Posts by Martin 71

MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross

Re: Concur with Stross. With a couple caveats.

Also the word processors themselves, along with their help files, do NOT make the learning easy. Most non-gui tools, because of the higher threshold, are better documented (not necessarily MORE documented, but better).

If I have a problem with a command line tool, google will find the answer for me. If I have a problem with a GUI tool, google will find a twisted morass of users also having the same problem, and 18 solutions, none of which work with my particular version and build.

This has happened repeatedly, with GUI products from many vendors

You like iPads, you like things called 'Air'. You will LOVE this puppy

That might be very GOOD for Apple. Because the missing <geeky things> currently make the iDevices markedly inferior. While geeks tend to be a small proportion of the population, they punch above their weight in buying power.

Incidentally, I'd rather see a thicker device form factor, with a MUCH longer lasting battery. Can you imagine how long a modern mobile phone with a battery making it the size of a late 90s one would last?

Slip your SIM into a plastic sheath, WIPE international call charges

Re: What happens when you are outside the UK?

Why would you NOT use a local sim?

Re: WTF?

Some parts of the world are still in the dark ages. Friend of mine is in the US, god bless her, and can't even text internationally, apparently that 'feature' costs extra...

Re: Oh dear...

If you've not got a data connection, surely you don't have a cellular connection at all? I've certainly never come across a point (O2, UK) where I have cell service but no data coverage.

Not trolling, I genuinely want to know, is that possible, I thought they used the same backhaul?

Easily picked CD-ROM drive locks let Mexican banditos nick ATM cash

Automated Teller Machine Machines?

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Typical! Google's wonder-dongle is a solution looking for a problem

Re: rubbish!

1 a video card with tv output?

2 Use an older tv

Re: ubiquity

I fear you are correct. I for one will still stick with a pc under the tv though. Or rather under the dirty great 19" CRT monitor!

Disclaimer: I do not pay the electric bill. If I did... yeah, it would change :)

Robot cop called in after MAD BONGER blown up in LIQUID MARIJUANA EXPLOSION

Re: Traditionally,

Acetone, difficult to get? Nah

Google's new Chromecast spills its simplistic guts

Re: You missed the point

You got the 'no cable' in the wrong column. And devices with no HDMI have been feeding signals to tvs since the 1920s

Graphical front ends for PowerShell? Here's a couple for you

Re: Geh

I agree, if it's a command I use regularly, CLI all the way. If it's something I rarely use, the added cues of the GUI really help out :)

Re: Geh

While I do see your point in some ways, the fact is sometimes a GUI is easier, sometimes a CLI is easier. See further up thread for a good example, changing a couple of settings on one machine, GUI>CLI, change settings on hundreds of machines, or repeatedly on one machine, CLI > GUI.

While not an admin myself I see this often in even single user windows sessions (I expect a downvote just for that admission!). Some tools are just easier to use in one mode than another. Nobody's forcing anyone to use a GUI front end, but it's making one available. More choice, I always see as positive.

Free cloud server self-destructs in 35 minutes

Surely there can only be 26MiB

Ay to Zed...

Ad man: Mozilla 'radicals' and 'extremists' want to wreck internet economy

Re: Dear Advertising Scum. STFU, GTFO, FOAD, & HAND.

Standing Ovation of several minutes! I may have to quote you

Acer silences Thunderbolt

Re: Acer

I think manufacturers often forget the 'knock on effect' of one bad experience. If that one person happens to be head of IT procurement, or even the overtaxed geek 30 or 40 people come to for PC advice, then one bad experience *COUGH MAXTOR* will cause loss of sales out of all proportion to what not trying to charge ME money to RMA a faulty drive would've cost ...

Chinese police probe iPhone user's death by electrocution

Re: I really shouldn't do this but ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_exfmbsPqEI says you're at least partly incorrect. Yes, no doubt some knockoffs happen on the same production line. Likelihood is they're not the cheap knockoffs, they're sold at or just below regular price, but the profit goes to person X, not apple.

Google Groups blunder exposes thousands of Japanese govt emails

Once again

A headline crafted to make us think the google department of the US government is the problem, whereas it was actually ignorance of basic online security (hint, if it's online, it's not secure) was the actual problem

Google loses Latitude in Maps app shake-up

Ok I'll be the first to say it

Was I the only one to think "Maps with no latitude, but they'll still have longitude, so wtf". Guess my dumbphone makes me persona non grata to Grabmoneyoogle eh?

Live or let dial - phones ain’t what they used to be

Re: Featured image.

711s and 741s actually look pretty much identical, (unlike the 706/746 desk models which are easy to tell apart). The innards of a 711 however, make a much better weapon :-)

Re: How well timed

Red 2 and 3 series, are worth a lot more than 200, and if you have any green 300/200 series... you're rich, they go for well over 1k. Sorry for your loss, but you may also have won out. Just make sure they go to people who will appreciate them. And a pint, raised to your dad.

Re: My mother

I doubt it's putrid green. If it's a 2 or 300 series, it'll be Jade Green, if it's a 7xx series, the name was Forest Green :-)

Re: Pulse dialling?

Most exchanges in fact do still recognize it, VOIP adaptors, asterisk systems and some bits of virgin-on-the-mediocre won't. Causes me endless problems when I sell rotary phones to people with a nonstandard phone setup

Ofcom set to release interesting spectrum chunk for unlicenced use

There seems to be something wrong with your keyboard

Obama says US won't scramble jets or twist arms for Snowden

Re: I absolutely detest Obama...

Oddly I usually support him, but in this he's being a prat. Maybe we should form a team?

Film crew plans dig to find lost burial ground of Atari's E.T.

Re: Parking lots are full of things!

My version was AC series transistors that failed QA.

I'm not sure whether that says 'yes it happened' or 'yup that makes it an urban legend'.

Either way I want to find out :)

UN to call for 'pre-emptive' ban on soulless robot bomber assassins

Re: Trick question. What is the difference...

In one case the people involved in creating it are good capitalists, and thus above the law. Otherwise nothing

Phones for the elderly: Testers wanted for senior service

being an MVNO, the coverage would depend solely on the big network it's piggybacking onto. Most of the major networks in the UK now have pretty good coverage, at least for telephone purposes, but yes, I agree you'd want to check into that first.

Don't Panic! Google FCC filing reveals mystery media device

Or it's an electronic guidebook

Connected to the HHG offices via ... something improbable?

Plans for fully 3D-printed gun go online next week

Like most true journalists, he believes in at least a pretense to accuracy. Therefore faux news made a perfect humorous example of the ridiculousness of the right. Right wingers getting upset at people pointing this out is merely another example of how ridiculous they are

Re: Oh puhleeze.

You have a point but if they're close enough to hold it to your head, many MANY things can be lethal. The problem isn't the actual object, it's the user.

And no, I'm NOT one of the 'guns don't kill people' brigade, I am usually fairly rabidly anti-gun, but this isn't a problem at all that I can see. Just someone trying to set off mass hysteria.

It'd be fairly trivial to modify an air pistol (.22) to fire a .22 cartridge, and nailgun cartridges would fit along with a pellet. And it'd likely survive a couple of firings if the pistol was well made. That's why actually doing so has such huge penalties.

In short, this isn't really anything new, just a new method, that may endanger the experimenter (someone else has already mentioned kids liking to experiment).

So long, Hotmail: Remaining users migrated to Outlook.com

Re: 'tis good

I agree to a point. What DOES look unprofessional is when a company has a website, with their own domain ... www.somecompany.example, but has emails '[e-mail].

WHY?

Brits on benefits: 'Dole office site only works on PCs over 10 YEARS OLD'

Re: What?

You can go procreate with yourself. Yes, i rose to the troll. Now sod off. I hope to hell you never end up on disability because you CAN'T work, because unlike you, I'm not a selfish little richard cranium

Virgin Media: SO SORRY we fined your dead dad £10 for unpaid bill

One thing I haven't seen commented on yet: ONLY a court of law can apply a 'fine'. Others may apply a penalty charge if mentioned in the contract, but legally, it is NOT a fine. I'd have let virgin mediocre try to put that one through the courts.

Moist iPhone fanbois tempted with golden Apple shower offer

In the UK the warranty would be moot anyway, sale of goods act makes their restrictions unenforcable :-)

Facebook Home gets SMACKDOWN from irate users

FIFY

"This is an experience for [Facejunk] access," he told us. "The phone is designed for people that want to be tools."

Music resale service ReDigi loses copyright fight with Capitol Records

Re: I am going to take an unpopular side here.

No angry downvote here, I agree, the entire idea was flawed from the start, but the record companies certainly are not making themselves any friends

Patent shark‘s copyright claim could bite all Unix

Four One IP, yes. If you'd made it One Four, I'd have clicked immediately. Bloody colonials!

After Leveson: The UK gets an Orwellian Ministry of Truth for real

Re: There sure as hell is a need for press regulation

Your second paragraph (aside from the first sentence thereof) I agree with. However, insulting someone who was driven to suicide puts you in the Littlejohn category

Researcher sets up illegal 420,000 node botnet for IPv4 internet map

Re: ZOMG Running out of IPv4 addresses!!!!

I'd agree, I'd certainly argue that DEC no longer needs an entire /8... for example. I think they need to *yoink* back those IP ranges that aren't being used.

Torvalds asks 'Why do PC manufacturers even bother any more?'

Re: it's the Windows handbrake

While I am a fairly happy windows user, I do have to agree with that. Legacy applications especially tend to assume screen resolutions. But then again, so do web sites. Which is plain crazy. Especially with widescreen being common now (I'm not going there re: popular or unpopular). Seeing a website taking up a strip 1/2 a screen wide with 2 huge blank vertical white spaces either side looks ludicrous.

Router crash downs CloudFlare services

Re: I think someone meant to do that.

Open disclosure. It means HOPEFULLY this will be patched thatmuch sooner.

Keyboard, you're not my type

Re: Flexowiters and Teletypes

Upvote just for the humour in that :-)

And I'd imagine the locked key could do some SERIOUS damage to a finger, especially back in the days when most people had learned to type on real typewriters

Re: I have one of those IBM clicky clacky keyboards

If you have one and don't like it, either gift it to a relative who does, or ebay it for beer money :)

Microsoft holds off on shooting Windows Live Messenger

Re: good riddance to an early 'hacking tool'?

I suspect you're mixing up messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

Messenger was the thing that used the LAN messaging service and messages had to be sent from the command line... and became rapidly useless due to spam and/or the prevalence of NAT.

Windows live messenger is/was that thing formerly known as MSN messenger.

Rid yourself of Adobe: New Firefox 19.0 gets JAVASCRIPT PDF viewer

Re: I scrapped Adobe years ago

I can confirm for you it absolutely IS optional. It's just another option in the 'applications' setting. I disabled it because I, like you, download all PDFs to open in foxit.

I since have uninstalled ff 19 and rolled back to 18.0.2 because of a stability issue, but that could've been my weird usage of firefox yesterday (cat pictures make up 40% of the internet yknow).

Beer, because it goes well with cat.

Any storm in a port

Re: Yeah, well, me too

It's fear. I have noticed this too. What happens, is, having broken at least one connector in our lifetimes (usually on a laptop or other item where it's difficult/impossible to replace), we take it VERY easy, the slightest resistance makes us reverse the connector. Then we find either (A) it fits, in which case the first time was wrong, or, (B), it doesn't fit, which means the first time was right but we didn't push hard enough through fear.

I agree the designer of the connector needs to be beaten

Plunging BT sales hit every branch of the biz on way down

Re: BT - bollock time

Can only agree with that, I'm known in family as the 'geek of communications', so whenever a problem shows up with phones, I get called.

This means I see a lot of the frustration that the techs and engineers suffer. They get watched for time, constantly. They get a major problem, they have to tell the customer 'sorry we can't fix it' and drive off, then another appointment has to be made, etc. etc.

And ghods help you if it's an intermittent fault, they HAVE to put it as 'no fault found', then you end up fighting a 100 pound plus bill from your phone provider :-( They hate this as much as the customer. Some of them will go out of the way to find a 'fault' (altho not the one reported) , just to avoid the charge to the customer.

I have been lucky a few times with the customer service part actually. Yes, frequently you get a person who is clearly a script reader, but on several occasions, the person has known shortcuts through the system. And in ONE case, an Indian operator told me, regarding a horrible intermittent ADSL issue, that there were several other calls from the same area, and that it was definitely an exchange issue and would be fixed soon. She was correct.

Beer, because the engineers quite often deserve one.

Pub o' clock comes early for C&W biz customers silenced by titsup phones

I really don't understand WHAT this penchant is for 08xx numbers anyway. Just use a normal geographic landline from a real phone company. Cable and Wireless were a worldwide telegraph outfit, what they're doing with phonelines, I have no idea

Hydrogen on demand from silicon nanospheres - just add water

Interesting...

Now I need to find some scrap microprocessors, my pestle and mortar, and do some chemistry!

*yes, I know it won't produce nanospheres, but the reaction might still be viewable!

Icon for what might happen if it produces enough hydrogen

'Leccy-starved Reg hack: 'How I survive on 1.5kW'

Re: Buffering?

That could be done with lead acid batteries and an inverter of some description, but the initial cost of those, and the ongoing maintenance of them, would make it borderline I would think. But I'd certainly be looking at it if I were in that situation.