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Comment Re:Interesting... (Score 1) 159

It's one of the more unreadable pieces of text I've come across recently... and given most of the competition for that prize is also online, that's saying something.

Not sure the author's theory/point really worked! If the article does read well to some people, that's rather worrying.

Comment Re:It's worse the other way (Score 1) 352

If you are essential, you'll have a week or two of clearly observed mania and making arrangements with coworkers for the two weeks off, followed on your return by a similar week or two catching up and following up with co-workers all over.

And even if you can avoid doing anything during vacation, if you are essential, people will have found your absence a hindrance.

Comment Re:Very Small Inconvenience (Score 1) 159

I'm sure someone in the EU could take a case against them. When they notify you that a friend wants you to join, I am sure the later reminders they send are long after they should have deleted your email address. Additionally they seem to link a circle of potential "friends" with your email address ("you may also know") - some of whom are unrelated to the friend who gave Facebook your email. Finally they have your real name too (again courtesy of your friend).

As far as I know, this kind of thing is illegal under European data protection rules. It simply requires someone to gather hard evidence (email trail) and find out who is the relevant person in Brussels to send it to.

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A note on the OP, as regards the unreleased Google tool, how do we know they aren't using this internally to tag photos of people in streetview internally in order to cross-reference this geographic information with other profile information on individuals, used for advertising?

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It's all gone beyond sci-fi stuff at this stage - truly the realm of nightmares. The Sony fiasco was only the beginning.

Comment Re:Reboot? (Score 1) 292

I found it an enjoyable action movie, but I did watch it thinking, "this isn't Star Trek". Now the original series has a brashness that later Star Trek didn't have, but nevertheless, this was only to the forefront for particular scenes in most episodes, not the whole show.

Also while fun and amusing, there was something almost "Galaxy Quest"-like about the parodies, sorry, portrayals of the "rebooted" characters.

It was a very genuine 21st century movie, for good or bad. Look back a decade or two later and it could be very dated, a lot of "contemporary" visual styles and acting and so on. Mind you, maybe we're going to be subjected to this kind of thing for some time to come? It's entertainment, but there's a certain superficiality and brainlessness to it, and almost a sort of "adults as teenagers" thing going on.

But I guess when even the BBC are reporting on a major e-coli health threat in Europe as a "cucumber crisis", there's not much hope for the future.

Comment Re:Errors (Score 1) 249

Last time I checked, calculator in Windows 7 has a "programmer" mode as well as scientific and basic, that on first glance is helpful (swap between bases) but doesn't really allow you to do much calculation. If I'm not mistaken, they've also removed the functionality to switch between number bases in the scientific mode. And finally it doesn't keep your current calculation up when you swap modes.

Typical Windows; in theory helpful, in reality some special version of hell.

Although I'm fairly convinced at this stage that Linux and Apple software are just different versions of hell.

Comment Re:preaching to the choir (Score 1) 399

Indeed - I had a region 1 DVD to play recently (i.e. not even PAL resolution) and because my Bluray player is region-locked even for DVD, I had to use my laptop (HDMI out). What was nice was that the software sent the output as native resolution for what was being played back, so my nice new LG LCD TV with decent upscaling could do its job. I was amazed at how well this worked compared to previous scaling by various devices that I encountered (although the blu-ray player, also LG, is as good and almost means there's not much point getting blu-ray discs!). I had seen the results of scaling from VHS input to the TV, but that wasn't as awesome as even so the picture is really too poor for 42" (on bought VHS - home recorded Super VHS are reasonable).

In general I'm very very pleased with recent AV kit (and laptop) and what it can do. All simple to interconnect too compared to the past although unfortunately with brother's PS3 and a Sky HD box, a HDMI switch box is needed - but even that switches automatically perfectly. A pity the Sky box can't send surround sound via HDMI, but fortunately the Blu-ray home cinema has a second optical in. In fact the Sky box is the main downer as it makes some noise doing background downloading/encrypting of broadcasts to HDD for "play on demand" features (seemingly even if you disable that).

And yes, I simply used the cheapest HDMI cables I could get, although some were bought locally for convenience so the cheapest was a stiff €15 for a short cable! (Although since then I think the local "euro store" has HDMI cables, as do Lidl/Aldi at times).

Comment Re:Why is this notable? (Score 1) 351

Actually, modern technology isn't the wonderful magic people assume. In fact because of it being more complex, it is likely that development times in general are longer than in the past (the finished product does orders of magnitude more of course). As regards bureaucracy and project management, I think that has also gone up and again, perhaps in some ways because of modern technology. But without it, development times for modern tech would likely be longer again.

I've come to conclude that even "Scotty"-like predictions of how long something will take to complete (i.e. say 3 months when you expect it to take a month) are inadequate for hardware or software today (e.g. it might take 6 months in my example).

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