Posts by AndrueC

Re: They'll evolve?

>None of their descendants are living today (Archaeopteryx and other ancestors of birds excepted)

So none of their descendants are living today other than tens of thousands of species and billions of animals?

Re: They need to be careful out there

Punishment for mining into a jettisoned can?

:)

Re: WTF

It's called progress?

Re: 9 years old

I used to own a calculator that took 27 seconds to work out 49!

I think I bought it from Tandy. Just thought you'd like to know :)

I seem to remember that I installed a skin of some kind from a company called StarDock that improved it a bit. And anyway the beauty of WPS meant if you had the time you could just 'skin' your own folders. Basically the same concept used for windows on the desktop I imagine. Each 'folder' presumably had the equivalent of OnPaint etc. and subclassing.

Oooh, I also remember DeScribe word processor. That had an excellent way of showing stylesheets. Actually showed them as a hierarchical tree. The default OS/2 web browser did the same for your browsing history.

And the OS/2 help system was better than the MS one. I seem to recall it used tokenisation to reduce file size and provided an indexed search facility without having to index it first.

Ah, happy days mostly. Unfortunately aside from Golden Compass and DeScribe I think I mostly used it to host DOS and Windows app. It did that very well though because it protected you from crashes. I was writing data recovery software at the time and the only thing it couldn't handle was me trying to control drives using the 'taskfile' registers. It seemed willing to try but kept spinning up the floppy for some reason.

What we need about now is a new discussion on the future of the license fee.

Re: So its a lock in detector with a 100ps window.

>This solution sounds like it is great for intra-office connections, government and military uses, where they have self-run dedicated lines

I doubt such connections exist outside of a single campus. Pretty much everyone relies on third parties - (ie; telcos) for long distance transport. I would expect most physical leased lines to terminate at the nearest exchange/POP and then become a virtual connection across someone else' backbone. It's just too expensive and difficult to go digging trenches or even blowing fibre across the country even for the military.

I can see verification being done at the exchange/POP at both ends though. Would that be enough? I confess I don't know enough about this stuff but if you could rely on 'the network' to be secure would be enough that the client's POP and the server's POP both agree? I guess you could verify at every switch/amp but would probably be impractical.

Re: Windows 8

> or Lotus Notes

I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.

Re: .....

> No. Just no. Others have already said this, but I have a practical counter-example.

Damn, you beat me to it by an hour. In my case I was just being anal about power consumption but yeah - we found the same thing. I confess at the time to being a bit surprised actually. It was a bit of a revelation to realise that computing consumed power.

Re: Most important thing any Linux user needs to install:

As technical advice..fail.

As humour..fail.

Re: Wow... WTF?

All three possibly.

Re: Personal Cloud

Sad, but probably true.

Re: What if . . .

>Not sure what happens if two people try to indicate they have an open relationship with you.

Your friends start looking at you enviously?

Re: What a mess.

First we lost multi-tasking.

Then we lost colour.

Then we lost overlapping windows.

Then we lost interest.

What's Windows 9 going to be? A text mode UI?

..and if American TV is anything to go by they always wear their underwear while doing it :)

..Guy 1: That's the second time we've been screwed and it wasn't as much fun this time.

Re: title optional

15 yo? Is that where he walks up to people and says 'yo' 15 times? Seems like a pretty serious offence to me.

Re: BBC

I'm wondering how much adverts contribute to channels on the Sky platform.

It's possible that for Sky owned channels they are only boosting Sky's profits so with fewer channels it might still be able to operate. But the majority of channels on Sky's platform are not owned by Sky and I don't think any of them could operate without advertising revenue. As I understand it they get something back from Sky based on audience share but I've heard that it's a very small amount.

Channels like Discovery can probably only exist due to advertising revenue now. Of course maybe we could move to every channel having its own subscription but I don't know if that would work for the less popular channels either. Advertising is vague enough to allow channels to get an inflated income because there's always the chance of a passing viewer. But force them to rely on subs and a lot of people will fade away.

Yeah but they are pretty specific about how in that one rare instant sex wasn't involved.

Mind the gap!

And now 4G is being rolled out. Of course the companies involved claim it will do more than 'fill the gap' but the realists might say that it's just about capable of doing that.

Time will tell.

Re: High Speeds?

(cont'd). Ironically in rural areas it be good enough to compete with wired connections assuming the users aren't sited too far from the mast and assuming the mast has adequate backhaul. But the bottom line is that everyone within a given cell is sharing the mast's bandwidth and once you get more than 'a few dozen' people attached to a mast there is going to be contention.

This is probably a large part of why EEs pricing/allowance offerings are so miserly. Even EE say that users are better off using wifi for streaming media:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/i/5520.html

"The most shocking comment from EE is 'for customers who want to download multiple songs or stream videos every day, we’d recommend they go for one our plans with a higher data limit or use our free BT Wi-Fi or any available Wi-Fi services'."