I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 last night and, at last, made it work (my floppy drive wasn’t working and I hadn’t noticed — and that was where the SATA driver was!).
My first impressions are good, although the continual checking that you wish applications to run may get annoying. But the Control Panel and My Computer windows are improved beyond recognition.
I look forward to telling you more later on.
Google Personalised Home has started asking me to complete a simple Turing-style test each time I try to open it… I hope this is a short-term bug because it’s beginning to annoy!
A Conservative MEP said of Guantanamo that it was acceptable because the US considers the fight against terrorism to be a war on terror and that it was, therefore, being used to hold prisoners of war.
I find this argument weak. The people they captured, guilty or not, cannot be said to be soldiers in some enemy’s army. They could not be captured on the battlefield and then imprisoned instead of being killed. In a conventional war, civilians could not be taken by the army and held indefinitely and, without ambiguity, this is what has necessarily happened to provide inmates for Guantanamo.
I completely sympathise with the US that they believe they have captured people guilty of attempting to kill US and other Western civilians. I understand that they feel they must find a way to stop these people before they kill people (which is the main problem with suicide bombings), but the solution cannot be the incarceration of potentially innocent people.
People have said to me in the past, and I probably said it myself at first, that these people don’t have much excuse to be where they inevitably were (Afghan hills etc) but that’s not something we have the liberty to decide — these people haven’t even had a kangaroo court hearing, let alone a legitimate one. If only some of the stories about these people having been taken from family weddings etc are true, then it exacerbates the already unacceptable situation.
I haven’t heard anything more of the former Guatanamo prisoners who have been released to Britain, but I don’t believe any of them were involved in the 7th July bombings… Maybe the UK intelligence services are using them as bait, or keeping close tabs on them, but that’s preferable to having innocent people lose four years of their lives. Us atheists don’t expect to have any more than the alloted time — no afterlife to provide us with peace-of-mind — so to lose four of those years is beyond imagination.
Let’s release the prisoners and hope that none of them attack the West or innocent people anywhere. If they do, then at least our consciences can be clear — we did the right thing.
… should be imprisoned until they’re dead.
What a simple debate.
There have been a lot of English patriots complaining about the Scots’ desire to support anyone but England. I am going to risk being the lone in the minority of (thanks Gareth) English patriot voices!
France just lost two points by stopping playing after they were 1-0 up against South Korea. It ended, I am delighted to report, one apiece!
And this delight, this is what the Scots feel when England lose, and I don’t begrudge them that. In fact I have nothing against the Scots generally at all — I welcome their competitiveness. The only Scots I don’t like are those who get animated at the prospect of an English Parliament. So many interjections, so many complaints about English imperialism — it is this which should frustrate, not the quite natural tendency for neighbouring nations to be competitive. If Scotland ever qualifies for the World Cup, they can be sure I’ll be supporting their opponents unless they’re French!
I have always been frustrated with software and computer-based services. Office 95, 97, 2000 and even 2003 weren’t particularly good programs. Alta Vista used to find bizarre results back when it was the number one search engine and Internet Explorer versions 1 to 6 were buggy security-nightmares which didn’t draw pages according to the rules.
But we have turned a corner. Over the last few months Microsoft has been making some truly excellent software available in Beta form. Most of Office 2007 is excellent and last night I found some more features of Word 2007 which have blown me away. The Styles along with integrated colour schemes make making a Word document look pretty a matter of choosing options, rather than having an eye for colours (which I don’t). The same is true of Excel’s graphs.
Windows Media Player 11 has all the buttons you need where you need them so that I have not yet had a need to use the old-fashioned File, Edit menus etc. Internet Explorer 7 just works and may well be Internet Explorer 4 to Mozilla’s Netscape.
At the risk of sounding like everyone else associated with the industry, Google is making amazing strides. I read a review of Google Spreadsheets the other day which was not particularly flattering. But I tried it last night and was reasonably impressed. And today I invited a couple of people into an open spreadsheet and integrated Instant Messenging along with the instant update of edited fields makes this spreadsheet program absolutely crucially powerful. No longer will someone say to me “Can you help me with this spreadsheet?” and have to wait for me to walk to their desk, now they can open it in Google Spreadsheets and we can both see the spreadsheet while I help them out.
Instead of pinging around large Excel spreadsheets (so long as they have no macros), I can just open the original file in Google Spreadsheets and invite people to view or edit it. It really is the beginning of a new era.
But the killer feature is Google Spreadsheet’s use of the ribbon bar.
“File”, “Edit” and “Window” are living out the end of their days. They were always more suited to non-graphical systems and now that they’re dead, we can see what imaginative design of software can achieve.
It’s a popular view, but I believe home users and, for selected files, business users will soon be using Google-esque Writely and Google Spreadsheets clones. Google Calendar, Google Mail and whatever else it brings out in the future with typically no fanfare, will be the killer apps of the future. Microsoft will continue to provide for those who need powerful software but that won’t be me, I’m quite sure.
It’s only a matter of time, now, before Google starts targetting Adobe’s suite of products and I, for one, cannot wait!
Finally, I tried Windows Vista but the MD5 for the download was incorrect so I’m trying again now, I’ll let you know how wonderful it is shortly!
Tom Griffin’s a new blogger to me… I’ve not found him before, but my God, what an excellent article:
Thanks to Gareth for the find.
England should not be multi-cultural for several reasons:
- The cultural ideals of many parts of the third world are completely at odds with our own, not least the attitude of parts of north Africa and the Middle East to women.
- Cultural attitudes that do not lie in parallel will inevitably lead to violent conflict
The Commission for Racial Equality is quite right (for once) that allowing parents to choose a school and, even, run a school, will lead to segregation. Miss Anon (a co-author on this site) said to me the other day, that despite inspections and the National Curriculum, the influence of cultural attitudes within a school run in a non-English cultural majority area will inevitably lead to further segregation.
It is, in fact, inevitable that if we do not try to assimilate foreign cultures (let’s not beat around the bush, that’s what non-English culture in England is), then we will soon not have a single England — rather mini nations within England. And if those areas become significant enough, might we not have separatist movements spring up in the not-to-distant future? It’s almost a reverse-zionism for non-Jews!
Anyone who knows me will tell you that one of my virtues is a complete belief in a policy of colour-blindness when it comes to ethnicity. I’ve said before that I have many friends of a non-white colouring. I don’t say these things because I think it qualifies me in some way to speak on this subject, rather to illustrate that the colour of someone’s skin makes vehemently, absolutely no difference to their behaviour, attitudes or politics.
The BBC, left-wing do-gooders and the proponents of quotas, positive discrimination etc. are failing to notice what needs to happen. Talking of police treading carefully because of ‘community relations’ is missing the argument entirely. The police, of course, should not be entering people’s homes and beating them up (if that’s what happened), but neither should the ‘community’ be treated as a single group, either by the police or the media.
There will be people of all ethnicities in the area with a complete range of attitudes. Thankfully, not all Muslims or coloured people think the same way as George Galloway.
What I’m trying to say is that the debate must move on from colour, it must move on from place of birth — neither of these are relevant. Instead we should focus on the English culture and see what can be done about ghettoisation, stigma, Muslim academic underperformance, fundamentalism and, most importantly, cultural diversity.
When I talk about English culture, too, I am not talking about some historic picture-postcard scene of gentele folk sitting around a sunny village green eating scones and cream tea while watching cricket. No, I am talking about attitudes towards working, freedom from oppression and looking out for one-another. English culture has evolved and will continue to evolve. It will, hopefully, absorb the finer points of foreign cultures (let’s hope we all start having large families and Latin-style low-key family parties soon), but it should remain a culture unique to England, not one of several cultures within this country.
I intended this to be a short post, but I have noticed something about my non-stop use of the phrase “English culture”. It is my belief that in the long-term, if the EU works out the way it should, there will eventually be a European culture. This isn’t abhorent to me, but it must be reached naturally and by following a process of evolution. There will be much opposition to it not least from the right of my party and from the left of Labour, but that’s what the UK has signed us up to and, while we remain the EU, we must accept that this is the direction it should take. The choice is (a) a path to a European culture or (b) England leaving the EU (and preferably the UK).
In one sentence, ethnic diversity is neither a bad thing nor a good thing (it’s irrelevant) — cultural diversity is a bad and dangerous thing.
What a load of nonsense!
The police, it appears, abused their position and made a mistake. Sadly, these two events combined paint a terrible picture of the police; a picture that wouldn’t look half as bad if only either one of these things had happened.
If we believe the police had viable intelligence that they couldn’t ignore, then there is just the apparent mistreatment of the family they invaded. If we believe the police, then their intelligence sources must be questioned severely.
The cynic in me wonders whether this is a PR exercise that is going as intended. What if Blair’s colleagues though “Let’s attack some Islamist-looking innocent Muslims, let’s rough them up and accuse them of something spurious and then any potential immigrants will think twice about coming to this country and we’ll have less terrorism.”
It wouldn’t surprise me for all the extra cynic-ness I am having to lay on.
I hope for the benefit of England and the UK that I am so far off the mark that I cannot see the mark. Sadly, the alternative is not much better!
And this, really, is my point. Whatever the police have or have not done, they have definitely demonstrated, yet again, that they are no longer competent. The BBC continually talks of the loss of trust between the so-called Muslim community and the police (which is just nonsense, but don’t get me started), but what about the loss of trust between everyone and the police?
It is not unusual for a long-term government to struggle, and eventually topple. What is unusual is for that falling government to have politicised the civil service to such an extent that the police — the guardians of liberty and enforcers of justice — are being dragged down with them.
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