lol american.

We've already for gotten Re Anderson! This is historic and something quite relevent to our "constitution".

( facts : http://www.justice.org.uk/images/pdfs/11inter.PDF )

Re Anderson is an ex parte case involving one of the Jamie Bulger killers. The death of this toddler was horrific beyond many people's imagination (I've purposefully kept ignorant of exactly what the killers did because the little i've heard sickens me enough!). The case set a precent however. It involves the HRA - Human Rights Act... A "bit of law" (a fantastic peice of legislation that DOES work - and actually protects your civil rights - see Re MB). The HRA enacts the ECHR - the European Charter on Human Rights - which essentially requires the "law" or officer of the judicary (a distinct and separate entity to the government) to pass judgements on people. Ex p Anderson makes descretionary tariff setting (by a politician or government appointee) illegal. The principle is simple: they are not a fair judge. Anderson proved that the then Home Sec was unfair in giving the individual life (all of it, not a sentence) imprisonment without parol. McKinnon is a prime example of where ee have another case of no judicial oversight into a judicial matter - the whim of a politician is massaged in exactly the same way as Ex p Anderson!

Yadda yadda

Matt

I'm pleased with Windows 7... So in order the counter the FUD i'll explain. Also, don't read this to merely complain I'm spewing crap: I know I am.

I'm an 'old school' zipslack 3.4 user. I not-so-recently installed ubuntu on an away-from-home PC that sits at my parents, and admin a decrepit centos-4 virtual machine. I've come a long way on RH machines.

I'd like to think I know what I talk about when I talk about the desktop: I've tried QNX ("things work"), BeOS (50Mb of "everything works all at once, weee"), and various Linux GDMs - fvwm95 being "good enough" for me. I'm a part-time KDE fanboy too. I'm a Vista-hater, although I do put up with it on my laptop because I have to (came pre-installed/don't want a Linux laptop)

Prior to Windows 7 I ran XP64. I didn't upgrade to XP32 until after Win 98 was largely depreciated and support began to stop (for the first time), as Win 98 was "perfect" for me (so was Communicator 4.72, but that's another story). SP2 was out shortly after I upgraded to XP, so I didn't feel any of the pain people consistently remind me XP had. I upgraded to x64 a few months after it came out, (again missing pre XP SP1 problems since XP64 is Win 2003 + SP1) even though I couldn't use any wireless adaptors, I praised the Win 2003 'core' stability.

So... with all that: I like Windows 7... *BUT* I have a brand new 4-core, 6Gb, dual ATI beast to enjoy it with. My initial reason for buying it outright on preorder (£140!), and not going the student edition upgrade route (£38) was that I wanted the "Pro" edition for gaming, and another licence not an upgrade in situ copy (I've plenty of working license via my MSDNAA membership, but this year I don't have access to Windows because I've switched away from the Computing dept).

I also wanted to experience a newer OS that had multiple cores in mind. As an LWN reader and Con Kolivas fanboy, I knew I wasn't ready to move to a full Linux desktop: I don't want to configure my graphics card to work, and the new open source ATI drivers won't power my games like they do under Windows (I spent money on my graphics card, and I want to make use of it!).

I usually theme to Windows classic without exception, and did the same with Windows 7 until I decided I wanted a transparent taskbar - so although I've small icons, quick launch and zoomed out on my desktop for smaller icons (CTRL-mouse wheel everyone), I'm happy with the Windows 7 UK theme. The new Win-key short-cuts are pretty useful!

It's the little things I'm pleased with. The console defrag has a parallel option, and works great out of the box - I can defrag a HD and watch videos without *any* stuttering. The native h.264 codecs work well (although I haven't tested them much they were the 3rd thing I upgraded b/c of a TV Versity transcoding limitation - ie: upgraded to recent codecs/and TVV needs to be a "user" service etc).

I'm pleasantly surprised with the instantly available/stripped down Media Player: under Windows 7 it's x2 as fast to start as Media Player Classic - the only annoyance I have with it is how small the track bar is, and that I can't use space to pause or my mouse wheel for volume.

oooh time to go to the pub!

Oh please!

It's not a stealth thing at all. The low power SoC market has always been ARMs. It's AMD (Geode... and then Intel's Atom) who decided to bring x86 to the low power market. If anything the article should focus on the troubles ARM is likely to face in the near future: unless RISC can continue to compete for price (aggressively), I doubt that adding more pipelines will make the general purpose platform developers happy - RISC bottlenecks will always be bottlenecks; x86 can simply gun for greater clock speed.

IMO Transmeta had it right: very long instruction words (which ultimately do 'everything'). Unfortunately it came 10 years too soon and no-one was ready because we didn't know "what" we wanted from a clock (or half clock etc if you're talking ARM...).

VLIW will be back soon enough, but I worry that it wont be the right place for ARM.

(nb: I am an ARM fanboy, having 'matured' in an ARM sponsored undergrad lab. it upsets me as much as anyone that ARM haven't tried to reinvent the wheel using the cash from their recent market dominance)

Matt

I thoroughly recommend his book, Bad Science, availible for less £5 on some sites.

We have moved to a service economy, therefore people have to justify their jobs in government.

We have a bloated civil service that commands too much power because they're not on top of their current workload thus submitting stupid proposals based on improper or myopic research is a career move and gives the illusion of competence.

I've met several councillors: they tend to be idiots with some form of aspergers (one is now a registered sex offender!)... Most are more concerned with controlling the incompetent voices rather than getting work done. It's a PR nightmare when you sack someone in public office - more so when you can't say how bad they are without further revelations about the state of the office ("So how long has it been that bad?") - so we're stuck with idiots in charge. But idiots surely wouldn't hide their incompetence would they?

The cabinet members don't have degrees or experience in their roles. There are too many cabinet changes (posts should be for the term of the cabinet, considering the first year of a politician's job is literally getting used to the backlog). If the Government killed some of the BS cabinet posts and put two ministers in charge of the really important stuff, things *might* get done.

In my opinion the problem is career politics and disrespect for the House of Lords and the peerage system (now stopped via the constitutional reform act), because they're too slow and considered, and the last bastion of hope for those pesky civil rights.

A good example is the no right turn sign that's recently appeared outside my flat in Nottingham, in order to make a road bus/bicycle only. There are several thousand people living here in a central city location. Go left and you hit traffic causing chaos (it's also a dangerous left). Go right, and you can ease into traffic via a route predominantly used by buses (coming from the town centre). From what I can tell, someone simply decided to add the no right sign. There was no consultation. We didn't get letters regarding the planning change. And they've added a number plate camera to catch people who continue to use it. If they expected people to continue to use the road (in order to justify the co-installation of the camera), perhaps there was a good reason *not* to make it a bus only route in the first place?

Another example is the decision of Oxfordshire council to change *all* their derestricted roads (national speed limit 60mph) to 50mph. Why?! Because it looks good.

I read the rough translation over at http://drop.io/breinpaidforthis_english

The only bit interesting was:

1.3 Since they summoned did not show up at the summoning they can now not fall back on the letter they have sent from 27th of juli 2009. Since they have said they were not going to be in court at the date appointed they can not fall back on not knowing about the summoning (article 142, lawbook of the netherlands Civil rights)

In most jurisdictions, if hold yourself out as intentionally disobeying an order of the court, they can throw the book at you in your absense. It all hinges on how the judge decides to interpret your letter of intent - they can be strict and litteral, or understanding and wide. Saying you will not be attending is very different to being unable to attend, regardless of whatever else said. Consider, "I am unable to attend the meeting because a family member has died and I am at the funeral at that time. I will not come." and "[at that time]. Please rearrange meeting". The latter indicates intent to come, whereas the former does not.

I find it hard to believe that they don't have prescribed methods of good notice - ie: in the UK good notice can be at their abode, registered address, or place of work. Only when you have "good notice" can you reply on preceedures in absense.

Matt

In Soviet Russia, super computer created from YOU!

If like me you read the business section of your broadsheet, then you'll probably be a little happier about this.

For those that didn't, Karl Icahn has been a one man activist investor of late. While admittedly Yahoo has had no compelling game plan, Icahn has quite simply been shit-stiring the whole Microsoft approach in order to get Yahoo to cave in. Originally MS wanted to buy out Yahoo's search business - but what would that leave the rest of Yahoo with? Icahn has been vocal about Yahoo not accepting several MS offers, so much so he's now got two seats on the Yahoo board in order to shut him up. The MS position was a simple win-win: gut one competitor, become stronger against google. Yahoo would get nothing but capital.

The Telegraph's business section insinuates Yahoo as missed out on the MS deal, but imho Icahn is a destructive force and a publicly vocal MS fanboy who's ignorant of the last 5 failured for MS search relaunches. Yahoo.com needs search (regardless of who provides it) to remain a serious internet business. It cannot move to advertising and mail alone - just look at Doubleclick's poor growth (wtf did the SEC approve the doubleclick/google merger?!). People notice when search engines become irrelevent - just look at the death of hotbot/altavista/lycos.

With this deal Yahoo remains Yahoo when MS lose interest.

like

Please learn both Ruby and Python, and while you're at it, some Javascript/JQuery/Mootools cool stuff too. And do it all using full systems hungarian notation. In vi. On Solaris. Upside down!

AND

If you feel like having some fun, adopt and a silly "langauge" like brainfuck or MS ASML (a quirky state machine language you can do OOP in).

Because of the current economic climate, please do not learn C, C++, Perl or Java. Please do not approach any VHDL gigs either (nb: you'll design some plain awful crap until you've done your advanced systems/digital modules). Please do not learn any programming abstraction methods or useful models - specially via the easy-peasy Java intro to it all at http://www.bluej.org./ Dont learn Qt or STL, and especially avoid OpenMP and Boost. Dont code a transaction engine, but DO make use of obscure SQL calls and extremely long queries with lots of stored proceedures on unnormalized sets. If you know when to use singletons, RAII/smart pointers or observer patterns, or know when to hit someone for telling you how to program, then stop: STOP I said! Forget everything you know and start again. Perhaps you could learn how to code a standards compliant doc type definition spec for the process of eating cheese. If you've learned anything useful, stop and spend time coding an XML parser or i18n input library, or if that's too hard, go and add lots and lots of structured exception handling to your favourite open source library.

In advance, I'd like to thank you for not competing with me and everyone else who's graduated or recently been made redunant.

Cheers,
Matt