Posts by Delbert 77 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2011
I'm afraid the credibility of 'Boing' was pretty low before this demonstration, denying there is a problem when it is blatently obvious is hardly going to convince anybody that they have accepted their responsibilities. A policy of corporate denial should be ringing alarm bells at NASA and among airlines.
Interesting choice of comparison vehicles on the one hand an electric sedan 'cruiser' on the other a relatively large SUV which no doubt carries a lot of equipment to deal with traffic incidents. Which would fare better in one of those PIT manoeuvres do you think and hopefully not set on fire.
Sadly Microsoft, Adobe and others are following a business model that ensures a continuing and increasing cash flow while offering dubious 'benefits' including the fixing of all the errors , bugs and vulnerabilities which should have been ironed out prior to release of their software. In a closed system where your hardware conforms to your own standards and works without interference or intervention it is a plan with little or no merit.
Since the phone is aimed at people who just want an effective working communication device its likely the folk who want a fashion statement to place prominently on the table at Starbucks are not going to rush to buy one. Likewise the lack of a selfie camera has to be applauded as it will further alienate those same people who hail from the shallow end of the phone user demographic . Now if we can just get away from making phones stupidly thin that have a negligable battery life but don't make a bulge in a Gucci (knockoff) bag there is that sector completely gone !
I got off the audiophile crazy train a very long time ago, after the constant and expensive upgrades. I was pondering whether the latest change of cartridge for a swingeingly expensive Shure small object of desire was better/cleaner than the one I had found acceptable for a year. I was straining to detect the subtle improvements and nuances then I realised I was no longer listening to the music instead listening to the equipment and that it was beyond futile and defeated the whole point of having the kit in the first place. I feel the same way about drinks once you reach a level where there is a broad enjoyable palette of flavours (and I have drunk some nasty 'French fermented piss' over the years) just have 'the experience' the overwhelming reason to spend several thousand on a bottle is only to show you can afford what other folk cannot and you are probably going to claim you could tell that is was a hundred times better than Aldi £6 a pop Bordeaux. Well it isn't and the very people who perpetuate the myth - wine writers have been caught in the lie in blind tasting tests. If it is enjoyable then you have achieved your goal no matter what you paid.
So run that past me again Google , the microphone is not on and is only activated if the user specifically activates the microphone which you have not told him exists or explained in the manual how to control........ which would reveal there is in fact a microphone. It almost looks like you didn't want anyone to know .... or perhaps it might accidentally be turned on
Anybody casting a critical eye over Facebook can see with one eye closed that they are being spammed with a stream of irrelevant advertising and sponsored posts. Somebody is paying by the click to have their uninteresting products placed in front of you multiple times. Think - if you didn't like it the first five times maybe we can try some more (he's paying)? We tried their offer of a free 'boost' worth twenty five pounds (they said) a fair wedge for our shoestring budget it yielded nothing quantifiable no wave of extra likes, clicks etc and we suspect it really annoyed more people who are not even slightly bothered about Classic Rock music. As my teacher would occasionally say "Needs More Work"
Oddly its not a very new idea, based on fixing the size of the swap file/virtual which memory goes back to windoze 95. Best done at the first install, you deleted all the bloatware ( which was tiny compared to today just unused jpg,install and text files ) set the swap file to zero min and max restarted and defragged. Reset the swap file to 4 times actual memory (er 16 mb) and you had a contiguous swap file freed from the clock cycle stealing dynamic resizing which gave a huge performance hit. Detailed later in Windows Annoyances so doing same for installs is pretty obvious idea if you have a massive harddisk space no so much if you have a measly SSD on a laptop.
Interesting that custom applications that work on windows 8 will not work on windows 10 yet it is deemed less expensive to recompile to iOS. Or buying into a by comparison horrendously expensive phone with a none replaceable battery will be a cheaper option than paying M$ for another years support after official support ends after all who keeps phones which are getting kicked around daily longer than three years or doesn't have a service contract that replaces their phones periodically. Perhaps the current IT department or at least whoever signed off on the replacement plan needs a reality check?
I'm with Local Laddie , if the only leverage we have is to bank elsewhere then make it so. My own bank would love me to use their new account and offer incentives like interest on the current a/c but require me to transact online through my phone which I 'can do anywhere'. Not convinced that having my data streamed through a third party wifi is any safer than having a stranger enter my PIN its not happening. Likewise my bank card was replaced at my request with one lacking an RFID chip I know the risk and I'm not taking it, it is my choice not the banks.
The problem with this is if you "consented" to the upgrade then you are bound by the EULA which basically takes away any rights to have an OS that works or will maintain your data safely. Those warnings are writ large in the agreement and legally binding - they should probably read click here and give up all hope. That brief period when you might have found you were updated without consent was just that a brief period crying a year later is unlikely to cut it. Failing to back up your data is a gross dereliction of duty in a business and trying to pass the blame marks you out as incompetent something that will no doubt be given as evidence.
We binned the HP's at home in favour of Dell 'lasers' direct connection ie cable has caused less issues in eighteen months than the HP's did in one day. The only downside being network wifi printing was flaky at best at worst you would need Harry Potter skills to connect. Would I buy another certainly if there is a box shifter selling them at discount I'll have an A3 size please :-) or one with a flat path for printing card.
At least one of the answers is standing there in the table and also the reason I am using Win10 on this laptop the decline of the unloved unwanted 'stinky' win8 which is overtaken by the ancient XP OS. A lot of people like me took the free upgrade to expunge 8 from their lives now that period has ended I wonder how the next upgrade will go if users find themselves with a Win8 box . I think the availability of Win7 licences might skew the numbers or perhaps more people would dip a toe into Linux distros the least likely option is buying a copy of Win10
I find that not updating 'Flash' is a wonderful sidekick to my ad blocker so many advertisers rely on Flash but if it is not kept updated Firefox detecting content asks "Do you want to run this legacy piece of crap (sort of)" a simple NO! and the carefully crafted/selected spamming goes in the bin.
Admitted it has vulnerabilities but...if it is blocked and cannot run.
Ah those were heady days my first homebrew was a 386SX33 perfect until a romance with fractals incited me into a threesome with coprocessor. My perversions knew no bounds and a soon I replaced the board and partnership with a 486 DX2 80 from that house of ill repute AMD whip me baby! :-p
T'ain't necessarily the case that Chinese brands will have no support. I was pleasantly surprised to find Cubot have now got a euro-service centre who bent over backwards to help me with a low volume jack socket problem on my new X12 Their diagnosis after we tried various work rounds was a warranty replacement done via the vendor. The new phone is happily driving my car (and truck) stereos for four to six hours a day .
I'm a fan of the company the only phone I have bought in recent years which has failed badly to perform was a Motorola Cliq ruined by google bloat/spyware. The oriental kit has performed well until inevitably it gets damaged by my hectic lifestyle new screen and my older P9 was good to go until it got jammed into a truck seat runner still worked though! I should get another screen so it is a handy spare.
Not really as soon as I started looking into the machinations of Chrome which slowed my single core machine to a crawl while loading. I decided that any browser that was running three hidden iterations for the purpose of reporting my web traffic to its masters was not worth having - removed never to return.
All depends on the purpose you use your computer for, the big bogey man was XP would no longer recieve updates for IE. The was back pedalled upon within a month and in any case the majority of users would rather pull the long hairs from their noses than use IE. A lot of soho users will have a better than adequate XP box running their legacy software until it croaks - if it aint bust dont fix it - is the paradigm. The trigger will come with computer death or when a critical programme (think accounting package) will no longer run after an essential update.
Having been heavily burned by buying a Moto Cliq which gave bloatware a whole new horrible meaning and ate up my data allowance even when not actively used, it would be a very cold day before I would touch anything Moto. I don't have problem with preloaded apps like Farcebook or Twitter etc most of the planet is on at least one they will update automatically and they are easily removable. My desire is a simple settings menu that allows me to decide how my phone compromises my privacy I hate the idea I have to pay for my device to report my every move,text and call straight back to moto/google I want a switch that says 'nothing to see move along'. Since the Moto went back in its box I've bought Cubot P9 that doesn't report my gps postion,only updates when I have wifi isn't connecting to facebook every couple of minutes it suits me fine. Will Moto do this level of configuration I doubt it?
Odd to criticise the positioning of the 4wd drive selector the best reason to have it away from the steering wheel is to discourage fiddling, it is not something you should need to use regularly unless you are a Kalahari or Amazon resident. The proof being the dedicated offroad manufacturers place it on the transmission tunnel by default Land Rover, Toyota, Subaru and Isuzu all think its a rather good idea.
I went into a certain store frequented by the 'beautiful people' in Manchester and saw their display case of blinged out phones. It really does get the point home that "this is not your kind of store" and you know the most impressive part is this phone is restrained compared to the contents of that case. If you had so little taste that you would buy a phone and pay ten times the price of the electronics for a pretty tacky case then daddy who is likely footing the bill will be appalled you cannot buy class!
Having been badly burned buying a Moto Android hampered by Moto/Google first refusing to update the firmware and then the dreadful clunky Google front end which simply ate data allowance by continually 'phoning home' and ignored attempts to block the drain. I put it back in the box and vowed never Motorola again. I found a 3G Windows ME phone - I know a retrograde step but it solved the data issue and I was moderately happy with a interface familiar to my old iPaq (2G).
I did need an android for a number of applications and now finally I have Chinese droid that works admirably, one which is upgradable, carries eight gig of storage plus a microSD slot and a second simcard slot (though only 2G) it doesn't have a massive megapixel camera (which I don't need) What it does have a slick capacitive multipoint touch response, unfussy interface, 5 inch screen and googleplay. Cost? a lot less than these featured here . Simply it does exactly what I need, it may not be a Starbucks table item of man jewellery (OK it looks a lot like a Samsung Galaxy S5 until you get very close) - but it seems while the big players stampede into specifying more unwanted features the actual Chinese manufacturers are listening to what users want and quietly making their own decisions like including everybody's favourite better battery life - well can you find a phone with a battery that really lasts to the specs? I have now five days standby with a few hours of websurfing and a handful of calls thrown in I'm down to just over 40% battery life? the landfill can wait!
I'm a subscriber who has watched VM steadily ramp up prices using little incremental things we are are not supposed to notice. In the end it was the constant repeating of programmes on TV that made me take another look at the rediculous amount of money I was expected to pay for a service no better than freeview with TV cancelled after subscribing to Netflix I'm over £40 a month better off and that first month covered the cost of my new freesat PVR rather less than the cost of "installing" ie plugging in a Virgin+ box .
They played a similar game with my mobile account with an enticing PAYG deal for twelve months that became a joke quickly from 20p for a days internet it jumped to 40 then 50p rehashed the call charges and it was time to cancel that as well. Time they learned that having loyal customers is not a reason to fleece them.
That sounds about right 50/50 split sadly though they have lost the plot in the same way Tandy did pricing themselves out of the market for those without urgent need. These days I check the 'specials' flyers when stuff actually gets marked down to the true street value. Why pay a couple of quid for a pretty blister pack with two plugs when you can buy 10 delivered for less money?
The elephant in any room involving Google is privacy and their record much like the elephant stinks. Would anybody discussing commercially sensitive information really trust them not to be trawling through communications in the way they routinely do with every product they produce? like that elephant its not going to fly.
I think you are correct in consumer law , holding a customer to ransom when you have supplied goods with a fault is not going to fly and is likely to get you dragged into court for failing to comply with the law,. Persue this in the local small claims court and send in the bailiffs to HP for reparations and siezures when they try to ignore it!
So far as I am aware I have not missed any episodes or movies of the good Doctor an advantage of being almost as old as a Timelord. I've warmed to all of them,I agree Mcgann should have been given more tenure Hartnell and Troughton were authoritarian figures Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee the two best Doctors in my mind they added depth to the role with their portrayals, Davidson was lighter more flippant a sea change in the role, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy were more idiosyncratic Doctors, which you prefer depends as observed when you came to the series of the reborn series Tennant would be my choice a blend of those who came before , not taking anything away from the others who carried the mantle with equal aplomb. but what of the companions that were the conscence, assistance and occasional voice of reason? I can tell you who was the worst but who was the best? they were the other side of the coin you could not have one without the other!
I wonder if yet again this is an example of undisclosed earnings for tax purposes? if I was in a revenue office I would be all over this like a fat chick in a cake shop. $1.6 billion is not an amount you find left in your spare jeans and to fail to account for it fully is nothing less than concealment..
The BBC would be unlikely to cast an 'A' list Hollywood actor budget constraints would rule that out, if Benedict Comberbatch had not taken the studio shilling I would have given him short odds , he has that idiosyncracy in spades. I think for my money David Threlfall would be by far the most obvious choice he has a great track record, can go the distance in a series (Butterflies, Shameless,Men of the World,Paradise Postponed,The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby)
Ah another politician shows olympic class jumping skills. A redtop tabloid newspaper prints a story which is demonstrably inaccurate about kids accidentally accessing porn on the web. Even after repeated google searches by interested parties might have skewed the results a simple duplication of the search still proves the story was based on a downright lie but the bottom feeding frenzy had already been triggered. It is up to parents to take responsibility for the actions of their offspring and not nannies who just look to boost their approval rating with voters if that was a top Labour politician the Milliband must be crying with shame.
Eerm not exactly anything new now i it I was conned into buying 'legitimate' fakes in my early years of building PC's. The infamous PCchips company were only too happy to fake clock speeds and caches to sell substandard boards . They escaped the attentions of regulators who by rights should have banned the company from ever trading with the west for such blatent fraud. Seems to me this is merely a continuation of the same business plan.
Not that I would expect it to have a long term effect but awareness of the problems of security can only be a good thing. One company (no names to save embaressment) employee recieved a suspicious email and forwarded it to IT with the stupidly dangerous suggestion to 'please check' which IT did and infected the system shutting it down for 48 hours so not everybody is immune from acts of foolishness!
Interesting comment 7inch pads are not big enough because we will be selling you a swigeingly expensive iPad which will be much bigger a huuuge 3 inches. :-p
In the real world the 10.2 inch pads are just a bit too big when you handle one as an ebook reader it is just not as comfortable as a book to handle, you want to rest it on one hand like a hardback book, as a youtube viewer held again at book distance from your eyes its rather like sitting at the front of a cinema too much too close perfectly ok for web browsing if websites would stop treating it like a phone and forcing mobile pages to display when it would be preferable to use full page size. Me? well I've had a 10.2 for over a year its handy but you want to put it on a desk like a notebook or rest it on your knee like a laptop, my wife agrees tried mine for a while and we got her a 7 inch pad which does everything she wants without causing wrist RSI If 7 inch was really too small then everybody would throw out their iPods wouldn't they?.
The only things these pads are missing is the snob appeal of half eaten fruit.........
Spot on, even in the days of roll film the best professionals would admit to being as happy as a pig in poop if they got a couple of worthwhile shots on a roll (36 exp) the rest went binwise in fact never got past the contact sheet (thumbnails by todays standard) its a major problem with digital that people save garbage just because they can. Be ruthless bin the bad stuff and keep the worthwhile so you do not look an idiot when you share a pile of badly focussed badly composed over exposed wastes of time and cyberspace. Personally I publish a few of mine on our blog at www.classicrockradio.eu to publicise artists and gigs I willl only use the best three or maybe four I could easily share the two or three hundred taken but we want to have an readership afterwards.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2023
