Read the sentence of mine that you quoted again, these discs were clearly faulty out the box from the manufacturer because of poor case design and as such were eligible for replacement under warranty. If they're faulty out the box then you can't make a backup anyway, so it's useless for the backup argument.
Even when there have been reports of the drives in the XBox themselves scratching discs you're still eligible for free replacement because it's a manufacturing fault of the hardware.
What I'm saying I've never heard of is a professionally written, default free out the box disc just failing.
""enough" is not determined by the buyer. You don't go into a store and argue with the cashier - at least not in most western economies - that the price is too much. You either buy it or you don't."
I actually agree with your post for the most part, but interestingly this is one part that's absolutely not true, at least in the UK.
You do have the right to barter, and some stores are aware of this and are willing to cater to it, it's a skill that most consumers aren't even aware of or have forgotten and by extension many shop staff aren't aware of and hence wont even cater to such that in some cases you'd have to speak to the manager.
It's not unheard of to be able to walk into a shop and barter for say £20 off of a TV for example. There are many factors that depend on success- how far they are from their monthly sales figures, the price of the product/what it is, the awareness of the manager and their willingness to be flexible and so on, but one things for sure, the tagged price isn't necessarily set in stone. Shops will often be more flexible than you realise on this.
Are you sure it gives the application access to all your friends info? I'm on Facebook but I'll admit I didn't realise this, so effectively although I never install these shitty apps, if what you say is true they could be leeching my information anyway? As I've refused giving these applications access to my personal information that would certainly seem to be a breach of the data protection act in the UK as I explicitly denied them access to my information when I recieved requests and of course, friends can't legally give permission to hand my data out.
Because the reality is, after a while Vista really wasn't all that bad.
I ran it for just over a year before 7 came out without a single flaw whatsoever. Vistas biggest problem was it was pretty crappy in it's earlier days and it never really managed to shake off that image.
I guess the situation in your area isn't representative, because Windows 7 adoption is currently well above Vista adoption.
Windows 7 has certainly been rather successful so far and it seems to have a much better public image than Vista earmed from it's crappy earlier releases.
I actually agree with you, but yet look at the Office 2007 UI.
It does a great job of solving the problems you state, options that aren't relevant are hidden, and only options relevant in the context of what you are doing are shown. To me this is a much better way of doing things, and yet the amount of people who complain, the amount who hate it far outnumber those who like it- OpenOffice and Firefox have recieved the same feedback when they suggested the same type of change to a UI that only provides what is relevant in the context of the actions being carried out for their applications too.
So the question is, whilst to some people like you and I the simplified context relevant system seems better, is there an underlying reason many others hate it? Do they simply dislike change? or is there something else there, like a context based system being more confusing for them because things aren't always where they were?
For what it's worth though I actually hate many of the Windows 7 changes, the new gadget system is appalling compared to the sidebar. Gadgets are useless because they're either on the desktop, out the way, and you have to explicitly switch to the desktop to see them in which case if you have to explicitly switch they may as well just be applications or alternatively they can be set to be always on top which means they obscure any windows you're working with underneath them. The sidebar ensured this wasn't a problem by allowing Windows to resize around the sidebar meaning they were both always on top, always available and yet never in the way.
I also found the taskbar changes unhelpful on a large screen, although it's great on the small screen of my netbook where taskbar space is limited, but on my 24" screen at 1900x1200 the new system only uses up about 20% of the length of the taskbar and yet I have to take extra clicks to find the window I want because they're all hidden in their groups. I reverted back to the classic taskbar where the Window I want is available instantly by using the full taskbar.
I even find the start menu since Vista much less efficient to navigate too in all honesty, if you don't type in the name of the program and want to click through because you don't know what icon was added the pre-Vista start menu was far more efficient.
As I say though, I do like Microsoft's ribbon interface. For me it's all about the speed and efficiency at which I can work, and much of the Windows Vista / 7 UI changes seem to add the amount of mouse movement and clicks I need to make, the Ribbon UI however does not as it puts what I need right in front of me when I need it.
No, I'm not sure why people still think the 360 hardware isn't making money, it has been for years.
Even Sony has been making a profit on the hardware now for a fair while and they were losing far more per system (due to Bluray and Cell), released a year later than Microsoft and have shifted about 10 million less units.
We're well past the stage of making a loss on the hardware this generation.
"MS really should set up some kind of verification system where you can call in a serial number and check an XBOX or "preowned" system where you can get a guaranteed, stamped approval."
If the console is chipped but has never been online then Microsoft wont even know the state of the console. Even if a console has been online prior to being chipped, they can't tell you for sure that it's not been chipped since it was last online. At best they could tell you if the console is in their list of systems that have been banned, but couldn't say for sure that it wont get banned.
Places like eBay allow you to ask the seller questions- if you ask them if it's been chipped and they say anything other than "No" then don't buy it. If they say no and sell you it and it is then you're free to get all your cash back pretty quick from Paypal (quickly and easily in my experience) as part of their dispute resolution process.
Like you say for people who just want to play offline though it wont matter and is a cheap way to play offline games. Chances are Microsoft aren't even losing out either as people who played online probably will just buy a new XBox and games to keep playing anyway. One of my friends who got banned in the last round a couple of years ago did just that but kept his old box and just used that chipped and banned one to play offline games (like GTA4) and his new one for games he liked to play online (i.e. CoD4).
Agreed. It'd be a big deal if Microsoft were bricking the consoles, or if they were even doing something to block the mod chips people have paid for but they're not, they're just saying if you have a modified console you can't play online with it via XBox live which has been made pretty clear is part of the terms of service.
I'm not sure what people getting banned expect, that Microsoft just don't enforce their terms of service? That they just allow people with chipped consoles to play online regardless of the negative effect it has on other gamers when cheaters exploit it making people who play by the rules leave the service?
At the end of the day it's a closed, controlled platform unlike the PC which is an open platform. Open platforms are great for many things, but having been a PC gamer for nearly 2 decades now I do not feel gaming is one of the things open platforms are great for because it really does open the door for cheating. This is why I choose to play games on a closed platform and expect to play by the rules.
I'm not even convinced Microsoft can even be shot down too much for blocking homebrew- again you can still do homebrew with a chipped 360, just not on XBox live. If you want to develop with XBox live support then XNA Game Studio and the publishing path they provide is probably the easiest method of writing entertainment software and getting it published on the planet right now.
Game backups are about the only argument I agree is a fair point but even then it's not as if there aren't disc exchange programs, and I've not actually met anyone with an unusable optical disc created professionally that wasn't faulty out the box from the manufacturer ever.
Microsoft aren't saying you can't do what you want with your console, they're just limiting what you can do with XBox live as per the terms and conditions.
I don't think price has much relation to impulse buying to be honest. I've turned away from impulse buys of Wii games at £20 after resisting the impulse and deciding I wouldn't play them, but my £250 netbook was really an impulse buy because I wanted something smaller than my laptop to take on holiday for 2 weeks but have really never used since.
If they ignored an EU ruling it's likely the EU could seize their European assets to pay a fine for non-compliance too. You'd realistically see hundreds of millions, possibly billions of dollars of assets seized. Effectively Oracle and Sun would suddenly be missing half their company.
"The only reason that anonymity should be permitted is when wrongdoing is being exposed and there is a possibility of extra-legal repercussions"
Why just extra-legal repercussions? There have been many occasions through the centuries and plenty in recent years even where the legal system in the US has been abused to cause undeserved harm to someone. Plenty of times people have been bankrupted or given a bad name through the legal system when they were in fact not wrong. A good example is someone accused of rape but who is innocent, those people often take physical and verbal abuse to the point they have to change their identity and move away from their family in friends even after being proven completely innocent.
No, the fact is, even legal (but still equally wrong) repercussions can be just as damaging, hence the importance of anonymity. Anyone pushing for political change in China or Iran can attest to that.
"if you've distributed the binary and you've used GPL code you're obligated to release that code. Your mistake, your mess. MS wouldn't be so forgiving, why should the GNU community be? You'd think that the worlds largest software producer, in 2009, would have a better understanding regarding the GPL."
If only the world was that simple. The fact is, in a large software corporation there is absolutely no way to ensure that some incompetent developer hasn't just gone on the net and copied some code no matter how hard you try. I understand your sentiment but it's also not really fair to penalise and entire company for the actions of one developer either.
The GNU community should be more forgiving because it's about showing that GPL'd code is useable in business as long as the rules are followed rather than trying to screw companies over if they go anywhere near GPL because that's a sure fire way to turn many other companies away from GPL - why touch if it's such a dangerous minefield? Having to pull software is a pretty big, costly and embarassing punishment in itself and is more than enough to put most companies including Microsoft off knowingly and intentionally violating the GPL.
Regardless, even if they do take it further what do you think will happen? It'll result in a court case and any judge is going to see that by pulling it Microsoft recognised it's mistake and tried to deal with it reasonably. You'd most likely see the case get kicked out as a waste of time because Microsoft were already making a good effort to rectify the problem.
"Oh and the only troll I see here Sopssa is you for posting repetetive bullshit posts like the one above."
Having a different viewpoint to you is not trolling, get over yourself, you're not the international dictator of opinion that decides what everyone's "correct" opinion on everything should be.
Certainly in postgraduate Maths the lecturers I've dealt with have all been too old to know or care what a computer is. Even the idea of using a marker pen on a whiteboard rather than chalk on a blackboard seemed like quite a change for them!
I'd imagine in a Software engineering degree you probably see a lot of this, I'm suprised if it's so common place in many modules of CS degrees though as most real CS people will understand the importance of demonstrating that sometimes even in the world of computing, doing things by hand makes sense.
It's a trend I've noticed a fair bit though, on their web site they're generally quite pro-file sharing, well, as best they can be, yet when you see their TV shows it's a completely different story- Jonathan Ross for example has been allowed to advocate over the top 3 strikes policy on the BBC and such.
I think what we're really seeing here is merely departmental difference. I believe the BBC's web team are quite technologically literate, quite forward thinking, quite intelligent and generally quite liberal. The rest of the organisation however does not seem to be the same.
It could well be an age thing- it's possible that much of the BBC is made up of the old boys club with celebrities being strongly linked to the media cartels and so forth still. In contrast the web team is most likely made up of people who explicitly went for technical jobs at the BBC or volunteered to go into that team when created. As we know from the sentiment here on Slashdot, technologically minded people rarely support the media cartels stance and so I'm certain this is probably why on the BBC's website we see the good BBC, but on TV we often see the bad BBC.
Yes, amusingly the same day they backtracked on this, they also ruled that intercepted data does not have to be stored in an encrypted form.
The whole thing is a fucking nightmare. The inland revenue service lost the personal details of 25 million people in the UK not so long ago, there have been hundreds more large scale (multi-million victim) data leaks since then and they expect us to now trust them to store all our personal contact data and suggest they don't even need to encrypt it?
Labour government IT is a complete and utter catastrophe with not a single lesson learnt from the constant stream of mistakes.
I don't think it's malice on behalf of the politicians. When you look at many prominent members of the Labour government you notice they're just not clever or intelligent people- Jacqui Smith, Hazel Blears, Harriet Harman, Keith Vaz, Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls and so on. I get the impression there's a few who are a bit more smart and are more malicious like David Miliband, but for the most part these people are a little dormant when it comes to their ability to think.
These people really do believe they're doing it for our own good, that it's a valid solution and that it's the right thing to do. When people like Peter Mandelson can't even keep the fact he's corrupt to the core secret, having been caught red handed about 4 times now in the middle of dodgy backhand deals, and Hazel Blears apparently can't walk down the street without getting her shoe stuck in the pavement and looking like an idiot in front of the worlds media why would anyone believe these people would have the mental capacity to pull off a power grabbing plot?
Of course you could still be right- it may not be the politicians, they could simply be puppets of those in the security services who are telling them what "needs" to be done which is plausible and probably more realistic. In general though the political problem is certainly one of incompetence rather than an inherent evil. The politicians almost certainly do believe these measures will really catch terrorists.
No, I'm pretty certain it wasn't tried in the UK, I've certainly never heard of such a case and have been following this for years. All that was done was complaints were put to the advertising watchdog (the ASA), and the watchdog basically gave the practice a greenlight based on some previous precedent (all you can eat restaurants or something). Their argument was that as long as it appeared unlimited to the average user this was acceptable, if a minority of users hit the cap then that was fine, I believe the threshold had to be 1% of users or something. For what it's worth tho, I'd bet you anything it's more than 1% of users that are actually affected at many ISPs and that they just fiddled the stats for the ASA.
I took my old ISP (Demon) to the small claims court after they limited me to 128kbps for a month down from 2mbps after they said I'd breached a cap which was never advertised and never in my contract. I claimed for a lost days work due to working from home but being unable to reliably use VPN at that speed, I claimed for the costs to switch ISP including the first months subscription, I claimed a month of XBox live and Dark Age of Camelot subscriptions for 3 accounts amongst a few other things and came away with £330 as they simply accepted the costs and settled.
Make of that what you will, but I'd wager that what the ASA says is one thing, what a court would say is a whole different story. It's such a small thing in most people's lives - i.e. they usually only run out of bandwidth a few days before their new month starts and it resets that they just put up with it, and of course, if they do lose then that's much more money out of their pocket if they have to pay the ISP's lawyers costs that no one has really bothered to try and sue properly because of the comparitive effort and risk for likely very little personal gain. They may get ISPs to change their practices but personally all they'd probably receive is a months ISP subscription back and £50 in compensation or whatever if the ISP decides to fight it but loses.
The heating costs wouldn't be as bad because you get a lot of thermal energy stored in the ground from the sun during the day.
Effectively you are just manually replicating the greenhouse effect.
It's something I've experimented with my greenhouse (as I live in the UK and grow tropical plants which must be kept at a minimum of 15c all year around). It's suprising how effective storage of heat in the ground and such actually is and I also now keep water cooler sized bottles of water around the greenhouse walkway and under the staging through the winter to hold sun during the day which is then released through the night, it's not a massive change, but it has certainly made a measurable difference to my electric heating costs- my thermostat based electric heaters now need to come on for much less time through the night.
I'm sure there's actually probably a better substance than water for the purpose, but this was really just a small experiment. I can certainly see though from this how harnessing natural heat storage of pavements, ponds, roads, rivers, outer walls of buildings and so on could all hold heat built up during the day from the sun to drastically help heat such a dome through the night.
Yes, 3D in cinemas is impressive, quite stunning in fact, a far bigger, better improvement to film than HD and probably the most important change to film since colour in fact- I'd argue it beats surround sound for sure.
But from what I understand they use special lense caps on the projectors and this technique can't be imitated on TV panels. Instead they're still using this crappy old technique that never really worked and that has flopped numerous times.
Why is it that because the new technique in use at cinemas is impressive and works they think this shitty old version that never really worked well will take off?
In fact, I'm not even convinced living room TV wants 3D terribly often, I think having to find your glasses to watch certain programs would become an annoyance after a while even if you don't mind it for the odd film.
What, so that the blogger can make up such lies to back his story even though there's no evidence and no way to prove what was said really actually happened?
I agree with internet anonymity, but if it's to protect bloggers then there's no way to verify what they say is true making blogs a pointless waste of time anyway. You either need verifiability to make blogs worthwhile, or you have anonymity and make blogs pointless.
It's unfortunate, but I'm afraid it can't work both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the sentence of mine that you quoted again, these discs were clearly faulty out the box from the manufacturer because of poor case design and as such were eligible for replacement under warranty. If they're faulty out the box then you can't make a backup anyway, so it's useless for the backup argument.
Even when there have been reports of the drives in the XBox themselves scratching discs you're still eligible for free replacement because it's a manufacturing fault of the hardware.
What I'm saying I've never heard of is a professionally written, default free out the box disc just failing.
""enough" is not determined by the buyer. You don't go into a store and argue with the cashier - at least not in most western economies - that the price is too much. You either buy it or you don't."
I actually agree with your post for the most part, but interestingly this is one part that's absolutely not true, at least in the UK.
You do have the right to barter, and some stores are aware of this and are willing to cater to it, it's a skill that most consumers aren't even aware of or have forgotten and by extension many shop staff aren't aware of and hence wont even cater to such that in some cases you'd have to speak to the manager.
It's not unheard of to be able to walk into a shop and barter for say £20 off of a TV for example. There are many factors that depend on success- how far they are from their monthly sales figures, the price of the product/what it is, the awareness of the manager and their willingness to be flexible and so on, but one things for sure, the tagged price isn't necessarily set in stone. Shops will often be more flexible than you realise on this.
Are you sure it gives the application access to all your friends info? I'm on Facebook but I'll admit I didn't realise this, so effectively although I never install these shitty apps, if what you say is true they could be leeching my information anyway? As I've refused giving these applications access to my personal information that would certainly seem to be a breach of the data protection act in the UK as I explicitly denied them access to my information when I recieved requests and of course, friends can't legally give permission to hand my data out.
Because the reality is, after a while Vista really wasn't all that bad.
I ran it for just over a year before 7 came out without a single flaw whatsoever. Vistas biggest problem was it was pretty crappy in it's earlier days and it never really managed to shake off that image.
I guess the situation in your area isn't representative, because Windows 7 adoption is currently well above Vista adoption.
Windows 7 has certainly been rather successful so far and it seems to have a much better public image than Vista earmed from it's crappy earlier releases.
I actually agree with you, but yet look at the Office 2007 UI.
It does a great job of solving the problems you state, options that aren't relevant are hidden, and only options relevant in the context of what you are doing are shown. To me this is a much better way of doing things, and yet the amount of people who complain, the amount who hate it far outnumber those who like it- OpenOffice and Firefox have recieved the same feedback when they suggested the same type of change to a UI that only provides what is relevant in the context of the actions being carried out for their applications too.
So the question is, whilst to some people like you and I the simplified context relevant system seems better, is there an underlying reason many others hate it? Do they simply dislike change? or is there something else there, like a context based system being more confusing for them because things aren't always where they were?
For what it's worth though I actually hate many of the Windows 7 changes, the new gadget system is appalling compared to the sidebar. Gadgets are useless because they're either on the desktop, out the way, and you have to explicitly switch to the desktop to see them in which case if you have to explicitly switch they may as well just be applications or alternatively they can be set to be always on top which means they obscure any windows you're working with underneath them. The sidebar ensured this wasn't a problem by allowing Windows to resize around the sidebar meaning they were both always on top, always available and yet never in the way.
I also found the taskbar changes unhelpful on a large screen, although it's great on the small screen of my netbook where taskbar space is limited, but on my 24" screen at 1900x1200 the new system only uses up about 20% of the length of the taskbar and yet I have to take extra clicks to find the window I want because they're all hidden in their groups. I reverted back to the classic taskbar where the Window I want is available instantly by using the full taskbar.
I even find the start menu since Vista much less efficient to navigate too in all honesty, if you don't type in the name of the program and want to click through because you don't know what icon was added the pre-Vista start menu was far more efficient.
As I say though, I do like Microsoft's ribbon interface. For me it's all about the speed and efficiency at which I can work, and much of the Windows Vista / 7 UI changes seem to add the amount of mouse movement and clicks I need to make, the Ribbon UI however does not as it puts what I need right in front of me when I need it.
No, I'm not sure why people still think the 360 hardware isn't making money, it has been for years.
Even Sony has been making a profit on the hardware now for a fair while and they were losing far more per system (due to Bluray and Cell), released a year later than Microsoft and have shifted about 10 million less units.
We're well past the stage of making a loss on the hardware this generation.
"MS really should set up some kind of verification system where you can call in a serial number and check an XBOX or "preowned" system where you can get a guaranteed, stamped approval."
If the console is chipped but has never been online then Microsoft wont even know the state of the console. Even if a console has been online prior to being chipped, they can't tell you for sure that it's not been chipped since it was last online. At best they could tell you if the console is in their list of systems that have been banned, but couldn't say for sure that it wont get banned.
Places like eBay allow you to ask the seller questions- if you ask them if it's been chipped and they say anything other than "No" then don't buy it. If they say no and sell you it and it is then you're free to get all your cash back pretty quick from Paypal (quickly and easily in my experience) as part of their dispute resolution process.
Like you say for people who just want to play offline though it wont matter and is a cheap way to play offline games. Chances are Microsoft aren't even losing out either as people who played online probably will just buy a new XBox and games to keep playing anyway. One of my friends who got banned in the last round a couple of years ago did just that but kept his old box and just used that chipped and banned one to play offline games (like GTA4) and his new one for games he liked to play online (i.e. CoD4).
Agreed. It'd be a big deal if Microsoft were bricking the consoles, or if they were even doing something to block the mod chips people have paid for but they're not, they're just saying if you have a modified console you can't play online with it via XBox live which has been made pretty clear is part of the terms of service.
I'm not sure what people getting banned expect, that Microsoft just don't enforce their terms of service? That they just allow people with chipped consoles to play online regardless of the negative effect it has on other gamers when cheaters exploit it making people who play by the rules leave the service?
At the end of the day it's a closed, controlled platform unlike the PC which is an open platform. Open platforms are great for many things, but having been a PC gamer for nearly 2 decades now I do not feel gaming is one of the things open platforms are great for because it really does open the door for cheating. This is why I choose to play games on a closed platform and expect to play by the rules.
I'm not even convinced Microsoft can even be shot down too much for blocking homebrew- again you can still do homebrew with a chipped 360, just not on XBox live. If you want to develop with XBox live support then XNA Game Studio and the publishing path they provide is probably the easiest method of writing entertainment software and getting it published on the planet right now.
Game backups are about the only argument I agree is a fair point but even then it's not as if there aren't disc exchange programs, and I've not actually met anyone with an unusable optical disc created professionally that wasn't faulty out the box from the manufacturer ever.
Microsoft aren't saying you can't do what you want with your console, they're just limiting what you can do with XBox live as per the terms and conditions.
I don't think price has much relation to impulse buying to be honest. I've turned away from impulse buys of Wii games at £20 after resisting the impulse and deciding I wouldn't play them, but my £250 netbook was really an impulse buy because I wanted something smaller than my laptop to take on holiday for 2 weeks but have really never used since.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie02k3eAvxY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYuJivFFa-c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-443dE5-gk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AscJO0uUQ_Q&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqooMGua3Yk&feature=related
Not if it uses an Atom processor :p
I agree.
If they ignored an EU ruling it's likely the EU could seize their European assets to pay a fine for non-compliance too. You'd realistically see hundreds of millions, possibly billions of dollars of assets seized. Effectively Oracle and Sun would suddenly be missing half their company.
"The only reason that anonymity should be permitted is when wrongdoing is being exposed and there is a possibility of extra-legal repercussions"
Why just extra-legal repercussions? There have been many occasions through the centuries and plenty in recent years even where the legal system in the US has been abused to cause undeserved harm to someone. Plenty of times people have been bankrupted or given a bad name through the legal system when they were in fact not wrong. A good example is someone accused of rape but who is innocent, those people often take physical and verbal abuse to the point they have to change their identity and move away from their family in friends even after being proven completely innocent.
No, the fact is, even legal (but still equally wrong) repercussions can be just as damaging, hence the importance of anonymity. Anyone pushing for political change in China or Iran can attest to that.
"if you've distributed the binary and you've used GPL code you're obligated to release that code. Your mistake, your mess. MS wouldn't be so forgiving, why should the GNU community be? You'd think that the worlds largest software producer, in 2009, would have a better understanding regarding the GPL."
If only the world was that simple. The fact is, in a large software corporation there is absolutely no way to ensure that some incompetent developer hasn't just gone on the net and copied some code no matter how hard you try. I understand your sentiment but it's also not really fair to penalise and entire company for the actions of one developer either.
The GNU community should be more forgiving because it's about showing that GPL'd code is useable in business as long as the rules are followed rather than trying to screw companies over if they go anywhere near GPL because that's a sure fire way to turn many other companies away from GPL - why touch if it's such a dangerous minefield? Having to pull software is a pretty big, costly and embarassing punishment in itself and is more than enough to put most companies including Microsoft off knowingly and intentionally violating the GPL.
Regardless, even if they do take it further what do you think will happen? It'll result in a court case and any judge is going to see that by pulling it Microsoft recognised it's mistake and tried to deal with it reasonably. You'd most likely see the case get kicked out as a waste of time because Microsoft were already making a good effort to rectify the problem.
"Oh and the only troll I see here Sopssa is you for posting repetetive bullshit posts like the one above."
Having a different viewpoint to you is not trolling, get over yourself, you're not the international dictator of opinion that decides what everyone's "correct" opinion on everything should be.
"As if Cameron's lot would be any better..."
I don't know why people assume because I slag Labour off I'd support Cameron. I agree, the Tories will be at least as bad.
It probably depends on subject.
Certainly in postgraduate Maths the lecturers I've dealt with have all been too old to know or care what a computer is. Even the idea of using a marker pen on a whiteboard rather than chalk on a blackboard seemed like quite a change for them!
I'd imagine in a Software engineering degree you probably see a lot of this, I'm suprised if it's so common place in many modules of CS degrees though as most real CS people will understand the importance of demonstrating that sometimes even in the world of computing, doing things by hand makes sense.
It's a trend I've noticed a fair bit though, on their web site they're generally quite pro-file sharing, well, as best they can be, yet when you see their TV shows it's a completely different story- Jonathan Ross for example has been allowed to advocate over the top 3 strikes policy on the BBC and such.
I think what we're really seeing here is merely departmental difference. I believe the BBC's web team are quite technologically literate, quite forward thinking, quite intelligent and generally quite liberal. The rest of the organisation however does not seem to be the same.
It could well be an age thing- it's possible that much of the BBC is made up of the old boys club with celebrities being strongly linked to the media cartels and so forth still. In contrast the web team is most likely made up of people who explicitly went for technical jobs at the BBC or volunteered to go into that team when created. As we know from the sentiment here on Slashdot, technologically minded people rarely support the media cartels stance and so I'm certain this is probably why on the BBC's website we see the good BBC, but on TV we often see the bad BBC.
Yes, amusingly the same day they backtracked on this, they also ruled that intercepted data does not have to be stored in an encrypted form.
The whole thing is a fucking nightmare. The inland revenue service lost the personal details of 25 million people in the UK not so long ago, there have been hundreds more large scale (multi-million victim) data leaks since then and they expect us to now trust them to store all our personal contact data and suggest they don't even need to encrypt it?
Labour government IT is a complete and utter catastrophe with not a single lesson learnt from the constant stream of mistakes.
I don't think it's malice on behalf of the politicians. When you look at many prominent members of the Labour government you notice they're just not clever or intelligent people- Jacqui Smith, Hazel Blears, Harriet Harman, Keith Vaz, Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls and so on. I get the impression there's a few who are a bit more smart and are more malicious like David Miliband, but for the most part these people are a little dormant when it comes to their ability to think.
These people really do believe they're doing it for our own good, that it's a valid solution and that it's the right thing to do. When people like Peter Mandelson can't even keep the fact he's corrupt to the core secret, having been caught red handed about 4 times now in the middle of dodgy backhand deals, and Hazel Blears apparently can't walk down the street without getting her shoe stuck in the pavement and looking like an idiot in front of the worlds media why would anyone believe these people would have the mental capacity to pull off a power grabbing plot?
Of course you could still be right- it may not be the politicians, they could simply be puppets of those in the security services who are telling them what "needs" to be done which is plausible and probably more realistic. In general though the political problem is certainly one of incompetence rather than an inherent evil. The politicians almost certainly do believe these measures will really catch terrorists.
No, I'm pretty certain it wasn't tried in the UK, I've certainly never heard of such a case and have been following this for years. All that was done was complaints were put to the advertising watchdog (the ASA), and the watchdog basically gave the practice a greenlight based on some previous precedent (all you can eat restaurants or something). Their argument was that as long as it appeared unlimited to the average user this was acceptable, if a minority of users hit the cap then that was fine, I believe the threshold had to be 1% of users or something. For what it's worth tho, I'd bet you anything it's more than 1% of users that are actually affected at many ISPs and that they just fiddled the stats for the ASA.
I took my old ISP (Demon) to the small claims court after they limited me to 128kbps for a month down from 2mbps after they said I'd breached a cap which was never advertised and never in my contract. I claimed for a lost days work due to working from home but being unable to reliably use VPN at that speed, I claimed for the costs to switch ISP including the first months subscription, I claimed a month of XBox live and Dark Age of Camelot subscriptions for 3 accounts amongst a few other things and came away with £330 as they simply accepted the costs and settled.
Make of that what you will, but I'd wager that what the ASA says is one thing, what a court would say is a whole different story. It's such a small thing in most people's lives - i.e. they usually only run out of bandwidth a few days before their new month starts and it resets that they just put up with it, and of course, if they do lose then that's much more money out of their pocket if they have to pay the ISP's lawyers costs that no one has really bothered to try and sue properly because of the comparitive effort and risk for likely very little personal gain. They may get ISPs to change their practices but personally all they'd probably receive is a months ISP subscription back and £50 in compensation or whatever if the ISP decides to fight it but loses.
The heating costs wouldn't be as bad because you get a lot of thermal energy stored in the ground from the sun during the day.
Effectively you are just manually replicating the greenhouse effect.
It's something I've experimented with my greenhouse (as I live in the UK and grow tropical plants which must be kept at a minimum of 15c all year around). It's suprising how effective storage of heat in the ground and such actually is and I also now keep water cooler sized bottles of water around the greenhouse walkway and under the staging through the winter to hold sun during the day which is then released through the night, it's not a massive change, but it has certainly made a measurable difference to my electric heating costs- my thermostat based electric heaters now need to come on for much less time through the night.
I'm sure there's actually probably a better substance than water for the purpose, but this was really just a small experiment. I can certainly see though from this how harnessing natural heat storage of pavements, ponds, roads, rivers, outer walls of buildings and so on could all hold heat built up during the day from the sun to drastically help heat such a dome through the night.
Yes, 3D in cinemas is impressive, quite stunning in fact, a far bigger, better improvement to film than HD and probably the most important change to film since colour in fact- I'd argue it beats surround sound for sure.
But from what I understand they use special lense caps on the projectors and this technique can't be imitated on TV panels. Instead they're still using this crappy old technique that never really worked and that has flopped numerous times.
Why is it that because the new technique in use at cinemas is impressive and works they think this shitty old version that never really worked well will take off?
In fact, I'm not even convinced living room TV wants 3D terribly often, I think having to find your glasses to watch certain programs would become an annoyance after a while even if you don't mind it for the odd film.
What, so that the blogger can make up such lies to back his story even though there's no evidence and no way to prove what was said really actually happened?
I agree with internet anonymity, but if it's to protect bloggers then there's no way to verify what they say is true making blogs a pointless waste of time anyway. You either need verifiability to make blogs worthwhile, or you have anonymity and make blogs pointless.
It's unfortunate, but I'm afraid it can't work both ways.
Exactly, because government departments are completely infallible.