Posts by Number6 2293 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Having though about it, with modern displays, there's plenty of width and not much height (especially on netbooks), so having tabs in a panel to the left (or right) of the main window, with a scroll bar, would probably be good enough. You could get a significant number of them there without impacting much, and then rearrange them into groups if you so desire.
Resistive screens are often not as sharp as a capacitive screen, it's all in the optical properties of the screen itself. However, it's possible to screw up a capacitive screen if you get your ITO patterns wrong.
I did like the old P800 (and indeed, I've still got one that works) and the interface on that - must have been one of the earlier examples of the touch-screen, including the little plastic keyboard that fitted over part of the screen and activated it when the buttons were pressed, for those who weren't quite with the concept.
My solution on every Windows XP machine I've used is to change the desktop theme to Windows Classic with a cyan-ish uniform background colour. Same look and feel all the way.
My father is still running Win2K on his home machine and I've just about persuaded him that next time I'm there, I'll upgrade him to Linux because it'll do just about everything he wants (email, web and a bit of word processing) and that'll save him having to pay for Win7 and new hardware on which to run it (his machine is old, but not worth upgrading for the amount of time he uses it).
A tax is a bad idea, it has no limits and can be abused by future governments who think that graduates are cash cows. At least with a loan you know you've paid it off and the government isn't going to screw you for even more.
Get your degree and emigrate, avoid the tax altogether.
Isn't this what we were saying at the time, that it was just a means to draw the NHS in to make it ever harder for them to move to an alternative solution? Time to bite the bullet, Mr Lansley, and ditch MS for a cheaper alternative. Yes, it will hurt short-term, but the savings will come over the following years.
Plus we'd see less headlines about various bits of the NHS being brought down by a virus or leaking data via a compromised machine (can't do much about the CD on the train though).
I think there are only two laws worth adding - the first limits the number of laws allowed, so that once it's reached they have to scrap an old one to add a new one, the second is to put a best-before-date on all legislation, so that after 5/10/20 years it expires unless debated and approved for an extension by both Houses of Parliament. This would eventually achieve the first aim, when they're spending all their time renewing old laws and don't have time to create new ones.
If I end up paying towards an ISP levy to cover filesharing then you can bet I'll join the party and benefit from some of what I'm paying for.
It's a bit like the threat to tax people on work-provided car park spaces in a misguided attempt to discourage people from driving to work - if I'm paying for it then I'm going to get the maximum benefit from the space and drive to work every day, rather than use the bike if it's a nice day.
I'm lucky to get a decent 2G signal at home, no sign of 3G. One has to drive some distance before a decent 3G signal appears.
I did have a telco sales droid call and try to sell me a 3G dongle, which I turned down because (a) I have a smart phone that does most of what I want and (b) their data coverage is crap and not worthy of spending money. Hopefully the feedback was passed up the line but I doubt it, he probably just moved on to the next call and forgot about me.
Lots of radio kit doesn't work too well in buildings, and generally the higher the frequency, the worse it gets. It shouldn't be too surprising that a UHF radio suffers a bit with a few walls between it and the base station, especially if there are also other buildings in the vicinity to add their walls to the attentuating circumstances.
I idly clicked on the "Bras" tag at the bottom of the article and found 25 articles, including at least one that had nothing to do with airbag restraint (I didn't look at all of them).
I'm not even sure this article is directly relevant, otherwise the title would have made mention of an iden-titty parade. It would have been appropriate, given that it occurred in Bustage.
Perhaps we need a bit of parental responsibility and education instead of silly buttons that just go to boost the egos of vested interests and add no practical value.
The state has demonstrated that it puts its own interests above yours, so learn to care for yourself and your family and don't expect them to do it for you.
I have two or three on-line identities, but they are kept apart and in a particular forum I'll always use the same one. Some date back over fifteen years and so in some ways are better known than if I did post with my full name. There are too many nutters out there to necessarily trust my full details to the wilder parts of the net although they're available for those who look hard enough
I am not a number, etc.
Only last night I was up in the loft space running a CAT5 cable to the bedroom for an internet radio. This morning I was woken by the clear sound of voices from my local BBC radio station, instead of the crackly hiss that my previous bedside alarm radio could manage (and which got worse when the CFL bedside light was on).
As for DAB, no chance.
Actually, my Aspire One netbook (running Linux, it has to be said) has helped out at the office on several occasions precisely because it is small and easy to carry and, on more than one occasion, because it was running Linux and not Windows. Recently I've been using it as a Linux development platform, although I have to admit to cheating by running an X server on my Windows desktop machine and using SSH to the netbook.
Microsoft killed the true netbook anyway - the Eee and the AA1 and their early competition. All of a sudden the screen size went back up to the point where it's a small laptop, not a netbook, and it's hard to get a low-end cheap, small machine now (although I just bought a spare AA1 on eBay). That's one of the reasons to dislike Microsoft, although it's not completely their fault.
Firstly they did the dirty on CP/M at the start of the IBM PC era. To be fair this was them putting one over on the Microsoft of its day if the story about the golf course has any truth in it.
There was the modification to Windows 3.1 to object to DRDOS in an attempt to discourage people from using DRDOS. Then we had all the FUD and dodgy marketing practice that shot down OS/2 when, at the time, OS/2 was better than the competing Windows products. Then there was the "pay us a licence for every PC you ship whether it's got Windows on or not". I have vague recollection of compressed disk technology getting a work-over, we get the vague threats to Linux that it's infringing patents without anyone naming those patents. Forever changing the file formats for MS Office so that competing products never quite catch up, and MS users are expected to pay for a new one when the old one is perfectly good apart from handling a new file format that doesn't give them any extra. OOXML, mustn't forget that.
That's the list off the top of my head, although I know there's more.
If the police don't have a YouTube officer then it's probably worth appointing one, given the number of clueless idiots who manage to post inciminating evidence of their wrongdoing.
No doubt the defence will be the advertising slogan "When you're too drunk to drive, take a bus"...
They should have put it top-left, so that it would be above the hand, and would end up top-right when rotated for landscape mode.
You're also a bit wrong in the article about us sinister types - I hold a phone in my right hand, always have done. It makes it much easier if I need to take notes while on a call.
It would be a vast improvement if they could manage to reduce most of the long runs to the nearest exchange by judicious use of fibre to the cabinet. In a small village several km from an exchange, you could improve broadband for the whole village by having the exchange end of the DSL in the local box.
It's a bit more problematic for a few houses stuck in the middle of nowhere, but they've probably got pole-mounted phone lines anyway, which could have fibre wound round them (as was done with pylons in the past, IIRC) for a lot less than the cost of digging trenches to lay cable,
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