Posts by Robert E A Harvey
2417 posts • joined Sunday 8th October 2006 16:17 GMT
Page:
Posted in Channel islanders attack Street View car
For Glod's sake
A kid with a box brownie could cover the whole place in one afternoon.
Surely googlers can walk?
Parkable phone
I agree entirely about the parkable phone idea. It would be brilliantly small, only needing enough battery power for half an hour max.
I have another idea. I have a bluetooth earset that parks in its own battery recharging lump. A parkable bluetooth headset that would recharge from the larger battery would also be cool, and could be paired with the parkable phone too.
untitled
>I'm actually surprised his salary is so low,
I was thinking that. We appear to have heads of individual hospitals earning that.
Perhaps?
>so why hasn't OSS triumphed?
The power of marketing?
The common 'plaint against M$ is its abuse of monopoly. The two local computer stores in my home town have both told me this week that they are 'not allowed' to sell me a computer without Windows,
But it is still the case that the fundamental weakness of FOSS is the absence of a huge marketing department.
dislike adds
I pay mail.com so I don't have to put up with adverts.
I'd give google a pound a month to search without ads.
Posted in Ten... iPhone 4 cases
Ten Essential... iPhone 4 cases
TEN? ESSENTIAL? How many cases does the wretched thing need? Do all these fit inside each other, or something?
I hear the distinct sound of the bottom of a barrel being scraped.
Cool
I want one.
Posted in OpenOffice files Oracle divorce papers
no title
>I guess you don't like Television, which if IRC is a mix of Greek and Latin
True. But there are many better reasopns for disliking television. Such as television programmes.
Testing
maybe Apple needed a test connector during development & proving? what more obvious than one they have as standard?
Yep
>"email traditionalists" + "Outlook users" = oxymoron
Yep. Any sentence with "outlook" and "moron" in it is automatically grammatically correct.
Posted in OpenOffice files Oracle divorce papers
Not sure
>Not even MS can trademark a word as generic as "Office".
Anywhere sensible, yes. US, no. After the way Apple just claimed 'Pad'?
Leftpondian bo**cks
I can't imagine a judge in England, or France for that matter, taking any longer over this that the time it takes to laugh.
People who live in a country where this can even be taken seriously long enough to start an action need to have a word with their politicians.
Posted in Apple iPod Shuffle 4G
+1
Ive got a sansa clip and a fuze, both heavily used. To the point where the batteries are worn out. I want another fuze, because you can set timers to record FM programmes off the radio. It's how I record the Carols from Kings while driving to get my mother-in-law for christmas.
Posted in Back-to-college 15in Notebooks
whats occuring?
When I were a lad we bought second hand textbooks & greatcoats, not brand new gadgets!
Can't speak for anyone else
but the ones I have had (mostly HP) have been clunky, unreliable, and not much good as phones. My disliking of them is not prejudice it is expience.
All required frequent rebooting, and two of them had to be coldstarted and the contact/applications reloaded every week or so.
I just can't be doing with it, and won't be bothering with the new ones.
Oh, perhaps the bluetooth will work in the new ones, but they put it in the old ones and swore blind it worked. Maybe the syncing with outlook won't strip the + sign off all the international numbers, but the last 4 did that and I'm not going to risk my own money on that sort of pedigree. And in any case, I don't want to sync to Outlook. ever again.
The last HP, a 617 that I bought from expansys was appalling. I once turned it off for a flight from Korea to the UK, and found half a dozen 'welcome to the ussr' messages on it when i turned it on. The only way to turn it off was to take the battery out. I sent the bloody thing back.
My wife bought me the 6301 having been told that, being windows, it could be kept up to date. No software updates for it were ever issued, no matter how badly broken the included software was. That was the one that worked as a PDA, but the phone app would silently crash with no obvious sign that it wasn't working until you tried to make a call.
Four times bitten, now shy. I will NOT be bothering them again.
Did you get an unexpected email?
If so, then your details were compromised.
its not rocket science
who cares?
I've given up on smart phones, they are too fiddly and too much bother. I'd rather carry a phone that';s just a phone and use my UNR based netbook for everything else.
Posted in Seagate rolls out 1.5TB external whopper
Host powered? or power brick?
There is no mention of how the thing is powered in the article.
I went to look at the press release, which says it comes formatted NTFS, but makes no mention of the power brick. It does say "all in one" so perhaps there isn't one. The box shot on engadget allows you to read the 'whats in the box' bit, and there is no mention of a power adaptor there.
So perhaps its host powered? Is that right?
Yep
As a token ring veteran from the 1970s, it was the first thing that came to my mind. But does each core have a separate ring adaptor, or does it handle the ring directly?
Just how far ahead of its time was the transputer?
every icon tells a story
White Doctor's coats. That's yer answer
News Quiz...
"Amateur dramatics is like naturism. The keenest participants are the ones you aren't interested in watching"
I'll get me,,,, no 'ang on, that's not allowed, is it?
and
"open to new members"
excellent!
Old arguement, see 1980s.
I had this conversation when $DEFUNCTCORP tried to sell off its vaxes and SGI stations. I'd told them when we bought it that the software wasn't an asset, but they had put it in the asset register & the liquidators kept refusing offers for the hardware because the system was on the books at a much higher price.
Long, long arguments, but since they stopped paying me after 12 days I stopped trying to explain.
Go gpl! it's the only answer.
will this do for a title?
"Anybody who starts saying "facebook me" deserves a good slap."
Well, given that we have *facepalm* and *headdesk* to imply low-impact percussive events, presumably *facebook* carries similar implications, only involving a 2nd party giving someone a thwack with e.g. a telephone directory.
And a good idea too.
Snake oil, Jam tomorrow, come to our grand re-opening, New-improved etc.
"Wikileaks will soon post biggest military leak ever"
Do I detect a self-publicist in a state of fugue?
I am reminded of children in the playground "I know something you don't, nah nah".
Posted in Cyberlink v. Nero media authoring suites
But I don't want either of them
I really don't like this monolithic approach. It seems a bit like world domination to me.
I look at either of these, and the density of what I'm being asked to absorb just makes my brain shut down. Why would I want a disc burner that edits video? It's like going to buy a car and being offered something that has helicopter blades and a JCB digging arm on the back. Your first thought will be 'it won't fly well, and you can't do much digging with that blade whizzing round".
I use programmes that do one thing well, like Brasero or CDBurnerXP. If I want to edit MP3 tags, I use Kid3-qt. If I want to edit audio use audacity. To rip CDs I use Rythmbox or EAC
I can't believe that any of these huge bundles of software are really very good at everything they try to do. And I worry that they devote so much time to bit-twiddling graphical apps that they forget to pay attention to the basic task of burning discs.
nearly true
>doesn't any machine running Windows deceive humans on a daily basis?
but not ALL humans
Posted in BT preps nationwide TV network
History
Video-on-demand was BT's pipedream back when Martlesham was still a research lab. AIUI the rf component of adsl had it's origin in Video-over-copper ideas.
What they need to look at is one of their oldest ideas - street level caching. If 5 people in the street want to watch the same football match it makes no sense to transfer it over the whole route 5 times. Once to the street cab & 5 times to the subscribers. Or another old chestnut - video on near demand. People ask for content, which is distributed with fixed start times e.g. 2 minutes apart. They get an hourglass till the next start time.
Posted in Beeb creates new global iPlayer post
Or payment
I'd be quite happy to buy remote access, as when I am out of the country my wife is still at home getting value for the TV licence.
I, for one
Have turned off autorun on all my windoze machines, often by installing Suse on top of them.
But my $MEGACORP flaptop has some sort of "fixed image" corporate tool. You turn off autorun, or change the default printer away from 'Microsoft XPS Document Writer' and within a few minutes it has changed back the way they like it. At which point I go 'ho hum' and let them get on with it.
Does anyone know what 'm2nl.bat' (which is not a bat file) does? $MEGACORP seems to not mind it infecting my memory sticks.
cost
I reckon that each email sent should cost something. Then 'reply all' would become much less frequently used.
The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.
ROTM?
Which may be the real story
>antispam was more useful than the antivirus
Given how much we spend on AV, how come such a well-known technique has been so succesful?
What do all these heuristic modes do? sound posh?
and why does the bl**dy OS still allow stuff like this in the first place? over a decade later?
Full traceability
Back in the 1990s I was lobbying for ISPs to get together and come up with different MTA protocols that would not allow spammers to hid behind anonymity or forged headers. None of them saw it as their job.They, of course, were quite happy to make money without actually doing any work. A more responsible attitude then might be saving us a lot of grief now.
We won't crack security problems while we are still using code designed for ARPA. Perhaps the time has come (is overdue) for the CCITT or some other telecoms body to define a new method of sending/recieving email that cannot be abused like this. It would not be so hard to migrate everyone: people interested in avoiding spam would be the trailblazers, and I reckon in 2 years pop3/smtp would be as dead as fidonet.
Here's an idea
>Microsoft Active Response for Security.
How active would it be to add some security to the OS?
Everywhere I worked plan A was "sell stuff that works"
Posted in Flaming work laptop toasts cottage
can't decide
Is the victim or the help desk the bigger moron?
If something is overheating, turn it off. And if it is really hot, put it somehwere outside.
(I suppose we should be grateful they didn't tell her to put it in a bucket of water)
Posted in HP Pavilion dv6-3085ea 15.6in notebook
whole bunch of them
The HP web site appears to have a whole bunch of these so perhaps it is possible to buy one without the fingerprint gadget. I can't make head nor sense of all the model numbers and processor types. Life is too short for all these arcane non-sequential type numbers.
the 3085 and 3065 appear to have identical specs but are fifty quid different in price. What is this, bait and switch?
ignoring all the rude remarks
(And Amy Pond is very attractive)
It is now possible to use a wiimote on Linux, will the sonic screwdriver work too?
apple TV
"other technology companies did not seem to understand that consumers didn't want a computer in their living room. "
Or, in mine, a TV. If big, historic, broadcasters can't make anything wort watching, what reason is there to suppose a control freak's overpriced online store would be any better?
The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.
Not to mention http://www.scambuster419.co.uk/ and it's hilarious 'context' site http://www.freewebs.com/gyppinginthemarsh/index.html
Posted in Doctor Who goes to the Proms
same word, different meaning
A 'promenade' concert is one where the audience can wander around, in and out and (in the 19th C at least), make assignations with their mistress or trollop while being at a perfectly respectable event.
In the 18th century a "promenade" social was an event where people would walk around e.g. Bath or Edinburgh showing off their best clothes, mingling socially without introduction or formalities, and make assignations with their mistress or trollop while being at a perfectly respectable event.
In Edwardian times, a 'promenade' was a paved area near the sea-side where the newly leisured lower and middle classes could stroll around taking the air, and meeting other people informally, and make assignations with their mistress or trollop while being at a perfectly respectable event.
Now what was that about american teenagers again?
but...
it's not as bad as being paid for answering a phone to support a product you know nothing about and don't understand.
wrong
Don't you mean 'budgie smugglers', not speedos?
quite
I'm an international service engineer, and I fly several times a week. I've yet to be on a flight with in-flight wifi.
And if I ever am, and if it is free (which it won't be) I will use it to read Girl Genius and Schlock Mercenary, not to work.
Posted in Samsung R780 17.3in laptop
Want one
I'm typing this on a Samsung SensG910 19" laptop in a cybercafe at Seoul airport, and it is very tasty indeed. I rather think I want one.
The keyboard is slightly gimp in that there are no page up page down buttons except the old-fashioned ones on keypad 9 & 3, need numlock. Otherwise it seems fairly splendid.
Screen is 16:10, not come across that before, 19", 7200 rpm hard disk, 1000:1 contrast ratio.
I reckon big FO laptops are very cool.
I reckon
I reckon the doctor should have regenerated as Karen Gillan, that would have been much more fun.
Paris, but only 'cos we don't have an Amy Pond icon.
Posted in PARIS team cracks Vulture 1-X wing
I was going to say most of that
Rather than the diagonal bracing tubes in compression, why not diagonal bits of cotton thread in tension? That would be much lighter and be able to handle much the same by way of forces.
A leading edge profile and a trailing edge stiffener would be normal - perhaps a horizontal bit of card of the same material as the ribs, slotted into the trailing edge? and three slotted radially into the leading edge?
