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Comment Obvious fraud opurtunity (Score 1) 273

I've been warning everybody who gets a new Barclaycard with this "feature" since I first saw it advertised.

My thoughts were somebody selling newspapers at a underground (subway) station swiping everybody who walks past at rush hour. Going home and cashing in on 1000's of £1 - 10 transactions. Not a bad afternoons work.

Comment Re:Warms?! (Score 1) 469

Here here. Woodland Management is key and in a few reports heading in the right direction now for most of Europe. Old trees can actually give off methane since they can be in a state of decay whilst still perfectly healthy, though they are very good for bio-deversity bugs and stuff which birds and small mammals go nuts for.
In the UK "Ancient Woodland" means over 400 years old. There is no woodland in the UK that has been identified that has not been under active management by humans prior to this at some point. Manage your woods replant or support regeneration plant a mix of softwood to be treated and durable hard woods for carbon lockup and a mix of short rotation coppice for bio-fuels (wood chip), all of which can be integrated into a woodland management plan, provide a living for foresters.
Leaving Trees standing and un-managed would be detrimental to the environment in the UK at least.
Sadly there is a movement for woodburners to be installed in houses and HETAS approved KILN DRIED fire wood sold to suppy them. Shows the economy is still more powerful than common sense.

Comment Re:Help (Score 1) 149

Google SketchUp still does not work 100% under wine.
Currently using Ubuntu Dual Boot into windows xp Occaisionally to run my PAYE software for the my employee's taxes.
Virtualise a windows box to run Sketchup which apart from a few problems refreshing the menus works fine.
Upgrading (or side grading) to Debian in another virtualbox while making sure everything works. (Have already installed Deb onto a seperate disk and am currently testing).
I also develop some software that needs to run properly in both windows and linux and others.
I am not a full time developer but I have a need to Virtualize and it is the only solution that works for me, without having two boxes under my desk.
So there,

Comment Gave up waiting (Score 1) 129

Either this is getting slashdotted and causing something to run slowly or what should be javascript running locally on my
dmesg | grep CPU0:
CPU0: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ stepping 01
is slower than my old 486 at rendering a mandelbrot.
I wrote my own viewer on an archimedes for a school project over 14 years ago and it was faster than this.
Any clues?
Or is this proof that browsers and scripts are only good for GUI and not actual processing?

Comment UK same silly idea on the horizon (Score 1) 875

The uk are trying to roll out 2Mb broad band for everybody. This sounds like a good thing until you try using the internet on 512kb which almost every building in the uk can receive even those right at the end of a line. It is also perfectly useable for youtube etc. I think this is purely a subsidising scheme for the telecoms company ( cough bt cough ) to upgrade all it's lines. Effectively the users pay for the service and give the company that supply the service the funds to create the service that allows them to charge them at a higher rate whether they need it or not. (Just try getting 512kb broadband in a built up area theses days...possible but I bet you'll end up on a 2Mb package anyway). All a bit useless really if the house owners don't have a laptop / desktop that will work in the next 5 years ( due to vista and xp no doubt not being supported and unable to display the latest .Net advertising schemes that most websites are covered in). So the next great idea? Free laptops for everybody! Paid for by the tax payer!

If I want a laptop and broadband I'll buy one. If somebody is on the dole and can't get a laptop. Help them get a job dont keep giving them free handouts so they can buy a massive telly an xbox a wii and play online so they can sit on thier bum not looking for jobs whilst still getting job seekers allowance.

Sorry just realised I was ranting.

Comment Re:what does open mean? (Score 1) 197

Java is static at compile time. However class files can be chucked around and objects instantiated from them using the reflection classes over networks and across machine types. Kind of like a CORBA implementation that can do the whole spec ( you just have to write most of the code to do it but the functionality exists). I have often wondered if this was the true purpose of the java byte code/JIT method, when those Java desktop boxes appeared I always assumed they would run like a thin client, big database objects on a server, upgradable client applications on the thin client whilst running, no need to stop and start the program. So kinda mega dynamic. Manages to be horrible at the same time.

Comment Treat them right (Score 1) 1134

That is to say let them be brilliant and congratulate them on it, Especially when they've got you out of a tight fix with some rapid coding.
Afterward when the dust has settled get them to go through their code and comment until another member of staff can understand it. Most people quite like explaining to other people how simple/elegant their solution is.
It will encourage them to comment as they code so they spend less time explaining it to other people later, and let them get back to what they do best.
Everyone wins.

Comment Packaging in Electronics Industry (Score 1) 195

I use to work for a small company producing about 30 machines a month. They in themselves were quite complicated bits of kit with many modular components.
Each component would come in through the door. Be Unpacked mounted and wired and the final machine was repacked and sent out.
The amount of packaging we had to dispose of was insane. As an experiment I stored up the amount of packaging for one of our units that we disposed of and compared it to the amount of packaging that we sent out.
What the end user sees land on the door step isn't half of the total packaging in production.

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