Posts by Tim Bates 917 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2007
Me and some of my family have had various Christian tunes as ringtones over the years. Much easier to do these days, since you can just bung an MP3 or similar on most modern phones using a data cable. But we did make some of the old style beepy ones back in the day.
I can't see them making a fortune off this given the smallish market, but I would think they aren't aiming to do that anyway.
Some people clearly would make good executives in companies such as MS....
Puker man (the name I have now assigned you): What are you on about? Any business that ignores what tech types say about technology is going to go broke.
Do you take your car to a mechanic for advice and then ignore it because how the engine works is not relevant to your business? I highly doubt it...
Terra: If MS don't care who I am, that's OK. I still won't like or recommend them. I'll still find their products incredibly spastic, broken and annoying. I really don't care if they don't care who I am.
They aren't getting my money though. And in the end, that's their problem... They don't care about customers. Fatal mistake in business.
And with Telstra still refusing to wholesale NextG, I think they should be forced to keep CDMA on anyway.
I know quite a number of people who have/had CDMA phones on plans from other providers. They have 2 choices now.... GSM (limited use in country areas) or switch to Telstra. Pretty lame choices.
When will Telstra grow up and realise that more money can be made by simply working with their biggest customers (other providers)?
I work in a school (in rural NSW Australia), and trust me, it's not the WiFi that leaves me with headaches, etc. It's the flickering lights, crap furniture, and the damn kids.
I don't get headaches at home, where we have more wireless APs with higher outputs.
Oh, and way back when I was a student, I had all those symptoms too. I finished school at the same time 802.11b was released as a standard, so it can't be that.
Crazy tin-foil hat brigade.
If it makes it to my place it'll be unlikely to do anything.
Symantec AV Corporate should whack it before it goes anywhere. If it makes it past that, well then it has to know that my MP3s are actually stored on a different box (Linux server). And if it does find them, it'll hardly hurt.... All the music I care about is OggVorbis.
I'm going to agree with the guy that said the suit wearing people are often there to break things.
Suit and MS "qualifications" are usually an evil combination that say, "I'm here to stuff around with no clue for a few hours, break 3 things, fix 1 thing and charge you much more than you expect".
I tend to agree. Organisations aiming to distribute funds should be:
a) transparent in accounting
b) non-profit
c) not directly controlled by any one side of the industry
Obviously an organisation setting costs on a fixed basis like this is not helping anyone, especially if they require $1bn to admin $20m. Seriously, give me $1m and I'll admin that $20m for them even if it takes me every waking hour to do.
OK. 2 possibilities I can see...
1. Everyone gets even more ticked off at Microsoft than what Vista has made us, and we all move to Linux, *BSD or MacOS.
or
2. MS offer free versions of programs with the ads, or pay versions without. This seems more likely.
If it's 2, then I'd be OK with MS giving me some ads in exchange for a free copy of Windows. No way I'd use it on a normal box, but I'd be OK with using it for a gaming PC or a media PC... PCs where I don't keep or handle files of any privateness.
Only things I've ever had to sign for jobs are:
Working with children criminal record check authorisation form
Tax File Number declaration form
Bank direct deposit details form
I don't think I could ever sign a contract saying I would hand over anything created on my time. Bugger that.
What do they propose? Because from what I've seen, most already crossfade tracks to prevent clean rips. People who are happy with the crap at one end and cutoff at the other end are highly unlikely to mind having lowered quality from recording the audio being played back.
Result: Anything beyond crossfades would be pointless.
Also, I'm a Linux user, so any DRM would likely break things for me.
Why would you rummage around looking for pr0n or music? Even if you wanted that sort of stuff, you only need to go about finding the problem usually... The music and/or pr0n is usually related to it.
Reminds me of the time I went to a house to fix a scanner problem. It was "the son's" computer, and he was still at school at the time. His mum booted the computer to show me the problem... She looked kind of embarrassed when the desktop wallpaper had a topless chick and there were collections of icons on the desktop for porn sites.
Firstly, why is it banned/overclassified? Easy. It's a RockStar game. Even before any real details for Bully were out there were people complaining. And every one of them repeatedly mentioned GTA.
Secondly, it'll get released, but with a lot removed. That disappoints me slightly, but so long as the content on all platforms is the same, I don't care.
It's not my type of game, but banning games based mostly on the publisher is not fair.
Seems there's been a post by a fanboy....
In all the "experiments" I've done with Open Office, users had no troubles figuring out things pretty fast. Faster than in MSO for some things.
MS Office 2007 is going to severely stuff a lot of users up. The divide between people who find it easier to use and those who find it painful to use is pretty well defined.
Converting to a lossy format and back would render any watermarking completely stuffed. And transcoding to anything should allow easy editing of any other tags in there.
So either way, it's not a big deal. If you don't upload them, no issues. If you want to be a pirate, just transcode it to MP3 and let any hidden tagging get obliterated.
"I am sure these HD videos and audio encoding sessions are a central part of your job as a school technician, hmmm."
You do know that videos are a very common part of school these days, right? Including the creation of videos and DVDs of school events, and on occasion, staff watch videos to confirm whether they fit the topic they are teaching.
We have Audacity and VLC installed on every PC at our school, and the teacher across from my office watches a LOT of DVDs to see if they fit in with English classwork.
Myself... I have so far only had to watch DVDs to test the software. But I have had to encode audio many times for staff that don't know how.
Is your high horse shrinking yet?
Assuming they were just watching, and not telling him what to do, how could they be charged with anything at all?
It's not like they could really do anything by the time they'd realised he was serious. I mean, do you think the guy had his monitor positioned so he could read it from the noose? And it's not like the viewers could call an ambulance for his IP address.
But can you be sued for a patent violation when you started production well before the patent was even filed?
Seems to me that it would be stupid to allow that, otherwise we'd see a patent for "a circular device rotating about a center axis and attached to another object for the purposes of allowing movement"... Or some such similarly legal way of defining a wheel.
Of course we are talking about the US patent system which seems to now allow companies to find inventions that haven't been patented, file a patent, have it granted, and then sue the pants off people. And they also do that ever-so-helpful "software patents" thing
On one side, I am always for bad things happening to Telstra's marketing machine.
On another, I can't help but think only bad things can come from people investigating illegal images on a "website" when it's not a website. If you don't get the technology, you shouldn't be applying the law to it.
I suspect along the lines of XBox Live will pop up to cater for modified systems some time fairly soon. Like how a tool was created to allow people to play online before Live launched for the original XBox (was popular in Australia since Live didn't launch for like a year or something).
Personally, I'll stick to a real computer and sane publishers.
Why should these stupid bastards come here if they feel so unsafe?
Stupid.
It's going to cost millions to have the pricks here.... And that's not taking into account the millions in lost revenue for Sydney businesses.
Hey Bush! Stay out of our country! USA is not the entire world, and the world is not USA.
Patents should not be allowed on non-physical items. I think Yahoo Serious got it right in the movie "Young Einstein" (though it was not his character that said it)... You have to have an invention to patent an invention. If it's all in your head, "what should we do? Patent your head?"
US laws suck 99% of the time. What a screwed up country.
I got a bill once from Telstra (Australia's wonderful equivalent to BT).
Had my busines name wrong, was for $0.00, and to top it off, I've never, ever been a Telstra customer.
When I emailed them and demanded to know what the heck they were thinking, they refused to tell me anything because I wasn't a customer. Even though I had quoted the customer number from the bill.
Isn't it wonderful that large corporations trust the computer is right...
You can use a cattle grid on the railway line too...
Cost is the big thing though. Any change to a railway crossing is expensive. Even something as simple as a set of flashing lights would run to many thousands of US dollars (I am Aussie, but I figure most people know what a US dollar is worth).
Out we I am we have hundreds of crossings with no protection. No lights, no gates, just a single sign on each side (Give Way sign with a train image under it). Maybe us country folk in Australia just know when to use our eyes and when not to park on the damn railway lines.
I wouldn't have thought they had a communications manager after the communication I had with them.
I had emails with no content in reply to some questions I asked.
My order was canceled with no notification (8 weeks after I ordered it!).
They only ever answered my question about why it was canceled via Microsoft themselves (after I made a complaint to MS).
Overall, I will now never, ever believe any MS offer again, and I will certainly never order anything via a Moduslink website.
Can you imagine if someone who died back in the 70s came back to life now and saw all the technological crap we surround ourselves with now? They wouldn't know what's going on. Now imagine how bad it would be if someone from the 1770's came back....
The dressing rooms in shops already give me the creeps... Imagine having the freaking mirror start talking to you...
Won't change my view that Dell make crappy products, but good on them for trying this.
Here I am today unpacking new HP laptops, and wishing they had been shipped with multiples in a box so I didn't have so many little boxes of packing to fill the bins with.
Takes time to open each box, manipulate the contents and packaging and then find space to put the rubbish before taking it out to the dumpster. One big box means less stuffing around.
I was making a map of our high school back when I was about that age. Was originally planned as a Halflife deathmatch map, but when we found the max map size too small we decided to start a single player level pack involving a fire in the school. Never got anywhere other than creating a few rough test maps and some plot ideas though.
On the other hand... A teacher at the same school made a Quake map based on the school library. We even played it at school.
Quick question.... Did the student in this article play as a terrorist or counter-terrorist? ;-)
What ever will become of all the citizens of Queensland's capital city, Brisbane when all the AMD fans are looking for that term?
Personally, I'm waiting for my home town to come up as a codename for a CPU... Intel, AMD, Via... Who cares.... I'll buy one just cause it's got the codename.
I'm confused by Robert Grant's logic... Why does sitting on a controlled explosion prove God can't exist? Surely it merely proves some scientist was clever enough to develop a way of burning fuels in a controlled manner.
I did have a laugh at the article though... I can't help but think Muslims are just a bit crazy.
I was all up for paying large ammounts to get my hands on one of these until now... I heard a rumor (which turned out to be untrue) that they would do a 1 for the price of 2 deal which I would have been up for.... I'd even pay for 5 of them to get 1.
But if they are going to run Windows, I won't touch them with a 3m pole. I want nothing to do with a project that inflicts Microsoft rubbish on the developing world.
Has anyone stopped and looked at the frequency and power output of these access points? Seriously... It's not a complicated issue.
802.11b/g/n all run on 2.4GHz. It just so happens that microwave ovens also use this frequency.
US FDA say that 5mW detected 2 inches from the microwave is safe.
Home level access points run at about 30mW full power (and much lower at higher speeds).
The power of the signal falls off at the square of the distance increase... ie 10 times distance = 1/100th of the power.
I have this crazy suspicion that the same people complaining about kids being fried by WiFi would happily let said kids lean on the microwave oven door to watch the microwave popcorn cook.
I heard about this yesterday on a school computer IT mailing list (in Australia).
When you consider that the US FDA consider 5mW of 2.4GHz at 2 inches to be perfectly safe, the 20-100mW put out by wifi access points is pretty safe. Unless you regularly partake in activities such as wearing access points as hats, or inserting the antenna into body cavities, I think you'll be fine.
A member on the mailing list I heard it from took a microwave leak detector device and held it to the antenna of an access point. It didn't even register anything. Meanwhile, a microwave oven triggered it to display a "safe" level of radiation.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
