threegee

Another day, another security breach: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7459579.stm

I take it there's no possibility of renegotiating the tenancy agreement? They face more than a possibility of having to pay rates on an empty property for years to come (another of Gordon's tax grabs which will have entirely the opposite effect to the reason it was - supposedly - done), and a pub that isn't commercially viable is a freehold that's going to be near impossible to sell. If they've got any business sense they'll let you set the prices. I'm afraid to say that things are going to get a lot worse, and that unlike previous recessions this one is going to be deep and very long. I won't bore you with all the reasons, but Gordo has steadily taxed the Country to death whilst fiddling the books. Unlike some other countries, who've put something aside for a rainy day, he's squandered the lot and the UK is now flat broke. Even worse: quite unnoticed by Joe Public he sold off all our gold reserves at the worst possible moment for a fraction of what they'd now be worth. Darling has made a desperate situation even worse by squandering pubic money he didn't have on Northern Rock. Real inflation is far higher than the government can admit, and it is focusing on all the wrong things. House prices are set to fall 25% or 30% off the peak, real wages simply have to fall, and the party is well and truly over! There's now no way out, even a change of government won't make much difference; at best all they can do is to stop pretending that it's just a short downturn and tell the truth. In all my decades in business I've never been more depressed about the long-term outlook. So... I think your thread heading is more telling than you probably intended, and maybe this is a blessing in disguise for you?

Very sorry to learn this! Was it the tenancy agreement that didn't allow you to earn enough, or just the level of trade generally? What are you going to move on to?

And again! More Secret Files Found On Train If/when WMD in lunatic hands become more than a figment of UK government imagination it will likely be because we paid our "Intelligence" Services to write the terrorists a self-help guide!

Not really! It's just a flame war about the best method to re-digitise. The best method must depend on what you've got access to. Anyway I suspect there's not an activate hacker community like for other PVRs. Sky would do its best to kill any - doing illlegal things or not!

I can tell you all you need to know about TiVo as I've networked a couple of boxes and poked around inside of them. TiVo is proprietary but Linux based so although they guard the secrets of the filing/encoding system there are ways to get at the data and control + customise the box. But I'd imagine Sky+ is a more closed system. As they're the program provider too they'd do everything they reasonably could to prevent their material going astray. I'm not sure if there is a Sky+ hacking community as I've never had any desire to become a customer again - for several reasons. But if the video is available to a TV it has to be in at least one of several formats, so there will always be a way to syphon data, even if it means having to re-digitise it. All they can do is to make it so difficult and inconvenient (and with no attached meta-data) that few bother. Anyone? On the USB thing, one (and only one) end has to be the master to control the data transfers, so just because two pieces of equipment have USB it doesn't necessarily mean they can physically talk to each other. This even if you know how the data would be arranged and encoded at high level. This is why you don't see USB leads with the same plug on both ends - and if you do find one it's a kludge that likely won't do anything al all useful unless there's some complicated active circuitry somewhere else. Also the USB specification only says how blocks of data are moved not what they mean. i.e. the two pieces of gear still need to understand each other's language.

"Police are investigating after top-secret documents containing the latest government intelligence on al-Qaeda were left on a train." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7449255.stm 42 days detention without charge for the culprit I say! None of this charge/fair-trial mullarkey!

And.,. you could now get 42 days imprisonment without charge for no other reason than the Gordo Gestapo don't like you! Golly! Whoops, can't say that either; it might remind someone of a children's soft toy, and we know where that kind of subversive thought can lead!

...and a word you may no longer use on TV! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7446274.stm

Undoubtedly it's that as they're not a struggling local small business and Wansbeck Rate-payer (and are an enterprise that takes money out of the Town) then they have no need to worry about being prosecuted for illegal bill posting.

Well... small mercies... at least they're not calling it a Fayre! So where is this unmissable event held in our Fair Towne? (All at the obvious risk of giving them the odd £3.75 they hadn't got the enterprise to advertise for themselves! )

We now have a "serious" area for local business to utilise. There there are few restrictions except it must be local biz. Banter and direct criticism is not possible. It is publicly viewable and searchable. In fact it will raise any local business no end on search engine ranking. And, all for free! The only restriction is that they can't use it to promote their own gravestone websites that they've possibly thrown away good money on. To allow this would be to ask our web-hosting sponsor to pay to promote their competitors! This restriction can be removed if they also sponsor us. Lets see just how many local businesses have the common sense to use the platform and how many dodo businesses we are harbouring in the Town.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/

The whole point of the Announcements/Notices section is that businesses (or anyone else for that matter) can't be ridiculed! It says as plain as a pikestaff that replies are not permitted. If you can make it any plainer then be my guest! If what Bedlington business wants is a plain vanilla platform for their "graveyard" advertising then not one business has had the nounce to ask for it! That, by my book, is total lack of enterprise. Successfully community business take every opportunity to integrate into their local community, particularly those avenues that involve little or no expenditure. It is in the site and the community interest that they have a smooth ride. The only thing they have to fear is their own customer base, and if they treat that half well they foster an army of unpaid salesmen to grow their business. I'm afraid I don't agree on the 'numpty' label. The numptys are not the active members of the site. For better or worse the site represents a fairly broad slice of Bedlingtonians both past, present, and future. You turn your back on those people at your expense and your future peril! IMHO we've still got more than our fair share of "Northern Rock" type operators in the Town who are only here for what they can get. They've no genuine interest in our community. WDC and their anti-small-business policy wiped out a good proportion of the owner/proprietor ones, a few of the old ones are still hanging on by their fingernails, but are otherwise dead from the neck up. Otherwise there's not a great deal of wealth producing business left. Well a few maybe that haven't been lured to Ashington, and they'll will surface in time. Hopefully we will see some local start-ups and the site will be here to help them. More when I read and digest what is being said.

You should have posted this in the Public Announcements section. Then the full text will be visible to absolutely anyone who visits (including the search engines), and it will not be possible for people to post distracting replies. Public Announcements are also published by RSS feed, which means they appear on other websites too, further increasing the notice's exposure. You only have to be a member to post Public Announcements, not read them. I ask myself why more Bedlington businesses don't use this free facility more(?). It seems pretty dumb not to use such a well targeted medium that's absolutely free. Then I look at the woeful state of business in the town, and (like Andy Brown) wonder how they are still there! Perhaps if we charged for it they'd value the service? Or maybe they need the tax-loss of having their advertising money dumped in a hedge or blowing in the wind?

Aahh... but was it an open-source egg?

It's unlikely to have anything to do with the local file system. The clue - I think - is in the question: So.. don't reset both, just reset one at a time, and see which it is that fixes the problem. It's likely some table filling up. I can vaguely remember a similar problem some years back with a ISDN setup, the box had to be rebooted every few weeks. Something else you can do is collect a short list of IPs for websites and check that they always get you to their respective sites. If you can reliably access sites with only IPs and stil have problems with some of those accessed through domain names, then it's a name server (DNS) related problem - and that significantly narrows down where to look for a solution.

I was going to say that, but as it's a Linux utility that someone has ported to Windoze - and in all fairness I'd have to point out the other five or six totally free Linux open-source packages for doing more or less the same thing - I thought it might somehow show Microsoft in a bad light.

But you forget; when you buy an Apple product you are buying a revolutionary piece of design that no one ever thought of before. http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/smartphones/ope...what-229243.php No? Well.. you must at least admit that no one ever thought of producing a moby where you couldn't swap the battery! Seems such an obvious way of saving 50p on production costs; making zillions extra from factory service, and ensuring that no cheaper replacement batteries appear on the market to dint your margins. Very slow of Nokia there!

Computer Corner now has a Microsoft Certified expert in charge. Ask away, but remember he has a day job, and he needs to earn a crust somewhere, sometime. I will still step in to help on hardware matters - and express a personal view - from time to time, but otherwise the M$ bashing has probably stopped!

Please enlighten us as to exactly what can't you do with it? And, as I said, you don't need to install it to try it - so you've put yourself to more trouble than you need have.

A Beeb reporter was showing a couple of the (now quite old) crop circle guys the reports and they couldn't believe they'd been taken so seriously. Particularly they were amazed at the public money that must have been wasted, and how the "security services" could have been quite so dumb! Here's a bit more Freedom of Information of the third kind: "We can't know how bad it will get." Aren't modern megapixel cameras with good optics wonderful?

If you read it on the Internet then it must be true!

It might have been true, but it isn't any longer. The Linux subnotebooks are proving that, and they have MS running scared! It's not the 70 quid, it's the paying time and time again for the same old slop. Why can't MS continuously upgrade? Because they dress the same old stuff up and resell it to you. An even more powerful reason is what you spend on apps. For the average totally honest user this will be more than the cost of the hardware. There's also the training. All they are training you to do is to follow the MS master plan. If you really want to know about computers - even just at the application level - you have to turn your brain on. Learning to use MS apps has little or nothing to do with learning about computers - but tell that to your educationalists! Just do it! Stick the CD in and boot - you don't even have to go through and install, the CD is live. Apple is for geeks with more money than sense. I speak as someone who has been quite close to the company on and off for 30 years +. In the grand scheme of things they are pretty irrelevant. But when you have this sort of market you can afford to make lots of mistakes - the punters end up paying for them. Time after time they've chosen the wrong CPU and then left their customers high and dry come the inevitable switch. Now they've been forced to use the same hardware as everyone else - an architecture that they've spent decades panning! With their dumb customer base they don't even need to rationalise the about face.

http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2008/05/micr...s-on-ulpcs.html http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/10/microso...ome-boundaries/ I currently use two near identical mini machines day to day. One uses XP Pro the other Ubuntu Linux. The only difference is the Ubuntu machine has 256MB less memory, and a smaller Hard Drive. Of late there are weeks when I don't even bother to dust the Windows machine off. The Linux machine is faster, boots quicker, and is a whole lot less hastle. And all the applications software - and there's an awful lot more of it than I care to try - is legitimately free! Question: If they can sell Windows for £15 and still make money why are mugs shelling out ten times that (every two or three years)? Answer: Because they know most people are lazy thinkers, and so they've got them by their purse or wallet. When you get around to buying a subnotebook (and you will!) make sure it's the Linux version. Not only will you get a better deal and learn something useful, but you'll be helping free the world (and yourself) from one of the biggest manipulators of all time. If you are buying a larger (old-fashioned?) PC then ask the shop if it is available without windows. If they say no, because everyone wants windows, then ask them how exactly do they know this. Ask them where you can find the non-windows machines in their store so the customer can exercise a preference.