Posts by Michael B.
58 posts • joined Tuesday 6th November 2007 14:10 GMT
Re: Voicemail Button
You can use alternative Voicemail providers, Hullomail is one that comes to mind, that give you additional options such as emailing an mp3 of the voicemail to you.
In these cases you need to change the voicemail number to use their services.
Re: Bored with your nonsense now!
Its bandwidth and Signal to Noise Ratio that determines the maximum bit rate. A 5Mhz channel at 1800Mhz and 800Mhz with the same S/N ratio will carry data at the same rate. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem#Examples for the Maths
Now the big advantage of these lower frequency transmitters is that they propagate further that then higher frequencies and as such fewer towers will be required to to cover a given area.
Radio Rates
Well here is an example of the royalty rates for Radio play in the UK http://www.jazzservices.org.uk/index.php/jazz-business-copyright/performance-royalties
One play of the song could easily reach a multiple of million people on Radios 1 and 2 so 100 quid for a million plays is actually over charging a little if you compare it to radio rates. Though they probably factor in an on-demand premium to charge Spotify more.
Posted in Review: Nokia Lumia 520
The 520 appears to have a GPS chip but no compass so it can tell you where you are but not which direction you are looking in. From a practical standpoint this would stop virtual reality apps such as City Lens from working fully but Nokia Drive should be fine.
Re: Perfect phone
I can't answer about the 520 ( I have an 920) , but regarding the iPlayer it's "coming soon" http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/Microsoft_mobile
but seeing the bad job the BBC have done at bringing the iPlayer to Android ( implementation and timescales ) as opposed to the slick IOS offerings I wouldn't hold my breath at it a. coming soon and b. being up to much more than just a streaming service.
Get the sound right first
On most of the conference calls I've been involved in sound has been the biggest problem rather than the picture. Instead of shelling out for expensive screens if only they could have invested in a bunch of lavalier mics with radio transmitters the picture really wouldn't have mattered that much.
Most of the conference calls I make I do from home and use my small studio with a cheap mixer, a compressor/gate and a modest microphone I am always the clearest participant by far.
Re: More proof...
I've seen this so many times before and this is no exception. From businesses reluctant to move from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000, from 2000 to XP, from XP to anything else. It's really just the continuation of a process that I have observed for more than a decade and a half and it actually bears no reflection on the quality of the OS.
Re: Why is Peter Horrocks silent about attempts to silence news from Iran?
In the UK Press TV was taken off air for a license violation which they could have resolved pretty easily and with no fuss, but I guess fuss is exactly what they wanted.
Frankly OFCOM treated Press TV with more restraint for its license violations than any other channel I've seen.
More Info on this can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/20/iran-press-tv-loses-uk-licence
I just listened back to the original "review" and for Top Gear it is actually pretty complimentary. The controversial bit has a voiceover saying "Although Tesla say that it will do 200 miles, we worked out that on our track it would only do 55 miles." over the crew pushing the car. Now the voiceover never says that it did run out of charge just that if they did run out of charge it would do so after 55 miles.
Re: Yeah, terrible service ...
I'm in deepest South Bristol, and also have the Samknows monitoring box, and I can tell you from the Stats page that 7pm to 8pm is, on average, one of the fastest times at around 90 Mbps on a 100Mbps line. Even the consolidated stats over a year show the same pattern of higher speeds during the evening.
One Feature that made this upgrade worthwhile
...and that was the ability to open, edit and save* PDF documents from within Word. That is such a life saver you wouldn't believe.
Elsewhere in Word there are lots of other solid improvements from the Navigation side panel to the improved properties sidepane and even the ability to directly insert a screenshot of another Program's Window.
All in all, for me, a solid but worthwhile upgrade
*I am aware that previous versions could save as PDFs
Re: " X86 which has a much larger software library"
Errr Supercomputers where it seems that over 3/4 of the top 500 are x86 based with over 90% of the top 500 use Linux.
From here: http://i.top500.org/stats
Re: An honest question
Edit PDFs as though they were native word documents. ( Actually I don't know if that feature is in LibreOffice I was just impressed by that in the preview version of Office 2013.)
Re: Microsoft seeks money
An Office 365 subscription comes with the full blown desktop versions as well as the online editions so you can run your macros and templates if that is what you want.
Re: Good but a touch too expensive
Archos have been pretty decent in the past offering an SDE (Special Developer Edition) firmware which unlocks the device and allows you to put Linux on it.
http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates_dev.html?country=us&lang=en
Granted it probably isn't your preferred version of Linux but it is a start nontheless.
Physical buttons rule!
I have the 710 which has physical buttons instead of the capacitive strip and they are almost impossible to hit accidentally.
Re: Tethering - one way to detect
Each tcp and udp packet that is sent out has a time to live field which is decremented every time it is forwarded on by a router. As a result the device that is tethered will have its ttl field decremented by one by the phone as it passes through the phone's router. Operating systems usually have a stable default ttl and as such once the packets hit the mobile network's routers there will be a mix of ttls either x and x-1 or x and y-1 from the phone's own packets and the device(s) tethered to it.
That's just one way to detect tethering from a network perspective.
Re: Not only that...
Youcam has nothing to do with Microsoft, it's a cyberlink product. It is probably part of the crapware on your machine or bundled up with a webcam driver update.
Posted in SeeSaw shut down
Hasn't been true in a long time
The BBC were forced by the government in 1991 to start using independent production companies and in the communications act 2003 they were set a quote of 25% that they had to achieve. The upshot is that all those programmes that you have paid for are actually owned by somebody else.
Even those that are wholly produced by the BBC will have complicated contractual and copyright restrictions. Actors will want residuals. Music and image will be restricted in terms of rebroadcasting and might have to be re-cleared, at a substantial fee, if they were to put the output on a website for free.
Straight from the Horse's mouth
In the twelve months to 30th June Sky had a revenue of £6,597million. No they could have spent a good chunk of that on programming but instead they only spent 2,188 million, Their marketing spend was almost half that at £1,179 million with the rest taking it up to a total spend of 5524 million.
So to answer your sarky comment, it was the Sky FY Press Release from 10/11 that gave me the figures. - http://corporate.sky.com/documents/pdf/latest_results/fy_press_release_1011
“It should still be possible to run an outstanding broadcaster"
Well Sky can't manage to be a decent broadcaster on 6 billion so I think the Beeb does excellently on almost half the revenue.
My first Idea too
When this was announced, with the fee, I realised that this would be a perfect way to get a high quality copy of your friend's library for one low yearly fee. Just borrow their music library and get iTunes match to trade you up to a lovely DRM free high bitrate AAC copy.
Posted in Football goal-line tracking tech delayed
Probably a factor of ten or more out
The total of the average Premier league attendance figures are around 700 000 out of a total capacity of 770 000. This is just the Premier league turnstile figures and ignores any TV coverage or other league games.
Taking in all the leagues down the the Blue Square and you have 1.4 million people through the turnstile each normal week of the year.
Stats from - http://itv.stats.football365.com/dom/ENG/PR/attend.html
Much more than your 180 000 which is less than the combined average attendance of the top 3 attended teams in the Premier League.
Who was snooping on whom?
So lets get this straight Google was snooping on Bing's search results when they noticed that Bing was snooping on Google's search results.
Microsoft is already experimenting with frontend and backend
Surely Microsoft Mediaroom as used on the BT Vision box could be the user interface, just ported to the XBox. Combine this with MSN Player in the UK as their playground for getting the backend intrastructure debugged (with a side benefit of proving to content providers that they can be trusted with their precious IP).
With just these two separate streams of developments it is clear that XBox TV channel could just be content deals away.
Now this is all predicated on Microsoft thinking ahead and not replicating development....which we all know that they would never ever do.
Plural of anecdote?
I think the Android sales figures being 3 to 1 over Symbian at that site, despite the real sales figures being almost the reverse shows that this is certainly no decent indicator of the real sales figures in any way. Pretty much all it tells us is at that site the Android buyers are looking for more "freebies" that buyers of other phones.
Probably their traffic is pretty low ( I hadn't heard of them) so they using any means to drum up publicity and get a story into the tech press. They didn't have a decent Apple bashing story so Windows Mobile being a failure is a good low risk strategy. Good job you didn't fall for that one El Reg.
Posted in Acer Liquid E Android smartphone
Acer have released an update
Android 2.1 is available for the Acer Liquid from here: http://www.acer.co.uk/acer/service.do?LanguageISOCtxParam=en&miu10einu24.current.attN2B2F2EEF=3734&sp=page15e&ctx2.c2att1=17&miu10ekcond13.attN2B2F2EEF=3734&CountryISOCtxParam=UK&ctx1g.c2att92=122&ctx1.att21k=1&CRC=2980211862
I have to admit from that page they could have done a better job of naming the update but it certainly does exist.
As to the hardware, they aren't completely identical the Liquid E has 512MB RAM as opposed to the Liquid's 256MB, but apart from that I can't discern any other differences.
Posted in UK.gov may cut BBC licence fee in 2012
ConDems repaying Murdoch's loyalty
I wondered how long it would take for the Conservatives to have to repay the free election campaigning that the Murdoch stable gave them. I really shudder at the thought of the dismantling of the BBC in favour of Sky's vision of the Broadcast media. We should also not forget that Sky has a budget about 600million higher than the BBC it is not playing second fiddle to the BBC as the Murdoch papers would have us believe.
Sorry to burst your bubble...
...but Google has placed an "onMouseDown" handler of the form "return clk(this.href,'','','res','8','','0CEIQFjAH')" on every search result and this clk function posts all of the parameters back to Google in a request for an image that returns a "204 No Content"
So they absolutely know what you are clicking on , what number on the page was the result that you clicked on and even the style of result ie is a video result.
Use the get_iplayer Web Gui
use the Web based GUI and there is no need for terminal sessions and despite this change get_iplayer seems to work fine. I have noticed a few more RTMP_ReadPacket errors recently but this does not seem to have affected the downloaded programs, at least noticeably.
Better than the current Student System
As a current OU Student I have to contend with only having 365 days worth of email ever being available, a 90's style 5.1Mb mailbox quota, no POP/IMAP access and slow access to the mailbox with frequent "pauses" for no apparent reason.
In my opinion outsourcing the Student mail system to either Microsoft or Google can only be a good thing.
Link changed
Whatever dodgy CMS they are using changes the link whenever they change the title of the story so the current link is now:
http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/s/2058902_pupils_watch_great_fire_of_london_model_burn
36 hours? errr no
I've had my PC World brand MSI Wind over a year now and certainly haven't been disappointed with it. In fact most of the people I know who have equivalent models love the small screen and diminutive size of the laptops. Carrying these small and light machines around is so much easier than a 14 or 15 in Dell clunker.
Networking Stack was rewritten for Vista
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb878108.aspx
Here it states that the networking stack was rewritten for Vista, which probably explains why the same old bugs seem to have re-appeared.
Posted in CRB checks can take years to complete
Re: How often?
A CRB check is requested by each organisation that a person works/volunteers for, and a CRB check will be performed when you are promoted or change job within an organisation.
I know my wife has had at least 5 CRB checks performed because she has changed jobs and works with children on a voluntary basis. ( 3 in the last year as far as I know.)
Posted in How to set up your HDTV like a pro
BBC HD test card
The BBC broadcasts on their HD test channel an audio sync test and the famous test card. If you have a PVR, and you manage to catch the tests you just pause the test and follow the instructions below on how to set your TV up.
"The new promo is on air now. Here are the timings you need if want to record the testcard and A/V sync signal.
1. Check the time the last programme of the day finishes
2. Set a manual record starting 25 mins later for 15 mins for testcard
3. Set another manual record starting 35 mins later (1 hour after the last programme finishes) for 15 mins for the A/V signalmins"
(from the comments as the new promo messed with the body text timing.)
From:<http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/12/a_christmas_present_from_the_h.html>
Re: Bloody Americans
I have a perfectly sane, in most respects, American friend who has lived in many countries around the world. One time he overheard me saying something like: "Chomsky is interesting and has some useful things to say" to another friend and he exploded into a tirade about Chomsky using Marxist rhetoric. The strange thing was that I was talking about Chomsky in terms of Grammar trees not his politics.
I've got one installed.
It's been 'installed' for about a week now and hasn't appeared to have slowed my transfers down at all. The 50Meg customers get a seperate box from the Linksys ones that Samknows trumpets.
The only downside is that if you use all the switch ports on your router then you will have to get a switch to sit between the Samknows box and yourself because the Samknows box, at least the 50Meg one, only has 2 switch ports on the back.
The setup is as follows:
Modem --- Router --- Samknows Box --- Computers
It's not all take though. On the Samknows site you get a page with a number of the stats that the box from latency to download speed so at least you get to see how your connection is doing.
Posted in Who wants T-Mobile UK?
Bye bye decent Internet package
As a T-Mobile customer with Web 'n' Walk I'm pretty depressed at the thought of either Vodafone or Cellnet buying up my account as they both have dismal Internet packages.Vodafone describes 500Meg as being "Whopping" and Cellnet calls 200Meg "Unlimited". ( I tried to compare this to Orange but their website is so bad I really couldn't find any details on it. )
Recursive location problem
It seems that Tennessee is located in Knoxville which is located in Tennessee. So unless Knoxville = Tennessee we have an infinite recursion problem if we try and resolve the location of Tennessee.
Oh an by the way the Google Squared has rendering problems in Google Chrome as well if you try and resize the window beyond a size that google determines is necessary.
Microsoft not the only company
Just taking a peek at the list of extensions I can see:
Adobe Acrobat
Google Update
Java ( but that asked me )
iTunes ???
Quicktime
A couple of Real plugins
and a Yahoo activeX plugin bridge
Apart from the Java plugin I believe all of those other ones did not ask me if they wantrf a plugin to be installed.
Posted in MPs battle to save great British pub
Now they care about my business
Pre-smoking ban Pubs were a smoky place where my Wife, who has asthma, could not stay for more than a short amount of time. As a result we discovered that we were perfectly happy at home well away from the Pubs. The Pubs couldn't care less about providing a place that we'd be happy to visit because business was good.
Now times have changed and they are begging for custom. As far as we are concerned if they had cared enough about non-smokers earlier I'm sure we would still be going to pubs, but we found a cleaner and fresher place to enjoy a drink, our living room. As it is they are as much a part of our life as Woolies is.
Surprised
I told my wife, who has to use that POS every day, about this story and her first reaction was one of surprise. She was surprised that the school involved had even managed to get SIMS to print that letter never mind it sending a letter to a dead girl.
Posted in Sky calls for access to cable network
Cheeky Beggers
"Sky said it was 'increasingly anomalous' that the cable network is closed to competition while BT's infrastructure is not."
Could it have something to do with the fact that the BT network was largely created with public money and Virginmedia's network was created with private money, albeit with a local monopoly, and has struggled with the debt that this has saddled them with. If Sky want to pay off VM's debt then I'm sure VM will allow them access to their network until then if Sky want access to a highspeed, non-ADSL, network they will just have to build it themselves.
Posted in Nokia to preinstall Skype on handsets
Which Skype Client?
Is this a real fully fledged Skype client or the fake one that makes a Skype call by calling a UK number?
Infinite Range?
Does it really matter if the car ran out or not. They aren't selling the car with an infinite range so it must run out sometime. There have been plenty of Top Gear segments when the Supercar breaks down or runs out of juice. Anyway the TG team never said that the car did run out of juice anyway they said "We worked out on our track it would run out after just 55 miles" which isn't bad for a track.
Pushing the car was just a handy visual shortcut to the next scene which was explaining the practical limitations of charging a Tesla when you don't have a 3-phase power supply or a lot of time.
The whining from the PR lady has pretty much undermined the generally good things they had to say about the car. "Yes ...it is snowing in hell" is a pretty good comment for Jezza.
Posted in Tesla takes Top Gear test to task
Truth is somewhere in the middle.
I've just read the missive from the Tesla corporate communications Manager and there is a slight inconsistency that the article above doesn't mention. The quote about the fuse is:
"The “brake failure” Clarkson mentions was solely a blown fuse; a service technician replaced the Roadster’s pump and it was back up and running immediately."
Note the fuse was blown and the technician replaced a pump. Either the Corporate Communications Manager mistyped (which she shouldn't since it's her job), she is taking a bit of TG artistic license here, or the Tesla is seriously flaky and a blown fuse destroys one of the pumps. For Tesla Roadster Owners' sake I hope she is just bad at her job.
November 2008 DirectX SDK
...contained the DirectX 11 technical preview with support for "Compute Shaders" which is Microsoft's term for GPGPU support.
The race is on as to who can get the first product actually released with appropriate driver support. Then the long wait until the first product that usefully takes advantage of these features.
The relevant lines from the 07 - 08 Information Manual
http://dida.edexcel.org.uk/VirtualContent/97404/DiDA_Information_Manual_07_08.pdf
6.3 eportfolio submission
...
"The eportfolio must be self-contained and constructed so that its contents can be accessed via the Moderator’s Toolkit.
(For further information about the technical specification for eportfolios and the Moderator’s Toolkit please visit the DiDA qualifications section of the Edexcel website at http://www.edexcel.com/dida-toolkit.)
Any eportfolios that do not adhere to the technical specification will not be moderated."
Since the Word Viewer is not in the Toolkit I think they are pretty much in the right for rejecting these submissions. Thought they probably could have got away with "File:Save As: HTML" within Word for a crappy but technically correct submission.
File Formats
There is an interesting page on the Moderator's website regarding a "Toolkit" of applications needed to moderate the coursework, and Word isn't on it, but the Office Compatibility Pack is. Powerpoint is explictly mentioned as a fileformat though.
http://dida.edexcel.org.uk/home/spb/toolkit/
