Posts by John 62

One requirement

(other than costing about 15quid)

Can you turn it on and off at the plug?

I got a DAB radio a couple of years ago. It was small and worked quite well (sometimes it even got a DAB signal!), BUT when you turned it off at the plug and turned it back on again it would stay off. You had to actually turn it on with a small button on the front, effectively needing two hands, which was not good in a kitchen.

Our Philips analogue radio lives out of the way on top of a wall cupboard. It stays on R4 so the only control it needs is turning on and off at the plug.

Is Cisco the new Nortel?

Does my memory trick me, or did the Register once recommend Nortel should merge with HP?

Does this mean Cisco isn't far from becoming Nortel?

colour, schmolour

one of the reasons I haven't got me a Kindle-type device yet is the GREYness of it all. The contrast in the new Ricoh display looks much better, colour or not.

Customers suing? what about the banks?

The banks will likely have as much to complain about to Sony as the customers. They're the ones who have to cover the costs of fraud. On Sony's scale of transaction processing there must be some requirement for them to keep credit card details adequately secure.

cuts? what cuts?

Has Ms Bee been watching the wedding instead of moderating today?

Government spending in the UK is still going up! George is just slowing down the rate of growth a bit.

The logical conclusion of those opposed to any reduction in government spending while that spending exceeds income, is that they deem money to be an unnecessary frivolity and the state can command you to do as it wills. i.e., if we keep borrowing, at some point we must default and maybe even say 'na na na na we won't pay you back!'

The saddest indictment of the NHS is that people go private to be seen more quickly. But at least we always had that option. I couldn't believe that in some Canadian provinces there was no private provision at all (e.g. Quebec, but I believe private practice has recently been allowed). US seniors may have gone north for their pills, but the Canadians with a bit of money went south for their treatment. Though it could be argued that going private is the public spirited thing to do, because your taxes pay for the NHS and if you don't use it, someone who needs it can use it.

Finally, it could also be argued that Thatcher's economic miracle was primarily because North Sea oil began to be exploited when she came to power, injecting massive amounts of money into the system and enabling lots of cheap energy. Then again, South Korea (no oil) and Nigeria (lots of oil) were in similar shape after World War II. There's a big difference between them now.

perspective

Nuclear can be dangerous, like flight, but it's heavily regulated so that for the vast majority of the time it is very safe. A bit like the millennium bug. The world didn't end with DARPA's computers turning on the ICBMs on 1st January 2000, not because there was no risk of problems (to banks, if not the ICBMs), but because a lot of people did a lot of work to minimise the problems.

A road traffic incident might not be anywhere near the disruption of Fukushima, but after the suicide of a man jumping off a flyover in Belfast, much of the city ground to a halt for most of the day when the police closed the vitally important stretch of road where the man had jumped. Or someone leaves a 'device' somewhere, viable or not, and vast areas are cordoned off and evacuated, just because the risk is small, but the public services have to cover their backs.

retina display!

According to these numbers the E6 has the same dot pitch as the iPhone 4.

It'll need all them pixels to make the new font look good, because although I hate the old one, at least it is legible all squeezed up. The new font is nice, but I don't know if it will look right as a UI font, especially on small device.

just something about it

looks like it's trying just a little too hard to be classy.

Anyway, the postbox pic looks atrocious for what's supposed to be a higher-end camera. Especially strange compared to the lovely photo of the flowers.

Helvetica?

It's nothing like Helvetica. The terminals are completely different, more like Arial, though still more open. It is, however, much less obnoxious than Nokia's previous font, which had only one good point: it was legible when squeezed. I think the new lowercase forms of Pure are slightly too rounded. I looked up a few screenshots of Pure in use and it looks good at very low density. It shows some pretty crazy kerning on the ce combo that wouldn't be available for oe. And it reminds be a bit of the new Ubuntu font when used as a UI across the whole screen.

http://www.meegoexperts.com/2011/03/nokia-pure-font-showing-stuff-n900-maemo/

Desert Strike

That taught us you only need one helicopter to topple a mad dictator.

Great game. Fond memories.

Or Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: you need a few tanks, planes, ships and artillery, but I found the best units were helicopters and troops with parachute or orbital insertion capability.

Also, I thought the last hundred or so pages of Clancy's the Bear and the Dragon were almost worth the pain of the preceding 800 pages. The US managed to destroy most of the Chinese 3rd Army with a couple of their biggest sub-nuclear bombs. After the F-15s with AWACS support cleared the skies of the PLAAF for the bombers. And I think most of the fighting was done by the time the US armor had rolled across from Germany by train. And the Rainbow team + the Russians they were training was sent as far as the Chinese ICBM sites by helicopter(!) Naturally the ICBM that took off before they could sabotage it burned up the Russians and not the Rainbow team.