Posts by Cliff

Re: Quick Questions are better than

>>> I've lost count the number of times I wrote "One more quick question ..." to a supplier this week<<<

To a SUPPLIER - ie the people whose salaries depend on keeping you happy. Ask away!

Re: ugggghh

I'm a stupid person by this definition. Except I'm not actually stupid, I made a deliberate payoff choice between good 'free' stuff, and some privacy. I made it based on the assumption that someone, somewhere was going to be tracking my activity no matter what, whether GCHQ, or just any other random SMTP server in my email routing. I had the choice to pay for expensive space for my webmail inbox or take up the Gmail offer of a huge inbox. Google Drive keeps 100 backup revisions of my work and means I can work wherever I am. Android reduced the cost of my phone and invigorated the smartphone market. I use Google's DNS servers to get past some of the rudimentary blocking my ISP thinks is good for me.

I made that choice consciously, as otherwise I'd be dealing with several dozen different suppliers and paying each one. I still have that option if I choose it, but the value of my privacy isn't a big deal considering London has a zillion CCTV cameras, my oyster card and credit cards will give you a decent idea where I am and what my patterns of spending are, GCHQ or 5 could easily get just about all this information anyway so my absolute privacy is already just an illusion. This way I also get some good toys in return.

In a few years, they'll have a whole bunch of data about a dead guy.

I am expecting a raft of high-horse downvotes by the way, but as you do, consider that some people see the world differently than you do.

Re: The Earth WAS created 4000 years ago!

Fair enough, 10^6 factor over clocking is easy if you also happen to control time, so from the inside it is still the same number of click cycles but from the outside the elapsed time is shorter...

Re: Scary

Dog 'skin' with a bleeding stump or loose hanging severed head - now that would be scary.

Re: Sounds easy to hack

Pretty easy to defend against - use the flash to constrict the pupil ;-)

Re: Whiznot

It's Irish, not British (It's similar to conflating Mexico with USA).

Most of the dishes are from around the world, but the breakfast of kings is Eggs Benedict :)

Re: £26 upfront...

I think the window is in terms of minutes, not days. It used to be 15 mins, but I believe they quadrupled or octrupled it to a still short window.

That said, if you return the app under SoGA in the UK, I'd fancy your chances.

Re: Laptop included?

Quite - I thought £159 was taking the piss until £245 came up.

Why so expensive? Actually, seriously, as a question. Fabric cost is maybe a few quid, retail. Stitching - seeing as Primark can make a profit on a jean jacket for a tenner, I'm not convinced that's the premium item.

Re: open source video editor

Lightworks made a big thing of going open source some years back - so why isn't it forked for the h.264 export? I'm not convinced it's as open as it claims.

It is a blooming great NLE though, although AVID is still my first love.

Working in the movies...

Some jobs are only ever a bunch of strangers working together for short periods. Thesps don't call people 'darling' through genuine affection, they do it because between personal, stage, nick and character names, it's just easier.

Yes, as I recall it did far more than just taking every nth frame, it was pretty clever stuff.

Re: Ha....@Cliff

Hi Lars,

No, I don't think he had anything to do with either, except obliquely as a consumer, and to misrepresent them, then run their products into the ground.

Not sure what lacking a 'British' Linux distro has to do with anything - we speak English (and indeed en-gb is well supported, or failing back to en-us is hardly a chore) so I can't really think what that would contribute. We have plenty of contributors to the kernel and other distributions, so I'm not sure I understand your point?

Employing people isn't just their take home salary costs. There's the NI, holiday pay, sick pay, maternity, recruitment, training, HR overhead, management of said staff, desk space, payroll run costs, IT overhead, uniforms, equipment, welfare vehicles, shift costs, plus the cost of what those coppers aren't able to at the same time. Employing people is expensive, the overhead is huge.

Lassie on Steroids - love it

Re: Must be pretty common...

Actually quite enterprising of Timo.

(Remember when memory sticks were that small and expensive? I bought my first 128MB stick when the price broke through the £1/MB barrier, now it's what, maybe 30p/GB?!

Re: low attention span reader (LASAR)

Yeah, to me it needed the touch of a sub-ed too

Re: better get that video service up

I haven't seen figures for youtube as a subdivision for ages, but I know a few years back it was half a billion bucks a year subsidy. I wonder if it's better or worse now (assuming you don't confuse things with internal accounting handwaving)? Better-more adverts, worse-more hours of stuff spinning every day, removal of more copyrighted works.

Perhaps we should just write this whole internet thing off as a failed experiment ;-)

Re: Intelligent Design

^^^ Most interesting about the Victorians. Maybe IP laws of the time didn't work as intended, have they been revisited much since?

I worry that patent law will take cues from the insanely lobbied copyright camp that means that bloomin' mouse will never enter public domain because protecting it for 95 years means the original artist is going to be more creative than a mere 20/40/50/75 years, which is blatantly bollocks.

With a title like that though, you know it's going to be shit, so make your own choices.

Another example of an excruciatingly bad film that will still happily take your £1.99 at the petrol station counter is 'Bikini Blood Bath'. You know it'll be dreadful (and it is indeed truly fucking awful) but it has a couple of clever moves for the post pub crowd. First few minutes, boobs (that's the last you see of boobs, too, they're there only as a come-on for the rest of the film), then bikinis, ketchup and no kind of plot worthy of watching. The scenes are apparently improvised by a bunch of vacuous non-actresses, but when the non-dialogue gets too dull for even the low bar you expect, the editor just drowns it all with crappy no-name rock. It really is quite a triumph of shitness, but cannot be included in a miserable viewing session like this as you KNOW it's going to be bollocks from the title alone.

What could possibly go wrong?

Re: But, but ...

In fairness, those transactions all used USD previously, and that was fluidly traded as also being used for Legit purposes.

It harvests energy proportional to the inverse of neural activity. Probably be sold on the woowoo shelf of health food stores that also sell stickers to block 'unhealthy' radiation from mobile phones using the power of tachyons and some pretty holograms. And woowoo.

Re: So what now?

More famous in more countries. Since 2003. Aren't Murdoch's lot leaving it a little late to squeal 'foul'?

Re: Deep work

Makes them smarter, but also encourages different ways of approaching a problem and of seeing/modeling the world around them.

Remember when you were learning Entity Relationship models, or Object Oriented design, you had a week it two is setting the world as tables with attributes or classes with methods? That was your brain making new connections, being able to spot bigger patterns, being, as you say 'smarter'. Smarter in that it'll now, at some level, be just a little bit better at analysing the big-scale picture and seeing flows of information, understanding interfaces, etc.

I would love some IT enthusiasm in cabinet alongside PPE and the classicists!