Posts by Anthony Hegedus

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Does it run windows 8?

data rates

€150 for 2GB sounds quite reasonable compared to what roaming charges can be. For example, travel to another secretive third-world state, such as the USA, on O2 it costs £6 a MB (£6000 per GB!). On the subject of roaming, call me thick, but how can something that costs £10 here (an extra GB of data) cost 600 times as much abroad. I know they have to make some money, but that is just ridiculous! Oh wait, they do a deal where you pay £120 a month for 200Mb of data. That's only £600 a GB. Bargain!

Wow! amazing!

So some of Windows ME's unloved features that nobody cares about because they've never found them anyway have been "improved". Like that's exciting: "Oh look I can move a tile around and make it a different size, and I can two apps side by side just like Windows 3.1!". Sorry Microsoft, but this is a crock of shit. Same shit, same colour.

.net?

.net - isn't that a suite of addon shit that take longer to install than a full OS, has more potential for updates failing than an HP Printer Driver and most people haven't got a clue why it's on their system in about 5 entries in programs&features? And isn't it just basically an API for windows APIs, in other words should have been part of the OS in the first place? Or am I wrong about that too.

And Java? unless there's a specific application, you just don't need it. So some goofy websites don't work. Better than the whole OS is broken due to a drive-by virus download!

Doomed...

They swore blind the planet was about to be eaten by an enormous mutant star-goat, or some such thing

Snot

We once had a laptop in with "liquid damage to the keyboard" and I rang the customer to ask what the liquid was, because after taking the keyboard off, it smelt of neither beer or coffee. He replied "well, not to put too fine a point on it, it's snot... I have pretty nuclear sneezes!". I washed my hands after that

What a crock of shit office 2013 is

I've tried this and I have to say usability has gone south in a big way. The default colour scheme, well, isn't. It's like Microsoft has taken 20 or so years of ui design and just ignored it. It's all just white lines with little or no shading and it's very hard indeed to differentiate between the crappy ribbon bar thing and your actual work area. I'd have understood if it took its visual cues from the functionally crippled but nevertheless colourful "modern" or "metro" or whatever it's called interface so beloved of Microsoft who can't tell the difference between a 4" phone and a 24" monitor, but it doesn't. The only improvement I can see is that lines seem to scroll smoothly in a fairly pointless sort of way. What really gets me about windows 8 and office 2013 is that for the average home user or typical small business it decreases usability and productivity. Two examples in Windows 8: for those of us used to clicking a start button or menu button to turn off a computer, find the "turn off computer" item. And another one : for those of us used to clicking on start and typing "update", where is windows update? It's not obvious and I've asked both technically literate people and ordinary folk these questions and they've been stumped. Microsoft: some people are normal, get over it.

Mistakes here: you don't need wifi on the box to connect to a wifi tablet - assuming the box (like most others) is connected via ethernet cable, a wifi tablet will connect because they're both on the same network.

And what the heck is Fibre to the Curb? First of all it's "Kerb" not "Curb" (unless you're one of those not-able-to-spell Americans) and secondly it should be "Fibre to the Cabinet" anyway. Actually just checked the article and the author wrote "Fiber" so they must be a yank.

I always wanted to use that emoticon or whatever it's called these days

Maybe the IT angle that was omitted was that he used his iphone to find a kebab place. If he'd just walked he'd have found one, but he had to drive didn't he? Probably because he used some donerfinda app which didn't know about the nearest one, instead taking him a car ride away. Maybe he'll sue the developer.

So what?

So some people have a party with a cheesy, corny song with some rude words in it. In Norway. I remember once using a rude word at an office party.

correct horse battery staple

passphrases like "correct horse battery staple" are excellent. They're easier to remember and hard to crack, especially if you use numbers and punctuation after each word, and mixed case as in "engineEr5whistlE!highwAy*locatE." Assuming the words are chosen from a list of 3000 easy to remember names, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that there are possibly 1.8 x 10^18 different combinations (or 1.8 million million million). Since most important passwords are to protect online things such as email, credit card accounts etc, and there's no way that anything would let an automated program take that many guesses (even if it were physically possible), I would say this is particularly secure.

Scaling that down to three random words separated by numbers, the security such a password offers is at least far better than most passwords, and certainly easier to remember than things like q3!U5opO3.

As humans, we can't remember lots of passwords easily, that's the problem. And seeing as many things which are passworded are less important than others, why not use a less secure (and therefore easier to remember) password for things that don't matter so much?

Surely I need less security on my Nespresso account (which can only be used to order coffee and requires a credit card number every time) than say my Paypal account (which can be used to send people money)?

Why do some broadband companies make their broadband signon password "welcome1" or even just not have one, whilst others make it "Y1H4O7P2"? The signon cannot be used for anything other than logging into the internet!

I'm no expert but there is a LOT of misinformation going round about passwords, I'm sure of it. I see people running a business whose password for EVERYTHING is "buster", I've seen people who have an incredibly complex password for their computer but a file on the desktop called "banking passwords and pin numbers!", and what about people who set a complex 64 digit WEP key for their wireless?

Anyway see passphra.se for more info about easy to remember passwords

No it doesn't

So google have my mac address. So what? Yes they're using my information to a) make more profit for themselves somehow (indirectly) and b) help people LIKE MYSELF who can get a quick triangulation of where they are if GPS signals aren't forthcoming. Really, why does it matter? I have a fixed IP address, I have domains registered to my address, I have all sorts of info out there that aren't really of much use to anybody but a criminal. If Google have my MAC address and approximate location, is it any different to any other organisation having my name and address? All this "right to privacy" crap really does wind me up. Yes, we all need our privacy, but we live in a connected world. We want to be a "global village" but wake up - in a small village everyone knows what everyone else is doing.

Losing useful functionality like wifi triangulation because of "privacy concerns" is really like saying "let's lose some really useful functionality because there are some criminals out there who might make use of it".

I was at a friend recently, who moved house, and my stupid iphone told me I was somewhere completely different from where I thought I was.

It's OK, they've cooked up an excuse.

This excuse is straight out of blackadder or something. I got that email too. About 5 hours later I got another email. It said:

"You have just received an email which was not up to the standards of TomTom. The greeting (Dear English Bas) was in fact specifying the language of the mail followed by my first name, this should have been personalised with your name.

We apologize for this error and for any inconvenience this might have caused. Underneath you will find the correct email."

and was signed :

"All the best,

Bas Komen

TomTom team"

Now doesn't that just sound a little, er, "made up". The funny thing is that if they hadn't sent me the apology email I wouldn't have noticed.

Safeley operate a firearm?!?!?

>>Are you able to safely operate a motor vehicle?

>>Are you able to safely operate a circular saw?

>>Congratulations! You can safely operate a firearm!

Forgive me for possibly not understanding the purpose of a gun, but I thought that a device whose sole purpose is to propel a piece of metal at very high velocity in a targetted direction, and then have that metal deform on first contact with anything harder than a melon, and continue to propel itself through whatever it hits with high force, causing maximum damage, cannot possibly be operated "safely".

Apparently if you aim one of these "guns" towards a "human being" and then operate the lever that activates it, the person the gun is pointed towards isn't likely to be a "being" much longer.

Now tell me what part of "safely operating" a firearm can possibly apply to any of its modes of functionality. Apart from the "keep it locked away and never use it" mode.

What is it with these yanks that makes it so bloody necessary to have a gun? In this country (United "no guns here" Kingdom) the vast majority of people were happy the last time gun controls were tightened (after Dunblane ISTR).

Tens of thousands of people are killed by each other using guns in america every year. And all they want to do is to have more guns. It's no use comparing gun ownership to some other dangerous machine. Sure, cars kill more people but the primary purpose of a car is to get from A to B. The primary purpose of a gun is to... oh there's no point, if you're a gun-toting american you won't understand will you? But then we'll get onto the argument that they need guns to protect themselves against the government should the need arise. Paranoid really.

pants!

Looking up contacts in google maps on the JesusPhone often doesn't work for me. Entries which don't explicitly say "united kingdom" in the country field don't work, because the keep trying to look up the address in the US. Do all americans type "United States of America" for every entry in their phone books? Well guess what, we don't put our country in either. Internationalisation... they've heard of it... not!

And why would you want to put your iphone in your pants? surely a more hygienic location would be... well, your trouser pockets?