Haha, I'm not scared...
I keep my passport under my tin-foil hat!
2772 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007
Let's face it, have you ever seen any sign of a Govn dept, or their advisers, that had the faintest clue about anything IT related?
Every time they open their mouths and say something about IT related stuff it's a laugh a minute. It's like trying to bluff that you speak fluent Polish to your plumber... He's gonna spot you're full of sh*t the moment you open your mouth.
"Wasn't Zune the I-pod "Killer" and I'm sure we've have other iphone "killer" statements on here in the past.. its all getting rather tedious."
There's a difference... Microsoft weren't an mp3 player manufacturer.
Nokia *ARE* a phone manufacturer.
So they know a thing or two about the global communications game.
In contrast Apple were a computer/mp3 player manufacturer who tried to make a phone, and although they made a lovely user interface (which they know all about), they kinda missed the target on the phone side of things (especially compared to what non-US customers are used to). Price too steap, Camera too cheap, MMS functionality missing etc etc. You only have to look at the sales figures to see that.
The only problem with that is sometimes it's impossible to know who to ask!
Someone who's not got the brains to configure wep/wpa isn't going to manage to change the SSID from the default "Netgear".
Plus even if they did, would you put your address on as the SSID, which might attract someone with a van and a habit of long term borrowing of equipment in the middle of the night?
Given that most routers supplied by ISPs, Sky, BT etc, are all WEPed up when they arrive, I would argue that an open wifi point has been deliberately left open as a service to the community.
Actually El Reg, Microsoft have not denied they are working with Lite-on to develop a BR drive for the xBox.
They have denied that Lite-on are manufacturing Blu-ray drives for the xBox. Note present tense.
They didn't say Lite-on weren't developing, nor that Lite-on would be making them in the future, just that they weren't at the time you ask (possibly because it was night in Taiwan and they'd all gone home).
I agree, stick with the old N95...
Nokia seem to have had a technological stall, and replaced it with an Appleesk urge to make things look pretty.
I have the original N95. My boss has the N95 8gig. Okay, the 8g has a bigger screen, which is nice, but the buttons have been squashed up to the point that they are hard to use, and the removal of the microSD slot (cos we all know it's just been used inside for the 8gig) is a serious pain in my book. I'm always swapping the cards on my N95.
The N96 doesn't seem to add anything of any use... TV? Errr, right.. Great. How about a better GPS chipset and a real flash on the camera?
I'm getting a bit immune to the picture too...
I find my eyes no longer drawn to the naked flesh, but to the incorrect shadows of the photoshop job that placed the Eee in the picture in the first place!
Maybe someone could photoshop it into the more substantial cleavage you suggested :-D
Hmmm... Well it is Friday afternoon... I wonder...
If you think that's bad, try to find a UK-EN version of windows... Any version!
All I've noticed so far is they try to avoid words that we spell differently to those in that big colony.
Win2k's Network neighborhood -> XP My network places
However if you poke about, you still find 'merkin spelling...
Display properties, settings, still has "Color" in XP.
No idea about Vista, don't have it, don't need it, don't want it!
I've literally just had a good bitch at one of my colleagues in a source comment, and you know what, it's staying there!
If he'd consulted me on his proposed modification to the database structure before implementing it, I wouldn't be here with a single SQL query containing 3 derived tables and 7 joins! I've spent an hour trying to find a misplaced bracket! Grrrr!
To be honest I hope he pulls the source off the SVN and reads it!
Only the other day I had the pleasure of sitting in a train with someone who was obviously designed at birth to be an annoying tw*t...
First he received at least 6 calls before we had even left the station, and had the worlds loudest, most annoying ringtone. It wouldn't have been so bad if he'd kept the phone to hand after the first call, but no, he buried in a pocket so we all got 15 seconds of his chosen "tune" each time...
Eventually we set off, and the calls stopped... Only for him to decide to use his phone as a mobile hifi unit and start playing some gangster rap through the tinny speaker!
Oh, and then he started to "sing" along with it!
I was half tempted to dig into the mp3 collection on my N95 and start singing Grace Kelly by Mika, cos I could really destroy that song, and I'm sure the 2 speakers on the N95 would have completely drowned out his crappy thing... But I resisted on the grounds that anyone singing gangster rap was probably "tooled-up".
Oh, did I mention this carriage on the C2C train was a designated "silent" one?
Thank God it was only a 20 minute journey for me, I don't even want to try to imagine what it would be like on a long flight... However at least one flight you can find a representative of the airline (easy to spot, they're usually trying to sell you scratch cards), who you can inform of you plan to murder a fellow passenger!
Anyone with Javascript enabled in an email client really does deserve everything they get! Unfortunately it'll be us that gets the spam when their PC links up with the botnet and starts spewing.
Does anyone out there (over the age of 14) really need javascript enabled emails? I don't even use HTML enabled emails! If I want to emphasize a word, I stick an asterisk on each end, job done!
No mention of the flying bits of chewed up paper launched via a dismantled bic biro?
Then again that was only with one teacher of German, who was young and inexperienced. The pack mentality of the students instantly home in on the weak.
Amazingly enough she managed to put up with this until the day she called for reinforcement in the shape of the head of French, a scary lady with a glass eye, or at least we think it was... It was never looking the same way as the other, that's for sure.
With the threat of a second bellowing hanging over us we all started behaving, and then dropped German as soon as we got our options!
"There will be no wriggling out using the 'I wasn't driving' defence, as the driver will have to name the person who was driving at the time."
Just like Neil Hamilton and his wife didn't wriggle out at all by saying "To be honest m'lord it was a long drive, we took it in turns, we have no idea who was at the wheel in that town"... Oh, actually they did didn't they.
I love how simplistic the plan sounds sounds, however we've had the ability to "roam" with our car insurance to mainland Europe for many years, but God help you if you actually have to make a claim! I'm sure the EU will need at least another thousand pen pushers to maintain this system too.
That concern aside, anything that can enforce our high driving standards whilst Johnny foreigner is mowing down grannies is a good thing.
Let's start by enforcing Tacho hours on all the trucks shall we, and how about making them pay some kind of road tax, like the Swiss do if you want to use their motorways. We can rape their wallets whilst all the illegals are being nuked by our x-ray machines at the port.
Errr, I am a real person, and I managed to beg a BBC from my parents (who are also real people who lived in a 3 bed semi).
I took great please in upgrading it to a 'B' myself, soldering iron in hand...
Ahhh... fond memories... The 6522 I/O controller, the 8271 disc controller chip which was almost impossible to find at times... Making funny shapes in mode7 with teletext graphics...
You know what, I'm gonna have to plug it in tonight!
(Anyone know the life expectancy of an 80 track 5.25" floppy?)
I assume this Science museum thing is the reason I couldn't get to the computer section on Saturday when I was up there... Grrrr!
Terribly geeky... Except mode 0-2 all used 20k of your 32, not 16...
Mode0 640x256 (2 colour) used 1 byte to store 8 pixels, so that's 640x256/8=20480
The clever bit about Elite is it ran the screen in two modes and actually switched the video controller (6845 I think) mid screen scan!
The wireframe space view was mode0 (640x256 2 colour), the radar at the bottom that needed colours was mode1 (320x256 4 colour).
VDU23,230,24,60,90,255,24,36,66,36
:-)
When a UK Orange phone is roaming in France, it was actually cheaper to make a call when roamed onto any other network, than when roamed onto Orange Fr!
Both of whom are owned by France Telecom...
Now tell me again how this isn't blatant profiteering again, I keep forgetting!
...taking a leaf out of some other countries books and allowing voting in person to be carried out over several days... Maybe including (brace yourself, this is going to be a shocker) a non-working day! (Told you it was a shocker).
Why the hell we have to vote on a Thursday really is beyond me... What genius came up with this? I guess it was a polling official that didn't want to work on a weekend.
Sort it out, I work away during the working week, and cannot possibly vote any other way than by post (not that there really is much choice between all the crooks bar the different colour rosettes).
"software developers will love its "non-existent" Android handset just as much as they love the iPhone"
Software developers love the locked down iPhone, the one who's SDK is only now poking it's head above water?
Well I never knew that.
Now if they were saying "software developers will love its "non-existent" Android handset just as much as they love the Symbian", now that would actually make some sense!
... Asus, do something about the analogue modem situation.
The 701 has an RJ11 plug with no circuitry behind it, and finding a Linux friendly USB modem (at least in the UK) seems impossible.
You aim the 701 at the new/casual user, so why do you seem to assume they are going to have a wifi enabled broadband router? I personally know of 3 pensioners who would buy one tomorrow for casual email and a bit of web if only it could do dial up.
Well I've been up working all night, and here in Essex I haven't even suspected a HGV of doing some rather late deliveries, let alone been shaken from my bed or watched tins of beans making a bid for freedom!
How anyone in London can claim to have felt it with the night buses running I will never know!
Paris, well she might have made the earth move for someone.
I think you'll find that the hardware does matter.
Apple have a nasty habit of sacrificing things purely to get "a look". Throwing things like the ethernet out because it would "compromise the lines man", is just daft.
IIRC wasn't there an Apple box that had all it's air vents on the top so not only could you spill a drink straight into the guts, but putting a folder on the top of the case was enough to cook it!
What next week, the Apple Blanco ultra-mobile, even lighter than the Air, but to keep the weight down it has no display?
And no I'm not a windoze fanatic, even my laptop (a chunky R52 thinkpad) is dual-booted with linux. Why dual? For practicality and flexibility, words missing from the book of Jobs.
I file Apple along with the X-factor and all that kind of thing, it's all about image and very little to do with depth/substance/longevity. Who else would come up with a circular mouse, and consumer electronics with a non-user swappable battery.
Damn, now look, you've got me started on the iPhone!
That with modern Li-ion batteries giving all sorts of info to the OS, like date of first charge, remaining capacity and current temperature, it would be a simple addition to either make them safely shutdown the OS in the event of overheat, or more brutally disconnect themselves from the charging circuit.
After all a sudden power off shutdown of windows might loose some data, but not as much as a bonfire.
The bypassing of the courts is worrying.
The record industry have a great record of failing to identify a user by IP. Grannies in the states hauled up for downloading gangster rap for example.
So when they do get it wrong, and you get 3 strikes, who do you appeal to? ISPs like Tiscali have a pitiful record of customer support, and that's just when you want to use your internet connection for something simple, like browsing the web!
I think BBC's Watchdog had better go nightly!
Encryption and all that sort of thing won't help with the methods they are using.
The way they work is like this...
1) Do a torrent search for one of their artists
2) Start downloading this torrent with their favourite bittorrent client.
3) Look at the peers they have. Write down the IPs.
4) Check the IP ranges against the ISP list they have
5) Fire off letter to ISP with IP date, time and the details of the torrent.
I assume (hope) that they do bother to verify the content of the torrent before sending off the letters.
However, there are of course ways to avoid this... Block lists. Most good bittorrent clients support one or more.
Grey listing shouldn't dump any legit email, all it would do is delay it for an hour or two. A real email server will just retry later.
It's no different to when a destination SMTP server gets swamped, they send out a "busy, try later" reply then too. It's a perfectly legit part of the SMTP protocol.
If legit email is getting lost due to an SMTP server saying "busy, come back later" then it's a problem with the sending mail server not correctly handling this.
Of course price plays a part... Sony appear to have learnt little from the VHS/Betamax issue in the early days of VCR. Betamax was technically superior, and was still used in professional circles until digital replaced it. However it's licensing was extortionate and JVC came up with VHS for the consumer for a far more reasonable sum.
Having said all that, I suspect the main reason would be that most people, including myself, don't actually see a problem with good old DVD. Many of us (again, including myself), are still happy with the reliable old CRT in the front room!
Hell, mines not even wide-screen!
I agree totally.
If she was capable of getting pregnant, then surely she will be capable of delivering a baby Nelly.
It's nature after all, these people need to learn to stop applying human morals to animals. I'm sure in the wild a 9 year old Nelly would have had the boys sniffing round her behind on more than one occasion.
The only reason the human age is set at 16 is so the parents can learn how to write and fill in their social security forms correctly. There's no biological reason for it, as has been proved many times in Basildon.