Posts by Chris Hedley 31 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2007
> "I think I'd prefer Judge Dredd."
I dunno, having the police issue cautions in the form of mildly risque ska sounds quite entertaining to me.
But I'm also warming to the idea of Judge Dredd as the Style Police. Maybe we'll be rid of flared trousers once and for all!
> "Does that suggest to you that you are a typical consumer broadband subscriber?"
Is there even such a thing? If there is, I suspect that playing games online is a more likely motivator than illegally downloading music that would've probably never been bought anyway. People have numerous different reasons for thinking broadband is fundamentally a better thing than dialup; whilst "freetard" may make a better headline, I can't help feeling that it isn't really the truth of the matter. It certainly wasn't part of my own reasons to go down the broadband route, which are mostly the reasons already mentioned several times here: always on, unmetered, less inconvenient, doesn't tie up the phone etc etc. The fact that I can download 1GB texture packs for the latest RPG in less than three weeks is a nice added bonus.
> "He's either a criminal, in which case he should be jailed, or he's a nut, in which case he should be sectioned."
I'm afraid you seem to have made a wrong turn. The Daily Mail's the third door on the left.
Sigh. I'm reminded of Monty Python's "burn the witch!" sketch. Not quite so amusing when it's actually happening, though.
> "The Oracle acquisition has raised doubt over the future status of ZFS, and it's possible that it may just disappear"
Arse. I /like/ ZFS a lot; so much stuff is lost due to take-over shenanigans. I can only hope it isn't yet another casualty... Sadly, I don't have much faith. :(
> The broadcaster was hit by a painful drop in ad revenues last year when it reported a net loss of £2.55bn that led to 600 job cuts at the company in March.
Maybe it's something to do with viewers switching off (literally) due to being spammed to death by ads. "More is more" might sound like a good thing at the advertising boutique, but from a viewer's perspective it just makes the TV unwatchable. Well, that and broadcasting crap in the decreasing amount of time when ads aren't being shown.
Still, sod that, sack your techies and outsource their jobs somewhere cheap because it's worked so well for everyone else who's tried, eh? Or maybe they'd be better off outsourcing their management to people in possession of a clue instead of a business degree.
Speaking as a lard-arse who doesn't really appreciate the attention of the mouth-breathers, I'm still utterly against this sort of proposed legislation: in fact I'd rather see existing "hate crime" repealed and instead rely on laws to tackle actual crimes, y'know, assault and stuff. As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather know up-front that some gobshite's a halfwit than have them silenced only to find out later. And if someone wants to dribble about my circumference, so what? I can lose weight, but there's bugger all they can do about being an idiot.
> "Why on earth is the Met Office part of the MOD anyway?"
Knowing what the weather's doing /is/ quite important in military planning. Though military planning isn't something we seem to do much of these days, so maybe you're right.
Whatever the truth behind this, it is a worrying trend. I'm not sure it does any of us any good that Labour and the Conservatives are locked in a "battle to be the most unelectable" contest.
I've no doubt the TSB had some antique equipment, but I don't think it's entirely fair to blame them for the current state of things: as an ex-TSB customer, I noticed the overall quality of service take several steps backwards when Lloyds took over.
As for the current problem, I noticed that I was unable to login until I cleared my cookies & cache, then it was fine. But still unimpressed with the degree of incompetence both in that I had to do that, and that they claim Firefox is unsupported and are encouraging customers to compromise their security by using IE. Then again, I don't think I can really expect too little from a company that thinks that running a financial system on Windows is a good idea.
Is there somehow vast riches to be made by alienating one's customer base, i.e. the people who've bought the songs whose lyrics they'd quite like to decipher? That's the only possible explanation I can think of for this unrelenting crusade of apparently pointless litigation.
Well, that and stupidity, in which case anything that hastens the culprits' demise is surely a good thing.
Though not a user of Napster or any of the other dubiously legal downloading facilities, I /still/ found Ulrich's pompous and offensively pious attitude so insufferable that I could no longer bear to listen to his band. Which I think is a net gain for my taste in music.
"Lars Ulrich is a cock" etc.
I like Giles Coren, but if the reportard wants to tax away my pie I'll roll on him. Bets are off as to whether his diminutive stature will withstand my BMI of 350 or whatever it is.
Pint of bitter, since there's /still/ no pie icon. What are you thinking, El Reg? Are you diet nazis as well?
Nothing at all to do with the Thatcher & Major gov't, then? Don't get me wrong, Labour are completely useless tossers, but anybody who thinks the Tories aren't at least as bad either has a very short memory or is a mug. Me, I'm just bemoaning the absence of a Monster Raving Loony candidate for my locale, at least they're honest about what they are.
As for the article, there's already been so much blathering about "UK crap, America awesome" from this source that I've rather run out of patience to try to figure out if it's credible or not. I'll assume probably not.
"They just won't do the honourable thing and call a general election"
What good would it do? Do you seriously believe that whoever ousts this shower will be an improvement? Who will you vote for? The Nasty Party? Mainstream politics in this country is in a very worrying state; the incumbents are utterly dire and the hopefuls present absolutely no useful alternative whatsoever.
We're screwed.
This is absolutely terrifying. I remember back in the day there was a market for "fault tolerant" computing where it really mattered: and this was for systems that were inherently more reliable to begin with.
Seems now we're going down the route of "fault guaranteed".
Who's the total and utter fuckwit that actually authorised this? Why did nobody challenge them?
That isn't exactly a good measure of how good the Challenger is or isn't, just that Britain still holds its crown as "the world's worst salesmen", an area where both the Americans and Germans are far more skilled. Of course articles like this don't help.
The Leopard is arguably a better all-rounder than the Challenger 2; it certainly has a better engine and is lighter and cheaper, but it has worse armour and though opinions are divided, its smoothbore gun is more limited in its abilities, even if it is extremely effective at firing APFSDS. But overall there's not much in it. The Challenger 2 has an /image/ problem, not helped by the rather half-arsed effort at dressing up a Chieftain as the Challenger 1 and pretending it was a new tank, then deciding to re-use the now tarnished name for their shiny new tank. But image ain't everything. Unless you're a salesman.
I've heard the "tanks are obsolete" argument for just as long as I've heard "Unix is obsolete", well over 20 years in both cases, yet both stubbornly refuse to go away. I guess the real world has this annoying tendency to contradict what looks good on paper.
And the "Sherman was Britain's best tank"? Er, no. Most available, perhaps, but as others have said, it was already bested by WWII designs such as the Comet, admittedly easily forgotten since it's overlooked by the US/German armour fanboys. The Centurion was probably the UK's most renowned tank and was hardly battle-shy, whereas the Chieftain was often given the "world's best" accolade for good reason. The current "embarrassingly aged" Challenger is another example of confounding media expectations, and as for it's age it's comparatively more youthful than the US M1, though I guess we should at least be thankful for small mercies in that we were saved the usual "we should buy American" rhetoric. Though perhaps worth pointing out that they can't build one all by themselves either what with its nice Chobham armour and stylish Rheinmetall cannon... or for "can't" perhaps "won't" since tanks benefit from globalisation as much as anything else.
And finally for those using this as an excuse to illustrate the evils of Labour, remember that the Conservatives were no better, introducing the bloody awful SA80, closing Royal Ordnance, having the fleet critically under strength at the outbreak of the Falklands Unpleasantness... no political points to be scored here since the useless buggers are all as bad as each other.
>> "Billy boy and co wrote Amiga BASIC for the Amiga, and god damn it was awful! It made lots of Amiga users glad they never developed virtually anything else for the platform!"
That brings back painful memories. Gates' BASIC made my first computer, a Dragon 32, a laughing stock with the contemporary technology press. At the time I thought that they were just being rather mean spirited towards the Welsh wonder, but the inevitable reality gradually dawned that it was indeed encumbered by a spectacularly crap version of the language compared to many of the other pre-IBM PC home computers. My realisation that Microsoft's products tended not to live up to the hype was a lesson learnt the hard way.
>> "DEC were, until Compaq bought them out (probably to kill a competitor), another huge company that had revenues bigger than MS."
DEC fell victim not to Compaq's taste for acquisitions, but inept management: after the board inexplicably (or at least too hastily) replaced Olsen with the visionless Palmer, the only way was down. Very sad, really, a lot of good technology sunk with it, but they were too busy with in-fighting and endless reorganisations to bother with apparently tedious irrelevances like customers. Who, ironically, were often lining up to buy their stuff only to find that they couldn't even beg DEC to sell it to them under Palmer's regime.
IBM PHB: "[...] how these assets and services could be leveraged."
Does anybody actually know what this means? More importantly, should we really have expected any particularly helpful decision from somebody who apparently thinks that this sort of thing makes any sense, or at least believes that the Great Unwashed will be impressed?
Well that's progress for you I suppose. I barely watch the telly any longer as it is because of the seemingly endless adverts for random tat I'll never want (and whatever happened to funny, entertaining ads? Seeing some hand-wringer coaxing a bunch of halfwits to talk about the injuries they sustained bashing themselves over the head with various blunt objects when they were supposed to be working is about as funny as having leprosy. But I digress...), are they trying to kill the medium off altogether?
"I haven't seen any reduction."
Me neither, just a bigger increase in everything else: 50-100 spams daily (not including the numerous non-deliveries to the fake address lists sold to halfwits and other annoyances) six months ago, 200-250 daily now. I'm afraid it's a bit of a stretch to call that "good news" of any sort really, other than for the spammers' ability to waste even more of everyone else's time and resources.
... I demand the following:
* That Snickers are known as Marathons once again. I don't eat chocolate that sounds as if it's named after a venereal rash.
* That Opal Fruits stop calling themselves Starburst. It's not big and it's not clever.
* The return of paper wrappers for chocolate bars so that I can get into the bloody things. I'm sure a vague comment about the joy of green biodegradable wind-farmed lentils and global warming should do the trick.
Until my demands are met, I'm holding my diet hostage.
I'm another one who's left Virgin, and it's nothing to do with the lack of Sky's offerings--they're crap anyway unless one happens to be addicted to cheap ads for bad finance and ambulance-chasers. I left because I couldn't face the prospect of dealing with their customer service any longer. Still, it's always easier for them to blame someone else, I suppose.
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