it's all right because...

...they'll be balancing the extension with fair use provisions.

oh, wait...

and another thing

"Government projects, for example the DVLA putting tax disc renewals online, are often inherently big and complicated. And that’s a reflection of the complexity of the civil service, and the technology it relies upon to maintain and constantly improve public services."

because: giving a stack of tax discs to on-line insurance compaines is so much more difficult than having Fujitsu (and IBM) build some huge platform to capture the same information and then check the motor insurer's database for a valid insurance certificate

why: if your job importance is measured on size of budget and number of staff then the HM Treasury "do nothing" investment option appraisal is nothing more than an inconvenient truth.

For a supplementary view as the comment to this article

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/when-it-meets-politics/2010/11/no-taxation-without-services-c.html

puts it:

"References to On-line Driving License renewal as a flagship should recognise that its success demonstrates shows that about a 40% of us are content to pay £2.50 extra for the privilege of helping HMG save 80p! I live barely 50 yards from a Bank and 200 yards from a Post Office. But for the queues in both, it would nearly always take me less time to transact with a human being than it does on-line - thanks to poor response times, bloatware and the need to look up security codes that I have forgotten. The Driving License renewal is one of the few cases where that is not the case."

Re: Points to ponder...

but here's the thing - I move my hand towards a device at say, 2 m/s - speed of sound is 330m/s

the observed frequency is (330+2)/(330+0) x actual frequency, f, say 1.005 f

(the zero in the bottom line assumes you are not throwing your laptop across the room in frustration)

It's a long time since I've done any serious digital filtering but it isn't going to happen using active analogue. Perhaps someone more up to date than me can advise on the feasibility

Re: And if it's not possible

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/ultrasonic-proximity-sensors/2370799/

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/ultrasonic-proximity-sensors/2370783/

I'm reading this on an 8Gb SSD Acer Aspire One

running openSUSE 12.1/KDE 4.8.3 netbook edition, it cost me about £180/about 5 years ago add in failed keyboard, failed network card, (though now 2.4Ghz/5Ghz) both in last 12 months, still less than £200.

I can watch video fullscreen no dropout never tried to edit video so don't know but low/no expectations. My portable office device of choice. I don't know what you mean by too slow, screen fine but obviously smaller - OTOH about £600 cheaper and no signs of running out of the oomph I need.

Not going to argue with any aesthetic choice you might have made but the "copied" BS is a tired trope, e.g., http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa043099.htm and do we want to discuss, e.g., KHTML?

Learning from history

Get Smart, a spoof spy series from the mid sixties, had a variety of wacky gadgets including the shoe phone:

http://voices.yahoo.com/get-smart-shoe-phone-sold-3900000-ebay-566960.html

If I remember correctly, one if its many drawbacks was that Max had to carry a suitcase around for the batteries, which was funny because everyone got the point about personal mobile communications being impossible because of the battery size problem.

Re: fuck off

not so, I'd have to track the case down but someone took the issue to trial and the Judge (Magistrate?) returned not guilty because fuck off is now part of the vernacular

Re: Will it be cheaper / safer to use Android and Linux

A 12 yr old version of the Linux desktop will be using KDE 1.something (I was there... yes, it was an act of faith) you wouldn't want to be running it today.

However, I've chuntered along the upgrade path gaining _reusable_ experience in everything along the way moving from kernel 2.2 to kernel 3.1 and from KDE 1.something to KDE 4.8.1 (yes 4.0 was a well documented speed bump)

I've got it running on 2003 yr old homebrew hardware as a standard desktop, an MSI WIND and AAO both as netbook interface

And of course I've moved from Star Office -> Open Office -> Libre Office with all that experience reusable

All as a user and as technical support for those that made the mistake of asking me which computer to buy.

PS I think you mean "damn" if you meant "damned" what curse did you apply and why and if you did mean dammed - check the log file...

A 1970s car is...

...such a wrong analogy. Software is not hardware.

There would be a healthy after market for any half decent 1970s car. After all it's not impossible to get parts for cars decades older than that.

Of course if you are using proprietary software it's like owning a car with the bonnet welded shut.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/19/ms_in_peruvian_opensource_nightmare/

Re: One flaw

Fail doubleplus

http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/playing_tv_progs/tvlicence

Re: How soon before TV licences are pirated, then?

It's also illegal to rob banks and mug people. However I'm still allowed to walk into banks and down the street on the assumption that I'm innocent until proved guilty.

Criminals will find their way around most things. The complying majority will play by the rules

Re: Re: Re: I wonder...

I can write an application on OSX that reads all the address book and sends it off to a server. You can almost certainly do the same thing on Windows and Linux.

Yes, you certainly can for a *nix system, except for the, er, file permissions thing...

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/filepermissions.html

not sure if you are being rhetorical, obfuscatory or...

Re: Wow...

which would be as useless as an 8" floppy.

spelling problem? warning, pedantry alert

In Brit English the present participle of "to license" is licensing. American English tends to make verbs out of nouns so doing something with a licence becomes licencing, whereas a licence is the outcome of licensing. Its called verbing.

Though we''ve got form here too: http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/f/verbingfaq.htm

@Local Group

A genuine keyboard moment

"why does hibernate still not work properly"

There's a lot of hardware out there, a lot of design issues.

Hibernate works on my Acer Aspire One, Opensuse 12.1 (it did on the 11s too). An MSI windbook 64bit is a bit more touchy, will be rolling it back to 11.4 but that's because I have the choice.

"it still falls over with simple tasks like being able to plug in a cheap printer"

I use HP, have done for years, on my third having started with 640C (?). Lexmark don't want to support Linux then don't buy their printers. Network based printing will solve all that over time.

"or run 2 versions of an app in different desktops"

bit difficult to argue that generality - does that never happen with Apple? It does with Windows and the only solution is to spend money.

With Linux, possibly we're all in this together and by using feedback to the devs we can reduce the problems.

so I asked...

More accurately some one asked me. Working in library services she asked me if a new e-book service she was testing worked on Linux (not Android), as she was concerned about universal access. (No, it didn't).

She didn't know that Android was Linux based. I used the growth of content consumption devices based on Android as a reason to pressurise the supplier - who replied with the gem "he didn't think that Linux for Android had been released yet"

I don't know the outcome of that one, yet, however this isn't a race, it's erosion. Ballmer was right.

Once market share gets to a level much higher than it should need to be (15%?) universal access to online public services will create political pressure to level the playing field a bit more, thus removing one more barrier. Possibly Android for tablets will enable LOTD as it becomes more possible to refurbish old hardware for general use.

@Jonas Taylor

"The solar subsidies were a step in the right direction and they were being used by councils to help lift some of the poorest families out of fuel-poverty, yet now the government has backed down and taken illegal action to prematurely reduce subsidies"

There are two themes to this argument - your like of this subsidy and your dislike ot this government.

Perhaps you could explain why these subsidies were a step in the right direction?

£12,000, your figure, is a lot of money. How does spending this alleviate fuel poverty?

At £500/year (in current cost terms) that's a 24 year subsidy directly to the fuel poor (I digress to mention there is only poverty not the hypothecated BS of fuel poverty) .

Then the greater the install base the higher the cost of conventional electricity to everyone including the "fuel poor" (the, admittedly unachieveable, end case would be everyone paying the subsidy to themselves, but poor people in the lower decks of blocks of flats would be worst hit).

What about "green" - do you have any input costs for PV? end of life disposal costs? One figure I heard/read (I can't substantiate) is that the input energy costs (not total environmetal costs) for PV is about eight years of output - let's hope that if I'm right that's not peak output.

The subsidy is only green if it is subsequently used for low carbon expenditure.

What about "jobs"? The stuff is all made elsewhere (only assembled here), so it does little for manufacturing ermployment. if the installation jobs only exist because of the ridiculous subsidies then why not pay people to do something more societally useful? Such as repair delapidated homes that are energy black holes? Make them more energy effiicient? Reduce energy usage (er, as in real "green"), Reduce fuel poverty buy reducing energy requirements?

But no, lets carry on with this regressive (look at the install base, look at who's paying, look at who's financing) ridiculous scheme because you don't lke this government - hurrah for your politics.

BTW the green deal was also started under the previous administration but was not seen as sexy by _any_ of the gutless bandwagon jumping backbenchers never mind the Islington socialist pushing FiTs at the time (the one currently considered so good at his job that even his own party think he's crap)

(see previous post, not in government (nor anywhere else remotely connected to all this)

PS: Are you are an installer? If so, shouldn't you declare?

@AndrueC, er, no not you

I was referencing the original a/c hence the title of my post.

Perhaps one fewer espresso before you next post?

@Replacing the copper loop with fibre?

In your dystopian world does no-one have a mobile phone? Some people I know are happy enough with a mob and dongle for internet. Have you seen the way BT call revenues are falling off a cliff?

I want FTTH for the internet.

Sometimes it's better to say nothing and look deep...

http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/lcd-libra-rethink

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/23/libra_disc/

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/NHS-courts-5bn-IT-disaster-by-following-the-Libra-route

give me strength....

... is your pension fund 100% Apple shares or something?

leaving aside all the other reasons I disagree with you

This is not remotely up there with grief such as Simon Singh putting his life on hold for half a decade and mortgaging his house in order to deal with the process of justice. The clue is in the five years. They are gone forever along with the stress etc. (Never mind real grief such as the woman that was killed by a bonkers ex-boyfriend despite 51 calls to the police).

However flipping the "broken window" approach to civic society on its head and applying it to those that claim to make our lives better, if I could in anyway be convinced that the bureaucratic machinations, incompetence and indifference had any consequences for the perpetrators of such, then your scheme might have a slim chance of being taken seriously.

In my world, nothing makes me want to get up quicker in order to kick my radio around the room than when I hear of the appalling consequences of yet another sequence of bureaucratic cock-ups together with some spokesdroid or other talking about "lessons having been learned" and "agencies working closer together in future"

Can you see the real me (can you?)

I don't watch TV.

I don't watch iPlayer catch-up TV because (a) (slightly sanctimoniously) I don't understand why it doesn't need a TV licence, (b) I gave up watching TV

For many years I thought "fuck you" with all the letter demanding that I engage TVLA, then in 2009 I decided to persuade then to stop, concluding with a letter sent by recorded delivery, They stopped.

Next I got letter addressed to someone else which I thought could give rise to actual problems, identity theft and whatnot (precis - the joys of the DPA and TVLA)

After that for some reason the Post Office decided to modify my PAF entry (did I mention "fuck you"?) which seriously irked me from an identity protection perspective

(short digression: while they could change my entry arbitrarily, as part of the argument losing process, they invented a need to involve my local authority to revert it. To my complete and utter astonishment, this was not a three year, we've lost your notes, process but a by return "sort it" email to the Post Office)

Of course both PAF changes triggered TVLA moronautomatons and now I just collect the letters in a folder (did I mention "fuck you"?)

For the record R4, R3, WS and very occasionally R6 are my friends and I would be happy to buy a radio licence.

Thank you

...for the thoughtful and articulate advertorial.

So to summarise

Apple: great for consumers

Microsoft: marvellous for business but not bad for consumers either

Android: it's shit

So really, the answer's Microsoft? Why didn't you say? oh, wait...

Is the book...

..."Stonehenge Decoded" Hawkins, 1965? Originally published as a paper in Nature?

It fell out of favour with the archeologists, perhaps because it wasn't wasn't written by one of them. Other interesting analytical work was done by Thom on geometric construction, together with the statistical identification of a common unit of measurement the megalithic yard.

Looking at, e.g., Cities, John Reader, he shows that 5,000 years ago we were not so different, then there are the various economic histories.

Given the amount of technical skill, societal organisation, deferred usefulness and opportunity cost required to build the bloody thing, it's difficult to imagine it's only an early example of a Victorian folly or indeed a prequel to the millennium dome...

"Please see Novell v Microsoft" - Why?

Because whether or not it turns out to be another illegal anti-competitive act, WPW was screwed over by Microsoft. Microsoft emails and other material are on the record.

You might say you don't care, WPW was rubbish. OTOH you might consider the well known expression "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me"

I think we've been around this buoy a couple of times, however...

"I disliked Win Word when it appeared because it was much slower than Word for DOS, but at least it worked reliably, which was far more than could be said for the Windows Wordperfect port."

Please see Novell v Microsoft

Case history here: http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20041115070558892

since we're playing in ped'ants corner today

fewer dependencies (the object is countable)

logic failure...

I don't know whether knowing someone with a criminal record is a sackable offence, but knowing someone who should get a criminal record seems to require action as part of the job.

What I really found curious is that you thought not asking a potential partner to do a CRB check because you'd done one behind their backs was a good start to a trusting relationship.

They just don't know (yet) that they don't have a trusting relationship.