Labor Party, left-leaning?
Pfft, hardly. They are just not AS far to the right as the Coalition, is all.
1068 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2009
There are many factors contributing to decline of PC sales, of course, but one I have not seen mentioned yet is the longevity of the current console generation. Since most PC games are not PC-exclusive but are designed for consoles as well, and since the leading consoles have been around for such a long time, games no longer require anything more than a cheap midrange computer. I bought a fairly cheap video card nearly three years ago and I have still been unable to find anything I cannot run at maximum settings.
@JimmyPage - I think what he is getting at is that if your single LastPass vault password is cracked, then the attacker has access to ALL your passwords in one hit. I do use LastPass myself, with a suitably secure password, but it is a good idea to be aware of this one particular weakness.
Sometimes I very much disagree with him. But one thing I cannot argue with is his view on nuclear power. It is one of the safest, cleanest power sources we presently have, and whatever your own views on climate change, nuclear really is the only reliable means of generating base load power right now. All the opposition to it is ridiculous.
The copper network is in a poor enough state that quite a lot of residences - in inner suburbs of capital cities, no less - cannot get ADSL at all and therefore have to resort to mobile connections or dial-up. Also, many households with a fixed connection will also have one or two mobile connections in the form of smartphones.
I'm pretty much over Star Wars altogether now, largely due to George spending so much time and money telling the fans what they should like and that they're wrong for what they do prefer. I'd rather spend my time on entertainment made by people who actually maintain a good relationship with their fans and where they don't talk down to their audience. You know, like MLP:FiM.
No, people are simply *enjoying* it, not profiting from it. Or do you think Shakespeare's plays should still be in copyright because people are still enjoying them? The point isn't that works should enter the public domain when nobody likes them any more, it is that works should enter the public domain while they still have some use left in them and the original creator has profited from them just enough to encourage him to make more.
Copyrights should be about 15 to 20 years, and should be non-transferable.
No, the translation layer I meant would be in the phone's electronics. It can present Windows with whatever it expects to see through the USB port, while using it's own, non-patent-encumbered filesystem internally. It just means Windows wouldn't be able to read the MicroSD card through a normal card reader, it'd only be able to read it through the phone.
16 Gb for nearly a hundred quid? In a package that size? I have a terabyte portable drive that cost less than this, and it's about the same size. Sure, it doesn't have wifi, but so what? If I need more storage on my phone, I have a micro-SD slot.
This is an expensive, shiny gimmick for people with more money than sense. Who do they expect to buy this? Oh yeah, that's right...
...that'd be a bit warm. But we have left footprints on an extraterrestrial object. And I agree, we should be ashamed as a race for the failure to follow up.
I wish the US would stop spending it's remaining money on stupid pointless shit, like "bringing freedom" to people who just want to stop getting shot at and for Americans to fuck off back to their own country. (Really, who outside America itself DOESN'T want Americans to fuck off back to America?)
And it'd be nice for the rest of the Western world to step up and and make a credible attempt at a manned space program of their own rather than standing back and letting the US bugger it up like this. Russia did it to a degree, China's doing it, India's doing it - what the hell's wrong with the rest of us?
Fashion analogies are much more appropriate in this case. People with more money than sense buy expensive designer label jeans in order to show them off. This is the Apple market.
Other people who don't care about showing off the latest expensive shiny gear would instead buy plain jeans that offer the same function but don't have the expensive designer label, such as a half-eaten piece of fruit. This is the Android market.
"Much of the backlash of jailbreaking has been due to it then being used to unlock the phone or run pirate software."
How is this a bad thing? For starters, I see no moral problems whatsoever with unlocking a phone.
If I were to also choose to run pirated software then that's between me and my conscience. My technology should have no say whatsoever in any moral decisions I choose to make.
The point of lossless isn't for better listening quality, it's so you can keep the best quality source possible. That way, when you convert it into one format for one device, a different format for another device, and want to use part of a track for backing music for your latest Youtube video, they each get created from your high quality source and you don't get the gradually declining quality from shifting between lossy formats.
It's purpose is archival rather than listening.
And who really gives a shit about the copyright holder's permission? Especially when the holder in question is EA. People want it, the copyright holder isn't distributing it. Therefore people will find their own ways of obtaining it.
The difference between Flash and HTML5 is that Flash is slow, buggy, and shit. My PC can run Crysis at max settings and high framerates without breaking a sweat, but if I fullscreen Flash Player I'm lucky to get 20 fps. And almost every time I get a crash in a browser session, it's Flash that has crashed. Also, may the Flying Spaghetti Monster help anyone who tries to run Flash under Linux.
The sooner we're rid of Flash, the better.