Tch!

Whatever did we do before social networking?

Got out of support a long time ago

So I do feel for tech support guys and, if I ever have a problem, I try to be nice to be nice.

I'm in design and development now but share an office with our IT manager (it's only a small company and so he's the one and only IT guy). However, because I use computers for more than just banging in numbers and printing stuff out, I'm also expected to answer IT problems whenever I pick up our IT guy's phone and know instantly what the problem is. As I'm not really qualified to answer IT-related support questions I generally just ask them to call back, and usually get a bit of attitude in response.

Best internal support call I got was "Is there a problem with the network? My keyboard has stopped working!" She had kicked it out the back of the PC. Yes flower, we plug all keyboards into the company server now...

But

Does the course that the rozzers undertake teach them how to write a GUI in Visual Basic to track the tea-leafs' IP?

To paraphrase Marcus Brigstocke...

Put on a Pink Floyd record and chill the fuck out

Aah!

Pretty much agree with the whole list, except Hungry Horace, which I never played: I was put off my Horace Goes Skiing.

Elite was by far the best game of the 80s. I used to play it on a mate's BBC Model B with another chum, a Spectrum owner. Because of the frankly weird placement of the Break key on the Beeb, and because we had to wait half an hour for Elite to load from tape, we had the rule that if you accidentally pressed it during your allotted hour of play, you forfeited your go, no exceptions. Said friend then got a 5.25 floppy drive to load it from, unbelievably fast load times!

And yes, nearly 30 years later I'm playing Oolite!

Used to play Jet Set Willy a lot on the other friend's Spectrum. I had a Vic-20 and so was stuck with Perils of Willy. Had Jelly Monsters and a bunch of text adventures on cartridge, including Pirates' Cove, which was ace!

Of course, there are many games not on the list. Others that stand out for me were Sentinel, Sabre Wulf, Imogen, Repton 3. Of the latter, I designed and tested a whole load of levels on graph paper before begging my mate to lend me his Beeb so that I could code them.

Thanks for the great memories Reg and fellow posters!

And me

I've been a Mac user since 1990, having gone through an SE, and LC475, G3, G4 and now Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. I've always found that though Macs are inherently expensive, their shelf life is much longer and they keep their value well. My current rev1 Mac Pro is now edging into 'over the hill' territory when I discovered last week that the original X1900 graphics card won't run Portal 2 (any recommendations for a new card that is compatible with this model?) and the original SuperDrive is becoming very flaky. Still, throwing more memory at it and plugging in bigger disks (2x 2Tb, 1x1Tb, 1x500Gb Western Digitals) continues to keep this a relevant machine for me, even if I would like a new 12-core behemoth.

In that time, friends and colleagues have gone through various incarnations of cheaper machines - laptops and desktops - and upgraded at least a couple of times due to hardware failures and Windows support.

Similarly, I have managed to turn other people on to Macs over the years and their satisfaction levels have remained consistently high.

Yes, Apple kit is expensive. Yes, you can get similar specs for less cash but overall Macs last longer, hold their value and generally support the latest OSs and applications. Running VMWare on my Mac Pro also means that I can run work stuff if I need to.

My only regret, being an Apple user, is that I didn't buy APPL stock in the 90s...

No ta

I'll wait for 2015 when the Mr Fusion comes out...

To paraphrase Chief Wiggum

What IS the fascination with my forbidden closet of mystery??

Great little game

I never really played this in the arcades (much preferred to throw my hard-earned 10ps into Bubble Bobble) but discovered it many years later on MacMAME and had a strange several month addiction to it. Not played it for years though but I think I might dig it out again. Classic game!

Meh

I'm not a fan. I kinda stopped watching after the excellent Blink and Empty Child episodes. I found the Rose Tyler / Dave Tennant running around the universe giggling like a couple of ADHD kids on a Red Bull trip annoying after a while. Unfortunately though, I'm vilified by my fellow geeks for not watching it, as not liking it makes me 'un-British'. Even more so for not considering the "edgier" spin-off Torchwood, the biggest pile of unwatchable shite I've ever witnessed. Yes John, we get it, you're gay.

So I ditched Dr Who for the far more interesting American sci-fi: Battlestar Galactica, V, and Flash Forward. Better production, better acted. We Brits can do ace drama; I just don't think think we're that brilliant at sci-fi. Dr Who started off so well with Chris Eccleston (though I generally watch anything he's in) but then just descended into kitsch.

No problems for me

And I kicked the download off at about 6pm. Download was slow but that's because I live in the sticks. Complete upgrade and restoration took about three hours in total. The only thing that went wrong was that I lost all my application groups and had to reorganise my application icons, but not really an issue.

Not had much chance to play with the new OS but it seems a little zippier on the iPhone 4.

Grrr

"Ofcom's decision treads awfully carefully though the rights of the religious..."

This is what pisses me off about any form of religion: that it considers itself immune from any kind of criticism, selling tat to the gullible and vulnerable in the name of 'faith'. Had a mainstream non-religious channel made such claims, I suspect Ofcom would not have tread quite so awfully carefully.

And yet we have to 'play nice' to this section of society that believes in magic sky fairies and tells people that they're going to hell if they don't talk to him/her/it every night.

I'll stop now. Once I get on to religion I tend to just ramble and rant inanely. Mine's the one with the God Delusion and Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the pocket...

More new words needed

Being Blackadder / Simpsons / etc. fans in our office, us lads are trying to get the words "embiggen", "cromulant", "contrafribularities" and "interfrastically" into the common tongue. Though no-one we know outside these walls know what we mean however.

Nice to see that The Reg uses "embiggen" now and again though!

Come to think of it, "nerdgasm" would be a good one too...

Oh no!

A company selling stuff with a mark-up? Surely not!

I bought myself a Blu Ray player a couple of weeks ago from a "high street electrical store" and was asked if I wanted a HDMI cable because one wasn't supplied in the box. A gold plated cable from them cost £30 but it came supplied with a little bottle of screen cleaner.

Similar HDMI cable from Tesco: a tenner.

I hate to break it to you Apple deniers but companies do this a lot. Kinda page one of "Economics, How to Make a Profit". And, like many others have said, this is a bargain if installation is allowed on a fresh disk, without Snow Leopard being on there first...

Precious

Received mine this morning. Found on Amazon.co.uk for £42, so snapped it up. Now all I need is a Blu Ray player! Was going to wait until next month but I think a trip to Comet/Amazon/Richer Sounds is in order some time later...

I'm confuzzed...

I thought the whole point of the the Flying Spaghetti Monster was to highlight the inherent ridiculousness of organised religion and blind faith in a magic sky zombie? Becoming a recognised religion pretty much legitimizes the concepts they were rallying against. Or are they being "ironic"?

Could someone enlighten me?

Is it just me

or does it seem to be the case that the more expensive something is, the tackier it is? This looks shite.

V funny

You have a fungus desk?? Sweet.

But I suspect that the inevitable Daily Mail / Express article will be even funnier. Though in entirely a different way.

Is the whole "May I be the first to welcome our toadstooloid overlords" meme still de rigueur?

Hopefully, this is a good thing

I am of the opinion that there is room in the world for both Android and iOS. Friends of mine use Android and I'm an iOS man. I know little about the former (because I've never used it) but word on the street is that the next major release of Android is going to be a biggie and I really hope that Apple take note and come back with something as good, if not better, which can only be good for both companies.

I feel that the current iOS is looking a bit dated and so hopefully v5 will be something pretty special.

Woo!

Raw British cynicism at its best! Someone calls to say you've won a prize; we immediately assume that it's a con. Makes me proud to be English! Had the winner been over the Pond in the Colonies you wouldn't have been able to do anything for all the high-fiving...

Stiff upper lip icon??

Beginning of the end

If they manage to manufacture this device as a sex aid for the ladies, that's us men fucked. And not in the good way...

Excellent article

Thanks for a very good read. I like my scf-fi but hate anything Star Trek for exactly the reasons outlined here. There seems to be this smugness amongst the characters that they know they are much cleverer than the viewer and spout all kinds of technobullshit that the Fanbois take as literal. A friend of mine, a big fan, heard that when Stephen Hawking was given a tour of the set he was heard to say "yes, I'm working on that!" when he saw the Warp Drive. He seems to think that Star Trek 'invented' many of the things we use today, communicators became mobile phones, etc.

This is why I'm a BSG. The technology isn't stuffed in your face and so the story can concentrate on real character development. Characters have weaknesses and faults set against the wider arena of political machinations. I'm a fan of Babylon 5 for the same reasons, which, whilst a bit cheesy in parts, does have some incredible dialog. I want dialog, I don't want a show with a load of bollocks about how a hypermegaplasmeriser works or seeing the characters dicking around in a hologram suite...

Thank you Reg!

For giving two fantastic phrases that I will endeavour to weave into every day conversation: Boffin Botherer and "leaky as a Swiss cheese rowing boat".

Who remembers?

Who remembers the halcyon days when the interwebs only appealed to us geeks? When there were probably only about four sites in existence, you could have a proper conversation in a chatroom and none of this Web 2.0 malarky? Who's great idea was it to open it up to easily led Great Unwashed??

Sigh.

What?

The BBC nicking someone's idea and passing it off as their own? Never!

</sarcasm>

Bit of a pain in the arse

The download was fine on my 3G but the "Backing up your iPhone" was glacial. I kept quitting it and restarting, thinking it had bombed, but no change. Checked out the Apple discussion forums and other people were having the same problems. In the end I just stopped fiddling about and left it to it. Had I done that in the first place then I reckon an hour or so in total for backup, installation and restoration wouldn't have been far off the mark. The whole experience though did piss me off a bit (for the first time in 20 years as an Apple user) but I'd had a crap day anyway!

No problems running iOS 4, no apparent slow downs and no hangs yet.

My Inner Geek loves this!

Makes me think back to the early 90s when I got my first Mac, a second or third hand SE, with a massive 20Mb hard disk, 2Mb memory and a black and white 320x240 screen resolution! Today's cash points probably have better screens than that old thing did! Still, in the three years I had it, it was on pretty much 24 hours a day and I did really cool stuff with Hypercard. Happy days!