Your first mistake was nailing your flag to the DRM flag at all. Now you've got a significant amount of music that you don't want to abandon, and it's like a millstone round your neck, dictating to you which machines you can consider buying. And that's after a fairly short space of time. Imagine if you'd spent ten years building your whole record collection out of this shite. You'd be baying for blood.
I just don't get why people buy downloaded music at all, especially not DRM'd stuff. For a marginally higher cost, a CD gives you your music in an uncompressed format and leaves it up to you how you want to encode it. And it's got pretty packaging too. Until music downloads are losslessly encoded, DRM-free, and allow me to send for the cover art at no additional charge, I'm not buying.
So that'd be "never", then.
Fuck 'em. Don't give them your money. Keep buying CDs until they come back with the online music stores we want, rather than the ones they see fit to give us.
You're telling me. I had mine removed twenty-odd years ago, back when they thought they did nothing but cause trouble, and ever since then I've caught every cough, sniffle and cold doing the rounds, and generally suffered from them more than everybody else around me.
Tonsils serve a purpose all right. As for arguments against intelligent design, look no further than the masterstroke that was putting our testicles on the outside. Intelligent design my back end. Either they got there by a process of evolution, or God's a woman.
I dunno, those American manufacturers seem to be able to sell cars in Europe which are competitive with anybody else's in the fuel economy stakes. Because the market demands it. And the market demands it for a variety of reasons, but much higher fuel tax has a lot to do with it.
They could take these efficient engines and drop them into American vehicles practically overnight if they had to. Problem is, too many people, thanks to decades of their marketing bullshit, labour under the misapprehension that there's no substitute for cubic inches. Meanwhile, we in Europe are driving around in two-litre GM cars with the same power as you might find in an American GM 3.5, and getting far better fuel economy while we're about it.
They could give you this stuff easily, but compared to a pushrod V8 whose origins date back 50 years, they're damn expensive to make, so they don't. But they way things are going, they'll have to soon enough.
Knowing the way these things tend to work in the UK, they'll have had to source them from a single approved supplier, who will have subcontracted it to somebody, who will have subcontracted it to somebody else. And all of them knew it was a public-sector job, so they would have more money than sense and hence were ripe to be ripped off.
The person signing the order's primary concern was probably not "is this value for money?", but rather "will I be able to deny all responsibility for this?"
Oh, believe me, I have no, erm, truck with truckers. I think an awful lot of what they do would be better done by rail, but that's another argument altogether. By and large they're the most responsible and courteous people on the road.
No, my complaint lies with the authorities who punish people ever harder for trivial infractions, whilst at the same time making it ever easier to break the rules, simply because there are more of them than necessary. All I want is a proper rethink of how we go about things, with the emphasis on making everything as clear and straightforward as possible, so that everybody knows exactly where they are, and therefore don't have to drive around with one foot hovering over the brake pedal.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think anybody choosing to drive in central London's a total idiot. But I also think that it's wrong to charge people to drive on public roads, and also to decide public policy out of personal prejudice. I mean, is it a congestion charge or a pollution charge? If it's the latter, fine, call it that. But if you insist it's a congestion charge, shouldn't you differentiate the fee by size of vehicle rather than how much it pollutes?
And also, is it fair to punish people for adding to congestion whilst at the same time deliberately engineering the traffic system to cause it? Over the last few years they've been tinkering with the traffic light sequencing to induce traffic jams as part of a concerted effort to piss off drivers (don't have a citation to hand, but do a bit of research, you'll see I'm not making this up). And as for the bendy buses bunging up every junction and wiping out cyclists willy-nilly...
Here in Tony Blair's wonderful nanny state, you can't fucking move without some sign or jumped-up idiot in a uniform telling you what you can and can't do. This has been steadily getting worse over the years, and now it's at the point that sometimes as you're driving along, there's so many signs bombarding you with instructions that you don't have time to assimilate them properly. This is especially problematic if you're in a strange location, where simply finding your way around's hard enough, without also having to work out if you're allowed to drive on the inside lane at 4:30 on a Tuesday, and whether the 40MPH speed limit sign you passed thirty seconds ago is still in force, because here comes a speed camera and it would be just like the bastards to lower the limit yards before it. Next thing you know, you're in the back of a Land Rover which has just pulled up to drop the kids off at school, and to rub salt in the wounds, a traffic warden chasing the employee of the month award is writing up a parking ticket with your name on it.
Still, here comes Ken Livingstone to save us all with a £25 congestion charge for people driving gas-guzzling behemoths like, er, a Mondeo diesel estate. Take the Tube, you say, Ken? Certainly, but first can you explain to me why, if the congestion charge is subsidising improvements in public transport, you felt the need to jack prices by 50% in some cases? Is there anybody you wouldn't like to fleece?
I used to live in Ipswich, and I can't think of anywhere else which has so many entirely pointless sets of traffic lights.
For example, there's a fairly modest roundabout on Kesgrave Road which I once spent long enough at to count that it has thirty-three sets of traffic lights.
Isn't the whole idea of a roundabout that the traffic organises itself without recourse to signals?
Meanwhile, here in the UK, they're increasingly putting speed humps on main roads outside schools, so that you have to drive excessively slowly (and have your car damaged) even at the fucking weekends.
Don't mistake heavy for safe. Your beloved SUVs and pickups are an inherently bad design for road use - tall, with a relatively short, narrow wheelbase, suspension geometry set up for long travel rather than cornering ability, and of course, enormous weight, which is lovely and safe right up until you hit something, whereupon it becomes something of a disadvantage.
Anyway, as a Brit, disdain for the rules of the road is a bit difficult to undersand - sure, there are places here where order breaks down (London's an utter mess), but for the most part, people accept that the rules are there to protect everybody, and nobody's being singled out for unfair treatment, and so we just play the game. By a curious coincidence, our accident rate's the lowest in Europe.
Well, we seem to manage to squeeze them in pretty easily here in the UK, and our roads generally aren't anywhere near as wide as yours. As for your other point, there are some (not many, but still too many) junctions where visibility is poor, but generally speaking, you can always see far enough to the side to decide when to pull out.
I really don't know where you get the idea that people go rocketing out of roundabouts, though.
Four-way stops baffle me (and probably every other Briton who's ever driven in America) - I know how they work and all, but surely you could have decided to give one road priority, instead of requiring a staring contest every time two cars arrive at the same time?
That just goes to show how much sway the big boys hold in America. Here in the UK, about the only DVD player manufacturer who persisted with region-locking was... Sony. Surprise surprise.
Some former colleagues of mine, in a previous job, told me that a guy who worked with them in the eighties could do exactly this with a whole multitude of different protocols, so I can believe you.
I'm one of the generation who grew up with these sorts of computers, and I was exceptional in that I actually tried to make use of the built-in programming capabilities that you find so cool. Most people - parents, kids, whatever - got these systems home, tinkered around for a while, and came to the conclusion that it was all very clever, but they couldn't work out what it was for. Apart from games. And that's what everybody did with them - they played games and not a lot else.
Nowadays, thanks to user-centred design, and the realisation that technology's just a means to an end, there's great software out there that lets people use computers for a thousand and one tasks. Sure, not many of those users get into programming, but that's because they don't have to - the software to do what they want to do already exists. This is a Good Thing.
Tinkering around's cool and all, and certain people will always want to have a go at it - taking things apart to see how they work is part of the male psyche - but we're better off now than we were then. Obviously I've no way of knowing, but I don't think those computers produced any more programmers than are emerging now, simply because then, as now, most people had neither the ability nor the inclination.
This thing, when it comes down to it, is a great big database. I know there's all sorts of clever stuff involving permissions etc., but really, that's what it is - a big database and a series of interfaces onto it.
Now, I have a theory that if the government had gone to somebody like, say, Google, handed them a blank fucking cheque, and said "how long do you think you'll need?", the answer would still have been half the price and half the amount of time, even if they would have pushed their bid as far as they dared.
And I doubt there'll ever be any return on investment, because it's so big and cumbersome that they'll need to start on the replacement long before they've recouped.
The problem is not that it's a big centralised organisation. That would be better. The problem is that it's set up from top to bottom to facilitate the abdication of responsibility.
Take, for example, the MRSA problem. An absolute disgrace, and an embarrassment for such a rich country - how hard can it be to keep a hospital properly clean?
Actually, it's damn hard to keep a hospital clean when you've contracted the work out to the lowest bidder, who are paying their staff too little for them to care about their job. Or they're employing temps who never get trained properly and will be off the first chance they get, so why should they care about doing a good job?
My grandmother was domestic staff at a hospital a long time ago, and this sort of shit would never have happened then, because the cleaners were permanent staff and not treated like shit. If your continued employment depends on the hospital being spotless, you'll do it right. But if you know you'll be gone in a month, why bother?
And you can bet your backside that contracting out's more expensive. But it gets the staff off the payroll and you don't have to worry about pensions and things, so the bean-counting short-termists are happy.
Why there isn't a government agency responsible for these large-scale public IT projects and nothing else, I don't know. It'd save billions.
We in the UK are masters of taking great ideas and implementing them embarrassingly badly. The NHS is a wonderful thing run by idiots.
The current government has more than doubled the NHS's budget, I believe. Is healthcare twice as good as a result? Is it hell. Why is this?
Maybe this little anecdote will give you an idea.
About a year and a half ago I got a call from a recruitment agent asking me if I'd be interested in doing some work on this NHS mega-project. She told me a bit about it, I said "yeah, fine, put me forward". Immediately, without asking what my daily rate was, she said "Now, we can't pay you more than £350 a day, will that be OK?" Ooh, I'll struggle by, I said. Let me tell you, my usual daily rate at the time was rather less than that. I didn't get the job, by the way.
The thing is, that £350 I would have been getting would be paid to me by a company who would also have had to pay the agent a fair amount of money. This company was itself a subcontractor for Fujitsu. Who were a subcontractor for BT. Who were being paid by the NHS.
Now, by the time everybody's had their cut, how much do you think my £350-a-day work would have been costing the NHS? A grand, maybe?
Ooh, I wonder how they went so massively over budget?
And of course, the reason for all this pointless sub-sub-subcontracting is simply that when the shit hits the fan, everybody can point the finger at somebody else. I can't help thinking that if they thought less about passing the buck and more about Getting The Job Done, it would cost a quarter what they're paying.
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Your first mistake was nailing your flag to the DRM flag at all. Now you've got a significant amount of music that you don't want to abandon, and it's like a millstone round your neck, dictating to you which machines you can consider buying. And that's after a fairly short space of time. Imagine if you'd spent ten years building your whole record collection out of this shite. You'd be baying for blood.
I just don't get why people buy downloaded music at all, especially not DRM'd stuff. For a marginally higher cost, a CD gives you your music in an uncompressed format and leaves it up to you how you want to encode it. And it's got pretty packaging too. Until music downloads are losslessly encoded, DRM-free, and allow me to send for the cover art at no additional charge, I'm not buying.
So that'd be "never", then.
Fuck 'em. Don't give them your money. Keep buying CDs until they come back with the online music stores we want, rather than the ones they see fit to give us.
Ad homonym?
Seriously?
And they say there's no point learning Latin at school...
You're telling me. I had mine removed twenty-odd years ago, back when they thought they did nothing but cause trouble, and ever since then I've caught every cough, sniffle and cold doing the rounds, and generally suffered from them more than everybody else around me.
Tonsils serve a purpose all right. As for arguments against intelligent design, look no further than the masterstroke that was putting our testicles on the outside. Intelligent design my back end. Either they got there by a process of evolution, or God's a woman.
I dunno, those American manufacturers seem to be able to sell cars in Europe which are competitive with anybody else's in the fuel economy stakes. Because the market demands it. And the market demands it for a variety of reasons, but much higher fuel tax has a lot to do with it.
They could take these efficient engines and drop them into American vehicles practically overnight if they had to. Problem is, too many people, thanks to decades of their marketing bullshit, labour under the misapprehension that there's no substitute for cubic inches. Meanwhile, we in Europe are driving around in two-litre GM cars with the same power as you might find in an American GM 3.5, and getting far better fuel economy while we're about it.
They could give you this stuff easily, but compared to a pushrod V8 whose origins date back 50 years, they're damn expensive to make, so they don't. But they way things are going, they'll have to soon enough.
Ah, the heinous crime of Being Brown In A Public Place.
Hanging's too good for 'em, eh?
Knowing the way these things tend to work in the UK, they'll have had to source them from a single approved supplier, who will have subcontracted it to somebody, who will have subcontracted it to somebody else. And all of them knew it was a public-sector job, so they would have more money than sense and hence were ripe to be ripped off.
The person signing the order's primary concern was probably not "is this value for money?", but rather "will I be able to deny all responsibility for this?"
Oh, believe me, I have no, erm, truck with truckers. I think an awful lot of what they do would be better done by rail, but that's another argument altogether. By and large they're the most responsible and courteous people on the road.
No, my complaint lies with the authorities who punish people ever harder for trivial infractions, whilst at the same time making it ever easier to break the rules, simply because there are more of them than necessary. All I want is a proper rethink of how we go about things, with the emphasis on making everything as clear and straightforward as possible, so that everybody knows exactly where they are, and therefore don't have to drive around with one foot hovering over the brake pedal.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think anybody choosing to drive in central London's a total idiot. But I also think that it's wrong to charge people to drive on public roads, and also to decide public policy out of personal prejudice. I mean, is it a congestion charge or a pollution charge? If it's the latter, fine, call it that. But if you insist it's a congestion charge, shouldn't you differentiate the fee by size of vehicle rather than how much it pollutes?
And also, is it fair to punish people for adding to congestion whilst at the same time deliberately engineering the traffic system to cause it? Over the last few years they've been tinkering with the traffic light sequencing to induce traffic jams as part of a concerted effort to piss off drivers (don't have a citation to hand, but do a bit of research, you'll see I'm not making this up). And as for the bendy buses bunging up every junction and wiping out cyclists willy-nilly...
Seduced by a list of features, I just got myself a Windows Mobile smartphone. Huge screen! Skype! Opera! Wi-fi! I could barely contain my excitement.
Till I discovered it has a few other features we all know and love from desktop versions of Windows - slowdowns, crashes, bizarre UI...
Here in Tony Blair's wonderful nanny state, you can't fucking move without some sign or jumped-up idiot in a uniform telling you what you can and can't do. This has been steadily getting worse over the years, and now it's at the point that sometimes as you're driving along, there's so many signs bombarding you with instructions that you don't have time to assimilate them properly. This is especially problematic if you're in a strange location, where simply finding your way around's hard enough, without also having to work out if you're allowed to drive on the inside lane at 4:30 on a Tuesday, and whether the 40MPH speed limit sign you passed thirty seconds ago is still in force, because here comes a speed camera and it would be just like the bastards to lower the limit yards before it. Next thing you know, you're in the back of a Land Rover which has just pulled up to drop the kids off at school, and to rub salt in the wounds, a traffic warden chasing the employee of the month award is writing up a parking ticket with your name on it.
Still, here comes Ken Livingstone to save us all with a £25 congestion charge for people driving gas-guzzling behemoths like, er, a Mondeo diesel estate. Take the Tube, you say, Ken? Certainly, but first can you explain to me why, if the congestion charge is subsidising improvements in public transport, you felt the need to jack prices by 50% in some cases? Is there anybody you wouldn't like to fleece?
It boils my blood, y'know.
I used to live in Ipswich, and I can't think of anywhere else which has so many entirely pointless sets of traffic lights.
For example, there's a fairly modest roundabout on Kesgrave Road which I once spent long enough at to count that it has thirty-three sets of traffic lights.
Isn't the whole idea of a roundabout that the traffic organises itself without recourse to signals?
Meanwhile, here in the UK, they're increasingly putting speed humps on main roads outside schools, so that you have to drive excessively slowly (and have your car damaged) even at the fucking weekends.
Clever.
Don't mistake heavy for safe. Your beloved SUVs and pickups are an inherently bad design for road use - tall, with a relatively short, narrow wheelbase, suspension geometry set up for long travel rather than cornering ability, and of course, enormous weight, which is lovely and safe right up until you hit something, whereupon it becomes something of a disadvantage.
Anyway, as a Brit, disdain for the rules of the road is a bit difficult to undersand - sure, there are places here where order breaks down (London's an utter mess), but for the most part, people accept that the rules are there to protect everybody, and nobody's being singled out for unfair treatment, and so we just play the game. By a curious coincidence, our accident rate's the lowest in Europe.
Well, we seem to manage to squeeze them in pretty easily here in the UK, and our roads generally aren't anywhere near as wide as yours. As for your other point, there are some (not many, but still too many) junctions where visibility is poor, but generally speaking, you can always see far enough to the side to decide when to pull out.
I really don't know where you get the idea that people go rocketing out of roundabouts, though.
Four-way stops baffle me (and probably every other Briton who's ever driven in America) - I know how they work and all, but surely you could have decided to give one road priority, instead of requiring a staring contest every time two cars arrive at the same time?
As a protest, you mean?
Seen who's up next?
At the rate they're going, the UK should have become every bit as oppressive as China by the time London gets the games in 2012.
I wish I was joking about this.
That just goes to show how much sway the big boys hold in America. Here in the UK, about the only DVD player manufacturer who persisted with region-locking was... Sony. Surprise surprise.
Some former colleagues of mine, in a previous job, told me that a guy who worked with them in the eighties could do exactly this with a whole multitude of different protocols, so I can believe you.
I'm one of the generation who grew up with these sorts of computers, and I was exceptional in that I actually tried to make use of the built-in programming capabilities that you find so cool. Most people - parents, kids, whatever - got these systems home, tinkered around for a while, and came to the conclusion that it was all very clever, but they couldn't work out what it was for. Apart from games. And that's what everybody did with them - they played games and not a lot else.
Nowadays, thanks to user-centred design, and the realisation that technology's just a means to an end, there's great software out there that lets people use computers for a thousand and one tasks. Sure, not many of those users get into programming, but that's because they don't have to - the software to do what they want to do already exists. This is a Good Thing.
Tinkering around's cool and all, and certain people will always want to have a go at it - taking things apart to see how they work is part of the male psyche - but we're better off now than we were then. Obviously I've no way of knowing, but I don't think those computers produced any more programmers than are emerging now, simply because then, as now, most people had neither the ability nor the inclination.
Clearly you're not familiar with the wonder of Mademoiselle Congdon's breasts.
And it's no wonder.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Amstrad GX4000.
It's for stock control and shoplifting prevention. They're not monitoring their customer's movements or anything in the slightest bit sinister.
Go and find something more useful to post, eh?
This thing, when it comes down to it, is a great big database. I know there's all sorts of clever stuff involving permissions etc., but really, that's what it is - a big database and a series of interfaces onto it.
Now, I have a theory that if the government had gone to somebody like, say, Google, handed them a blank fucking cheque, and said "how long do you think you'll need?", the answer would still have been half the price and half the amount of time, even if they would have pushed their bid as far as they dared.
And I doubt there'll ever be any return on investment, because it's so big and cumbersome that they'll need to start on the replacement long before they've recouped.
The problem is not that it's a big centralised organisation. That would be better. The problem is that it's set up from top to bottom to facilitate the abdication of responsibility.
Take, for example, the MRSA problem. An absolute disgrace, and an embarrassment for such a rich country - how hard can it be to keep a hospital properly clean?
Actually, it's damn hard to keep a hospital clean when you've contracted the work out to the lowest bidder, who are paying their staff too little for them to care about their job. Or they're employing temps who never get trained properly and will be off the first chance they get, so why should they care about doing a good job?
My grandmother was domestic staff at a hospital a long time ago, and this sort of shit would never have happened then, because the cleaners were permanent staff and not treated like shit. If your continued employment depends on the hospital being spotless, you'll do it right. But if you know you'll be gone in a month, why bother?
And you can bet your backside that contracting out's more expensive. But it gets the staff off the payroll and you don't have to worry about pensions and things, so the bean-counting short-termists are happy.
Why there isn't a government agency responsible for these large-scale public IT projects and nothing else, I don't know. It'd save billions.
We in the UK are masters of taking great ideas and implementing them embarrassingly badly. The NHS is a wonderful thing run by idiots.
The current government has more than doubled the NHS's budget, I believe. Is healthcare twice as good as a result? Is it hell. Why is this?
Maybe this little anecdote will give you an idea.
About a year and a half ago I got a call from a recruitment agent asking me if I'd be interested in doing some work on this NHS mega-project. She told me a bit about it, I said "yeah, fine, put me forward". Immediately, without asking what my daily rate was, she said "Now, we can't pay you more than £350 a day, will that be OK?" Ooh, I'll struggle by, I said. Let me tell you, my usual daily rate at the time was rather less than that. I didn't get the job, by the way.
The thing is, that £350 I would have been getting would be paid to me by a company who would also have had to pay the agent a fair amount of money. This company was itself a subcontractor for Fujitsu. Who were a subcontractor for BT. Who were being paid by the NHS.
Now, by the time everybody's had their cut, how much do you think my £350-a-day work would have been costing the NHS? A grand, maybe?
Ooh, I wonder how they went so massively over budget?
And of course, the reason for all this pointless sub-sub-subcontracting is simply that when the shit hits the fan, everybody can point the finger at somebody else. I can't help thinking that if they thought less about passing the buck and more about Getting The Job Done, it would cost a quarter what they're paying.
You must live in London. Nowhere else has such a comically distorted concept of fair pricing.