Posts by Bassey 1131 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2008
"We will take action where....companies are profiteering from unlawful activity"
Why not just take action where companies are undertaking unlawful activity? Why does there have to be profit involved? Am I any less of a victim if the company selling my details on illegally isn't competent enough to make a profit?
It IS cheaper to buy and carry a spare (whci I ALSO do) but these do have advantages. For example, I can head out into the hills for a full days training with one of these (actually, I use the cheaper, lighter, slimmer Maplin one as per an earlier commentard). I leave my San Francisco plugged into this which, effectively, just doubles the thickness of the device but also allows me to run full GPS tracking software for about 15-20 hours (depending on what else I'm doing). Swapping batteries isn't always convenient out in the hills and, in the case of training runs, causes a break in the GPS trace.
Also, whilst the spare battery will have to be thrown away when I get rid of the SanFran (or thrown in with the eBay auction!) the external battery has seen me through three different devices now and is still going strong.
"the /entire/ team responsible don't have a single clue about interface design"
Whilst I'm not convinced personally, they have published the results of lots of user studies suggesting new users find it easier and existing users get back up to speed quickly. Not sure why existing users should have to get back up to speed though. Then again, it is INCREDIBLY rare that I use toolbar buttons. 99% of stuff is done from keyboard shortcuts and they have put a bit of work into making that easier. The changes around spacing and grouping look good. I love the idea of getting rid of lots of the default tools from the toolbar. The tool and function search look excellent.
The removal of colour immeadiately struck me as something they can bring back for VS2014 so they can say "we listened to lots of your feedback and decided...."
"Your £10 keyboard has a cable, doesn't integrate into a case, and doesn't allow the tablet to be angled appropriately."
That's bizarre. I'm sat here with the case and, it would appear to the untrained eye, that I CAN adjust the viewing angle and it IS fully integrated into the case. It's ALMOST as if I can see the case and you haven't got a clue what you're talking about.
Seriously? Why would you comment telling me what MY case can and can't do you freak?
How can they possibly justify this price? For £10 I got a USB keyboard case for my (£60) tablet. It's leatherette, provides excellent protection, I can type away happily on it, the function buttons are all programmable and it has cursor keys. In other words, it does exactly what this one does for one tenth of the price and, because it is USB, I don't have to keep it charged.
£100 is just criminal!
"Synthetic hydrocarbons...to produce these requires an energy input of at least the amount that can be gained from burning them...the input will be greater than the output... a potential answer to energy storage"
You ARE aware that the input is sunlight, aren't you? This isn't like generating electricity by burning fuels and then storing it with pumped water. This is GROWING stuff - photosynthesis - thereby capturing energy from the sun (and CO2) and then burning it later.
"Tight viewing angles are just what you want on a plane to keep your neighbour from reading your screen".
The review specified that it was the verticle viewing angle that was sensitive (hence the bit about lifting and lowering the lid). I don't know what kind of scary-ass airlines you fly with but the day my nearest neighbour is sat such that they are looking over or under me is the day I walk to New York.
Commentard FAIL
Rather than complicating things by trying to provide interesting and varied menus just employ the right astronauts. They already test for everything else so why not just make sure the Astronauts are fine with eating the same bland food ad infinitum. I have porridge for breakfast, a ham & lettuce sandwich with an apple and orange for lunch every day and have done for many, many years. I have no sense of smell so food all tastes much of a muchness. I eat for nutrition and by having the same thing every day I don't need to spend time thinking about what I'll eat.
If NASA just employed a bunch of freaks like me (or, better still, employed me) they could save a fortune on all this R&D.
"In private industry, heads roll when there are data breach screw-ups"
Alas, that, too, is complete bollocks. People just hide behing employment law. If you try to sack someone for being utterly shit at their job and frequently disclosing confidential information they will just claim they were improperly trained and take you to tribunal. It is damn near impossible to sack someone for incompetance these days.
We have a HR manager that frequently miss-uses the Outlook Adress Auto-complete feature to send confidential information to all and sundry - but feck-all ever happens.
My thoughts exactly. From a deep-space research point of view, go ahead. I'm sure they will learn all sorts of interesting things. But as a "Space station" or stopping off point for deep-space travel it seems a logistical burden. Once there, NASA would feel obliged to use it in order to justify the expense but getting parts, fuel etc out there is going to cost serious fuel without any obvious gains.
"I'm still looking for a pair of headphones that can block the noise of my shouting, yawning, sneezing, coughing, farting, burping, coin-sorting office-mates"
Firstly, I don't sort coins at work. Secondly, no, you want fully closed headphones. These are only half-closed. A good compromise for those wanting to concentrate on their music but still hear the phone ring etc.
Sorry Piro but he is absolutely spot on. This is one of the ugliest cars I've seen since the Porsche Cayenne. That rear-end is enough to induce fits of vomiting.
Not sure about the gull-wing comments. Hasn't it been shown that gull-wings open is LESS side-space than a conventional door? Of course, if your garage roof is low you're buggered. But then, if you can afford to drop that sort of money on the Bride-of-frankenstein's hideous grandmother then you can probably afford a house with a decent sized garage.
I was expecting something seriously rugged from the looks of it. 12m diving is okay, if nothing to write home about and the 1.5m drop is underwhelming at best. But -10C is positively pathetic. We've beaten that in parts of the UK twice in the last week whilst your average continental skiing holiday is going to go way below that. Having spent a bit of time in Norway, Finland and Northern Canada -10 would be considered a bit average. I would say -25C would be a minimum spec for something marketing itself to adventure sports people.
You know, that isn't such a terrible idea. People already wear adverts (any branded clothing is really just an advert). Today, people pay a premium in order to wear that advert. Why not have a system whereby I can receive a small fee for each "impression" with dynamic clothing?
"When we were more subject to the effects of the seasons you can imagine it making a difference to a child's development"
This is still the case and has been shown in many studies. Children born in July/August do MUCH worse than children born in Sept/Oct. They also have a higher incidence of suicide (about 10% higher which is ENORMOUS). But, of course, this has nothing to do with the position of the planets. It is down to the Western Education system being based around a school calendar year rather than the absolute age of the child. So a child born at the end of August is almost a year younger when they start school than a child born at the start of September. This makes a huge difference to how they start learning which has a correspondingly large knock-on effect later in life.
Due to their poorer results, poorer job, less money etc they are more likely to suffer anxiety/depression and go on to harm themselves.
But that STILL doesn't mean there is ANYTHING to astrology.
It just proves that society is slightly biased towards a particular date of birth.
"What I was trying, and probably failing, to say was that most commercial users will be making decisions on forecasts for periods considerably longer, or further ahead, than the next few minutes."
Ahh, fair enough. Well, as both a keen ultra-distance race-walker and former Mountain Rescue volunteer I can assure you that the hour-by-hour forecasts are hugely useful. Gave up on the met forecasts 4 or 5 years ago, mind. Nowadays I read the pressure charts & radar to get an idea of where things are and where they are going followed by Accuweather for a pretty good stab at what will happen. Their granularity is also much smaller than the Met (i.e. they claim to offer forecasts for smaller areas) and I usually find them to be spot on.
Not holding out much hope for accuracy this week, though. The pressure charts show the warm front edging back and forth over where I live - which basically means prepare for all types of weather every ten minutes or so.
"I've never really understood why it is considered necessary to know what the weather will be from minute to minute."
"I can understand that an accurate forecast is very important for certain occupations and industries"
So, having said you don't understand it, one line later you do. Excellent.
Whilst I admit that, on a pure cost basis, the PS3 wins hands down, it isn't exactly living room friendly, is it? It makes one hell of a din and pumps out more heat than a tumble dryer. But it does make you wonder why this costs £350 when the PS3 is £200 cheaper with more expensive components.
"Why should we 'grow up' out of video games, Star Trek and posting turds through objectionable neighbour's letter boxes?!"
Erm, because it will send you bankrupt, your wife will leave you leave and you'll be left destitute and in tears. Man, you really weren't paying attention, were you!
Do you mind clarifying what is "Daft" and "Stupid" about a TV built to be the same aspect ratio as the majority of films? I find it hugely frustrating that I have spent good money on a widescreen TV but still get huge black bars at the top and bottom of most films. I don't watch telly (naff all on worth watching the last few times I looked) so I would love a 21:9 screen. That means either a projector or one of these.
I just can't see what is daft about having a film screen designed correctly for films? Please enlighten me?
Not really. There are already devices perfectly suitable for that. I take a Samsung dumb-phone with a three-week battery life out into the Mountains with me. Would anyone actually trust a piece of electronic kit to be working, untested, after 15 years? Of course not. So the claim is bollocks and the technology pointless.
If I really wanted to run a phone off something like a AA battery I would by one of the £5 AA powered chargers and keep it, along with a couple of batteries, in a dry bag.
No mention of nettops? I've been using two NVIDIA ION based Atom Nettops for a couple of years now. With 2GB of RAM I get decent enough Win7 performance from a PC that consumes around 20W peak. It handles Hi-def video, I can do basic video editing (as long as I leave the final "build" to run overnight) and I love it.
I reckon 90% of users could get by on Atom-based hardware and would never notice the difference over a Core i3/5. Certainly most business PCs.
I agree to an extent. I'm amazed there isn't a verticle slider on the market with a standard keypad on it. These were all the rage five years ago (Nokia 7650 etc) and would seem ideal as a decent compromise between touch-screen entertainment and keypadded "getting things done".
That said, I've owned full QWERTY keyboard phones for the best part of a decade and, despite being 1.92m with coal-shovel hands I have never had a problem with them. Sure, they take a few days to get used to but then T9 takes me a few days to get used to each time I have to go back to it and capacative screens caused months of frustration after many years of resistive/stylus use.
Surely last weeks "sexual partners" survey proved once and for all that asking the public in order to ascertain the truth is entirely pointless. For those that missed it that survey published results last week in which the average man claimed to have had 15 sexual partners and the average woman claimed to have had just six. Which proved that either the vast majority of men are homosexual or everyone lies in surveys, particularly on moral issues.
Whenever there is a car thread in here a bunch hollier than thou morons come on and tell everyone "well, if you were driving properly..."
Bollocks.
I want ABS because the prick at sat in his driveway up ahead might not see me and could pull out in front of me. In that scenario, I have done nothing wrong but ABS might prevent us both winding up dead.
Just because you feel the need to jump on a public forum and tell everyone what a wonderful driver you are doesn't mean there aren't compelete pricks out there that could kill you in a flash.
There is no prize for being "dead" right.
"People can choose a more economic vehicle, public transport, a motor bike instead of a car etc etc and the more you consume the service the more you pay towards its cost"
I hear this argument a lot. Politicians, when asked what people can do about rising fuel costs, often go on about how people could insulate their homes, shop around for the cheapest supplier etc etc.
I did that. Several years ago. I double insulated the loft. Had cavity wall insultation injected into the walls. Replaced the boiler with a super-efficient condenser. Had all the windows checked and re-sealed. Sold the old 1.2 Clio (45mpg) and got a 1l Hyundai that does about 65mpg. I lift share with two people in my village. I swapped my mobile contract for one costing just £7.50/month all in. I'm on the cheapest broadband and the cheapest everything else.
I haven't had a pay rise in four years but my wife and I have an extra mouth to feed now. There IS no public transport where we live and we can't sell our house (on the market for over 2 years) to move nearer to work. I was spending about £150 on petrol getting to work. Thanks to fuel price rises It is now around £250 and with 30% hikes in gas, heating oil, electric etc....
What the fuck do I do now?
People do get a bit hot and bothered about this sort of thing, don't they? Almost as if they have some inherent right to be the one to get the deal.
I wasn't actually aware of the £1 sale but tried to visit eBuyer to purchase a nettop. As the site wasn't responding I got it from Amazon instead.
There are three simple rules that most technology literate smartphone users will stick to.
A smartphone MUST have;
1) A memory card slot - preferably MicroSD
2) A Proper SIM slot
3) A removable battery
So many of the flagship smartphones from ALL manufacturers seem to be breaking 1 or 2 of these rules just recently and without any consistency. Manufacturers seem to be sealing in the battery one week, then opening that back up but omitting the memory card slot the next. It doesn't seem to make any sense. They KNOW this pisses customers off and harms retention so why do it?
That seems a bit harsh. I'm 1.92m tall. So, despite the fact I'm fairly trim (I run ultra-marathons) I probably weigh the same as a short lard-arse.
BMI is also a useless system as it assumes people are 2D and so punishes the tall. Is there a system for differentiating people who weigh a lot because they are tall and/or muscular and people who weigh a lot because their eat/move ratio is out of whack?
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