Oh yes there is such a thing as a free ride in London. You would be amazed what a large fraction of all bus riders are paying nothing. All old folk, school kids, and disabled travel free. When they equalized the ages between men and women for free old age bus passes, they brought men's down to 60. Very nice for me, but sometimes I feel guilty sprinting to catch the bus and then flashing an old-timer's free pass!
Seriously though, the whole of transport policy in London is deeply corrupt, with hidden subsidies going in all sorts of directions, some socially desirable, but very often acting as a powerful financial engine to transfer resources from poor to rich. If this Oyster card crack serves to make a few more people aware of the problems, it can only do good.
I thought Elonex (i.e. the north London PC makers we once bought from) went bust and were then bought from administration by someone else. Nothing wrong with that, except that New Elonex was reported in the press to be refusing to honour Old Elonex's warranties on the grounds that they were a different legal entity. Nothing illegal in that, but New Elonex's web site gives the impression of business continuity.
Could we perhaps ask New Elonex to clarify this point? Are they as honourable a business as we would all like to believe? The world is a bit too full of dodgy phoenix companies for my liking.
Yet another reason why biometric ID cards are nonsense!
Read a person's fingerprints etc, ideally remotely from an RFID passport, but more likely by hacking an official reader. Then 3D fabricate copies. No need to hack off their fingers now.
I have actually written software to kern text (for the sign-making industry) and can testify that kerning is not an exact science. Yes, one needs to even up the areas of white space between letter, but then one needs to bias the calculations in favour of the tops of the letters. And then make some allowance for any white space inside the letters, and.... and.... and..... Spacing that is correct for 12-point type on paper would be quite wrong for a huge 3D sign on the side of a building, and so on.
For perfection, there is no substitute for the human eye. The algorithms used by our brains to unscramble text are very complex.
Dell systematically hides offshore from all serious complaints. I discovered this the hard way.
Living in Britain, my home was plagued by nuisance phone calls. Some idiot faxing service on an untraceable number used to call our voice line and leave endless beep-beep-beep tones on our answering machine. Day after day after day we had to tediously delete this crap.
I eventually found that Dell was trying to junk-fax seven individuals in a nearby business with a wrong number from a dirty database. Multiply up 7 names by 4 failed-fax repetitions by 13 weeks' fax campaign and..... we had 364 nuisance phone calls. We were seriously peeved!
This sort of junk faxing is blatantly illegal in Britain and the law clearly states that Dell owes us compensation. So I phoned Dell to ask for an apology, preferably the crinkly paper stuff that indicates real contrition and an intention not to bug other poor suckers.
Of course "customer service" by big corporations is one of life's great wasters of time and phone bills, but Dell are absolute champions at the art. Basically, if an issue does not fall within the foreseen list of technical problems that Dell's phone-jockeys are given, absolutely nothing happens. All promises are broken. All letters are ignored.
In the end, I got so annoyed at the insult on top of injury that I threatened to sue Dell. (Via the small claims track in a County Court.) In order to do this, one must know exactly which legal entity to sue. Ah, therein lies the problem!
Who or what is Dell in Britain? Is it their UK brass plate company in Reading? Is it their European headquarters in Dublin? Is it their minions who do their selling or their publicity? No one seems to know, and I cannot justify the time to nail them down.
So here is the bottom line. Dell is offshore. You cannot enforce consumer rights against them in the same way as you can against a normal high street store. If you are the unlucky customer who buys that one-in-a-thousand piece of kit that goes wrong in an unusual way you cannot just take it back to a store and create a scene until someone puts it right.
Anyone who tries (like me) to build small lighting devices with LEDs rapidly discovers lots of practical difficulties. To equal the light output of one cheapo fluorescent tube you need hundreds of the little blighters. It is not easy to make their output look even, rather than dotty. And with that large number, reliability is a real problem. Even a 1% failure rate (amplified to 3% or 5% by the LEDs often being in series) rapidly translates into major unevenness. Even production lines struggle to make large arrays of LEDs stay 100% alight, but little people often get sold the bin ends, which fail rapidly in service.
Also LEDs are NOT yet more efficient than fluorescents. Their data sheets never give the one number that really matters: what percentage of input energy actually emerges as light? The answer is usually frighteningly low. Therefore LED devices tend to cook themselves to death if run really bright.
To run LEDs stably requires either a wasteful series resistor or an expensive semiconductor constant-current device. And cheap low-voltage power supplies are actually badly life-limited by their electrolytic capacitors. In my experience many LEDs die prematurely because of a failing power supply and hot sunshine.
Don't get me wrong. LEDs are the future, but you must be wary of calling them energy-saving, long-lasting, or easy to use!
Ask any vector graphics program (Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, etc, etc) to generate an outline around some text and you will rapidly see the limitations of conventional trigonometry. Increase the width of the outline and/or the complexity of the text and sooner or later the maths will blow up.
A few years ago my software house needed a subprogram to create paths offset any chosen distance from another 2D path. (Necessary for machining in the sign-making industry.) I fondly imagined this was half a day's work for a clever visiting student.
Alas, no, it turned out to be a 3-month coding nightmare. Finding the precise intersection of two nearly parallel vectors (expressed as lines, circle arcs, or Bezier curves) is surprisingly difficult, within the limits of precision and time set by computers. You end up dealing with special case after special case.
In ignorantly fumbling towards a better way of expressing the calculations, I got as far abandoning angles and using quadratures. If only Rational Trigonometry had been around at the time.....!
My small business has a mixed bag of computers of various ages with Windows XP, Me and 98, within which most of the big antivirus names are simply hopeless. (Won't upgrade cleanly, won't load on 98 or without IE6, hog lotsa memory, etc.) We tried AVAST (free for home use, moderate price for commercial) and love it -- superb product. However, nowadays, a firewall takes primacy over an antivirus program, so what actually got our money was Zone Labs antivirus suite (low price, high performance). Daily virus updates download smoothly on dial-up, but the monthly new programs (13M) are a job for broadband and then port to outlying machines on a USB key.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes there is such a thing as a free ride in London. You would be amazed what a large fraction of all bus riders are paying nothing. All old folk, school kids, and disabled travel free. When they equalized the ages between men and women for free old age bus passes, they brought men's down to 60. Very nice for me, but sometimes I feel guilty sprinting to catch the bus and then flashing an old-timer's free pass! Seriously though, the whole of transport policy in London is deeply corrupt, with hidden subsidies going in all sorts of directions, some socially desirable, but very often acting as a powerful financial engine to transfer resources from poor to rich. If this Oyster card crack serves to make a few more people aware of the problems, it can only do good.
I thought Elonex (i.e. the north London PC makers we once bought from) went bust and were then bought from administration by someone else. Nothing wrong with that, except that New Elonex was reported in the press to be refusing to honour Old Elonex's warranties on the grounds that they were a different legal entity. Nothing illegal in that, but New Elonex's web site gives the impression of business continuity.
Could we perhaps ask New Elonex to clarify this point? Are they as honourable a business as we would all like to believe? The world is a bit too full of dodgy phoenix companies for my liking.
Yet another reason why biometric ID cards are nonsense!
Read a person's fingerprints etc, ideally remotely from an RFID passport, but more likely by hacking an official reader. Then 3D fabricate copies. No need to hack off their fingers now.
I have actually written software to kern text (for the sign-making industry) and can testify that kerning is not an exact science. Yes, one needs to even up the areas of white space between letter, but then one needs to bias the calculations in favour of the tops of the letters. And then make some allowance for any white space inside the letters, and .... and .... and ..... Spacing that is correct for 12-point type on paper would be quite wrong for a huge 3D sign on the side of a building, and so on.
For perfection, there is no substitute for the human eye. The algorithms used by our brains to unscramble text are very complex.
Dell systematically hides offshore from all serious complaints.
..... we had 364 nuisance phone calls. We were seriously peeved!
I discovered this the hard way.
Living in Britain, my home was plagued by nuisance phone calls. Some idiot faxing service on an untraceable number used to call our voice line and leave endless beep-beep-beep tones on our answering machine. Day after day after day we had to tediously delete this crap.
I eventually found that Dell was trying to junk-fax seven individuals in a nearby business with a wrong number from a dirty database. Multiply up 7 names by 4 failed-fax repetitions by 13 weeks' fax campaign and
This sort of junk faxing is blatantly illegal in Britain and the law clearly states that Dell owes us compensation. So I phoned Dell to ask for an apology, preferably the crinkly paper stuff that indicates real contrition and an intention not to bug other poor suckers.
Of course "customer service" by big corporations is one of life's great wasters of time and phone bills, but Dell are absolute champions at the art. Basically, if an issue does not fall within the foreseen list of technical problems that Dell's phone-jockeys are given, absolutely nothing happens. All promises are broken. All letters are ignored.
In the end, I got so annoyed at the insult on top of injury that I threatened to sue Dell. (Via the small claims track in a County Court.) In order to do this, one must know exactly which legal entity to sue. Ah, therein lies the problem!
Who or what is Dell in Britain? Is it their UK brass plate company in Reading? Is it their European headquarters in Dublin? Is it their minions who do their selling or their publicity? No one seems to know, and I cannot justify the time to nail them down.
So here is the bottom line. Dell is offshore. You cannot enforce consumer rights against them in the same way as you can against a normal high street store. If you are the unlucky customer who buys that one-in-a-thousand piece of kit that goes wrong in an unusual way you cannot just take it back to a store and create a scene until someone puts it right.
Anyone who tries (like me) to build small lighting devices with LEDs rapidly discovers lots of practical difficulties. To equal the light output of one cheapo fluorescent tube you need hundreds of the little blighters. It is not easy to make their output look even, rather than dotty. And with that large number, reliability is a real problem. Even a 1% failure rate (amplified to 3% or 5% by the LEDs often being in series) rapidly translates into major unevenness. Even production lines struggle to make large arrays of LEDs stay 100% alight, but little people often get sold the bin ends, which fail rapidly in service.
Also LEDs are NOT yet more efficient than fluorescents. Their data sheets never give the one number that really matters: what percentage of input energy actually emerges as light? The answer is usually frighteningly low. Therefore LED devices tend to cook themselves to death if run really bright.
To run LEDs stably requires either a wasteful series resistor or an expensive semiconductor constant-current device. And cheap low-voltage power supplies are actually badly life-limited by their electrolytic capacitors. In my experience many LEDs die prematurely because of a failing power supply and hot sunshine.
Don't get me wrong. LEDs are the future, but you must be wary of calling them energy-saving, long-lasting, or easy to use!
Ask any vector graphics program (Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, etc, etc) to generate an outline around some text and you will rapidly see the limitations of conventional trigonometry. Increase the width of the outline and/or the complexity of the text and sooner or later the maths will blow up. .....!
A few years ago my software house needed a subprogram to create paths offset any chosen distance from another 2D path. (Necessary for machining in the sign-making industry.) I fondly imagined this was half a day's work for a clever visiting student.
Alas, no, it turned out to be a 3-month coding nightmare. Finding the precise intersection of two nearly parallel vectors (expressed as lines, circle arcs, or Bezier curves) is surprisingly difficult, within the limits of precision and time set by computers. You end up dealing with special case after special case.
In ignorantly fumbling towards a better way of expressing the calculations, I got as far abandoning angles and using quadratures. If only Rational Trigonometry had been around at the time
My small business has a mixed bag of computers of various ages with Windows XP, Me and 98, within which most of the big antivirus names are simply hopeless. (Won't upgrade cleanly, won't load on 98 or without IE6, hog lotsa memory, etc.) We tried AVAST (free for home use, moderate price for commercial) and love it -- superb product. However, nowadays, a firewall takes primacy over an antivirus program, so what actually got our money was Zone Labs antivirus suite (low price, high performance). Daily virus updates download smoothly on dial-up, but the monthly new programs (13M) are a job for broadband and then port to outlying machines on a USB key.