Posts by James Pickett

League tables

"an elite world club after Japan, France and Germany"

Rather crushing for the inventors of the railway (and maglev), but I guess we should be used to it by now. Anyone remember the APT..?

Brilliant...

The RIAA claims that its big problem is lost CD sales, so what do they do? Start suing the people who are keeping the business afloat!

Have they thought this through?

I look forward to the CFL replacements for car headlights and halogen display lighting. Not to mention the millions of desk lights, before we all enter a gloomy, green-tinged, fluorescent Hell...

Why bother..

..to ask the retailers when sales figures are widely published? I tried to buy a Wii in Game, but they didn't have one, so I went to HMV, who did. Nintendo aren't macho enough for hard-core game shops, who are now grumpy about losing sales they're not trying to make!

Snivelling

Why are apologies always reported as 'grovelling' or 'snivelling'? It was just an apology, OK? When they offer money or (better still) to sack their lawyers, that merits an adjective.

It's like effing and blinding all the time - when something really bad happens, you're out of words... (G.Ramsay please note.)

Silenced

"if I were this office junior I'd go totally public"

IIRC, he was put under police 'protection' to prevent him from doing just that. They'll have to let him out eventually, though...

Not just HMRC

This item seems to have slipped under the radar:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7123285.stm

I suppose unless GB and co. lose more than 25m sets of personal details, it doesn't count as News any more...

Found..

A pair of discs wearing a Post-it note that reads '6ord0n'. They got a bit mangled in the post, so they're not really readable...

Destination

"He's going to hell"

He'd enjoy that too much. Send him to Heaven and make him squirm...

@Thad

"I have no wish to spend any more money on MS software"

Precisely! You can only fool the public so many times...

Speed

"If you want a really fast machine, run Windows 98."

I do, and it is.

Er..

I don't doubt the general message, but how is the steeper fall of BR from Q2-3 interpretable as 'widening the sales lead'?

Still, it would be fun to see MS forced to adopt their chief rival's format!

Nice to see 'disc' spelled properly, too.. :-)

Just wait..

..until ones flies into a tall building!

Eh?

So, he's inciting religious hatred by arguing that God doesn't exist? I think I'll go and have a lie down, with my teddy, Beelzebub.

Er...

"have been bought by movie buffs"

I thought you said the figures included add-on drives for X-boxes. Or are they so rubbish at games that they are only useful for watching films..?

Target

"missile defence shield"

Wonderful how HMG is so determined to defend us from a few loonies with some semtex and a death-wish, but appears wholly unconcerned about putting us top of the list of targets when we are up against hard-core megalomaniacs in bunkers who control an air-force, rockets and nuclear weapons.

You’d think some evidence that this so-called shield works would be a pre-requisite. If the Yanks are so confident, perhaps we could lob a few old Tridents in their direction to test it? Any casualties could be classed as friendly fire, so that would be OK...

Replacing radios

A quick check reveals that we have 8 FM radios in our house, plus two in our cars. Not much motivation to replace them all with DAB radios that may not get reception, will sound worse if they do, and will have far shorter battery life.

The only reason they have 20% of the market is that old-fashioned radios last almost forever, and people rarely shop for new ones. I doubt that DAB radios represent more than about 1% of the total number in use!

Last resort

"Apple is perhaps one of the most notorious possessors of a 'US and them' worldview"

For balance, I adopt an 'everyone else, then Apple' approach. It seems fair, and saves me money...

Surfacing

Wonder where all these discs will surface? I assume they're being held by a sinister, disfigured individual with a bad accent and a white Persian...

At the values being discussed lately, I imagine the ransom demand could be quite substantial...

Really?

"Banks have been informed and are monitoring relevant accounts"

All 25m of them?

And these clowns want to run a National Database..?

What a shame..

..never mind. I find it hard to muster much sympathy for a government department that so frequently fails to follow its own advice, including selling its own property portfolio to a company operating out of a tax haven.

Perhaps ASPIRE should be rebranded as CONSPIRE.

Query

Does Excel use the same method? I think we should be told.

Mission

"complete a full mission"

Which is? How long before these things are armed? The lizard army awaits...

Missed opportunity

I still have a 4-year old HP850 long-zoom camera with some, then, innovative features. It married a good lens (made by Fuji) with an excellent menu system and general good handling. Since then, HP seemed to lose their initiative and are now, as you put it, trying to have their cake and eat it. Well, they would be if there were any cake, but they have squandered their assets and long since lost the support of any photographers who might once have held them in some regard.

Excellent...

This is good news, although why HP resisted in the first place is a bit of a mystery. Don't they know their own EULA? Once the average punter finally latches on to the notion that you don't have to have the factory-fitted OS, then perhaps the factories will stop fitting them. In an ideal world, that would be the other way round, but if this were an ideal world, Bill Gates would be a mere millionaire and Steve Ballmer would be on a permanent anger-management course...