Posts by Simon Harris
534 posts • joined Thursday 1st March 2007 00:04 GMT
The BBC estimate of 15000 songs kind of suggests something like 90Gbytes (assuming MP3s of around 6Mbytes per song). But almost 11 quid a song? - even HMV's not that expensive!
Can someone at Orange please explain to me how it is possible to receive that much data on a phone through their network in a month - half the time when I try to connect, I get bugger all - the data counter on my phone says I've only managed to download 180Mbytes since the beginning of March!
"Edwin Vargas, a 42-year-old Bronx investigator"
Not so much a Bronx investigator...
... as a Bonks investigator.
I'll be the one wearing Columbo's shabby raincoat.
Re: Samsung 1 Nokia 0
@AC 14:30
The report I was quoting was purely Android based - I wasn't trying to compare Android vs Apple at all. There was the claim in Eadon's post that Nokia would be doing much better if they produced Android phones rather than Windows phones.
I was merely pointing out that Samsung dominated the Android market (your last statement seems to agree with this), so Nokia would have a huge hill to climb if it was to have joined in there, and possibly not had the success suggested.
Re: Samsung 1 Nokia 0
Some reports ( e.g. http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-dominates-95-of-android-phone-sales-say-analysts-15282170/ ) suggest Samsung is trampling over the Android market with 95% of phone sales.
If those reports are anything like correct, it would seem Samsung ate most other Android manufacturers' lunches too. If Nokia were to enter that market, it would be in with that 5% of Android also-rans struggling to claw back some of the 95% from Samsung.
Posted in Happy 23rd birthday, Windows 3.0
Re: Was it an OS?
"Win 3.1 was a big jump, Win 3,0 was rubbish compared to Win3.1."
I remember the first portable system I had (386SX based with a plasma screen) came with MSDOS 4.01 and Windows 3.0, and a 40MByte hard drive.
After trying Windows 3.0 out of curiosity for a couple of days, I decided I'd rather have the disk space back - at the time all the software I had was DOS based anyway and I could see no advantage to keeping Windows.
Windows 3.1 was such an improvement that by the time I got that on a 486 machine with a whopping 250Mbyte drive, it was worth keeping.
Posted in Happy 23rd birthday, Windows 3.0
Re: "popular app Notepad"
"It's simple, small, easy, basic, what's not to like?"
Having more than one level of Undo would make it more likeable!
The Windows 3.x versions were pretty limited on the largest file they could read/edit too.
Re: Acronymity...
Do they cross the road at giraffic lights?
Billy Bookshelf...
"You may only retain a copy of the content on the personal computer on which you make the original download." - what a crazy use case...
If my MFI bookshelf collapses under the strain of all my books and go to IKEA for a Billy bookshelf, can I still read my books when I take them from the new shelf? I think I can! Don't these DRM inventors ever think how things work in the real world?
@ I ain't Spartacus - Re: NOW will you try Windows Phone 8?
"I could be perfectly happy with iOS, Android, WinPho or Blackberry phones at the moment. Each would annoy me with something they can't do, but would have some advantage over the other OSes to make up for it."
This is a Reg forum. Who told you that you were allowed to post balanced opinions here?!
'one more than win 7'
I'm waiting for the special edition version of Windows that goes all the way up to 11.
Re: NASA computers... space station uses Linux
"Linux laptops etc are on the Space Station."
Given the low gravity environment, it'll be one of the light-weight distros.
Re: Love is not a malfunction!
Software has been demonstrating 'unconventional' family arrangements for years...
After all, in John Conway's Life it took three parents of indeterminate sex to make a baby!
Re: Gay Patch
@Eadon - Well, if it's restricted to the scope of the 'true' path of the IF statement, what is the point of even setting it ? - nothing actually uses it in that path, and it'll be forgotten the moment the IF statement goes out of scope. Possibly it won't even be created to be forgotten - the compiler will notice it's pointless and optimise it out.
Probably any normal person reading the pseudocode might have expected sim1.gender and sim2.gender to have been set up when the Sim character objects were created (or possibly modified in the Sim Gender Reassisgnment Clinic - is there such a thing in The Sims?) as that attribute is probably already seen to be controlling other features of the character.
Re: Gay Patch
Eadon,
unless you've remembered to initialise isMarriageOK somewhere, your bug fix will bombard users wtih gay sims add ons 'adverisements', but will not fix the bug and will still randomly allow same sex marriage depending on what happens to be in memory at the time, without the user having to fork out for the add-ons.
Posted in IBM gives a cloudy outlook for COBOL
Re: By the Lords of COBOL
I would have upvoted you...
... but after the travesty of the final episode, I was trying to put that show out of my mind.
Jaquard Looms.
It just occurred to me, if Jaquard Punched Cards are used to set the pattern in fabric, then any clothes created from this fabric could be called Jaquard Punched Garments.
The data on the cards can then be considered the first instance of a JPG image file.
Coffee...
will it be a cup of Nescafe instant...
or that really expensive stuff that comes out of a civet's bum?
Re: Eadon's theory of Techie "Waves" - TWO types
@Eadon - you seem to have got stuck in a loop here...
The phrases 'not entirely accurate' and 'pseudo-quantum physical' may have given you a clue that I had acknowledged that I was using quantum mechanics terms more in an attempt at humourous observation than to pass a physics exam, yet you repeat the correction. That would be equivalent to me castigating you all over again for conflating Jaquard looms with analogue computers after you admit your mistake.
EADON REPETITION FAIL!
Except he's Austrian
Re: Eadon's theory of Techie "Waves" - TWO types
@Eadon "You are confusing a binary (2 states) computer with a digital computer, they're two distinct concepts. Jaquard looms were not digital computers."
In your 11:08 posting, you were referring to analogue computing with the Jaquard Loom being an example. The Jaquard loom is not analogue, as I and a fair few others have pointed out. Nor is it a computer, any more than a musical box or a pianola, both of which use a digitally stored pattern to control music (pins on a barrel or holes in a paper roll). None of these (including the loom) do any computation - they just translate the holes or pins on a 1-to-1 basis to hooks or musical strikers.
If you're going to be picky, I'll call you out as wrong on two points - both the analogue reference and the computer reference.
The quantum uncertainty reference may not be entirely accurate. 'Hanging Chads' got to be something of a catchphrase from the 2000 Election, and it was worded as (as you say) an 'amusing' pseudo-quantum physical reference to what was (as you might have said) a...
PUNCHED CARD FAIL
In fact, to be accurate there were many possible recount scenarios in the Florida ballot that could have swung the result one way or the other.
Re: Eadon's theory of Techie "Waves" - TWO types
"To clarify I meant the analogue computing punch cards that existed before digital computers, e.g. Jacquard loom cards."
Jaquard loom punched cards are as digital as any other punched card. As I understand it, each hole on a Jaquard loom card corresponds to up or down on a hook that carries the warp thread. The pattern of holes thus controls whether the weft lies above or below the warp to create the pattern in the weave.
Up or Down, which I count as 2 states. There is nothing analogue about a Jaquard punched card!
The only punched cards I can think of that may not be so definitely digital are those used in the 2000 US Presidential Election. The 'hanging chads' on cards in Florida seemed to result in a quantum uncertainty whereby the cards were simultaneously punched and not-punched depending on who you asked.
Re: Eadon's theory of Techie "Waves" - TWO types
I'm Not Waving But Drowning in Eadon's list of waves!
Re: Does this mean
Ahh, now I understand. Unlike every other paywall, with The Sun paywall you have to pay to be let out!
Who needs The Sun online....
... when you've got such high quality news stories on Yahoo! News! for free to compete with it!
Joke Alert, because as reporting standards go, both are!
Re: 16GB?
The Nokia site doesn't list any memory expansion in the 925's specifications
http://www.nokia.com/gb-en/phones/phone/lumia925/specifications/
so it looks like you're out of luck with expansion - all it suggests is 7GB of free SkyDrive storage as an external option.
Re: Dilemma...
"I guess it comes down to whether you get fries and "diet" coke with the lab-burger."
and I bet if you ask for an orange juice as your soft drink, they still say no!
Poo into a clear plastic bag...
... problem solved!
"tilt rotors that tilt and collapse"
Looks like the rotor tips move from about waist height to head height as they spin up and down...
Better not be standing too close to that thing when it takes off... or land it in a crowded space!
<-- it was the only icon I could see with sharp blades on it!
1280 x 768 on a 4 1/2" phone screen...
just goes to show how pants standard laptop screens are with their similar pixel counts!
Re: FFS
"if their employers were to dictate they had to use paper and pen..."
Oh, they do. I've spent the last 25 years in research and engineering and everywhere I've worked I've had to keep notebooks written in ink even though most of my work involves sitting infront of a computer, the premise being that dated and signed off ideas in a notebook are easier to use as evidence of precidence when it comes to IP disputes.
Re: So Fugly it's mother would feed it with a catapult
"The "Commentard status" is only based on the number of posts you have committed, nothing about quality, and I think it is as well."
The bronze badge is based on the number of posts over the last year.
The silver badge is based on the number of thumbs-up (2000 I think).
The gold one I think is based on cool-dudeness, services rendered by useful postings and generally being liked by the mods.
Re: Come in Major Eadon!
Definitely deserves that beer!
Re: Works on ZX81
"and if it includes binary-to-audio on the fly, then that's impressive."
Is it really impressive? That's what 8-bit computers were doing in 1980.
The Acorn Atom with its 1MHz 6502 processor did most of its cassette interface in software - admittedly it did have a 2404Hz timebase derived from dividing the 4MHz master oscillator by 16x13x8 to use as the high tone, but generated the low 1202Hz tone in software from this and sorted out the start and stop bits and data shifting in software. To make it a bit more sine-y than a square wave, there was an RC low pass filter on the output.
Re: HOW DARE YOU!
Arrowheads? Buffalo hide?
Luxury... All we had were scraps of old bark and pointy twigs to punch the holes.
Re: Midi
I think as well as getting the frequenciess right you probably also need to make sure that the sine waves are syncronised so that each bit starts on the beginning of a cycle of a 1200Hz or 2400Hz tone (well, for the Acorn tape interface that used the Kansas City tones anyway - not sure whether the Spectrum used the same frequencies)
Re: Not a true representation of Bletchley Park
It's not chained to the radiator though.
Re: You've got red on you.
D'oh - should have checked the Verizon website before posting - red seems to be their colour too!
You've got red on you.
They could have chosen a different Windows Phone colour scheme for their photos.
Does anyone else see that much red on a screen and guess that it's a Virgin branded phone?
Re: So Fugly it's mother would feed it with a catapult
"Could someone confirm that Eadon's Silver Commentard status is purely down to posting rabid bollocks on any MS story? Because that sounds like an abuse of the system to me."
I suspect Eadon has received so many down votes for his rabid bollocks postings that the thumb-counter has wrapped around from INT_MIN to INT_MAX and the system mistakenly thinks he's got 32000 or so thumbs-up!
I shall buy a hat...
... just so I can take it off to you, Sir!
Good work, James Pegrum
Re: Landfill Android vs SEWER-FILL WinPho8
It used to be said that the British Standard test for a toilet flush was half a rolled up copy of the Daily Telegraph.
Perhaps modern cisterns should be calibrated by the size of the smartphone they can send round the U-bend.
Re: This will struggle to compete with low-end Android devices
The specs for the Asha phone mention...
Standby time: Up to 48 days (Dual SIM standby time: up to 26 days)
Talk time: Up to 17 hours (all variants)
Which Android phones realistically last more than a couple of days without charge?
I should imagine this is aimed at those markets where it is important that phones don't die as soon as you're out of sight of a mains socket!
Re: moments
Everyone has their 'moments'
Don't forget the Apple III moment, the Lisa moment, the puck mouse moment, the Newton moment....
If nobody had moments, we'd never have anything new!
Re: Vista moment.
"I did once interface a teletype to a C64 over the ttl level I/O, but we moved to a house in town and I had to get rid of it."
When I was at school, a school mate who was living with my family for a year (his family had moved to America) had an ASR-33 teletype. We disassembled the paper tape reader and hacked the hole sensors to make a parallel printer interface that we plugged into an Acorn Atom (his, I think, mine already had a printer attached!)
Re: Vista moment.
"Do USB teletypes exist?"
An ASR-33, A USB to RS232 converter, an RS232 to 20mA current loop converter if necessary and Bob (not Microsoft Bob of course), as they say, is your uncle!
Re: Follow this simple yes-no rule
Err.. is there an echo in here?
Re: Alternating Succuess
@Eadon
Did you forgot to mention Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.x there?
Might as well throw in every version of MSDOS while you're at it.
EADON INCOMPLETE MICROSOFT TRASHING FAIL
Re: Alternating Succuess
Windows 98SE was quite good compared to Windows 98 original - slip that into the table between Windows 98 and Windows ME and the alternating sequence fixes itself.
Re: Microsoft's strategy is FAILING
"It will be like giving people something that looks like a toffee apple to give them the familiarity of the toffee apple that they are used to paying for. BUT, instead of a tasty, familiar apple therewithin the toffee veneer, the victim discovers that it is an onion."
But caramelised onions are so tasty.
Damn, now I'm hungry... time for lunch I think.
