Posts by Amorous Cowherder 1063 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2012
What about the Belgians in Africa? As soon as things started to go a bit pear shaped they just buggered off and left the two warring factions to tear the shit out of each other.
Great Britain did capture and trade slaves from Africa. Sir Francis Drake was a very well known person who's slave trading and privateering is quietly forgotten in favour of his hero image, however that was 500 years ago.
I once had a Summer job as a dogsbody at a sports centre. The town was a few miles away and I couldn't be bothered to walk, so apart from living off snacks from the vending machine I also spent every lunchtime for 2 months playing Outrun. I once completed 14 straight runs through it without fail. Meanwhile everyone else would be outside at lunchtimes enjoying the sunshine or taking advantage to use the sports equipment for free. Fairly obvious I was heading for a career in IT, that is stuck indoors in front of a screen, and kept away from direct sunlight!
I challenge anyone to watch, "Ground Control" starring Keifer Sutherland.
www.imdb.com/title/tt0137799/
Budget in the hundreds of dollars and, at the time, minor celeb attempts to save a piss poor boring script but instead stretches what should have been a 5 min student film into a 90min lurching, done-on-the-cheap disaster of a movie. The end result is that you want to scratch out your eyes and insert a fork into your earhole and scramble your brain to make it go away!
Just what I was thinking, a whinging maggot trying to garner sympathy. Sorry but the world is a bigger place than the good ole' US of A and the world has lots of very small countries, and where they've combined they are all given a right to speak and make their own points. So this FB shill should realise that this the very epitomy of a democratic group like Europe, everyone gets a say! Don't like it FB? Then simply shutter up your website and don't allow anyone from a European IP to access it. Oh no, you won't do that as it would mean losing potentially a 1/4 to 1/3 of your "products" who won't be able to access the site. ( rough estimate of 600m in Europe ).
Reality bites!
When Windows95 came out the general public were getting their first taste of the "inta-toobs" and MS hit a spot. Other than the Sony Playstation, most consoles ( Sega, Ninntendo ) were seen as kids toys, serious gamers used PCs. MS managed to convince people that they needed to keep upgrading to retain that "first time" experience and keep playing those state of the art games. Sadly the wheels have long since come off that wagon, the average person has that laptop/PC they bought 3 years ago and it's still good enough for using the "da toobs" to email Granny in Canada and to satisfy little Johnny's need to play Minecraft. Outside that Johnny can play his "Kill a Brown Bad Guy" game on his PS4 as he can have it in his room, he has a mobile phone and probably a tablet for everything else. When most people need to write a formal document, they can simply use Google office apps through a copy of Chrome, no need to buy and install huge office apps suite these days, most people simply want to bang out a formal letter to the GP or the local council and Google through a browser is adequate.
MS needs people to keep upgrading their hardware, that's generally the only time your average Joe P actually upgrades their O/S. I can put money down and show you that most of my rellies are still using XP or Windows 7 and they're happy, change is tough. MS keeps faffing around with the interface and average person doesn't like it. Most people still see a PC like a fridge or washer, just a device to get things done. They don't expect the fridge to change every 9 months!
MS are damned lucky that Apple kit is expensive. I have at least one relative who got absolutely fed up with Windows 8 inability to do simple things like edit a home movie. My wife lent them her Macbook and with just the bog standard OSX apps, her video was edited and output in 30 minutes with no previous experience. They were going to get a new Windows laptop, now they've decided to spend a little more and get a Macbook. Plenty of IT people are setting up Linux desktops as most people simply need a browser. With Google Office apps online, those are good enough for most people.
"Since HSBC does not appear to be claiming that it suffered a breach by hackers it seems that it may have inadvertently stored the data in a manner that made it accessible on the internet."
A1, first class excuse! "We weren't hacked sir! Honest! We simply put it there by mistake and some other, bigger boys read it sir!"
The lives of the great and the good eh? Yep some bloke who runs a division of worldwide tech company just decides to fire a government minister in the UK and put his best mate in charge. When these sorts have such a disconnected sense of reality, it's no wonder no one has any trust in govs and corps.
I bought into the Adobe CC model for Photoshop and Lightroom and couldn't be happier. Working out the difference I'd have to stump up £700 for those two if I were able, but with CC I pay £8:50/month and I get constant rolling upgrades and I can install it on 2 seperate machines at the same time. I have Windows edition on my desktop and concurrently the OSX edition on my Macbook when I'm shooting away from home. I could never do that with a single paid-for edition as it had to be deauthorised before reauthorising on another machine, so I already have twice as much software for a cheaper price. I worked out, it would take me several years of rental CC to pay the same amount as I would a full paid copy.
Don't ever forget you never, ever own software. What you get is always a license to to use it, which you have paid for. In the previous sales model you still had full functioning software after you had paid and long after it had stopped being supported, that's big difference. What I will have if I stop paying for my "ransomware" is no software.
O/S on a monthly model, no way as that's truly holding people to ransom. I don't need Photoshop to be able use my machine, I do need an O/S. I'm happy with Win8.1 ( one of the few who is! ) I left OSX behind because I liked Windows8 so much, but if MS start messing about with rental versions of Windows, by-bye and I'm off to go play with the fruity mob again thanks very much.
If I wish to walk around with a balaclava on during the winter months, do I have something to hide? Am I about to cause trouble? Or is that I don't want a cold head and also you've become one of those people who's become so damned paranoid by way of a moronic media that truly believes in the mantra, "nothing to hide, nothing to fear"?
This is the reason I'm intrigued, purely as a backup to my backups. I have 140 years of family history in photos in JPG and 7 years of landscape images I've shot. 2 backup sets on NAS boxes at home and I want offsite storage to dump 2TB of CR2s, ARWs, TIFFs and JPGs. My wife has a Prime account and that's really got me interested as I can piggy back her account for this.
NSA and US Gov? I'm not bothered if they want to rake through 45,000 images of long dead pets and my since deceased relies grinning into camera!
Ideas and situations change, mostly for the better. We don't use terms like paki, nig-nog, wog or coon any more because they're nasty, racist and only serve to demean others based on skin colour and cause friction. Would you describe your female co-workers as babes and bitches? Not unless you want slap and handed a cardboard box by HR.
The world is changing Duncan my old son and having respect for everyone, whether they have a penis of a vagina, shows we are growing up and becoming better people. I suggest you leave your 1950's attitude to women at the door.
"Yes, stupid safety features. They should ban selt belts and airbags and put a massive barbed spike sticking out the middle of the steering wheel. That would stop speeding. Dead."
They should also make it compulsory to learn to read a comment, weigh up the relative merits and then make a sensible comment in return. Instead we have the "unlicensed" with their utterly stupid knee-jerk reactions.
I interpreted the OP AC comment as simply making a point that safety features are all well and good but should be designed to consider that human override is appropriate sometimes. ABS braking, no human override, airbags no override, sign reading speed limiters yes override allowed.
It's pure unadulterated "poor porn", cheap and easy to make. Get an out of work jobbing actor for £100/day, get them to voice over some PD CCTV footage and you've got yourself a TV show.
The mentality of those who watch, "Ha ha, look at those people they're worse than us, let's laugh at them for entertainment!". Sorry but anyone who sinks low enough to watch this kind of utter shit for entertainment is, in my opinion, lower than the people being shown in these so called documentaries.
Reminds me of the "TV shows" in THX-1138, simply boiled down to the key elements. You want sex? Just watch two people having it off. Want violence? Watch someone being beaten. Why bother wasting time with characters of plots, just show the key elements in the raw.
I'd rather watch my cat take a dump than the shite that spews out of the TV channels these days.
OK, I can accept that Facebook will probably keep the CC details secure but there's one gaping, huge monsterous gap in the plan...the fleshy thing with the account details! Given that 1/6th of the planet has an account on the ad network how many users have absolutely ridiculous passwords that anyone can guess the credentials for?
Auntie Gladys is not very tech savvy, she needed her nephew to set up the PC and the account and her nephew did his best to secure the passwords but when password change time came Gladys changed the password to something easy to remember. Now Gladys thinks it would be a great idea to send that £25 birthday pressie to her niece through Zuck's system. 2 days later Gladys CC is has been maxed out or her bank account has been cleaned!
One of the best practiced human right's abusers on the planet is banning a simple computer game that involves tasks we have to do on a daily basis, killing animals for food and skin, because those actions in the game are seen as too violent?
ROFL! LOL! Brilliant! Sorry? You're serious? Oh!
I want my kids to understand that food doesn't just arrive on the plate, it has to gathered from crops or got from killing animals. This is taught to young kids in this game in a safe way so when they do find out about industrial level food production, it's no great surprise to them to learn that burger and veggies don't just magically appear down TESCO.
You never, ever start off with the backup strategy, you start off with the restore/recover first. What is it that you would need to have back WHEN ( not if! ) XYZ goes tits up? Once you know what you cannot live without, then you work backwards and from that you can come up with backups that will cover what you have to restore.
"What Blu-ray playback software would you recommend then?"
VLC! VLC! VLC! It reads the streams, not all the useless other shit they load onto discs. If you can't be arsed to dig about for the stream, simply pop in the disc and just throw VLC at the disc and it will soon fathom out where the menu system is and show that to you.
Let me expand that, "What movie (file) playback software would you recommend then?"
VLC! VLC! VLC! Transparent source and I've yet to find a format it won't at least have a crack at playing on any platform I've used it on, Linux, Windows, OSX and Android.
Untrusted source? That would be a certain Japanese company by the name of SONY I believe. They've proved once they can't be trusted with even a simple CD, tech has moved on and become more complex and so I certainly wouldn't trust any media they have to sell me.
I remember a company I was working for back in 1994 bought a 48" CRT, it took a team of builders a week to prep the setting for it and a team of 6 people to lift the thing into place. It was absolutely stunning, had picture in picture, more sockets than an old style exchange and loads of other gubbins. No doubt it ended up in a skip on it's way to a scrap pile in the third world in the end.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
