Posts by This Side Up 442 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2011
Then just masquerade as the supported browser. I remember whan I had to set the browser "Who am I" to IE5 or Netscape because some sites simply wouldn't talk to any other browser. It looks like we're heading back to the bad old days.
A browser is only a tool, FGS. I remember a conversation with an IS bod that went something like
"I've uninstalled IE"
"You can't uninstall IE"
"But I have..."
I didn't tell them how, though it wasn't exactly difficult.
What's important is the amount of light it emits and that's measured in lumens, not the power consumption of some obsolete and inefficient bit of technology that produces mostly heat. In any case 50W was not a commonly used rating for GLS lamps. It might be useful to know how much power the system is actually consuming when in use and on standby.
"I knew this would rile ROS fans, but y'know that's how Bill called it. ADFS::HardDisc4.$ compares to C:\ how?"
But how often do you actually need to type in ADFS::HardDisc4.$.? Virtually never, though you can if you want to. If you need a full pathname you can just shift-drag the icon.
Oh, and RISC OS keeps the file type separately from the file name.
How can you call RISC OS idiosyncratic? It's intuitive. Drag and drop filing is so much easier than having to navigate Windows's or MacOS's filing systems. It had the icon bar long before both Microsoft and Apple pinched the idea. It has the ability to put windows to the back, and to have focus on a window without automatically bringing it to the front thereby covering up the other windows you wanted to see. In short, RISC OS is so much more user-friendly that it's worth putting up with a few drawbacks like the absence of a fully-featured web browser.
"A politician who doesn't know the difference between the Internet and the WWW, or a tech site that doesn't know the difference between the Internet and the internet."
There is no such thing as the internet.
There is Internet Protocol though. Internet means 'between networks'.
"The 'better' ones already do that, especially in cases of rootkits, buffer-overflows and return-oriented programming. using a compiler would make this work very difficult to do, if not impossible."
There's a difference between a compiler, a symbolic assembler and writing in machine code in hex or octal.
Perhaps they should be made to enter their programs in binary using the keyswitches on the front of a PDP8, or was it an 11?
"To quote Churchill:
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."
That could apply to the Jimmy Savile affair.
It's the right decision for Gary McKinnon. Now let's hope he makes a full and speedy recovery in the style of Ernest Saunders.
The food industry is the worst offender. If I got to the pound shop or the 99p shop or my local newsagent I can buy a 2 litre bottle of milk. If I go to the supermarket I have to have 1.136 litres or 2.272 litres. If I buy tea it's in convenient 125 or 250g packets; coffee comes in 454g packets. Most things are metric, so let's get rid of the anomolies once and for all. While we're at it let's use Joules (or MJ) for energy rather than Calories or kW.hr.
The only two exceptions I'd make in the short term are beer glasses in pubs and glass milk bottles for doorstep deliveries. That's not because I have any objection to drinking a "large" (500ml) or a "small" (300ml) glass of beer, but because I don't want to impose additional costs on publicans and dairies. I'd ban the introduction of new imperial size glasses and bottles except for souvenir shops, home use etc. Wine and spirits are already sold in metric quantities and pubs should switch over for beer when new glasses are needed. Their remaining old glasses can be sold to pubs that wish to remain 'imbeerial' for a bit longer. Something similar could be done for dairies.
The government and the media seem to think metric is fine for engineering, commerce, aggriculture, fisheries, construction, ... but not for the general public who are a completely different set of people that can't cope with all this new-fangled stuff. I was taught metric units in school (cgs not SI) and that was 55 years ago. The excuse that we can't handle metric units is just nonsense. We changed to decimal currency in 1971. Who would seriously want to go back to £sd now?
And bridge strikes.
We have a lot of continental drivers in the UK, both resident and visiting. A great many British drivers drive on the continent. It will save lives in the long run if we all use the same units for speed limits and height and width restrictions. Weight limits are usually in tonnes anyway.
short of playing them into an analogue VCR?
And why do we have to put up with this dreadful horizontal style EPG? I just want a list of programmes for one channel at a time, going down the screen, left or right to see the previous or next channel, and numbers to go directly to a channel.
"Anybody foolish enough to believe that electric cars are good for the environment needs their head examining"
You need to differentiate between environment and ecology. Electric vehicles are good for the environment in town centres. Whether they are good for the planet depends on how the electricity is generated. At the moment they aren't.
The problem with most DVB-T tuners is that you need to use the tv to select the station unless you can remember accurately what the key sequence is. Also those that record don't let you download MP3 to your computer or player although S/P-DIF is provided in some cases.
You can of course get portable DVB-T receivers (with screens) but reception is dire with the built-in aerials.
"Which is never ever mentioned... is that the whole transmission system is designed for use in a moving receiver."
Ah, at last I see what I'm doing wrong. I should be waltzing around the kitchen carrying the DAB radio to keep it on the move while I'm frying the black pudding. I'm glad you pointed that out.
The big department stores certainly do have low power relays - somewhat different from broadcast transmitters - especially if the audio department is in the basement, otherwise tey'd be completely stuffed.
"A failing DAB signal just mutes. If your receiver allows you to hear the burbles, it's either wrongly calibrated or you've deliberately turned off the muting to give yourself something to moan about."
I think I'd have something to moan about either way, and with justification. I'd rather have a bit of noise than no sound at all because the receiver can't recognise enough 0s and 1s to reliably convert to analogue.
The Roberts RecordR records in MP2 format presumably because it's easiest, but what good is that to man or beast? What software will play MP2 or convert it to MP3 or any usable audio format?
If you buy a domestic video recorder, be it tape, DVD, BluRay or HDD, it comes with one or more tv tuners as a matter of course. If you buy an audio recorder it virtually never comes with a radio tuner or any facilities to schedule a recording. If I use the PVR to record radio off DVB-T it's recorede in some bloated video format that takes up just as much space as video, but I can't ediit the recording. The only thing I can do is play it back in real time to an audio recorder or computer, resulting in another cycle of expansion and compression.
"Your on about the wrong type of compression "
No, he was specifically replying to a post about audio (dynamic range) compression. The problem with DAB specifically is the excessive lossy digital compression which is used to squash as many channels as possible into the bandwidth. This knocks the stuffing out of music and in particular destroys the stereo image because it loses phase information, not that you'd notice with two speakers 10cm apart.
It's very sad that the BBC has lost any desire for technical excellence, a few old school engineers excepted. It just wants to be a ratings whore and pump out stuff to the uncritical masses.
DATs and DLTs? When I were a lad, or rather a data processing trainee, we had proper tape decks with big 9-track tape reels and write permit rings. Those were the days! My first useful job was converting tape-based batch update systems to direct access i.e. exchangeable disc stores. More than 40 years later I've been converting our talking newspaper from compact cassettes to USB flash drives.
Why do people keep calling these things "set top boxes"? How many people put them on top of the set? How many sets actually have tops that are both flat enough and deep enough to put equipment on? If it's a digital tuner or a DVD recorder or a hard disc recorder than just say what it is. It doesn't matter where it's located.
It's a total epic failure. The system is completely incapable of handling the situation where a series flips between one channel and another (e.g. Michael Portillo's Great British Railway Journeys) or when a single programme such as the Wimbledon Tennis Championships transfers from one channel to another.
write a program to detect without human intervention whether a web page, text, image or video is pornographic. She doesn't need to code it - a detailed specification will do. First of all define what pornography is. It doesn't include innocuous nudity like the odd prince cavorting in Vegas, or a mother holding a naked baby or a wardrobe malfunction or a fine art nude painting. The offending material may not be on the home page and the route to it may not be obvious. If she can do that then she can talk to the telcos about it.
It's easy to come up with a list of sites that do contain hardcore material but it will never be exhaustive. Sites come and go, change IP addresses and domains. Is she prepared to trawl the web and ftp servers and usenet and file sharing sites and bit torrents to maintain the list? If she relies on people to report sites it will be too late.
No. If kids find smut it's because they were loking for it. If they encounter censorship they will find a way around it. That just adds to the challenge. Finding the forbidden fruit is more exciting that eating it.
If Harry want's to get his kit off, so what? There's no need for the UK media to get into headless chicken mode about it. If he invites a few hot chicks up to his room for a romp he shouldn't be too surprised if one or two of them have smartphones with cameras.
PS do hotel rooms usually have billiard tables?
"That means they effectively all will, since no one's going to buy a new car that lacks an NCAP rating."
No. There are quite a lot of low volume cars that don't have NCAP ratings and will no doubt continue that way.
Btw it won't stop the vehicle behind slamming into you when your brakes come on before its driver has reacted to the situation.
What's the point of having an EPG if it bears no relationship to the programmes being transmitted? I tried ten times over the weekend to watch or record Click! The EPG said it was on. The BBC web site schedule said it was on. The Click! pages on the BBC web side said it was on. The 'info' button said it was on. Was it hell? All I got was people gassing on about some sports thing that seems to be going on at the moment. Amd at 3.30 in the morning too!
Tonight exactly the same thing has happened on the World Service. With all this gee-whizz digital technology why is impossible for the UK's leading broadcaster to put out correct information?
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