Posts by Matt 5
24 posts • joined Wednesday 17th June 2009 15:08 GMT
Re: Yeah, terrible service ...
Oh, I only have 100mb atm. Don't get 120 'til later in the year.
Re: Yeah, terrible service ...
Just to add data points,
http://www.speedtest.net/result/2488553934.png
Re: Ughhh
Ground rules for transporters have been around for years? Sure, and they change according to plot. Always have.
Regardless, they've done warp transporters before. In TNG to be sure, and I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who'll claim that 'that's not star trek'.
Only the most uptight fans try to claim consistency. Star Trek (and Star Wars) have technology that moves at the speed of plot - not according to actual rules. For example... we're on a 5 year deep space mission, but if we want to get back to earth we can manage that without upsetting our schedule.
Let go of the details and enjoy the story. There's nothing in the Star Trek reboot that's really outside of the norm for Star Trek. It could be worse, they could still have Brannon Bragga and Rick Berman hanging around their necks.
I doubt I'll be first to mention this, but...
Fahrenheit 451 is probably the most predictive bit of SF I've read (although the author claims the majority of his work to be fantasy).
Take for example how hard it was for Guy to get his wife to communicate with him while she had 3 screens on the go - a mixture of friends and family shouting at her (facebook et al), redundant semi-interactive tv shows (take your pick of x-factor or WoW farming I suppose) plus an inability to go more than a few feet without some sort of tech stimulus (in ear radio in the story, but concept of people having withdrawal symptoms when offline is definatley there).
Of course he misses flat out in other respects - such as the extremely elongated advertising boards to be easier to read while high speed driving and so on. I'll leave it up to you to decide if the idea of over simplified, dumbed down, governing a country by lies, half truthes and hoping the warm fluff will make the populace doscile ever came to be...
Re: Excellent
Its still there.
But why leave Win7 if there are features you miss in Win8?
Re: Shutdown button
Are you complete novice? Hitting the shutdown button on the machine doesn't turn the machine off, it just triggers a normal shutdown as if you'd clicked the shutdown option anyway.
Don't talk while the adults are talking little one, you'll keep embarrassing yourself. You and the idiots who up-voted you.
You're either a moron or a troll
You don't press Start to shutdown. Which is to say, clicking the start button does not shutdown your machine <<queue bsd jokes here>>
You press Start to 'Start a task'. From the presented tasks you can then click shutdown, to shutdown.
Posted in Virgin Media introduces P2P throttling
Contention
I invite everyone to remember that you're paying for a consumer grade service with a contention ratio of (at least) 20:1 or 50:1. While all ISPs try to give people something that looks like the service they're paying for, they've never been under any obligation to actually deliver it 24/7.
Offcom's investigations into broadband speed have always been to do with actual achievable speed and not usage.
So you might have a 50mbit, or 8mbit service, but unlimited has never been unlimited. Their actual obligation to you is to provide 1/20th or 1/50th the service you signed up for. This has always been the case.
Traffic shaping and AUPs are just an attempt to spread the pain more evenly over their entire network, otherwise some shit down the road from me who's a US tv/every other linux distro/super pirate who tries to max out his connection 24/7 is going to cause me and the other 18+ people on the same line to have some serious issues. Screw him is what I say.
Overall most people get waaaay better than that minimum. Anyone who thinks that for their £20 - £60 / month they ought to be getting an uncontended, unlimited service please go to your doctor and ask for some anti-delusion pills.
Ok, I'll bite...
The speed of light is constant - in a particular medium with fixed properties (remember the c most talked about is the speed of light in a vacuum, which is faster than the speed of light through the atmosphere and so on. Go re-read your high school physics books on refraction!). These guys are simply talking about changing the properties of the rubidium vapour, thus altering the speed of light in that substance. However, all light in that substance at that particular attunement will move at the same speed. So there you go. All sorted out for you.
Posted in Scottish iSchool goes 100% iPad
Does ayone really think...
That the school isn't getting some kick back or other from Apple on this?
Well...
Without wishing to either support or denigrate either the ACCU or the BCS, you have to acknowledge that in terms of IT, programming is actually only one small facet of what goes on.
I'm a true geek who enjoys programming for the sake of it and thought it ludicrous people would pay me to do it!
However, IT in general is so ridiculously full of cowboys its not funny. The profession needs something like a Charted IT Professional qualification thats not controlled by some company or other (Microsoft and Cisco, I'm looking at you!) that can mean something to people who aren't IT literate and give them some confidence in hiring people with it.
Now, I'm not saying that the BCS's program is actually any good in filling that gap, but someone, somewhere does need to do so. God knows degrees in IT are worthless for filtering out the idiots...
If we can make some progress on this, perhaps we can get away from badly specced IT projects that are inherently undeliverable and end up with less time wasted on projects that end up being cancelled half way through...
Hardly a reasonable comparison
While Apple is doing undeniably well, it is fundamentally a selfish company.
Microsoft is in no way doing badly.
However, Microsoft is not a 'selfish' company.
By this I mean very simply, what is the full economic impact of Apple's turnover, and what of Mircosoft's?
Apple, for better or worse, are a full service company. The design, build, configure and sell their products. True they have a few outlets that sell Apple product's (and this has grown steadily with their iPod/iPhone productline), but their core business ethic is 'keep the profit for themselves'. And there is nothing at all wrong with that. Its why businesses exist afterall. THey might start for noble and lofty reasons, but they keep going for cold hard cash.
Microsoft's bottom line, however, is only part of the Microsoft economic story. As it stands they're doing pretty darned well. However, if you factor in the third party economy, the resultant figure has to dwarf anything Apple could currently dream of. Remember that here we have multiple vendor's for PCs and phones, we have multiple vendor's for direct software sales and business licensed sales, there are the consultants, the developers, the management teams, the derived products and solutions (and by this, I don't mean generic Windows programs, I mean programs reliant on MS tech e.g. SQL Server, Exchange, Office etc).
I'm glad Apple are doing well, their products (like them or loathe them) keep everyone else on their toes. But you really can't compare Apple and Microsoft in any simple comparison. The companies just aren't in the same business, regardless of what cross over exists.
Umm...
Didn't computers in the 60s and 70s 'just work' mainly because they were all carefully hand crafted and had every line of code scrutinised before it was even committed to punch cards?
It had nothing to do with the ethos at the time, is was the only way things could be done.
Pointlessly required title entry
All that tells me is not to run bind. It doesn't tell me not to run Windows. Not to mention that any decent sized operation isn't running dns on anything but a ver small percentage of machines.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your underlying premise, jsut saying that your evidence/example is severly flawed.
Finally, how long can the linux market really survive with people not making money out of the development and packaging of distros? Surely there's a breaking point where people realise they need food and somewhere to sleep so they need to get paid?
Free software isn't free, someone's paying for it somewhere.
You forget...
So long as you keep paying for those Windows licenses, MS don't really care if you use it or not.
Posted in BBC clambers onto iPhone bandwagon
Yet another set of iPhone apps...
That ultimatley aren't much more than glorified RSS feed readers and/or customised websites.
Doesn't say much about the iPhone experience does it when any popular site feels the need to produce and application for it just so people can read it?
Very adult
Nice to see moderation and free exchange of ideas being taken seriously here.
Well obviously...
Reverse cow girl!
I refuse to title a response!
Then I'd say that more likely your boss' wife is a complete idiot then.
We have people here who've been using windows for more than 10 years and still don't know when they need to double click or single click something, let alone understand what a folder is.
We rolled out office 2007 with the ribbon bar and we had no complaints. If these luddites can cope I have to assume anyone who can't figure it out is severly thought impaired.
Forced Microsoft?
Firefox forced Microsoft to release newer browsers? Hardly.
Microsoft hasn't changed is browser release strategy at all - 1 IE release per OS release. How exactly can Firefox take credit for that?
If they'd said that their market share had forced microsoft to be more standards compliant, that'd be something I could believe.
RE: Serves them right
Are you a total idiot?
You really don't get why people would have a non-isp e-mail account?
How about... portability? If you have a non-isp e-mail address you can change ISPs at a whim without losing you e-mail and having to keep telling people what your address is.
How about privacy? Only give personal contacts your 'real' address and use your free account for posting on forums, and other logins.
How about the simple fact that these passwords have most likely been stolen by means other than comrpomising hotmail servers? Pretty much no security system is immune to social engineering.
Posted in Second open-source Silverlight hits beta
RE: Moonlight, what a joke
"Microsoft should realise that most professional web developers would prefer them to start implementing SVG and HTML5"
Really? Really?
Where's your evidence for this? Most professional web developers are quite happy with their flash and/or css. I personally despise flash, but thats mainly because of the abusive flash adverts out there.
Well, it could hardly be any worse than....
...the new series could it?
The original, while awful, had a lot of 70's camp charm about it. It was never going to change your life, but it was entertaining.
The new series... I mean, jeebus help me! Wtf was that about? The schitzo's were really seeing angels and god was manipulating them? Earth is actually third generation humanity?
Maybe not prior art, but...
They might not be able to claim prior art (there may or may not be earlier systems doing this) but certainly it fails the obviousness test?
Any technically minded person faced with a problem of keeping a group of networked machines updated witha piece of software would undoubtedly come up with a solution that covers these broad strokes.
Also, if they believe there's any validity in the patent why haven't they sued everyone already for breach? Or have they already got licensing agreements with every company that does this?
