There's no reason the direct debit couldn't have been larger or that there couldn't have been multiple direct debits. It almost certainly wasn't for the very reason someone was merely disproving his point, which they did rather effectively.
Also he's somewhat more protected than Joe average, if someone tries to make, say, a fake passport under the name Jeremy Clarkson but with their photo and try to use it any customs officer is going to laugh that someone thinks they can pass themselves off as a well known TV celebrity - especially one that's publicly handed out all his personal details!
There's nothing to say now of course that more people aren't going to follow suit and try and screw him either of course.
If anything, his absolutely and entirely disproved his point - even he accepts this! Besides, £500 is still no small amount to lose for an awful lot of people.
You could even try and make the process fun making it visual and have swarms of ants running round your neighbourhood spreading virtual pheromones over your neighbours' garden all in the name of finding a good route to use!
Whilst the 360 is in second place to the Wii, it's still 1st place in terms of software sales by quite a decent margin. That means that no matter what the 1st party support it's still getting a hell of a lot of development attention because it's the console software developers can currently make the most money from.
Seeing as Nintendo and Sony have much greater 1st party software support yet lower software sales for their consoles (despite in the case of Nintendo having a higher userbase) I fail to understand how any perceived collapse of 1st party support is a problem anyway.
Not that Bizarre and Bioware were ever 1st party anyway, just that they simply chose to support only the 360 on certain games, which makes sense when for a large portion of the period they were developing those particular games the 360 was the only console with a sizeable amount of units out there anyway.
Or to put it another way, no you can't have Devil May Cry 4, GTA4, Assassins Creed, Virtua Fighter 5, Beautiful Katamari or Fatal Inertia back for your PS3!
Canadian customs and immigration checked through my laptop also. In fact, I say also but US customs and immigration has never actually checked the contents of my hard drive as Canadian customs did but they have made sure it turns on and isn't a bomb instead however.
I've never taken my laptop round Europe with me so I can't really give any experience of other customs. I've not actually had British customs itself check my laptop at all though, simply putting it through the scanner in it's case was enough for them although I'd imagine they may check it if I was coming into the country as a foreign national or if I seemed slightly more dodgy!
That's 832gb right there. Okay, so that sounds like a botched number right? Not entirely, as mentioned elsewhere they've also announced a 1.6tb disk, they could make this simply by replacing the 4gbs with 64gbs (well that gives just around 1.75tb but you could drop some 64gbs for 4gbs) if they're roughly the same physical size.
I'd guess they're just filling the drive with the most cost effective blocks they can and over time will just scale up the lower capacity blocks to higher capacity blocks to increase drive sizes.
It's speculation and I really don't know much of the way drives like this work or are designed but should my assumptions be correct then this seems a viable explanation - that whilst they could just release a 1.75tb drive now it really would cost too much, 12x64gb and 16x4gb is probably some price sweet point now whilst scaling up to a full 28x64gb may really push the price up to the truly unacceptable levels.
The fact is C and C++ whilst to many of us self-taught programmers was our first language it's not necessarily the best first language and had I known differently I'd probably not have chosen C as my first language.
I went to uni already knowing C but then being taught Java it seemed a nice starting language and I somewhat wish I'd learn it earlier. I'd question why his students are unable to transfer from the idea of reference variables to pointers as the concepts really aren't massively different, when you get your head round the whole references thing the pointer concept isn't that far a leap. I'd argue that if his students understood Java and are unable to make the jump to C that it may be the teacher that's at fault.
As I see it the best route would be to teach the likes of Java and so forth in the 1st year and then make the jump to C/C++ in the 2nd and 3rd years, probably even assembly of some forth in the 3rd year also. I'm not convinced there is one big problem here, the lack of teaching of C/C++ isn't necessarily Java's fault and the two languages certainly aren't mutually exclusive in their ability to be learnt.
What I do think would be a bad idea however is throwing students into C/C++ straight away when they may have no knowledge of other languages, I'll be a brave man and admit I think it did me some damage that took a fair while to repair jumping straight into C as it's easy to overlook important things such as avoidance of buffer overflows when you're not even totally sure about pointers and are still initially trying to get your head round the concept of multi-dimensional arrays as well as trying to remember even the syntax of the language.
Regarding students not being able to understand how to write console programs, again I don't see this as a fault of Java and I doubt if students can write GUI apps that they're incapable of writing console apps, it's just down to a lack of teaching about different programming patterns such as FSMs and so on.
My biggest problem with uni teaching in this area is not the use of specific existing languages but the fact some Unis and courses make up their own languages which don't always quite work right having never had testing in a wider environment and that really offer nothing over certain existing languages. At least students get another language under their belt that's actually usable outside that specific course should they be taught an existing language than some home grown one for the course.
Learning about web design is a decent idea because many of the ideas of good website design can also be applied to any applications.
Specifically look up things on web usability and web accessibility, you'll be amazed at how much of it is relevant to non-web applications. In terms of accessibility the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) are a good started.
Of course, HTML and CSS is a fairly straightforward playground to practice layout and design also, especially as pretty much every OS has a web browser and text editor to hand to try things out with!
I guess in a weird twisted way Slashdot is almost acting as a moderator for the open source community, the fact that someone like this is getting exposure like this acts as a good warning for other people to not act like idiots.
Of course people always will, but if I was in a prominent position in some community I'd seriously think twice about writing off my future career prospects by acting like such an idiot in such a high profile manner.
Whilst I agree we don't want Slashdot to become some crappy sensationalist tabloid like news site similar to the way The Register has become it also probably doesn't hurt open source and scientific communities by keeping people like this in check.
The UK has plenty of partnerships with foreign research centres and as such doesn't necessarily need it's own supercomputing power. Where the UK is week in supercomputing it may be strong elsewhere and can hence trade resources with other nations (mostly the US) that do have more computing power available.
Regardless however, out of the systems above the UK's 10 are situated in the US and 2 in Germany, that means only 6 nations actually have faster supercomputers than the UK anyway so using your reference to the UK's ranking in terms of GDP at 7th place on the fastest supercomputing list the UK is still doing quite well.
Finally, I'm not sure that this list pays any attention to distributed computing, so whilst the UK may not have powerful supercomputers, they may well have extremely powerful distributed processing systems instead.
Just because a nation is at x position in terms of a certain ranking doesn't mean it has to be at x position for all other rankings. It's unrealistic to expect that the UK should be at number 17th in all possible areas. Things also change rapidly, it wasn't so long ago that the UK was hands down the world leader for robotics for example, but now that's an industry that the UK has long lost to the likes of Japan, that's not to say the UK is not doing well in other areas instead such as the financial and medical industries in which the UK is still a world leader.
The most important point to take away is that the UK is obviously doing something right to be so high in the rankings for GDP and purchasing power parity so it's questionable if more scientific research is needed in the grand scheme of things. I'll admittedly however agree with you that personally I'd also love for the UK to be responsible for many more pioneering scientific breakthroughs than it currently is.
TFA is quite the troll and I'd question if he's ever used one or even understands the idea that different people have different needs.
For me it's the perfect device for making notes and reading eBooks. I've got a 15" widescreen Dell also but it's simply too big and bulky for most purposes, even smaller screen laptops are the same. This device though is just perfect for carrying around because it's small enough to be easy to carry but big enough that it doesn't suffer the problems that PDAs and phones do - i.e. crap at web browsing, too small to read eBooks decently, no proper keyboard for input and so forth. The closest thing I saw previously to this for doing the job I want was the old Macbook minis, the 13" ones or so but then Apple made them bigger so they have the same issue as standard laptops.
To sum up, these Eee PCs are big enough to overcome the problem of being to small for some tasks that most existing mobile devices suffer but small enough to carry around avoiding the problems that full size laptops suffer, the thing fits in the glove compartment of your car! One final point of course is the price, for under £200 it's not even expensive, it's cheaper than even the likes of the iPhone and does so infinitely much more because it's a standard and open x86 architecture system.
Sorry I should have clarified, by vicious I didn't so much mean damaging but more one that has extremely strong infection capabilities and strong countermeasures against removal (anti-anti-virus etc.).
In a P2P virus network there's no reason the virus couldn't update itself with new plugins for exploiting new vulnerabilities allowing it to spread yet further. If the virus could also update anti-anti-virus techniques it could potentially be very hard to wipe out whilst still fulfilling the same purposes as existing hijacked PCs - essentially we'd be looking at extremely resilient botnets and such that literally expand themselves and to an extent protect themselves even in the face of many of todays standard countermeasures.
I've not been up on what bot herders are upto nowadays but it can only be a matter of time before these techniques are adopted if they don't exist already.
That's some pretty poor advice to run multiple anti-virus apps. other than AV vendors who all want a piece of the pie where is this being suggested? Initially there's the fact many conflict in their tasks and implementation to the point where having multiple AV software will sometimes goes as far as giving you a nice BSOD each time you boot up until you can mangle one AV app out of your system using recovery console or safe mode (Some versions of Symantec and McAfee for example). Ignoring that however there's the most prominent problem of the ridiculous drain in system resources you'll suffer from having one, let alone 2 AV apps - even worse if you stick an anti-spyware app. in also! I've yet to see any enterprise network deploying multiple AV solutions to the same machines and the only place I could see this being advised is the likes of Futureshop, PC World or whatever big chain wants to make as much money as possible selling useless apps in your particular country.
The best way to protect yourself from viruses or spyware is to not get them in the first place. That requires educating users to avoid sites that appear dodgy, to not download anything that isn't from a reputable publisher and to not open attachments unless you're expecting them and trust the source fully.
Current AV systems are flawed, malware has evolved but AV software really hasn't. It's still following the paradigm of reactive action which is hopeless in today's world because by the time AV software has acted the malware has already had chance to embed itself and potentially even disable or remove the AV in question.
It's only going to get worse also, I'm not entirely sure why we haven't seen extremely vicious viruses yet but I'd like to think that it's because anyone competent enough to writing such a virus would be intelligent enough to put their efforts elsewhere for good use. Looking forwards for example with advances in AI we might encounter viruses that can mutate to use new security holes, viruses that work as P2P networks to distribute virus updates and hence become as difficult to shut down as the file sharing phenomenon and so on. The current AV market is both a sham and a scam, to suggest that much of the AV software out there really protects people is a lie, it doesn't. The times I've seen AV programs out there detect stuff it all too often can't clean it and so manual removal ends up being the only solution anyway.
Viruses need to be stopped at the borders, but the difficulty is simply the amount and type of borders (Internet - various services, floppy, USB, CD, etc.). We can of course follow the trusted computing route but that's not ideal either because companies don't trust us to use our computers so we lose a massive amount of freedom which to many of us makes computing great. There's no easy solution to the problem but the current option offered by AV vendors isn't even a viable start to the solution now, let alone in the future, it's like trying to save a decapitated person by sticking bandage on their neck when the only way to save them was to prevent such an accident in the first place. Sticking multiple bandages on that neck still isn't going to save that person!
Any idea if these windmills have an adverse effect on ocean dwelling creatures or can they happily swim around them without trouble?
I'm just intrigued by the idea that whilst providing power, they may also provide protection to allow fish stocks to recover in the waters around them where trawlers will struggle to fish.
Of course, I hear these things are quite bad for birds instead however so it's still not entirely harmless I guess.
Not in my experience
on
Where are Wii?
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· Score: 1, Insightful
I'm probably going to get modded down for saying this, but honestly the Wii with just one controller is a pretty shit console, you can count the number of games worth playing by yourself on one hand almost literally. It's a console that really needs to be played with people to really stand out as an amazing console so in my experience, having owned a Wii since release and having a few friends with one you really do need at very least one extra controller, but ideally 4 so you can make the most of the awesome party games that are aimed at multiple players.
Contrasting that with the 360 there's a plethora of games you can play by yourself and with other people but the games you play with other people are nearly always designed to be played with other people online so you realistically only need one controller, maybe 2, there is of course the fact that one controller fits all so other than the likes of guitar hero you are only buying the one or two controllers for the full range of games rather than requiring the classic controller, the gamecube controller for backwards compat., the wiimote and the nunchuck and if you're really into it the various other addons out there like the wii zapper and such.
I'm not saying the Wii is a bad console, but I've always thought those that suggest it's the low price point that made the Wii do well are wrong, because here in the UK you're looking at £175 for the Wii, £30 for Wii play + the Wii mote, £50 for another 2 wii motes, £45 for 3 more nunchucks and £30 for a pair of classic controllers - that's essentially £330 for the Wii to really reach it's peak which is also more than it costs for a PS3 and 360 to reach their peak. In contrast you can get a 360 with a couple of games and extra controller bundled in for £280 now or a PS3 with a game bundled and 2 controllers for £300.
I don't think therefore that the Wii is doing well because it's cheap unless people really are failing to realise the total cost of the Wii but because it is different, because it is a social phenomenon, I realised pretty early on that the Wii was going to end up costing me more in terms of hardware than my 360, but it didn't deter me because the concept of it interested me and because the 360 and PS3 just didn't have the same selection and same amount of fun party games for when friends are over that the Wii did.
It seems silly to speculate that Toshiba is subsidising HD-DVD and the Bluray group are not, particularly as Sony was selling PS3s at a loss for so long which was attributed to Bluray and Cell.
In terms of backwards compatibility I refer to the fact that HD-DVDs can use a layer of the disc for DVD such that you can buy HD-DVDs now and use them in your existing DVD player and have them play standard def. then when you do make the switch to HD-DVD you've already got a library of HD films meaning you don't have to rebuy your entire DVD collection in HD if you don't wish to. See here for more information:
I'm not sure why you suggest Bluray DRM isn't more problematic, whilst the underlying AACS layer agreeably isn't, there have been notable issues with BD+ - an extra layer of DRM which HD DVD doesn't use, see here as an example of the issues:
"There is no Region Coding in the existing HD DVD specification, which means that titles from any country can be played in players in any other country." From the DRM section of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD Which has no region coding section as Bluray does.
I don't care why Microsoft would support HD-DVD, I'm just glad that they do although the argument seems rather foolish because you could equally argue Sony are trying to fuel the HD-DVD war so that they can sell more PS3s and downloadable movies via their online store too.
The HD-DVD format whilst not perfect is much more consumer friendly in that it's cheaper, it's region free and it's backwards compatible to an extent.
In comparison Bluray suffers from being region locked, having much more unfriendly, more problematic DRM and doesn't support backwards compat. in DVD players.
A lot of people don't want HD-DVD to win because Microsoft are backing it, but I think Microsoft is the lesser of two evils in this case, the biggest bonus for me is the region free part, whilst this is probably largely useless for North American consumers who get films earlier and cheaper anyway for those of us in Europe this is immensly important, rather than paying £23.99 for a film we can import it for about £15 and often get it 6 months earlier. With Bluray you're stuck with your £23.99 cost and the 6 month delay between North American and European releases.
Sadly it may be too late, HD-DVD isn't holding up that well right now it would seem, for me personally if HD-DVD won I would buy an HD-DVD player because of the cheap import HD-DVDs I can buy but if Bluray won I'd go for online purchases of HD content for no other reason than I refuse to pay over £15 for a movie.
"In fact I'd accuse Mr Robertson of hyperbole suggesting the BBFC is the British Board of Videogame Censors as a quick search of their records [bbfc.org.uk] shows that Manhunt 2 is the only game currently listed as rejected."
Isn't that the point? Manhunt 2 whilst being a crappy game is certainly no more violent than various other films and not really worse than some other games out there.
The BBFC has banned Manhunt 2 because to this day the media is still blaming Manhunt for the death of Stephen Pakeerah despite the copy of the game involved in the murder investigation being owned by Stephen himself as stated by the police. Unfortunately, the general media such as the BBC aren't willing to correct their misreporting partly because if they can save face they will and partly because they make money reporting about the evils of video games as it pulls the readers/viewers in.
The real problem is that the BBFC has absolutely no balls in dealing with the issue, they need to stand up and accept that the game is perfectly acceptable in a mature society and should anyone criticise a decision to allow it through they should also have the balls to put forward the police report regarding the fact that Manhunt was absolutely in no way to blame for the murder of Stephen Pakeerah.
It's not a decision about fair ratings, the decision to ban Manhunt 2 in the UK is political, period.
Well I understand that bothers a few, but for every person that understands that there may be potential problems there seems to be thousands more who simply don't know what DRM is and don't care enough or even think to check for copy protection warnings on the back of CDs.
Most people I know buy CDs to play in their car if anywhere and not their PC so it's simply not an issue if it has computer based DRM - the amount of CDs that have DRM that effects playing in a standard car based CD player still seems to be so negligible that if it does occur, people just put it down to being unlucky and getting a faulty CD without ever realising that DRM exists, by which time the studios have realised their colossal screw up and sent out working CDs to the stores.
...I can't see DRM making much difference to brick and mortar stores but this DRM hurting physical CD sales attitude is caused by the same mentality that piracy is to blame for the major record labels current downfall.
Still, it's nice to see the music industries oversimplified logic and ignorance of reality working against it for once of course so I'll keep my mouth shut and pretend they're right and it's all DRMs fault because in a strange twist of fate it can only be a good thing having the distributors against it;)
He's one of the more influential voices in the IT world. Whether that's good or bad, the fact is he has a lot of power, so as much as it would be nice to, we can't simply ignore him.
Be it corruption, cheating, lies or whatever that got him where he is, the unfortunate fact is that he is there.
Isn't it great that technology like the internet has reached the point of acceptance that when peoples houses are burning down one of the main priorities is to ensure the shelter everyone has to hide in has wireless internet access and that people make sure they at least rescue their laptops and PDAs.
I'm sure it wasn't much more than 5 years ago that people would look at you funny if you turned up in such a place and said "Right, where's the net access?".
I think you have to remember China is a pretty big country with a whole lot of people.
Most English teachers probably end up in the well populated large cities, where life is a whole lot more westernized whereas I'd imagine a lot of the oppression, human rights violations and such occur more in the outer regions where the sweat shops are and where the Chinese goverment isn't willing to invest in learning English as it is in the major business centres. As you quite rightly point out, plenty of people go to China and come back as English teacher but not only that, think of all the business people and tourists that also go and come back without these tails.
I could be completely wrong, but again I'd guess it's because the China Westerners see and experience isn't the China that the majority of the Chinese population experience. Beijing is probably the most commonly visited and heard of part of China for Westerners yet it only holds around 13 million of China's 1.3 billion people.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no reason the direct debit couldn't have been larger or that there couldn't have been multiple direct debits. It almost certainly wasn't for the very reason someone was merely disproving his point, which they did rather effectively.
Also he's somewhat more protected than Joe average, if someone tries to make, say, a fake passport under the name Jeremy Clarkson but with their photo and try to use it any customs officer is going to laugh that someone thinks they can pass themselves off as a well known TV celebrity - especially one that's publicly handed out all his personal details!
There's nothing to say now of course that more people aren't going to follow suit and try and screw him either of course.
If anything, his absolutely and entirely disproved his point - even he accepts this! Besides, £500 is still no small amount to lose for an awful lot of people.
You could even try and make the process fun making it visual and have swarms of ants running round your neighbourhood spreading virtual pheromones over your neighbours' garden all in the name of finding a good route to use!
Whilst the 360 is in second place to the Wii, it's still 1st place in terms of software sales by quite a decent margin. That means that no matter what the 1st party support it's still getting a hell of a lot of development attention because it's the console software developers can currently make the most money from.
Seeing as Nintendo and Sony have much greater 1st party software support yet lower software sales for their consoles (despite in the case of Nintendo having a higher userbase) I fail to understand how any perceived collapse of 1st party support is a problem anyway.
Not that Bizarre and Bioware were ever 1st party anyway, just that they simply chose to support only the 360 on certain games, which makes sense when for a large portion of the period they were developing those particular games the 360 was the only console with a sizeable amount of units out there anyway.
Or to put it another way, no you can't have Devil May Cry 4, GTA4, Assassins Creed, Virtua Fighter 5, Beautiful Katamari or Fatal Inertia back for your PS3!
Canadian customs and immigration checked through my laptop also. In fact, I say also but US customs and immigration has never actually checked the contents of my hard drive as Canadian customs did but they have made sure it turns on and isn't a bomb instead however.
I've never taken my laptop round Europe with me so I can't really give any experience of other customs. I've not actually had British customs itself check my laptop at all though, simply putting it through the scanner in it's case was enough for them although I'd imagine they may check it if I was coming into the country as a foreign national or if I seemed slightly more dodgy!
How about 12x64gb and 16x4gb ?
That's 832gb right there. Okay, so that sounds like a botched number right? Not entirely, as mentioned elsewhere they've also announced a 1.6tb disk, they could make this simply by replacing the 4gbs with 64gbs (well that gives just around 1.75tb but you could drop some 64gbs for 4gbs) if they're roughly the same physical size.
I'd guess they're just filling the drive with the most cost effective blocks they can and over time will just scale up the lower capacity blocks to higher capacity blocks to increase drive sizes.
It's speculation and I really don't know much of the way drives like this work or are designed but should my assumptions be correct then this seems a viable explanation - that whilst they could just release a 1.75tb drive now it really would cost too much, 12x64gb and 16x4gb is probably some price sweet point now whilst scaling up to a full 28x64gb may really push the price up to the truly unacceptable levels.
The fact is C and C++ whilst to many of us self-taught programmers was our first language it's not necessarily the best first language and had I known differently I'd probably not have chosen C as my first language.
I went to uni already knowing C but then being taught Java it seemed a nice starting language and I somewhat wish I'd learn it earlier. I'd question why his students are unable to transfer from the idea of reference variables to pointers as the concepts really aren't massively different, when you get your head round the whole references thing the pointer concept isn't that far a leap. I'd argue that if his students understood Java and are unable to make the jump to C that it may be the teacher that's at fault.
As I see it the best route would be to teach the likes of Java and so forth in the 1st year and then make the jump to C/C++ in the 2nd and 3rd years, probably even assembly of some forth in the 3rd year also. I'm not convinced there is one big problem here, the lack of teaching of C/C++ isn't necessarily Java's fault and the two languages certainly aren't mutually exclusive in their ability to be learnt.
What I do think would be a bad idea however is throwing students into C/C++ straight away when they may have no knowledge of other languages, I'll be a brave man and admit I think it did me some damage that took a fair while to repair jumping straight into C as it's easy to overlook important things such as avoidance of buffer overflows when you're not even totally sure about pointers and are still initially trying to get your head round the concept of multi-dimensional arrays as well as trying to remember even the syntax of the language.
Regarding students not being able to understand how to write console programs, again I don't see this as a fault of Java and I doubt if students can write GUI apps that they're incapable of writing console apps, it's just down to a lack of teaching about different programming patterns such as FSMs and so on.
My biggest problem with uni teaching in this area is not the use of specific existing languages but the fact some Unis and courses make up their own languages which don't always quite work right having never had testing in a wider environment and that really offer nothing over certain existing languages. At least students get another language under their belt that's actually usable outside that specific course should they be taught an existing language than some home grown one for the course.
Learning about web design is a decent idea because many of the ideas of good website design can also be applied to any applications.
Specifically look up things on web usability and web accessibility, you'll be amazed at how much of it is relevant to non-web applications. In terms of accessibility the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) are a good started.
Of course, HTML and CSS is a fairly straightforward playground to practice layout and design also, especially as pretty much every OS has a web browser and text editor to hand to try things out with!
I guess in a weird twisted way Slashdot is almost acting as a moderator for the open source community, the fact that someone like this is getting exposure like this acts as a good warning for other people to not act like idiots.
Of course people always will, but if I was in a prominent position in some community I'd seriously think twice about writing off my future career prospects by acting like such an idiot in such a high profile manner.
Whilst I agree we don't want Slashdot to become some crappy sensationalist tabloid like news site similar to the way The Register has become it also probably doesn't hurt open source and scientific communities by keeping people like this in check.
The UK has plenty of partnerships with foreign research centres and as such doesn't necessarily need it's own supercomputing power. Where the UK is week in supercomputing it may be strong elsewhere and can hence trade resources with other nations (mostly the US) that do have more computing power available.
Regardless however, out of the systems above the UK's 10 are situated in the US and 2 in Germany, that means only 6 nations actually have faster supercomputers than the UK anyway so using your reference to the UK's ranking in terms of GDP at 7th place on the fastest supercomputing list the UK is still doing quite well.
Finally, I'm not sure that this list pays any attention to distributed computing, so whilst the UK may not have powerful supercomputers, they may well have extremely powerful distributed processing systems instead.
Just because a nation is at x position in terms of a certain ranking doesn't mean it has to be at x position for all other rankings. It's unrealistic to expect that the UK should be at number 17th in all possible areas. Things also change rapidly, it wasn't so long ago that the UK was hands down the world leader for robotics for example, but now that's an industry that the UK has long lost to the likes of Japan, that's not to say the UK is not doing well in other areas instead such as the financial and medical industries in which the UK is still a world leader.
The most important point to take away is that the UK is obviously doing something right to be so high in the rankings for GDP and purchasing power parity so it's questionable if more scientific research is needed in the grand scheme of things. I'll admittedly however agree with you that personally I'd also love for the UK to be responsible for many more pioneering scientific breakthroughs than it currently is.
TFA is quite the troll and I'd question if he's ever used one or even understands the idea that different people have different needs.
For me it's the perfect device for making notes and reading eBooks. I've got a 15" widescreen Dell also but it's simply too big and bulky for most purposes, even smaller screen laptops are the same. This device though is just perfect for carrying around because it's small enough to be easy to carry but big enough that it doesn't suffer the problems that PDAs and phones do - i.e. crap at web browsing, too small to read eBooks decently, no proper keyboard for input and so forth. The closest thing I saw previously to this for doing the job I want was the old Macbook minis, the 13" ones or so but then Apple made them bigger so they have the same issue as standard laptops.
To sum up, these Eee PCs are big enough to overcome the problem of being to small for some tasks that most existing mobile devices suffer but small enough to carry around avoiding the problems that full size laptops suffer, the thing fits in the glove compartment of your car! One final point of course is the price, for under £200 it's not even expensive, it's cheaper than even the likes of the iPhone and does so infinitely much more because it's a standard and open x86 architecture system.
Sorry I should have clarified, by vicious I didn't so much mean damaging but more one that has extremely strong infection capabilities and strong countermeasures against removal (anti-anti-virus etc.).
In a P2P virus network there's no reason the virus couldn't update itself with new plugins for exploiting new vulnerabilities allowing it to spread yet further. If the virus could also update anti-anti-virus techniques it could potentially be very hard to wipe out whilst still fulfilling the same purposes as existing hijacked PCs - essentially we'd be looking at extremely resilient botnets and such that literally expand themselves and to an extent protect themselves even in the face of many of todays standard countermeasures.
I've not been up on what bot herders are upto nowadays but it can only be a matter of time before these techniques are adopted if they don't exist already.
That's some pretty poor advice to run multiple anti-virus apps. other than AV vendors who all want a piece of the pie where is this being suggested? Initially there's the fact many conflict in their tasks and implementation to the point where having multiple AV software will sometimes goes as far as giving you a nice BSOD each time you boot up until you can mangle one AV app out of your system using recovery console or safe mode (Some versions of Symantec and McAfee for example). Ignoring that however there's the most prominent problem of the ridiculous drain in system resources you'll suffer from having one, let alone 2 AV apps - even worse if you stick an anti-spyware app. in also! I've yet to see any enterprise network deploying multiple AV solutions to the same machines and the only place I could see this being advised is the likes of Futureshop, PC World or whatever big chain wants to make as much money as possible selling useless apps in your particular country.
The best way to protect yourself from viruses or spyware is to not get them in the first place. That requires educating users to avoid sites that appear dodgy, to not download anything that isn't from a reputable publisher and to not open attachments unless you're expecting them and trust the source fully.
Current AV systems are flawed, malware has evolved but AV software really hasn't. It's still following the paradigm of reactive action which is hopeless in today's world because by the time AV software has acted the malware has already had chance to embed itself and potentially even disable or remove the AV in question.
It's only going to get worse also, I'm not entirely sure why we haven't seen extremely vicious viruses yet but I'd like to think that it's because anyone competent enough to writing such a virus would be intelligent enough to put their efforts elsewhere for good use. Looking forwards for example with advances in AI we might encounter viruses that can mutate to use new security holes, viruses that work as P2P networks to distribute virus updates and hence become as difficult to shut down as the file sharing phenomenon and so on. The current AV market is both a sham and a scam, to suggest that much of the AV software out there really protects people is a lie, it doesn't. The times I've seen AV programs out there detect stuff it all too often can't clean it and so manual removal ends up being the only solution anyway.
Viruses need to be stopped at the borders, but the difficulty is simply the amount and type of borders (Internet - various services, floppy, USB, CD, etc.). We can of course follow the trusted computing route but that's not ideal either because companies don't trust us to use our computers so we lose a massive amount of freedom which to many of us makes computing great. There's no easy solution to the problem but the current option offered by AV vendors isn't even a viable start to the solution now, let alone in the future, it's like trying to save a decapitated person by sticking bandage on their neck when the only way to save them was to prevent such an accident in the first place. Sticking multiple bandages on that neck still isn't going to save that person!
Any idea if these windmills have an adverse effect on ocean dwelling creatures or can they happily swim around them without trouble?
I'm just intrigued by the idea that whilst providing power, they may also provide protection to allow fish stocks to recover in the waters around them where trawlers will struggle to fish.
Of course, I hear these things are quite bad for birds instead however so it's still not entirely harmless I guess.
I'm probably going to get modded down for saying this, but honestly the Wii with just one controller is a pretty shit console, you can count the number of games worth playing by yourself on one hand almost literally. It's a console that really needs to be played with people to really stand out as an amazing console so in my experience, having owned a Wii since release and having a few friends with one you really do need at very least one extra controller, but ideally 4 so you can make the most of the awesome party games that are aimed at multiple players.
Contrasting that with the 360 there's a plethora of games you can play by yourself and with other people but the games you play with other people are nearly always designed to be played with other people online so you realistically only need one controller, maybe 2, there is of course the fact that one controller fits all so other than the likes of guitar hero you are only buying the one or two controllers for the full range of games rather than requiring the classic controller, the gamecube controller for backwards compat., the wiimote and the nunchuck and if you're really into it the various other addons out there like the wii zapper and such.
I'm not saying the Wii is a bad console, but I've always thought those that suggest it's the low price point that made the Wii do well are wrong, because here in the UK you're looking at £175 for the Wii, £30 for Wii play + the Wii mote, £50 for another 2 wii motes, £45 for 3 more nunchucks and £30 for a pair of classic controllers - that's essentially £330 for the Wii to really reach it's peak which is also more than it costs for a PS3 and 360 to reach their peak. In contrast you can get a 360 with a couple of games and extra controller bundled in for £280 now or a PS3 with a game bundled and 2 controllers for £300.
I don't think therefore that the Wii is doing well because it's cheap unless people really are failing to realise the total cost of the Wii but because it is different, because it is a social phenomenon, I realised pretty early on that the Wii was going to end up costing me more in terms of hardware than my 360, but it didn't deter me because the concept of it interested me and because the 360 and PS3 just didn't have the same selection and same amount of fun party games for when friends are over that the Wii did.
It seems silly to speculate that Toshiba is subsidising HD-DVD and the Bluray group are not, particularly as Sony was selling PS3s at a loss for so long which was attributed to Bluray and Cell.
In terms of backwards compatibility I refer to the fact that HD-DVDs can use a layer of the disc for DVD such that you can buy HD-DVDs now and use them in your existing DVD player and have them play standard def. then when you do make the switch to HD-DVD you've already got a library of HD films meaning you don't have to rebuy your entire DVD collection in HD if you don't wish to. See here for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD#DVD_.2F_HD_DVD_hybrid_discs
I'm not sure why you suggest Bluray DRM isn't more problematic, whilst the underlying AACS layer agreeably isn't, there have been notable issues with BD+ - an extra layer of DRM which HD DVD doesn't use, see here as an example of the issues:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071007-new-blu-ray-discs-with-bd-drm-failing-to-play-on-some-devices.html
Region coding:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluray#Region_codes
vs.
"There is no Region Coding in the existing HD DVD specification, which means that titles from any country can be played in players in any other country."
From the DRM section of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD
Which has no region coding section as Bluray does.
DVD/HD hybrid discs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluray#DVD_.2F_Blu-Ray_hybrid_discs (The section is empty)
vs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD#DVD_.2F_HD_DVD_hybrid_discs
DRM problems:
Nothing about DRM issues on Wikipedia for either format, however as has been reported, the extra layer of DRM I refer to has caused it's fair share of problems:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071007-new-blu-ray-discs-with-bd-drm-failing-to-play-on-some-devices.html
Which facts were you suggesting Wikipedia could correct me on?
I don't care why Microsoft would support HD-DVD, I'm just glad that they do although the argument seems rather foolish because you could equally argue Sony are trying to fuel the HD-DVD war so that they can sell more PS3s and downloadable movies via their online store too.
The HD-DVD format whilst not perfect is much more consumer friendly in that it's cheaper, it's region free and it's backwards compatible to an extent.
In comparison Bluray suffers from being region locked, having much more unfriendly, more problematic DRM and doesn't support backwards compat. in DVD players.
A lot of people don't want HD-DVD to win because Microsoft are backing it, but I think Microsoft is the lesser of two evils in this case, the biggest bonus for me is the region free part, whilst this is probably largely useless for North American consumers who get films earlier and cheaper anyway for those of us in Europe this is immensly important, rather than paying £23.99 for a film we can import it for about £15 and often get it 6 months earlier. With Bluray you're stuck with your £23.99 cost and the 6 month delay between North American and European releases.
Sadly it may be too late, HD-DVD isn't holding up that well right now it would seem, for me personally if HD-DVD won I would buy an HD-DVD player because of the cheap import HD-DVDs I can buy but if Bluray won I'd go for online purchases of HD content for no other reason than I refuse to pay over £15 for a movie.
One of my XP machines pulled down a WGA update from Windows automatic updates yesterday.
Have they also somehow altered WGA in XP?
"In fact I'd accuse Mr Robertson of hyperbole suggesting the BBFC is the British Board of Videogame Censors as a quick search of their records [bbfc.org.uk] shows that Manhunt 2 is the only game currently listed as rejected."
Isn't that the point? Manhunt 2 whilst being a crappy game is certainly no more violent than various other films and not really worse than some other games out there.
The BBFC has banned Manhunt 2 because to this day the media is still blaming Manhunt for the death of Stephen Pakeerah despite the copy of the game involved in the murder investigation being owned by Stephen himself as stated by the police. Unfortunately, the general media such as the BBC aren't willing to correct their misreporting partly because if they can save face they will and partly because they make money reporting about the evils of video games as it pulls the readers/viewers in.
The real problem is that the BBFC has absolutely no balls in dealing with the issue, they need to stand up and accept that the game is perfectly acceptable in a mature society and should anyone criticise a decision to allow it through they should also have the balls to put forward the police report regarding the fact that Manhunt was absolutely in no way to blame for the murder of Stephen Pakeerah.
It's not a decision about fair ratings, the decision to ban Manhunt 2 in the UK is political, period.
Well I understand that bothers a few, but for every person that understands that there may be potential problems there seems to be thousands more who simply don't know what DRM is and don't care enough or even think to check for copy protection warnings on the back of CDs.
Most people I know buy CDs to play in their car if anywhere and not their PC so it's simply not an issue if it has computer based DRM - the amount of CDs that have DRM that effects playing in a standard car based CD player still seems to be so negligible that if it does occur, people just put it down to being unlucky and getting a faulty CD without ever realising that DRM exists, by which time the studios have realised their colossal screw up and sent out working CDs to the stores.
...I can't see DRM making much difference to brick and mortar stores but this DRM hurting physical CD sales attitude is caused by the same mentality that piracy is to blame for the major record labels current downfall.
;)
Still, it's nice to see the music industries oversimplified logic and ignorance of reality working against it for once of course so I'll keep my mouth shut and pretend they're right and it's all DRMs fault because in a strange twist of fate it can only be a good thing having the distributors against it
He's one of the more influential voices in the IT world. Whether that's good or bad, the fact is he has a lot of power, so as much as it would be nice to, we can't simply ignore him.
Be it corruption, cheating, lies or whatever that got him where he is, the unfortunate fact is that he is there.
I think the point isn't the speed, but the distance they can cover without stopping.
Isn't it great that technology like the internet has reached the point of acceptance that when peoples houses are burning down one of the main priorities is to ensure the shelter everyone has to hide in has wireless internet access and that people make sure they at least rescue their laptops and PDAs.
;)
I'm sure it wasn't much more than 5 years ago that people would look at you funny if you turned up in such a place and said "Right, where's the net access?".
Oh how times change
I think you have to remember China is a pretty big country with a whole lot of people.
Most English teachers probably end up in the well populated large cities, where life is a whole lot more westernized whereas I'd imagine a lot of the oppression, human rights violations and such occur more in the outer regions where the sweat shops are and where the Chinese goverment isn't willing to invest in learning English as it is in the major business centres. As you quite rightly point out, plenty of people go to China and come back as English teacher but not only that, think of all the business people and tourists that also go and come back without these tails.
I could be completely wrong, but again I'd guess it's because the China Westerners see and experience isn't the China that the majority of the Chinese population experience. Beijing is probably the most commonly visited and heard of part of China for Westerners yet it only holds around 13 million of China's 1.3 billion people.