Posts by Efros

It can be done

Satellite providers in the US charging comparable fees to the cable companies provide the hardware with a charge at the beginning of the 2 year contract, which is then waived. I have no illusions, the cost of the equipment is then made back over the 2 years through service charges, fee for a DVR etc. But and it is a big but, I cannot lie, at the end of the contract the customer can usually get new equipment under the same deal. Previously I was with a cable company and I had 2 DVRs which were about 8 years old, were good room heaters, and they would only be replaced with the same antique devices if and when they failed, these were replaced with a single All Home DVR (twice as many channels to record and 5 times as much storage) and two wireless bedroom stations, all for less money than the cable service it replaced. If cable is wondering how it got to this they only have to look at the way they have screwed their customers with increasing gusto over the last 20 years or so.

My Beard

Reached its 28th birthday last year, last time I shaved it off was due to a visit to a very, very hot climate and it seemed prudent to do so. Currently I would be a good approximation to Gimli in terms of beard, height wise I would have to be chopped off at the knees to complete the look.

On the article it strikes me that the current fashion for beards would pretty much destroy any data concerning sexism and beards. I do know that there is a fair amount of pogonophobia out there and it would be interesting to see whether that shows a gender trait, however, the current prevalence of beardies may nullify any conclusions that are made with current data.

Pricing is unlikely to be cheap.

Well given that it's LaCie, it's going to be even less cheap than you thought anyway.

Hmmm.

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

Usually attributed to Albert E. but probably not one of his.

But...

Will it play Crysis?

Using the company mail server

was the problem here. Probably a disciplinary offense,

Personally I would have done as he did, burn the email with fire and forget it ever happened.

I know not of what you speak

Quick what now?

Give 'em a taste

and they will want more and better.

Hit 'em where it hurts

Right in the spank bank!

For Shits and Giggles

I put Remix on a fast USB 3 drive and plugged it into an i7 4790K desktop and booted it from the USB, holy crap!

They've lost the place...

which is of course presuming they had it in the first place.

So the app of brevity is hooked up to the sport with the biggest ratio of inactivity to action there is. 60 minutes of an American Football game contains on average 11 minutes of actual play, and can take up to 3.5 hours to complete.

MSDOS/Apple DOS prankage

A batchfile silently executed on boot to display corrupted messages to the screen with a C: drive failure message, used this frequently to stop weekend use of my PC and the instrumentation it was connected to by arseheads who wanted to play Dungeon and/or Star Trek.

Best one I saw/heard was someone in the same lab who had setup an Apple IIe with some speech synthesis (yeah it was that long ago) set to scream "Get your Effing hands off me" should anyone touch the wrong key combination to unlock the IIe. Measures taken to prevent budding computer experts (in their own estimation only, in everyone else's they were pillocks) faffing about with some carefully crafted 6502 assembler.

How the mighty have fallen

Were the bees knees in affordable turntables and styli for a while.

Something very

Creepy about the whole Alexa/Echo thing. I remain to be convinced of any advantage to the user that is not outweighed by the advantage to the supplier... but they still want to charge you an eye watering price for the Echo, and even more disturbing is that people, a lot of people judging by the reviews on Amazon, are willing to buy them.

Not before time!

Forty quid for a single pdf, that I wrote!

Bellendous spunktrumpet

Has become my favourite expression of contempt lately.

I wish they'd develop

tools to stop Edge grabbing default program status for pdfs. It keeps nicking it from PDF-Viewer on one of my machines. Better still an uninstaller. Only time I've deliberately run it is immediately after a Windows 10 install to go and download Chrome.

Pity it's only bugs

If it was annoyances with Onedrive they'd go bankrupt... mind same could be said of most firms' software.

Kills 99.9% of all known germs... dead!

leaving the strong, resilient 0.1% to kill off the humans.

Maglev

Just a contraction of magnetic levitation, which the Japanese train uses as its mean of propulsion. The train in your linked article is the SCMaglev, Super Conducting Maglev train.

"harden your 'data centre on wheels'"

Few tattoos, couple of cheek scars and a decked out Escort XR3 no doubt.

And...

The fix is in.

Wonderful to see that graft still has its place.

No Security Breach

Just no fixing "stupid" I suppose.

Non intrusive and relevant

I'll turn off my ad-blocker when an ad doesn't add to the screen load time significantly, doesn't occupy a major fraction of the screen, isn't screaming at me audibly or visually and is actually pertinent to the content I'm viewing. As to blocking ad blockers, go ahead, Forbes already lost my page hits because of this, so fuck 'em!

hackers exploit fresh holes

Brought to mind the spoof version of the film rather than the Queen soundtracked one. With one of the all time great quotes

Monster: [after being shot in the bum by Flesh Gordon] Ooh, the pain! The humiliation! The haemorrhoids!

Education march

Will be picking up pace, school districts are under the cosh financially in the US, especially in rural areas, even more so with Republicans in power locally. The Apple deals are less and less affordable and the hardware more and more irritating to work with. Our district will not be replacing our current 1 to 1 MacBook Airs (circa 1000 machines) when they exhaust the contract in 2 years, it is looking highly likely we will be moving to Chromebooks. Google's year on year costs and the benefits offered compared to Apple are very favourable.

Phew

Looks nothing like an ED 209!

I would

attach the fitbit to my dog's collar and let my pooch baffle their analysis.

Interesting use

of the "think of the children card"

Seems the politicos and the enforcement agencies can be played at their own game.