Posts by cpage
12 posts • joined Friday 26th November 2010 09:44 GMT
Re: Streetmap is superior
I agree. For most purposes streetmap.co.uk is very much better - has real OS maps down to 1:25000 and has town maps at larger scales. All streets named, which Google maps only does sometimes, and much more reliable.
Different bands for different markets - how awful
The whole point of a mobile phone is that you should be able to take it around to different places and it should just work - I'm fed up with having a GSM phone that only works in parts of the USA and Canada, for example, because they use different bands to ours.
So what do we find here: 4g with the hardware using a different selection of bands when sold in different places. So if I buy one in the UK it probably won't be able to use 4g in other countries. What a mess.
Gmail and Thunderbird are not alternatives
You say that gmail has vastly more users, but you have no idea how many of those are actualy accessing their gmail accounts using a client like Thunderbird, as I do, so those figures have a large overlap, they are not alternatives. Personally I find webmail clients far too clunky for use (except when away from home using some one else's computer when I have no alternative).
But Thunderbird has lots of annoying bugs that really need to get fixed, e.g. it sometimes doesn't alert you to new incoming mail, or it displays mails as unread long after you have read them all. As others have said its handling of plain vs HTML text and replies is not all that good either. As far as know Thunderbird is the best of the free mail clients, but it's surprising that it still has so many features that need fixing.
Posted in Nokia Asha 201 Qwerty phone
Only 2-band - how stupid.
This might have been useful, but how can they produce it supporting only 2 bands, so it won't work in many places around the world, especially north and south america. I couldn't possibly consider it.
Posted in Ten... mono laser printers
HP - good printers, bad sales strategy
I've had an HP1000 printer for several years, which has been very reliable, and non-HP cartridges are fairly cheap. But I'm going to have to replace it soon because HP have chosen not to release drivers for Windows Vista or Win7, so when my last Win-XP computer goes, so will the printer (since the PC is used to do the rendering, it simply won't work without a specific driver).
This is obviously a ploy by HP to force me to replace a perfectly good working printer with another one bought from them. I take strong exception to this, so, despite having used lots of HP laser printers over the years with generally good experiences, the next one I buy will be from any company except HP.
Posted in Verity's secret shame revealed
Slases in URLs
I went to a talk by Tim Berners-Lee not long back and someone asked him if he had any second thoughts about the design of HTML etc. He said that he had only one regret: if had to do it again he definitely would have had just one slash after the http: instead of a double one. I think the audience were with him on that.
nothng to stop you insuring with Sheila's wheels
They don't - I'm a male and have an insurance policy with Sheila's wheels.
Such a pity
Nokia used to make such good phones, but they failed to modernise them, such a pity. Now they plan to join up with one of the dinosaurs of the computer industry - which seems a terrible mistake. I don't think I could bring myself to buy a Nokia phone knowing that it had Windows inside.
I agree
Agree that there is no technical reason for the response to be so slow. And this really matters: I find the current TfL Oyster cards are just about fast enough, but the readers at some national rail stations, like those of East Midlands Trains at Leicester, are much slower, and really make you stop and wait, until the gate opens. The gates bear a sticker saying "Don't push" presumably because so many passengers are surprised when the gates don't open as they expect. Such stupid design (but that's consistent with the general behavour of our privatised railway companies).
Wow indeed
"You can rely upon Ofcom to do the right thing eventually (but only after they have explored all of the other possibilites").
Actually I think that was said about some other organisation entirely, but it seems apposite.
Easier way to explore
Sounds like it would be easy enough to put a dam across the mouth of the Gulf and then pump it out? Would also provide quite a lot of fertile ground, which some countries around there might like to populate.
Posted in WTF is... up with e-book pricing?
e-books are competing with free libraries, not with physical bookstores.
A more serious problem, it seems to me, is that with an e-book you don't actually own it, you just rent it. With a physical book I can lend it to others, or sell it when I don't want it any more. If I want a book for just a period I can borrow it from a library. That suggests that e-book rental pricing ought to be *much* lower than it is at present to be attractive.
