Re: Lemmings
"you'll regret that"
2772 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007
A lot of the streaming TV services have issues beyond your connection speed.
I'm lucky enough to have FTTC, and 38mbs into the house, but 4OD often stutters and fails to stream smoothly even in the silly "real programmer" hours.
The other night even iplayer was being moody playing live TV, yet the TV catchup app on my Nexus 7 connected to my wifi was able to stream the same channel without issue.
Having just returned from Christmas in Hungary, where coincidently I gave a friend's son a R-Pi for Christmas, I can confirm the air traffic control, and whole airport organisation is running smoothly and efficiently. So the cleaner's son must have finished the project already.
More than can be said for those w*nkers Easyjet and Luton airport in general who caused me to miss my flight out in December.
You should try the Home Hub 3's standard PSU.
When I first got Infinity I couldn't work out why my previously reliable network of power line kept failing to link.
A few tests later, and I found it's the cheap PSU BT supply chucking too much noise back down the mains!
Binned it.
I class myself as a bit of a data hoarder, and I have a tendency to keep old machines and recycle them. I also take a lot of photographs and store them in RAW form, but this guy has twice as many PC's as me and blows my online storage completely out of the water...
100TB... At home... In a flat?! Although I do wonder if there is a bit of Daily Mail style reporting going on as I only saw 2 HP Microservers, which even when modded with extra SATA cards are not going to account for 100TB.
If he truly does have 100TB, I can't help but suspect the cops will find something amongst all that data which will hang this chap completely out to dry.
@DougS
I wonder how many of the iOS devs actually do make money. If they weren't already a Mac owner, they would have had to purchase one before they could even start developing. Not a good start to the bottom line!
The Android dev suite runs on anything, and costs nothing. Maybe this explains why a lot of apps are decidedly amateur.
@Craigness
Now that is odd. What version do you have? I've just checked on my vanilla Nexus 7, JB 4.2 and there is no update. BBC News Version 1.1 is what I have.
If they are supposed to be supporting a wide variety of devices, they need to be testing on the wide variety of devices.
So far the Facebook Android app always seemed to lag behind the iOS version, even though Android is the dominant mobile phone OS.
So they needed to do something to give their staff a kick up the behind to at least get them to more accurately reflect the real world user base.
It's not just FB. How often do you see "The hit app now available on Android!!!", answer, a lot. How often do you see "The hit app now available on iPhone!!!", answer not much. For whatever reason, iOS always seems to get the initial attention. It will be interesting to see if this changes if the ipads dominance of the tablet market is threatened.
Now if only the BBC could be given a similar kick... Their Android iplayer is horrendously low bitrate, and their news app doesn't even do basics like rotate, let alone take advantage of larger tablet real-estate.
What amazes me is that the whole world wasn't sitting there going "Oh my god, those huge square pixels, they hurt my eyes!!!" for all those years before Apple (sorry, Apple's LCD manufacturing suppliers) brought along "retina".
And you know what... A large proportion of the world are still using those huge pixels without screaming in pain or going blind... Weird eh?
Although I'll have to admit I enjoy Apple fans re-arranging their arguments now somebody else has brought an anaconda to the willy-waving competition.
"With Android devices, it's easy; you plug it in and then select "Mount file system" on the device"
Plug it in?
How quaint... I just turn on the FTP server installed on my Nexus 7 and send it over from my desktop! ;o)
(Or open the FTP client and suck it over).
I generally find iOS (and OSX for that matter) over protective and simplistic. Trying to do complicated things is either impossible, or buried. For your general Joe/Jane Bloggs in the street I guess this is great, but unfortunately I'm the guy they then ring up with the terrifying "Hey, Steve, you know about computers and stuff right? Well I have this problem with my iphone"...
I think I'll stick with my 'droid devices.
Having said that, I probably won't be buying an N10. The iOS OS wasn't the only reason I didn't buy an ipad. It's just too damn big! I really don't think I have a use for something like that. The N7 in my pocket is perfect for just that reason. It is in my pocket.
Thank you Charles! I had wondered about the downvotes myself, but then I remembered this is El Reg, so logic goes out of the window!
As you may have guessed, I too did several years working in the computer telephony industry, this included systems with voice recognition. As you know (and other probably don't), DTMF detection is usually performed on the telephony card, it's occurrence generates an interrupt so the processing application can then service the telephony card and point it to a new prompt or transfer the call etc. Voice recognition is usually farmed out to a specialist card, or to the main CPU as required.
Having a CPU or dedicated cards capable of continually processing audio from all the 30/60/90/120 inbound channels (modern systems usually have coax/fibre connections) is just crazy. Sure it makes the programming easy, just bind all the resources one to one instead of the more usual round robin pool allocation, but blimee that's gonna cost on the hardware!
This would only work if the queuing system kept a constant, unique, audio link from you open at all times. Whilst this is technically possible, many IVR / Autoattentant systems simply connect you to a common audio source (music on hold, comfort messages), and don't bother listening to you unless they really have to.
The resources required for speech recognition are also pretty high, so it would need a pretty beefy system to be performing speech rec on every inbound channel 100% of the time. Usually these resources are only allocated when required, i.e. when you've been prompted to say something.
So whilst it might work on some queuing systems, and the idea that an Apple system would be "spying" on you all the time isn't exactly shocking to me, I wouldn't go banking on it working in every situation.
You'll probably have more luck having a keyboard mash (don't forget * and #) and finding a get out of jail that way.
Alternatively, and preferably, just spread the news of the terrible support far and wide. This will reduce the number of customers, and hopefully you position in future queues if you haven't seen the light and taken your business elsewhere.
That is pretty damn rapid... It's mad enough doing that kind of speed in a powered water craft, but at least you have control of everything (bar the waves). Pulling that kind of speed at the mercy of the wind - mental!
It's also nice to see people in their rightful places too. Brits doing the design thing in their sheds, and a crazy Aussie piloting it. That's how it should be!
Yup, landscape only... What a superb advance... *rolls eyes*
I haven't tried it in video chat yet, but I bet I can guess what happens... If I hold it landscape, I'm sideways to the other person, if I hold it portrait I look correct to them, but their picture is shown sideways to me.
I'm going to roll my eyes again because I'm going to need the rotational practise soon!
"a plug from Oprah has been enough to send product sales up more than 600 per cent."
You mean they might actually sell two dozen?!
Seriously though, anyone who thinks Oprah, or the UK version, Stephen Fry, are the Oracle of all things technical (and supremely knowledgeable about devices available for only a few days) really do deserve to be parted from their money.
Accepted engineering practise would be to build in a safety margin.
Given the weight difference between a 4gig and 32gig SD card is negligible, they're a bit daft not to go for the bigger card.... If they were already using the largest card available, increasing the shooting interval would have been a good idea.
And why stop shooting when it reaches altitude? That misses all the "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGHHH!" shots on the way back down again!
Get_iplayer works fine in windows, although I did have to pay with it a little - manually update rtmpdump to get all the shows to download correctly...
I wish rtmpdump would sort out the 32bit arithmetic issue (or just make it unsigned!), then it would cure the max show length issue - that only kicks in at about 3 hours (funny to watch the counter flip over the top and start descending toward zero before going boom!) so not a major issue. I only noticed it when grabbing some Olympic stuff.
As opposed to what? Paying for 20 minutes of adverts per hour for sky, or lowest common denominator "reality" shows with premium rate phone ins on the commercial channels?
Apart from the news, I watch almost 99% of TV shows "off-line" from either iplayer, PVR recordings or torrents when I've forgotten to record something, or the main UK channels stop showing a show after a couple of series and I have to resort to US recordings to keep watching.
Generally the BBC are pretty good, but their handling of the F1 coverage (sharing it with SKY, and only showing 50% of the races, with the rest being high-lights) is just a farce. I gave up on F1 at that point. God help them if they ever screw the MotoGP up like that!
They're probably too busy w*nking over some reskin for their retina ipads/imacs whilst ignoring the non fruit majority and then fobbing them off with half-hearted efforts.
For example, the Android BBC News app doesn't even rotate!
Anyway, back to the subject... get_iplayer does indeed work... Very nicely thank you.