Posts by Tharglet

Voyager 1 now 20 BEEEELLION KMs from the Sun

Re: l33t

You rang?

RBS collapse details revealed: Arrow points to defective part

Re: Well I'm closing my accounts at RBS.

I have a bank account with Nationwide. Had a problem with my account and their customer service left a lot to be desired. Not entirely trusting of their backend.

Blizzard ponders World of Warcraft for iPad

FoTM class

So for whichever class is FoTM, do they get a special iPad gesture of rolling their face against the screen to win all fights?

Re: Class selection

That one's for portals. Obviously.

World of Warcraft bot ban ticks off world of critics

Actually...

... recently someone did get legal action taken against them for using someone else's membership card ¬¬.

Amusingly, the company was defrauded out of.... 2p.

Auction for failed games developer hit by DDoS attack

Maybe...

... it was organised by the people who were playing APB... those would be the first in my investigation ¬¬

Microsoft's KIN goes to hell: Site offers comfort

ForeverMised

Nice to see they proofread their pull-down message.

Was sort of confused why "mised" was the name for the site... til I noticed it was a typo XD.

'The internet's completely over', declares petulant Prince

Downloads vs CDs

I'd certainly buy more legitimate downloads if they were consistently cheaper than the CD. Quite often the download is the same price/more than the CD, so I might as well express about 2 days of patience and have the thing delivered. Then file the "backup" somewhere safe.

I don't care if I'm not supposed to rip my own discs (lawlol) - if I'm not sharing the files (which I don't) then nobody should really care what I do with them.

Debenhams wows shoppers with free delivery offer

Debenhams

Not really with it on the online stuff.

Used their wedding system when someone recommended it - I sure never will. Site borked up setting up the list, took several calls to sort it, and had to wait for the store to do a *manual* process too.

Site was then awkward to add to/edit the list.

When we got the stuff, after they rearranged the delivery slot, despite it being booked and they had a PLANNED absence that made them reschedule, a picture frame was missing, and we had an item from someone else's list!! Names on the card attached to the gift weren't ours!

Compare this to Amazon, where setting up the list took about 5-10 mins, adding things was a breeze, and all the stuff that was bought from that list was delivered. OK, it's not one delivery, but wasn't an issue for us.

Only reason I had the Debenham's list was for people who didn't have internet could buy us things.

Collect from store is usually possible with bricks + mortar retailers, in my experience. Pointless to me with Debenham's as there's none for miles. Not really free delivery if it's delivery to store NOT house.

OMFG, what have you done?

If you wanted fixed...

... why couldn't it be the grey banners instead? OK, they do make the content panel look a little prettier, but on the larger resolutions they do look bad. And, I for one, generally prefer reading longer lines.

And the comments are fixed and an even smaller width, which looks rather odd to me.

Site has horizontal scrollbar when in small form too, or at least does for comments. The webdev toolbar tells me my viewport is 847x465 (Contrary to popular belief, sometimes some of us do browse the web in a shrunken window.... ).

Vodafone says termination rate clampdown would hit the poor

So every Aaron, Adam, Abi etc...

... could end up paying a significant amount for pocket calls...

Not every call you don't want comes from numbers you don't know ;).

Mozilla plugs 10 security holes in Firefox

Updates

I'm amazed about the number of people complaining about browser updates.

Not had any problems with FF since the last upgrade myself, and the upgrades never take very long. If I'm busy I'll wait til I'm going away from the desk for a minute, click the button, then by the time I get back, it's done. Admittedly, I suppose it could be tedious if you have to do this a lot of times, but then again, MSIE's updates come in the dreaded windows updater anyway.

I'm a Firefox user as I find it much better to use, compared to IE. Between FF2 and IE7 I haven't noticed a huge difference in speed on XP. (IE6 was faster, but effectively does less). At the end of the day *I* prefer Firefox, but if you want to prefer IE/Opera/Safari/Netscape/Lynx... *shrug*.

I find the added functionality of addons and the layout of the browser the main deciding factors, however I find FF's rendering generally better in quality over IE.

Microsoft cuts Vista price

Vista vs XP

On my home machine I use XP, but have (briefly) used a Vista machine. For the day-to-day things that I do, it would not be worth upgrading - there is close to zero improvements as far as I'm concerned. Maybe if it worked properly with my two monitors it'd be nice. And if alt-tabbing from a game would keep it maximised (though the two games I play most have a windowed mode). For the improvements I've seen, I'd say £20-30 at best.

Any lockups I've had as of late are heat-related, which would crash any OS I should imagine. So no benefits there.

Even if Vista installed flawlessly on my machine I would gain nothing. I don't bother upgrading my phone, as it does everything I need it to right now, so I don't see why I should upgrade my OS which does most of what I want right now.

RIAA chief calls for copyright filters on PCs

I have a plan....

....so every time I want to get someone in trouble, I encrypt (or get an encrypted mp3) and send it to an unsuspecting person, who then has the unfortunate luck of unencrypting it.

And due to how instant this software claims to be, there'll be sirens at their door in no time...

Mine's the one with the mp3 playing taser in the pocket...

100Mbit/s sewer broadband rollout coming your way

Excuse me...

... I'm just going to go and make an upload to the internet...

Though it'll be a good long while before they have it where I live...

US woman launches 'Taserware' parties

Tasering self

And how long will it be before more I-tasered-myself stories hit the internet?

How many of them do you think will have read the story about the guy (with his cat onlooking) who did just that?

Maybe we'll be lucky to have a Darwin Award contender soon...

Now, where did I put my foil suit with a trailing cape, and wellies?

Asus dropped hard disk from Eee PC at eleventh hour

Not just the camera....

... but the EEE PC looks like it's also photoshopped into the pic - look at her hand and the lighting around the edges of the laptop.

Biometrics won't fix data loss problems

Biometric data

What's protecting the biometric data? What happens when someone gets the hashes/pictures/etc of the fingerprints, matched up to owners, then uses that data? There's still data to be lost/misappropriated/stolen/faked.

What I would like to know, is if they make the readers accurate, would that argument I once had with a blunt pen knife render me unrecognisable for a week?

What biometrics are they planning on using for people with no hands? There would have to be more than one biometric system in place to cater for that, but most biometric things I've seen either concentrate on finger prints or iris scans.

MS drops nagware validation for IE7 installs

I see unwanted updates...

Wondered why it popped up as a download again, despite blocking it the first time around.

If they make IE7 look like IE6, I might download it. But even that won't stop me using Firefox 99% of the time.

Most of the time I spend in IE is testing stuff, more than anything else...

Second-generation Sony PSP unveiled

Sony does it again!

Forgot about the PSP - the next in line for "smallification".

How long will it be until the doorstep-sized PS3 gets a slimming...

TomTom files patent for camera sat nav

What happens if...

What happens if TomTom goes wrong, when the roads have changed? I know of a couple of places where the roads have changed - but TomTom's maps haven't.

(one place used to be a roundabout - now it is a set of traffic lights at a junction)

Would be interesting to see what it does.

Day-of-silence protest hits Net radio

Net Radio

In the UK, there aren't many good radio stations for the music I listen to, even with DAB. I've not got a DAB radio, and the last time I looked they were ludicrously priced for the actual value of owning one.

I have found a couple of radio stations that I can listen to online, when I don't have "portable" music with me, or want a change from the things I currently own.

As for the charges, it does seem rather unfair to retroactively charge radio stations, who've ended up racking up a debt that they couldn't anticipate. Hiking up the prices allows a choice - retroactive fees do not, in my opinion. It would be best if there was no increase, but in the way of life, it's not surprising there is one.

Good luck to internet radio and it future!

Oh my Word

The Word-only user

What's the scariest kind of user is the one that exclusively uses Word for EVERYTHING. I've been sent screenshots in Word documents before, when trying to fix people's computer woes. What usually follows is instructions on how to use Paint.

And what's more scary about these users is that they don't usually know much about Word.

At school it used to be Publisher that was the worst - that app is horrendous IMHO and the Word users were the better lot.

That, and I spent most of some IT lessons on showing how to paste screenshots into Word for reports (we had to) and teaching people the values of ctrl+enter so they didn't have to spend ages fiddling about getting the right number of enters on a page.

And you forgot one class in the Normals - the person who always types in Comic Sans, no matter what the document is.