* Posts by Lamont Cranston

1555 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2010

Dogecoin off the leash after Doge Vault admits server attack

Lamont Cranston

Re: I am shocked and appalled....

Nonsense, the article style is just in keeping with the sub-head.

Urinating teen polluted 57 Olympic-sized swimming pools - cops

Lamont Cranston

Re: dead animals: yes

Relaxed sphincter or not, once that animal's dead and decomposing, the poo is going to find its way out, sooner or later.

Smash 'n' grab: Fighting GODZILLA in your lounge? Read this first

Lamont Cranston
Thumb Up

No need for anyone to make "the next Rampage".

It takes a lot of play for Rampage to get old, and it's dead simple to pick up and play.

Dixons and Carphone Warehouse confirm £3.7bn merger

Lamont Cranston

Re: Not just outdated...

They have a retro-styled "brick" phone for sale, now, which seems like an expensive, impractical novelty: http://www.carphonewarehouse.com/phone/other/the-brick

Stop bullying SUPER FAT GODZILLA, urge movie stars

Lamont Cranston
Go

Re: "aren't we all?"

Certainly not! My son has been busy trying to sort out the continuity between the (Hollywood) films, and explain why the new Godzilla is so different to the last one (he cried at the end of that).

Activist investors try forcing Google to pay more taxes

Lamont Cranston

Re: Interesting

@codejunky You seemed to have missed the middleground between "earn all the money and horde it for myself" and "do f*ck all and expect the state to care for me". I think most of us prefer to live there, but "fatcat bankers" and "benefit scroungers" make better news copy, so we get forgotten about.

Lamont Cranston
Joke

Re: "Dont take it from me, take it from him. He has more than me!!!".

Hey, there's an election, next week, and I haven't received my bribe. Could you let them know that I've been missed out?

Lamont Cranston

Re: Classic nonsense

Might encourage others to join in. Get enough of them, and it might make a difference. Has to be better than doing nothing, and they are at least putting their money where their mouths are.

Lamont Cranston
Stop

Re: "Dont take it from me, take it from him. He has more than me!!!".

I've always preferred "Take it from me, but please also ensure that a fair proportion is taken from him also. He may have more or less than me, so some sort of banded arrangment will probably be appropriate." I think this way, as I'm in favour of a sufficiently large state apparatus that is able to provide essential services (health, education, refuse collection, roads, and so on), ensuring that they are available to all, not just those with the means to pay for them at the point of need.

Mozilla agrees to add DRM support to Firefox – under protest

Lamont Cranston

Re: Easy

@Christian Berger I think Mozilla know that the users' action, on finding out that their video won't play, is not to contact the content provider, but to switch to a compliant browser.

Anonymous: Why we're PICKETING Glenn Greenwald's book tour

Lamont Cranston

Re: Agent Provocateur

Might be a child.

Moto E pops up with £89 price tag – alongside new LTE Moto G cuz

Lamont Cranston

I'm glad I put off upgrading.

I was hoping that the Moto G would shake up the market a bit, and the release of the E and the 4G G (hello, SD slot!) should force other manufacturers to raise their collective game.

It still beggars belief that Samsung have the Galaxy Ace out as their budget option, as it is a truly terrible device that deserves to get obliterated by the budget Motorolas.

Google Maps adds all UK public transport timetables

Lamont Cranston
Flame

Re: if you can't walk that, get a taxi!

If you can walk on to a earlier/later stop, you might as well. The bus will also be providing a service* to those who can't do that.

*well, it should be; no doubt it's been deemed to be unprofitable, and been cancelled.

Dogevault praying backups work after confirming attack

Lamont Cranston
Happy

Re: Cheezburger

Nice to hear that something good has come out of those stupid cat pictures!

Lamont Cranston

Re: Bravo chaps

I'm not entirely sure what Dogecoin is but, based on the subheads to these articles, I'm assuming that it's something for morons. The financial equivalent of Cheezburger, or somesuch.

Apple, Beats and fools with money who trust celeb endorsements

Lamont Cranston

Re: what are they going to do with them?

Keep both brands and MAKE ALL THE MONEY, I expect.

Lamont Cranston

Re: Limited bit rate?

People get excited about access to lots of music in a convenient, portable format. Quality hi-fi gear is a niche interest, and thus there's not a lot of incentive to cater to that market, other than to mug them for more of their disposable income with nonsense products.

Beats is successfull because their products are fashionable, not better than their competitors - a good fit for Apple, I should think.

I can't remember when I last listened to a CD - everything is streamed from Deezer, via my phone, hooked up to the car stereo. The quality may be terrible but 1) I can't tell (I don't own any premium hi-fi kit, and never have), and 2) I don't care.

Gigabyte Brix Pro: You don't need no steenkin' Xbox... when you have 4K-ing amazing graphics

Lamont Cranston

Re: Seems fairly pointless...

The small form factor is attractive to me, at least. I built my first PC, this year (about the size of a VHS player, replacing the mahoosive tower that I used to have), and a major motivation was to get the size down (and bring the spec up so I could play some more modern games).

What this Brix teaches me, is that I was probably wise not to go for the smallest possible case!

We'd switch mobile networks, but we can't be bothered – survey

Lamont Cranston

Re: I have a little list...

From the small amount of research I did when renewing my contract with Orange, Tesco Mobile apparently throttle off the connection if you're streaming large quantities of data (no idea if that's true or not).

What the frag? Earn millions as the world watches you SLAY rivals

Lamont Cranston
WTF?

How the world has changed!

I can remember visiting my mate and watching him play the latest releases on his BBC Micro - not sure I'd have stood for it if he'd charged for the privilege!

Mozilla axes HATED Firefox-ad-tab plan ... but will try again

Lamont Cranston
Coat

Third stage: ???

Fourth Stage: PROFIT!!!

Lamont Cranston
Go

Re: Am I the last person on Earth...

Sounds fair. Afterall, plenty of "free" phone apps have a "donate 69p to disable ads" option (I've even used it for games that I've actually enjoyed).

UK's pirate-nagging VCAP scheme WON'T have penalties – report

Lamont Cranston
WTF?

Re: Japan has it right

Yeah, just last week I was walking home from work when some chav in a hoodie sidled up to me and offered me a download.

Lamont Cranston
Thumb Up

Re: I dont agree with piracy

Very much this. I've been digitising my DVD collection, of late*, and I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that it'd be considerably easier to just comb the web for the appropriate torrents. The existence of UltraViolet suggests that the industry are capable of acting on this, but that's along way off of being a comprehensive solution.

*whack it on the NAS, watch it anywhere in the house - really wish I'd started sooner.

Lamont Cranston
Go

"I say, would you stop doing that, please?"

Followed by a "Paddington Bear stare".

A rather British solution.

Vinyl-fetish hipsters might just have a point

Lamont Cranston

Damn, that was an annoying trick!

Almost as bad was the trick of hiding tracks before the first, so you had to skip the CD down to -1, or whatever, which wasn't always possible, depending on hardware.

If it's something worth hearing, include it on the album proper - if not, just leave it off, and save it for a b-side.

Carphone Warehouse, Dixons embroiled in £3.7bn merger rumour

Lamont Cranston

I was in Carphone Warehouse, during lunch,

where the staff were refereshingly non-pushy ("you could buy this, but you probably wouldn't like it") - how are they going to explain this to the Currys sales-droids?

How Google's Android Silver could become 'Wintel for phones'

Lamont Cranston

Silver-certified handsets for the wealthy (fighting it out with Apple),

Cyanogenmod-certified handsets for the techie. Nokia can probably pick-up the remainder (poor people and non-conformists need phones too!).

Sounds OK to me, particularly the part that promises death to the Android overlays.

Not hard to imagine it all going catastrophically wrong, though.

Ouch... right in the Androids! Google hit by another antitrust sueball

Lamont Cranston
FAIL

"...not achieved this monopoly through offering a better search engine"

Except that's exactly how Google made its way to a monopoly position. I wouldn't argue against the case that Google is cementing its position by having its own services baked in to Android (in much the same way as Microsoft tied Windows to Internet Explorer), but Google became number one in search by being better at it than everyone else.

Behold! World's smallest 3D-printer pen Lix artists into shape – literally

Lamont Cranston

Kids might well love this.

But how am I supposed to attach a 3d sketch to the fridge?

Stone the crows, Bouncer! BT defends TV recorder upgrade DELETION snafu

Lamont Cranston

Re: I have a silver one

If it weren't for its dependance on an approved internet connection, I'd have liked to have kept my old silver Vision box. Much better than everything I've used since. Massive, though!

Lamont Cranston
Thumb Up

Re: TVHeadEnd

I might have to give this another go (tried to get it going on my old Mint box, but the tuner card wouldn't play nice with Linux), as I've been using RaspMC to watch ripped DVDs and it really is a very nice piece of software. Every Freeview box/PVR that I've used has sufficient faults to put me off ever purchasing another one (I really want to like the TVonics box that I bought a couple of years ago, but it's depressingly prone to freezing up).

Quid-a-day Reg nosh posse chap faces starvation diet

Lamont Cranston

Re: Think 3rd world...

Not in the UK, they don't! No guns (for the most part), bow and arrow is illegal for hunting purposes, and we're not allowed to run things over on purpose. That only leaves trapping, and most of us wouldn't know where to start.

Anyone fancy wrestling a deer to death?

Lamont Cranston

Re: I often

Take some of the stuff out of your freezer, and eat it for lunch? Unless you're stockpiling for the inevitable collapse of society...

Google Glass teardown puts rock-bottom price on hardware

Lamont Cranston

Re: Does it matter?

Finding out what is inside the device, and what they cost, is just curiosity - there's no harm in looking. I think it was made pretty clear in the article that the determination of the BOM was not a passing of judgement on the retail price.

Google in NOT EVIL shocker: Bins student email ad scanning

Lamont Cranston
Joke

It's bad enough that my Council Tax gets spent on local schools,

now the ad revenue that I generate for Google is being spent on them, too!

Google forges a Silver bullet for Android, aims it at Samsung's heart

Lamont Cranston

Re: storm in a tea-cup (@ M Gale)

I'd contend that a great many people neither know, nor care, which version of Android their device is running. After 2-3 years, their contract renews, and they get a new handset from their network operator.

Conversely, the subset of the population that posts on these forums, is probably very interested. Pop the Silver brand on a low end Galaxy, and ask me to pony up a few extra quid in return for a less shit phone - I'd be interested!

BBC hacks – tweet the crap out of the news, cries tech-dazzled Trust

Lamont Cranston

Re: Actually...

Was encouraging "answers on a postcard" part of a sinister plot to put money in the pocket of the Royal Mail?

Lamont Cranston
Unhappy

Re: Tabloid

I make a point of not watching TV news, as I almost always end up angry about something when I do, so prefer to get mine from the radio (probably due to the style of reporting, I dunno). This preference for radio is probably why, if I do choose to watch TV news, I'd much rather have a sensible presenter/reporter, talking about the subject, rather than a whizzy infographic. If BBC News goes infographic-heavy, it's basically losing its USP, at least in my eyes.

Dell charges £5 to switch on power-saving for new PCs (it takes 5 clicks)

Lamont Cranston
Happy

Re: OH NOES THINK OF THE CHILDREN

I think my opinion of car mechanics has been soured, ever since I bought a Service Plan from Ford. Everytime I took the car in for its service, they would offer to top up the washer fluid (for some extravagant fee). Anyone who has bothered to look under the bonnet, would know that there is no need for this, so I can only assume that Ford, like Dell in this case, were seeking to profit off of the ignorance of their customers by carrying out unnecessary work. I'm not a massive fan of that sort of practice, and so am generally in favour of the light of publicity being shone on such things, so that the general public may become more aware.

Lamont Cranston
Facepalm

Re: OH NOES THINK OF THE CHILDREN

Yes, and when the mechanically ignorant take their car to the mechanic, and he makes up a load of unnecessary work to bill them for, they should be happy to pay because it's good for the economy.

DeSENSORtised: Why the 'Internet of Things' will FAIL without IPv6

Lamont Cranston

Re: the lightbulb moment...

Couldn't help but assume that we're all going to get so fat that reaching up to flick the lightswitch will be beyond us, and that the (IPv6 compatible) lightbulb will automatically order a replacement for itself when it's about to die - and then you'll find out exactly how many technicians it takes to change a lightbulb.

Wall-E was a documentary, right?

TalkTalk's catch-up telly fib silenced by ad watchdog

Lamont Cranston

Re: a catchup for Dave?

Sure there is - Dave the next day/week/month/year, until the end of time.

Lamont Cranston
Joke

Re: Hang on.

It'd be nice to think that a collaborative effort, like the YouView consortium, could get their act together and tag the relevant content for local recording.

Lamont Cranston

Re: Hang on.

Thanks for clearing that up, Lazlo. Looks like I'm going to have to side with TalkTalk on this - the complainants are idiots.

Lamont Cranston

Hang on.

If YouView doesn't give you access to iPlayer/itvPlayer/4OD/Demand5 via scrolling back through the EPG, what does it do?

Zuck talks up mobile shift as Facebook money mill rolls on

Lamont Cranston

Someone must be clicking on all those ads.

Not likely to be anyone from here, though.

Judging by the ads I get served up, facebook appears to have moved on from "you're looking to get laid" to "you're fat". Can't say I'm particularly delighted by their profiling of me.

Happy 25th birthday, Game Boy!

Lamont Cranston

Re: latency of the LCD screen

This is a good point. I got hold of my sister-in-law's old GameBoy, a couple of years back, with the intent of giving it to the kids - ditched it sharpish when I found that playing Mario (or anything that involved moving scenery) just turned the screen into an indistinct blur.

Having read the comments on here, I'm starting to wonder if I could have done something to make it better, now. Ho hum.

Slip your finger in this ring and unlock your backdoor, phone, etc

Lamont Cranston

NFC enabled door locks sound great,

until you get locked in/out during a powercut.

Dell Wyse Cloud Connect: Pocket Android desktop

Lamont Cranston

Even as a lower-power corporate desktop

a Pi seems like a better choice.