Posts by Tom7

Re: My PS4 feels slicker and more refined than my PS3

I have the HDMI issue with my 360 - if I don't use optical audio, I get VGA resolution and 2ch sound through HDMI. Connect an optical audio lead and I get full HD and 5.1 sound.

Re: Hey you don't like it.....

It might be arguing semantics, but I'd say Google is very interested in you as an individual. So are their advertisers. That's basically the whole purpose of the Google online estate - to build as detailed a profile as possible of you as an individual.

Of course they do the same thing to everyone else, as individuals, and probably what you meant is that they don't treat you any different to the other 4.5 billion humans who access their services (or whatever the number is).

Curiously enough, a recent BOFH (well, recent in BOFH terms, anyway - episode 5) dealt with this exact issue.

"Is it an inkjet printer?"

"Yes."

"Then pop it in the bin."

"I've only printed about 30 pages!"

"Oh, right! Count your blessings - and then pop it in the bin."

...

"In the OLD days, printers were made of STEEL! If one FELL on you they just amputated the limb at the joint because anything under the printer was PASTE! And if an engineer's tie got caught in a drum printer they had about 10 seconds to scratch out a message to their next of kin before they choked to death. AND THE PRINTER WOULD KEEP ON RUNNING! You could print three-layer fan-fold forms WITH carbon sheets in between and the only warning you EVER got was a PAPER OUT light when the box was empty. There was NO jam. EVER. There were no printer monitors running in the taskbar to tell you that magenta was getting low or that it was performing a routine clean and that your ink level was going to drop by 10 per cent - you just changed the ribbon when you thought it needed it. And feed problems! The only way the printer would misfeed is if you put the box in the wrong position, so you just marked the box location out on the floor for the benefit of the idiots on night shift - otherwise the printer'd keep on running week in, week out... They could take your printer to bits, put it back together, give you about 10 parts that they couldn't remember where they came from - AND THE PRINTER WOULD STILL WORK! They were! We've still got a hammer action drum printer in the basement that's done over a million pages. A *MILLION*! At 600 lines a minute! You'd consider yourself blessed these days if an inkjet did 100! We ran out of paper and ribbon for the machine years ago so we just taped over the paper-out and ribbon-out micro switches and feed stuff in it to be destroyed."

That's the sort of rant I've been trying to compose for about 15 years.

Re: You are comparing apples with oranges.

Indeed. This could be a real problem for Microsoft. What exactly is stopping Apple from replacing the ARM with x86 and installing OSX on it? And, oh look, it supports Office...

Re: Different colours on different surfaces...

Since you'll be seeing it from the bottom, surely the Union flag should go on the bottom to indicate it's the right way up and the Federation star on the top, to show it's upside down?

Re: I know you're in Spain for Lohan

No, only scanned the article for photos. Disappointed.

Re: Why don't you.....

"I had written off RT as useless until I got one for next to nothing and its great"

Good for you. But you rather make the point for us. It might well be great, but not at the price Nokia is pitching it. If they want to sell consumer devices, they need to be in the £150 - £300 market segment, not starting at £400. The grandparent commenter might be perfectly correct - RT might well do all those things brilliantly - but a £100 no-brand Android tablet does them at least as well for the average user. Printing is the only thing that's been mentioned that RT does particularly better than Android, and even then most printer suppliers have an app for printing direct from an Android phone or tablet. So what makes RT at least £300 better?

Re: How to make a big company pay their debts on time

Although applying for liquidation is likely to piss off your customers, sending a statutory demand to the likes of BT is not unreasonable. The idea is to get the attention of people who can actually make things move. You're not being pushy or unreasonable - you're saying, "Hang on, the law is the law and it applies to you, too. You promised to pay on a given schedule; where is it?" As others have pointed out, there is considerable legal protection for companies making this sort of demand and statutory provision for penalties for late payment.

If you're operating a business on the philosophy of, "Pay when you're ready, no worries mate," then you're not serving your shareholders as you have a duty to do. You need to insist on payment on time because your customer has a legal duty to pay. Do you really think that, when you're late paying BT, they'll just say, "No worries mate, pay when you're ready"? If so, you need to read the article again.

I think it's even worse than that. People are discovering that you can make old systems much slicker by changing a HDD for a SSD and SSDs are getting cheaper sharpish. It takes a little technical nous to do the changeover, sure, but why replace a perfectly good CPU, graphics card, motherboard etc when they perform perfectly well?

For a long time now poor disk performance has been hiding adequate performance in other parts of the system. While there was no real option for upgrading the disk, people upgraded all the other components. The difference was incremental rather than large, but it was the only way to improve performance. Now there is an option to upgrade one component and make the system feel much much faster overall and the result is that the bottom has fallen out of the market for all those other components.

This will balance out eventually - as disk becomes a smaller factor in system performance, all the other components become proportionally more significant and so worth upgrading again. But it might take a little while.

Re: Laptops in the bath?

My other half does this. Now, to hack into her webcam... oh, or I could just wait until she gets out of the bath.

Re: Fashionable to mention Google

And the article misses the point just as badly. Google has this monopoly only because it makes the best free email service and the best free web search and the best cloud storage system.

Making a product free-to-use and funding it through targeted advertising does not somehow magically create user lock-in and a monopoly. Google keeps creating services like gmail, google drive, google+ and so on precisely because its core business, search, has no lock-in at all. Changing to another search engine is as easy as changing a browser bookmark. So google has two options for keeping its dominance: Create services around search that create lock-in, or keep its search better than anyone else's.

It's not clear to me that its 'surrounding products' strategy is working. Gmail is, AFAICT, the best free email out there. But if a better one came along, I can jump ship any time and set up a permanent forward from gmail to the new service. Google Drive is, AFAICT, the best free cloud storage out there. But if a better one came along, I can download all my documents and put them in the new one whenever. Google+ is as near as they come to a true lock-in product, but it seems pretty clear that it is losing to Facebook, precisely because fb has beaten them at the lock-in game.

Re: Calories

Not many people seem to have spotted that this is a five-day "week". That's 2,600 calories per day. According to the NHS, the average man needs about 2,500 calories per day to maintain his weight - about right.

It's alright

Mike Philpott agrees with you, 100%. Until your plan goes wrong and your children are burnt to death, of course.