Posts by Amorous Cowherder 1063 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2012
Absolutely brilliant! A nice little horror edge, a little though provolking and a little bit of gentle romance. German language with English subs, nobody I'd heard of and for once not wrecked by big named, short-arsed, short-tempered Hollywood B-listers with wooden acting skills that could be bettered by a broom handle!
"But OS X? Not one ounce of lock-in."
You seen 10.8? The default setting is only install/allow to run Apple approved app-store software. Piece of cake to switch it back to full-open, run what-you-like-mode and yes I know it's not full vendor lock-in as we understand it, but the seeds have sown...
"but the way that we went about it didn't allow us to get the leadership"
Excuse me?! Listen Billy the street punter thinks mobile, they think iPhone, Blackberry, Android, then you start to get names like Nokia, Samsung, etc mentioned then finally after that lot you get Mr Average Punter thinking, "Really the Windows computer people actually make a mobile phone do they? Well I never!". Honestly, two of my relatives have said almost that exact phrase. Average, typical street punters think Windows=Computer, let alone even remotely thinking about Windows=Mobile Phone!
Ooh look a shiny box that will cost shitloads to start with, games will be close on £60 a copy, most of which will get slated as not being what the gaming faithful wanted and then after 3 years R&D will have been recouped, console will be down sub £100 and the next annoucement comes out and the whole cycle starts again with a brain rotting and tedious inevitbality.
This must be one of those signs when you realise that as a dad, you're actually turning into a "Dad"! Next thing I'll be down the shops looking for elaticated waist slacks that I'll put a belt around and pull up right up just short of my 'nipple-line'! Oh dear God no, help me!!
Brilliant! When I installed it last year I was so surprised it knew about my home town, some backwater spit in Hertfordshire. Then after about 3 weeks of using it, it was almost as if it knew my mind when I started typing messages, obviously the algorithms they've got for scanning your language habits are pretty neat stuff!
I got a copy from Google when they had it on offer for 10p and so glad I did!
"I do not think it is money for old rope. If you look at the essence of what Capita endeavours to do, the specialisms that we have are all about process management and trying to run operations in the most efficient way that we can."
To which I would have said. "You seem to have managed to use an unfeasibly large number of words to say absolutely fuck all of any worth! Now, take a deep breath and let's try to answer the question again shall we?"
"Every person who becomes home secretary seems to be turned into a crazed maniac that would put the head of the Stasi to shame."
No, they are the sort of empty headed moron who suits the job perfectly because they can be manipulated into the mouthpiece for the civil servant twats who work in the Home Office, who are the sort of "...crazed maniac[s] that would put the head of the Stasi to shame."!
We used to have the crappy surveys at school every few months and we'd always, without fail, put YES to every dodgy or dangerous activity and write some rubbish on them. We'd never any of these things, we just thought it would be a laugh to annoy people, that's what kids do!
I'm sure it might work with the casual user who dabbles but most of the hardcore know how it works and know how the game is played and when the odds of being caught are so minute, this seems more like a token effort to fulfill obligations to the media corps on educating the masses.
Oh dear God no! The media would simply be awash with every pundit and critic spouting the word "cyber" at every opportunity, even more so than they do now. I'd need a few weeks holed up in a tent in the Caringorm's to survive that one without going bonkers!
They had just finished the final proof so they all got off their heads on the Friday night. Next morning John is the only one left and he gets a call from the publisher saying they need a closer for the book. Still off his face on shooms, he finishes the book off for a laugh. There's a work experience person in the office early on the Monday morning who doesn't bother reading John's demented rantings and sends it to the printers proof unread!
Shame they forgot to print the final page in the bible, the one that reads "All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental."
What a load of old toot! I bet 90% of the people who complained never even saw the app, just saw the the word "asian" and started bleating like a load of fecking sheep!
The only thing I can't understand though, is what is this generic "asian" look that the app purported to provide? From my limited experience Asia is a huge continent that encomposes a huge diversity of facial tones, shapes and varities how that could be distilled into a single app with basic morphing and colouring code is beyond me.
Sounds more like a right load of crap that simply gives you an olive skin tone and black hair. Wouldn't call that rascist, just a waste of 69p that would be better spent on a fart app to be honest!
"Erm, so what would you add to a smartphone to make it groundbreaking again?"
Nothing, It's a phone, so long as it makes phone calls, sends messages and maybe allows a few games and a bit of browsing that's good enough for 98% of people. Apple are telling us how ground breaking their latest tech is and how you will be a nobody if you don't buy it, well the only people daft enough to fall for that marketing guff are usually kids under 25, the key demographic that has cash on the hip and no responsibilities.
Apple have drummed up this image of being the hipsters techy friend, you only have to look at the opening videos on their app software. River Island/GAP clad young twenty somethings in Apple emblazoned t-shirts teaching you how to get creative with your new copy of Aperture, iPhoto, etc. People are seeing Apple for what they are, just another successful tech company making pretty good products. People now compare them to others like Samsung, they see that no one product or company is actually any better than any other, they're all make OK products and actually it's down to personal choice in the end.
Be quiet! The only thing I could moan about was the Dad's rather annoying trendy beard but I bet he's a real hero to his kid and the the kid's mates at school as well.
If this convinces his kid or just one kid in his son's school to follow a career in science, I'll let the Dad's beard thing go!
Life is hard enough as it is, people bunking off here and there to go bunking up. So glad I'm an ugly, hairy IT geek and only one woman has messed up her life by wanting to spend it with me!
Trying to have your cake and eat it? Sod that! I have two women in my life, my wife and my pre-teen daughter, I have enough bloody grief already and it's about to get worse when my daughter's hormones reach critical mass in a couple years time!
Volunteering to work Xmas supporting the DBs for the 10% who had to come in after they ran out of holiday entitlement, doing sweet FA or bugger-all ( I haven't decided which yet! ) all day and then off down the pub for a liquid lunch, that's how to get through Xmas!
@Stevie 0 15:36
Plod: "Oh nothng much sir, we're just collecting for the Police charity fund and would like a donation. I say sir, what's that pile of smashed equipment on your living room floor? Please be careful you don't cut yourself. Have a good day sir!"
Balls! Balls! Balls! My data! Arrrrrgh!
"Before that disk platters could be lifted out of disk drives."
I remember working on ICL System 25's back around 1992, we had the big portable stack platters you lifted out, 60MB I think they held over 4 platters. When one got corrupt I managed to snag it and it's safely stored up in my loft in my "Historical IT Crap Museum", ha ha!
"A screen filter for your CRT monitor to protect your eyes." - Those bloody awful things that looked like fly-screens you see on doors in films about the US Midwest!
"16Mb RAM on your computer was something to be envied." - As penniless student that would have been the dog's wotnots! 4MB and be very thankful! Ditto 2GB HD, I was over the moon when I got my first 100MB+ HD!
The joy of pushing your video card all the way up to 256 colours at 1024x768 with drivers for Windows 3 you had to spend 30 minutes downloading from a manufacturer's BBS.
Logging into remote university FTP sites as they almost always had decent pirate software available in the public directories! Then catching some nasty virus from said software and spending the day cleaning your machine, LOL!
Messing about with memory manager TSRs to get just a few more KB out of the lower memory ranges to run that hefty DTP package or game.
Simple days and happier times.
" Those who don't learn from history, and all that: he might be referring to the Chinese leadership who ruled during the Cultural Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four). '
....and those of us who remember the classic Not the Nine O'Clock News parody of aforementioned GoF!
Well if a UK company made it..."New XYZ - It's OK but not great! You know what, you might be best to give this one a miss. My girlfriend's mate, quite fit as it happens, had this thing where it wouldn't sync with ABC so she took down to PC World. I know! I said look, you muppet don't go there, it's full of planks. Bad as my dopey sister, the pair of them. Anyway, XYZ is OK just try to do that thing that goes boing, boing after you push that button marked with a green Y on it, should be alright."
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