Posts by deshepherd

Re: Never mind Lego

yes, Playmobil are just playing catch up with Lego who've had a bank robber (helpfully identifiable by a striped top .... sadly, though, without a bag marked SWAG) called "the Brickster" for many years!

Re: TV Advert

Don't count your chickens yet ... they've said that they are retaining the Virgin brand in the UK and as to the vast bulk of the population Virgin==Branson then I'd assume they'll be keen to keep him involved (and I'm sure it won't take much persuasion to keep the shy and retiring inveterate self-publicist around!)

Re: I'm worried...

Back in the 60s we only got to watch half hour Dr Who episodes

Except a single story was told over several episodes so you had to be able to follow a storyline for several weeks .... and each episode started off where the last ended - you didn't get 5 mins of "previously on ..." intro to remind you what had happened. Whereas now you get 45-60mins self contained episodes (occasionally you get some 2-part stories but in current Dr Who series think they've said that they have abandoned this).

Re: Kettle and Microwave.

Perhaps I am a barbarian American, but for tea, I always heated water on the stove

Probably are! I spent time in California in 1996 and 1998-2000. On first 6 month visit we went to local electrocal retailer (Fry's) and searched for a kettle ... found nothing and salesbods had no idea of what we were talking about. Just before I returned to UK branch of Bloomingdale's opened in Stanford shopping centre and I spotted a mini kettle there for .... $99! 2 years later when were were back for almost 3 years things had moved forward a bit and found an "electric water heater" for $20 in Walmart which was basically a 2 mug kettle which saw us through ... though at 110V it took forever to boil.

Re: article totally misses the point

5. The airport's strategic relevance with regards to the Falklands is very limited.

Also when considering the airport note that as a quid pro quo the Goverment funding for the airport is being done on the basis that when it opens they remove the funding that currently supports the mail ship that with 6 weekly visits is currently the only regular connection between St Helena and the outside world.

Re: SETI ?

Or maybe they're going to pickup up something from CETI!

Re: The truth is out there...

I don't believe this for a second. Every mobile phone I've ever used require a button press (or opening of a clamshell) to answer. One does not answer a mobile phone by pressing it straight to the ear.

Might not have been a true "mobe" but a "carry-around" DECT phones ... many of those have a mode where lifting them off the base station answers to call.

Re: Optional.

How is it bad for the publisher though?

I think the argument is that Amazon will take a hit on costs now to build up a dominant position in e-book selling so that in the future they'll be able to turn back on the publishers and tell them that if they want them to sell ebooks for them then they'd better reduce the prices.

Re: A fascinating read

Used to be my main news source ... but a few years ago they forked the website to supply different versions to "UK" and "non-UK" users and, although I'm in the UK my companies WAN has its internet gateway in Switzerland so I can't see the "UK" version at work and as a result I switched to the Guardian as primary news site.

Re: Browser agents

I've not done it but it may be a factor ... I remember in the days when Netscape was trying to nibble away at the IE dominance that there was a belief that Netscape usage were a bit higher than reported due to people changing agent strings ... why, because then many website checked this and sent anything other than the latest IE version to a "we don't support your browser, update to the latest IE" page.

Re: my friend's four-year-old

Ditto everyone else - been there done that. We got series 1 TiVo when our sons were 5 and 1 and both immediately made the association TV == TiVo and were very put out at other peoples hosues to find they couldn't pause TV etc and got used to idea that a collection of their favourite programs would be already recorded waiting for them to watch. Still the same today 11 years later ... only difference is the selection of programs has moved on from Telletubbies/Tweenies to Futurerama/Castle. Meanwhile, there is still a role for "live TV" ... its called endless reruns of TopGear or QI on Dave!

Re: Good job

All the 24 OBS feed channels were on VirginMedia as well

Re: 500Mbps?

average UK broadband may still be under 10Mbs (but my VM has just jumped to 60Mbs!) but if you are using homeplugs then you probably have several PCs/devices around and then may well have a NAS or are sharing files/media from a PC. If so then higher speed may be beneficial - I've just added a couple of gigabit switches to my LAN setup so can get gigabit connections between main couple of PCs and a HP microserver that I am in process of setting up as replacement for current NAS ... quick comparison on transfer speed between PC and old NAS which has 100Mbs port and to microserver with 1Gbs port (and also better processor and newer disk etc) was stunning ... there definitely was a 10x speedup.

Re: 70% of list price to the developer

But I thought one of the complaints of the Amazon app store was that developers found that their app had been chosed for a special "75% off" offer and as a result got 30% of 25% of what they'd priced the app at. So I think you'd still be at risk of Amazon deciding to discount you book-in-an-app idea.

"When was the last time you saw a Porsche or Ferrari advert?"

Don't know about Porsche but Ferrari have managed to get Sky to devote an entire channel to their adverts ... SkySports F1 - Ferrari's entire marketing activity is effectively their F1 team

Re: The star trek game

We had a very early 6800 "system" in the electronics lab at school and I remember when we got the code for star trek (n.b. this was hex code that had to be typed in before we could save it to ?paper tape - may have been floppy) but there was a problem as it was too big to fit into the 1kB memory so there was a mad rush to put together a 4kB memory *expansion card* so that we could run it!

Re: I'm reading

I'm reading books mainly on a Kindle now (and confirming reports, I'm reading more books than before) but also really like the ability to pickup from the same point on the Kindle app on my phone. Best of both worlds!

Re: Just a shame...

I believe that with the VM "SuperHub" you can set it into "dumb modem" mode via its webpage setup interface. Probably something I'll have to sort out in a couple of months when I get upgraded to the 60Mb/s service ... I'm currently on the original 20Mb/s "XL" speed as when they moved XL to 30Mb/s my "free upgrade" involved paying £50 for a "superhub" which at that time seemed to have a fairly dire reputation + could not be used as a pure modem. Since then I think things sound better + they introduced modem mode and from what I gather a superhub is now a free part of the upgrade as they want to shift everyone to the latest cable standard so they can free the bandwidth used by us 20Mb holdouts!

Re: Mystery solved re NTL Virgin Media box!

Think the issue is that the cable boxes used a different IR protocol to other AV devices (?IRDA vs IR) because the original idea was that the IR connection would be used for more than simple remote use and things like IR based keyboards etc would be used.

There was a similar problem in getting an original S1 TiVo to control one of these boxes as the TiVo was designed to output IR signals which the cable boxes didn't recognize so you had to buy an extra "dongle" which plugged into the IR extender port and "translated" the IR signals into IRDA

Re: Smart Meters

Sounds like an electricity monitor and not a smart meter - smart meter replaces your exisitng electricity meter and is intended to send meter reading automatically via a wireless/mobile connection to remove the need for meter readers to come and read your meter. N.b. in the US (well at least 10-15 years ago when I was there) meter reading must be a significant expenses as PGE read our meter *every* month (as did the water company) - compared to the UK where it seems to be about once every 18-24 months to check that your reading/their estimates are sufficiently accurate

Re: Play.com?

Yes ... saw an item on hotukdeals today about a sale on "Android Market (Play)" and my immediate assumption was that play.com must now have an android market. It was only when I read another article like this one about the name change that I realized it was talking about the Google Android Market which is now called Play.

Re: Damage

Just started reading Arthur C Clarkes "Rendez-vous with Rama" and as usual he's almost spot on with his predictions ... that has a catastrophic meteor strike in 2077 which wipes out most of North-Eastern Italy.

Re: Simple solution...

Problem is that 4 digit PINs are deeply entrenched into the system ... you'd need to make changes to terminals etc worldwide to cope with the change (for example virtually all UK ATMs wait for 4 key presses for PIN entry). I lived for a time in the US at end of 90s and there you could have a longer PIN number on cards .... but every so often you'd read a travel article that would warn readers that before travelling to Europe they should change their PIN to a 4 digit number as otherwise they could find they were unable to use their cards when European card readers assumed a 4 digit pin.

But have you seen the design for Apple's new HQ?

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/06/07/applespaceship.png

Just wait till the internal covers are retracted revealing the underground fortress surrounding the iDeathRay ... then China will start to obey!

Item on the R5 business program last night was talking about "reputation management". One of the contributers said that businesses always had to treat negative comments more seriously than positive ones since the rule when he started 20-30 years ago was that a happy customer told 2 or 3 people about theie good experience while an unhappy customer told around 10 - but the change was now via the internet an unhappy customer now tells thousands.

As for saying "My doctor was wonderful, listened to me, and was very helpful" - that's what I said a few years ago to someone I know who's a GP when I was impressed that having gone in to get a prescription of hay fever treatement the doctor I'd seen had had a short chat with me about my general health, what exercise I did and then checked my blook pressure ... however this positive illusion was quickly dispersed when the GP I knew explained "that's just because he would have needed to do that to meet a target for the practice bonus"

Re: IPTV, the downside

Yes ... advertisers guessing what you are interested in from past history can be very irritating ... after buying a birthday present for a friends young daught I had months of emails from Amazon telling me "as someone who's bought Sylvanian Families in the past you may be interested in ..." - eventually I investigated and found out how you can click on a link to tell Amazon to ignore the history that is leading to this.

Then recently having upgraded my phone to something that can display flash adverts and not having AdBlockPlus available in default browser (hmm maybe time to switch!) I'm seeing ads ... was quite interesting to realize after researching electric guitars for son's Christmas present that I was suddenly getting ads for the shop I'd bought it from all over the place .... but now, as a result of looking for info on how to fix a leaking toilet, I'm being bombarded with ads for flush mechanisms!

30MB is the same price level as 20Mb ... in fact 20Mb is "obsolete" and only exists for people (like me) who were at the 20Mb and declined to have a "free" update to 30Mb which (still) requires "buying" a superhub (originally for £75 but now, I think, just £30 "activation"). As you were upgrading from 10Mb then you jump direct to the 30Mb level and get a free superhub as part of the upgrade. Its the usual Telewest/VM story of new/upgrade users getting something that long standing existing users cannot get. At least it appears with the 20/30Mbs->60Mbs I'll get a free superhub as I assume they are wanting to free up all the bandwidth allocated to DOCSIS2.