Posts by TeeCee 9436 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
Yes, it does work well on a small touchscreen device, like your tablet. The "fill the screen with the app" approach is the right one when screen size is small and the navigation works very well with touches and swipes.
Where it's a ruddy pig's ear is on a large, conventional monitor with a keyboard and mouse for input. Which is what we're talking about here.
Missed one:
Is of no bloody use whatsoever for that corporate login password to gain access to the machine in the first place, which is the one that must be at least n characters long, contain some esoteric combination of characters, be changed regularly and where each one must not be like the previous umpty-something used.
Or, in other words, the only one that I'm really likely to forget.
Advertisers don't lie, they just have the same effect on the truth that black holes have on spacetime.
The closer you are to an advertising agency the more bent out of all recognition it is and as soon as you walk into their offices conventional rules of what is true break down completely.
...possibly reduce the number of cargo containers that could be carried by 1
That alone would wipe out the cost savings from all the efficiencies carefully built into the rest of the aircraft. They could do that, but nobody would buy the things.
Remember, it's cargo where the money's made, not passengers.
Put yourself in the position of the bloke running it.
If you have loads of people doing it, if something gets through that shouldn't, you can track down the poor serf that missed it and throw them to the wolves for political reeducation.
If you put a system in place to do it automagically and something gets through......(!)
Anyone in that position's primary concern should always be to ensure that there's someone else to blame when there's a fuckup.
Someone might remove the body part in an attempt to get access.
"Give us your ATM card and PIN number or we'll chop your hand off.". That option already exists. Actually the current version is more effective as "Right, give it to us now or we'll chop your other hand off" is available in case of non-compliance.
Someone might coerce or kidnap me to get access.
In that case the type of security is entirely irrelevant as with you present to provide password / PIN / hand / thumb / eyeball / whatever it can always be circumvented. So that option also already exists.
Got any objections that are actually specific to biometric palm readers?
Personally I'm too nosy to use one....
Same here. Only commentard I've ever considered using that on is Eadon, but the thread resulting from one of his turdspurts is often quite funny and I need the OP to make sense of it all.
Eadon's ratio is an interesting question. Dunno why you can't see another commentard's up / down totals. After all you can see all their posts and the scores on each so you could just add 'em up, which makes the total counts public domain info anyway.
The new layout in many places here seems to be having a skewing effect. If you can get one onto the article page under "Most popular comments" it skyrockets from there. Anyone else noticed that?
"Officially" you couldn't move an OEM copy of the OS's between machines as well. In actuality, ringing 'em up and answering "yes" when asked "Do you only have this installed on one machine?" would do the trick. My one copy of XP lasted though several incarnations of the machine it sat on.
So much so that they eventually bypassed the need to speak to one of their people and replaced it with "Do you only have this installed on one machine? - Press 1 for yes or 2 for no......".
There's a big difference between what it says in the licensing, designed to milk the corporate market and how they treat a personal user on the phone.
This is a really poor argument....
Ok, how about this one then. British aid to India is significantly less than India's aid to elsewhere. If they really needed it, they probably wouldn't be giving it to someone else. Also I'd love to hear your justification for hosing aid cash on a country with a sodding space program.
I reckon it would be more constructive to stuff it in a bank in the Cayman's / piss it up the wall / pile it on the floor and burn it / whatever. At least with those alternatives you're not paying a load of civil servants to waste it for you.
While we're on the subject of message box weirdness.
Selecting the checkbox to post as AC results in a thumping great box saying something like "Anonymous Cowards cannot choose their own icon.". Any chance that could appear over the icons below (where it would make more sense) rather than being plastered over the bit you're trying to type in (where it's a royal PITA)?
....so don't know if the new cheaper ones will be fast enough.
As far as I can make out, having fiddled with a few, MS have been a bit cunning here. Rather than just letting the fast ones be fast and the slow ones annoying, what they seem to have done is vary the frame rate dependant on the hardware. So the navigation works at exactly the same speed across the entire range of hardware, but the more horsepower it has, the silkier it looks.
I suspect the amount of grunt you actually need is entirely dependant on what you intend to run on it by way of apps.
Win 7, Cygwin and a little registry tweak that adds "Cygwin prompt here" to the Explorer context menu for directories.
Presto. A GUI OS that's consistant everywhere and known by world+dog, with those powerful Linux command line tools a mere click away. Far more convenient than dual-booting, firing up VMs or whatever.
Well, as it seems perfectly possible to get some mug to "refund" a payment made with a rubber cheque, that should be the simple bit.
If I^Ha hacker were really clever I^Hthey would set up an enterprise flogging Pi's at 150 quid a pop first and win on both the swings and the roundabouts.
Connect a smartphone to a monitor and keyboard, for example, and the OS could shift from a phone-like UI to a more traditional desktop PC experience.
Hello? Microsoft? That is indeed The. Way. It. Should. Fucking. Work.
Actually I'll have a tenner on that being the design remit for Windows 9............
You're right, there's no telling 'em. Not so long ago a recently-divorced friend of my wife's was following the Internet dating sites.
Wife's friend: "I've found this great bloke! He's a sergeant in the US army!"
Me: "It's a scam."
WF: "No we chat regularly and get on really well."
Me: "It's a scam."
WF: "He's in Iraq at the moment."
Me: FFS! It's a ruddy scam and one that's as old as the sodding hills to boot. You watch, he'll be asking for money for a ticket to come and see you soon and when that happens, ask yourself how likely it is that US military personnel are a) skint and b) forced to make their own travel arrangements?".
WF: "You really are a bloody cynic aren't you? I'll show you........"
Several weeks later:
Wife's friend, now in tears: "It was a scaaaaammmmmm.....I can't believe I felllllll for iiiiitttttttt....."
I didn't even try to make my saving throw vs lack of sympathy, the negative factors were just way too high.
Oh come on! You have to consider the unfair advantages that augmented reality could confer in such situations.
E.g. Foxy chick at bar. As you approach, Google glass does a bit of photo matching, resolves FB details and such, revealing that she's a sex addict with a fetish for Jewish cowboys:
"Howdy ma'am. The name's Bucky Goldstein, can I buy y'all a drink?"
Deer in the headlights......
....to solve a problem properly, you use a sledgehammer.
Hmm, I had a slight oopsie taking that approach once. We were trying to remove the bucket from a mini-digger and couldn't get one of the retaining pins out:
Me: "Got a sledge?"
Mate: "Yes, in the garage."
Me: "Great. Go get it."
He returned with the sledgehammer and I dealt the pin a fearsome blow.
Mate: "Owwww. Fuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkkk!". This is the sound made when a chrome steel pin of around a foot long, a couple of inches in diameter and propelled with a wallop from a sledge impacts what is euphemistically referred to in cricketing circles as the "upper thigh".
.....that despite some of the hate aired here so far, their Android phones are actually rather good.
A light touch with the added crud[1], a cut above most for quality, decent cameras and updates seem to turn up when promised too.
If they keep it up, I'll probably get another one when this one expires.
[1] Ok, the FB integration's a bit cheesy and all-pervading, but you can at least make that thoroughly disabled with conventional weapons[2]. Removing it all completely to get the storage back does require root though. On the serious plus side, their DLNA "play to" integration is the dog's bollocks.
[2] Something I'd like to see in smartphone reviews - How easy is it to de-Twatterise and un-Faceb0rk the thing?
The Momentus XT hybrids don't cost much more than their conventional 7,200rpm siblings and with the additional bang that buck provides, you'd almost be mad not to.
Can't see the 5,400's going hybrid. Having "cheap 'n cheerful" and "fast but pricier" options with clear air between them seems about right to me. Muddying the waters with a "faster but not quite that fast and only slightly cheaper" option would seem a bit silly.
Tito said that he would like his astronauts to be a couple, preferably married, to help offset some of the psychological difficulties.
I'm sorry, but if your aim is to select a pair that are happy to spend 17 months shagging their way to Mars and back in a huge ball of shit, psychological difficulties come with the territory.
You'll be liking the one on the old IBM 5251 terminal then. Fully capable of derailing freight trains if left in the wrong place and so thick that if you wanted to use one as a door wedge you'd need to buy a medieval castle first. Built into a heavy steel casing, it looked a bit like a Commodore VIC-20 upgraded to survive nuclear warfare.
The thickness meant it was impossible to rest your hands on the desk while using it, so you didn't so much type on it as play it, like a maestro at a concert grand piano. Unfortunately, the only note it played was <CLACK>. One being typed on sounded like a Maxim gun and a roomful in use sounded like a squadron of Sopwith Camels and a circus of Fokker DIIIs in a dogfight. AFAIK the only keyboard ever made which offered deafness as a side effect in addition to RSI.
Bloody horrible, but utterly indestructible.
Ah yes, the A-12 or "Oxcart". There's a very good Area 51 documentary doing the rounds at the moment which is all about the Oxcart program and with firsthand accounts.
I particularly liked the bit when they were horrified to find that the Soviets had the shape of an Oxcart and were trying to figure out how. They knew when the Soviet satellites went over and religiously hauled the things indoors while they passed. They eventually figured out that, while the aircraft was hidden, the heat shadow where it had been stood on the apron remained and that's what the Russkis had picked up in infra-red.
Turning a cockup to their advantage, they made the world's largest "tangram" set out of black painted bits of cardboard. When the Soviet sats were due, they'd nip outdoors and arrange the things on the floor to make weird aircraft shapes, often adding a couple of space heaters to look like engine signatures. This worked a treat, as feedback from the spooks showed that the Russians were investing a considerable amount of time and effort in evaluating all these secret aircraft and trying to find out what they did.
One bit did have me laughing out loud. At the same time as all this was going on, the USAF were running "Project Blue Book" and more than a few of the "UFO sightings" were, of course, actually the CIA's Oxcarts. Every time the military lads followed the trail of one of these, they'd eventually hit a wall of secrecy. This would be followed by a call from the CIA telling them it was one of theirs, classified above everyone's pay grade and that they were to invent an excuse to pass it off.
Rather helpfully, it turned out that the USAF were a bit crap at excuses and tended to trot out the usual "weather balloon" type platitudes. This led to the belief that there was a monumental cover up of UFO work at Area 51, which handily distracted everyone from what was really going on and suited the CIA down to the ground. It was so useful as misdirection that the CIA made a point of pouring fuel on the fires of the conspiracy nuts at every opportunity.
Yes, that is a music stand. I can't see how sticking an iPad on top to display the staves and notes rather than sheet music makes it "innovative", so it would appear that there's a few hundred years of well-documented prior art on this.
The fact that it does not appear to fold up for carriage would seem different, although it would also seem to be bloody stupid.
So Nominet's explanation of their decision is cobblers, but I think they're saying that many of the answers given to two questions would seem to be mutually exclusive.
So the answers given were cobblers. This is probably and they even allude to this themselves, because the questions were not clear.
So the questions asked were cobblers.
So in effect they've not only asked a stupid question, but then at the end of a chain of stupidity given us a stupid answer as a result? Is there an award for disappearing up your own arse that we can nominate them for?
I agree. It wasn't a "terrible product".
Ok, it was pretty bloody dreadful OOB, but once you added a sensible skin to it (like SPB's excellent Mobile Shell), it was fine. You could hack it, fiddle with it, load what you wanted onto it and there was a healhy community cooking updated ROMs for most devices. I have to suspect that MS tacitly supported this latter, as there was a never ending source of image leaks from Redmond to help it along.
Funnily enough it was very like Android. Uncannily so with said SPB Mobile Shell installed as the stock Android UI looks suspiciously similar, to the extent that if SPB were Apple I'd have expected the lawsuit by now. Moving from WinMo with Mobile Shell to Android was a fairly seamless experience, once I'd found MyPhoneExplorer which does a sterling job of substituting for ActiveSync.
For some reason, the new WinPho platform seems to have left its user base to Android and set off down the iPhone / Blackberry route of total lockdown. I suspect that may be due to WinMo's (and to a lesser extent, Android's) achilles heel, dependancy on the OEMs to ship updates and the resulting perception that the platform was unstable. Instability was invariably caused by shite OEM driver implementations and the fact that OEM updates were like hen's teeth meant you were usually stuck with the cockups supplied.
And there we have the phone OS conundrum. If you wish to push updates centrally, you need to provide very little leeway on hardware. If you allow any hardware and hand the driver side over to the OEMs, you leave your user base at the mercy of a bunch of tossers who see work invested in updating anything bar their latest offerings as money down the drain.
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