Posts by EddieD 1117 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
If I was in my teens and 20s, I'd be opposed - I'd have 6 or 7 more decades on the planet, time enough for it go go to hell in a handbag.
Now I'm in my fifties, I don't reckon we'll come to too much grief in the 2 or 3 decades I have left (at best, given my lifestyle), so let's go for it.
I'll need that gas to warm me in my dotage. Those younger than me - learn to swim, and enjoy the environmental vibro-massages from time to time.
They look like nicely designed, well built machines, which in this day and age is about all you're going to get.
A phone's a phone for a' that, we may get a step change with things like Google Glass, the various smart watches, but it will take a while for something to do this.
For now, just let's enjoy that things are getting better.
Dunno about the definition, but I had to search who Melanie Sykes was.
Then again, I'm a boring old fart who thinks that the cast of Blake's 7 are celebs, so I probably wouldn't notice if the celebs that Zuck thinks are celebs disappeared up their own arseholes.
Which hopefully they will do sooner, rather than later.
I got my wee Inspiron Duo, and put my work copy of Windows8 on it - and I found Windows 8, metro/modern interface and all, very usable.
However, with a machine that doesn't have a touch interface, it was an uphill struggle.
One thing I did sense though - if felt a lot smoother and slicker than Win7 on the same hardware.
Look at the top of the Reg page - see that masthead, the bright red masthead.
Mr Orlowski is extremely good at writing articles to gain a reaction - it's his job, as it is the job of every editor of every journal - and looking at the the responses here, he's done his job well.
It does come across as an Apple biased article, but he has also done Android, WinPhone, and various other articles, the primary purpose of which is to get us commentards frothing at the mouth and raging in the comments.
Back on topic - the DoJ has a fairly long track record of shafting folk on anti-trust issues, have a look here:-
http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/index.html
Personally, I don't think that this is too extreme.
Never trust a species that smiles all the time...they're planning something.
And besides, we only hear the stories of the folk escorted to shores. The other 90% were lured out into the deep sea.
And now we find that they have great memories...all the better for holding a grudge, or remembering where the other bodies are.
5 years ago, after a particularly unpleasant encounter with user support, I cancelled my television subscription.
All I had/have was a 10Mb (now 20Mb) cable connection - and I don't feel I have missed a thing.
iPlayer, Netflicks, Lovefilm, 4OD, ITV.com, catchupTV, all filled the void, and I now find I have a lot more time to do other things - time that previously was taken up with channel surfing.
I've been a customer of Telewest/Blueyonder/Virgin Media/Liberty Whatever and their customer service, which used to be exemplary has deteriorated - I used to be able to specify a 2-hour window in the evening service for support visits, now I have a 6 hour window, I used to get knowlegable and helpful folk in telephone support, now I just get thickly accented voices reading a list of questions, and so on.
And still, in spite of my speed doubling a couple of weeks ago, BBC iPlayer still craps out with "insufficient bandwidth" over half the time...
If you give a lackluster service, you'll get lackluster returns.
I oscillate in my view on WinPhone - half the time I hate it, I then try the opposition and realise they're all dogs, just with different fleas (Gordon Gecko, iirc).
In fairness, my Lumia 800 has lasted me trouble free for 18months, it has good call quality, which is what I look for in a phone, the bundled apps are good, and the store now has a reasonable amount of good apps. Will I replace it with another - probably, but not just yet - I'll try and move to a sim-only contract until the 1020 is available...which I'll buy rather than contract.
Pinch to zoom - or rather, make a gesture involving moving two fingers, or in my arguement, hands, apart or together were being used in VR implementations in the mid 90s for goodness sake.
I think the judge should put one hand behind the head of hte Apple brief, one hand behind the head of the samsung brief, and make a short, sharp zooming guesture
"If Cameron thinks we're not allowed porn, he should compensate us with a shedload of lynxes."
We Brits can't even preserve our last wild cat - the Scottish wild cat is heading for extinction in the next few years, the most pessimistic guess is about 18 months, the most optimistic is a decade or so. Cross breeding with domestic/feral cats is the biggest problem.
The lynx has the problem that it it is very pretty, and all the politicians want it in their region, bugger the science, this is popular politics.
Such a shame
Episode 1, series 1, Yes, Prime minister (first broadcast in 1986) satirised the whole idea of Britain having Trident, with the conclusion that even then it was a useless vanity. Satire aside, the arguments used (involving mainly how unlikely it was that Britain would ever face nuclear attack from another superpower) are even more relevant now - the cold war is over, and the threat - at the moment - no longer comes from a monolithic block we can bomb /be bombed by to buggery, so the cost is ridiculous. If we have to spend this amount of money on military equipment, it would far better be invested in conventional forces.
And this is without the uncertainty surrounding the fate of the Trident base at Faslane - if that has to move following a Yes vote for Scottish independence, you can tack on 10+billion to the costs for relocating the base.
Personally, I think the Health service would be a better target for money that is to be pissed against a wall.
That's my policy too*, but when a grade 9+ academic insists it is my problem, I don't have a right of refusal. Nor do I when the same academics ask as a favour that I look after their RA/Supervisee/Blue eyed boy.
*Actually my policy is to blink, say "you've messed up your machine and it's /my/ problem? How does that work?" I then offer to fix the machine - I wipe it and apply a standard image. I'm not expecting promotion
Having the backend of the Metropolitan Area Networks and JANET means that we are spared a lot of the network hassles most folk see. It means we have a surfeit of IPv4 addresses (two B class blocks iirc), so even fewer hassles.
OTOH, the students who BTOD then demand I install all the software they would be using on their devices, and refuse to accept that it's not legal.
They then decide that I'm repsonsible for fixing things when they torrent a dodgy copy of Photoshop and get hit by the Zero Access toolkit or other malware....
...which they then pass on to each other and every one else by sharing thumbdrives, and I then have 20 machines to disinfect.
all of which means I have more work to do than if they used our devices.
On the other hand, the alternative is working somewhere else and actually having to work...
In "Spycatcher" Peter Wright details all the tricks they used for mail tracing in the 50s and 60s - and the various techniques used for extracting letters from sealed envelopes, using thing tweezers to roll the contents up, for example, and solutions they could use that would render the envelopes transparent/lucent.
Apparently one Trade Union leader (a card carrying commie) used to preface all official letters with a salutation along the lines of "Hello MI5 you prying bastards"
He wasn't a spook, he was a contractor. He knows nothing about the "how" of the security services, all he did was download the results. If he was stupid enough to travel with his data stores, then the Russians will (probably) already have everything he took, and will just want rid of him.
I still play Timeshock! - it was a pretty reasonable sim, and it wouldn't take much ingenuity (a few tilt switches, if you'll pardon the pun) to create a custom controller that responded to body language.
When I was a student, my addiction to Pinball made it to our Freshers welcome book, where they were advised to find me at the Pinball tables, if they needed help.
Craft brewed in an ancient lomond still at Bruichladdich - I've yet to find anyone not to do a double take when taking their first gulp - it's a unique taste, but glorious.
50-60 liters a year - that's about 80 75cl bottles a year, i.e. about a quarter bottle, about 10 units a day.
Wimps.
I used to try and keep one of all the Apple adaptors to loan to speakers at conferences - but there are more than 20 of the damn things, so now when we host conferences, printed prominently in the information packs is the caveat:-
"All our display devices use standard connectors - VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort. If your device uses a proprietory connector you will need to bring the adaptor necessary to connect with these interfaces".
I hate to tar with a very large brush, but an awfully high proportion of folk who use these devices with proprietory connectors seem to think that reading the conference blurb is beneath them. Hey ho.
It's a first go, and it's a proof of concept.
You could easily design most of the parts for a 3D printer, and use a metal pipe for the barrel.
In the future, the materials used by a 3D printer will be developed, and there are plastics and composites that would be able to be used for a short lived firearm.
Nonetheless though, everything you say is bang on - Harlan Ellison style zip guns and numerous other improvised firearms already exist, and are better than this, but nothing, particularly not the truth, will stop the hysteria that can be drummed up by the media for this sort of thing.
Best to just chuckle gently, and wait for the reports of folks losing bits of their anatomy
If you have to start mucking about with USB then it is no longer straightforward compared to "insert disk, press go".
And end up with a system with generic drivers..oh, you mean you have to install them? What hardware do you have? Which chipset, have you got the install disks, yada, yada...get them off the internet? Allow windows update to do it?
A bootcamped mac you have no worries about what your drivers are, you've got a nice neat bundle. By far the easiest installs I do.
"The company also points out that Windows installs on Macs aren't straightforward" Erm, yes they are. Bootcamp assistant, save out support software to usb, insert dvd, answer a couple of questions, re-insert usb stick, run installer, voila, Windows. More straightforward than on most machines - no desparately trying to find which revision of which GPU driver you need and so on.
"and that Windows-on-Mac experience suffers from ... the lack of a Windows button on the keyboard" Except that the Apple key works as a Windows key on all the Macs I've bootcamped, and I'm definitely into triple figures on those installs.
As other folk have pointed out, their methodology is questionable, but so apparently is their experience with bootcamp.
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