Posts by conan65 posts • joined Thursday 5th April 2007 13:58 GMT
I'm also sick of it - there aren't enough choices. I want a top-spec phone that's the same size as my current Nexus One (and also, shocking though it is, the most successful smartphone - the iphone). No such thing exists. If I want decent build quality, all mod cons (top-of-the-line processor, bluetooth 4, high-res screen etc.) then I have to get a massive device. I looked at the HTC One S thinking it was the smaller version of the One X but it's huge! There's no way I could reach the top of the screen with my thumb. So now I'm looking at legacy devices like the Sensation and Desire, which have underpowered processors for ICS (which I need).
Paris natch, for a comment about whether size is important
The other thing keen gamers might not be happy with is not owning a copy of their games. Personally, I regularly play games I bought 5-15 years ago, on various platforms, using emulators and such; I don't trust companies like nVidia not to go bust or discontinue their services in this timescale. I only buy games on Steam that I'm fairly sure I won't ever want to play again.
Not entirely nonsense. As far as the game (and hence nVidia) is concerned, reaction time doesn't just involve the human processing time, but also the interface through the control device. A seasoned gamer will be much faster at turning their reactions into the appropriate input signals through a mouse/keyboard, joypad, or even a wiimote or kinect. People used to taking dictation don't necessarily have faster reaction times than anyone else, but they'll certainly be able to respond faster in typing words into a computer and correcting mistakes.
I fully agree. i've bought Civ, two copies of Civ 2, Civ3, Two copies of Civ 4 and now a copy of Civ 5. I have never resold any of these, even the duplicates (bought because they included add-ons bundled and I wanted a single installer with it all on), because i like the game and want to keep playing it. You can buy Civ 4 for a tenner these days - well worth it. I still play Civ 4 and sometimes Civ 1 for a laugh.
I'm all for putting a beacon on the bot and a camera on the fence. put it in the corner and it can do an L-shaped garden, although it seems reasonable not to support crazy shapes - most gardens are more or less rectangular. The bot would only have to flash a signal every so often, so it'd be very low power, and the camera could be hooked up to the mains. Super cheap and ticks the boxes.
I always get the opposite from the author. I buy a laptop having spent ages researching laptops, starting with looking at loads and narrowing it down over a couple of weeks, until eventually I buy one specific model that i've come back to again and again. From then on I get ads for... The same model of laptop. Again and again. Nowhere in the AdWords algorithm does it occur to Google that having bought a laptop (which they know, because I used Google Checkout) I probably don't want another of the same, but might want a case for it, or an extra PSU, or a trendy travel mouse.
As a CompSci grad myself now working as a Java developer I agree with Pete 2's points. If you want to be an engineer as I now am, go learn engineering - don't go to university to learn Computer Science. The key's in the name - it's Science. A programming language is an engineering tool, it's just a way of getting machine code written, and nothing to do with science. When I left university I was expected to be able to program in any language, be it object-oriented or functional or procedural or whatever, as it's just a question of learning syntax and implementation details, and not relevant to the solution to the problem at hand.
The problem is not the universities, or the teachers as the author claims - it's the students. On my course (Computer Science) of 200 students at a red brick university I'd guess that 95% of them wanted a job in IT rather than to become Computer Scientists, so of course the university provides what its customers want - Software Engineering. I had to learn about design patterns and stakeholders and Extreme Programming, none of which is anything to do with computer science. There were precious few courses on computational complexity, algorithms or computer algebra, and in none of them were there more than 15 students.
Of course, for me it turned out that I wasn't smart enough to do a PHD in intractability, so I became a developer, but I value what I learned on those courses because it fascinates me; I have no colleagues who could write an efficient sorting implementation.
She's called Lovelace, that should be enough of an IT twist. Stand-up journalism if you ask me
The first poster didn't comment on the righteousness (or lack thereof) of illegal filesharing, they just pointed out that raiding server farms in this way will not bring it to an end. I agree; that approach is definitely a fail. There have been proposed a number of ways to stop people sharing illegally, the most obvious of which seems to me to be to provide a single place where all movies/music can be downloaded (what bittorrent offers) for a fee, instead of for free.
It seems unnecessary to go calling people names for things they didn't say.
In the first paragraph of this article, an apostrophe is incorrectly used to terminate the quote "pedants' revolt" instead of inverted commas. Coincidence or a deliberate mistake?
Adblock is one of the most popular Firefox addons, and I for one wouldn't switch to a browser without it. As the author stated, Google make their money from ads which they plaster all over their services - exactly why I like adblock so much. Are they really going to allow the same functionality to be reproduced in Chrome? My guess is that they'll use Chrome to deliver the ads in more sophisticated ways.
Look, 0.9999 recurring is not completely equal to 1, as otherwise their alphanumeric representation would be the same, but one of them clearly has a 0 and a point and some nines, and the other just has a 1. They're only mathematically equal, so to claim they are just "equal" is incorrect. Problem is, mathematicians always limit themselves to mathematics when discussing numbers.
It doesn't matter how simple it is to install Linux. Consumers don't install their operating systems.
It doesn't matter how simple it is to install open source applications. Consumer's don't install their applications.
Linux may be easy to use; but everyone uses Windows at work, so they're familiar with it. They choose Windows because they've seen it. Linux has to be not just better than Windows, but so easy to use that someone who is comfortable with Windows finds it easier.
And it has to have a name. "Linux" is no good - there are loads of distros. There needs to be one, whose name everybody knows, so it becomes familiar. When somebody says "Why not get a Linux PC next time?" to their neighbour, their neighbour has to say "I was thinking about that actually, I've heard they're good" like they do with Apple Macintosh computers. Then if somebody goes to a shop to buy a PC with Linux, they get sold a PC with the same Linux as everybody else they've ever met with Linux, so it's familiar.
Am I the only Reg reader who lives in a flat? All this talk of putting a solar water heater in your home is all very well for those that live in 2-up, 2-down town houses but does anybody have microgeneration suggestions for the (reasonable) number of people who live in a flat, and therefore don't have their own roof?
Now, my reasons for wanting microgeneration aren't green (I believe the greatest carbon savings come from building the biggest power plants possible), and they're not really even financial (unless you plan to live in your property for 10+ years it just seems to cost, because nobody pays extra to buy a property with microgeneration), but largely motivated by the incredible amount of hassle it is dealing with energy suppliers. If I could open the door to nPower salespeople and laugh in their faces before going back to watching the iPlayer on my 800W gaming rig in a bath I'm topping up with the kettle guilt-free it'd be worth every penny.
No Paris, because the only flat she knows about is lying on her back
Never had a problem playing any of the GTAs on the PC, the controls are far superior if you ask me - no auto-aim, just nice mousey point-and-shoot. But the graphics and performance were so much better for San Andreas on the PC (remember when console games never stuttered?) that I'd rather play on the PC with a playstation controller than on a playstation. Works for Pro Evo, why shouldn't it work for GTA?
They really aren't close to hurting Google are they? If you search both Cuil (I agree with the French arse comments, btw) and Google for the term "cuil", Cuil has a hundred thousand results to Google's four million. Plus Cuil only has 250 results for the word "the"
There may be issues with nVidia chipset boards, but they're not unmanageable issues and the extra complexity of the boards must be expected to produce a few problems. I must say, I wouldn't ever choose an Intel board for anything but a real budget gaming rig right now, and there have been a number of successes with the nVidia chipset in the past, so even if the boards aren't quite up to scratch now there's no reason to think they'd just pack it in and go home.
If you live longer, you should work longer; I'm in my late twenties and expect to work to 75. I have no interest in supporting an aging population who want to have their cake and eat it by living longer but not working longer - the taxes I'm paying for their pensions are what will cause me to delay my retirement. State pensions should be based on a ratio of years worked to current life expectancy.
I regularly bang my head on the frame of the bike sheds at work. Sure, my helmet won't stop me dying on the road, but it stops me hurting my head in the morning, which is worth £20 to me.
Lots of people seem to be saying that it's because phones are free with contracts in the US - they're free in the UK too! I've had a new phone every year with my contract here for the last 6 years, feeding my more slack friends with a steady stream of outdated models. That's not the reason people don't nick phones!
Webmasters make content public and don't discriminate about how they serve their content. So if lots of users want to scan links before they click on them, that's their perogative. It's a shame that AVG chose to use this approach, but there's nothing wrong with it, any more than Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft scanning stuff for searching purposes. If you don't like it, make users sign up before they see your content. People who advertise on billboards have to live with folk spraying graffiti on it, and that's actually illegal - making HTTP requests is not.
Telecoms pricing is stupid pretty much across the board, as the costs aren't passed on to the customer in the way they are amassed. It costs loads to set up a telecoms network, but it costs nothing to send data once you're up and running. A mobile phone, broadband connection, TV connection or whatever should cost a few grand when you get it and that should be it. Humpf.
If you're a webmaster, then you're making some content freely available on the internet to anyone who asks for it. That's up to you. if somebody wants to make loads of requests to your site for security reasons and you serve the results back, that's your call. You've got the option of only sending responses to people who post credentials to your site, but you choose not to. Just because AVG make software that's useful doesn't require people to run it. I use it, I don't really care if it scans search results or not because I don't expose myself much to malware risks on the internet and I don't notice any slowdown in browsing experience. So as far as I'm concerned, this is just part of life for webmasters and they should deal with it.
I bought it and am happy with it. But the article's right - there's only one feature worth buying it for - DirectX10. And if Microsoft had deemed to make DX10 available for XP, there would be no reason to buy Vista. This makes me dislike Microsoft, but it sells a copy of Vista. When will there be an alternative for PC gamers?
The victim's aren't in any way responsible for the actions of the perpetrator, whether or not they've used adequate security. But the moment their machine is part of a botnet which launches a DDoS attack or sends some spam out, they become fully responsible. I have no sympathy for somebody who sends me spam or attacks my website, irrespective of whether or not they knew they were doing it.
I've no idea about the situation in Canada, but in the UK when you sign up to a VOIP package you have to agree to a big, obvious disclaimer that says something like "Don't rely on your VOIP phone for emergency calls. Ensure you have another way of contacting the emergency services. We can't guarantee how emergency numbers will work on your VOIP phone". Hence, if I was a parent who didn't have a reliable mobile phone or two, I wouldn't choose VOIP. As I say, it might be different in Canada but my guess is that the family were warned not to use VOIP for emergency calls - can anyone confirm/deny this?
@Anonymous Coward: Go to your mouse settings and replace your mouse pointer with a dot. My guess is, you'll still be able to point at things on your screen. ergo, it's still a pointer, dot, arrow, aeroplane, dragon, whatever.
There seem to be a lot of people here that say you shouldn't use Vista, and should stick with XP/use Linux/use a Mac etc. but a reasonable proportion of consumer desktop machines are used for gaming. If you want Directx10, you get Vista, simple as that. Having done that, I've found Vista to be very good. There are some niggles with the interface, but no more than I've found with every version of every OS I've used. All my games run perfectly in Vista. All my hardware works perfectly with Vista. I don't think it's any better or any worse than any version of Windows (except ME, of course), except it supports DirectX10, and so right now is better than all of them. Maybe Microsoft could have included DirectX10 in XP, but there's no company in the world that retrofits their old products with the latest technology at the expense of their new ones, so I'm not really surprised.
Poole Council are not the bad guys here - they've been given a job to do and powers to do it with, and they've put the two together. The problem is that the powers they've been given are not appropriate - if you gave a bus driver a remote control that changed traffic lights to green, he'd use it to keep his bus running on time, but everyone else would get home a bit later than normal. You can't blame him for that, he's just trying to do his job the best he can. The problem is when you make up laws that allow that kind of surveillance to happen without having a good system backing it up to ensure it's used in an appropriate manner. I don't know how much surveillance costs, but I'd wager it's probably not much less than an extra place at the school.
I find it very reassuring that so many people here consider this to be the ISPs' problem. My consicence is clear paying for a service which is "unlimited" and using as much bandwidth as I can find uses for. Too many of my friends make the argument (the same one people make about insurance companies): that if I'm using up more than my fair share of bandwidth then I'm hurting the service other people receive, which upsets me; if it's a government service that affects society, then I'm happy to reduce my consumption of the service when I don't strictly need it, because I understand that public resources are limited and others could gain more benefit from them than I. When it's a private contract between myself and a corporation, I'll do exactly what they do - try to get as much as I can for as little as possible.
Paris, because she gets a lot for not very much
The Beeb kills its own DAB offering for me - I think their "listen again" functionality on their website is ace, I've been using it for years, so why buy a DAB radio? My computer lets me listen to many more radio stations than DAB ever will, most of which aren't commercial (and hence are often of a higher standard).
I like it when I have a long weekend, and show up for work on Monday fully unprepared, only to remember that I've missed Friday's BOFH and it's still waiting to be read!
Oh. I'm sad now. I just voted, and then found out that only one other person went for Emmet Brown. But he had mirrored shades on! Mirrored shades hadn't even been invented then!
I was reading on wikipedia the other day about "Turing Porn Farms" (er, I searched on the term "turing", honest), which are apparently a clever way around these CAPTCHAs. You just set up a free porn site, and require folk to fill in a CAPTCHA to access it; because you can rely on a fairly constant stream of people signing up to your porn site, you can just scrape the CAPTCHAs from gmail or livemail or whatever in real time, and use the results to sign up for dummy accounts. Nifty, eh?
He really is called Ivan Arce. Look!
http://www.coresecurity.com/?module=ContentMod&action=item&id=47
Best ever Register story
Pirates may be as cool and hard as ninjas, but they're no where near as deadly. I mean, would you be more worried if someone told you they'd hired a ninja to kill you or a pirate?
We should definitely have a ninja logo. Or a pirate one. Because they both are pretty cool.
You don't need a plugin to change Firefox's user agent string, just go to about:config and make a new String entry called general.useragent.override and stick whatever you like in it. Handy for seeing what your websites are pumping out to different browsers
I'm not quite so anti-Virgin as some of the posters on the Reg, but it's certainly not all gravy. I'm quite upset by the throttling, because it's a real pain when you stream a lot of video, hit the threshold and it suddenly starts dropping out. The increase in speed is welcome, though - Telewest and now Virgin seem to have fairly regularly upped their speeds without charging extra, and I usually see around 50% of the listed speed (throttling aside) fairly consistently. They could easily have charged extra for each of these upgrades, although they can't really be given credit for that, as it's just the market forces. Personally I'd like to see upload speeds being treated the same as download speeds (i.e. a 10 meg connection means 10 megs duplex, or at least 5 megs duplex). I still think it's better than nothing though.
...get a backbone and publish your name when inciting activism, or at the very least explain what YOU'RE doing. There are readers of El Reg who do occasionally try to make a difference you know
Whether the joke's funny or not is irrelevant - I know lots of jokes which I think are funny, and would defend my right to say them and that I'm only extracting the michael and not expressing prejudice - but the workplace is not an appropriate place to deliver it. The point being that when you're at work you're entitled to work in an atmosphere free from insults and slurs and other demeaning behaviour. This kind of joke can easily contribute to a sense of inequality in the workplace, and a senior figure in any company should know better than to make the obvious implication that Shi'ites are not good. He's entitled to feel that way, or just to make a joke of it, but not at work. If a senior member of my organisation made a joke targeting me (I'm not a Shi'ite, so they'd have to think up another one) I'd inform them that they'd overstepped the mark and lodge a formal complaint.
Why is everyone here so against the development of new aspects of language? it is annoying to have somebody talking in l33t-speak on forums all the time, but the odd word making it into the dictionary is all part of the evolution of language, surely? I like new words - they give me more to say, and I do love saying stuff...
It's been easy to buy a Wii where I am in the UK all year, it's just hard if you wait for December before rushing out to buy one for Christmas - factories produce at constant rates, they don't suddenly increase their capacity at Christmas. It would be foolish for a company like Nintendo to build a factory which can produce consoles at Christmas-demand rates all year round, because that would be wasted capacity for the rest of the year.
I personally think it's fine for people to charge whatever they like on Ebay for Wiis. If your kid really wants one for crimbo but you can't find one in the shop, why shouldn't you have the option of paying more from Ebay? If you don't want to pay, just wait a bit. I waited about a month after release and had no problems buying one from a shop.
You've all made reasonable points here, but from reading the article I didn't get the impression that the author was having a go at Google. They just seem to be criticising the prevalent view that Google are nice people, a view which I encounter every day. Because their products are generally quite good, people have a good impression of them as a business, whereas a company like Microsoft whose products are perceived to be generally quite poor are thought of as being nasty people. Like the author says, Google sell advertising - not an industry I consider to be particularly beneficial to humanity. I fully agree with criticism of the positive spin that's put on them expanding their core business; they're not doing it to be nice people, they're doing it to make more money from advertising, and I'm sure they couldn't give a flying monkey's about the residents of Iowa. I advise caution when defending companies like these.
"I don't think the people who posted them would like to be on receiving end of that kind of treatment."
Gimme his level of earnings so far and you can photoshop me all day long...
So Segal, Van Damme and Arnie are thinking of ways to revive their movie careers. Segal says: "We need to do something with more pathos, so we get taken seriously".
Arnie responds: "Yes - something that will win an Oscar",
so Jean-Claude suggests: "How about a history of famous composers? I've always admired Wagner, I could play him".
Segal says: "No no, Rachmaninov is the best, I'll play the Russian"...
To which Arnie simply says: "I'll be Bach"
CustomizeGoogle has lots of handy features for gmail/firefox users, including a preference to always use the secure servers. http://www.customizegoogle.com/ , or you can just get it from the Firefox extensions page. Just thought it might help.
Looks like the site's just gone down - I guess somebody spotted it. boo
Well I'd never heard of them until I read this article. Although it's unlikely, if I ever need some accountancy software in the future, I won't buy it from 2clix. I don't like people who sue forum owners. I think forums are good because they let you express your opinions.
(it's just occurred to me that this would be a great opportunity to push my own accountancy software, but I haven't written any.)
Hey everybody, calm down - it seems perfectly reasonable to find the whole concept of guns and killing and stuff sickening. Sure, it may be a necessity, but that doesn't mean we should all feel great about it. I reckon there's a few soldiers in the world who've seen their buddies blown to bits next to them who found the whole experience quite sickening, and they're in the business of using guns to kill people. I personally find human excrement quite sickening, but that doesn't mean that I'm a super-liberal who can't change my views and isn't open-minded enough to accept the realities of life. I've been known to excrete on occasion, but I don't hang around afterwards revelling in the joy that is my excrement, I tend to just flush and move on. I don't want to think about how I'd feel if I saw pictures of an exhibition about it all...
A few people have posted saying that it's standard business practice to drop heavily the price of consumer electronics soon after the inital launch, so people should stop whining. It's also standard business practice to manufacture lots of goods in sweatshops in developing countries, so stop whining. It's standard business practice to sell faulty software and only fix it later if there's sufficient demand, so stop whining. The argument doesn't follow - a heavy price drop so soon like this, even if people were happy to pay the launch price, just isn't treating the customer very well; so I say you should whine, as loudly as possible.
The reason Apple are being picked up on this practice and not other companies is that the iPhone is one of the most high-profile devices on sale at the moment. There are some other high-profile consumer electronics on sale subject to similar pricing methods, and they're taking the flak too - the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Just because somebody agrees to something doesn't make it fair on them.
