Posts by James Pickett

Disappointed..

..that they don't/didn't include retractable blades in the toes, like Rosa Klebb's. Come on, Nike - if you're going to use names like that, you should at least make them appropriate.

Why?

Why does everything marketed at 'kids' always look so bloody awful? I can't see any self-respecting child (including mine) wanting to be seen dead with one of those...

Book 'em Dano

"BT denied having done any deal with Phorm"

Isn't lying about your business activities illegal any more, then?

@Trevor Pott

"Google will become the next Microsoft"

Funny - I don't remember MS providing free anything (unless it was designed to ruin somebody else) or pledging not to do evil...

Analogy

Since billg once made the mistake of comparing the motor industry unfavourably to his, perhaps I could ask if he would prefer a cheap car that hardly ever needed fixing to an expensive one that broke down regularly, but had a good network of garages?

Er...

Good article Lewis, but do you really have a gas-powered washing machine..?

Apple-cheeked little daughter...

V.good! (and cheeky)...

Budgets

So that's $333k for a beefed up model plane, or roughly the price of three Cessna 162's. Ain't military spending wonderful? No wonder America is practically bankrupt...

(And yes, I do know we're heading down the same path.)

Bad losers

"HMRC will appeal the ruling"

And spend yet more money, which they collected from everyone else!

Deep joy

"The company apologised for any inconvenience or annoyance caused by the theft."

In the vain hope that nobody sues them, presumably. I just hope that some of the victims were lawyers. Should play well in the rest of the meeja, or at least test the 'honour among thieves' adage.

As for "inconvenience or annoyance", I'm sure those aren't terms they use when reporting similar incompetence by others!

Villains

I notice that all the Brown stuff is aimed at the consumer and not at his friends at Tesco, et al, who generate mountains of waste by rejecting fruit and veg that fail to meet idiotic cosmetic parameters that have nothing to do with flavour or nutrition. I sometimes get tomatoes from the bins of nearby greenhouses - they are mostly a millimetre or so under or over-sized, or a bit too ripe (i.e. they might taste of something) and, more to the point, may not be sold as food, as it might affect their profits! (This is a condition of purchase imposed by the supermarket.) The bins, which each hold about a ton of fruit, are then sent for local landfill...

Potato growers operate under similar constraints. A farmer who supplies (if he hasn't since been blacklisted) McCains had a container-load rejected because the flesh wasn't white enough for MacDonalds' specification. MacD (and the supermarkets) say that they are simply responding to consumer demand, but when did you last critically inspect the contents of a chip or take a vernier to your tomatoes?

Finally, the larger growers around here are discouraged from selling to small local shops, lest it put a tiny dent in the supermarkets' turnover. Instead, their produce is transported to a central depot miles away (it has already been packed by the grower, at his own expense) and then ferried all the way back.

And what does Brown do? He blames us!

You really couldn't make it up.

Er...

"Ballmer would not negotiate any deal with Yahoo!'s current management."

That sounds a pretty good argument for keeping them!

Efficiency

I think nature/natural selection has done a pretty good job. IIRC, an albatross can stay aloft for days and cover thousands of miles on a single journey, all on a stomach full of fish. My model aeroplanes, using propellors, hi-tech batteries and the things that the prof. thinks so superior, can stay up for about 20 minutes!

There was a good item that he probably missed on R4 recently, about the variable geometry of a Swift's wing, whereby it alters the shape and sweep to suit the conditions. This works so well that they can stay in the air (refuelling as they go) for two to three years...

Wheels are fine on smooth level surfaces, but anyone who has cycled up a steep hill will know the limitations. A friend of mine says that he will take robots seriously when they can successfully walk upstairs carrying a plate of soup. I agree.

Excellent!

Great men, both. Thanks for the tip-off.

And another...

Sorry AVG - low overhead is paramount for me and the home users I support, most of whom have oldish kit. That was one of the reasons I recommended AVG in the first place! I also didn't like the arm-twisting to switch at the end of May, which turned out to be a false alarm. If you can't trust AV suppliers.. :-(

Clam AV now has half a dozen new users.

But...

If global warming doesn't exist, what will happen to all those research grants?

Sounds like a good opportunity to send Jeremy Clarkson back to the N.Pole, though...

Over-excited

Has Lewis had a lie-down yet? I liked the image of the chorus girls, though...

Buses

Typical! You wait for years for a replacement for IE6, and then two come along (almost) at once...

It might be the best IE ever, but that's not saying very much, is it?

@Dick

Thanks for the clarification. I only mentioned because there seemed to be an assumption that gas turbine powerplants were so called because of what they ran on. We have a 'backup' power station here on the Isle of Wight, which has two modified Olympus engines (half a Concorde, if you like) that very definitely do not run on gas! They don't generate steam with the heat either (as someone else mentioned, but why use a jet engine to do that?) - they have reduction gearboxes to drive the generators.

Foot-shootery

£220 would be fine if we hadn't already been told to expect £199! I'm not buying one now, on principle.

(Also because I just got an old but good Compaq E500 off Ebay for £60)

@Mrak Gardy

"trying to amnipulate the user journey"

So that's what they're doing!

Peace, man

"We become the best new neighbours"

Hmm - past behaviour would suggest otherwise, I fear.

Parallel world

"i would hate to think what the internet and the tech industry as a whole would be like without bill gates"

IIRC, Bill G nearly missed the internet altogether! I prefer to think how much better the world would be if Gary Kildall had got the job...

OMG!

But won't we be overrun with terrorists if they don't do it? Same as with ID cards, detention without charge, etc, etc...

Perhaps if they (i.e. No.10 and the Home Office) calmed down a bit, and stopped aggravating Middle Eastern conflicts (not having Blair as a 'peace envoy' would help), we could all sleep a bit more easily...

Er...

Are we talking about DAB or DAB+? I thought they were incompatible, which will really help the switch-over, if existing DAB radios won't work. We have about half a dozen radios in the house, and I'm certainly not throwing them all out!

Tricky

"In order to establish the origin and potential significance of the item"

I wonder what they expect to add to the Mayor's explanation? Presumably, they simply don't believe anything anyone says now until they've banged them up for 42 days...

CCTV

So where does CCTV feature in all this? They're photographing pretty well everywhere all the time, including buildings in Hull and (gasp!) children...

Choice

"Like my mother always said.."

I'm sure she did...

WRT distros, why does a short, but reasonable balanced review of one produce so many wild opinions about the others? The whole point of Linux is that it offers choice, something conspicuously lacking if you trawl the high street for a laptop without Vista, for instance. More reason to celebrate it, IMHO.

MS would love to divide and rule, and we seem to be helping them!

Er...

"it’s not a world away from cost of a 15.4in desktop replacement"

Indeed not - in fact, it's more expensive than some of them (several available for £299 inc. VAT now). £200 is the price point, and that means ditching Windows (unless MS cares to release XP under GPL - ho, ho).

Just a thought...

I once did a back-of-envelope calculation that revealed that the amount of sunshine (@1kW/m2) enjoyed by my garden on one summer's day would be enough to heat my house for a year, so I agree that solar energy is a Good Thing. Given that the oceans absorb a fair amount of it, and distribute it a bit, why not use heat pumps to capture some of that energy? You could even help restore the melting Arctic, always assuming that it actually is...

@Martin

"or they've been heavily bribed by Microsoft"

Seems highly likely. You'd think a firm like Asus could capitalise more on their position.

Size

"no stranger to big fines"

Not big enough, clearly.

Security

"subject to the 1998 Data Protection Act"

Doesn't that allow you to have a copy of the data in question if you pay a few quid? Marginally better than leaving it on a train, I suppose...

Neat

although "faster than Vista" isn't a huge claim.

The last time I used Vista, the hourglass was replaced by a calendar...

Deep joy

And what sauce would you like on your goose, Mr Ballmer..?

A pedant writes...

"automatically writing less data"

Shouldn't that be 'fewer data'..?

Copyright

"April Fools' Day 1918"

Should be out of copyright by now then, unless they know who the original artist was, and that he was still alive in 1938...

Tricky

Sorry to sound xenophobic and/or cynical, but I'm not wholly at ease with the thought of French engineers assembling nuclear reactors on UK soil. It is no coincidence that they have sited their own (and a reprocessing plant) at the Northern tip of the Cherbourg peninsular, where the prevailing wind is away from their mainland and straight over ours, via the Isle of Wight (two birds with one stone!)

It seems we are cowering over terrorists when detention is being considered, but completely blasé about them when building indefensible targets...