Posts by ZootCadillac 105 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2009
About WinRar, which like most other people I have been using since the baby jebus was well, a baby. I thought I should check that I have a license. Turns out I do. Which is great. Also turns out that I'm running V5.00 Beta 8. How is it even possible that's still running and working perfectly on a daily basis? I think it came out in 2013. I should probably fix that.
I initially came here to post something humorous after seeing the headline in my inbox. Even when I started reading I thought that there had to be some comical value in the story. But nope. After having read it all he's just s filthy pervert who would be better placed in my garden for a good fucking kicking rather than a prison term.
Does this term get used in today's woke society? When I was at school in the 70's there was always a "cock of the school" who was considered the 'hardest kid' in the playground. This either made him a target or a person of awe to be revered. He was usually in the final year of high school and had a lot of hangers on whose reputation was far higher than their capabilities. By association of course.
I once had a run in with our resident "cock" and his posse of council estate honchos. Took a few slaps and was derided for it amongst my peers for a few weeks. The same guy actually came to a school reunion about 10 years ago and oddly had the same attitude. Took offence to my car when I arrived and the "bullying" continued every time we passed at the bar. Went to the bathroom and had a little more of the same. Left the bathroom, he was asleep in the urinals. Nobody told him I fought competition pak mei kung fu into my mid thirties. Slowly slowly catchy monkey.
Where was I, oh yeah coq. Not a good name for a business of any kind.
I feel I have to take umbrage with the opening phrase "Legendary games company Atari" as i feel what follows is a terrible disservice to the once great name. Because this really isn't Atari is it? It's a small French games company named Infogrames Interactive ( eventually, they had a few renames as assets came their way) who had early success in that boom and went on a splurge buying up other struggling games companies including, Ocean International, Gremlin Interactive, GT Interactive and Hasbro Interactive which the latter, fortunately for them came with the Microprose assets plus the Atari brand name and it's intellectual property. Subsequently the company was renamed Atari Inc. and that's where we are today.
A look into their history shows some colossal losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars almost on a yearly basis and the holding company and subsidiaries spent a couple of years in chapter 11 bankruptcy.
I had the misfortune to have some dealings with them some years back. They don't take criticism at all well and they certainly do not like any scrutiny about their dealings or being reminded of the facts.
I only became aware of this screen yesterday and it took me about three minutes to decide to pre-order one from Scan. £1160 though. I've stayed drunk since. not sure i want to face what I have done. I currently have 3 37" monitors on my rather large desk. This will free up some real estate at least. I don't care about the 1080 as it will be gaming only, well mostly.
Actually if anyone cares the UK has 10 MQ-9 reaper drones. These are the only drones available to the RAF capable of carrying out such a mission in Syria. They are all in operation in the Middle East since 2014.
They are being phased out and replaced with 20 Predator B drones, which have a greater reach and larger payload. These are apart from and in addition to a greater number of differing types of high-altitude reconnaissance drones.
Hans, I'm not sure who the "flawed loonies" are that you refer to. VirginMedia don't employ anyone to design routers. They pay Netgear to rebrand their models and use those. Are you suggesting that VirginMedia fire Netgear?
There is no problem with these routers that does not already exist in most of them in that keeping the default password on any supplied equipment is a ridiculous idea. It's not all that long ago that the default password on all NTL ( who are now VirginMedia) came with a router/modem password which was "changeme".
I changed my passwords and those of my family the day they were installed.
As I read above. The Router is not at fault here and I'd go further and say the company are not at fault either. This is most definitely a user issue.
I picked that to make precisely the point that no single country should be controlling the internet. You are reading too much into what I said. It's not that the biggest country should be in control but that no government should be in control.
It should be under the control of an independent body who represents the interests of the global user base.
The US Government is not representative of anybody but its citizens. They do not speak for or have responsibility for 95% of the world. So that's why i chose that for my statement. I hope that sates your curiosity.
I'm running windows 7 on a desktop which is also my media server, happily. There is the 'get windows 10' icon that sits unobtrusively on my toolbar and every few days I get the little blue box nagware show up which I take no notice of but do recall it recently said something about concrete.
I click the X ( which is blue, or grey and in a white box) and it goes away for a few days. Has ever been thus.
I did install W10 on this machine some time back but the then video drivers were useless for my multi screen setup and I just could not be bothered fixing so immediately rolled back. Interestingly it then told me that my software was counterfeit ( it isn't ) and required some restarting and using the genuine software thing to resolve.
I will upgrade to W10, there is no reason not to in my eyes. I just won't do it yet.
I will not be changing operating systems because I can't afford to replace my considerable software library or have to go through learning new software for some tasks that are now second nature to me with Windows OS versions.
I know people's mileage is varying with the W10 nagware but for me personally it's not even been an annoyance. I did the upgrade on the Acer and Asus laptops and apart from the unfamiliarity of it from W7 it's been no problem to use.
I was unsure also, so got these snippets from the FT:
"Ultimately, Virgin Media is seeking to connect 17m premises to the network by 2019, in what would be the largest investment in UK broadband infrastructure in more than a decade......
.....Virgin Media has already started to roll out fibre to premises in Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire, with work soon starting in West Yorkshire, Devon and East Sussex. In the past year, Virgin says it has laid enough new cable to stretch from Land’s End to John O’Groats".
and this from Recombu:
The ultrafast fibre connections will deliver top download speeds of 200Mbps and 300Mbps to an unspecified number of homes and businesses in West Lothian, Renfrewshire, Leicestershire, West Yorkshire, Inverclyde, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Hampshire and Dorset.....
....The first rural communities that will benefit from Virgin Media’s FTTP rollout are:
Kirknewton (West Lothian)
Houston, Crosslee, Craigends and Brookfield (Renfrewshire)
Bridge of Weir (Renfrewshire)
Ratby (Leicestershire)
Wilsden (West Yorkshire)
Kilmacolm (Inverclyde)
Stoke Poges (Buckinghamshire)
Lightwater (Surrey)
Hartley Wintney and Phoenix Green (Hampshire)
Oakley (Dorset)"
BT only rolloed out Openreach in areas where it was commercially viable. For rural areas and villages where they deemed it too expensive the communities were offered the opportunity to pay for it themselves with a 'community fibre partnership. Think about that. Some communities got fibre paid for by taxpayers because it would make BT money. And then some taxpayers got fibre because they paid for it themselves. Again. It's ludicrous.
Even before the BDUK programme was announced BT were tasked with getting broadband to hard to reach areas yet because copper is useless over distance for ADSL they just didn't bother.
They took, or will have taken, £1.2Bn from the public purse to do a roll-out job that nobody else would bid for because they knew it was not viable. But BT took the money. They didn't do the job.
Now Virginmedia have access to the telegraph pole network and ducting of BT they are back in the rural business. They didn't bid for the broadband roll-out contracts because they had no access to BT infrastructure at the time. Now they have they are running cable by pole to rural areas and serving high speed broadband.
They are doing this with their, or their investor's money. If they can do this ask yourself why BT could not do it with the public's money?
BT are supplying 39% of the investment for this programme and are getting 100% of the profits. That they get to pick and choose only profitable areas sickens me, as it should any taxpayer.
If my accusation is false let BT sue me. MP's stood up in the house and claimed the taxpayer was being ripped off as far back as 2013.
*same disclosure by me. I'm nobody but a taxpayer and virginmedia customer.
and likely only made possible after BT were ordered to allow access to their infrastructure to the competition. This of course includes ducting but more importantly in this case also includes the telegraph pole network, making cabling rural areas much simpler.
As for it being rural areas then good luck to them. It's what people have been clamouring for. I live on the outskirts of Greater Manchester in between the city and a vast rural farm area. I am a VirginMedia customer. Does not bother me in the slightest that someone has the option of faster speeds than me. The 200Mb/s service I get now is more than adequate for my needs.
It's been too long coming and is appalling that private enterprise is managing this when BT are failing to do what they have been tasked with whilst given a huge chunk of the public purse for it.
You are wrong. You are very wrong and when someone is wrong on the internet? Well, you know the drill.
Most of the UK fibre network was installed by US company Nynex. I say most because there were some smaller, local players over the years but it was pretty much all handled by Nynex. They ran some cable TV plus dial up internet services and had a backbone to the US.
In 1997, the UK assets of NYNEX were merged with the Cable & Wireless subsidiary Mercury Communications, cable operators Vidéotron and Bell Cablemedia, then renamed as the new company Cable & Wireless Communications. This company offered the UK its first alternative to BT for telephone services and continued to operate cable TV Services.
C&W changed their business focus worldwide in 2000 and decided to pull out of the UK domestic market ( as well as the US corporate market) and sold their UK assets to NTL. They did little to no infrastructure expansion during their ownership.
NTL ran in parts of the UK with Telewest being their only real competition. Some time around 2005 NTL had been running an ISP for Virgin ( Virgin.net) and bought that company out to begin their own ISP service. They also struck up talks for a merger with Telewest. That merger eventually went through in 2006 (top of my head here) but to prevent triggering a change of ownership clause with the BBC for services the smaller Telewest acquired NTL to become NTL:Telewest.
In 2007 this company, now running Phone, cable TV and Internet purchased Virgin Mobile to become the first quadplay media business in the UK. At the same time NTL acquired a licence to use the Virgin brand name from Richard Branson in exchange for shareholdings. So NTL:Telewest was re-branded as Virginmedia but were exactly the same company as previously but now had a mobile phone network in their asset locker.
NTL and later as virgin invested very heavily in infrastructure over the years regularly increasing their reach and are currently undergoing a £3Bn improvement to reach a further 4-5 million homes in the UK and improve speeds and services. Virgin's current lowest package available is 50mb/s with the highest being 200Mb/s. The 100 Mb/s package has been upgraded to 152Mb/s and unlike non-cable competitors those speeds are pretty accurate most of the time. All of this is with fibre to the cabinet and copper to the premises.
So you see my incorrect friend nobody went bankrupt. Nobody paid for infrastructure that a later company benefited from because it was all bought and paid for. If companies have disappeared it is only through the normal business processes of acquisition and merger and in fact both NTL and Telewest exist today as Virginmedia because all they did was change their name.
I hope that helps you brush up on your 'history'.
Just where in is it in the BBC's remit that they are to undertake research and development projects? Where in the Royal Charter does it say that as well as its "mission to inform, educate and entertain" it also says I have to pay for vague R&D projects?
This archaic leech needs to be cut from the public teat and allowed to sink or swim on its own merits. it has no more value to the UK taxpayer now it is shown that private enterprise can do the same job as well if not better.
It does not matter in the rest of the world because we thankfully are not under the yoke of the California led eco-warriors in the EPA.
America is a huge market for the motoring industry outside of the US but I'm pretty sure that VAG, the ninth largest company in the world, could live without it. Which would probably suit the insular US and their agricultural V8s ( which I'd like to know how they pass any kind of eco test on the planet, let alone the draconian ones in California )
People write software for the ECU in most vehicles all the time. Once done, usually for the purpose of better real world performance, you can be sure it will never beat an emissions test ever again. That is why before it's time to go in for the test we map vehicles back to factory default.
It goes on all over the industry. Seems VW just found an efficient way to automate the process. How very German.
I'm 50 years old. Today actually. I've been ginger for the majority of that time. Although now I sport a nice little bald area and the rest of my hair is turning a quite odd ruddy blonde.
Was I bullied about it? You bet. And growing up in one of the poorest areas of the UK in the 60's and 70's was no picnic I can tell you. but I guess it helped make me who I am today.
And who I am is someone who gets deeply annoyed when strangers get offended on my behalf when not asked to.
I find nothing at all offensive about the term 'ginger stepchild' and its various uses because it's a metaphor and neatly sums up what a writer means when the term is used.
So please, come down. It must be cold always up there on the moral high ground.
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