Paul Smith's Blog

On the news tonight - reports of Georgian forces observing a ceasefire - desperately trying to cast the Georgian forces in a positive light. Yet even on the very same news programs they later admitted that fighting continued in South Ossetia, and that Georgian forces hadn't completely withdrawn. Tskhinvali is tonight still under fire from Georgian artillery. The Georgian government cannot be trusted to observe any ceasefire, the last ceasefire was on Thursday, which they broke within hours when they launched an all out assault upon South Ossetia with armour, aircraft and artillery which flattened large parts of Tskhinvali killing around 1,500 civilians, and 10 Russian peacekeepers - the very forces they were supposed to be on the same side as....

For those up early Friday morning, if you turned on the news you saw reports of a huge Georgian offensive against separatists in South Ossetia. Background: South Ossetia, is a de-facto independent state, which Georgia claims is its own, however it is primarily made up of Russians, most carry Russian passports and have Russian citizenship. Following a brief period of fighting in the early 1990s, a ceasefire was made between the rebels, whereby a joint Russian-Georgian and Ossetian peacekeeping force (limited to about 500 soldiers) remained in the area to keep the peace....

Blatant and obvious to all, hypocrisy at its best. In response to the Georgian offensive against Russian peacekeeping forces within the de-facto independent state of South Ossetia (ethnically Russian). The U.S. State Department supports Georgia's "territorial integrity". What a shame it doesn't support Serbia's territorial integrity - or anybody else's for that matter, unless of course they're a reliable business partner. South Ossetia's independence was forced by rebels during the early 1990s, until 1992 when a ceasefire was declared and a small Russian-Georgian-Ossetian peacekeeping force was put into place to oversee the ceasefire....

The press has been running seemingly endless anti-China stories, almost every article on the BBC website has an image of a policeman to go along with any story about the Olympics. How about reporting the news for a change instead of creating it? Today two Britons are being held by Chinese police after putting up "Free" Tibet banners near the national stadium, a number of other protests have gone on around the city by small groups of people....

Just a heads up for those living in the UK or further east. There will be a eclipse of the Sun on the 1st of August, best viewed from parts of Russia and China where it will be total. Only partial from the UK - around 10%. In the UK this will start at around 0931 local time (0831 UTC), the mid-point of the eclipse will be around 1015. Safely blurb:...

Let's put this bit of FUD to rest. Fact: Windows Vista on launch was around 5-10% slower than Windows XP for gaming, this was largely due to video drivers not being as mature. 10% isn't even noticeable, I'd happily trade 10% for video drivers which don't take out the entire system when they crash thanks to them running in User Mode in Windows Vista instead of Kernel Mode like they do in Windows XP....

I've been toying with the idea of microblogging for a while now. I'm leaning into the direction of trying to start up microblogging simply because I don't always have time to do a full blog post on a particular topic, but when I'm limited to 140 characters it is much easier to quickly touch on something. Typically I would just host it myself, like I used to do with my moblog....

Not surprising. Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks, Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista....

I must say I am getting slightly irritated by O2, and their complete and utter lack of a product roadmap. As many of you know I've been after the HTC Touch Pro since before it was announced. Catherine has had the HTC Touch Diamond for nearly two weeks (from Orange). Which when I was in Newport this week obviously checked out quite extensively. The short review: Much better than I had expected....

Congratulations to John Mason on winning Glasgow East, but I hope he is planning on picking up some science books soon. Mr Mason described his win as being "off the Richter scale", the only way I can interpret that as being so weak it is undetectable, or that there is no seismic activity at all, and as such it isn't on the scale. I don't think he meant it in that way, and as such I'll remind him that the Richter scale, which is a base 10 logarithmic scale for measuring the amplitude of the largest seismic wave during an earthquake, has no upper limit, and so nothing can be off the scale....