Posts by Furbian 185 posts • joined 13 Feb 2010
... and yet its share price has been in the toilet for years, worst investment I have made in the last ten years, and the only loss I'll book since if the takeover is finalised. That's from £11 in 2016 to £5.50 today,
My sadness at ARM's passing was tempered by having been a longer term investor in paying off well just weeks after the Brexit vote. Oh the Brexit angle, I'll leave that to someone else to state "Dan Ridsdale, analyst at Edison Investment Research, said "An increase in inbound merger and acquisition activity was one of the obvious consequences of Brexit and weakened sterling, but few expected it to manifest itself so quickly or at so large a scale."". Oh and didn't vote out.
Once this is implemented, will they issue advertisement and programme makers a guide so as to avoid the lines like:-
"You going out? Turn the TV off before you leave"
"This TV Offer is out of this world"
"I used to watch TV often when I had nothing better to do"
"Get that TV off my foot, it hurts"
etc. ad infinitum
I have no idea if 'TV Off' already exists, my Samsung 59" TV is dumb and defective (they won't fix it, despite confirming warranty via an e-mail they doubt they sent), and my Smart (semi?) 65" Hi-sense has no ears to listen with.
Well that's pretty it that, I can't even if I wanted to. In the meantime I use fasthosts, not for hosting but just for domain management, and it's been OK, I get reminders when a card is about to expire, I update the details and life carries on. Actually that reminds me, it was updating an expired card on Google Checkout (as it was back then) that caused the Google block in the first place, if you're bored, you can read about it here :- http://furbian.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/my-google-walletplaycheckoutwhatever.html
Oh I've been using Amazon App store since for paid apps, which is OK apart from most Apps needing a wi-fi connection to work, i.e. no using most Amazon Apps on a flight etc.
EE, and now I've discovered 3 as well, shops do not appear to have the authority to do anything at all, other than sell you a phone. Any problem? 'Ring our Indian call centre', who will then, allegedly, authorise a repair or exchange but will argue to death to avoid doing so, expect to waste an hour on the phone. On the rare occasion they agree to an action and if you go back to the shop as instructed (sometimes they arrange a collection) the shop staff have no idea and refuse, for example in my case, to accept a return (for repair). Ring back and they'll tell you oh they should have! They behave like two companies, one with shop fronts here, and the other an Indian half, that barely know how the other works and with the Indian half conveniently holding the balance of power, out of reach in effect. Rubbish service from all providers, that lead me to go Pay as you go, which has saved me a packet, buy the phone for £400 and paying for calls has saved me loads, my monthly call/data spend has been less than £5.
They could run an ad campaign featuring probably the most famous EE product, the Lightening, and claim their broadband/mobile network is 'Lightening Fast' (as an ex-customer though I can testify that it is NOT), but then who would recognise an EE Lightening in this day and age. I am definitely too old for this...
... is a great worse, though the physical scars of my schooling are largely long gone, I haven't quiet forgotten the beatings. That's 'darker' skin colour, obviously. Not many have ever picked on my obesity and in the career I eventually had, both factors had little if any influence, though starting the career was a nigh on impossible task in the first place.
Quite literally, maybe they all pulled out from their deals with Phones 4u a few weeks ago precisely so they could pick up the stores on the cheap. Quite like someone doing a lot of hard work in introducing someone to a client they have good relationship with, only for the introduced party to go around the chaps back and make a deal with the client themselves, i.e. cut out the middle man. The ones who pay the price in this case are the workers left without a job. Naked capitalism as its worst, though I'm no advocate of communism either (i.e. DPRK, no thanks).
Which is why I mentioned a 'CD' (for those not savvy enough to be able to cover their tracks on-line)... then again with CCTV's everywhere, maybe they'll see who posted it, could be a bit tricky if one drops it in a post box in the centre of a large city though.
Wasn't there a campaign sometime back to have an encrypted file sent to your MP, and to then tell the Police to investigate them for being up to no good? The MP's would then claim not to know the password, and since they have the e-mail or CD in their possession, they would be guilty of not supplying the password. Would have been fun to send encrypted copies of their expenses as an MP, for the irony of it.
Agreed, and looking at the share price, I got out just after the Verizon deal was completed, it's continually heading southwards towards less than £2 (£2.05 today). Even if it did end up at £1.90 I'd still be wary of buying it again. One has to wonder what their management has 'planned', if anything.
This is the same company that was busy using its Google camera cars to grab people's home wi-fi details, illegally, and now it claims to be acting in the interest of net users? It's not, it's a commercial company that operates for the sake of its own profit margins, which is after all its purpose, including that hyped up marketing slogan 'Don't be evil', read 'YOU don't be evil, but we can snoop away, avoid tax as much tax as possible etc."
No doubt being an American company it will oblige the NSA with a good number of back-doors, rather than risk its wrath (underhand or otherwise) in Google's primary market. Probably given up on China for good, or that 10% share is probably what they're desperately trying to cling on to so that they can maintain a toe hold there.
Iwas loaned a QL a few years after it had lost most of its value and about a year before the Atari ST as widely available, so I did at least get to enjoy using it. Superbasic really was quite nice compared to what I had on my Spectrum. But those darn Microdrives, awful from beginning to end. Could write a chapter on my Spectrum Microdrive odyssey, finally ending with the Opus Discovery One 3.5" disk drive expansion box, with £6 blank floppies which were just so much more reliable.
Why are apps allowed to be downloaded with in app purchases enabled? They should also ship their devices with in app purchasing off by default. Odd that they don't, maybe they know they make more money, even after the refunds, buy not doing so.
My two pences worth, we were caught out early a year ago, £25 of purchases were made before the plug was pulled, Apple refunded it.
As for consumer rights, Google locked me out when I updated an expired card, unless I hand over a copy of my passport. I switched to Amazon app store instead. May as well troll my experience:-
http://furbian.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/my-google-walletplaycheckoutwhatever.html
Tell them I have Linux, these leaves them befuddled and they hang up quickly. In reality I have a few Linux Virtual Machines, but my main OS is Windows 7.
Another one I do for fun, tell them I built my PC, this also results in a quick hang up, i.e. "Yes, it's very simple, bought a case, motherboard CPU and memory, and put it all together...".
Last but not least, "YES, I am really having trouble, can you just wait a minute.", then leave phone near a TV or some source of music, repeat as long as it's fun, i.e. "with you in a jiffy, just hang on, really interested", or they hang up.
For quite some time, getting our PS3 out of HDMI mode meant just pressing 'on' for a few seconds that made its display output reset to default, quite important when you took it to a friend's and that didn't have a 1080p display.
The Xbox 360? If you forgot to change it before taking it, you had to look up the sequence required to change the display type, i.e. the d-pad actions required to access the systems menu and change the display. Don't know if they ever introduced a display fall-back, it was still needed as recently as last year :-
power the console on using the guide button on a controller and wait for a minute
press up on the dpad
press right 6 times
press down once
press A 3 times
press down 4 times
press A twice to enable display discovery
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"97m-and-counting in taxpayer money will have been written-off as the software currently being used by just 2,000 benefit claimants"
That's £48,000 per claimant. Dole at about £50 a week costs £2600 per claimant a year, wouldn't it be cheaper to let them claim as they are doing currently? It's not as if they get it for nothing, job centres are quite adept at sanctioning those they think are not doing enough to get a job.
Anyone else, bar a banker maybe, loosing that sort of money would lose a lot more than their job, probably their liberty too by landing in jail. Seems like being a minister, elected democratically by the people for the people of-course, is the ultimate form of Limited Liability Company, even your job is immune from being touched, for at-least five years whilst you rake in some decent dough on a generous MP's wage until the next election. If voted out, you can then get some cushy job paying over £100k a year working a few days a week, if that, advising, more often than not, a bank, as one now has inside knowledge of government to 'help' their new employer, i.e. how get into government projects guaranteed to be cash cows, even if they are doomed to failure from the start. Nice.
Absolutely. Though the launch PS3 we bought very early on, within weeks of release whilst abroad, before it was released in the UK, is till with us today, though if Sony think I'm going to rush out and buy a PS4, disposing of software library at the drop of a hat, or keep both, well they're wrong.
Xbox 360, the current one is the 5th (or is it 6th? lost count) one. Having said that it's Kinect sibling is now in it's second year, no issues there. Again, Xbox 1? Nah, too many unfinished Xbox 360 games too.
A year down the line, We'll see if there's any compelling game that necessitates a purchase, in the mean time, my PC with a Radeon 7870 and a 30" 2560x1600 monitor made it the choice machine to play Skyrim and the Dragon Age series on.
I was weaned on a ZX81, and learnt Z80 assembler back in '81.... now some 30 + years on, yesterday, I was at a Russell Group university, assisting students and marking their assignments, in, wait for it, assembler (not telling which processor! might give away the 'where'), and I do get this feeling that year on year the intake is getting worse, though the grade requirement is rising. For the first time I had a batch of them who could not understand what an unconditional branch was, despite my bringing up an example in front of them.. just one anecdote of the several I have.
Might as well add my two pence's worth. Wife's 15" HP had a display failure just outside the 1 year warranty. Ordered a £18 inverter, opened up screen bezel, bit of pain. Noticed a magnet had managed to fall out of a nearby slot (inside the bezel) and land on the inverter, put the magnet back with some glue, all fixed, the inverter I bought wasn't used. Then about half a year later, noisy CPU fan, dies. Buy this for £15, cheap, but taking it apart wasn't good, a few clip lug broken and had to remove the entire board to get to the fan. Two years on it still works, given to relatives recently.
My HP Envy 17, over 1k's worth of laptop, two years on, begins to overheat, with BIOS telling me of fan failure. So opening time again, resent that I had to get the board out, i.e. near full tear down, to clear out heat sink and fan (during a holiday!), but it was quite easy to take apart and re-assemble, no clips and lugs like the 15" one.
My Sony Xperia Z, a glue up job, that's meant to be 'water resistant'. Well despite all port covers checked as closed, some water did get in to mess up the power switch. So now I'm toying with the idea of opening it, but heat gun? I've decided to stick to using a soft button to get around the problem instead.
.. oh right, the European part of Turkey is Turkey occupying someone, care to mention who? The Bulgarians? They're awfully quiet about wanting it. Long memory you have too, Istanbul only having being established some 560 years ago.
Last but not least, if Turkey shouldn't be NATO due not bordering the North Atlantic, what part of Greece is anywhere near it? Or for that matter Austria, Italy, Romania etc. are? Best of all is Cyprus, which lies further from any European country than most of Asian Turkey.
As for the main article, Turkey in the EU? Never in a million years, too racist and bigoted, with a few notable exceptions. Judging by the postings here, most don't even appear to consider them as being human, but some sort of lower sub-species, in all but name.
My daughter's iPad was sold pending an upgrade to an iPad 2, however she started university; taking notes and editing them in lectures became a priority. I thought about this and bought her a Lenovo X201 12" Laptop. It fits in her large hand bag, and she can watch the umpteen videos in odd formats she has on it straight off VLC, can run Matlab etc.
Eventually though she did get iPad mini as well, as she enjoys the convenience, but that laptop was boon.
My needs were completely different, sold my iPad (a gift) after a few months and bought a HP Envy 17 (Windows 7) instead, which I've had ever since. Admittedly it breaks my back when I carry it to work every now and again on my bike, but it has served me well. Now someone has given me an old iPad as a present again. Installed 'Badland' on it, and I really am quite enjoying it, to sell or not to sell...
My phone's an Sony Xperia Z, which I can take notes on reasonably well using Swype, though I've never written or edited a document on it, then again I've never needed to.
Useless stats, of the per 100k of population you'd be surprised how many toddlers can't use electronic devices. Under 13's (the bulk of the population in poorer countries) aren't even meant to have facebook accounts, assuming that they have access to internet in the first place.
More useful would have been be what proportion of internet users (or better still facebook users) have had their data requested by a government agency.
India has an internet penetration of just 13% (152m) whereas the UK's is 87% (54m users).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users)
You could stick about 128K or more of data in there.. maybe that's why they trashed the graphics card.
Yes I'm being sarcastic, just in case some Daily Fail reader thought that 128K or so is enough to stick anything worthwhile on, or that the Guardian tech staff would be clever enough to use a graphic card's firmware area in that way. Rest of it just looks like pure mindless vandalism. Oh no, hold that thought, the motherboard's BIOS could also be flash with 'stuff' though getting the data out if it's a surface mount BIOS (most are) could be one heck of a challenge.
Pay for Skype and DVR content? No thanks, we can already get these services for free through a multitude of devices, a Sky HD box, Freeview, a Freesat HD Box and number of PC's tablets and smartphones.
As for 4k HD, well there aren't that many HD channels to start with (no I don't pay a Sky subscription so that I can watch re-runs of stuff that I already have on DVD and Blu Ray, and prefer a weekly cinema visit and the odd budget blu ray purchase), so not holding my breath on that one.
As for even pricier Xbox Live, I'm already paying about 65 quid a year for two subs for my offspring, however as they have now exhausted the Halo series, they've now switched to PS3 on-line titles that are free to play. They'll be no renewals.
Let's see where the Xbox 1 and PS4 get to in a years times, barring some stunning games, I can't see what these have to offer over the Xbox 360, Kinnect and PS3 we already have. With the recent news that MS are going to 'overclock' the Xbox 1, it does remind me that our Xbox died no less than 5 times. The first of these deaths and the subsequent lengthy repair wait meant that we bought a PS3. That was in early in 2007, that PS3 still works fine, and doesn't 'need' 'replacing' with a PS4 yet, or for quite some time. 'Replacing' as the new consoles are not backwards compatible.
Having close relatives geographically dispersed means that I am in effect travelling from home to home, I was searched when returning to Britain, and I was revealed to be carrying some curtains, and a bin lid (it was a pricey Brabantia one). That caused some minor amusement.
Later I was asked to bring a pressure cooker back, as we had two, and one was redundant (technically both are, one is used for cooking without the top), I refused, as they're two a penny where I was being asked to take it, and I didn't fancy being asked why I was carrying it. Then I was told oh not to worry, they'll probably go through it anyway, and find it empty (apart from clothes stuffed in it), to which I made the point, look what happened in the US, problem is what one can do with it afterwards.
So recently someone wishes to take an elderly relative up to some mountain range, I point out that the air is quite thin and not good for him, and the air pressure is lower than it is in an aircraft, said relative having ruled out air travel. So I'm busy googling aircraft cabin pressures to get the figures right (yes I was right), but in the back of my mind there was a worry over which spook/program would be sitting there monitoring what I was googling...
As a chap whose parents came from a supposedly unenlightened area of the world which is supposed to be bad for women, I was quite sold on the idea of 'relative' gender equality here. Find it amazing that so many chaps were so offended by a woman on a note, don't get it one bit. Something new one learns every day.
As for my reaction, told my undergrad daughter about it with some amusement, her desire to study English literature was thwarted by bureaucratic incompetence and (exam board) bone headedness, this was ironic, as it went against the racial stereotype, i.e. girl of ethnic origin wants to do something, parents support it, equality thumping society blocks it, as opposed to girls wants to do something, parents beat girl into submission, society was waiting with open arms for her.
Anyway I would have preferred Agatha Christie, and why did they take Florence Nightingale off anyway?
... might even decided that rather then just using a such a device to replace defective bits with healthy bits, he could also rid all those who he considers to be followers of an 'evil' ideology of their beliefs by changing bits of their in the process.
It could be marketed as a 'Prevent' mark 2.
It would have been nice for Intel and AMD to have a new rival on the block, especially a British one. However using Windows 8 on my desktop put me right off the whole thing, tablets included. If the RT was cheap to start with, it may have had an impact, but it's too late now, the price cuts looks like a stock offload, it IS a stock offload.
Indeed, bending your elbow, angling it, which is what the whole article focus's on is not just illegal in modern cricket but will get you labelled a 'chucker' the worst of worst cricketing insults. It will cause a diplomatic incident with country whose bowler is alleged to have done this, referral to the authorises to examine the bowler's bowling action and then result in the chap having to have training to remedy his 'action' or medical tests to prove that he's (possibly she, but I've yet to hear of a lady 'chucker') double jointed.
Oh cricket vs baseball, the cricket ball, being made of cork wrapped in leather really really hurts if it hits you, one floored me for a good ten minutes one when it hit me in the ...
Thank you for a genuinely useful post! I had messed around with Stardock stuff, but it was always cumbersome and some themes, though nice, would glitch our here and there, and my worst foible is (was?) that I do actually like Aero, even on Vista, it was so nice that I tired to get 3rd party apps on XP to mimic it, but they were a poor substitute. Then Windows 7 came and I was impressed with the speed and the improvements were excellent.
I'd over looked shells since then, so now I've installed Classic Explorer, with Windows 7 style selected. Seeing an ordered version of old Programs menu is a welcome return.
Oh Windows 8? As a developer I've found it to be a downright nuisance, so after three months of use on a secondary machine, I've disposed of it. Oh and I don't like Unity for Ubuntu either, feels like a copy of MacOS, but nowhere near as bad as Windows 8. The solution for the Linux machine was simple, I switched to Mint.
Well I broke the DRM on some music I downloaded from a free service (now defunct) so I could put them on my iPhone. Apparently that's just as bad as shoplifting a DVD, according to those ads, as copyright infringement is 'theft'. In fact they should also include a chap at a photocopier having copied 11 pages of a 100 page book, as apparently you're allowed to copy 10% of a book in this manner.
Anyway with Prism etc. on the prowl, why they don't just ask GCHQ instead, I am sure they (or the CIA if the info isn't to hand) have plenty... no need to shop your family, neighbours and friends, Middle East dictatorship style.
... well that's it really. Gave Windows 8 a spin (3 months on a secondary machine), and Office 2013 too, didn't like either, yes I'm a retard according to Windows 8 fans, though they could tell me how it would help me write Rails, Javascript and PHP applications better, and no I'm not going to Linux for my main machine, or any form of Mac (though a lot of fellow developers I know do use it, but again not for me).
So They can roll out Blue, Green, etc. ad infinitum, I just don't care Maybe next year, if it offers something new and useful.
.. those Culture novels are almost (bar 2 others) the only fiction I've read over six years, or rather the only reason I read fiction after Frank Herbert's works. The Sci Fi excursions from the Culture universe, Against a Dark Background and The Algebraist were excellent too.
He will be missed.
I for one would look forward to Mr. Hurt as the doctor. I envisage 3 paths. 'Alien - Kane', 12th Time Lord is the thing that bursts out, starts killing all civilisation with the Tardis, even the Dalek turn into refugees, that enter an alliance with the humans. 'V for Vendetta - Sutler', comes to Earth takes over the 3rd Reich, leads it to victory, humans then spread through the galaxy, 'purifying' it in a reign of tyranny, not unlike 'In a mirror, darkly – Enterprise’. Last but not least, '1984 Winston' captured and brainwashed by Ingsoc, isn’t sure if he’s with the Daleks or against them, ends up wiping out humanity with them, realises this to be a mistake, gets rid of Dalek’s and Cybermen too, more atonement and just making sure. Ends up sad and lonely, shoots self, expressing love for Big Brother.
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