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* Posts by Julian Bond

105 posts • joined Tuesday 20th February 2007 18:51 GMT

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Julian Bond
Stop

G-Wizz?

Curiously the G-Wizz is not actually a car but a Quad. This gets it round a whole bunch of type approval regs. It also means it's not eligible for the subsidy (IMHO) and doesn't get counted in the stats about electric and hybrid car sales.

It would be nice if the gummint provided a workable subsidy scheme for electric bicycles as well instead of the faintly ridiculous "ride to work" scheme. Perhaps they could just make Bicycles and E-Bicycles 0% VAT rated. As if.

Julian Bond
Paris Hilton

Surely, they just need to

Reverse the polarity!

In the last 10 minutes of the film, leaving ample time for the epilogue.

Paris, obviously, since she knows a thing or two about films.

Julian Bond
Go

Cable

Still trying to understand how BT is forced to offer LLU, wholesale and duct access to 3rd parties, but Virgin isn't.

Thatcher and crew gave a broad set of incentives to the cable industry to build out a new layer of infrastructure. Perhaps it's time to offer the same sort of incentives to the nascent fibre industry to do the same thing.

Maybe there's a Murdoch in there somewhere.

Julian Bond
Coat

Mine's the one

with the candles in the pocket.

Julian Bond
Stop

Music, books, videos

DRM was killing music but we headed that one off. Now DRM is killing[1] eBooks, Videos and the mobile Apps market and it's still a rip off.

Just say No to DRM. And if that means just saying no to Apple and Amazon then so be it.

[1]Yes, I know the video and iPhone Apps market is not exactly dying. And I really hate the argument that "it's not Apple/Amazon's fault, they're being pushed into it by the copyright owners". Apple/Amazon are the retailer that we deal with and they're colluding in the lie that DRM works or is good for anyone.

Julian Bond
Stop

Spam

They've got a huge problem building with spam and malicious comments beginning to appear. it's going to be fun watching them deal with *that*.

Julian Bond
Stop

And Virgin?

How about they force Virgin Cable to sell bandwidth wholesale, provide LLU and open up their ducts to 3rd parties? After all, the cheap loans and tax incentives to the original cable companies[1] have all been used up or buried in multiple buyouts. So if one half of the duopoly is constrained and forced to provide for a 3rd party market why isn't the other half?

[1] Maybe it's time for another round of tax incentives and cheap loans for new operations who can lay fibre to the home?

Julian Bond
Troll

And Ian Dale

And can we please keep him off our TV screens as well.

Julian Bond
Big Brother

Thatcher and Cable

Wasn't it Thatcher's government that provided some very healthy tax incentives and cheap loans to the nascent cable industry? Maybe it's time to start treating Virgin like BT and requiring wholesale bandwidth and LLU from them, while starting a new infrastructure industry?

Then we can all enjoy the next players digging the roads up again.

Julian Bond
Black Helicopters

Port Police?

I have this sneaking suspicion that they've sold a bunch of these to the customs police at the Channel Tunnel. I was part of a bit of security theatre there that makes it all feel familiar. Me and a mate (40 something and 50 something) on clean late model motorcycles covered in luggage get called over on our way out of the country. The police wave a magic wand over the bikes and then send us on our way. I've been wondering for a couple of years now, exactly what that wand was supposed to do. Now I know. The Police were in fact part of a crack squad of psychic detectives looking for hidden truffles with $8000 worth of "Advanced Detection Equipment".

Julian Bond
Stop

Gatsos

Never mind cars, could we use this thing on Gatsos and other speed traps?

Julian Bond
Coat

LHC

How about we collide Mandy with a large hadron?

Mine's the black one with the hole in the pocket.

Julian Bond
Badgers

Mandy

"The case shows that artists and music companies need better protection."

So I guess they'll be flying the Evil Lord Mandelson off on an all expenses paid trip to the Caribbean. He'll still be around no matter who gets in at the next election so keeping him sweet writing a few more advertorials for the copyright biz in The Times will still be cheap publicity even if he can't direct government policy to the same extent.

Mandelson and Badgers? I feel sure Matthew Parris will announce the connection on Radio 4 shortly.

Julian Bond
Thumb Up

I for one

look forward to China extending this all the way to Vienna. It must make more sense to move all those container loads of electric bicycles to Europe via train rather than ocean going ship.

Shortly afterwards I expect somebody to commission a new TV Play. "Murder on the Guangzhou Express"

Julian Bond
Stop

These are

not the androids you're looking for.

Julian Bond
Stop

Stop right now

As other's above have said, we cannot live under this lop-sided treaty.

There's enough law in the UK (and EU) to prosecute him for computer misuse and for him to serve a sentence in the UK, regardless of exactly where the computers were located. Shipping him off to the USA just because the USAians ask for it, cannot be a good thing for any of us.

Needless to say this wouldn't apply in the scenario where UK forces had picked him up, and shipped him off to some CIA terror camp in Algeria via extraordinary rendition from where he was shuffled around for 5 years and finally ended up in Gitmo. Because obviously that would be entirely justified.

So let's hope everyone can string this out till after the next election and the incoming Home Secretary can stick two fingers up to the USA.

Julian Bond
Jobs Horns

Control

"there is a finite number of devices on which an Ad Hoc build will run". What is it, I wonder, which controls this?

There is a solution to this, but it's one that Apple probably wouldn't like. And that's to do as Firefox does. There's an App store. Installing and upgrading from the App store is trivial. But you can install an App from a 3rd party website providing you mmake a couple of extra clicks to say "I know this is dangerous, but I want to do it anyway".

I don't buy the "security of the phone system" argument. If the iPhone exposes APIs that are dangerous and could affect the security of the phone system, then it's broken and should be fixed.

As for one way upgrades, I think this really applies to all software thes days. We want automatic or at least painless upgrade systems, and the price for that is that there's no going back. It doesn't really matter what software environment you're talking about.

Julian Bond
Pint

Australian national sport

As this is Australia, shouldn't they have worked in the national sport of Dwarf Tossing?

Ithankyew. Mine's a XXXX.

Julian Bond
FAIL

Skype

So use Skype?

Julian Bond
FAIL

We're all doomed!

So enjoy it while you can.

Julian Bond
FAIL

Compete with free

There is a price that competes with free. And it's pretty much what AllOfMp3 used to charge. $0.10 to $0.25 (you do the maths) per track and $1.00 to $2.50 per album. All for 192K LAME VBR Mp3s. You can probably charge a little more for FLAC. Even if you habitually download and share music (or just swap hard drives), the convenience of a reliable source of quality encoding and tagging is worth that much.

So how about the music industry works out how to get a distributor to license the allofmp3 software and puts out every track they've ever released at that sort of price?

Julian Bond
Thumb Up

Streamlining

So will they allow real streamlining?

Julian Bond
WTF?

P4S, NJB, USB

The Pre could use Winamp and Microsoft's P4S, NJB or plain old USB mass storage. Oh. Wait. no Winamp on a Mac without parallels and XP/Vista.

The real problem here is that a commercial bit of software from a vendor with a long history of lock in has become the market leader. And they have a vested interest in maintaining the lock in. It would be better for all of us if the market leader was an open system with no hardware/software manufacturng ties. Then the software developers would be striving to work with everything rather than limiting themselves to work with only one thing.

This whole area is so silly. USB mass storage with XSPF as the database would work fine and it would be easy for everyone to support. We really don't need proprietary formats for what is actually a very simple computing problem.

Julian Bond
Go

Public Webcams

Yes, indeedy. Let's have a law that all CCTVs *must* be made available as publicly accessible internet webcams. And not just the publicly owned ones but private ones as well.

And I bet there's one or few unintended consequences, not all pleasant, in that idea.

Julian Bond
Thumb Down

Hard disk

Oi! Where's my 240Gb hard disk iPhone?

Julian Bond
Paris Hilton

It's all about the money

Graham Bartlett: More than 20p a song, and I'm not doing it.

Andy Bright: people with actual money overwhelmingly don't see $10-$15 as an obstacle to owning music.

The truth is out there somewhere between Graham and Andy. I figure there is a price that competes successfully with free and it's somewhere around 10c per track for 128Mbps and 30c per track for flac. In fact pretty much where allofmp3.com was pitching it back in the day.

Paris: Because even she knows the difference between the price of something and its value.

Julian Bond
Black Helicopters

Yes, please

In fact can we have a law that every CCTV camera *must* be a publicly accessible webcam.

Julian Bond
Paris Hilton

Mobed?

Andrew: What's a mobed? Have you got a turbo-nutter bastard 4 poster?

I'm sure Paris could commute without leaving her bed.

Julian Bond
Go

No PGP?

If PGP is verboten surely there's a simple answer, use GPG.

Which then makes you wonder: Are Linux and Mac PCs compatible with their VPN?

Julian Bond
Alert

Queen Kong!

Where are you?

Julian Bond
Go

Please, a better iPod, please

Somebody, anybody, please build a better iPod. Apple need the competition.

- A 240Gb version

- Built in radio

- No DRM, no ties to iTunes

- User replaceable batteries

- Ogg support

- USB Host support

and so on. And just sell it as a bit of USB connected consumer hardware, not as the centre of some notional music-video ecosystem.

But it's clearly not going to be Microsoft.

Julian Bond
Thumb Down

Competition

Almost shocked that I'm suggesting this, but how about we let the market decide. LLU and BT wholesale was supposed to encourage a competitive marketplace for ISPs. If that actually works and we have enough regulation on truthiness in advertising then the whole net neutrality debate becomes moot. ISPs that limit bandwidth or throttle protocols will then fade as more open ISPs take their business.

Now can someone explain why BT are forced to offer LLU and wholesale bandwidth but Virgin cable isn't?

Julian Bond
Stop

Diesel?

So where's my diesel electric plugin? Is there some obvious flaw that means that couldn't possibly work?

Julian Bond
Stop

Hmmm

There's something wrong with that Wikipedia story. Even transparent proxies should pass though the client IP address. And Mediawiki and the wikipedia code should be checking HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR and HTTP_CLIENT_IP not just REMOTE_ADDR

So either the wikipedia code is stupid or the IWF proxies are not playing fair.

Julian Bond
Paris Hilton

Because

Oh, you work it out.

Julian Bond
Stop

Real competition? Or a .gov sanctioned pigopoly

If there was real competition between ISPs we wouldn't have a net neutrality problem; either in the UK or USA. So please explain to me why:-

- BT have to sell bandwidth wholesale and support LLU but Virgin don't

- US Anti-Trust laws haven't come up with an equivalent scheme to force the Baby Bells (and others) to sell bandwidth wholesale and support LLU

- Why even now we're not supporting investment in the next infrastructure upgrade (fibre to the home, say) with tax breaks and cheap loans, the way we did with cable TV.

Julian Bond
Thumb Down

O RLY?

"Because the six ISPs are routing Wikipedia traffic through transparent proxies, huge numbers of would-be Wikipedia editors appear to be coming from the same IP range."

If this is true, then either the proxies are not following http or the wikipedia is making an elementary mistake in parsing the http headers. HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR or HTTP_CLIENT_IP are almost always included by proxies, transparent or otherwise.

Julian Bond
IT Angle

!geek

A surprisingly large number of these people have got a good degree from a major university. Like say PPE at Oxford. So at least at one time in their lives they were definitely not stupid. So does being a politician actually make you stupid? More likely is an underlying attitude of graduates with arts degree that the sciences are somehow grubby and beneath them. This has always seemed grossly unfair to me. If you have the misfortune to have the geek gene, you are expected to have a working knowlegde of Art, Literature, History and such like in order to be a real rounded individual. But if you do an Arts degree you don't need to have a basic knowledge of the sciences.

So I think we need a disparaging term for the sort of !geek who frankly hasn't a clue about technology or what we think of as technological common sense. Suggestions?

Julian Bond
Go

Honda generator

If I bought one, I'd be off to Halfords for a nice little Honda Generator to put in the boot. And that's the problem with pure electric. Just like mobile phones, they'll run out at the just the wrong moment. Like when you're 15 miles from home and 3 miles from the nearest 13A socket. That's going to make for an interesting AA call. Now where's my Serial, Diesel, Plugin Hybrid?

Kamen's Sterling Serial hybrid is interesting. Especially if the Sterling engine can run on heat from a wood burning stove.

Julian Bond
Unhappy

Where did free acces go?

I really wanted to live in a world where you could find free wifi access anywhere you went. For a while there the Linksys/belkin/dlink defaults community network made this possible. But now I'm finding that every access point I can see is locked down. It's a downside of the journalists and commentators pushing the manufacturers to make security the default.

So although there are some downsides to leaving wifi open, there's a downside to closing it all up as well. I find that sad.

Julian Bond
Pirate

before eventually being thrown away.

When you say thrown away, could they be thrown to some enterprising Russian who could then rent them out for joy rides? Seeing as getting them flight approved in the UK is probably impossible. Or perhaps they could be thrown away to some Banana Republic. Like the next decade's newly capitalist Cuba.

Julian Bond
Black Helicopters

Certain lack of thought here

They really haven't thought this one through, have they. I look forward to my PAYG SIM being remotely disabled until I register. Along with the 40m other PAYG customers. End result. 20m registered. 10m presumed lost. Leaving 10m false positives.

Next stop. No installing or downloading Skype without registering at your local police station with 2 forms of photo ID. Oh. Wait. That would just be silly, right?

Julian Bond
Coat

"Corporate ASBOs"

So Lehman Brothers will be prevented from drinking alcohol in public anywhere with the Square Mile?

Oh. Wait.

Coat because everybody else at Lehmans have already got there's and left.

Julian Bond
Black Helicopters

Good eating?

The real question here may be which is the better eating? There are so many crayfish in the river Lee (or Lea) near Hertford that you can fish them out with a bit of bacon tied to a piece of string. But I can't quite bring myself to eat them given the colour of the water.

That is a crayfish in the sign and not a black helicopter, right?

Julian Bond

USA Only

Will it be USA only like all the other Location Based Systems? I exaggerate obviously. But it's amazing how often these LBS are not world wide from day one.

Julian Bond
Thumb Down

Sigh

Where are my cheap LiOn batteries (with added nano-carbon bucky paper)? Lead Acid is bit old hat, no? And why isn't this being churned out by the million in China for £2500, not hand made in the UK for £8000.

Do you think there's room in the boot for a Honda petrol generator?

Julian Bond
Paris Hilton

Sad

Sad that the Belkin-Linksys-Dlink community defaults network is dying out. For a while there you could find a free unencrypted AP almost anywhere but these days everyone is setting encryption to on.

Paris, because she would never give it away for free.

Julian Bond
Stop

Too late

Too late. This would almost have made sense 8 years ago. Or 4 years ago if MicroSd slots were a standard in every MP3 player. ISTR suggesting that MP3 players should have no on board memory but have a memory slot like cameras, but it was an idea that never happened.

But frankly actually buying music is just *so* last century.

Julian Bond
Thumb Up

Nowt wrong with this one

These things are getting really good now and there's not much left that's wrong with one, the only downside on this one is the mic speaker connectors on the front edge. They should be on the LH Edge on all laptops so you don 't snag your wrists on them. But if that's really the only complaint, it's a very small one.

And as for the price, it's *so* much cheaper than previous tiny laptops. As longs as it's below £300 inc VAT, its ok.

Julian Bond
IT Angle

Safety systems

I feel astonished that in the 21st century we haven't got more efficient safety systems than relying on a person to see a red light and take action. Or am I being naive?

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