I'd not involve either a record company or a bank manager. There are plenty of people who make a living from their music without involving either. They make money by teaching, playing lots of gigs, and flogging recordings and other merchandise, both at gigs and online. Thanks to t'interweb you don't need someone else to do your PR and you don't need massive up-front investment to manufacture your merchandise or distribute your recordings. You don't even need to spend much on studios and engineers these days, given how much you can do at home on your Mac.
And even if your favourite car does remain constant, you still have to remember whether you told them it's "E-type", "E type", "Jaguar E type", or any of several other variations on the theme.
A better question is "when will parents *re*learn" that their childrens' little misdemeanours are their responsibility.
It's true that parents can't stop their kids from doing any stupid things, but what's different now from when I were a lad is that back then my parents took responsibility. They didn't look for third parties to blame. They could have smothered me in supervision and not let me out to play (and steal, and vandalise) on my own to prevent me from doing many of the stupid things I did, but they decided it was better to allow me some freedoms - and to punish me when I screwed up.
Well, this geezer seems to think (and he may be right) that his kids are better off if allowed a little bit of freedom to play without him looking over their shoulders all the time. He has to accept the risks that come with granting that freedom to people who are fundamentally irresponsible.
Have you ever listened to commercial radio? Sure, Radio 1 and Radio 2, and most of the local radio stations could survive, but their content is indistinguishable from commercial radio anyway. And for that reason they should be closed. The BBC should not compete with commercial broadcasters but should provide services that the market chooses not to - such as Radio 3, Radio 4, and good quality TV. There's not enough good quality BBC TV programming to fill four channels, so some of them should be closed.
The argument that "waah, I don't watch the BBC so I shouldn't pay for it" is stupid - I don't receive benefits, so do I get to opt out of paying for those? No. There are some things which I don't partake of but which are beneficial to society as a whole. Unemployment and disability benefits. Education for your children. Roads in Wigan. The BBC is another of those things that is beneficial to society as a whole even if, like going to Wigan, it isn't something you take advantage of personally.
You do *not* have to prove anything to Capita. I've been ignoring them for years, and just putting their monthly letters in the bin with all the other junk mail.
Yeah, great. It's good that old people are being catered for. Blind people are catered for too, by the iPhone which has awesome accessibility gubbins built in. Shame that us deaf people are ignored unless they're also old. We can either use a Smart Phone for all the apps that we want, but struggle to hear people talking to us, or we can get a Cripple Phone with a volume control that goes to eleven (or works with the telecoils in our cybernetic enhancements) but is utterly useless for anything other than phone calls.
Part of the problem, of course, is the RNID, which seems to think that crippled 1990s-style phones are actually useful these days for anyone apart from old fogies and that "large clear buttons" are more important than functionality.
But even then compulsory reservations only work well with "quiet coaches" if you can both choose to be in the quiet coach and choose *not* to be in it. When booking trains in the UK you can often choose "i want to be in the quiet coach" but I've never seen "I do not want to be in the quiet coach" offered. So you might want to make calls, but have been dumped in the quiet coach anyway without anyone telling you in advance.
But PETA aren't painted as being the leader for animal rights. That would be the RSPCA. Are you seriously saying that anyone pays any attention to PETA anywhere?
I most certainly will *not* be downloading "sneakers" within 20 years. I am not a fucking chav. Therefore I will be downloading decent shoes and boots.
Given that positron tracks can be observed in cloud chambers, and we know their electric charge and can measure their velocity, surely we can calculate their mass from how sharply their paths bend in a known electric field. In a horizontal cloud chamber, gravitational effects are irrelevant. So to then see if gravity affects antimatter differently from matter, turn the cloud chamber on its side and see if you get different results.
It was not the entertainment industries that "attached the name pirate to copyright infringers", and certainly not going "right back to the days of pirate radio". Extended figurative uses of "piracy", including for unauthorised reproduction of creative works, have been around far longer, since at least 1606, which was before copyright was invented.
And "pirate radio" wasn't called that because of unauthorised copying, but because they were broadcasting without a licence. The name has historically been attached to just about anything illegal or even which the speaker merely disapproves of. For example, on 16 Jul 1897 the Prime Minister spoke in the House of Lords about "theological piracy" in the context of a debate about church schools and non-conformists in Wales.
I want to pay for two data plans. A decade or more ago when Sun were advertising "the network is the computer" they got slated for it, but they were right - they were just a few years ahead of their time. A computing device without always-on connectivity - which means wifi when available, 3G/EDGE/GPRS the rest of the time - is not fit for purpose these days. I *really* regret being a cheapskate and buying the Wifi-only version of the iPad.
"it became too expensive to give kids a simple computer to toy with"?
Rubbish. Back in 1984 my parents bought an Amstrad CPC 464 for me and my sister. It cost 400 quid and came with a monitor. That's about the same as a grand these days, for which you can buy *two* cheap Dells, with monitors.
No, the problem of kids not having simple computers to play with isn't cost, it's that users aren't forced straight into a programming environment, which makes it more difficult to just play with the damned thing and see what you can make it do.
A side issue is that families these days appear to be addicted to the telly, and so kids can't unplug the idiot box to use it as a monitor. There's no technical barriers to doing this - lots of modern digital TVs have VGA ports, and DVI-to-HDMI converters are common.
It is apparently also still OK to take the piss out of well-off well-educated people for the way they speak, but not to do the same to plebs who couldn't be bovvered with going to school.
I bet it doesn't sound crap - or at least, no crapper than a CD. You can't hear the difference when you take into account engine noise, road noise, and the fact that you're not concentrating on the music.
It's hardly news that Asia is where most spam comes from. Back when I last analysed my spam three or four years ago, *75%* of it did. What's news here, despite the misleading headline, is that spam sources are spreading out more evenly across the world.
Yes, it's vital. Quickly, answer these questions: at 1969-11-11Z01:00, what was the local time in London? And in Moscow? And in Hobart? And when it's 2012-03-15 04:00 in London what will the local time be in Maine and in Arizona?
A computerised index is not just faster, it lets you do more, and it can enforce referential integrity. To search a bunch of cards by either author or title, you need two indexes. It's way too easy to end up, through simple human error or misfiling, to make stuff disappear from one of them, and there's no way to tell that this has happened. A computerised index stops that from happening, and also lets you search by, for example, words in the middle of the title as well as by other attributes such as the publisher, or year of publication, or language.
Think those things don't matter? Think again. When I was learning Italian, I went to my local library and asked "what books do you have in Italian?" They didn't know, because this was in the Dark Ages. All they could do was point me at a shelf with half a dozen books on it. They couldn't tell me what other (interesting, worth reading) books they had in Italian at other branches.
As for searching by publisher - some publishers specialise in particular genres, and so if you like, for example, light-weight space opera, you might ask the librarian "what do you have published by Baen books?"
Or by year - if you're interested in the history of a subject, you might ask "what physics text books do you have published before 1900?"
A computerised index *is* cheaper, because it enables all of this stuff which can't be done in a cost-effective or reliable manner with card indexes.
But with perhaps five exceptions, total, all Welsh people of school age or greater can read, write, and speak English, so they get just as "rewarding" an experience as the rest of us.
"8.73 million adults in the UK have never used the internet, mainly because of age"? No. No-one doesn't use it because of age. They miss out because they are technophobes, or because they think it might be difficult. There are *plenty* of people who prove that being old doesn't prevent the use of new technologies, including the internet.
Wow. I recognised almost all the words but have no idea at all what that article was about. I sure hope that Microsoft's documentation does a better job of explaining their platform than this article does.
Is Amazon's version really going to be a fork of the OS (and thus maybe incompatible with mainstream Android apps) or is it just a different UI and some different bundled apps? Given that Amazon presumably still want apps in *their* app store to work on both their hardware and other Android vendors' hardware, I don't see that the assertion that Amazon hardware will only be able to use stuff in the Amazon app-store holds.
And even if it does, I bet it doesn't last long cos the hardware will be rooted a few days after it goes on sale.
Pointless title, which must contain letters and/or digits.
I bought the Tomtom iPhone app ages ago. I now use Copilot instead, for one reason and one reason only. With Tomtom, you can't easily plan an itinerary more complex than "go from A to C via B", and you can't save that at all. With Copilot, I can plan far more complex itineraries - eg go from A to D via B and C, then back via E - and I can save several of them in advance of my trip. Being able to plan such itineraries in advance is essential.
About the only thing Tomtom does better is that its speed camera warnings are far less annoying.
Pointless title, which must contain letters and/or digits.
The big conclusion I'd draw is that there is a market for dead simple devices that a non-techie can use as a web and email terminal. Those people don't care much about OS updates or third-party apps, neither of which they can count on ever receiving for the Touchpad, and they can't justify spending eleventy squillion pounds on a device that has those pointless features.
Of course, I wouldn't really draw that conclusion, as I knew it already.
Register
128 posts • joined Friday 16th February 2007 14:10 GMT
Page:
Re: Economic harm?
I'd not involve either a record company or a bank manager. There are plenty of people who make a living from their music without involving either. They make money by teaching, playing lots of gigs, and flogging recordings and other merchandise, both at gigs and online. Thanks to t'interweb you don't need someone else to do your PR and you don't need massive up-front investment to manufacture your merchandise or distribute your recordings. You don't even need to spend much on studios and engineers these days, given how much you can do at home on your Mac.
I think he's already made that clear - nuclear power. Because "renewables" are *not* the only other source that there is.
Also, so-called renewables aren't renewable. They're powered by the sun, which will eventually run out.
Anything to wean people off the TV teat is a good thing.
And even if your favourite car does remain constant, you still have to remember whether you told them it's "E-type", "E type", "Jaguar E type", or any of several other variations on the theme.
Bring back the stocks!
My money's on this being use of satellites to prospect for minerals and other resources on Earth.
Re: When will parents learn
A better question is "when will parents *re*learn" that their childrens' little misdemeanours are their responsibility.
It's true that parents can't stop their kids from doing any stupid things, but what's different now from when I were a lad is that back then my parents took responsibility. They didn't look for third parties to blame. They could have smothered me in supervision and not let me out to play (and steal, and vandalise) on my own to prevent me from doing many of the stupid things I did, but they decided it was better to allow me some freedoms - and to punish me when I screwed up.
Well, this geezer seems to think (and he may be right) that his kids are better off if allowed a little bit of freedom to play without him looking over their shoulders all the time. He has to accept the risks that come with granting that freedom to people who are fundamentally irresponsible.
Re: Err...
Have you ever listened to commercial radio? Sure, Radio 1 and Radio 2, and most of the local radio stations could survive, but their content is indistinguishable from commercial radio anyway. And for that reason they should be closed. The BBC should not compete with commercial broadcasters but should provide services that the market chooses not to - such as Radio 3, Radio 4, and good quality TV. There's not enough good quality BBC TV programming to fill four channels, so some of them should be closed.
The argument that "waah, I don't watch the BBC so I shouldn't pay for it" is stupid - I don't receive benefits, so do I get to opt out of paying for those? No. There are some things which I don't partake of but which are beneficial to society as a whole. Unemployment and disability benefits. Education for your children. Roads in Wigan. The BBC is another of those things that is beneficial to society as a whole even if, like going to Wigan, it isn't something you take advantage of personally.
Re: Only compulsory if...
You do *not* have to prove anything to Capita. I've been ignoring them for years, and just putting their monthly letters in the bin with all the other junk mail.
Re: 500ish posts later, and nobody's mentioned 1967's "Barbarella"?
What? Barbarella is in "so bad it's good" territory. Which is far better than "so bad it's unwatchable".
The Navy Vs The Night Monsters
It has to be The Navy Vs The Night Monsters, which is, thankfully, one of the most obscure bad films ever made.
Yeah, great. It's good that old people are being catered for. Blind people are catered for too, by the iPhone which has awesome accessibility gubbins built in. Shame that us deaf people are ignored unless they're also old. We can either use a Smart Phone for all the apps that we want, but struggle to hear people talking to us, or we can get a Cripple Phone with a volume control that goes to eleven (or works with the telecoils in our cybernetic enhancements) but is utterly useless for anything other than phone calls.
Part of the problem, of course, is the RNID, which seems to think that crippled 1990s-style phones are actually useful these days for anyone apart from old fogies and that "large clear buttons" are more important than functionality.
And unlike the real thing, it could launch when there was a bit of a breeze. NASA should hire these guys.
Re: Je suis dans la train!
But even then compulsory reservations only work well with "quiet coaches" if you can both choose to be in the quiet coach and choose *not* to be in it. When booking trains in the UK you can often choose "i want to be in the quiet coach" but I've never seen "I do not want to be in the quiet coach" offered. So you might want to make calls, but have been dumped in the quiet coach anyway without anyone telling you in advance.
But what's 70 Grays in El Reg units?
So they move their money overnight to where it can work hardest for them. Big deal. All large companies do that.
But PETA aren't painted as being the leader for animal rights. That would be the RSPCA. Are you seriously saying that anyone pays any attention to PETA anywhere?
Dr. Brain? What next - a real Professor Branestawm?
True, many charge over the odds for FLAC. But many don't. And, of course, FLAC is common on sites that fly the jolly roger.
I most certainly will *not* be downloading "sneakers" within 20 years. I am not a fucking chav. Therefore I will be downloading decent shoes and boots.
Given that positron tracks can be observed in cloud chambers, and we know their electric charge and can measure their velocity, surely we can calculate their mass from how sharply their paths bend in a known electric field. In a horizontal cloud chamber, gravitational effects are irrelevant. So to then see if gravity affects antimatter differently from matter, turn the cloud chamber on its side and see if you get different results.
What am I missing?
press hard? where's the 'hard' key?
It was not the entertainment industries that "attached the name pirate to copyright infringers", and certainly not going "right back to the days of pirate radio". Extended figurative uses of "piracy", including for unauthorised reproduction of creative works, have been around far longer, since at least 1606, which was before copyright was invented.
And "pirate radio" wasn't called that because of unauthorised copying, but because they were broadcasting without a licence. The name has historically been attached to just about anything illegal or even which the speaker merely disapproves of. For example, on 16 Jul 1897 the Prime Minister spoke in the House of Lords about "theological piracy" in the context of a debate about church schools and non-conformists in Wales.
Within the enterprise, "Apache" is tantamount to saying "safety"? No, it's tantamount to saying "web server".
If it hadn't been seen since the Dark Ages (and in biology, 1956 really is the dark ages) how did they know it was a separate species?
And anyway, who cares, it looks exactly the same as the bees in my garden according to that photo.
I want to pay for two data plans. A decade or more ago when Sun were advertising "the network is the computer" they got slated for it, but they were right - they were just a few years ahead of their time. A computing device without always-on connectivity - which means wifi when available, 3G/EDGE/GPRS the rest of the time - is not fit for purpose these days. I *really* regret being a cheapskate and buying the Wifi-only version of the iPad.
and WinCE ran on ARM, MIPS, and the Hitachi SH-3.
"it became too expensive to give kids a simple computer to toy with"?
Rubbish. Back in 1984 my parents bought an Amstrad CPC 464 for me and my sister. It cost 400 quid and came with a monitor. That's about the same as a grand these days, for which you can buy *two* cheap Dells, with monitors.
No, the problem of kids not having simple computers to play with isn't cost, it's that users aren't forced straight into a programming environment, which makes it more difficult to just play with the damned thing and see what you can make it do.
A side issue is that families these days appear to be addicted to the telly, and so kids can't unplug the idiot box to use it as a monitor. There's no technical barriers to doing this - lots of modern digital TVs have VGA ports, and DVI-to-HDMI converters are common.
It is apparently also still OK to take the piss out of well-off well-educated people for the way they speak, but not to do the same to plebs who couldn't be bovvered with going to school.
Urgh, desktops
I'll take just a window manager thankyouverymuch. olvwm by preference.
ANY TVs in the bedroom, surely
I bet it doesn't sound crap - or at least, no crapper than a CD. You can't hear the difference when you take into account engine noise, road noise, and the fact that you're not concentrating on the music.
You think you need a gun to travel to unfamiliar places? Seriously?
No, God definitely said "kill", not "murder" when dictating the bible to King James.
It's hardly news that Asia is where most spam comes from. Back when I last analysed my spam three or four years ago, *75%* of it did. What's news here, despite the misleading headline, is that spam sources are spreading out more evenly across the world.
If you're using the TV as background then you need your head looking at. Seriously.
I find that having one TV is a side-effect of me having better things to do than stare zombie-like at a piece of furniture.
1700 quid for a bike? A bike that will rot when it rains? And people think us Apple users waste our money!
Yes, it's vital. Quickly, answer these questions: at 1969-11-11Z01:00, what was the local time in London? And in Moscow? And in Hobart? And when it's 2012-03-15 04:00 in London what will the local time be in Maine and in Arizona?
A computerised index is not just faster, it lets you do more, and it can enforce referential integrity. To search a bunch of cards by either author or title, you need two indexes. It's way too easy to end up, through simple human error or misfiling, to make stuff disappear from one of them, and there's no way to tell that this has happened. A computerised index stops that from happening, and also lets you search by, for example, words in the middle of the title as well as by other attributes such as the publisher, or year of publication, or language.
Think those things don't matter? Think again. When I was learning Italian, I went to my local library and asked "what books do you have in Italian?" They didn't know, because this was in the Dark Ages. All they could do was point me at a shelf with half a dozen books on it. They couldn't tell me what other (interesting, worth reading) books they had in Italian at other branches.
As for searching by publisher - some publishers specialise in particular genres, and so if you like, for example, light-weight space opera, you might ask the librarian "what do you have published by Baen books?"
Or by year - if you're interested in the history of a subject, you might ask "what physics text books do you have published before 1900?"
A computerised index *is* cheaper, because it enables all of this stuff which can't be done in a cost-effective or reliable manner with card indexes.
But with perhaps five exceptions, total, all Welsh people of school age or greater can read, write, and speak English, so they get just as "rewarding" an experience as the rest of us.
"8.73 million adults in the UK have never used the internet, mainly because of age"? No. No-one doesn't use it because of age. They miss out because they are technophobes, or because they think it might be difficult. There are *plenty* of people who prove that being old doesn't prevent the use of new technologies, including the internet.
It's a false dichotomy anyway, as any Moslem, Sikh, Hindu, Wiccan, or follower of any other primitive superstition will tell you.
No, but we promise to take turns making sympathetic noises in between the pointing and laughing.
Wow. I recognised almost all the words but have no idea at all what that article was about. I sure hope that Microsoft's documentation does a better job of explaining their platform than this article does.
Is Amazon's version really going to be a fork of the OS (and thus maybe incompatible with mainstream Android apps) or is it just a different UI and some different bundled apps? Given that Amazon presumably still want apps in *their* app store to work on both their hardware and other Android vendors' hardware, I don't see that the assertion that Amazon hardware will only be able to use stuff in the Amazon app-store holds.
And even if it does, I bet it doesn't last long cos the hardware will be rooted a few days after it goes on sale.
Pointless title, which must contain letters and/or digits.
I bought the Tomtom iPhone app ages ago. I now use Copilot instead, for one reason and one reason only. With Tomtom, you can't easily plan an itinerary more complex than "go from A to C via B", and you can't save that at all. With Copilot, I can plan far more complex itineraries - eg go from A to D via B and C, then back via E - and I can save several of them in advance of my trip. Being able to plan such itineraries in advance is essential.
About the only thing Tomtom does better is that its speed camera warnings are far less annoying.
Pointless title, which must contain letters and/or digits.
The big conclusion I'd draw is that there is a market for dead simple devices that a non-techie can use as a web and email terminal. Those people don't care much about OS updates or third-party apps, neither of which they can count on ever receiving for the Touchpad, and they can't justify spending eleventy squillion pounds on a device that has those pointless features.
Of course, I wouldn't really draw that conclusion, as I knew it already.
Pointless title, which must contain letters and/or digits.
The channel "regularly advertises products in the middle of programmes (which isn't allowed)"?
Sweet, does that mean that ITV, Channel Four, Channel Five, Sky etc are all going to be closed down?
Pointless title, which must contain letters and/or digits.
Does this mean we have to shop all the Scottish IT contractors that we know? Tax-dodgers, the lot of 'em.
Opportunity to dig a deeper hole?
Nice presumption of guilt there.
Page: