Posts by Dazed and Confused

Re: UK Music has claimed that the reforms will cost musicians £58 million a year in lost revenues

Some people have never heard of the idea that having a better product might lead to better sales.

In the 15 years before I started ripping CDs to play them through MP3 type players I might have averaged 1 or 2 CD purchase a year. Most years since then I've probably been closer to 100 since I suddenly had a format which meant it was sufficiently convenient to use the product. I don't mind paying for my music (and spoken word CDs), I don't see why musicians shouldn't be paid for the work they do. But I'll only buy something that I'm going to use. Make it usable and I'm in the market, stop it being usable or make me feel like I'm being ripped off and my money will stay in my pocket.

Re: Typical!

That is how the EU commissioners are chosen. Don't all EU governments nominate commissioners like this? Look at some of the dolts we've packed off to Brussels.

Re: Biter Bit

The spooks need to realise that they aren't unique. If they can decrypt something then we have to assume that so can everyone else.

Re: Most people realise

My point was that why would someone design a mobile that is designed not to be able to be carried in the way that you know most people are going to carry it. It's a question of whether the design is fit for purpose. I've no idea how the size compares with an SGS4 but that works fine in the front pocket of any trousers I've tried, but I'd not not try sticking it in a back pocket and sitting down. Lesson learned from Nokia bricks... sit on them and you end up with bruised buttocks.

Re: An excellent excuse to label all our employees as potential terrorists,

No No No, employees are potential saboteurs

It's voters that are the potential terrorists, I mean some of them aim to bring down the current government!

Re: When will the morons learn that the cloud isn't secure?

Not all clouds are public clouds.

Many companies will run their own private ones,

Re: Security

> exciting when one considers that the nominal user might need it to buy their ticket back home

But if you're battery is flat they won't let you on the plane and you'll probably be shot as a terrorist anyway. So by not letting you buy a ticket they're gonna save your life.

Apple just forgot to backdoor the Healthkit.

Where would the thermometer go then?

Re: Meeeh

Before CDE HP-UX had them in VUE, and I'm sure they'd been around before then. Now HP's VUE is where MS got 3d effect windows from, HP & MS had agreed on making various things common in appearances and many of the keyboard shortcuts. These then became available in Windows 3. So its taken them a long time to implement the rest... like 25 or more years.

Re: Microsoft Minecraft EULA addendum

Don't forget in game purchases, all materials used in construction are now to be purchased in the new store feature.

voters or industry

My money is with you on this one.

Two million votes sent emails but since none were making campaign contributions they wouldn't count for anything.

Re: Multi-user authentication?

> No, the NSA don't need a password to login.

But they insist on knowing anyway. You're not even allowed to keep that secret

Re: What essentially saved TCP/IP?

> Looked at Exchange Server addresses lately ?? :-)

Hey I run a Scalix server at home, which used to be OpenMail, so the whole internal addressing scheme is X.400. But I don't have to fight the rest of the damn thing and can largely ignore all the X.400 addressing stuff which was always bloody stupid and unfit for purpose.

Re: Arapaho used Left-hand Screws?

> Not once you include right-side wheel lugs on old Chrysler products.

Lots of vehicles had those, not just Chrysler. I remember spending a couple of hours with increasingly large spanners trying to take the back wheel of an ambulance, with mate standing on one side of a bloody great big spider while I hauled up on the other side... nothing till in frustrate thumped the spider in the other direction and it span free.

Incidentally all cars with knock off wheels have spinners going in the opposite direction to wheel so the trundling effect tightens then rather than coursing the wheel to drop in the first 50feet.

Re: They need to release 250GB or 500GB discs for 8K and 4K...

> HDTV became a standard thanks to the Blu-Ray and the Sony Playstation3 gave a huge sales boost worldwide.

I rather felt that HDTV became accepted as a standard because it became available at about the time when flat screen TVs became affordable. The move to flatscreens was a significant benefit to a lot of people, it save tones of space in the living room and made bigger teles practical. Digital and HD just happened to be happening at the same time and got a free ride on it's coat tails.

BTW, Sony's version of HDTV was 1920x1200 not the spec we ended up with which is lousy 1080p. Sure looked good in 1990 when they lent me their demo system for a show stand. Doesn't that make it pre-date the original PS?

Re: On handguns or American morals

Americans have guns, but are legally forbidden from having nipples. Americans have guns in case they ever discover anyone who posesses a pair of nipples (therefore must be a witch)

If we import American moral standards we'll all need to surrender our nipples in return for being allowed to carry guns, but all right thinking people know that it is better to show people shooting other people than to show any evidence that people are mamals and that therefore Dawin might have had a point.

Re: Sahara etc

> Yeah, we usually blame the extensive deforestation on the Brits - where do you think they got the timber to build all those ships to rule the world from the 16th Century on!

Err that lot of oak came from the British Isles (well mostly)

Funnily I heard something on R4 the other day where someone was saying they'd been involved in some environmental committee a few years back where they were looking at trees and visited the Forest of Dean and he was extolling the beautiful natural woodland, when a local pointed out that none of it was natural, it was all planted to grow battle ships for the navy.

Bikes and corners

I remember back in the 70's reading a review in something like Autocar or Motor where they pitched the new Honda CBX inline 6 cylinder bike against the an Aston Martin Vantage, the bike was miles ahead at the first corner, just ahead at the end of lap 1 and then disappeared after that and no one ever accused the Vantage of being particularly good at corners. A Bugatti Veyron might beat one of these to the first corner, but after that it wouldn't see which way this thing went.

Re: New Category Needed

Still need to be able to complain so the programme planners know we want something more interesting than the normal twaddle that pollutes the airwaves.

Re: Turkeys campaigning for Christmas

> This is a catch-22 for Apple, fighting a patent troll in court which could lead to a legal decision against trolls which could well be used against their own trolling in the future

Just like Oracle hell bent on asserting that APIs are patent/copyrightable just so they can be forced to hand over every red cent they ever earned to IBM.

Re: , all we as sys admins care about is ...

" that data is only important to the users, all we as sys admins care about is uptime and minimum outages."

True, until the bastards try to screw you down and you know all the emails about it are stored where you've got full access.