Bandwidth

"Bandwidth is a limited resource and 3 would much prefer to support 200 users on a cell with only a few hundred kilobits each, than 20 users downloading video files while the rest can't get at their email - though the 20 users concerned might not feel the same way."

In your dreams... A 21Mbps sector has less than 2Mbps average throughput, and there are up to 3 sectors to a cell typically..

You would be lucky to have 2 sector users able to stream YouTube at once. That's 6 cell users.

3G/HSDPA is rubbish.

It uses CDMA, so fully loaded the range shrinks and available total capacity can be 1/4 as much.

They need to do this and have < 1G caps or it is worse than Dialup. In Ireland due to mad expensive line rental (26 Euro) and poor BB availability they sell this as a fixed solution. Fixed users are online longer than Mobile, so even if many "mobile" are mostly fixed, 3's own assertion that 50% of users are "fixed" makes system 5 times slower than it would be for only mobile users...

See why 3G is poor and Mobile can't Deliver Broadband. True Fixed Wireless can as it is x16 better in the same spectrum:

http://www.radioway.info/comparewireless/CompareHSPAandFixed-v4.html

http://www.techtir.ie/forums/showthread.php?t=1832

Midband Forum. Clue. What's not Dialup but worse than Broadband?

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=1147

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=60

P2p?

It's a phone network.

Not designed for continuous data.

It's not Broadband.

Some good points

@Eddie Edwards

Great valid point.

I'm sorry to say that UK & Irish goverments, Ofcom and the even worse Comreg don't understand the concept of National Assets.

Also even if relocated there is no need for Digital.

There are huge savings on Video going digital as MPEG4 is so much more efficient. But for real time audio Analogue is superior.

Even FM Broadcast doesn't need closed ever and replaced by DAB. DRM might be a good idea eventually on LW, MW, SW/HF.

CCTV

Probably Central Chinese TV

They have a bunch of free (boring) channels on various Satellites that can be received in UK & Ireland

www.lyngsat.com

FreeTV category is not the country to receive in, but originator:

http://www.lyngsat.com/freetv/China.html

CCTV4, CCTV9, CCTV E, CCTV F can be received in UK and Ireland. Though a 110cm motorised dish rather than Sky's soup strainer pointed at 28.2E is recommended for those keen to sample a wide range of non-UK TV.

On a bigger dish in UK and parts of Ireland you'll get Badr (if you have it pointed correctly) for CCTV Arabic.

Future

It's even harder to see one for Windows Mobile.

We'll see what adding QT instead of UIQ and S60/S80/S90 does for Symbian.

And moving Maemo to use QT also

A bit early to write the obituaries.

We may see Android & Symbian competing for top place.

iPhone in 3rd

Maemo (nokia and others?), Palm & RIM compete for 4th, 5th & 6th.

and WinMo in 7th.

Symbian (Symbian + QT, not Symbian + S60) and Maemo (Linux + QT) are more "open" than Android. Android may be OS, but the idea is phones as locked to Google & Operator as iPhone is to iTunes and Operator.

QT != Quicktime, but the formerly Trolltech QUI Tool environment that has I believe been used for KDE and runs on OS X, Windows, Linux, Symbian etc...

At least

It's not included and you don't have to buy it.

There is nothing wrong with a wire though.

Wireless mice are pointless waste of spectrum. I've had many problems with mouse over last 20 years, the wire isn't one of them.

I'd be surprised if this is popular. A tad too many buttons. but then I never use F1 to F12, Pause, Break, Scroll Lock, Sys Req on my keyboard.

Insert, Home, end rarely used.

The key the menu and key with a window are never used.

AEOHNRTS "left Shift" are starting to fade a bit on this 8 year old keyboard.

Either way..

It's the end.

It will just be faster now.

last one out turn off the lights.

It's a commodity market out there now with big multi-product companies. Likely no future for Niche companies like Adaptec any more.

If Logitech had stuck to selling Modula-2 and Mouses and Creative to Sound cards, they would be gone already. As it is the future is gloomy for them. Is Genius a brand owned by someone bigger now?

eReaders

Lots of pretty readers now.

But all too expensive. I think they will take off when the price halves. I'd build my own if I I could interface a bare eInk display to an GP2X. Though a display with USB is easiest, it probably costs as much as an entire Reader anyway.

Keep up the good work, your coverage of these is quite good.

Flickery Screen

I prefer clean installs.

I did one install no problem, the 2nd PC the graphics was an old Creative GB300 and was very poor (faulty output signals, not SW) so I put in an old ATI card instead. Flickery screen and unable to log into console during boot to reconfigure as characters typed only occasionally entered, no * to indicate if a password char has been entered or not.. A reinstall fixed it.

A happy penguin.

3.8

3.8 was last decent version. They broke it adding Win7 support.

I agree, I'll be surprised if this is more than a GUI layer and API to the voip blob.

Cliff

What's that whistling noise?

Why are those dots getting bigger?

Qualification?

He may be a C# expert but no MS program or badge is a real qualification.

He should not have gone public about it, made him look like a school kid not getting Prefects Badge this term.

Speed & Interference

"Our wiring is almost 30 years old, and we'd expect to see higher numbers in newer housing than our 1980s house-to-flats conversion"

May be irrelevant. It's basically the amount and length of wiring. Even 40 years ago or more the wiring was similar to today. Ageing of the PVC insulation won't make any difference.

How much interference does it make? What if your phone line is near mains wiring, does it affect the DSL speed then (likely).

Any mains wiring offers 1000 times less RF isolation than Cat5 cable. Run some STP Cat5e along the skirting and get a real 1G ethernet connection. For many people these won't give more than 20Mbps.

See discussion here. With links to real tests and facts.

http://www.techtir.ie/forums/showthread.php?t=1843

I think this review didn't test the unit in a realistic setting.

Flash block

I didn't watch.

Norway

Is not in the EU. But maybe they like EU privacy law.

Have you seen the price of beer there?

Ofcom Compliance

Will they check other samples of the same model to see do they really meet CE standards or do nothing?

RSGB is taking them to court because they won't check dodgy PLT/Homeplug gear, one Model has been banned in Sweden.

Also some CFL lamps are "RF clean" and others (and some "transformerless 12" Halogen lamp PSUs) completely obliterate LW, MW and SW radio. Who actually checks the Manufacturer's self certification?

Not all rubbish

There where (are*) a lot of useful sites on it too.

(* some appear to be still there on the 27th. Zombie sites?)

No "under construction" animated gif here?

The components

Don't cover the royalties, always. Sometimes yes.

Qualcomm have a BOATLOAD of CDMA related patents, and 3G uses CDMA.

Also if you do your own ARM core ASIC or other Wonder Chip for Radio/WiFi/GSM/3G you need to pay royalties.

I wonder will Broadcom, Qualcomm and others be suing Apple next week.

Look at how long and expensive the Qualcomm/Broadcom and Qualcomm/Nokia spats were. Make SCO look like sunday school picnic.

Why?

If I'm buying a new machine maybe.

But if I have XP, MaC OS or Unbuntu, what is spending money on Win7 for an existing machine going to give me? DX11? Is that it? Nothing else?

Not the iPhone

The loss is due the the Disasterous merger/takeover that is NSN. Nothing to do with Devices.

Peer to peer

But all WiFi devices support Peer to peer in the spec now...

What will be different?

Umm..

Shouldn't the OS be managing this and transparent to the Browser?

It doesn't matter

It's been proven for 20 years that User Education and the USER *NOT* deliberately installing supposed codecs, scanners, toolbars and whatever and NOT running attachments is the solution.

AV software is a failure. I know people using the Internet for 12+ years and no viruses ever and no AV. I know other people that have AV and seem to need re-installed every few months.

Almost all PCs I've cleaned have had AV.

Waste

Really 5 mins on Internet discovering what services.msc does and turning of the really un-needed ones helps more.

Getting rid of accumulated junk in run registry and startup folders helps more too.

Look each service or program up with Google

run silentrunner.vbs from www.silentrunners.org

Android

May be open source.

But it's about Google and Operator control of the handset.

Inplace Ungrades

Have always been rubbish.

The only way to reliably install is a fresh empty partition.

You wait for Win7.. SP1 ... test and wait till replacing all the old PCs.

I don't believe an 6 or 7 year old system with 512M or even less running XP perfectly will run Win7. And if it did what is the advantage? None.

I can see no value to Win7 for existing PCs at all.

Geome Targets

A way to remove Twits?

Why bother?

Dual Boot Ubuntu & XP, or run one and the other on a VM.

I've used Mac OS 8, 9 and X and fail to see any advantage. A disadvantage sisnce they abandoned Power PC and their own OS and moved to a Shiny Shell on a BSD Unix fork in Intel hardware, overpriced.

I can't figure non-Mac people that want to run OS X on non-Apple HW, and Linux people that buy Macbooks to badly run Ubuntu.

10hrs

10 hrs is good.

But a suitable ARM system will give same Browser/"Office Docs" performance and better HD performance than Atom with 1/2 weight of battery.

If you use the 2 x2 pixel RG BW staggered cell LCD instead of RGB inline triad, you save more power, have cheaper display and brighter panel. You might then get down to 1/3rd or 1/4 as with 10" screen the backlight becomes significant power drain.

Win7 (aka NT 6.2?) won't work on an ARM. Once windows NT did work on MIPS, Power PC, Alpha, 64bit Alpha, x86 and Pentium Pro. That was before Win2K. (NT5.0)

WinMo/CE works on ARM. But really it's a completely different OS, more different than Win3.x/Win9x/WinME family is from NT/XP(NT5.1)/2K/Vista/Win7 family.

Our penguin loving friends are likely. But not the Android flavour as it's GUI is designed for handsets and it's App based designed for Google's version of Java. A Netbook wants a more featured GUI and more native applications (plenty of both available for ARM + Netbook size screen).

Symbian is fine if they ditch S60 etc and do a new decent GUI in QT as rumoured, but you'd not bother with it on a Netbook. Nokia "PDA" Tablet Skunkworks stuff is already Linux based (N800 and related pocket tablets)

Tests?

Really are these any more scientific than Phrenology?

It's so subjective you might as well judge character with a handshake.

Or Why?

the brain dead W-CDMA was 3G successor to 2G GSM. Politics?

W-CDMA is only "faster" as because it uses 5MHz rather than 0.2MHz channels of GSM's FDMA/TDMA.

Otherwise it's pretty rubbish compared with what other possible technologies existed then.

LTE is OFDM on the downstream.

XP in VM

Something is very wrong with Win7,

No real advantage over XP, yet can't run all the SW XP can.

So why bother installing Win7 at all if you need SW that works on XP and not WiN7. The only extra is the DX10 game API

The "extra" security is largely mythical. The problem is social engineering where the users install the Malware deliberately.

Arrrgh

It's absolutely NOT 3D, none of it.

It's Stereoscopic. Even the Victorians knew that. It doesn't even work very well if you have a dominant eye. Stereoscopic "3D effect" is very poor compared to real 3D and doesn't work for 1/5th of the population.

The LCD shutter version using 100Hz screen and thus 50Hz per eye works for more people, and is less headache inducing plus better colour.

The Coloured / filter Glasses was a failure in 1950s cinema and is nothing more than a novelty.

HDTV

This is setup for any TV ever...

since about 1936.

Color 1951

Colour 1970

CRT, LCD or Plasma. HD or Not.

It's important that European people who are indoors types have cream skin, not orange.

If everything is at correct setting rather than turned up to 11, everything lasts longer.

LCD filter dyes fade

Backlights get dimmer.

Keep LCDs out of direct sunlight.

Plasmas and CRTs fade quicker if colour and brightness is higher.

1Gbps

That will give about 5Mbps to 10Mbps per user.

You do need that on a Mast to truly have Broadband performance. 100Mbps LTE manages only just 500kbps to 1Mbps per user economically and realistically loaded.

14.4Mbps 3G/HSPA only does about 1Mbps to 2Mbps average throughput and with 20 users can easily be under 200kbps for 1/2 the users or more. 50kbps or dropped connections is not unusual.

What no Razor

Using C?

mad. A write only portable Assembler. Hardly a decent High Level Language.

Occam, Modula-2, Oberon, maybe C# or C++, not C

Keep taking the Tablets

Archos has nice one already.

Primarily such a thing only has use in specialist markets. It can't be used as easily as an iPhone as it's too big for holding in hand or pocket. It can't be used a usefully as netbook as no keyboard.

It may be successful in Archos's Media Tablet and Portable DVD player market but it's not going to hurt Netbooks or pocket mediaplayers/smart phones.

It's also going to be twice the price it needs to be if it's $700. It really needs to be under £250/€300/$400 to have much traction. Actually usually Archos are overpriced (French for Apple should be Archos, not Pomme). I'm amazed at their 160Gbyte HDD Windows and 250Gbyte HDD Linux 10" netbook prices.

The Apple FanBois will all buy one. But having worked on tablet design concepts for 20 years simply having a multitouch GUI and OSX is not enough.

http://www.archos.com/

(Mines the one with an Archos 605 ripping the pocket)

Qualcomm a Chip maker?

Maybe,

But primarily an IP licensing House.

Some Qualcomm IP they claim is free, but but you can't get it without licencing the expensive IP.

Qualcomm is a huge obstacle to innovation and competitive pricing.

I knew my laptop was good

A Dell Inspiron 8200 might take a 12.5mm drive, but MIDE, not SATA :(

Perhaps 750Gbyte is apprx 2.5 platters.

i.e. 5 heads rather than 6?

Crows

The rooks here figured how to use the peanut feeder for the Tits.

Hilarious when they were learning as they tended to fall off head first and fail to avoid hitting the ground.

I think they ate the Squirrels. Never seen one here ever.

Protect the plants

I'm using printouts around the garden to kill slugs.

Was it designed with a Corona Typewriter, sticky notes, glue and a colour photocopier?

ID ten T error

Once again as with PC email attachments the real problem is users.

pay the regulator £554,000 a year for every pair of 1MHz frequencies it uses

bandits.

Not mission Critical?

Mobile is NOT broadband. Yet the Irish (ComReg) figures include all most 1/3rd "Fixed Broadband" connections are 3G.

Someone should tell Eamonn Ryan.