
Re: Watch Your Backs
"Short people can be very dangerous and we should always watch out backs for those willing to lie for a living. The current poster boy for this being our favourite Russian dictator."
There, FTFY ;)
100 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2009
You just reminded me of the guy on the Apprentice UK recently. They had a focus group for their kids toothbrush which consisted of 1 boy and 4 girls. When asked who liked it, only the boy put his hand up. Nick then presented this to the other contestants as 100% of the boys liked it. That then became "50% of their demographic", then eventually 100% of their demographic somehow.
Lying bastard.
I bought a Samsung Chromebook a few years ago that I use occasionally. Fired it up last year to find it was EOL. On the other hand I have a 17 year old windows laptop still going strong on windows 10.
When I have time I might put Linux on the Chromebook, but I have no intention of ever buying another one it's just not worth it.
I remember in a previous role one day all the touchscreens on our customers' machines failed. After a bit of decompiling I found that the mouse driver scanned through the BIOS looking for a specific pattern of byte values, which it then used as an offset to read the serial port settings. Of course on that particular day the date matched the pattern, and just happened to be located a few bytes before the pattern the driver was looking for. We told the customers that we would push out a fix overnight, although we might have omitted to tell them it would happen again in 20-odd years...
I too liked Maplin, and would regularly buy from them at bargain prices compared to Currys and Amazon. Things such as Philips Hue bulbs, SmartThings devices, wifi access points and the like. Amazon regularly price-matched them, which the will no longer need to do.
I know it's fashionable now to slag off Maplin, and yes some of their prices were ludicrous, but they were no more guilty of it than any other retailer, and there were plenty of bargains to be had if you did your homework. It saddens me that even el reg has nothing better to offer than write articles like this; it's just lazy journalism to be honest and wouldn't be out of place in the likes of the Daily Mail.
Just wait until Amazon have a stranglehold on online retailing, then you will see their real face I do not trust them one bit with their prime-only deals, and their policy of banning you and your family for life if you take advantage of your legal rights under the distance-selling regulations once too often.
From my experience they sell quite a lot of items at better prices than Amazon or Currys, and they pay decent cashback rates and give out plenty of decent vouchers. I will miss them if they go, and so will everyone else here. Less choice = higher prices.
( ...and don't get me started on ebay tat... I remember laughing at my colleague who insisted £1 ebay hdmi cables were as good as any other because "they're all just digital connections". He ended up buying a mid-priced one like the rest of us )
“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen.”
Back on topic, I imagine it was just some poor software engineer who decided on an over-simplistic solution that if you couldn't communicate with the secure element then the phone was compromised and should not boot, not thinking that there might be legitimate reasons for the fault and a more complex solution was required. Why does it have to be anything more sinister than that?
It doesn't automatically detect the language tho does it? At least mine doesn't. You have to select which 2 languages are being spoken.
And the instant camera translation thing requires you to snap a picture and then highlight the bit you want translated. From the description it sounded like augmented reality but it isn't.
Dunno about google, but facebook certainly do this. They pilfer your friends' contact lists from your their phones the moment they install the facebook app.
Also, make sure you log out of facebook when you finish with it, otherwise they track you as you browse the web whenever you go to a website that has a facebook like button.
If you switch off your reality distortion field for a moment you would find that most top end android phones also keep their resale value.
Given that I probably spend half as much money for my similarly-speced phone than you, and can get a decent sim-only deal that gives me unlimited calls and data fro less than half what you pay, then I would say you are not saving as much money as you believe.
And I've been using the industry standard DLNA to play content off my phone (and other DLNA servers) on my tv (and other DLNA players) for as long as airplay has been around. So what's your point exactly?
Edit: And a quick google reveals that Google Wallet has allowed android users in the USA to pay for stuff by NFC for the last 2 years. So instead of Apple lending their support to the current payment scheme, they have decided to do their own thing again, and managed to hoodwink everyone into thinking it is somehow new and revolutionary.