Posts by John H Woods
952 posts • joined Wednesday 14th November 2007 11:44 GMT
Posted in W**k-O-Meter
It's real...
... developed by FiveAgainstTheBaldGuy. I've given it a very quick go and it says that either I'm kidding them or I have a serious medical problem. A subsequent quick shake told me 'the phone is not accurate enough to measure nanoseconds, sorry'.
You're a ...
... vulture culture vulture.
Yes, because ...
... at least the car salesman KNOWS when he's lying
Let me explain ...
We, as giant multinationals, may do research, manufacturing or outsourcing anywhere in the world that suits us. You, as lowly serfs^H^H^H^H^H consumers may only buy goods in your own regions.
Posted in London's Olympic clock claps out
oh be fair ...
... there's a substantial element of pharmacological research
Ok ... from the lawyer's mouth
He tells me that 'v.' stands for 'versus' but should not be written 'vs' or 'versus'.
It is pronounced 'and' in civil cases (Smith v. Jones) and 'against' in criminal ones (R. v. Jones) where R. is Regina or the Crown.
I asked him why and he said he didn't know, but thought it was useful for working out if people knew what they sounding off about. When I said that was typical of lawyers to be deliberately arcane he pointed out that I had sniggered when he had referred to his desktop computer as 'the hard drive', and he suggested that 'geeks' probably use a similar strategy to assess the competence of the folks they are dealing with.
This article is about damage to nuclear reactors ...
... and loss of life. None of the comments, at the time I write this, are the 'anti-nuclear lobby jumping for joy' - your comment is certainly not a reply to such a comment, in any case. It is extremely difficult to respect your opinions because of the timing, context and manner in which you express them.
Many of the workers who have been - and will be - exposed to radioactivity and other dangers will be in that position because they are working to keep other people safe. Show some respect FFS.
Verbum sapientis satis...
I was very fond of referring people to this case but an acquaintance told me that one risks exposing oneself as a legal ingénue by using the word 'versus' in the context of an English civil case, Apparently if you want to do it properly you should write it 'v.' and pronounce it 'and'.
IANAL and would be glad to hear if this is useful advice or if I was being fed a line ...
Carrot required...
Why is it all stick and no carrot? How about average speed cams through villages with ANPR. Stick to the limit and get a smiley face, and an entry into the national raffle for a free vehicle tax disc.
Posted in WD works on hybrid drives
I'm with you...
... I put one in my T61 and it's made a massive difference. Maybe not quite enough :-) but it's not magic.
Posted in Amazon outlines Android bill of rights
Proper search...
... if you want to find good Android apps then use AppBrain (an app recommendation service) or just use an internet search for 'best android apps'. I only ever use the search function of the android market for finding apps that I already know I want - I can imagine it would be terrible for just browsing the market.
112 is the GSM emergency number
It works in the UK, Australia and North America (as well as a few other countries, I believe) not just mainland Europe. Many (Most?) phones will let you dial it whilst they are keypad locked.
three quarters of a century ago...
... the Daily Mail was also a different organisation - an active supporter of the British Union Fascists (famous headline: "Hurrah for the Blackshirts"). But times have changed and Bernados now accept that they were wrong. Not sure about the Daily Mail tho.
Posted in Nuance Flext9
Dic too big...
I bet that's why the app is too big. Most people use 5000 words maximum - Swype and T9 dictionaries (and all spell-check dictionaries) should be small (say 10k words) and extensible. Only crossword solving dictionaries and their ilk need to be huge.
For instance, I was outraged recently to have Swyped 'tine' rather than 'time'. How many fucking times do you want to discuss fork prongs in SMS? It is much, much better to confirm the occasional use of a word outside the top-frequency list than it is to accept mis-spellings because they happen to be obscure or archaic words.
Place names especially should not be present in such dictionaries. Although I have to say that Swype does give you a better class of typo. As I wrote last week - this is Tuscaloosa (Ridiculous).
"IT'S A GAMES CONSOLE"
In other words, a post-sale change made by a manufacturer doesn't count because it is not something in which you are interested?
You say "SONY had the right to change it." That, my friend, is what is called begging the question - you are assuming the very point that is at issue. Naturally, if everybody agreed with you that SONY had that right, you would be entirely correct. But they don't, so you aren't. What you need to demonstrate, if you wish to be taken seriously, is some supporting evidence that SONY have the right to make such changes in the first place.
Of course this is all slightly off topic but, considering the timing (virtually contemporaneous) and the subject matter (ownership of intellectual property) it is hardly surprising that the matter has been raised.
I personally don't give a toss about OtherOS, even though I experimented with it. But I can see why people who DO give a toss about it are aggrieved and, at the moment, I think they are correct that SONY have been (at the very least) unfair. No wonder they are pleased to see SONY getting some 'karmic retribution'.
Lego Dr Who...
... *please* ...
That argument is a tragedy ...
... by which, of course, I must mean that it is a song about a goat.
This is true for ALL the press ...
... as my old Dad liked to point out, if you spoke to an expert in 'x' for long enough, they would eventually tell you how everything written about 'x' in the media was pretty much rubbish. As you went through life, and met more people, you found that this was true for a pretty large range of 'x'.
I am reminded of an ancient punch cartoon...
... showing two old geezers in their high-sided chairs surveying the not terribly interesting proceedings at the old folks home where they live. Caption: "If we hadn't given up smoking and drinking, we'd have missed all this!"
BTW it's more useful to think of a unit as 10ml of alcohol rather than 8g.
amen to that...
"Record researcher Samantha has made one of her customary visits to the gramaphone library, where she runs errands for the kindly old archivists, such as nipping out to fetch their sandwiches. There favourite treat is cheese with homemade chutney, but they never object when she palms them off with relish."
Posted in Windows Phone 7 gets 'goodie' update
WTF?
"When the Iphones didn't have it for years, it was deemed unimportant. When WP doesn't have it for a few months, it's considered a major flaw."
This would only be an "inconsistency" if they had been released contemporaneously. Would you claim I was inconsistent if I criticised a new make of car because it didn't have airbags, and I hadn't taken into account that the first Fords didn't have them either?
Yeah but ...
... Napoleon wasn't short!
actually no...
... try looking in the OED, or Jane Austen, for example. The English changed it to an 's' afterwards, and the Americans kept the 'z' (along with the stupid Month / Day / Year thing).
PR Opportunity
Just reconfigure it to be good at the LINPACK tests.
yes ...
... in fact, Lotus Notes has a web-interface that - even though it's not that good - beats the Notes (fat) Client into a cocked hat.
Posted in Bank scorched by stupid Facebook policy
CBA ...
... usually means something else on Facebook, if I am not very much mistaken.
Posted in Ten... wireless keyboards
I agree...
... those IBM clicky-clicky ones were the dog's. One thing I like to do when i get a keyboard is to swizzle the keys round into the Dvorak layout. It's getting harder with most modern keyboards because the keys from different rows are different sizes, or because some keys have nipple cutouts (GHB on a Thinkpad, frinstance).
@Ramazan
Many people will point out that national law trumps what is written in contracts. Hence Apple UK having to abandon re-stocking fees for mail order goods.
Blimey ...
... if 'not entertaining' can be used as a reason to get a refund on a game, video or audio product I might be able to hear some floodgates opening. Never played Blops on multiplayer, the single player campaign was worth the money. But what about terrible games such as Haze?
I think if you've had the game for 2 months, like Gangsta, you'd be hard pressed to prove it's just been gathering dust. But I've taken games back to GAME a day or after purchase and asked (succesfully) for credit against a different purchase. But then I'm in there every week spending $$$ so they know that if I take something back there's a good reason.
Posted in Wind turbine bonanza expected in Hull
Doesn't matter ...
... when the wind blows, charge up your car!
Unluckiest...
Person... EVER
Repeat after me ...
... the internet is not like other media. It is simply not amenable to the same levels of control, censorship or regulation. The only thing that needs to be done about this is that people need to realise that it is simply not amenable to the same levels of control, censorship or regulation. It seems that politicians and bureaucrats are significantly behind the curve where this realisation is concerned.
Wall socket?
I'm undecided about electric vehicles, for a whole variety of reasons, but I think it's unfair to quote charge times for a single "wall" socket. Any house with a remotely modern electrical system can supply a 10kW load (e.g. a cooker or shower) so I'm pretty sure 230V x 45A would be a quite reasonable expectation for a domestic charging point.
Standard 13A UK three-pin sockets would only ever be used for exceptional circumstances - charging up somewhere where there was no vehicle charging point, and in most houses you can plug two 3kW loads onto a modern ring main without it tripping, so with appropriate circuitry you should be able to get at least 25A from two adjacent wall sockets.
Posted in Lane Fox promises sub-£100 PCs
Agreed ...
3 told me they "don't support linux". Fortunately you can just plug a 3 dongle into a modern Ubuntu distro, and when the box pops up, select '3'. Then it works. It's one of the advantages of using Linux - last time I tried an O2 dongle on Windows it tried to subvert all my Wifi config by replacing the windows zero-config with a huge bloaty buggy mess.
Posted in Top CEOs agree: US is down the crapper
Exactly correct...
... and this is why there are more sports therapists than engineers. You can't outsource sports therapy, so anyone who is any good can always get work where they live. However, someone who is an ace software engineer can easily be out-competed by someone on the other side of the world.*
I don't want to be telling my son that plumbing is a better career option in the UK than software development, but unfortunately it's the truth, and until your toilet can be remotely unblocked from China, it's going to stay that way.
* In my experience, the competition is only on price, because outsourced software is rubbish. Not because of the quality of the people doing the coding, but because of the increased disconnect between the recipients and producers of the system: managing complex and changing requirements was hard enough when teams were small and co-located.
Posted in HTC Desire HD
Tasker ...
... can save you battery life.
It's not free but it rocks. For instance - automatically switch wifi off when not in range of home wifi; enter power saving mode if placed face down. go into quiet mode if both at home; on charge and it's between midnight and 6 am.
Also divert calls from mistress' phone straight to voicemail if you're at home :-)
I got a DHD for Xmas and I haven't yet put it down, I absolutely love it. Hopefully a bigger battery will be available someday but I'm quite happy having it on charge whenever I am at home or in the car.
The screen is so large it is effectively a mini-tablet, and as a handheld computing device, I think HTC have set the bar. Any larger, and you'd probably not want to hold it up to your head, unless you are Dara O'Briain. But for chunky fingered lardies like me, who could use the exercise of carrying an extra few grams, it cannot be beaten.
If you want a lot of standby time, just do what I did - spend a fiver on a tiny cheap Samsung and carry that around as well. But
Please can we distinguish ...
... between percentages and percentage points?
RIM: 35.0% -> 19.2% (loss of 15.8 percentage points or 45.1%)
iOS: 20.9% -> 26.9% (gain of 6 percentage points [not 7] or 28.7%)
Android: 27.5% -> 40.8% (gain of 13.3 percentage points or 48.4%)
Other: 16.6% -> 13.1% (loss of 3.5 percentage points or 21.1%)
Same for VAT please: it is a 2.5 percentage POINT increase - it has gone up by 14.3% and represents a 2.1% increase in the price of goods with standard rate VAT.
I'm pretty sure I'll have fallen foul of Muphry's law here somewhere, but I still think we should encourage the term percentage POINT
[A-Za-z0-9]+
I've bought loads of apps from the Android market. Some of these are "unnecessary" - for instance the free version of Maverick (off-road GPS) is quite good enough, but at the same time it is so good I couldn't resist the opportunity to bung the developer the tiny amount of loose change the pro version cost. Is this a sustainable model? I think only time will tell.
Google IBS
Hint: the first result is not iSoft Business Systems. Surely it's worth a quick check before naming your business?
LOL
So did I!
How detector vans might work:
Well I can think of some fairly simple electronics that would do the trick. But maybe it's just electronics to make beep-beep noises, after all.
And within a few hundred years...
... the parasitic meme of religion took hold of our gullible race and cost us at least a millennium of scientific and mathematical progress (and probably philosophical, ethical and social progress too).
Yes ...
... the OECD report notes, according to the report in the Telegraph:
"Countries where schools had more bureaucratic freedom performed better and the study showed a strong link between good discipline and high scores "
Of course, the government response to our recent poor performance in this test means that they will feel they need to exert even more control.
Just the excuse I needed ...
... to cancel my paypal acct.
Errm...?
"I suspect the causes are typical geeky ignorance of real politics along with unhealthy doses of mind-deadening socialism spoon-fed over a lifetime. "
Wow - you're objecting to ad hominem attacks (on RL and his followers) with this?
Don't be so modest, Cake.
See title
Be nice to Ke$ha you lot ...
... come on - how many hot blonde pop starlets are on record as saying they like fat blokes with beards?
