Posts by Mountford D 132 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2007
... can be a philanthropist. What is $10 million but a fraction of the interest paid on Mr Gates' stash? Presumably by probing the universe we will come closer to finding some alien seed that will be the panacea for all the ills on Earth enabling us to live happily ever after. In the meantime, I'll settle for an Open Source version of Windows, thank you (as much chance of that as the alien seed).
I can categorically say our Windows 2003 SBS gave us no problems whatsoever over the Christmas period. In fact I've never seen it so reliable and when I came in this morning after a fortnight. It was humming away, smooth as the proverbial baby's...
Fantastic - now if I can persuade the rest of the company to take the remainder of 2008 off, I can relax and carry on singing the praises of Microsoft. In the meantime. I'd better get my arse into gear and sort out the various logging in problems the helpdesk appears to be innundated with - oh well, the Ubuntu servers seem OK so I guess it must be...
I know I should be coming up with a comment a la mode El Reg but seriously folks, they are finger grips. It's a thinner version of the rubber thimbles used by bank tellers to count large wads of cash and a more hygienic way of gripping paper than licking your fingers. And yes, it's the same material as condoms: rubber.
Have you ever been to China, Shad?
If not, I suggest you do. Yes, they have all sorts of problems but no more than anywhere else. I have seen more poverty in the USA than China. The issue of Human Rights is open to interpretation and depends very much on whose perspective you take as is the environmental issue. I know they run conservation programs second to none but they also have to balance the need to look after their human population unlike the extreme animal activists we see in the UK who would be quite happy to wipe out the human population in favour of some cuddly furry creature who will wouldn't think twice about taking your arm off.
I can write a whole essay on why China is not as bad as it is portrayed but equally I can do the same on why the West is not as rosy as everyone thinks but I won't.
For me, China is simply trying to modernise itself after years of social engineering by an autocratic government that left it in the dark ages and is now hitting all the problems experienced by developed nations like the UK a hundred-plus years ago. China is in her industrial revolution and if she can avoid and learn by the mistakes made by the industrialised nations during their development, she deserves to be the next global super-power.
I hope the camel died from natural causes and wasn't slaughtered for this purpose as it is clearly a record-breaking stunt. From a culinary point of view, I can think of loads of other better meat to spit roast. I wonder if Christian Falco and his BBQ guests at Rabat have ever tasted camel meat?
Having been born and lived my early years in South-East Asia, I can understand the guards' sonambulistic practice as the Far Eastern culture is one of peaceful honesty and respect. Vandalism is unheard of and the presence of a guard, awake or asleep is usually enough to deter burglars.
Napping in the hot climate is common practice for guards and burglars alike and they certainly would not have been expecting to be clobbered on the head, much less by one of their own.
I changed my ISP to TT in the house because all the family needed was a bog-standard OK connection and a saving of nearly £20 a month was an offer I could not refuse. I was mildly surprised when the expected constant drop-outs and slow connections did not materialise other than from around 11pm to midnight when everything appears to die.
Maybe, just maybe, TT are genuinely listening to criticisms and are doing something right, as opposed to my previous line supplier whom we all know never listens to any of their customers, unintelligible billing, famous for frequent changes to their broadband service name and incarnating itself in many guises through their broadband wholesale programme.
In all the e-petitions I have signed, I simply receive an email from the PM or his office thanking me for my efforts but we (the government) are going to ignore the e-petition anyway as we are the elected government and you (one of 60 million insects we govern) are totally irrelevant until we need your vote.
Dear Mr Prime Minister (and/or office),
Why have an e-petition site at all (or even a petition procedure)?
Yours yada, yada, yada...
"Can't we just abolish this daft clock changing business altogether? I have yet to have someone explain to me a plausible reason why we do it anyway"
In this day and age, none, other than for the vote casting peasants who do not own time-pieces and share living spaces with their animals. Having said that, I doubt if animals give a jot what time of the day it is as long as they get fed and milked at conditioned times be it 5am or 6am.
Upgraded from Feisty to Gutsy a couple of days ago using apt-get without any problems whatsoever. The only change I made was to ditch ndiswrapper and use the built-in bcm43xx support in the kernel, which was a conscious decision. Everything is as it was - makes me wonder why I bothered really...
"...their being capable of speech doesn't prove that we would have been able to sit down with the "cavemen" and have a natter over a cup of tea (proving that our evolutionary cousins could speak is pretty much impossible, given the absence of contemporary sound recording equipment)"
Not so impossible. If anyone would care to send me a stamped addressed envelope plus £10, I can send them sample recordings of conversations held in presumably some sort of meeting, furthermore proving that Neanderthals have not died out and a small group disguised as computer programmers is still alive and well, thriving in an old building in Staffordshire.
Having found that we were hardly using our broadband at home, I have just switched from Eclipse to TalkTalk's bundled package to save some money on the assumption that TT is not *that* much worse than one of the BT wholesale mongers like Eclipse. So will someone please reassure me that I haven't signed myself into broadband hell for 18 months!!
Presumably the A80 near Haggs will be closed for the next few days while the authorities clear up the carcasses. As other posts suggests, the chickens are not likely to survive so the area will come to resemble the chicken version of the Somme.
The IT angle is that my colleague who appears to consume a whole supermarket cooked chicken for lunch everyday may have to change his culinary habits if the price of chicken goes up as a result.
"I find it amazing that we (UK) can go to war on a dubious reason, but we fail to do anything about these atrocities!"
Actually we did - Sierra Leone and Iraq. Saddam Hussein was supposed to have committed far worse atrocities on his own people but it just wasn't reported as graphically as it has with Burma or Zimbabwe. We were quite successful in Sierra Leone and the powers that be thought we could repeat the success in Iraq and I think we did in Basra.
Burma was an British colony (albeit as an annex of colonial India), so we have been there before, as we had in Afghanistan. Strange how history repeats itself. The next thing you know, we'd have an Empire again...
I wouldn't go by market share.
I was a Host Europe customer myself but Leicester outfit Freevirtualservers (www.easy-internet.co.uk) is who I use now. However, they seem to have changed recently since I signed up with them (new web site design and hosting now appears to be in the US) and I've noticed a few more outages than before though that could be my ISP or BT. Having said that, their support department is excellent, 5* and second to none.
Even with start-ups, a lot of investment would have gone into bringing out a product. In the UK, winding up a business is big hassle and there are negative implications for the directors, ranging from loss of face to disqualification from being a company director for years. Not something to be taken lightly.
If they are compelled to stop distributing their product, then it could mean death for the company. It would cheaper and infinitely less hassle for them to allow access to the GPL code - and only the GPL portion, not their proprietary added stuff.
In view of the EU ruling today, Microsoft may lose the advantage of having Windows pre-installed on every new PC bought from box-shovellers like PC World, in which case they had better train their monkeys to be better informed on non-Microsoft products and O/S. Perhaps they will start hiring real IT pros instead of air-heads whose main computer experience comes from an 18-hour daily diet of Windows games.
It makes me wonder why spammers bother doing what they do. Every internet savvy user must be aware of spam and UCEs by now and take absolutely no notice of them. In fact it has got to the point where ALL users I know are even deleting bona fide mail-shots (which incidentally, US marketeers please note, is subject to different laws in the UK and EU) without reading them.
The whole exercise is self-defeating so wouldn't it better for the world if spammers would just stop? Let's face it, does anyone REALLY take penis enlargement pills seriously, buy drugs and software from some unknown source who sends you an email, or respond to pump-and-dump emails? I suppose anyone who does deserves to be fleeced and that is who the spammers are after but what proportion of the spammed recipients is that? Pretty much nil I would imagine as most if not all, internet users are pretty intelligent.
My thoughts exactly. Every working person in the UK contributes into some sort of pension fund or other so why not fantastically rich pop-stars like Cliff who can't be short of a million or two? Thinking about it, do they actually NEED a pension with that amount under the mattress unless stardom has also given them the powers of immortality?
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