Posts by Steve Davies 3

Re: Industry Standard Bus?

There was a book released by DEC that told you how to design interfaces to connect to the UniBus in the proper way. Along with the Schematics that cam with the Systems, yes Unibus was propetary but it was darned easy to build an interface for and DEC didn't stop you doing it. We had a dodgy interface that messed up all the DEC disgnostics even if it was placed after a Bus Repeater so we made sure that it was always disconnected when their Field Service came to do a PM on the 11/45 we were using.

Them were the days.

Re: One way?

If you believe one what I heard today during the Autumn Statement then the age of the Pacer is coming to an end.

I'm sure that Northern Rail would love to keep them because they are cheap to run but if NR wants the next Franchise they have to promise (with fingers crossed behind their backs) to get rid of those '4 wheel not so bendy busses'.

Yeah right, pull the other one. Still EU (so don't vote UKIP or you may have to suffer them for longer) will make them illegal to operate around 2020. No Disabled Toilets etc.

Re: Win 8.1 and Office

You have perfectly described the 'Lipstick on a Pig' scenario. Underneath it is still a pig.

I'd even prefer to battle with the Ubuntu U/I (I'm a CentOS/Gnome-2 person) than Windows 8.whatever.

So what if if it cheap. 1366x768 screens on cheapo laptops are beyond a joke these days. Dell were selling 1600x1200 laptops in 2003. Where is the progress?

Re: Automated config never existed before?

Of course it has existed before.

As a friend of mine if very fond of saying,

The more that you re-invent the wheel, the more square it gets

I'd really like to know what makes Chef so attractive and why it is better than anything else in cluding sliced bread.

You seem to have forgotten

that it was the Fruity company that was the first major player to ditch DRM in the face of fierce opposition from the record labels.

Sure they might have been douchbags (and still are) at times but they made DRM'd music a thing of the past and for that we shoud be thankful.

Unless you are a lawyer you can't really know if their actions are Anti-trust or not. At the time, there were plenty of other players in the MP3 market (eg Creative). Remember that this was all happening 10 years ago.

well...

Both the 500X and the Evoque are pug ugly vehicles. That squashed rear of the Evoque? wtf?

How about...

A chamoix leather?

Then she can give it to you and say,

"Clean my car!"

Re: WOW

They should rename it to Bling.

Then advertise it to 'The Only Way is Essex' crowd and ther use of the site will quadruple.

Cool Innit!

If you want to avoid UK Footie then

head to the middle East. It is all Real Madrid and Barcelona.

I was in a 4* hotel in Jordan recently. Getting them to change the channel from a re-run of a re-run of a 4yr old el-Classico game to see a premier league game was an impossibility.

I've encountered the same in Dubai, Doha and Bahrain. The sports bars often have the flags of Real, Barca, Inter, Bayern and sometimes Liverpool up on the walls. The rest? forget it.

Messi is a hero. He is in a lot of TV adverts.

Ironically, it is easier to see the likes of Man U (note to self to wash mouth out with soap), Arsenal (ditto) and Chelsea( ditto twice over) in places like Sao Paulo.

{I support a team in the conference ok!}

Re: Desperate times

Nah, it shows that they are desperate to keep the share price higher than their trading figures alone would warrant.

They don't have the billions and billions of won in the bank like Apple.

Yes there is a school of thought that by doing this they can be seens to be doing something but frankly apart from the Semi-conductor division where the margins are rather thin, the rest of the company is a bit of a basket case. The flasgship S5 has just about tanked when comparing actual sales against projected sales.

Apple on the otherhand were literally forced to intitate a share buy-back to satisfy one major investor. While they could afford it, it appears that they'd rather have the cask in the bank.

Re: Excellent article

The thought of twin 2-stroke doozle engines in a car is mind boggling.

I'd prefer a Diesel-Hydraulic rig myself.

Re: MVNO

Manager Virtual Network Operator

or something like that

Tesco Mobile is an MNVO in that it uses someones elses physical network.

Re: Call me lazy

Add to that things like RAM expansion and (cough, cough) HDD updates. Are they possible etc etc etc

{If I am shopping for an i7 powered device then I'd like to put at least 32Gb of RAM in it plus a 1TB SSD }

If this site is going to do this sort of review then unless they have never, ever read a similar type of article in the dead tree press then they'd know that the bit at the end comparing the spec and making a choice of gold, silver and the 'you What? are you crazy?' awards is more or less mandatory these days.

Re: Or use AdBlockers, a Hosts file, & NoScript for no ads whatsoever.

You must be spending a lot of time on the crapper then.

Commercial TV is fast becoming a constant stream of adverts interrupted by other stuff which is also laden with advertising through product placement.

I watched something on Sky as it was broadcast at a friends the other week. The 'other stuff' was ok but just as you were getting interested in the story, it was interruped by 5 mins od adverts. 20-25 mine per hour of this crap seems to be the norm these days.

It is little wonder that I record just about everything I want to watch on TV.

But it is increasingly closer to the time when I ask myself,

Is it time to get rid of the GoggleBox?

If the likes of Sky etc don't watch out, the level of adverts will reach a tipping point and people will realise that they can't stand being bombarded with Adverts all the time and they'll just switch off.

Re: I seem to remember

There are examples of large scale renewable energy use. Google use some of them themselves.

The Apple Datacentres in North Carolina are mostly powered by Solar and renewables.

Then there was the story of the 'No 2' bus being powered by our own 'No 2's'.

The waste from 5 families can power a bus for around 300miles.

Yes the likes of China and their thirst for coal fired power stations is a problem but as the Tesco advert says, 'Every Little Helps'.

You have to start somewhere, out of little acorns do mighty oaks grow etc etc etc/

As has been said, yes there is a cost in making the kit for renewable generation but once that is a capital cost not a recurring one. The problem with most of our energy consumption is the recurring costs.

Re: Live our own lives (I'm sorry Dave...)

So the Con-Rod in your engine is continually sending data back to the motheship (manufacturer) and gets a message bacl because you have red-lined the engine more than once a year and the whole thing stops working because you are operating it out of the tolerances laid down by the manufacturer? And happens to do so in the outside lane of the M1 in Rush Hour?

Sorry, please stop the world, I want to get off. This is not a future I really would want to buy in to.

Or it could be that this so called expert is just embiggening his own ego?

(Does he have a book about to be released by chance?"

Re: How long does Ecuador's London embassy lease have left?

The embassy is part of the state of Ecuador. If there is a lease, the freeholder will find it impossible to evict the tennants.

The saga of the Iranian Embassy some 30 years ago plus the shooting of the WPC Elaine Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy set the precident here.

There are all sorts of international treaties govening this. You could expell the ambasador etc but you can't take (legally) take over something that is part of a foreign country.

In the scope of things his crimes are fairly minor. There may come a time when it is no longer in the Swedish public interest to persue the case. (Not sure is Sweden has a statute of limitations but if they do, then when that runs out, that's it. The scumbag is safe.)

Re: Destroy the company, buy it for pennies.

I don't see any evidence that Apple are even remotely interested in buying GT. With GT getting out of Saphire production what would Apple be interested in? They own the building already.

Remember that the GT CEO is under investigation by the SEC. His 'timely' (cough-cough) sale of his shareholding just before they went belly up is a might suspicious IMHO.

My take on this that this was the way for the CEO & CFO to fund their pensions and retirement to somewhere well away from US law.

Re: Apple's delay with the iPhone

Your post demonstrated far too much common sense for this early hour.

Don't worry, the Fruity Hater will be along soon to pour scorn on the whole thing.

As for me, I'm waiting until I can get my hands on one before deciding if this is another Zune or and iPod.

At the moment, my like/dislike rating is 'Meh!' trending towards 'So What'.

The only plus thing I can see for it is that it is not a solid band type device like the MS bit of kit.

Come Feb/whenever, we shall be able to try them out and make informed decisions. Until then... 'Meh!'.

Re: Hmmm...

If you actually read some of the more sane posts on the subject, you might have grasped that TRIM is not developed to a common standard. What might be ok for a Samsung SSD is not Ok for say a Crucial one.

It is a venerable minefield.

Why try to 'trim' and SSD when you might do more harm than good. Then the outcry about 'Apple borking my SSH' would be far larger than this. The lawsuits would start flying in all directions as well. Better safe than sorry eh?

Re: Windows 10

Until the product has been released and an offiical statement made by MS (and approved by their Legal dept) anything in the tech preview can be changed/renamed/deleted/whatever\

It is a preview. More like testing the waters to see what stick more like. But the above still applies.

If you take it a gospel that all current Lumias will run W10 (or whatever it is called) and base any purchasing decisions on that fact then you might be in for a rude surprise.

That's not to say it is not true but... this far ahead of the release anything and everything can and probably will change. That is MS's perogative. Otherwise, sorry, more fool you.

Re: So should we have good design or not?

If my designs were [bjust copied[/b] then I'd be peeved.

If my designs were copied and improved then I'd probably say 'well done'.

See the difference?

The same goes for my source code.

Copy it and leave my name on it. Good

Copy it, add nothing, remove my name BAD, very BAD.

Copy it and improve on it [leaving my name on it and adding yours...] Good.