Posts by stu 4

knowledgeable yes, annoying and full of himself, also yes

I'd imagine the reason the author gets on peoples tits, is that he speaks like every other agency pond life we have all probably had the misfotune to have to speak to, pander to, and basically hope for a scrap from his table.

Granted this one seems to know what he's talking about, which frankly, puts him in an exclusive group of 1 with his fellow agent scum in my experience.

It's a bit like reading a Dawkins book when he's on a roll:

+ you agree with him, he makes excellent points

- he comes over as a bit of an arsehole, completely full of himself - the odd possible 'convert' is more likely to be wound up by his attitude and stop reading, than listen to him anymore (this is from the experience of gifting his books to friends and family only to be informed they couldn't stand his attitude after a few chapters*)

It's a persona not best suited to persauding the greatest number of people to your point of view imho.

*The Magic Of Reality it like this... he makes a statement at the start about 'this is not about god, no talk about god and athiesm here'... then littered through the book are aside snide comments about the stupid god believers, etc.. does he not realise that this puts certain people off ? he just can't help himself. An otherwise excellent book, remains unread of my mothers bookshelf, as she does want to be preached at like a 5 year old.

Re: Compare to Dental X-Ray

some causality required here methinks... seems more likely to me to be caused by the Kgs of chemical crap they plaster all over their faces every morning....

Re: 30th anniversary of every man and his dog releasing a Spectrum-basher

Apart from ARM - the most successful technology company in the history of the world....

Re: is this the same

""no obvious financial return (e.g. some drug research, etc"

you are aware that some of the most sucessful and profitable companies in the world do drug research???"

er.. yes. are you aware of the way drug research works ?

you spend money on creating drugs that make money, not 'cure people' or stop suffering.

My point (which I though was obvious enough to a reg readership to not need pointing out).

Aids got drugs developed because wealthy white folk got it. If it had remained in Africa they'd have been no research, and no drugs as an example.

Ben Goodacre for example makes a good point about drug research being made independent from industry funding for those very reasons.

However, expecting the government to say, invest in your companies wish to build faster networks is moronic.

And Governments haven't funded universities much for decades. Most research is commercial short term privately funded.

Re: back in the day...

>Had a chat with BT's own futureolgoist as well, which was an eye opener.

Was the eye opener "what a fucking arse-piece - the only thing imaginative about him was his octagonal glasses"

Ian Pearson - a man devoid of any skills whatsoever. And for whom, imagination was an anathema.

you'd often see him in the canteen with a film crew he'd manage to get in to shoot him with his crappy mock up 'computer on a wrist' ...." in the future we'll all have like computers on our wrist and... er... you know avatars and er.. some other shite I've just made up with my limited imagination"

Re: Fail

>What a stupid argument. Lets all buy 2nd hand cars because clearly then we'll never need new ones.

good idea. why not ?

>The point is that the new cars being introduced as old ones wear out should be as clean as possible, not that >everyone should ditch their car for a new e-car. It's a long game, there is no infrastructure for everyone to switch >anyway.

does your house wear out ? Do you sell it and get a new one every 5-10 years even ?

no - of course not - you 'maintain' it - and by doing so it last indefinately. Sure, in the end after maybe 100 years there's some 'ship of theseus' going on, but have economically replaced old parts as required, recycling them as necessary.

Do we still need new houses ? sure - growing population, and a small amount of poor housing being renewed - but would you ever even consider knocking a house down after a certain number of years just because it's old ? of course not - it would be mental. And yet we do exactly that with cars.

A modern car is much the same as a new and has arguably no defined maximum lifetime anymore than your house does.

My X5 has done 150K miles and drives like it's just came out the showroom. In other 50k it might need a reconditioned gearbox, perhaps in another 150K miles, a new engine. The bodywork shows no signs of rust whatsoever after 11 year, so I imagine that will be just as good in 10 years time.

The people buying new cars are not the people who have previously run a new car for the last 20 years until it was no longer maintainable - if they were you might have a point. They are people, that 'buy new cars'. They are the main contributors to any environmental pollution. It doesn't matter whether they are buying an EV, a diesel or a ferrari - they are still the no.1 polluters.

The economics of new cars, now only works with a worldwide market because of the longevity of the cars these days. How many 10 year old cars do you see on British roads ? Not a fraction as many as there should be - because they have been shipped out to eastern europe, china, etc.

As long as the supply of new cars continues unabated, the supply of 10 year old cars to china is unabated, and the inefficient recycling of perfectly good 20 year old cars will continue (since who in China will want a 20 year old car, when 10 year old one are coming in all the time).

stu

Re: let's be completely honest

fair point I think.

Though it is something I do thing is very very weird. 2 things that seem to really stand out if you look at people these days that seem, just, well illogical:

ties. I mean what do they do ? it is such a stange decoration to have which has no purpose. And yet has taken over the western world.

makeup: painting your face with coloured stuff. Just utterly mental. It's like something we'd see folk doing in the amazon and thinking 'how quaint' and yet as you say, nearly all western (and some eastern I suppose) women do it. Just seems utterly ridiculous. And then they put on their 4in tall clown shoes too.

And at the end of all that stupidity they complain that 'pictures in magazines don't represent them' - eh ? you don't represent a human female woman yourself !! lose the clown paint and the shoes then we'll talk.

Re: So essentially what you're saying

Hmm... I know which one I'd rather shag...

uhu

"If they wished I would connect them to BusinessBB sales so they could move/upgrade their service to the same shit service, packaged as a business product for 5 times the price."

BBC handling

While I agree, I do feel the BBC's handling of this has been all 'fingers and thumbs'

thank you and goodnight.

Re: AltaVista.digital.com

hehe.

reminds me of my time in the early days at BT Laboratories in Martlesham, Suffolk.

Around the same time, it decided to rename itself to Adastral Park. A contractor got wind of it, and registered adastralpark.com and tried to sell it to BT. BT refused and until recently it was a NSFW swingers site.

Re: Geeks have macs too

er - I was referring to the fact he says he now uses macs, not PCs (or linux).

An Apple II, is a 'II' not a mac...

Re: fuss over nothing

'That's not the norm, though'

says who ? apple have among the highest customer satisfaction rating* in the business. you mention my 'anecdotal' evidence (sure, it's my personal experience), but you appear to be doing the same thing (or is it just something you'd heard ?

There isn't a consumer electronics company out there that doesn't invalidate warranties unless they are repaired by a qualified repairer (and there are approved 3rd party apple repair shops). desktop PCs have always been the strange and singular exception to this consumer electronics rule because of their componentized/standard based construction and a historical accident caused by IBM in the 80s.

I would personally argue that that has given us one very good plus and one very bad minus:

+ cheap PCs

- tie in to archaic standards like BIOS, IDE, PCI that should have died years ago.

Have a look at Sony's equivalent all in one (SVL2412Z1E) and tell me how apple is really any different in support and upgradeability ?

*top of ACSI, top of JD Power, etc.