Posts by Nosher
18 posts • joined Tuesday 12th January 2010 13:19 GMT
Always Connected my arse
I have a two-day-a-week 1.5-hour-each-way commute to London during which I work (as part of my working day). Even though the Greater Anglia Inter City train has fairly good WiFi (considering it's a train and all), I find that unless it's *perfect* then all these Google Drive apps are a waste of time as *everything* they do (even just adding text) depends on some AJaX backhaul. Using them is tedious beyond words, so I find myself still using LibreOffice and such to create docs and spreadhseets whilst on the move. So much for the liberation of The Cloud: it'll probably be a generation before the cellular/radio/LTE/whatever network is good enough /everywhere/ between Diss and London, whilst travelling at over 100mph, for this to work practically and seamlessly.
An actual 8-track floppy/tape implementation
1977's Compucolor 8001 had an /actual/ 8-track cartridge tape system (which they called "Floppy Tape Memory") available for it. It was capable of storing 1MB (that was a lot of storage back then) which could be read at 4800baud.
iTedious
Sigh. Whilst this is an excellent idea, what has that fact it was an iPhone got to do with anything? Nothing. If anything, it might put other people off trying this out as they can't afford the Apple premium.
Petulant Freeloading Children
There's a lot of noise here, and much of it is the sound of petulant tantrums and the stamping of feet. "Oh, but America has got some program so I WANT IT TOO!!". It might be frustrating (and I'm not suggesting that there aren't much better business models), but where does it say there's some kind of Fundamental Universal Right to get hold of something someone else decides to create on any terms other than theirs, regardless of how much they decide to charge or where they decide to release it first? If you find those terms annoying, you're free to reject their offer and go out and create your own album's worth of music or $1million-per-episode TV program. Oh, what's that? You can't because you're not creative or talented enough??
Is it the 1980s again?
Meh. 1985 called and wants its story back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartwatch#Seiko_RC_series
Apple are dominant only if you choose your stats carefully
Apple's perceived dominance of the smartphone market is something of a myth. Ok, they have fairly dominated the app market for most of the time since the release of the release of the iphone, and there is no doubt that they dominate the profits, but in terms of units they've never amounted to more than about 25% of the smartphone market and more like only 10% of the entire mobile market. The iphone became a media poster child, which gave the impression that it was the *only* device around, leading gullible media types to conclude that it was the whole market and nothing else mattered.
Re: Why?!?
Shame that Apple wasn't actually the first at anything, when it came to "home computers". The Apple 1 /was/ vaguely innovative in having TV out and support for a keyboard, but it internally it was probably much like other 6502 machines around at the time (like the MOS KIM-1 - the development board). And it was still a kit - you had to provide a monitor, a keyboard, a case and a PSU yourself. The Apple II wasn't the first home computer either, being announced several months after the Commodore PET. Its other contemporary in the "1977 Trinity" - the Tandy/RadioShack TRS-80 - sold 5 times as many computers in the first four years after the Apple was released and it wasn't until Visicalc came along that the Apple started shifting units (even then being released on the Apple was more coincidence than anything).
So enough with the Apple revisionism, please!
Annoyed Lingua-Pedantry
FFS! Being "vegetarian" is an ethical position - an active choice made by a person to eschew eating meat or animal-derived products. I think you'll find that dinosaurs (or indeed any other animal) do not actively choose one way or the other and that the word "herbivore" is what you're looking for in this case.
Frankly, I'm with Debenhams on this. Anything that has got so utterly pretentious that it requires a "trained barista" to make it is so up its own arse with its self-important sense of metropolitan uber-trendiness that it's not even funny any more. Watching people chugging one of any number of varieties of *the same basic drink* out of their baby sippy cups just makes me squirm.
It's amusing (in a deeply ironic, depressing way) to read people grumbling about "only getting 37mbps" or "only managing 8mbps". Living in rural Suffolk, the maximum where I am is 2.5mbps, but I'm actually still on 1mbps - yes, *one* - simply because it's an old Demon uncontested circuit and the throughput is way better than that from the 2.5mbps circuit (it was probably poor DSLAM profiling when I briefly switched to ADSL "Max", but I could never persuade Demon to investigate it). Still, 1mbps is just enough to stream from LoveFilm...
VM have no credibility in these arguments when their closed network reaches less than 50% of the population, and they're doing nothing to extend their reach (and most likely never will).
Try living in /my/ world, high-speed townie whingers!! :-)
Dammit! No need for the apostrophe in "leccy"
You guys keep needlessly prepending the slang word "leccy" with an apostrophe, when it shouldn't have one (the word Eleccy does not exist). If you're treating it as being a contraction (like 'ello), then it would be 'lec'c'y, but that's clearly daft.
Apple behaviour?
"Selling out of a product depends as much on the stocks you have as the level of demand"
Of course Apple would never do such a thing, would they?
What about J2ME/MIDP?
Funny that they chose not to sue over the various manufacturer implementations of J2ME or MIDP back in the 2000's. Or were they all actually "licenced"? Or was it that they weren't juicy-enough targets at the time...?
Pure Evoke Flow and O2 Jogglers
I found with Coherence (Python-based DNLA server) that I had to set the DNLA/UPnP version to Version 1 for my O2 Joggler to work with my content. My Pure Evoke Flow, on the other hand, seems to work flawlessly with both Coherence and MediaTomb - however, you might get some joy just by changing the version your server provides.
Internet Radio my arse
Yeah, because internet radio would work *really* well in my car on the drive to work - 53 miles each way with perfect DAB coverage across Suffolk and into Cambridge with the enjoyable company of 6Music. Don't get me wrong - I love inernet radio. At home. With a computer (or my Squeezebox). With broadband. Please just stop slagging DAB - you clearly don't actually use it. Only a few of the issues you constantly raise are legit - yes DAB+ would be better, etc, etc. but it's hardly the end of the world if it doesn't work in Europe (you've clearly not listened to French radio) but the audio quality issue is completely bogus - it sounds perfectly good in the car and on my Pure Evoke Flow in the kitchen, and is shed-loads better than the AM tech which seemed to suffice for Radio 1 until 1988 - nobody moaned constantly about that (much). Enough already!
So is HD TV a "failure" too?
Actually, according to RAJAR figures, the number of households with DAB radios is "over one third". The number with HD TVs (including those with HD-ready TVs but without an HD service, which is arguably comparable to those with DAB radios who only listen to FM) is around 40%, so in your measured opinion does that make HD TV a failure too?
Why not try for 14TeV now?
Soooo... if it's scheduled to be off-line for a year anyway, and the outcome of a possible failure is similar to the last time it blew up, then why don't they just try a full-power run for a laff? What's the worst that can happen? Oh, it's offline for a year to fix it. Erm...
Nudity != Porn
I don't get it. Since when did fuzzy images of simple nakedness, i.e. of people in their *natural form* equate to pornography?
"por·nog·ra·phy (pôr-nŏg'rə-fē): Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal."
OK, so some people might get off on that sort of thing, but porno it is not, and thus I fail to see how any "pornography" law would even apply. The world is losing touch with reality...
