Trained

Apparently it was someone's "pet" they'd trained to box.

Figures.

Flash?

Have they talked to Adobe? Seems to me that most "activity" running on a page is Flash animations. Don't know if there's already some kind of "visibility" detection in Flash to allow it to "take a break" when no-ones looking?

Think I'm missing something

So the device absorbs a laser beam by using another laser to convert it to heat?

Pretty sure I could absorb a laser beam and convert it to heat using say, a house brick?

Staff knowledge

My wife was looking for a digital camera in one Dixons and trying to get some info on the various models. She left PDQ when the PFY "assisting" her asked "what's a pixel?".

Hex???

*** OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ***

RE: assault and battery (groan)

Should have used copper tops. Maybe it was a glitch in the Matrix...

@John Angelico

I don't exactly mask my signature - just change it every time I use it - no one's noticed yet.

Could be a form of mutating encryption, maybe...

RotATM

My step daughter tried drawing out cash to go shopping for herdaughter's prom dress. Screen went blank just before dispensing cash. Result: no cash but debited from account.

Took her ages to get through, but they restored the balance straight away; so must have been a few with the same thing.

Not particularly robust software if a disk array going down causes that.

I'm with Jimbo on this one

Windows 7 actually seems slightly faster than Kubuntu 9.04 on my ancient P4 512MB machine. Had to manually find a driver for my old Freecom DVB stick, but apart from that everything installed perfectly, running two different browsers with 3-4 tabs each and watching telly in Media Centre on a second monitor was fine.

Only thing I wasn't keen on was the amount of disk space Windows took up, but hey, disk space is cheap.

Hmm

Liked her on the Kevin Bishop show - that bikini was quite flattering ;)

Bring back Leela, I say! Or Ace - remember Ace?

Ahh memories...

Linux v Windows

Recently started playing with Linux (would have been sooner but the sometimes rather rabid fanboyism tended to put me off).

Actually got interested in OS's again, so thought I'd create a couple of partitions on my aging machine with 512MB RAM, whacked Windows 7 RC on one, tried a couple of flavours of ubuntu on the other.

Wanted something to watch tv, browse a bit of 'net, p2p - nothing too taxing.

Windows 7 ran surprisingly well with IE8 and FF3 running several tabs each and Freeview in Media Centre coming from an old Freecom USB stick (once I'd found drivers for it; Win7 didn't find them automatically) - although that was obviously it's limit as I'd get a pause or two occasionally.

Seeing comments on the good ol' Reg repeatedly telling me Linux is so much less demanding on older machines than Windows, I gave Ubuntu a go.

Tried "standard" Ubuntu - damn that default brown theme is ugly ;), tried Mythbuntu for the TV - failed to install properly; probably my fault for not being clued up enough on Linux.

Then had a look at Kubuntu - now we're talking, I thought. Really liked it with the gadgets an' all - excellent idea to have your UI gadget based I reckon. Took some time to get it to work on both my screens, mostly because of X server config file permissions not letting me save the changed settings.

Running Firefox and Opera with the same tabs as I had in Windows 7 and Kaffiene for TV seemed to work slightly less well than Windows 7, more pauses and telly quality not as good.

Now, I don't know if I could improve Kubuntu performance with the right configuration and optimisation settings, but right now I'm still leaning towards Windows, with Linux an interesting "hobby" OS for when I can afford either a new computer or at least some more RAM.

Windows just seems "to work" a little bit more than the distros of Linux I tried. Perhaps I'm more biased because I'm used to the way Windows works - but that could also apply to the majority of computer users out there, too.

Marmite?

s'alright I guess... but it's Vegemite makes the taste buds go round!