Posts by Martin 71
149 posts • joined Tuesday 30th June 2009 09:09 GMT
Or it's an electronic guidebook
Connected to the HHG offices via ... something improbable?
Like most true journalists, he believes in at least a pretense to accuracy. Therefore faux news made a perfect humorous example of the ridiculousness of the right. Right wingers getting upset at people pointing this out is merely another example of how ridiculous they are
Re: Oh puhleeze.
You have a point but if they're close enough to hold it to your head, many MANY things can be lethal. The problem isn't the actual object, it's the user.
And no, I'm NOT one of the 'guns don't kill people' brigade, I am usually fairly rabidly anti-gun, but this isn't a problem at all that I can see. Just someone trying to set off mass hysteria.
It'd be fairly trivial to modify an air pistol (.22) to fire a .22 cartridge, and nailgun cartridges would fit along with a pellet. And it'd likely survive a couple of firings if the pistol was well made. That's why actually doing so has such huge penalties.
In short, this isn't really anything new, just a new method, that may endanger the experimenter (someone else has already mentioned kids liking to experiment).
Re: 'tis good
I agree to a point. What DOES look unprofessional is when a company has a website, with their own domain ... www.somecompany.example, but has emails 'somecompany.example@hotmail.com.
WHY?
Re: What?
You can go procreate with yourself. Yes, i rose to the troll. Now sod off. I hope to hell you never end up on disability because you CAN'T work, because unlike you, I'm not a selfish little richard cranium
One thing I haven't seen commented on yet: ONLY a court of law can apply a 'fine'. Others may apply a penalty charge if mentioned in the contract, but legally, it is NOT a fine. I'd have let virgin mediocre try to put that one through the courts.
In the UK the warranty would be moot anyway, sale of goods act makes their restrictions unenforcable :-)
FIFY
"This is an experience for [Facejunk] access," he told us. "The phone is designed for people that want to be tools."
Re: I am going to take an unpopular side here.
No angry downvote here, I agree, the entire idea was flawed from the start, but the record companies certainly are not making themselves any friends
Four One IP, yes. If you'd made it One Four, I'd have clicked immediately. Bloody colonials!
Re: There sure as hell is a need for press regulation
Your second paragraph (aside from the first sentence thereof) I agree with. However, insulting someone who was driven to suicide puts you in the Littlejohn category
Re: ZOMG Running out of IPv4 addresses!!!!
I'd agree, I'd certainly argue that DEC no longer needs an entire /8... for example. I think they need to *yoink* back those IP ranges that aren't being used.
Re: it's the Windows handbrake
While I am a fairly happy windows user, I do have to agree with that. Legacy applications especially tend to assume screen resolutions. But then again, so do web sites. Which is plain crazy. Especially with widescreen being common now (I'm not going there re: popular or unpopular). Seeing a website taking up a strip 1/2 a screen wide with 2 huge blank vertical white spaces either side looks ludicrous.
Re: Chromebook is doing what Surface was supposed to do...
I'm agreeing, the first part of the comment was quite sensible, although the 'ms sucks on tablets' is what made me look. Surely sucking on anything BUT a tablet is what win 8 is famous for? Made me go read the name...
Beer, because you can always use a tablet as a coaster, plus it's good to drink
Posted in Router crash downs CloudFlare services
Re: I think someone meant to do that.
Open disclosure. It means HOPEFULLY this will be patched thatmuch sooner.
Posted in Keyboard, you're not my type
Re: Flexowiters and Teletypes
Upvote just for the humour in that :-)
And I'd imagine the locked key could do some SERIOUS damage to a finger, especially back in the days when most people had learned to type on real typewriters
Posted in Keyboard, you're not my type
Re: I have one of those IBM clicky clacky keyboards
If you have one and don't like it, either gift it to a relative who does, or ebay it for beer money :)
Re: stuck in 2007?
Thank you for being the one to notice that the emperor has no clothes, and that tablets are not the same as desktop computers. I wish you worked as a UI designer.
Re: good riddance to an early 'hacking tool'?
I suspect you're mixing up messenger and Windows Live Messenger.
Messenger was the thing that used the LAN messaging service and messages had to be sent from the command line... and became rapidly useless due to spam and/or the prevalence of NAT.
Windows live messenger is/was that thing formerly known as MSN messenger.
Re: I scrapped Adobe years ago
I can confirm for you it absolutely IS optional. It's just another option in the 'applications' setting. I disabled it because I, like you, download all PDFs to open in foxit.
I since have uninstalled ff 19 and rolled back to 18.0.2 because of a stability issue, but that could've been my weird usage of firefox yesterday (cat pictures make up 40% of the internet yknow).
Beer, because it goes well with cat.
Posted in Any storm in a port
Re: Yeah, well, me too
It's fear. I have noticed this too. What happens, is, having broken at least one connector in our lifetimes (usually on a laptop or other item where it's difficult/impossible to replace), we take it VERY easy, the slightest resistance makes us reverse the connector. Then we find either (A) it fits, in which case the first time was wrong, or, (B), it doesn't fit, which means the first time was right but we didn't push hard enough through fear.
I agree the designer of the connector needs to be beaten
Re: BT - bollock time
Can only agree with that, I'm known in family as the 'geek of communications', so whenever a problem shows up with phones, I get called.
This means I see a lot of the frustration that the techs and engineers suffer. They get watched for time, constantly. They get a major problem, they have to tell the customer 'sorry we can't fix it' and drive off, then another appointment has to be made, etc. etc.
And ghods help you if it's an intermittent fault, they HAVE to put it as 'no fault found', then you end up fighting a 100 pound plus bill from your phone provider :-( They hate this as much as the customer. Some of them will go out of the way to find a 'fault' (altho not the one reported) , just to avoid the charge to the customer.
I have been lucky a few times with the customer service part actually. Yes, frequently you get a person who is clearly a script reader, but on several occasions, the person has known shortcuts through the system. And in ONE case, an Indian operator told me, regarding a horrible intermittent ADSL issue, that there were several other calls from the same area, and that it was definitely an exchange issue and would be fixed soon. She was correct.
Beer, because the engineers quite often deserve one.
I really don't understand WHAT this penchant is for 08xx numbers anyway. Just use a normal geographic landline from a real phone company. Cable and Wireless were a worldwide telegraph outfit, what they're doing with phonelines, I have no idea
Interesting...
Now I need to find some scrap microprocessors, my pestle and mortar, and do some chemistry!
*yes, I know it won't produce nanospheres, but the reaction might still be viewable!
Icon for what might happen if it produces enough hydrogen
Re: Buffering?
That could be done with lead acid batteries and an inverter of some description, but the initial cost of those, and the ongoing maintenance of them, would make it borderline I would think. But I'd certainly be looking at it if I were in that situation.
Re: very talented guy, r.i.p.
Ah yes, one of my first memories of Thunderbirds :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOCmI72eRh4
Re: And another genius is lost to us.
Upvoted it again for you :-) Now can someone upvote it again for me?
And I'd extend the 'age of influence' to 80s kids too :).. so far we have everyone from 30 to 70... any advance?
Posted in Ten… top tech cock-ups of 2012
Re: 3=1, etc.
Much as I'm an anti-apple-fanboi, (Their products are ok, but massively overpriced for what they do, and sometimes restricted in weirdly arbitrary ways, and thus I like el Reg's constant attacks on them), I agree, the maps fiasco was merely a one off mistake, the 'interface previously known as metro' is hideous, and apparently was designed by someone who wants microsoft to go under. I attempted to use a windows 8 machine in John Lewis, couldn't figure out how to use it.
Previous incarnations of windows have not been like that. Windows 98 was new to me (my previous computer experience had been DOS and CP/M), yet clicking the start menu was obvious, as it looked like a button and said "Start" on it. This new interface may be okay for touchscreens, but for a normal computer with a pointing device, and a screen bigger than 'tiny', it looks more ludicrous than XP's luna theme, and the fact it breaks the UI paradigm they've used for so many years may well be 'game over' for them.
Re: BT overcharging
"The phone lines should be public property like the national grid."
They were, till Thatcher stole them. She also stole the national grid.
Re: Facefcuk
I am not sure about shutting it down. How about just issuing an international arrest warrant to whoever makes their decisions (these days it'd be a board, not just Zuck, surely?) for contempt of court, obstructing the police, and several other offences. That'd change their tune methinks
Re: 5 more sites
THAT, right there, is a very good idea and would send a clear message.
Re: Bad decision by naive court
The court was clearly not naive. The court merely thinks that the law is more important than the views of a bunch of semi-literate morons on facebook.
I should name him on a facebook page. That would be fine, according to them, right?
Re: They are doing it wrong these Pedophile's
The only problem with your conflation of Paedophilia with a mental disorder, (which may, in some cases be true) is that it doesn't really help, it'd just increase the stigma on Schizophrenics (which is already enormous). The public are ignorant dimwits by and large... Attempting to pretend otherwise is doomed to failure.
I agree with you re: disproportionate, but if the police TRY to be proportionate, in the case of terrorism, the government get on their backs, and in the case of paedophiles, the public get on their backs.
None of which helps anyone, least of all the victims of either group.
Not much I wouldn't think
Most modern exchanges feed a set current down the line (20-30mA if I recall, can't be bothered to stick a DMM into the phone socket to find out), but the current demand of modern systems is TINY compared to their electromechanical ancestors (where the selectors usually took ~1 amp when stepping).
The actual current consumption of most phonelines is much smaller now, as people tend to use their mobiles more than the landline. The non-use leakage of the line is tiny, less than 2mA, as around 2-3mA will trigger them to send Openreach round randomly to bill you 100+ quid for finding a fault that's not there.
Re: Disgruntled of TW
1. Black phones tend to have the bells inside, the ones with them on top were wooden
2. The 50v is to feed the DC speech circuitry, ringing voltage is 75-80v at 16-25Hz
3. The national grid is a mix of (mostly) 400kv with some smaller segments still on 132kv and 66kv, not 500kv
4. The 25degree C figure is the temperature at which the resistance is measured, not the temp it's alleged to be heated to by the current.
Re: What's the magic word?
Landlord should really have sent GE an invoice
Re: and win7 and assoc apps are ??
I once had the misfortune of having to use a computer with office 2007 on it. The lack of a menu bar made the application fundamentally unusable . I know the keyboard shortcuts for Print, save, open, find but more obscure ones I do not. It's the same usability issue Google Chrome has, breaking the UI paradigm people are used to is not 'something they'll get used to', it just annoys them and makes them hate the company who did it.
Re: Must watch more news
I think they're pissed that Obama won the US election (after all he was the first US leader with the balls to suggest they get out of gaza), and are waving their willies around.
Re: The odd thing about the swiss railway clocks...
It's because it's a master clock system with the second hand independent of the minute/hour hands (and the master clock). The second hand is adjusted to be slightly fast, so reaches the 12.00 position slightly ahead of the minute impulse from the master clock. It's locked there mechanically till the minute impulse releases it :-)
We used to have similar systems over here (I believe some of the later Gents' systems did it) but now... all over to quartz crap that doesn't keep time, never shows the same times, and needs batteries. YAY progress!
Posted in Sock-wielding movie pirates go to prison
Re: Thanks!
Yes, because we don't want a representative sample of IT types on here do we.
Face it, much as you may not like it for moral, or 'i'm better than you' reasons, some people with IT knowledge like to download movies. WHY should they be banned just because you morally disagree with them? I think you're mistaking El Reg for a religious institution
Re: pants
Are you sure you read it right? I saw "I GET IT" as in 'yes i understand what you mean, now p*ss off so I can continue working the way i always have in a webmail interface', that is: Grouchily, and with bad grace. I only ever use it when I am away from my main PC. Really need to stop using POP3 and start using IMAP, then i'd never have to see the web interface except on my phone.
FWIW, when I clicked the "I get it" I was returned to the normal compose interface :-)
Re: If a HAM radio enthusiast
2" (50mm) separation is the standard, or a physical barrier (thin plastic conduit counts as a barrier). So it really wouldn't be a problem. And plaster can be re-done.. so usually the argument against cat5 wiring is purely one of laziness.
Re: "Where can I find samples of shielded domestic mains power cable?"
To be fair, FP200 and even boring ole SWA would probably work too. But the point is, this stuff's unnecessary anyway. Install cat5e or cat6 cable. Job done, cheaper than pyro ;-)
And I LOVE MI cable, beautiful stuff to work with when you have time (ie, not on a contract job!)
Re: Outraged!
They already DID change the law to allow firearms.
The IOC can piss right off
SMS and Data are paid for by all users of the network. They have absolutely NO right to ask anyone not to use it. They shouldn't be using the cellular phone data network for such things if it's that important
Re: Thing is, STB ... (was: My email reader/writer is ...)
I'd purged edlin from my mind. Thanks so much for undoing all those years of therapy
Posted in Stanford boosts century-old battery tech
Re: Q=CV
That's what I get for replying in the early hours of the morning using info I haven't actively used in 15 yrs.
Being corrected instantly is one of the reasons I love this place. No, seriously.
Now where's me coffee?
Posted in Stanford boosts century-old battery tech
Re: So in essence...
That depends what the charge/discharge curves look like. A capacitor (even supercapacitor) shows logarithmic voltage changes with charge... a battery tends to have a much flatter curve
