The forecast was predicting heavy cloud cover after dark yesterday, but in the afternoon we had a clear spell. I used this opportunity to capture Venus and the Moon before the occultation. The following was taken at 15:34 UTC, a few minutes before the Moon moved in front of Venus. As predicted the cloud covered the rest of the occulation.
So Darling in his pre-budget report announced that VAT (sales tax for those non-UK readers) will be cut from 17.5% to 15% from the 1st of December. Good. We'll see if in a few weeks time I'll have people asking if all our £39.99 products are now £39.14 or there abouts. I'm sure a lot of retailers will be keen to soak up the decrease, especially as it so small and easy to hide....
You don't get many days like this. The first image of an exoplanet around a Sun-like star has been released. Previously we had only visually detected a 5 mass Jupiter exoplanet around a brown dwarf star. Brown dwarf stars are too small to undergo any nuclear fusion, and as such they just dimly glow from their original formation. This makes planets far easier to detect around them as they put out millions of times less light, which normally hides any planets....
The Times reported yesterday that Margaret Beckett is considering proposals similar to what the Chartered Institute of Housing came up with last month. I hope her considerations involved quickly moving the proposals from her desk to the bin. Booting people out of their homes because their "circumstances have improved", be they a slightly better paying job or their kids moving out is unacceptable, and so is offering them friendly advice on cheap home ownership or private renting with a wink and nudge, and then threatening them with higher rents or booting them out which is what these proposals basically call for....
So here's a review of the HTC Touch HD, no I don't have one but the first are trickling into the UK:
Not everything is going well on the political scene in the United States, three states, Florida, Arizona and California banned gay marriage, this brings the total number of states to 40, although some still allow civil partnerships. From the NYT: "It was a great victory," said the Rev. James Garlow, senior pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego County and a leader of the campaign to pass the California measure, Proposition 8....
The 5th Security Intelligence Report has been released this covers January to June 2008. The full report can be downloaded here. Here's a quick look at it: First up we see the percentage of browser exploits on Windows XP vs Windows Vista. We can see on Windows Vista only 5.7% of the exploits are targeting Microsoft code, while on Windows XP that figure is 42.3%. A break down of the security vulnerabilities on Windows XP looks like this, a mix of Microsoft and 3rd party vulnerabilities....
The recent issue over the BBC and Jonathan Ross and that other guy, Russell Brand or whatever his name is, the one who says "like" too much, has continued to be in the news. So I thought I'd just comment on it (makes a break from the endless tech stuff - sorry PDC and WinHEC conferences back to back means there's a lot of tech going on). Old time readers of my blog will no doubt remember multiple instances that I've said the BBC needs to raise its game....
Check this guy out: Update: He pulled the video. He claims the Windows 7 Taskbar is copied from the Mac OS X dock. He even includes an edited image featuring the same Adobe icons he has in his dock to try and make it seem even more similar. Apart from that he also makes numerous mistakes and wrong assumptions about how the new Taskbar works, and does the standard everyone is copying Apple line, which is completely and utterly false yet it something the Apple fanboys repeat ad nauseum....
As many of you are aware although the backup in Windows Vista was easy to use - it had no control over exactly what you wanted backup. The only controls were things like pictures, documents, recorded TV etc, and of course if you've got lots of php files and things like that in your documents folder you had to select the other files option, which would pretty much backup everything on the system - resulting in extremely large backup files....