Posts by T_o_u_f_ma_n

Official announcement from the ministry of propa... communication

Ironically it is always the ministry for communications which promises results within an aggressive 3-4 years time frame yet somehow always fail to deliver the 1st part of the program before said time frame has actually passed. No communication is ever issued when it is clear to all that the plan pathetically failed: the ministry of truth, more like. In Ireland, the former communication monstrosity responsible for delivering the infrastructure, Eircom, sat on its laurels for years ripping off customers with high prices for a rubbish connection (Euro 60 per month for a 2 Mb ADSL or ISDN download speed with mandatory landline back in 2005) while the competition was pushing for fiber and cable connections in the big cities. Sadly if it wasn't for NTL/Chorus/UPC/Virgin (whatever the heck they're called this month) and a couple of smaller ISP, even the greater Dublin or Cork areas would still cry for a decent 20Mb link for home customers.

The UK needn't worry, your rankings are safe. Count on total inability to deliver on plan to mess this up and that's even before our politicians get involved with it.

Well, when you do something and Trump, Le Pen, Hofer and Wilders praise you - you know, you've done the wrong thing..

FIFY

Re: Hopefully Brexit...

>* I want Ireland out of CTA and into Schengen, which will never happen unless the UK breaks away

> (personal reason).

Sure why not. Could we have that bit of the north of the island back then since you're done with it ?

Thanks a mill'

Lee Prechaun

Re: Two things spring to mind

Well, OK then. If it is a third party generic component, then Samsung should direct the customer to said component manufacturer to obtain an updated driver.

If it is Samsung's own components then it is their responsibility for issuing updated drivers.

In both cases, just pointing the finger at Microsoft isn't terribly helpful, unless MS buggered the driver layers in Windows 10 so badly that neither generic drivers nor Samsung's work any longer.

I was only making the point that Samsung cannot be bothered with updating firmware for their own SoCs in their own (flagship) phones/phablets/tablets that they produce themselves. That shows they have hopeless after sales support for even their best products. The complexity of the product is irrelevant: if they make it, it is their responsibility to support it.

Re: Just get rid of corporation tax

To reform tax on a global level, one would need to also reform company law in multiple locations at the same time. Corporations have the ability to become themselves limited shareholders of shell companies in many different locations by simply paying basic registration fees and listing a few individuals as directors/secretaries. It is fairly cheap for a global corporations to create a network of loosely owned firms which have no other purpose but to reduce their global tax exposure or to hide losses or to hoard cash etc.

The concept of Corporation Tax has not evolved quick enough to deal with what a Corporation was allowed to become.

Re: It's not that bad.....

€ 150,000 would get you a nice garden shed in Dublin 2 or Dublin 4 for sure. However I would expect people to be mostly interested in concrete and longer term accommodation.

Re: Another reason for Netflix Difficulty

You can either employ people to dub (often badly) other countries' shows and TV movies into French or hire local actors, production crews and TV presenters to create homegrown programs in French.

Oftentimes the quality of the end product is the same however one solution offers better prospects of employment for a whole industry than the other...

The law is a subsidy in disguise but I don't think the average quality of TV shows would suddenly rise if/when this particular law is repelled. There is an awful lot of cr*p on English spoken TV channels around the world too.

Re: VLC

I used to swear by VLC on Windows (and I still use it on Android) but it no longer works straight out of the box for me on some rather common formats (Wave for audio, .MP4 for video). Other players handle the files without the audio/video desync or the constant stutter so I've leaned towards MPC-HD and MediaMonkey/Foobar2000 for my needs. I'm not 100% sure what changed or whether I somehow borked my install (and subsequent updates) but I had to abandon VLC as my single goto software for all things audio/video...

Re: Fine

I think you overestimate the sensibilities of the average Internet user. Unless the other video websites you mention get a significant edge on Youtube feature wise, I cannot see a massive transfer of users happening.

There are ample amounts of people who put up with corporate trash on TV, radio and yes on the Internet too. It is actually quite amazing what people put up with when they think they use a superior service or product (e.g. Farcebook, Gmail, Flash, etc...)

Re: Am I the last person on Earth...

There isn't much money to be made out of a web browser. Ask Opera. If there was a premium version of FF available, what features would it include ? Since it is already ad-free (so far), the Mozilla foundation can only rely on donations and revenue from ads via searches to keep itself going.

It's the perennial question: how to make enough money from Free Software to sustain the organisation without losing its ethos ? How can the Mozilla foundation stay independent from monetary influence by bigger players while still staying solvent ?

Re: Conservative

Actually wasn't that comment about being "conservative" made by the interviewer ?

No matter how "passionate" users might be about the interface they were forced to use for nearly 20 years (!), one could hardly expect them to suddenly welcome such a sharp learning curve when they're trying to get their daily job done. Very few people care about the OS version they run on their computer as long as it doesn't get in the way of simple tasks: sadly getting in the way is exactly what Metro does. And please do not tell me to amend the registry or install an add on to disable parts of the interface. How does that even make sense to people who use mostly MS Office and Internet Explorer at work and have been doing so (by no choice of their own) for years ?

I tried installing "Dropbox" on Windows 8.1 after downloading the installer from the Dropbox website. It would get stuck on "Initialising" for several minutes... Only after I searched on Google did I learn that one had to install it from the Windows Store. Would Microsoft expect all users to figure that one out ? If it has to be installed a specific way, maybe signalling that to the user would help...

Re: And this is censored......

In the case you mention, it was self censorship on the part of the publishers according to the writers of South Park who got involved in the game development. I agree with you that it is very odd but again Europe is still a very fragmented market where laws on abortion for instance differ greatly. I'm not sure that everyone in Ireland or Spain would get the jokes... But then again whoever buys a South Park game or video should really be aware of the content.

As far as banning a show of breasts on a book cover, it just seems really OTT. Anybody walking into a museum would be able to get exposure to women's bodies in various degrees of nakedness through sculptures, paintings and other pieces of art. Hardly the same material as your average Max Hardcore hard back cover magazine.

Re: Always a PC

Unless a sizeable share of companies still running XP / Office '97 decides to either completely switch to a different OS / Productivity Suite (which is time/money consuming) or to give up entirely on getting support from Microsoft by not upgrading (which is risky and potentially expensive from a security point of view), Microsoft still has THAT potential population of users to get upgrade money from. So financially Microsoft still has a captive audience which (willingly or not) is likely to spend money on their products. Maybe some will not upgrade but companies are scared of losing application support and/or spending money re-training users on new systems so a majority will. Whether said products actually improve the business is sadly irrelevant once a client is stuck in the upgrade-because-of-obsolecence cycle...

While this is a lucrative cycle to be stuck in for MS, they haven't been able to ring-fence another market just as well or leverage their desktop advantage into other areas: they've lost the lead pretty much in anything else they attempted to breach in and that is what makes investors uneasy. While they can afford to mess up in the short term because of their deep pockets, they seem to have lost the technological lead and that could cost them dearly in the next 5 years. They may not fade away as quickly as RIM-Blackberry, but Microsoft seem to be quite a dysfunctional entity nowadays (and not just because of Ballmer / Gates) so they would need to be successful in "something else" than just desktop to satisfy their shareholders and guarantee their long term survival.

Re: Cd wallets

I also found that CD wallets were the most sensible way to deal with the ever increasing size of my collection a few years ago. Obviously I would have loved to keep all the cases and display them on shelves library style but it just proved too bulky once I reached 200 plus CDs. Jewel cases just add a lot of extra plastic to your collection for no convenience at all in return. One cannot compare the ease of carrying a wallet around with physically moving a shelf and all its content. Plus as SeanEllis pointed out, they're dirt cheap.

Converting all actual CDs to FLAC (for archiving) and Ogg Vorbis (for mobile audio) however is just taking a little longer than I would have liked... I would recommend dbpoweramp and EAC on Windows to whoever wishes to deal with such massive undertaking but ripping an entire CD collection is by no means a quick venture.