Posts by Toastan Buttar 806 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2008
"And how, exactly, will patients be *informed* of this option anyway?"
Simple - it will be on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
"Opt out" is NEVER best practice when it comes to sharing private data. Last time I looked, BUPA was a commercial, for-profit company, not a branch of the NHS.
I like 'em because you only have to replace them every couple of years rather than every couple of months like we used to get out of your typical Asda filament jobs.
But in terms of saving energy ? Pissing in the wind, mate ! If we did one less washing load and one less tumble drier load and one less use of the electric fan oven each week, I'm sure that'd dwarf any savings we got from using efficient bulbs.
U2's new album "No Line On The Horizon" was officially 'made available' on Spotify days before its scheduled release. Copies were downloaded from the Universal Music Australia website a couple of weeks beforehand and of course spread like wildfire through file-sharing sites. Yet somehow it still managed to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in its first week, going to #1 pretty much everywhere in the world.
Arguments that leaked music leads to reduced sales are completely invalid. Leaked crap music on the other hand...
Games companies get inundated with them every day from hopeful third parties. The trouble is that in order to make a great product, everything depends upon the details of implementation - those minute-by-minute decisions which lead to a quality product. The same holds true for music, movies, books, cars, gadgets and toys.
Great idea + crappy implementation = useless end result
Crappy idea + great implementation = potentially great product
Great idea + great implemetation = killer app
"It's hard to imagine the privately held company being worth nearly as much as it was a year ago."
It's hard to imagine how Facebook was EVER thought to be worth ANYTHING. Hell, I LIKE Facebook and dip into it pretty much daily, but I'm buggered if I'll give them one single penny of my hard-earned.
A business model, you say ? What's that ?
Bill, because really it's nice to have a nerd rather than a jock as the richest guy in the world, isn't it ?
For "If you're a savvy Reg reader..." read "If you're a tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoid..."
Good grief, man ! Do you ever use a debit/credit card for online payments or in bricks-and-mortar shops ? Guess what ? You're being profiled ! If not, then my apologies for my presumption.
You continue: "The trouble is, of course, they *like* the apparent ease of so-called 'services' from free-to-use portals like MSN, Yeehaw and Google.
What does one do to protect the stupid and lazy from their stupidity and laziness?"
Google provides the best search engine - by far - in the Interwebz and the reason it's free to use is that they get an income from advertisers. If we geeks supply every 'lazy and stupid' web user in the world with the means to defeat ads, guess what'll happen ? That's right - the best damned search engine on the Web becomes a subscription-based fee-paying service. Thanks, mate !
Let's keep the AdBlockPlus trick (and its ilk) secret for us and our immediate friends and family.
A J Stiles wrote:
"Then there's that thing Maplin sell, which has only 128MB of RAM but is based on some sort of RISC architecture."
The Maplin machine (CnM Lifestyle) is one of a family of machines based on the Ingenic JZ-4730 SoC. Other machines with this architecture include the Elonex ONEt, Bestlink Alpha 400 and Trendtac 700 EPC. The Ingenic chip itself uses a MIPSEL instruction set.
There is a thriving user and hacker community for these teensy machines. A good starting point is:
http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/
which will lead you to other forums such as:
http://linuxlaptopforum.ark2webdesign.co.uk/
where forum member Wicknix developed the frankly astounding new distro called '3MX':
http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/software/3MX.htm
I'm having a lot of fun with my Elonex ONEt.
I really hate to say this but "Windows Just Works" these days. Yes, it really does. Every USB stick, every Wi-Fi adapter, every graphics card, every sound card, every camera, every phone, every webcam. You stick it in (or load Windows onto an existing system), feed it the drivers (these are NOT hard to find, so don't even try to bring this up), maybe restart the system a couple of times and you're good to go.
This has never been my experience with any flavour of Linux. Don't get me wrong - I've been INCREDIBLY impressed with what does work 'out-of-the-box' - kudos to the programmers on distros like Ubuntu ! Unfortunately, unless you're trying to get a fairly 'normal' desktop or laptop configured, you're pretty much guaranteed that some piece of hardware is going to jump up and bite you on the face. The situation that boggles my mind the most is when a manufacturer delivers a pre-configured distro which is still buggy, WITH THEIR SUPPLIED HARDWARE ! I've heard tales of EeePCs choking on the Asus-defined hardware - WTF's that about ?
I would have loved to use a netbook as a portable editor so I could tweak my MIDI synths on stage. Even using Ubuntu (arguably the most hardware-friendly distro) and a USB MIDISport adapter (arguably the most widely supported device out there) and spending several nights reading through forums, I could only get as far as loading the firmware into the MIDISport on startup. Getting any application to actually talk to hardware over MIDI was just never going to happen - even editors written specifically for Linux.
I'm afraid the Microsoft tax works out at a lower TCO than days of frustration followed by a still unsatisfactory experience.
"If anything, hardware patents are a deeper thicket than software," Semmelhack said. "It will be an issue. But I don't think it will be a terminal issue. The truth of the matter is that if you do anything moderately successful, you'll be sued."
I fail to see how being dragged through the courts could be anything OTHER than terminal for a small startup trying to do its thing the OSH way. He's 'shrugging off' the concerns but that's easy to do when you're not in a court room facing a stream of corporate lawyers.
Does anyone know the deal between the PRS and Spotify ? I'd like to know if they're going to royally f*** that for everyone as well once they start to get greedy.
@Simon Brown - What's your take on Spotify as a promotional avenue for your music ?
Pirates, cos you know which Swedish website is going to see increased traffic tonight as a direct result of these actions.
In The Real Frank Zappa Book he said
"When you compute the length of time between The Event and The Nostalgia For The Event, the span seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia."
"Bill Gates didn't invent BASIC either, as some people seem to believe."
No, but Gates and Allen pulled off a really impressive stunt by writing a fully operational BASIC interpreter for the Altair without actually having access to the machine itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC
If you were around at the birth of the home computing boom, you'd know that being able to run genuine Microsoft BASIC on your machine was a big bonus, and in some cases a deciding factor in which system you purchased.
to help make anything run as slickly on Linux as it does under Windows ? A broken implementation on Linux will drive more casual punters back to Windows.
@Simpson
"Cross platform C# applications running on Linux boxes infected with Mono, will ultimately lead to the destruction of MS as we know it."
...and then you woke up. Seriously - there are some cracking Linux distros out there and some cracking native applications. But still, there hasn't been a huge uptake of Linux on the desktop at home. Why might this be ?
What the public wants from a PC is just a box which lets you:
• play games (cracked or bought)
• use the 'famous' applications (cracked or bought)
• surf the Web (without certain sites appearing broken)
• watch Flash content (video and SWF)
• run the standard messaging clients, perhaps with webcams
• run a BitTorrent client
• burn CDs and DVDs with the resultant torrent download or
• run the iTunes software to upload it to their iPods
If any one of these functions is an important one to them and it's 'broken' on Linux, yet works fine under Windows, you're going to have to offer a very good explanation as to why they should persevere with a free (as in beer) OS. It's going to look like it costs nothing because it's crap for everyday use and can only be used by geeks.
I use Ubuntu most of the time but there's still an awful lot of stuff that I can only do in Windows.
Hellfire ! All the hard work has been done to identify the vulnerability and its machanism. Coding up the fix is the EASY part once you know where the problem lies. So why won't it be ready until March 11th ? Tech savvy users can disable Javascript manually but most home users will be unaware of this and still be vulnerable until the patch appears.
Although the entire raison d'etre of TPB is obvious to anyone, the prosecution have a tough time ahead trying to pin anything on them within Swedish law. Just because they're doing something which the RIAA finds unfair, and being cheekily defiant about it in the process, doesn't mean that they have necessarily broken any laws.
This is going to be interesting. I do like a meaty courtroom drama.
> so why do we have a "sex offenders register" and no "life takers register"?
Bloody good point, my man ! Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Surely the taking of life is [b]the[/b] #1 crime ?
And while we're at it, how about a "mental thugs register" and "psychotic neighbours from hell register", too ?
Yup, if you can be arsed going that route, there's nothing to stop you.
However, I think the record industry got it right - 100% right - this time. They're giving you the chance to 'try before you buy' the entire track/album in a very convenient and let's face it - trusting manner. It would be bad show on our part not to seek out a paid-for permanent copy for use on players, whether that's on a CD or through a legitimate download site.
Exploiting the 'analog hole' with Spotify to get free-as-in-beer music would confirm everything the industry says about file sharers - the very things that file sharers deny so loudly on forums everywhere (inc. El Reg).
Jolly Roger, cos I didn't use the 'P' word.
The Windows client runs fine on Wine. I use it without any problem when I boot into Ubuntu.
My kids rang me at work today (school holidays) to find out how they could log in to my account. I wasn't going to give them my password, so I'll have to set up new user accounts for them tonight. They're about as addicted to Spotify as I am. I just hope the business model holds out - I'd hate to lose it now that I'm so used to it being there.
"Of course, there has never been an example of breeding from one species into another in the history of the world. (I am sure the wise crackers will say otherwise.)"
I see what you did there - pre-emptively state that anyone who disagrees with you is a wise-cracker.
Anyhow, it'd do you a lot of good to read the entire talkorigins.org site (particularly the feedback archives), but the must-read article for you is
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
There have been plenty observations of one species turning into another (yes, inside a human lifetime - not relying on historical evidence). Take that fact on board, mull it over for a while and then, armed with your new found scientific knowledge, take another look at how well ID stands up as a theory.
You might want to read some of the articles about Michael Behe, too.
I, in turn, will have a look at the credentials of the people who maintain the talkorigins.org website and see if they are in fact just a bunch of wise-crackers.
Tux, because penguins evolved from dinosaurs.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
