Posts by auburnman 1230 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2011
Not to mention loyalty cards and trying to upsell insurance on games/shite old DVD's at the counter. Just ring up what I want to buy and let me get on with my Saturday.
I will be sad to see them go, but I won't pretend to scratch my head in puzzlement.
Device you can plug your aerial into - with improved Wifi over the review version, access to a NAS or higher internal memory capacity and a half decent channel browsing/taping interface, I can see cheapo Android boxes eating into the market for Sky+/TiVo boxes (what's their generic name again?)
"leaving network operators in the impossible position of being unable to raise prices against rising costs"
Or simply locking in their price for as long as the contract term is fixed/accepting the contract is void if they change the amount of compensation they want? It can't be that hard surely. A smart operator would use it as a marketing opportunity "our contract prices are guaranteed for the minimum term of the contract" and a sales opportunity (make it widely known the price hikes happen every e.g. June and reap the benefits of people jumping onto contracts in May before the rise.)
"Really - care to articulate one"
Theoretical company A has gone into administration with total debts of £10Million. Even split £5M each secured and unsecured. Theoretical administrator B has a potential buyer in theoretical consortium C who are willing to buy the majority of the assets for £8M, totally paying off the secured debt and leaving a good chunk for the unsecured portion if they can pull together the funding to buy.
Into this scenario comes Fatcat D who makes an offer of £5.1M for only the very best assets of the dead company - but he is willing to sign on the bottom line today. This deal will collapse the value of any remaining assets as the best have been stripped off, but it will settle all secured amounts while leaving the unsecured creditors scrapping over change. Both deals have merit, and although C does not currently have the funding it is not unrealistic that they could get it within say a week. Is there anything to stop B taking the immediate, less work option that screws over the unsecured creditors?
Isn't Deloitte's status as a preferred creditor a potential conflict of interest? It's not unreasonable to suppose there could be a situation where they are faced with a deal that offers a decent chance of paying off a large number of creditors vs. one with a slightly better chance of being able to pay off the preferred creditors only.
Obviously they do have to have preferred status or no-one would get paid for doing what I'm sure is a hard and skilled job, but are there any oversight safeguards to make sure they don't pull stunts like selling stores to friendly companies at below-market prices?
Couldn't agree more. No-one likes it and mostly everyone thinks it's a sneaky thing to do, but they didn't break any laws so hounding them for legal conduct will only ensure less cooperation in the future. And it's the future we should be looking to by closing these loopholes. In the modern business world, no CEO or CFO REALLY has any choice in the matter - if word got out they were planning to pay millions more in tax than they could legally get away with, they would be booted out and replaced with someone else.
For my money the only long term workable plan is to have a mandatory percentage of tax applied in the jurisdiction of the consumer, before whatever tax haven Amagoog is in this week gets a look in. It's the only way tax revenues will have a hope of rising or falling proportional to the population the taxes are collected to support. The big problems with this are implementing such a shift without violating international agreements, the risk of corporations sneaking on a stealthy price rise when they can blame it on the government, and the risk of smaller businesses suffering from increased complexity/costs.
As I understand it you always have the right to not have photos of you published, unless there is a potential defence that publishing the photos is in the public interest (eg someone caught in the act of committing a crime).
The paparazzi and gutter press operate on a schedule that allows them to publish the photos before anyone can object to them, and once they're out there the damage is done. Celebrities put up with most of it partially because they need the attention of the public to further their career and because they are just as put off by the convoluted rigmarole of legal action as the rest of us.
You do see the odd lawsuit when the buggers go too far to let slide though, and it usually ends up going against the paps/redtops.
Companies are only allowed a certain number of 'whoopsies' before incurring much more severe penalties. IIRC correctly they can be struck off the Companies House register until they get their house in order (which in turn makes them unable to legally trade under that name) so it's very rarely allowed to get that far by any company with finance bods who even vaguely know what they're doing.
"16 pages of the Royal Pregnancy in the daily papers, thank god for El Reg."
I upvoted because I reckon your prediction is spot on, although I was tempted to give you a red mark for depressing the shit out of me.
I think the next big thing for TV will be when the Youview box or one of it's competitors gains a proven track record of useability and the price becomes comparable to the up-front for a Sky box.
I'm glad the analog signal is finally off as hopefully this means I will never again have to repeatedly explain to my mum that she already has digital TV and it won't affect her.
Why not? Okay, not full BluRays obviously, but a few years back I had to endure a long bus commute twice a day for about 6 months. The only thing that kept me sane was my PSP. Long after I got bored with the games it continued to prove it's worth as I plowed my way through seasons of spooks, Battlestar Galactica etc which had been compressed down onto the card. I can't see why people wouldn't do the same with their phones now that the screen resolutions and available storage space allow it.
The other thing that makes people stick with removable cards? I can't overstate the convenience of just being able to pull the bloody thing out of the mobile device, whack it into the PC and drag and drop your files like you would any other drive or USB stick vs. Fannying around with proprietary connectors and/or terrible transfer software. Android used to do plug-in drag and drop quite well but they have knackered this a bit in recent updates. I'm sure things will eventually improve, but I'll still stick to a phone that has removable memory just in case.
There's been a noticeable upwards trend in the visibility and popularity of smaller cheaper 'Indie' titles in recent years too... and with Kickstarter taking off I wouldn't be surprised if smaller cheaper downloadable games are a big part of the future. The only thing that worries me about the Ouya is the limited specs (8GB Internal flash memory and only 1 USB port specifically.) I'm having one just so I can experience the joy of having a Megadrive (emulator) in the living room again.
The pessimist in me says Staples will still try to charge for a 3D construct that one of the minimum wage monkeys has clearly put a foot through at some stage of the process. Assuming anyone in the store actually knows how their 3D printer works, which the realist in me says is unlikely based on past experience.
You have a few options. The phone helldesks are useless, more interested in getting rid of you than helping you.
1) Try visiting an Orange store and asking for the unlock code, if you're still in a contract with Orange after your upgrade they'll probably not try to charge a fee (don't mention it if they don't!) They're less likely to not give you what you want if potential punters can overhear the kind of service you're getting. Plus a store assistant can't hang up on you if they don't want to talk to you*.
B) Try looking for an independent phone accessories shop in town or in the market. They'll likely charge, but they should do it then and there and you can probably haggle them down to about a tenner.
iii) Google around online a bit and see if you can get an unlock code. I'd pick this as a last resort option, as a fair few sites try to look like free help sites that describe all the steps you need to find your EMEI number etc but ask for money just before they give you a code. Add in the possibility of conflicting, misleading or just plain wrong information out there and you could brick your phone.
*Like they did to me last week. Grrr.
PS if you are still with Orange you'd do well to check your bill. I just discovered they've been massively overcharging me for data.
It's been said above already, but decent phones from the pre-touchscreen era are kept as they are good rugged backups. My one old Android phone sits on my bedside cabinet as my alarm clock which also serves as a mini tablet if I can't sleep or need to look something up/make notes etc in the middle of the night. With no SIM in the card, I can leave it in flight mode and it lasts ages on one charge.
As spare droid handsets get more common I can foresee a growing number of people repurposing them for pet projects like media centres, mobile security cameras etc. Wired already have an article about some boffins who are using one as the brains of a DIY drone.
We might even see Google sponsoring a hacking competition for best re-purposing?
I don't know if that'd be good idea. Great in principle, but I think a full front page "We are wrong and stupid and here's why" article would be the only thing on this Earth that could make me buy the Daily Mail. Depending on how many people feel the same way, their front page apology punishment could well turn out to be a record seller. Maybe an automatic fine with every retraction?
There will likely be strict caveats on the press against publishing their own screenshots. It's probable a PR dept somewhere sends out a number of 'approved' screenshots for reviewers.
Anyone know if Ubisoft are still doing that atrocious 'constant net connection required to play' mince? I fancy getting this for PC, but I'll probably abort to PS3 if they're going to shut me down if my internet breaks.
Hacking? All the joyriding is probably done from the remote control at the Perth facility. It's a good thing they don't have the remote(control) drive at the remote(isolated) site - I doubt it would take long for the few humans out in the middle of nowhere to start playing chicken with the trucks.
I don't think it's fair to say Call of Duty didn't push any boundaries either; When Modern Warfare 4 came out it had the most photorealistic engine seen to date, with a Tom Clancy Russians/terrorists/nukes plot that stayed just on the right side of believability. It was also the first game I remember with a cinematic 'movie' style plot that went as far as two weave the storylines of two different groups together - I can't recall any other game where things were kept fresh by jumping the player between characters.
Unfortunately when it went massive it became something of a victim of it's own momentum; with Treyarch pumping out a COD title every other year that you could describe as not-as-good if you wanted to be very charitable, even the Infinity Ward follow ups weren't quite as good as the first Modern Warfare.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
