Posts by Robert E A Harvey
2413 posts • joined Sunday 8th October 2006 16:17 GMT
Page:
Posted in Samsung's Galaxy stuck in history
how odd
I thought these comments were moderated, but the mod seems to have missed a duplicate here!
Posted in It's the end of TV as we know it
it's all about the software
It's not IPtv or tv-on-demand that is 'the end of tv as we know it'. It is 'tv as we know it' that is 'the end of tv as we know it'.
The orignal BBC-only service was obliged to give a variety of programming, to a minimum standard. Then came ITV, with regional obligations and local programming. Even adding BBC2 and ch.4 wasn't a problem: they produced good, varied, programming
Now we have a multiplicity of satellite channels - which are either endless repeats of programmes from before satellite multiplicity (The good life, To the manor born, Fools and sodding horses) or are endlessly and minutely repetitive (escape to the sun in the country cooking kitchen) - and then endlessly repeated.
For glod's sake, further opportunities to view drivel doesn't stop it being drivel. We have enough distribution channels already - arguably far too many. What we don't have is anything remotely worth distributing on those channels.
I'm going to buy a season ticket for live theatre. And renew my library ticket. and then take the dogs for a long walk and check the local wildlife.
Paris. 'cos she is not only who the programmes are aimed at, but who they are about!
Posted in O2 grovels for London network failure
Knew it
3 years ago someone came up with the idea of selling off surplus bandwidth capacity for data. Then the marketing people realised it was a 'product' and started competing for the business with other networks.
Snag is, they forgot they were trying a bit of marginal revenue from a bit of underused capacity, and they have oversold it /without putting in any new infrastructure/.
Sound familiar?
Mobile suppliers really are the pits.
Posted in US mum calls 911 over Grand Theft Auto
My guess
I reckon they'd been hoping to gat a peek at this kid for drugs, porn, or hacking and this was the perfect opportunity.
Or they were bored witless
Speaking of witless...
bit late for this year
I gave up years ago on royal mail's search.
But with a nearly accurate name and half an idea of an adress it's a doddle to find subscribers on bt.com. If they've got a landline phone. The displayed address includes a postecode
Posted in 5-megapix 'iPhone 4' set for June?
Capitalism red in tooth and claw
Bit by bit they are converting the iphone into what people thought it was all along.
Clever, though. Selling the victims a new one every year, when they are on 2 year contracts.
Needless to say, I don't have one.
Aye
Cheered me up.
Now lets hope they have to 'patch' all the copies out there, because that will probably break them.
Posted in O2 takes a Christmas break
If you can
Good job you have an iPhone, then. I once bought an HP614c & there was no way to edit things lipe APNs. All you coud do was tell it your operator name. It thought it knew best after that.
Hear Hear
I have much the same approach, and now work on Large Power systems and PLCs instead of knocking my brains to bits re-learning the same product every 18 months
Hardware
I'd like the competition authorities to see that we have real alternatives of the OS supplied with the hardware. When Dell says "Dell recommends windows 7" and it really means "Dell enforces windows 7" something is wrong.
I do wish Apple would come down off the fence and sell OSX legitimately for generic installation.
Posted in DARPA scientists demand lightning on tap
It's been done
Gilgamish Wulfenbach:
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20071126
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20071203
(Where is the mad scientist icon, by the way?)
Schiphol
They have these at Amsterdam airport. Every time I am scanned I ask to see my image, and every time I am refused "because of privacy".
Posted in Amazon Kindle International Edition
Well, quite @AC
When I have finished with a book I lend it out, give it to Oxfam, leave it in a hotel library, or liberate them in public places (http://www.bookcrossing.com/)
I can put it in a box, bury it, and in 400 years someone can dig it up and read it.
When it goes out of copyright, people will still have access to it - they won't have to beg some lomg-dead company to unlock it.
ebooks? beyond the Gutenburg project, no thanks.
Oh, and as for the people who want to charge me 90% of the price of the physical object - just how gullible do you think I am?
Posted in Obama banks on NASA's big launcher
ESA? cHINA
Time for someone to step into the breach:
http://www.bristolspaceplanes.com/
http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/
Alien: 'cos they might offer to sub-contract
Quite simple
They don't want me to watch their movies. I won't.
You can't put DRM on live theatre, thank $DEITY
Posted in Hackintosher goes titsup
what next?
Do apple get the 2.7 mill they agreed with these people a fortnight ago, or have psystar evaded that by folding?
Nexus, Bing etc.
it's obvious that we are running out of words, especially if large companies want to own more than one each (Windows, Word, etc).
What we need is to triple the number of glyphs in the alphabet. Similar phonics, just three different ways of drawing each of them. The existing ones would be pronounced in our normal voice, one of the new set in basso profundo, and the other in falsetto.
You see, in the present alphabet Bing sounds the same as Bing, even though the first one was squeaked in a barry gibbs manner.
Then companies could use the squeaky ones for trivial products appealing to mall bunnies and the deep, resonant ones for really serious things like mainframe app generators
Can I copyright this idea?
Posted in Nokia sets date for netbook UK debut
what moron dreamed this up?
I'd give them £190 for it with suse 11.2 or ubuntu, but £649? You can buy a computer for that!
Hmmm
One of Terry Pratchett's characters described psychological warfare as keeping the enemy asleep all night chanting "We're going to cut yer tonkers off"
Posted in Motorola Milestone
No outlook sync?
I am supremely indifferent.
What I actually /want/ is a markup language style standard for address books that phones, email systems, etc. can all share, and then to serve it from a server somewhere.
Oh wait, that's LDAP isn't it? Cache it locally in the phone except when on wifi and my desires would be met.
Posted in Wireless mics get reduced bureaucracy
most commented?
How very odd. This story was at the top of 'most commented' - with 3 comments.
I've just boosted that by 33.3%, so it should now be unasailable!
Posted in 'Steve Jobs' repeals AT&T iPhone prank
Quite.
The networks started offering data as another way to sell the same cow, and have made promises they cannot keep.
Paint.
Why don't we paint all our roofs & tarmac roads gloss white?
Posted in Chumby internet-connected alarm clock
No BBC? No hope
As you say, a wireless that won't get test match special is not worth having.
err.
So I'm standing outside a coffee shop in the Angel, Islingtron, and see a dot pattern.
I photograph it, send it to google, and it says "you are outside a coffee shop in the Angel, Islington"
If this is regarded as cool technology, then I give up. If this is the best we can use all this silicon for, after years of effort, then.. well I don't know what.
Garden Trains
I'm sorry, but to me LGB will always be "Lehmann Gross Bahn" - see www.lgb.com .
The railway items are, in fact, the first 25 odd items returned by google
where is the steam engine icon?
Every word
Yes, they look both incompetent and like bullies.
And our government looks intransigent and uncaring.
There is only one icon suitable for this shameful and miserable excuse for a government.
McKinnon did something very stupid. But the punishment is out of all proportion, contrary to natural justice, and (given his mental condition) contrary to his human rights. Next time they lecture China, I am sure the chinese will have a ready repost.
umm
why no pictures
Bwahahahahhaaaa
"all going a bit Babylon 5" is absolute genius. I cannot promise not to nick it for use elsewhere
Decca Photoplot
In 1969 I used to service a true-track radar system called a Decca Photoplot. It had a tiny PPI crt display (you stared down a microscope to focus it). The ppi was tracked across the tube by separate xy deflection plates, resolving the ship's log and compass. The moving image exposed a 35mm film. After 6 minutes the film moved on one frame, the ppi reset, and incredibly tiny metering pumps flooded the exposed frame with developer & fixer, then the image was projected upwards onto a huge plotting table.
Kelvin hughes had an even wierder system, with a temporily photosensitive glass plate servoed across an ultraviolet ppi crt . There was a TV camera pointing at the plate which was 'interrogated' with blue light and fluoresced where the crt had burned in the target tracks. A few analogue buffers & you could have as many displays as you wanted on raster TVs. The plate was periodically erased with light of a third wavelenght - a flash while the plate movement was re-centered.
I do hope someone kept some of them in a museum somewhere.
testing
When I was a telephone engineer we har Strowger exchanges run off 80V batteries. A big diesel engine could run the batteries when the mains failed.
.
We had 2. genies at Grantham. We tested one on Tuesday & the other one on Friday.
Posted in Icon design for dummies fanbois
You know what?
The most important thing about software is the functionality, not the pretty pictures.
When are we, as a culture going to grow up and get over this obsession with form rather than function.
There is an obvious way to illustrate my point.
all head, Mr Scott
I am amazed that none of the nutjobs who write about the LHC have suggested that it is really a warp drive intended to move the entire planet
I attach a photo of someone with experience of earth-moving
Posted in HTC HD2 Windows Mobile smartphone
@ Chris McFaul @ IT specialist
Your comments only confirmed what I suspected.
If they offer this with Android, then fine. Otherwise it seems pointless.
I've always paid
I used to pay for Opera when they charged, and I've given a fiver to Mozilla for each machine I've added Firefox to, and a tenner for Thunderbird.
I think we should pay for FLOS software when it is possible to pay the developers
Posted in The biggest flash drive in the world
Ah, the old days
I unforget installing a 'ram disk' on Baker Perkins' IBM mainframe. It was the size of a couple of filing cabinets, and looked like a 10" removable platter disk drive to the OS, while being a hundred times faster.
It used about five horse-power's worth of electricity and contained something like 25Mb as I recall. Or would have done if the tight bastards had ordered it full.
At the time the streetlights outside were still gas-lit.
well, there you are then
I created a hatemail login to reserve my name in -- ooh, 1999? -- and decided it was horrid. Then it became spam central, theft central, and they started changing it every 15 minutes.
I have been paying for webmail from mail.com since 1997, and it just works. No spam, no security problems, reasonably straightforward technical support.
Don't freeload off Redmond, lads and lasses. They don;t know what they are doing.
ebooks
I want an ebook reader, true enough. But one that does not tie me to buying books from the hardware vendor.
And, like paper books, allows me to remove it from my reader and give it away to a friend. Or to Oxfam to sell for charity.
Or, like paper text books, allows me to sell them second hand at the end of the year/course to the next bunch of hopefulls
And which, when copyright expires, allows anyone to read it, copy it, archive it.
The obvious solution is to put the books on tiny memory slips, like microSD, and give the reader half a dozen slots and a pocket on the back to keep a few hundred more in. Such memory slips could be read-only, and not available blank, if the trade want to control piracy. I'd be happy with that, as long as encryption was an ISO standard and not proprietary to one supplier.
retrospective
Even if sudo is not prior art - and it obviously is - surely the policy editor has been around for more than 5 years. WHy on earth are microsoft granted a retrospective patent?
This whole business of software patents is as foolish as we all said it would be in advance.
Posted in 3 to start shaping traffic on Monday
drearlily predicatable
The mobile networks had spare capacity.
They decided to sell it, and pitched it as mobile internet. It was too expensive, and no-one bought it.
Then there was a move to lower prices, similar to ADSL, in an attempt to shift the goods.
That worked so well that they over-sold the capacity they had, and now they are backtracking on the service.
It's all distressingly similar to how they sold the phones in the first place.
Posted in Ringback tones outselling ring tones
yawn yawn
The phone companies take quite enough money off me already, thank you very much.
Paris, 'cos its the sort of thing you can only sell to airheads.
Posted in Microsoft admits Mac was Windows 7 muse
Yawn Yawn
Windoze itself was "inspired" by the Gem and Apple Lisa interfaces, who in turn took the WIMP paradigm from Xerox's research place.
the '\' subdirectory separator was added to MSdos when subdirectories were added, in imitaiton of UNix's '/' rather than Digitals '[root.sub.subsub]' convention.
8.3 file names were snitched from CP/M, and the unique OS that was used for the first Intel development systems
Redmond is just an ideas hoover attached to a rather shoddy code factory and a very good marketing department.
Oh, and I agree that the idea that Vista is more stable than OSX is the most laughable case of pissing into the wind I have heard for a long time. Pull the other one, big boy, it has bells upon it.
Veerrry Clever, but...
OK, so how exactly does a blind person point the gadget at a sign? and, indeed, how does such a user know there is a sign there at which to point it?
Posted in T-Orange puts names on dotted lines
And the competition implications?
Yawn.
Big co. blah - branding blather - snore.
Why did the competition commissioner allow this?
What will happen to the deal with virgin?
It certainly wont do much to improve coverage.
Posted in Elgato DTT Deluxe
'doze, fruit, what about penguins?
Does this work with any of the Linux systems?
@ITWillSaveTheWorld
>Maybe teenagers just like sex more these days?
Blimey. The poor buggers must be absolutely exhausted then. Or, indeed, shagged out.
@sed gawk
Thanks for the audio tips. My dual-audio-card setup is broken *again* like after the 9.04 upgrade. When I understand what you have written, I'll have a go.
aaarrgghh
Why do we keep going round in circles like this?
The phone I want would be 100% voice operated for most things, and would use it's camera to watch me touch typing on the table top for creating documents.
I don't care about touch screens or buttons - when am I going to be able to get DAB radio on it? or stream BBC radio 4 Long Wave by wifi, at least?
stop tiddling about - innovate. Or at least put the SDHC slot on the outside so you don't have to take the battery out to change it.
Paris, cos she doesn't care about being touched either.
For Glod's sake
Without a bit of racial sterotyping the world gets very dull.
I say, Up with pot-smoking dutchmen with their fingers in Dykes, Hurray for French chaps on bicycles with onions on the handlebars, Welcome the Fat Bavarians in lederhosen with a sausage in one hand and a beer in the other, Well Done to repressed Englishmen in suits, Huzzah for comic-opera Italians gesticulating all over the place, and God bless all Swedes, clever enough to follow you into a revolving door and coming out first!
Russians /have/ to wear fur hats; Irishmen /need/ to carry a shelaliegh; and Norwegians /must/ eat fish 3 times a day. It's traditional. Just as the Welsh /ought/ to be in a running battle with red-haired winking dominatricies of restricted height. [1]
So why on earth should the Scots be exempt? It could be worse, they could be portrayed as dour, humourless, kill-joys standing at despatch boxes and looking in two directions at once.
I'll get me coat. It's got bells and hankies tied on it, and a squeezebox in the pocket.
[1] to be fair, /anyone/ in a running battle with that one deserves public support.
