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.
Posts by Pete Smith
8 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2007
Sophos punts anti-virus for Klingons
Windows 7 gets built in XP mode
'Vista Capable' judge tosses class-action status - again
Tuesday 14th April 2009 15:21 GMT 
What's the fuss?
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.
Mattel bemuses gamers with 'brainwave' toy
Speed cams ditched in Wiltshire
Thursday 23rd October 2008 11:58 GMT 
@ AC:1022
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.
Samsung fires up 128GB SSD massive attack
BBC Micro creators meet to TRACE machine's legacy
The RIAA will come to regret its court win
Monday 8th October 2007 14:51 GMT 
Future of Publishing
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.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
