Posts by Bit Fiddler196 posts • joined Monday 9th July 2007 15:48 GMT
If executives and media people go on toy courses like this and come away with a hands-on sense of what programming actually entails, what value do you think they will subsequently have in the actual programmers they employ?
They will think working in IT is even easier than they do already, lower wages and treat staff like dirt.
Idiocracy here we come...
With anything new, there always has to be someone with vision who does too much too soon and ends in failure, if not shame.
Then, those who come after, essentially follow the same model but find success and get all the iCredit.
Then, history finally reveres the pioneer as a giant of their time and retro-rewrites their life and times into a fantastic and happy story. Shame that part of the cycle tends to happen 150 years too late.
"smart meters are just dumb meters with blinkenlights"
The irony here would be that after sacking all the minimum wage meter readers, they end up having to hire the same number of IT professionals to visit each meter and twiddle with it every five minutes. Except they won't be on the minimum wage, and customers' tariffs will rise to compensate!
So then, exactly as Oliver Postgate predicted...
I'll believe it when I see it. They've been saying there would be more episodes on Dave since the three Easter episodes a couple of years ago, but nothing has come of it. No more than the film version, which has been about to go into production any day now for the last 20 years.
The same applies to Blake's 7, which has been poised for a comeback for just as long.
I thought, given the budget, the recent Red Dwarf production was not only great, but highlighted how good for its time the original series was. However, the story or direction was a bit weak and it wasn't as funny as it should be. Episode 2 was the best but let down by a slow start in episode 1 and a disappointing resolution in 3.
I liked the idea that Lister had become so bored in the intervening years that he was passing his time spending *days* setting up the 'tomato sneeze' ironing scene just to get a simple sneer out of Rimmer, but the direction meant it dragged too long on-screen.
Perhaps the remaining bloke behind it now needs to take a back seat as an executive producer and allow other writers and producers to provide up-to-date comedy and plots, while he ensures it remains faithful to the original and maintains its relatively high production values?
I thought the way they faked elaborate corridors on the ship by putting intricate scaled models in front of the camera and then using a huge depth of field as the actors did their stuff further away was inspired! Obviously it limits the shot to a fixed camera angle, but it's better than a moving camera showing a set that looks cheap.
It'll be nice if it comes back again, but it needs to build on the last three specials. Otherwise, it'll turn into a Norman Wisdom of a TV show, where a small set of people just cheer for the sake of it, knowing deep down inside that what they're seeing is a pale shadow of what once was.
If they're going to make it out of wood, at least have the decency to paint it blue and stick a flashing light on top.
"you'll be able to walk in a straight line, perform complex manual tasks and probably even stay awake on the night bus home after a heavy dose of alcoholic refreshment."
That pill sounds worse than making fully grown men put up shelves whilst wearing goggles, ear muffs, gloves, kneepads, a hairnet, overalls and keeping a fire extinguisher nearby.
What these scientists are doing to my colossal benders is yet another sorry sign of madness gone politically correct.
I can't help but think of Ed Miliband as the modern-day Neil Kinnock.
So, inspired by that other great institution, the Dixons Stores Group, I hereby rename Ed Miliband to kinnock.digital
Ohhhhhh.....
My old man's a dustman,
He's got a new iPad,
He says the Council's barmy,
And the man who bought it mad.
He looks a proper nana,
As he Wi-Fi's on his rounds,
It's covered in detritus,
What a waste of Council pounds.
The register also needs to learn not to steal images from the Internet and fail to provide any attribution:
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/08/24/britains_red_phone_booth_turns_75_years_old/
I have the relevant page in all its states saved.
And as my comment to that article was moderated and a SILENT update made to it without the courtesy of any feedback/gratitude, I now feel morally obliged to click on David Robey at the BBC from my contacts list (who I'm sure will know exactly who to forward the information to) and the Daily Mail to inform them of the series of hypocritical events on their critic's site...
If someone said ten years ago that Google would undermine MS Windows as an OS by creating a web browser that supports <peek> and <poke> tags (old timers will get that joke, and its irony), use web languages as an application platform and allow websites to run C++, they'd have been locked up in a padded cell and sedated.
I write my own comments, making them up as I type.
The only 'interesting' thing to happen to me whist calcifying in the foyer of Argos, waiting for a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal to go and find my item from a stockroom shelf, get curious as to what it is, open it and play for a while, then bung it randomly back in the box before throwing it down a hole in the floor to smash on the ground of the shop floor, from where another Neanderthal scoops it up in a dustpan & brush, pours the remains into a bag and then hands it to me, before telling me I have to queue up at the till to complain and get a refund.... is a drug dealer offering me his wares.
You have to respect the initiative and marketing prowess of a man clearly able to identify a bored captive audience looking for something to restore the life draining from their heavy eyes.
I'm surprised there aren't more 'shoppers' lurking in the Argos foyer and making 'polite' conversation with the lonely-looking male punters whilst dressed like Lady Gaga.
I'm sure I read years ago that Atkinson had crashed a sports car, possibly even written it off. It may even have been another McLaren. Does anyone else remember this?
How curious that a person should buy an expensive sports car capable of giving F1 racers a run for their money and then exceed the speed limit...
"Jones found that 75 per cent of the BBC's science stories were based on a single press release, and seven out of eight of those only feature the source – there is no additional view to the story."
In other words, even the BBC, with their corporate procedures and management, and the unique way it's funded, are just as lazy as any other mainstream news outlet.
They just shuffle the words of press releases and offer them as 'articles' by writers too busy feeling cool and sexy as they play with their iProducts and keep up with each other every time a new one comes out.
Just look at how BBC news recently repeated the same inaccurate information about Doctor Who - A BBC show! None of them even bothered to dial the switchboard extension for the Doctor Who office and ask them first-hand.
I'm not a BBC basher, but if The Sun want to be lazy, it's their money and they're welcome to do as they please. But TV viewers are paying for the BBC, and as much as we all expect something extra when it comes to BBC drama (and don't the BBC love to tell us at every opportunity how great there are at that), we should also expect the same when it comes to news.
I remember them being criticised for being very late reporting some breaking news stories, including 7/7. The excuse was that they wanted to confirm the stories before broadcasting them, in order to avoid the common mistakes Sky make in rushing 'facts' out too quickly. But then for the rest of the time when there isn't a 7/7 going on, they just rehash press releases.
And to be fair, The Register does it's fair share of that. How many new major releases of software come out (even free software like browsers) and the report on here is just a rehash of the official press release, complete with official statistics for how much better/faster it is? Would it really be too much effort to download the new browser, try it out for a bit (I'm sure the techies working at The Register can find their way around a new browser and its features quite quickly) and then write your articles, reporting how much faster and memory hungry you found it to be?
Blogs are often private messageboards, where the only poster is trying to write like a journalist, whilst the journalists on real news sites are all too often writing glorified blog entries. Thankfully, that doesn't include Andrew Orlowski on here, though many are — as they are at Another Place™ (unless they're just plagiarising El Reg).
I'll believe it when I see it. They've been saying there would be more episodes on Dave since the three Easter episodes a couple of years ago, but nothing has come of it. No more than the film version, which has been about to go into production any day now for the last 20 years.
The same applies to Blake's 7, which has been poised for a comeback for just as long.
I thought, given the budget, the recent Red Dwarf production was not only great, but highlighted how good for its time the original series was. However, the story or direction was a bit weak and it wasn't as funny as it should be. Episode 2 was the best but let down by a slow start in episode 1 and a disappointing resolution in 3.
I liked the idea that Lister had become so bored in the intervening years that he was passing his time spending *days* setting up the 'tomato sneeze' ironing scene just to get a simple sneer out of Rimmer, but the direction meant it dragged too long on-screen.
Perhaps the remaining bloke behind it now needs to take a back seat as an executive producer and allow other writers and producers to provide up-to-date comedy and plots, while he ensures it remains faithful to the original and maintains its relatively high production values?
I thought the way they faked elaborate corridors on the ship by putting intricate scaled models in front of the camera and then using a huge depth of field as the actors did their stuff further away was inspired! Obviously it limits the shot to a fixed camera angle, but it's better than a moving camera showing a set that looks cheap.
It'll be nice if it comes back again, but it needs to build on the last three specials. Otherwise, it'll turn into a Norman Wisdom of a TV show, where a small set of people just cheer for the sake of it, knowing deep down inside that what they're seeing is a pale shadow of what once was.
I'm a responsible tea-totalling adult who wouldn't dream of allowing a drop of the evil stuff pass my lips in front of the missus.
But in light of this important medical research on this incredibly warm and blue-sky sunny day in London, I now feel obliged to follow Lewis Page's advice and go to the 'chemist' this afternoon to get some 'medicine' and do my utmost to keep myself healthy.
After all, it avoids yet another burden on the NHS. I'm just trying to be a good and healthy citizen. That's all. That's why I'm emailing this link to the missus along with a note that I'll be home from work half a day later than usual for a Friday night.
But which way around is it? Does listening to too much music make you overly emotional and depressed, or do people who are inherently overly emotional and suffer from depression develop a greater dependency on music to help cope with it all?
I suspect you'll find that depressed and non-depressed people probably listen to very different types of music too, all of which is just as inevitable and understandable.
There's nothing inherently rude about 'nice baps', especially when it's referring to actual baps.
It strikes me that it is those who find the name rude who have the dirty minds, allowing a euphemism to take precedence over the literal meaning of a word. Presumably these same people also baulk and complain at the sight of "Daddies Sauce", "Faggots" and "Eat Me"?
These people clearly need to rush to their local priest, say their confession, do a hundred laps of a rosary with all the gusto of The Stig and purify their dirty minds.
Mind you, I suspect these people are also first in the queue at a Fascinating Aida concert, and think it's the most wonderful and entertaining thing ever.
PS. 'Baps' evidently isn't in my spell checker.
Bearded billionaire funster, Richard Branson, should buy all four ships, paint them bright red and spend his days larking around the Indian Ocean blowing pirates out of the water, should such folly be his wont.
He could dress like Cap'n Bligh, sail under the Red Ensign with an all-woman crew dressed in red uniforms (apart from the Daily Mail embedded reporter) and shout "Ahoy there me scurvydogs" at the pirates from the deck before giving the order to fire and singing Rule Britannia at them.
It's just a shame he couldn't have bought Concorde that time. It would have gone perfectly with the Ark Royal.
I think Apple court this kind of controversy because it clouds people's judgement over wider issues relating to their products.
They ban other web browsers and remove some apps from their web shop at the drop of the hat, and then people accuse them of being oppressive, shutting out opposition and being monopolistic.
So then they let the world know that apps like this gay thing exist to project the illusion of Apple being a very open, accommodating company who aren't scared of competition and don't need to be in control of their users.
The truth is that which browser you use on your iPhondle or FoldleSlab really does matter to Apple, whereas some random app that claims to 'cure' being gay does not, any more than an app to tell your horoscope or tell you what to eat. Apple might argue that there are other apps just as freely available to 'balance' things, such as that one that locates other gays in your area (or so I saw on Top Gear with Stephen Fry) but you won't find them arguing that other web browsers merely 'balances' the choice of Safari because controlling the browser people use gives you control over them. An app that cures being gay does not.
So the bottom line is, this issue is nothing to do with immoral iApps, it's about distracting you from the real issue of buying into an effectively closed platform.
86.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
"The London Olympics countdown clock has clapped out after less than a day"
If you think that's embarrassing, wait 'til you see what happens when they light the Olympic flame...
Time travel is possible... you're doing it right now!
Education, education, education.
No wonder shows like My Family and The Green Green Grass are so popular...
What ever happened to Vincent Bethell? You never see hide nor hair
of him these days.
Do keep up at the back.
God knows what the aliens will be making of us as they notice how we pillory someone who has sex with an animal whilst thinking nothing of doing it with one of our own species, yet we then create an industry to let people drink the mammary grand excretions of animals whilst closing down shops that allow us to consume the derivatives of the most human-compatible milk on the planet.
Intellectualism aside, you have two hopes of me eating any of that dodgy ice cream: Bob Hope and no hope, you sick & pervy f**ks.
It does seem rather common for young people in the far east to drop dead in the midst of an online gaming marathon. I suppose you'd have to experience the gaming culture first hand to really understand it.
And then you wonder why the authorities feel there's a growing problem that warrants a military-style (re)boot camp...
If they're so smart, why aren't the angry Scottish ones cooking up a leg of man on a Sunday whilst shouting profanities at the lambs who've been tasked with pulling up and preparing some carrots?
It all smells fishy to me.
It seems a similar divide exists between Australia and the UK.
You see, here in the UK, the definition of 'unlimited' is something which has a monthly cap, throttling/shaping applied during peak times and gets you either booted off or forced to upgrade to an unlimiteder package if you use too much.
Whereas in Australia, it would appear that 'unlimited' means something which is limit-free...
How odd!
I meant 'NON-intrusive', obviously. Freudian slip.
I also forgot to shoehorn in an unnecessary comparison between the police having an itchy trigger finger when it comes to members of the public taking photos, yet behaving like an anaesthetised Jabba the Hut on a very cold day when it comes to dealing with the News of the World genuinely spying illegally by means of hacking people's mobile phones.
Yes, great idea.
It's just a shame that the police can't be trusted not to be completely inept and abuse the powers just as much as they abused S44 to harass photographers and other innocent people going about their inoffensive, intrusive, legal business.
If given these powers, they will go berserk, closing down perfectly fine sites at random, or making systematic cock-ups resulting in the closure of sites with unfortunate URLs such as penisland, whorepresents, expertsexchange, therapistfinder, powergenitalia, molestationnursery, etc, because some clueless 'po-leese hofficer' who doesn't know a right-click from a hard drive completely misunderstood what they were looking at.
I suppose an obvious IT question is, what browser are they going to use?
What's the odds that Sky try leaning on the brewery to make it difficult for her to continue running the pub once the media loses interest in the story?
The breweries should be right behind her, offering financial and legal support. They need to reduce the running costs of pubs and the wider industry now more than ever. And as Tesco says, every little helps. £1000/month could be the difference between a small pub staying open or not.
Something was on ITV last night that had a lineup of Mexicans in stereotypical dress (a blanket with a hole in the middle, worn as a coat along with a big hat and a guitar, I think Richard Hammond would say) and the panel had to guess which one was the real Mexican. They made fun of the Mexican people too, with comments like "Ooh, I feel like I'm working in US border control".
Will anyone be mentioning this? Has His Excellency already drafted a letter of complaint for ITV?
Anyway, I'm expecting some kind of insincere on-air apology by Hammond on Top Gear followed by a huge back-handed compliment about Mexicans by May, ending in Clarkson assuring His Excellency that they meant no insult to the good people of Mexico, who they're sure lead bountiful lives full of blameless bourgeois domesticity in common with the rest of us. Apart from their sports cars, which are rubbish!
Which bit of this Register article didn't I read that says he DID back up his stuf?
Don't forget MS's long standing practice of using bots to flood server logs with fake referrers and IE user agent strings that make it look like people have found your site thanks to searching MSN/Bing.
They've been pulled up about this before and claim it's just a method to verify the site in question is real or some such nonsense. It's done purely to make MSN/Bing show up in Analog and other stats tools that show search engines in pie charts and other graphs.
So MS give their users 'fake' results in the form of old Google photocopies, and then they give websites fake perceptions of how much they're relying on the search engine. This is MS, not some Internet scam run by a known conman operating out of a south-Pacific island.
Ultimately, he should back-up his own files, not rely on the cloud. The same goes for ISPs that lose data websites or anything else. If you don't have a CD, external HD or other form of backup for data that you own and value, you're no better than someone who goes out leaving windows open for the burglars and then moans that the insurance company only want to go so far in covering your losses.
However... Where is Flickr's backup? Do they seriously have no backups that would at least restore the majority of the photos from such an old account? What do they do when a HD fails? What contingency is there for fires or other incidents? No backups, no shadows, no protection for their users' data, or even their own?!
It may be statistically unlikely that a woman is the murderer, but it's also statistically very unlikely to be any given man in Bristol either.
I thought we learnt about the perils of picking on and rounding up specific demographics over the last few centuries? Obviously not.
Has someone seriously written an article saying that the police keep a record of phone emergency calls? You can tell people are just returning to work after Christmas.
"senior officers admitted the information could be used against people as part of any future police investigation" — And where does this say that 'people' necessarily implies the person who made the call? This just means that having a record of a 999 call is another piece in the puzzle when it comes to prosecuting criminals. What I've quoted is weasel words written by someone trying to make out the police said something specific that should put fear into anyone thinking about reporting a crime to the police, when in fact the police officer's wording was a generic reference to police record keeping.
This 'piece' might as well have been a new thread on Digital Spy by a commentard. No doubt the same commentard would be the first to complain if they phoned a bank, ISP or utility company who had no record of a previous call relevant to the current matter.
This system could do with two more icons:
One for services that take a lump sum from your account, usually mobile services that let you donate or pay £5 or £10 in one go simply by sending a text message. This icon could be another red one, but with a picture of a bank note next to the phone.
And the other icon is for automatically recurring services — again usually for mobiles — where you send one text message to sign up to a service that sends regular text messages (such as weekly betting tips) or photos (such as weekly porn) for a per-item fee, until you send another text message to stop the service. This icon could also be red, and use the same kind of 'loop' graphic next to the phone that you commonly see on CD/MP3 players.
Sewage works already sell the human shite they gather to farms for growing mushrooms and potatoes. Perhaps this is just a call to do more of it?
I always wash my mushrooms and potatoes. I even cut off the ends of the mushroom stalk if I don't like the look of them.
Looks like Tommy director Ken Russell got the last laugh, eh?
"Some schools have forced pupils to wear goggles while playing" — No wonder they're all shifting over to knives, guns, alchopops and chlamydia to get their thrills!
Consumers, try paying your ISP 'up to' whatever its monthly charge is and see how confusing and frustrating they find the practice.
Horses, donkeys, ponies, asses, mules, whataver.
What we need to do here is start an equally harmless sequel to the cold war, in which all the competing countries fly successions of ever larger and more bizarre animals. It will drive industry for the next 50 years.
If it were up to me, my next move after a horse would be to fly a giraffe. I'd also get a Harrier on standby to tether a herd of ostriches on elasticated rope and help them become the first flying-in-formation flock, right over the Palace of Westminster on the day the Queen opens Parliament. Imagine seeing that flashed up on Sky News.
It could all end with two Zeppelins holding up a huge tarpaulin between them carrying a blue whale, drawn on the ground along the course of the Thames by elephants ridden by small monkeys in suits and gipsy hats. The RAF could keep flying over them, perfectly targeting the whale with a series of waterbombs to stop it drying out. It would all be very symbolic (not to mention intimidating) to the Russian audience.
Oh, and sending animals into space is nothing new, but bringing them back is less common. I propose that Britain should get those rocket scientists from Top Gear to send a wooden stick into orbit. Then the Government should launch a border collie into space, complete with a specially designed space suit, to do the world's first space doggie walk, retrieve the stick and safely return to Earth. Preferebly, touching down in Hyde Park. But knowing the Russians, they'd probably respond by sending a dog to the moon to (literally) mark its territory.
Whilst I do have my concerns about the future of Symbian at the hands of Nokia, let alone without Psion's involvement to provide the Apple-style innovation element, I remember just about every analyst in the 90s writing off Symbian from the moment the company was formed.
They all said it would be inevitable that the only company who would end up dominating the mobile arena would be MS with WinCE.
They even kept preaching this mantra whilst Symbian was enjoying an 80% market share and MS was (and still is) constantly re-branding its mobile platform and trying to re-invent itself as a wireless/mobile company.
In truth, WinCE has gone nowhere (as was always going to happen), Symbian became the dominant OS provider after all (as was always going to happen) and the surprises in the industry and real knocks for Symbian came out of the blue - Apple and Google (which probably shouldn't have been surprises for analysts, if they ever really had a clue what they were inhaling fumes from the sacred flame and sharing their visions about).
At least when the Roman visionaries got it so spectacularly wrong, they were thrown to the lions - and I wouldn't doubt for a minute that their horoscopes for that day said they'd meet a pretty stranger, come into some money and have a happy evening.
So what's the point of ASBOs and suspended sentences?
Not just for this, but for everything. It's the same pattern whether it's middle aged women making noise in bed or teenage thugs pulling the windscreen wipers off cars.
No, that's obviously anything other than Cleartype. It's plain anti-aliasing, possibly on Linux or Safari using its native rendering.
Cleartype is fantastic, and if you honestly don't think that then you must either be using a CRT or an LCD that doesn't have its sub-pixels arranged in square R-G-B patterns. If you do have a B-G-R or other LBC type, just use MS's tweak tool to adjust the rendering to your weird screen's needs. You can also control how thickly it renders the strokes of the fonts.
Cleartype is just MS's name for a generic method of smoothing fonts. It's also used by Macs and other systems, and goes back to the 70s. If the text on a Mac LCD system/laptop is smoother than your Windows LCD system/laptop with cleartype enabled then something is wrong with your system.
Another possibility is that you're not running your LCD at its native resolution, are not set in 32-bit colour mode or have your graphics card set up oddly.
