Finally

A picture worthy of replacing "girl on a beach with the ee PC"

Please Reg can we think of some suprious reasons to keep reposting it?

Mobile phones? That's nothing!

In 1979 you couldn't even buy a zx80, now we have ipads up the wazoo.

All praise maggie.

FFS.

You never forget your first. I think my Oric atmos (which was "upgraded" from an Oric 1 through an offer at Oric where they took you old machine and gave you a new one) is still in my parents' attic.

"apple symbol was not chosen by chance"

No, it's a tribute to Alan Turing you French f***wit!

eople who earn >£250 a day and pay the same amount of tax as someone earning minimum wage

Sorry that's just total BS unless said contractor is using some kind of phoney company on the isle of Man or somesuch (these schemes are being shut down now and quite right too).

Contractors' companies pay corp tax on their income and then they pay income tax on the dividend (0% for basic rate and 22.5% on higher rate) meaning the marginal rate is higher than income tax (because corp tax rate is now higher than basic rate income tax) They also pay NI on any salary or benefits in kind they get from their co.

They are not tax dodgers, they typically pay more in tax than someone on permanent salary. Yes this is to compensate for the inherent risk of their position, the travelling to jobs away from home, sick time, long periods between contracts. This is what they accept when they decide to go contract.

If they winge about it, then, just like a permie who's complaining that the other side of the fence has the greener grass then they should simply jump and shut up. Can't have it both ways.

"Almost inifinite"

What's that number that's the difference between "almost" and "infinity" again?

@martin - what you get in a DSLR

You get a much, much, bigger image sensor and this has 2 effects:

1. Much, much less noise in pictures, especially low light ones as the pixel density on the sensor is much lower (each gets moire light)

2. Control over depth of field. high quality pics often have focus on a subject within the frame, portraits are a good example, with the rest of the iamge being a nice smooth blur of soft focus. This is easy to achieve on a DSLR by just opening up the aperture, compacts and bridge cameras weith compact sensors struggle to achieve any meaningful DOF effects. So, for e.g. if you take picture of someone in the crown, the entire crowd is in sharp focus not jsut your subject, the image is flat and boring.

3. Ability to use different lenses for different effects, filters, high quality raw images.

The list goes on but 1 and 2 alone will mean that pics on a base model DSLR with kit lens (like a D40) will easily best those on a high end bridge cam.

Just waiting for the regualr Permie backlash comments

Good enough for them, fat cat contractors etc. etc.

Impressive

Most impressive

@Bassey no need to pay sky

You can get freesat instead, that's already got HD and n'ery a penny goes to Mr Murdoch.

Failsafe

A failsafe system fails when it fails to failsafe.

Acorn electrons for Christmas 2003?

Have I stepped into one of those parallel worlds where the West lost the cold war?

Right turn Clyde

and stop outside Boots, I need some hydrocortisone cream.

Who uses MMS?

Anyone who has kids.

Gutted if I couldn't send/receive pics of the little ones when me or she is in work.

@ Mage RE: HD marginally better than upscaled SD

I think you di it a deservice especially as you focus on the vertical resolution.

SD is 720*576i at best. A good few freeview or SKY channels are transmitted as 544*576i.

Compare that to HD which is 1280*720p at worst. That's a near or better than doubling of horizontal resolution, and a near tripling of vertical resolution for movement (because 576i it 288 ilnes every second whilst 720p is 720 lines every second).

It looks dramatically different and is much better when scaled up to 1366*768 than SD is, if only for the fact no deinterlacing has to take place with the compromises that can entail (especially with anything other than film sourced content).

Sure, if you have a 26inch set and sit 10 feet away you may not see the benefit. But, as people buy into HD, they almost always go up a screen size or 2 (I went from 28inch to 40inch and that's common with others I've spoken to). Bigger the screen, the more apparent the benefit of HD whether it be 1080i or 720p

'course the boradacasters are doiong their best to ruin it with crappy bit rates) those planned for freeview are super crap). But there you go.

Won't apply to typical IT contractors

As they (we) operate through limited companies as directors not employees.

This only hits temps, which of course, the agencies would prefer us to be.

@ Michael Saunders

Sorry Mike, you will need a new box,

There are _no_ TVs on the market that wil be able to receive this new HD service.

As someone has already posted, it's slated to use the DVB-T2 standard. This is not ratified yet and there are no commericially available DVB-T2 tuners.

So, a new box for you and, perhaps, some tellies with this built in out in a year's time.

Wrong Currency

It was obviously Zimbabwean dollars and he wanted to buy a stapler.

Thanks for

"Super mario"

Says it all?

GPS in space Uh?

How does that work then? Surely the ISS isn't at a lower orbit than the GPS satellites?

Paris is as clueless as me.

Had me one of these for Christmas

not bad, greast pic though load times were slow and had some freezing probs even after firmware update.

Sent it back for a full refund as soon as the Warner news broke.

Now in the market for a Ps3. Hey ho,

M$'s own HD-DVD add on works on Mac

Doesn't it? Sure I've heard of people plugging them in to find them recognised (as data drives but no installed software to play the movie).

Frankly though the 5Mbs 720p video with 5.1 of the Apple TV downloads doesn't compare to the 20Mbs (or higher) 1080p with HD sound encoding on the discs you can rent for a similar amount or buy for a few quid more.

invisibility

Presumably this is the same technology Paris Hilton and Brtiney Spears have had built into their underwear?