Posts by Robert E A Harvey
2417 posts • joined Sunday 8th October 2006 16:17 GMT
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Posted in Online sync'n'store services
Penguins?
Not enough mention of Linux clients for my liking.
* dropbox has a well-regarded linux client, but is very expensive.
* carbonite doesn't like penguins.
* Ubuntu One does 20Gb for 30USD per year, which still seems over-priced to me.
MSCE?
I recall a double MSCE, married to another MSCE, who had to ring her dad to find out how to copy a file from a floppy disk to a hard disk....
depends
did anyone else have the chilli?
Soap opera
A thoughtful, well researched, and insightful piece about what might have been, or how things could have been otherwise.
And you know what? I don't care. When companies get so big (and I work for another $MEGACORP) the decisions become divorced from the product, customers, and workforce. People start to see the abstract or intangible as real, and the real as mere 'detail'.
It becomes - as so eloquently reported here - about personalities. So much management effort expended on everything but the product. This is why Vista was such a dog, Phone7 is a lash-up, and security is never good enough.
Ho hum and goodnight. I don't care.
and
If they;d called it operation windows phone 7 they would have been too late to achieve anything
ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
et en Francais?
In these internationalisation days, I wonder if the same fuss is being made in French, Urdu, Mandarin or Welsh?
Thought not.
Transit passes
In about 1969/70 I was on a tanker with a satellite dish. To call goonhilly you had to stop the ship, get a really good nav fix (probably bearings off a pair of radar beacons) and contact Portishead Radio by morse on short wave with the details. If you were lucky you got a timeslot, transponder frequency, beacon frequency, rise time, rise azimuth and orbital inclination.
At rise time you steered the dish around the rise azimuth till you saw the beacon on the spectrum analyser, then started tracking up the inclination. although semi-automatic some manual steering was still required. Then you tuned the transciever to the transponder & listened to other peoples calls till your timeslot came up. The Skipper or the Chief engineer then spoke to head office for a few minutes till the end of your slot. Typically a 25 minute pass was split into 2 minute slots.
Frankly, compared to SSB on short wave it was a right palava. It didn't really catch on till Inmarsat A came out.
But I loved it. Real satellites. Goonhilly. Mechanical x-y resolvers to do the tracking. GOONHILLY! I was talking to Goonhilly on a sputnik! spectrum analysers, double logarithmic AGC Cascaded filters, link budgets, sun avoidance, band choice, horizontal sextant angles, low-elevation diffraction, 350ms propagation delay, true and false horizons. Goonhilly. satellites.
God, it was dodgy and awkward and unreliable, but it was so much fun. Now THAT was cutting edge
inevitable
I never trusted this mobile internut idea. They hopelessly over-sold what wap could do, then a few years later tried to cash in on a bit of unused bandwidth. That sold, rather to the telcos surprise, so they exploited it as a new cash bonanza. Did they build a matching infrastructure? did they bollox.
When people tried to achieve what they had been sold, the telcos - who already have the cash, just withdrew the service.
Same sort of scam as adsl, but with even less chance to deliver.
whot?
"after you've downloaded it, it will tell you how to get the Windows code"
why?
Is there some terrible secret?
Like it costs £99?
yep
Its difficult to see how an enforcement operation could be run the way Ofcom is currently structured.
Bring back the GPO, I say.
ye glods
You can go to the theatre a fair few time for that much cash. And not have to knock through to the kitchen to fit anything on the wall.
yuk
Just because something is possible, that doesn't make it a good idea.
expired
Well, frankly, the whole windows thing bores me to death, so maybe thats it?
Transpondian Lingo
I have noticed several stories talking about Goosing things, and am having a reality failure. Where I come from "goosing" is a less-than-innocent intervention of one [fully dressed] adult upon another. The sort of thing made famous by Beryl Cook:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/05/31/article-1023215-016E7ADD00000578-405_233x312.jpg
(sorry about the origin of the image, google images has no taste at all.)
Can someone offer a translation of the Left-pond usage for a rather startled brit?
Yawn
The publicity machine rolls on. BT got what they wanted - a positive image. The campaigners got what they wanted - a faster feed than their brother-in-law. No-one died. And, Frankly, Nothing much happened.
Yawn.
Well, quite
A bit of folded cardboard and some computer annimations are a long way from a real product.
or
There is a point, people just don't enjoy it.
Posted in LG uncloaks six-foot 3D TV
but
surely the more of the buggers there are, the more bandwidth you need?
ha ha ha ha
That's still nearly £50 per machine to buy something you already have!
A decade too late
Why, in the name of glod, didn't they do this a decade ago? or two?
Along with a standard file format for address book entries? That could be read straioght off the phone in usb mode, rather than requiring MS Look Out?
echo
I've had that problem. Worse, I work abroad so I get charged for receiving sms spam.
If a web site insists on a phone number, I either use their own or 0207 944 1212 (whitehall 1212)
Posted in LG uncloaks six-foot 3D TV
It's really Steroscopy
I can't be doing with it all, I really can't.
Its really hard to justify HD, let alone 3D.
Pubs are full of Giant 625 line screens showing footie to halfwits. I've never once heard a knuckle-dragger complain that there weren't enough pixels on that.
The more pixels there are the worse the compression artifacts get. You know those amazing shots of the start of the London Marathon? or of flocks of barnacle geese all changing direction at once? I've seen those block-and-freeze on ordinary dtv. 3D must have twice the pixels. No thanks.
Selling point
If apple made a dual-sim one I'd buy it tomorrow.
Yeah
come back happy, or not at all as my old boss used to say.
Excellent
UK government please note. And copy.
seriously vague
The League of Nations was set up After the first world war, precisely because of the desire to avoid a war. It was discredited by the outbreak of the 2nd, but is an important predcessor to the UN in many ways.
German
Our German friends do that with the trams. But you need a rules-complaint population.
In some cities if you buy a one-use paper ticket you are supposed to stamp it as you get on to stop you using it twice. I've seen people in Hannover get onto a tram with a broken stamper, and then get off to wait for the next one so they can remain compliant.
Miss!
He said "Lappy" Miss! we aren't supposed to say "La..." Oh bugger.
Posted in O2 promises to tap-up customers in 2011
Are people simple, or what?
Your phone suggests you buy something and you do? Oh come on.
Open your wallet and repeat after me "Help Yourself"
Anyone tries this trick on my phone and it will meet with a nasty accident.
yes!
"Windows tablets aren't failing because they have x86 processors. They're failing because they have Windows. "
Applause.
no
People won't want to run desktop apps on a platform that doesn't do pre-emptive multi-tasking
it ought to be
>I should imagine it would not be a trivial 're-compile' to get those apps running.
It ought to be. As they work out why its not, they will find out why their products are not maintainable.
old,old story
>Next year, when tablet2 comes out and is the next 'must have' our hero
>doesn't even bother looking at the Windows version.
Except that if we let M$ in they will stitch up the market so you won't be able to buy without paying an M$ tax
Innovation is good
I am delighted that some people have the balls to be different. Innovation is what we need, and its not as though X, gnome, kde, etc.etc. will cease to exist.
Contrast and compare with windull, where you get the choice of one filesystem and one ui. And every bit of hardware comes with disks that patch the OS to make then work.
and...
and you should not start paying till you are talking to a human (preferably on the same continent)
Now _that's_ a thought. All calls to out-of-country helpdesks should be free. Then you would be paying what they are worth!
Oh ffs
Can't we stop fiddling with things for half a minute. I DON'T WANT TO CHANGE MY SODDING NUMBER AGAIN.
When I got a phone it was Bourne xxxx. Then 0476 97 xxxx. Then 07842 xxxx Then 0780 42xxxx Now it is 01780 42xxxx . My mobile started out as 0658 xxx xxxx Then 089 xxx xxxx Now it is 0789 xxx xxxx
had a shop for 12 years. In that time I had to reprint the stationery 4 times for number changes, & once when they did away with telex.
oh dear
Another reason to keep my 8 year old phone.
Look, lads, try asking if I want my phone to be my wallet. And then listen to the sodding answer.
who'd have thought it?
"Miscavige described Anonymous as a group of "mask-wearing subversive and anarchistic internet denizens"."
No? really? Gosh.
Don't believe a word of it
They called the police, and they got there in less time than it takes to pull one off?
Impossible.
Posted in FBI 'planted backdoor' in OpenBSD
or windows?
>Who thinks they stopd at smallest dist?"
or indeed at non-commercial software?
Only one suitable icon
or
or, indeed, a hosts file such as http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
...and
we'd never have seen the cow with the flaming flatulence if we were blocking...
Posted in Ten... sub-£150 PMPs
Sansa Fuze+
They've dropped the timed FM recording that the original Fuze has, and have not implemented folder navigation even though they provided that on the Clip+. The touch interface got a serious kicking on the Sansa site forum, although nearly all the critical messages have now been removed.
I can't see any advantage over the original Fuze, and won't be buying one.
Posted in EMEA server market grows some legs
EMEA?
where I live this usually means 'East Midlands, East Anglia'. Or the incest belt.
Paris knows all about family relationships
Posted in EU telecoms to Apple, Google: 'Pay up!"
Hmm.
'you break, you pay'? sounds reasonable at first.
How about 'You promise, you deliver.'?
All these telcos & isps sold us a service where we could stream video, download isos, share pictures, really quickly. If they can;t provide that for the quoted price that is their fault, surely?
All together now. 'You promise, you deliver.'
ROTM?
I'd suggest this was an ROTM story, except in his case they wouldn't have to rise very far at all.
oops
That's it. Oops. Even my netbuk uses salted shadow passworms.
