Posts by Len Goddard 436 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007
Drones don't take pictures, people take pictures.
You can't ban guns on the grounds that they can be used to kill people, but it is all right to ban camera equipped drones because they might take pictures, or websites because they can be used for illegal file sharing.
The law should be aimed at the illegal act, not the enabling tech if that tech has other perfectly legitimate uses.
AFAIK this crud is only in the Ubuntu unity interface, not in the other 'buntus. I moved to Xubuntu when unity appeared because it is as ugly and unpleasant as TIFKAM.
Having said which, Stallman is quite right in this case and Shuttleworth should be ashamed of what he has done to what was a well respected distro.
It is still Connery for me, despite the political incorrectness of the films. Most of the later Bonds have had to suffer from pretty naff scripts padded out with special effects and big fight/chase scenes. The results are neither memorable nor impressive.
Dalton made quite a good fist of his two outings. Brosnan was too smooth. Moore was far too smooth. Lazenby was not bad but struggled with a really poor script and a leading lady who couldn't stand him (is it really true she ate raw onions before every love scene?). Craig comes second for Casino Royale, but Quantum of Solice is so forgettable that the only thing about it I can remember is that I have seen it.
I doubt that many people will rush out and buy a copy of win8 to upgrade an existing machine. Most copies will be sold with new hardware, particularly once MS puts the screws on vendors to stop them installing win 7.
I'm actually having a hard time remembering when I last upgraded a copy of windows on existing hardware. I think it was when I went from 3.1 to Win 95. Not a happy experience. M$ does not have a good record for allowing upgrade-in-place, preserving installed apps and configuration options. Unlike my work Ubuntu system, which was upgraded every six months from 5.10 to 11.10 with more or less no problems.
Whenever anyone questions change some cretin comes up with the mantra:
"Change happens, get used to it"
Why? It is just as reasonable to complain about change for the worse as it is to complain about maintenance of a bad design.
I'm perfectly happy with windows the way I have it set up now - win7 with classic shell to make it look as close to the XP/classic interface as possible. So I suppose this is more or less a Win 2K look and feel. Basically it does what I want without too many unpleasant suprises - most unexpected behaviour is where the emulation fails (such as the brain-dead version of Windows Explorer in Win 7). I could have slavishly learned each new interface along the way but why should I? The best OS is the one you don't notice - things just happen the way they always did.
I don't object to new interfaces provided they are not mandatory. If Win8 had a nice prominent initial setup option - Use Classic Interface - I could quite happily leave TIFKAM to those who want their desktop to behave in the same way as their tablet or phone (a not unreasonable desire). Unfortunately it does not, and the monolithic Windows design precludes complete desktop replacements in the way allowed in linux. And yes, I did move from Ubuntu to Xubuntu because the Unity interface screwed up my normal workflow (ingrained over the last 6 years) but Xubuntu required very little change in behaviour.
You can block the java plug-in (and other things) in firefox by using the noscript plugin then enable it on a temporary page-by-page or site-by-site basis if you really have to have java. You can even allow it on whitelisted sites if you feel brave.
Not that it is that important for me ... I just checked my setup and discovered that as well as being blocked my java is at 1.6 anyway. Ho hum.
I had one of the early transformers and I thought it was an excellent tablet, but I finally disposed of it for the simple reason it would not play mkv videos and I have a lot of material in that format which I have no intention of transoding to mp4 just to satisfy one device. Does this one play mkv?
Single speaker is also disappointing. My TF101 had stereo.
Well, I do care about computer games. I enjoy them, despite not being in what is generally regarded as the target demographic. And, to be honest, games are the only reason I still have windows on my home PCs (my office PC ran linux only for years before I retired). If Win8 forces a reasonable number of games developers over onto Linux I will jump for joy and happily purge the ghastly Windoze mess from my life forever.
Seems to me that this thread shows the essential futility of the original article. There is virtually no concensus on what is good or bad. Also, just because YOU don't like a show doesn't make it crap and just because I like it doesn't make it great.
You can attempt to analyse shows on the basis of some arbitrary checklist of qualities but once again you descend into a morass of argument over what should be judged good and bad. Fine for a university course on contemporary media but essentially useless otherwise.
In the end, a show is good if enough people watch it to pay for its production and encourage the makers to produce more of the same or similar. Unfortunately that makes a lot of stuff "good" which I personally loathe so I don't watch much TV nowadays.
Me, I liked (in no particular order) Luther, The Wire, Lewis, Hustle, West Wing, Fringe, Spirals, Wallander, The Borgias, Rome, Firefly and many others. Equally, I'd rather watch reruns of Porridge or Yes, Minister or Mash than most recent comedies.
You are always likely to have more good US shows than British simply because they make so many more. They also frequently can excellent shows for silly reasons or as a result of poor ratings due to schedule mishandling (yes, Fox, I'm talking about you).
Now I'm off to watch the recent Shakespeare Hollow Crown cycle. That's not something likely to emerge from the US.
I'm lost. The more immersive and engaging the show, the more likely any knowledgable viewer is to take action to avoid it being interrupted by advertising, like pre-recording it and skipping the ads.
There are a staggering number of fallacious premises in this whole area. Nowadays, measuring program viewing numbers gives absolutely no indication of ad penetration, if it ever did. The only really important measure is whether sales, or at least brand recognition, goes up as a result of advertising or down as a result of not advertising. This is rarely measured because it is hard to do, and anyway in most cases the results almost certainly wouldn't show anything the advertising companies would want their customers to know.
I just went and looked at the new tab page. Of the nine options, 4 are different pages on the same website, four have titles but no images, one says "file not found" and seven of them are for sites I already have open on other pages.
So I took the suggestion in the article and clicked on the square icon thingie. A blank page is less distracting. Maybe I'm getting old but it seems that most "usability enhancements" nowadays are just complicated graphical ways of performing simple tasks.
How are we supposed to get these wonderful images into our homes? 8k pictures are approximately 16 times the size of 1080p. Bluray won't cope, we'll need a new format UV-ray perhaps? And of course some film makers want to go to 48fps instead of 24, or maybe higher. Add 3D to that and we'll need X-ray lasers in our disk players. Or we can rewire the whole country with multiple fibres to each premises just to deliver the ultra-hi-def adverts which will be the bulk of the content.
After much thrashing around and downloading of Classic Shell et al I've finally managed to make Win 7 work more or less the way I want it to ... ie with the Win2000 user interface. It is not as good as Win XP was due to some upleasant behaviour from the file manager but it is tolerable.
I don't want a new interface every time I get a new computer (which is about the only time I change the version of Windoze). The classic interface does everything I want the way I expect it to. It is not the best interface in the world but it is familiar. If I try to learn Win 8 it will have changed again long before I am half as comfortable with it as I am with Classic.
It is much the same in the UK. It used to be that if you clipped the ads out of a 2 hour program you were left with 100-105 minutes of programming. Nowadays you are lucky to get much over 90 (and that includes 90 the credits which probably have voice-over ads for upcoming programs). The old 2-breaks for 1 hour and 3 for 2 scheme has become 3 and 4 respectively, with the extra break stuck in near the end for maximum exposure. This is particularly a problem with older programs where they shoehorn the extra break in with no regard to content.
"And the murderer was"
<5 mins advertising>
"Colonel Mustard in the TV room with the fatally boring advert".
I remember some arrogant cretin of a network executive coming up with the unbelievable statement that skipping the ads was equivalent to stealing the programming.
My PVR doesn't do a fixed-period skip so I run through them on fast-forward (30x). Oddly, research shows that the impact and retention of advertising material at this speed is much the same as if you watch them at normal speed. TBH, advertisers are better off if I don't watch their rubbish because on the odd occasion that I notice an ad it is usually because it has annoyed me so much I will never use that product again. I haven't eaten Shredded Wheat breakfast cerial for about 40 years because one of their jingles got up my nose so much.
Nah, you put a cookie on to say they are willing to be tracked. If the cookie is not there, you ask. That way people get so fed up being questioned they say yes just to shut you up.
Meanwhile I think I'll go check a few guv'mnt websites and complain if they are non-compliant. After all, they should set an example and as far as I can see are the only ones that we can guarantee can be taken to court.
The only good outcome that could result from this fiasco would be a general acceptance that far too many trivial and bad patents are allowed (many of which would fall foul of prior art provisions in the eyes of anyone except a patent lawyer).
Patents should protect truely innovative and creative works for the benefits of the innovators and creators, not act as restraint of trade instruments to prevent competitors from including obvious and necessary features.
To be honest, I am slightly surprised that no one has patented the use of fingers on touch-screen devices, thus forcing the development of nose and tongue controlled devices to prevent infringement.
If they can reduce their budget by £700 million without any loss of quality then they were wasting that money in previous years and someone needs to be sacked. There is a major difference between making a saving and eliminating unnecessary and unproductive spending. If times are tough you look around for things which you can cease doing with the least pain but waste elimination should be an ongoing process at all times. Sure, in good times there may be a small amount of fat which it is more trouble to remove than it is worth, but 50% of the budget??
I flew from London to Sweden once next to a guy who was terrified of flying. He babbled about it for the whole trip and clenched my arm so hard it took two days for the blood to start flowing again.
Can you specify a neighbour who doesn't want to talk? And doesn't use excessive quantities of perfume or aftershave.
As far as I know all my commercially-pressed CDs still play fine. I have, however, had a number of DVDs go bad, generally with adhesive leakage from between the layers. Sometimes you can clean this off but on other occasions it has become so crusted on the playing surface that it could not be removed without damage. I've also had a number of DVD +/- R disks become unplayable for no obvious reason - possibly they simply became insufficiently reflective over time?
High bitrate mp3 (256k+) are adequate for all but the best listening environments. Certainly they are more than sufficient for noisy situations like cars & trains & planes. I don't use AAC but I assume it is similar.
FLAC is easy to get into a decent hifi - a squeezebox, sonos or any one of a number of inexpensive streaming solutions connected to a cheap fileserver or a reasonable NAS will produce excellent results. Quite a few modern amps have USB inputs (mine does but I've never used it) and many good hifi companies are providing dedicated streaming solutions. Having your music online so that you can get anything you want more or less instantly has many advantages - I can route my collection to lounge, bedroom or kitchen without carrying disks around.
Having said this, all my music purchases are physical CDs. I then rip them to the format(s) I want and the original disk forms my primary backup and proof of purchase. I might buy downloads if they were in a convenient lossless format but I won't buy lossy music - you can't get back what isn't there. However, for me downloads are less convenient so I would expect to pay significantly less for them than for the physical disk.
TBH, I think this article is probably BS anyway. There was a report on this site yesterday that said CDs will still bring in more revenue than downloads through 2015 and I can't see the big labels voluntarily cutting off more than 50% of their revenue stream.
I start my desktop PC when I get up in the morning, if it hasn't been running all night. Occasionally I have to reboot during the day. Flash based storage isn't going to do a lot for me until I can afford to replace the 3Tb of data drives as well as the boot disk.
The situation may be different on a notebook PC but I don't use one.
I've been using effectively the same windows interface since Win2000 (or maybe NT4, I can't really remember what that looked like). There are only a limited number of things I need to do with the interface and provided it doesn't change I can do those without thinking about it. I don't believe I will live long enough for any "productivity improvement" to give me back the time I would have to waste learning new interfaces. Currently on Win7 I use the "classic shell" application which does a fair job of giving me a familiar interface (although I'm still not terribly happy with the new version of Windows Explorer).
If I want to do something unusual, new or one off I drop back into the Unix command line which is the first thing I install on any windows box.
TBH, most of my productive work is done on linux but there are a few apps I have to have windows for. Even there I've had to move to Xubuntu because the creeping crud of phone interfaces has infected Ubuntu ... ahhh, well, I'm in good company, Linus Torvalds did much the same thing to avoid Gnome 3.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but most of what I do is of no interest to anybody else and the information that is of interest to others is probably only of interest to people I don't want to know it. Also, most of what other people do is of less than no interest to me.
Unfortunately, too many companies now assume all their customers have facebook and put valuable information there which is not easily accessible elsewhere. I've got around this by creating a completely anti-social profile - every privacy setting maxxed out and every piece of information ont he profile itself is a lie.
Somewhere upstairs I have a book I was given when I was about 8, with a series of articles about various scientific fields. Amongst them was an article about fusion power which could have been used more or less intact as background for this article. I think they were expecting commercial fusion reactors within 25 years.
I'm now 58. Commercial fusion is still at least 25 years away. I'll believe it when the "too cheap to meter" electicity arrives at a socket near me.
With a decent SSD a full boot of windows 7 from the end-of-bios to the login prompt is not exactly a time consuming operation. The major issue is the crud which occurs after you log in (which is not helped here).
I think I'd rather have the full boot every time so that at least I know my current session is not contaminated with some undiagnosable lurgy inherited from a previous session.
I loathe the unity interface - as someone else said, if I've gone to the trouble of buying a large hi-res monitor why should I convert it into phone-clone.
I tried lubuntu, which is clean and simple but I prefer the Xubuntu application set and I don't need the space-saving or low-hardware support of Lubuntu. Pity, because I quite liked the gnome 2.2 interface.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
