Posts by Anthony Hegedus
37 posts • joined Monday 27th October 2008 20:29 GMT
... Start button
Does it run windows 8?
I knew this would happen
I've been warning people for months about this. And telling them NEVER to use their ISP's email - if they want a freebie, use gmail!
Re: Spamhous must really be hurting those parasites
Sounds good, do you use it to send outgoing mails too? I run an SME server linux distro at home and have absolutely no problems with spam - yes, we get a few, but no more than with other providers. Having said that, I won't even bother to let it send mail out directly, as I'm using a BT dynamic address. And yes, I use a dynamic DNS service.
Don't you mean "it consumes less than 10w"? Sorry...
Posted in NORKS switch off 3G data for tourists
data rates
€150 for 2GB sounds quite reasonable compared to what roaming charges can be. For example, travel to another secretive third-world state, such as the USA, on O2 it costs £6 a MB (£6000 per GB!). On the subject of roaming, call me thick, but how can something that costs £10 here (an extra GB of data) cost 600 times as much abroad. I know they have to make some money, but that is just ridiculous! Oh wait, they do a deal where you pay £120 a month for 200Mb of data. That's only £600 a GB. Bargain!
Wow! amazing!
So some of Windows ME's unloved features that nobody cares about because they've never found them anyway have been "improved". Like that's exciting: "Oh look I can move a tile around and make it a different size, and I can two apps side by side just like Windows 3.1!". Sorry Microsoft, but this is a crock of shit. Same shit, same colour.
Re: @Lusty
yes, but you're wrong. Enter may insert a paragraph mark into a document, but to the average user it inserts a new line, and badly. By default MS Word 2007 and above has a default line spacing between paragraphs, so pressing Enter after a para automatically puts in a a nice gap. Not so useful when typing a list and you don't want bullet points or numbering or bloody great gaps between each line.
So you can use shift-enter. Except you can't if you've got full justification on, because if you've got just a few words on the last line, using shift-enter sets these few words out fully justified with the last word all the way on the right, and huge horizontal gaps between the words!
So you end up having to rejig the style, or choose a different style (easy enough if you know what the hell a style actually is!!!).
No, this is not usability. It's crap. Yes, it works for people who want to design nice looking consistent office manuals and the like, but then for the rest of us, it feels like bullying tactics. Seriously, I've talked to enough ordinary people trying to use this crap and these are the sort of things they say.
For me personally, I know how it's meant to work, and it doesn't bother me that much. I find frustrations will all word processors, as I switch between "typing a shopping list" and "typing a 10-page proposal".
And to avoid accusations of MS-Bashing, I have similar problems in Apple's Pages effort: It's super-easy to type simple documents and edit bits of more complex ones, but you try and do some complex numbering or align pictures and it's not so much that it's difficult, it's more a matter of "where the hell do I go now - why isn't there a button for this???". In LibreOffice, you try doing a mail-merge, something microsoft has got fairly much spot-on.
Re: There is a simple explanation
Your point is to my mind true to some extent only. Yes, the dreaded ribbon helps people use styles. And styles help keep document consistency and other things. BUT when you want to write a letter to the tax office, when you want to write a poster saying "hot tap faulty" or a simple quote.... you don't want typesetting rules and styles to cloud your mind. You want to find where they've put the fucking "save as" command, or how to insert a table, or you want to know why the stupid thing insists on putting a blank line after every carriage return (SO many people ask me to stop it doing that!).
The point is that WP is a commodity app for most tasks and most people - nobody gives a shit about styles, alignment or anything complex like that. For MOST tasks MOST of the time all you need is Print, Save As, bold underline and Italic and the ability to change fonts. And also (and this is the problem) the ability to open documents written by people who do give a shit about styles etc without it completely cocking up the layout.
Re: There is a simple explanation
My point EXACTLY. MAC OS may not be perfect, but their usability team have probably been testing it on slightly less weird people.
Re: There is a simple explanation
It seems that microsoft employs demented cabbages to design their UIs. I challenge anyone to log into their new "outlook.com" style hotmail and write an email without a message coming up about "are you sure you want to send this without a subject?". Actually, we can all do it, but sit someone down who hasn't just just read this and challenge them to do it. The way it's designed is such one's eyes do to travel over naturally to the subject "area", and you end up forgetting to do it. Not massive problem for most people, you'll eventually work it out. But usability testing - don't they spend millions, if not billions on this at Microsoft?
So the end result is that we will do what microsoft want because we're forced to use their rubbish, until one day we open our bloody eyes, and there's a worthy competitor around. No, much as I like and use linux, it's not a serious contender yet. But google could do it... It really is like the story of The Emperor's New Clothes and has been for years and years. Microsoft-bashing is boring because it's so easy, and that's the point, surely: it shouldn't be.
Re: What is this article supposed to be?
Which is why you shouldn't buy it in the first place really.
Re: Her Mutt
I think "mutt" in this case is a term used in satire by journalists to indicate "we all know full well than a King Charles Vauxhall Cavalier Spaniel is probably some kind of 'pure bred' as opposed to 'affordable' dog, but back in the real world, it's just a bloody dog"
.net?
.net - isn't that a suite of addon shit that take longer to install than a full OS, has more potential for updates failing than an HP Printer Driver and most people haven't got a clue why it's on their system in about 5 entries in programs&features? And isn't it just basically an API for windows APIs, in other words should have been part of the OS in the first place? Or am I wrong about that too.
And Java? unless there's a specific application, you just don't need it. So some goofy websites don't work. Better than the whole OS is broken due to a drive-by virus download!
Re: are just scratching the surface
Interesting idea - why not have three read heads? By clever arrangement of data, you could achieve 3x the throughput maximum, and more importantly, 3x lower seek times. Defragging's going to be fun!
Posted in Any storm in a port
Re: Optional
Yes, SCART was the work of the Devil himself. A French Devil. They're designed to fall out of the socket when any amount of force is exerted from the massive sideways-fitting lead. And then when you do try and fiddle with them, they usually fall to bits. They are also used to con gullible a-little-knowledge-etc type people into purchasing gold-plated versions. Who remembers seeing gold SCART leads for £79 at currys?
Doomed...
They swore blind the planet was about to be eaten by an enormous mutant star-goat, or some such thing
Snot
We once had a laptop in with "liquid damage to the keyboard" and I rang the customer to ask what the liquid was, because after taking the keyboard off, it smelt of neither beer or coffee. He replied "well, not to put too fine a point on it, it's snot... I have pretty nuclear sneezes!". I washed my hands after that
... and we loved it!
Cats...
Don't knock it, Islam apparently teaches that cats are special, and you should be kind to them. Mohammed has a special fondness for a cat called Muezza. According to the Koran, Mohammed was late for the mosque one day, as his cat Muezza was sleeping on his prayer robes, so he got a knife and cut of the arm of the robe (yes, the robe) so that he wouldn't disturb his beloved cat from its sleep.
So I would imagine that our friendly ayatollah looks has already liked loads of cat-related websites.
What a crock of shit office 2013 is
I've tried this and I have to say usability has gone south in a big way. The default colour scheme, well, isn't. It's like Microsoft has taken 20 or so years of ui design and just ignored it. It's all just white lines with little or no shading and it's very hard indeed to differentiate between the crappy ribbon bar thing and your actual work area. I'd have understood if it took its visual cues from the functionally crippled but nevertheless colourful "modern" or "metro" or whatever it's called interface so beloved of Microsoft who can't tell the difference between a 4" phone and a 24" monitor, but it doesn't. The only improvement I can see is that lines seem to scroll smoothly in a fairly pointless sort of way. What really gets me about windows 8 and office 2013 is that for the average home user or typical small business it decreases usability and productivity. Two examples in Windows 8: for those of us used to clicking a start button or menu button to turn off a computer, find the "turn off computer" item. And another one : for those of us used to clicking on start and typing "update", where is windows update? It's not obvious and I've asked both technically literate people and ordinary folk these questions and they've been stumped. Microsoft: some people are normal, get over it.
Posted in TalkTalk's YouView: Why no Wi-Fi?
Mistakes here: you don't need wifi on the box to connect to a wifi tablet - assuming the box (like most others) is connected via ethernet cable, a wifi tablet will connect because they're both on the same network.
And what the heck is Fibre to the Curb? First of all it's "Kerb" not "Curb" (unless you're one of those not-able-to-spell Americans) and secondly it should be "Fibre to the Cabinet" anyway. Actually just checked the article and the author wrote "Fiber" so they must be a yank.
The joke goes something like...
... a Cyborg walks into a ... McDonalds??
Re: Hubs?
Actually if you went to your nearest PC world and asked for a hub, they'd probably sell you a router, after first ensuring it's got a DSL modem if you're using Virgin Cable or Satellite, or just a regular ethernet WAN port if you use ADSL. Except they'd call it a DSL router if it was actually the one for Cable broadband.
Actually, they'd probably sell you a Norton antivirus at only half the double normal price. And a USB cable that costs £40.
In point of face, there's (probably) no such thing as a network hub any more. About 15 years ago they got replaced by proper network switches. A network hub allows for all the bandwidth (say 10Mbit/s) to be shared with all the ports, thus creating a massive slowdown when people actually start working. A network switch allows for much greater bandwidth as it switches traffic between relevant ports almost as fast as the circuit allows (10/100/1000Mbit/s). A switch and a hub effectively do the same thing from and end user point of view. So a switch is like a sort of... hub... I suppose.
I always wanted to use that emoticon or whatever it's called these days
Maybe the IT angle that was omitted was that he used his iphone to find a kebab place. If he'd just walked he'd have found one, but he had to drive didn't he? Probably because he used some donerfinda app which didn't know about the nearest one, instead taking him a car ride away. Maybe he'll sue the developer.
So what?
So some people have a party with a cheesy, corny song with some rude words in it. In Norway. I remember once using a rude word at an office party.
Re: Fsck Word
so what exactly is so good about word perfect? I'm not exactly a fan of MS Worse - I tend to use LibreOffice when I want something done on my linux box - but am intrigued by the thought of something new that might be a bit more stable and with the commands not hidden behind some bloody indecipherable ribbon shite.
correct horse battery staple
passphrases like "correct horse battery staple" are excellent. They're easier to remember and hard to crack, especially if you use numbers and punctuation after each word, and mixed case as in "engineEr5whistlE!highwAy*locatE." Assuming the words are chosen from a list of 3000 easy to remember names, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that there are possibly 1.8 x 10^18 different combinations (or 1.8 million million million). Since most important passwords are to protect online things such as email, credit card accounts etc, and there's no way that anything would let an automated program take that many guesses (even if it were physically possible), I would say this is particularly secure.
Scaling that down to three random words separated by numbers, the security such a password offers is at least far better than most passwords, and certainly easier to remember than things like q3!U5opO3.
As humans, we can't remember lots of passwords easily, that's the problem. And seeing as many things which are passworded are less important than others, why not use a less secure (and therefore easier to remember) password for things that don't matter so much?
Surely I need less security on my Nespresso account (which can only be used to order coffee and requires a credit card number every time) than say my Paypal account (which can be used to send people money)?
Why do some broadband companies make their broadband signon password "welcome1" or even just not have one, whilst others make it "Y1H4O7P2"? The signon cannot be used for anything other than logging into the internet!
I'm no expert but there is a LOT of misinformation going round about passwords, I'm sure of it. I see people running a business whose password for EVERYTHING is "buster", I've seen people who have an incredibly complex password for their computer but a file on the desktop called "banking passwords and pin numbers!", and what about people who set a complex 64 digit WEP key for their wireless?
Anyway see passphra.se for more info about easy to remember passwords
Americans....
Final and clinching proof that America is the aggressive bully of the world
No it doesn't
So google have my mac address. So what? Yes they're using my information to a) make more profit for themselves somehow (indirectly) and b) help people LIKE MYSELF who can get a quick triangulation of where they are if GPS signals aren't forthcoming. Really, why does it matter? I have a fixed IP address, I have domains registered to my address, I have all sorts of info out there that aren't really of much use to anybody but a criminal. If Google have my MAC address and approximate location, is it any different to any other organisation having my name and address? All this "right to privacy" crap really does wind me up. Yes, we all need our privacy, but we live in a connected world. We want to be a "global village" but wake up - in a small village everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
Losing useful functionality like wifi triangulation because of "privacy concerns" is really like saying "let's lose some really useful functionality because there are some criminals out there who might make use of it".
I was at a friend recently, who moved house, and my stupid iphone told me I was somewhere completely different from where I thought I was.
Everyone in the world is American
I didn't know playbook might have any other meaning than something to play on. So here's yet another company who thinks that in countries other than the USA (I mean "in international"), we must either not count, or speak American. Sorry RIM, but Playbook means something to play on, and not a business tool!
Sorry, did I read that right? No email client???
If this machine has no email client out of the box then how exactly is it a business "professional grade" machine?
And I disagree with the assertion that flash support is necessary to make the web what it's supposed to be. The iPad can display web sites pretty damn well, and not many serious web sites require flash. Not many flash applications will work properly with touch screen input for a start. And the web isn't always ideal for a 9.7" or 7" screen, especially for interactive applications so special versions would have to be built anyway. Be they altered web sites or apps - it doesn't really matter to the end user.
I'd much rather have no flash, but the ability to run all day on one charge. A modern machine that lasts just 24 hours on standby is a bit of a joke. And two hours heavy use? Come on RIM, that derisory!!!
Posted in UK's oldest working telly up for sale
No, it hasn't got a DVI port
Apparently, DVI wasn't around prior to 1956, so it won't have a DVI port either.
Nobody's mentioned it, but does it still come with the original remote?
Seriously though, how long would this take to warm up?
Taste of semen
Sorry, but I'm over 20 and I haven't a clue what it tastes like. I imagine it has a horrible mouth-feel. Oh, and I'm a bloke.
It's the way forward
@Chris19 - you're right, we'll have extremely usable and secure machines, and a new type of machine - a hobbyist computer that is totally unlocked.
That's exactly what we should be aiming for. Devices that actually work as intended, where they work as described in the manual, where you know it's not going to kill the machine just because you download something without reading the small print - in short, tools that do the job.
It's a balance between flexibility and reliability and I think that with the iphone/ipad, Apple have got it just right. It's not as flexible as an Android phone, but it's probably less likely to suffer from rogue code.
And for people who want the extra flexibility, they'll go for the hobbyist systems, like Android, Windows and so on.
The Mac App Store is just a clever way of selling that reliability factor to people. I wish they had one for Windows.
Posted in TomTom goes Jock to abuse English 'bas'
It's OK, they've cooked up an excuse.
This excuse is straight out of blackadder or something. I got that email too. About 5 hours later I got another email. It said:
"You have just received an email which was not up to the standards of TomTom. The greeting (Dear English Bas) was in fact specifying the language of the mail followed by my first name, this should have been personalised with your name.
We apologize for this error and for any inconvenience this might have caused. Underneath you will find the correct email."
and was signed :
"All the best,
Bas Komen
TomTom team"
Now doesn't that just sound a little, er, "made up". The funny thing is that if they hadn't sent me the apology email I wouldn't have noticed.
Safeley operate a firearm?!?!?
>>Are you able to safely operate a motor vehicle?
>>Are you able to safely operate a circular saw?
>>Congratulations! You can safely operate a firearm!
Forgive me for possibly not understanding the purpose of a gun, but I thought that a device whose sole purpose is to propel a piece of metal at very high velocity in a targetted direction, and then have that metal deform on first contact with anything harder than a melon, and continue to propel itself through whatever it hits with high force, causing maximum damage, cannot possibly be operated "safely".
Apparently if you aim one of these "guns" towards a "human being" and then operate the lever that activates it, the person the gun is pointed towards isn't likely to be a "being" much longer.
Now tell me what part of "safely operating" a firearm can possibly apply to any of its modes of functionality. Apart from the "keep it locked away and never use it" mode.
What is it with these yanks that makes it so bloody necessary to have a gun? In this country (United "no guns here" Kingdom) the vast majority of people were happy the last time gun controls were tightened (after Dunblane ISTR).
Tens of thousands of people are killed by each other using guns in america every year. And all they want to do is to have more guns. It's no use comparing gun ownership to some other dangerous machine. Sure, cars kill more people but the primary purpose of a car is to get from A to B. The primary purpose of a gun is to... oh there's no point, if you're a gun-toting american you won't understand will you? But then we'll get onto the argument that they need guns to protect themselves against the government should the need arise. Paranoid really.
Posted in Google Earth lands on Jesus Phone
pants!
Looking up contacts in google maps on the JesusPhone often doesn't work for me. Entries which don't explicitly say "united kingdom" in the country field don't work, because the keep trying to look up the address in the US. Do all americans type "United States of America" for every entry in their phone books? Well guess what, we don't put our country in either. Internationalisation... they've heard of it... not!
And why would you want to put your iphone in your pants? surely a more hygienic location would be... well, your trouser pockets?
