Posts by blackworx 973 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2008
Then this is no great loss to all us XP holdouts.
I'm with Glyn2 on the death-by-a-thousand-cuts nature of the W7/Vista SP2 interface and unexplained pauses. When something that took one click in XP now takes three, or when simplified UI "features" can't be turned off, there's only one word to describe it: stupid.
"However, you are missing the environmental point that leccy can be generated without releasing fossilised carbon."
I'm not, I just didn't make reference to it ;o) ... If we were all to stop using gas right now then - discounting the fact that there wouldn't be enough generating capacity to cope - the electricity that would instead be used to provide heat would not be coming from a zero carbon source. My point being that us all being "addicted" to consuming gas for heat is less harmful for the environment than the only currently available alternative which, until we either build more nuke plants, make fusion work, find out the earth's crust lies on a huge bed of hydrogen and not steaming hot magma as we'd previously thought, or get all that power via renewables*, is to burn more fossil fuels in power stations.
*Note I have listed these in order of likelihood.
"global warming is not caused by the release of heat"
You don't say! (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Good info there, although when I said "isn't it more efficient ... to burn gas ... than it is to generate electricity from that gas.." I was referring to electricity generation by a power station rather than by an SOFC, which is I think where Lewis was coming from also when he was banging on about our "gas addiction".
Still - all interesting to know!
Somebody correct me please if I'm wrong, but isn't it more efficient on the whole to burn gas for heat at the point of consumption than it is to generate electricity from that gas and then convert the electricity to heat?
I know the whole gas/leccy power usage thing is one of our Lewis' favourite tubthump topics, and I'm with him when he uses it to argue against idiot proclamations of "total" household power consumption that don't take into account the huge amount of energy we get from gas, but if my assumption above is right then Lewis' allusions to our "nasty gas habit" in this article seem more than a little disingenuous.
Surely it would just make more sense to allow people to use ripped media in the same way as they're already licensed to use the original source material? e.g. If you've paid your PPL for public performance of licensed works (e.g. fitness instructors etc.) then you should be allowed to use ripped copies of the music you've paid for.
Never mind Flash refuseniks! How about all these people who don't even want a computer?! Surely they too should be compensated for not being able to watch BBC programmes online? Some sort of electronic viewing device that receives and decodes a broadcast signal perhaps?
Seriously though, the Beeb are damned if they do and damned if they don't. For the BBC and its customers there's zero benefit to this SWF verification thing, ergo this is either Adobe twisting auntie's arm or auntie being petty and/or incompetent (again).
Hate to find myself in agreement with anything Steve Jobs says but really - the sooner Flash becomes irrelevant the better.
It's got nothing to do with the BBC. The DMCA is mentioned in reference to the fact that if XBMC (available in the USA) were to spoof "SWF Verification" then it could be seen to be frustrating a copyright protection system built into SWF, owned by Adobe who are, um, American. And since frustrating copyright protection systems is against the DMCA, um, in America...
"...or aggressively invite users to upgrade their browsers..."
I can see it now... If they did that, Google would naturally push Chrome and nothing else. Then we would have everyone and their dog complaining about Google abusing a dominant market position. Deja vu much?
BOOZED UP HOODIE KIDS ON BEER STRONGER THAN VODKA WREAK HAVOC AND TERRORISE KIDS! WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
...without a single reference to it costing £40 a bottle. Although they may get confused when they try to tie in the anti-Boche angle. perhaps they'll run that one on a different page...
GOOD OLD BLIGHTY SHOWS JOHNNY KRAUT HOW IT'S DONE!
On a saner note, BrewDog beers are generally fucking excellent - well worth hunting out, especially their Punk IPA.
Personally wouldn't use the word without first deciding the comment in question has a particularly high marketroid score, which is the case for both of these posts - they're off the scale. Granted, Ben Lambert's probably wasn't (he just looks like that rarest of beings - a true believer) but the original AC comment stinks of marketing in both form and content. I'm paraphrasing slightly here, but "if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it might as well be a duck".
I think what AC and Ben Lambert need is an active "icon" (Silverlight, natch) which rolls out to roughly 1.5 x fullscreen whenever your pointer goes within a country mile of it and is basically an interactive advert for good old Microsoft.
The rest of us need an astroturf icon.
Thank you!
You can never have 100% profit unless you magic stuff out of thin air and sell it on the spot.
Selling something for £2 that cost you £1 including your overheads means you generated 50% profit off a 100% markup.
Also, according to the article, iSuppli include manufacturing costs in their calculations.
General implication of this article, without even a link for balance, is that Macmillan tried to hold poor little Amazon to ransom. Seems more likely that Macmillan were trying to stop Amazon from stealing even more of their margin.
And what exactly is the Sci-Fi authors' input? Precious little according to this article, making it look to me more like their "wading in" was simply an excuse for an article that seems pretty short on any *actual* news.
I'd expect this kind of add-nothing dross from boingboing, not the Reg.
And I really can't understand people saying ooh eBooks cost next to nothing to reproduce I'm not paying that much. What proportion of the cost of publishing a book do you think printing and distribution takes up? Do they think books just magically appear at the printing press ready to print?
"if you've got ten layers of security, the key logger will log them all. You might as well use user name and password and let your users get in nice and easy"
This is from a supposed professional? One can only assume he's never heard of on-screen keyboards, partial passphrase requests or callback systems?
Besides, it's all a bit rich (sorry) coming from an "industry" that generates its income simply by taking money off people in excange for a few flashing lights.
Would the results really change that much after the announcement of the iPad? Remember this is a survey of eReader *owners* not prospective buyers. I'd imagine opinion will change a lot more in the latter category. At a guess I'd say anyone who has spent any time trying to read anything off an LCD in broad daylight (never mind blazing holiday sunshine) and then moved up to an eInk screen will still be perfectly happy with their purchase. Throughout the comments during the iPad furore it seems to me the only folk slagging off eReaders in comparison are the Mac fanboys.
@AC 16:34 - If you're meaning will it be too shiny to read off in sunshine without straining your eyes then yes I think it probably will be. Besides, I think it's almost certain that the backlit LCD screen will be practically unreadable in those situations anyway - shiny finish or not. No doubt some case companies are already beavering away incorporating flip-up bellows type visors to their iPad designs.
"OK, OK, PC gaming is dying a death thanks to the rise of stupidly powerful console, along with the rise of stupid DRM"
I think that's a misconception. I'm not saying PC gaming hasn't had a rough patch or that DRM isn't stupid, but apparently sales of gaming PCs are bigger than all 3 home consoles combined - for that reason alone I would be hesitant to write the market off so readily.
It's easy to see the desires of big publishers like EA who would no doubt PREFER everything to be on a nicely-controllable closed platform with a fixed update cycle, but the reality is that PC gaming is where the real innovation comes from and it's where the vast majority of passionate developers spend their formative years. Right now and for the foreseeable there's nothing the likes of EA can do to stop that.
Besides, most of the real turds in the PC market are turds because they're late, badly-ported console games, and enthusiasts know this (not that I'm saying the market is made up entirely of enthusiasts). There's no shortage of decent games that take proper advantage of the vastly more flexible PC platform and stretch even the most powerful hardware. On a technical level the PC is still untouchable, and that includes the majority of mainstream consumers who don't buy into the latest whizzbang kit.
Do a search on bit-tech.net for "PC gaming" and check out the first few hits, also check out the interview with Richard Huddy of AMD/ATi. Good articles all.
I did have an iPod once and yes I did buy something else much better but until you can understand the point of what I said, half in jest, then I humbly suggest you take your opinion and shove it.
PS: I *am* an arse, so really I'm not in the slightest bit worried about looking like one, but really -- thanks so much for the heads-up.
Back when Apple was a basket case and Microsoft was foisting Windows 95 on an unsuspecting world, I used to think of Apple in the sad, fond way folk tend to of the runty underdog. Now I find myself really wishing Apple would just go away - not because I'm "haunted by the thought that somebody, somewhere might be enjoying themselves" with their devices (which is undoubtedly so, in the same vacuous way that people "enjoy" listening to The Black Eyed Peas) but because their PoS closed devices are, by their growing de facto status, showing every capacity to hamper my own bloody enjoyment!
Nice article though. The sky-is-falling brigade are always good for a laugh, and there's a few good points made and some nifty phrases I can file away under "things to say when in need of lines to wind up a web2.0tard".
PS: Well done for getting by without mentioning Cory Doctorow.
Considering Andy Coulson is usually the one running the smearing (or worse) I'm willing to forgive the Guardian this one. Seems pretty clear to me they're not making anything up. The sad thing is that this carry on (both the voicemail tapping and the smearing) is the expected norm. How long now before we have wholly US-style diversionary "politics"?
Having to strip out PNG gamma correction and bolt on Javascript to enable alpha channel is a bloody joke pure and simple.
True, there are a lot of all-in-one scripts out there these days that bring IE sort of close to standards compliance, but (especially for a basic text, images and layout site) why should we even have to go there?
After the Phorm debacle it's no surprise Virgin are treading carefully.
Mind you, the only real reason I can see for them wanting to do this kind of monitoring is to figure out a strategy for converting that traffic into extra zeros on their bottom line.
@AC 12:57 - did you read to the end?
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