My Dad's machine is a Athlon XP2400, with 512mb of ram and an AGP Geforce 6100, it runs Vista slowly but it does run Vista. As an expeariment I did try it with 1.5GB of DDR400 and it ran ok and not really much worse than XP, the vista expearence index was 2.3 (2.1 with 512mb of ram). He's since deceided to buy 2GB of DDR ram. The machines still running Vista business 32bit now, personnally I would stick XP back on it but since the other two machines in the house are using Vista he wants that one to as well.
The problem you and my dad face is a new copy of vista is about £70, the old style ram is probably anouther £50. With low end laptops costing £300 and the ability to buy full desktop systems for £200 both which come with Vista Home Premimum (even though many can't run Aero) in the long run its better value to buy a cheap desktop and pay the extra £25 for 2GB of DDR2 ram get a reasonably fast machine thats secure and has the prettyness.
P.S. I too am eagerly awaiting the next Ubunutu release since Fiesty Fawn really impressed me, I'm hoping to take anouther crack at learning just how WINE works and seeing if I could go Vista free.
P.P.S Since SP1 network transfers don't seem effected by music playing unless your copying to a pre SP1 Vista machine (Vista SP1 to Vista SP1 and Vista SP1 to Xp seem fine now)
Quasars are an effect created by the supermassive black holes at the centre of each galaxy, these black holes consume tremendous amounts of mater (something like 10 sun masses a year) the more solar masses they consume the brighter they are. Obviously there is only so much material than can be pulled in by the supermassive black hole, eventually all the material is either ejected as high intensity engery (the quaser pulses we can observe) or consumed by the black hole.
The article mentions that astronomers have discovered galaxies with quasars which are old enough that the matter orbiting the black hole should have been used up. The current scientific hypothisis for old galaxies with quasars, is that the collision of two galaxies can generate new material which is pulled in by the supermassive black hole (thus supplying the matter to generate a quasar.) These older galaxies don't show any signs of recent collision and so the question of how the black holes in the centre are getting enough matter to generate a quasar needs to be asked. Since scientists don't know why there are quasars on these older galaxies they seem to be assuming that something else is causing new matter to be sucked into a galaxies supermassive black hole. The articles twist is this could potentially happen in our own galaxy, potentially killing us all.
I used to love 1&1 too, until they decided to screw me over.
About three years ago I started hosting podcasts. I didn't see a problem because when I'd set up the account (perhaps two three years before that) there was a bandwidth cap of 5GB a month. However 1&1 removed the cap without altering their terms and conditions with me. Suddenly I had a £400 bill posted to me, which obviously was slightly worrying.
Despite dozens of phone calls with service representatives (which seem to only consist of three people) and having them recorded saying the amount was incorrect and their fault, they refused to refund the money and re-instate the cap. I had the account type changed and placed a email notifier to ensure that if I went over the daily limit I would be notified, within hours of me placing that notifier my control panel was "updated" and the notifier removed, and anouther £250 bill was noticed three days later.
After writing to the damm company with about three pages of compliants they agreed to waive the £250 since it was within the new accounts limits (and aparently a technical error.) They disagreed about the control panel "update" dispite me waiving the logs in their face (the update also removed several other things I put in place to stop my bandwidth issues) lastly the finance department argued it was ok for them to change the terms and conditions without notice because they didn't offer that service anymore (despite going against the contract and UK law.)
Because I lived with my parents and we were moving house I had chance to talk to a solicitor about the whole situation, who told me I was legally in the right and it was a pretty much open and shut case, but because of the evidence etc.. needed to prove it I'd be better off paying the bill as it would save me time and money.
1&1 are theives as far as I'm concerned its been three years since this happened and I still get angry about it.
Phorm argues it doesn't break the law because they offer an "opt out" clause and so isn't effected by the RIPA act. BT's trial last year of Phorm against 10,000 users is being investigated as potentially illegal as users wern't given the chance to opt out. It should be a easily won case since BT by supplying 121media and not asking if they can share this information have broken the Data Protection Act. BT maintains plans to implement Phorm with the ability to opt out (through a cookie on your PC.)
I've already sent a letter to my service provider (virgin media) informing them I want no part of Phorm and if they implement it (which they are considering) I will be prosecuting them under the Data Protection Act. I suggest all BT, Talk Talk and Virgin Media users do the same.
The Data Protection Act in the UK is the best defense against this sort of thing, it defines how companies my handle personal data, the right a person has to that data and what responsibilities the organisations have with it. The biggest problem with it tends to be phone operators who've never read it trying to tell you the section you read to them is wrong.
I believe someone is trying to prosecute Facebook because they were unable to remove their information from Facebook (when you leave a service you have a right to have all information on a companies database to be deleted) If I were to go into a police station and demand all the CCTV footage they have on me they would have to supply it (my right to see) finally if I don't agree that companies can share my information with 3rd parties then they aren't allowed to share it full stop if they do you can prosecute.
121Media argue phorm doesn't violate the Data Protection Act because you are visiting public websites (it being akin to walking along a public highway and so no right to privacy) Hopefully the Information Commisson won't see it that way and will enforce the view that sending unencrypted http packets through port 80 is the same as making a phone call and so falls under the same protections.
RTFA and pay attention to what the modder says, he found diliberate bugs in the drivers which didn't exist in the Xp drivers (and with Xp driver tweaks were resolved) as well as a bunch of other things. By the looks of things Creative made the drivers work good enough to claim their fake "Vista Ready" logo but made sure the sucked enough that people would upgrade to Xi-Fi.
As an idiot who did just that I won't be buying Creative anymore.
Your talking about ethical responsibilities, as the parent said a Lawyer has a ethical responsibility to report if a accused is planning to kill and informant, just as a Doctor has a ethical responsibility to report child molestation. In both cases the job is to protect someone who can't protect themselves from anouther force. If you were to look into domestic violence cases while it might be in the doctors interest to taddle on a beating wife/husband unless the victim comes forward or they can defintily prove something dodgy is going on there very little they can do because it would be a breech of their privacy.
Thats where technology falls short, excusing a few organisations like the IEEE and IET (which are voluntary) there are no industry ethics.
My final year project involved writing a bluetooth stack for a bluetooth v1.0 device. Sure I didn't have to follow the hardware guidlines but the bluetooth specification is over 1000 pages and I could grasp it (it took a very long time to read.) I also implemented the Compact Flash standard sucessfully within the same project, my only issue was trying to implement the FAT standard. I simply didn't have time to locate a detailed and good enough standards document (CF was just as hard to find btw.)
My project was able to discover other bluetooth devices, pair with them and recieve files which would then be stored on a cf card (getting the information off the cf card was the issue my process was quite extended.) It was done in assembly I designed my own cf and rs232 adapters (for the bluetooth device) to work with a custom 8051.
1 Designer/developer in less than 6 months dealing with something close to 2000 pages of component design documentation, system documentation and standards documentation. As long as the documentation is as well written as the bluetooth specification (which I don't think is great) I really don't see an issue with a spec's size, my biggest issue was using a 8bit controller to deal with bluetooth address which were several times larger than the total storage of the device.
Try turning off Aero and switching Windows Indexing off, I've been asked in the past to put Vista on a AMD Sempron 2800 (with 512mb of ram and a Nvidia 6100.) The windows index service is usually what causes performance lag on low end machines. Aero is what effects the seeming delay in responsiveness.
I've found it an interesting expeariment as a bunch of low end machines I own now run Vista Business 32bit as fast or faster (haven't timed it offically but it definitly seems snappier) than Xp on the same machines. I actually went out and bought Vista for my very low laptop because it was faster to boot up, log on and hibernate works perfectly for once.
Lastly the supercache you mention is one of the miss-understood applications in Vista. On a new machine it will slow it slightly but after a month or so it does seem to speed things up (game loading in particular.)
The PS3 has a digital optical out socket for sound, this easter weekend I purchased a Samsung sound system which supports optical in and is working perfectly with every PS3 game I've thrown at it so far and sounds fantastic. The whole system (including speakers) cost £200. I was going to buy the Sony D1100 system which for £300 comes with standing speakers.
I agree thats not 7.1 and having some decrete analogue outputs would have saved me £200, but after hours of trapsing around various shops 7.1 doesn't seem to be something thats sold anymore.
I like Vista as a x64 user its great to finally see large amounts of x64 drivers being written. Since the last Nvidia driver I get the same FPS in games that I did in Xp. Some of the UI changes while annoying at first do work once your used to them and some can be really usefull (the Games folder on the start menu for instance.) The new networking stack has actually made home network shares easy to set up. Vista on a network does strange things too I used to have a Dell machine that would refuse access to any machine despite permissions being given, put a Vista machine on the network and you can access its shared folders, take that Vista machine off and you have the old problem comes back. Its as stable as Xp and I honestly think many of the drivers written for it are of a higher quality than XP's (Creative I'm looking at you.)
Vista has three main issues, the first is the higher resource requirements you can get it to run on a low spec machine but you end up turning so much off the difference between it and Xp is minimal. The second is the amount of updates released for windows through windows update, when you include SP1 I've probably downloaded close to 2GB's of updates for my machine over the last 14/15 months. Lastly its been the target of the biggest FUD campaign ever invented which is probably why it will never gain the market acceptance of XP.
Re:Banks is not a good author
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
Authors will generally take the time to briefly cover a previous event I've been able to read Terry Goodkinds books out of order (its been hard to get them all) and understand the storyline and plot quite easily because when Goodkind has a character take an action based on previous experience (in another book) he will use a small paragraph to give a description of that past event, most authors do this.
You can pick up the latest Anne Macathry book and understand what's going on, not well enough to understand all of the nuances but well enough to enjoy the book, Asimov's foundation series does the same thing.
Bank's writing style uses minimal description, this writing style can work however he often fails to elaborate things and in later books he won't reference past things and will just expect the reader to know. I'm no writer but the difference could be shown thus:
Most Authors:
Sam was couldn't believe it, it was the Starship Sen, the vessel which had destroyed his homeworld. He had fought it years before in the Galaxy war and lost, his loss had lead to the fall of the empire and his current position. He had to hold the line and stop the invaders before his new home was lost as well.
Banks
Sam couldn't believe it, it was the Sen. He knew he had to hold the line and stop the invaders before they destroyed his new home.
You only have to give that small amount of back story once and suddenly the reader knows a little bit about the people attacking, why Sam is so desperate to stop them, something about how Sam had gotten into his current position and a little bit about the current situation. Banks fails to do this and it makes his books difficult to read, this back referencing can be done to the detriment of the book (Robert Jordan's books suffer massively by this) and I agree sometimes a minimalist approach to description can make some very interesting books (Rankin's books spring to mind).
I've always thought the genre of a book was unimportant and will read different genres as long as the authors a good one. If your only ever going to tie yourself down to one genre you are going to miss so much. I'd rather know a great author than the next best author in genre xyz... Wouldn't you?
Interesting point but if cost is your main issue then get a Windows Mobile 5/6 phone, you get several days of battery (with use) wi-fi is standard, many have GPS built in (that works well) I've yet to see one which didn't have expandable memory so you can put that 4GB mini-sd card in for your music, skype already works on the format, it already works near perfectly with exchange, you can open/edit word/excel/powerpoint documents and if a decent keyboard is on your list then you can get a full (usable by fat fingered people) keyboard included as well. For £0 and a 18month contract (which has a lower rate than the iPhones.)
Anouther idea why not buy a PSP? My PSP has a good web browser (better than my phones) wifi and supports VOIP.
Apple were not the first to do integrated devices.
Banks does not get front place in UK bookshops, well, not in any WH Smith or Waterstones in the south west. He generally gets his own shelf and you'll only see people who've never read him pick up one of his books and its rare to see them make the same mistake twice.
His books fail to give any real backstory or context, which can be ok however characters will make decisions based on things you don't know about and aren't told. He takes little effort to bring the reader into the universe he's writing on and once I had the misfortune of picking up a book in the middle of a series and he made no attempt to explain anything, even after making the attempt to pick up the first book in the series things made little sense.
You want a good British author read Terry Pratchett or Philip Pullman, Banks can look inviting because everyone of his books has words like "Times best seller" and "Winner of Award xyz" don't fall for it.
I don't think that would work, I've recently moved within the UK from a big city to a small town. In the big city I never saw a single fight on a night out (but did hear about the occasional one) in the small town every night out seems to show either a fight being broken up, police talking to whitnesses or as of last friday 10 guys running up and hitting a guy dressed up as a cricket dude because he was dressed up as a cricketman.
Listening to their self congratulations after they decided that knocking him to the floor was enough showed they didn't think of any consequences only pride in how "hard" they were. Increasing jail terms wouldn't have dettered them as they honestly couldn't see an issue. Whenever I've had the displeasure of coming accross a theif or violent ejit they seem not to understand what their doing is wrong and seem to take pride if they do it well. I have no idea how you'll address this but sadly I don't think its a problem that can be easily solved.
I do agree that western society needs a culture of responsibility rather than rights.
PS the area in question is Sherborne/Yeovil which apparently have renowned schools, having gone to a top twenty school I can honestly say I don't see much difference between them and your average comprehensive student. But the local parents don't like me saying that.
Too powerfull? There are certain rules about entering a robot wars competition one of those being a weight limit of 100KG's and a weapon system which won't damage the safety perimeter (as well as a few other rules.) After looking at their robots on their web page and doing a bit of googling on battlebots rules. The heavyweight class would be appropriate for robot wars the super heavyweight being to heavy. So my guess is that either they brought a super heavyweight which was too heavy, or the disc contained enough weight to shatter the arena walls (which would need to be more than 10KG at 10,000rpm (hynodisc)) or it is the robot I'm about to mention which doesn't make it to the semi finals.
If you goto their own website http://www.teamlogicom.com/ and look at the robot "The Revolutionist" competed in robot wars twice and won neither in fact their own page suggests they went out fairly early on in the first competition.
Going to wikipedia and looking for robot wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Wars if you scroll through the entry you'll come accross the world championship results, comparing this with tv.com's episode summary http://www.tv.com/robot-wars-extreme-warriors/the-robot-wars-world-championship/episode/162581/summary.html you'll find their revolutionist robot failed to make the semi-finals in any of the events.
During the second world championship America managed to reach runner up and semi finals. If you bother to read the match summary's (same tv guide link above) you'll notice the drillzilla spends the entire time running away from Razor. BTW Manta was the best robot the USA ever put forward and it would have lost against Tornado (a bit more googling shows the motors aren't as powerfull.)
Feel free to go into details about how I'm wrong I loved robot wars when it was on.
I think the most important thing about Battle bots was how pathetic they were. During the international Robot Wars competitions there were a few American robots which were simply anihilated. You'd have some uber geek who'd spent $10k on making a robot that stuggled to go through glass and the americans would go crazy for it.
Robot wars was great you saw real progressions in designs as the series went on, from self righting mechanisms (thank you road block and chaos 2), to better protection (thank you hypnodisk for what you did too matilda) to new and interesting weapons (Razor) and there was always that occasional bit of contreversy (Tornado Vs Razor.)
I've watched the occasional episode of battlebots on comedy central and it doesn't seem like anyone ever learnt anything, the emphasis also seemed to be on expense rather than ability. Robots in the later seasons were no better than the early seasons.
As a person living in a country filled with manual gearbox the polite thing to do when engine breaking is to tap your brakes, this indicates to other drivers your slowing down. In the UK its actually written in the highway code book.
As a person who actually enjoyed the sheer challenge of Simcity 4 I did buy Societies. It was possible to build a huge sprawling metropolis which would function well in Simcity 4 and SimCity 4 was a stable game (I don't have the expansion) however, Societies is a completly different kettle of fish. Some of the issues I've had include:
The CD's copy protection occasionally will refuse to see the disc as a legal copy
The game is impossible to uninstall, after installing it on Vista Business, XP SP2, Xp MCE 2005 and vista Home Premium x64 I've yet been able to uninstall it on any of those machines (the uninstaller often breaks)
The games installation is often leads to a incomplete installation requiring you to install it again.
The games installer crashed on half the machines I installed it on.
The CD lacks a game icon
The CD's autoplay doesn't actually work
It is the only new game Vista doesn't recognise as a game, Vista will pick up a simcity 3000 installation and put it in the games folder, but not with Societies
Once you can actually get the game working things only get worse. While the game itself is stable, graphically its somewhere between Simcity 2000 and Simcity 3000 the gameplay is so simple that a five year old child would find it boring. I literally had to spend twenty minutes to create a situation which would cause the city to collapse and even then the game was trying to make the city sucessfull. The game isn't challenging The sims is harder to play than SimCity Societes.
The worst part of it all is you can occasionally come accross things which are really good ideas and if societies had been more like simcity 4 and had actually had some quality control it would have been a really great game.
I plug my PC into the wireless router and from windows update it will download:
My Creative x-Fi Extreme gamer drivers and a solutions thing will popup directing me to creatives site to get the console,
My Creative Vista IM driver and a solutions thing will popup directing me to creatives site to get the viewing app (msn will work fine without that),
Download and install the scanner and printer drivers for my Epson DX4400
Finally it will download the Netgear W111v3 drivers for my USB wireless card.
Last weekend I reinstalled vista (after breaking it by installing vm ware) I left the pc alone after intial installation and it was connected to my wireless router, it took an 45 minutes after install to download all of the windows updates (around 400Mb which is insane) and everything was setup all I had to do was run media centre to tune in some tv channels. The same is true for my laptop a 4yr old amd64 and a 8yr old amd2800 if Vista doesn't come with the driver there will be one on windows update. I particular like the solutions thing built into vista it can be usefull in tracking down abandoned hardware drivers/application software.
Interesting logic but you forget one important thing most drivers do see something wrong with their actions and if they get caught they may contest. They agree with the law in principle, if I speed through a zone and was caught fair enough I shouldn't have been speeding, maybe I won't take the offense seriously and will occasionally break it, but I recognise the need for the law.
Most people don't see copyright infringement as stealing, they don't see it as wrong and think they should be allowed to do it.
I contacted my MP (Oliver Letwin) when this story first broke on BBC news's website. I detailed the technical reasons why such a thing would be near imposible and asked that very same question.
He's got a month to reply to me, shadow chancellor or not his first job is to his constituants, he he doesn't bother responding to me, actually hold a surgery I'm never going to vote for the guy. If I get a standard response which clearly shows he hasn't read my message I'm sure the other 350 constiuants who work in the software house with me will be interested in his answer, I'm weary of conservative MP's who don't respond.
Considering they object to 10 page EULA's for products I wonder how they feel about Terms and Conditions for product and services bought online? Last time I signed up for a server host I read through about 15 pages of terms and conditions which were contained with a tiny scroll box and that company was UK based. As far as I can tell the reasons they give for objecting are equally valid for every UK ISP I've signed upto and every service I've bought online. Should be interesting to see where it goes.
Goto the BBC website and look at the crime statistics for each year, I believe this year crime in general decreased 11% however there was an increase of 9% in violent crime. The media naturally reports on the 9% rise first and mentions the 11% decrease in general in passing.In the last 4 years of reading the bbc website I've yet to see the total amount of crime to increase.
The streets are getting safer and safer, yet the media is helping us think they are getting worse. While I admit the chav's do get on my nerves they aren't the demons the daily mail would have you beleive. Then again I agree with this device because chav's will mindlessly vandalise places and it will help reduce that.
As someone who finished whis BEng in Computer Engineering this year I have to ask, where are the embedded jobs?
I hunted around looking for any assembly/vhdl/c job I could find and only found one which didn't require 2 years expearence, they didn't get any message back to me until 2 months after I'd applied. I applied to roughly 35 "entry level" jobs dealing with embedded devices. None were interested because I lacked two years expearence. In the time it took the only one to get back to me I'd been contacted by a C++/Java company had a phone interview went up and been personnally interviewed and been offered the job.
The real kicker is the embedded jobs paid less, didn't mention any benifits and wanted more work out of me. I think the real issue is most companies aren't willing to invest in graduates unless its for business positions. It is difficult to get 2 years expearence when everyone demands 2 years for their entry level jobs. Which leads to a shortage since no one gets offered a embedded job so Universitys don't bother going into too much detail since 99% of their students will never use it.
I think your investment cost is massivily overstated, I was involved in a podcast project (we also worked with muscians) most of us found that buy buying the appropriate microphone (around £50 for me) and learning to use audacity we had a pretty powerfull audio mixer sitting infront of us.
Musical instruments do tend to cost alot but everyone I know who can play an instrument usually owns one of those instruments. The cost of producing music has plummetted to a few basic criteria:
Owning a PC with a audigy/x-fi in it
Installing Ubunutu Studio or installing audacity
An exprensive microphone that covers a wide spectrum
The foam thing you put infront of a Microphone to diffuse sound (really makes a different for bass and vocals)
The ability to make a decent webpage to advertise
The ability to make a cool looking MySpace page
A quiet room to store all of this and most importantly...
The ability to play live, get a gig and build up a fanbase
These days your average person (assuming they can song write) could probably set themselves up for less than a £1k.
Slashdot Mirror
My Dad's machine is a Athlon XP2400, with 512mb of ram and an AGP Geforce 6100, it runs Vista slowly but it does run Vista. As an expeariment I did try it with 1.5GB of DDR400 and it ran ok and not really much worse than XP, the vista expearence index was 2.3 (2.1 with 512mb of ram). He's since deceided to buy 2GB of DDR ram. The machines still running Vista business 32bit now, personnally I would stick XP back on it but since the other two machines in the house are using Vista he wants that one to as well.
The problem you and my dad face is a new copy of vista is about £70, the old style ram is probably anouther £50. With low end laptops costing £300 and the ability to buy full desktop systems for £200 both which come with Vista Home Premimum (even though many can't run Aero) in the long run its better value to buy a cheap desktop and pay the extra £25 for 2GB of DDR2 ram get a reasonably fast machine thats secure and has the prettyness.
P.S. I too am eagerly awaiting the next Ubunutu release since Fiesty Fawn really impressed me, I'm hoping to take anouther crack at learning just how WINE works and seeing if I could go Vista free.
P.P.S Since SP1 network transfers don't seem effected by music playing unless your copying to a pre SP1 Vista machine (Vista SP1 to Vista SP1 and Vista SP1 to Xp seem fine now)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar
Quasars are an effect created by the supermassive black holes at the centre of each galaxy, these black holes consume tremendous amounts of mater (something like 10 sun masses a year) the more solar masses they consume the brighter they are. Obviously there is only so much material than can be pulled in by the supermassive black hole, eventually all the material is either ejected as high intensity engery (the quaser pulses we can observe) or consumed by the black hole.
The article mentions that astronomers have discovered galaxies with quasars which are old enough that the matter orbiting the black hole should have been used up. The current scientific hypothisis for old galaxies with quasars, is that the collision of two galaxies can generate new material which is pulled in by the supermassive black hole (thus supplying the matter to generate a quasar.) These older galaxies don't show any signs of recent collision and so the question of how the black holes in the centre are getting enough matter to generate a quasar needs to be asked. Since scientists don't know why there are quasars on these older galaxies they seem to be assuming that something else is causing new matter to be sucked into a galaxies supermassive black hole. The articles twist is this could potentially happen in our own galaxy, potentially killing us all.
I used to love 1&1 too, until they decided to screw me over.
About three years ago I started hosting podcasts. I didn't see a problem because when I'd set up the account (perhaps two three years before that) there was a bandwidth cap of 5GB a month. However 1&1 removed the cap without altering their terms and conditions with me. Suddenly I had a £400 bill posted to me, which obviously was slightly worrying.
Despite dozens of phone calls with service representatives (which seem to only consist of three people) and having them recorded saying the amount was incorrect and their fault, they refused to refund the money and re-instate the cap. I had the account type changed and placed a email notifier to ensure that if I went over the daily limit I would be notified, within hours of me placing that notifier my control panel was "updated" and the notifier removed, and anouther £250 bill was noticed three days later.
After writing to the damm company with about three pages of compliants they agreed to waive the £250 since it was within the new accounts limits (and aparently a technical error.) They disagreed about the control panel "update" dispite me waiving the logs in their face (the update also removed several other things I put in place to stop my bandwidth issues) lastly the finance department argued it was ok for them to change the terms and conditions without notice because they didn't offer that service anymore (despite going against the contract and UK law.)
Because I lived with my parents and we were moving house I had chance to talk to a solicitor about the whole situation, who told me I was legally in the right and it was a pretty much open and shut case, but because of the evidence etc.. needed to prove it I'd be better off paying the bill as it would save me time and money.
1&1 are theives as far as I'm concerned its been three years since this happened and I still get angry about it.
Phorm argues it doesn't break the law because they offer an "opt out" clause and so isn't effected by the RIPA act. BT's trial last year of Phorm against 10,000 users is being investigated as potentially illegal as users wern't given the chance to opt out. It should be a easily won case since BT by supplying 121media and not asking if they can share this information have broken the Data Protection Act. BT maintains plans to implement Phorm with the ability to opt out (through a cookie on your PC.)
I've already sent a letter to my service provider (virgin media) informing them I want no part of Phorm and if they implement it (which they are considering) I will be prosecuting them under the Data Protection Act. I suggest all BT, Talk Talk and Virgin Media users do the same.
The Data Protection Act in the UK is the best defense against this sort of thing, it defines how companies my handle personal data, the right a person has to that data and what responsibilities the organisations have with it. The biggest problem with it tends to be phone operators who've never read it trying to tell you the section you read to them is wrong.
I believe someone is trying to prosecute Facebook because they were unable to remove their information from Facebook (when you leave a service you have a right to have all information on a companies database to be deleted) If I were to go into a police station and demand all the CCTV footage they have on me they would have to supply it (my right to see) finally if I don't agree that companies can share my information with 3rd parties then they aren't allowed to share it full stop if they do you can prosecute.
121Media argue phorm doesn't violate the Data Protection Act because you are visiting public websites (it being akin to walking along a public highway and so no right to privacy) Hopefully the Information Commisson won't see it that way and will enforce the view that sending unencrypted http packets through port 80 is the same as making a phone call and so falls under the same protections.
RTFA and pay attention to what the modder says, he found diliberate bugs in the drivers which didn't exist in the Xp drivers (and with Xp driver tweaks were resolved) as well as a bunch of other things. By the looks of things Creative made the drivers work good enough to claim their fake "Vista Ready" logo but made sure the sucked enough that people would upgrade to Xi-Fi.
As an idiot who did just that I won't be buying Creative anymore.
Your talking about ethical responsibilities, as the parent said a Lawyer has a ethical responsibility to report if a accused is planning to kill and informant, just as a Doctor has a ethical responsibility to report child molestation. In both cases the job is to protect someone who can't protect themselves from anouther force. If you were to look into domestic violence cases while it might be in the doctors interest to taddle on a beating wife/husband unless the victim comes forward or they can defintily prove something dodgy is going on there very little they can do because it would be a breech of their privacy.
Thats where technology falls short, excusing a few organisations like the IEEE and IET (which are voluntary) there are no industry ethics.
My final year project involved writing a bluetooth stack for a bluetooth v1.0 device. Sure I didn't have to follow the hardware guidlines but the bluetooth specification is over 1000 pages and I could grasp it (it took a very long time to read.) I also implemented the Compact Flash standard sucessfully within the same project, my only issue was trying to implement the FAT standard. I simply didn't have time to locate a detailed and good enough standards document (CF was just as hard to find btw.)
My project was able to discover other bluetooth devices, pair with them and recieve files which would then be stored on a cf card (getting the information off the cf card was the issue my process was quite extended.) It was done in assembly I designed my own cf and rs232 adapters (for the bluetooth device) to work with a custom 8051.
1 Designer/developer in less than 6 months dealing with something close to 2000 pages of component design documentation, system documentation and standards documentation. As long as the documentation is as well written as the bluetooth specification (which I don't think is great) I really don't see an issue with a spec's size, my biggest issue was using a 8bit controller to deal with bluetooth address which were several times larger than the total storage of the device.
Impossible hardly
Try turning off Aero and switching Windows Indexing off, I've been asked in the past to put Vista on a AMD Sempron 2800 (with 512mb of ram and a Nvidia 6100.) The windows index service is usually what causes performance lag on low end machines. Aero is what effects the seeming delay in responsiveness.
I've found it an interesting expeariment as a bunch of low end machines I own now run Vista Business 32bit as fast or faster (haven't timed it offically but it definitly seems snappier) than Xp on the same machines. I actually went out and bought Vista for my very low laptop because it was faster to boot up, log on and hibernate works perfectly for once.
Lastly the supercache you mention is one of the miss-understood applications in Vista. On a new machine it will slow it slightly but after a month or so it does seem to speed things up (game loading in particular.)
The PS3 has a digital optical out socket for sound, this easter weekend I purchased a Samsung sound system which supports optical in and is working perfectly with every PS3 game I've thrown at it so far and sounds fantastic. The whole system (including speakers) cost £200. I was going to buy the Sony D1100 system which for £300 comes with standing speakers.
I agree thats not 7.1 and having some decrete analogue outputs would have saved me £200, but after hours of trapsing around various shops 7.1 doesn't seem to be something thats sold anymore.
I like Vista as a x64 user its great to finally see large amounts of x64 drivers being written. Since the last Nvidia driver I get the same FPS in games that I did in Xp. Some of the UI changes while annoying at first do work once your used to them and some can be really usefull (the Games folder on the start menu for instance.) The new networking stack has actually made home network shares easy to set up. Vista on a network does strange things too I used to have a Dell machine that would refuse access to any machine despite permissions being given, put a Vista machine on the network and you can access its shared folders, take that Vista machine off and you have the old problem comes back. Its as stable as Xp and I honestly think many of the drivers written for it are of a higher quality than XP's (Creative I'm looking at you.)
Vista has three main issues, the first is the higher resource requirements you can get it to run on a low spec machine but you end up turning so much off the difference between it and Xp is minimal. The second is the amount of updates released for windows through windows update, when you include SP1 I've probably downloaded close to 2GB's of updates for my machine over the last 14/15 months. Lastly its been the target of the biggest FUD campaign ever invented which is probably why it will never gain the market acceptance of XP.
Authors will generally take the time to briefly cover a previous event I've been able to read Terry Goodkinds books out of order (its been hard to get them all) and understand the storyline and plot quite easily because when Goodkind has a character take an action based on previous experience (in another book) he will use a small paragraph to give a description of that past event, most authors do this.
You can pick up the latest Anne Macathry book and understand what's going on, not well enough to understand all of the nuances but well enough to enjoy the book, Asimov's foundation series does the same thing.
Bank's writing style uses minimal description, this writing style can work however he often fails to elaborate things and in later books he won't reference past things and will just expect the reader to know. I'm no writer but the difference could be shown thus:
Most Authors:
Sam was couldn't believe it, it was the Starship Sen, the vessel which had destroyed his homeworld. He had fought it years before in the Galaxy war and lost, his loss had lead to the fall of the empire and his current position. He had to hold the line and stop the invaders before his new home was lost as well.
Banks
Sam couldn't believe it, it was the Sen. He knew he had to hold the line and stop the invaders before they destroyed his new home.
You only have to give that small amount of back story once and suddenly the reader knows a little bit about the people attacking, why Sam is so desperate to stop them, something about how Sam had gotten into his current position and a little bit about the current situation. Banks fails to do this and it makes his books difficult to read, this back referencing can be done to the detriment of the book (Robert Jordan's books suffer massively by this) and I agree sometimes a minimalist approach to description can make some very interesting books (Rankin's books spring to mind).
I've always thought the genre of a book was unimportant and will read different genres as long as the authors a good one. If your only ever going to tie yourself down to one genre you are going to miss so much. I'd rather know a great author than the next best author in genre xyz... Wouldn't you?
Interesting point but if cost is your main issue then get a Windows Mobile 5/6 phone, you get several days of battery (with use) wi-fi is standard, many have GPS built in (that works well) I've yet to see one which didn't have expandable memory so you can put that 4GB mini-sd card in for your music, skype already works on the format, it already works near perfectly with exchange, you can open/edit word/excel/powerpoint documents and if a decent keyboard is on your list then you can get a full (usable by fat fingered people) keyboard included as well. For £0 and a 18month contract (which has a lower rate than the iPhones.)
Anouther idea why not buy a PSP? My PSP has a good web browser (better than my phones) wifi and supports VOIP.
Apple were not the first to do integrated devices.
Banks does not get front place in UK bookshops, well, not in any WH Smith or Waterstones in the south west. He generally gets his own shelf and you'll only see people who've never read him pick up one of his books and its rare to see them make the same mistake twice.
His books fail to give any real backstory or context, which can be ok however characters will make decisions based on things you don't know about and aren't told. He takes little effort to bring the reader into the universe he's writing on and once I had the misfortune of picking up a book in the middle of a series and he made no attempt to explain anything, even after making the attempt to pick up the first book in the series things made little sense.
You want a good British author read Terry Pratchett or Philip Pullman, Banks can look inviting because everyone of his books has words like "Times best seller" and "Winner of Award xyz" don't fall for it.
I don't think that would work, I've recently moved within the UK from a big city to a small town. In the big city I never saw a single fight on a night out (but did hear about the occasional one) in the small town every night out seems to show either a fight being broken up, police talking to whitnesses or as of last friday 10 guys running up and hitting a guy dressed up as a cricket dude because he was dressed up as a cricketman.
Listening to their self congratulations after they decided that knocking him to the floor was enough showed they didn't think of any consequences only pride in how "hard" they were. Increasing jail terms wouldn't have dettered them as they honestly couldn't see an issue. Whenever I've had the displeasure of coming accross a theif or violent ejit they seem not to understand what their doing is wrong and seem to take pride if they do it well. I have no idea how you'll address this but sadly I don't think its a problem that can be easily solved.
I do agree that western society needs a culture of responsibility rather than rights.
PS the area in question is Sherborne/Yeovil which apparently have renowned schools, having gone to a top twenty school I can honestly say I don't see much difference between them and your average comprehensive student. But the local parents don't like me saying that.
Too powerfull? There are certain rules about entering a robot wars competition one of those being a weight limit of 100KG's and a weapon system which won't damage the safety perimeter (as well as a few other rules.) After looking at their robots on their web page and doing a bit of googling on battlebots rules. The heavyweight class would be appropriate for robot wars the super heavyweight being to heavy. So my guess is that either they brought a super heavyweight which was too heavy, or the disc contained enough weight to shatter the arena walls (which would need to be more than 10KG at 10,000rpm (hynodisc)) or it is the robot I'm about to mention which doesn't make it to the semi finals.
If you goto their own website http://www.teamlogicom.com/ and look at the robot "The Revolutionist" competed in robot wars twice and won neither in fact their own page suggests they went out fairly early on in the first competition. Going to wikipedia and looking for robot wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Wars if you scroll through the entry you'll come accross the world championship results, comparing this with tv.com's episode summary http://www.tv.com/robot-wars-extreme-warriors/the-robot-wars-world-championship/episode/162581/summary.html you'll find their revolutionist robot failed to make the semi-finals in any of the events. During the second world championship America managed to reach runner up and semi finals. If you bother to read the match summary's (same tv guide link above) you'll notice the drillzilla spends the entire time running away from Razor. BTW Manta was the best robot the USA ever put forward and it would have lost against Tornado (a bit more googling shows the motors aren't as powerfull.)
Feel free to go into details about how I'm wrong I loved robot wars when it was on.
I think the most important thing about Battle bots was how pathetic they were. During the international Robot Wars competitions there were a few American robots which were simply anihilated. You'd have some uber geek who'd spent $10k on making a robot that stuggled to go through glass and the americans would go crazy for it.
Robot wars was great you saw real progressions in designs as the series went on, from self righting mechanisms (thank you road block and chaos 2), to better protection (thank you hypnodisk for what you did too matilda) to new and interesting weapons (Razor) and there was always that occasional bit of contreversy (Tornado Vs Razor.)
I've watched the occasional episode of battlebots on comedy central and it doesn't seem like anyone ever learnt anything, the emphasis also seemed to be on expense rather than ability. Robots in the later seasons were no better than the early seasons.
As a person living in a country filled with manual gearbox the polite thing to do when engine breaking is to tap your brakes, this indicates to other drivers your slowing down. In the UK its actually written in the highway code book.
As a person who actually enjoyed the sheer challenge of Simcity 4 I did buy Societies. It was possible to build a huge sprawling metropolis which would function well in Simcity 4 and SimCity 4 was a stable game (I don't have the expansion) however, Societies is a completly different kettle of fish. Some of the issues I've had include:
The CD's copy protection occasionally will refuse to see the disc as a legal copy
The game is impossible to uninstall, after installing it on Vista Business, XP SP2, Xp MCE 2005 and vista Home Premium x64 I've yet been able to uninstall it on any of those machines (the uninstaller often breaks)
The games installation is often leads to a incomplete installation requiring you to install it again.
The games installer crashed on half the machines I installed it on.
The CD lacks a game icon
The CD's autoplay doesn't actually work
It is the only new game Vista doesn't recognise as a game, Vista will pick up a simcity 3000 installation and put it in the games folder, but not with Societies
Once you can actually get the game working things only get worse. While the game itself is stable, graphically its somewhere between Simcity 2000 and Simcity 3000 the gameplay is so simple that a five year old child would find it boring. I literally had to spend twenty minutes to create a situation which would cause the city to collapse and even then the game was trying to make the city sucessfull. The game isn't challenging The sims is harder to play than SimCity Societes.
The worst part of it all is you can occasionally come accross things which are really good ideas and if societies had been more like simcity 4 and had actually had some quality control it would have been a really great game.
I plug my PC into the wireless router and from windows update it will download:
My Creative x-Fi Extreme gamer drivers and a solutions thing will popup directing me to creatives site to get the console,
My Creative Vista IM driver and a solutions thing will popup directing me to creatives site to get the viewing app (msn will work fine without that),
Download and install the scanner and printer drivers for my Epson DX4400
Finally it will download the Netgear W111v3 drivers for my USB wireless card.
Last weekend I reinstalled vista (after breaking it by installing vm ware) I left the pc alone after intial installation and it was connected to my wireless router, it took an 45 minutes after install to download all of the windows updates (around 400Mb which is insane) and everything was setup all I had to do was run media centre to tune in some tv channels. The same is true for my laptop a 4yr old amd64 and a 8yr old amd2800 if Vista doesn't come with the driver there will be one on windows update. I particular like the solutions thing built into vista it can be usefull in tracking down abandoned hardware drivers/application software.
Interesting logic but you forget one important thing most drivers do see something wrong with their actions and if they get caught they may contest. They agree with the law in principle, if I speed through a zone and was caught fair enough I shouldn't have been speeding, maybe I won't take the offense seriously and will occasionally break it, but I recognise the need for the law.
Most people don't see copyright infringement as stealing, they don't see it as wrong and think they should be allowed to do it.
Its an important distinction
I contacted my MP (Oliver Letwin) when this story first broke on BBC news's website. I detailed the technical reasons why such a thing would be near imposible and asked that very same question.
He's got a month to reply to me, shadow chancellor or not his first job is to his constituants, he he doesn't bother responding to me, actually hold a surgery I'm never going to vote for the guy. If I get a standard response which clearly shows he hasn't read my message I'm sure the other 350 constiuants who work in the software house with me will be interested in his answer, I'm weary of conservative MP's who don't respond.
Considering they object to 10 page EULA's for products I wonder how they feel about Terms and Conditions for product and services bought online? Last time I signed up for a server host I read through about 15 pages of terms and conditions which were contained with a tiny scroll box and that company was UK based. As far as I can tell the reasons they give for objecting are equally valid for every UK ISP I've signed upto and every service I've bought online. Should be interesting to see where it goes.
Goto the BBC website and look at the crime statistics for each year, I believe this year crime in general decreased 11% however there was an increase of 9% in violent crime. The media naturally reports on the 9% rise first and mentions the 11% decrease in general in passing.In the last 4 years of reading the bbc website I've yet to see the total amount of crime to increase.
The streets are getting safer and safer, yet the media is helping us think they are getting worse. While I admit the chav's do get on my nerves they aren't the demons the daily mail would have you beleive. Then again I agree with this device because chav's will mindlessly vandalise places and it will help reduce that.
As someone who finished whis BEng in Computer Engineering this year I have to ask, where are the embedded jobs?
I hunted around looking for any assembly/vhdl/c job I could find and only found one which didn't require 2 years expearence, they didn't get any message back to me until 2 months after I'd applied. I applied to roughly 35 "entry level" jobs dealing with embedded devices. None were interested because I lacked two years expearence. In the time it took the only one to get back to me I'd been contacted by a C++/Java company had a phone interview went up and been personnally interviewed and been offered the job.
The real kicker is the embedded jobs paid less, didn't mention any benifits and wanted more work out of me. I think the real issue is most companies aren't willing to invest in graduates unless its for business positions. It is difficult to get 2 years expearence when everyone demands 2 years for their entry level jobs. Which leads to a shortage since no one gets offered a embedded job so Universitys don't bother going into too much detail since 99% of their students will never use it.
I think your investment cost is massivily overstated, I was involved in a podcast project (we also worked with muscians) most of us found that buy buying the appropriate microphone (around £50 for me) and learning to use audacity we had a pretty powerfull audio mixer sitting infront of us. Musical instruments do tend to cost alot but everyone I know who can play an instrument usually owns one of those instruments. The cost of producing music has plummetted to a few basic criteria:
Owning a PC with a audigy/x-fi in it
Installing Ubunutu Studio or installing audacity
An exprensive microphone that covers a wide spectrum The foam thing you put infront of a Microphone to diffuse sound (really makes a different for bass and vocals) The ability to make a decent webpage to advertise The ability to make a cool looking MySpace page A quiet room to store all of this and most importantly...
The ability to play live, get a gig and build up a fanbase
These days your average person (assuming they can song write) could probably set themselves up for less than a £1k.