Posts by Fred Flintstone

Re: Did I miss the big Microsoft advertising blitz?

Microsoft have gone for product placement in nearly every show

Figures - with actors it doesn't actually have to *work*..

Re: quiet coaches

I don't have any problem with people using their phones or computers silently

I tried to use my phone silently, but they keep hanging up on me after "Hello? Hello? Are you there?"

Re: Just for the shits and giggles...

I must guiltily admit it would seriously make my day just to imagine the resulting furniture bill..

Re: NO

I am not familiar with flash mobs

It's a group of people clubbing into Apple shops, demanding that Apple supports Adobe.

Re: Speaking of .Sinister..... Gotta love the FEATURE :-

That's actually a massive whole in the whole Data Protection legislation: a company has to give chapter and verse about what they are going to use YOUR data for, but there is no control over what they can ask your FRIENDS about you. That's why they're all so eager to get your address book - it allows them to legally bypass all that annoying Data Protection stuff.

I also hate the BS that providing your mobile number will increase your privacy - both Facebook and Google have been at this for ages. In reality, it allows them to build a mobile phone database - something we left behind when we went from landlines to mobiles. Personally, I very much like it that way - I noticed that the "do not contact for marketing" flag is very frequently ignored, usually by companies that simple operate from abroad so you cannot go after them without great expense so not having a public number is A-OK as far as I'm concerned.

wait till you tell us that is a disaster and fixes nothing. Then it always works like a charm.

Funny that, I have that with film reviews. I'd say that around 80% of the more entertaining movies I watched in 2012 were panned by the "experts" :)

Borland

Personally I have been always much more fond of the stuff Borland cooked up than what Microsoft brought out, and I think that started when a Borland compiled version of Windows beat the living daylights re. speed out of one compiled by Microsoft. I dabbled a bit in Turbo Pascal (every language they had was "Turbo" because it compiled and ran faster and tighter than Microsoft's own version), but work meant I mainly ended up running Quattro Pro for spreadsheet work and was hacking lots of Paradox code in BRIEF, which was not Borland's, but had an option to directly support Paradox coding.

I think it's because of BRIEF I had a deja vu feeling when encountering emacs on Unix, but I chickened out, and picked up enough vi to get to a point where I could install pico (and later nano) :).

What staggered me was the lack of international capabilities of Excel. Until very recently it was impossible to take a spreadsheet in one language and use it in another language because macros were not tokenised. Really, my jaw dropped when I found out. A German version, for instance, would have "=SUMME(A3:A5)" in a cell, and when you opened that up in an English version it would not understand that that meant "=SUM(A3:A5)" in English. Honestly, we were past the year 2000 when I discovered this. To me, that was a WTF on the same scale as Vista..

Actually, I *like* widescreen. I can get far more data on it, and especially with design or flowcharting it's good to have all the toolboxes in sight without having to park them on a second screen or having to hide them or dig them from underneath other windows.

And with system work I can get many more command line prompts in view before they start overlapping.

I can, however, see that being an issue with the weird crowd that use all their applications maximised. I find that to be seriously inefficient, but maybe it works for them.

Re: an easy fix to this situation

The problem is that that is like the drugs legislation they use in the Netherlands; it only works if everyone does the same. You can see that now: companies simply shop for the most beneficial jurisdiction and don't have a problem with moving if changing conditions make moving cheaper than the tax difference..

Re: Can someone enlighten me?

There are two major advantages of MS Office over other suites:

(a) documents *look* the same. Ever since we went WYSIWYG, the fact that a document word wraps at the same position has become FAR more important than what's actually in it, so using MS Office means you won't get whinged at by people who have nothing better to do than making sure your margins are the same.

(b) you don't have to wait for the next incarnation of import/export facilities in Open/LibreOffice. The people who write this stuff have a lot of work still ahead of them, because I don't think MS will ever give up on inserting stupidity into their format just to make their life difficult. Don't get me wrong, I have immense respect for their work (I work by default in OpenOffice) but if I have to make the choice between battling for 30 mins to get things in shape or 5 minutes wait for MS Word to load up I'm afraid MS Office pays for itself quickly. It's just not worth the hassle.

Having said that, I use OpenOffice as my main package (somehow LibreOffice is too different for me to get on with) but on OSX there is a VERY annoying bit of behaviour that makes me jump to Apple iWork's Pages or MS Word: dragging in an image. For some bizarre reason, OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) insist on opening that image up in Draw instead of just dumping it on the page like any other word processor does. So you have to use "insert image" to make it behave, *very* annoying, and never adequately explained.

Each package has IMHO its own killer feature:

MS Word gives me a command not found in other packages: "resume cursor position". It's a pretty hidden command which hides under Shift-F5, but if you're editing a big document it's fantastically useful. It's about as useful as the ribbon isn't.

Apple's "Pages" gives me good layout facilities (once you understand them), it's very quick to hack up a layout - it feels more DTP than word processing focused

Open/LibreOffice give me the same UI on Windows, Linux and OSX and as I use all 3 it's an easy choice. To me, the Navigator is worth its code in Gold as it's like Word's Document Map, but far more intelligent. That, and its ability to rescue MS Word documents where Word has screwed up formatting so much in documents it won't even open them. OOo has no problem with it.

However, I really wished that every one of them started with a tutorial on the importance of using styles. Once you get the hang of that, structure and layout are *so* much easier..

Either that or someone with an old Dell laptop. Must be the same supplier ..

Re: Actually

Never before have I seen such a wretched hellhole of violence, debauchery, and mindless bigotry as the 'people' who comment on an el-reg story*

And that's just the authors :)

Re: " “shape-conformable” polymer electrolytes." Hmm......Might this not pave the way........

If want a battery life of a week, use a dumbphone for calls and a tablet for internetty stuff.

I hate to point this out, but that sort of ruins the original concept of a smartphone :).

As it happens, I have a shell on my phone with an extra battery so it lasts a whole day without charge provided I don't leave Skype running, and I'm amazed at how that transforms my use of the phone. It's almost like having a Nokia 6310 again, but with data. Interesting is that also female friends of mine love it (they bought similar shells on my advice), so I guess the weight thing isn't that much of an issue (and I think I sometimes carry less in my rucksack than some women carry in their handbags, but I digress).

So, back to the original point: I'd love a smartphone with a battery that lasts instead of the always slimmer trend. My other phone is an old Motorola RAZR V3i (for "travel" SIMs), and that one lasts *days* with a single charge, despite its age (it still runs the original battery)..

Re: Meh

Nah, Facebook friends are only called "friends" because "acquaintances" was too hard to write.

I admire your optimism, unwarranted as it is..

Re: 1.2 billion light years was the upper limit for the size of a structure

Ultimately whether we like it or not, the point of physics is to make predictions and the predictions that come out of special relativity, both on a quantum and a classical level, match reality to whatever accuracy we can push it. That then implies that any theory we come up with to replace special relativity has to mimic it in these regimes so closely as to be indistinguishable.

World class summation IMHO :). Have an upvote!

Actually, you have a point here. Correlation is not causation, but the timing *is* interesting..

Re: I'm not exactly sympathetic to the perpetrators here.

I agree with the "conscious criminals" statement, however..

If they had instead executed a well-organized insurance scam for several years, or set up an insider-trading ring which ran for several years, they'd probably get similar sentences

No. They would now be working for someone in Wall Street. That's the difference between "bail" and "bailed out".

Re: Underrated

Out of curiosity, what did you base it on? Am looking around myself..

Re: The REAL reason

You mean, *create* a license count :)

Re: Funniest thing about this whole thread ...

*period* might be the operative word.

I'll go and hide now..

Re: Serial numbers

Not catching the thieves invites a repeat once the stock has been refilled ("revisits" are very common after burglaries). I think they will be watching the serial numbers, and with devices that need activation you don't have a choice - it won't work without submitting that data.

Re: When is MS Office for iOS and Android coming out?

MS Office for smartphones? Good heavens, no. The only thing that would do would be anti-virus protection - the system would be so overloaded with useless bloat a virus wouldn't stand a chance.