Posts by Len32 posts • joined Monday 26th January 2009 10:51 GMT
Ehm... train gauges are defined in metric of course, they are used by engineers. Engineers switched to metric before the general public did. The official 'Standard Gauge' for trains, the one the UK uses together with most of the world, is defined as 1,435 mm.
Exactly, and beer from the supermarket and off-license is always metric. You don't think can and bottle manufacturers want to make special pint sizes for just one country, do you?
Beer is sold in the UK in 33CL or 50CL/half litre bottles or a 50CL/half litre can and has been for god knows how long. Only exception is the pub which still sells some products in imperial.
Yep, the Dutch kept their old names, just metricated the amount. So, a 'pond' is 500g, an 'ons' is 100g.
This device is said to support DAB and DAB+ as well.
Samsung announces mobile device with DAB
"Samsung are to release a new device which has a built-in DAB+ receiver. The Galaxy S Wifi 5.0 also has a TV receiver and will use the Android platform when it’s released in April."
http://radiotoday.co.uk/2012/02/samsung-announces-mobile-phone-with-dab/
1) is about CSV, not ODF in OpenOffice. That has nothing to do with ODF.
2) sounds like a problem with OpenOffice, not with the Open Document Format.
Have you considered LibreOffice or IBM Symphony? Both support ODF but may not have those issues.
Interesting comment from Michiel Leenaars who expects Microsoft to announce ODF 1.2 support in April.
https://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/240930/spreadsheets_come_to_odf_as_version_12_wins_approval.html
MS Office 2007 and later currently support ODF 1.1 for reading and writing. As the technical details of the ODF 1.2 standard were fixed over a year ago (the rest taken up by proofreading, legal review etc.) many office suites already support 1.2
European Society of Nematologists?
Erasmus Student Network?
European Society for Neurochemistry?
32bit Macs have a maximum limit of 32GB addressable RAM because OS X uses Physical Address Extension. (PAE). Apple has been selling 32bit OS-es on systems with more than 4GB physical RAM quite some time before they introduced a 64bit OS. All thanks to PAE.
The (default) 64bit version of Firefox on OS X has very impressive speed improvements over the (legacy) 32bit version.
https://boomswaggerboom.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/firefox-4-for-mac-os-x-under-the-hood/
How about when you are about to lose your job because you have been stuck in a tunnel for 2 hours, again.
Nobody will do voice calls anyway, much too noisy, but being able to text and email would be a god send.
The excellent WohnOrt have done some digging and it turns out that this set support DAB+ as well as the old DAB. http://www.wohnort.org/DAB/
Quite handy if you would also like to use it in Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, Malta, Hong Kong, Malaysia etc. etc.
My brand new Nokia C3 has micro USB but not for charging...
Why would Apple not play ball? Do you really think they earn their money by selling people cables to charge their iDevices? Apple was in the first batch of companies to sign this MOU and I don't see why they wouldn't be. It only offers more convenience for their customers.
Mind you, USB will not replace the dock connector, it will be in addition. Unless the USB standard body invents a new USB standard that offers the dozens of additional features the dock connector (analog audio and video signal? Firewire?) has but USB hasn't...
http://www.allpinouts.org/index.php/Apple_iPod,_iPad_and_iPhone_dock
My two month old Nokia C3 has a micro USB connector. However, it refuses to charge through it.
I can charge my iPod from any PC but have to bring my proprietary Nokia charger with me to charge my brand new Nokia.
Although there is nothing exactly similar to Direct2D on non-Windows platforms does not mean other platforms won't see hardware accelerated browsing.
Firefox uses OpenGL on OS X and Linux to use the GPU for rendering of everything from basic HTML to SVG animation and HTML5 video.
Joe Drew, Mozilla: Hardware accelerating Firefox
http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2010/05/25/hardware-accelerating-firefox/
Considering the problem is not that it is a vendor-prefix but that it is a vendor-prefix from another vendor (out of the control of the MS team that builds the IE engine) this can be easily solved. The IE team can just use the exact same implementation as the Webkit team but call it -MS-text-size-adjust.
Of course h.264 is an Open Standard. Everyone can download the spec for free and build their own implementation. Distribution of your implementation is not always free and can incur some costs, depending on use type. However, price has nothing to do with being Open or not, Free as in beer has. H.264 is not always Free as in beer.
Download the h.264 spec at: http://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-H.264-200305-S!!PDF-E&type=items
Oracle also recently bumped the price from the superior ODF Plugin for MS Office from free to $90.
A shame since it is a lot better (more standards compliant) than MS Office own implementation that is only included in their last versions of MSO. If you are on an older version you're out of luck.
http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/
[quote]In her view, it is now Apple, Adobe and Google who are less committed to web standards - Microsoft, Opera and Mozilla are fully onboard.[/quote]
I am puzzled what metric she uses to decide who is "commited to web standards" and who isn't.
It can't be ACID3.
Chrome, Safari and Opera score 100 and Mozilla's latest preview is around 97 currently whereas IE is stated to be at only 55.
It can't be HTML5 video tag support.
Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera support already and IE is stated to support it in the future.
It can't be HTML5 video codec support.
Firefox and Opera are in the Ogg Theora camp while Apple, Google and Microsoft are in the h.264 camp.
It can't be general HTML5 support.
All the major browser developers have now pledged support for it.
So, which reason does she have to put Microsoft, Opera and Mozilla in one camp and Apple, Adobe and Google in the other?
I don't see the problem and actually welcome this move.
As it stands now, 10.4 users will still be supported by Mozilla well into the second half of 2011 if not later. By that time most PPC users will have either upgraded to 10.5 anyway (My five year old G4 runs 10.5 just fine for everyday work and is my main computer).
Besides, by that time, 10.4 users will have become such a small number that it is not worth it to have all other users suffer from a lack of innovation. 10.4 lacks many of the modern frameworks and APIs that it would be a shame if Firefox could not make use of those because a hand full users still hangs on to some ancient OS.
I think you underestimate the power of market forces and the network effect.
An ever increasing number of local, regional and national governments are in the process of switching to ODF as the only allowed format for user editable documents. From smaller countries such as Denmark and The Netherlands to massive countries such as Brazil.
These organisations globally buy millions of seats for Office applications for their staff. If Microsoft's offer doesn't pass the compliance and interoperability tests in procurement procedures they will have lost a big sale.
Now, these governments exchange documents with suppliers in the private sector who in turn will need to adapt to their big customer's office format. All these private companies need an Office suite whose ODF implementation is compliant and interoperable. MS will simple not be able to continue their half-hearted low quality implementation of ODF if they want to continue selling to these customers.
I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years time MS is in the same situation with ODF as they are with HTML now. The power of Internet Explorer to set the web standard is gone, even though IE is still the most used browser. IE is now chasing tail lights of other browsers that do follow the W3C standards...
The article suggests Firefox doesn't support Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). That is incorrect, Firefox has had SVG support for years. They just weren't able to land all the improvements to SVG they were hoping to include in time for Firefox 3.6.
Doesn't pushing that jog-thingie upward act as a shortcut to the camera? That has been the case in this phone's predecessors in the 63xx series. My current 6300 does that for instance...
"The ITU is a slow moving beast, but while its endorsement probably won't make any difference in the short term it might make hold-outs like Apple take note of the direction the rest of the industry is taking."
Eehhmm... you haven't really been paying attention, have you? Apple was in the first group of companies to pledge their support for this universal standard months ago.
Granted, it is relatively easy for them as they have already been using USB for data transfer and charging on all their mobile devices for years now. As opposed to my @£$%"% Nokia which has a USB connection for data but refused to be charged with it.
"Several major mobile manufacturers, including Nokia, Apple and Research in Motion, have signed up for the universal charger initiative led by the Group Special Mobile Association (GSMA), according to Reuters.
[...]
The 10 cellphone manufacturers beginning Micro USB adoption in Europe are Apple, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG , NEC, Qualcomm, Research In Motion, Samsung and Texas Instruments."
Europe Gets Universal Cellphone Charger in 2010
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/microusb/
@RotaCyclic
I am aware of that. However, first of all the error correction mechanism in DAB+ is much more advanced. You are much less likely to come across that "bubbling mud" sound that is so characteristic for the old DAB standard and the receiver will be able to turn weaker signals into a good audio signal. That means better reception indoors, in moving vehicles and further away from the transmitter.
Secondly, because MPEG4 (HE-AACv2 in this case to be precise) is much more efficient a 64kbit stereo stream will sound better than FM or 192Kbit MPEG1-level2 (which the old DAB uses). Personally, I even find 48Kbit HE-AACv2 very good and certainly good enough for stereo music in noisy environments like cars. And that is for stereo music, you can easily halve that bitrate for mono spoken word.
So, the error resilliance of DAB+ is something no broadcaster can and will change. Of course, if they really want to they could drive bitrates down to 24Kbit or worse but I think that is unlikely:
* Three high quality DAB+ channels can fit in the space of a single DAB channel and getting rid of inneffiencent analogue broadcasts creates even more capacity. The current issues (low bitrates) are due to lack of capacity, that is not likely to be the case after 2015.
* Broadcasters and Ofcom know all too well that one of the main selling points of DAB should be audio quality and that it's failing in the current situation.
@Neil 44
The report mentions that World DMB Forum profile 1(http://www.worlddab.org/public_documents/WorldDMB_Digital_Radio_Receiver_Profiles.pdf) would be the standard for all radios (including in-car ones). That means compulsory DAB, DAB+ and DMB-A compatibility. Therefore the market is actually huge, not just UK+Denmark but also almost all of continental Europe, Australia, several Middle-Eastern and Asian countries and possibly China. Even without China the market is well over half a billion people.
With a market that size and countries like France making the inclusion of digital radio a legal requirement in cars from 2012, expect the vast majority of cars to come with digital radios as standard within a few years.
And yes, basically the report makes way for the gradual migration from DAB to DAB+ in the UK. Finally the quality we've been promised years ago, MPEG4 HE-AAC encoding, much better error correction and many additional services.
@Charles King
Not really. Most SSDs (including all those that can be ordered in a Mac) are too slow to actually run into this issue. And even if you have exchanged the standard SSD for a exceptionally fast version yourself chances are you won't notice this. You need very large files that are sequentially stored on a drive (not fragmented) that you want to read in one single go. Maybe the odd user storing his Final Cut Pro files on a custom fitted SSD may notice something.
For the most part this is an artificial benchmark issue as most sequential reads stats usually are, and certainly in this case.
Considering:
* The hardware hasn't changed in the revision
* No existing Apple hardware (either conventional HDD or SSD) comes close to the limit of 1.5Gbit, let alone 3Gbit
* Apple therefore has nothing to gain from limiting devices (it wouldn't be a segmentation effort to persuade power users to buy a more expensive version)
* I think this is something that nobody would usually come across when designing these products. One would have to buy a third party ultra fast SSD, replace the Apple SSD for it and only then one theoretical benchmark would show this issue
It indeed looks like something that will be probably fixed in a driver/firmware update.
Considering one of the major benefits of ZFS is the use of checksums to guarantee data integrity I would say ZFS is more useful to the average Joe than, let's say, a battery in a notebook.
Let's take a very cautious assumption that 95% of ordinary users do not like to lose their data. That would mean that 95% of ordinary users benefits directly from ZFS, whether they have a single 60GB hard drive or a 500TB storage solution is irrelevant.
The problem with Secunia's reports are that they punish companies that disclose and fix their bugs. The best way to become Secunia's "browser with the least flaws" is not to disclose any of your security issues and certainly don't patch them (as that is a disclosure as well).
Sure, a handful of issues may be discovered outside your test labs but those will always be fewer than those from browsers that are open about security.
The central issue is that Secunia has no data about the amount of existing security issues. It only has data about the amount of issues that are in their database. There is an unknown 'dark number' of issues that nobody knows the exact size of, and certainly not Secunia. They can only take a stab at it, a rather unreliable one.
One can only hope that browsers developers ignore Secunia (as most fortunately do) and keep vigilant about their security.
The Register:
"The cost of the electricity produced is even worse than this figure indicates; wind farms' average output over time is around 30 per cent of their capacity, whereas nuclear stations typically run at 90 per cent. Thus, it costs more than six times as much to build a given level of power production using windfarms as it does using nuclear."
The original article in the FT:
"The comparison is made even worse because offshore turbines might generate power for about 40 per cent of the time, whereas modern nuclear stations operate at about 90 per cent of capacity."
Interesting error, is The Reg campaigning for nuclear?
