Posts by M Gale 3500 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2007
...and not knowing about it?
That guy either had a serious lack of nasal sensitivity, or the guys downstairs had some impossibly heavy-duty ventilation. That or they were growing shite.
Either that or the trekkie thought the smell was "the mould". Or perhaps he was getting sly shipments of Cardassian Swamp Plant from the guys downstairs as a "shut the hell up" agreement. Who knows?
And yet, the response from many telcos or even phone manufacturers as to "when will I get updated firmware" is "when you buy a new phone."
Maybe when something happens that crashes the entire bloody network, they'll get a clue? That or a suitably large class action, but who's going to bother bringing one of them over a stuck phone? How many will even know what the problem is, instead saying "oh it's broken, time to buy a new one"?
This application has access to the following:
Network Communication
[Full Internet access]
Your location
[Coarse (network-based) location]
Phone calls
[Read phone state and identity]
And all that to throw paper into a basket? Yeah.. I think not.
Chances of this class action suit changing anything whatsoever? Unlikely. There's just too much money involved in profiling every single person on the planet.
Mine's the one with a copy of TrackMeNot in the pocket.
You stick a ticket in the front of the machine. The barrier opens. You walk through the barrier, and your ticket is regurgitated at the other end by the time you've got there.
What the hell was so wrong with this system? Not enough pork involved? Not hackable enough? What?
Seriously. He seems like the sort of person who would be marvellous at a dinner party.
However, due to more uncouth friends of mine taking every single word of his as gospel - it's true because Stephen Fry says it is - I have to afford myself a little snigger.
Don't worry old bean, it's not you, it's them.
It might be more a case of "let's embarrass those bastards down South." Scotland has its own share of fuckwitted legislation. Took more than the usual amount of effort for my brother across the border to get married to his American wife. Not because she's American, but because she's been married before.
The reason your PC exists is because IBM may have copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, but they didn't patent it. Cold-room reverse-engineered by Compaq, I believe?
It's possible to make your own thing in a different way with copyright. You just have to do the work yourself.
Patents? They stop you from doing even that.
The system requires detonation. Any and all software and method patents must be utterly destroyed, or this is going to happen again, and again, and again.
A simple (probably overly-simple) test could be "does this invention physically exist?"
If not then no, you may not patent it. You may copyright it, and that's all.
...requires but the stroke of a pen.
And yes, it is an identity card. Government-produced or not, it is nationally recognised, therefore is de facto a national identity card. That's its entire purpose. It's there to prove who you are. Not to track you, not to be attached to a massive database designed to aggregate every single bit of data about you over your entire life. It's not there as a weapon of the state to enforce subservience amongst a populace that might be considering themselves to be a little "too" free. It's just there to show that the bearer is who they say they are. That's why it has been a Home Office accredited system for decades. It's also free to you, since you've evidently wasted money on New Labour's white elephant.
And have you never heard of passport wallets? Or maybe you could lobby the government to make passports smaller. In any case, why the hell should I be forced into some money-grabbing, data-mining, authoritarian scheme run by beancounters and wannabe nazis just for YOUR convenience?
Sure it might be nice for existing cards to remain valid, but that would require keeping a half-complete, most likely insecure system up and running for the next 9 years, and paying for it to be grandfathered in such a fashion. Perhaps you'd want to be amongst the next bunch of people to have their data leaked via a USB pen and the 17:05 from Tower Hill?
If you really want a pint-sized passport, then that's what you should ask for. Get yourself a free CitizenCard, and then go forth and lobby for it to be recognised as a travel document within the EU. Besides, the law in the Netherlands is, I believe, for "a form of identification" to be on your person at all times. Not a passport. IANAL but CitizenCard sounds like it would suffice. You could even - I know this is pretty radical - use your driving license!
Now me, I'll just avoid being anywhere that has such awful laws. Having to have your papers with you? Every single day? What persuaded you to take up a job that required THAT?
www.citizencard.com
Completely voluntary, Home Office-recognised. Been around for years longer than that godawful Blunkett idea, and doesn't have the mother of all databases attached to it either.
What's more, if you've had the oh-so-awful loss of thirty quid (some of us weren't exactly relishing the prospect of complete loss of freedom arising from refusing to go along with the stupid plan in the first place), CitizenCard will ever so nicely GIVE you a free identity card. A nice PR stunt from them, and a PASS-certified identity card, just in case you forget your name and have to look at a bit of laminated plastic to remember it. Seriously, go look at the site and see for yourself. Team Reg or Jane Fae Ozimek (is that her real name?) might want to think of adding a bootnote to the article about that.
The rest of your points have already been met and defeated by numerous other posters here. If I decide to go to somewhere in Europe, I'll take my passport with me. Oh dear, it has to fit in an inside pocket.... major inconvenience, that. Much worse than the fact I'd have to be carrying some kind of papers around with me at all times, oh yes!!!! </sarc>
Been around for years. Lots longer than Blunkett's ejaculation. Doesn't have the creepy Big Brother aspect attached either. Mostly because you don't have to have one, but also the lack of a massive national database underpinning it...
http://www.citizencard.com/
Even more amusing is that these guys have offered 15,000 people a free Citizencard replacement for their now-defunct national identity card. After the Home Office threatened to remove CitizenCard's accreditation during the last administration, possibly to remove the argument of "we already have a national identity card that's voluntary"? Yeah, I think there's a few people in that company who are quietly grinning as they hand out the replacements.
The Netherlands. Funny you should mention that.
See, now if you're Dutch, you have to have some form of identification on you at ALL TIMES, or you are subject to fines. I know a few dutchies (ain't the Internet marvellous?), and they ain't too pleased about that. Apparently that load of bollocks was introduced on the back of a wave of islamophobia. How many terrorists has it caught yet? What, none?
I also have the right to leave? What's that? I also have the right to be coerced out of the country of my birth and into a foreign land where I'll be treated like Johnny Foreigner by the locals, up to and including most likely needing visas, passports and god knows what else? Assuming I even speak the local language? That's a funny definition of a "right". I'd call it bullshit, myself.
And as for "When were these won - and by whom?" - I think you'll find the demographic split between WW2 vets who do like, and WW2 vets who don't like compulsory ID cards, is about the same as for everyone else. They are people, you know?
As for those who don't like it doing something to improve their situation: I've donated to NO2ID. I've stood there in Manchester handing out leaflets to the MPs, trying to convince people of the bullshit wafting right under their noses. What have you done? Asides run away, that is?
And if you can see the pixels on a 4:3 19" screen with that resolution, you have microscopes for eyes. That or you have your nose up against the glass, and you're going to be going blind real soon.
Now try playing an old game with a maximum resolution of less than your native resolution, and tell me your picture doesn't look like it's being viewed through net curtains. Maybe you want to play a modern game without chewing your GPU up? Even better, try using your operating system without having to tweak everything so that the icons and text aren't eye-strainingly small. Those of us who still have CRTs can just, you know, change resolution. We get this lovely full-screen anti-aliasing effect for free as well, meaning even less GPU chewed up while displaying high-resolution graphics.
Flat screens? Not so much. Not without the net curtain effect, anyway. Plus I can look at a CRT screen from any angle I like, without the picture turning purple or green. Flat screens have the smaller/lighter advantage, I'll give you that. If you want picture quality though? CRT all the way, baby.
I'd love to be able to buy a modern CRT monitor. Silly high resolutions, with all the CRT advantages. They're kind of specialist these days though, yaknow?
It's not been that long since a crapton of people were persuaded that ditching their old CRT for a flat thing with a vastly inferior picture quality was a good idea. It took years before flat screen technology even started to approach the level of a CRT without costing a gigashitload of money. Even now, when it comes to computer monitors, no flat screen beats my crusty old AOC 5C 19" monitor for picture quality and viewing angle at any resolution you care to think of (and not just one native resolution). You'd think manufacturers would have put some kind of filtering in their flat screens to remove the native rez requirement by now...
We've also had the rise and rise of awful, MPEG-artifacts-everywhere digital television, be it via terrestrial, satellite or cable-based delivery. Seriously, does anybody remember how good the old broadcast-quality standard-def analogue signals used to be? It took until HDTV was released to return to the old level of quality, let alone "improve" things - and that's yet another expense that people have shelled out for.
And now we have manufacturers wanting us to buy 200hz-refresh flat screens under the moniker of "3D TV", spending yet more money to throw out perfectly working kit?
Maybe we've just reached the point where a lot of people are saying "fuck this - maybe when the old one breaks"?
Wondered what was happening. Thought the Android client was playing silly buggers, but nope.
<strike>And literally just this minute, in the middle of prepping this reply, it flicks to "online". Trouble over, I guess!</strike>
Scratch that. Down again. I guess it's going to yo-yo a bit before becoming stable, but at least they're working on it.
...of the time that Network Rail decided, for some bizarre reason, that it'd be a really good idea to close every single line between the north and south of England, in order for "essential upgrades". All at the same time.
I was heading from Cornwall to Merseyside at the time; an epic, arse-numbing journey that ended up taking over 15 hours of trains and buses. While waiting for two hours at Birmingham, I decided to whip out the camcorder and pan it over the masses of waiting crowds for the enjoyment of the people back home.
I was promptly pulled over by some snotty guy in a high-vis and told that I could either delete the images, or be escorted from the station. Well, I recorded over a couple of minutes of nothing with the lense cap on, and kept the juicey stuff. Captured some nice audio of the jack-booted bastard while I was at it.
At some point I'll get myself one of those analogue-to-digital thingumijiggers and youtube the lot of it, but anyway, this is not an unknown phenomenon. Companies don't like to be embarrassed, and they and their minions will stop at nothing to ensure their image remains untarnished.
Nobody even knows what the phone will look like, yet. Everything so far has been artists' impressions and maybe-possibly-perhaps rumours.
Besides, there's absolutely no reason the phone couldn't come with a Dalvik stack for Android, and a little included app called "Playstation". Maybe even a hypervisor to rapidly switch between Playstation mode and Android toyphone mode? They can do that, you know.
Personally I'd rather the whole thing be a bit more integrated. An Android toyphone with a really beefy GPU and a Sony games market in addition to Google's stuff, perhaps.
Finally if Sony call them Playstation games, they are Playstation games, Android or not. They own the brand, yaknow?
Disposable pre-paid debit/credit cards... don't work. Yep, that's right. Apple changed that policy a while ago.
As for whether something is a toy or not based on what shop it is sold in: http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=4488309
There's your precious iPad Mini, being sold in Toys R Us. 64GB model too. I'd reckon the reason they don't sell the big one is either because Apple won't give it to them or because the big version is for big boys. This doesn't detract from its toy-like nature though, and Toys R Us still sell plenty of iPad accessories. Bluetooth keyboards too. Would that be an oops?
And no, I consider it completely bloody unnecessary to give Apple bank details after already handing them a metric shitload of money to start with. They don't need or deserve my private and confidential information, and that's exactly what the parent and guardian of the eight year old I've already mentioned, think too!
Age limit? It's going to be used under supervision, inside the house. This boy's mother is his legal guardian, not Apple.
Anyway, I've really had enough of arguing with iTards. It's about as productive as trying to troll 4chan. Seriously, enjoy your toys. Just don't try and tell me that they are serious tools to be relied upon.
Not in Argos it wasn't.
Seriously, you expect to use any iToy without the One And Holy App Store access? Good luck with that.
Having to activate the bloody thing via iTunes is another stupid and unnecessary step. The toy itself plainly has everything required on-board, so why tether it to a (real) computer? This particular iPod Touch 4 is being bought for an eight year old whose mother does not have a computer or Internet access. Luckily, they know somebody who does, and is able to pre-load a bunch of stuff onto the thing for Christmas.
Fortunately, it wasn't my laptop that had to be weighed down by that godawful piece of shit known as iTunes. I'm just the guy who recommended they go for an 8GB 4th gen instead of an 8GB 3rd Gen due to the 8GB 3rd gen being a 2nd Gen in disguise. Also the guy they called when they switched their "magical and revolutionary" device on for it to say "FUCK YOU, CONNECT ME TO A COMPUTER YOU TARDS."
Apple: It Just Works.
Still, at least now they're well pleased with it. Plenty of free little things and it'll connect anywhere there's wifi access. I've also set up skype for them. The one thing these people I know have, that it seems a lot of people here don't? The realisation that they have just bought a toy. Primarily for an eight year old. And no, he won't be going outside the house with it for a few years yet.
My point is, realise what you're buying. People are going on here like the iPad is some kind of productivity tool. No, it's an expensive Apple Playstation with pretensions.
Of course I'll be downvoted for that. Too many people here who have bought a nice little toy and don't like being told their very expensive toy is a toy.
And then I'll get called ignorant for it. Oh the irony.
"Important: Before proceeding to the next step, you must purchase a free application by clicking Free App."
I'm pretty goddamned certain that step wasn't there when I looked through Apple's support section. I had to find it from some other unofficial help site.
Anyway, nice to see that Apple seem to read the Reg. Not so nice that Apple "It Just Works" Computers couldn't make their iToys... just work!
And this is exactly what I mean. My PC is my PC.
If I bought an iPad (and who knows, if I somehow end up with enough money to buy a mansion, five cars, a several-thousand-pound b&o hifi, a yacht and some hired help then I might), then I know that I'm subjecting myself to Stevey-boy's dictatorial tendencies. I know that at some point in the future I may end up with functionality added, removed, and generally fucked about with on the device that I've paid good money for. All without me asking for it. I would know that my iDevice is essentially a toy, to be played with but certainly not relied upon.
Just like a Playstation. The game is just the start? Yeah right.
(I love the smell of downvotes in the morning.. or afternoon, as the case may be)
Doesn't work.
It used to work, but not any more.
Seriously. Factory-reset your iToy, update iTunes, create a throwaway email account and TRY to register a new Apple ID and iTunes account without giving them a debit card. Apple don't even accept PayPal these days, and they still have yet to update their help pages (last updated in November) to match this fact!
(while you're at it, try telling them you're 8 years old and see what happens.)
Now, the only way of achieving the "none" payment option is hackery, arsefuckery and general buggery of the highest order. Not what I wanted to be dealing with at 11:30pm with a friend of mine getting increasingly exasperated at the £160 toy he'd just bought for an eight year old. If it wasn't for that hackery, he would have been taking it back the next day and Apple would have lost a sale. Now as you said to me, get your facts straight.
It's okay Steve Jobs, you can thank me later.
"As to Apple iPad, in my social circle every family and friend has one.."
I think that says more about your social circle than the public at large.
Really, I'd like to meet this fabled place where everyone has an iPad. The iPod? Fairly popular, not as popular as Apple would have you believe, but you do tend to see them out and about. The iPad? Not so much!
Not as much as netbooks and laptops, anyway - and I'm going outside my own particular circle of friends here. All I can say is, you must be in the well-above-average wage bracket.
(waiting for more downvotes...)
I have a friend who rather likes his BMWs. He's not rich, so he tends to get second hand ones. His every-day car is a 315i, and he's just gotten himself an old M5.
Three litres. Rear wheel drive, like all good BMWs.
Do you know that no car with a BMW badge on it will ever be anything other than rear wheel drive, or four wheel drive, and that BMW are proud of that? The Mini doesn't have a BMW badge on it, by the way.
You know what he likes to do most in his BMW? Yep, he likes to drive sideways - and he's good at it, too. Remember those BMW adverts that profess to put the "joy" into driving? The ones that show that car driving around an ice rink? Film directors should hire this guy as a stunt driver, he's that good.
BMW. Nice toy, but you don't buy one for its fuel economy, boot space or "productivity". One would think that for the latter, you'd buy a van. Maybe Mercedes-Benz, maybe Ford.
Really, really bad example you gave me there. Besides, second-hand BMWs don't stop working on modern roads just because the manufacturer has decided to not give you firmware updates any more.
It's a toy because it only does what Stevey Boy allows it to do.
It's a toy because it's locked down like a games console.
It's a toy because it's pretty but massively overpriced.
It's a toy because it doesn't do half the things that a netbook costing half as much does. Like, oh, plugging an SD card into it?
It's a toy, just like a PSP, Nintendo Wii or to be honest, most "smart" phones on the market.
I can't believe you mention ergonomics, when you're holding a flat slate on your lap, neck craned downward, and pretending you can type properly with it. Do you know that for significantly less than an iWotsit, you can buy a netbook with an Office suite on it? You can even install Photoshop AND get half decent performance out of those tiny little Atoms. Productivity? Try using a keyboard, and not having to guess whether you're hitting the right bit of glass.
It's not that I don't have use for one. If I won the lottery, I'd probably have an iPad specifically for flinging birds at pigs. I'm just under no illusions as to the nature of the device.
It is a locked down, nannying, restricted and expensive toy that's less yours and more Apple's. Don't believe me? Try using one without an iTunes account, or without installing that kitchen-sink travesty of bloatware to start with. Or even better, try registering for an iTunes account without giving Apple access to your bank account in one way or another. That one took me all night, and it wouldn't surprise me if Apple soon close the hackish loophole I managed to google and find! Try getting one as a gift for a child without lying about their age when Apple asks how old you are. Try getting one without subjecting yourself to every present and potential future diktat from the Cult of Jobs.
It. Is. A. Toy.
Now please, downvote me some more, iTards. I relish your disapproval.
If the iPad was an actual tablet computer, I'd be tempted myself. I remember when the first rumours of an Apple tablet started, and I thought "Mmm.. tablet. OS X. Partition it with Ubuntu, get a bluetooth keyboard, this could be my first real, live, actual fruit machine!"
Instead it's a bloody big, expensive, iPod.
So no, I do not consider this device (nor the various droid tablets, yet) to be anything other than toys. You have fun with yours, but I'm not willing to shell out that much on something that limited. Spending all night (literally, from about 7pm to Midnight) trying to get an iPad Mini^W^WiPod Touch 4 working because first iTunes needs updating, then the owner didn't want to put a debit card into iTunes before giving it to an 8 year old as a Christmas present? Yeah, right.
Oh, don't ever be honest with the age if you're giving it to a kid as a present. Not only will Apple ban you from creating an account, but they'll ban that email address AND your copy of iTunes from attempting to create another account for the next 24 hours. Cue some interesting hackish workarounds and some interesting choices of epithets being thrown in Steve Jobs' direction.
Apple: It Just Works. Hahahahaha...
Based on h.264 and AAC, so "open" as in "we'll sue you if you don't pay the danegeld" open.
Apple have apparently pledged to release Facetime as an "open standard" (at least, Wikipedia says so), but they haven't yet and I don't see how h.264 and AAC can ever really be part of an open standard. Well, without completely twisting the meaning of the word "open".
So maybe, eventually, if someone with enough money to pay for it wants to. Right now though, Facetime is good if you only want to talk to other people with iDevices.
Talk about reading things that I didn't write.
Now try reading what I actually wrote, and not what you want me to say. I didn't say DSLRs are pointless. I didn't say anything about the quality of the viewfinder.
I just suggested that "mDSL" might be a slightly better marketing term than "EVIL".
Fuxache, people are touchy today.
..Most non-shit digital cameras are "single lense", and don't really need the "reflex" bit because the viewfinder is using the sensor anyway. No need to have a mirror bouncing the light up towards a pentaprism, yaknow?
With that fact out of the way, what precisely is the difference between DSLR and this new "EVIL" category, asides number of features? Maybe EVIL cameras should really be called mDSL or something?
Not really so easy. Asteroids and comets don't have evasive manouvering capabilities, and tend to have very predictable movements.
Missiles, as people here have already stated, not so predictable.
<strike>Also is it just me or is everyone's post time coming up as Jan 1st 1970? Epoch fail?</strike>
Scratch that. It's coming up as 1970 when you click the "withdraw" button though. Someone made a boo boo when re-hacking the comments section?
I've worked in enough temperature controlled environments. Given enough frozen meat and veg to protect, it becomes financially viable to make a very large space go down to -30C.
Only problem I can see there is condensation. I've seen it snow indoors in such places, when something gets an accidental knock from a fork lift. Still, the other option is to use refrigerated boxes with built-in dehumidifiers. From what I recall, there are companies that specialise in this sort of thing, specifically for overclockers funnily enough!
Has anybody ever seen as many little red ones in a comment section before?
I think someone's playing silly fuckers. Moderatrix, can you confirm? No need to break the data protection act with a username, just a "yes and I've got the little scrote in my dungeon as we speak" would be nice.
Why does software rely on filename extensions?
Partly legacy, partly laziness, partly Microsoft (which I suppose would be legacy AND laziness), and partly because it's easier to grep the filename for everything after the last full-stop, than poke around in the file data looking for magic bits and metadata.
Linux and other Unix-like things tend to (but not always) rely on metadata and magic bit sequences within the file, and won't be fooled (in many cases at least) by renaming a file extension. You certainly can't make a file executable just by calling it "something.exe" (this is what setting the executable bit is for), and I've had VLC for Linux and Movie Player both work nicely with movie files that have no extension.
Windows? Not so much.
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