Posts by Dick Emery

Ideas should not be patented...

unless you have a working model of it. Or at the very least a written plan that can be made into a working model. Simply saying 'A method to compress an image file with such and such algorithm' for example is not enough IMHO. This is why we have so many BS patents.

There should also be a timeout period whereby if you don't put your patent into practice withing say 5 years you lose the right to hold that patent anymore.

Also there should be a pot that ALL patent holders who benefit from their 'inventions' should pay into to protect small fry from big companies. There should be a level playing field when it comes to legal challenges and not the current situation where 'usually' the one with the biggest pockets wins. I do not know the details of i4i's case against MS so it's hard to say who was trolling who here. I just know that the current system is broken and needs a major overhaul.

The only place I can see this being useful...

...is on a certain notorious image board :)

Modems

This is why I went and got a 3COM U.S. Robotics Pro Message Modem second hand off of Ebay. It has very reliable Caller ID (You have to use an application called Phonetray Free to fix Caller ID in Windows 7) and I use Callstation to answer calls with personal messages. Callstation acts as a software answerphone system and can auto hangup on bad callers, give personal greetings and other neat stuff. For numbers without Caller ID, out of area, blocked or known bad Caller ID's I have a recording of the 3 tones "The number you have dialed has not been recognised...." etc etc

It does cut down on the number of calls significantly over time combined with TPS and complaining about the numbers you know (*DO* complain or TPS is worthless as above poster said).

Researchers!

Are the people who give these criminals ideas in the first place!

It's all about the lens

Having a very wide angled lens on the camera is what makes this seem more daunting. Still impressive though.

No Win7 support...

...for my M-Audio keyboard and soundcard which are perfectly good devices and only a few years old. I can get my soundcard working in Win7 with some XP 64 drivers but it's not perfect and I can get the keyboard working using a midi to usb cable (I just use the inbuilt usb connection to power the keyboard).

It's a bit silly how we have to change things that plug into the PC and work fine everytime we upgrade the OS.

All I want...

...is a 10-12" handheld display that I can control my main Windows PC from over wifi. It does not need to do anything else.

Err no...

...not quite. If the CPU is capable of doing 3Ghz instead of 2 then it should bloody well do 3Ghz from the start! Selling you an underclocked item only to try and charge you more to make it run at it's capablities later on is a con. Plain and simple. Also hackers would be trying to unlock these things to spit in Intels eye anyhow.

All they need...

...is a glory hole and a milking machine (I have such a smutty mind).

Those sneaky moonites!

This would make a great hideout for potential alien invaders. If that ever happens it will c-rater riot!

Badoom tsh!

Sooo....

If they implement these and they do not make any money (Because MOST people who speed probably slow down for average speed cameras whereas normal GATSO cameras just catch chancers and the unaware. ASC's tend to force you to slow down because everyone in front has to too). Will they then become too costly to maintain and have to be switched off eventually?

Sandbox it!

Do all web related activities in a Sandbox. Any malware will remain in the sandbox and get deleted on exit if you have it set up right.

Meh

They need to concentrate on moving away from moving parts. Hard disks are more likely to go wrong and more power hungry simply because they have moving parts. They need to throw more r&d into solid state.

£45

For a game.

Nuff said.

WHAT!?

TOMTOMS ALIVE!?

OS independent

Every drive manu should be OS independent and provide an ISO to make a boot CD for testing. If they do not they are complete twats and should be avoided at all costs!

I think you forget the type of person that joins the forces

From a single point of view my belief is that the type of people who join the police forces (and the army too) are the bullies and misfits that were 'in your face' at school. Likewise people can turn into nutters over time and end up in the police. I had a friend who was a nice stable guy. He got married. Had kids. We would hang out occasionally. He used to work as an engineer for BT. Then he got separated and divorced. Had trouble seeing his kids. He began turning into a real asshole. Slept around. Showed me photos of his 'conquests'. Eventually I lost contact with him. Until one day I saw him patrolling in police uniform with a bunch of other likely lads. All acting generally like thugs. He pulled me over once. Also pulled my brother over.

IMHO a lot of police 'officers' are a bit broken in the head. I believe you have to have a certain state of mind to be one.

Pay for ads

I bet they still show adverts on the pay version too.

For all the oldies on here remember this song?

"Welcome welcome welcome home to I............ TEEEEEEEEEE VEEEEEEEEEE!"

One day...

...all vehicles will have a chip inside and a signal that is sent to restrict the speed in whatever zone you are driving. It will also monitor you for deviant behavior and automagically call the pigs if you are caught using a mobile, eating, drinking or fiddling with your gearstick in an inappropriate manner whilst at the wheel.

Guess what?

You can rename a Quicktime file to .mkv and it will still play usually since most players read the header information.

He speaketh in tongues.

That officer talks in such wordy doublespeak that even the great William Archibald Spooner would have trouble understanding him. No wonder the rest of the force is confused. Or perhaps that is the general idea.

Can we have a Boris the buffoon icon?

Can we have...

...an Apple filter please.

Are other manu's effin' dense?

This is why they fail. Waiting to see how Apple does before launching something half as good into the market place a year or more late and then wonder why they have lackluster sales in comparison. They already know how Apple steals key market segments (or creates them) with their products. The iPad is nothing new or innovative. It's just a big iTouch ffs! No wonder Job's is laughing all the way to the bank. I honestly believe that the people running some of these other companies need firing and replacing them with monkeys. They'd probably do a much better job!

I wish I was head of some company like HP, Dell, Asus,Samsung or one of the other smartphone makers perhaps. I'd soon kick their design teams into shape.

Fail

Using an OS where the core is too power intensive and apps (Especially stuff like Flash) will drain it further. At least Apple got that right. Code for the hardware. That way you get speed and power savings. By trying to shoehorn Win7 into tablets and smartphones it will spell disaster.

Ha!

Like I'd register with real info.

Oopsie!

That's one big screwup. Does that mean they will be stuffed for supplies and have to return to Earth? I would not like to be stuck up there with no options.

NAS'd off!

What's annoying me is that whilst you can not buy large format drives for very little we still see NAS boxes selling at exhorbitant prices. I mean come on. You can but a 1TB drive for a little over £50 but if you want to put 4 of them in a RAID box it will cost you £200 upwards (For a decent one). I know you can do soft RAID and use any old server but then you have the issue of power, heat, noise and bulk.

When are we going to see affordable NAS's for 4-5 drives?

If they can't prove you wrong

You can believe anything you like. If you are a prof with lots of fancy letters after your name all the better since it makes you look legit. Or does it? Indy?

I'll get my whip and hat.

Internet tax

This has internet tax/license written all over it.

Demo? D-E-M-O?

I want to see it in action with some demo before even considering this for anything. Plus what about high res? I'd want at least 720P on my 50" plasma thx. Also....laaaaaaaag!

What?

But no charges on the indecent images?

HDMI 1.3

Total fail on that front.

Nobody cares about the people

Notice how they continue pointing the cameras at the chopper and not at the injured people. It's like 'Oh wow look at that cool chopper. Oh people got hurt? Oh wow look at the cool chopper'.

Fail.

The most useful app would be...

Remote Desktop for Windows on iPhone/iPad.

I bet there is not an app for that!

Maybe he should have added

That it likes to wipeout your jailbroken iPhone too if you plug it into a iTunes infected computer.

Think of it this way.

It's the size of 4 iPhones stuck together so in effect you are only paying around a quarter the price of 4 iPhones. Possibly less :)

Proprietary sucks

I used to work for a recruitment agency. They used an inhouse system built back in the late 80's (This was back in the mid 90's). The original programmer and mainainer had long since left and there was only one guy who was a temp consultant who knew how it worked and hot to manipulate it (to a small degree).

I was glad I left before they had to move onto some other platform. Who knows. Perhaps they are still in business and still using the same system. But it was slow and horrid to use. They also used Sage for accounting and that was a pain in the backside to work with too (and cost a fortune on contract).

Geeks are disgusting!

And I am one of them! I thought I was the only one that liked to live in a dumpster. I have gadgets galore all over the place but my flat is a mess! Every space is taken up with clutter so cleaning is a problem. The floor area in partcular. I doubt that robot would help much as it would not be able to get to the edges and corners of the room!

It makes my heart warm to think I am not the only one living in a health hazard, dust mite collecting, fluff (dare I say it? Skin?) and other detritis zone.

I bet you are single ;)

Dat ring

$$$ lol

And...

Apple will wipe the floor with them all. Not because it's better but purely because they got there first (I mean they pushed out something more intuitive than previous incarnaitons of tablet PC's) and because of their fanbase...I mean marketing. Oh and Jobs. Lovely Steve Jobs. ;)

It's a Sony

Overpriced. Overhyped and over here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfokurUmoro&feature=related

Buffering...

...jerk jerk...oops! Flash crashed the browser.

BNP on toast?

Mines the one with the char grilled buttie.

Sigh

Why do people insist on sharing every moment of their lives with the world anyhow? This is one reason I would never use such 'services'. I they want to expose themselves in public then serves them right I say. Just another consequence of the wannabe celeb generation I guess.

BEWARE!

Someone suggested RegCompact. I have just spent over an hour repairing the damage it did as it completely hosed my Win7 64 system. Win7 repair did not work, System Restore refused to restore anything saying to remove system protection first (I could not) and the ONLY way I got back to where I was before it killed my system was to restore the backup registry HIV's from C:\Windows\System32\Config

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!