Posts by Neil Hoskins
409 posts • joined Wednesday 25th July 2007 08:11 GMT
But...
...from what we've been reading on these pages over the years, it's just an extreme example. Most of the devices and security measures in place at airports are a complete sham, to keep the public scared and the terrorists thinking they might get caught. They're still taking drinking water off passengers, despite the fact that there was never a viable liquid bomb plot. At Schipol, they make you stand in a big perspex box that looks like it's out of Star Trek, which I can say with a fair degree of confidence, does FUCK ALL.
Mobile
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a wholly remarkable book, was, of course, primarily a mobile device. Douglas Adams foretold the popularity of smartphones and connected tablets while we still thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea. Which is why I've always been puzzled about the H2G2 site being aimed primarily at desktops. There does, in fact, seem to be some content at h2g2.mobi, but this looks really cut-down: text-only, in fact. What is needed is something aimed primarily at 4" and 7" devices.
What a joke
2G around here would be something of a novelty. And I don't live out in the sticks, either.
It's Clearly...
... taking the piss out of humans. "This is what you sound like, ha-ha..."
Re: Prior art?
... and surely I remember it being on Nokias from around 2006?
Here we go again...
I think you may be confusing correlation with causation. Underweight people are probably underweight due to an underlying pathology; that is, they're already ill. Overweight people are likely to be overweight because they eat too much but are otherwise healthy... for the time being.
Chocs and clocks?
OK, I know you're just making a little joke, but this perception of the Swiss has annoyed me ever since I visited one of their machine-tool companies in the eighties. For years I had to listen to Thatcherites saying that we could base an economy on financial services, "like the Swiss", knowing it to be utter bullshit.
This is a local dispute
I have no interest in it. Wikipedia's decision to take the whole English-speaking world offline demonstrates once and for all that they are a dangerous cult and we shouldn't become too dependent on them.
Posted in Netflix UK to stream BBC shows
Blinkbox
I really hope that doesn't mean they'll be taken off Blinkbox. I, for one, am not going to have anything to do with any service that involves a monthly subscription.
Posted in Nokia's Great Lost Platform
Nice one...
Any plans for a similar feature on Maemo? I'm still intrigued by the decision to chuck it all in the bin and start again with Meego, just as it was coming together.
Nothing new under the sun
I'm glad you pointed-out that the People app isn't really a new idea, since my N900 has something very similar. But that's the whole point about the mysteries of marketing, isn't it? Bill Gates was trying to shove tablet PCs down our throats years before the iPad. There were UIQ touchscreen smartphones years before the iPhone. As far back as the seventies, I remember Yamaha bringing out a bike with a "revolutionary" square-four engine, but some grey-haired old duffer then remembers that a British company had tried something similar about a hundred years previously. It's all very, very strange.
'Enigma', the film...
... was a film of the novel, and was therefore a work of fiction. If you watched it thinking it's an inaccurate documentary, then you're a plonker.
"...ARM-based netbooks were taking the PC market by storm..."
Either I'm very tired and missing something or this bit doesn't make sense. Googling for "ARM-based netbooks" results in several articles from two years ago saying they'll be here any minute now, and, er, this one.
Are you getting mixed-up?
The N9 is the already-officially-launched Harmattan Meego device.
Posted in Educating Verity the OU way
Java
After two whole years of Java, when they still hadn't shown us how to write and deploy an actual program that would run on an actual computer or other device, I decided it was time to jack it in and buy a book about Android.
Posted in Moderatrix kisses the Reg goodbye
Sub Headings
I think it's the sub-headings I'll miss more than anything. The English language at its finest.
Posted in Nokia's Windows phone outed on video
"...I would really like to see an Android Nokia phone - that would tempt me...."
http://nitdroid.com/
Easy-peasy, and most of it actually works. Not a huge fan of Android, though, I'm discovering.
Posted in Nokia's Windows phone outed on video
In other words, a bit like the original iPhone launch
I remember that one fondly. Tuning into the live video feed surreptitiously on my work PC, then:
"It's got a touch screen.".... wild applause.
"It's got a calendar."..... wild applause.
"It's 3G.".... wild applause.
Can we please...
...have a sub-heading of the month vote.
Posted in Hannspree Hannspad 10.1in Android tablet
Skype
Skype was never going to be very good on mobile devices, being dependent upon always-connected 'supernodes' whose owners don't mind their resources being gobbled up. It's not even very good with networked modern desktop devices. If you want to make free/cheap VoIP calls, use SIP, if you want to make video calls to the grandchildren in Australia, use Google Talk or similar. (And no, I have no idea if google talk video works on android; it doesn't work too well on my N900 but no worse than Skype.)
I tend to agree
The Maemo tablet series bubbled along quite happily in the background until they made the catastrophic decision to chuck it all in the bin and start again. This is the 'start again' and I must say it looks quite good. I agree the average spoilt-rich-numpty doesn't give a toss what OS his/her phone is running. The UI looks intuitive and simple. The third party apps look good (they've had plenty of time to get them right, let's be honest). If the price is right and it's bug-free on launch, I think it may well sell. Apart from anything else, it's an alternative if the first windows devices turn out to be crap. Certainly the flash support and tethering-out-of-the-box is one in the eye for the fanbois.
Who the hell drew a straight line through those data points!?
Whoever it was should be taken outside and kicked to death by respectable physicists.
Posted in IATA: this iPad could BRING DOWN A PLANE
It does seem foolish...
...to go to huge lengths and expense getting all electronic equipment on an aircraft certified as not emitting too much interference, and then allowing carry-ons made by just about any tin-pot manufacturer.
Meanwhile...
Four fatalities in Pembrokeshire. I bet they don't get as much publicity.
Just one little problem:
The titles that they actually release in this way will be crap.
context
I think you've taken his comments out of context. Maybe it's the criminal waste of taxpayer's money that's decided his future voting habits....
"...celebrities said to have taken out injunctions..."
If that's what this debate has been reduced to then it's a real shame. To me it was always more about not being allowed to say that Banker A has been found to be incompetent, or that Russian B trying to buy an English football club is an ex-con.
No
Too much vitamin A causes osteoporosis, which is a problem in Denmark because of all the herring they eat. I think this is a case of the Danes being ahead of the rest of us, and we'll probably start to see warnings on anything with added vitamins and, indeed, the mega-vitamin quack pills available off the shelf.
How do you get fifty Belgians into a 2CV?
You put a chip on the back seat.
How do you get them all out again?
You shout, "Come and get the rest!"
Don't do it
I did. It's crap. It can make phone calls and the photo viewer is almost finished. That's it.
"...Maemo (as Meego was then known)..."
Not really. They're very different entities, as you then go on to say. Maemo was a terrific OS and UI, and just about ready for the mass market. Meego is an embryonic PoS that's not even worthy of being called an "alpha".
There are two things I'll never forgive Nokia for. One is chucking Maemo in the bin, and the other is their failure to develop a decent UI for Symbian until it was too late.
Does anybody else...
...remember the scene in Apacalypse Now? "Why are you guys sitting on your helmets?"
Posted in Space flutes salute Yuri Gagarin
I wondered the same thing
I reckon that he can hear her but she can't hear him. She starts the piece and he finishes it. We hear what Ian Anderson hears, on Earth.
Posted in The new killer app is … MMS
And in other news...
...it turns out the pope is catholic and white middle class people are only a small fraction of the world population.
Posted in Mozilla debuts Firefox 4 for Android
Here's what I did...
1) Head over to http://www.mozilla.com/m. Press the big shiny button on the right. This will fire up the app manager to install Firefox.
2) Get annoyed as the app manager tells you that Fennec is already installed, you beta testing scum.
3) Uninstall the beta and the beta repository, but keep the one that's just been added called "Mozilla Multi Catalog".
4) Repeat 1) This has given me "Firefox 1.1" which I presume is the full version. It also seems to have remembered all my add-ons and settings from the beta.
I'm intrigued by the add-on that claims to fetch the low-resolution version of Flash video, because this might enable me to finally use BBC iPlayer. However, without an actual Flash add-on, I'm not sure what this achieves.
title
I tend to favour cruise missiles for exactly the same reasons. The Mk 1 eyeball isn't much use when NATO shoots up convoys of tractors carrying refugees, is it? And don't even start on the Yanks, notorious for mistaking recognition signs for missiles, and cameras for RPGs.
Posted in Asus Eee Pad Slider
Want!
It's a Psion7/Netbook with an uptodate OS and I am absolutely getting one. Certainly does NOT need a track pad, which would spoil it. After some use, you'll find the combination of touchscreen and keyboard is the PERFECT configuration.
Posted in Engineer killed on Endeavour launch pad
Come to think of it...
I wonder how they do risk assessment in the space programme... I really wouldn't know where to start. You're right, though: falls from height should just not happen in this day and age.
Good point
None of the UI's ever got close to Psion. I think you've correctly identified where the rot set in.
Great attitude
So I should stay in bed on election days? Because whatever I do won't make any difference? Maybe Emmeline Pankhurst shouldn't have bothered doing what she did. Gandhi should maybe have just carried on being a lawyer.
Duh...
It's a protest vote, dummy, because we object to the very fact the question is being asked: why do you find that so hard to grasp?
Disagree
If you put "No Religion", all that will happen is that there will be an equivalent proportion of secular schools. Far better, surely, to spoil their silly game by putting "Jedi" or, in my case, "Pastafarian". If enough of us do so, the game is disrupted because they'll have to provide Jedi faith schools. I think the BHA have got it wrong on this occasion.
More's the point, I'm torn as to whether to put "indigenous mzungu" for my ethnicity.
*US* Market Share
Who cares?
"...when the pair merged their Moblin and Maemo mobile-Linux projects..."
That's what I thought, too. But it's more accurate to say Moblin and Maemo got thrown in the bin and they started from scratch. I was genuinely shocked when I tried out the MeeGo dual-boot on my N900 and realised how little progress they'd made. I can only start to imagine Elop's shock when they showed him how far they'd got; I'd love to hear how that particular meeting went.
Posted in What sealed Nokia's fate?
N900
This is sent via my N900. What's the problem? Maemo 6 could have been a world-beater, but they just had to throw it all in the bin and go back to square one with Meego.
Posted in What sealed Nokia's fate?
Does anybody else...
...think that Steve Ballmer is the spitting image of Peter Boyle, the actor (the monster in 'Young Frankenstein)?
Posted in Nokia's 15-year tango to avoid Microsoft
Not really, no.
You haven't taken into account the fanboy factor, which has to be worth billions in its own right. Now, if you could bottle that....
