Posts by Elmer Phud

Sperical, plural

"Facebook requires users to provide their real first and last names. Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited, as is maintaining multiple profiles on the site."

But they don't check, do they?

There is a fair bit of chat on the various games groups where it is clear there are peope with multi-multi acounts.

There are loads of users who have recent pictures that show they are well below the minimum age for Facebook.

All you need is an email account to confirm registration and email accounts are found falling out of packets of breakfast cereal.

If they really, really wanted to check they would lose one hell of lot of 'members'.

All they had to do was own up that they'd fucked up and not do the usual corporate thing of shittng on anyone but themselves.

Must go to Specsavers

"Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring, of the Muslim-based Prosperous Justice Party,"

I just read that as " Titaufl .... Preposterous Justice Party" , though maybe I've just got my babel-fish glasses on instead.

New games

As an old person I was in to pinball which was nudged out of the way by machines that took less space and needed far less maintenance.

For nostalgia I use Future Pinball http://www.futurepinball.com/ a free pinball simulator that others write tables for. There are some very welcome reminders of a mis-spent youth especially some of the German machines. There is a good mixture of machines to load in, some carefully recreated from old and some brand new, some are wonderful and some are shite.

The sound of the coin dropping in the slot is just the start , the rest of the evening can be easily lost.

And it's all free.

It depends

A lot of the speed issue depends on the current state of the connection.

I used to work doing broadband repair and the basic, simple exchange line test (SALT) would be enough for us to say fairly accurately what speed to expect at the time of testing (line length, line balance, line capacitance)

Even before I got a 10meg connection I knew I'd get about 7.5m (roughly 1meg attenuation per kilometre). On damp days it'll drop quite a bit and it doesn't help that the exchange equipment now has priority on 'connection at all times'.

Got a call from O2 the other day and they tried to tell me what I'd get and were surprised that it really was fairly simple. I've recently been upgraded to 20meg and on a good day can get 15meg (rare - it's often 12).

We often tried to tell our superiors how simple it was and how much info you could get from a basic line test but they were so wrapped up in thier ignorance and superiority they refused to even try to understand. They always said there were other factors involved but could never actually come up with any -- a bit too technical for a manager?

We also occasionally told the cutomer what they would roughly get but also that times of day would affect speed. Not something the 'superiors' liked as they always referred to the speed at the exchange and not what the customer could expect.

How about Klingon?

Though any self-respecting Klingon would trash the Sat-Nav as soon as it presumed to tell them where to go.

calm down, calm down

Bloody kids these days, I dunno.

Yet another email account

So Facebook are going to give me another email account.

I've got loads already - I use some purely for when you have to register to get in to a site (no, not those sorts of sites) and for adverts I might want to see now and then - the incoming spam keeps the account alive.

I guess it'll come in handy, I could use it to set up another Faceache account.

yeah but . . .

it seems to have a foreskin

News?

News?

We knew about this ages ago, just what's going on if the Fail isn't carping on about dirty students smashing up the home of democracy and 'all that is good and great'. Ah, either it's 'cos they recongise thier own kids on the demo or it's they never checked te 'PARIS' reference before reserving front page space.

Anyway - we feel just a bit smug as we read all about it here first and watched it live(ish) on Google Earth.

Save the (insert favourite animal here)

It's always something I've wondered about -- how much heat is put out by the servers that calculate global warming and all that stuff.

Hitachi might have just got a ready maket.

Feedback

One small issue with all of the motion-based controllers is the lack of physical feedback, especially when doing exercises or playing sport games.

The pic of someone apparently playing volley ball is a good example, you just don't get the physical connection between body and playing surface or the ball.

Or kicking a football or tennis or, or, or . . .

Roasted nuts

Many of the men that are seen perpetually attatchd to thier laptops seem to have more of an interest in what is on the screen rather than what is happening in the real world. Procreation is not foremost in thier minds nor is permanent attatchment to a laptop one of the biggest turn-ons for women.

The cooked tadpoles can be seen as Darwinism in action as the sub-species reduces in numbers. Another sub-species is coming to the fore, that of the Pad-Carriers, they are more likley to die out due to rushing across busy roads trying to get a decent signal.

That's better

Clicked on the 'street view' link to open it in Google Earth, got rid of all the camera icons and tilted the view over for height. Now watching on Google Earth.

So many things to do, so little time to do them.

Fuck 'em all - I'm busy

Upset?

Is there a definition of 'Upset' that they use?

Is there a way of measuring the possibility of long-term harm by a few questions?

My kids grew up on-line (almost). They've done the BeBo thing in the past and had some odd messages and always asked me if they thought anything was dodgy.

"If you don't know who it's from, if you don't like the way it's worded, if you're not sure about a link you've been sent - don't click, don't reply"

They don't seem to have been scarred by it, one of them let me take over a chat from some twunt who was attempting to get her to download a 'cool little game'. He gave up after about half an hour once I told him it wasn't going to work and that he had also been reported while we had been chatting.

Trust and education rather than fear seems to be a better way, especially education. Rather than just be told there are bad things in the woods, teach them how to deal with the everyday hazards of being on-line.

location, location, location

" "Half of the servers used by cyber-criminals for the purpose of controlling their botnet empires are located in commercial hosting facilities within countries not traditionally associated with this kind of crime," "

Otherwise known as not pissing on your own doorstep?