
The rite of Ginst'a'Ed.
Ginst'a'Ed.
Ginst'a'Ed?
Ginster Head. As in "looks like you have a cornish pastie glued to your head".
Please. At least it looks like they have a partial sense of humour.
8 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2007
I built a homebrew PC back in 2005, using standard, non-top-end parts - Athlon 64 3500, 1Gb of RAM, ATI X800 graphics card - certainly not the best quality/speed stuff out there.
I was using this, running Vista since RC1 (or was it Beta 1?). I run at 1600*1200, 32bpp, with all fancy bits turned up to the max, cleartype fonts, shadows etc.
It ran absolutely fine, until I upgraded it (or rather kept the case, monitor, DVD etc) in Jan 2009. The only real reason was that Farcry 2 wasn't running as fast as I'd like, and I'd had a HDD failure that meant the drive couldn't be seen at boot time, when booting off it. It was visible to Windows, so I added an IDE drive that held the boot stuff, and booted the OS off the flaky drive.
Whoever was building these PCs, 12-24 months after mine became obsolete that were incapable of running Vista is taking the mickey. Probably some cheap a*se integrated, all-in-one motherboard, built down to a price, inadequate RAM, pitiful graphics, and generic processor. (Just like the Evesham one my in-laws bought. They've now got an iMac, which sits upstairs in its shrine, totally unused, while they still use the 8 year old heap of crap downstairs!)
One thing that I would say is that 2Gb of RAM is vital. It's a bit slow with all the effects turned on with only 1Gb.
Pete.
8 people a day do die on our roads, you're right. The "old" government line was that 33% of accidents were caused by speeding, so this would equate to ~20 people a week (so it's not "most" caused by speeders)
A recent study by the same government however, said that only ~5% of accidents are directly down to speed in excess of the posted limit, i.e. ~150 people a year. There was a further breakdown of the remaining 95%, but I'd bet most of them are "not looking where they're going" , "pullout our without looking" or "pissed pedestrian walked out into the street without looking".
A speed camera won't get someone driving under the posted speed limit, and we don't have "driving like an arse" cameras, which is where the problem actually lies.
However, a watchful copper *would* spot someone driving like an arse, and would hopefully do something about it. Unfortunately, they're all back at the nick, filling out forms.
Ken Hagan: If you want a glimpse of the future of publishing, consider the fate of the most recent Harry Potter -- photographed within hours of release, almost certainly OCR-ed by now, and probably available in a nicely marked-up format somewhere on the internet.
This is a bit pessimistic: I saw torrent files containing (presumably) OCRd RTF versions of book 6 after about 12 hours of release. At 14:00 UK time. there were some that were already 2 hours old. I didn't wait out all night though (again!), mine was delivered in the post at about 9am.
I assume that a bunch of many people were allocated a few pages each, and the results were all centrally compiled, checked etc.