Fitaly is an onscreen keyboard (for Windows PC and mobile devices mainly) that for me, groes about half of previous touch-typing speed (20 vs 40 words per minute, not world class, good enough). Since typing is now a short road to agony for me, I use Fitaly for almost everything, including this paragraph.
Fitaly is also better with active detection of the stylus (so you can see where you're hitting before you do), with a separate clicker instead of a delicate pen-based contact switch, and with keystrokes spoken back to you so that you hear mistakes and can correct them. But maybe on headphones so other people can't hear what you're typing (p, a, s, s, w, o, r, d, 1, 2, 3).
Handwriting input is way slower, speech is faster - if the hardware and software support it. Re speech, possibilities have been discussed to receive speech without you talking aloud. I wonder if we'll get to lipreading...
Anyone know a lightweight 32-bit spreadsheet then?
I have a Windows PC with limited memory, and I've been using As-Easy-As (abandonware) to log Internet quota use. I'm pretty sure it's a 16-bit Windows version.
This vulnerability seems to be about escalating from the local user's privileges to administrator rights - which is generally unauthorised access but not from malweb coming through the browser (for me, Opera), unless malicious web content has another way to sneak onto your PC. Another heoole in the system. Which would be bad by itself.
Is it possible to disable these features for particular user accounts? Sandbox the browser? Or better, sandbag it. Of course I can run a Windows application as not my main user...
While "their", "there', and "they're" are words with distinct functions - and when tired I have found myself typing the wrong one, and I consider myself literate - offhand I think it's always or usually clear which of them belongs in an otherwise grammatical sentence. So I think it IS just being over-picky. Perhaps you can think of a counter example, and of course it isn't true of other confuseable words. By all means illustrate the problem with 'it's / its", too.
Opera's been a flexible, fast, standards compliant, multi page web browser since 1996 and Windows 3.1 and 95. But back then you had to buy your copy (shareware trial). Which I did. Between 2000-2005 you could have it free with advertisements displayed. Since then you can just have it free. You can have pages without graphics for speed until you press the magic button, and you can have over-wide pages zoomed or rearranged to fit your screen or window size. Microsoft's own web sites deliberately test whether a user is using Opera and then send ugly or broken web pages back. Really. Or, they used to; mostly Opera works well now even on Microsoft sites. Now Google I don't know about.
If running advertising in software offends you, remember that you now have to hate and despise Microsoft Office as well. Its new version runs commercials too.
My office is in the fifth great year of Adobe Reader 7.0.5. (Well... I'm not sure we got 7.0.5 when it first came out. But we've got it now.)
Probably we couldn't run your exploits if we wanted to, and if hackers are sufficiently professional to shred their files after three years, I guess we're pretty safe.
Chocolate news now? Are you reviving the "Confectionery Theory" report?
Or, where will we now get our chocolate teapots to compare Windows Vista to? (Actually it looks pretty good to me, but I don't use it!)
Cadburys recently went Fair Trade on major products, which is something. My local Co Op chocolate is Fair Trade but also Past Sell By Date, I probably should mention it sometime. Note that standard recipe chocolate contins more sugar than cocoa, so that had better be Fair Trade as well.
Chocolate isn't a bad investment in a time of depression... comfort food, you know.
It's kind of my impression that the Conservative approach to communication is to brutally reject and then deny any opposing point of view. To put it that if you don't agree with them then you haven't thought about it, or you aren't really American, or you don't exist. And also to be proactive and hunt in... packs? herds? (Party symbol = elephant. Or for Palinians, jackass.)
Y'know, like Macintosh / Linux / Microsoft fans (and you wouldn't think there could be any, but there are).
To a floating... um... turtle, that probably makes quite a strong impression, on first encounter.
If you ARE stuck with IE6 for this legendary stupid-application compatibility requirement, I dunno if you can install IE8 alongside it - and you're liable to be hit anyway. But you can install Firefox, or Opera, or anything else that isn't Internet Explorer underneath - which a lot of "browser" brand names are - and use IE for Stupid-Thing and any non-Microsoft post-9/11 browser for all your other HTML-rendering needs.
Then again, is there scope for an "IE6 Is Stupid But Do It That Way Anyway" Mode in Firefox?
Wikipedia says: "Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, and 7.0 (Experimental) have also been unofficially ported to the Linux operating system from the project IEs4Linux." Can you do anything useful from that? Say, run Linux on Windows, in a sandbox, and IE6 in a cage inside that?
Or, install a Windows 7 version with support for the Windows XP sandbox and IE6 locked down... uh oh. What this is for, is getting people to buy Windows 7.
Has Yahoo-Tse-Tung! thus dissented from an objection to having one's business computers hacked, thereby coming out as pro-hacking? Someone may take them at their word.
Or is it only "certain people" that Yahoo! China doesn't mind being cracked by?
In other totalitarian news, Kim Jong-Il has decided to have a go at hacking for the first time, and immediately guessed the backdoor password to the entire Internet - it's qwer1234jkl;780 but the Dear Leader has changed it now so you won't get in. To anything. (If you want to know how you're reading this, it was probably in your browser cache.)
For one thing, a great many children were killed or maimed during and after our invasion of Iraq, arguably worse than this fellow could do flat out.
It seems rather unlikely that the CIA would be framing this guy now, less so at the time, also that it took this long. But after all they don't necessarily agree with the U.S. president himself about what needs to be done and how. There was already one nest found of CIA people still carrying out President Cheney's secret orders in mid 2009, long after he was supposedly gone.
I also wonder if the CIA has a drug or a ray that turns you into a child molester. Really. Discrediting your critics is a valuable weapon if you want to do what they do in an apparently free society. More useful than killing - and you can do that afterwards and make it look like suicide. There are medical cases of uncontrollable sexual urge following brain injury - really - so you'd just need to microwave exactly the right part of their head, and Bob's your nasty uncle.
Since Google is busily scanning the world's copyrighted out-of-print books, they probably can tell Amazon whether my novel is actually by me or is a minor work by Evelyn Waugh that I'm bootlegging.
Harder to tell whether I am Evelyn Waugh's heir and executor or not, or to stop me writing my own Harry Potter novels and selling them through Kindle.
Cheap electronic self-publishing is used to to keep out-of-print material available - stuff that was reasona bly successful at launch but is not necessarily going to pay back if printed up wholesale again. I think Airship Entertainment publishes some of their old comics material on Lulu, and it also provides mercchandising-type goods - image of your choice on a mug, maybe.
(Well, my apologies to people who want to **** but haven't yet found the right person. Or animal. Office furniture. Whatever.)
Maybe your popularity with some prissy to freakish Americean moral organisations will take a dive. But it will blow over. In perspective it'll be just one little hump in an otherwise successful career.
Remember that you can install Google Chrome as a plugin in Internet Explorer. So developers have that reason to run MSIE, to test it on the web.
Since Chinese people can't say the letter R, I think it's unlikely that they called their hacking project Aurora. It would be like sharing an office with a hundred stammering Jonathan Rosses. After two weeks of getting no work done, they'd surely change the name to Opewation Four Poofs. (Of course, some readers won't know what this has to do with Jonathan Ross, or who he is.)
When isn't there "an unannounced and highly confidential Apple product"? This proves nothing.
I'm not an Apple user at the moment, but good luck to them. If they do make a tablet PC, I expect it to be more than just a computer with a touchscreen and no keyboard (which you cen supply with USB, Bluethooth, etc), I expect astonishing software to go with it. A camera that reads manual sign language, say.
If China uses an on-off tax strategy to undermine foreign production of rare earths and also foreign manufacture of rare earth goods, it looks as though - if trade treaties allow - other potential producer nations can just tax Chinese rare earths themselves and open profitable mines and waste extraction and recycling schemes.
Another thing that changes... the article mentions the importance of rare earths in cathode ray tube displays. I think we won't be worrying about CRTs so much in future. Rare earths are also used in mantles, the luminous component, for gas lighting. Again not so much nowadays.
...a deliberately unpleasant pop music band, whose fans were taken aback to find that the principal "Slipknot" web site was actually about crochetcraft and the like.
Horses and ponies are easily frightened. Having a strange human waking them at night and doing things to their mane would upset them, before you even consider demonic animal possession and video for the Dutch market and so forth. I think counselling is called for. And also revive "Operation Terry and June".
I assume in the story, "Lighting" is the incomplete name of the incomplete product called "Lightning".
In other news, the Time Lords returned in Doctor Who, and the Doctor Who Adventures magazine calendar gift has two months missing - at least mine did. They've been at it. I think May and November are the periods that you should block out for your alien abduction episodes - and after all Doctor Who is an alien and he abducts people. Granddaughter indeed.
I will repeat that apparently it costs about £500 to get a one-hour video classified. If that is imposed then lots of innocent little productions will be penalised to the point of being uneconomic. At least as far as being legally released in this country goes. Others will be done but the customer will pay extra to make up the cost.
I will also repeat that there is already a list of naughty elements that will disqualify a production from being exempt, but maybe that list doesn't include everything that should be on it.
Projector replaces your existing overhead light fitting, screen is pasted onto the wall having removed a suitably sized piece of existing wallpaper. It's a thought.
I don't know if I've not been paying attention or if Britain is behind the times technically, but I've not been aware of waves of British hackers going into action against the rest of the world when our national interest or national pride is at stake. Not so Russia and China.
Incidentally, is there evidence of the "Iranian Cyber Army" actually being in or associated with Iran, or are they perhaps the Russians, Chinese, or CIA?
You may have heard that just before the German Third Reich invaded Poland, German units attacked a German border town posing as Polish troops, to make it look as though Germany was invading in self defence. It's hard to see that this mattered, but it's the sort of thing that goes on.
Alcohol also kills a great many people. So do cars.
If David Nutt was sacked from his unpaid(?) position for criticising government drugs policy, I was under the impression that it was specifically the policy of pretending that your policies are based upon scientific evidence when they are not. Which is slander against science itself.
It's not a neutral question. http://www.bbfc.co.uk/customer/cust_proc_fees.php appears to be BBFC's scale of fees for certification. http://www.bbfc.co.uk/faq/docs/12120.html and http://www.bbfc.co.uk/customer/cust_procMisc_exempt.php comment on exempt status and labelling. For videos it's £6 a minute plus £75 "handling fee" - before VAT, I think, in which case certifying an hour-long recording costs about £510. Then there's lots of extra charges.
There is also a list of disqualifications from exemption - so an educational video about lock-picking probably wouldn't be exempt, nor would "The Year of the Sex Olympics" (actually a BBC drama about a TV show that just locks people in a house with cameras in every room and watches them), nor "Vicky Does the Vatican".
Meteors do burn up in the atmosphere, mostly. The meteorite is the little bit that's left over.
Also, today's one is likely, if it does ever hit at a later time, to graze the atmosphere obliquely. Plenty of burning up time before it could reach the ground.
Pictures? Will need to look out for The Sky at Night.
Stephen 2: the police asked you to destroy evidence?
Did you film that?
The police are scary. It's in the job description. "Must be scary, must have very large feet." But it's like keeping intimidating dogs, if they turn on you there's not much that you can do.
As you go on to say "three per cent of sudden, unexpected deaths", which is not the same thing at all.
I imagine that other leading causes of sudden unexpected death in Spain include vehicle accidents, cot deaths and big men with moustaches, knives and an adverse disposition. But I wonder whether stroke and heart attack in the elderly are included, and being more than a bit slow crossing the road, or if we also are looking only at healthy adults who are not likely to die at all except by getting on the bad side of a vehicle, a man with a moustache and a knife, or the "Running of the Bulls" in Pamplona.
The concept car is the one that they don't make and you can't buy (obviously). They could if they wanted to, they don't want to. Perhaps the idea is to suggest that the car they actually do make is even better, but then the concept car costs a squazillion pounds to build. The real cars are much cheaper, and they look it. Relatively.
And this particular car is only on show in the future, so at the moment it's only a concept car concept. It's such a moller it might as -well- fly as well as doing what it actually (conceptually) does.
I was trying to work out whether "develooper" is jargon for object oriented programming developer. The company appears to be object oriented in a fairly unfortunate way.
...but I gather the IBM PC started out as an executive toy stroke status symbol - pretty expensive for a toy. People who made compatible PCs were sued initially - Compaq is in the story here somewhere - but Microsoft's MS-DOS availability kept clone machines alive as a concept, eventually third-party machines were made that IBM couldn't sue over, and basically here we are. Also in the story is Lotus 123, the world's spreadsheet before Excel, a hugely useiful tool for managers, right there on a PC in your own office.
IBM's PS/2 was an attempt to use IBM know-how to make a new PC that was both proprietary again, and so much better than other machines that you didn't mind that - like Apple Mac. That didn't quite work. OS/2 is the operating system that those PCs were to use, but the world went with Microsoft Windows instead. Part of the problem was that OS/2 was aimed principally at the business market and Windows was fun. Windows even came with games, although by now in 2010 the boss has tools to stop this. But I bet a lot of managers chose Windows PCs just to have the Freecell card game.
As for Lotus 123, they were ready (or tried to be, I forget) with a version for OS/2, so that's when they went off the rails as well.
"I mean, what was wrong with just sticking a slip of paper in saying manuals can be downloaded from the web."
Obviously (1) you may be depending on this device to get to "the web", and (2) what process puts a product manual on the web that is better than can be put in the box?
In the case of the memory device, the operations that are described seem to be exactly the same as for all other USB memory devices, leaving the question: why didn't we get a copy of sromeone else's good manual? And the answer, I suppose: copyright.
If I remember, I'll check for bad or "gratuitous Engrish" on recently purchased packaging or manuals. Stuff from Maplin is probably fruitful. And Japanese regards "Roman" script as eleglantly ornamental, but without being particular as to meaning.
English-language terms can be converted to Japanese merely by saying "gee" after the rest of the word. And, come to think, to Hindi as well. Hmm-gee.
I hope I'm not embarrassing anyone, but I understand that a succession of different, incompatible editions of Palm and PalmPilot devices with limited support for developers persuaded Textware finally to give up developing their Fitaly touch keyboard for new Palm models, having started there. Windows CE / Pocket PC / Windows Mobile - actually the same thing - were a friendlier environment, even with multiple hardware manufacturers instead of one, and MICROSOFT. Admittedly, Fitaly probably hooks into places on a Palm device where it wasn't meant to.
And as far as I recall, Windows Vista was going to be the ####-the-developers-AND-users edition of Windows. Will the software you already use work in the new edition of Windows? The official default answer from Microsoft was no. You would need to buy new compatible software. Then I don't want to upgrade, do I? I like what I'm using now. And so Vista died, even if actually older Windows apps are supported just fine. And Windows 7 comes with XP compatibility... as an optional add-on. Hey, now MS know what customers want, they can make you pay extra for it.
Google had better not make the mistake of Palm and Microsoft, changing the platform to disable or discourage developers and users from building a long-term relationship over more than one device lifetime - which isn't long. They need to make a commitment to long term compatibility.
If you want speech recognition, it was included in XP Tablet PCs, apparently in a better version in Vista, and I assume in Seven. But in the first generation of Tablets, built for battery life instead of data-crunching power - and light on RAM - it was painfully slow to respond, and inflexible. On machines in 2010 it may be more useable than ever before, although again the fashion is for less processing power on your portable device and longer battery life. Maybe someone 'll set up speech recognition in the cloud, voice decoding as a servvice across the Internet... isn't that scary!
Then again, back in the day I was solemnly assured that every fax message sent in Britain (ask your parents) was duplicated at the national spybheadquarters, GCHQ.
The Windows Tablet PC could always run Windows applications. But handwriting, speech, and on-screen keyboard were clumsy attachments on-screen. It's diificult - I use an alternative screen keyboard called Fitaly, but my most useable arrangement has it docked into a fattened taskbar, and I had to hack to do that although it may now be self-docking. Application rewrites for Tablet were to be more pen-friendly, and in some special markets, very notably medicine, the stylus computer did catch on. Tablets also had a Rolls Royce of stylus input, an electronically sensed stylus instead of clumsy fingers, which were invisible to it. My preferred mode was stylus for pointing and separate mouse for clicking, and since the cursor is rarely even exactly where the stylus is, I appreciated seeing where it was on the screen before each click.
As for other devices making touch acceptable, surely not Kindle but PalmPilot, PocketPC, and a generation or two of smartphones. Are you being deliberately inaccurate to provoke comments? Or just being subtly sac!rcastic? Ahhhhh... you got me good then.
"Slate" for me is a touchscreen computer built without, and designed for use without, a typing-size keyboard. So the Classmate touchscreen net-book (I've just bought one, still in the box) isn't a "slate". It has a keyboard, but one for small hands. By me, the Samsung Q1 Ultra is a slate, although it has two halves of tiny keyboard either side of the screen. I think it also has a dog of a microprocessor but I may be mistaken.
Due to disability I'm a full-time touchscreen user, with keyboard software called Fitaly. Since this is about half typing speed in my experience, I'm interested in speech recognition, which ought to be faster - and is built in to Vista, and I assume Windows 7. But I'm scraping these fine words onto Windows XP not-Tablet edition. Heigh-ho.
"Slate" is "touchscreen PC without a keyboard" (unless you plug one into USB). It should be quite clear. Better than "netbook", which means "doesn't have a DVD drive".
I don't think the previous U.S. administration attacked and/or abducted Al Jazeera buildings and employees because a hoaxster made it look as though Al Jazeera was passing messages to terrorists. I think they attacked and abducted because Al Jazeera is a news organisation that was and is willing to publish information that is unfavourable to the previous U.S. administration. Having said that, Osama bin Laden sends all his tapes to Al Jazeera and apparently they broadcast them - we should have his Christmas message around now. Well, does anyone else still have a cassette player?
Naturally you expect classy material like this to come from the BBC but I assume it is on ITV as you said. In Scotland, however, STV will be showing its own documentat!ry, "Bluebell de Jour". Which is nice too.
Undocumented methods may be excluded from general use because the code is an ugly hack or really is liable to be changed in a future product. It may be at a point where you really are not meant to interface non-original program code into the system.
As you say, however, applications - as in separate commercial product - ought not to use undocumented calls. Now with stuff that is part of your distro, that's okay.
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Isn't Shockwave laegacy?
And I think Adobe bought these tools, didn't invent 'em.
I don't know if I have it or what it's for.
And the litcence on their free stuff says you can use it on 1 computer, which seems to say if you have more than 1 computer then you have a problem.
Fitaly is an onscreen keyboard...
Fitaly is an onscreen keyboard (for Windows PC and mobile devices mainly) that for me, groes about half of previous touch-typing speed (20 vs 40 words per minute, not world class, good enough). Since typing is now a short road to agony for me, I use Fitaly for almost everything, including this paragraph.
Fitaly is also better with active detection of the stylus (so you can see where you're hitting before you do), with a separate clicker instead of a delicate pen-based contact switch, and with keystrokes spoken back to you so that you hear mistakes and can correct them. But maybe on headphones so other people can't hear what you're typing (p, a, s, s, w, o, r, d, 1, 2, 3).
Handwriting input is way slower, speech is faster - if the hardware and software support it. Re speech, possibilities have been discussed to receive speech without you talking aloud. I wonder if we'll get to lipreading...
Anyone know a lightweight 32-bit spreadsheet then?
I have a Windows PC with limited memory, and I've been using As-Easy-As (abandonware) to log Internet quota use. I'm pretty sure it's a 16-bit Windows version.
This vulnerability seems to be about escalating from the local user's privileges to administrator rights - which is generally unauthorised access but not from malweb coming through the browser (for me, Opera), unless malicious web content has another way to sneak onto your PC. Another heoole in the system. Which would be bad by itself.
Is it possible to disable these features for particular user accounts? Sandbox the browser? Or better, sandbag it. Of course I can run a Windows application as not my main user...
There there
While "their", "there', and "they're" are words with distinct functions - and when tired I have found myself typing the wrong one, and I consider myself literate - offhand I think it's always or usually clear which of them belongs in an otherwise grammatical sentence. So I think it IS just being over-picky. Perhaps you can think of a counter example, and of course it isn't true of other confuseable words. By all means illustrate the problem with 'it's / its", too.
@Dale Richards
Opera's been a flexible, fast, standards compliant, multi page web browser since 1996 and Windows 3.1 and 95. But back then you had to buy your copy (shareware trial). Which I did. Between 2000-2005 you could have it free with advertisements displayed. Since then you can just have it free. You can have pages without graphics for speed until you press the magic button, and you can have over-wide pages zoomed or rearranged to fit your screen or window size. Microsoft's own web sites deliberately test whether a user is using Opera and then send ugly or broken web pages back. Really. Or, they used to; mostly Opera works well now even on Microsoft sites. Now Google I don't know about.
If running advertising in software offends you, remember that you now have to hate and despise Microsoft Office as well. Its new version runs commercials too.
Lobbyists
Who are the lobbyists lobbying?
As Republicans are fewer now in the legislature than in recent years, scarcity value means the price of buying each one has gone up.
Whereas here
My office is in the fifth great year of Adobe Reader 7.0.5. (Well... I'm not sure we got 7.0.5 when it first came out. But we've got it now.)
Probably we couldn't run your exploits if we wanted to, and if hackers are sufficiently professional to shred their files after three years, I guess we're pretty safe.
What is this?
Chocolate news now? Are you reviving the "Confectionery Theory" report?
Or, where will we now get our chocolate teapots to compare Windows Vista to? (Actually it looks pretty good to me, but I don't use it!)
Cadburys recently went Fair Trade on major products, which is something. My local Co Op chocolate is Fair Trade but also Past Sell By Date, I probably should mention it sometime. Note that standard recipe chocolate contins more sugar than cocoa, so that had better be Fair Trade as well.
Chocolate isn't a bad investment in a time of depression... comfort food, you know.
If Conservatives are personally unpleasant
It's kind of my impression that the Conservative approach to communication is to brutally reject and then deny any opposing point of view. To put it that if you don't agree with them then you haven't thought about it, or you aren't really American, or you don't exist. And also to be proactive and hunt in... packs? herds? (Party symbol = elephant. Or for Palinians, jackass.)
Y'know, like Macintosh / Linux / Microsoft fans (and you wouldn't think there could be any, but there are).
To a floating... um... turtle, that probably makes quite a strong impression, on first encounter.
If you ARE stuck with IE6
If you ARE stuck with IE6 for this legendary stupid-application compatibility requirement, I dunno if you can install IE8 alongside it - and you're liable to be hit anyway. But you can install Firefox, or Opera, or anything else that isn't Internet Explorer underneath - which a lot of "browser" brand names are - and use IE for Stupid-Thing and any non-Microsoft post-9/11 browser for all your other HTML-rendering needs.
Then again, is there scope for an "IE6 Is Stupid But Do It That Way Anyway" Mode in Firefox?
Wikipedia says: "Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, and 7.0 (Experimental) have also been unofficially ported to the Linux operating system from the project IEs4Linux." Can you do anything useful from that? Say, run Linux on Windows, in a sandbox, and IE6 in a cage inside that?
Or, install a Windows 7 version with support for the Windows XP sandbox and IE6 locked down... uh oh. What this is for, is getting people to buy Windows 7.
Um....
Has Yahoo-Tse-Tung! thus dissented from an objection to having one's business computers hacked, thereby coming out as pro-hacking? Someone may take them at their word.
Or is it only "certain people" that Yahoo! China doesn't mind being cracked by?
In other totalitarian news, Kim Jong-Il has decided to have a go at hacking for the first time, and immediately guessed the backdoor password to the entire Internet - it's qwer1234jkl;780 but the Dear Leader has changed it now so you won't get in. To anything. (If you want to know how you're reading this, it was probably in your browser cache.)
It doesn't mean the war was right.
For one thing, a great many children were killed or maimed during and after our invasion of Iraq, arguably worse than this fellow could do flat out.
It seems rather unlikely that the CIA would be framing this guy now, less so at the time, also that it took this long. But after all they don't necessarily agree with the U.S. president himself about what needs to be done and how. There was already one nest found of CIA people still carrying out President Cheney's secret orders in mid 2009, long after he was supposedly gone.
I also wonder if the CIA has a drug or a ray that turns you into a child molester. Really. Discrediting your critics is a valuable weapon if you want to do what they do in an apparently free society. More useful than killing - and you can do that afterwards and make it look like suicide. There are medical cases of uncontrollable sexual urge following brain injury - really - so you'd just need to microwave exactly the right part of their head, and Bob's your nasty uncle.
Re rights, ask Google perhaps?
Since Google is busily scanning the world's copyrighted out-of-print books, they probably can tell Amazon whether my novel is actually by me or is a minor work by Evelyn Waugh that I'm bootlegging.
Harder to tell whether I am Evelyn Waugh's heir and executor or not, or to stop me writing my own Harry Potter novels and selling them through Kindle.
Cheap electronic self-publishing is used to to keep out-of-print material available - stuff that was reasona bly successful at launch but is not necessarily going to pay back if printed up wholesale again. I think Airship Entertainment publishes some of their old comics material on Lulu, and it also provides mercchandising-type goods - image of your choice on a mug, maybe.
Seriously
What else are CRTs for - in the year 2010?
Okay... maybe some places in the world are still buying CRTs. I still -use- a CRT widescreen TV and a couple of monitors.
Don't worry, Ms Lohan
Everybody ****s.
(Well, my apologies to people who want to **** but haven't yet found the right person. Or animal. Office furniture. Whatever.)
Maybe your popularity with some prissy to freakish Americean moral organisations will take a dive. But it will blow over. In perspective it'll be just one little hump in an otherwise successful career.
Chrome has an MSIE version
Remember that you can install Google Chrome as a plugin in Internet Explorer. So developers have that reason to run MSIE, to test it on the web.
Since Chinese people can't say the letter R, I think it's unlikely that they called their hacking project Aurora. It would be like sharing an office with a hundred stammering Jonathan Rosses. After two weeks of getting no work done, they'd surely change the name to Opewation Four Poofs. (Of course, some readers won't know what this has to do with Jonathan Ross, or who he is.)
Always
When isn't there "an unannounced and highly confidential Apple product"? This proves nothing.
I'm not an Apple user at the moment, but good luck to them. If they do make a tablet PC, I expect it to be more than just a computer with a touchscreen and no keyboard (which you cen supply with USB, Bluethooth, etc), I expect astonishing software to go with it. A camera that reads manual sign language, say.
Taxes are two way
If China uses an on-off tax strategy to undermine foreign production of rare earths and also foreign manufacture of rare earth goods, it looks as though - if trade treaties allow - other potential producer nations can just tax Chinese rare earths themselves and open profitable mines and waste extraction and recycling schemes.
Another thing that changes... the article mentions the importance of rare earths in cathode ray tube displays. I think we won't be worrying about CRTs so much in future. Rare earths are also used in mantles, the luminous component, for gas lighting. Again not so much nowadays.
DI_Wyman: because he hadn't paid his fare
He isn't allowed on the bus without a ticket. That's why it's unusual that he's in the queue.
Maybe he'll be sponsored by Oasis.
I'm reminded of Slipknot
...a deliberately unpleasant pop music band, whose fans were taken aback to find that the principal "Slipknot" web site was actually about crochetcraft and the like.
Sensitive animals
Horses and ponies are easily frightened. Having a strange human waking them at night and doing things to their mane would upset them, before you even consider demonic animal possession and video for the Dutch market and so forth. I think counselling is called for. And also revive "Operation Terry and June".
Someone's up to something iffy over there.
Incomplete
I assume in the story, "Lighting" is the incomplete name of the incomplete product called "Lightning".
In other news, the Time Lords returned in Doctor Who, and the Doctor Who Adventures magazine calendar gift has two months missing - at least mine did. They've been at it. I think May and November are the periods that you should block out for your alien abduction episodes - and after all Doctor Who is an alien and he abducts people. Granddaughter indeed.
The ancient Greek Olympics
was all-male and all-nude, you know.
And you only watch cricket for the streakers.
I will repeat that apparently it costs about £500 to get a one-hour video classified. If that is imposed then lots of innocent little productions will be penalised to the point of being uneconomic. At least as far as being legally released in this country goes. Others will be done but the customer will pay extra to make up the cost.
I will also repeat that there is already a list of naughty elements that will disqualify a production from being exempt, but maybe that list doesn't include everything that should be on it.
Maybe
Projector replaces your existing overhead light fitting, screen is pasted onto the wall having removed a suitably sized piece of existing wallpaper. It's a thought.
Presumably state organised hacking
I don't know if I've not been paying attention or if Britain is behind the times technically, but I've not been aware of waves of British hackers going into action against the rest of the world when our national interest or national pride is at stake. Not so Russia and China.
Incidentally, is there evidence of the "Iranian Cyber Army" actually being in or associated with Iran, or are they perhaps the Russians, Chinese, or CIA?
You may have heard that just before the German Third Reich invaded Poland, German units attacked a German border town posing as Polish troops, to make it look as though Germany was invading in self defence. It's hard to see that this mattered, but it's the sort of thing that goes on.
Another danger
You noticed the pink thingy in her handbag, you assumed it was her new sex toy, you decided to surprise her with it...
Yes
Alcohol also kills a great many people. So do cars.
If David Nutt was sacked from his unpaid(?) position for criticising government drugs policy, I was under the impression that it was specifically the policy of pretending that your policies are based upon scientific evidence when they are not. Which is slander against science itself.
Not "The Skin Trade" then. (n/t)
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BBFC charges for the service
It's not a neutral question. http://www.bbfc.co.uk/customer/cust_proc_fees.php appears to be BBFC's scale of fees for certification. http://www.bbfc.co.uk/faq/docs/12120.html and http://www.bbfc.co.uk/customer/cust_procMisc_exempt.php comment on exempt status and labelling. For videos it's £6 a minute plus £75 "handling fee" - before VAT, I think, in which case certifying an hour-long recording costs about £510. Then there's lots of extra charges.
There is also a list of disqualifications from exemption - so an educational video about lock-picking probably wouldn't be exempt, nor would "The Year of the Sex Olympics" (actually a BBC drama about a TV show that just locks people in a house with cameras in every room and watches them), nor "Vicky Does the Vatican".
Meteorites do burn up in the atmosphere.
Meteors do burn up in the atmosphere, mostly. The meteorite is the little bit that's left over.
Also, today's one is likely, if it does ever hit at a later time, to graze the atmosphere obliquely. Plenty of burning up time before it could reach the ground.
Pictures? Will need to look out for The Sky at Night.
Stephen 2: the police asked you to destroy evidence?
Did you film that?
The police are scary. It's in the job description. "Must be scary, must have very large feet." But it's like keeping intimidating dogs, if they turn on you there's not much that you can do.
Three per cent of deaths?
As you go on to say "three per cent of sudden, unexpected deaths", which is not the same thing at all.
I imagine that other leading causes of sudden unexpected death in Spain include vehicle accidents, cot deaths and big men with moustaches, knives and an adverse disposition. But I wonder whether stroke and heart attack in the elderly are included, and being more than a bit slow crossing the road, or if we also are looking only at healthy adults who are not likely to die at all except by getting on the bad side of a vehicle, a man with a moustache and a knife, or the "Running of the Bulls" in Pamplona.
Concept: translation, you can't have one
The concept car is the one that they don't make and you can't buy (obviously). They could if they wanted to, they don't want to. Perhaps the idea is to suggest that the car they actually do make is even better, but then the concept car costs a squazillion pounds to build. The real cars are much cheaper, and they look it. Relatively.
And this particular car is only on show in the future, so at the moment it's only a concept car concept. It's such a moller it might as -well- fly as well as doing what it actually (conceptually) does.
Male or female, must be attractive, Bristol area
Thank you Ronnie Barker...
I was trying to work out whether "develooper" is jargon for object oriented programming developer. The company appears to be object oriented in a fairly unfortunate way.
A watch with eight megabytes of Flash!
That's enough to store an entire MP3 track! And the B side as well! (Ask your parents. No. Your grandparents.)
We have larger ringtones today. And smaller SD cards.
I have programmed entire computers that had less memory than my video card.
Sometimes I think a Time Lord lives -too- long...
I wasn't there
...but I gather the IBM PC started out as an executive toy stroke status symbol - pretty expensive for a toy. People who made compatible PCs were sued initially - Compaq is in the story here somewhere - but Microsoft's MS-DOS availability kept clone machines alive as a concept, eventually third-party machines were made that IBM couldn't sue over, and basically here we are. Also in the story is Lotus 123, the world's spreadsheet before Excel, a hugely useiful tool for managers, right there on a PC in your own office.
IBM's PS/2 was an attempt to use IBM know-how to make a new PC that was both proprietary again, and so much better than other machines that you didn't mind that - like Apple Mac. That didn't quite work. OS/2 is the operating system that those PCs were to use, but the world went with Microsoft Windows instead. Part of the problem was that OS/2 was aimed principally at the business market and Windows was fun. Windows even came with games, although by now in 2010 the boss has tools to stop this. But I bet a lot of managers chose Windows PCs just to have the Freecell card game.
As for Lotus 123, they were ready (or tried to be, I forget) with a version for OS/2, so that's when they went off the rails as well.
The same as everyone else's manual
"I mean, what was wrong with just sticking a slip of paper in saying manuals can be downloaded from the web."
Obviously (1) you may be depending on this device to get to "the web", and (2) what process puts a product manual on the web that is better than can be put in the box?
In the case of the memory device, the operations that are described seem to be exactly the same as for all other USB memory devices, leaving the question: why didn't we get a copy of sromeone else's good manual? And the answer, I suppose: copyright.
If I remember, I'll check for bad or "gratuitous Engrish" on recently purchased packaging or manuals. Stuff from Maplin is probably fruitful. And Japanese regards "Roman" script as eleglantly ornamental, but without being particular as to meaning.
English-language terms can be converted to Japanese merely by saying "gee" after the rest of the word. And, come to think, to Hindi as well. Hmm-gee.
Critical holes fixed in Firefox?
Um, I think this means zero. http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/3.5.7/releasenotes/
"Firefox 3.5.7 fixes the following issues:
Fixed a common stability issue.
Fixed a problem with how updates were being presented to users."
Sounds like "annoying but not insecure", but... worth having.
I'm not an iPhone user but I think
Each device should have stereo speakers as well, but I don't see 'em.
Annoying the developers
I hope I'm not embarrassing anyone, but I understand that a succession of different, incompatible editions of Palm and PalmPilot devices with limited support for developers persuaded Textware finally to give up developing their Fitaly touch keyboard for new Palm models, having started there. Windows CE / Pocket PC / Windows Mobile - actually the same thing - were a friendlier environment, even with multiple hardware manufacturers instead of one, and MICROSOFT. Admittedly, Fitaly probably hooks into places on a Palm device where it wasn't meant to.
And as far as I recall, Windows Vista was going to be the ####-the-developers-AND-users edition of Windows. Will the software you already use work in the new edition of Windows? The official default answer from Microsoft was no. You would need to buy new compatible software. Then I don't want to upgrade, do I? I like what I'm using now. And so Vista died, even if actually older Windows apps are supported just fine. And Windows 7 comes with XP compatibility... as an optional add-on. Hey, now MS know what customers want, they can make you pay extra for it.
Google had better not make the mistake of Palm and Microsoft, changing the platform to disable or discourage developers and users from building a long-term relationship over more than one device lifetime - which isn't long. They need to make a commitment to long term compatibility.
tabletslate trioYou wants peach wreck ignition? Well,
If you want speech recognition, it was included in XP Tablet PCs, apparently in a better version in Vista, and I assume in Seven. But in the first generation of Tablets, built for battery life instead of data-crunching power - and light on RAM - it was painfully slow to respond, and inflexible. On machines in 2010 it may be more useable than ever before, although again the fashion is for less processing power on your portable device and longer battery life. Maybe someone 'll set up speech recognition in the cloud, voice decoding as a servvice across the Internet... isn't that scary!
Then again, back in the day I was solemnly assured that every fax message sent in Britain (ask your parents) was duplicated at the national spybheadquarters, GCHQ.
History lesson
The Windows Tablet PC could always run Windows applications. But handwriting, speech, and on-screen keyboard were clumsy attachments on-screen. It's diificult - I use an alternative screen keyboard called Fitaly, but my most useable arrangement has it docked into a fattened taskbar, and I had to hack to do that although it may now be self-docking. Application rewrites for Tablet were to be more pen-friendly, and in some special markets, very notably medicine, the stylus computer did catch on. Tablets also had a Rolls Royce of stylus input, an electronically sensed stylus instead of clumsy fingers, which were invisible to it. My preferred mode was stylus for pointing and separate mouse for clicking, and since the cursor is rarely even exactly where the stylus is, I appreciated seeing where it was on the screen before each click.
As for other devices making touch acceptable, surely not Kindle but PalmPilot, PocketPC, and a generation or two of smartphones. Are you being deliberately inaccurate to provoke comments? Or just being subtly sac!rcastic? Ahhhhh... you got me good then.
Turing invented a Halting Machine
But it didn't always work, that was the problem :-)
What's a slate
"Slate" for me is a touchscreen computer built without, and designed for use without, a typing-size keyboard. So the Classmate touchscreen net-book (I've just bought one, still in the box) isn't a "slate". It has a keyboard, but one for small hands. By me, the Samsung Q1 Ultra is a slate, although it has two halves of tiny keyboard either side of the screen. I think it also has a dog of a microprocessor but I may be mistaken.
Due to disability I'm a full-time touchscreen user, with keyboard software called Fitaly. Since this is about half typing speed in my experience, I'm interested in speech recognition, which ought to be faster - and is built in to Vista, and I assume Windows 7. But I'm scraping these fine words onto Windows XP not-Tablet edition. Heigh-ho.
tabletslate trioSlate is
"Slate" is "touchscreen PC without a keyboard" (unless you plug one into USB). It should be quite clear. Better than "netbook", which means "doesn't have a DVD drive".
Because they were journalists
I don't think the previous U.S. administration attacked and/or abducted Al Jazeera buildings and employees because a hoaxster made it look as though Al Jazeera was passing messages to terrorists. I think they attacked and abducted because Al Jazeera is a news organisation that was and is willing to publish information that is unfavourable to the previous U.S. administration. Having said that, Osama bin Laden sends all his tapes to Al Jazeera and apparently they broadcast them - we should have his Christmas message around now. Well, does anyone else still have a cassette player?
Except for viewers in Scotland
Naturally you expect classy material like this to come from the BBC but I assume it is on ITV as you said. In Scotland, however, STV will be showing its own documentat!ry, "Bluebell de Jour". Which is nice too.
Why undocumented?
Undocumented methods may be excluded from general use because the code is an ugly hack or really is liable to be changed in a future product. It may be at a point where you really are not meant to interface non-original program code into the system.
As you say, however, applications - as in separate commercial product - ought not to use undocumented calls. Now with stuff that is part of your distro, that's okay.
Well, a postcode can cover a few dozen addresses.
Likely to be several children of any given age within one two-part postcode. Hundreds if you only use the first part.
Still...
We can't afford US cop shows
We get The Professionals. And Heartbeat.
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