Posts by Oliverh 33 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2007
Dylon, I might draw your attention to Cade's own post where he confirms that he has now added the ommitted title.
It wasn't, then he fixed it, and now, by the time your wit has arrived at the party, it is!
Read that in puce if you like! (Seriously, who, other than dyslexics, displays text in non-standard colours?)
Errrr, I'm not sure you have got to grips with how AC works, but its not "pushing" air in through those lagged copper pipes! Its cooling air that stays in the room by circulating it, no pressure build up! The pipes contain the heat laden refrigerant, literally transporting just the heat out of the room.
Are you one of those people (usually women, sorry for the sexism, it's just an observation!) that says "Oooh it's hot in here, turn on the AC and open a window?"
AC Works best in a sealed environment. Now if you were talking about fans extracting air, then you need a neutral pressure inlet that allows air to flow in at the rate it's pulled out to avoid a negative pressure build up as the fan tries to suck all the air from the room.
As is the norm with the reg of late, your attention to detail is outstanding!
You counter Tim's argument that it was a fault, with:
"I'd have thought the same, except for that I asked the company what had happened to it, and they responded by telling me about how they can remove anything they please for whatever reason they please, not that it could be a fault."
When Tim stated:
"but suspect that if they have, it may be rather less embarassing to hide behind their terms of use."
Conratulations, you missed the point. Tim guessed that they might have spun you a yarn rather than tell you the truth, and you argue, moronically, that they would never have spun you a yarn and would have told you the truth when you asked. Keep up the good work.
Glad to see you suck though.
Oliver Hussick
Not El Reg, thankfully.
"Boob bursting bee on biking blunder"
This is not The Sunor The Sport!!!
and to V.Srikrishnan:
Coats can be used to keep warm should shame cause you to leave a room, headed for the tumbleweed infested, freezing wasteland that is BadJokeTown! It comes originally from The Fast show I believe. My favourite being the historical sketch where the character, after an awful faux pas, proffered "I'll get my cloak"
......rants, rather amusingly, that those who use "acid" to describe wacky crap are just lazy. "Like Terry and June on acid" I believe the joke went, describing the lame comparison of a new tv show with aforementioned drug induced retro TV show moment. No, Terry and June on acid would be four hours of Terry examining the pattern on Junes floral crockery saying "That's quite interesting, ooh that's quite interesting, oooooh that's quite interesting........" over and over again.
"The speakers are based on a single driver design, as opposed to the dual-driver - tweeter and woofer - design used in many speakers. Eclipse claimed its approach "maximises time, phase and impulse characteristics" to avoid distortion"
or because its cheaper?
"and there is no crossover to smear out any of the sound."
yes, I find 10khz rumbles fed into 1" tweeters often reduces smear!
This sounds like first class, almost commendable, marketing tripe to excuse the fact that these are pants. My B&W at a grand each must be rubbish with their stupid 2 driver system. And I really must remember to turn off my smeary crossover so all the bass can go freely into the high frequency drivers!
TOSH!
"Copper thieves often drive vans, don hard hats and scale telephone poles, in an attempt to blend in with legitimate telephone workers. But instead of fixing broken lines, they pilfer the FIBER used to connect ATMs, emergency 911 call centers and phone service."
Not very good at copper thieving then! Trade descriptions!!!!!!
Why not just take the output of any legacy source you like and run it into your PC's line in? Admittedly, a phono amp is required for turntables, but anything that already kicks out line level signals via RCA/phonos or whatever can be hooked up to a PC without the need to spend a ton on a dedicated deck with a universal USB audio interface sellotaped to the side!
How about a mindisc which converts the binary on the disc to analogue via the DAC that feeds a USB audio interface that sends it to the PC? Just so we can get all those old Minidiscs on our PCs?
Wax cylinder phonograph USB recorder anyone? Cup and String USB interface?
Optic Fibres? To all PCs? With crazy lasers scrambling about all through them? What if they "leak" "laser" (whatever that is?) out all over the children? the children!!!!!! WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN??!?!?!??!??!
Reminds me of Bill Bailey quoting Rosie O'Donnell>
"There’s this one celebrity, Rosie O’Donnell, a talk show host, and she said this: “I don’t know anything about Afghanistan, but I know it’s full of terrorists, speaking as a mother.” So what is this "speaking as a mother" then? Is it a euphemism for "well, talking out of my arse"? "Suspending rational thought for a moment"? As a rational human being, Al-Qaeda are a loose association of fundamentalist zealots who could be rounded up with a sustained police investigation. But speaking as a parent, they’re all eight foot tall, they’ve got lasers under their moustaches, a huge eye in their foreheads and the only way to kill them is to nuke every country that hasn’t sent us a Christmas card in the the last 20 years. Speaking as a mother…"
Again, in its entriety, because its the best damn diatribe I have read on here for a long time! And if its any consolation, I hate fax machines. Yes they were technologically advanced, now they are just a substandard method for moving blurry (and still somerimes curly) paper around the world, rendeirng it illegible and necessitating the phone call to clarify, that would have done the job in the first place!
And just in case the image might come out legible at the other end, it sucks through 3.2 offset and wonky pages at once in its "new improved sheet feed" so I then have to manually feed it one page at a time, wasting yet more time. And they are only capable of beeping at ultrasonic, ear splitting frequencies.
And my colleagues here actually still print emails and give them to eachother in a kind of homage to faxes. We even have amazing fax servers here to cope with 10 lines, and what do these servers do? PRINT THE GOD DAMN FAXES!
I hate printers, fax machines and stupid paper-wasting eco-oblivious technophobes.
I love Steve.
"I hate printers. I have always hated them. People are always asking me to fix them. I'm a software person. How the f*ck should I know how to fix a printer ? Countless code hours wasted staring into the mysterious guts of some godawful office equipment filled with springs and belts and tiny things that break off when you look at them, and then won't go back on, so you have to lie to the service engineer, when the lazy bugger actually gets around to turning up.
No, I shall no longer stand for it. Currently I do this :
Supplicant : "Hey Steve, do you know what's wrong with the printer ?"
Me : "Yes, it's shit."
Supplicant : "??!!"
I shall enjoy being able to say "Yes, it's poisoning us all slowly to death, throw the hateful thing out of the window and have done with it."
I hate printers."
I have said this for years, eventually they will find everything is bad for you and we should all kill ourselves to avoid death by smoke/toner/fluffy rabbits.
I do love the comparisons drawn with smoking (not much though, I'm trying to forget the 5 weeks since my last hit of marlborory goodness!). Can anyone see printers being banished to the outdoors? Not likely!
I may just go and suck on my laserjet until my nicotine craving passes!
"What I am more interest in the fact that the gentlemen in question is guilty"
Is he now? Thats that sorted then! Confession/admission might not be the whole story!
"If you walked up to a house, tried the door knob and the door was unlocked, would it be legal for you to go inside and rummage around?"
Actually its a bit of a grey area, in as much as this is trespassing, locked doors mean breaking and entering. Different charges and sentences! Insurance companies won't pay out on theft claims if there was no breaking, just entering!
"I consider it faintly ironic that without the 'eBay fascists' you would not have the paypal service that you wish to use with other vendors!"
Whilst I agree with the sentiments of your comment, for historical accuracy, I do believe that paypal existed before ebay. They just bought it, like anything else they fancy, skype et al!
That's not to say the irony isn't still there! "Fcuk ebay but can I still use paypal please?"
Ebay's decision is not about policing the world! Its about staying out of a politically touchy subject! Its a bit different to corner shops selling cocaine because "its up to the user to abstain"! Legal issue, so its policed in the market place.
Its not a legal issue, just a politcal one, so there is no relevance to "policing" anything!
Sex toys aren't illegal, but you proabably won't catch Tesco stocking a whole section because its not something they want to be associated with.
Apologies for the extreme (and weird!) analogies, but I think some of the comments are rather extreme (and weird!) reactions! Ebay just don't wanna play in this sandpit!
PS Morale Highground? Is that a hill where the happy people go?
"By RW
Posted Friday 27th July 2007 15:58 GMT
The issue is really just one of the well-known differences between British idiom and American. The Brits often treat collective nouns as plural: "The Beeb have announced..." whereas the Yanks generally treat them in the singular: "The Beeb has announced..."
Neither is wrong; it's merely a difference in emphasis, just as some languages deeply embed in their grammar the perceived reliability of a statement."
I don't care if it's singular or plural. It is still not a collective noun! A collective noun is a word that describes a group or collection of other "nouns"! A PRIDE of Lions, a MURDER of crows.
There is no such thing as a GOOGLE of servers!
Google is a name, with a capital letter and everything! Therefore a proper noun! There's a simple test! You can't use it in Scrabble!
Used to be a kid in my town called Astral, and every time the kid's chavvy mum screamed at it, it sounded like Ashtray! Awesome!
"AAAAAShtray Will you come here now!"
Also don't you just cringe when you hear parents swearing at their kids a la "Chanel" posted by George Johnson? Maybe I mark myself as a real Conservative (Capital C) here, but I think that and spitting in the street give us a real idea of what the kid will end up like! I remember my mum giving a teenager in a lift a clip round the earhole for daring to swear in from of me and my little sister, then shopped em to the security guard of the shopping centre we were in! Classic!
The economics are as follows: farmers pocket around six to ten yuan a kilogram (20 to 35 pence a pound in old money, the Telegraph helpfully adds), while Cantonese restaurants knock it out as delicious rat stew for up to four quid a pound
Just yesterday I beleive came the comment from the chap riled by a mix of metric and imperial. I wonder how angry the added currency variable made him.
Compare yuan per kilo with GBP per pound. Sounds like a trick question from a GCSE paper, except this one doesn't have the answer right after it or award points for getting your name right!
I don't think I know a single girl who hasn't dropped her phone down the toilet. It must be genetic. And the first thing they all do after its retrieved? Try and turn it on.....fizz. I know its not an exact science, but its always worth letting electronic items dry after a soaking.
A friend of mine regularly recommends that apple keyboards that have been a victim of coca-cola or some such liquid go in the dishwasher. As long as they are dry before you plug it back in, all should be well!
<Rant Mode: On>
Its true, there is nothing but Customer Disservice left in this world and we are kinda to blame. Don't get me wrong, there is no excuse for failing to serve your customers. I have had possibly the worst customer service ever from the likes of (I love naming names) o2 on many occasions, BT, NThell, Budget Insurance and Norwich Union.
There is one reason for the problems occuring and the problems not getting resolved when they do occur. Cost. Companies are obsessed, because of consumers, with being the cheapest, and nobody, not one, is concerned with being the best. That leaves little in the pot for enough staff, sufficient training and a salary to reflect how important they are in the corporate machine. Does a call center worker on £12k really care that you might leave the multi-million pound telco firm with one less customer?
Its the same even with fast food industries in my opinion. Their one redeeming feature for customer service (it sure ain't the food) is speed. It used to be "Whatever you want SIR, its ready to eat, and hot too". But that attitude has had to change over the last 5 years in my opinion. "We can't afford to throw loads of stale warm food away MATE, so if you park/sit over there it will be ready when I can be bothered."
Its all the same thing though, we don't like to pay and we don't like to wait, but it would appear that we can't have it both ways. I for one would ask that companies consider the real cost of providing real customer service, pitch their prices accordingly and accept that customer service is not something that costs businesses money, it IS business! Do something for a customer, they pay you, don't do it, they stop paying you pretty quickly.
Be it emails that take weeks (14 sent to o2 and still no resolution) to get a response, if ever; Phone calls that inform you "We are experiencing (AS EVER!!!) high call volumes, you are 145th in the queue and should expect to wait 6 years before an agent will be with you, we really do care about your custom" or clueless loons such as Rufus that, when you finally get a response, have failed so catastrophically to understand what you are trying to acchieve, they abuse you for daring to expect something to work properly. If just one person at one company shows me they care, I'll stick by them for as long as that person stays with the company!
The only real solution is to start demanding it. I don't let them get away with it, I won't just close my account. I will keep asking, as politely as possible for what is right. Until we all make companies serve their customers, they can keep reducing the customer service budget, keep shedding call centre staff, even shedding the tiresome job it is to run a call centre by letting some indians do it.
Lets start a war! Lets have a resolution! Lets make businesses look after the wage payers, not the shareholders!
<Rant Mode: Off>
Apologies, your article appears to have pushed my "Mental" button. It wont' happen again!
I was recently told in no uncertain terms that o2 couldn't tell me whether a device they supplied supported SAP. I wasn't asking how to use it, just if it was present on the device.
"The O2 XDA min S supports AKU2 and several other Bluetooth profiles, a full list of which can be found on our website, www.o2.co.uk/xda <THERE IS NO SUCH LIST>. O2 does not support SAP (SIM Access Profile). Further information about bandwidths etc can be obtained on the website or by contacting O2datasupport@o2.com."
"O2 do not support or offer advice on Bluetooth applications."
"Bluetooth – Bluetooth 2.0 is installed in the Mini S. and this works with myriad applications. I’m afraid I’m not able to supply any further information."
AKU2? What has that got to do with anything? Anyone want to try downloading SP2 for XP via bluetooth.
After 14 emails from people who didnt understand my question, let alone posess the necessary skills to form a coherent response, I gave up.
I have to admit to getting quite angry at one point:
"Bluetooth is the name given to a radio technology making transmission of signals over short distances between telephones, computers and other devices, like household appliances, without the use of wires.
The BlackBerry is a handheld device providing e-mail, telephone, text messaging and web browsing and other data access.
I mentioned nothing about blackberry, push email technology or the delicious fruits of Bramble bushes.
I can see where the confusion comes in. Bluetooth.....Blackberry, its all the same. Any chance someone can read the question and answer it approprately?
Which bluetooth profiles does the XDA mini S support. If YOU (the reader of this email) do not understand the question, its probably best not to try and answer it. Pass it on to someone who knows what bluetooth is, what bluetooth profiles are, and preferably what reading, comprehending and responding is. Please do not send me any information on Blueberries or Black Teeth. I hate getting annoyed and being sarcastic, I really do, but this is beyond a joke."
But what is the point in getting nowhere if you can't have fun on the way!
Customer Service is dead! Long live the age of misinformation and support avoidance!
RANT OVER
Since when did the C of ICT become necessary? What is communication if not the conveyance of information, more often than not, using some form of technology? Otherwise we need to include all the various uses of IT to cover entertainment, education,business, pr0n, ad infinitum. Anyone for ICEEBPT?
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