Posts by Cameron Colley

RE: So..

It's OK, I will explain to you, since it is obvious that you have been living outside of modern society fro some years.

In many countries, especially the United States Of America, they have things called "patents" -- this is a kind of "bagsy" people can have on something that they think they may make money from at a later date -- a kind of bet if you will. So, people who disagree with this kind of blatant abuse of power tend to look to other ways of doing things, which aren't covered by these so-called patents.

Oddly, Google prefer to move away from patents -- but to do so they have to register patents then "open" them.

With this type of strategy google will own the world's data and the world will be a worse place. But nobody else seems to care, so I wouldn't worry your pretty little head about it.

@binsamp

Have you tried Lynx?

Erm, did you see the pictures?

It is being pitched as having "an ergonomic layout". Which means less finger movement into a hard surface. My point being that more finger movement onto real buttons seems to have saved my fingers and tendons from aches.

@cozappz

Except having to produce ID at a border isn't giving up any liberty -- it's just giving up some convenience. As I posted, in most countries in Schengen it's probably mandatory to carry ID anyhow, and having some on you when abroad could be jolly useful anyhow.

It's not about safety either -- it's about not having to build more and more refugee camps and not having to spend money putting people through the deportation process.

RE: Written before reading??

Nope, I read two anti-gamer out of the few posts at that time (making up about 20% of the posts at that time) and didn't think I needed to name names. Though, as you say, it is also in response to those who have posted similar on similar threads.

Oh, damn, you mean this is appearing on Facebook, AC?

Or do you mean El Reg say I'm a dumb fuck and a bitch? Oh, you mean the firm I work for are in breach of the DPA and have handed my details over to advertisers in return for my use of a phone? Seriously, how do you know that?

Oh, I see, you're trying to be clever.

Nothing you're expected to have or use in relation to your job should force you to give details to a reckless, foreign third-party marketing firm.

Most TV speakers I heard were crap.

I know there are some exceptions but most people I knew who went for a larger-than-normal TV, or updated to Widescreen, or whatever used separate speakers and amps.

If you're spending a stupid amount of money on a large HD set and you don't have a separate sound setup then I would think you'd be in the minority.

I may be wrong.

I thought the main source of very loud noise from helicopters was due to the angled blades hitting each other's wake vortices rather than the air shifted? You can just push air with a fan fairly quietly in comparison.

Why pictures?

Do you know all the local crims and where they live and hang out? Also, how do you know the machine will be internet connected before the OS is wiped?

It's not the same at all.

On a Piano the "D" key is always next to the "C#" key -- regardless of intonation and if you drop-tune a semitone, for example, you would probably still use the same key for the same note on the stave as would the rest of the musicians.

The only way it could be the same is if you made the black keys a full tone after the white ones, made a note appear to the right of a lower one or deliberately tuned the whole piano up or down a tone or so to change the range of notes available -- but the last would still cause almost anyone to be a little confused and is hardly "normal", though it's still just playing one note to the right rather than hitting a key in a completely different location every so often during a piece.

That's in an ideal world.

In the real world Telco's are scum and getting any information from them is next to impossible.

So, since someone has the data it can't be that hard to simply make the file available on a website. The Local Authority don't have to do any conversion or either format of the file or of the data itself -- all this could be done by any number of bored CS students or other assorted geeks. It's not that hard to receive a file, virus scan it, then post it on a web page next to a disclaimer.

You mean a blender, surely?

Or is the hammer just to get it into the blender?

@turnip handler

Not only do some burglars operate this way, so do some robbers -- though admittedly it's generally using Twitter if the reports are anything to go by. I think a "famous rapper" or "hipity hop star" was even a victim of this.

@NightFox

I was paraphrasing for brevity.

It means that you don't have to pay for Spotiy and then buy another copy -- which I take it you would probably do in iTunes in this day and age, especially if you owned an Apple product and wanted the music quickly.

Christ on a bike -- Apple users aren't half tetchy. My comment wasn't anti-Apple it was pro-Spotify, pro-choice and anti-having-to-buy-something-you-already-paid-to-use-from-a-paid-for-lease-service.

In fact, in allowing this Apple went up a little in my estimation, which I freely admit is still low.

@Cazzo Enorme.

That is verpry odd -- I've heard of many accounts of people being harassed by police in the UK.

Can you get some kind of event license here or something?

You could try Debian.

I got fed up with a couple of choices made by Canonical a few releases ago -- one was to use Pulse Audio and the others I forget. So, I decided to give Debian a go. I'm not saying it's the best distro, as that's a personal thing, but since Debian is what Ubuntu is based on you'll find it more familiar than most other distro's.

That said, if you're not as lazy as me then learning about other distro's will be time well spent I'm sure.

The email address makes sense.

Your credit card number is checked and an error is returned if it doesn't match the other details you give -- there is no way that anyone can check that you entered your email address correctly (other than asking you to reply to an email sent to it, and even that only means you got the domain correct).

I agree about the over-checking though -- some moron where I work forced SMTP addresses to only be of the form <firstname>.<lastname>@wherever.com so anyone with a slightly different form caused errors which propagated across several systems.

Not sure this is the product you mean to rant at.

This is a device to be used to back up a home computer and store a little media -- so if it dies either you'll have the original PC or the media will be in some way retrievable (depending on its copyright status and how it got onto the disc in the first place).

It's also supposed to be "cloud" so your photographs, for example, will be stored in one or more "clouds" as well as being on the device.

Oh, and as to RAID5 -- my current main home partition is on one but I'm not sure why since

I worked out that there's a good chance that if a drive fails one of the others in the pack could fail not long after and the stress of rebuilding a RAID could be just the trigger.

I don't think any devices of the type reviewed here are "backup" devices -- they're convenient ways of sharing data. All serious backups are off-site.

I knew you'd get there in the end.

They use alternative methods -- much like this will likely allow "normal" passwords and a screen reader instead. Token systems also allow permanent passwords instead of tokens.

Most systems of authentication nowadays offer a couple of ways of doing things.

RE: Errm

As someone who uses Opera on and off, and has done for several years, I know very well it is free to download and, whilst I'm not keen on it myself, I know it's a decent browser.

What I was referring to is that Opera is not open source or free and people do pay to include it on device builds.

I can't believe my first pro-Opera post ever got such a negative response.

Don't know about anyone else.

I criticise because it's fucking annoying.

Take the example I used before of Ridley Scott's Gladiator -- that film would have been a great epic of our time if he just learned how to use something other than close-ups and quick cuts in action sequences.

I view it as a bit like criticising a restaurant where the plate was cold or they overcooked the vegetables or, in Shayamalan's case burned the steak -- ruining something which had potential.