Posts by The Dark Lord

Just popping in to give some love to the person who wrote the subheading to this article. Bravo!

Why all the hate?

Audio cables are just like any other piece of recreational equipment. People spend money on what they want to, and if they perceive a benefit, then they win.

All the commentards in this thread are doing is revealing their own prejudice and intolerance. Your recreational passion is my "snake oil" or "evidence that you're a gullible idiot who deserves their fate."

Think it through:

- Famous Grouse vs Glenmorangie whisky

- Ford Mondeo vs BMW 5 series

- Primark vs Hugo Boss

- EasyJet vs British Airways

Each of them gets the job done, but which would you prefer?

In all walks of life there are opportunities for people to express a value preference on the quality vs cost spectrum. Where this is in the arena of recreational pursuits, it's a personal choice.

You may not agree with paying £10k for an ethernet cable to improve sound quality. But in the scenario of the seller, the buyer and one pointing out the "folly", it's that third party who's being a dick.

Patience Padawan

I ordered a bunch of stuff on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday (yes, yesterday). In each case, with the Free "whenever you like" delivery.

It's all been dispatched already. And I don't NEED any of it today. If I did, I would go to a bricks & mortar store.

Prime seems to be a good way to tax the impatient, to me.

However, it would be nice to understand why Amazon stole my daughter's £10.33 gift card balance... I don't think that the cash paid for the cards expired, so why should the cards?

eBay PR

Based on the tweet exchange I had with them, I'm not sure whether eBay's staffers would pass a Turing Test.

They seemed unable to cope with the notion that the security of the user database was not dependent upon the newness of passwords contained therein, just kept repeating the "it's important for security to change your password" mantra.

Clearly, we can only assume that eBay itself has no confidence in the encryption mechanism used to store users' passwords. One could hope that the ICO will use this as an opportunity to gain some tax receipts from an obfuscated multinational, but I doubt that they have even the strength of will to achieve that, much less be a force for change in the security landscape.

I love the way the reaction to these data breaches is for the organisation to tell the users to change their passwords. Like that will solve anything at all!

And, why should I change MY password? It's not MY eBay account that spunked personal information on 145m people all over the internet.

Hardware required

I remember that Xenon 2 made microswitched joysticks pretty much mandatory, as you couldn't maintain the rate of fire required without them. I think that was the first time I ever bought new hardware specifically for a game.

Xenon 2 is definitely in my top 5 games of all time.

Priorities

I'm not going to say that I think this is a waste of time. But isn't there something more societally worthwhile that these people could be doing? Like rebuilding a community space, or planting some allotments, or doing a bake sale for charity?

This exercise seems like a self-righteous back-slapping party.

Consumer/producer confused

As an amateur/hobbyist photographer, I would like to take advantage of some sort of microstock-like arrangement. I guess I have dreams of some day monetising this hobby to the extent that I can exit the day job. But it doesn't seem as if the content producers have any control over whether their images are "freely available" or not. And the discretion to add/remove images from the free bucket seems to be entirely in Getty's court. So does that mean the photographer cedes all rights to the image, gets it distributed, whereupon Getty thinks "Ooh, we can make some cash off this", raking it all in for themselves, with the 'tog getting nothing? I rather suspect so.

And as someone who runs a couple of blogs, I know how much a carefully curated image adds to the post. To date I've been making use of Creative Commons licensed work, but it would be good to have a ready-curated library of suitable works available. But then, what if Getty thinks "Ooh, we can make some cash off this", sending me a bill for using the image that had been free?

So, I may be doing Getty a disservice here, but it seems like they've dressed up a massive land-grab of licensing control as an apparently benevolent offer of making quality images available for authorised use without charge.

As a producer and user of photography, I'm out.

Friday Funny

Thanks for the chuckles, that was a great piece.

The only people I know who use WhatsApp use it as some kind of "stealth" messaging technology to speak to people they shouldn't be speaking to about things that wives/husbands/partners/parents may be upset to discover. So that's right up the swanny then! Way to use the world's media to kill your USP!

I'm no Frontiersman

Seems like cryptocurrency could be the next gold rush, but at the minute it very much looks like the Wild West. And (per title), I'm no Frontiersman.

People who are OK operating in such high risk spaces deserve the returns they get for their preparedness to trade on those terms. But it's not for everyone and it's not for me. Rather than laughing at the misfortune of people losing money through MtGox though (as some seem happy to do), I'm just content that these ructions are validating my position of sitting out the game.

Locking the stable door

Once again, the ASA bans an ad AFTER it's been shown to the public.

When is it going to implement pre-approval for all telco ads? The industry seems to be riven with persistent lies in advertising, and any sensible(*) supervisory organisation would have mandated pre-approval by now.

(*) Yes, yes, I know that the ASA has consistently shown itself not to be a sensible organisation...

Expansion

If the existing SMR drives are so sensitive to vibration that other drives spinning freak them out, then how does FB manage installation of new racks? Do they have to shut down whole racks of disks?

Both drivers...

Are at fault here. The car driver in front for slowing without valid reason or indication to use a mobile phone while driving. And the lorry driver behind for driving too close and/or without sufficient attention to crash into the back of her.

The fix for this is proper education backed with intelligent enforcement. Not mindless signs and speed cameras and driver's licenses on the back of cereal packets.

Police Involvement

I'm rather heartened in reading this story that the police's involvement in the matter has amounted to "Meh." Perhaps that Paul Chambers laddie has had an effect after all.

MoS Shovelware

Given the number of adverts I see for MoS compilations, they should be treated in the same way as patent trolls.

Price vs. Quality

"So the UK's second 4G operator to publish its pricing has pegged the cost around the same as the first (EE), choosing to bundle more data and value-added services rather than compete on price. That's probably good news for those hoping for rapid rollout and ubiquitous coverage - even if it's less good for those hoping for cheap 4G."

Hopefully the shocking state of the country's 3G network will make most people realise that it's better to pay a little more for something that works than it is having the operators cutting our service along with our bills.

Fond Memories

I jumped ship to Microsoft at around NetWare 4.12 stage. A shame in many ways because NetWare and GroupWise were pretty lean and effective products. When I think of the amount of hardware required to run an enterprise e-mail system these days, it was remarkable what could be achieved with a single 200MHz Pentium Pro based server.

My own horror Novell experience came late one night in Lanarkshire. Our WAN provider had made changes to our router (on our request), but I had to back those changes out. The change involved removing IPX support. So I was forced to teach myself IPX routing in the middle of the night, to save my bacon. A bit of online research, and a few wild guesses later, and that was the IPX routing back on line.

Currency conversion

Creative Cloud price in Australia: $49.99

Creative Cloud price in UK: £46.88.

At current rates the Australian price is £30.06.

The Australians are worried about international gouging???

ARPM

This is nothing more than a ploy to increase the Average Revenue Per Month from customers.

The mobile market is broken, and we customers are implicit in that. By expecting handset subsidies we allow the phone manufacturers and the wireless carriers to obfuscate the market and impose draconian terms (such as the 24-month contract).

If we were collectively more mature about it we'd disaggregate the process of buying the phone and the airtime, and be able to make our own choices on both when it suited us.

Two problems...

I played with LEGO a LOT as a child, but my elder sister wasn't interested. So I don't think it's a new phenomenon.

Now I'm a parent, I've got two real problems with LEGO. Firstly, it's REALLY expensive. Any model of any substance is £25 or more. It makes it very difficult to buy as a birthday present for someone else's child, because it's too expensive. The smaller sets are incidental "stocking filler" types, but are still too expensive to be bought as an incidental thing like a bribe for good behaviour. These two factors combine to largely eliminate the mass-aggregation of sets that I had as a boy.

Secondly (and this is something James May commented on when he built his LEGO house) too many of the pieces are single-use. In order to provide visual richness to the end product, the typical set has many parts that are suitable only for that set. This further dilutes the original aim of LEGO of it being "a new toy every day." Every set seems to be a model, an end-goal clearly in site. I remember getting sets that were basically big boxes full of bricks with a few ideas. Now you have multi-page build manuals, bagged component groups and a over-reliance on the construction being a process that must be followed exactly to achieve a pre-determined goal, rather than it being general principles of construction that allow the child to make what he (or she) has in their head.

Top stuff

Happily bimbling along enjoying another BOFH, but then Simon goes and makes it all awesome right at the very end. Well done sir(i)!

Short years at El Reg

First 2011 issue 11th Feb, last issue 18th Nov. I make that 10 months' of BOFH.

Christmas is my busiest time of the year while the clients panic to set everything up for the New Year. Is BOFH on holiday for two months?

Easy life...

Nannying

Up here in Edinburgh, the entire class "SN07" was not issued because someone in the DVLA thought "snot" was offensive.

Well, duh

Does this wonk also recommend the use of warm water when trying to boil an egg?

Not all of the story

And what became of the people who didn't check this man's work? An organisational structure that puts the keys to the cash register in a man's pocket and then turns away is at least as much to blame as the man who fails to withstand the temptation.

Meanwhile, doubtless, some clerk is having their £10 bill for office supplies mercilessly scrutinised.

I dropped them years ago

I dropped them years ago after they changed their transaction system. They did something that caused my bank to block my card every time I bought something from Dabs. The bank didn't really want to discuss the exact mechanics with me.

I tried to provide feedback to Dabs because I thought they might value it. They weren't interested. So now I use other suppliers.

It's a shame, because when they started out, they were excellent

Seems like a lot of effort...

... for precisely zero result. So _you_ can specify the image you look at for 3/10ths of a second while you're sliding the power switch? Is that really worth "jailbreaking" the device at the potential expense of warranty?

That being said, I too am confused as to why it doesn't sleep to the cover of the (last) active book.

I've already bought the first three twice

... and that's enough, thanks.

The more I watch them, the more I come round to Alec Guinness's way of thinking.