It's not really that hard is it? I was just reading this article on the BBC news site and it's disappointing that people just still don't seem to get the message.
We try and recycle as much as possible in our house, and typically we only have to get the grey bin emptied once or twice a year, with an extra collection if a bit of spring-cleaning has hit the house. We manage to recycle nearly everything - Since the green bin started accepting plastic we manage to recycle just about all our packaging, and food waste is composted. It only takes a small change in behaviour to start recycling and once you start and realise how easy it can be then it just snowballs from there.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
The Gartner hype cycle graph
There seems to have been a bit of buzz about Gartner's hype cycle graph recently since their article on cloud computing It seems that a lot of people have been having knee-jerk reactions about it over the last year and fail to understand that this graph is just another tool - It needs some kind of judgement exercised to create and interpret it, but I guess all sorts of people just love to get on their hobby horses about their chosen subject(or go on an anti-Gartner rant, as if Gartner should be compelled to ask EVERYONE's opinion...)
Anyway, check it out and see if you agree on where your own areas of interest are going. If nothing else, it provides a bit of stimulus to the thought centres.
Anyway, check it out and see if you agree on where your own areas of interest are going. If nothing else, it provides a bit of stimulus to the thought centres.
Amazon Kindle breaks the price barrier
Well, it looks like Amazon have finally managed to get the price down to an acceptable level for the UK release of the Kindle. I would actually be very tempted to get one now and in fact would have pre-ordered it except that they won't ship outside the UK! OK, you can order it from the international site and pay shipping and import fees but I'm not that desperate (or am I... It wouldn't be that much more than the GBP to EUR conversion). Actually, I think I will order it...
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Medion Full HD Media Player - GPL source code
Well, after a bit of searching I found it...
http://download.medion.de/downloads/treiber/gpl86162de.exe (121MB)
It's a self-extracting file which contains two tarballs. Haven't had a chance to trying building it yet, but it looks promising and looks like it should contain the most recent updates.
http://download.medion.de/downloads/treiber/gpl86162de.exe (121MB)
It's a self-extracting file which contains two tarballs. Haven't had a chance to trying building it yet, but it looks promising and looks like it should contain the most recent updates.
PDF Pad - Flags, custom graph paper, calendars and charts.
I'm in the process of going through my bookmarks and rediscovering useful links.
One site that is very useful if I need to print out grids is PDF pad, which has all sorts of PDFs and PDF generators to print plain graph paper, engineering or science graph paper, isometric grids, polar charts, etc.
What's handy is that there is also a collection of flags, custom calendar generators, storyboard layouts and even a sudoku generator.
It certainly beats trying to throw something together in word or excel.
Some previews from the site (copyright PDF Pad)
One site that is very useful if I need to print out grids is PDF pad, which has all sorts of PDFs and PDF generators to print plain graph paper, engineering or science graph paper, isometric grids, polar charts, etc.
What's handy is that there is also a collection of flags, custom calendar generators, storyboard layouts and even a sudoku generator.
It certainly beats trying to throw something together in word or excel.
Some previews from the site (copyright PDF Pad)
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Note to Eric
Articles on BBC news about this collecting of wifi data streams by the Google street view cars.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8684110.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10122339.stm
If you brought your front door key into a shop to get a copy of it and the operator made their own copy for "research", would you be happy? Even if they never used the key, would that make it OK? No harm, no foul, right?
Playing devil's advocate - On the other hand, if people have an open wireless system then they are effectively saying, "Here is a network, do what you want with it", which I think they should be entitled to do. If you were to open up your garden as a right-of-way that would be your decision. If people trample all over your grass and reduce it muck, well that was your fault, but if people are going to be prevented from doing (or not doing) their own risk assessment, then how are we going to evolve into anything other than automatons.
Back to the original point, however; If you archive the raw data, then what you're doing is storing a potential time-bomb of personally identifiable information that could be cross-indexed with all your other data. Plus, who knows what kind of correlations could be made if dumps were obtained and traded in hacker networks. Say you wanted to look at web traffic to a particular site to look for vulnerabilities, what better way than to dig out that huge data source and start filtering SSL negotiation sessions or comparing secure vs insecure traffic to the same server to help work out encryption keys. The only saving grace is that it appears to have been sampling packets rather than streams.
In short though, it's one thing to say "your data was on an open network, anyone could have looked at it", but it's quite another to take that data and archive it, with who knows what kind of security protecting it from widespread dissemination.
If you think I'm being a bit extreme, there isn't much difference between this and Google opening up a cable Internet box on the street, sniffing everybody's network data and uploading it to their servers for later perusal. The only difference being that they'd have to answer to another large corporation and regulatory mechanisms instead of relatively powerless individuals.
in other words, common sense is something that was sorely lacking in the decision to archive publicly available wifi traffic. What's been done is that disparate local area networks, which in themselves would have little value have been aggregated into a potentially very lucrative source of demographic and behavioural information.
Google deserve to get smacked around for this mistake. Not because they did something bad or evil, but because they did something greedy, stupid and inconsiderate. Being acquisitive is not an admirable trait in people and neither should it be in corporations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8684110.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10122339.stm
If you brought your front door key into a shop to get a copy of it and the operator made their own copy for "research", would you be happy? Even if they never used the key, would that make it OK? No harm, no foul, right?
Playing devil's advocate - On the other hand, if people have an open wireless system then they are effectively saying, "Here is a network, do what you want with it", which I think they should be entitled to do. If you were to open up your garden as a right-of-way that would be your decision. If people trample all over your grass and reduce it muck, well that was your fault, but if people are going to be prevented from doing (or not doing) their own risk assessment, then how are we going to evolve into anything other than automatons.
Back to the original point, however; If you archive the raw data, then what you're doing is storing a potential time-bomb of personally identifiable information that could be cross-indexed with all your other data. Plus, who knows what kind of correlations could be made if dumps were obtained and traded in hacker networks. Say you wanted to look at web traffic to a particular site to look for vulnerabilities, what better way than to dig out that huge data source and start filtering SSL negotiation sessions or comparing secure vs insecure traffic to the same server to help work out encryption keys. The only saving grace is that it appears to have been sampling packets rather than streams.
In short though, it's one thing to say "your data was on an open network, anyone could have looked at it", but it's quite another to take that data and archive it, with who knows what kind of security protecting it from widespread dissemination.
If you think I'm being a bit extreme, there isn't much difference between this and Google opening up a cable Internet box on the street, sniffing everybody's network data and uploading it to their servers for later perusal. The only difference being that they'd have to answer to another large corporation and regulatory mechanisms instead of relatively powerless individuals.
in other words, common sense is something that was sorely lacking in the decision to archive publicly available wifi traffic. What's been done is that disparate local area networks, which in themselves would have little value have been aggregated into a potentially very lucrative source of demographic and behavioural information.
Google deserve to get smacked around for this mistake. Not because they did something bad or evil, but because they did something greedy, stupid and inconsiderate. Being acquisitive is not an admirable trait in people and neither should it be in corporations.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Slow news day?
So Jeff at Coding Horror decides to post something pointless. Well, perhaps not because it somehow manages to become topical because of today's successful Ariane launch and the clarification of the Ariane failure in 1996 (read the comments for that.)
All programmers know the term GIGO. If they don't, then perhaps an alternative career should be considered. Accurate number storage has always been an issue, so I would expect that any post about it in the 21st century should be putting forward a practical solution, not leaving it as an exercise for commentators.
All programmers know the term GIGO. If they don't, then perhaps an alternative career should be considered. Accurate number storage has always been an issue, so I would expect that any post about it in the 21st century should be putting forward a practical solution, not leaving it as an exercise for commentators.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)