Posts by M Gale 3500 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2007
Like "Sativex"?
That's another mowie-wowie-based medicine that is rather effective for MS, Chrons (so I'm told by people with it) and neuropathic disorders. GW pharma say you can't get high on it. Someone I know who has drunk a whole 100-spray bottle would like to disagree with GW pharma.
I'll also reflect the sentiments by various commentards: Why legalise a plant that people can grow in their own homes for free, when you can charge the NHS £240/month for every prescription?
You sound like one of the people I've known who look at me like I'm insulting them after getting in the car and immediately putting the seat belt on.
I'll tell you what I tell them after they accuse me of accusing them of being a bad driver: It's not you. It's every other fucker on the road.
Of course with an attitude like that, it's a bit of the driver as well, but I don't tell them that.
Given the situation that many people will be in when they want emergency services, I don't think many people will be thinking too clearly about which number to dial. They might even skip the whole "unlock the phone" palaver and hit the emergency call button instead. Which dials 999.
The question is, why does 999 not use tower triangulation if 112 does?
And personally, I thought the emergency services had access to the phone's location chippery anyway. Meh.
I see a few people complaining about silly names in IT, without realising that IT in general is peppered with silliness.
Really, iPad? Am I supposed to wear the thing, stick a parrot on one shoulder and shout "ARRR, JIM LAD" at random people?
Hey, what should we call this phone that's going to be used by a gazillion serious business-types and their workforce? Oh, I know: Blackberry. That's real sensible. Let's give all the workers blackberries. Yep.
Windows? You're going to install windows on my computer? Surely that's the sort of thing that hardcore gamers do to their PCs so they can show off the triple-SLI water cooled GPU rig that cost them two month's wages?
While we're at it, what kind of a name is COBOL? Was someone reading really bad Space Opera when they thought that one up?
Smallest piece of information you can store in a computer? Let's call it a bit. Oh, you want a name for a collection of bits? Well, a byte, obviously. Half a byte? A nybble, of course.
Apple Macintosh? Quark Xpress? Acorn?
Yes, a silly name is quite enough to have an otherwise very useful product, company or service laughed out of the city.
+1 just for mentioning Digitiser. Biffo or Hairs really should be writing for the Reg. I think they'd fit right in perfectly.
Reveal-o-texts, Turner the Worm and moc moc-a-moc. Dammit. Nostalgia.
This may be true for new accounts...
It's not even true for new accounts. Go through the setup procedure. Once you get to "congratulations, now give us all your private information so we can spaff it to the world in a G+ account", you close the browser. Then reopen and log in with your new account, minus Google Facebook.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-GB-monthly-201209-201309
Try less than 5%. Blackberry is more fantastically successful in the UK than Windows Phone is, and this is a region where iOS still leads things. As for "fastest growing", by what metric? I'm looking at those charts of actual usage (not phones stuffed into warehouses and shops), and Windows Phone is looking pretty flat to me.
Nobody wants it, even though it's being advertised absolutely everywhere and talked about by all the tech sites and consumer magazines. If Microsoft are lucky, and they waste a few more billion, they might make 4th or 5th over the next 5 or 6 years or so, at current growth rates. That's assuming Google hasn't bought them by then.
I figured "compressed memory" were what the various ram-pack programs for Windows 3.1 and 9x were doing years, and years ago? They tended to make things run slower, if not as slow as virtual memory.
So long as Apple don't try to claim this as some kind of innovation, then yay.
[quote]Here are just a few of the innovations that will make your Mac work smarter, not harder....[/quote]
Oh. Well then. How unusual.
Amiga was never "niche", except later in its life when the PC got the 3DFX card to go with the Soundblaster Pro and 16. If you were as old as me, you'd know that the Amiga was the shit back in its day. Microsoft operating systems were still a whole bunch of 640k limits and creating custom config.sys and autoexec.bat files to make stuff work properly.
What MS got that many people failed to get is having a half-decent office suite, but it would only run on their half-baked OS. MS did nothing, precisely nada to lower the prices of PCs. Amstrad did more than they ever would, with a "pile it high, sell it cheap" mentality that might not have resulted in the best hardware, but resulted in "good enough" to run Microsoft's incredibly expensive office software along with the operating system seemingly designed from the start to lock everyone into it.
You might laugh, but Linux and the Penguinistas have done more to make PCs affordable than Microsoft ever have. Yes, really. Microsoft can't get away with charging more than the cost of the hardware on an office suite any more, when products such as OO.o and LO.o are "good enough", and free. The Microsoftians know this as well, hence their total war against free with proxy companies, groups, and unproven patent allegations.
I will state again that the only role Microsoft has ever played is to demand a toll to cross a bridge made of everybody else's hard work.
So what you're saying is Dell did more than Microsoft.
As did Compaq, Amstrad, HP, Gateway, even ye olde Time Computers. Before that, Sinclair, Commodore and Atari were blazing the home-computing trail in a way that the PC only managed to follow once companies like 3DFX, Creative Labs, ATI and NVidia managed to make the PC a viable proposition for the home (ie: made it do good graphics and sound).
The only role Microsoft played in any of this was as a troll charging a tax to cross a bridge that everyone else made.
Most of the reason why inkjet manufacturers get away with the shit prices on ink, is they are giving the printers away at below-cost.
So, what's Cube's excuse?
And as people above have mentioned, I'm waiting for a version that will take any old ground-up thermoplastic. 52 quid for something that should be costing about 50p? Fuck off.
On Google's search page the other day was a link to the new Nexus 7 tablet. If that isn't market abuse I don't know what is.
Please tell me you're just trolling?
Only I just saw several links to Microsoft Windows on that Bing thing. I only wanted to look up some prices on double glazing, too.
The thing about expert systems, is you generally need experts on hand to train them. AI is generally done top-down, not bottom-up. The moment the latter happens to any extent where experts are no longer required, is the moment we start building our own (perhaps slightly perturbed) GSVs and other Minds. Or rather, it's the moment they start building themselves.
Then we're all out of a job!
Sounds to me like you just proved andreas koch's point big style!
Unless I'm completely misreading their post, Koch's point was about the UI. I'm pointing out that there was a lot more disliked about Win95 than the UI. Hell, the Win95 UI wasn't a radical break from Win3.11. You could still use Windows 95 without touching the Start menu, creating folders on the desktop just like you would with the old progman (which was still included in Windows 95, as already mentioned).
Windows 8 (and Unity) on the other hand, seem to be more about turning desktop computers into phones. No ta. I'd rather have something that works, without some OS X-alike unified menu bar, either. And, as mentioned, I'm wondering how well KDE, XFCE and other less phone-like UIs will work with Mir?
Windows 95 was a big change and a lot of people didn't like it at first, now there's a change away from that paradigm and most people want to stay with it.
I remember the most hate about WIndows 95 was the sheer amount of hard drive space it required, and it breaking compatibility with a crapton of stuff that came before. There were the lies about "your DOS programs now run faster than ever", the price, and the fact that up until Windows 95, at least you could buy alternative operating systems that worked with the vast majority of software (except Microsoft software, natch).
However, at least Windows 95 included progman if you still wanted to use it that way. Does Windows 8 have the start menu? No, it has a shitty phone UI and you will eat it up and say Thankyou Sir.
Speaking of which, will KDE, XFCE and other desktop environments more suited to the desktop environment continue to work in Mir?
And if the company gives two hoots about what you do in your private time, is it really a company you want to work for?
Q1: Can they do the job?
Q2: Can they do it well?
If the above two questions are answered successfully, all else should not matter. Save the moralising for the Mary Whitehouse Appreciation Society.
A service that didn't sell user's data or advertise at them would have to be funded by subscription fees. Now, when was the last time something like that worked on the Internet?
Ask Blizzard or CCP?
Vimeo seem to have a paid service too, if you fancy an alternative to Youtube.
And if I were the airline employee then I might have risked a quip about getting the cattleprod out, depending on the humour of the situation. That or just quietly smirked. Maybe even side with the customer whilst also admitting that there's little that I could do about it. Give them a complaints number perhaps. Really, giving someone the 3rd degree over "moo"?
And then starts publically slagging you & your company off ?
A few years ago, I was a PC World employee.
Try "suck it up and get on with it"? There is a marked difference between criticism and abuse. Actually, I kept my job there for so long despite not having the best sales figures because dammit, I had so few complaints. Customers liked me. Tended to come back more often because of that. Partly because I didn't respond to criticism with "right, fuck off, out of the shop, you." In fact, in many cases I would agree wholeheartedly with some of the stuff that customers came out with. Why act like a pissy jobsworth? Life's too short, and the company certainly isn't going to reward blind loyalty anyway. Yes sir, you are absolutely right, that is a terrible price for a USB 1.1-rated cable. Unfortunately there is little I can do about it, however my figures for today are not too bad. If you're buying a printer and ink, I can probably discount it for you.
Professionalism. Something an Easyjet employee or two might do well to learn about.
Typical, a lawyer trying to scare people to get what he wants.
Typical, a pissy employee of a substandard airline trying to play God because someone had the temerity to not worship the ground they walk on.
Take a look at what happened here. The guy might be a shark, but he's also incidentally happened to defend your rights as well as his own. Or, do you think that somehow a shit airline should not be criticised?
OH GOD I'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO GET ON AN EASYJET FLIGHT NOW!!!!
Might have something to do with Google getting rid of the "+" operator?
And all for a "social network" that only has such a high user count because they're trying every dirty trick in the book to pretend that all of its youtube, gmail and other users even want the damned thing.
A Windows keyboard - smells less than pouring your beer into the fan but not as nice.
Power buttons on the keyboard is something Apple Macs had first. It's just as fucking annoying on them, too. Think different? Yeah, right.
Amusingly, the keyboard I'm using thankfully has no such retardedness on it. Model? Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 800.
Security theatre aside, wouldn't a bit of yellow tape strung across the entrance kinda indicate that this is not an entrance for unauthorised personnel?
Really. Couple of $ worth of yellow gaffer tape to tide them over until the airport can afford a barrier. Emergency vehicles can still plough on through, and you'd have to be exceptionally, undeserving-of-a-driving-license thick in order to not notice it.
There. No need to thank me. Just get it done before some lost driver collapses some undercarriage and makes a few hundred people go splat.
First they insisted on Google+ to rate or comment on an Android app.
Sorry, Android devs, but you'll never get another rating or review out of me, and that's why.
And now they're integrating the shit into Youtube comments? Gee, I wonder what I'll be doing about that then? What I won't be doing, is having anything to do with Google+.
Note to the chocolate factory: If I wanted a Facebook, I'd have a Facebook. I don't, so I don't.
Not just that, but a catastrophic loss of remote control could possibly end up with the aircraft making a dead-reckoning (assuming GPS has been jammed) return to safety, all by itself. It only needs to be so accurate to get back to a friendly area, then either command can be restored, or the aircraft can self destruct upon depletion of fuel. Or, just maybe, the aircraft can crashland somewhere flat and open and at least be partly salvageable.
It's not like a few people with some garden shed engineering can't build a small-scale craft that can return to base under autonomous control. The current SPB project seems to be shaping up in exactly that direction.
...who cares if the phone can be unlocked? Who even cares if it can be switched off? One or two tools, and you've popped the case, ripped the battery out, and have the screen, sensor and any other salvageable spares either on Fleabay or winging their way across the seas to be sold in other territories.
Any phone "anti theft" measure is not so much anti theft, as preventing random bods from peering at your data.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
