Posts by Ash

Quick enough...

... to copy a DVD?

Unless they're expecting you to use a magnifying glass and etch the pattern by hand with a compass needle onto Vinyl, I don't think it'll take any more than about 20 minutes.

That's 'think'...

Rubbish.

UNLIMITED ACCESS

Words can't express the hostility I feel when I hear those words.

No VoIP

No use as a modem for a laptop or other computer

No going over 2GB a month.

I might just mail one page of a Collins dictionary to their legal department. Guess which letter section it'll be from.

Why are they worried about citizens buying this?

Maybe they shouldn't have sold the very same equipment to the people we're now fighting 15 years ago.

Then again, maybe we shouldn't have gotten into this war in the first place.

N.B. Remember that dude who made the 95% coverage ballistic suit? $2000 bulk produced? T.W.A.T. will end when we start putting folk on the battlefield who look THAT COOL. Terrorists will give up, thinking we have GM super-soldiers.

Blockbuster the rental chain?

They shot themselves in the foot in the UK when they cut the rental of new releases to ONE night from two, and put the price UP to just under £4.00.

Oh, and by stocking crap, but it's hardly their fault.

TV catch-up?

TV replacement! I haven't watched a single program on TV since this application launched. Why would I? It's the program I want, when I want it (within 7 days).

I may as well drop the TV in the skip and save myself a Television Tax^H^H^HLicense.

Oh dear...

The Third World War will be faught by Robots.

There will be no Fourth World War.

Use of Memory Sticks

You have an important 250 page document to get to a certain department for a certain time. It exceeds the limit for attachments in email, and it is unsuitable for you to put in a shared area. You could ask IT to set up a secure folder accessible only to both parties, but when do they ever have time to do that between games of network Doom and rm -r'ing whiney users' folders?

So, you drop it on a USB stick and walk the possibly 15 metres to the guys desk, and save all the hassle and a lot of time. There's your 70%.

As for finding a memory stick and looking at the data, I would just to find out who it belong to so I could return it! If it's confidential, i'd tell them i'd seen watever i'd seen but that it was in the interest of returning their property, and possibly more valuably, their data. If that's a problem, they can consider someone not as altruistic as myself getting hold of it and finding their data on eBay, or in the hands of the press. Obviously I weigh the chance of it having some form of malware up, but i've got a laptop running a Live-CD, dedicated to scanning for malware on untrusted devices anyway.

@Alex

Because they already did something very similar by calling their service "Unlimited". People believed them, paid the £50, and used the "Unlimited" functionality to watch videos, download software and music, and play games. the problem is that with so many people (3%, apparently) using this "Unlimited" connection speed, other people were losing out and getting slow connections. Somewhere along the line, "Unlimited" became "Unlimited, apart from when you hit this LIMIT on how MUCH you can download, at which point we will LIMIT how FAST you can download. Oh, and you get to pay more for the privilage."

When that didn't work, they went with this advertising gamble. Their point of view is that the 3% who use it to capacity (read: those who know anything about computers) will kill their contracts, and the problem will solve itself. Those 3% will go elsewhere, the bandwidth defecit will disappear, and they can make money selling advertising data from the remaining 97%.

Win-Win.

@Ferry Boat

Tickly at the back of the throat, quite oily. Best dried before rolling.

Anyway, all we need is the same stuff that lines our stomachs to line our blood vessels and we wouldn't need to breathe at all.

News just in!

Big company thinks users disagreeing with their policies are idiots! Film at 11.

I was leaving them in May, anyway. Suppose i'd best call the Retentions line to see if I can get a LUDICROUS renewal term out of them, or i'm off somewhere else.

Either way, I have a Nokia E51; I may just go PAYG instead and use VoIP for voice calls, and hell any Symbian-compatible IM client for SMS replacement. Fring would be ideal if they could get the volume and Skype functionality sorted, but Truphone looks promising too.

O2 lose every way.

FAIL

http://www.flvsoft.com/download_flv/

Too late.

Winston would be proud

Transcript TruePerson ListFile UnPhrase "hack-proof".

@smoker licenses

I'd quit smoking on the spot. Drinking, too, if it became required for purchasing alcohol.

Not only will they not get my ID, they'll not get my tax.

Fuck 'em.

@Mr B

It's easy to close an HSBC account; you go into a branch, and say "I'd like all my money please. Bankers Draft. If you can't do that because of a computer error, cash will be fine. I assume you can still count without using a calculator?"

You then promptly take your money down to another bank, and deposit in a new account. Setting up the services you need may take longer, but there are alternatives in the mean time. Assume HSBC have outsourced the fault finding to India, and they're using a remote desktop session over a 28.8k modem, and a local engineer whos qualifications top out at "have upgraded the ROM in a CPU."

The important thing is your money is not with HSBC, and that's what they don't want to happen.

Where do you get these numbers?

I run a Q6600 on a non-TOTL motherboard with 4GB budget DDR2 and an 8800 gtx, no overclocking, and get 60+fps in Crysis all the way up to the "shoot dem turrets!" end sequence.

V. High "patch" for xp made a bit of a dent, but still more than playable on a rig supposedly a lot lower power than either of those you tested.

@First touch screen device

Hardly stylish devices; they look like mis-shapen Sega Game Gears.

@AC (American language pedant)

Aluminium is actually pronounced aluminum; the boffins (a phrase popular with El Reg) some time ago decided that the name didn't look right on the periodic table next to Plutonium, Caesium, Francium, and other elements. They decided to add the extra "i" to make it look pretty.

http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/13.html

@Mat

That's not really a good analogy, as there are no identifying markings on a bullet (using the bullet = packet analogy).

A better one would be a man with a video camera reporting speeding outside his house to the DVLA, submiting a video of the car, and asking them to not renew his tax disk. Even this isn't an ideal analogy, though.

It does, however, take into account that jurisdiction doesn't fall with the owner of the road (connection), and that the driver of the car may not be the owner...

So what?

Microsoft failed to secure Vista SP1 in a recent independant test.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/03/29/ubuntu_left_standing/

@Cameron Colley

'I don't know for certain, but I suspect that has more to do with German law forbidding the display of swastikas than them being "harmful".'

How does this apply to eBay? What jurisdiction does Germany have over eBay?

eBay.de might be in trouble, but eBay.co.uk, .com, or whatever, unless hosted in Germany, is pretty much in the clear on that one.

My rig

No clocking, air cooled:

MoBo: Gigabyte N650SLI-DS4

Chip: Intel Core2Quad E6600

RAM: 4 x Geil 1GB DDR2

GFX: XFX GeForce 8800GTX 768MB

PSU: Tagan TG-800 (800W)

Only the graphics card was top of the line when I bought it; the rest was pretty much bargain basement stuff. Will run Crysis on 24" widescreen monitor 1920x1200 (16:10 native aspect) without any slowdown on highest settings (DX9, but getting "DX10" fix to see what it's like).

BFG do lifetime warranty on graphics cards, GEIL and Kingston on memory, and I think you get extended warranty on Intel retail chips, but OEM come cheaper (and without an HSF).

Hahahahaha!!!

They were charging 25p a minute to call some Uzbekiranistanislavian call centre and speak to a guy reading from a crib sheet who didn't understand what I was saying, instead opting to repeat what's on the screen.

Worst support EVER (and i've used MS's paid for support).

Ha!

I remember using these at school! Not cutting edge graphics, but still pretty awesome for the time...

By the way, i'm 24. The time was 1997.

*Sigh*