Yes, but not all rectangles are squares. Sorry, I couldn't let that pass.
Posts by Queasy Rider
292 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2014
Man, its smartphones are SQUARE. But will BlackBerry make a comeback with them?
Hey, Mac fanbois. HGST wants you drooling over its HUGE desktop RACK
Re: A little (bad) math
Tom38: Thanks for reading my post so carefully. I'm not an IT guy (obviously), just someone with a Seagate 4TB and a Toshiba 3TB both packed to the gills with dvd back-ups, like an earlier commenter. If you had chosen to do the math you would have realized that New Egg can sell you 64TB of external storage for $140. x 16 = $2240. I wasn't suggesting that was practical for pro setup, only that for consumers like myself who are not IT pros, and already have a few multi-TB drives bulging with dvd backups, a $7,000 enclosure is not very appealing. By the way, where you came up with 140 drives I have no idea, but thanks for the reply.
Hate Facebook? Hate it enough to spend $9k fleeing it? Web 'country club' built for the rich
Heads up, Chromebook: Here come the sub-$200 Windows 8.1 portables
Bought an Acer 9' Aspire One with XP years ago. Liked it so much I hooked it up to a 22' monitor to be my main computer. (Still was till last month.) Then I caught an Asus netbook on sale so cheap that I grabbed it to carry around. That piece of crap was so slow that when I accidentally stepped on in and destroyed the screen, my first thought wasn't " Oh my, I just destroyed almost $200. worth of kit," but "I should have done that sooner." I honestly don't know what the difference was between the two machines, but they were day and night in performance. I suspect we'll discover the same with this newest crop (and probably some crap.)
P.S. After I gave the Asus to a buddy who hooked it up to a large screen to run his electronic map program on his boat, I went out and bought a 17" Toshiba laptop so I could actually read my screen without a squint inducing headache. It was a Vista but I learned to live with it because the price was right. Life is a compromise, sigh.
Data entry REAR-END SNAFU: Weighty ballsup leads to plane take-off flap
NATO nations 'will respond to a Cyber attack on one as though it were on all'
it's much hit's much harder to prove where cyber-attacks are coming from
"It's much harder to prove where cyber-attacks are coming from," and that scares me the most. Lord knows how many times in history some force has faked an attack on itself to use a pretext to strike an adversary, but we all know the Nazis did it, and the Americans did it in Vietnam (Gulf of Tonkin). A fake cyber attack is the perfect war monger's tool.
China: You, Microsoft. Office-Windows 'compatibility'. You have 20 days to explain
A work of fiction on this very topic
I stumbled across the free e-book THE BITE OF THE DRAGON by JF SUSBIELLE a few days ago. Although I doubt the consequences of banning Windows in China ever being so dire, the currency and topicality of the novel (written in 2007, pre-Snowdon no less) made for a fun read on a rainy day. I am surprised that nobody in this thread has recommended it yet... maybe in another, earlier thread then?
You can find it here... https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/3853
Sony reads the future, quits e-reader market says German report
Re: The future is
I also thought such a dual-screen device would be brilliant, so when one came on the market I jumped for it. I'm not saying that the concept is unworkable, but mine was a huge disappointment. Poor responsiveness, feeble wi-fi range and rather lame apps and battery life left me cold. As for waterproofness, when hurricane Katrina finally finished it off, I mourned the money loss, not the tablet. It hadn't been out of its box for months by that time. Good riddance.
All those new '5G standards'? Here's the science they rely on
Re: The higher the frequency,...
Being a non-tech type, reading this article made me feel their goals were impossible to achieve, although I expect them to succeed eventually.
As for range vs. speed, I wish they would give good range spectrum priority to voice
and whatever spectrum is left over to data. If you want to watch movies, listen to music or work on spreadsheets during your daily commute, download that shit before you walk out the door. And browse Facebook at work like everybody else does. I use my phone as a phone. YMMV
Apple fanbois SCREAM as update BRICKS their Macbook Airs
UN to Five Eyes nations: Your mass surveillance is breaking the law
Re: Mark 85, I think the real question is..
And what are YOU, Sabroni, going to do about it? See, that little game can go on ad nauseum. By the way, I'm doing nothing because I firmly believe that neither myself as an individual nor we in our collective millions can stop, slow down or deter anybody from amassing data, simply because knowledge is power. Besides, the only thing I can do is withdraw from the system, get rid of my cell phone, landline, internet connection then computer, bank accounts (with my credit and debit cards), employer, multiple insurance policies, driver's license and vehicle, library card, cable tv, magazine subscriptions, and soon, cash transactions, and finally go live in a hole in the ground. Oh wait, didn't Saddam try that already? We are not little guys to the real power brokers; we are nothing guys. And nothing, that is, zero times x, whether x is one or a billion is still zero.
The old cliche is you can't fight city hall. We know that isn't quite true because some individuals have done just that by expending prodigious amounts of effort and resources. Now multiply that by the size of the national or world stage. The godfathers of this world don't owe us; we owe them and they will never relent on any issue unless it gains them more money or power, not less. You want to live in a different world, go join a commune, but be aware, while you are hiding under your communal rock the rest of the world will keep on turning, and when you emerge blinkingly from under that rock you will only find it even more difficult to suffer the world order.
You can change your own little corner of the world, but unless you want the rest of the world to rain down on your head like some kind of metaphorical Armageddon, you'll have to go along to get along. It all makes me so sad, Sigh.
Skiddies turn Amazon cloud into 'crime-as-a-service' – security bod
Child diagnosed as allergic to iPad
Re: Applephilia
Applephelia... NOT
As someone who has followed computers with interest all his life, but could not justify their expense
either commercially or personally, it took till 1995 before I obtained my first. It was a used Zenith
laptop, 386 processor, 4MB ram, 84MB hard drive, DOS 3.x os with an added gui of which I can't
remember the name. Disappointingly, all I could do with it was write text notes to myself, and by
osmosis, learn a handful of the most basic DOS navigational commands. I wanted to try programming but
I had no use for it and hated it from the first stroke. DOA
But I kept on buying newer used machines and reading as much as I could and became convinced Apple
was the system for me (and everybody else too). In the mid-2000's I finally scraped the money
together for a used iBook and took the plunge. It sported ver. 10.2. I was thrilled by the quality of
the display and initially loved iTunes, but not for long. The filing systems baffled me, and in spite
of all the claims of intuitiveness, and internet Apple help sites, I was forced to buy a FOR DUMMIES
book. Things only got worse. I had many free programs on my Windows machines that allowed me to tweak
to my heart's content and delight, but forget that with Apple. It was either their way or overpay for multiple
crummy tweak programs that could do only one or two basic things. In frustration I finally coughed up
the money for the highly rated (and expensive) Windows emulation program. It turned out to be so slow
and unstable as to be unusable, (and don't forget, I was only using the most simple and basic of
programs. The Koolaid was wearing off fast and I started falling back on my old Windows machine,
finally only using the iBook to listen to my mp3's. Even that got to be too much and when, after
about a year, the screen failed and the battery wouldn't hold a charge for even five minutes, I
chucked it with relief.
I couldn't even give it away. I was ashamed to even try. I moved on to Win 98SE then XP, and haven't
looked back since.
Sorry for such a long post but I had to get this off my chest after being suckered over a decade ago
by Apple, Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field, and everybody else that drank the Koolaid and
passed in on. It was one of the biggest, and the most expensive mistakes of my impoverished life.
NASA: ALIENS and NEW EARTHS will be ours inside 20 years
'Father of Zeus' banking trojan appears at very reasonable price
How naive am I?
It simply amazes me that such large electronic money transfers can't be followed in real time by law enforcement to be there to cuff the miscreants as they collect their booty. I realize that the cuffees are normally mules but nabbing them repeatedly ought to put a crimp in their handlers' activities since the whole criminal enterprise depends on somebody picking up the CASH somewhere. NSA, you seem to know every time I pick my nose or blink. Pull out your finger and get on this.
How naive am I? Very it seems.
FBI: We found US MILITARY AIRCRAFT INTEL during raid on alleged Chinese hacker
I'm not so sure
...how much is gained hacking into Boeing. Any info on currently operational planes can easily be obtained by bribing foreign maintenance workers with, oh say, an SUV and a date with Miss Beijing 2008.
As for birds still on the drawing boards and not in the air yet, just give them time. Any country that can erect skyscrapers in days and weeks instead of months and years can surely copy a freshly launched military plane (that took decades to get off the ground) in less time than it takes for the U.S. to build a viable fleet of them, once they have the plans. And probably improve on the american design at the same time; they don't send all those chinese students to american colleges for nothing.
Dubai to get huge climate-controlled domed city and giga-mall
Re: I had a break in Dubai, last year
Of course you wouldn't want to work in Dubai. The place is traditionally highly stratified socially, with their rich upper classes lording over the common workers, while in Britain you could be working for a fraction of Dubai wages while the rich upper classes... oh wait, never mind, it's the climate, right?
'Biggest bird ever': 21-foot ripsaw-beaked flying horror
Re: take off
I don't think the bulk of their diet was found up on cliffs, so they still probably had to take off occasionally from the water. The only way I see around this is to only feed in waters around cliff bases, then somehow climb the cliff face till they are high enough to launch into a suitable updraft.
Apple fanbois to talk at the iWatch, INSPECTOR GADGET style – report
Re: How utterly pathetic.
I miss about 20 to 30% of my cell calls because I can't get my phone out of my pocket in time to answer. And more annoying than that, when I immediately call back, about 20 to 30% of those calls go straight to the callers' voice mails. A wrist device might solve my problem but I won't be getting one until my PAYG provider offers one at a reasonable rate, (read CHEAP). It sure as heck won't be an Apple device. I paid $20 for my present feature phone and I don't plan to pay any more for a wrist accessory so I'm not holding my breath since I'll probably be too old and feeble to use it anyway. Sigh.
Vodafone: SPOOKS are plugged DIRECTLY into our network
Cloud computing is FAIL and here’s why
Xiaomi launches Mi Pad fondleslablette – your (legal) move, Apple
The best defence?
I don't know how "bendable" the court system is in China, but if I was this guy planning to release an iLike piece of electronics, the first thing I would do is populate my board of directors with lots of folk who have very "cordial" relations with the judiciary; you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge. After all, it never hurts to have friends in high places, just saying.
STEALTHY NANOROBOTS dress up as viruses, prepare to sneak into YOUR BODY
T-Mobile US cuts overage charges, dares rivals to follow suit
Re: Good or Bad? Gerat!
Have same plan here. Only used 9 minutes of voice over the last 5 months. I have a PAYG TracFone with triple minutes for gabbing. The T-Mobile Nokia 521 Winphone is tethered to my Acer netbook & 22" monitor. You get 5 gigs @ 4g then they throttle you down to 2g (after warning you when you exceed 4 gigs usage) but I've only had that happen once in 5 months, after going on a Youtube BBC Documentary spree, (Iain Stewart is great). My 2 phones together average $45 to $50 per month, tax included. Good or bad? Great for me, a low use consumer.
Apple, Symantec, other tech heavies challenge anti-gay legislation
Re: Guess I'll be the bad guy
If the black man Sam Jones comes into your establishment and causes a disturbance then I can see you banning Sam Jones, not all blacks. If the Uptown Lesbian Society comes into your establishment and causes a disturbance then I can see you banning the Uptown Lesbian Society, not all lesbians, etc. Somehow I can't see you bigots barring all white christian males because one redneck has given you grief in the past.
If every black is disrupting your business and every gender bender too, then I suggest you examine your business practices because your problem is more likely internal than external. Businessman, heal thyself.
Appeals court decides Dotcom warrant was legal after all
Re: When Big Brother Is After You
Although your arithmetic is a little fuzzy to me, I do agree with the thrust of you argument, for that you get an up-vote. I would have liked to hear you address this part too... "...harmed OTHER people in a big way, by stealing, and helping steal their property and life's work, on a massive scale, and through this destroying thousands of jobs and careers, destroying assets legitimately built up..."
Wow, talk about hyperbole.
In case anybody is passing judgement on my presumed digital activities based on my above stand, here I am: 23 years ago a friend and I traded CD collections to copy and archive as remote backups for each. I seldom listened to his stuff, and he mine. Now that collection is virtually mute. Yesterday, for the first time in almost a year, I listened to a half a dozen random songs out of boredom whilst waiting on a Source Forge download over a particularly bad connection.
P.S. Years ago some countries imposed surcharges, or taxes if you will, on CD sales, earmarked for the music industry to reimburse them for lost sales. I am curious as to how that worked out, especially for the artists, and whether such a scheme could work today with torrents and p2p.
Time Warner merger great for Comcast, but not for anybody else
Verizon jumps into wireless discount punch-fest with 'More Everything'
Re: price cutting? not for everyone
I have a $30/month PAYG plan from T-Mobile. I had to buy their Nokia 921 Windows phone for $100. back in November but I believe they are cheaper now. The $30 plan gets me 100 minutes voice, unlimited texts and unlimited data. The first 5 GB per month are at 4G then when you exceed that they throttle you back to 2G.
Psssss, don't tell anyone but I have it tethered to my 9" Acer notebook running XP, connected to a 22" monitor, all through Bluetooth wifi hardware (Tenda) to a cheap router donated to me by a friend. I can't imagine a much cheaper internet setup, and after 5 months the phone will have paid for itself. The system does fail me quite often, requiring restarts of various components of the systems,(the tether app, the browser Firefox, the Tenda Bluetooth wireless, and sometimes XP itself, no surprise there), but as a semi-retired person living at 1/3 the poverty line, no credit cards, not even a vehicle, I bless T-Mobile for enabling me to get back on the internet after doing for years without.
Microsoft denies reports of scrubbing Chinese-language Bing searches
Re: not necessarily deliberate
Did you not read the article? Google searches don't return such language specific biased results, but Microsoft's Bing does. By identifying myself as a downvoter, I'm probably opening myself up to future retaliatory votes, but hey, have a good day. One downvote for you cap'n.
15,000 London coppers to receive new crime-fighting tool: an iPad
California high school hackers expelled for grade tampering, test thievery
Re: Cheating and education
I fully agree with your final statement; it does address only one issue, but I must strongly dispute your time and paper claim. Since you already have to enter the marks into the computer anyway, how much more time does it take to hit the print button? As for the amount of paper, depending on the number of students per class, (we're talking high school here, not university with hundreds per), I'm sure one classes' marks would fit on one, or a maximum of two sheets of paper. Multiply that by the number of classes a teacher has and you still only generate a folder's worth of papers. The only additional time required is that needed to check the marks posted. Any teacher that can't be arsed to do that just affirms my judgement of their laziness, harsh though that judgement might be. Sorry.
Cheating and education
I'm quite surprised that nobody here has offered any technical solutions for this grade changing problem. If I was a teacher I would keep a paper record. You enter the marks into the computer system, then immediately print out the marks. You might even have another staff member sign off as a witness to those records to cover your behind. Take those records home for safe keeping. Then, at the end of the term, or whenever the marks are officially released, mind you, after they become public, not before, you check them against your paper records. If any marks don't match up you have irrefutable evidence that tampering has occurred in the interim, and all it has taken you is the time to print the records and the time to check them. With the proliferation of computer hacks and break-ins by students, I consider it sheer carelessness and/or laziness that teachers don't keep a hard copy to check against computer records. Even the most computer illiterate teacher should be capable of that. Are teachers really that naive to the ways available to students to cheat? Maybe somebody should establish an extended learning course for teachers to make them aware of all the new ways (and old). We already have sites to check for plagiarism. What's the point of issueing marks if it's so easy to game the system? We might as well just give them all a pass and push them on through, like some some people claim we are doing anyway. Frankly I'm not surprised that so many American firms are top heavy with East Indians. They had to work to get where they are. America, we need to try harder. Sorry.
And before you all flame the hell out of me, I know the cheaters are a small minority and some of them are even teachers, but there are still too many. And while this is not exactly undermining the whole system, it is certainly not improving the system, and we we all know how desperately it needs fixing if we don't want the rest of the world to leave us in their dust.
Dell disputes 15k layoff figure: Only a few staffers accepted 'voluntary separations'
Your story this morning reporting that Dell is laying off 15,000 employees this week/imminently is wildly inaccurate. I can confirm that a very small percentage of Dell’s global team members accepted the company’s recent offer of a significant severance package associated with a voluntary separation program...
Translation: Since so few accepted the voluntary separation program, 14,999
will be enrolled in the involuntary separation program.
Meanwhile, we’re hiring in strategic areas of our business, including hardware and software development, engineering and customer coverage worldwide...
Translation: But you won't have to take your shoes and socks off to count how many each department actually hires over the next long while.
It is accurate that we've taken steps to optimize our business, streamline operations and improve its efficiency over the past few years. And, as any prudent business, we'll continue to review our operations in an effort to remain competitive and best serve customers. Thanks...
Translation: Not only are we laying off massive numbers immediately, but these kind of layoffs will continue for the next few years. So frack you.
Google Glassholes, GET OFF our ROADS, thunder lawmakers in seven US states
Re: HUD?
Son: "Mom, are you watching your speed with your Google Glasses?"
Mom: "Oh son, you're such a tech head. I don't need all that silly driving stuff when I'm only driving you to football practice. I'm watching a new cat video, and you should see the cute boy on a bicycle in it."
Son: "Mom, that's a real boy and you're about to... nooooo!"
Re: Prescription lenses are no excuse
Anonymous Coward
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Re: Prescription lenses are no excuse
"You know how expensive some of those prescription lenses can be? Some may not be able to afford more than one set."
I hope you are being sarcastic here, because anybody able to splash almost two grand for a pair of prescription Google Glasses can certainly afford a pair of prescription back-ups. By the way, where are your original glasses? Aren't they now back-ups? Oh wait, stupid me, you had to be kidding. Sorry.
Re: When driving, the road is in the center of your vision
But is it the center of your attention?
I don't care how useful or handy GG might be. If it can be used as a distraction, it will be used as a distraction. And from the tone of many of El Reg's commentards, I suspect that they will be some of the worst offenders. I believe if home bomb making kits were legal, there would be a handful of you breadboarding one on your commute to work. I know how you guys love your toys and can barely keep your hands (and minds) off them.
I'm somebody who is sitting here disabled for the next few months because another driver pulled out in front of me in the dark because he didn't notice me coming at 55 mph. Believe me, when you're doing highway speed on a motorcycle and you slam into the side of an SUV, it really hurts. And at 62 years of age I'll probably hurt for the rest of my life.
As a rider I found my own instrument cluster a distraction because I had to lower my eyes for a brief instant, knowing that during that instant another driver could make me dead meat because they were distracted too. As a fellow rider commented to me once. "The scariest thing you can see while driving at night is an oncoming driver's face, because you know it is being illuminated by the smart phone screen they are looking at." I'm seeing too many drivers now with their heads down like they're staring at their crotches, and you know damned well they are texting while driving. I just read about a former fashion model who was horribly disfigured in a car crash because she was distracted by texting. And here's the real kicker. She said she should have known better because she had already been in two previous accidents because she had been texting. There's the perfect candidate for a Darwin Award. And there are millions of us like that out there, and I count myself among them when it comes to certain specific situations.
I would be far less opposed to allowing GG while driving if they were only capable of displaying useful safer driving info, but one person's useful is another's distraction. In their present configuration they are no better than having your speedometer displaying cat videos or your oil gauge showing the latest stock quotes, or your temp gauge feeding you Fox TV, or your tach showing emails, or a HUD on your window showing that Game of Thrones episode you missed; you get my point.
Again, when comes to new and disruptive technology for cars, public safety should always come first, down votes be damned.
Re: So does this ban smart-watches?
I am not a hunter myself, but I seem to recall a Canadian hunting law which stated that if you were caught in the woods (or where ever) with a gun outside of hunting season, that gun was considered sufficient proof that you were hunting illegally, resulting in the confiscation of all your hunting gear, including your vehicle and all its contents. As if that weren't disincentive enough, you still had to stand before a judge and accept any additional punishment he meted out to you. All in all, pretty harsh.
Now I'm not proposing that they take your car,(although they love doing that with alleged drug offenders, and just try to get your car back after being acquitted, a subject well covered by national tv documentaries filmed in Louisiana, revealing how local parishes make a career out of siezing poor peoples cars and selling them),but common sense tells me that if the law allows the public to get away with claiming that, yes, they were wearing Google Glasses, prescription or not, but no they weren't turned on, then the law is an ass, pardon my french.
If I'm an arresting officer, don't tell me you need a fifteen hundred dollar pair of prescription glasses with internet video feed (actually even more with the prescription option) to drive when I know that virtually every prescription wearer out there,(especially drivers), has multiple spares lying around somewhere. By the way, where are the prescriptions you had before you became a Glasshole? Keep a spare in your glove box, or your cup holder, or locking console between the seats, or in one of those eyeglass holders that they sell to stick on your dash to hold your sunglasses. Keep a pair in every vehicle you drive, if you can afford prescription Google Glasses, then you can afford a spare pair of glasses for your vehicle. That goes doubly so if you can afford to drive more than one vehicle. grrrr
Long story short, you are caught driving wearing Google Glasses, that is sufficient proof that they were turned on. Let the law err on the side of public safety, supposed or not.
Now i feel better. I had to get that off my chest, ahhhhh
ps. I wish I had a pair of Google Glasses to play around with, just not to drive with.