Posts by Dave 642 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Apr 2007
It would be good if they could also take out the other search pages - I don't need to go through two search engines to get to what I want, but some things that I put into Google just gives me a load of pages that are effectively other pages of search results from others, usually all trying to sell me the item when what I actually want is a specification or a review.
Given that two days a week I manage to bugger off to the local gym for an hour during normal working time, avoiding the rush at start and end of the day and at lunchtime. Although I guess the result of this is that I'd find that it was busy when I wanted to use it so OK, I've changed my mind, it's more nuLabour crap and shouldn't be allowed.
Oh, and an icon suggestion - how about a steaming turd.
How do you know they haven't built something from the alien technology. I couldn't possibly comment but would have full stealth technology so you'd never know about it, especially if they kept the shuttles around to distract people.
Now, what's that materialising outside the window?
As I've got a DG834 and it's been pretty good despite a poor S/N ratio (other routers have struggled), I'll have to take the lid off and see what chip it's got. I know the Draytek router I had didn't like the link at all, the DSL300T was mostly OK and the Speedtouch USB thingy behaved most of the time and I blame the USB side for its issues.
It isn't that simple in the UK (or wasn't when I was in a position to play with it). With good old BT DASS2 lines, you could send a CLI modifier as part of the call setup, but the exchange did a range check on it and if you were outside your approved range, would just substitute the default for your system. So you'd get the base part of the CLI supplied by BT and the last few digits supplied by the PABX if they were valid. There was no easy provision for sending a full number and claiming that as your CLI. Of course, modern ISDN signalling may have that hole in it, and there are valid reasons for wanting to be able to map 0845 and similar numbers onto outgoing calls, but that ought to still be validated by the exchange software.
I remember playing with packet radio on the amateur radio bands and I can see a lot of the issues discovered there that will come and ruin this new technology. So not only will it wreck US TV broadcasting, but it'll be slow and inefficient and generally useless itself. Worse, the technology will leak to countries that don't want it, and the rest of us will suffer as well.
If Microsoft say they comply 100%, just remember that it is a demo version...
Normal procedure is to apply the brakes briefly before retracting the gear, because you don't really want it spinning anyway, so it'll only be going slowly if at all as it comes into the wheel well. Certainly on the Dornier 228/328 where you easily watch a wheel if you're in the correct seat, there's a noticeable bang as it comes to a stop before being retracted.
Surely the answer to the cost issue is as found elsewhere in the world - you pay a nominal fee to file the patent, which establishes your date, and when it is granted a year or two later, you pay the full fee but you have protection back to the filing date. That gives the company a fair amount of time to whittle their 25 ideas down to five. If they're still working on 25 at that point, it'll be costing them far more than the patent costs to keep them all being researched.
Carbon dating is only a theory that is backed up by observations. Core samples taken from rocks match the theory and, as is common with science, the theory is accepted as fact until or unless something comes along to cast doubt upon it. Newton's Laws of Motion are pretty accurate at slow speeds, but break down when you go fast enough, hence the revision by Einstein.
After the nuclear tests last century the system breaks down due to the increase in radiocarbon from manmade causes.
You might actually manage to achieve that from a car manufacturer as a special order. You'll get charged for a customised version but unlike your average PC vendor, the car dealer would probably do his best to provide you with what you want, and would probably even offer to fit your choice of wheels before delivery.
The car would cost more because it's a significant extra to customise from standard, whereas an OS-less machine ought to be cheaper because you're omitting a step from the process by fitting a blank disk instead of one with software pre-installed. The minimal admin charge for handling the paperwork should be negligible compared to the cost of the software.
I was looking for a new monitor recently. I looked at the PC World site just to see if they had any of my possible options in stock, given that even if a local shop is more expensive on the base price, adding in carriage can swing the balance close enough that the 'now' factor wins. The monitor section of the website is pretty useless and misses a lot of relevant specs (such as is it DVI or DSUB15 only) and when I did a stock check on the one that interested me, the local store had them available, with a similar model out of stock but available at a store 30 miles away. So went for a walk around my local one, only to find that they'd got loads of the one that was supposedly out of stock and none of the one that was supposedly in stock.
So I left empty-handed, although I did detour via the cable display to have a good laugh at the cost of a 20metre CAT5 cable.
My grandmother used to take toys out of my left hand and put them in my right. Fortunately my mother stopped her. At school the lefties were singled out by the left-handed teacher and taught to write. Every school I went to did this, so I ended up with completely illegible handwriting, a combination of all the taught styles. So the next one to try it got a firm refusal - one of the more valuable lessons I learned at 13 is that you can say NO if you've got all your arguments organised.
The Reg is not exactly innocent when it comes to in-your-face ads - I find the site far more readable without things moving and flickering on the page, it's just a cleaner presentation with that sort of advert blocked. The blocker I use does appear to take out Google ads as well, it does mean I miss the gems such as nuclear power stations for sale on eBay, but I can live without them to avoid the rest. There are definitely sites out there that are unreadable due to the amount of distracting ads - either I block the ads or I don't go there again - either way there's no revenue for anyone.
You only have to look at some items such as frozen peas, formerly available in a bag prominently labelled 4lb, then they added 1.81kg below it, then swapped the font sizes so that the 1.81kg is bigger than the 4lb. Still the same bag size though. Plenty of items still have both Imperial and metric measures on them, those of us who grew up with both just use whichever is most convenient at the time.
Some kit is hard to screen because it is trying to measure really small signals on the end of long wires and the filtering required would degrade the wanted signals. However this sort of kit isn't usually found in general wards, more typically in A&E and intensive care and a ban on mobile use in those areas is not unreasonable. The ventilator example sounds a bit like poor design or other post-manufacturing fault, because I don't think it would pass EMC testing in that condition.
I'm sure we've all heard the characteristic noise of a GSM phone too close to audio equipment - it's the same effect and moving the two apart, often by a very small amount, can fix it. (If 0.55V of pickup doesn't rectify in a diode but 0.6V does and causes an audible signal, it doesn't take much change to go from nothing to quite bad.
That's because in the US you've let the banks be in charge. In the UK we seem to have had more success so far in keeping the worst excesses in check - ATM fees a while back, free banking (albeit with pitiful interest rates on credit balances) and the current one about penalty charges. Another one of note was the campaign twenty years ago to get Barclays to withdraw from South Africa. The student campaign on overdrafts is just the latest reminder to banks that we do still have a choice.
Did I just hear a back door opening? Once we've all got local cards, they'll unify the database into a big national one.
Not that I use the local leisure services (being based in a different district council to all the main ones nearby), nor public transport (three buses a day doesn't encourage use) and I'm fortunate enough not to need benefits. so I guess I'll still be able to refuse.
If you walk into the baby section of some stores you're met with a wall of pink and a wall of blue. It's not so easy to get generic clothes of other colours, although if you refuse to tell relatives the sex of an imminent baby they'll usually manage to find some. Once the sex is known, expect to be deluged with pink or blue, as appropriate. This is how the imprinting happens, right from an early age, aided and abetted by friends and relatives.
I can recommend reading such contracts and crossing out/initialling the bits you don't like. I did this with a credit agreement once, where I objected to the company phoning me with an automated dialler. It caused the salesman in the shop no end of hassle and worry, he called the credit company to see if they'd still accept it (they did, interestingly enough) and was obviously worried about losing his commission.
Linux will never manage to dominate the desktop until two things occur:
1. Hardware manufacturers provide automatic driver support in the same way they do for Windows, and there's a seamless method for loading new drivers from disk in the same way that happens with Windows when it detects new hardware.
2. Software vendors release a Linux version of their apps either at the same time as the Windows version or even before. Said Linux apps to have the same or improved functionality compared to the Windows version.
The catch-22 is that there is little pressure for vendors to do this unless Linux starts being a significant desktop force, and it will never get to that stage without good vendor support.
Perhaps if they'd go back to proper science teaching at school instead of the dumbed-down stuff taught at present, it might inspire children to go for it a bit more. At the moment it seems that chemistry, physics and biology are all lumped together and there's too much wishy-washy crap involving essays in the curriculum. Physics and chemistry are all about hard facts and equations, at least at A-level standard, not global warming and other popular subjects of the day. You can't have a proper informed discussion on global warming without learning the hard science behind it.
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