Posts by Cpt Blue Bear 485 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Aug 2010
"They could take their ire out on companies that operate in the US, but they cannot compel a US company to make a foreign company break the laws of another country where they are operating."
Don't be naive - they can and they have. Just ask a Canadian bank or the government of a Caribbean island..
I'm stating to fear the same thing. My only hope is that the current scheme is sufficiently advanced and the enough contracts signed that this whole alternative scheme is, like the "stop the boats" rhetoric,a pose to differentiate them from the incumbent muppets.
Sometimes I despair at the quality of government we get.
I call Bullshit.
A DVD, depending on how you pack it might slip in under $3 or you might be up for $6.50.
Camera lens from Brisbane to Adelaide was about $20 including insurance. I actually did this recently.
One and a half kilo fragile and very valuable item from Adelaide to the boonies west of Brisbane under $30 including insurance and tracking. I also did this recently. Worst case on this was Aussie Post's "Express
Platinum" service which would indeed have cost $50 but would have gone overnight (except it wouldn't in this case 'cause it was going to the boonies...)
Those prices a third of what you claim but still much higher than the article assumes. But if you are shipping volume you don't use Aussie Post, you have a deal with a courier company.
On the other hand we had fun and gams yesterday: we were quoted $34 freight for moving something two suburbs - a distance of about 4km being really optimistic. When challenged as to why it wasn't the usual $10 we were told it was over 70kg total weight. Our response: send it in two lots and save $14. The driver was very unimpressed, especially as their crappy dispatching system made him actually do it in two loads...
Awesome. Feelgood Hit of the Summer popped into my head last week during a particularly boring meeting. I couldn't remember the order and didn't fancy searching for it (note the lack of a verbed brandname) as I was inside a corporate network controlled by lunatics. I'd probably have to submit a urine sample before they'd let into the building next time after that hit the filter.
I think I'll turn off adblock, log into Google and try it now to see what effect it has their targeted ads. On second thoughts, I'll probably just get a series of full and fatuous anti-smoking ads rather than anything in any way entertaining.
This is the franchise's modus operandi translated into digital sales.There is always something else to you "need" to buy and as you get in deeper the prices go up until you find the customer's limit. I remember working this out at the age of 11 or 12, as did most of my mates.
I shouldn't pick on My Little Pony alone - Barbie, Star Wars, etc are all the same.
From personal experience of social science practitioners, they have no control group for one of two reasons. Either they don't understand the importance (or possibly the concept, it can be very hard to tell the difference) or because it prevents them getting the result they are after in order to draw their pet conclusion.
"I got an interview for a good job through a bad agency, but this did mean we had to devote a section of the interview to correcting what the recruiter had said about each of us ("errrrm, that's not true", "I don't know why she said that", "I haven't done that, but I have...")"
Isn't that fun? Many years ago I went for an interview where the agent got what the company did wrong, but they turned out to be really nice and the job was great from just about every perspective (even if it wasn't the one I'd been "briefed" about). It was a crying shame when they got taken over by a much bigger rival and everything went to shit. I was long gone by then, mind, 'cause I followed the people who'd made it such a great place to work out the door...
"I'm also now stuck with a zip drive with zip disks i'm never going to use."
Nonsense - bung them on eBay and some other muppet will buy them. I know this because we moved office recently and have been off-loading all manner of crap old kit to benefit the End of Year Pissup Fund. It's in the black to the tune of over $1,000 already...
Zip drives are still in demand it seems based on how our stash have gone. I'm still looking for the power supply for a USB Zip250 and the whereabouts of the old SCSI Zip100 (I reckon an ex has it - it provided termination for the external SCSI chain on her PowerMac...)
Nonsense! I've read a bit about Victorian era policing and if you're not phased by what they dealt with daily, you aren't going to be worried by the former and the latter can be dealt with by the application of a stout truncheon or hobnailed size nine (both approved methods of dealing with miscreants of the era).
Except that's not what the article says. Quite the opposite.
This is Queensland where the major demand is to run air-conditioning, with demand peaking mid-afternoon in step with solar production. The generators (private) and distributors (gov) are complaining that it takes the edge of their most profitable time of the day.
And frankly, if one and a half percent can do that, I reckon they're gaming the market themselves by restricting supply. Unlike Enron, they're smart enough to only do it for a few hours a day and so far no one seems to have noticed.
Yawn. Another article that is basically a press release masquerading as news. Maybe Andrew Orlowski should write a piece on the decline of online journalism at his own publisher rather than kicking Wired. Not that I'm against kicking Wired and their ilk, mind.
So care to 'fess up who published this press release? Who commissioned the survey?
I've always found them helpful and very reasonable to deal with both for professional and personal imports.
The AIIA on the other hand, are a bunch of self serving cretins who are otherwise unemployable in the industry they claim to represent. The Computer Industry Association is just as hopeless. To dim to make it an industry? Don't worry, you can always work for an "industry body" instead. There's saying about piss ups and breweries that applies to both...
It's also long since time that the retail chain in this country got called on pricing. It is pure price gouging. if you look around you find plenty of examples where competition has forced the prices down to a world level so there is clearly nothing fundamental justifying it.
@Anonymous Coward 6:25: re: But will it ship? You're using the wrong vendor / shipper, mate. Last box from the UK was just under 6kg and cost ~£60 while 2kg from the same vendor would be ~£40. Freight costs go down per unit as the volume goes up as a rule, with a practical cap for airfreight at around 20kg.
@Timm66 re: No duty on IT? Really?: the letter you received told you what the justification was. I know, I've received enough of them (and NONE for any electronics). You did read the letter didn't you? My guess is you got charged duty because when they opened to package it turned out not to be "computer equipment"...
Does anyone seriously think these "sites" aren't already moderated by the ad agencies that run them? Partly to maintain control over their client's "message" but mostly, I suspect, so they have something ongoing to bill for. The ACCC is just putting them on notice that they know how the game is played and will knock heads if they think it gets out of hand.
I feel your pain, brother. We have one customer with multihead embroidery machines that have dedicated control software running only in Windows 3.x. Believe me, we've tried to make it run on modern hardware and OSs (closest we got was using WINE, but it still fell over to often).
To all those who've never played in this space, the realities are that it costs tens to hundreds of thousands to replace a machine and they are built to run for decades. People running these systems for business have the attitude that it's worked fine up until now, we'll move on when the machine dies. You deal with it or they find someone else who will.
I see people above talking about tariffs and duties - please give details. As far as I'm aware there are no duties on software or hardware. Nor on electronics or books or DVDs. The only things I can think of off the of my head that attract duty are alcohol and tobacco. You can't blame the government for this one, no matter how much you'd like to.
This is down to the importers, exclusive agency agreements and the fucked up nature of distribution and retail in the country. Do us all a favour - buy everything you can OS until these clowns either wise up or collapse under their own weight.
Bah humbug.
I was at uni with a bloke who changed his name to Wolf, dropping his family name (there was a big family conflict at the bottom of this that we never heard all of but it was nasty and he wanted nothing to do with them). The enrollment system could not cope with this so it gave him an initial. Thus he was A Wolf. He spent ages trying to get them to change it to "The"...
"Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If you already have a personal account, then we cannot allow you to create business accounts for any reason. "
Is that current? It seems totally at odds with reality. It implies that that the whole FB image management industry is against FB's Ts & Cs. It also implies we can get any FB account closed if we demonstrate that the person who created it already had an account (personal or otherwise). Oh what fun that could be...
HTF do you get lost in a supermarket? It's a grid layout without half the grid. With signage at every junction visible from both ends. And one end is distinctly different (what with having checkouts and all. And they have people who work there who you can ask - and don't give me that "there's never any staff" line go to the frontend counter if you have to you lazy buggers.
If you can get lost in that no amount of technology is going to save you from yourself.
I don't buy that. Sure it was overhyped, but it was not a self inflicted wound.
Not one Y2K job I was involved with was on a system less than 8 years. Several were obsolete when they were installed in the early '90s. I seriously doubt anyone writing, building or installing those systems thought they'd still be in use at the end of the 20th century.
When I was a callow youth I worked as junior shit-shoveler at a medium sized engineering firm. One afternoon there was an almighty bang and the whole site went dark except for the emergency lighting. It seems both the main HT connector fuses had blown when one of the company sparkies grounded something he shouldn't have (and was very lucky to be alive). Anyway, need new HT link. Head sparky starts making calls but none to be found this side of the country. Nearest replacement is 1000km and two days away. No mobiles back then, so all this had to be done in full public view in the front office, with a growing and restless audience. Management by now is soiling it's collective self about downtime and missed deadlines.
Cue junior sparky and a "hang on lads, I've got an idea" moment: one piece of one inch copper pipe, two blows with a hammer to flatten the ends, punch two holes to fit over the terminals and voila! We are back in business...
Another missed detail: Terry Gou is Taiwanese - the losers in that little stoush in 1949. So he's unlikely to share any Chinese antipathy toward South Korea. Or just maybe, such considerations are irrelevant to in the world of big business and this is purely about his product vs Samsung's. Nothing to see here, and even less to analyse.
I'll grant that Startup Repair is bloody awful but if you are having these issues after even a few patch releases then you have bigger issues to deal with. That's just not normal. I think we've seen one system crashing update incident that we don't know for sure wasn't cause by an existing problem (I'm pretty sure it was caused by an existing root kit).
There are HR managers out there who think that is a valid method of creating "voluntary redundancies" (read: fuck this shit - I'm outa here). I've met them and sat through meetings with the fuckers. They genuinely think it's clever social manipulation. The idea is to make the job floor so unpleasant that people "make their own redeployments" (actual phrase used by one). I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but here sacking someone making someone redundant is a potentially expensive exercise what with paying out leave, etc. If you quit, they are off the hook for a large slice of it.
Just in case anyone thinks this is a clever way to shut down and outsource their IT dept while avoiding redundancy costs, my boss' comment at the post-meeting debrief (read: I'll have a pint while you're there) was "that arsehole is worth millions to us". He wasn't wrong - he hired most of the redundant staff and pimped them back to their old employer for three times their original wages bill.
In a final act of irony, Mr HR Manager got made redundant when they outsourced their HR dept to a labour hire company. Oh how we laughed.
+1 on reasons one and two.
I gave up on reason 3 years ago 'cause my experience with market research operators is that they try to return the result that the customer wants so that they get more work.
Also I once picked up at a focus group (on electricity prices and smart meters of all things). Optimism bias (plus cash and free food) keeps me going back :-)
But after 24 hours of trying on and off to read what he has to say I confess I didn't make it a third through. He doesn't need an editor, he needs a writer. I realise this is a transcript of a presentation but even reading it out loud doesn't make it any easier to get through.
The first attempt ground to a halt at the complaint that artists are working harder and longer and getting paid less - well so is everybody else, sunshine. It's tough all over and you are not a special case 'cause you are a "creative".
Second attempt fell foul of his repeated claims to have been so hip to everything he did it before any of it was hip.
Third go I dozed off while counting straw men.
Broadly speaking, all true. But in this case we are talking about the BBC - a public broadcaster that was until recently respected as one of the last bastions of serious journalism.
While they have no advertisers to please, it seems they have become infected with a lot of the same credulous sensationalism and lax attitude to the truth as commercial operators.
I'm told there used to be a running gag amongst British airline pilots in the 50s and early 60s along the lines of "sure, I know the way to Berlin / Dresden / Dusseldorf / name-your-major-German-city, I used to do regular run every night."
There's another famous bit of aviation humour: a BA (should that be BEA?) pilot requests instructions from a very busy Templhof aproach controller repeatedly. Control replies in a rather short manner suggesting the pilot is of less than average intelligence.
A very British voice replies "I'm terribly sorry, the last time I was here was 15 years ago, it was dark and I wasn't landing. It's changed a bit since then..."
Games, yes. When done well.
Many years ago by modern time scales we had a nice sideline selling "virtual reality" gear. The killer demo was Quake at high res (1024x768 woohoo!) in stereo* with shutter glasses. Really freaked people out when they saw it. We spent most of an afternoon tweaking sync, frame rates, convergence and DOF to make it so. Mechwarrior (2?) was another good one. Tombraider was awful and Descent just made people motion sick.
The problem was that we set it up right and the customers didn't so 9 times out of 10 they weren't so impressed by their real world performance.
What you say tallies with my experience of live generated content. But most of what we are talking about here is recorded content. For this stereo is little more than a gimmick because it's viewed from a predefined angle, with a predefined field of view. The only really good stereoscopic video I've seen was from last years Tour de France (and I reckon I spotted the guys filming it with a pair of Canon 7Ds in the regular broadcasts) and frankly that had only novelty value.
To sum up: yes you are quite correct that stereoscopic video can be very effective. But it's only useful where the extra depth queuing is useful. Otherwise it's just novelty and novelty wears off.
Oh, and I really must go see if R-Factor supports stereo displays 'cause that combined with head tracking sounds awesome.
* Calling a spade a spade here - it's not 3D, it's steroscopic
Ah, freaky wierd arse 3D mouse things!
A mate had the misfortune to spend 18 months working on a Sun workstation of some description that came with an outlandish fist-sized mushroom shaped device in place of a mouse. I think it had five buttons plus pan, tilt and rotate. It was intended for CAD work I assume, but we could never get it to work properly (read: we were to lazy to work out how to get the extra functions working) and the CAD monkey operator couldn't come to terms with it. I don't blame him, the combination of shape and colour was disturbing to a sensitive, creative type.
So we gave it to Reg (let's call him Reg 'cause that is his name) because it had cost a lot of money and we couldn't throw it out. Now, Reg could never be described as sensitive and it turned out he wasn't too lazy to work out the strange scripting language used to customise the damn thing either. Once he got it set up with macros, auto-text, modal changes, conditional functions and the like he was like a demon
Fast forward to the end of project and starting a new contract: Reg walks in and is presented with a brand new and very flash Power Mac. Sits down, places hand on mouse and realises with horror it has only one button...
iLink was pretty popular out here in Aus with the "serious" home video people. But only once it was common knowledge that it was just firewire 1394 rebadged. With the addition of a $25 PCI card you had a pretty foolproof digital video solution.
The catch is (for Sony anyway) that no one called it iLink except when identifying the socket on a Sony camera,,,
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
