Posts by Amorous Cowherder 1063 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2012
A lot of companies, such as Amazon and quite a few indy producers, offer digital download with a paid copy of a product. How does that fit into this? What am I allowed to do ( within reason! ) with the digital copy? Am I allowed to put it on a USB for my car AND my phone AND my laptop, or am I just allowed to play it just off the PC it was downloaded to?
As someone else said SONY's name is a little bit grubby so sympathy from me is thin on the ground. On the one hand I think this little shit should at least be given some sort of punishment but then the CEO is the CEO of SONY ( remember the rootkits, the DRM, the removal of Linux, etc ) and think bollocks.
I love using SONY mirrorless cameras though but the rest of the corp can go "ruck" themselves for all I care!
I used it for about a week with a Adobe Photoshop CC to edit and maintain my images, using it for about 3-4 hours a day. Out of all the stuff I used ( Thunderbird, Chrome, Firefox, Photoshop, Lightroom, some other utils ) the only thing that didn't work was Kaspersky AV. I hate the icons on Windows 10 but other than that it seemed to work fine for what I needed to do with it.
I won't go as far as to say, "Anyone stupid enough to buy something like this, deserves to be shot!" but I'm pretty close. The day I saw a video of 6 year old girl drooling over her pink semi-automatic and handguns, was the day I lost any tiny fragment of respect for anyone who says they need to own guns.
"Glorified version of a pellet gun.
Feels so manly, when armed."
I don't have the time these days. No my life is not a hectic whirlwind of activities but I enjoy doing photography and as such I have a creative hobby that often keeps me either out of the house shooting pics or in front of a PC editing or chatting with fellow photographers. I'm not alone, lots of people have other interests that don't involve something so passive as watching TV. We have the internet giving us the ability to take part and communicate with like minded people who enjoy the same hobbies and activities.
When I'm commuting to my dayjob I'll often watch educational things like tutorial videos from places like Pluralsight or Lynda,com on my tablet, the videos are either about IT topics or Photography. In this day and age you need to be a jack-of-all-trades to survive in IT and if you have a knowledge of all sorts of areas, you tend to remain useful to your employer. My precious free time is split between my favourite pasttime and my need to stay informed and educated in order to keep paying the bills and allowing me to enjoy my hobby. When I do sit down and watch TV it's often a half hour comedy here or there that's I've previously bought, usually something I've seen many times before so I can put it on in the background a bit like a radio station.
I'm not alone, we have so many opportunities available that you have many choices how you wish to use your free time. If you work in IT you might have to work at all sorts of odd times, weekends, evenings, etc so you have to make the most of your free time when you get it. TV takes a lot of time and it's hard to justify being in the right place at the right time to watch a live broadcast, it simply doens't make sense in the busy world we all live in these days.
Reddit is quite a pivotal site on the internet for a lot of people, it's a great way to channel traffic to your own site as you have access to so many people you can coerce into looking at your site(s).
Having said that, this does seem like a lot of nursery school kids losing their marbles because their favourite teacher has left!
"I've never tried Linux but I know I don't like it."
Hmmm must be so nice to be so 100% sure about things in life. I cut my teeth on IBM mainframes, DEC Alphas, IBM AIX mini's, moved on to Solaris, worked as an Ingres, Informix and Oracle DBA and learned countless languages along the way. Now after 25 years in IT I'm learning the nitty gritty of Windows admin and chucking in a bit of learning C# for good measure.
Shoot me through head if I ever get so jaded as to never want to learn something new each day in IT!
Let's face it, it has to be some little US Government dept testing how people react to loss of internet service, so they are forewarned if a terrorist attack happens and takes it out. Governments are always doing things like this, they need to know how to handle a volatile public should they lose something vital like their ability to post kitten pics on Facebook and Instagram!!
So far I thought it was quite a good version of Windows. I use it primarily for Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop and they worked perfectly on the last preview version. Kaspersky 2015 was the only product I use that wouldn't work.
Can't stand this trend towards bland, flat icons on interfaces. We struggled from the naff WIndows 1.0 icons to the superb richly detailed icons of WIndows 7, OSX and Gnome and now we seem to be heading away from a rich GUI experience to these faceless, bland interfaces. I assume this new design aesthetic is all about function over form. Sorry but my graphics card and monitor cost me good money so "make wit da bling" as the kids say!
The one about the Eiffel Tower, it being an illuminated work of art so no nighttime photos without permission, is a superb anachronism in this wired world we live in.
About the only thing I can be truly thankful for to our wonderful Government here in the UK, they didn't sign up to this Euro cack about no pics of private buildings from public spaces, means I can happily snap away all I wish, almost anywhere I please.
"...MS was managing a "complex topic" as it juggles multiple versions of Windows, while changing the way it builds and deploys the OS..."
Here's a tip that works well for OSX and most Linux desktop distros, release just 1 version! Job done. OK MS, I'll cut you some slack as you do have servers to sort out, just release just 2 versions, desktop and server. Simples!
I'd be more embarrassed by Microsofts abuse of the English language during the installation procedure.
"Getting finished" appears just after the files have been copied and it's about to reboot. Is that even proper English? Surely "Completing installation" would be better?
"...but it's access is hidden in 8.1 & 10."
I wouldn't go that far, simply refuse to create one at install time and it fails over to offering a local account. I can live without my calendar needing to be sync'd to "the MS cloud" thanks very much. Plenty of FOSS Windows kit out there that will happily fill the void and is actually usable rather than the Fisher Price school of GUI Design that the Metro designers must have attended to come up with an interface so simple that it's impossible to actually use it without re-learning all you ever learned about using GUI applications!
When you're installing 8.1 it tries to force you get an MSA account by default but you just have to fail that option and then force it to offer you the choice of creating a local account on the machine. Job done. I suspect after 29th July, the first commercial release will have the same option, force it to fail the MSA account creation and make it give you the local account option.
Facebook's entire financial model is based on people obsessing over how much each post is liked. Without people constantly posting more and more crap and getting more people to like them and their latest crap, Facebook would collapse overnight if everyone decided to listen what Miss Swift has said. I have to give her some kudos for saying something sane and positive that people should at least consider.
( Drop the "teenagers" bit Miss Swift, trust me lots of adults of all ages post stuff and lose it if they're not liked enough! )
Doing lots and lots of Windows coding lately, my mate is a Windows coder and he let me have a play with his Lumia and I was impressed. The only thing that's putting me off is a couple of apps which I would have to live without if I moved off Android, such as the Photographer's Ephemeris. I think the the Winpho took some stick but seems to be picking up nicely, I see few more every few weeks while on the daily commute.
"Give him a break, boys are boys and that damned point won't leave us alone."
Right so it's OK to be an twat and bother the opposite sex because you're old, desperate and a bloke? This sort of bollocks is why fundamentalist feminists love bloke hating, they accuse us of doing these things and the only defense some of us can come up with is to confirm that we can't help ourselves! FFS! "Sorry darling, it's millions of years of genetically repressed animal instinct. I can't help but leer at your cleavage and make remarks about your arse!".
1) They had invested a GDP sized amount of money into it and couldn't kill it off without justifying that to the shareholders, so they have to pilot this doomed course right into the jagged rocks, having jumped off the boat just before it crashed!
2) They're MS, they can make people do things the MS way...well they used to be able to but in these modern times, people power seems to carry a lot of weight. Companies are learning quickly that with everyone now online and communicating all the time ( as these companies demanded that we do! ) that people power is even stronger when we're united against a common enemy.
Oh dear Lord!
Look don't get me wrong, I love using Linux, it's my desktop of choice 9 hours a day, 5 days week but Windows has been MS flagship product for almost 30 years, they've invested the same amount of money into it's R&D as that of a small European country, do you honestly think for a single second that MS would consider releasing a Linux distro? I'd put money down that they have one buried somewhere in their R&D labs in the back-of-beyond at the Redmond campus, they'd have to so they can understand how it works but it's going to be full-on "mushroom" ( kept in the dark and fed with shit! ).
While I can't see FB going anywhere soon, there's a hell of a lot of website using FB as an authentication mechanism. I'm sure FB reaps in too much personal info from these auth requests to shutter that service but as you say, it's still not a good thing to rely on services like FB for this sort of thing.
Same here, been using them since 2002 and they've always been OK for basic services. However the migration during May was an absolute bloody mess, took nearly week for them to sort out the mail and their various URLs, luckily it was only my family whinging at me constantly, not customers!
I was with you until your final patronising paragraph. Have you ever descended from your ivory tower to walk among the mortals of this earth?
Normal PC users see a PC as a gadget, like a fridge or a washing machine. The PC is simply a tool that does stuff and much like their car, when it stops doing stuff it's supposed to Joe Public needs help. I've worked in IT for close on 30 years, it's my life career I know how much of a pain in the arse computers are but I also have a good idea where to start looking to sort stuff out. If my plumbing or my car starts playing up I might have an idea but I don't have the skills or the tools to fix complicated problems, it's not my job so I hire a plumber or a mechanic to look at it. I trust someone with the skills in that area, that I don't know. Non techies hire people like us. Yes they make some fucking stupid decisions and abuse the PC but can you honestly tell me you've never done anything stupid with things outside IT? I know I have.
Why? If they're anything like my pre-teen daughter it'll be spouting mindless bollocks to their mates about "who's going out with whom"(*) , stomping about the house looking moody, occasionally arguing with parents and slamming doors when things don't go their way!
(*) Note the average length of a relationship for a youngster under 14 seems to be about 3.2 seconds from what I gather!
Way back in 2001 ( pre towers ), we got pulled by airport security in NY, they claimed we had knives in our bags. We said we had nothing of the sort. Security showed us the X-Ray and sure enough there was something that looked like knives. So we pulled the entire bag apart only to find 2 long handled hairbrushes and some finger nail sand-boards!!
I had a Swiss army penknife I stupidly left in my carry on bag, no one even noticed that!
Desperately suspending disbelief at the whole story for a second ( no easy task ) , he wants to get famous for proving he can screw with the avionics of a plane he's riding is. He's risking his and lots of others lives, plus many more on the ground. Hmmm. If this even had a shred of truth to it, how's he going to get famous a researcher, posthumously?!
Do me favour! Best April Fools I've heard in ages!
After the meltdown last year I was wary, so I waited another 2 months for Adobe to get their act together and learn from it, touch wood, Photography CC package has worked flawlessly since I started using it. I even got the new Lightroom CC only 36 hours after they announced the general release. They release regular patches and it's never crashed once. My old CS5 would crash at least 2-3 times a week. I can use CC on my Windows desktop and Macbook simultaneously, something I couldn't do with my standalone copy, I had to keep moving the license back and forth and I couldn't have it on separate platforms. I've been away for 3 week shooting trips and it's worked perfectly on the laptop without any complaining about authorisation as so many said it would. A lot of the complaints people raised that put me off committing for so long, have turned out to be groundless.
No you don't own it but you don't really any software, just a license to use it. Given the pace at which operating systems and software move those standalone copies people are clining desperately to, will soon have to be run inside VMs on old copies of Windows 7 or OSX.
the game presents a “Non-deterministic Polynomial-time” problem “that computer scientists believe are on the boundary between hard and easy.”
No one says you should spend every spare minute trying improve your intellect by reading the latest CERN research paper, there's nothing wrong with wasting a bit of time but people should try daydreaming and using their imaginations to waste time, give your brain a chance to relax for 5 mins. Playing cack like CCS is like not letting your car's revs drop below a certain point, it's not a problem to leave your brain to idle once in a while for a few minutes, it's actually beneficial.
When I went to buy my Honda CRV the salesman said there was an option that would allow control of the accelerator where it would gauge the distance to the car in front and control the cars speed appropriately...he said it was a complete waste of time and money! And he was on a commission for selling it and even he didn't want the grief of dealing with it.
As a photographer I found the picture overlays that people had submitted to be very useful on Google Maps, they promptly pissed that up. The old version supported that great feature for about a year, now it's gone. You have to go to Panoramio to get that feature where a picture of a location is actually overlaid in the location itself!
Metal, which is basically 50/60's rock and blues with more speed and a shit load of overdriven guitar. 30 years at the metal mast, don't get me wrong I'm a fan of anything decent like Emperor, Suno))) and Skeletonwitch but I'm under illusion where metal's roots are. I was brought up listening to Cliff and the Shadows, The Ventures, Stones, Floyd and Buddy Holly, I can see almost direct lines running back to those 60's bands.
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