What bemused you today?

[ABERS]

Sounds like a go-ahead business that M$

[picsfor]

Yep - sure is hence for quite a while Mr Gates was the wealthiest man going. I wonder if can remember when he counted his wealth in terms of tens of billions?

Thank god they never got their mits into photography otherwise we'd have a package called M$ Develop which would occasionally lose pictures from your catalogue, refuse to accept the advice of a colour profiler resulting in the introduction of an M$ Color Profiler which would demand we accept black was white as a solution to it not working properly. Oh yes - mustn't forget the best part. We would only be able to edit pictures with tools that they had got to be almost reliable - the heal tool would put a picture of a plaster (band aid) over the affected area and the crop tool would be called guillotine and require us to place our picture under the virtual cutting tool and then operating it.
Images not printing out properly would be the norm and we would have a price scale based on how successfully we got the image to print out. And all of this would require Tb's of hard drive space because M$ have never created files that contain only the necessary information. Why have a tidy file when you can bloat its size to something extraordinary...
And they would probably have developed a close deal with one or two camera manufacturers and forced them to adopt an M$ standard until they could produce their own imaging device or they bought one of the 2 partners out and killed the other one.

And of course your gallery would be full of white and black toned images containing shades of red, green and blue   

[ABERS]

I take it that's pure supposition Andrew?
What am I missing that's wrong with Internet Explorer?

[picsfor]

Alan,

Internet Explorer is like most MS products. It is built on a flawed development process of either buying in a product by buying out the company and getting his programmers to "make it work with MS stuff"
or developing stuff using MS developing tools - which only meet MS standards which MS create because their developing tools fail to match the global standards.

It's a bit like checking your spelling. As far as Bill Gates is concerned the only true English is US English - so us "Brits" must adapt to the US English because the Americans can't cope with British English.
Why do you think hackers always target IE for security bugs?
Not because they're so big and deserve to be hit. No - it's because it's so easy.
Such sloppy coding and a culture of denial has allowed people to do all sorts of things. It becomes a bit of a game now.
Every thing is built around the Visual Basic, Visual J and Visual C platforms which inherently are all the same thing - non standard development languages that MS tried to force through with bully boy tactics to get accepted as the de-facto standards.

As i've said, Bill Gates has done some marvelous things in creating agreed standards but he has produced some fairly shoddy software to to accompany those standards as well.
His short cuts and tactics are slowly coming home to roost -but by the time MS sort out the problem it is likely that Linux and Apple will have taken the center ground because they stuck with tried, tested and approved standards!

[spinner]

I'm a PC and I........

I upgraded to Windows 7 on the machines my wife and daughter use, I'm not sorry about it good deal for the money. However I purposely built a machine to run Ubuntu Studio and it's great. No issues, but I'm a bit of a techie. I'd recommend it to computer savvy users but it's not for mom and pop yet. Very close though. But I digress, I've tried a few Linux Distros over the years and most of them tend to come bundled with Firefox, why no hoopla over that?

And, sorry Andrew, if MS was so bad why does it have over 90% of the market. I've a co-worker who has a computer business of the side and he tells me there are just as many Mac horror stories but no one wants to talk about it. He reckons people who pay big money for a Mac don't want to admit they might have been hosed. 

[Hinfrance]

And, sorry Andrew, if MS was so bad why does it have over 90% of the market. I've a co-worker who has a computer business of the side and he tells me there are just as many Mac horror stories but no one wants to talk about it. He reckons people who pay big money for a Mac don't want to admit they might have been hosed. 

Don't start that one again 

Andrew, M$ do have a brilliantly compact way of storing lossless images - it's called HD Photo and writes files a fraction of the size of tifs - you can get a M$ plugin for the various photoshops that enable them to use the format (Serif Photoplus comes with it built in) - personally I can't understand how the tif format can survive against this better alternative, yet it does . .

[anglefire]

A lot will have been put off by the fact that it is M$ - and more by the fact that it is not TIFF/PSD or Jpeg.

Whether now that it is accepted by the Joint Photographics Experts Group and called Jpeg XR - it will become more used, only time will tell. But I suspect that unless it is adopted by Adobe and thats not likely.

And, who's heard of Jpeg 2000, let alone used it?

[Forseti]

Those damn Europeans poking their bloody noses in again! I'm all for choice but I don't want it rammed down my throat!

I am in full agreement with you on this one. The tech savvy amongst PC users will already be aware of the alternative browsers available, and for the non tech savvy PC users - well that's their own fault.   In all seriousness though, I would have thought that an addition to the labelling of the packaging would have quite easily sufficed in this regard, and cheaper - you know, that long list on the outside of the box detailing the specs etc. A little note stating that the bundle includes Internet Explorer but alternative browsers are available free for download blah blah should have been more than enough to satisfy the bureaucrats but no, thanks to their inept meddling, I'm now going to have an additional bit of software installed on my machine with an icon on the task bar advising that other browsers are available and that I shall have repeatedly to click NO to. I'm reminded of little people sitting behind very big empty desks having a need to dream up some other bureaucratic nonsense in an attempt to justify their miserable existence. Without siding with M$ here, but why is it that Apple don't come in for this continual scrutiny?

[picsfor]

And, sorry Andrew, if MS was so bad why does it have over 90% of the market. I've a co-worker who has a computer business of the side and he tells me there are just as many Mac horror stories but no one wants to talk about it. He reckons people who pay big money for a Mac don't want to admit they might have been hosed. 

When i worked in I.T. Support i used to go and visit Microsoft on a fairly regular basis at the Reading (Berkshire UK) HQ and get to mix with all the other keen bods.
Oh i was a complete geek in those days, probably even a hacker in the original sense of the word, and the one thing that came across was the reason MS has so much of the market is because of the tactics it used to get MS Office and MS Windows on to all computers and into businesses. Oh yes - we all signed up to get our MSCE's and encourage companies to become MS Partners - yes it was good for our wages and good for our companies accounts.

Also, the creation of the famous bug entitled "an MS bug" came into being - a problem caused by the sloppy coding that went into their products or that they were just not skilled enough to understand.
This became evident when they couldn't get Windows 2K to work and ended up releasing a stripped down version with a nice new front end and the bits they could get to work.
XP was very much what 2K should have been but without the great features MS promised and with another new front end and some more of the features that they had been able to get to work.

Horror stories with Macs? Of course there will be. My favourite computer of all time was the Amiga and i heard of horror stories on that - but an Amiga 500+ could still multi task in a way that MS could only dram of in those days and comfortably out process a Pentium 1 PC. It required less processor, memory and hard drive and was far better at scientific research than the PC struggles to be today. Frightening.

I've played with MS since the DOS days on a 286 (DOS 3 or 4 i think). Underneath Windows 7 is nothing that far removed from those DOS days apart from a prettier interface and the ability to handle modern hardware with greater automation.

Oh, and if i had invented Windows 7 - Apple and Linux would have been history and even fond memories of my Amiga would have disappeared.
I stand by my view - MS does a good job badly.
Apple does a job according to "Jobs" way. And the horror stories are still happening with the new 27inch iMac - something to do with QC - so i'm not completely sold out to Apple.

[CML-1591]

My university building got broken into over the weekend. (YAY day off, sort of) but it has less security cameras than my secondary school  . Building has loads of tech and just the offices got broken into

[ABERS]

Struggling with your photography, or anything else for that matter? Become world famous for snapping celebs like any old photographer can do, take a million images (there must be one or two good ones in there somewhere) and all your worries can be over in an instance.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8557088.stm

[spinner]

The cult of celebrity will forgive anything. 

[picsfor]

I wonder if they'd do me a loan to allow me to go and photograph all the things i'd like to photograph?
I'm sure i could bring it in for under a million and i'd be prepared to travel the world to exhibit my works of pixel.
What's more they'd even get some money back at the end!

Yes i'd get the celebs travelling up and down to London from the Sussex coast on our trains - i'd even travel to get pics of such major celebs such as Sir Paul riding his bike along the sea front and paying the £30 fine for doing so or the Krankies appearing at Worthing Pier. It can take ages to get to Worthing from Brighton via Sompting if you time it wrong. I'd even go as far as Eastbourne to get pictures of  Paul Daniels entertaining the retired. Yep, the trains can get quite packed to Eastbourne.

Ah well - we can dream!

[spinner]

I'm sure i could bring it in for under a million and i'd be prepared to travel the world to exhibit my works of pixel.
What's more they'd even get some money back at the end!

There's a saying, something like 'if you owe the bank a million they own you, if you owe the bank a billion, you own them!' . Think big!

[jinky]

My university building got broken into over the weekend. (YAY day off, sort of) but it has less security cameras than my secondary school  . Building has loads of 5D mark II's, D700's, iMacs, big ass television studio style cameras, video cameras you can take out in calumet hard-cases and I think only the offices got trashed... Craig

If you can just give me the postcode for my sat nav and advise on access for transits I`ll be down soon