The quality of their office printers collapsed around 2000-2003 and onwards. Then they jammed the price up on them. By the time they'd finished 'cutting costs' the things had all the structural integrity of a '79 Alfasud and half the appeal.
The less said about WebOS the better. Arguably better UI than iDiotOnSlab and An-drone (which lets face it isn't exactly rocket magick). Built in security features (like BB OS and Symbian). Good hardware. So, of course, it had to be killed.
Computer models and ranges that bore more resemblance to a GPS co-ordinate than something a customer would be able to remember (always assuming that between the time the customer saw it in the catalogue and the time they finally managed to get hold of a sales drone it hadnt been replaced by something entirely different, and even less suitable).
No-one has mentioned what they did to Compaq - Hewlett Pointless gutted the quality there too - the servers used to be one of the better offerings. Now they're the server equivalent of the little known and even less loved ARNA (the only collaboration in history to multiply the worst points of both companies into something truely mind numbingly dismal. At least until Compaq/HP that is)
Its a shame that there seem to be so many US CEO's who went to the same 'lose as much money, customer goodwill, and repeat business as possible and you're a success' school of business.
Nokia have been saddled with one. (Note to Nokia: 90% of your smartphone customers dont want Windows Zombie. This should be a hint to give up on it and beg/plead/steal the Symbian and Meego people back).
HP have been saddled with at least two and probably three, the way this one is going.
Sad to see once good companies taken out, tied to a post, and shot.
Its even more depressing when its the people tasked to run the companies are doing the shooting.
some broken bones, and a partially barfed up heart, everybody seems to be ok..
*sigh*
beyond the fact that using devices that could, and probably have, been everywhere - and are practically impossible to sterilise, and the fact that just a little screwing about with an android app like this in particular could cause problems of epic proportions (for example, lets see what happens when you practically drench an 83 year old in adrenalin - aka Mad's horse turbocharger in Last Continent) is no one else worried that once theres an app for that - NHS miniondrones will slavishly use it and lose the will to think?
They're bad enough already - gave my gran morphine for a chest infection; gave me an anti-emetic after an accidental overdose, when the treatment primary revolves around the patient vomiting up, they gave me something designed to make sure that I DIDNT vomit.
I havent even started on the Apple Evil Empire(TM) thats doing its level best to own our schools and government - now they're after healthcare..
When even MS drones whinge about Windows Phone you know its on a hiding to nothing. You can get a more credible 'smartphone' buying a second hand Touch Pro/Diamond and putting the hosts UI on it, oh look its free. All the Windows Phone tilegasms, less of the monumental bugs. Or you could have Point UI, thats free too, and the steampunk theme is great.
I said months ago that bad bugs could be a problem... Oh look, they are.
I said months ago that all Symbian needed was a UI makeover... Oh look, its getting hugs and people are wondering why its being killed. Why? They gave it a UI makeover.
Can someone tell me where to go to get a cushy job spouting the bleeding obvious please?
I connect up my E7 to a bluetooth kb, a mouse through USB, tv through HDMI or analogue/SCART & 99% of the things I can do on my laptop I can do just as well on my SYMBIAN phone, with the 680mhz processor, and the nHD, and the confusing-to-americans OS... Not to mention a full sound system through HDMI too if I want to listen to music...
And lookee ma, I still manage a days battery life!
Mr Elop, here is my advice. Take Lumia phone hardware, put Belle on them, walk away from Windows Phone. Nokia might just make it.
Go and look at AAS april fools phone - the E7-10 - E7 + N8 camera, FM transmitter & a sodding REMOVABLE battery/microSD! Build it and they will come, 60+ comments all wanting one.
Plus with Belle, Mr Elop, you wont be making a $200 loss on every one you sell. Whats not to like about profit?
Great... fantastic. Not only can they not even keep hold of a physical object with our data on it thats the size of a large print version of the collected works of Charles Dickens, this idiot is proposing putting it in 'the cloud'.
As a customer of HMG I would like to propose he puts this idea somewhere that doesnt involve cumulonimbus!
This idea is so many levels of dumb I cant list them here. The best part is the 'savings' to be made. As a former local government IT person I can state categorically that the only reason they aren't still using a network of daisy chained ZX Spectrums and a thermal printer (not to mention 300k acoustic coupler) is they cant get the parts.
How much do you expect to save when you have to upgrade everything from Windows NT & 16mb RAM or Windows 98?
Thats over and above the security issues - then theres the joys of what happens to sensitive data when the supplier does a Jobs. You can of course bet your bottom euro that the first data to go on will be abuse victims names and addresses and the like - promptly to be barfed out because some cloudpeon didnt understand the permissions.
Bad, bad, bad idea & another governmental epic fail waiting to happen.
Well, that would be the part where I am IB for back problems amongst other problems, which pretty much qualifies me.
More to the point - if they are prepared to allow it for a group of people - probably on the basis that alot of people with disabling conditions (such as late stage MS for example, or many ME sufferers) wouldnt be able to use such a machine - what is stopping them just accepting that its common sense.
The faster a cyclist can go in town traffic the safer the cyclist. The electric and 2 stroke bikes can keep up town speeds permanantly. The less the speed differential the less accidents - the less accidents the better safety. Not to mention the fact that most bikes like mine sound like demented wasps played through an amp... which means most people (bar the wannabe darwinists) have a better chance of hearing them coming than some old girl on a pushbike wobbling down the middle of the path.
Actually a 22cc Golden Eagle has been legalised - including if i remember a tuned pipe on a full suspension ATB frame in blue.
Not only that - but with suitable brakes and competition pads fitted they can actually have better brakes than officially designed mopeds. I know, because I have both out-dragged and out braked manufacturer mopeds on my homebuilt.
Please try not to make comments claiming factual exactitude when they are nothing more than slightly to the left of guesswork.
Re: Actually its the riders that are the problem and not the speed or DoT
I have more than once told people riding on the path its illegal. I generally get told to do something biologically impossible.
Thats assuming they can be bothered to slow down before they've maimed you.
However - when the car drivers in my area stop using the bike lanes for car parts or for vehicular target practice - it'll be alot safer to be on the road. Its gotten worse over the years, even for experienced and skilled riders. Put a child on the average UK road and you are just asking for some nerk in a BMW/Audi SUV to send them flying through the air without even noticing the accident
The sole, solitary time, I ever rode the GEBE off the road was on waste ground to see if it was usable cross country at any speed. It worked ok, but as a hardtail, at any speed it took a couple of hours to stop your insides vibrating afterwards.
One of my sigs I had for a while on a site relating to MB's...
"40mph doesnt hurt, its the side of the Audi that hurts"
Thankfully I had fitted good brakes when some idiot did that to me.
Thankfully the only 'accident' I had on the Golden Eagle was a wet slide (bruised from my hip to my knee - which went a lovely shade of purple) despite various darwin award types trying to commit vehicular seppuku in front of me.
The first is something like the smiths autowheel and deriatives thereof. These included motors designed to attach to a normal bike in varying positions. They were usually of small swept displacement and either fitted as a 'third wheel' drive (autowheel), a clip on attachment such as the 'Mosquito' and amazingly a 22cc Bugatti cyclemotor with of all things a small supercharger! Other members of this august yet wheezy class include the Cyclaid and My Golden Eagle 32cc belt drive single speed (of 2007 vintage, and hand built by myself). The more modern types such as the 48cc and 80cc 'china-girl' bikes can be had with a layshaft system to use the bikes built in deraillier gears. For the suicidal there is the Morini motor putting out 8.5hp on a pushbike and good for 50+mph.
The second is an autocycle - which usually used a single type of engine in various frames with various transmissions. These are bikes built by the company WITH engine and the relevant bits built in.The engine was a 98cc single cylinder engine from Villiers. Examples of this type are the Bown bikes, Francis Barnetts (commonly with the later Junior De Luxe motor). Some of these bikes were multispeed with generally 2-3 speeds. One used a 1st-neutral-2nd box which needed either careful handling or a good kicking depending who you speak to. Most autocycles have pedals - and the starting procedure is either to kick the engine over on the stand using the pedals - or ride up to speed and let in the drive starting the motor that way. Almost all autocycles used the Villiers 98cc series engines, either the Junior with canted cylinder or the Junior De Luxe with a horizontal one), so that could be said to be a pre requisite. Most of these machines could be pedalled - but if the drive was unclutched this was not a fun procedure. Flat out these machines were good for 35mph or so - but the port design on the Villiers engine is not really condusive to fitting tuned pipes, nor would they be original parts.
Then we come to mopeds. These are a entirely different kettle of fish. Generally they use an engine of around 50cc - 125cc. Older bikes used manual transmissions, with one bike memorable for having 7 speeds and a engine that ate piston rings like Prescott eats pies (warning of their demise was a cloud of blue smoke and a tinkling noise, as bits of sintered metal were expressed from the exhaust port at an appreciable fraction of local lightspeed). They were generally 2 stroke, they had pedals (of dubious ability) but they was more a show than of any practical use. The more modern machines tend to use 4 strokes - with various types of automatic or CVT transmissions.
Modern 'mopeds' bear little or no relationship to any of these. With a spavined 4 stroke engine, no pedals and generally squeeze and go they really dont come under any of the categories. However there is hope at hand. Its entirely possible to remove the 4-stroke motor and replace it with a 2 stroke (twice the power density as standard) and to fit a tuned pipe for more performance. This wont speed you up that much (unless its a pipe entirely for top end) but it will give you more power and torque in the mid bands (its a complicated theory) which aids in hill climbing and mid band acceleration (think the equivalent of the old 50-70mph sprint times they used to post for cars).
Sounds familiar, my ex who died september '08 from secondary cervical cancer - caused by a grandparent abusing her was in the same situation. Ironically she kinda consented to what happened to protect her sister. Hearing that was about the time I gave up on there being such a thing as any kind of God.
Her family, other than her sister, wouldn't and wont countenance it ever happened. Mind you these are the same people that had my ex's sister committed after she emotionally fell apart...
Families are wonderful things, I think there should be a written exam before some people are allowed to breed.
Kudos to the DSi girl for coming up with a good idea - as to a shutter sound she probably knew enough to disable that aforethought - we dont give kids enough credit in this country.
As to the 'perp - dont ya just love 'care in the community' *sigh*
I rode two petrol power motorized bikes for 2000 miles+. The first was a Raleigh MTB with a 22cc two stroke motor from Golden Eagle bikes, which was stolen. The second which I still have is based on a Cruiser frame with a 33cc piped two stroke.
Both are capable of 30, the D7 of 38mph but that has a tuned pipe on it. The latter one I upgraded the brakes, lights and various other equipment - all simple things to do and got the brightest lamps I could lay my hands on.
The piglets locally didnt have a clue what to make of it - one tells me its entirely legal - another verbally abuses me, gives me 6 points for driving without insurance (its a SODDING bike) - and his boss flat out lies through his teeth after I threaten to go to the IPCC. Not to mention he plainly had no concept of cycling since his comment at what had been the brightest LED tail-light on the market was 'thats small isn't it' - notwithstanding the fact you cant even look into it without literal pain - your eyes actually hurt!
The only accidents I had on it was dropping it on wet pavement at speed (a lesson learned, and a brake handle destroyed - wet road and front brake, bad idea) and some dozy Asian girl who walked out in front of me glued to her mobile phone completely oblivious (goddess knows how, the thing sounds like a hornet on methaphetamine run through an guitar amp).
I agree with the people who say that speed actually helps cyclists - the faster you go the safer you are, end of. There is a steep hill near were I used to live, cars parked on both sides, and a bus route. The 22 bike wheezed a bit on it, but the D7 flew up it at traffic speeds - which is much safer than toiling up it,swaying all over the place, doing barely walking pace, in a lovely shade of puce... millimeters away from the front of a 65 bus.
But heres the thing. The D7 bike cost me about £1000 all told - would sit at WOT all day without complaining and would do 22+ miles on 600ml of petrol, with some still left.... If you said I could have gotten 25 out of a tank thats 189MPG - full throttle all the way. Average speed of 28mph for the journey. Top roadspeed on the flat, 35mph.
I am now driving a car, doing the same journey. If I am really careful and hypermile the car gets 28mpg or so, even the best diesel manages maybe 65-80mpg - and on a bad trip the average speed is 15mph!
The government have no interest in cutting carbon footprint - if they did they would actively sponsor machines like mine, not treat people who are actually making massive carbon savings, taking a car off the road, and travelling efficiently, like target practice for traffic police with PMS. Thats not to mention there are various people online who have converted their bikes into cargo haulers for businesses. A fully-sus MTB based 22cc GEBE was able to carry over 600lbs of equipment without problem, using just off the shelf components fitted to the bike alone - that wasnt including what it could have towed via trailer. The 33cc 2S GEBE could probably pull half that again. Add that to the fact you can buy a frame extensions off the shelf that will allow you to seat 4 people in tandem & still make 25-30mph, it makes you think...
Government... if you want to save money, save resources, free up money in the wider economy and generally improve peoples lot. and ironically health, then Electric assist and Petrol assist bikes are the way to go. Most people who build their own bikes take alot of care about it, and finish them to a high standard - a simple check would suffice - not the same palaver for a motorized bike as for a Caterham 7.
RIM gives the decryption algorythms to Saudi Government...
Company Memo:-
To: All 'Chop-Chop Square' employees.
There has been a marked increase in the waiting lists for service users. Therefore all shop floor operatives will receive chainsaws and pressure washing systems and attend a mandatory training course in the use of same. Said equipment will be provided by an American company with which the government retains an agreement.
Very true, but with one proviso, which my ex-bosses ex-boss found out to his cost.
Apparently this numty had been replacing 'out of date' or 'terminal hardware fault' equipment slightly more often than he should have been. The company of course, noticed nothing, and assumed all was hunky dory with this, despite a failure rate that would put the first generation SA80 to shame...
It all came to a head and the Police got involved when this nerk sold a laptop on ebay, that was supposed to be dead and gone without wiping any of the confidential company data and the buyer did the honorable thing (aka the stupid thing, whats the betting the average cop would have had them for receiving) and contacted said Police...
My boss then turned up for work to see his boss being escorted into a squad car and the rest is history.
I think they call that a salutory tale - tale of two idiots is more like it.
I am just waiting for some government nerk to be interviewed on this...
Reporter: "So how do you pick whose career to demolish?"
MP: "Oh, thats simple, we just characterise 'loyalty & stupidity around the mean'"
Reporter: "You do realise we're live on air..."
MP: "ah, ummm..."
This can only end badly, the scots git stubs his toe, and half the cabinet are working at poundshop..
Its been attempted before in stocks and bonds (the original LTCM) - when it works its great, when it doesnt its a total unmitigated palladium plated balls up of Stalingrad-esque proportions.
And may the Gods protect us if someone like Mandelson gets a hold of it. To slightly misquote Blackadder;
G: "Can you imagine it, the Gay Gerbil, with the power of life and death over every bally fool in the cabinet..."
Black: "Yes, unfortunately I can, George; still at least we don't have to write the headlines, or read them for that matter..."
Bald: "I know sir, how about "Gerbils rush in where Fools fear to tread"..."
Black: "My word, intelligence from a Baldrick, better keep quiet - they'll make him first Education Minister if they find out..."
The problem with FB is that it can get away with things that would have a private citizen helping the police with their enquiries.
In the case of that American couple, they had never even met this womans father, right up to the point he killed them. Facebook in that case holds major responsibility, because without that site the whole situation would not have happened, it wouldnt have been possible.
I am not saying that every single crime on the planet can be blamed on the Joys of Facebook - but it has facilitated several, and thats only the ones we have heard about, to the point people have died as a result.
Every single of those 'couple of dozen, tops' are people who have/had a family. Not quite so funny now is it.
More to the point, alot of those crimes associated with FB happened *specifically* because of facebook - because of the information placed on that site which the persons concerned both victims and attackers/killers would not otherwise have had or known.
Do that as a private citizen, and the local Police will be readying their desk drawers with the intent of charging you with aiding and abetting at best - and as a co-defendant in a murder case at worst.
Do the precise same thing as the reichskanzler of Facebook and people are congratulating you on your stock options and how well you have shafted your colleagues.
Of the couple murdered for the heinous crime of unfriending a sociopaths daughter on facebook will be thrilled for the little parasite. It must surely make up for finding out your daughters face just had an argument with the business end of a 30-ought-6.
Not to mention that teenager who was raped & murdered - or the Harrods shop assistant who found out first hand that 9mm copper jacketed ball rounds and her face didnt really mix.
Facebook - your friendly neighbourhood crime against humanity...
For everything else there's real life... Remember that?
I am wondering if the chinless wonders who've come up with this have the remotest clue?
Many people on benefits can barely manage to pay food and heating, im sure they're bouncing for joy about this.
Not to mention those who dont have a computer will be down the libraries to 'use' it there. You know, the places that think patches are something you wear at the elbow... And that netscape is the latest in technology
The really fun part? Taxpayers will be paying twice - once to set it up, and once to pay for the damage.
What nation would that be? since right at the moment the Scots seem undecided about precisely what nation they are members of. Although I have to be fair, Scotland is about the only place in history where one of its best known Kings actually retired!
Now your position comes somewhat clearer, I hope you will be proud of yourself, because the position you espouse is precisely the worst possible for your families continued success.
Apple want to re-organise text books and the like in Jobs's image. All very well and good, and laudable. Until you realise that when they've done it, they'll have copyright, which means they'll charge what they like. A boss of Apple isnt very happy with a certain bunch of people, latterly found in the rough area of the Levant, oh look the history of a certain unpleasant event is somewhat massaged...
AND YOU'LL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT PAY, AND ACCEPT IT.
Or your grandkids will end up in room-temperature-IQ hell.
Because if the copyright Ghazi nutters who are involved in downing MegaUpLoad and all the rest of it get their way - how long do you think it'll be before Wikipedia goes down in flames? Free, openly distributed information, we cant have that can we?
I am reminded of a film called Santa Claus, and the memorable line....
"A sequel. That's it. We'll bring it out on March 25, and we'll call it... Christmas 2!"
Wont your grandkids be happy with their all new Christmas by Apple, to go with their classroom by Apple etc etc...
As I have said repeatedly. I am happy to pay a fair price. If I can get the same or better product at a lower price, then I pay a lower price. Thats one of the reasons I wont touch BMW or Apple, and thats above and beyond idiotic or shabby business practices respectively.
If your customers pay your prices good on you - you might have got the balance right.
I remember when I used to work in Cambridge, with DTP companies mainly, most of whom were using a certain piece of software - 90% of which was 'pirated'. Do you know *why* it was pirated?
Because EVEN THE REPS SELLING IT ADMITTED the price was too high.
If companies of all descriptions sell their wares at an honest fair price then people will be happy to pay those prices, but precisely why should I pay £50,000 for something when a competitors product does a better job at £25,000?
More to the point, if something like a car costs me say, £15k, and the actual entire build cost is £7-8k thats all well and good.
But if I am charged £15k for something which cost the person selling it & making it £100... then its a definate no.
Once a music CD has been mastered every further copy from that master costs a single blank CD, some ink, and some electric - maybe 6p in all per CD. Now I would like you to explain to me precisely why, charging every single customer a mark up of 99.6% is fair and ethical?
You are stepping perilously close to the 'all fighter pilots are evil because they kill people, except ours' conundra...
Situation the First:
I walk into my local HSBC with a working version of Vasquez's somewhat modified MG42 and steal what little cash the bank has, jump in the car and disappear into the distance.. while the local police try to coax their Diesel Focus into life..
Situation the Second:
Disney use a DVD copier machine ($5000) and a load of blank DVD's ($0.01 each) to copy on 40 year old tat that even 8 year olds cringe at - and then sell it at £15 a shot, to parents that are barely making ends meet as it is... they used to call that profiteering...
Both are little more than theft, but one person will be making the HMP Broadmoor equivalent of a Diane Fossey documentary while the other is sitting comfortably (and lets not forget, making sure that plenty of lawyers are on hand in case someone mentions a certain Walter Disney & his raving anti-semitism).
Not to mention the fact that the only difference between the person doing the precise same thing as Disney but in their garage and selling the results for half the price - is a piece of paper saying Disney are allowed to?
Profiteering is nothing more than legalised theft. Profiteering is what the media industry has been doing for years.
I pay to watch TV in the UK for example, for the life of me nowadays I dont know why. I used to enjoy watching, back in the day, Buffy and Angel. I'd go with Buffy but I'd be thinking of Tara etc etc.
I could tape or use other methods to record *something I paid for* for very little - corporations can do it for practically nothing because of economies of scale - but for the 7 series of Buffy you pay £100+ for a boxed set...? and thats honest commerce?
Would you buy an iPhone for £20,000? because thats the equivalent mark up you are paying for a piece of cardboard and a printed frontispiece. (apple fanbois excepted of course).
All this stuff with Megaupload is basically the US govt throwing its toys out of the pram because the PHBs got ass-raped over the SOPA/PIPA debacle. Its basically gulf war the 3rd. Lets go harass and dick around with someone who had NOTHING TO DO with whats got us with our panties in a knot, because we feel like it and we rule the world.
Personally I would like a fair compromise. Fair profits for the corporations concerned and the artists concerned. Fair prices for the customer. Selling something at a 50% markup is one thing - a 5000% markup is something else entirely.
As to Megaupload I hope and strongly suspect that this 'trial' will fall apart faster than a UK Police Corruption investigation. Notwithstanding the fact that the US has overstepped its mark to the point of needing the hubble telescope as a visual aid, they have also taken data that is entirely legal (for the given value of legality in this day and age), from people who have done absolutely nothing wrong, and seem intent on destroying it just because they can. I wonder how many businesses have been damaged by this action?
Now, forgive me if I am wrong, but stealing someones own work and data and then destroying it is theft is it not? much the same as stealing someones Lexus and having an impromptu barbecue over its burning carcass is theft (and theft, sonny, thats just for starters).
Not to mention the albino mastodon in the room but people, and this is the important bit, so sit up and listen at the back...
PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS COPIED AND SHARED STUFF BETWEEN EACH OTHER...
How do you think the Bible got to be such a popular title? - yup, they copied it (although to be fair, blokes with swords cutting up people who didnt agree with it was somewhat of an incentive)
How do you think people learned about new music acts and stuff they now like? you guessed it, from mates giving them copies of albums or songs - I remember being at Uni and my friend lent me a copy of a Cranberries album.... OH GODS, BURN HER AT THE STAKE NOW!!!!!!
Funny isnt it, that in the intervening years I went and BOUGHT, with my money, the CD's and the like that that band have produced.
The only thing sadder and more pitiful than the US justice system would be drowning puppies, and there would have to be alot of them..
Not only are they stealing and scarfing your personal information, and ignoring your privacy, and generally being as morally reprehensible and bankrupt as is possible outside the Sudanese government - they're making millions on it.
Or
stealing Gigabytes of personal data - Free
Selling Gigabytes of personal data - $millions
Selling shares based on theft from your own victims - PRICELESS
For everything else, theres PRIVACY*...
* remember this word, because it'll soon be critically endangered. Your grandkids seeing privacy will be like your kids curling up with a white tiger.
Given that this lot are now in cahoots with the paragon of mobile phone honesty and customer support that is Orange - my suggestion to anyone contemplating this would be to be very very careful and read the contracts and every document associated in company with their solicitor or lawyer.
Orange is well known for changing contracts and T & C's left and centre (and memorably got clobbered by the regulator more than once).
Can you imagine the bill you would get if T-Mobile/Orange decided at the start of the month to change unlimited to 1gb/600/600? A £700 bill is one hell of a shock and dont expect the regulator to support you.
A bad bad bad idea, especially for a smartphone newbie.
The bit where there is no chance in hell that any site like The Reg is *ever* going to post this story with two blokes kissing, not two women...
And people say the godbotherers are hypocritical...
I love that theres all this palaver about gay marriage - when the divorce rate for the straights is through the roof...
Oh, and AdamWill - there is a reason for no specific place having a yea/nay in the UK on gay marriage - because there is a single law for the country, not a dual level system as with the American state and federal laws. You can blame the Saxons for that (one of their kings did for the english legal system what GMT did for the train timetables, but for the life of me I cant remember which one).
As to why all the different corporations are getting involved for my money its a fairly simple conundrum to solve. I've even been nice and given you a clue...
Still not got it? its MONEY
Every penny people like the great Gates-by and the immortal Jobs spends on charity is wonderfully repaid by the lesser spotted tax credit. Its just good business, with a little bit of personal soul-polishing on the side.
Personally I think people should take their snouts out of everyone elses sexuality. Its no-ones business but the two or more people involved. That goes for governments, god botherers, parents, siblings and the rest...
Oh gods... they did it on the other side too, and the back, and the front...*
It looks a lot like the Toyota bosses held a styling competition at the local special school...
Notwithstanding the fact that the Prii and their ilk are little more than a cynical marketing ploy anyway.. at least the 'training shoe' shape was bearable...
This thing looks like a Aston Martin Lagonda mated with a stately home and then ran into Wayne Szalinski - via every concept car since that spavined 1981 Austin Metro saloon (yes seriously, they actually bothered to make one).
Seriously, that thing is worse than someone having a chavgasm all over an Austin Allegro (aka £500 rims and the exhaust from a retired B25). It should be put down, if it were an animal PETA would be in favour of animal testing on the basis that nothing could make its life worse!
In the annals of mid life facelift face-plant moments this almost pips the Morris Ital to the crown in the Lady Camilla Eyesore Cup knocking the Austin Ambassador out of second place by dint of its utter pointlessness and eye-gouging ugliness.
Please please please no, Toyota; if you dont want to make a total loss on them, you could sell the entire production fun to Top Gear, although where you would find that many cranes and grand pianos (Icelandic volcanoes might be your friend here)... On the upside it would stop the Marina Owners Club from whingeing...
*Free zen hug if you get whose quote I half inched.
My partner at the times daughter was good at cause and effect - she was generally the cause of stunned disbelief - the causation of which she enjoyed no end, as well as the results (Laura & I were usually laughing too hard to tell her off). This girl by the way is a pretty blonde blue eyed cherub with a PhD in looking innocent...
The highlight of her career thus far was, at the age of 4, when asked by the Sunday School teacher of all people "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was to wait until she was sure everyone was listening.. and say very loudly and clearly "I wanna be a lesbian when I grow up...". The teacher was stunned, L was in hysterics with laughter - and all the parents had that 'oh god' look because they knew full well the next question from their kids would be "whats a lesbian...?".
We dont give kids enough credit for what they pick up and when in this country. Its plain fact that kids learn very quickly from 3 years old or so, and it gets slower as time progresses. So it amazes that kids 3-10 are basically treated like buck toothed idiots in general, and then suddenly become sinks for information at 12? no wonder they lose interest. Its I think a subset of that thing where peoples perception says kids dont have a sexuality or healthy interest in the opposite sex/same sex/both at once/family dog until their gender expression and sexuality chip is installed at 00:00 GMT on their 16th birthday.
Practically any child has the ability to do practically anything (I mean, if William Hague can be in the government, theres hope for us all), so its criminal that we proscribe and control the very people we are berating 5 or 10 years later for being apathetic and disconnected.
I might be a Hackerette - but what do you think custom ROMs for different mobile companies are?
If the mobile company cant have what it wants then they wont stock it. End of.
Of course you get some monumental mistakes - a notable one being the Orange ROM for HTC Touch Diamond. You know the one, it was where some 12 year old idiot decided to see what happened when he banjaxed all the powersaving and loaded it with crudware. The phone ran so hot you could have glued 50 together and heated a fair sized room (for say 20 minutes till the battery died)... It took me 4 different *FREE* ROMS and two lots of open source software and the phone was improved 100 fold...
That was Windows Mobile - but with Windows Phone everything is that much more controlled and that can never be a good thing. With WinMo mistake = 45 minutes and a new ROM image - which even my mother could do herself. WinPhone = hard luck you're stuck with it (bar the odd 'update' that'll probably flake out something else on the handset.
Handset companies are stocking the Lumia on the basis that its Nokia - for no other reason. If it fails then Nokia have nowhere else to go. They've effectively gut shot Symbian, and are gleefully watching it twitch and gurgle via accenture - while to paraphrase Hugh Dowding, "Praying to Microsoft and hoping for Customers...". They'll lose the people who liked the high functionality of Symbian - and against Android and iOS, for all their myriad faults, Win Phone has the popularity and appeal of a week dead skunk. So there goes their projected new customers...
Oh. and just as an aside - alot of people have suddenly gotten into reflashing their phones since CarrierIQ et al went all 1984 on them...
I wont say I told you so - but its hard to resist..
In the hope they'll replace all the customers who've told HSBC to ram it up their collective behinds over their Internet Banking - aka the utter utter cock up.
On the upside, when the 'world bank' goes bankrupt - we know exactly where to go to point and laugh.
If Windows Phone was actually any good then it would sell itself. To be frank its not. Even Microsoft management employees admit that Windows Phone was a rush job (apparently evinced by the lack of support for legacy, a mistake they seem to want to make again with Windows 8).
If Windows Mobile was released now, instead of back in the day, it would be a raging success compared to Windows Phone. Win Mo was before its time, it was powerful, effective, and more importantly infinately editable, modifiable and hackable. The success of Android is substantially due to those same factors. Windows Phone is none of those things, and more importantly its fighting against Apples stranglehold on the locked in/locked down paradigm. Whether it comes good in the end, which is by no means assured, second to market is usually second place.
What Microsoft are trying to do has been done before, many times, by many notable companies - and most of the time its been a dismal failure. People will look at it, decide to take a chance on it on the basis of the distilled BS poured from straight faced salesdroids, spend the rest of the time loathing it (and or mourning lost features) and thats a customer lost entirely, probably for life, on the basis of a 24 month contract and short term sales massaging.
It already appears to be coming clear that Windows Phone is not so much an also ran as an also limped. Putting their faith in Windows Phone is putting companies like Nokia at risk doubly - not only do they lose customers from their previous offerings (lack of features between old and new OS) they may fail to retain enough of the 'new' customers to survive.
Im sure Apple are so proud they've managed to snag the idiots. Personally I wish we had human cloning already, 10 years of inventing gory imaginative ways of executing clone steve jobs's would just about calm my ire regarding how he brought the smartphone into the dance of the idiots. Not to mention what his 'legacy' has done to personal privacy & security of same.
But whenever there was a problem or something creepy happened, you seemed to have been involved. Most of the people here have been humiliated by you, or lost jobs because you at one time or another.
We're proud to say that the Facebook generation has the lowest social quotient of any in history. And we know at least part of that is because of you. So we offer our thanks, and give you, uh, this. It's from all of us, and it has written here: "Facebook. just Die Already!"
Shame really that Anya was only fictional - the number of people who could really use a vengeance demon when the name Zuckerberg is mention probably beggars belief.. I wonder how many times she could kill him in creative ways before she got tired. It'd be messy, so put a tarp over that sofa..
Point the first: One megavolcano kicking off can bring down civilisations - one such was the santorini eruption which wiped out the Minoan state and directly led to the end of Hyksos rule in egypt, not to mention migrations, war, and a top to toes reboot of Greek civilisation. It could be said to be the one event that ended the Greek Heroic Age.
Point the second: The Deccan Traps are volcanic and metamorphic associate deposits of if my memory serves acidic/intermediate volcanics. Think Mount St Helens + Vesuvius + the yellowstone caldera all mixed up and then multiplied a couple of thousand times.
The result of a few thousand years of that is going to result in an atmosphere thats full of fine ash, so there goes the temperature and the green plants, so its bye bye food chain. Then theres the rain thats something along the lines of battery acid. Not to mention the nice friendly pyroclastic clouds and the noxious gas seepage that'll put paid to anything local.
Pretty much anything and everything that could erupt, explode, smoke or barf out hundreds of cubic kilometers of nice baking hot volcanic rock at about 800-1200c all got in on the act all at once.
Point the third: Life is very resiliant, theres a saying that life turns up everywhere it can, the places where it cant just take a little longer. Human society could probably manage to take maybe 2 megavolcano events simultaneously without buckling, by that I dont mean extinction, but fundamental problems with our social frameworks and paradigms.
10 simultaneous or closely sequel megavolcano level events, probably not.
The Deccan Traps and their associated deposits are thousands of years of megavolcanic events numbering 100s to 1000s. Add to that we are apex omnivores... And we are pretty much screwed.
The issue with the Permian event is that its quick and its massive. Life manages usually to deal with one or the other, but not both. Massive and slow = evolution. Quick and localised = repopulation. Both quick & massive together is a terminal combination, because there is nowhere retaining a healthy population.
The problem for us, is while we have worldwide networks and transport, we are still dependant on a food chain, we've no other populations except on this planet, and no way of tapping resources from other planets or bodies. It actually might be an idea that all missions to the space station be mixed male & female - things start to go bad in a short term way, we have a seeding population, albeit a small one.
One poster mentioned that a single volcano has no quantifiable effect. They do, but its usually hidden in the data or something like a small ice age. Its like a person taking codiene for example... 30-90mg stops pain, but you only have to increase that by 100fold to end up with a corpse and some worrying questions. Likewise, 1-3 volcanos kick off, you might get a cold snap, 100 kick off and you're reduced to dwarf bread with a nice long island battery acid.
Yes, but only because we all buy into the idea. We are taught from practically age 0 that money does this and money does that - we need to pay for this and pay for that.
You know its odd, thinking about bank account interest. I put my money into a big pile of money and it makes 5% a year... what does it do? does my £5 note find another £5 note and make babies faster than a chav on a housing estate?
The concept makes absolutely no sense. The concept that if I take it out of the money box in my bed room and put in in someone elses box in another room and it miraculously seems to gain the ability to use the photocopier and create more of itself.
It has no basis in fact - other than the fact we agree that it happens - its a construct relying on a worldwide government induced hallucination and it needs to stop, because the more integrated the hallucination becomes the more of a total disaster it will be when the whole thing fails.
Given your argument the human race shouldnt exist - because if money was that important to the concept of the human race, we shouldnt even have evolved.
Its actually fairly simple. You mention an MRI machine, which at the moment is an expensive bit of kit, which hospitals buy, with money, because they have a need for it. But you are assuming that if we were to remove money from the equation the whole thing would grind to a halt and the MRI would have never existed or be needed.
WRONG
Money does not drive development on its own, there are so many other reasons - a wish to be better, a dream to fulfil, the drive to make sure that cancer will never take another persons loved one (and I know that pain personally), even just the drive to be the best person you can be. If it did we would never have managed to get beyond the stage of yelling at the other monkeys in the next door tree. There is a need for MRI scanner systems ditto other complex systems, but the monetary cost for them is entirely arbitary.
I dont get paid for mucking around with my old WinMo phones to make them the best that they can be with the hardware available. I dont get paid for hypermiling and ecomodding my Safrane either, I do it because I enjoy it. If I had the ability to build MRI systems I would, because I never EVER want to watch another 22 year old woman, who was my partner, die of a pervasive and slow cancer that took 7 years of agony to finally kill her, or see anyone else go through that pain.
The amount of people in jobs they hate merely because of MONEY must be amazing, I have personal experience of that, my grandfather had a massive heart attack at the age of 52, simply because of stress from a job he hated. I wonder how much money we would save on health care if people werent worrying about money and their kids college funds and the like.
As to arbitrary value, I've another example. A 2.2vi 136bhp hatchback with class leading ride and features - at half the price new of the directly competitive BMW. Its now 15 years old and *still* has features that brand new cars dont have. Oddly though, you can get hold of one for £525. Why, because people have put an arbitrary value on it even though it does a better job as something twice the price. Then you get the ridiculous price of £215 for a 15cm wheel on a piece of metal, welcome to price gouging for spare parts, which wouldnt happen without the powerful but horribly broken paradigm of 'currency'.
The assumption that everyone has been trained to make is a simple hallucination. "If money were to disappear then the world would end". No, it wouldnt, unless you are a banker, hedge fund manager or the like.
We progressed before there was money, we will progress after there is money...
The problem we are having now is the same problem we had with religion at times like the enlightenment. The paradigm is tired and just not compatible with the continued advancement of the human race - true, there will probably be a world wide crunch heard when the paradigm is shifted without the use of the clutch (aka lots of wars and the like). It will be a painful shift most likely, but my personal opinion is its coming to the point where we are in serious danger of a complete and utter implosion going forward.
It could be argued that 2008 was that implosion, but I dont think so. I think things could get immeasurably worse. 2008 was led by American debt - the problems the banks had worldwide was fundamentally that they had bought US debt (in some cases without even knowing it) - therefore the effects were worldwide - but importantly the fundamental failure WAS NOT.
Now imagine what would happen in say 50 years time when we have say 3 different countries (US, Russia, China) in the same situation as the US banking industry; at once. Up until this point bankers and the financial system has always had somewhere to run for liquidity. Whats going to happen when *all* possible sources are dry? You think Libya & the like are bad, or Greek protests? That sort of implosion, assuming the governmental response is the same as this time - try worldwide mass civil war...
We are going to be sitting on our hands with no way back and no way forward - and given the state of things with just US based issues right now how much worse do you think will can get?
Scrap the whole tottering edifice and save ourselves the hassle.
the world monetary system is nothing more than world wide hallucination, and as lethal in its way as cancer. It pervades everything and is the root of many of the social problems we've seen in the hundreds of years we've all happily joined in the madnesses.
Lets say I trade my skills for money to buy a car. Great, but its all arbitrary, it makes no sense. I could spend £500 on something which is much more functional than something I spent £50,000 on? I buy a house - it triples in value - some twerp screws up 3000 miles away and its down to half its original value within a week.
On the other hand... do away with currency altogether and youve lost nothing...
Right now people work to get money to eat and purchase other items. Drug addicts do what they do to keep body and soul together and get high. Companies produce items but have to add money to pay for the food and purchasing of their employees plus their materials. transportation adds more costs and so on.
since monetary value is nothing more than a construct based on a collective insanity... why bother with it and all the problems it brings?
but we need money to buy food...cars... crapple products. Yes, but only if we all agree that a lot of pieces of paper equals a Jaguar XK8.
Money only has value if that is universally agreed. Therefore if money and currency is.abandoned alot of the bad effects of it cease to exist.
How is that an advantage? its simple really - there'll be no arguments about value, no 10 year disasters because some banker decides all of a sudden that hes bored and thinks its a good laugh to trash the world.
I wonder how many people the banks have effectively murdered post 2008... the good thing about corporate manslaughter is its not messy... even better its based on a mass hallucination.
The point that people seem to miss in all this is money is no longer neccesary. fundamentally what happens today with money has no reason to stop without it. US buys oil so that the people who sell it buy from others, great, but since we're all going round in circles anyway nothing will fundamentally change without the use of money. It has no reason to.
In fact for alot of the world things will get much better. No more african debt, less african war, less war less disease better standard of living. No nees to 'profit', less overuse of land and other resources, the list goes on.
Take Mexico, 45,000 killed in 5 years over drugs and the profits thereof. No intrinsic value or price, no profit; no profit, no incentive - no incentive, no beheaded women and children. Its the same with everything else, we've managed to get into a position where a theoretical construct with no intrinsic value rules all. It makes no sense...
After all, whats good will a bag of coins do you on a desert island? On the other hand, a big bag of potatoes might be more boring, but its a damn sight more useful.
We are such a connected world that the old arguments about currency driving trade make little sense either. Trade drives trade. You want something in Germany so you give the people who have it something they need and so on.
No money... no need to assign entirely arbitrary values to things. No value, no way of creating debt, no debt means no need to come up with arbitrary ways of valuing value and no need for money to service that value.
life still goes on... exactly the same as before... just we're a little more lucid and alot less miserable. If you think about it it'd even help the environment too, in so many little ways. Less stress due to money worries, less smokers, less COx.. happy kangaroos.
The only downside for it is that to work we've all got to do it at the same time and *thats* the real embuggerance¥
¥ Technically defined as "an obstruction in the way of progress"
It constantly amazes me that people seem to be of the opinion that having a bloody great empire just up the road (in this case the Acheamenids (sp?) shouldnt have an effect on the people next door. We know that there were British local tribes in the period before the Roman Conquest that were building their settlements on a grid style roadway system - and that many of the well off British tribes and their leaders not only traded with the Romans but visited their various cities (some making it as far as Rome itself, not a minor feat when the highlight of road transport was a horse).
Its not so much the current Islamics bashing the Pre-Islamic civilisations - 'Christian' archeo's are just as guilty for making monumental mistakes or deliberately fudging the evidence (even when it concurs with the bible texts, which at least in the Old Testament which current evidence seems to indicate are alot more 'true' than was formerly thought)
As to the previous commentator who said 'not enough written evidence' - there is alot, its just a matter of how you look at it. From one point of view you can take Troy as a myth and all the stories that come from that as stories and nothing else. True, the bit about the slapper called Helen is probably not entirely true (its more likely that the collapse of the Hittite empire at the end of Bronze age IIB/C or so, of which Troy was a satellite city state gave the Greeks the excuse to put the boot in), but there is evidence for Mopsus's story - among others - including Danaus doing a runner in the days after Troy (Wilusa) fell. It wasnt straight after - maybe a generation or so according to the latest research (Troy VII period) but there is good evidence it happened. Then theres the bit where biblical Jericho had walls with earthquake protection built in (the part with the bloke playing Jazz was probably a later addition) - it just takes watching the local animals to know when a big quake is coming... and the rest is Josh: Fall of Jericho... with a lass called Rahab playing the part of the separatist Sangheili...
As to our great friends the Romans, theres also fairly good evidence that they rose from the core of the fleeing Trojans, including Troy style tombs dated to the early Roman period. Even Homer admits that the Trojans at the time of the Iliad were talented fighters, talk about comeback! Not to mention the proto Hoplite form of warfare that would have been prevalent at the time of Troy, bears a interesting resemblance to the Testudo & other common Roman tactics
The mistake I think people make is that we assume that because one group had a particular skill or technology, that they were alone in possessing it. The Romans & Greeks & Egyptians had writing, all well and good, but we have no way of telling, bar going back and asking the Romans, if various groups they overran and absorbed had it too, simply because the Romans steamrollered over them. Winners write the histories.
PS: as to it 'not being their history' there is good genetic evidence, especially in the far and middle east, of long occupations by the persons currently ensconced there. For example, the Iranians, Afghanistanis and kazakhs all have Persian descent, point of fact the -stan suffix comes from the old Persian word for 'country' - they share many characteristics, including physical appearance and languages, and are well known to be the military equivalant of 'bottle coveys' - in other words they wont stop fighting even when they should, and you better not turn your back on whats left afterwards. Hence them giving the British Empire a good kicking twice (and it would have been a 3rd time if we hadnt cheated, this time is number 4 by the way), the Russians twice, The Macedonians only managed it because they fought a couple of battles and then legged it. The mobile mixture of different people in different lands is partly due to Colonialism, partly due to the various violent diasporas and partly due to economic factors...
Oh, and by the way, im part Saxon, English (which itself is a corruption of East Angles), Irish, Scandinavian, and French (sigh, my family has alot of connections with the Hugenot french diaspora). Thats at least 1500 years of 'British' history - and I am still here... in the land of my forfathir.
I know at least any Jewish person with any knowledge of their history will, ditto anyone of Armenian or Irish, Welsh, Scottish stock and the list goes on and on (including any Russians whose ancestors weren't part of Stalins direct family). Practically any racial group who've had another/other racial group(s) put the boot into them since somewhere around 72CE will have an unenviable knowledge of it. Just because you had to look it up in a dictionary doesn't mean everyone else has a reading age of 12 and the charisma of a tabletop.
Personally I think its a good use of the word, since the idea is to do the very same with your own personal entity, but in a controlled way that gives better (any) personal security to the individual concerned. The name Facebook is about as Aspergers as it gets as its the most basic simplistic description of what it does and is/was meant to be. (Disclaimer: I have a mild form of Aspergers/ASD myself - so I can say things like that, in the same way as I can make Essex girl jokes - being a girl and from Essex)
You know I have to wonder about the decisions made by the UK banks in regard to security. My bank, HSBC, has just changed its security system to use a small PIN generator device from China. Now its not too hard to put in a few little extra bits in order to enable some sort of 'nullify and reset' signal, or even, given that Chinese companies (and government) have the algorithms to hand, a brute force type of attack. Given also that from my conversations and letters to him, the security head of HSBC, is either a Oscar worthy actor or as dumb as a stump, whats the odds that they've checked the devices properly?
From my point of view; given the chance to bet £10 on a bank paying out money to have the things taken apart and checked from top to tail, or Commander Sir Samuel Vimes Vs a Quasi-Demonic entity of extreme power; I have to say I would be voting for the guy in the chain mail...
Now, how long do you think it would take for our nice tea drinking, cricket loving civilization to turn into a cutscene from Halo:Reach if all the banks that used a similar system that was obtained from China (and whats the betting thats alot of them) were all hit at once. People cant get money for food, bills or petrol/Diesel - They cant get paid, and so on. I know there are other systems in place - but the thing there is that the banks have automated so much, that what was the entirety of a bank 20 years ago is a shadow of its former self (the physical staff etc) and it will *not* be able to cope for an extended period alone. Thats not even to mention the additional havoc that could be caused by pulling a stunt like that in the middle of Great Depression II...
I know it sounds paranoid, but the thing about being paranoid is its like being a pessimist. You are never ever disappointed.
if the Chinese could pull something like that off for an extended period then you wouldnt even need a nasty war like was going on in Libya. You just wait a little while and then saunter down and pick up the pieces after the countries you want are practically in the middle of their own little civil wars.
Even the most elementary tactics tells one that you don't build an army with only one type of unit, you just don't do it. Similarly, you don't put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to bank security - and I wonder how many people, when they look at the their security pin device see 'Made in China' on the back. There have already been cyberattacks traced to China mentioned in the media, given that we probably only hear about 1/10th of the total that happen, Im not happy about the odds that the 'system failures' we hear about are as innocent as they seem...
Time to find me an old sock to put under the mattress methinks.
Is it me, or does the picture of Stevie-boy on the first page remind you far to closely of Mr Zorg out of Fifth Element too?
Im sure a person who buys a new car every 6 months just to get out of paying the fee for a licence plate and happily parks in disabled parking pays is a wonderful person... but of course he is, alfter all he is the one who took all the credit for the iPhone...
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235 posts • joined Wednesday 31st December 2008 13:25 GMT
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I am surprised that they lasted this long...
The quality of their office printers collapsed around 2000-2003 and onwards. Then they jammed the price up on them. By the time they'd finished 'cutting costs' the things had all the structural integrity of a '79 Alfasud and half the appeal.
The less said about WebOS the better. Arguably better UI than iDiotOnSlab and An-drone (which lets face it isn't exactly rocket magick). Built in security features (like BB OS and Symbian). Good hardware. So, of course, it had to be killed.
Computer models and ranges that bore more resemblance to a GPS co-ordinate than something a customer would be able to remember (always assuming that between the time the customer saw it in the catalogue and the time they finally managed to get hold of a sales drone it hadnt been replaced by something entirely different, and even less suitable).
No-one has mentioned what they did to Compaq - Hewlett Pointless gutted the quality there too - the servers used to be one of the better offerings. Now they're the server equivalent of the little known and even less loved ARNA (the only collaboration in history to multiply the worst points of both companies into something truely mind numbingly dismal. At least until Compaq/HP that is)
Its a shame that there seem to be so many US CEO's who went to the same 'lose as much money, customer goodwill, and repeat business as possible and you're a success' school of business.
Nokia have been saddled with one. (Note to Nokia: 90% of your smartphone customers dont want Windows Zombie. This should be a hint to give up on it and beg/plead/steal the Symbian and Meego people back).
HP have been saddled with at least two and probably three, the way this one is going.
Sad to see once good companies taken out, tied to a post, and shot.
Its even more depressing when its the people tasked to run the companies are doing the shooting.
Well; apart from
some broken bones, and a partially barfed up heart, everybody seems to be ok..
*sigh*
beyond the fact that using devices that could, and probably have, been everywhere - and are practically impossible to sterilise, and the fact that just a little screwing about with an android app like this in particular could cause problems of epic proportions (for example, lets see what happens when you practically drench an 83 year old in adrenalin - aka Mad's horse turbocharger in Last Continent) is no one else worried that once theres an app for that - NHS miniondrones will slavishly use it and lose the will to think?
They're bad enough already - gave my gran morphine for a chest infection; gave me an anti-emetic after an accidental overdose, when the treatment primary revolves around the patient vomiting up, they gave me something designed to make sure that I DIDNT vomit.
I havent even started on the Apple Evil Empire(TM) thats doing its level best to own our schools and government - now they're after healthcare..
As Tony used to say...
"Grreat"
*sigh*
Re: Utter bollocks.
You conveniently forgot to mention....
Symbian S60 3rd had them 2 years before iPhone. As well as TV/projector out and 'retina' screen (416x352) in 2006 on the E70 & others.
Must be nice to be first...
Oh wait...
When even MS drones whinge about Windows Phone you know its on a hiding to nothing. You can get a more credible 'smartphone' buying a second hand Touch Pro/Diamond and putting the hosts UI on it, oh look its free. All the Windows Phone tilegasms, less of the monumental bugs. Or you could have Point UI, thats free too, and the steampunk theme is great.
I said months ago that bad bugs could be a problem... Oh look, they are.
I said months ago that all Symbian needed was a UI makeover... Oh look, its getting hugs and people are wondering why its being killed. Why? They gave it a UI makeover.
Can someone tell me where to go to get a cushy job spouting the bleeding obvious please?
I connect up my E7 to a bluetooth kb, a mouse through USB, tv through HDMI or analogue/SCART & 99% of the things I can do on my laptop I can do just as well on my SYMBIAN phone, with the 680mhz processor, and the nHD, and the confusing-to-americans OS... Not to mention a full sound system through HDMI too if I want to listen to music...
And lookee ma, I still manage a days battery life!
Mr Elop, here is my advice. Take Lumia phone hardware, put Belle on them, walk away from Windows Phone. Nokia might just make it.
Go and look at AAS april fools phone - the E7-10 - E7 + N8 camera, FM transmitter & a sodding REMOVABLE battery/microSD! Build it and they will come, 60+ comments all wanting one.
Plus with Belle, Mr Elop, you wont be making a $200 loss on every one you sell. Whats not to like about profit?
You do know what profit is right...?
Too soon...?
Great... fantastic. Not only can they not even keep hold of a physical object with our data on it thats the size of a large print version of the collected works of Charles Dickens, this idiot is proposing putting it in 'the cloud'.
As a customer of HMG I would like to propose he puts this idea somewhere that doesnt involve cumulonimbus!
This idea is so many levels of dumb I cant list them here. The best part is the 'savings' to be made. As a former local government IT person I can state categorically that the only reason they aren't still using a network of daisy chained ZX Spectrums and a thermal printer (not to mention 300k acoustic coupler) is they cant get the parts.
How much do you expect to save when you have to upgrade everything from Windows NT & 16mb RAM or Windows 98?
Thats over and above the security issues - then theres the joys of what happens to sensitive data when the supplier does a Jobs. You can of course bet your bottom euro that the first data to go on will be abuse victims names and addresses and the like - promptly to be barfed out because some cloudpeon didnt understand the permissions.
Bad, bad, bad idea & another governmental epic fail waiting to happen.
Re: @ Jemma
Well, that would be the part where I am IB for back problems amongst other problems, which pretty much qualifies me.
More to the point - if they are prepared to allow it for a group of people - probably on the basis that alot of people with disabling conditions (such as late stage MS for example, or many ME sufferers) wouldnt be able to use such a machine - what is stopping them just accepting that its common sense.
The faster a cyclist can go in town traffic the safer the cyclist. The electric and 2 stroke bikes can keep up town speeds permanantly. The less the speed differential the less accidents - the less accidents the better safety. Not to mention the fact that most bikes like mine sound like demented wasps played through an amp... which means most people (bar the wannabe darwinists) have a better chance of hearing them coming than some old girl on a pushbike wobbling down the middle of the path.
Re: eBikes and the law
see
Vehicle Excise and Registration Act 1994
You are here: 1994 c. 22SCHEDULE 2 Vehicles for disabled people Section 18
A vehicle (including a cycle with an attachment for propulsion by mechanical power) which—
(a) is adapted, and used or kept on a road, for an invalid, and
(b) does not exceed 508 kilograms in weight unladen, is an exempt vehicle.
You were saying...?
Re: Sense, not very common these days
Actually a 22cc Golden Eagle has been legalised - including if i remember a tuned pipe on a full suspension ATB frame in blue.
Not only that - but with suitable brakes and competition pads fitted they can actually have better brakes than officially designed mopeds. I know, because I have both out-dragged and out braked manufacturer mopeds on my homebuilt.
Please try not to make comments claiming factual exactitude when they are nothing more than slightly to the left of guesswork.
Re: Actually its the riders that are the problem and not the speed or DoT
I have more than once told people riding on the path its illegal. I generally get told to do something biologically impossible.
Thats assuming they can be bothered to slow down before they've maimed you.
However - when the car drivers in my area stop using the bike lanes for car parts or for vehicular target practice - it'll be alot safer to be on the road. Its gotten worse over the years, even for experienced and skilled riders. Put a child on the average UK road and you are just asking for some nerk in a BMW/Audi SUV to send them flying through the air without even noticing the accident
The sole, solitary time, I ever rode the GEBE off the road was on waste ground to see if it was usable cross country at any speed. It worked ok, but as a hardtail, at any speed it took a couple of hours to stop your insides vibrating afterwards.
Re: Sense, not very common these days
...some stupid ass pulls out across you...
One of my sigs I had for a while on a site relating to MB's...
"40mph doesnt hurt, its the side of the Audi that hurts"
Thankfully I had fitted good brakes when some idiot did that to me.
Thankfully the only 'accident' I had on the Golden Eagle was a wet slide (bruised from my hip to my knee - which went a lovely shade of purple) despite various darwin award types trying to commit vehicular seppuku in front of me.
Re: Mopeds
Um, no.
There were three classes of machine in all.
The first is something like the smiths autowheel and deriatives thereof. These included motors designed to attach to a normal bike in varying positions. They were usually of small swept displacement and either fitted as a 'third wheel' drive (autowheel), a clip on attachment such as the 'Mosquito' and amazingly a 22cc Bugatti cyclemotor with of all things a small supercharger! Other members of this august yet wheezy class include the Cyclaid and My Golden Eagle 32cc belt drive single speed (of 2007 vintage, and hand built by myself). The more modern types such as the 48cc and 80cc 'china-girl' bikes can be had with a layshaft system to use the bikes built in deraillier gears. For the suicidal there is the Morini motor putting out 8.5hp on a pushbike and good for 50+mph.
The second is an autocycle - which usually used a single type of engine in various frames with various transmissions. These are bikes built by the company WITH engine and the relevant bits built in.The engine was a 98cc single cylinder engine from Villiers. Examples of this type are the Bown bikes, Francis Barnetts (commonly with the later Junior De Luxe motor). Some of these bikes were multispeed with generally 2-3 speeds. One used a 1st-neutral-2nd box which needed either careful handling or a good kicking depending who you speak to. Most autocycles have pedals - and the starting procedure is either to kick the engine over on the stand using the pedals - or ride up to speed and let in the drive starting the motor that way. Almost all autocycles used the Villiers 98cc series engines, either the Junior with canted cylinder or the Junior De Luxe with a horizontal one), so that could be said to be a pre requisite. Most of these machines could be pedalled - but if the drive was unclutched this was not a fun procedure. Flat out these machines were good for 35mph or so - but the port design on the Villiers engine is not really condusive to fitting tuned pipes, nor would they be original parts.
Then we come to mopeds. These are a entirely different kettle of fish. Generally they use an engine of around 50cc - 125cc. Older bikes used manual transmissions, with one bike memorable for having 7 speeds and a engine that ate piston rings like Prescott eats pies (warning of their demise was a cloud of blue smoke and a tinkling noise, as bits of sintered metal were expressed from the exhaust port at an appreciable fraction of local lightspeed). They were generally 2 stroke, they had pedals (of dubious ability) but they was more a show than of any practical use. The more modern machines tend to use 4 strokes - with various types of automatic or CVT transmissions.
Modern 'mopeds' bear little or no relationship to any of these. With a spavined 4 stroke engine, no pedals and generally squeeze and go they really dont come under any of the categories. However there is hope at hand. Its entirely possible to remove the 4-stroke motor and replace it with a 2 stroke (twice the power density as standard) and to fit a tuned pipe for more performance. This wont speed you up that much (unless its a pipe entirely for top end) but it will give you more power and torque in the mid bands (its a complicated theory) which aids in hill climbing and mid band acceleration (think the equivalent of the old 50-70mph sprint times they used to post for cars).
Re: Parenting fail
Sounds familiar, my ex who died september '08 from secondary cervical cancer - caused by a grandparent abusing her was in the same situation. Ironically she kinda consented to what happened to protect her sister. Hearing that was about the time I gave up on there being such a thing as any kind of God.
Her family, other than her sister, wouldn't and wont countenance it ever happened. Mind you these are the same people that had my ex's sister committed after she emotionally fell apart...
Families are wonderful things, I think there should be a written exam before some people are allowed to breed.
Kudos to the DSi girl for coming up with a good idea - as to a shutter sound she probably knew enough to disable that aforethought - we dont give kids enough credit in this country.
As to the 'perp - dont ya just love 'care in the community' *sigh*
Re: eBikes and the law
And if you arent a copper I'll eat my hat. Why does a copper doing the Anonymous Coward thing still not surprise me?
The idiots strike back...
I rode two petrol power motorized bikes for 2000 miles+. The first was a Raleigh MTB with a 22cc two stroke motor from Golden Eagle bikes, which was stolen. The second which I still have is based on a Cruiser frame with a 33cc piped two stroke.
Both are capable of 30, the D7 of 38mph but that has a tuned pipe on it. The latter one I upgraded the brakes, lights and various other equipment - all simple things to do and got the brightest lamps I could lay my hands on.
The piglets locally didnt have a clue what to make of it - one tells me its entirely legal - another verbally abuses me, gives me 6 points for driving without insurance (its a SODDING bike) - and his boss flat out lies through his teeth after I threaten to go to the IPCC. Not to mention he plainly had no concept of cycling since his comment at what had been the brightest LED tail-light on the market was 'thats small isn't it' - notwithstanding the fact you cant even look into it without literal pain - your eyes actually hurt!
The only accidents I had on it was dropping it on wet pavement at speed (a lesson learned, and a brake handle destroyed - wet road and front brake, bad idea) and some dozy Asian girl who walked out in front of me glued to her mobile phone completely oblivious (goddess knows how, the thing sounds like a hornet on methaphetamine run through an guitar amp).
I agree with the people who say that speed actually helps cyclists - the faster you go the safer you are, end of. There is a steep hill near were I used to live, cars parked on both sides, and a bus route. The 22 bike wheezed a bit on it, but the D7 flew up it at traffic speeds - which is much safer than toiling up it,swaying all over the place, doing barely walking pace, in a lovely shade of puce... millimeters away from the front of a 65 bus.
But heres the thing. The D7 bike cost me about £1000 all told - would sit at WOT all day without complaining and would do 22+ miles on 600ml of petrol, with some still left.... If you said I could have gotten 25 out of a tank thats 189MPG - full throttle all the way. Average speed of 28mph for the journey. Top roadspeed on the flat, 35mph.
I am now driving a car, doing the same journey. If I am really careful and hypermile the car gets 28mpg or so, even the best diesel manages maybe 65-80mpg - and on a bad trip the average speed is 15mph!
The government have no interest in cutting carbon footprint - if they did they would actively sponsor machines like mine, not treat people who are actually making massive carbon savings, taking a car off the road, and travelling efficiently, like target practice for traffic police with PMS. Thats not to mention there are various people online who have converted their bikes into cargo haulers for businesses. A fully-sus MTB based 22cc GEBE was able to carry over 600lbs of equipment without problem, using just off the shelf components fitted to the bike alone - that wasnt including what it could have towed via trailer. The 33cc 2S GEBE could probably pull half that again. Add that to the fact you can buy a frame extensions off the shelf that will allow you to seat 4 people in tandem & still make 25-30mph, it makes you think...
Government... if you want to save money, save resources, free up money in the wider economy and generally improve peoples lot. and ironically health, then Electric assist and Petrol assist bikes are the way to go. Most people who build their own bikes take alot of care about it, and finish them to a high standard - a simple check would suffice - not the same palaver for a motorized bike as for a Caterham 7.
Tethering...
Oh look, my HTC diamond and Nokia E7 can do tethering no problem.
Although, and this is the interesting part.
The tethering client in Windows Mobile 6.5.3 uses WEP encryption as standard.
The tethering client in Symbian Belle (third party) only works without encrypt unless you pay extra... which makes it effectively utterly useless.
Don't you just love the joys of progress?
I haven't bought a phone without WiFi for years - its faster, more secure and takes less battery life than mobile data.
Not to mention we've been being gouged for years over SMS and MMS messaging.
Looks like we might be getting our own back finally.
Middle east sext-ers
RIM gives the decryption algorythms to Saudi Government...
Company Memo:-
To: All 'Chop-Chop Square' employees.
There has been a marked increase in the waiting lists for service users. Therefore all shop floor operatives will receive chainsaws and pressure washing systems and attend a mandatory training course in the use of same. Said equipment will be provided by an American company with which the government retains an agreement.
Re: Err
Very true, but with one proviso, which my ex-bosses ex-boss found out to his cost.
Apparently this numty had been replacing 'out of date' or 'terminal hardware fault' equipment slightly more often than he should have been. The company of course, noticed nothing, and assumed all was hunky dory with this, despite a failure rate that would put the first generation SA80 to shame...
It all came to a head and the Police got involved when this nerk sold a laptop on ebay, that was supposed to be dead and gone without wiping any of the confidential company data and the buyer did the honorable thing (aka the stupid thing, whats the betting the average cop would have had them for receiving) and contacted said Police...
My boss then turned up for work to see his boss being escorted into a squad car and the rest is history.
I think they call that a salutory tale - tale of two idiots is more like it.
I am just waiting for some government nerk to be interviewed on this...
Reporter: "So how do you pick whose career to demolish?"
MP: "Oh, thats simple, we just characterise 'loyalty & stupidity around the mean'"
Reporter: "You do realise we're live on air..."
MP: "ah, ummm..."
This can only end badly, the scots git stubs his toe, and half the cabinet are working at poundshop..
Its been attempted before in stocks and bonds (the original LTCM) - when it works its great, when it doesnt its a total unmitigated palladium plated balls up of Stalingrad-esque proportions.
And may the Gods protect us if someone like Mandelson gets a hold of it. To slightly misquote Blackadder;
G: "Can you imagine it, the Gay Gerbil, with the power of life and death over every bally fool in the cabinet..."
Black: "Yes, unfortunately I can, George; still at least we don't have to write the headlines, or read them for that matter..."
Bald: "I know sir, how about "Gerbils rush in where Fools fear to tread"..."
Black: "My word, intelligence from a Baldrick, better keep quiet - they'll make him first Education Minister if they find out..."
Thanks Nicolae
Now I need brain bleach.
Surprised looking Alsatian...
I didnt know the BOFH knew my ex...
The problem with FB is that it can get away with things that would have a private citizen helping the police with their enquiries.
In the case of that American couple, they had never even met this womans father, right up to the point he killed them. Facebook in that case holds major responsibility, because without that site the whole situation would not have happened, it wouldnt have been possible.
I am not saying that every single crime on the planet can be blamed on the Joys of Facebook - but it has facilitated several, and thats only the ones we have heard about, to the point people have died as a result.
True...
But think on this...
Every single of those 'couple of dozen, tops' are people who have/had a family. Not quite so funny now is it.
More to the point, alot of those crimes associated with FB happened *specifically* because of facebook - because of the information placed on that site which the persons concerned both victims and attackers/killers would not otherwise have had or known.
Do that as a private citizen, and the local Police will be readying their desk drawers with the intent of charging you with aiding and abetting at best - and as a co-defendant in a murder case at worst.
Do the precise same thing as the reichskanzler of Facebook and people are congratulating you on your stock options and how well you have shafted your colleagues.
Is my point coming clearer now?
Im sure the families...
Of the couple murdered for the heinous crime of unfriending a sociopaths daughter on facebook will be thrilled for the little parasite. It must surely make up for finding out your daughters face just had an argument with the business end of a 30-ought-6.
Not to mention that teenager who was raped & murdered - or the Harrods shop assistant who found out first hand that 9mm copper jacketed ball rounds and her face didnt really mix.
Facebook - your friendly neighbourhood crime against humanity...
For everything else there's real life... Remember that?
Sigh
I am wondering if the chinless wonders who've come up with this have the remotest clue?
Many people on benefits can barely manage to pay food and heating, im sure they're bouncing for joy about this.
Not to mention those who dont have a computer will be down the libraries to 'use' it there. You know, the places that think patches are something you wear at the elbow... And that netscape is the latest in technology
The really fun part? Taxpayers will be paying twice - once to set it up, and once to pay for the damage.
...For everything else, theres COMMON SENSE.
What nation would that be? since right at the moment the Scots seem undecided about precisely what nation they are members of. Although I have to be fair, Scotland is about the only place in history where one of its best known Kings actually retired!
Now your position comes somewhat clearer, I hope you will be proud of yourself, because the position you espouse is precisely the worst possible for your families continued success.
Apple want to re-organise text books and the like in Jobs's image. All very well and good, and laudable. Until you realise that when they've done it, they'll have copyright, which means they'll charge what they like. A boss of Apple isnt very happy with a certain bunch of people, latterly found in the rough area of the Levant, oh look the history of a certain unpleasant event is somewhat massaged...
AND YOU'LL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT PAY, AND ACCEPT IT.
Or your grandkids will end up in room-temperature-IQ hell.
Because if the copyright Ghazi nutters who are involved in downing MegaUpLoad and all the rest of it get their way - how long do you think it'll be before Wikipedia goes down in flames? Free, openly distributed information, we cant have that can we?
I am reminded of a film called Santa Claus, and the memorable line....
"A sequel. That's it. We'll bring it out on March 25, and we'll call it... Christmas 2!"
Wont your grandkids be happy with their all new Christmas by Apple, to go with their classroom by Apple etc etc...
As I have said repeatedly. I am happy to pay a fair price. If I can get the same or better product at a lower price, then I pay a lower price. Thats one of the reasons I wont touch BMW or Apple, and thats above and beyond idiotic or shabby business practices respectively.
If your customers pay your prices good on you - you might have got the balance right.
I remember when I used to work in Cambridge, with DTP companies mainly, most of whom were using a certain piece of software - 90% of which was 'pirated'. Do you know *why* it was pirated?
Because EVEN THE REPS SELLING IT ADMITTED the price was too high.
If companies of all descriptions sell their wares at an honest fair price then people will be happy to pay those prices, but precisely why should I pay £50,000 for something when a competitors product does a better job at £25,000?
More to the point, if something like a car costs me say, £15k, and the actual entire build cost is £7-8k thats all well and good.
But if I am charged £15k for something which cost the person selling it & making it £100... then its a definate no.
Once a music CD has been mastered every further copy from that master costs a single blank CD, some ink, and some electric - maybe 6p in all per CD. Now I would like you to explain to me precisely why, charging every single customer a mark up of 99.6% is fair and ethical?
Especially since we are talking about 'trained' Americans, which means there'll be no people on the same side left to ask anything.
@ AC 15.25
I hate to say I am beginning to agree with you. Corporations havent done fair since Walter Disney married a Markovicz...
This post has been deleted by a moderator
...umm, you might want to be careful with that...
You are stepping perilously close to the 'all fighter pilots are evil because they kill people, except ours' conundra...
Situation the First:
I walk into my local HSBC with a working version of Vasquez's somewhat modified MG42 and steal what little cash the bank has, jump in the car and disappear into the distance.. while the local police try to coax their Diesel Focus into life..
Situation the Second:
Disney use a DVD copier machine ($5000) and a load of blank DVD's ($0.01 each) to copy on 40 year old tat that even 8 year olds cringe at - and then sell it at £15 a shot, to parents that are barely making ends meet as it is... they used to call that profiteering...
Both are little more than theft, but one person will be making the HMP Broadmoor equivalent of a Diane Fossey documentary while the other is sitting comfortably (and lets not forget, making sure that plenty of lawyers are on hand in case someone mentions a certain Walter Disney & his raving anti-semitism).
Not to mention the fact that the only difference between the person doing the precise same thing as Disney but in their garage and selling the results for half the price - is a piece of paper saying Disney are allowed to?
Profiteering is nothing more than legalised theft. Profiteering is what the media industry has been doing for years.
I pay to watch TV in the UK for example, for the life of me nowadays I dont know why. I used to enjoy watching, back in the day, Buffy and Angel. I'd go with Buffy but I'd be thinking of Tara etc etc.
I could tape or use other methods to record *something I paid for* for very little - corporations can do it for practically nothing because of economies of scale - but for the 7 series of Buffy you pay £100+ for a boxed set...? and thats honest commerce?
Would you buy an iPhone for £20,000? because thats the equivalent mark up you are paying for a piece of cardboard and a printed frontispiece. (apple fanbois excepted of course).
All this stuff with Megaupload is basically the US govt throwing its toys out of the pram because the PHBs got ass-raped over the SOPA/PIPA debacle. Its basically gulf war the 3rd. Lets go harass and dick around with someone who had NOTHING TO DO with whats got us with our panties in a knot, because we feel like it and we rule the world.
Personally I would like a fair compromise. Fair profits for the corporations concerned and the artists concerned. Fair prices for the customer. Selling something at a 50% markup is one thing - a 5000% markup is something else entirely.
As to Megaupload I hope and strongly suspect that this 'trial' will fall apart faster than a UK Police Corruption investigation. Notwithstanding the fact that the US has overstepped its mark to the point of needing the hubble telescope as a visual aid, they have also taken data that is entirely legal (for the given value of legality in this day and age), from people who have done absolutely nothing wrong, and seem intent on destroying it just because they can. I wonder how many businesses have been damaged by this action?
Now, forgive me if I am wrong, but stealing someones own work and data and then destroying it is theft is it not? much the same as stealing someones Lexus and having an impromptu barbecue over its burning carcass is theft (and theft, sonny, thats just for starters).
Not to mention the albino mastodon in the room but people, and this is the important bit, so sit up and listen at the back...
PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS COPIED AND SHARED STUFF BETWEEN EACH OTHER...
How do you think the Bible got to be such a popular title? - yup, they copied it (although to be fair, blokes with swords cutting up people who didnt agree with it was somewhat of an incentive)
How do you think people learned about new music acts and stuff they now like? you guessed it, from mates giving them copies of albums or songs - I remember being at Uni and my friend lent me a copy of a Cranberries album.... OH GODS, BURN HER AT THE STAKE NOW!!!!!!
Funny isnt it, that in the intervening years I went and BOUGHT, with my money, the CD's and the like that that band have produced.
The only thing sadder and more pitiful than the US justice system would be drowning puppies, and there would have to be alot of them..
Oh, the irony
Oh goodie!!
Not only are they stealing and scarfing your personal information, and ignoring your privacy, and generally being as morally reprehensible and bankrupt as is possible outside the Sudanese government - they're making millions on it.
Or
stealing Gigabytes of personal data - Free
Selling Gigabytes of personal data - $millions
Selling shares based on theft from your own victims - PRICELESS
For everything else, theres PRIVACY*...
* remember this word, because it'll soon be critically endangered. Your grandkids seeing privacy will be like your kids curling up with a white tiger.
...I've got a bad feeling about this...
Given that this lot are now in cahoots with the paragon of mobile phone honesty and customer support that is Orange - my suggestion to anyone contemplating this would be to be very very careful and read the contracts and every document associated in company with their solicitor or lawyer.
Orange is well known for changing contracts and T & C's left and centre (and memorably got clobbered by the regulator more than once).
Can you imagine the bill you would get if T-Mobile/Orange decided at the start of the month to change unlimited to 1gb/600/600? A £700 bill is one hell of a shock and dont expect the regulator to support you.
A bad bad bad idea, especially for a smartphone newbie.
Im not even going to bother...
saying anything...
*smile*
You know what makes me smile?
The bit where there is no chance in hell that any site like The Reg is *ever* going to post this story with two blokes kissing, not two women...
And people say the godbotherers are hypocritical...
I love that theres all this palaver about gay marriage - when the divorce rate for the straights is through the roof...
Oh, and AdamWill - there is a reason for no specific place having a yea/nay in the UK on gay marriage - because there is a single law for the country, not a dual level system as with the American state and federal laws. You can blame the Saxons for that (one of their kings did for the english legal system what GMT did for the train timetables, but for the life of me I cant remember which one).
As to why all the different corporations are getting involved for my money its a fairly simple conundrum to solve. I've even been nice and given you a clue...
Still not got it? its MONEY
Every penny people like the great Gates-by and the immortal Jobs spends on charity is wonderfully repaid by the lesser spotted tax credit. Its just good business, with a little bit of personal soul-polishing on the side.
Personally I think people should take their snouts out of everyone elses sexuality. Its no-ones business but the two or more people involved. That goes for governments, god botherers, parents, siblings and the rest...
awww..
.. and I was so looking forward to live action Steve Jobs guro....
There is a hell btw, its called Luton, Bedfordshire.
If destroying peoples privacy was classified as a crime against humanity, this guy would have been one of the people up against the wall.
just too easy...
EA/MS - Its in desperation...
Seriously MS - flogging a dead horse is not a miracle cure.
Android patent trollery $15
second rate processor $75
Watching MS begging on its knees ... Priceless
For everything else theres Belle...
Oh gods... they did it on the other side too, and the back, and the front...*
It looks a lot like the Toyota bosses held a styling competition at the local special school...
Notwithstanding the fact that the Prii and their ilk are little more than a cynical marketing ploy anyway.. at least the 'training shoe' shape was bearable...
This thing looks like a Aston Martin Lagonda mated with a stately home and then ran into Wayne Szalinski - via every concept car since that spavined 1981 Austin Metro saloon (yes seriously, they actually bothered to make one).
Seriously, that thing is worse than someone having a chavgasm all over an Austin Allegro (aka £500 rims and the exhaust from a retired B25). It should be put down, if it were an animal PETA would be in favour of animal testing on the basis that nothing could make its life worse!
In the annals of mid life facelift face-plant moments this almost pips the Morris Ital to the crown in the Lady Camilla Eyesore Cup knocking the Austin Ambassador out of second place by dint of its utter pointlessness and eye-gouging ugliness.
Please please please no, Toyota; if you dont want to make a total loss on them, you could sell the entire production fun to Top Gear, although where you would find that many cranes and grand pianos (Icelandic volcanoes might be your friend here)... On the upside it would stop the Marina Owners Club from whingeing...
*Free zen hug if you get whose quote I half inched.
Cause and effect.
My partner at the times daughter was good at cause and effect - she was generally the cause of stunned disbelief - the causation of which she enjoyed no end, as well as the results (Laura & I were usually laughing too hard to tell her off). This girl by the way is a pretty blonde blue eyed cherub with a PhD in looking innocent...
The highlight of her career thus far was, at the age of 4, when asked by the Sunday School teacher of all people "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was to wait until she was sure everyone was listening.. and say very loudly and clearly "I wanna be a lesbian when I grow up...". The teacher was stunned, L was in hysterics with laughter - and all the parents had that 'oh god' look because they knew full well the next question from their kids would be "whats a lesbian...?".
We dont give kids enough credit for what they pick up and when in this country. Its plain fact that kids learn very quickly from 3 years old or so, and it gets slower as time progresses. So it amazes that kids 3-10 are basically treated like buck toothed idiots in general, and then suddenly become sinks for information at 12? no wonder they lose interest. Its I think a subset of that thing where peoples perception says kids dont have a sexuality or healthy interest in the opposite sex/same sex/both at once/family dog until their gender expression and sexuality chip is installed at 00:00 GMT on their 16th birthday.
Practically any child has the ability to do practically anything (I mean, if William Hague can be in the government, theres hope for us all), so its criminal that we proscribe and control the very people we are berating 5 or 10 years later for being apathetic and disconnected.
*sigh*
I might be a Hackerette - but what do you think custom ROMs for different mobile companies are?
If the mobile company cant have what it wants then they wont stock it. End of.
Of course you get some monumental mistakes - a notable one being the Orange ROM for HTC Touch Diamond. You know the one, it was where some 12 year old idiot decided to see what happened when he banjaxed all the powersaving and loaded it with crudware. The phone ran so hot you could have glued 50 together and heated a fair sized room (for say 20 minutes till the battery died)... It took me 4 different *FREE* ROMS and two lots of open source software and the phone was improved 100 fold...
That was Windows Mobile - but with Windows Phone everything is that much more controlled and that can never be a good thing. With WinMo mistake = 45 minutes and a new ROM image - which even my mother could do herself. WinPhone = hard luck you're stuck with it (bar the odd 'update' that'll probably flake out something else on the handset.
Handset companies are stocking the Lumia on the basis that its Nokia - for no other reason. If it fails then Nokia have nowhere else to go. They've effectively gut shot Symbian, and are gleefully watching it twitch and gurgle via accenture - while to paraphrase Hugh Dowding, "Praying to Microsoft and hoping for Customers...". They'll lose the people who liked the high functionality of Symbian - and against Android and iOS, for all their myriad faults, Win Phone has the popularity and appeal of a week dead skunk. So there goes their projected new customers...
Oh. and just as an aside - alot of people have suddenly gotten into reflashing their phones since CarrierIQ et al went all 1984 on them...
I wont say I told you so - but its hard to resist..
well, they need to be exact for new customers....
In the hope they'll replace all the customers who've told HSBC to ram it up their collective behinds over their Internet Banking - aka the utter utter cock up.
On the upside, when the 'world bank' goes bankrupt - we know exactly where to go to point and laugh.
*sigh*
If Windows Phone was actually any good then it would sell itself. To be frank its not. Even Microsoft management employees admit that Windows Phone was a rush job (apparently evinced by the lack of support for legacy, a mistake they seem to want to make again with Windows 8).
If Windows Mobile was released now, instead of back in the day, it would be a raging success compared to Windows Phone. Win Mo was before its time, it was powerful, effective, and more importantly infinately editable, modifiable and hackable. The success of Android is substantially due to those same factors. Windows Phone is none of those things, and more importantly its fighting against Apples stranglehold on the locked in/locked down paradigm. Whether it comes good in the end, which is by no means assured, second to market is usually second place.
What Microsoft are trying to do has been done before, many times, by many notable companies - and most of the time its been a dismal failure. People will look at it, decide to take a chance on it on the basis of the distilled BS poured from straight faced salesdroids, spend the rest of the time loathing it (and or mourning lost features) and thats a customer lost entirely, probably for life, on the basis of a 24 month contract and short term sales massaging.
It already appears to be coming clear that Windows Phone is not so much an also ran as an also limped. Putting their faith in Windows Phone is putting companies like Nokia at risk doubly - not only do they lose customers from their previous offerings (lack of features between old and new OS) they may fail to retain enough of the 'new' customers to survive.
To quote Futurama 603...
Its cos they're...
"Dumb Bastards"
Im sure Apple are so proud they've managed to snag the idiots. Personally I wish we had human cloning already, 10 years of inventing gory imaginative ways of executing clone steve jobs's would just about calm my ire regarding how he brought the smartphone into the dance of the idiots. Not to mention what his 'legacy' has done to personal privacy & security of same.
A slight rewrite of "the prom" speech
But whenever there was a problem or something creepy happened, you seemed to have been involved. Most of the people here have been humiliated by you, or lost jobs because you at one time or another.
We're proud to say that the Facebook generation has the lowest social quotient of any in history. And we know at least part of that is because of you. So we offer our thanks, and give you, uh, this. It's from all of us, and it has written here: "Facebook. just Die Already!"
Shame really that Anya was only fictional - the number of people who could really use a vengeance demon when the name Zuckerberg is mention probably beggars belief.. I wonder how many times she could kill him in creative ways before she got tired. It'd be messy, so put a tarp over that sofa..
/off to think happy Tara thoughts...
This is all related to the Deccan Traps in India.
Point the first: One megavolcano kicking off can bring down civilisations - one such was the santorini eruption which wiped out the Minoan state and directly led to the end of Hyksos rule in egypt, not to mention migrations, war, and a top to toes reboot of Greek civilisation. It could be said to be the one event that ended the Greek Heroic Age.
Point the second: The Deccan Traps are volcanic and metamorphic associate deposits of if my memory serves acidic/intermediate volcanics. Think Mount St Helens + Vesuvius + the yellowstone caldera all mixed up and then multiplied a couple of thousand times.
The result of a few thousand years of that is going to result in an atmosphere thats full of fine ash, so there goes the temperature and the green plants, so its bye bye food chain. Then theres the rain thats something along the lines of battery acid. Not to mention the nice friendly pyroclastic clouds and the noxious gas seepage that'll put paid to anything local.
Pretty much anything and everything that could erupt, explode, smoke or barf out hundreds of cubic kilometers of nice baking hot volcanic rock at about 800-1200c all got in on the act all at once.
Point the third: Life is very resiliant, theres a saying that life turns up everywhere it can, the places where it cant just take a little longer. Human society could probably manage to take maybe 2 megavolcano events simultaneously without buckling, by that I dont mean extinction, but fundamental problems with our social frameworks and paradigms.
10 simultaneous or closely sequel megavolcano level events, probably not.
The Deccan Traps and their associated deposits are thousands of years of megavolcanic events numbering 100s to 1000s. Add to that we are apex omnivores... And we are pretty much screwed.
The issue with the Permian event is that its quick and its massive. Life manages usually to deal with one or the other, but not both. Massive and slow = evolution. Quick and localised = repopulation. Both quick & massive together is a terminal combination, because there is nowhere retaining a healthy population.
The problem for us, is while we have worldwide networks and transport, we are still dependant on a food chain, we've no other populations except on this planet, and no way of tapping resources from other planets or bodies. It actually might be an idea that all missions to the space station be mixed male & female - things start to go bad in a short term way, we have a seeding population, albeit a small one.
One poster mentioned that a single volcano has no quantifiable effect. They do, but its usually hidden in the data or something like a small ice age. Its like a person taking codiene for example... 30-90mg stops pain, but you only have to increase that by 100fold to end up with a corpse and some worrying questions. Likewise, 1-3 volcanos kick off, you might get a cold snap, 100 kick off and you're reduced to dwarf bread with a nice long island battery acid.
Yes, but only because we all buy into the idea. We are taught from practically age 0 that money does this and money does that - we need to pay for this and pay for that.
You know its odd, thinking about bank account interest. I put my money into a big pile of money and it makes 5% a year... what does it do? does my £5 note find another £5 note and make babies faster than a chav on a housing estate?
The concept makes absolutely no sense. The concept that if I take it out of the money box in my bed room and put in in someone elses box in another room and it miraculously seems to gain the ability to use the photocopier and create more of itself.
It has no basis in fact - other than the fact we agree that it happens - its a construct relying on a worldwide government induced hallucination and it needs to stop, because the more integrated the hallucination becomes the more of a total disaster it will be when the whole thing fails.
Given your argument the human race shouldnt exist - because if money was that important to the concept of the human race, we shouldnt even have evolved.
You still dont get my point do you?
Its actually fairly simple. You mention an MRI machine, which at the moment is an expensive bit of kit, which hospitals buy, with money, because they have a need for it. But you are assuming that if we were to remove money from the equation the whole thing would grind to a halt and the MRI would have never existed or be needed.
WRONG
Money does not drive development on its own, there are so many other reasons - a wish to be better, a dream to fulfil, the drive to make sure that cancer will never take another persons loved one (and I know that pain personally), even just the drive to be the best person you can be. If it did we would never have managed to get beyond the stage of yelling at the other monkeys in the next door tree. There is a need for MRI scanner systems ditto other complex systems, but the monetary cost for them is entirely arbitary.
I dont get paid for mucking around with my old WinMo phones to make them the best that they can be with the hardware available. I dont get paid for hypermiling and ecomodding my Safrane either, I do it because I enjoy it. If I had the ability to build MRI systems I would, because I never EVER want to watch another 22 year old woman, who was my partner, die of a pervasive and slow cancer that took 7 years of agony to finally kill her, or see anyone else go through that pain.
The amount of people in jobs they hate merely because of MONEY must be amazing, I have personal experience of that, my grandfather had a massive heart attack at the age of 52, simply because of stress from a job he hated. I wonder how much money we would save on health care if people werent worrying about money and their kids college funds and the like.
As to arbitrary value, I've another example. A 2.2vi 136bhp hatchback with class leading ride and features - at half the price new of the directly competitive BMW. Its now 15 years old and *still* has features that brand new cars dont have. Oddly though, you can get hold of one for £525. Why, because people have put an arbitrary value on it even though it does a better job as something twice the price. Then you get the ridiculous price of £215 for a 15cm wheel on a piece of metal, welcome to price gouging for spare parts, which wouldnt happen without the powerful but horribly broken paradigm of 'currency'.
The assumption that everyone has been trained to make is a simple hallucination. "If money were to disappear then the world would end". No, it wouldnt, unless you are a banker, hedge fund manager or the like.
We progressed before there was money, we will progress after there is money...
The problem we are having now is the same problem we had with religion at times like the enlightenment. The paradigm is tired and just not compatible with the continued advancement of the human race - true, there will probably be a world wide crunch heard when the paradigm is shifted without the use of the clutch (aka lots of wars and the like). It will be a painful shift most likely, but my personal opinion is its coming to the point where we are in serious danger of a complete and utter implosion going forward.
It could be argued that 2008 was that implosion, but I dont think so. I think things could get immeasurably worse. 2008 was led by American debt - the problems the banks had worldwide was fundamentally that they had bought US debt (in some cases without even knowing it) - therefore the effects were worldwide - but importantly the fundamental failure WAS NOT.
Now imagine what would happen in say 50 years time when we have say 3 different countries (US, Russia, China) in the same situation as the US banking industry; at once. Up until this point bankers and the financial system has always had somewhere to run for liquidity. Whats going to happen when *all* possible sources are dry? You think Libya & the like are bad, or Greek protests? That sort of implosion, assuming the governmental response is the same as this time - try worldwide mass civil war...
We are going to be sitting on our hands with no way back and no way forward - and given the state of things with just US based issues right now how much worse do you think will can get?
heres an idea...
Scrap the whole tottering edifice and save ourselves the hassle.
the world monetary system is nothing more than world wide hallucination, and as lethal in its way as cancer. It pervades everything and is the root of many of the social problems we've seen in the hundreds of years we've all happily joined in the madnesses.
Lets say I trade my skills for money to buy a car. Great, but its all arbitrary, it makes no sense. I could spend £500 on something which is much more functional than something I spent £50,000 on? I buy a house - it triples in value - some twerp screws up 3000 miles away and its down to half its original value within a week.
On the other hand... do away with currency altogether and youve lost nothing...
Right now people work to get money to eat and purchase other items. Drug addicts do what they do to keep body and soul together and get high. Companies produce items but have to add money to pay for the food and purchasing of their employees plus their materials. transportation adds more costs and so on.
since monetary value is nothing more than a construct based on a collective insanity... why bother with it and all the problems it brings?
but we need money to buy food...cars... crapple products. Yes, but only if we all agree that a lot of pieces of paper equals a Jaguar XK8.
Money only has value if that is universally agreed. Therefore if money and currency is.abandoned alot of the bad effects of it cease to exist.
How is that an advantage? its simple really - there'll be no arguments about value, no 10 year disasters because some banker decides all of a sudden that hes bored and thinks its a good laugh to trash the world.
I wonder how many people the banks have effectively murdered post 2008... the good thing about corporate manslaughter is its not messy... even better its based on a mass hallucination.
The point that people seem to miss in all this is money is no longer neccesary. fundamentally what happens today with money has no reason to stop without it. US buys oil so that the people who sell it buy from others, great, but since we're all going round in circles anyway nothing will fundamentally change without the use of money. It has no reason to.
In fact for alot of the world things will get much better. No more african debt, less african war, less war less disease better standard of living. No nees to 'profit', less overuse of land and other resources, the list goes on.
Take Mexico, 45,000 killed in 5 years over drugs and the profits thereof. No intrinsic value or price, no profit; no profit, no incentive - no incentive, no beheaded women and children. Its the same with everything else, we've managed to get into a position where a theoretical construct with no intrinsic value rules all. It makes no sense...
After all, whats good will a bag of coins do you on a desert island? On the other hand, a big bag of potatoes might be more boring, but its a damn sight more useful.
We are such a connected world that the old arguments about currency driving trade make little sense either. Trade drives trade. You want something in Germany so you give the people who have it something they need and so on.
No money... no need to assign entirely arbitrary values to things. No value, no way of creating debt, no debt means no need to come up with arbitrary ways of valuing value and no need for money to service that value.
life still goes on... exactly the same as before... just we're a little more lucid and alot less miserable. If you think about it it'd even help the environment too, in so many little ways. Less stress due to money worries, less smokers, less COx.. happy kangaroos.
The only downside for it is that to work we've all got to do it at the same time and *thats* the real embuggerance¥
¥ Technically defined as "an obstruction in the way of progress"
Why are people surprised?
It constantly amazes me that people seem to be of the opinion that having a bloody great empire just up the road (in this case the Acheamenids (sp?) shouldnt have an effect on the people next door. We know that there were British local tribes in the period before the Roman Conquest that were building their settlements on a grid style roadway system - and that many of the well off British tribes and their leaders not only traded with the Romans but visited their various cities (some making it as far as Rome itself, not a minor feat when the highlight of road transport was a horse).
Its not so much the current Islamics bashing the Pre-Islamic civilisations - 'Christian' archeo's are just as guilty for making monumental mistakes or deliberately fudging the evidence (even when it concurs with the bible texts, which at least in the Old Testament which current evidence seems to indicate are alot more 'true' than was formerly thought)
As to the previous commentator who said 'not enough written evidence' - there is alot, its just a matter of how you look at it. From one point of view you can take Troy as a myth and all the stories that come from that as stories and nothing else. True, the bit about the slapper called Helen is probably not entirely true (its more likely that the collapse of the Hittite empire at the end of Bronze age IIB/C or so, of which Troy was a satellite city state gave the Greeks the excuse to put the boot in), but there is evidence for Mopsus's story - among others - including Danaus doing a runner in the days after Troy (Wilusa) fell. It wasnt straight after - maybe a generation or so according to the latest research (Troy VII period) but there is good evidence it happened. Then theres the bit where biblical Jericho had walls with earthquake protection built in (the part with the bloke playing Jazz was probably a later addition) - it just takes watching the local animals to know when a big quake is coming... and the rest is Josh: Fall of Jericho... with a lass called Rahab playing the part of the separatist Sangheili...
As to our great friends the Romans, theres also fairly good evidence that they rose from the core of the fleeing Trojans, including Troy style tombs dated to the early Roman period. Even Homer admits that the Trojans at the time of the Iliad were talented fighters, talk about comeback! Not to mention the proto Hoplite form of warfare that would have been prevalent at the time of Troy, bears a interesting resemblance to the Testudo & other common Roman tactics
The mistake I think people make is that we assume that because one group had a particular skill or technology, that they were alone in possessing it. The Romans & Greeks & Egyptians had writing, all well and good, but we have no way of telling, bar going back and asking the Romans, if various groups they overran and absorbed had it too, simply because the Romans steamrollered over them. Winners write the histories.
PS: as to it 'not being their history' there is good genetic evidence, especially in the far and middle east, of long occupations by the persons currently ensconced there. For example, the Iranians, Afghanistanis and kazakhs all have Persian descent, point of fact the -stan suffix comes from the old Persian word for 'country' - they share many characteristics, including physical appearance and languages, and are well known to be the military equivalant of 'bottle coveys' - in other words they wont stop fighting even when they should, and you better not turn your back on whats left afterwards. Hence them giving the British Empire a good kicking twice (and it would have been a 3rd time if we hadnt cheated, this time is number 4 by the way), the Russians twice, The Macedonians only managed it because they fought a couple of battles and then legged it. The mobile mixture of different people in different lands is partly due to Colonialism, partly due to the various violent diasporas and partly due to economic factors...
Oh, and by the way, im part Saxon, English (which itself is a corruption of East Angles), Irish, Scandinavian, and French (sigh, my family has alot of connections with the Hugenot french diaspora). Thats at least 1500 years of 'British' history - and I am still here... in the land of my forfathir.
I dont know about that...
I know at least any Jewish person with any knowledge of their history will, ditto anyone of Armenian or Irish, Welsh, Scottish stock and the list goes on and on (including any Russians whose ancestors weren't part of Stalins direct family). Practically any racial group who've had another/other racial group(s) put the boot into them since somewhere around 72CE will have an unenviable knowledge of it. Just because you had to look it up in a dictionary doesn't mean everyone else has a reading age of 12 and the charisma of a tabletop.
Personally I think its a good use of the word, since the idea is to do the very same with your own personal entity, but in a controlled way that gives better (any) personal security to the individual concerned. The name Facebook is about as Aspergers as it gets as its the most basic simplistic description of what it does and is/was meant to be. (Disclaimer: I have a mild form of Aspergers/ASD myself - so I can say things like that, in the same way as I can make Essex girl jokes - being a girl and from Essex)
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence
Three times is enemy action.
You know I have to wonder about the decisions made by the UK banks in regard to security. My bank, HSBC, has just changed its security system to use a small PIN generator device from China. Now its not too hard to put in a few little extra bits in order to enable some sort of 'nullify and reset' signal, or even, given that Chinese companies (and government) have the algorithms to hand, a brute force type of attack. Given also that from my conversations and letters to him, the security head of HSBC, is either a Oscar worthy actor or as dumb as a stump, whats the odds that they've checked the devices properly?
From my point of view; given the chance to bet £10 on a bank paying out money to have the things taken apart and checked from top to tail, or Commander Sir Samuel Vimes Vs a Quasi-Demonic entity of extreme power; I have to say I would be voting for the guy in the chain mail...
Now, how long do you think it would take for our nice tea drinking, cricket loving civilization to turn into a cutscene from Halo:Reach if all the banks that used a similar system that was obtained from China (and whats the betting thats alot of them) were all hit at once. People cant get money for food, bills or petrol/Diesel - They cant get paid, and so on. I know there are other systems in place - but the thing there is that the banks have automated so much, that what was the entirety of a bank 20 years ago is a shadow of its former self (the physical staff etc) and it will *not* be able to cope for an extended period alone. Thats not even to mention the additional havoc that could be caused by pulling a stunt like that in the middle of Great Depression II...
I know it sounds paranoid, but the thing about being paranoid is its like being a pessimist. You are never ever disappointed.
if the Chinese could pull something like that off for an extended period then you wouldnt even need a nasty war like was going on in Libya. You just wait a little while and then saunter down and pick up the pieces after the countries you want are practically in the middle of their own little civil wars.
Even the most elementary tactics tells one that you don't build an army with only one type of unit, you just don't do it. Similarly, you don't put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to bank security - and I wonder how many people, when they look at the their security pin device see 'Made in China' on the back. There have already been cyberattacks traced to China mentioned in the media, given that we probably only hear about 1/10th of the total that happen, Im not happy about the odds that the 'system failures' we hear about are as innocent as they seem...
Time to find me an old sock to put under the mattress methinks.
Is it me, or does the picture of Stevie-boy on the first page remind you far to closely of Mr Zorg out of Fifth Element too?
Im sure a person who buys a new car every 6 months just to get out of paying the fee for a licence plate and happily parks in disabled parking pays is a wonderful person... but of course he is, alfter all he is the one who took all the credit for the iPhone...
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