Re: Charger
Good. I'm swamped with the bloody things.
GJC
Posts by Geoff Campbell
1879 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2008
Page:
Best budget Android smartphone there is? Must be the Moto G
Look at how many ways we ruin your life, Redmond boasts
Thursday 14th November 2013 12:25 GMT 
Re: On the other hand
Absolutely. I've also managed to take the family on several long holidays a year whilst running my own company, on the grounds that I can log into my email account for a few minutes every morning and check that everything is well with my customers. These days I'm on a salary, but rarely need to go into the office as I have everything I need locally. All of which gets switched off at 17:30 on the dot.
This shite *is* empowering, so long as the user ensures they control it, rather than vice versa.
GJC
Ultimate electric driving machine? Yes, it’s the BMW i3 e-car
'Burning platform' Elop: I'd SLASH and BURN stuff at Microsoft, TOO
Monday 11th November 2013 12:42 GMT 
Business leadership for the 21st Century:
Making things work is hard. Selling chunks of the business to achieve short-term profit is easy. Sell, baby, sell!
FFS, near-on 30% market share for Bing, and XBox number 1 in the market, and he can't be arsed to try and make them profitable? The man's an idiot.
GJC
BIG, CURVY Apple models: Just right for SLAP AND TICKLE
Latest global menace: ELECTROPULSE NORKS, apparently
Sunday 10th November 2013 20:55 GMT
Re: Nah.
Quite funky, certainly, but not really much different to shooting any conventional directional weapon at a target. The point of an EMP is that it will, supposedly, take out anything in a given radius from the device. Trouble is, the inverse square law means that "given radius" is pretty damn small.
GJC
Anonymous hacktivists' Million Mask March protest hits London
Wednesday 6th November 2013 13:07 GMT
@AC 11:59
Why is it insane?
I'm with him. I've not voted in a general election since 1997. This is not apathy, or laziness, or some mis-guided idea that my vote is worthless - I value my vote highly, and absolutely refuse to cast it for someone just because they are not someone else, or for any other reason than that they (or, at a stretch, their party) are worthy of my vote.
Give me a candidate worthy of my vote, and I will vote again. Until then, fuck 'em all, and the horses they rode in on.
GJC
Google's Nexus 5: Best smartphone bang for your buck. There, we said it
McDonalds ponders in-store 3D printing for Happy Meal toys
Reding: NSA, friends don't spy on friends. Europe, let's team up for our own SPOOK CLUB
Tuesday 5th November 2013 14:13 GMT 
Oh FFS, really?
"There's too much spying in the world. What we need to fix this is, obviously, MOAR SPYING!!!"
Fuck off, Reding, and take all your power-hungry, empire-building, corrupt politician buddies with you. I don't know about anyone else, but I've had enough of this. Can't we just declare the whole sorry experiment as a failure, and move on to something more sustainable?
GJC
Watch out, MARTIANS: 1.3 tonne INDIAN ROBOT is on its way
Tuesday 5th November 2013 13:28 GMT
Re: Spending
Actually, we do have the figures this time - £45million for the rocket, versus a population somewhere north of 1 billion. Let's use 1 billion to make the sums easy, we get 4.5p per head. You might just squeeze one meal out of that at Indian prices, but it's only going to be a small one, and pretty bland - rice and lentils, perhaps.
Money well spent, I'd say.
GJC
IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE! Google's secretive Omega tech just like LIVING thing
Moto sets out plans for crafty snap-together PODULAR PHONES
Thursday 31st October 2013 06:59 GMT
Re: BAD idea
Yeah, sure, phones do occasionally hit the ground for unavoidable and explainable reasons. But in the huge, huge majority of cases, the reason is "User is a blithering idiot who has their attention elsewhere than what they are doing with a £500 electronic device". This I find hard to understand, and I find it even harder to understand that those who do regularly drop their phones always have an excuse ready. So they shell out lots of money for a new phone, and do it all over again, because they have lied to themselves about why it happened.
I think I have finally made this point stick with my eldest daughter, simply by ensuring that she pays for her own phones, and pointing out how much time she has taken to earn the money to do so. We'll see how long her new one lasts.
GJC
Lenovo stands up rinky-dinky new Yoga tablet
WD slips bullet between teeth, gets ready to hand $706m to Seagate
Wednesday 30th October 2013 11:40 GMT 
I would pay good money...
...to be a fly on the wall in Dr. Mao's next performance review:
"Achievements: Several new and innovative improvements to blah, blah, blah...
Room for improvement: Losing the company $706 million by acting like an unprofessional idiot.
Recommendations: Firing squad. The one with the really *big* guns."
GJC
Toshiba brings out terabyte laptop drive (yes), miracle enterprise-grade TLC
Coding: 'suitable for exceptionally dull weirdos'
Monday 28th October 2013 07:45 GMT
Re: Comment from the Cockwomble in question
Ah, right. So you wanted to generate a debate, and figured doing so by insulting people was the best way?
Given you are a professional writer, I'm *astonished* that no-one has ever told you that cheap insults are lazy writing. But then, looking at the quality of your writing, perhaps I'm not that astonished, after all.
For the record, having been in the industry for thirty years, I'm proud and humbled by just how many extraordinary people I have met who work alongside me keeping the 21st century on track.
GJC
LG G Flex: A new cheeky curvy mobe with a 'SELF-HEALING' bottom
Locked into fixed-term mobile contract with variable prices? Not on our watch – Ofcom
Samsung to take stake in Gorilla Glass maker Corning after LCD deal
Pop OS X Mavericks on your Mac for FREE while you have LUNCH
Wednesday 23rd October 2013 06:14 GMT 
The cynical half of me wonders...
Well, OK, the cynical 95% of me, wonders what hardware support will be like on future OS X releases. Nobody can complain at limited latest-device-only support from the OS if it is given away free, right?
However, that may be overly cynical even by my standards. We shall see.
GJC
UK's tech capital named: Read it and weep, Tech City startup hipsters
Tuesday 22nd October 2013 06:11 GMT
Molly Millars Lane
Back in the late Jurassic, I started my IT career working for a software house on Molly Millars Lane in Wokingham, which had a few tech companies even then. 1983, I think it was.
I had my suspicions at the time that this cluster was mostly due to the number of decent pubs within a short walk of the place, these being the happy, carefree days when the IT industry was mostly pissed a large percentage of the time.
GJC
Bacteria-chomping phages could kill off HOSPITAL SUPERBUGS
Billionaire vows to turn 007's Lotus Esprit into actual submarine car
Monday 21st October 2013 12:01 GMT
Re: Really?
Your down-votes fall upon me like a gentle summer shower...
Bear in mind that this piece of priceless movie memorabilia was so treasured and sought-after that the container it had been chucked into after filming was completed was sold in 1989 with no-body knowing what was stored inside.
Should we put all movie props in a museum? It'll have to be a big one. How about we just treasure the films, and let the near-autistic male collector gene wither and die like the disease it is?
GJC
Android's defences against malicious apps dissed by security bods
Google's leaky ship spills new Nexus 5 photos, $349 price tags all over web
Rumblings: Amazon to chum up with HTC, smartphones in mind
Wanna run someone over in your next Ford? No dice, it won't let you
Thursday 10th October 2013 08:23 GMT
Re: Self-driving cars are never going to take off
Your figures are *way* off. Under 2,000 people died on the roads in the UK in 2012, with a further 23,000 serious injuries. The total number of injured people is under 200,000, with ~90% of those being minor injuries.
http://www.rospa.com/faqs/detail.aspx?faq=296
GJC
Expert chat: The end of Windows XP and IE6
Alcatel-Lucent slashes 10,000 jobs worldwide
Cook invokes GHOST of STEVE JOBS in Apple-wide memo
'Stupid old white people' revenge porn ban won't work, insists selfie-peddler
Tesco's new fondleslab winks at Apple's stealthy NFC assassin iBeacon
Wednesday 2nd October 2013 15:31 GMT
Re: Maybe I'm missing something here...
Shop assistant?
If this is implemented properly (and, of course, there is absolutely no reason to assume it will be), then the payment will be registered centrally, and the security systems on the door will know that the item you are carrying has, or has not, been paid for. Automated machine-gun nests above the door can then take over from there.
GJC
Dixons preps home 3D printer for plastic-piping punters
The LSD guru, the 1980s pop-star and video games to reprogram your brain
Wednesday 2nd October 2013 06:23 GMT
Re: Leary computers and drugs ..
Well now...
You will notice that I did not claim that anything Leary did had any intrinsic worth or value. I asked what Jake was doing that had more worth or value, which is an entirely different question.
As to whether or not Leary did anything of value, who knows? He asked a lot of questions, and made a lot of other people think, which is good enough for me.
Drugs and computers went together just fine in the 1980s, I can tell you from personal experience. "Drugs" is a very broad church, and covers a whole bunch of substances that each have different and diverse effects on the mind and body. I found a combination of alcohol, coffee, and amphetamines just right for business programming as it was done back then. Probably wouldn't work in today's much more structured and big-corporate world, I grant you.
GJC
Tuesday 1st October 2013 06:50 GMT
Re: Computer games & drugs? Seriously?
Once again, your mindless knee-jerk reaction leads me to ask the obvious question, to which I would like a genuine and thought-through answer from you:
OK, then - tell us what you view as important? What do you do that is more important than what Leary did? Or do you just like jeering from the sidelines, with nothing constructive to add?
GJC
Wireless-charging power struggle latest: Qualcomm invades rival to kill upstart
Monday 30th September 2013 13:51 GMT
Re: Standards
The pads are fine, I've not had one burst into flames yet. They don't seem to get hot at all, which is a good sign, and the input to them is 5v micro-USB, so you won't be getting shocks even if they do malfunction.
I did start with the add-on patches to go under the existing back case on the phone, but decided I wasn't happy with the pressure they were putting on the battery, so went for the genuine Samsung replacement back for my S4 in the end. £30, but worth the extra, I think.
GJC
Monday 30th September 2013 13:33 GMT
Standards
Qi charging pads are about a tenner on eBay, so I didn't see the point of holding off. If a different standard emerges in a year or two, I will change when I change my phone - the investment is not huge.
Now I have it, I wouldn't be without it. I've put charging pads in the two offices I work in regularly, and by my bed. In combination with NFC tags to set a profile in each place, they really improve the usability of a smartphone, so much so that both capabilities will be non-negotiable requirements for my next phone.
GJC
Biting the hand that feeds IT
