Posts by Amorous Cowherder
162 posts • joined Thursday 5th July 2012 06:49 GMT
Posted in Happy 23rd birthday, Windows 3.0
Happier, crappier, simpler times!
I remember actually buying a full boxed edition of this and 3.1!
I remember having to dial up the AST Computers ( remember them? ) bulletin/support board at 2400 baud and download some specific Windows 3.0 drivers for my whopping 512KB graphics card so I could drive it at top resolution to a huge 640x480 display!
Re: The PirateBay
Blocked by a UK ISP?
Plenty of proxies on offer if you bother to fire up Big G's website and look for them!
Some things just don't make sense in this world!
Far quicker and easier to simply download a rip off a torrent proxy than wait the 30 odd minutes it takes to rip a DVD movie from a disc you bought! I think the last one I did was "Titans" just after it was released on DVD, took just over 3 minutes to download ( that's at 720x576 ) and would have taken 35 mins to rip the movie into basic 640x480. I got a better rip in a tried and tested media format without only a couple of clicks.
Threads
I bought Threads on DVD about 6 months ago, pretty scary stuff and worse when you think we came pretty close it becoming a reality. Has a young Reese Dinsdale who starred in "I.D." another nutty role in another nutty film!
Being a spotty 16 year old thrash metal fan in the late 80's we got a regular dose of being told that the end is coming whether you like it or not, so stop worrying and just get out and party just before you get wiped off the face of the earth!
I'm sure it's more likely to be about the act and the possibility of being caught but Jesus wept surely it's easier to just go and pick up a Gratton catalog ( or whatever the local version is called ) if you fancy a quick oogle at a women arse? That's before we even get to the to whole "How big a percentage of the internet is grumble-flick sites now?" debate!
I'm all for new tech and interesting ideas, and apologies in advance if I'm wrong but somehow this seems like just another bell-end designer riding the "I must use Twitter/FaceBook/YouTube for something so I can get attention for myself!" syndrome!
Re: There's a lot more detail in the BBC article than here at the Reg which is surprising...
Love Fallout and Skyrim too much to part with my 360. Still at least getting spares or replacement 360's should be a darn sight easier, I bet the prices have dropped through the floor on Fleabay already!
"The results can match the output of an SLR"
Hmmm, I'm sure it can. Shame it can't match the quality due to the superbly engineered and very expensive glass we use on (D)SLRs!
There's a bloody good reason a 600mm L-series Canon lens costs around £10k!
Numbers!
Hmmm, lots of lovely numbers that should give the "measur-bators" something to get excited about!
Re: So insubstantial you will fall through...
I think you've just summed up practically every project I've had the misfortune to work on!
Re: Evil.
Google don't pay taxes. Governments don't have as much money. Care homes get closed or have less money. Kids at risk. Ergo Google are Evil!
Is it not diversity as you've suggested in you references to lots of technology? Are we seeing more diversified use, ie horses for courses?
I was a PC fanatic but I find that an XBOX does fine for my gaming, the PC for my photo editing and uploading to sharing/stock sites and practically everything else is on my tablet, including checking on my social networks and general browsing. Slouch on the sofa, tablet up and running in seconds flat and you're chatting to Auntie Doris in Oz on Facebook, while watching an episode of something on TV or possibly in another window on the tablet itself.
We have so much more choice of device now, ones designed to perform certain tasks perfectly, the PC is not the one-size-fits-all it used to be and is therefore fighting to maintain our attention when it comes to upgrade time. We often can't afford to upgrade all items at once, the manufacturers are cutting great deals on cheap tablets so being savvy consumers we're upgrading those while the prices are reasonably good.
Re: Eadon's theory of Techie "Waves" - TWO types
You're nothing if not consistent mate!
Zero positive votes and all negatives again!
Posted in Amazon launches own currency
Re: Itchy and Scratchy money is like real money, but more fun.
Spot on sir, exactly what I was thinking!
Well bugger me a fashion trend is coming to an end!
Well call those bears that are squatting in the woods and those Popes that are not in the least bit confused to find themselves at Mass.
Isn't this the point, that fashion trends only last at most, just a generation? Christ Almighty! Sometimes I think I made a big mistake dropping out of college when I could have had an easy ride in certain academic circles, coming up with surveys and reports that take 300 pages to tell everyone the bleedin' obvious!
I have no problem providing it saves me money, I know two OAPs who have them on their water and gas they are over the moon as they have saved almost 50% off their bills in the last year....
However I do not them as I know this will be/is a serious fuckup from the government, costing us way more than it should due to cronyism and back-handers. The energy companies will use it as an excuse to screw us about. Security? Ha ha! Do not even attempt to put the words security and government on the same page, let alone the same sentence!
"and was told by her bank that they had never heard of private companies asking for this information."
You ever shot stock photography? Well they ask for it! Shutterstock.com will not give you an upload account without you submitting your driving licence or passport to prove your identity.
Ha ha! Funny!
Knowing how much this software is used by the world and his dog, I give it less than 24 hours after each release and there will be patches and patched versions available from your local "freetard trough" site!
What?
"One colleague has indeed checked with Adobe and been told that if you allow your subscription to drop then you'll not actually be able to open your old files."
No, what they said is the application you've lapse with the subs on will not run up, the PSD files from Photoshop for example, will still be yours and still usable on any other app that can read them. You suggest that no subs paid and they will lock your files up!
Why let the real facts get in the way of a bit of journalistic FUD, eh?
Re: So many complaints all about the same thing
The quirky, gimmicky style of your post combined with that dreadful last line leads me to one of two conclusions, you're either an MS ad agency shill trying to "get hip" and "down wiv da MS 'friends' " ( customers as adults call them ) or you are in fact a 14 year old ICT student who's entire IT experience started with Windows XP3 and has seen nothing of the evolution of consumer IT development in the last 25 years!
Re: How about you listen to feedback _before_ you RTM next time?
"blood interface"
Some sort of edition of Windows for Klingons?
"Do not rely on Wikipedia as as your sole reference or source of information."
Judging by the way some of the US authorities behave I don't think many got to the line above, especially the proof reader!
Re: Worse Than Jason Voorhees
"Do the security services really want it though?"
Not really, they have enough to do but the management in said services need to have some sort of justification for all the money they siphon from our taxes. Junkets to far flung places and new Bond style gadgets need to be paid for somehow!
Re: unintended f*c*i*g consequences.
Yeah well the Yanks seem to have this obsession with treating anyone older than 6 months as an adult, forcing kids to grow up as fast as possible and they wonder why the place is full of radicalised nutters who never had a childhood.
FFS! Whatever happened to giving teenagers a bollocking for being bloody stupid and leaving it at that? Oh no, we have all this complete and utter waste of public money prosecuting some dopey kid who fancied messing about. They should have marched the girl in question straight to the head of the science dept for a discussion about to safety and chemicals, the teacher gets to know their students better and might prevent a student from seriously injuring themselves in the pursuit of science, the student gets to understand how daft unplanned experiments can be. Oh no, let's have a panic situation and whip the miscreant off to Gitmo for being a trainee terror suspect and all because some complete fecking local nutjob somehow managed to get a job as the state prosecutor and wants to justify their budget and get their name in the industry press for preventing a disaster!! FFS!
My Dad told me he got a severely thick ear off his grandad once when my Dad, being a dopey teenager at the time, him and his mates thought it would be bloody funny to hide bangers and aerosol cans in a bonfire. The resulting explosion frightened most of neighbours and his Mum to go slightly deaf in one ear. If he tried that now, his feet wouldn't touch and he be in a Police cell quicker than you can say "police state over reaction"!
Posted in Movie review: Oblivion
Normally I wouldn't bother with anything TC is in, but the preview really caught my eye as he appears have a second-place role to the whole eco-damaged planet, dregs of humanity underground backstory thing.
I won't bother with the cinema but I'll certainly grab a copy on DVD when it surfaces.
Re: You' re just seeing future echos.
"So what is it?"
Re: Size does seem to help but....
"...looks like it always loses to a $5000 Armani suit and the keys for a Porsche. I wonder why..."
Well anyone with a need for those over-compensatory affectations is oviously a very, very profient onanist already!
Re: so...
They all do it and on any price ticket too. I go to some less than wonderful little dives in London, the tickets are sometimes as cheap as £4/head but you buy online and they instantly slap a £1.50/head booking charge and £2.50 to post. I've even been charged a "postage" fee on an eMail only, PDF ticket FFS!
Didn't have much time for Mr Gates until I saw Pirates of Silicon Valley, where both Gates and Allen are painted a rather tragic, put-upon figures fighting injustice ans Jobs set as a as a manical psychotic!
Re: Ancient and cursed ring?
Exactly! My car has cost me a bloody fortune in the last 6 months every month something has gone wrong on it , "It is bedevilled and cursed by Lucifer himself!".
Nope, it's just come out of it's 5 year guarantee and done 80,000 so some of its bits are knackered and need replacing. Nothing to do with curses, simple and modern variation on Sod's Law, "The split second anything comes out of its guarantee period, the only guarantee left is that it will go wrong!".
Re: If only someone would invent a "search engine"
Well done, you've more or less summed up exactly why the education system is in such a mess in the 21st Century! "Yeah, I'll just go on the internet and read someone else's work, no point if it's already been done!"
Ever wondered why kids in the upcoming 2nd and 3rd world nations are 10 times smarter than our fat, complacent little offspring?
Why bother?
It's hardly a chore to obtain some free soft-gumble images off the web, even a simple Google search will cover that, then slap them onto your mobile if that sort of on-hand need "floats yer boat"! Will they really sell many copies of this app? Not mocking, just curious if it's worth the bother given how easy page-3 style images are to get hold of these days.
Oh and " re-imagining "?
Two words for anyone who uses that utterly irritating word, one starts with F and the other ends with F!
Re: Wow so he knew about all the chip roadmaps.....
Just what I was thinking when I saw the title. To quote Rodney from one episode, "Mum always had something to say on her deathbed Del. That woman must have done nothing but rabbit in her last few hours!".
Re: Doesn't he know...
Being into computers when I was at school back in the 80's kept most blokes away let alone women, when it was practically about as pure as girl repellant could get!
Ah well, you can't make an omlette without affecting house prices...or something like that!
Posted in NORKS switch off 3G data for tourists
Re: The most amazing thing about this....
"It does, and so does Chernobyl/Pripyat."
My mate went, took a load of pictures and video, came home and set the lot to a Joy Division track which darkened an already depressing set of images!
Re: A little historical context
If you realy want to know what happned at Bletchley Park, get hold of a copy of the excellent BBC radio comedy "Hut 33"!
"Yes hello Alan this is Ian Tretn ( IT ), it's not working? Have you tried turning it off and on again? OK, there you go!".
You, I and most of the proper backroom boys and girls on Reg know that, but management cut costs on the IT support and you get what you pay for!
Brilliant!
Cheers, one more reason to keep away from Ubuntu and stick to a better distro!
So first it was the threat of Amazon ads and now......
"Ubuntu, now comes with totalitarian regime approval! When you need that extra push over the cliff of human rights abuse, install Ubuntu!".
Re: Sounds like they asked for it...
It's all gone a bit Ratners!
I'm not outraged but have to admit with this behaviour they've certainly slipped down in my estimation.
With our online 24 hour lives information and opinions move at a frightening pace. One day your the darling in your chosen field, next day you're about as welcome as a Jimmy Saville impersonator at a kiddies party bash!
Re: We are born, we live for a while, we die.
"I am here, now. The next century is out of my hands."
Good job our ancestors didn't think like you else we'd all still be sitting up trees picking nits off each other!
FFS, grow up!
I used to get bored some evenings and port scan addresses on my local subnets, you'd easily find at least 10% of the devices totally unprotected and connected directly to the live net connection. You'd find printers, lots of FTP and webservers, the odd NAS box all with default passwords still left in place, modem/routers with wide open configs that would given the time allow you through into the networks behind. It's no wonder these botnets take off, you don't need to waste time messing about hooking people thorugh iffy webpages, just port scan like this person did and "Bob's your Auntie's live in lover"!
( I'm one of those who believe people should have a license to be able to use the internet! )
For the lover of all that's Holy!
"an Android app promising to allow them to see through clothes with the phone’s camera"
I know "there's one born every minute" but for fuck's sake! People that stupid really do need locking up for their own protection!
90k? Ha ha! It's like "taking away" the license from someone caught driving without a license, they never cared in the first place so they're bloody unlikely to care now!
Obligatory Python reference!
"The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!"
Not like most of us then, either jump in a cab or call local Operations team member to go into the office and boot of a USB stick in safe mode to find out what's wrong?!
Swiss film "The Cargo"!
Absolutely brilliant! A nice little horror edge, a little though provolking and a little bit of gentle romance. German language with English subs, nobody I'd heard of and for once not wrecked by big named, short-arsed, short-tempered Hollywood B-listers with wooden acting skills that could be bettered by a broom handle!
Re: So let me get this straight
"But OS X? Not one ounce of lock-in."
You seen 10.8? The default setting is only install/allow to run Apple approved app-store software. Piece of cake to switch it back to full-open, run what-you-like-mode and yes I know it's not full vendor lock-in as we understand it, but the seeds have sown...
Re: People will pay for music if it is sanely priced
The internet has democratized music distribution at the bottom of the chain. The huge library of information means that if I want to find out more about Iranian death metal bands ( yes there are Iranian death metal bands! ) I can hone in on a very, very specific sub-sub-genre of my favourite music and deal directly with the band or their promotion company. I don't have to wade through a pile of supplied and pre-approved drivel from the majors hoping to find a few diamonds in the rough.
Back in the 90's I used to buy about 10-15 albums a week on CD ( out of college, new job, still living at home, cash on the hip, etc ) I would probably re-play only half of what I bought, the rest went on the shelf and never got played more than once. As soon as more bands got online and bandwidth allowed me to get samples of their work I stopped shopping-by-chance and started buying directly from artists and made very selective choices. Now I am a middle-aged parent, basically broke and no much time, I am even more selective about my listening habits.
It's not piracy that killed music, it's the availability of information that gave real music fans the choices they craved and allowed them to be selective and more choosey.
