3 posts tagged “rants”

The Royal Mint has unveiled the new British coins... as I said yesterday, the Royal Coat Of Arms. Meaning England, Scotland, and Ireland. NO WALES.

And get this... they were designed by a Welshman! Matthew Dent, from Bangor. Unbelievable.

And they want us to swear allegiance to this Royalty, who doesn't even acknowledge we exist. Erm... no.

I've been looking around for the cheapest place to buy Cysgliad, which is a Welsh dictionary/thesaurus/spellchecker for Word and OpenOffice.org. But it's the same price everywhere, £50ish. Wow, that's expensive for what it is. And it's far more expensive for home or business users that it is for government-ish users, which is arse-backwards if you ask me. If you work for the council, Cysgliad will be on your machine. College, voluntary organisations etc can all get it in bulk, and encourage all their employees to use it. Which is fine, and the software is widely used.

BUT... what about the kids at home? The small business? The blogger?

IMO, and no-one will pay attention but I'll say it anyway, Cysgliad should be a kind of shareware model: free for home/non-commercial use, a minimal fee for commercial use. Come on Bangor Uni, let's get this software into every house in Wales. I know you have to make your money back, but considering it was partly funded by the Welsh Language Board, lets not be greedy here. Afterall, they claim "The Board's main aim is to make it easier for everyone to use Welsh in all walks of life." As long as you can afford it, it seems. A paper dictionary and a paper thesaurus will cost me what.. £6 each? Sell Cysgliad for £20 and THEN you'll see a profit, simply because of the increase in sales volume.

Of course, the users could rebel, and say you don't actually NEED Cysgliad. Spot the odd one out:

The Welsh spell checker for Office 2007 is a free download from Microsoft. They also have Office 2003, XP and Vista packs for download. For FREE.

The latest version of OpenOffice.org, Welsh Version, is also free.

Cysgliad, the Welsh spell checker, dictionary and thesaurus developed by a University and funded by government is.... £50. Doh! But wait... the OSX version of Cysgliad, from the same people, is.. FREE! What the hell...?

Of course, if the Cysgliad people would like to send me a copy, I'll stop ranting about the cost lol

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update: hmmm... the OSX version is just a bunch of Python scripts. I wonder....... ;)

I had an email earlier on Gmail from a relative, with about 5 jpegs attached. I downloaded them all. Then I went back into Gmail and got the following message:

Lockdown!

Our system indicates unusual usage of your account. In order to protect Google Mail users from potentially harmful use of Google Mail, this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.

Whatthefeck? All I did was download a couple of tiny attachments. Holy crap, if Google freeze my email for 24 hours I'm taking them to court. Seriously.