Posts by Mage
1799 posts • joined Friday 23rd November 2007 08:43 GMT
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More than a glass of Sherry usually too.
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Get used to it Operators
People just want a connection, a pipe.
Operators have NOTHING else that people want or need.
SMS? Charging lots for something that costs nothing...
They charge about x300 times per MByte for voice (2G, 3G) than Data. Expect data prices to double when the old licences to print money (SMS and voice) evaporate.
If
maybe they will next open source the Flash player.
Sounds not impossible now.
Not exactly just Rock
But Shirley the "blues Bros" should get a mention in passing at least?
Mines the one stuffed with DVDs.
UKIP?
Hardly an unbiased commentator.
Posted in ARM rolls out new GPU, loses head
Shh!
Don't tell anyone ARM is based in the UK or UK "investors" or the Government will find a way to wreck them.
Inmos Transputer was a good idea too.
Bleagh
Yet again the promising Linux has shot itself in the Feet. Removing both legs.
Not everyone uses a Tablet / Mini-Netbook.
Debian + Ice Window Manager for Older HW anyone?
It doesn't make sense that newer versions of OS need new HW unless your partner(s) are AMD or Intel.
Essentially the only bit of PCs that wear out are the keyboards and Mice and on Laptops/Netbooks additionally the Battery.
Of course HDD or SSD can fail any time.
Own a cat?
No one owns a Cat. A Cat might think it owns you.
Posted in Elgato EyeTV Mobile
Specs?
MPEG4?
DVB-T2?
AAC?
Or is it plain vanilla obsolete DVB-T + MPEG2 + MP2 only?
The UK will have SD on DVB-T2 + MPEG4 ffrom end 2012
Some countries ONLY have MPEG4 SD.
The DTT networks in UK and Ireland are planned assuming roof top aerial. Only those areas in direct close view of transmitter can expect an Indoor aerial to work.
So that's what was in the Sludge
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-10-31/
Previously he was forced to drink the sludge at a press conference to prove it safe.
Posted in Boffinry summit names 3 new elements
@Bronek Kozicki
Copernicus was a Man. I'm not sure why you "really, had to say that". Or what the joke value might be.
In the 1490s everybody had long hair and most better off wore robes that looked a bit like a dress but more like a long dressing gown really.
Posted in Boffinry summit names 3 new elements
Umm
They had already decided on these names. It's just "finalised" or something.
A further meeting will look at proposals for names for 113 to 118 (the last of which was agreed to have been created in June 2011). Then another meeting will ratify the final choices.
Advanced boffins are trying to make the Periodic table obsolete by synthesis of elements 119 and higher. It's not clear what happens after 120, if indeed any higher can be synthesised.
Prenaming Elements.
It's not certain that any elements above 118 will be created, or which ones (they tend not to be created with sequential atomic number, so the "next" one above 118 might be 132 or anything).
Delivery...
Buffering....
Broadcast is instant, but linear.
YouTube and other OTT content at decent quality depends on Cable or FTTC or FTTH. It can't be delivered easily on older Broadband systems. Also very little "connected" viewing causes contention on non-NGB / NGH systems and uses up all the viewer's data allowance (Cap).
So... Maybe add a HDD or other storage to buffer the popular likely to be watched content and download it in the background to give viewers instant stutter free VOD. Except Broadcast with hidden PVR partition can do that 10,000x cheaper.
Also Google has to compete with HbbTv, MHEG5 and youview from the Broadcasters delivering non-broadcast (and hidden broadcast) streams via Internet.
But for widespread acceptance you need Fast Broadband with no cap (or a cap over 200GByte a month) and minimum speed of 20Mbps+ at peak times (not an "up to" speed) so users can use internet at same time or even use OTT internet content in more than one room.
A student or single person can use a Laptop/netbook/tablet anyway, Families are the more likely users of TVs with OTT content and they often have more than one TV and/or may be using internet at the same time.
Our BluRay Home theatre adds internet to our TV and we have a PC Media centre on it too. But Internet browsing or YouTube "clip" viewing is mostly a personal activity, not something done on the shared living room TV.
How long before the local Internet can compete with BluRay for instant viewing at same quality vs simply a download to watch later or after enough has "Buffered"?
They need to test Google TV in the Real World, with real people not in the Fibre fed Googleplex by single Geeks.
Posted in It's time to end the Windows Wait
Flash
Depends on price. My nearly 10 year old Laptop running XP (120G HDD replaced original 30G about 3 years ago) boots about the same time as many cheaper Flash based Linux running Netbooks.
You need big money for fast Flash. My CP/M system is faster as it doesn't have to load much.
ROM booted non-PCs back in mid 80s were impressive boot time. But not so useful as CP/M or MS/DOS.
Posted in ARM specs out first 64-bit RISC chips
Servers with lots of stuff
But Embedded processing needing more than 4G RAM? I don't think so.
But
Can't Airbus also make a Dreamliner sized plane of Scandium -Aluminium alloy? But can Boeing make an an A380 size composite?
Newton not first
Not first PDA or touch screen. It failed in the market unlike some others.
So small improvements
So Cities will get a small improvement using 2.6GHz LTE instead of 2.1GHZ HSPA+, most noticeable on very busy cells, where speed is least like broadband.
And in the sticks you'll get slow LTE on 800MHz (due to fact entire band only has 7 x 5MHz channels for LTE or 3 x 20MHz and one 5MHz channel, total for all operators and the distances) replacing GSM EDGE. They won't increase the basestation density. Not economic. So not "Wireless Broadband".
Just 50% to 200% better depending on location and cell load.
No 2.6GHz roaming in Ireland
UPC uses it for wireless Cable, AKA MMDS.
Some pulses received
.... . .-.. .--. -- . .. .- -- - .-. .- .--. .--. . -.. .. -. .- -. . ..- - .-. .. -. --- ..-. .- -.-. - --- .-. -.--
A 1907 Coherer for Radio probably works better than any detector for Neutrinos
Posted in Google TV receives (much needed) upgrade
There are only two
Logitech and Sony.
I expect both to abandon ship.
Intel
Intel has an ARM licence. They even kept one XScale chip, a communications processor.
All Intel has to do is make like ADI, Texas, Qualcomm and Samsung who design their own variations of ARM. Like Samsung leverage their own processes / fabrication too for the 3 layer Flash + RAM + CPU chip trio.
Only Texas does the OMAP version ARM
Only Qualcomm does the Snapdragon version ARM
Intel can use their design expertise and fabrication to make an ARM that Texas, Samsung or Qualcomm can't compete with. Maybe they already have a skunkworks team and should add all the Itanium resources to it. After all, the only Itanium customer, HP, is flirting with ARM based servers.
I hate to say it.
Stallman at times seems close to a raving lunatic.
But on this he is talking sense.
Apple should lose the Patent wars
Almost all Apple patents are really things that in UK would be covered by either copyright or registered design.
Samsung and other "real" Electronics and Technology companies have real patents.
Yes, Samsung and other products might look similar and be used in a similar way. This is like that cars have 4 round wheels rather than 3 or 5 octagonal wheels.
Yes, Samsung and others may infringe Apple patents. But those patents are invalid and should never have been awarded.
Back in 1986 I was designing Pocket Information systems. By 1989 the connectivity was Analogue Cell phone and 64Kbps DECT in the the office.
Guess what? The GUI used icons. The screen covered most of the front. No buttons. It was a rounded rectangle designed to fit a suit pocket (not very comfortably as about x2 to x3 thicker than a modern PDA/Phone. It did work also as phone using the stylus as a handset.
The stylus had three buttons and miniature optically read ball to work as a "mouse" on desk.
Capacitive touch screens existed. But like everyone else we wanted sketch and handwriting input as these very much two way devices.
PC compatibility was to be by a PC card emulating graphics card and connecting via DECT wireless to the Mono touch display (like a HW implementation of VNC so DOS or any OS etc would work in a sliding window over the virtual terminal).
Since Bluetooth didn't exist the "Pen/handset/stylus" used a two way ultrasonic link for voice and button/mouse data. I did have a now expired patent for that. If the company had not gone bust before production I'd be richer than Jobs was today but not be suing Apple when the iPhone first came out, because I believe in reasonable competition and think only the absolutely innovative, un-obvious and complex to invent things should be granted monopolies.
They really only have two businesses left
They were never good at Software or Services.
Their servers are not good value and not as good as they once where.
They made a mistake with the details of the Tablet, they should have tried again rather than burn it.
Their PCs and Printers is what is left. But they need to do their own design and improve quality. They need to fix any problems with their PSG, not dispose it and be on a downward spiral to nothing. They'll never emulate IBM's shift of ditching PCs to Lenovo because IBM was major in SW & services before the PC and never left that. HP spun of the the Testgear that was their origin as Agilent and lost the heart of their R&D culture. They have never been good as a SW and Services company. Their origin was HW. Since they are world leader in Printers and PCs that's what they need to concentrate on.
If they just re-badge other's netbooks and laptops though they are doomed. Nor can they afford to be Apple and concentrate on just Aesthetics and GUIs.
Mine's the one with an HP calculator in the pocket.
Posted in China Central TV comes to Freeview
Expense?
Actually if you have a significant market share, say more than 1%, then Broadcast is FAR cheaper than Internet for Broadcast quality.
if you only have 0.05% viewing time, but it's everyone at once (e.g. news at 9) then Internet is horribly expensive.
The Internet is only viable for low quality or low numbers of people at once when you consider video.
Posted in Apple gets patent for ‘unlock gesture’
"what is claimed is",
All this kind of stuff is:
Been done before
Obvious
Dates to research on Gestures 1970s to 1990s
Even if no one did it, it's not worthy of a patent.
This is what happens when only 2.5% of Budget is R&D in a Tech company.
Point to me ONE Engineering development by Apple.
Point to one user interface feature that should be really patentable.
One GUI feature that isn't just a prettier and slicker implementation of concepts that others did earlier.
Possibly some aspects of a GUI should be covered by copyright and the absolute appearance definitely is. But not a rounded rectangular box to put it in, nor rounded icons. Just the actual image on the Icon.
The court system for enforcement and the system for awarding patents is "broken". It's allowing who ever has the best lawyers and spends the most on "patent" applications to have a monopoly on the obvious and already out there.
Posted in Google dumps + from Boolean search tool
Also degraded
Since they decided to high rank all the sites you went to before. I want to find NEW sites with "that" content., I'm not looking for a Bookmarking service
Posted in Google dumps + from Boolean search tool
Bah
Google are the new Evil Axis. Worse than MS ever was, who only wanted your money. Google wants your soul (Profile) and hopes to wreck your head so you don't notice.
Posted in Ten... small screen HD TVs
The Hannspree SV28LMMB and LG 26LK330
For 28" the 1920 x 1200 and 1366 x 768 are not TV resolutions.
They are "low" resolution Computer Monitors (my ancient 19" 4x3 PC monitor does 1680 x 1260 as I type this).
For reasons best known to Marketing people, laptops and notebooks all now have TV 16:9 screens and you need 17" to get 1080 pixels vertically.
11 years ago you could get 1600 x 1200 on a 15.6" laptop. I'd love a 1680 x 1260 4:3 laptop or netbook for web browsing or PDF reading.
I prefer to watch video at longer distance on a TV screen. So TV screens should be 1920 x 1080. But many TVs that are 1920 x 1080 even "rescale" TV to "over scan" like the CRT era and will only show perfect unscaled 1920 x 1080 from a PC source!
Conversely I'd 4:3 screens on PCs, Laptops, Netbooks. Even just one, that's good for A4 PDFs.
Also where are the HD capable 4" to 16" portable TVs to replace analogue ones? They can have a 960 x 540 or 720 x 405 screen if they like. It's just for portability. Some channels (and increasingly next year) are HD only. This is already true in Ireland where on Digital the RTE2 is ONLY transmitted in 1440 x 1080 and ALL channels are in MPEG4. There are ZERO portable TVs as far as I can see that work on MPEG4 SD, DVB-T, DVB-T2 and MPEG4 HD. Only "obsolete" MPEG2 only DVB-T portables.
nyelvmark: I hope that's a poor attempt at humour
Hmmm
http://www.gmer.net/
Posted in Deep inside ARM's new Intel killer
Maybe if Intel put 28nm versions of the old 386SX and the Pentium pro on one chip they might do it.
A billion transistors? Intel has got too bloated concentrating on simply server/high end desk top performance over all else.
They had to step back in time to do the Atom (for low power), ironically the 1st Atom based netbooks about 1/2 the speed of a 10 year old laptop.
Or
This is what they want their enemies to believe ...
Unfortunately
The DMC DeLoran is a rubbish sports car:
Fibre glass body with thin easily dented stainless steel skin that also parts company.
Underpowered.
The whole exercise was a scam on the British taxpayer. I was there at the time and remember the mad amount of money he got because he claimed it would create loads of jobs in West Belfast. It never got anywhere near the target.
Nice comedy film.
Samsung have been stacking RAM, Flash and CPU inside a < 3mm high package for maybe 5 years.
of course it's ARM not x86
Intel may be a leader in x86, everything else not so much.
Not a true High Level Language
Really it did exactly what it was designed to be.
A Machine Independent Macro Assembler.
Hence the HUGE dependence on Makefiles and #define
C was a great Achievement in the climate of early 1970s
What did he do for the next 40 years though?
<<If one was to compare the recent losses in technology to certain fictional figures then I would not consider it to be unfair to say that.
Dennis Ritchie == Jesus>>
Actually you can argue if Jesus was a Deluded Man, or God, or his followers made up stuff. But no shortage of historical evidence that he was a real person.
Posted in RIM stands, staggers, falls again
Single vendor
A Cloudy service with a single operator? No thanks.
I have various email with various providers.
Is this the future of iThings and Azure/xbox etc?
I can't see an iPhone being better in the LONG term...
Codex
Codex means "book", A scroll cut up into pages. Easy navigation. Invented about 2000 years ago.
Nice that computing is finally going to abandon the glass teletype/Scrolls. Drupal allows nice easy creation of paged content. GSP/GST Publisher had two different DTP to paged HTML schemes (one of which used NO javascript).
It's not hard or new. But presumably the proposed methods will make it more common and easier to produce.
Apps for content on the Internet is a bit daft anyway. Apps should be only for local content.
Simple solution
End all termination charges. They are a throw back to dedicated circuit switching where the customers at each end used dedicated copper just for them for the whole route and whole time. "Modern" Telecoms doesn't work like that any more.
On average Telcos would be better off, assuming they all still charge the same as today for the same calls.
Both ends pay any intermediaries on a traffic basis.
OK if house trained
If rats can be house trained and a small team able to make and bring a cup of tea then cheaper on upkeep than monkey butlers.
Now if the implanted ones can also persuade the rest to visit the National Institute of Mental Health we may solve finally the rodent problem. Of course it's Asia they are more a problem eating up to 1/3rd rice crop. Maybe the Asians need more snakes rather than Robo-Rats.
Eveventually you get tired of testing Betas
Why don't they ever finish anything properly in the Linux /Gnu community?
They seem to get bored or seduced by latest Apple or MS changes and go off at a tangent again.
If the GUI was even like NT4.0 and everything just worked in an expected manner it would be good,
They fix the stupidity of how Linux does sound, then fix WiFi forgetting settings... That takes about 6 years and then they go and break a lot of stuff.
Sadly more people than it's merits (an it has many) justify will buy it.
Sadly more people than it's price as a phone justifies will buy it,
Also
11. It damages the Economy as Apple takes money out of circulation. Why don't they pay any share dividends?
A self selected gullible < 0.1% sample of world Population is representative?
I don't think so.
vb.net vs c#
The reason is that vb.net is so different from vb6 that it's easier to go to c# (which *is* really MS Java). Your VB6 source won't run in VB.net anyway.
They left too much good stuff out of vb.net so it's a C programmer's concept of VB. Pointless.
That's why VB.net is less popular than VB6 was and VB programmers migrating to c#
No
What has killed Usenet long ago for real users is
1) The Binaries. Few ISPs will run a NTTP server anymore
2) Spam
Some of us used to use it for real messages. It was 300bps Packet Radio friendly too...
I guess the freetards will get IRC killed next.
Compare retail cost of
a) OS X vs Windows 7
b) Mac compared with similar PC
Apple make their money from the overpriced HW.
Posted in Go Daddy flogs 50 MILLION domains
Validation
How many of these real and how many spammers, con men, money laundering and typo-squatters?
Posted in Linux Foundation merges MeeGo into Tizen
Taser
What is it with stupid platform names?
So the King is dead, long live the King.
Android is successful BECAUSE it's not 100% an open project. No committee. The problem to date with all other things Linux and Handset related is that they have all been Camels.
We need a strong visionary person or company in control (not Intel or Samsung), otherwise Tizen will be another maemo, Limo, open Moko, Moblin, Meego etc etc failure (qtopia PDA version was too like a WinCE interface, needed stylus and qtopia phone edition was too late). At least it doesn't start with M.
Stupid name though
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGYwWZznMUE
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tizen-
But
4G won't deliver broadband performance in the real world either. They will not have enough towers or enough spectrum. HSPA is already near the Shannon Boundary.
So in reality to have entry level Broadband performance you nedd about x9 more masts and about x6 more spectrum. That's never going to happen. No economic argument for it.
If you just want to read
Then eInk is better than LCD. But I found the regular kindle too small.
Most of the PDFs I want to read are SCANS of old books. The text is just too small.
If you are reading a book you can't be zooming and scrolling on each page either.
If I want Video the TV is best, or if on a plane/train the old Archos 4.3" with 800x600 and 160Gbyte HDD.
If I want to do a mix of things a real laptop running Windows XP is still best. 1600 x 1200. I have separate Ubuntu laptop.
The tablets seem best suited for browsing material and people with short attention span:
Reading 3 page docs rather than 300 pages
Watching 3 minute YouTube rather than 3 hr HD feature film
Writing 3 line message/Note rather than 3 page to 30 page document.
Flipping through a dozen web sites rather than maintaining one or reading in depth Articles.
So Smart Phones, Tablets. Real Notebook/Laptops, Pocket PMP too large as a phone too small as a tablet and eReaders are really complementary different markets.
