Posts by Nosher

"seeing as how the iMac was quite unlike anything that the personal computer market had seen before"

Oh, apart from maybe 1983's C/WP Cortex - released some 15 years before: http://www.nosher.net/archives/computers/az_personal_computers_1984-10_001 (with apologies for pimping one of my own pages but it's the only advert reference I could find. old-computers.com also has a small article on it: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=899&st=1)

"Inspire the Next Generation"

The phrase "inspire the next generation" really bugs me, because by implication it's writing off the /current/ generation of children. Even at the age of ten I've heard that it's possible to learn new stuff.

Always Connected my arse

I have a two-day-a-week 1.5-hour-each-way commute to London during which I work (as part of my working day). Even though the Greater Anglia Inter City train has fairly good WiFi (considering it's a train and all), I find that unless it's *perfect* then all these Google Drive apps are a waste of time as *everything* they do (even just adding text) depends on some AJaX backhaul. Using them is tedious beyond words, so I find myself still using LibreOffice and such to create docs and spreadhseets whilst on the move. So much for the liberation of The Cloud: it'll probably be a generation before the cellular/radio/LTE/whatever network is good enough /everywhere/ between Diss and London, whilst travelling at over 100mph, for this to work practically and seamlessly.

iTedious

Sigh. Whilst this is an excellent idea, what has that fact it was an iPhone got to do with anything? Nothing. If anything, it might put other people off trying this out as they can't afford the Apple premium.

Petulant Freeloading Children

There's a lot of noise here, and much of it is the sound of petulant tantrums and the stamping of feet. "Oh, but America has got some program so I WANT IT TOO!!". It might be frustrating (and I'm not suggesting that there aren't much better business models), but where does it say there's some kind of Fundamental Universal Right to get hold of something someone else decides to create on any terms other than theirs, regardless of how much they decide to charge or where they decide to release it first? If you find those terms annoying, you're free to reject their offer and go out and create your own album's worth of music or $1million-per-episode TV program. Oh, what's that? You can't because you're not creative or talented enough??

Is it the 1980s again?

Meh. 1985 called and wants its story back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartwatch#Seiko_RC_series

Annoyed Lingua-Pedantry

FFS! Being "vegetarian" is an ethical position - an active choice made by a person to eschew eating meat or animal-derived products. I think you'll find that dinosaurs (or indeed any other animal) do not actively choose one way or the other and that the word "herbivore" is what you're looking for in this case.

Frankly, I'm with Debenhams on this. Anything that has got so utterly pretentious that it requires a "trained barista" to make it is so up its own arse with its self-important sense of metropolitan uber-trendiness that it's not even funny any more. Watching people chugging one of any number of varieties of *the same basic drink* out of their baby sippy cups just makes me squirm.

It's amusing (in a deeply ironic, depressing way) to read people grumbling about "only getting 37mbps" or "only managing 8mbps". Living in rural Suffolk, the maximum where I am is 2.5mbps, but I'm actually still on 1mbps - yes, *one* - simply because it's an old Demon uncontested circuit and the throughput is way better than that from the 2.5mbps circuit (it was probably poor DSLAM profiling when I briefly switched to ADSL "Max", but I could never persuade Demon to investigate it). Still, 1mbps is just enough to stream from LoveFilm...

VM have no credibility in these arguments when their closed network reaches less than 50% of the population, and they're doing nothing to extend their reach (and most likely never will).

Try living in /my/ world, high-speed townie whingers!! :-)

Dammit! No need for the apostrophe in "leccy"

You guys keep needlessly prepending the slang word "leccy" with an apostrophe, when it shouldn't have one (the word Eleccy does not exist). If you're treating it as being a contraction (like 'ello), then it would be 'lec'c'y, but that's clearly daft.

Apple behaviour?

"Selling out of a product depends as much on the stocks you have as the level of demand"

Of course Apple would never do such a thing, would they?

What about J2ME/MIDP?

Funny that they chose not to sue over the various manufacturer implementations of J2ME or MIDP back in the 2000's. Or were they all actually "licenced"? Or was it that they weren't juicy-enough targets at the time...?

Internet Radio my arse

Yeah, because internet radio would work *really* well in my car on the drive to work - 53 miles each way with perfect DAB coverage across Suffolk and into Cambridge with the enjoyable company of 6Music. Don't get me wrong - I love inernet radio. At home. With a computer (or my Squeezebox). With broadband. Please just stop slagging DAB - you clearly don't actually use it. Only a few of the issues you constantly raise are legit - yes DAB+ would be better, etc, etc. but it's hardly the end of the world if it doesn't work in Europe (you've clearly not listened to French radio) but the audio quality issue is completely bogus - it sounds perfectly good in the car and on my Pure Evoke Flow in the kitchen, and is shed-loads better than the AM tech which seemed to suffice for Radio 1 until 1988 - nobody moaned constantly about that (much). Enough already!

So is HD TV a "failure" too?

Actually, according to RAJAR figures, the number of households with DAB radios is "over one third". The number with HD TVs (including those with HD-ready TVs but without an HD service, which is arguably comparable to those with DAB radios who only listen to FM) is around 40%, so in your measured opinion does that make HD TV a failure too?