Posts by Giles Jones

Exactly

Multiple waveforms including pulse width modulation. You could even combine waves.

Envelopes, essential for mimicking real instruments as a piano doesn't start and stop abruptly, there's an attack and release at the very lease.

Multi-mode analogue filter, which was flawed and they knew it but there wasn't time to fix it. But it was better than nothing.

Ring modulation (an effect famously used to create the Dalek and Cybermen voice sounds).

To get a keyboard with such synth features in 1982 would have cost you quite a bit. Okay, it was a bit rough and there's crosstalk and bugs (the 6581 never fully closes its envelope generator) but you have to remember that it would have been heard through a TV set.

It's influence on some people is indicated by the fact you could get the sound chip in a MIDI module (I have one myself, quite a rare item), check out the owner list, you might recognise a few of them (especially Depeche Mode):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektron_SidStation#Bands_that_use_SidStations

But of course, some ignorant comparer or specs will point out the BBC Micro has 4 sound channel compared to the C64 SID's 3 channels :) completely ignoring the fact that the beeb can only produce boring tones.

Have you ever been to Milton Keynes?

No satellite dishes allowed, aluminium phone lines so no ADSL in most areas and lots of obsolete fibre cable technology.

http://mkbag.org/

Pre-2007 there were quite a lot of Windows Mobile devices. There was a time when you only really had a choice of two platforms if you wanted a PDA. Windows or Palm (Or PSION, but they had sadly fallen behind). There were Linux PDAs from Sharp, but they weren't widely available in the UK.

PDAs turned into smartphones which was half of the reason why they weren't very usable on the move until the interfaces were redesigned for use with fingers not styluses.

Those who don't trust IE, don't like Firefox (it has become bloated) and don't trust Google with their privacy perhaps?

Makes you wonder have a user space application can crash an OS. Usually it is code running inside the kernel space that does that, drivers and the like.

They'll never be short of a tea tray in that house.

Most solar or wind turbine solutions you can buy will take around 25-50 years to recoup the investment. Given that the average first time buyer is in their mid 30s it seems like a poor investment.

Better to improve the insulation in your home, that's cheap and can save a reasonable amount per year. If you already have a lot of insulation there's always triple glazing.

Apple have a long history in computing and the Apple Newton was started in 1987. So I'm sure they have plenty of technical and software patents. So claiming they have no heritage in mobile technology is a bit silly.

You sound like a sore loser. If it was HTC winning against Android I'm sure you wouldn't be complaining.

All these cases prove is that everyone has a valid patent or two that apply to mobile computing and UI design, which is to be expected.

There are cases of blatant copying in the IT world but also plenty of cases of coincidence. When developing software do people ever research what patents maybe out there? it is doubtful unless they are making software very similar to an existing successful product.

Look up the case of the Nvidia mobile GPUs. They supplied duff parts to Apple and many others, Nvidia denied that Apple was affected but Apple found out otherwise.

I had my logic board replaced for free after my warranty had expired, it would have cost me around £300 otherwise. Guess who is paying for the repair? Nvidia, they decided to take a hit of $150-200 million!

That's because Facebook has moved away from the Social Networking norm and has become little more than a glorified replacement for email where you add people you probably know and use it to share things and communicate with them.

Social networking used to be different, people didn't put all their personal details such as email address, phone number, home address and all their life details on a profile. They also used to choose a net name or alias and be careful of what they shared.

Try one of the Google TV boxes, you'll be begging for your Apple TV back.

It wasn't just Nokia, it was Microsoft and even RIM didn't seem concerned. Yet both now have single figure (or barely double figure in the case of RIM) marketshare.

It's not so much "digital" compression, but compression of the dynamic range of the audio signal.

So the loud peaks are reduced and the lower parts of the signal are boosted.

Most music is compressed like this now too so it sounds better or louder on rubbish audio systems (which appear to be the norm now).

That's in-app purchases. They're not automatic, you request them. In-app purchases can be disabled.

That kids parents made the mistake of associating their credit or debit card with their iTunes account instead of using top up vouchers.

I was running Tomtom on my PDA in 2003. A few years later I was running it on a Windows Mobile phone.

Tomtom moved into hardware as their software was being copied. Also smartphones weren't all that popular until the iPhone and Android appeared.

Depends what you like doing with your spare time. The last thing I want to do when I get home is driving over to someone's house to fix a problem on their tablet.

What's worse is so much modern digital data is wrapped up in copy protection and DRM so in years to come it will be pretty hard to recover without the help of encryption experts.

But then why is that odd if your actually selling computers like appliances?

When you buy a toaster, TV, fridge, washing machine and so on do you look for a hatch to open them up?

While computers sometimes need memory and disk upgrades you tend to burn out your washing machine before you upgrade to a better model. This tends to be true of most people when it comes to computers, they stick with the factory specification.

Maybe someone should tell Nokia that the blue and white of the original iMac went out of fashion about 15 years ago.

Then why isn't he looking at green technologies? he has enough money to make them viable.

What is positive about nuclear waste? it's toxic and hard to dispose of.

Any new trick a startup has come up with will be buried by Intel's anti-competitive tricks. Remember Sony's transmeta laptop that was mysterious pulled at the last second?

I played it fairly briefly. I was more into the New Zealand Story, another Taito classic.

Why not? you don't have to like people to read about them. Perhaps if you did read it you may appreciate that while he had flaws he contributed a lot to the industry. Competition to Windows kept Microsoft on the ball, monopolies often produce incremental improvements. A world without Apple would not have made Microsoft or Linux any better.

It's helpful when commenting about someone if you know about them, just like you can't really be too critical of religions if you haven't read their holy book.

Assange is slowly becoming a caricature. He'll be joining forces with David Icke next.

The hemp they grow has little or no THC content, so it's legal and useless to smoke.

See it in context. There was no iTunes and there was practically no download media market back then.

People wanted to download music, discover new music and so on. There was nothing legal that allowed you to do so back then.

Sure, there were websites with mp3 clips littered around the place, but nothing centralised.