In the UK, anyone arrested for any alleged offence is fingerprinted (and palmprinted), photographed and DNA samples taken. If they aren't then charged with the crime, or it goes to court and they are released as not guilty, the police still get to hold onto all the biometrics.
This process has gone to the European Court of Human Rights, and found to be wrong, but the UK Government haven't worked out what to do about that ruling.
Wind kills birds? I've done quite a bit of walking around windfarms, and have never seen a dead bird and blood on the turbine blades.
Admittedly, wind turbines will create turbulent airflows, which any aviating species (including humans) would prefer not to be near, so it wouldn't surprise me if statistically there are fewer birds in an area after a wind farm has been erected.
Wind turbines should be at sea, where there's lots of wind, and no pesky hills and buildings to create turbulent airflow. Actually, if they could combine wind turbines on the same pylon as tidal turbines, that would be quite an excellent use of resources.
Indeed, and ZFS makes it utterly trivial to add new disks to the pool, so if you're getting short on space, go down to your local computer retailer, and add a few of those cheap half a terabyte external disks to your system. If you are running a laptop, then get yourself a bigger disk.
and I get annoyed when the average fuel consumption meter in my car maxes out at 150.0mp(imperial)g. I know it is doing better, but it never reads more than 150.0.
(Admittedly, this is after resetting it at the top of a long straight downhill stretch on a motorway). It normally reads about 60 miles per (imperial) gallon (approx 50 miles per us gallon, or 4.7 litres per 100km) at the end of a tank. The stupid trip computer won't let me work in metric, and is forced to work in obsolete units.
Anyway, I think the reason why European cars are doing so well on efficiency is that there's various legislation stating that motor manufacturers products should produce less CO2 across the range, which has the nice knock-on-effect of reducing the fuel consumption. Of course, Porsche hate legislation like that, since they only make powerful cars, and Ferrari also have problems complying.
So it won't be too long before unscrupulous cashiers (or their handlers) fit optical scanners on their clandestine card skimmers to read the CVV2 (and signature - why not) from the back of the card whilst the mag stripe is being swiped.
At least with chip and pin stuff, the ATMs in the countries that support it will actively compare magstrip with data read from the ICC, and probably reject transactions or retain the card if they suspect fraud (eg. if the auth request says there was only a mag stripe, but the issuer says that card should have a chip on it, then they get rejected). This just means that the skimmed card clones end up being used in countries that still only use mag stripe.. Which is fairly easy for the fraud triggers at the card issuer to work their magic. Cardholder present in geographically disparate locations within a few hours.. That sort of thing.
Fibre to the street cabinet, and then a DSLAM in the street cabinet means they don't have to disrupt customers too much, or make access appointments and so on, but it would mean maximum of ADSL2+ speeds.
Digging up streets is extremely expensive and labour-intensive, which is why when all the little local cable companies had built their networks, they had very little money to invest in the actual serice, and they ended up being taken over by what eventually merged into Virgin Media.
Virgin Media seem to have no intention in laying cable to areas that never got finished in the initial build 12 years or so ago, and villages and small towns will probably never get cable. Remote rural users won't either.
Even if BT Openreach did run fibre to the street cabinet, there are many lines in rural locations that are many km from the nearest street cabinet, and wouldn't be able to get much better service if the DSLAM were relocated closer to their premises, and BT Openreach are hardly likely to install fibre to a new cabinet and install a DSLAM that is only going to serve 10 houses in a remote hamlet.
It takes considerably more than 4 minutes to patch XP, even from a local copy of all the service packs and patches on a USB hard drive. More like 2 hours if you haven't got the updates scripted, and at least 30 minutes if it's all scripted.
If you factor in that the average user doesn't have all those service packs and hotfixes archived, and need to download from the internet... It's toast.
I had the unfortunate experience of taking delivery of a new Laptop that had Vista on it, and at the time, the only Internet connection available was a dial-up. After five hours online, it still hadn't finished downloading the updates.
This makes me think - why can't Microsoft's updates just patch files that is already on the disk, rather than replacing the entire binary? This is hardly new technology.
It's getting there. More and more hybrids on the road, and there's getting to be more 'traditional' vehicles with systems like CitroÃn's stop-start, or BMW Efficient Dynamics, which although not hybrids in the Prius/Civic sense, do stop the engines automatically when the vehicle doesn't need them on to move.
Of course, you won't get total silence because some people will still be listening to break beat music through sound systems fitted to the back of the car that use more kilowatts than the motor, and cost more than the car.
I use a freeloader solar charger, with the add-on "Supercharger" solar panel. I did consider making up something like a Mintyboost, or something that charges via an ultracapacitor and a non-friction generator, but the output of this generator (7V 25mA pulses) isn't really enough to charge the phone.
Agree that the N95 battery life is poor. Before I got that, I found that switching off 3g, not playing MP3s, switching off wifi scanning got substantially better battery life when doing GPS stuff.
Strangely, it's exactly how OS/2 did it with it's services.. Which Microsoft then copied into NT.. and so on down the food chain to Vista.
Not really a new idea. It's been out for nearly two decades now.
It's just that typically, improving the boot speed of unix systems hasn't been that much of an issue - since a traditional unix host doesn't power down or reboot unless kernel updating is required, or other power reasons.
If your DHCP servers can't cope with a few thousand requests in a minute, it's high time to get the DHCP server software replaced. DHCP is such a simple protocol.
Mind you, this reminds me of a time, long ago, when I was testing HP-UX in a university lab environment as a shared unix host. inetd wasn't multi-threaded at that time, and it waited until one request was fully forked before dealing with the next one. The upshot of which was that if you had a classroom of 30 students trying to log into the host with telnet (remember that? We're talking before the days of ssh), then by the time the 30th student had managed to get the login prompt, it was time for the class to finish. We ended up buying Sun instead.
None of which are in the EU, or the United Kingdom. Their telephone numbering is part of the UK dialling plan, but they have their own telcos; and many UK telcos don't offer inclusive minutes to those area codes. If you take a UK mobile phone there, you are roaming, and have to pay for incoming calls.
Last time I looked, you didn't need a static IP address on the target machine in order to send a wake-on-lan packet, you need the MAC address, and an ability to get that packet onto the same LAN as the target machine. For a college campus, where you have control of all the routers, it would be easy to arrange the wake-on-lan packets to be sent to all of the college's subnets.
It's called rental. If I need to haul half a tonne of junk to the appropriate municipal recyling point, I'd rent a truck or van. It would cost me about £40. There is absolutely no point in my owning, taxing, insuring and filling the fuel tank of a large vehicle that I only need once or twice a year.
Either that or rent a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_(container). A big truck comes to deliver it. I fill it, a big truck comes to collect it and dispose of the contents.
Strange. I was thinking of precisely that song when I passed a school today, they had bike sheds, with CCTV cameras front and back, and yes, they had loudspeakers on the CCTV cameras.
"You! Yes, you behind the bike sheds: Stop smoking that cigarette, laddy"
Body weight: in kilograms (ask any medical professional) Body height: in metres (ask any medical professional) Beer: In imperial pints, but only if it's draught beer, in bottles it's all in litres. Milk: In litres, unless it's in returnable bottles. (My milkman delivers in litres)
I have on my machine at least four versions of Sun's Java runtime. I need at least four versions to run the various Java applications that I need. This is because Sun keep deprecating and eventually breaking API calls that were previously in favour.
Some will only run on 1.1.3 Some will only run on 1.3.1 Some will only run on 1.3.2 Some will only run on 1.5
Write once, run anywhere, yeah right.
Re:Outlook is where its at
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
nice. Auto-installation of malware. Yeah, go off and run random code in, or referred to, by an unsolicited email message, without user intervention.
If this is the UK (or elsewhere in the EU, which has broadly similar legislation)..
Get your friend to serve their employer with a Data Protection Act request (no need to contact a lawyer), asking for all data pertaining to themselves and their movements recorded by the company.
The person holding the data can charge a reasonable fee (no more than GBP 10, I seem to recall).
This covers CCTV systems, computer records and paperwork.
If nothing is forthcoming regarding the CCTV footage, report them to the Information Commissioner (see http://www.data-protection.gov.uk/ , there's plenty of good information there)
That's a nice email your list is sending out. It would be a shame it any of it went missing or rejected.
You should get it insured. My brother Guiseppe, he runs a insurance firm that specialises in this area.
It's all very well having a system suspend to disk and effectively stop processing until an external event happens.
If you happen to have network connections to another machine, the other machine won't know about this until it tries to send a packet, and never gets an acknowledgement.
When the system wakes up again, all the apps by default think nothing has happened, and network sessions just die. All you ssh sessions and the like are dead, and need re-connecting.
That's why the OS needs some sort of signalling to the apps that such an event has happened, and it's up to the application designers to get their application to handle this accordingly. Sadly, this is beyond the architecture of many network applications. I can't think of an implementation of ssh/sshd that will indeed pick up where the client left off when it went into suspense, despite the server thinking it's dropped off the network and tcp timeout happens.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK, anyone arrested for any alleged offence is fingerprinted (and palmprinted), photographed and DNA samples taken. If they aren't then charged with the crime, or it goes to court and they are released as not guilty, the police still get to hold onto all the biometrics. This process has gone to the European Court of Human Rights, and found to be wrong, but the UK Government haven't worked out what to do about that ruling.
Wind kills birds? I've done quite a bit of walking around windfarms, and have never seen a dead bird and blood on the turbine blades. Admittedly, wind turbines will create turbulent airflows, which any aviating species (including humans) would prefer not to be near, so it wouldn't surprise me if statistically there are fewer birds in an area after a wind farm has been erected. Wind turbines should be at sea, where there's lots of wind, and no pesky hills and buildings to create turbulent airflow. Actually, if they could combine wind turbines on the same pylon as tidal turbines, that would be quite an excellent use of resources.
Indeed, and ZFS makes it utterly trivial to add new disks to the pool, so if you're getting short on space, go down to your local computer retailer, and add a few of those cheap half a terabyte external disks to your system. If you are running a laptop, then get yourself a bigger disk.
Anyway, I think the reason why European cars are doing so well on efficiency is that there's various legislation stating that motor manufacturers products should produce less CO2 across the range, which has the nice knock-on-effect of reducing the fuel consumption. Of course, Porsche hate legislation like that, since they only make powerful cars, and Ferrari also have problems complying.
So it won't be too long before unscrupulous cashiers (or their handlers) fit optical scanners on their clandestine card skimmers to read the CVV2 (and signature - why not) from the back of the card whilst the mag stripe is being swiped. At least with chip and pin stuff, the ATMs in the countries that support it will actively compare magstrip with data read from the ICC, and probably reject transactions or retain the card if they suspect fraud (eg. if the auth request says there was only a mag stripe, but the issuer says that card should have a chip on it, then they get rejected). This just means that the skimmed card clones end up being used in countries that still only use mag stripe.. Which is fairly easy for the fraud triggers at the card issuer to work their magic. Cardholder present in geographically disparate locations within a few hours.. That sort of thing.
Digging up streets is extremely expensive and labour-intensive, which is why when all the little local cable companies had built their networks, they had very little money to invest in the actual serice, and they ended up being taken over by what eventually merged into Virgin Media. Virgin Media seem to have no intention in laying cable to areas that never got finished in the initial build 12 years or so ago, and villages and small towns will probably never get cable. Remote rural users won't either.
Even if BT Openreach did run fibre to the street cabinet, there are many lines in rural locations that are many km from the nearest street cabinet, and wouldn't be able to get much better service if the DSLAM were relocated closer to their premises, and BT Openreach are hardly likely to install fibre to a new cabinet and install a DSLAM that is only going to serve 10 houses in a remote hamlet.
It takes considerably more than 4 minutes to patch XP, even from a local copy of all the service packs and patches on a USB hard drive. More like 2 hours if you haven't got the updates scripted, and at least 30 minutes if it's all scripted. If you factor in that the average user doesn't have all those service packs and hotfixes archived, and need to download from the internet... It's toast. I had the unfortunate experience of taking delivery of a new Laptop that had Vista on it, and at the time, the only Internet connection available was a dial-up. After five hours online, it still hadn't finished downloading the updates. This makes me think - why can't Microsoft's updates just patch files that is already on the disk, rather than replacing the entire binary? This is hardly new technology.
It's getting there. More and more hybrids on the road, and there's getting to be more 'traditional' vehicles with systems like CitroÃn's stop-start, or BMW Efficient Dynamics, which although not hybrids in the Prius/Civic sense, do stop the engines automatically when the vehicle doesn't need them on to move. Of course, you won't get total silence because some people will still be listening to break beat music through sound systems fitted to the back of the car that use more kilowatts than the motor, and cost more than the car.
I use a freeloader solar charger, with the add-on "Supercharger" solar panel. I did consider making up something like a Mintyboost, or something that charges via an ultracapacitor and a non-friction generator, but the output of this generator (7V 25mA pulses) isn't really enough to charge the phone. Agree that the N95 battery life is poor. Before I got that, I found that switching off 3g, not playing MP3s, switching off wifi scanning got substantially better battery life when doing GPS stuff.
Strangely, it's exactly how OS/2 did it with it's services.. Which Microsoft then copied into NT.. and so on down the food chain to Vista. Not really a new idea. It's been out for nearly two decades now. It's just that typically, improving the boot speed of unix systems hasn't been that much of an issue - since a traditional unix host doesn't power down or reboot unless kernel updating is required, or other power reasons.
If your DHCP servers can't cope with a few thousand requests in a minute, it's high time to get the DHCP server software replaced. DHCP is such a simple protocol.
Mind you, this reminds me of a time, long ago, when I was testing HP-UX in a university lab environment as a shared unix host. inetd wasn't multi-threaded at that time, and it waited until one request was fully forked before dealing with the next one. The upshot of which was that if you had a classroom of 30 students trying to log into the host with telnet (remember that? We're talking before the days of ssh), then by the time the 30th student had managed to get the login prompt, it was time for the class to finish. We ended up buying Sun instead.
Isle of Man
Jersey
Guernsey
None of which are in the EU, or the United Kingdom. Their telephone numbering is part of the UK dialling plan, but they have their own telcos; and many UK telcos don't offer inclusive minutes to those area codes. If you take a UK mobile phone there, you are roaming, and have to pay for incoming calls.
They all market themselves as tax havens.
Makes me think who NEEDS to run a petrol vehicle with an engine size of over 2.5 litres capacity? Most cars in the UK are less than 2 litres anyway.
Last time I looked, you didn't need a static IP address on the target machine in order to send a wake-on-lan packet, you need the MAC address, and an ability to get that packet onto the same LAN as the target machine. For a college campus, where you have control of all the routers, it would be easy to arrange the wake-on-lan packets to be sent to all of the college's subnets.
It's called rental. If I need to haul half a tonne of junk to the appropriate municipal recyling point, I'd rent a truck or van. It would cost me about £40. There is absolutely no point in my owning, taxing, insuring and filling the fuel tank of a large vehicle that I only need once or twice a year. Either that or rent a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_(container). A big truck comes to deliver it. I fill it, a big truck comes to collect it and dispose of the contents.
Strange. I was thinking of precisely that song when I passed a school today, they had bike sheds, with CCTV cameras front and back, and yes, they had loudspeakers on the CCTV cameras.
"You! Yes, you behind the bike sheds: Stop smoking that cigarette, laddy"
Oh well, at least they can eat their meat.
Nope. You can bid for it all you like. Buyer collects. Terms: Cash on collection.
Body weight: in kilograms (ask any medical professional)
Body height: in metres (ask any medical professional)
Beer: In imperial pints, but only if it's draught beer, in bottles it's all in litres.
Milk: In litres, unless it's in returnable bottles. (My milkman delivers in litres)
Like Sun do with the various flavours of the JDK.
I have on my machine at least four versions of Sun's Java runtime. I need at least four versions to run the various Java applications that I need. This is because Sun keep deprecating and eventually breaking API calls that were previously in favour.
Some will only run on 1.1.3
Some will only run on 1.3.1
Some will only run on 1.3.2
Some will only run on 1.5
Write once, run anywhere, yeah right.
nice. Auto-installation of malware. Yeah, go off and run random code in, or referred to, by an unsolicited email message, without user intervention.
If this is the UK (or elsewhere in the EU, which has broadly similar legislation).. Get your friend to serve their employer with a Data Protection Act request (no need to contact a lawyer), asking for all data pertaining to themselves and their movements recorded by the company. The person holding the data can charge a reasonable fee (no more than GBP 10, I seem to recall). This covers CCTV systems, computer records and paperwork. If nothing is forthcoming regarding the CCTV footage, report them to the Information Commissioner (see http://www.data-protection.gov.uk/ , there's plenty of good information there)
That's a nice email your list is sending out. It would be a shame it any of it went missing or rejected. You should get it insured. My brother Guiseppe, he runs a insurance firm that specialises in this area.
It's all very well having a system suspend to disk and effectively stop processing until an external event happens.
If you happen to have network connections to another machine, the other machine won't know about this until it tries to send a packet, and never gets an acknowledgement.
When the system wakes up again, all the apps by default think nothing has happened, and network sessions just die. All you ssh sessions and the like are dead, and need re-connecting.
That's why the OS needs some sort of signalling to the apps that such an event has happened, and it's up to the application designers to get their application to handle this accordingly. Sadly, this is beyond the architecture of many network applications. I can't think of an implementation of ssh/sshd that will indeed pick up where the client left off when it went into suspense, despite the server thinking it's dropped off the network and tcp timeout happens.
1. roadkill
2. wrap in foil
3. engine block
4. eat
and the serial port.. Even Windows still comes with something that can do x/y/z modem and Kermit.