Paul Smith's Blog

So Scoble commented on the whole China blocking the main search engines, despite people in China like Blognation's David Feng saying it was not true. Within his entry he suggests the US pulls out of the Olympics, fine more medals for everybody else, of course it would rob US athletes who in many cases for years have been looking forward to and training for the games. But never mind them, just use them as part of a political stunt, like in 1979 in response to a war you lot started....

I picked up a copy of Windows Home Server a couple of weeks back, saw it on Overclockers and ordered it with a new 500GB hard drive, I was originally going to have this finished a day or two after installing, but things got in the way. Microsoft announced Windows Home Server back at the CES in January, it was very well received and I managed to get onto the beta program a couple of months later, so I come at this review having used it for 6 months or so already....

Well, thanks to the positive feedback on my last post, I've fired the letter off today announcing my intentions to face selection. Due to the nature of Yeovil, my name will go onto the short list automatically. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long for the hustings, and then the vote. Even if I don't get selected, hopefully my running will put some socialist issues on the agenda, which I'm confident is the only way we can recover, and increase our share of the vote....

So the deadline for nominations for Yeovil Labour candidate is soon. Obviously I think we need a left-wing candidate. One who if won the election, would support the Trade Union Freedom bill, vote against anymore imperialist wars, resist the increasing infestation of private business in public services, renationalise the railways and support measures to reverse the growing gap between rich and poor. Things that no doubt have wide support among the public, and the Labour Party membership....

It's October and the minimum wage has gone up to £5.52 an hour. Game, are so gracious to pay me 3p above minimum wage, fantastic stuff. I guess they have to save a bit of cash for a few years after buying out their only other competitor on the high street. £5.52 isn't enough; the minimum wage should be at least... £7.50 an hour ...For all workers, not just those over 22....

Spotted this over on Grimmer Up North, Tony Benn intents to stand for parliament once more. If he stands it'll be for the Kensington and Chelsea seat, which is a safe Tory seat. However clearly there are many positives, first he may actually win; this is Tony Benn we're talking about here. But more importantly this puts socialism on the agenda again, the more attention we can get to this the better - at the coming election the left must make a push to get as many socialist in parliament as possible, we must build on the advances that came about thanks to John McDonnell's campaign....

On the 4th of October 1957 @ 19:28:34 UTC Sputnik launched, about 98 minutes later it was heard on the radios at Baikonur - confirming that it had completed one successful orbit. We had made something travel so fast, nearly 30,000 kph, that it took months to fall back to the Earth. To quote a French newspaper from the following day "Earth's gravity has been conquered". 50 years ago we made the single greatest technological achievement since the development of agriculture....

This question pops up quite a lot in online forums nowadays. Before I could quite honestly tell somebody if you need to ask, you have 32-bit. That's not true anymore, you can buy machines with 4GB of RAM in them, and increasingly they are being loaded with 64-bit Windows Vista, so the system can make use of all the memory. The following works for Windows Vista and Windows 7: You can find out by going to Control Panel -> System and Maintenance (System and Security for Windows 7 users) -> System....

So Microsoft held their biannual BlueHat security gathering last week, as they've been doing for a couple of years now, inviting outside security researchers to have a chit chat with Microsoft developers on security.  The press aren't invited to these (officially it's an internal Microsoft event), and so what details emerge is usually from the blogs of researchers who were involved. Halvar Flake, from Sabre Security was invited to write up his thoughts on the BlueHat blog....

Just a quick rant about the state of ATI's video drivers before I call it a night. Sleep mode isn't working, not even from hibernate. These are basic computer functions - a graphics driver should not be hanging the resume process. How did the 7.9 drivers get approved for release in this state? This isn't the only problem I've been putting up with, since the 7.4 drivers I've had to deal with washed out colours....