"...but at least B&O's panels are made by Phillips."
I reckon Ikea's stuff is also made by Philips. They always used to have Philips' kit dotted around their showrooms. These days it looks like the same stuff with Ikea badging stuck on it.
9432 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
That is purely an economic decision though and nothing to do with tree-hugging.
Otherwise explain the "greenness" in shipping megatonnages of Bauxite around the world in Diesel-fuelled ships to Iceland for refining using geothermal power, as opposed to providing renewable power sources and refineries locally to the sources and merely shipping the vastly smaller tonnages of aluminium resulting directly to where they're required.
Ah yes, but you're considering 98SE as a seperate release rather than the 98 SP1 it actually was. Worth having, but not worth spending release money on to move to it from 98.
2k was on the NT track, not the consumer desktop track which limped off into ME land. While it made a great office desktop, it wasn't for general use as it lacked the back-compatibility with the consumer stream which materialised in XP.
So that's 3.11 --> 98 and/or SE --> XP --> 7. In meerkat terms, simples and the future is thus 9-shaped.
As for starting from 95, well that puts you firmly at the start of the "dog" track, giving you ME and Vista to look forward to and quite rightly so IMHO.
Except that neither of them were SF films.
Close Encounters was a meandering, turgid pile of poo with added flashing lights and ET was a Lassie film with a cuddly alien replacing the cuddly dog.
I have never understood the "commercial and critical success" of CE. Best I've ever been able to get out of it is the feeling of Herculean triumph generated by managing to stay awake 'til the end.
Hint: The "unknown word" is the one spelled "rscintunf" or similar.
I had sort of wondered why these things popped up with a word and a rejected new car name from the nearest Strategy Boutique. I'll save myself the typing and just enter the obvious control word from now on.
I do find that ReCaptcha does seem to generate the most unreadable ones of all the types out there. Certainly the only ones that give me a consistant "miss" rate. I can see why Google wanted 'em, a fiendishly clever algorithm that produces useless shit is right up their street (Living at number 43a actually).
The home Epson ones do the first. They only have one tray, but it has two sections, one for regular paper and one for photo.
The second I have only ever seen on high end office printstations. They don't really do this "without a computer being involved at all" as they cheat by, er, having a computer inside them.......
Seconded, thirded, whatever on the FOV problem. Headache guaranteed there.
The problem is that dropping the use of depth-of-field removes the most powerful tool in a film director's arsenal for getting the audience to concentrate on the bit he's trying to emphasise. It's also nigh-on impossible for live action to film with a depth of field permitting everything between the camera and infinity to be in focus in all bar the strongest light levels.
The other snag is they'd have to either shoot the film twice or post-process the 2D version to add the depth-of-field effects. Presumably post-production depth-of-field for 2D would look about as good as 3D conversions on 2D material do. I.e. Shit.
Works well for animated features though.
Yup, ruddy marvellous.
My only gripe with the new series is that they just had to fuck around and re-orchestrate the theme music. The original had the most fantastic impact to it and was one of the best opening themes of all time IMHO. The new version's just sort of, er, "limp" (for want of a better term) by comparison.
The original was one of the very few things that had me making a point of sitting through the opening credits, even when watching on PVR and having the option of skipping 'em.
Someone at HBO needs to be sent a plaque with; "If it ain't broke, don't bloody fix it!" on it to hang on their wall.
"...now is a good time to launch an attack on the smartphone firm as its dwindling popularity weakens its position."
Well, either that or they were hanging on in the hope of getting a multi-gazillion dollar payout from a huge, cash-rich company, but have decided to cut their losses and grab what they can before the whole thing goes titsup.com.
Yup, always amusing to see the words "statutory rights unaffected" on guarantees, contracts, etc.
Makes no odds, nothing that they write can affect any rights you have that are enshrined in statute (i.e. law), as they override any contractual weasel words. It's there to protect them ("we never intended our contract to ride roughshod over our customers' rights, look it even says so!"), not you.
It's like putting "Warning: contains nuts" on packets of peanuts.
Thumbs Down Missions.
I've noticed that. It invariably occurs when I've wound up the raving freetards[1] by pointing out something that pisses on their picnic.
Try having a look back through your comments and see if you can spot a similar pattern. Look for a rash of one or two downvotes on trivia and then look for the controversial post that sent the wingnuts off into a frenzy around the same time.
[1] I.e. the ones whose argument is basically; "I can get this for free, therefore any rules saying it shouldn't be free are wrong."
I hung around for a while with a bloke on the expat circuit who worked for Mars and I can spill the beans here.
I asked about the "New Bigger Bar" that turns up occasionally. The way this works is that they gradually reduce the size of the Mars Bar over time and preserve the price. Then, when the thing gets too small, you get the "New Bigger Bar" and a stonking price hike.
Clever, huh?
Incidently, he confirmed something else. Back in the day, Mars Bars really were harder and more chewy than they are now. The old paper wrapping didn't preserve them as well as the modern plastic/foil one, so they had to be a harder mix of ingredients to provide decent shelf life without forming that white surface of sugar that you used to find on them if they'd been sitting around too long.
I pointed out that I rather preferred the old, chewy bar to the modern soft thing. That piqued his interest and he went back to raise a "Mars Bar Classic" suggestion with his peers.......I live in hope.
Hmm, IIRC that was the technique used to "prove" that the iron plating used was substandard. Unfortunately, inspection of the wreck itself and the section of hull retrieved proved it wasn't.
That hull section has rivets in it too. I wonder why going and looking at the physical evidence was eschewed in favour of reading between the lines of old documents? Probably something to do with likely being unable to get the film-release-bandwagon-friendly results required from the facts.
Nice of Apple's O/S to allow malware to be installed to the system by an application. Of course, we may not have the full story.
Usual stuff. If the users are being prompted for admin rights for the malware installation and letting it happen, then there's no story as no O/S is proof against stupidity. If, on the other hand, the O/S is allowing this to happen without complaint, then Apple would appear to have implemented some of M$s legendary failings themselves.
No O/S should rely on applications being bug-free and well behaved for security, there'd be some top-quality FAIL there, if it were the case.
I saw it at the cinema when it came out. A terrible mistake, which I have regretted ever since.
It was utter shit then and it hasn't got any better over time.
Still gets my vote as the greatest stinker I have ever seen and yes, I did see "Phantom Menace" when that came out too. Not a good film, but nowhere near as godawfully shite as Highlander II. Comparing the two is a bit like comparing rotten apples with putrifying pears in a barrel of shit.
"Pedalling furiously" is the actual offence and was probably signed into law by Noah.
When I was at Poly, a mate got done. He might have got away with a ticking off, but for two important things:
1) He was shitfaced.
2) On being told what his offence was, he countered with the fact that he wasn't pedalling at all, merely freewheeling.
There's only one thing the plod hate more than a smartarse and that's a pissed smartarse.
Hmm, I quite agree about Dan Brown.
I remember that when the hype was getting really breathless over "The Da Vinci Code" I went out and bought a copy to see what everyone was on about.
The fact that my previous read had been Iain M. Banks' lastest oeuvre only served to enhance the feeling that I was reading a "Janet and John" book. The only thing missing was the "New word" footnote on each page.
When the court case over blatant plagiarism of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" came up, my only reaction was "Funny, that's exactly what I was thinking after the first couple of chapters.".
So it's someone else's plot with a hero, villain and dolly bird dropped in, rewritten to appeal to the terminally thick.
A mate told me this one. He found an HR droid giggling to himself in the pub and bought him a beer to get the story.
They'd been interviewing a candidate who had an impressive CV and who countered every question with a referral back to it. E.g:
"We frequently encounter time pressure due to legislative changes. How would you deal with this?"
"Well, if you look at my CV, you will find that while I was working for XYZ, I ran a project where the scope repeatedly changed. Through keeping tight control of planning.........etc, etc, etc."
"Well, we also find that we sometimes have to respond rapidly. How do you ensure that resource availability is managed?"
"If you look at my CV, you'll see that while I was working for ABC we had a project where the deadline moved forward. I was forced to work with my staff to reschedule holidays.......etc, etc, etc."
Then the punchline:
"As a follow up to that last, we often see changes that render existing projects moot. Say you had moved heaven and earth to acheive a date, including cancelling holidays and such, only to find that on that date it was not going ahead. How would you feel about that?"
"Well if you look at my CV in the 'Hobbies and interests' section, you'll see that I am a season ticket holder at Tottenham Hotspur. I'm used to handling disappointment....."
So you prefer your black bars down the sides?
Think about it..........
Incidently, most of the widest film formats date from way before there were any widescreen televisions, so it's utterly incorrect to talk about TVs "catching up" and film changing formats since. If fact, these days the majority of films are shot in 16:9 format........
Obvious example is the original Mini (1959). No space under the bonnet for it.
The MGB (1962) has the battery behind the seats, forward of the boot. Originally two six volt ones, then a single twelve volt. The reason here is that when it came out, they couldn't get a single 12v unit that provided sufficient cranking amps to turn over the engine reliably and two 6v units wouldn't fit in the front. The fact that the "B" series V8 engine that required that cranking power never got made is beside the point. The resulting unnecessary pig's ear, of a car having a bonnet mostly full of fresh air and a battery in the back, is just typical of the british car industry....
Yeah, right.
Try playing that on your car stereo without fannying around with transcoding first. This made all the more interesting by the fact that all the transcoding utilities I've found that support FLAC have proced to be buggy as hell and come with offensively shite UI's.
I've moved to using WMA lossless, purely for practical reasons.
UK2? Support not only in English, but they fairly recently insourced their support to, er, England IIRC. They always seem to get a round of approving noises from the commentarderie whenever they get a mention here too.
"Support in English" can easily mean "supported by muppets who speak something resembling English from a call-centre in India".