Posts by Puck

Sun Online readers paying? hah!

i cannot conceive of a customer profile less likely to pay for content than that of Sun Online's readers.

Come to think of it, Times Online will kill 80% of its ad revenue if it erects said paywall: it's readers are average Joe Spods like me, misers saving money on buying the paper edition of it and other favourite newspapers.

the only successful mass circulation paywalled daily is the FT, which punts VERY specialised OCCUPATIONAL financial information at very wealthy people who get a tax deduction for the expense.

how much says Times Online goes back to non-paywalled, ad-revenue only model within a year?

broadband or satellite sourced?

Sorry, could someone here please clarify for me whether this service will enter the digiboxes via broadband or satellite dish? Thanks

re: An ethical ISP, shock horror

An unethical freetard, what a find.

Knockers desist!

It's just fun, imaginative TV. OK OK I know some of the characters are a bit silly (Ecclestone gave gravity and a sense of mortality to the stories) and childish but I've just been enjoying it and Torchwood greatly, as pure escapist fun which is all one should surely ever ask of TV.

Paris, because she's got her knockers too.

Freetards go fuck yourselves

If you won't pay for creative content then you deserve to listen to nothing but Muzak and watch nothing except ITV reruns for the rest of your life. Thieving cheapskate swine. Fuck you.

'Backside' illumination?

Why must scientists always stand on ceremony? What's wrong with 'arse'?

"... that would allow the munging together... "

"Munging"?

A choice word!! Never heard that one before. More! Conjugated in irregular perfect and imperfect tenses, please.

Better regulation, better computers, or no...

...as long as the institution isn't a deposit-taking one underwritten by the UK taxpayer, then they can bankrupt each other for all I care - Mervyn King's 'separation of banking types' advocated recently would work quite well. Risk would be priced accordingly and people would put their money in safer hands - and those who gambled with the crazy investment banks would get all the crap they deserved.

As for this suggestion that these crazy casino operations would then go abroad, well, fine - let them fuck somebody else's economy up for a generation - not with UK savers' and pensioners' assets and with their stupid debts not paid for by us lot for the rest of our lives. Grr.

thanks for the work fellas....

For "concerns about their identity documents" read "concerns about size of payroll".

"It looks like you're trying to eat an unfeasibly large hamburger..."

"...would you like some help with that?"

Mine's the shellsuit with ketchup stains on it

"... just 4.7 pounds"?

"...just"?

I know it's not quite Altair territory but neither seems it quite light, either.

Hm, am sounding a bit like amanfrommars today. Where is the fellow these days, anyway?

Cost, cost, cost, and hubris

The marginal/incremental cost over a DVD writer, of installing HD DVD, if it still existed, would be negligible.

This is quite sad actually. Even without a worldwide demand crisis, pre-2007, the extra costs associated with producing Blu- Ray, seemed prohibitive, and likely to constrain the market for high definition DVD products extraordinarily.

It is extremely ironic that Apple were one of the drum beaters for this unadoptable technology, the marketing of which crushed the rival which had the potential to reach a mass market.

local govt funding shortfalls versus frontline services

I find this proposal as distasteful as anyone, not least as my chronic RSI means 'e-services' are extremely inconvenient for me to access, however, if you look at the local and central govt tax-take since, say, Lehman, it's a nightmare, and if they can shrink wage spend through getting more people to access services online, then that's for the good.

Yes, yes, I know that govt spending shouldn't be shrinking in a recession, but, we've been all living like kings on boom-time monies and when the economy is back doing well then the discipline will have to occur.

The only problem is that local govt tend not to procure en masse but hire expensive consultants to put up simple web-pages etc and do flowcharts of reorgs etc, town by bloody town. Local govts should purchase their web-based services together, in fact, they should centrally hire some good IT people on permanent contracts to design and code them - one template for the whole country. That'd be an efficiency bloody saving.

Pulverised quivering bloody Tory

The ironic thing about this implicit wink at people who like to drive fast, is, that with 3,000 road deaths and many tens of thousands thus maimed each year, the odds are, it's one of the Tories' loved ones who'll be on the wrong end of a speeding idiot.

Even if one cannot credit them with anything so burdensome as care for their fellow man, you'd nonetheless think those supposedly public-cost-hating Tories, would be mindful of the financial burden of supporting those thus injured.

Really like it

This is a long way away from a lot of the pointless rubbish to which some of the knockers above refer. It reminds me of 1980 when I think at Brent Cross shopping centre in London, there was a digital camera setup, where you paid 10 or £20, and had your portrait taken, in maybe 30 pixels by 40 pixels (or maybe a few more), with the same variable pixel size, in black and white. My grandmother had and my mother has a copy of the photograph taken of my brother and myself hugging like friends, looking really very sweet. It is quite affecting, perhaps it is something to do with the medium and its simplicity which means that you have to actually take a photograph of something meaningful and communicative to make it worthwhile, e.g. your loved ones, rather than just any old crap with your camera phone. There is an intimacy about that sort of imagery which I like.

Our technology these days is too good and makes us blind to it and to the art work which it generates-so the low-tech, low fidelity approach can be refreshing and vital. In this instance, the product is, I suppose, not in a completely dissimilar category to one of those miniature Polaroid cameras which takes photos of you and your friends when you're drunk or so-it's not a hasselblad, and you probably won't use it when you're 40, but it has its place. Good luck to its maker (although I do agree with and above person who suggests it is probably too difficult to produce all those pins etc). Lovely idea though-keep them coming.

UK/US law/Delaware

This is a fascinating story, as are others on US law, but, on US law it remains, and, as far as I know, they don't have nearly the strength of consumer protection as we do here in the UK-these points about the end purchaser not having contracted with Autodesk seem interesting-but as for " void clauses", I gather that's more a concept introduced with British statutes like the sale of goods act and especially the unfair terms in consumer contracts regulations. I gather American law, entails far more "privity", ie "freedom" of contract between parties-and possibly also relating to intellectual property. The "Delaware " principle basically is that American companies will tend to have their head offices in Delaware, the state where there is least consumer protection, and most freedom to write unfair contracts.

Basically, this is a fascinating story, and although it's interesting to hear fellow British readers giving their legal opinions on it, my understanding is that it needs someone who knows all about American law to give proper qualified comment on the matter.

Oh for goodness sake...

What kind of a first name is "Phillpott", anyway?

BBC World Service/bubbling mud

I'm grateful to DAB for having introduced me to BBC World Service (in its comparatively hiss free incarnation therein), but, having just moved to Potters Bar in Hertfordshire, I'm unhappy to find that my £150 singing and dancing Roberts DAB radio, will not receive even so much as "bubbling mud" virtually anywhere in this property.

Did I mention BBC World Service? It's really good. When you can hear it.

High street showers

I think DSG's business model could be fairly well summed as "there's one born every minute...". Just try pitching that in your local Business Link nowadays!

Lol@andaroo79 ("...death to PC World...").

@pete2, G-HAM 2000, Cameron Colley

Well, Pete2, I must also count myself amongst the followers of the Church of Smartphone. The gadgets can be shockingly good. My favourite app (and I think this is KILLER) is using www.beebotron.org to run BBC Listen Again or live radio via Realplayer on my 3yo Nokia E61 - whilst up a ladder, in the countryside or wherever, miles from any copper wire. Or just in parts of the house which aren't getting good reception off the Roberts.

They also seem to bounce on pavements a lot better than laptops (although please anyone correct me if I'm wrong), and mine survived being fully submerged for a whole minute in several inches of water in the footwell of my VW Golf.

Oh, and the N900 looks goood...

'Lynnfield'

It feels better somehow, to read of a processor family named after a place, rather than just a set of digits. Even if 'Nehalem' is a bit heavy metal. I look forward to the 12-core 'Sidcup' range of CPUs.

Mine's the green waterproof.

hm.

£170 markup for an OSX-enabling gizmo, wow, well, providing it were vaguely future-proofed, that's in theory half of Apple's business model nicked right there! A fiver says Apple either buy the company and/or issue their own EFIX-type-gizmo, at about the same price.

HP are at the cutting edge of innovative sharp practice!

...Not just with shipping but with the business plans for their products generally: my dear mother bought the HP 7280 all-in-one printer for the handsome price of £149.99. It looks beautiful. But it has six ink cartridges, ALL of which are used, if, say, one copies a black and white page, or, receives a fax, or prints a fax confirmation. If one prints B&W only from the print driver, still, colour cartridges are used. There is NO way to perform 'black only' printing.

I asked HP why there was no way of performing 'black only' printing/copying/faxing. They told me, that it was because the black produced through the combination of six colours, was BETTER. Better.

I studied fine art for six years full-time, I went to Chelsea and St Martins, and I feel that qualifies me to assert that black is black. If one wants to make a very, very special black, for a one-off piece for a special collector, fine: use as many colours as you want. But to photocopy a recipe or receive a fax, that would be insanity.

The cartridges, each of the six of which have been replaced three times in the past year, despite my mum having never printed anything in colour, cost up to £14.99 each.

One of these days I'll get round to getting redress, but my mum and I are gutted, enraged. GRRR!

Pah!

Although I agree with users on here who imply there is an anticompetitiveness and anticonsumer issue about Apple having a monopoly on tied software-hardware packages, nonetheless UK users commenting should note in the US Apple self-cert-taxpayers get a tax deduction anyway, to buy a new computer every three years; as for other users being disadvantaged by the overpriced hardware Apple sells with its superior OS, it should be borne in mind that the low-end Macs work fine: other than video and photoshop (which worked fine on G4 Macs -admit it), the seriously processor-hungry software like proper voice recog, and gaming, is all only on PC!

To look at the starship-enterprise-specced Macs in some folks' homes, running email and youtube, you'd wonder how people got by in 2000 with their 366mhz G3s and G4s -and yet they did, just fine, and Hollywood and the music charts and god knows what else, from the time, are testament to that; I remember the 400mhz G4 Powerbook being called 'the first portable supercomputer' - and it was!! The upshot being, if you need a supercomputer, get a Mac Mini (OK wait til the i5 version comes out) and enjoy.

Paris, because, er, we'll always have her.

Rosetta who?

Michel Thomas CDs are better anyway.