Posts by Steve X 504 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
This surely isn't much of a surprise. Is there anywhere in the Netherlands where it's even possible to live as far from an exchange as one can in rural England or Scotland? Take any small, modern,homogeneous densely-populated country (NL has 2x population density than UK) and you'll find better availabilitiy of services than in a big equivalent.
I think that the new standards are more likely related to newer compression systems, so that the next UHVSDTV won't require everything from MW to visible light just to get one channel in.
Sadly it is probable that no new standard of decency will be introduced to prevent that channel being the latest series of X-factor :(
> I can clearly see the difference between 720p and 1080p on my 21" PC monitor
Of course you can, you're probably sitting 50 cm from it! Plan to watch your 52" screen from 1.25m away? The human eye has limited resolution, based on the number of rods/cones it contains, so inevitably there is a practical limit. The BBC have researched this, they have whitepapers on the engineering website.
Nothing to do with small antennae. GPS just tells you where you are on (or above) the planet. If you want that position shown on a map, you have to download the map, which is nothing to do with the GPS satellites.
When you start the Nokia maps application (at least on my N95) the first question it asks is "Go online now?". Just say no. If you preload the maps from a PC you'll have no phone charges.
Anyone remember the 1200bps modems that used to drop carrier when listing Fortran programs? Turned out that a long series of "C"s generated a bit pattern that the modem didn't like. Of course no-one ever writes long series of "C"s. Except when a Fortran programmer wanted to delimit a comment, and after putting a C in column one, they just held the key down to repeat for
71 times....
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
C This is a comment block
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC{{}NO CARRIER
They were the guys who knew what they were talking about, so took the time to fix customer problems. Which of course meant that they took longer to fix things than the folks who followed the scripts and never got past "turn it off and on again". Clearly less efficient, so they got the chop. Typical beancounting helldesk management, really.
> miss out because they are technophobes, or because they think it might be difficult.
Or because they just aren't interested. My Dad used my Mum as an email proxy for years, he saw the advantages of email from the golf club, but had absolutely no interest in using it himself.
"stop breaching telecoms regulations by issuing bills to consumers for services that have not been provided. "
Sorry? Is "breaching telecoms regulations" Ofcom newspeak for "fraud"? . Maybe instead of asking them nicely to stop, they could have hauled their CEO into court? Or would that have been too much like hard work for that bunch of regulatory incompetents?
Scan the barcode, pay for it via an app, and trigger the security alarms as you leave because a checkout operator hasn't cancelled the security tag? I can see that working. Not.
PayPal thinks it can do this cheaply because it doesn't have the overheads of a bank, but those overheads are there for security and protection. As usual, when the new boy thinks it can solve a problem better than the folks who've been doing it for 50-odd years, it generally means that they don't really understand the fine details of the problem. Wait until the first time someone gets conned, and discovers that theyt have no legal protection, because Paypal isn't a bank.
I think you'll find that BT, like most other service providers (gas, etc.) uses the "passed" terminology to indicate the number of *potential* houses they can supply. i.e. if they cable a street with 50 houses then they have "passed" 50 houses, i.e. 50 houses which can get a connection if they want, no matter how many are current customers. It has nothing to do with copper/fibre differences.
3 phases (red, yellow, blue) from the grid, three phases from your local source. Lightbulbs between grid "red" and local "red", ditto for the other two. When all the bulbs go dark together it means there's no significant voltage difference between grid and local on any phase, i.e. you know that your local source is in sync with the grid, and can be connected.
> I believe Ms James would object to being called chairman
Unlikely, since
a) It's how she's described in official McAfee press releases
b) The fact that the word ends in the three letters 'm', 'a' and 'n' has no connection with the sex of the person holding the office. She would be correctly addressed as Madam Chairman.
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