Marklands blog

I’ve not added anything about this fiasco to date, but feel compelled to comment on a headline on the subject in the media recently which states that the money that the Government was using to prop Northern Rock up worked out at something to the tune of £3,500  for each person in the country.

Whilst this might be true in terms of figures

(i.e. amount of money leant/population) =  amount per person

.. the tone of the article suggested that Northern Rock was getting money from the Government which was destined for you, me and everyone else.

I’m pretty sure that the Govt wasn’t saving that money to hand out on our Birthdays, but just in case they’ve missed mine, so could they please send a cheque!

During the early hours of Wednesday morning an earthquake measured at 5.4 on the Richter scale with an epicentre situated around the Lincolnshire town of Market Rasen.

I was awoken by this quake and the affect it was having on the room as the bed, radiator and wardrobe all rattled and I confess that for a while it was a little concerning, but not enough to stop me turning over and going back to sleep!!

One thing that didn’t cross my mind was to phone the Police unlike these people

“A Lincolnshire police spokeswoman said the force had received dozens of calls from residents but there were no reports of anyone in the county being injured.”

From “http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7266136.stm ”

If no-one was injured what do those people expect the police to do? Are they expecting them to arrest a tectonic plate? or are members of our Law Enforcement service immune to earthquakes and wouldn’t notice!!

I give up with people sometimes I really do!

There has been a lot in the news about this recently, esp with the convictions of Steve Wright, the Suffolk serial killer and Mark Dixie the murderer of Anne Bowman and being secured due to DNA evidence, with the latter being apprehended 9 months after the occurrence of the murder of Anne Bowman after being arrested for assault and his DNA being taken.

With there being 4 million records on the current DNA database there have been inevitable calls for this to be extended to a national system with everyone’s DNA stored.

Leaving aside the practical difficulties in achieving this, is it even desirable?

There are two individuals who had their DNA taken when they were held for minor offences and later released without charge who are taking their case to have their samples removed to the European Court of Human Rights. On the occasion that they were arrested, they were found to be innocent and released, but you do wonder whether the fact that their DNA is on the register will deter them, or others in a similar situation from committing a serious crime in the future?

Are they planning to commit offences for which they don’t want their DNA to be matched?

Broadly, I think apart from the actual collecting of DNA data and the ability to design a system that has sufficient safeguards built-in and has no exports option so the data cannot be downloaded onto CD and lost in the post, I think I’m in favour of a National DNA database.

The latest version of iLife from Apple has been release recently, but yet again UK consumers are gettin a raw deal.

Compare and contrast the following prices.

US (£) Euro(£) UK NZ$ (£)
Standard edition 79 (38.75) 79 (53.55) 55 109 (41.07)
Family edition 99 (48.56) 99 (67.10) 69 138 (52)

Currency values converted yesterday on ft.com website.

Why Apple is the UK version of the family pack approx £20 more than the US$ price when exchange rates are taken into account?

It’s not as if UK consumers get a UK version of the products (and it’s not just Apple that do this). We have to suffer color and other spelling abominations.

I could understand it if the German or French versions were higher due to translation costs, but they are slightly cheaper than the UK £ price.

At least they aren’t just using the dollar price and changing the $ for a £ as some companies do.

The ability to send text messages to communicate short pieces of information to someone that you don’t really want to talk to is one of the marvels of the modern age, but like all things should be used carefully.

After all, trying to pass on detailed information in this format might lead to mis-communications and punctuation should really be used.

For example the lack of a full stop in this text gives a completely different interpretation to this message.

“Hello sexy. Plumber should be here at 1pm….”

becomes

“Hello sexy plumber should be here at 1pm”

which reads quite differently!!

Also trying to communicate different topics within the same text can lead to problems of context.

“Happy Anniversary. Have got new bird for you….”

Read as above, no-one would know that the bird comments was relating to a garden ornament which had been replaced and could easily be misconstrued!!

Having had some time to reflect on the scandals that enveloped the Tour de France this year I’ve arrived at the conclusion that it’s an exercise in futility to try and stop the trend of drugs use.

Therefore I propose permitting the cyclists to take whichever performance enhancing substances they like,…. so long as they declare it by displaying an appropriate logo on their jersey.

Much like a can of beans or packet of crisps tells you clearly about the contents, the riders should have to tell the world what’s inside

HGH [X]
Testosterone [X]
EPO [X]

for example…..

But there should be a life ban for anyone caught using something that was not declared.

If they had to publish the drugs they were taking in this way with the threat of that penalty , then perhaps it would dissuade them from taking performance enhancing substances in the first place??

Following the recent flooding in the Gloucestershire region where homes are without a source of fresh tap water despite being surrounded by flood water, it makes me wonder whether Samuel Taylor Coleridge ever visited the region, or Tewkesbury in particular?

Given his famous quote from his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

“Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”

I wonder whether it would be bad taste to suggest they adopt him as their town poet?

After swapping various components of the old P200 I reached the point at which the only way to get more performance was to build a new PC from the ground up

Jupiter ATX case from Maplin, MSI Socket A motherboard, 128MB Ram and a Duron 700MHz, which was upgraded to a Duron 850MHz (both CPU’s are still in a box in a draw somewhere).

Creative SoundBlaster DVD drive with useless IR sensor and remote and CD/RW drive was then installed. ….This cost lots….

New build Athlon 1200MHz

The last time I upgraded a PC was way back in 2002 when I bought a new case, with a Gigabyte Dual BIOS Socket A motherboard, an AMD Athlon 2100 (1733 MHz), a Dabs Value NVIDIA GeForce 4200 Ti with 128MB RAM, 512MB and a 80GB HDD, although I did add a DVD/RW drive in the recent past

As I don’t have time to play all the very latest games and only really test the PC about once a year doing memory intensive Publisher files (for Calenders), I really can’t see any compelling reason to spend the money upgrading .

My tip on building/buying PC’s would be to get as much memory as you can realistically afford and, if you want the PC to last more than a couple of years, make sure that you get a decent graphics card. The GeForce card mentioned above still plays (my most recent) games like Hitman 2 and Simpson’s Hit and Run perfectly and on checking the specs in a well know high street PC vendor, it seems like my system still more or less will run the latest games

Whist leafing through the latest IT retailer’s catalogue to drop onto my doormat, I was surprised to find that hard disk drive with capacities of upto 750GB are now available for very low cost.

An example, Seagate VG075106 SATA drive with 750GB capacity for £172.71 (£0.23028 per GB).

Whist I applaud the downward trend of computer hardware prices, it does concern me is the potential for massive amounts of data to be lost.

I understand that to buy and install one of these you must have some idea what you are doing, after all Joe Public doesn’t very often venture into the inner workings of a PC, but you can also purchase external USB/Firewire drives with similar capacities which are directly marketed at non IT consumers.

I think it’s these high capacity external drive that concern me the most, as your average computer owning member of the public (unless I’m been very uncharitable) will not think

“Cool, an external disk with load of room for my files, that’ll be a handy way to backup the files on my PC in case the disk should fail”, more “Wow, look how many holiday photos/MP3’s, etc” I can put on here.

Even IT professionals don’t backup their data as often as they should (myself included) so what hope is there for the rest of the PC owning public?

I wouldn’t like to work in somewhere like PC world when an irate/tearful customer arrives with failed drive in had, demanding to know what happened to all their digital photos of their wedding. Christmas, Uncle Joe’s Birthday etc. I know some manufacturers are offering up to a 5 year warranty on the drive, but that doesn’t cover the data stored on it.

Perhaps there is a market for the online backup products that BT and TalkTalk et. al. are currently trying to flog.

I have been fiddling with computers back to the days of the 16k (Note not even the 48k) rubber keyed Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which was superseded by a 128+2 (the original grey one) with its amazing addition of a built in tape deck.

For the younger readers (if there are any), I’ll upload some pictures so you can see what computers *used* to be like.

My first PC was an Intertan 286 DT-286e 16Mhz with 2 or 4 MB of RAM (Purchased in Jan 1993) and no internal hard disk. You had to boot DOS 5.0 from floppy disks each time you wanted to use it, then run programs again from floppy disks. It came with a stunning 14″ SVGA display

After having a 20 MB (yes that’s Megabtyes not Gigabytes) hard disk installed it was eventually replaced with a 386 DX 25/40 (40MHz in Turbo mode, though I don’t know why you would want to slow it down) with a LED display on the front to show the speed you were running at, and a really cool top opening screwdriver-less case, although I guess it was really easy to steal parts out of).

This was then upgraded to a 586DX 133MHz with 540MB HDD, then with a completely new case to a P200 MMX with 32MB of RAM and even the addition of a creative CD-ROM drive and sound card.

A short while later, I took temporary leave of my senses and replaced the Intel 200MHz CPU with an Evergreen AMD 333MHz module which in hindsight seemed to give no discernible performance enhancement.