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* Posts by Ray Bellis

10 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Mar 2007

LG HLX56S net savvy 3D Blu-ray soundbar combo

Ray Bellis
WTF?

5.8 GHz?

Last I heard, you still needed a £50 p.a. license to operate any equipment in the 5.8 GHz band in the UK.

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Apple iCloud pricing revealed

Ray Bellis
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No iDisk?

Damn, that's an annoying loss - I've found it really useful. Oh well, I've stacks of DropBox space which kinda does the same thing.

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ISPs under a wholesale price squeeze, says Hackett

Ray Bellis
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Context?

Could you perhaps have mentioned this was an Australian issue some time _before_ the end of the 4th paragraph?

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Freesat talks up a year of HD sport

Ray Bellis
FAIL

ITV-HD ?

Any chance of getting ITV-HD on a standard HD receiver (ironically meaning a Sky+ HD box) and not one that's only Freesat compatible with its hack to get the otherwise obscured ITV-HD ?

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No Freeview HD kit in time for launch, warns telly exec

Ray Bellis
FAIL

DVB-T2 != MPEG-4

The article is wrong when it says "Freeview HD uses DVB-T2 which uses the MPEG 4 AVC video codec".

Yes, Freeview HD will use both DVB-T2 *and* MPEG-4 AVC. But they are not the same thing. One is a modulation scheme, to carry the digital signals. The other is a codec, to encode video within those digital signals.

DVB-T2 is a more efficient modulation scheme than DVB-T. It's perfectly possible to carry MPEG-4 AVC over the current DVB-T modulation scheme, but they couldn't then carry as many digital HD channels per UHF channel.

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Apple to detail latest laptops on 14 October

Ray Bellis
Unhappy

No mini-tower?

Please Apple - let's have a mini-tower machine that doesn't cost an arm and a leg!

What I don't want is an iMac (with a built-in screen) or another Mac-Mini (which is so tiny that there's no room for a decent amount of memory or graphics card).

When I can build a quad-core machine with a decent graphics card for well under 500 quid the MacPro looks ridiculously over-priced.

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Only Sky can save digital TV

Ray Bellis
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Fine by me

So long as we don't have to buy Sky's proprietary hardware to receive it.

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Google invades Outer Space

Ray Bellis

Venus

The "exploding" planet thing is because Google Earth is using place marks to represent the different positions of the planets in time.

If place marks overlap then whenever you click on one it'll briefly move the other icons out of the way, leaving a line pointing at the original position of the place mark.

It's not particularly weird, it's exactly how overlapping place marks work for terrestrial sites too.

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Make way for the 64 bit revolution

Ray Bellis

64-bit source compatibility

The Alpha is sadly defunct, and indeed applications didn't often need the 64 bit addressing that it gave.

However today's applications still owe a huge amount to the Alpha. Back in the mid 90s there were many applications that simply wouldn't work out of the box on an Alpha system.

Too many coders assumed that an "int" and a "void *" were the same size. On 32 bit systems that was generally true, but on the Alpha it wasn't. I myself submitted patches to many OSS projects to fix 64 bit compatibility, and coders gradually got better at not making those assumptions.

Without the Alpha we'd still be facing issues getting today's applications to compile on modern 64 bit systems.

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