Posts by The Dark Lord
99 posts • joined Wednesday 9th April 2008 08:56 GMT
Not exactly in defence, but...
This is a problem endemic with Adobe's free products. They're crap, and they come with crap that you don't want.
But shell out for their headline apps, like Photoshop, Lightroom, Dreamweaver etc, and what you find are highly polished, highly capable products that do what they're meant to do, and with aplomb.
Adobe's business model seems to be a living parable for "you get what you pay for".
Posted in Why you need a home lab to keep your job
Creeping Death
I agree with the posters who've said that this is yet another way in which companies take the piss out of their employees. And some employees actively encourage it. I know several people who have home labs that they spend the weekends working on.
And it's work. Not even hobbyist tinkering, it's proper work. They then get a significant advantage during the working week because they're making the rest of us (those with families, hobbies, etc) look like we're thick. We're not thick, we're just not donating two days a week of free labour to the company.
It pisses me off, and it pisses me off that managers then EXPECT that out-of-hours working from everyone. In this timesheet-obsessed cost-cutting world, personal development is long gone. Companies obsessed with growth need to do some of the nurturing that growth requires. And employees with home labs need to understand that they're undermining their colleagues and themselves.
Ultrabook Spec
In my view, ultrabooks won't succeed until they have touchscreens installed. users graduating from tablets to something with a proper keyboard spend ages prodding the screen and getting frustrated with it. I can only imagine that this will become unbearable on Windows 8.
So, OEMs: Make an ultrabook in the same form factor but touch-enable the screen. And yes, when I say "the same form factor" I do mean "don't delete the trackpad you cheapskates".
OEMs are also being pretty dim generally. With BYOD becoming increasingly prevalent, OEMs need to appeal to individuals, which means sexy designs, not corporates and their relentless bottom-line chasing.
Two problems...
I played with LEGO a LOT as a child, but my elder sister wasn't interested. So I don't think it's a new phenomenon.
Now I'm a parent, I've got two real problems with LEGO. Firstly, it's REALLY expensive. Any model of any substance is £25 or more. It makes it very difficult to buy as a birthday present for someone else's child, because it's too expensive. The smaller sets are incidental "stocking filler" types, but are still too expensive to be bought as an incidental thing like a bribe for good behaviour. These two factors combine to largely eliminate the mass-aggregation of sets that I had as a boy.
Secondly (and this is something James May commented on when he built his LEGO house) too many of the pieces are single-use. In order to provide visual richness to the end product, the typical set has many parts that are suitable only for that set. This further dilutes the original aim of LEGO of it being "a new toy every day." Every set seems to be a model, an end-goal clearly in site. I remember getting sets that were basically big boxes full of bricks with a few ideas. Now you have multi-page build manuals, bagged component groups and a over-reliance on the construction being a process that must be followed exactly to achieve a pre-determined goal, rather than it being general principles of construction that allow the child to make what he (or she) has in their head.
Getting to the point
Takes a long time for this piece to make the key point:
> Source aggregation and - where possible - hands-on testing is still vital for all of us who work in IT.
"Source aggregation" (not just reading things in one place and believing/disbelieving them) is the core of intelligent reading. No one journalist, not even one outlet (sorry El Reg) can be exclusively trusted.
Too few people do their own diligence these days. Far easier to allow themselves to have their minds made up for them.
Good money after bad
That's right muppets. You made a bad investment decision, and lost a trunkful of money. But instead of learning and moving on you're now going to spend MORE money on lawyers trying to get back that which you wouldn't have lost had you understood WTF you were doing in the first place...
Losing money hurts, but really, that pain should be a lesson to the loser, not reflected onto whoever's last in the firing line. Anyone who knew anything could see Facebook was a massive lose-lose risk.
Posted in BOFH: Siri, why do users lie?
Top stuff
Happily bimbling along enjoying another BOFH, but then Simon goes and makes it all awesome right at the very end. Well done sir(i)!
Posted in Google Drive Issues on Mac
Lucky escape
Frankly, if a piece of software designed to steal all my content didn't work properly, I'd consider that a lucky escape!
Why anyone's capitulating to this IP landgrab I really can't understand.
Short years at El Reg
First 2011 issue 11th Feb, last issue 18th Nov. I make that 10 months' of BOFH.
Christmas is my busiest time of the year while the clients panic to set everything up for the New Year. Is BOFH on holiday for two months?
Easy life...
Nice green thinking by the Eurocrats there...
It's this sort of blithering idiocy that engenders Euroscepticism. A lovely anti-envrionmentalist policy for all.
I'm all in favour of charging a value-add tax on the reader, but on the content? It just betrays a complete failure to understand on the part of the politicians involved.
Posted in Apple plugs iTunes Ghost Click hole
iTunes update
10.5.1 also doesn't fix random UI pauses on high-spec Windows 7 machines.
But, unforgivably, it required a reboot! What is this, 1997? Christ Apple, get a freaking grip on your packagers!
Nannying
Up here in Edinburgh, the entire class "SN07" was not issued because someone in the DVLA thought "snot" was offensive.
Customer service? Apple: Ha ha ha
"Six weeks later, you'll receive your replacement."
They want you to send your player off to them, and then SIX WEEKS LATER they'll send you an unbroken one? What are you supposed to do for those six weeks? Hum?
Well, duh
Does this wonk also recommend the use of warm water when trying to boil an egg?
In Pixar's back catalogue...
... you see that they have already committed Steve Job's bio to silicon celluloid.
He is, of course...
SYNDROME!
Rejected in the youth of his career by his closest ally, then comes back all natty-dressed and laden with shiny gadgets. And quite evil & shouty with it.
Well I for one
... refuse to be gouged by this transparent money-grabbing tactic.
Honestly, Disney is a terrible company that exists only to fleece parents by continually releasing drugs for avaricious children (which is, let's face it, pretty much all of them).
And retro-fitting 3D to movies is just an appalling concept. I'm sure George Lucas is working on a 3D re-re-re-re-re-re-release of Star Wars.
I'd be fine with buying 2D Blu Ray remasters of some of the movies, but going to see it in 3D in the cinema? Forget it.
Posted in Vodafone dishes out free unlimited data
Easy offer to make
"Unlimited" they say? Limited only by their utterly despicable data network, surely.
I think you'd struggle to hit your download cap even if you spent all month at it. Shocking service.
Not all of the story
And what became of the people who didn't check this man's work? An organisational structure that puts the keys to the cash register in a man's pocket and then turns away is at least as much to blame as the man who fails to withstand the temptation.
Meanwhile, doubtless, some clerk is having their £10 bill for office supplies mercilessly scrutinised.
Posted in dabs.com says sorry for delivery debacle
I dropped them years ago
I dropped them years ago after they changed their transaction system. They did something that caused my bank to block my card every time I bought something from Dabs. The bank didn't really want to discuss the exact mechanics with me.
I tried to provide feedback to Dabs because I thought they might value it. They weren't interested. So now I use other suppliers.
It's a shame, because when they started out, they were excellent
Seems like a lot of effort...
... for precisely zero result. So _you_ can specify the image you look at for 3/10ths of a second while you're sliding the power switch? Is that really worth "jailbreaking" the device at the potential expense of warranty?
That being said, I too am confused as to why it doesn't sleep to the cover of the (last) active book.
Posted in Huge fat pipe squirts mighty streams
Nice to see...
... that on a day where I myself am having difficulty stringing sentences together, Lewis has no trouble with the mot juste.
"Smut hose". Funniest thing I've read in a long while.
I've already bought the first three twice
... and that's enough, thanks.
The more I watch them, the more I come round to Alec Guinness's way of thinking.
Posted in Leicester unloses key data
Please help calibrate my BS meter
"we ran a series of tests on it which indicated that the data on it has not been accessed during the period the device was missing."
Is this actually possible? It sounds like the just the kind of BS an organisation comes out with to provide some reassurance to an unquestioning idiocracy.
Of course, I could be being unfair...
Lowest life form?
Err, once you've discounted all the genocidal maniacs running around the entire globe, all the despots and bandits in Africa, the drug barons in South America, and the rapists, murderers and paedophiles, I assume?
"Microsucks". Ha ha ha.
For heaven's sake, actually think about what you're writing before vomiting your patheic bile over all our screens. Troll.
Posted in Channel VAT loophole shrunk, not shut
Tax exemptions
This is yet another example of how the panopoly of tax exemptions creates more harm than good. A simplified tax system will allow people to operate their businesses in a stable manner without worrying about protectionism being induced by special interest groups.
The High Street Music Stores only have themselves to blame. They have singularly failed to capitalise on their market advantage. Where Amazon et al can maintain massive inventories in warehouses, but the consumer still takes a risk on a purchase, the HSMSs could have pursued "try before you buy" models that would allow consumer certainty. However, by piling the latest chart trash into rack upon rack, they have neglected the opportunity of bricks-and-mortar to provide value-add to clients. They've taken on the distribution warehouses at their own game and have - by & large - lost.
If you look at successful retailers competing against the internet you see time and time again that customer service wins, especially if it is coupled with risk mitigation. Allowing a customer first hand experience of a product adds value to them, for which they will pay. Sure, for many customers, price remains the only consideration, but that is because they have not appraised or have devalued the risk element of an untried purchase.
While their businesses are under threat from internet retailers, you do see that camera and hifi shops are able to build sustainable businesses charging 20% more than the internet for the same thing.
At a lower price level, clothes retailers offer similar value to customers.
Nothing to see here....
... 'cept lawyers feathering their own nests.
It is quite amusing to watch the hysterical language though. Erudite people going at it playground-style
Posted in Killzone 3
Staying in the Zone
The Reg reviewer has completely failed to mask their distaste for this style of game. The review reads as if Mr Bailey's initial response to the task was "Killzone THREE? They made another instalment of this crap?"
Killzone is an FPS, plain and simple. It's not an FPS which is trying to pretend it's an adventure game. It's got clearly defined targets, missions, processes and goals. They fit in with the storyline. Some people (myself included), like this level of focus and direction. I personally can't be bothered spending hours exploring/wandering about aimlessly (delete as appropriate) in the hope that I happen upon what I'm supposed to be doing to progress. Yes, it's fun discovering things, but not if that fun is only derived from a release from the ennui of trying to work out what it is that is to be discovered.
KZ2 was a phenomenal cinematic experience to play, and yet one which facilitated your way through the game efficiently. I've played the KZ3 demo, and I'm a bit disappointed that they've jacked up the lighting to COD's toytown level. Otherwise it's more of the same only more intense and with more weapons. It appeals to me, hence my positive feelings on it.
So, it's not that KZ3 is an awful game. It's not even that it's an awesome game. It's just that El Reg's reviewer couldn't stop himself from trashing the format and then trying to make his review fit his preconceived idea.
Missed point
The article reads as "deduplication is bad, or at least isn't as good as you thought it was", whereas the actual point is that dropping vast storage arrays onto your network doesn't excuse you from carrying out good capacity planning.
I'm tired of asking organisations what their storage/app pool/network/etc utilisation is like only to be told "oh, the kit is so fast/massive we don't have to worry about it". As the "track your usage" AC pointed out, capacity planning is all about the rate of consumption of space, but the sad fact is that most managers don't look at your capacity graphs until it's too late. Then they fall bad on dedupe and emergency deletion until the problem goes away.
Organisations have to face up to the fact that buying the storage array is only the start of paying for storage.
Posted in Flickr thinks again about 4,000 pix loss
Metadata
"in the case of Flickr, it would be damn useful to at least be able to back up the title, description, keywords, tags and people."
The easiest way to do this is with a Digital Asset Management tool (e.g. Aperture, Lightroom, or any number of FOSS alternatives). Tag the image BEFORE upload, not after. Then you've got the metadata stored in your DAM database/the image EXIF/an XMP sidecar (delete as appropriate).
Hell, you can even do your own geolocation outside of Flickr (using e.g. Geosetter).
Posted in Flickr thinks again about 4,000 pix loss
Reminds me of a line from a movie...
"Flickr will also soon roll out functionality that will allow us to restore deleted accounts more easily in the future."
Calls to mind the line from the (otherwise hateful) Broken Arrow: "I don't know what's scarier, losing nuclear weapons, or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it. ".
Also, on whether "25 years" == "lifetime", then we need to consider whose life is being measured: the 'tog's or Flickr's!
Posted in O2 to fling out free Wi-Fi for all
Internet access
Is something I can live without, if the price of it is some gimp flinging ads for crap I don't want at me.
Posted in Scotland bans smut. What smut? Won't say
We do not publicly disclose our prosecution policy
"We do not publicly disclose our prosecution policy..."
This is beyond scary. Alternative translations include:
- we want the freedom to make it up so as to be able to prosecute whomsoever we want
- we haven't decided yet
- our people are so capricious it's impossible for us to pin them down to a consistent application of the law
I'm figuring that #1 is in effect.
Jump Starting
Yep, iMac jump-started (or rather defibrillated) Apple, but little else. It truly was a computer for people who thought they needed a computer but didn't really want any part in the computer ownership process.
Since iMac Apple has done a great job of exploiting this market sector - they've done the same thing with smartphones and with netbooks - but their innovation is always in bringing tech to those who want tech without the knowledge acquisition burden.
Call this a destroyer?
What a pitiful array of weaponry!
A destroyer should be from the Neo class: Guns, Lots of Guns
Posted in Brits say 'no, no, no' to 3D TV
Not surprising
3D is only on the higher-end sets, not well supported on Blu-Ray players, has a very poor range of viewing media, and forces the user to adopt glasses that may not be comfortable or convenient for them.
So, it's really not surprising that THIS YEAR, relatively few people are planning a purchase. Especially since (as Anthony Shortland mentions) the collapse of panel prices in the last two years means that many tech-savvy houses have young sets.
I'm ordering a new 3D TV this weekend though. My circumstances are such that a 3D TV purchase makes sense for me at this time.
Twenga didn't poll me.
Backups are subject to court order
I'm surprised nobody has cottoned onto this aspect yet. I'll go through it stepwise:
1. user posts content
2. user content is backed up to offline media
3. user deletes content
4. user content is not backed up to offline media
5 court order requests _all_ media, including that of steps 4 AND 2.
The only "fail" here is that people aren't thinking that deleting their content _now_ doesn't affect the way their content was backed up when they first posted it; and that the assumption is that backups _wouldn't_ be covered under a court order.
Posted in Star Wars set for 3D rehash
This is a title
Phantom Menace the worst? Not by a long shot. That's got to go to Attack of the Clones, which - while some of the battle scenes were good, and the Obi-Wan/Jango Fett story line was excellent, was dragged into the realms of the dreadful by the tawdry and turgid "love scenes" between Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman.
In fact, on much the same grounds, I would say that Revenge of the Sith is a credible candidate for second-worst. By contrast, The Phantom Menace has the least overplayed acting, and the best relationships between the characters of the prequels.
Accordingly, The Phantom Menace - which is a proper kids' movie - is only the third worst.
And I wonder how long those of us who enjoyed the Star Wars movies AS children will continue to cling onto the notion that they're the very best of all time, in consideration of the fact that there are better movies coming out of studios like Pixar. George Lucas has made a biblical quantity of money through the marketing of rose tinted glasses.
Re: Oh noes...
No, the news here is that Google is using software algorithms to enforce their view of what we should be searching for onto us, but are branding it as "helpfulness". Google has now joined Apple, in being the recipient of the "JUST USE WHAT I FUCKING TYPED" rant.
Clickety-click-click
I wonder if El Reg were so dismissive of Sony, who had exactly the same control mechanism on their CD and MiniDisc Walkmans, around the turn of the millennium.
Oops, sorry, I've just demonstrated that Apple didn't invent some radical new control mechanism.
Posted in FarmVille moooves onto iPhone
"you'll already be getting bombarded with status updates "
Err, no. There's a hidden button on each status update allowing you to hide the person posting or the application posting the update. I've hidden all the games, and de-friended the most serious offenders.
Also, this is the only reason I log into the main Facebook site. I do everything else on it from my iPod or Tweetdeck or Lightroom.
Posted in Stephen Fry's truly terrible mistake
Commercial greed
So is Mr Orlowski's rant (for that's all it is) a rant about DAB being bad or Stephen Fry's voiceover appearing to convey that he endorses the bad product? Seems poorly aimed either way.
DAB has been a victim of the broadcasters' desire to reduce signal quality to the consumer's tolerance threshold in a desperate aim to shovel more shit at us. You only have to see the sprawl of stations (especially on TV) peddling generic rubbish at terrible quality. In this light, it's not hard to see why internet radio is succeeding: it is at least possible to find some high bandwidth streams that don't sound appallingly compressed on anything other than supermarket brand hi-fi.
Not for nothing have Pure gained the greatest DAB penetration with a portable set whose speaker placement means it may as well be playing a mono signal from 1955.
Broadcasters: give us fewer channels with better programmes, in better quality. Stop assaulting our audio/visual senses with dumbed down crap.
The A2 was a nice little car
The A2 was overpriced and under-marketed, but it was actually a good little car. If you were resource conscious, it allowed you to have a neat little city car with all the big car acoutrements. But it did 50mpg.
My wife had one for a couple of years, only getting rid of it when child #3 came along. Very well screwed together, and a hoot to drive if you rang its neck.
If only people would drop the Chelsea Tractors and drive cars like the A2, cities would be a nicer place.
In summary then
So, in summary, this Tory candidate is a git. Hasn't strictly done anything wrong, is likely to incite the ire of the "won't somebody think of the children" lobby, but is a git nonetheless.
So long as we can be clear on the "hasn't done anything wrong" aspect, I think we can all live with the proof of gittishness.
And while we're at this "revelations" lark:
2 + 2 = 4 assuming base of calculation > 3
Posted in Newtonian Rock shop leaks iPad prices
This is substantiated
When play.com released the price earlier in the year, it was around the same level though. I seem to recall them stating £700 for the 32GB WiFi/3G model.
Aye, that's iPhones for you
My wife's iPhone holds a magnetic attraction to the children. Especially the youngest. Collectively, the children have managed to tweet, update Facebook status, "Like" items on Facebook, and make calls. Tthe eldest is 5. The youngest likes to carry it around. In her mouth.
And this is wifey's second iPhone. The first died of water ingestion.
I'm all in favour of computing for the masses, but the problem with devices like iPhones (*) is that by obfuscating the technology they remove a user's investment in the sensitivity of the device. They remove the user's feeling of "duty of care". And so, such "accidents" happen.
I'm sick to the back teeth of telling the wife to look after her phone. To always hit the standby button on the top of it, which will at least protect it until the kids figure out the unlock code. She doesn't listen, and yet to replace it would cost £500. Think of how a £500 ornament would be protected! And yet iPhone is left lying around.
(*) not just iPhones, society in general, I guess.
Spelling
Why is it that so many people don't know how to spell "definitely"?
Posted in Gmail users howl over Halloween outage
Cloud Computing
Services like GMail are inspirational for IT Directors looking to outsource to SaaS. They look at the low cost model and forget other issues such as performance & uptime. My contention has always been that if the service you're outsourcing to is running, then they offer great value. But the control you lose when service is struggling is in many cases too expensive for the customer to bear.
Basically, the customer can scream and scream at Google all they want. The service will be back when it's back. No escalation, no redirection of resources, nothing. None of the usual tools for crisis management are available.
Seems Google need to work on this area of their service now if they and the other cloud providers are to convince us that SaaS is the way to go.
Posted in Intel aims 30W Nehalem at 'microservers'
Sounds ideal for...
... branch office servers. Esp with 2008 RODC.
Children at play
As a parent, I want to spend time engaged in recreation with my children, but I also recognise that it's important for them to socialise without me being there. My children will frequently refuse to play with their nursery friends when I'm around because they would rather be with me. That's nice 'n' all, but i don't really understand it. They should play with their peers.
So, I want to be able to take the children to a safe fun environment where they can have a good time with their peers. BUT, I want to be able to assure myself that they're happy BEFORE I leave them there. If I'm just to let them in and leave, I'm immediately more suspcious. Don't forget, I'm on first name terms with all of the staff at the children's nursery, and I know my eldest daughter's teacher (who is also the Head of Year) and the Head of Primary at her school. Not a collection of minimum wage Council dimwits.
Sensible parents just want to be able to make an informed choice. And to be able to play with their children (and photograph them) without some fucking pious wanker accusing them of being a paedo.
