Posts by Shades 910 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Mar 2008
Bit miffed that you felt the need to locate Welshpool as being "30 miles west of Birmingham"
It would have been far more accurate to say Welshpool is 17 miles west of Shrewsbury, as that is probably the closest large place of reference. I trust most El Reg readers are intelligent enough to have heard of Shrewsbury?
"[blah blah] '2D FLUGLY' [blah blah]"
Pardon me but I'm having difficulty working out if you're 12 or 102? You keep banging on about Windows 10 being '2D FLUGLY', at every tenuous opportunity, but what I think you actually mean is that its not to your taste. Skeuomorphic design has, I'm afraid, served its purpose and its day is done. It made sense when computers were just emerging into the home and there were whole generations who needed an illustration of a button to know something was a button and could be clicked upon, but we've moved way beyond that now.
Kids, even toddlers, pick up on how tablets and phones work with ease and after being shown a few things it doesn't take them long to suss out how to navigate their way around a phone/tablet to their favourite games or get to their favourite websites on their own. Similarly, my grandparents, both in their 80s, have Android phones and barring showing them how to get to a few settings I've never had to show them how to use their phones. Granted this is probably due, in part, to things like the skeuomorphic interface of Windows 7, but I'm fairly confident that they could now switch from Windows 7 to 10 on their computers and, conversely due to Android, have no problems doing the stuff they currently do.
For what its worth I think skeuomorphic interfaces are awful (I actively avoided Windows 7 because of Aero) but I've never felt the need to keep banging on and on (and on and on and on) about it being "flugly". I quietly avoided it (Windows 7), merrily got on with my day and didn't sound like I haven't progressed beyond having a tantrum simply because something isn't to my taste. Its not as though there aren't solutions to your "complaint" either. Pick one of them and get on with the more important things in life before you give yourself an ulcer or something!
By the way, I think your caps-lock key has an intermittent fault.
"Until I saw this article I'd never considered a washing machine catching fire as a real possibility other than a freak accident"
I'm guessing you're not from the UK then?
I can vouch (sort of) for that kind of hackery... I had a slot loading DVD-ROM drive, back before most non-nerdy people knew DVD was a thing*, which eventually required a "bump start" to get it going; A quick push with a thin, but not sharp, object was enough to get it spinning and it survived like that for years.
* I think even I only had 1 DVD movie for years though as they were still ridiculously expensive.
"I would be amazed if a Chief Constable didn't want to be able to stop a speeding getaway car safely"
Which is all well and good in HappyRainbowsAndUnicornsWorld. Sadly we don't live there, we live in DepressingPowergrabAndOverreachLand, a land where the likes of RIPA are introduced with pinky-swears of "we won't abuse these powers", only for them to be immediately abused.
What would happen is the power to remotely stop a car will absolutely not affect criminals; they'll be the first to find out how to disable that particular "feature" of a car. Instead it will be used to remotely stop people who dare to stray a few miles an hour above the speed limit... Bzzzt "I'll come back for you in a minute", Bzzzt "I'll come back for you in a minute", Bzzzt "I'll come back for you in a minute". And what will happen to all those cars remotely disabled? Well they most certainly won't be re-enabled until a non-immediately-payable fine is paid which means the car will need "recovering" and the owner will also face having to pay the recovery fee and and the extortionate storage fee's that the police love so much.
I admire your optimism, I really do, but there would be much talk of "assurances and operational procedures" only for them to be immediately thrown out the window and loopholed every which way. Or are you going to trust an organisation who's main MO is to often lie to get an admission of guilt?
I've complained about this annoying trend appearing on El Reg before. I'd like to think that the average El Reg reader is beyond having the mental capacity to only concentrate on a single sentence at a time; this isn't Buzzfeed or the BBC website. Next we'll be having "Listicles" with giant animated Gifs.
Up next on El Reg: The Top 100 Top 100 Listicles
"Quizzed about their motivation behind a decision to pay the ransom, most companies (37 per cent) said they were worried about being fined if data were lost. Other reasons included encrypted data being highly confidential (32 per cent)"
They're worried about being fined for data lose or because the data is highly confidential? I'd argue that the ransomware encrypted data is now considerably safer than it obviously was in their hands to begin with!
"Jenson Button has the looks and fitness for the 007 role"
Looks and fitness? Absolutely. Acting ability? Not so much.
"The hashtag was trending because an unnamed individual (who is in need of serious psychiatric help)"
Just because the guy likes a bit of jerk chicken (and thats a play on what he's doing, not because of his skin colour before anyone pipes up with the race card) it doesn't mean he's in need of "serious psychiatric help". Lets face it, people do much, much worse to get their rocks off and, as long as its not pre-sale, he's not harming anyone.
Seems the Left-Pondians got themselves another Puritan some 400-odd years after all the others!
This always confuses me as a metric for how good a phone works. Unless I'm mistaken don't most (if not all) SoCs have dedicated video decoding (and encoding) hardware acceleration embedded within the chip these days? If video was purely software decoded on the main processor cores then "it handled video with aplomb" would make sense but when its decoded by a sliver of the silicon that is designed to do exactly that its hardly indicative of the phones performance in general.
Confused about what? The only one confused here is you... I'm from the UK you country of birth misidentifying moron, I couldn't care less what you post about Hillary or anyone else. Again, how you've extrapolated that I would be a supporter of Clinton shall forever remain a mystery to those of us capable of rational thought.
To whomever is modding this thread: Please stop editing my posts and claiming that the word "cunt" isn't allowed on El Reg; 1460 un-modded uses of "cunt" at forums.theregister.co.uk would disagree with you.
"Children, enough."
But he started it sir!
"Feeling the Bern or just not liking the fact your "hero" is making a living off his treachery? LOL, so funny how exposing some simple facts gets you lot so worked up and frothing!"
You've completely lost the plot Twatt. I was simply mocking your incessant and increasingly pathetic little names, how you extrapolated all that from my post is a mystery that not even Hawking (or as you'd probably call him Dorking) would be able to fathom.
Sometimes, just sometimes, you make very good points Twatt, but then you go and ruin it all with your pathetic name calling, little jibes and other such nonsense. As I said before, isn't it about time you grew up and actually had an adult discussion instead of more often than not invalidating your own arguments, not because they may be wrong, but by mere virtue of expressing yourself like a Grade-A mod edit, no C-word on El Reg?
mod edit - no, really, children, drop it.
"Perhaps you'd be happy to see Chatham historic dockyard closed too"
One of my friends wouldn't be happy about that, he'd lose his home and he'd be out of a job! And I wouldn't be happy because I wouldn't get to see the beautiful pictures he takes of the place. Especially the famous No. 3 Slip building, which you've probably seen and not realised, having been used as a set for a few movies* and UK TV**
* Les Misérables, The World Is Not Enough, Children of Men, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
** Oliver Twist, Call the Midwife, Mr Selfridge
Perhaps I just don't understand graphs, but whilst Motorola did start pushing out the update before anyone else it appears that it was actually HTC that had the fastest uptake?
If we take the points directly above each month for the period between January and June Motorola captured a total of 0.885% of network traffic while HTC managed 1.176% overall.
Its hardly surprising that Motorola was the first out of the gate as they are known for having an almost vanilla Android implementation but once HTC got their version sorted their uptake was the arguably the fastest.
I see little to crow about Motorola pushing out a limited run of the upgrade to 10/20% of their users and leaving the rest exposed for 4 months while HTC wait a month, to get their version sorted, and then seeing a steady uptake (which, once released is no longer in the hands of the device manufacturer anyway but highly dependent upon the device owners settings and inclination to update).
TL;DR: That graph is almost meaningless
Really? Even taking into account that the image has been enlarged for the article it still looks like a Chinese knock-off version of a logo that they couldn't find the right typeface for.
It inspires about as much confidence as I had when I saw the "OEM" replacement screen for my HTC One M8 that was delivered yesterday morning... I ended up ordering a HTC 10 later that afternoon.
"at least it's THERE and not in "C:\Program Files" with the damned white-space in the middle of the directory name..."
I can't see how this is that much of a problem. Even Windows 10 still has the underlying 8.3 name convention hidden away underneath the long file names*.
C:\PROGRA~1 = "C:\Program Files"
C:\PROGRA~2 = "C:\Program Files (x86)"
*Although this seemingly only works for folders/files on C:. All my own files, located on D: don't have a short version, but if I copy a long named file to C: it suddenly gains a short name.
Yes, its always looked ugly and kludgey but its always worked.
"even though it was last patched in the mid 90s (I think it was)"
As the S3 was only released in 2012 you're not even close! ;)
"No need to get insulting" - The chosen icon was not for no reason. If you think I was being insulting you may perhaps need to dial the sensitivity down a little Mary. See now that was insulting (if only to prove a point dear fellow. Please don't get all butthurt, we're generally all friends around here. Well, except with Matt. No-one really likes Matt.)
"What you call "Internet use" is what I call web surfing" - You can call it Wizzlewub Shimphonging for all I care, but its still all internet use. You can't alter the definition of things just because it suits your case. Well, not unless you want me to suggest you're a politician now instead of a footballer? ;)
Look, there is a Beer icon somewhere over there >>>>>>>>>
How much more of an obvious gesture do I need to to make for you to get that I was, and still are, partaking in a bit of friendly leg pulling?
"Not quite."
Your total usage of a smartphone is 110%, thats quite an impressive feat! I also didn't realise footballers visited El Reg?!
However, now correct me if I'm wrong, last time I checked isn't email and mostly secured messaging (which by default must mean mostly not SMS messaging?) all routed via, y'know, the internet? So using your percentages that is actually 95% internet use, 15% phone.
"Yyyyyeahno, I can't take all the credit, its a team game and it was a team effort, we gave it 110%. Towards the end there we were running out of energy, but we held on, y'know?"
"(2) It depends more and more on the cloud, which removes control from me and puts it somewhere dependent on external factors to work. And if they go wrong, it doesn't"
Does it? I don't use cloud anything and haven't found W10 to be hamstrung because of that, not once.
"(3) They keep trying to shove what THEY feel is a wonderful 'experience', like Cortana, down my throat, giving me no options to say 'sorry, don't want this particular feature'"
I've hidden Cortana and she hasn't popped back up. Whether she is actually turned off or not is another matter. Perhaps I should unhide her and actually talk to her, that seems to turn off most women I know! ;)
You could try asking the UK's Tories: BBC News: Student nurses and midwives protest over grants cut
If the changes go ahead it would mean nursing students would, in the long run, pay to work. Unlike regular students nursing students have to work in clinical placements for 50% of the year, doing the exact same jobs as fully qualified nurses (and often being used as dogs-bodies, doing crap they shouldn't be doing and/or other people don't want to do). This means that, again unlike regular students, they have no time to take additional work to provide themselves with some extra income. If bursaries are replaced with loans, which have to eventually be paid back, it means that, essentially, they have paid to work in hospitals for 50% of their training period.
"What this typically means from my understanding, is the moment you get a bad sector (if using a hdd and if its a seagate it maybe sooner than later from what ive seen) and clone it off to a new drive as a precaution to avoid losing all your data, you boned your licence is no longer valid.
[...]
As the hardware fingerprint is a combination of cpu/mb/drive serial, but its ok microshaft will sell you a nice new licence."
Well thats largely nonsense, as I've found out due to a recent spate of bad luck with HDDs.
I have a Asus Transformer TP300L, with Windows 8.1, that is just under a year old and the HDD decided it was going to throw a bit of a wobbler. Couldn't use the warranty as I was heading to Monaco to work in two days so threw caution to the wind and swapped out the 500gb drive for a 1tb drive (which I was going to do when the warranty expired anyway). Fortunately the old HDD stayed up long enough to make a recovery drive and Windows (8.1) didn't even raise an eyebrow when it found itself living on a new HDD. Incidentally I've just upgraded this machine to Win10 and it works better than it ever has with 8, both as a normal laptop and when using the touch-screen (Win10 detects touch and makes some desktop UI elements more finger friendly). It even cured an annoying and (very) random audio glitch that it had under 8.1.
Then, while out in Monaco, I had to fly back to the UK for a couple of days and, needing a small powerful machine with a proper graphics chip, not just crappy Intel integrated graphics, I treated myself to an MSI GS40 Phantom. Just one month after buying the machine the HDD decided to catastrophically relieve itself of its duties. Unprepared to be without the machine for a month, to do what is essentially a five minute job, warranty stickers got broken (which isn't too bad as apparently MSI are pretty cool about machines being opened up to replace/upgrade memory/drives... as long as nothing else has obviously been touched. The warranty stickers are largely there to deter the clueless. Anyway, I digress). So I replaced the drive, booted into Windows (it fortunately lives on a PCI-e SSD) and it could not have cared any less that it had a new drive thrust upon it.
So yeah, Windows using drive serials as a metric for hardware signatures seems to be complete nonsense.
"but it seems 4TB is pretty much the default option for a home user HDD"
What home users would that be? I can't remember the last time I saw a working desktop in the home and, apart from one guy I know who has 16Tbs worth of drives in a USB/NAS enclosure, pretty much everyone else I know uses cheap laptops (when they're not using tablets or their phones) which are only just starting to get 1tb drives.
Careful there, you sound like one of the element of Brexiters - that every Brexiter claims they're not* - that are probably the reason the sign had to go up in the first place.
I think the distinction you're failing to recognise is that the sign is referencing the shop owners themselves, not the items owned by the shop owners.
This is just a hunch but I'm guessing the shop owners aren't white and/or British nationals?
*Yes, I know... Not every Brexiter is a racist, but every racist is a Brexiter. Now, where have I heard that before?
Davies goes up against the UK government in the High Court over legislation driven by Theresa May. And loses.
Ironically the Eurosceptic MP goes to the big bad EU's Court of Justice over the same legislation and pulls out of the action before the eventual ruling against it. (Withdrew during the lead up to the referendum? Can't be seen to be taking advantage of the EU when you're rallying against it!)
He then finds himself in Theresa Mays government as Minister for Brexit; otherwise known as the Minister for The Fall-guy When It All Goes Titsup.
Theresa May may be a vile woman with a history of saying one thing and voting for another (or is it vice-versa?) but I think many have underestimated her as a political opponent!
Yep. In a bid to remove those unelected politicians telling us what to do we now have an unelected politician telling us what to do. Sterling work there Brexiters.
"But, but, but, she said she'd abide by the Brexit vote"
Oh, so NOW you believe a politician, after all the lies that got us into this mess? Well she's got what ALL politicians want, to rise to the top, now she is there ALL bets are off I'm afraid. So yeah, Sterling work Brexiters!
"A referendum. Is a snapshot. Nothing more."
Although I've upvoted you I'd save your breathe (or finger tips), it largely falls on deaf (or ignorant) ears. I was saying this for months before the referendum, only to be meet with "out out out", "O U T O U T O U T" or variations thereof. Its that level of intelligence and articulation thats got us here I'm afraid.
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