Re: I am shocked and appalled....
Nonsense, the article style is just in keeping with the sub-head.
1555 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2010
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.