Posts by Steve Mason 73 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2006
so I recently bought a new telly... Nice new Sony... had a look around at various places for the best price.
£650 compared to Curry's £1100... guess where I went.
PCWorld and Currys have always been overpriced, and have always had terrible customer service - I'm surprised they've stayed in business so long. With more people getting online and getting more "tech savvy" this can only get worse for them, and good riddance imo.
I assume that any device with a compatible browser (flash based video I'm assuming again) will be able to access this version of iplayer given the correct url.
If so, then linux and even ps3 users should be able to use this so long as flash is enabled/supported in their browser of choice.
The most important part of the article is the following line
"It intercepts domain queries that are non-existent in Karoo's own cache."
so, just set up an automated job to clear you dns cache say, ooh, every hour, and then the majority if all dns queries are magically "non-existent in Karoo's own cache." and get forwarded to ask.com... thanks very much.
having worked at Becta (contractor thankfully) I can sadly report that half the time the organisation doesn't know it's arse from it's elbow.
and I fully agree these elbow-holes should be rounded up and locked away - WE DON'T NEED PROTECTING... if something's offensive to a particular person, they shouldn't bloody well read it! End of!
do we really need to be dictated to regarding material that we might possibly find offensive, but probably not if we have at least a few braincells to bang together
my home pc stays always on too, but precisely for the reason that it takes a while to boot.
if I want to use my machine I want to use it NOW, not turn it on, make a cup of tea, and come back when it's finished booting - this sort of thing might be precisely what's needed to get me back into the habit of turning my computer off at night.
I remember a nice install of 48 v480's I did a few years back... After providing the power and thermal specs of the machines the company in question said "We'll look after that".
After replacing nearly all of the pdu's which had blown while firing up the servers they were finally in a position to fire up enough to make the aircon units literally "sweat" all over the racks... we had to throw plastic tarp sheeting over the racks just to keep the water off, and you can imagine what that did to the airflow :D
laugh? we nearly cried!
even if they completely remove the "5 installs only" DRM, I still wouldn't buy a piece of software that installs a rootkit that can't be uninstalled when I uninstall the product. if I uninstall a game, I don't expect parts of that software left behind clogging up my system - I wonder how much information this spyware would collect even if the game it was designed to monitor wasn't installed!
windows apps are bad enough at leaving crud behind in the registry and hidden files/folders without this sort of behaviour.
no thanks.
<cynic hat on>
okay, so it may be illegal, and against their own EULA... and in 5 years they get stung for it in some european court or other and what.. oh no, they get fined 500m* euros *gasp*. The masses will cheer over the moral victory! In the meantime MS will have raked in 2 billion euros* from advertising and selling rights left right and centre.
Exactly the same thing has been happening with those irritating ringtone adverts - they illegaly lock you into a subscription after advertising a one-off payment, they make an absolute killing and get fined pittance months or years later when someone finally does something about it. And that's only if they lose the case.
* numbers pulled from the proverbial to illustrate the point
"250 billion tonnes of rain was artificially created "
artificially encouraged to fall rather than created would be closer to the mark... and even that's wild speculation considering the "best-guess" approach weather experts have to take w.r.t predictions.
There's a well known fact (tm) to counter these claims... Sensitive Dependance on Initial Conditions.
I rest my case m'luddites
The idea of a lower limit to the size of the universe in it's earlier times is not a new one... Superstring theory has already suggested a lower limit where the values of equations for a universe of given size "x" have the same outcome for a universe of size "1/x" - thus making the 2 mathematically equivalent. I believe this theory is at least 5 years old.
Quantum loop gravity theory seems a regurgitation of the above to my barely educated eyes :)
Perhaps if Microsoft made a reliable and consistent OS, qualified and experienced (or both) engineers alike wouldn't need to bodge the damned thing to make it work properly in the first place.
I have lost count of the number of times the OS behaves differently based on identical installations on identical hardware.
Steve
Well it can't get any worse... I just hope some heads are knocked together and people actually start taking some responsibility in a company where they seem to have a different team for every type of problem and no overall project ownership whatsoever.
I mean, how hard can it be to deliver a pair of load balanced webservers ? Well, BT "delivered" ours in November and they're ~still~ not loadbalanced...
My advice? Just walk away
"The question is, if we're not getting any health benefits, then why continue to promote ethanol and other biofuels."
How about the fact that as a planet we are running out of oil, and the need to switch to renewable fuel sources far outweighs the results of some dodgy research with "blips" in the data.
As an owner of the first incarnation of the so-called "shuffle" I've seriously considered complaining to the ASA about this misnomer. This device is not random at all but instead plays a pre-defined supposedly random order of tracks - as demonstrated when I listen to 10 songs, turn it off, turn it back on and have to skip past the same 10 songs in the same order despite being on "shuffle" mode both times.
Disappointing to say the least and the only reason I haven't gone elsewhere is due to the recharge-off-usb ability they've removed from the new one. Great move Apple - not.
Suffice to say I won't be buying another one, ever.
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