Posts by mrfill 205 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2009
If the saintly Apple do not copy then I assume that the iPhone 5 will not have a large screen (been done lots of times) and that the iPad mini will have a screen the same size as the iPad. 7 inch tablets have been around a while and entry into this market will be just more slavish copying - err.... innovation
To a lot of the public, iPhone, iPad and iPod are now eponymous so they may have a Samsung iPhone, a Creative iPod and an Advent iPad in the same way as they have a Dyson hoover. They are concerned with the function of the product not who made it. Naturally, this excludes the Brand sheep who choose one regardless of quality, price or usefulness just because it has a certain logo on.
If people ask for an iPhone and take away a non-iPhone, it isnt their confusion - it is the sellers deception and that is no manufacturers fault.
Not quite... it is how companies are INITIALLY funded. The company initially owns the share and sells it to X and pockets the money. When X sells that share to Y, the company makes not a bean and every other transaction after the initial sale creates zero for the company.
Once you sell your company to the market, you cease to own it so do not profit from sales. However, you are still liable to pay any dividend declared by the board who are appointed by the company owners i.e. the shareholders.
This doesn't seem to be the case in the world of cameras, MPVs, aeroplanes, televisions and many other products. I suspect a lot of people like the idea of several similar products to choose from. Having a choice of one does rather smack of a Stalinist ideology and rather flies in the face of the idea that competition is a good thing
I guess Australia never got the Allegro, the first car to have a square (well 'quartic') steering wheel.
Clearly the Allegro design team have been working hard since then and the Win8 UI is their latest masterpiece so - WIndows Allegro
I'll bloody sue if they do.....
That assumes that the arse you are overtaking doesnt speed up in the way that a lot of pompous arrogant halfwit British drivers do to protect their manhood. What should you do? Brake and try to get into the gap behind which has been closed by another arse or speed up to get out the way of these fools?
To overtake safely requires both parties to behave sensibly. This is often not the case but you dont actually find out until alongside a twat.
It is quite possible to drive quickly and safely. It is also possible to drive within the speed limit at all times and be the greatest menace on the road - no spy-in-the-car will protect the good driver against them.
If speed is so dangerous then we must stop all police, fire and ambulance vehicles from exceeding any limit as they are endangering the public. Any excuse that the driver is properly trained cannot be allowed as properly trained drivers in their own vehicles are not exempt.
I was talking with a friend only last night about the BBC B which prompted me to ferret around in the cupboard and bring out my fully working example! Also in the cupboard was my old Amstrad PPC640 - the 'laptop' for those with extraordinarily strong laps. Two (!) floppy drives, modem built in and a huge battery consumption. A real cutting edge machine...
God knows why I still have them...
I use Skype on linux. I can make and receive calls (with or without video) perfectly well. I can send text messages, call PSTN phones, make conference calls and use it anywhere in the world I can get a net connection.
So what doesnt work properly? The windoze version may have more bling and lots of useless flim-flam to impress the 'I want shiny things' crowd but is also more resource greedy and bloated - rather like MSN. At least the linux version is stable.
In the late 80s when they de-mutualised, in came a new team of dynamic halfwit top management who gave the user depts more power. The user management decided that the IT dept were just "overpaid clerks" and that their favourite poodles could do the job just as well for less money.
I'm delighted to see the chaos that resulted is still going on twenty odd years later.
I worked for NU and was 'restructured' in their first wave of dumping staff in1993.
On execution day, everyone had to remain at their desk. Outside calls were banned and incoming calls had to be refused unless from The Blue Building. My phone rang and I was summoned and told my skillset did not meet their requirements. I was escorted back to my desk (with instructions to talk to no-one), given a fine selection of M&S plastic bags to clear my desk and then marched out. It was all a bit Pythonesque but was the best thing that ever happened to me. I got 3 months 'gardening leave' on full pay and then 30K tax free. I hated my job so it was a nice reward and I took 6 months off to look after my newly born son and then got a contract for twice the money. I'm now just about to get another huge tax free bung and a good pension from Aviva (i had worked for NU for 21 years). It looks like they have refined the firing process a little but otherwise the competence has remained at near-zero. I bet the management still all have snappy suits, slick hair and bugger all brains.
On of my project leaders there was a DJV. An excellent man and far too good for that bunch of clowns.
If it is such a great deterrent, why is it that in neighbouring states in the US, one with, one without the death penalty, the murder rate (especially the murder of police) is always higher in the states with the death penalty?
Perhaps it could be that in a state with the death penalty, you may as well kill as many as you can. In which case the death penalty actually encourages murder rather than deter it.
Most murders in the UK are 'crimes of passion' - man killing nagging wife or wife killing violent husband. If you want to deter murder, it would be more effective to ban Stella Actatwat.
Charging by volume will allow the government to introduce an 'internet tax' very easily. I believe Belgium does this.
Anything other than uniform pricing will increase costs as the additional billing costs far outweigh any savings. Most ISPs have speed calculators for given numbers and these are generally reasonably accurate. If that says 2Mb and you get 2Mb then you dont have grounds for complaint, even if the generic advertising says 'up to xMb'.
What Wispas campaign might achieve is a huge increase in costs for the majority. Upping the cost of an 'up to 8Mb' connection to, say £30/month will allow the few to have slight reductions for underspeed lines, subsidised heavily by the rest. Bad news. The ISPs are desperate to increase their charges and they would love this plan.
Internet provision in the UK is pretty cheap when compared to a lot of countries and if you want a better service it will cost you a lot more. Telcos prefer to hand out huge profits to shareholders rather than investing in infrastructure. Witness Vodafone for example.
The solution? Check to see who offers what locally and select whichever option suits you. If you dont like any of them, then dont buy any.
To use the sugar analogy, if I buy a bag locally, it costs £1.20. If I buy at Tesco's (6 miles away) I pay 89p. I dont suggest that Tesco should increase their price to £1.20.
One huge disadvantage of a laptop is you dont get an air of smug superiority as you polish the screen to remove that morning's jam, shuffle a few icons around the screen and mess around zooming and panning photos of Great Aunt Ada knowing that, because you have a tablet, you must be considerably richer and important than yeow. Praise the lord I dont have to commute by train into Lundun.
In November, after a couple of months flooding, the wholesale price had increased by ~20% whereas retail prices had shot up by 200% and now they have dropped by 20%. Bit like the oil companies who up the price of fuel as soon as the oil price rises and then make some feeble excuse to maintain the high price when the oil price falls while blaming fuel duty (which hasn't increased).
Most of the plants were back up and running at the end of December and I saw almost no evidence that there had been any flooding anywhere in the country - certainly nothing much that affected normal life/business.
Its just the usual capitalist rip-off
I switched all my company mobiles (40+) to Giffgaff back in December. My monthly bill has dropped from £700 to around £150. The phone/text service has been much on a par with any other operator, the internet is not a patch on 3 but works after a fashion - slowly. The bugs in their card acceptance seems to have been resolved and this is the first major outage I have experienced and I'm not terribly distressed about it - shit happens.
Perhaps all the twatterers and bookfacers can temporarily get a life during this period of peace and quiet rather than telling the world what brand of toilet paper they prefer and using 'would of' instead of 'would have'.
It'll be back before long - its not the end of the world. Enjoy the silence
I'm afraid wifi is not actually 'everywhere'. In France it is illegal to operate wi-fi equipment outside for a start. In the UK, free open wifi is quite rare. You may be able to pick up a dozen signals but will you have the keys for all of them?? Clue: No.
A rather better money saving idea would be to not buy a vastly overpriced touch screen netbook. Depending on the model chosen you could save up to £649.
Many moons ago, before the Bling era, there was a mighty successful record company. It was called Apple and its logo was an apple cut in half. Year later a small computer company with totally original thinking decided to call itself Apple and have a logo of a half rainbow apple (with a bite taken). Apple sued Apple and in 1981 the evil pirate computer company had to pay a lot of money and promise not to enter the music business. They lied.
5 years later, the pirates introduced sound recording and got sued again. They agreed that it would not package, sell or distribute physical music materials. They lied
12 years later the pirates started iTunes - an entry into the music business (see 1981 above). Sued again but the pirates had enough money to get clever briefs and they survived.
Fast forward another 4 years and the pirates finally resolve matters. They get to keep the name and the logo and license the use by the record company. Reputedly, this cost the pirates $500m.
Apple - white as the driven slush
I think you'll find that when the police return the car they will arrest your son for fraudulent conversion and he would get prosecuted. The purchaser would be recompensed under the Criminal Injuries scheme. He would not be able to keep the car as good title had not passed.
If the Taiwan mob sold something it had no right to then Apple's case must fail or it is guilty of receiving stolen property.
Now, if anyone wants to buy the trade mark 'iTosser', its yours for £150000...
is that they didnt read the original article properly. There is no mention of an extra $30m, just that the total cost is 1m THB (which is $31,211,810 on today's rate, not 33m). The original article also states "As of June 30, total investment in Seagate's Nakhon Ratchasima and Samut Prakan provinces was 38 billion baht." so this is not really a big deal in the rand scheme of things anyway..
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