I got my Pi a few weeks ago. downloaded debian, installed onto an old Sandisk SD card using some SD boot maker tools I found somewhere on a PI related website. Stuck an HTC phone power supply in, wireless mouse, wired keyboard and plugged it into an HDMI monitor. Worked perfectly first time, had a play around the x desktop, used the browser and tools. now just looking at what arm binaries I can use and how to cross compile on windows (if I can).
It's pretty straightfoward to get working, although beyond that the community support isn't there yet. But it half the folk using them providing something back in the way of a tool, assistance to others, forum support etc then there is no reason it shouldn't take off. There is a bit too much negativity in the IT world.
I missed that point and it has to be one of the most relevent in the whole Microsoft/Nokia saga.
If Nokia are tied in to paying MS almost the same amount in royalties that they get in platform support payments, the the OS is effectivly zero cost, but no more than that. However android is also zero cost and a lot more popular. Nokia is really swimming against the tide and with a not very popular OS to boot (historically).
Nokia can only be gambling that MS will see windows phone as too essential to fail and promote it to the hilt, something that's not yet happened.
They have dropped Java support on BBX, Its native C++ or nothing. Daft idea when they have a large existing Java developer and app base and BBX on the PlayBook is suffering from a shortage of apps!
It's being sold in the uk for far less. £250 for the 64, £200 for the 32 and £170 for the 16GB models. The carphone warehouse stock them. Bizzarely when I got mine a few weeks ago, they still had the old prices on display. I had to ask to confirm the new pricing was in effect.
I'd agree with the comments about it being cracking bit of hardware. Now they finally have an email client its a lot more usable. There are a few niggles, for example not being able to change the email address on an account (create new, delete old) is a pain when google are chaning from googlemail.com to gmail.com. The app downloader can only download one at a time, dosn't inform you the others are queued and will quit half way through if closed (no warning or background working). And you can't turn off notifications completly, glow, led or both. But in general terms, its great for day to day use and far cheaper then an iPad.
If they can encourage developers* to write a decent colletion of apps it could be a contender...
As someone who works with mobile retailers the biggist problems are poor deals for the consumer, lack of stock at the wholesalers and low commision (~high handset cost). There is no incentive for anyone to buy, for anyone to sell and no way of getting hold of them if they ever took off. Nokia spent a lot of money on advertising a phone they don't seem very keen on selling.
I used to work for a bussiness unit supplier schools with IT equipment in Norfolk.
The old PC was disposed of via a recycyling firm who took them away for free. The hard drive was taken out first and disposed of in-house with a secure wipe followed by a hammer.
The new PC was bought from Dell and delivered to site. A technican would go out and imagine on site. For large install we would ship an image disc to Dell to install prior to going out or would deliver to base, image then deliver alongside the technican.
Of course, now my old company has been taken in-house by the county council all this has changed.Central managment software has been replaced with a collection of partly working vb scripts, curent OS builds have reverted to XP/Vista from Win7. Procurement has a 3 month lead time (paperwork) and imaging is now done from a USB attached harddrive, one at a time.
£3500 is £2500 worth of inefficiency added to £1000 worth of equipment.
"Lieury discovered that the groups using the DS actually recorded a 17 per cent decrease in memory tests after seven weeks."
Honestly, if you are going to flame about how the research is crap and the DS is at least as good as paper and pen, at least read the damn article.
The DS may have increased logic and speed but it had a detrimental affect on memory, the paper and pen version had a significant positive effect. Bearing in mind one school in my area is wasting taxpayers money on 100 of the little blighters, I'd say its a pretty important point.
I'm guessing its down to the fact you have to write the answers down rather than clicking a button, not sure how that squares with the control group though.
I think you misread my post, that would be 10 additional teachers for a grand sum of 10 kids, that's 300K, not very cost efficient. Its a simple question of logistics, a teacher can only be in one place and if the kids abodes are fixed... I'll have a word and see if we can publish some detail to explain the whys and wherefores, no promises though, its not my project and I'm not posting in a official capacity.
The WiFi was a East of England project and not an NCC one as such, although I'm personally in favour of a mesh network for the entirety of Norfolk. It could lead to savings in the long term regarding public sector IP telephony etc. I hate to even think about the phone bill for such a rural area, take 431 schools for instance, or god knows how many NHS surgeries.
As for the unitary thing, blame Norwich CC, no one else wanted it, it was a case of offer an alternative or have Norfolk cut in two, which serves no-one (IMO).
If this is the same scheme I worked on, Its not just laptops, there is a 24/7 support arrangement with a Becta approved supplier, plus the laptop comes with a standard software stack, office, AV, anti-spyware etc plus monitoring software (Securas) as these are designed for education not playing half life.
There is also the not so little amount of money required for the ADSL provision (for those that don't already have it) and the remote access solution, they are forced to use a software vpn that provides filtered Internet access and access to local (school) content only.
At the end of the day, the money is peanuts is it helps the kids to fullfill their potential and yes, some will undoubtably end up on eBay, but when prison places cost 40K a year and top rate tax payers are paying 45% back to UK PLC it sounds like a bargin.
Incidently some of these are going to home schooled kids who can't get into a regular school and others to kids in hospital long term so they can continue their school work. The alternative would be to exclude them from schooling altogether or pay 30K for a teacher per student.
I think the times are playing silly buggers, the link to the article is in arts and enterainments. The one in the article is to a 2006 "McGuinness is a British spy" page.
An SPF record should provide details of the mail servers permitted to send on behalf of a given domain. It's not a complete solution, but at least provides some assistance to combating spam. SenderID is not exactly the same as it uses a different approach to identify the domain, (PRA). Unfortunately they both use spf1 which causes confusion.
Don't BT already have a plan to fibre up Britian with 21CN?
As I understand it the backbone is being done first and the main reason is cost savings to BT that they intend to pass on to the end customer, (according to the presentations).
It seem's like Offcom is just waving a flag to say I'm here.
The motors may be 90% efficient compared with the 15-30% of combustion engines, but you have to carry some serious battery power around to get anywhere.
For 360 miles in a 30mpg petrol powered car you need approx 40KG's of fuel. For the same distance in a Honda EV+ electric car you need a 374KG Zinc Air battery pack or 3 times this for Metal Hydride, (what they came with when made).
Even taking account of a smaller engine and no need for exhaust systems, this a significant amount of additional weight and would require additional energy to cart around.
Energy Content
0.21 KWh/kg for Zinc Air Battery
0.07 KWh/kg for Metal Hydride Battery
44.0 KWh/kg for Petrol
I can't believe I went and looked all this up just for a comment!
It's considered a known fact by webbies that Opera will outperform all other browsers for rendering HTML/CSS and processing Javascript. Firefox and Safari (on Mac) will also outperform IE7, although only by a fairly minor margin.
Using things like Sliverlight and Flash isn't really up my street but I would assume it largely depends on who wrote the plug-in rather than the browser or platform.
Either way, poorly written pages and scripts cause far more issues with speed than anything else. (I know of a 400KB HTML table on one websites front page and have seen MB's of Javascript source files being loaded as part of a standard template on another.)
On the Norfolk schools network "Social Networking" (filtering list) is blocked even for teachers. Students are in school to learn and teachers to teach and I don't see that changing any time soon. If parents wish to permit access to MySpace, Bebo, Facebook etc. at home, then they need to accept the responsibility for monitoring it's use.
I wonder how long before every public worker is tasked with monitoring his or her neighbours behaviour on behalf of the state?
I see any kind of prosecution as very dangerous. If this women can be held accountable for the girls death, then what about school bulling. Some 13 year old kills themself after a playground spat and 4 other 13 year old girls get jailed for Manslaughter/2nd degree murder. Sounds a little extreme to me. At the end of the day the girl was responsible for ending her own life regardless of the provocation.
"it ignores the massive single issues that cause people to keep a party out of power at all costs."
Europe for example, although you have to wonder if it would be such a big issue if rags like the daily mail didn't exaggerate the issue of sovereignty and costs out of all proportion.
Still, the thought that policies get anyone elected in Britain is silly anyway. There are too many mindless sheep who vote for a party by habit, matching social class, because a parent voted that way or some other idiotic reason.
I think someone's getting confused between application developer and content developer. Anyone can be a content developer (YouTube, Flickr etc) but as yet applications are still a closed shop. Even Yahoo's pipes or Excel Macro's cause heart failure amongst those who do not have the correct mindset to break a problem down and implement a solution. Until they start teaching logical analysis in depth at secondary school level, my jobs safe.
Amazon do actually deliver the books to the purchaser so must have the address. What's so difficult with simply adding the sales tax at the point of sale, thousands of other website manage to do it. Buying from German, Italian and French web sites and getting the UK's 17.5% VAT on top is perfectly normal for me.
Sounds like Amazon are simply worried about losing sales as their prices look less attractive when they are forced to complete on a even field.
Do you get points for each copy of *that* image that's published. Or is this some kind of scam to reduce bandwidth by reusing a previously browser cached image repeatedly.
I have a 915 based Dell laptop running ubuntu just fine. There is a specific 915 driver package that sorts a lot of issues out, search for Intel 915 on package manager. (assuming you haven't already of course...)
Currently data is collated per local authority and only subsets of aggregate data are sent to central government, (At least pre contact-point). Will this solution result in one huge database sitting at number 10 full of names, addresses, parent details, with sensitive pupil data such as SEN statement, religion and ethnicity stored within?
If so I don't think this will go down well with schools.
I've just been looking at Zimbra Groupware to see if we could use it at work. As a Yahoo owned company it seemed fairly well backed and looks a well supported and stable product. However I can't see MS Yahoo continuing with a Linux/Mac based email product that competes in the same space as Exchange. Hopefully the DoJ will ask that it be spun out as a separate company, otherwise....
it's not the ID card as such but the ruddy great database they are building behind it. Hospital file, education record, job history, criminal record (reported crimes etc), credit history, voting record, driver details, vehicle history all available from one place, (for a small fee).
My understanding is that HTML 5 is a fully XML compliant SGML rather than HTML 4.0 on speed. The major issue will be like with WAI 2, how much pointless "we want you to buy X" rubbish makes it into the final version. WAI 2 was watered down so much by companies with product to sell it was self defeating.
Different projects have different strengths and weaknesses. In many cases your arguments hold weight, but take Open Office as an example and see how much clout its gaining on the desktop, (in many cases under Windows), to see how an Open Source product can offer significant benefits over it's closed source equivalent. It's not so much the open or closed nature of the product, but it's other attributes including cost that gives that success or failure badge.
Although in Norfolk (UK) all students are provided with an email account by the local education authority, this is considered unusual. In most authorities schools are expected to provide email accounts themselves should they choose to. Many simply don't see the need, or tell students to use free services like Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc. So 'ir' who posted above has an entirely valid point.
I also know of at least one college and 6th form who don't provide email accounts, so its not just limited to pre 16 education.
"Everyone knows that they'll call it the WOPR, not deep green..."
And as usual will refuse to document the tech, instead relying on a single scientist who inevitably decides its all bollocks anyway and decamps to papal new guinea to research the mating habits of crayfish instead.
"Now who is smoking what! DVD Jon has reverse engineered another product that he does not have legal right to do. "
Is reverse engineering illegal? I was under the impression (Samba et al) it was perfectly legit to reverse engineer proprietary file types as long as no source was used.
Personally I'd rather have a GPS system that transmits my location to the extremely slow moving caravan/tractor/artic in front of me in order to get them out of the way. 40mph is *not* the national speed limit.
We have the law of precedent here in the UK, its the judges job to interpret the written law the first time this issue comes to court. Once the decision is made then it will be used by lawyers to determine if its worth going to court for future cases. If the judge gets it wrong in the eyes of parliament (once the usual appears have been exhausted) then MP's can redraft it to provide clarification.
It's a system that's worked well for over 300 years so lets not knock it yet.
(Having said that, I bet this one is an easy win for Google)
I had a play with the Sky thing a while back, installed the provided app, it crashed when started and refused to uninstall without leaving little bits of itself behind all over the place, lots of obscure reg entries and DLL's.
I then did some searching and found the name of the app was (as mentioned) Kontiki. I managed to install the client downloaded from their website and every thing worked ok. Was still an arse to get rid of though once I got fed up with watching made for TV movies and disney reruns, (after about two days).
I seriously hope its improved, I have a large family (of PC's) to support.
Register
51 posts • joined Friday 1st June 2007 22:47 GMT
Page:
I got my Pi a few weeks ago. downloaded debian, installed onto an old Sandisk SD card using some SD boot maker tools I found somewhere on a PI related website. Stuck an HTC phone power supply in, wireless mouse, wired keyboard and plugged it into an HDMI monitor. Worked perfectly first time, had a play around the x desktop, used the browser and tools. now just looking at what arm binaries I can use and how to cross compile on windows (if I can).
It's pretty straightfoward to get working, although beyond that the community support isn't there yet. But it half the folk using them providing something back in the way of a tool, assistance to others, forum support etc then there is no reason it shouldn't take off. There is a bit too much negativity in the IT world.
Re: Microsoft <-> Nokia payments
I missed that point and it has to be one of the most relevent in the whole Microsoft/Nokia saga.
If Nokia are tied in to paying MS almost the same amount in royalties that they get in platform support payments, the the OS is effectivly zero cost, but no more than that. However android is also zero cost and a lot more popular. Nokia is really swimming against the tide and with a not very popular OS to boot (historically).
Nokia can only be gambling that MS will see windows phone as too essential to fail and promote it to the hilt, something that's not yet happened.
Re: Don't give up
They have dropped Java support on BBX, Its native C++ or nothing. Daft idea when they have a large existing Java developer and app base and BBX on the PlayBook is suffering from a shortage of apps!
Re: Also affecting Spain
Talk Mobile is Vodafone.
Reliable, but slow....
Re: Playbook prices
It's being sold in the uk for far less. £250 for the 64, £200 for the 32 and £170 for the 16GB models. The carphone warehouse stock them. Bizzarely when I got mine a few weeks ago, they still had the old prices on display. I had to ask to confirm the new pricing was in effect.
I'd agree with the comments about it being cracking bit of hardware. Now they finally have an email client its a lot more usable. There are a few niggles, for example not being able to change the email address on an account (create new, delete old) is a pain when google are chaning from googlemail.com to gmail.com. The app downloader can only download one at a time, dosn't inform you the others are queued and will quit half way through if closed (no warning or background working). And you can't turn off notifications completly, glow, led or both. But in general terms, its great for day to day use and far cheaper then an iPad.
If they can encourage developers* to write a decent colletion of apps it could be a contender...
(*thats why i have one)
retail sales
As someone who works with mobile retailers the biggist problems are poor deals for the consumer, lack of stock at the wholesalers and low commision (~high handset cost). There is no incentive for anyone to buy, for anyone to sell and no way of getting hold of them if they ever took off. Nokia spent a lot of money on advertising a phone they don't seem very keen on selling.
Thats only about 30 years older than the wooden windows and roof on my parents house, no wonder they cost so many millions to treat each winter...
Ha!
I used to work for a bussiness unit supplier schools with IT equipment in Norfolk.
The old PC was disposed of via a recycyling firm who took them away for free. The hard drive was taken out first and disposed of in-house with a secure wipe followed by a hammer.
The new PC was bought from Dell and delivered to site. A technican would go out and imagine on site. For large install we would ship an image disc to Dell to install prior to going out or would deliver to base, image then deliver alongside the technican.
Of course, now my old company has been taken in-house by the county council all this has changed.Central managment software has been replaced with a collection of partly working vb scripts, curent OS builds have reverted to XP/Vista from Win7. Procurement has a 3 month lead time (paperwork) and imaging is now done from a USB attached harddrive, one at a time.
£3500 is £2500 worth of inefficiency added to £1000 worth of equipment.
re DS better than paper comments
"Lieury discovered that the groups using the DS actually recorded a 17 per cent decrease in memory tests after seven weeks."
Honestly, if you are going to flame about how the research is crap and the DS is at least as good as paper and pen, at least read the damn article.
The DS may have increased logic and speed but it had a detrimental affect on memory, the paper and pen version had a significant positive effect. Bearing in mind one school in my area is wasting taxpayers money on 100 of the little blighters, I'd say its a pretty important point.
I'm guessing its down to the fact you have to write the answers down rather than clicking a button, not sure how that squares with the control group though.
retrain viglen
"remain vigilant"
For some unknown reason this reminds me of Beneath a Steel Sky, now thats scary.
I'll bite...
I think you misread my post, that would be 10 additional teachers for a grand sum of 10 kids, that's 300K, not very cost efficient. Its a simple question of logistics, a teacher can only be in one place and if the kids abodes are fixed... I'll have a word and see if we can publish some detail to explain the whys and wherefores, no promises though, its not my project and I'm not posting in a official capacity.
The WiFi was a East of England project and not an NCC one as such, although I'm personally in favour of a mesh network for the entirety of Norfolk. It could lead to savings in the long term regarding public sector IP telephony etc. I hate to even think about the phone bill for such a rural area, take 431 schools for instance, or god knows how many NHS surgeries.
As for the unitary thing, blame Norwich CC, no one else wanted it, it was a case of offer an alternative or have Norfolk cut in two, which serves no-one (IMO).
Jay
Not just laptops
If this is the same scheme I worked on, Its not just laptops, there is a 24/7 support arrangement with a Becta approved supplier, plus the laptop comes with a standard software stack, office, AV, anti-spyware etc plus monitoring software (Securas) as these are designed for education not playing half life.
There is also the not so little amount of money required for the ADSL provision (for those that don't already have it) and the remote access solution, they are forced to use a software vpn that provides filtered Internet access and access to local (school) content only.
At the end of the day, the money is peanuts is it helps the kids to fullfill their potential and yes, some will undoubtably end up on eBay, but when prison places cost 40K a year and top rate tax payers are paying 45% back to UK PLC it sounds like a bargin.
Incidently some of these are going to home schooled kids who can't get into a regular school and others to kids in hospital long term so they can continue their school work. The alternative would be to exclude them from schooling altogether or pay 30K for a teacher per student.
@Flocke
Thanks for that, was really interesting to see an explanation of how the difference types work in practise (NAND/NOR).
J
Fingers
".........And expect a backdated law to be passed illegalising the collection or ownership of fingerprints soon after..."
I read that as ilegal ownership of fingers.
Its only a matter of time...
J
Bad link
I think the times are playing silly buggers, the link to the article is in arts and enterainments. The one in the article is to a 2006 "McGuinness is a British spy" page.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5003394.ece
SPF
An SPF record should provide details of the mail servers permitted to send on behalf of a given domain. It's not a complete solution, but at least provides some assistance to combating spam. SenderID is not exactly the same as it uses a different approach to identify the domain, (PRA). Unfortunately they both use spf1 which causes confusion.
BT's 21CN
Don't BT already have a plan to fibre up Britian with 21CN?
As I understand it the backbone is being done first and the main reason is cost savings to BT that they intend to pass on to the end customer, (according to the presentations).
It seem's like Offcom is just waving a flag to say I'm here.
Elecy Cars
The motors may be 90% efficient compared with the 15-30% of combustion engines, but you have to carry some serious battery power around to get anywhere.
For 360 miles in a 30mpg petrol powered car you need approx 40KG's of fuel. For the same distance in a Honda EV+ electric car you need a 374KG Zinc Air battery pack or 3 times this for Metal Hydride, (what they came with when made).
Even taking account of a smaller engine and no need for exhaust systems, this a significant amount of additional weight and would require additional energy to cart around.
Energy Content
0.21 KWh/kg for Zinc Air Battery
0.07 KWh/kg for Metal Hydride Battery
44.0 KWh/kg for Petrol
I can't believe I went and looked all this up just for a comment!
J
@Joshua
What he said :)
If Gordon seriously thinks the public are behind him with 42 days, then why not put forward a Labour candidate on that platform?
Speed
It's considered a known fact by webbies that Opera will outperform all other browsers for rendering HTML/CSS and processing Javascript. Firefox and Safari (on Mac) will also outperform IE7, although only by a fairly minor margin.
Using things like Sliverlight and Flash isn't really up my street but I would assume it largely depends on who wrote the plug-in rather than the browser or platform.
Either way, poorly written pages and scripts cause far more issues with speed than anything else. (I know of a 400KB HTML table on one websites front page and have seen MB's of Javascript source files being loaded as part of a standard template on another.)
Norfolk
On the Norfolk schools network "Social Networking" (filtering list) is blocked even for teachers. Students are in school to learn and teachers to teach and I don't see that changing any time soon. If parents wish to permit access to MySpace, Bebo, Facebook etc. at home, then they need to accept the responsibility for monitoring it's use.
I wonder how long before every public worker is tasked with monitoring his or her neighbours behaviour on behalf of the state?
Dangerous Law
I see any kind of prosecution as very dangerous. If this women can be held accountable for the girls death, then what about school bulling. Some 13 year old kills themself after a playground spat and 4 other 13 year old girls get jailed for Manslaughter/2nd degree murder. Sounds a little extreme to me. At the end of the day the girl was responsible for ending her own life regardless of the provocation.
Popular Opinion
"it ignores the massive single issues that cause people to keep a party out of power at all costs."
Europe for example, although you have to wonder if it would be such a big issue if rags like the daily mail didn't exaggerate the issue of sovereignty and costs out of all proportion.
Still, the thought that policies get anyone elected in Britain is silly anyway. There are too many mindless sheep who vote for a party by habit, matching social class, because a parent voted that way or some other idiotic reason.
Its all in the mind
I think someone's getting confused between application developer and content developer. Anyone can be a content developer (YouTube, Flickr etc) but as yet applications are still a closed shop. Even Yahoo's pipes or Excel Macro's cause heart failure amongst those who do not have the correct mindset to break a problem down and implement a solution. Until they start teaching logical analysis in depth at secondary school level, my jobs safe.
leaky air con
He missed the air con installed to such a high standard that it leaks at one end, right over top of the phone* system UPS.
J
*Just luck, honest.
Tangible Assets
Amazon do actually deliver the books to the purchaser so must have the address. What's so difficult with simply adding the sales tax at the point of sale, thousands of other website manage to do it. Buying from German, Italian and French web sites and getting the UK's 17.5% VAT on top is perfectly normal for me.
Sounds like Amazon are simply worried about losing sales as their prices look less attractive when they are forced to complete on a even field.
J
the new windows
"...Vista I think is the new Windows 2000..."
Only usable after service pack 4?
Jay
great excuse
Do you get points for each copy of *that* image that's published. Or is this some kind of scam to reduce bandwidth by reusing a previously browser cached image repeatedly.
Jay
915 and ubuntu
@zcat
I have a 915 based Dell laptop running ubuntu just fine. There is a specific 915 driver package that sorts a lot of issues out, search for Intel 915 on package manager. (assuming you haven't already of course...)
J
Expansion
Currently data is collated per local authority and only subsets of aggregate data are sent to central government, (At least pre contact-point). Will this solution result in one huge database sitting at number 10 full of names, addresses, parent details, with sensitive pupil data such as SEN statement, religion and ethnicity stored within?
If so I don't think this will go down well with schools.
Age of Hardware
"...edit-save-compile-link-run..." or F6 as some of us know it by...
J
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
Zimbra
I've just been looking at Zimbra Groupware to see if we could use it at work. As a Yahoo owned company it seemed fairly well backed and looks a well supported and stable product. However I can't see MS Yahoo continuing with a Linux/Mac based email product that competes in the same space as Exchange. Hopefully the DoJ will ask that it be spun out as a separate company, otherwise....
National DB
@Luke
it's not the ID card as such but the ruddy great database they are building behind it. Hospital file, education record, job history, criminal record (reported crimes etc), credit history, voting record, driver details, vehicle history all available from one place, (for a small fee).
HTML5 is XHTML 2
@Anon
My understanding is that HTML 5 is a fully XML compliant SGML rather than HTML 4.0 on speed. The major issue will be like with WAI 2, how much pointless "we want you to buy X" rubbish makes it into the final version. WAI 2 was watered down so much by companies with product to sell it was self defeating.
J
@Charlie
"Oh fuck off you timewaster!"...
Seriously, that comment is out of order.
(unless your wife ran off with another woman, that would definitely constitute a bad karma day, flame or no flame.)
J
Open vs Closed
BKB - You're generalising.
Different projects have different strengths and weaknesses. In many cases your arguments hold weight, but take Open Office as an example and see how much clout its gaining on the desktop, (in many cases under Windows), to see how an Open Source product can offer significant benefits over it's closed source equivalent. It's not so much the open or closed nature of the product, but it's other attributes including cost that gives that success or failure badge.
@anon
AFAIK Playing bowling on a Wii is on the same console.
Basicly the fellas wife seems to have had a male friend over to stay a number of nights.
DPA
"Does anyone know if HMG and its employees are subject to the Data Protection Act "
Government offices are usually covered under part 4 - exemptions, or at least that's the going assumption.
If you can read it without falling asleep:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/Acts/acts1998/ukpga_19980029_en_5#pt4
It's all in the paperwork
"My dad always told me that unless you want the whole world to know something, never write it down."
I know a tax advisor who gives the same advice.....
Student Email Accounts
Although in Norfolk (UK) all students are provided with an email account by the local education authority, this is considered unusual. In most authorities schools are expected to provide email accounts themselves should they choose to. Many simply don't see the need, or tell students to use free services like Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc. So 'ir' who posted above has an entirely valid point.
I also know of at least one college and 6th form who don't provide email accounts, so its not just limited to pre 16 education.
10 year old?
If a 10 year old is permitted to play an 18 rated game, shoot the parents, don't ban the game.
J
Trademarks
Just scrap em, how on earth the words 'American' and 'Airlines' can *belong* to anyone boggles the mind.
Crayfish
"Everyone knows that they'll call it the WOPR, not deep green..."
And as usual will refuse to document the tech, instead relying on a single scientist who inevitably decides its all bollocks anyway and decamps to papal new guinea to research the mating habits of crayfish instead.
reversing
"Now who is smoking what! DVD Jon has reverse engineered another product that he does not have legal right to do. "
Is reverse engineering illegal? I was under the impression (Samba et al) it was perfectly legit to reverse engineer proprietary file types as long as no source was used.
J
HUD
Personally I'd rather have a GPS system that transmits my location to the extremely slow moving caravan/tractor/artic in front of me in order to get them out of the way. 40mph is *not* the national speed limit.
UK Law
We have the law of precedent here in the UK, its the judges job to interpret the written law the first time this issue comes to court. Once the decision is made then it will be used by lawyers to determine if its worth going to court for future cases. If the judge gets it wrong in the eyes of parliament (once the usual appears have been exhausted) then MP's can redraft it to provide clarification.
It's a system that's worked well for over 300 years so lets not knock it yet.
(Having said that, I bet this one is an easy win for Google)
J
Kontiki
I had a play with the Sky thing a while back, installed the provided app, it crashed when started and refused to uninstall without leaving little bits of itself behind all over the place, lots of obscure reg entries and DLL's.
I then did some searching and found the name of the app was (as mentioned) Kontiki. I managed to install the client downloaded from their website and every thing worked ok. Was still an arse to get rid of though once I got fed up with watching made for TV movies and disney reruns, (after about two days).
I seriously hope its improved, I have a large family (of PC's) to support.
J
Patent
Who-ever examines the patent for prior art is in for some interesting times.
Patently Absurd
A patent application to rotate a screen 180 degrees.
How novel, would never have thought of that one...
J
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