Posts by badger31
35 posts • joined Saturday 29th January 2011 19:43 GMT
Why would anyone want this?
I'm seriously, you guys. Why?
Posted in The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME
Re: I seem to recall..
Wow! The Apricot F1 had a HUGE keyboard :-)
"many of the fundamental operations of a computer are pure mathematics and are not patentable subject matter. "
May I suggest that ALL of the fundamental operations of a computer are pure mathematics and are not patentable subject matter.
Should have stopped at 'Dyson.'
None of the rest of the article made any sense.
I agree with the ridiculousness of EE's pricing. Their cheapest sim-only contract is £21pm, and that;s with just 500mb data allowance. I pay £15pm with 3 for unlimited data. Even if my phone was 4G capable, there's no way I'd be moving to EE.
Re: why is line-rental mandatory?
I'm with you on that one. They put up the line rental saying "Ooh! Free calls!" Free? They're not free if you are charging extra for them. Also, I get my calls and broadband from Sky; it is IMPOSSIBLE for me to use those free calls you are forcing me to buy. Basically, BT got pissed off with people using them for line rental only, so they simply stopped offering line rental only. I now get my line rental from Sky, too. Screw BT.
Can they still call this The Internet?
It sounds to me like they are providing access to the World Wide Web, and little else. ISPs calling this service 'The Internet' would be like calling a broadband connection with a download cap 'unlimited', and they would never get away with that. Oh, wait ... they did, and they probably will.
Re: Biz model
They aren't the fist with this business model - this is what 0845 numbers are for.
Some years ago I moved house. I spent an hour and a half on hold to cancel my NTL only to get cut off as soon as someone answered. I called back on the sales line and was answered in two seconds, but obviously they couldn't help me. Back on hold for another hour and a half, but what choice did I have?
I knew someone who worked in a call centre that serviced some telco or other. He told me that the call centre had target MINIMUM times to keep people on hold; the telco got really pissed off if they answered too quickly.
Apologies for the off-topic rant.
Re: Is there
They truly are the Ryan Air of the internet.
Third time's the charm.
Facebook did almost exactly this, not that long ago. They changed the TOS to say something like leaving Facebook handed ownership of all your photos to Facebook. There was outcry and a fair amount of back-peddling, so that's twice they have tried and failed. Like I say -- third time's the charm. They'll definitely give it another go, soon enough.
I can see them making this.
And then selling/renting films and TV series through iTunes. My question is will they allow watching your own video collection via USB? I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was no. You always get great stuff with Apple products, but there's too much stuff you don't get just because Apple choose no to let you have it(FLAC playback for iPods, for example). They just expect you to suck it up, and lots of people do.
But this is why I love Wikipedia
I remember during my college years researching a dreary assignment on wide area networks. I looked at the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_network to discover that wide area networks were invented in 1976 by Gok Wan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gok_Wan). Made my day, that did.
Re: Double Fail
@JDX
So write it down, then. Just don't write it on a post-it note and stick it to your monitor.
overcome a fundamental problem in the creation of “bio-hybrid” robot
Phew! For a while there I thought we'd never have bio-hybrid robots. I'll sleep better tonight.
Re: Re While some will no doubt point to Fukushima as a sign
I agree. If it wasn't for the fact the backup diesel generators were located below the water line, my understanding is that there wouldn't have been a problem at all. The building survived and the reactors shut down as they should, but the cooling system failed. Seems a bit knee-jerk to do away with all nuclear power because some prat put the diesel generators in the basement.
+1 for Sam-a-rama ding-dong!
Aaaactually ...
As an aside, a generation lasts 25 years, the chances of you and your brother being different generations is highly unlikely - generation X is generally used to denote those born in the 70's and 80's, generation Y starts some time in the 90's.
His brother could be just one year younger and still be in a different generation. That doesn't seem too unlikely.
Re: Hmmm, new buttons.
... for which they are soon to be granted a patent.
Bugger! I tried so hard to resist.
Points 2 and 2 ...
Anyone who needs a replaceable battery and an SD card that buys an iPhone is, obviously, a tit. For everyone else, it's still a valid choice of phone. This includes me - my iPhone 4 fits my needs very well, and my old iPhone 3G is still going strong in the hands of my wee brother. The reason I won't be buying the iPhone 5 is:
6. Facebook integration
The very thought makes my skin crawl, but I guess loads of people are gonna love it.
the first thing Curiosity did after landing ...
was to check for an operating system update and install it.
Holy shit - that was brave! Imagine it got all the way to Mars, only to be bricked by a failed update. I'll bet there were some sweaty palms while that update was running.
Posted in LG pitches £7k 55in OLED TV, again
Re: Exercise in pointlessness @This Side Up
How do they make the white OLED pixel, if not by mixing RGB? I suppose you could use layered RGB, as opposed to side-by-side, or is there something much more clever going on?
Posted in Cloud mega-uploads aren't easy
Re: Teething problems, or something worse?
If it were me, I wouldn't trust my data entirely to the cloud. I would keep an on-site back-up that was always in sync with the 'live' data in the cloud. That way, if the cloud stuff goes tits up I would still have all the data safe and sound. The sames goes if I wanted to change cloud services provider. No need to get the data out, just delete it.
@thesykes
They are providing a payment service, and are entitled to charge whatever percentage they like for that service. The bullshit is that app devs can't tell Apple where to shove their service - the use of that service is mandatory for in-app purchases. It now also seems that not having in-app purchases, choosing instead to link to a completely external (to the app and Apple) web page for purchases is also against the rules.
BTW: I love my iPhone, but I am under no illusions that Apple aren't the biggest shower of bastards.
Re: "The copying of the DVD ... a criminal offence ...involves circumventing copy protection"
I was thinking along the same lines. " ... circumventing /effective/ copy protection." It's only effective until someone circumvents it. Oh, no. I've gone cross-eyed.
Re: About bliddy time
Just a thought ...
Could the exams getting harder, as you looked further back in time, be because the curriculum has changed over the years and you were taught different things than they were back then? I can't help thinking that if you took a paper from today and sent it ten years back in time, the children would (have) be(en) thinking "blimey, exams are hard in the future. I don't know hardly any of that stuff."
Re: @Sean Timarco Baggaley
The reason the MBP gets so hot under heavy use is that Apple don't allow the fan to run fast enough. They seem to think that being quiet is more important than temperature control, a habit they picked up with the original Macintosh. Just install a third-party fan controller - I use smcFanControl - and set your own, more sensible, fan speeds. It may be a bit noisier, but you get to keep your goolies.
I use SatNav 2 from Skobbler
It's not free, but it is very cheap (£1.69, IIRC) and offline maps are ~£2.50 per country (or ~£5 for the whole of Europe) so you don't need 3G or a massive data package. It's not very easy to get directions via entering a start and finish address, but if you can find your destination on the map you can tell it to 'Take me there' - which is nice. I also like that if there is a mistake on the map, you can tell them about it. Presumably they verify this somehow and update their maps (OpenStreetMap). It's free to update your offline maps. So it's a bit fiddly to use, but once it's going the navigation is exactly what I expect of a SatNav. 4/5 :-)
@ Graham Marsden
I had a brief discussion about this with my professional issues tutor at university during my computer science degree. You are right, an image is deemed to be child-porn, even if no children were involved in the making of said images, if the subject is somehow judged to be child porn. I also believe that photographs of naked children are now classed as child porn, even if they are not pornographic - so my mum had better burn all those naked photos of me as a child before the feds get her. Oh, and didn't someone in America recently get done for possession of child pornography because a doctor looked at some images on his computer and decided that the girl looked under age. The model even stood as a witness at his trial with proof she was over 18, but they did him anyway - madness! Meanwhile the real nasty people are still harming real children.
Maybe,
but chip-and-pin didn't stop a mate of mine being mugged at knife-point by two guys, and have his card _and_ pin stolen. Only when one of them had emptied his account did the other let him go. This could now be a one man job. "Give me your phone and your pin, or I'll stab you." How quickly can you get this stuff shut down? Presumably you would need to find a phone you could use first.
I agree
Sounds like a duff HDD to me. Even a good HDD that has spun down can freeze your system for a couple of seconds while it spins back up.
Posted in Tesla pre-sells all 2012 Model S output
" ... all modes of transport will go fully electric ... "
Yes. I'm looking forward to the electric jumbo jet.
How about ...
instead of spending all that money on showing, yet again, that temperatures are going up, spending some on figuring out what the hell we are going to do about it? So global warming is real, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Now what? Call me a sceptic if you like, but I seriously doubt that forcing us all to use CFLs will make any difference.
You could write an app for that.
Posted in E-petitions site: Death wish FAIL
@AC
No. I want MY BBC tax to go towards showing a motor race every other weekend, so that I don't have to face paying Rupert Murdoch £400+ quid a year for them. I may be in a minority here, but I bet I'm in an overwhelming majority amongst the British F1 fans.
Calm down
I couldn't care less = I don't care
I could care less = I do care
