Posts by David 45 613 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I have to say that this type of research does seem to me to be a complete waste of money and other resources that could well be used for more worthwhile projects. Seems a tad frivolous - and, before I get accused of being a grumpy old man, yes, I DO have a well developed sense of humour!
Surely if you buy a PAYG phone, you're not on record, anyway, unless you rashly "register" yourself with your network provider, as I was requested to do by Vodaphone when I kept receiving gibberish texts, which eventually stopped, anyway. When I tried to report it to them on their website, they wouldn't do anything unless I divulged my details and "registered". No thanks. The only down-side I can find is that with no "registration", there is no guarantee that you will keep the number that was issued with the phone, but I've never heard of anyone losing their number.
This is despicable. How dare they set themselves up as judge and jury without going through due legal process. I'm surprised (and pleased) that even BT seem to regard it as a nonsense. They are easily big enough to do battle with the IRMA. They need teaching a severe lesson in the law. It is NOT the ISP's duty to police their networks and make arbitrary decisions to cut off people at the drop of a hat on the say-so of a third party.
DAB is one of the worst cons pulled on an unsuspecting British public. We were promised super-dooper, near-CD quality. Great things were on the cards. What do we get? More and more stations shoe-horned in at ever-decreasing bit-rates and one (BBC7) in MONO, for goodness sake! Don't anyone dare tell me it doesn't matter. There are numerous re-runs (plays, etc.) that were originally broadcast in stereo and can be heard in their full glory on BBC7 from satellite. There was also talk of user-adjustable compression. That died a death and most stations butcher the sound before it enters the transmission chain with hideous amounts of audio processing and compression - just like good old FM. I protested to the Radio Authority (as was at the time) about it but got absolutely nowhere - the same result on previous occasions when I complained about the original Jazz FM station blatantly changing their format. Now it's Ofcom and they seem to have inherited the same set of useless teeth.
Will owners not be able to turn the wallpaper off altogether? It's a well-known fact that wallpaper and other uneccessary fancy graphics drain system resources and I would imagine that a netbook needs all it can get. My own home desktop machines have no wallpaper and are set for "best performance" in properties and "classic" appearance. Dull, I know, but not having to struggle to maintain all the fancy graphics and/or wallpaper does perk them up quite considerably.
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