I'd disagree with the "will need a new aerial" statements in the ukfree.tv link. It assumes that in areas where signals can be received from more than one transmitter a non-wideband aerial would previously have been installed. Whilst in some cases that might be true, in most cases (and all in my experience) I suspect that it isn't. Before ITV homogenised its programming many people would have TVs tuned to "the other" ITV channel as well as the normal one in order to see for example different films broadcast at night.
Incidentally, Freeview's postcode checker seems to be intentionally pessimistic - it says "Unfortunately you can't receive the Freeview channels in your area now" for me but I can receive 4 of the 6 multiplexes reliably with the crappy old aerial that's been on my roof for at least 30 years.
The reg link is a comment article rather than a story - and it generated a lot of responses questioning the independence of the author!
The real reason why we "need" digital TV is so that spectrum can be sold off. Ultimately it's a way of raising money that would otherwise come from general taxation. There is a question about the many smaller analogue relays - it really depends on what happens in the Border region when that switches. A (relatively) very small number of people will lose coverage when their relays are turned off. I'd be surprised if some of the higher profile cases didn't cause some sort of crude subsidy to be made (ultimately funded by you and I via either the BBC or general taxation) - but it'll be less than the "digital dividend" from the sold spectrum.
It's always struck me as odd that there isn't GSM coverage on the western side of Mount Hamilton - there are actually people living there, it's in direct line of sight from the valley (and only a couple of miles away).
It says "Downloadable BBC Content is available for download within the UK only" rather than "Downloadable BBC Content is available for download by licence payers only". However it also says "You agree... to not download or attempt to download the BBC Content if you are outside the UK". Maybe you could persuade them that you've got very long arms?
I'm not aware of any "protected ability to retransmit content from one place to another" in the UK. There are some new rules in the 2003 copyright act, notably legalising timesharing (see http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2003/20032498.htm#19 ) and a few other specific exemptions, but I'm not aware of anything general.
The resolution seems to be about 500*300. If it was on my TV, it'd fill about a quarter of the screen. On my PC, it's about 10%. When the flash window is maximised, all sorts of horrible artefacts are visible.
This sort of poor picture quality is forgiveable if you're watching "woman falls down hole" on Youtube, but this is supposed to be proper telly, isn't it?
20% has been said previously, but John Hutton's actual comment (which is quoted in the BBC link) was "...wind power to power all UK homes...". He was immediately asked what happened when the wind wasn't blowing, and said something to the effect of "it's always blowing somewhere".
Whilst wind would clearly contribute, I'd much rather rely on a Severn Barrage. If the moon stops orbiting the earth we've got bigger things to worry about.
Any idea if these windmills have an adverse effect on ocean dwelling creatures or can they happily swim around them without trouble? I don't think that flying fish are a major portion of the catch out of the North Sea.
Apart from the large number of Norman French words, most of the Latin and Greek ones were borrowed/stolen a few hundred years ago. Since then the borrowing has continued, but from a wider variety of sources.
Welsh picked up a fair few French words too - bont for bridge, eglwys for church for example.
The first five of those are available analogue (which is currently being phased out); everything is available on a series of digital multiplexes which may or may not be available depending on where you live. If you follow the website links from the Digitalspy page you should be able to get to "who owns what", but in brief the BBC is publicly owned and licence-fee supported, ITV is a standalone company, ad-supported, Channel 4 is publicly owned, ad-supported and Five is owned by RTL.
According to the BBC complaints ruling "two viewers complained". Assuming that one of them was Prof. Repacholi, I must be the other. But then again, I'm probably Spartacus as well.
Since this report was published Panorama was broadcast as usual on Monday night. There was no trailing "we got the wifi program badly wrong" apology, so I've complained again about that - we'll see what happens.
It's worth mentioning that the BBC is going through a sustained period of navel-gazing at the moment, ever since the Hutton Report. Among the items for consideration have been such earth-shattering topics such as the name of the Blue Peter cat http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2007/09/it_fair_knocks_your_socks.html and whether two pieces of film about an unelected German woman had been reversed between the programme and the trail http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7079070.stm. In among this, ensuring basic scientific accuracy in a flagship current-affairs program clearly isn't very important.
If you have ever had an emergency, run for the nearest land line The last time that I had to dial the emergency number was on a motorway bridge a good few miles from anywhere (someone had just turned a car over on the opposite carriageway). Running for the nearest landline would have been quote a jog.
There are lots and lots of telemarketers out there that want to talk to people. There are also lots and lots of people who don't get out much - elderly, live a long way from town, whatever. Shouldn't we be putting one group of people in touch with the other? Even better, people with anger management issues or those who are just having a bad day could sign up for the service, called something like "ripthepissoutofatelemarketer.com" (I haven't checked - maybe it's still available?) and get all of their issues off their chest with someone who actually wants to talk to them!
It should be noticed that the particular groups of people who campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences are terrorists Agreed - but until this particular anonymous person has been convicted of a crime we don't know that they are one.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is still important, even if the people concerned are (a) odious and (b) eventually found guilty. It's not as if there haven't been miscarriages of justice in the past.
I can't believe I'm reading so many "why do I need a firewall on an Internet-connected database server" comments above.
Yes, the article looks like just a press release based on dubious extrapolation of data, but it doesn't mean that it's OK to have your company's application servers around the world capable of being accessed by anyone else around the world. If you trust Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or whoever else to write bug-free code you're a braver man than I.
Re:How is this different than a food chemist?
on
Chefs As Chemists
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Mod parent up - it seems to explain why problems were occurring on some sites and not others. "extend a sincere apology to all impacted customers" even seems like an apology.
So other GPRS / EDGE devices are loading the same page in 11-90 seconds (from the numbers above) and the fact that it's slow on your iPhone is Redhat's fault?
90 seconds on an Xda Orbit (Windows Mobile 6, GPRS only SIM card) 20 seconds on a Blackberry 8800 (GPRS only SIM card) (and about 13 for me with Firefox and Noscript via ADSL)
What's going on here isn't that RIM have some magic beads that make GPRS 4 times faster - different pages are getting served to each device. Redhat serves something pretty close to the "full" page (the same as the PC browser gets), whereas the Blackberry doesn't get sent the graphical tabs arrangement at all (although it does get sent the graphical adverts).
So comparing "address X on device Y" as a test of speed needs to take into account what's actually sent, and how usable it is on the device when it arrives. Redhat.com's actually an example where the Blackberry page is better suited to the device than the Windows Mobile one (it has proper links on rather than a mangled tabset), but this probably isn't typical.
The "silently dropping mails" problem has been around for a while. I've had a Hotmail address for ages - well pre-Microsoft, and tended to use it for lists that I read every now and again. Out of about 20-30 regular list posters it was very repeatedly dropping certain senders - a few UK cable addresses (but not other UK cable addresses), one Gmail and a couple of Hotmail addresses (but not others).
Headers of the dropped mail were all pretty legit - in the case of ISP mail, person's PC SMTPs it to ISP, the servers of which SMTP it to the list, which SMTPs it to Hotmail (in the case of webmail, the webmail servers send it to the list via some route). None of this "silent dropping" seems to be content-dependant (it's always the same senders and always all mails from those senders).
I gave up completely on Hotmail a few months back - to be honest I only keep the account open to say what emails it's dropping.
One thing that the Dutch have got right though, is ensuring that people are well-informed as to their voting options, to help them select the right party to vote for:
Slashdot Mirror
It's apart-height.
(sorry to recycle such an old joke!)
Maybe you'd care to enlighten us?
From looking at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/features.mspx?tab=At%20a%20glance , about the only thing that I can see here that a hard-disk-in-a-box couldn't do is automatic remote backups. If someone's capable of working any backup program (even Windows' delightful "ntbackup") then they're capable of writing a backup to a bit of remote shared disk.
Am I missing anything?
I'd disagree with the "will need a new aerial" statements in the ukfree.tv link. It assumes that in areas where signals can be received from more than one transmitter a non-wideband aerial would previously have been installed. Whilst in some cases that might be true, in most cases (and all in my experience) I suspect that it isn't. Before ITV homogenised its programming many people would have TVs tuned to "the other" ITV channel as well as the normal one in order to see for example different films broadcast at night.
Incidentally, Freeview's postcode checker seems to be intentionally pessimistic - it says "Unfortunately you can't receive the Freeview channels in your area now" for me but I can receive 4 of the 6 multiplexes reliably with the crappy old aerial that's been on my roof for at least 30 years.
The reg link is a comment article rather than a story - and it generated a lot of responses questioning the independence of the author!
The real reason why we "need" digital TV is so that spectrum can be sold off. Ultimately it's a way of raising money that would otherwise come from general taxation. There is a question about the many smaller analogue relays - it really depends on what happens in the Border region when that switches. A (relatively) very small number of people will lose coverage when their relays are turned off. I'd be surprised if some of the higher profile cases didn't cause some sort of crude subsidy to be made (ultimately funded by you and I via either the BBC or general taxation) - but it'll be less than the "digital dividend" from the sold spectrum.
It's always struck me as odd that there isn't GSM coverage on the western side of Mount Hamilton - there are actually people living there, it's in direct line of sight from the valley (and only a couple of miles away).
If you're having trouble sleeping, you could have a look at the Ts and Cs here:
... to not download or attempt to download the BBC Content if you are outside the UK". Maybe you could persuade them that you've got very long arms?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/help/legal/iplayerterms.shtml
It says "Downloadable BBC Content is available for download within the UK only" rather than "Downloadable BBC Content is available for download by licence payers only". However it also says "You agree
I'm not aware of any "protected ability to retransmit content from one place to another" in the UK. There are some new rules in the 2003 copyright act, notably legalising timesharing (see http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2003/20032498.htm#19 ) and a few other specific exemptions, but I'm not aware of anything general.
The resolution seems to be about 500*300. If it was on my TV, it'd fill about a quarter of the screen. On my PC, it's about 10%. When the flash window is maximised, all sorts of horrible artefacts are visible.
This sort of poor picture quality is forgiveable if you're watching "woman falls down hole" on Youtube, but this is supposed to be proper telly, isn't it?
20% has been said previously, but John Hutton's actual comment (which is quoted in the BBC link) was "...wind power to power all UK homes...". He was immediately asked what happened when the wind wasn't blowing, and said something to the effect of "it's always blowing somewhere".
Whilst wind would clearly contribute, I'd much rather rely on a Severn Barrage. If the moon stops orbiting the earth we've got bigger things to worry about.
Apart from the large number of Norman French words, most of the Latin and Greek ones were borrowed/stolen a few hundred years ago. Since then the borrowing has continued, but from a wider variety of sources.
Welsh picked up a fair few French words too - bont for bridge, eglwys for church for example.
The grammar's solidly Germanic, though.
Taking non-satellite, non-cable first, the basic list's here:
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/terrestrial/epg/
The first five of those are available analogue (which is currently being phased out); everything is available on a series of digital multiplexes which may or may not be available depending on where you live. If you follow the website links from the Digitalspy page you should be able to get to "who owns what", but in brief the BBC is publicly owned and licence-fee supported, ITV is a standalone company, ad-supported, Channel 4 is publicly owned, ad-supported and Five is owned by RTL.
The largest satellite operator is Sky TV:
http://www.sky.com/portal/site/skycom/tvguide
(mostly owned by News Corp)
The largest cable operator is Virgin Media
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/websales/service.do?id=1
(standalone company)
According to the BBC complaints ruling "two viewers complained". Assuming that one of them was Prof. Repacholi, I must be the other. But then again, I'm probably Spartacus as well.
Since this report was published Panorama was broadcast as usual on Monday night. There was no trailing "we got the wifi program badly wrong" apology, so I've complained again about that - we'll see what happens.
It's worth mentioning that the BBC is going through a sustained period of navel-gazing at the moment, ever since the Hutton Report. Among the items for consideration have been such earth-shattering topics such as the name of the Blue Peter cat http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2007/09/it_fair_knocks_your_socks.html and whether two pieces of film about an unelected German woman had been reversed between the programme and the trail http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7079070.stm. In among this, ensuring basic scientific accuracy in a flagship current-affairs program clearly isn't very important.
There are lots and lots of telemarketers out there that want to talk to people. There are also lots and lots of people who don't get out much - elderly, live a long way from town, whatever. Shouldn't we be putting one group of people in touch with the other? Even better, people with anger management issues or those who are just having a bad day could sign up for the service, called something like "ripthepissoutofatelemarketer.com" (I haven't checked - maybe it's still available?) and get all of their issues off their chest with someone who actually wants to talk to them!
"Innocent until proven guilty" is still important, even if the people concerned are (a) odious and (b) eventually found guilty. It's not as if there haven't been miscarriages of justice in the past.
I can't believe I'm reading so many "why do I need a firewall on an Internet-connected database server" comments above.
Yes, the article looks like just a press release based on dubious extrapolation of data, but it doesn't mean that it's OK to have your company's application servers around the world capable of being accessed by anyone else around the world. If you trust Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or whoever else to write bug-free code you're a braver man than I.
About 50 quid a head.
...tried to do that but the needle slipped off the side of the record.
Mod parent up - it seems to explain why problems were occurring on some sites and not others. "extend a sincere apology to all impacted customers" even seems like an apology.
That's absolutely beyond belief...
Incredibly, they do offer web design courses:
http://www.hrodc.com/WEB.DESIGN.htm
(Surely it's a joke though? A standard page format, each one populated by "Eliza"?)
So other GPRS / EDGE devices are loading the same page in 11-90 seconds (from the numbers above) and the fact that it's slow on your iPhone is Redhat's fault?
Some more numbers...
90 seconds on an Xda Orbit (Windows Mobile 6, GPRS only SIM card)
20 seconds on a Blackberry 8800 (GPRS only SIM card)
(and about 13 for me with Firefox and Noscript via ADSL)
What's going on here isn't that RIM have some magic beads that make GPRS 4 times faster - different pages are getting served to each device. Redhat serves something pretty close to the "full" page (the same as the PC browser gets), whereas the Blackberry doesn't get sent the graphical tabs arrangement at all (although it does get sent the graphical adverts).
So comparing "address X on device Y" as a test of speed needs to take into account what's actually sent, and how usable it is on the device when it arrives. Redhat.com's actually an example where the Blackberry page is better suited to the device than the Windows Mobile one (it has proper links on rather than a mangled tabset), but this probably isn't typical.
The "silently dropping mails" problem has been around for a while. I've had a Hotmail address for ages - well pre-Microsoft, and tended to use it for lists that I read every now and again. Out of about 20-30 regular list posters it was very repeatedly dropping certain senders - a few UK cable addresses (but not other UK cable addresses), one Gmail and a couple of Hotmail addresses (but not others).
Headers of the dropped mail were all pretty legit - in the case of ISP mail, person's PC SMTPs it to ISP, the servers of which SMTP it to the list, which SMTPs it to Hotmail (in the case of webmail, the webmail servers send it to the list via some route). None of this "silent dropping" seems to be content-dependant (it's always the same senders and always all mails from those senders).
I gave up completely on Hotmail a few months back - to be honest I only keep the account open to say what emails it's dropping.
One thing that the Dutch have got right though, is ensuring that people are well-informed as to their voting options, to help them select the right party to vote for:
http://stomwijzer.nl/
Actually, I think the people editing Uncyclopedia are doing an excellent job...