Posts by fixit_f

BBC calls DRM cops on iPlayer download party

@Dr Mouse

I'm not 100% convinced I am being a dick. All I'm saying is that apart from the odd program I'm not convinced that they're producing "top quality content" and additionally where they are not much of it seems to be done "in house" if you see what I mean. Apart from that it's the same slack jawed cheap lowest common denominator entertainment (like reality TV) that the commercial stations produce. Even the news website isn't as good as it used to be.

In America advertising on commercial channels is definitely annoying - but I find the level of advertising in the UK pretty tolerable. The thing that annoys most people about old Auntie's licensing structure is that it's based around an ancient and irrelevant model and there's no opt out other than to not own any receiving equipment - in the same way that I don't bother paying for Sky I'd like to have the choice of not paying for the BBC.

Independent Production Companies

FFS I can't believe the amount of people justifying this with the fact that the BBC doesn't own the copyright to these programs. What exactly are they doing with the 135 quid a year that every household in the country pays them. Just stop and think for a second, that's 135 quid times millions of licence payers and all they can offer us for that sort of silly money is pay production companies to produce programmes for them? ITV and C4 do that for free. For that amount of cash they should be sending us DVD's through the post, not whingeing about people downloading it for free.

I find the whole premise of the BBC absolutely insane, it's every bit as dumbed down as the commercial channels these days and it's time we treated it as such and stopped paying for it.

The evolution of Crystal Reports

Hideous clusterf**k of an application

Awful, awful, awful, I need another shower just thinking about it. I was using it for just simple reporting, well within it's "limitations" and found I'd always end up writing database views for it to run on because you often couldn't format fields or build simple joins correctly. And if you did try and join anything using it's visual linking expert thing it'd automatically decide to join every field on every table to pretty much every field on everything else, completely undoing all your manual joins in the process. Urggh.

Woman murdered after answering Craigslist ad

I think "Yeah, Right" has a point.

I think the point here is about the fickleness of the media and their unwillingness to report stuff that doesn't have some kind of ghoulish twist or that hasn't happened in their own back yard. Hundreds if not thousands of people are killed every day all around the world, completely unreported, and in far more horrific circumstances - and yet the media will blow up the significance of one poxy case. People are killed all the time, that's human nature, but there needs to be more balance in how it's reported. There should perhaps be laws and journalistic guidelines that make it illegal for people like Madeleine Mc flipping Cann to be on the front page for more than a few days, at which point they should be rightfully replaced with coverage of the huge numbers of other dead people who nobody seems to give a flying f**k about.

<< Puts on flak jacket >>

What's 77.1 x 850? Don't ask Excel 2007

Furry Muff

J, I take your comment on board and in most ways I agree, apart from the aggressive and slightly substandard intelligence / illiterate manner in which you raised it "It's a bloody software" is a case in point. Mate if you've seen something do the job better let me know, I'd like to see it because I'm as anti-ms as you can get, It's pretty poor that a package whose entire raison d'etre is calculating numbers should go so fundamentally wrong, but once you've spent time in software development around allegedly "critical systems" in finance and seen them do obvious numeric f**k ups - erm, you'll understand the sloppiness that is de facto throughout the industry, Seriously, you wouldn't believe the state of "mission critical" systems in financial services. I'd happily write a book on it (if I didn't work in it and expect an expose to cost me my job) - Northern Rock anyone?

Software vs Hardware

Despite only being 28 years old, I remember two things worth factoring in:

1) Usborne books when I was a kid assuring me that "computers don't make human mistakes, that's why they're the ultimate calculating machines.

2) The early incarnations of the Intel Pentium processor that had bugs in floating point arithmetic which made calculations (even in whatever version of excel was around at the time) cock up under certain very rare circumstances. I mean seriously, the computer mags of the time (there was precious little internet then) would give you examples of how you could trip it up, but it was accepted wisdom that unless you were some sort of hardcore science boffin you'd never notice it.)

So as a relatively young IT professional and also as a genuinely experienced and platform-agnostic fella (I'm talking Vista and Linux back to Pick) why am I the only bugger who thinks:

"Sod it, in a new and complex and recently released product this is essentially a teething problem and is pretty much to be expected. Even in a formally released product. So long as they fix it quick-ish in a service pack then all is good"

If Open Office did this people would just write it off as a bug. Just because it's MickeySoft, much as I'm wary of them, "sod it" it's nothing more than an unfortunate oversight. Even the finest ofdevelopers are prone to a scenario that they didn't test appearing as a bug in their software. Big deal, at least you can patch it rather than it being an inherent hardware bug like the floating point stuff in the earlier pentiums. I work for an investment bank where lots of stuff among the traders is still done through excel, and while there are lots of unfixed bugs that they still work around they are still as a whole grateful for such a powerful package that can calculate stuff on the fly like excel does. Much as I dislike Microsoft's OS, the Office Suite is almost beyond reproach - it's excellent.

Conservatives cock-up over pound again

Haha it's gone.

What a bunch of stupid right wing arsewits.

US teacher fired for non-literal bible reading

Wow.

f.x. << slaps back of head repeatedly while saying "duhhhhh, duhhhhhhhhhh, I'm an American" >>

PC superstore refuses to take sack in hand

Arsewits

PC world really are the biggest bunch of clowns going, God knows where they get their staff from. I should know, I bought a laptop there the other day. Their most comedy tendency is the staff making up random b******s when they don't know the answer to a question, which is frequently.

US in move towards GPS-based air traffic control

I don't like the sound of it.

In the maritime world it's best practice that in addition to GPS you plot your position on a chart using old fashioned navigation techniques, and tools such as a protractor and ruler. This is so that if your GPS fails you still have a fair idea of where you are and can continue to monitor your own position. In the aviation world (where you add the extra dimension of altitude) it seems a bit daft for air traffic control to deliberately phase out their backup system. Anyone that has owned a GPS knows that sometimes they are occasionally downright wrong to the point where people like polar explorers or cartographers carry three - two are permanently switched on, and when they give a differing result the third is switched on to establish which one is right!

Microsoft delivers critical fixes for Windows, IE and Excel

Linux evangelists are all tw*ts.

I use linux myself at home, but people who live and breathe it and put posts on news sites about it are cocks who need to get a life.

PS to the fella above who can't find a distro that works on all hardware out of the box, try PCLOS - it's hardware detection is absolutely excellent, even things like my wireless adapter worked straight away.

UK VPN security is outstandingly mediocre

VPN

Unfortunately you get people who take VPN security too seriously. My workplace specifically ban my linux machine (or other people's Macs) from connecting to VPN because they can't be arsed to test whether IPTables is as good a firewall as the stateful firewall that comes with the windows-only version of the Cisco VPN client, so they set something that won't connect you if you aren't using it. This doesn't make an awful lot of sense to me, I suspect they're just lazy sods who can't be arsed to deal with anyone with the imagination to use a different platform at home. So unfortunately I have no choice but to pollute my home machine with windows and dual boot. Gits.

MS-DOS paternity suit settled

GEM

You don't need to have been a "fossil" to have used GEM - I'm 28 and it was the main UI on my Amstrad 1640 when I was a kid, along with an installation of Windows 1. I remember GEM was years ahead Windows at the time. I remember it had a really good DTP package as well, "Timeworks" or something...

Mobile device mayhem, or...

I don't think it's fair to call that "state of the nation"

I think if you surveyed non-register readers things like integrated cameras would be further up the list. My missis just picked her new phone based pretty much entirely on it having a 3mp camera. Daft - but unfortunately that's the sort of feature lots of people go for.

Microsoft strips Office from charity PC scheme

Not the end of the world.

No big deal - they can bundle them with Open Office instead. Be a good bit of publicity for open source.

Ebuyer in hard-drive warranty debacle

Ebuyer are a terrible vendor full stop - avoid.

That is all.

No end in sight for Vista's Long Goodbye

For God's sake LINUX espousing muppets shut up, you're spoiling it for all of us.

Why is it that every time I read any Microsoft related article in here there's always some pillock making snide "you should be using Linux then" type comments.

I've been using LINUX for years. That's my choice, and I like it, and to be honest for a lot of people on this site you'll be preaching to the converted anyway. If however I go to a LINUX forum and look at bug reports I don't see loads of comments to the effect of "you never get that in Windows." It's poor form, it's making the rest of us more moderate LINUX users look bad, and it's making you personally look like the sort of narrow minded twit that the open source movement could do without the support of. A bit like the standard clueless nit you always get propping up the pub bar opining about something he knows very little about to anyone that'll listen. If you don't like Microsoft products then fair enough, many of us don't - but surely that means you have no real opinion on Microsoft related stories?

Prats.