Posts by IHateWearingATie 683 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2008
... when you start talking about being a hooker (as I found when I was young on a trip to Disney).
*Note to our colonial friends - the 'hooker' is the middle position in the front row of a scrum. The ball is put in, and the hooker uses his leg to hook the ball back to his own side.
I'll still probably get a PS4 as that is the one that my mates have pre-ordered (and sunday nights would be pretty bare without getting thrashed by them playng online Grid 2). However:
PS3 games - very annoying, but at least that is something I can understand. New architecture, very difficult to make backwards compatible. They managed it for the PS3 ->PS2 games, but I guess things have got more complicated.
Bluetooth - WTF??? Why won't my bluetooth headset work? Have they gone out of the way to cripple it???
DLNA - I DONT WANT YOUR CRAPPY ONLINE SERVICE SONY! With your encoruagement (remember, Sony made a big play on the PS3 being a media hub) I made the PS3 the centre of my under-telly hub. I have music and films ripped to a server that my PS3 serves very nicely over my network to my sound system and TV. I could understand it if it was a feature that you were planning to put in later (like the PS3) as you con't quite get it done for launch day (like blu-ray films), but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Music - Really?? I have 2 boxes in my unit under the telly - Sky and PS3. I don't want to add one or two more (play CDs, stream DLNA). Why they hell have you removed this? Again if it was coming later as patch, fine. But to cripple it to force me to use your crappy online service is terrible.
I have a rasberry pi, and I've used it very successfully as a DLNA server but it makes hooking things up complicated (do I have enough HDMI ports, how do I rig the sound to make it easy to switch etc). I know there are solutions, but this is a real retrograde step. If my mates weren't getting a PS4, I think I'd go Xbox.
Although I've now moved into the Android ecosystem entirely with Android tablet and phones, I can still appreciate the great engineering that goes into the iPad. The 4 was lovely, and it looks like the air will be even better.
However, there's no chance I'll be buying one- a nexus 7 and cheap windows laptop cost about the same (£500 or so) and are more flexible for my needs
I know what an iso is.
While my imagination is large enough to think of non-infringing iso images that can be distributed over the internet, lets not pretend the VAST majority of iso images that people were using the site to search for did not contain copyright material.
You may not like the law at the moment and want to change it, but you can't willfully break it, try to pretend you didn't and then attempt to claim some technicality to avoid the consequences.
... this guys' arguments seem pretty disingenuous to me. The damn site is called isohunt - its not like Google where they may index infringing material as a small part of what they do, most of what the website is about is searching for stuff that breaks copyright. He knows that. We know that. The rest is just attempting to swing a technicality.
Stop whining and take the punishment like a man.
"Nevertheless, Windows 8.1 is a step forward and a worthwhile upgrade over Windows 7 even for those sticking with desktop, keyboard and mouse."
Really? From all I've read about Win 8 and 8.1 I just can't see any advantages for me with my desktop, keyboard and mouse - used for games, normal home stuff (editing photos, home movies, managing music collections etc) and a bit of working from home.
Given I moved to Win 7 from XP for this desktop, I think I'll skip a generation again.
You need to think very differently about the contracts and the way systems are specced.
Certainly in some of the ones I was involved with, there was no way little guys could bid (except as a subbie). Building a new benefits system is going to be a larger chunk of revenue than you'd be comfortable with for a small supplier. Unless you radically changed how you build big mission critical systems.
For those with lots of bad things to say about the big boys working on big systems - you have a point as lots of those went wrong (not all though - ESA worked very well for example) but let's not forget smaller firms screw up as well (iSoft for the NHS, COINS, etc) with the same bad results.
I can see exactly why SAP are interested in parts of Blackberry - they are pushing hard to have SAP modules as the mobility software that are used in supply chain, field forces etc.
I can imagine them using stuff from Blackberry to provide a more complete mobility offering, but I suspect a SAP phone isn't one of them!
I thought his early books were great (Cardinal of the Kremlin etc), but the later ones (Executive Orders, Bear and the Dragon etc) just got more and more one dimensional - 'America is great, right wing libertarians are right and everyone else is wrong'.
RIP
Okay, so Ichan is a tool, but the idea in money to buy back shares is not stupid. A business is funded (with some exceptions) through debt or equity. Equity is expensive due to the expected returns of shareholders being generally higher than debt interest for companies like Apple. One way to reduce gearing (ratio of debt to equity) is to borrow money to buy back shares. That pushes up the share price and which increases shareholder returns and increases the amount of working capital funded by cheap debt rather than expensive equity - after all they do own the business, a fact Steve Jobs seemed to forget when refusing to pay dividends.
It's basically a slightly updated 5 with a new plastic back - the pricing differential is almost exactly the same as Apple has done in the past with previous versions when a new one is out.
Plenty of people have opted for the previous version of the iPhone to save costs - Apple were still happily selling plenty of the 4S after the 5 had come out.
... and it was sorted by the morning. Her feedback so far is:
- Picture gallery updates very good
- Control centre very good (particularly the torch button in the control centre)
- Changes to contacts and messaging very good
- Colours and icons awful, too bright and looks like something for my 3 year old daughter
She still wants an Android phone next though (not because of the operating system, but because she saw a Sony phone in purple - ho hum)
Only 4 thumbs down for daring to mention fragmentation on Android?
Come on Fandroids, you're not trying hard enough!
(I've just moved to an Android phone from iOS btw, and my question was genuine, not trolling. Very interesting answer from @DrXym to my point )
Eventually the amount of memory in smart phones will move beyond 4GB, so Android will have to make the move to 64bit at some point.
Given the amount of control that Apple have over the hardware and development environments compared to Google and Android, if Apple are having problems I wonder how bad the fragmentation will get for Android when they make the switch?
Interestingly, this is the approach that Brompton uses for their folding bikes. Went to a talk by the guy who runs the company (not the original designer - this guy took over from him) and he said the patent files are like a little design library for Chinese bike companies - they pick out a patent, and get a handy reference guide for exactly how to rip off a design.
They stay ahead of the game through innovation in the manufacturing process - the design of their bikes makes it really hard to manufacture if you don't have the custom designed tooling they have created.
Very disappointed.
My requirements:
- somewhat waterproof (won't go swimming in it, needs to resist getting dunked when I wash my hands)
- Tells the time & date
- Enough battery capacity to get me through a full day with moderate use
- Wireless charging (put charging mat on bedside table - watch gets placed on it each night)
- Functions like the notifications pull down in the phone - preview emails, texts etc. Don't want to have to configure notifications for watch separately, it needs to use my phone's settings
- Controls volume, play/pause, simple track and playlist selection for whatever audio apps I have (pocketcast, double twist etc)
- Maybe voice control for sending simple texts etc
- Tell me when it and the phone needs recharging
- Have the option to display phone connectivity status (wifi, cellular etc)
- Cost around £150. Will possibly stretch to £200 for something amazing - a half decent looking Seiko standard watch costs over £100 anyway.
Won't be getting a smart watch until it can meet the list.
I have a PS3 but as no games are backwards compatible I was up for moving to xbox, but I cant see any reason to make the jump and lose my PS3 gamer tag.
More expensive, not quite as well specced and bundled with the Kinnect that I will never ever use. And I hate footie games so the bundled fifa game doesnt interest me (no choice of bundled games?)
- Bring full range of MS assets to Winphone and properly integrate (Outlook, office, skydrive, Xbox etc)
- Make app store free for developers for the next 2 years (important to define the period to give certainty)
- Make available free / v low cost developer tools that make it easy to port code from Android / iOS
- Partner programme where they pay key developers for apps on winphone
- Bribe, sorry, incentivise key networks to carry winphones
Will cost a few $bn, but they have the cash and just spunked $5bn on Nokia so they can't pull back now!
Nice to see the Electron given a write up - it's the forgotten cousin of the BBC Micro and not usually mentioned in the stories written about the time.
I had an Electron, bought for me second hand by my Dad well after they had stopped production (couldn't afford a new computer). Still, it played Elite and The Last Ninja so I was happy!
... one bit I visited had a shallow lake that froze every night and thawed every day.
During the daytime I was wandering around in shorts and a t-shirt, but at night I needed proper winter gear (base layer thermals + 2 warm layers + outer etc). Also, sleeping at high altitudes gave me the weirdest and most vivid dreams...
Have you got a link to the CA moaning about poles and cabinets? Generally land owners like pole delivery of cables as they get cash from it, and plenty of rural areas have direct connections to the exchange so there are no cabinets.
The cabinet moaning brigade tend to be townies living in expensive bits of London.
I want them to fail for the perfectly selfish reason I've chosen a Galaxy S4 for my work phone over a iPhone 5 (work not willing to wait to offer me a 5s) and my self esteem will get a boost if the 5s is the same as the 5 with a crappy finger print scanner, tacky gold colouring and fisher price inspired icons.
... who's not sure if the rocket motor will fire yet?
I seem to remember from the REHAB chamber test that there was a significant pause before the motor fired properly - one interpretation was that the motor was burning a little and the exhaust gases built up increasing the pressure within the REHAB chamber, and once the pressure had built close to 1atm the rocket then fired properly.
I remember there being a comment in the article about investigating this, but I don't think anything ever came of it. Coupled with the only partial success of the igniter trial with the SPEARS board recently, how confident are you that it will actually fire ?
If you read the legislation carefully, you'll find that they can detain him for up to 9 hours and nab his stuff for up to 7 days in order to work out whether he is a terrorist (as defined by 40(1)(b) ). They do not have to have grounds to suspect he is a terrorist - see para 2(4).
So, they have not exceeded their powers, and as long as they return his stuff within 7 days (assuming they find out he isn't Bin Laden's twin brother in the meantime) the law will have been complied with.
That's not to say it is right though. This legislation gives the border force carte blanch to perform a dragnet on people coming through the borders, and leaves it option to (alledged) abuse in cases such as this.
I shall be writing to my MP, who, being a Tory in a marginal seat might actually pay some attention. Or not. We shall see.
BoPL on a mass scale for anything other than low bandwidth applications (like smart meters) is not a great idea with current technologies, and it difficult to implement in the UK given how the power infrastructure is owned (liabilities if there is an accident, who fixes it etc).
An explanation is probably worthy of an article in itself, but one of the many things is that you have to either inject the radio signal into the cable after the final network transformer (as the transformer blocks the signal completely) or rig some kind of bridge on each transformer to allow the radio signal to span it and inject it further back in the line (but not too far due to attenuation). For mass consumer broadband, you may as well keep going down the fibre to the cabinet or fibre to the home route due to the additional network nodes you'd have to build.
They do use BoPL for smart metering in Italy I think, and I seem to remember that powerline networking was in the mix as part of the bidding process for the UK.
Been a couple of years since I worked on this stuff so things may have moved on.
It's better than the current EE offer - I struggle to hit the 1GB cap on my phone at the moment - can't see me (or the majority of other punters) hitting the 4GB cap each month (comparable to the £31 a month I pay now)
Voda data capacity in central London still sucks though, so they wouldn't be my provider of choice.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
