Posts by Anonymous Coward 101
590 posts • joined Monday 16th May 2011 21:11 GMT
Re: Britain is pathetic
It isn't just the Daily Mail that has no sense of perspective.
What stuns me more than anything is exactly how the McAlpine story came to be on Newnight in 2012. The original accuser had been shown to be a bit 'unreliable' as early as 1999:
http://www.newstatesman.com/ns-special-report-what-bbc-did-not-tell-us
Incidentally, the writer of that article (who died in 2011) wrote extensively about the North Wales child abuse case, and would be incredulous that it is restarting. I suspect a lot more innocent men, many now dead, are going to be slandered - only this time it will be with state approval.
"On his Twitter page, Kim Schmitz/Dotcom describes himself an "innovator". To earn the title, you've got to introduce something new. Kim Schmitz/Dotcom - in this case at least - doesn't appear to have done so."
That will not stop the US Patent Office from upholding his patent.
Okay, how have they valued this IP theft?
If they are giving high values to the theft of advanced technology, then that is perhaps fair enough. However, I am willing to bet they have used dodgy accounting to massively increase the cost of Lady Ga Ga album pirating.
DRM is Shite
Imagine if you could buy counterfeit clothing at the local dodgy market that was not only far cheaper than the real thing, but also better quality. What you have imagined is similar to the current market for streamable films - except the pirate version isn't just cheaper, but free.
I learnt this the hard way, when I naively bought music on the internet in about 2004 or so. The DRM servers were shut down a few years later; I did have the chance to enter my password to the service to gain access to the music, but I could not remember the password. So the music was binned, and I learnt a harsh lesson.
I do buy DRM encrusted books for my Kindle, but only because I can strip the DRM from the books so I will always have access to them. Should I lose this ability, I will stop buying the books.
Re: "There is no reason why this area shouldn't be the home of a new boom..
That is why the economy of London has slumped hard in recent years, while that of Middlesbrough and similar cities has grown fast. Oh, wait, that is not true.
Although some companies will pay London costs because they do not know what they are doing, most pay because they believe it is worth it. For example, in London lots of people will have specialist skills in particular areas. Is the same true in Middlesbrough?
Re: Just goes to show
"The best hackers are the ones that keep their traps shut and never brag about their exploits."
Perhaps that is something these chumps will learn in their two or three semester course at the University of Crime? I'm sure their fellow 'students' did not get nicked for being so stupid as to publicly boast about their crimes.
I imagine there was a 'non-disparagement' clause in the contract between Murdoch and the new owner of My Space. Lawsuit?
No, opportunity-cost is the same thing as cost! Tim has pointed out that a cost benefit analysis was undertaken, but he reckons it was shite.
Posted in Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook
Why?
The Chromebook is trapped between laptops with a regular Windows/Linux/OSX operating system, and tablets. What's the point?
Autocomplete is fun for finding out all the unsubstantiated rumours about people. Some of the stuff is frankly incredible.
Manufacturers of high end Android devices need to sort out the shit pointed out in this article. It is not good enough for these manufacturers to add craplets to these devices in a bid to make another 50p. It's a shame there is sometimes good apps mixed in with the shit - why taint the good apps?
When it comes to low end devices, is Android 2.3 going to be the OS of choice for years to come? If so, Android will de facto become two different operating systems - the latest version (or thereabouts), and the ossified relic of version 2.3.
If you don't want to contribute to the making of a new generation of genocidal nuclear weapons, you have to evade and avoid UK taxes.
You know it's true...
Re: Good grief!
"*Note: I am not talking about genuine disabilities here, using a digital device under supervision is the best way for them."
The problem here is that a new 'genuine disability' will be created for everyone who is a bit 'fick.
"The bullet is crammed with terrific force into the too-narrow rifled section, and accelerates extremely fast - acquiring a massive spin from the rifling - as it travels along the barrel with the expanding gas brutally pistoning it along the whole way to the muzzle. "
There's enough Freudian imagery here to keep a crack team of psychoanalysts busy for years.
BT...
...a large underfunded pension fund, with a loss making sideline in telecommunications.
Re: Tyranny
"In France the paramilitary CRS will come to your town every year and ask teenagers to produce their identity cards. Failure to produce the card results in being hit around the head with a baton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnies_R%C3%A9publicaines_de_S%C3%A9curit%C3%A9"
In the lower photo used on Wikipedia, the CRS look like they have modelled themselves on Judge Dredd. The one in the middle is especially delighted with himself.
Re: Mumsnet is amazing
"Just look at the 'motoring' section if you want a good laugh."
Why? I agree with their review of red cars - and they've got it right about blue cars as well.
Re: Mostly Boredom
"I love the way James Bond breaks into the villain's office at night and the first thing he pulls out of the filing cabinet is the Master Plan."
That's what the Daily Telegraph would have you believe happened when they supposedly found documents in Iraq's bombed out spy headquarters proving that George Galloway was taking cash from Saddam.
I'm no fan of Mr Galloway but that was fucking laughable.
Nokia was Going to Die with Symbian
Market share was tanking before the 'burning platforms' memo. Everyone was going iPhone, Android or Blackberry by the end of 2010. In western Europe, Nokia smartphones were already rare. They had no choice but to kill it. Meego might have worked, but it would have been an extraordinary risk.
Re: to answer the headline question
"I got to word seven, paragraph two of your post before shouting BINGO!"
Yes, it sounded like a 'Green Energy' trade association press release calling for more swill to be poured into the trough. Normal people do not use phrases like 'raising awareness'.
It is highly problematical that a large organisation that controls the biggest selling eBook format should have the right to determine what books are sold or not sold. The cost of making the book suitable for the Kindle format is borne by the publisher. What would it cost Amazon to sell this book for the Kindle, even if it didn't sell a single copy? I would hope this is just bureaucratic sloppiness rather than anything more sinister.
OSGR Coordinates
You can search by OSGR with Streetmap, or obtain OSGR coordinates after a search by place name. It is in other regards shite, but there is that.
Re: Fixed the phones?
If you are going for a low cost funeral, you would be better hiring some Poles or Nigerians to throw her in the Thames. Based on the amount you bid for the job, the representatives of the NUM will go on strike because you surely can't be paying them much. And your animal welfare standards can't be very good.
God Bless Maggie
Imagine how much CO2 the nation would be producing if she hadn't crushed the miners.
"It is pressure, real pressure - 80 cold calls a day,"
Man, the world of sales is thrilling stuff.
"Wanted: Energetic self starter to sell stuff you don't understand. Must be able to tolerate being to be told to fuck off 85 times per day."
"It was only too much money because ABN Amro was lying about the value of it's mortgage assets"
It might have been a good plan to give the tyres a kick before splashing out, don't you think? I mean, when ABM Amro only provided RBS with "two lever arch folders and one CD ROM of information"* then I would guess that they were trying to be evasive.
* http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/12/royal-bank-scotland-0
Re: Hey El Reg
The PC is not dead, and likely never will die, but as a mass consumer item it is fading away. Every item on your list of things that "supposedly" killed the PC did indeed help to slow and then reverse the sales growth of PCs - especially the tablet.
For people who regularly need to do "proper work" and high end gamers the PC is king. For everybody else, there is a more effective tool for the job.
Re: PCs are being SNUFFED by crass pre-installed operating systems
"If OEM's were to supply PC's with Linux with a nice Window Manager then more people would buy a PC.
No they wouldn't. Whenever Linux has been pre-installed on PCs for sale to non Linux enthusiasts, it has only led to confusion and people taking them back to the shop.
Re: Ireland, a first world country...?
Nah, deregulating the buses would be a huge error of judgement. That's the system that pertains in the UK outside London, and it is (with some exceptions) a mess. From the sounds of it, the existing bus provision in Dublin sounds like a mess, but best not compound the errors.
Shame
It's a shame that all the cheap money flowing into Ireland years ago was spent on now crumbling, empty, housing stock rather than investment in infrastructure. No use looking back with 20/20 hindsight though - nobody back then could have foreseen that this was fucking stupid.
"This has been frequently and consistently shown to be incorrect, since ,at least, the 1970s -- by a number of Nobel prize winners at that. Has the author not been keeping up with the times - or is he stuck in the 1950s?"
That might be true when it comes to stocks and shares, but within companies, that does not follow. Investing a lot of money in R&D for consumer electronics is high risk, but potentially very high reward.
Posted in Review: HTC One
"I want something that can last for four or five days between charges"
This does not mean anything. It is like saying "I want a car that can go two weeks between refilling the tank". The important factor for battery life these days is how much the screen is on.
I imagine it would be extremely easy to write an anti-CAPTCHA tool to fox this. However, why bother when this is one forum for reasonably brainy people?
Once again...
...it was common knowledge that Autonomy wasn't quite right before HP bought Autonomy. The following blogger said "I could tell the accounts were not kosher from an office in Sydney."
http://brontecapital.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/hewlett-packard-and-autonomy-notes-from.html
If it is the case that Autonomy was a fraud (as opposed to merely having 'ambitious' accounts), it is damning that this fraud was in plain sight for so long. It is also absurd that HP wasted so much money on something that everyone with a clue knew was dodgy.
Misleading Marketshare Stats
It must always be remembered that when smartphone marketshare stats are produced that show Android trouncing iOS, they are essentially misleading because of all the cheapo Android devices that are classified as smartphones. Somebody in the market for a cheap Android was never going to buy an iPhone, just like somebody in the market for a Ford Fiesta isn't going to buy a BMW 5 series.
It would be far more meaningful to show the marketshare of devices in different price brackets. A Samsung S3 definitely counts as a competitor to the iPhone, but a Samsung 'whatever-their-cheap-shit-Android-is-called-today,' doesn't.
I do think Google will eventually have to optimise Android version 2.3 because of all the phones that run it, and (let's face it) will continue to run it for years to come.
Re: Bye bye IT
"I'm going to go Snowboarding for a while."
Sounds like your IT career was a fucking nightmare.
Perhaps companies simply cannot afford to pay high salaries, even though they are desperate?
If this is true...
...and lower speeds really will translate to a more reliable connection, then I would applaud Virgin for seeing sense. When you are using your phone outside, is 8Mb/s really a great deal more useful than 2Mb/s?
Having Alicia Keys as 'Artistic Director' was so stupid that the people who who thought it was a good idea should be fired. It just looked pitiful. Probably the only time she has used a new Blackberry is when she is forced to for public appearances.
It was common knowledge in the financial community that Autonomy's accounts were rather funky, and that HP were overpaying. This is not hindsight - it was perfectly clear to everyone at the time. This article here pretty much explains what was going on: http://dealbreaker.com/2013/01/h-p-wasnt-going-to-let-a-little-fraud-stand-in-the-way-of-acquiring-autonomy/
HP are retards.
Gosh
I won't be the first to point out that for the same money you could get a decent laptop that is ideal for 'proper work', plus a first rate tablet, and still have £200-300 left over. I have no doubt the Surface Pro will be a really nice bit of kit, but what a lot of money.
Re: Why would the operators back MS?
"But yes, they should have funnelled money between them into the GSMA and come up with an Android fork with n different operator-flavoured versions of a home screen, icons, operator app store, mobile manufacturer app store (got to bribe them somehow), media store, account management app, push e-mail, cloud storage, Joyn, twatbook app, etc... Can't be that difficult, most of it's done already for Android and Intel would love the chance to throw money at it too."
Why would anyone in the market for a nice phone want this? The phones would need to be either much cheaper than existing Android phones, or better.
Given that Android is given away to manufacturers and the major expense is the hardware, the phones are unlikely to be cheaper. The phones are extremely unlikely to be better: there is no possibility that the network operators will come up with a better maps app than Google, and a multitude of shitty app stores will be correctly perceived by consumers to be inferior to one good app store.
I could see this plan might snare a few customers at the low end of the market, but at the higher end, forget it.
Forking Android
Why assume that operators won't mess up an Android fork, just like they mess up everything else?
Re: Daily Mail
I simply do not believe that there was five part a series entitled 'Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle'. I do not think that 'Tara Brady' has credible sources within North Korea that could provide this information.
This factoid smells like a bullshit Wikipedia entry or joke that has been copy-pasted into her story. I could be wrong of course, but that's what I think.
"Dell takes aim at iPad, uncloaks enterprise-level Win8 tablet"
It surely can't be long before Apple go bankrupt as the world rushes out to buy great Dell tablet computer products, much as they did to buy Dell's superb smartphones.
Re: Nokia NEVER learn
I kind of see your point, but if anything Nokia have sorted out their naming conventions since Lumia. The nadir was when they had lots of random four-digit pincode phones that nobody could remember. It was as though Nokia couldn't be arsed giving their phones memorable names. Also their N series phones where the numbering would jump around. The N96, N85 and N79 were all the same underlying device, but people would think the bigger numbers were better (in fact they were all fucking terrible).
"Their self driving cars will kill someone eventually"
I have no doubt they will, but the question is really how many they will kill compared to humans. I am fascinated by the real prospect that driverless cars will be a commercial reality before 2020.
It is partially off topic, but I believe the BBC called it correctly in not showing the original Savile Newsnight.
The ITV documentaries only showed you one side of the story. Had Savile faced a trial regarding some of the allegations - which he did not, albeit possibly incorrectly - I suspect some of the witnesses against him would have had trouble when facing a defense QC. The blogger who goes by the name of Anna Raccoon was at Duncroft School where many of the accusers in the ITV documentaries came from, and she has very different recollections from those in the documentaries. Read this: http://www.annaraccoon.com/annas-personal-stuff/trial-by-posthumous-innuendo/ along with other very interesting posts she made regarding Savile.
I believe that Savile may well be guilty of some sex offences (though I certainly don't know that), but I also believe that many accusations are exaggerated or totally unfounded. No lawyer has defended him. That is, I suspect, the difference between him and Chris Jefferies, who came in a for a similar onslaught and eventually showed the media told massive lies about him (read his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry online).
Though our libel laws may be flawed, they act to keep the media a lot more honest than they otherwise would be. Savile is dead, and the papers can legally say what they please about him. Indeed, they have said that he was a necrophiliac, a Satan worshiper and suggested he was the Yorkshire Ripper, in amongst more standard sex offences. A little pause for thought is required by the public.
Re: Not surprising, but nice to see some stats
He didn't mean all disabled people are hooked on drugs, FFS.
