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coolblue3000

Listed below are comments made by coolblue3000 between Friday, 9th May 2008 and Tuesday, 19th May 2009.

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Are you working from home today? 12:54pm on 19 May 2009 Unfortunately although technology has progressed to the stage that home working is easier and more productive than it has ever been, attitudes of management and companies are still very solidly stuck in the past. I am a programmer and I can do my work from home as easily as I can at the office while having a better work life balance and spending less on fuel (and the obvious environmental benefits that also brings). Yet due to old attitudes I have never been given the opportunity to work from home at any company I have been at due to it still being seen as a chance to skive off. Many of the offices I have worked in have been cramped and over populated yet instead of solving the problem with home working companies would rather install smaller and smaller desks! In my opinion, as long as you produce the work it does not matter where or how you do it. This country will take a long time (and a cull of all the old fools in upper management) before home working is accepted as it is in other countries.
How damaging is illegal file-sharing? 2:44pm on 12 May 2009 @aflockhart

Lets use your train analogy in a different way.

Would it be ok with you if the Music and film companies made the Train company search every one of its passengers while traveling in order to check that they do not have any stolen cds on their person or are carrying a cd/dvd that they have borrowed from a friend or even check their ipods to see if they have ripped any tunes on to it from cds that they have bought?

Not that comparing file sharing to a physical train journey is ideal. After all the train company could have fitted more passengers on the train if you were not taking up an unpaid seat. They also have to pay for the extra fuel to carry you and the wear and tear on the train caused by your carriage. Pirated digital files are neither stolen from anyone as no one is missing their copy and the distribution of these files causes no loss to the content industry. Also going after the ticketless passengers is like going after the home pirates when the real damage is being done by the ticket counterfitting operations akin to the mass production pirates. Go to Corfu or any other sunny destination and there are people selling pirated dvds and music openly on the beach! Go to china, iran, india etc and it is practically impossible to buy legal music as every copy on sale in stores is counterfit. Also with films, most copies originate from the industry itself (preview copies, insider leaks etc) so they really should get their house in order before going after everyone else. Also the other flaw in the train analogy is that people who ticket jump were clearly likely to have took the journey anyway where with music and film the pirates are likely to have never bought it even if they had not got the pirate version.

Another thing. I was stuffed by the game industry, I bought far cry on the day of release. I then took it home in excitement installed it on my pc and then found that it would not load! I scratched my head and did some searching and found that it was due to me having a DVD recorder. The software had detected that I had the potential ability if I so wished to possibly copy the game if I wanted to and therfore prevented me from playing it! I wrote an email to ubisoft for help and got no reply so I took things into my own hands. I found a no-disc patch and installed it, I could now play the game but had supported the pirating effort in doing so. Now the really stupid thing is that I could have got the pirate version for free that very morning and without having to go out my house to the shop and I could have played the game with no restriction. However stupidly I payed for a crippled version instead and I could not take it back as it was a pc game and I could not get any help from the publisher so that was the very last PC game I ever bought. Should I have not cracked the game and just accepted that it was useless? Then there are the ridiculous dvds I buy that come with unskippable ads! and a helpful intro that tells me that I should not buy pirate discs, even though I have just bought the thing legally! Or I could get a pirate version that just plays the film and does away with the ads. How about music, up until recently I had the choice of purchasing low quality mp3s from itunes for more than they cost on an cd or I could get high quality versions (even flac) for free from the pirate channels. Thankfully they are relaxing the drm but they are still generally low quality compared to the cd versions. What am I supposed to do if I want to stream them on a sonos player? I can't rip the cd as that is also illegal.....
How damaging is illegal file-sharing? 12:35pm on 12 May 2009 The content industry is clearly telling lies to protect its distribution model. They are not loosing nearly as much as they would like us to believe through piracy. In fact they may well be making money through it! A number of studies have shown that the most prolific pirates are the biggest spenders too, but they hide that fact. I personally have bought albums after trying the pirated version and then also bought subsequent albums by the same artists. The industry is making plenty of money and I can't remember a time when there were as many great bands as there are currently. If the industry is struggling then why are we not seeing a reduction of bands? Also an industry that charges £30 for a bluray version of WALL E deserves to go out of business. I can't believe that Bluray discs cost so much more to produce than dvds that they need to charge twice the price for them. Unfortunatley the content companies are realising that no one needs them anymore. Music artists can produce, promote and distribute music from their bedrooms and it is getting easier for film makers to do the same. They are scared and fighting for their future survival, not from the threat of piracy but from the freedom of the internet. The more restrictions they can put in place the more control they can retain and the more artists and consumers they can rip off in the future. After all we have laws to deal with theft so why do we need special ones for the music and film industries?
Is it safe to Explore? 4:25pm on 16 Dec 2008 As a web developer I would advise people to use Opera or Firefox (safari is horrible in my opinion). Opera is by far the best in terms of pure browsing but firefox has some nice add ons. Opera is the safest.

Also please please please make my job easier and move from IE! It does not use web standards so pages have to be modified to work in IE.......

Hopefully MS will do a better job with IE8.
Popular Horsfield faces his most difficult opponent 12:24pm on 16 Oct 2008 As a Birmingham fan I wish the horse well and hope that he recovers fully. He always gave 110% which is more than can be said of many premiership footballers.
Google, privacy and Street View 12:24pm on 04 Jul 2008 As an above comment stated, we are constantly watched by unknown people for unknown reasons, why on earth is this a problem?

I would rather be accidently captured on a usefull and innovative service than purposefully captured by uknown people with no idea how the images are used. Also why do paperazzi and papers have the right to make money "editorially" yet other industries are not? I think it is fair to say that streetview is more use to the public than the latest shot of beckham with a new haircut.

Also are the police not capturing private images without our consent and for commercial ends by using speed cameras?
Firefox: Can browsers make bucks? 10:59am on 13 May 2008 @#35

The fact that the article is supposed to highlight the business models of browsers is exactly why Opera SHOULD be included. It has a different business model to FF and IE as they offer amazing and free desktop browsers to tempt people into purchasing their equally amazing mobile and tv based browsers etc.
Firefox: Can browsers make bucks? 10:08am on 09 May 2008 Why has Opera not been mentioned? Although Firefox is a great browser, Opera is by far and away the best browser out there at the moment (And responsible for the innovations you appear to have attributed to firefox) and it just gets better and better with each release. It is also the best browser for mobiles and is great on the Wii too. As a web developer the quicker people move from IE to a more compliant browser the better (preferably Opera). I have to spend a lot of time and effort making pages render properly in IE as it has standards all of its own. I hope they fix this with IE8 but I am not holding my breath.

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