the polling station staff write on their register the number of the ballot paper you are given, which means it is, in theory atleast, possible to trace who voted for which candidate.
At this time it isn't a crime to vote for any candidate, and anyone who has sufficient support and pays their election deposit can be a candidate, hence the number of crazy candidates from parties such as The Official Monster Raving Loony Party and other less than serious candidates.
Kind of makes you wish there was an official monster raving loony running for the US presidency eh? [They are both fully paid up members - Ed]
I have a huge pile of DEC Sources, everything needed to build from scratch a VAX/VMS system (versions 2.0 up to 4.4). I also have piles of technical information and design information for buckets of DEC PDP/11 and VAX hardware. All of the above has been acquired lawfully over the past 20 years.
Am I therefore prohibited in using my personal knowledge to benefit open source software? Do I have to seek Compaq's permission to release open source software?
On a wider note, as I work with closed source software all day as part of my normal job, does this also disqualify me participating in OSS projects? I don't think so, because if it did, a lot of people on the linux kernel credits list would be in trouble for a start.
What if any Microsoft programmers, who have presumably legally seen sources, joined an OSS project? Would Microsoft be able to stop them? The possibility for nasty legal precendents is rather alarming.
I lose count of the number of times I have to go and reset user preferences on the internal web at work when an installation of MS Internet Exploder that the user has somehow acquired and installed resets options like 'Always check for Internet explorer updates', and stops the user seeing our internal home page when they start up.
Yes, on our internal net, do not adjust your computer, we are in control of what you see and do during the next half hour!
Presumably, this is hard coded into the software or a registry setting somewhere then? Perhaps it can be overwritten? Word Macro anyone?
With microsoft HTML generator's idea that means 'default font size' and not "Why, hello netscape, please render this font as an unintellible series of dots", how much can they fit on 150 pages? Do legal documents have to be a particular number of words per page? Presumably they are on 'legal' paper (how do I know, I'm from Europe where we have highly descriptive paper sizes like 'A4'). Will MS lawyers be able to resist using all those new truetype fonts all over the page?
I ask only for information.
Here I go, thinking aloud again. Someone reach for the volume control...
;-)).
Talk to most people who consider themselves proficient computer users, and they will be horrified at the sort of thing you can find lying around on disks.
How many times have you allocated a large file on disk without writing to it and found all sorts of interesting things lurking in there with 'strings'?
There are of course many ways that users and programmers can prevent information leakage on multi-user systems this way. Erase on allocate, erase on delete, etc. However, how many word processors are in the habit of doing the same with memory, doing the equivalent of mlock() on the document pages, (the techniques employed by MS word seem to be to gobble all your memory, thus leaving nothing to allocate
I've noticed, that when we ran our product on windows NT, a simple fopen()..fseek(several hundred megs)..fwrite()..fclose() took forever, because it seems to insist on writing all the intervening blocks. Could this be a security thing (and how do I turn it off? or is it a bug).
Back to the subject, Joe public would be horrified to find that his data doesn't go away when he thinks it does. Methinks encrypted filesystems are the answer (different file, different key).
Finally something interesting on Radio 4. (Atleast more interesting than the shipping forecast, which was about as good as it got after they mashed 'Week Ending', and is about the only thing on when I'm up and hacking)...
Catch this really great line from the last show:
Bailey: Cyclonic become northwesterly 7 to severe gale 9 decreasing 5. Showers. Moderate or good.
But 11AM, that's like, in the morning when I'm due to be asleep at my desk at the office. No repeats. I could try and tape it, as I can get Radio 4 off Astra 2A on the digital service, but they don't build a timer into that thing on the grounds that "You can watch what you want, when you want to watch it". Either I haven't found the tardis controls, or nobody has told the broadcasters that!.
As I understand it, if you are not a common carrier, you are wide open to legal action from your customers.
For instance, I go to www.verynastystuff.org, and I'm offended by what I see. Do I complain to postmaster@verynastystuff.org, or do I sue my ISP for delivering that content?
This could mean that ISP's will become paranoid, and you, the customer, will only be able to see what they feel will not alarm you.
Joo-Janta-200.net Peril Sensitive ISP Anyone?
> No, I'm sorry. The only way to get an A+ is to do everything without records in a haphazard fashion, without even knowing why you're doing it yourself.
So why do government departments score D-? Most government departments don't know why they do what they do..
Courtesy of the Regulation of Investagatory Powers bill (otherwise known as RIP), many government departments in the UK don't know why they have to intercept communications by people they don't know on subjects they don't care about, using technology they don't understand. This scores A+ by government standards. Why?
It makes a change for someone not to jump onto the nearest 'internet' bandwagon that comes their way.
However, news agencies such as Reuters are paid good money by many news broadcasters (BBC, NBC, ITN, CNN etc.) - I doubt very much that the likes of Yahoo! get Reuters newsfeeds for free.
This raises the question of who owns news. Once any 'authorised' news broadcaster has revealed who, say, won the long jump competition, it becomes public knowledge. How can you prevent a web site reporting that? People who are interested (some people are, I suppose) in sports results will talk about it. To prevent that sounds like excessive restraint on free speech.
A simple answer to prevent the judicial system overloading is to create or appoint an agency, which sues a spammer in bulk (just like they offend in bulk).
Incedents are pooled, and complainants get $9 out of their $10 gains, and the agency keeps the remaining $1; Amounts may of course vary, but given a large enough audience, someone can make a small profit while stamping out the spam.
(Hopefully this makes sense, it's been that kind of day..)
For what it's worth, Here is a link to the full text of the legislation passed by the house of commons.
Thankyou for contacting us regarding the incorrect charges to your credit card from Porn-O-Matic Inc.
According to the new code of conduct aggreed to by the internet sex industry, you should only have been charged for six hours viewing, and not the seven hours charged.
We trust that the matter has been resolved to your expectations.
May we also take this oppertunity to inform you of our member discounts from Grabbit, Floggit, and Leggit partners, Divorce lawyers.
Sky Digital, who are responsible for the bulk of channels on the Astra 2A satellite, a full list of which can be found here already has, on transponder 25, 60 channels of nonstop no-DJ no-Ads channels of digital music. I guess it's not bad if you like that sort of thing, but I'm willing to put up with short commercials if there's a decent DJ who can liven up the programming.
About 15 of these channels are part of the standard SKY Digital subscription with the remainder being a pay-for add on option. I don't see any figures showing how many people actually take them up.
I'm happy with the programme content of that system, but I'm sometimes vigen to wonder what happens to all the data that their 'free' recievers collect. To get a free dish and box, you have to agree to have your box connected to the phone line for 12 months, and each week, the box sends back a list of what you have watched. If this is compiled for advertising revenue ratings purposes, fair enough, but the possibility for abuse is huge.
Finally, if you want inane background music for shops, it's also there. A number of stores use satelite radio for their background muzak. ASDA (a UK supermarket group) have their Asda FM on the Astra 1 analogue satelite, and Costcutter (a smaller UK chain) use Astra 1D.