Posts by Tim Brown 1

Phoney

aIs there actually any premium-rate phone service that isn't some kind of con? Or at the very least doesn't take advantage of the mentally-challenged?

Stick to the bell-ringing Jeremy...

I hear you''re good at that

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpHmDYVMXDM

Lucy who?

Am I the only one who, when I hear the name Lucy Koh gets her confused with the actress Lucy Liu who played a judge with dominatrix tendencies in Ally McBeal...

You never used the milk...

I'm sure you did, but you never told us when :)

(I suspect it went in with the egg)

Amicable my ass...

There is one word in the WHATWG statement that gives the lie to the idea that the split is amicable.

'venerable' - translation: you're procedures are completely out of touch with reality and we're fed up of waiting for you to get your act together.

So...

Let's hope Team Terrorist (sponsored by Haliburton) got their invite to the games, to justify all this security in the first place.

Someone in the government should have thought outside the box and designated the whole thing a NATO exercise then we could have had our european partners pick up most of the bill.

God help us if we ever get to stage the Eurovision Song Contest Again!

The point is...

Microsoft are just stuffing the people who are vaguely loyal to them.

The people who subscribe to Technet are at least prepared to give Microsoft SOME money for their software. Any good techie knows of other sources for this stuff if they prefer to pay nothing.

As far as I can tell...

alll inventory and character information is stored on the server, not locally, so there really is no 'offline mode' for D3.

Huh?

That graph has to be one of the most confusing pieces of 'research' going. Ubuntu is shown as top, but then the second line down is 'linux'. What linux? All the major linux distributions have their own lines. Is it a sum of those? But Ubuntu is linux too...

The original source site throws no light on the subject. There is also no explanation of how this data was derived.

If there's really a problem...

fix the apps causing the problem or fix the job scheduler in the kernel, don't introduce a layer of bloat which simply tries to deal with the symptoms.

I was prepared to give it a go but...

... I'm right-handed, I like things that I use frequently with the mouse to be on the right side of my screen. It's my choice that's the way I work.

So I thought I'd move the launcher bar to the righthand side of the screen. No biggie surely?

Three hours, and several fruitless Google searches later, all I'd found was the statement from Ubuntu that they weren't letting people move the launcher bar because it was part of their 'design philosophy' for it to be on the left.

It was at that point that I gave up, deleted Ubuntu from my machine and installed Linux Mint.

I can recommend the company I use, Poundhost. We rent a couple of low-end dedicated servers from them at around the £35 mark each. I did splash out on a one-off cost to have 4GB memory rather than the standard 1GB and upgraded the disks to have 2x250GB in a raid-1 configuration.

Their support is decent, tickets generally get an in initial answer well within an hour although as with all support it sometimes takes a bit of communication to get everything sorted completely.

The OP doesn't say what type of site/application he's looking for hosting for. I find that a lot of hosting problems arise from people expecting too much for their money. If you're looking to run say a busy site or complicated php application on shared hosting for a few quid a month then you have to expect to run into performance issues now and then.

Could someone please...

direct the writers of the IPCC report to the Plain English campaign?

Do the people who author this sort of thing go on courses to make their language as convoluted as possible?

Agree he seems a most unpleasant person but...

I can't help the feeling that here we have a judge and a legal system playing to the gallery.

How does his sentence stack up against the repeated fines, asbos and community service orders that we regularly see handed down for theft, assault, robbery and so on?

His views and opinions may be abhorrent, but so is heavy-handed punishment for thought-crime.

I'll stick with XP...

Call be a luddite - go on, really, please.... but

Is there any chance we might get to a point where instead of releasing 'new', incompatible versions of Windows-whatever every few years, Microsoft release instead incremental upgrades to what we already have?

I took a look at a preview of Windows 7 and quite liked it, but the potential pain of having to do a clean install and re-install (or find new versions of) all my current apps made me stick with XP. I'm quite relieved that Windows 8 is such a mess, since that makes keeping XP an easy choice for me.

Let me see...

So basically, it's a smartphone without a touchscreen, battery, headphone socket and gsm radio then? Plus it can't do anything useful unless it's connected to something else.

A few years ago I might have been impressed, now it just seems kind of pointless.

huh?

Office on an iPad is surely pretty much of an irrelevance. Doing heavy work with office-type documents is not what tablet computing is about. At most the iPad might benefit from a Word/Excel viewer.

Very successful business only successful

My heart bleeds. They have revenue of £1.5 BILLION with a 7.5 margin, so estimated £112.5 million profit.

If only I ran a business with 'problems' like that!

Back in the 90s...

I had an Acorn Risc-PC that as well as having an ARM processor also had a hardware PC card with an X86 chip on it.

One of my favourite demonstrations of the superiority of the ARM chip over its X86 cousin was to take out both processor cards and let people see the physical difference between the bulky X86 with its cumbersome heatsink and the low-profile, cool and slimline chip (no heatsink required) that was the ARM.

It's a real shame that Intel (and later AMD) captured the desktop market the way they did largely thanks to the marketing power of the mighty Micro$oft, because ARM always has been the better design.

Competition in the french mobile market is sorely needed

As someone with a house in France I can tell you that their mobile market still lags a long way behind the UK.

For instance ALL pay-as-you-go plans in France still use the concept of expiring credit. Top-up your phone with say 30 euros of credit and if you don't use it within a specified time-limit it's gone, even if you''ve made no calls at all. The UK did away with that sort of thievery a decade ago or more.

It's been known about for a lot longer than a month

The article of the XDA forum that one of the commentators on your original story linked to was dated MARCH 2011,

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11763089

The android development community has known about it for quite a while. Perhaps the reason no one has been particularly bothered is that the 'security researcher' who 'discovered' it recently is spreading FUD.

Now that's not to say that it's something I'd want on my phone, but all these hysterics are out of proportion.

A missed opportunity

I tried the beta too, fairly intensively too since I had the time, reaching level 28 (my target had been level 25 so I could ride a speeder). There were a few bugs, nothing too game breaking, the worst of which being that all my recipes disappeared after doing some crafting, that's a known issue though so should be fixed for release. The graphics (particularly on Aldebaran) were good although some levels feel a bit too 'enclosed' for me.

However as I played on, the overwhelming feeling I got was one of a missed opportunity.

Like other posters have noted WoW has been out for seven years now, I've played it for five of those seven. SWTOR has the same basic 'kill, collect or click somewhere' that WoW had when it first came out, but now WoW quests offer a lot more variety, mini games, vehicles and so on. SWTOR feels like going back in time in terms of quests.

Also as others have noted, the UI and controls are WoW with a new skin. But again where is the innovation? Group healing in WoW is only really made sensible by the use of addons (Healbot and Grid if you're into WoW). Why didn't the SWTOR delevopers build some of that into their core UI? As it is, group healing is once again a mess of constantly switching target before casting a heal.

SWTOR apparently won't support addons at launch, so although I'm at least tempted to see the class storyline through, I'm not sure that it will hold players for the endgame, which is really where WoW has been successful over so many years.

Paris, because she knows how to play a good game.

Some thoughts

Do they employ anyone to monitor the mental health of people asked to view disturbing images day in and day out?

What sort of person is drawn to work for this type of organisation?

How vigorous are the background checks on the people they employ?

Sadly...

... they gimped the original Wii with too little memory. I bought one 'serious' game for mine but gave up on it after a few sessions due to the incessant loading screens.

Great...

So Apple go to great lengths to secure the iPad so that we can't (legitimately) run customised software on it then make a total screwup of proper security for our data.

Source?

Where does the figure of 111,036 subscriptions for The Times come from? News International are notoriously secretive about this sort of data.

Does it take account of the fact that they give the sub to free to any subscribers to the real paper?

Just for perspective

I think it's worth posting something I saw on Twitter a few days ago

The death of Steve Jobs vs the death of Dennis Ritchie:

http://t.co/uc4KudMS

Attractive but not very functional

I downloaded the iPad app to have a look at it a few days ago, but in it's current incarnation I find it pretty much unusable and certainly not something I would consider paying for.

The navigation is far from intuitive, too much emphasis seems to have been put on making it pretty rather than conveying information. Would it be too much to ask for a simple list of headlines somewhere?

Flipboard does the whole thing a lot better.

The problem was the security

The problem wasn't with downloading the update itself which went relatively smoothly if slowly, the problem occured because Apple insists on digitally signing each install with a unique key based on the device serial number. It was the servers responsible for generating these keys which were unable to cope.

I find this level of control on custom hardware overkill to be honest and one of the reasons I'll be jailbreaking my shiny new iPad just as soon as I get the chance.

Now lets the casting speculation begin

My pick of the A-listers to play Jobs:

Tom Cruise - a little short maybe but he's got the intensity

Russell Crowe - did Jobs ever go around punching people? If so Russell would be ideal

Stephen Fry - I'm sure he'd be great at explaining the technology!

Google are getting a lot out of Android

Not directly in the form of cash, I grant you. But in a world where information is power they are collectiing lots and lots of information.

All those GPS enabled handsets provide invaluable profiling information for their principal money-making activity - marketing.

You underestimate Google at your peril.