Posts by Stevie

Re: Somewhere close to the equator, would seem like a good bet...

So, what, Lizard Point then?

I dunno why we'd need runways. Everyone knows that British rockets will launch from a rocket sled riding on rails (possibly using maglev, but that was never explained in the show).

Can't wait to be issued with my flying motor scooter.

Re: Only Ill

Dammit, that's what posting from an iPad on the Register App with its itty-bitty comment typeface does for me.

Another triumph for technology and superannuated eyeballs.

Re: Bleen

Thank you , AC, for cheering me up. The FAQ on that idiotic Bleen page had me rolling around with laughter for several minutes. I particularly enjoyed the three sentences of verbage in response to "Do you have a working prototype?" which could have been replaced with the word "No", and the paragraph responding to "How does your device work?" that amounts to "not telling".

And the real answer to "Will Bleen work under the sunlight?" has to be "As well as it does in the pitch darkness".

And the watch had me almost peeing my pants, especially the photo of the guy with the Facebook alert projected on his hand - upside-down!

Re: "or in the case of board games, you can end up getting it for down 30% of the price "

Not to mention stumping up money a year in advance to watch the delivery of one's copy held up for an unnecessary month so the game can be demoed and sold at Gencon first.

Re: Bah!

" As Haje says, if they had stuck to the slightly clunky initial version there's a good chance it could've got shipped."

Thank you JDX. That is *exactly* what I was saying. Have an upvote.

Re: Bah!

" If I were Haje (I'm not) I'd be inclined to see damages for spreading that kind of story."

And the English love of the lawsuit for no reason rears its head once more. I despair of my mother country sometimes.

So, to state the bleeding obvious: what else is a "complete rethink" but a whole new (and unfunded) new project? I know I said "new" twice but you missed the point the first time round.

As for your proxy legal threat:

My wife works for one of the more successful law firms in this neck of the woods. Bring it on. But bring your wallet. We take the civil suit seriously here in New York and believe strongly that the best defense for a lawsuit is a countersuit. ;o)

Bah!

Posting the pictures in the first place in an act of violence.

What people do with them behind closed doors is, well, harmless. No further damage to the depicted person is done.

And, although it is not popular in these PC times to say so, if you don't want your body to be shown all over the internet in a state of nakedness, don't take pictures of it in that state and if you do, don't use an internet connected device to do so and if you do, don't use an internet file dump "in the cloud" to backup your device and most definitely never show the pictures to anyone else no matter how deserving in any form other than the one hard-copy (hur-hur) you made yourself and will be taking back in a few seconds once the lucky viewer has said the right things. To do anything else is to see yourself on a website one day in all your glory.

Digital file sharing involves copies. I'm not sure why people do not "get" that. You might as well take your hot snaps down to Boots and have copies made.

re I work in an office full of people who don't know how to use it properly.

Most of the complaints I see about MS Word boil down to this and it's sub-heading "and can't see the reason to find out".

A good, if not relevant to the Stross Problem De Jour example is the oft-repeated canard about what a mess MS Word makes of generated web pages, with scads of inline styles all over the place. A simple and documented switch change will alter this behaviour and produce few unexpected lines of code in the final HTML, but it is obviously more fun to scream how awful MS is than try and learn how to use the product properly.

That said: MS have done themselves no favours with the recent UI revision. They seem to be working under the rule: "What do you do if there's a perception your product is hard to use? Make it ACTUALLY hard to use".

As for the venerable Mr Stross: If he can use OfficeLibre now, why not all along, and how does this make his pain go away? OfficeLibre is no better integrated into Scrivener than any other word processor (ask me how I know this).

I'm more confused because he was posting that he'd switched to iPad for all his productivity-production-processes and didn't know full product MS Word or OLWrite would run on ythe said platform. As a new iPad owner I'm eager to know that I can use a proper (and free) office suite on the device.

Re: well that might be OK as an amateur

As I recall, author Piers Anthony uses all OSS for writing his novels. Maybe someone else drops it into Word later on, but he's certainly a professional writer.

And unless he's recanted several years of public statements, he wrote just about all his famous novels longhand on paper using a pencil. Certainly most of the Xanth stories, the Tyrant of Jupiter stuff and Macroscope.

At least, that's what he used to say before Windows XP.

Re:Burn the Heretic!

Agree! He needs a good sprinkling with Oofle Dust.