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January 29, 2004

Link Splurge #2

Well, the title of the last one warned you there'd be more, right?

Your regular scheduled programming now resumes.

Posted by James at 15:36 | Comments (3)
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January 27, 2004

Mmmm, debt

Blair wins topup fees vote (BBC News)

Following the success of my last attempt at using this blog as a soapbox to disagree with a popular opinion, I thought, y'know, why not try it again? :-)

So, less than 3 years after winning an election where they promised not to introduce so-called "topup fees" for university students, our esteemed government have decided that, well, actually maybe they're not such a bad idea after all. The vote was close, with a significant rebellion from Labour MPs voting against the government, but at the end of the day not close enough. You have to wonder, how much faith can we put in the manifesto pledges of New Labour (or any party) at election time, if barely halfway through their term they're already breaking them.

This isn't, mind, to say I'm especially against the idea of topup fees. I'm all for the idea of students (and yes, I include myself here) paying a bit more towards the cost of the expensive education they receive; my only proviso to that is that the payments would have to be collected after the student has started reaping the rewards of their extra education, conventionally understood to be a higher salary on average than their peers without degrees earn. The topup fees scheme appears to work like this, with payments being collected in a similar manner to student loan repayments, so that's fine by me.

What I don't want to see, and what this bill allows for, is differential fees between universities, or even between courses. The process of choosing a university is hard enough already — adding this extra factor can only make it more so. I'm reasonably certain I wouldn't have bothered applying to Oxford if it was, say, £500 a year more expensive than other places. It simply wouldn't have been worth it. I'm less certain of how far I'd have applied this philosophy; perhaps I'd have simply chosen to go to UCLAN or some other recent-ex-polytechnic instead.

An entirely different issue, but related, is that of the (up to) £1100 students' parents are currently expected to pay towards their fees. That part of my university fees, I'm strongly against — I don't see why my parents should be expected to cough up for my education like that, not once I'm an adult living away from home. Still, maybe if the topup fees thing takes off they can stop levying that bit, or something. I'm not holding my breath though.

Posted by James at 20:02 | Comments (2)
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January 26, 2004

Arise, Sir Bill

So, most people reading this have probably seen by now, Bill Gates has been awarded a Knighthood. If the discussion on various LUGs is anything to go by, the linux-using community is generally disgusted by the idea.

As part of said community, I'm left wondering why the hell we care. OK, so Mickeysoft's products are somewhat on the shabby side, and their business practices dubious, but that's not the issue here. The issue is rewarding Gates for the fact that his company has spent lots of money in the UK, which is didn't (necessarily) need to, including a lot of investment in higher education and research (as I'm sure Ganesh will tell you :-) ), as well as for the money he personally has invested (sure, OK, it's a tax writeoff, but that misses the point too I feel) in combatting poverty around the world, in researching AIDS treatments, and so on and so forth.

So, please, if you're one of the people making a big noise about this, or feel you can explain why they are, leave a comment/trackback, or drop me an email, and tell me why Bill Gates is any less deserving of being a Knight of some defunct empire than George Bush (Sr.), and Rudolph Guiliani. I'd love to understand it, but I don't think I do, at the moment.

(This isn't to say I don't have an inherent problem with the honours system as a whole, mind. I just don't see why Gates getting one is any worse than some of the other awards of recent years, like the entire England rugby team getting honours....)

Posted by James at 15:37 | Comments (7)
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January 22, 2004

Another one bites the red dust

So apparently the Spirit Rover has lost contact with Earth. In doing so, it follows in the footsteps of its cheaper travelling partner, Beagle 2, and just about every Mars mission before. You have to wonder about their planetary defence system, it seems far better organised than anything we've got. There is, incidentally, at least one Mars rover blog, which has quite cool photos.

Still, Opportunity gets a go next, maybe it'll have more luck. Of course, if you believe everything you read in the papers, in 10 years time, the first earthlings will be visiting Mars. Cool.

Posted by James at 18:08 | Comments (1)
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January 15, 2004

Let the memes begin!

I am an Intellectual

[smarter than most]

Which America Hating Minority Are You?

Oh, and I'm helping (or hindering?) Carl sort out trackbacks..

Posted by James at 18:57 | Comments (1) | TrackBacks
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January 14, 2004

Link Splurge #1

There's not a lot to say about this really. Here are some links I've followed recently, which may or may not be interesting:

Everyone left yet? Right, I'll stop now then, and go back to reading some maths notes.

Posted by James at 14:25 | Comments (0)
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January 13, 2004

A Forged Sense of Security


Adobe and others put "anti-counterfeiting" measures into graphics apps.

So. New versions of some of the more popular image-editing apps out there now won't open anything that looks like certain types of banknote. Wonderful. I imagine that'll stop all those mean nasty forgers right in their tracks. I mean, it's surely unthinkable that they might use, say, an older version of Photoshop, or an open source solution such as the GIMP.

Sigh. Once again we have a pathetic "anti-crime" measure that will do absolutely nothing about the crime it targets, and merely affect the rest of us. Go us!

Now, this is what apparently happens if you try to open a scan of a modern UK £20 note in Photoshop 8. Predictably, version 7 opened the file without a problem. Still, I'm sure we can trust those pesky counterfeiters to upgrade, right?

Posted by James at 10:46 | Comments (2)
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January 12, 2004

Why I stopped whipping the llama's ass

I used to really like Winamp. It was a media player for windows that didn't suck, it ran quite happily on quite piffling hardware, and new versions kept up with developments I cared about, such as including Ogg Vorbis support.

Then, there was the disaster that was Winamp 3. I don't think I've spoken to once person yet who liked it. Sure, there were some features that people wanted in there — apparently the multiple playlists were something people had been asking for for years — but all of a sudden winamp was this slow, bloated media player, and worst of all had a completely different interface. All my old finger macros, long since forgotten by my brain but remembered by my fingers, were completely broken.

Luckily, Nullsoft were canny, and realised that people would want to stick with Winamp2. They continued to develop it, releasing updates at classic.winamp.com, and everything was hunky dory.

Recently, Nullsoft released Winamp 5. This was supposed to be the Next Big Thing — all the whizzy new features of 3, with all the performance and the old interface from 2. Who could possibly not like it? Well, frankly, me. It sucks. Sure, it does all the things Winamp2 used to do, but it doesn't do anything extra that makes me want to stick with it. Throw in the fact that it runs like a pig in treacle on my (not that old) laptop, and I think it's clear why I didn't see a great need to stick with version 5.

Still, this wasn't going to be a problem. Classic.winamp.com would have versions 2 and 3 on it, right, for those of us who didn't want to switch to 5? Hell no. classic.winamp.com now also only offers winamp5 for download. Luckily, I still had the installer for 2.91 from last time; that said, maybe this is a good oppportunity to see what other media players are out there. I've not got on with the Creative PlayCenter that came with my soundcard, and couldn't stand the look of MusicMatch — iTunes is downloading as I write this, so I'll give that a go, perhaps. Failing that, I really don't have a clue what's out there. Suggestions welcome :-)

In other news, I've opted for blog redesign by gradual accretion of tweaks to templates/stylesheets, rather than any dramatic rewrites, so don't be surprised if things occasionally break in slightly odd ways.

Posted by James at 01:49 | Comments (4)
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January 09, 2004

It's Back

After a brief hiatus, my blog is back. I'm not sure how easy getting the old version out of blosxom will be, so I'm leaving that for now. Meanwhile, enjoy.

Now all I need to do is stop using the default templates.

Posted by James at 14:59 | Comments (1)
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