Posts by Sweaty Hambeast

What happened to comics for kids? Hell, what happened to COMICS?

Re: Engaging comic-book-guy mode....

Upvoted for saying it much better than I would have done. Tx.

Apple iPod Nano 7G review

Re: Uh, 16GB?

"Are people's music collections really so small?"

Yes. We've got about 60 CDs which we've collected over the years when we've found something decent. The last set of purchases have been via iTunes and are mostly BBC audiobooks (I live abroad and can't get them in the shops) although some old songs have been bought and some digital replacements for the vinyl (don't have a turntable any more).

All of this liveshappily on the old 16Gb Nano that sits in the living room and connects to the hi-fi and still has room to spare! (Don't talk to me about streaming things - the other half still can't get to grips with the Nano!)

Reg hack uncovers perfect antidote to internet

Re: Want one

Would that more people would be so considerate!

PS Banner

As a complete aside, I like the effect on the banner :-)

Where can I get a job like this?

Let's see:

warm climate (mostly)

donkey breeding

donkey workforce

lots of butch mates down the taverna

forefront of space exploration

sideline in writing articles for a well-known website

Who do I have to sleep with in order to get a job like this? (N.B. Anyone who answers "Orlowski" will be sent back in time in a handy TARDIS to suffer at the hands of the Moderatrix!)

Re: Not even a hard-hat ?

"Many times I think the hard-hat requirements are to keep you from bonking your head on some partially-finished piece of construction. More to protect you when you crash into something than the other way around."

50% true. The other 50% is to protect your head from small falling objects. You realize this when you're working in a shipyard and crawling around in torpedo tubes in the dark with odd (*) protrusions or wandering around outside whilst people are chucking things around the Bridge fin. I'd not worn the hat consistently until then. I did afterwards.

(*) They may be odd to me but they're probably not to the Naval Architect. But that says a lot about Naval Architects!

Re: Not even a hard-hat ?

+1 for speaking common sense and having the experience to know what you're talking about.

Hey, El Reg, give this person a job!

WTF is... scale-in?

Re: My Understanding

You were doing alright until the last two paragraphs.

"The problem I can see with all IBM products is that they are highly complex"

Rubbish. Just a throwaway insult to address your generalization.

"DB/2 is basically a mainframe product and you need the friendly IBM customer engineer to run it."

Bollocks. I ran dB systems from IBM for 16 years without needing a CE at all. I'm not the only one either.

"The customer engineer (which is often on-site for days a week with large customers) will actually create a working installer."

That may be so these days but it wasn't in the past (before the work went East and I had to change direction) and, quite frankly, says more about the quality of the people that are available than about the product - experience talking here!

"These antics are in my opinion the very reason for the existence of Microsoft and Oracle. IBM still doesn't know how to make a product which works w/o a customer engineer holding the user's hand."

Rubbish and bollocks. You may not be able to do stuff but some of us can.

(Irritated? Who, me? Surely not!)

Eight... Rugged Cameras

Erm...

"Has anybody not trashed a digital camera at some point while out and about?"

Yes. Just saying, that's all.

(Ok, I could have a rant about how people don't see any further than their own horizons, like this, and how that's why lousy programming languages and operating systems are what I have to deal with day-to-day but that would be off-topic.)

AT&T to allow unlocking of out-of-contract iPhones

Re: Phony Economics

"Maybe the UK is different in this regard,"

Possibly. I live in NL and I when I was looking around for a smartphone, the contract prices for 2 years were far too expensive. I could have bought something for EUR500 and then had a PAYG SIM or maybe a contract for the SIM but the prices were far too much (although the prices have dropped due to the EU recently).

Eventually I bought a new computer, cheapo mobile and an iPod Touch for about the same money! YMMV.

Angry Birds Space flings 10 MILLION downloads in 3 days

Re: Interesting

> I wonder if I can get a bird into a sustainable orbit...

I, for one, would pay good money to see that :-)

Google asked to bin autocomplete results for Japanese man's name

Re: Fired on the basis of a Google name search?

> What employer would be so cretinous,

The ones that ask you for your Facebook login details. (*)

> and would.you want to work for them?

No fucking way! (**)

(*) Other social networking sites are available (and no, I don't have a Facebook account; I have a life).

(**) Although you may have to. I'm currently unemployed(***) and the terms of receiving my unemployment benefit state that if someone offers me a job, I am obliged to take it.

(***) Due to the boss making me redundant due to him being almost broke as his clients are "saving" and not spending money on his services.

El Reg user forum opens to public, HTML for all (mostly)

Re: What about handling html plus markdown?

>Though the conventions I would prefer are those from text email:

And the ones I would prefer are from IBM's GML which use : and . instead of < and > and here's the problem: lots of people have lots of different preferences. Anyone wanna start a count?

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Ok, most have been mentioned...

...but for the popularity contest...

Batman and Robin (and I'm an avid DC fan and this was just taking the piss)

Hitch-Hikers Guide film (and I'm an avid... same reason)

ST: V (so bad I've actually forgotten the rest of the name - really, what were they thinking)

bunch of others that've been mentioned...

...and one I've not seen mentioned yet, Fame. Sigh... what was I thinking...

Re: The title is too long

Captain Power was a TV show and actually got quite watchable at the end when they actually added a bit of a plot. Not a lot of a plot but...

Russia plans manned moon shot by 2030

Re: One isn't

"Extra points if you know which are NOT EU without looking it up!"

Norway and Switzerland.

Charge of the Metro brigade: Did Microsoft execs plan to take a hit?

Re: So what if Win8 fails? Win9 wins....?

"It seems that the bad reputation that Vista has is current only among non-Vista users."

Allow me to disillusion you. We've got it on the other half's laptop (pre-installed, Acer) for his "program that'll only work under Windows" (sigh) and it's a right pig. I had all the std. problems that were mentioned in the fora. It's awful.

Council spunks '£100k on how to wash your hands' vid

Re: There are plenty of blokes who could do with watching this video

I'll go you one better... or worse. I'm often waiting for the one washbasin in the loo here and the number of people who step away from the urinal or, worse, come out of the trap, and then proceed directly to the door without washing their hands is unbelievable! Comments about it are invariably ignored as they wander back to their cubicles and lay their grubby mitts on their keyboards and phones.

Sorry... this annoys the hell out of me :-(

Metro breakdown! Windows 8 UI is little gain for lots of pain

Re: Well said Andrew!

"This all seems like MS is deliberately trying to destroy itself by chasing a new market and destroying the immense market it already has. It's nuts!"

No, it's Christmas come early!

Indiana Jones flicks out on Blu-ray this Fall

Re: Errm...

Naah... Temple of Doom was the best and wins the award for the most artistic use of a swear word, ever.

Apple fanbois forced to go on the pull by Motorola patent

Re: can you still cry with both eyes gouged out?

"Yes, "

Unless you're Klingon.

(Yes, I know and understand the reference but it's Friday and it's beer o'clock and I'm unemployed - give a man a break!)

New password-snatching Mac Trojan spreading in the wild

"Flashback-G initially attempts to install itself via one of two Java vulnerabilities."

Ok...

"OS X Lion did not come with Java preinstalled, but Snow Leopard does,"

Also ok...

"so users of Mac's latest OS are more at risk of attack."

Erm...

I know it's beer o'clock (specifically 4.5 excpectio... expecc... very strong ones) but what did I miss?

Intel joins The Document Foundation, pushes LibreOffice

Re: Re: Maybe it will finally happen

"$400 is less than a professional gets paid in one day"

In this depressed European market? Where and what sort of professional?

Re: Re: Just to annoy MS?

"they will probably end up wrecking each other."

We should be so lucky.

Microsoft explains bland new Windows logo

Re: >"tuning in to the mindset of your customers and helping them connect with the experience."

> “…counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor…” Hm-hm. Death’s too good for them.

Brilliant! You owe me a new keyboard :-)

Space: 1999 returning to TV?

Frakes' fault?

Was it really? Personally, I'd have blamed the lousy script, wooden acting, outrageous liberties and non-descript brothers. Frakes may have done the best he could with these things but... hmmm...

There was supposed to be a comic...

"I know there is a movie allegedly in production,"

...by Misc! Mayhem, but it never materialised. Shame as the preview panels that I saw of it were pretty nifty.

What happened...

Gareth Thomas left the series at the end of the 2nd year (Blake was lost due to the space war). He said he'd come back for the finale.

At the end of the 3rd year, Avon seemed to have found Blake in some sort of medical facility but things turned out to be a little hazy.

When year 4 ended, it turned out that Blake was a bounty hunter on a planet somewhere and eventually ended up being shot by Avon before the rest of the crew was shot by the Federation guards (although we never *saw* Avon being shot).

Jackpot: astronomers tag Goldilocks planet

Tomorrow's World...

...did an item on this during the Michael Rodd era. It was posited that there must be a lead race, The Primans. The problem was... maybe we're The Primans.

Brit space agency sends up 1st satellite

Easy way to fund this...

...just come up with a way to gather lots of personal information via a web page, come up with a way to make it *cough* cool *cough*, collect 800 million members and then IPO it. Hey presto, lots of money.

Anyone got an idea... oh, wait...

Boffin's blog blast births boycott of publisher Elsevier

It's called...

...Western Style Capitalism.

New Earth-observing satellite snaps 'blue marble' shot

I was told...

> Finnish, by the way, is one of those weird-ass languages that isn't part of a 'normal' branch; it's not really comparable to anything else,

I was told by one of the really good guys on the Int'l helpdesk that Finnish, whilst being really weird, was close to Hungarian. Anyone got an idea of this is true?

Many years ago...

...IBM had just started NLS on it's programs. We'd grabbed a copy of DW/370 and installed it for the customers (bureau, int'l custs) and were wondering whether it worked or not.

Obviously we typed in the appropriate SET LANG command and ended up in Finnish.

The problem was, the only way back was to type the appropriate SET LANG command to get back to English and we didn't know Finnish!

Luckily for us we had an option to show the commands via a menu. Cue trial and error and a report to the usability lab...

Untangling the question of antimatter mass

This one's actually quite good

I thought Lucy was pretty good and missed her when she left. Lester wasn't a bad substitute but Richard is pretty good. He explains things clearly, lets you know where he thinks he may have a lack of understanding and manages to make readable articles.

And now back to my copy of Scientific American...

The Commodore 64 is 30

Oh puhlease...

> The model that did more than any to bring computers into the reach of normal folk.

Commodore's problem was that they overpriced their machines. No, don't argue with me. I'd have happily had a Commodore but I couldn't afford one. From the PET (for which I still have a soft spot) to the Vic-20, there were other machines that I could afford that would do what I wanted (and I've got a computing degree from the days when these things were worth something). They always brought their new machine out at one price class higher than it should have been.

That said, I've still got my Amiga 400 and the games and they still work and they still knock spots off the crap that's produced these days.

iPad scammers pwn Lady Gaga's Facebook page

Wrong

> Proof (if needed) people really are DIM.

No, they just don't spend as much time trawling the internet as you do, nor do they necessarily have the time to do so.

I know lots of very intelligent people who just don't understand this because *it's not their profession*!! They have to deal with psychiatric patients (I couldn't do what my other half does in this area) or deal with legal matters. They concentrate on their own area and they're very, very good at it. They just don't have the time to sit down and spend lots of time learning all the ins-and-outs that computer people take for granted.

Get over it.

(I dunno why I re-signed up to this site... I'll just get downvoted by the people who don't seem to realise that there is actually a life out there...)

(Ok, I just did it for the handle...)