Posts by Robert E A Harvey 3010 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2006
62 here & have owned 4:
A White painted wooden thing that Mrs H already had, VHF/UHF dual tuner, but colour
A Sony Trinitron that did Tellytext
A Phillips thing, CRT analogue/digital. OnDigital were supposed to write the code, but went bust first. After 4 years Phillips sent me a set-top box gratis, that my niece is still using.
A Samsung 32" LCD with LED backlight for the digital switchover. We had that 2 years early. 1080p, but not 3D, and I don't miss it.
Well, maybe. Maybe tablets will outsell PCs. Thing is everton mints outsell Mercedes C-class saloons. Socks outsell underpants 2:1. You aren't comparing like with like.
in 0.5 billion office workers need a desktop PC this year, the fact that each of their children has an iThing, outnumbering the desktops by 2,5:1 does not mean that those 0.5 billion won't want a desktop to do their job next year. It's a class error.
M$ has become deluded into thinking the toys are an alternative, not an extra. If they concentrate all their efforts on the toys, the desktop will suffer.
Oh look. Already happening.
Damn shame about the blind users, but to be honest lads: you don't need the TV. It's full of witless girlies recapping the programme every 5 minutes. They are so damn annoying that not having a picture of them looking pretty will make them compeltely insuffereable.
Radio 3, 4, 5 & jazz FM. You know it makes sense!
1,600 x 900 is a little less insulting at the price point than x768, but it's still nowhere near good enough for the 2nd octile of the 21st century. We've been building typewriters with LCD screens for decades now, is this really still the best we can do?
of course not. It is still possible to buy a netbook for something like a quarter of the price, so why are these machines still so poor.? OK, posh CPU. Which of us stresses our CPU to the ultimate? Screens, connectivity, storage, are all inadequate. if they want to take a thousand currency units off me, it better be worth 1000. Why not stick a wireless DVD drive in the box with it at that price?
Yep. Charging nearly 1000 dollars/euros for something with no optical drive and half the correct number of pixels per inch was never going to work.
I've been looking for something to replace my Dell mini-10 more or less since the day I got it (600 vertical pixels. Huge buying mistake). Nothing has even half excited me since, except the iPud3. If it had a keyboard...
Any attempt to interpret a few fragments dug from the ground as evidence of some sort of trade treaty sounds, in the absence of a written text, to be extrapolation beyond the data.
Archaeologists have form in this regard, and this sounds like an idea they had before they started looking.
Go read some of Frances Pryor's extraordinary writings about flag fen and Maxey henge, and you will find that even the most level headed and practical of trowel-wielders can get carried off on flights of fancy.
>I was not aware that that was considered a difficult task.
One council round-by-ere gave itself planning permission on a chunk of land it owned, and then sold it off to a developer. part of the planning process is a purely nominal but legally required pass through the relevant Parish Council. After work started, it was pointed out that they hadn't passed it to the correct parish. Now no-one knows if the planning permission is legal or not.
I suggest they let the HP experience dictate their price, rather than the Apple experience. Or they will end up doing what HP did.
I'm actually all for this. Back in the dark days before the IBM PC manufacturers delivered the hardware and the software. That gave us things like the VAX. It seems natural and good to me.
It seems to work for Apple and for Vtech. perhaps this device will be somewhere between Apple and Vtech?
Not convinced. Hope not.
If the kids end up trying to make athletics day timers with a raspberry pi it might well be python.
A lot depends on what the projects will look like - there is an opportunity here for some intelligent vendors to bundle up some hardware, a dev environment, some examples and some teaching material.
I'd like to throw in a word for http://processing.org/, but I don't suppose anyone involved in delivering the programme reads elReg.
I like the suggestion that no one language is mandated, that makes sense. I welcome the idea that ICT as taught at the moment is a load of bollocks.
I ought to be against Microsoft's involvement, but I'm not. It is likely that the target systems the kids will be programming will be things like the Arduino or the Pi, and M$'s programming products have always been quite good anyway. I think the youngsters should get a decent spread of ideas before they have to do it all properly at University.
Fairly positive about the whole thing, really.
new != good in every case.
I like nice cars, e.g. my Alfa 156. The new alfa guilietta is horrid. I will look elsewhere.
Or, consider the Stylophone. That was new and different when it appeared. Ditto the Sinclair C5.
Sometime new is good (the new 4-cylinder Z4 for example, or from the same era as the Stylophone the miniMoog) but a new turkey is still a turkey
Why on earth are Busses not for making a profit?
Where I live we get a proud and wonderful service from a family owned bus company that has had to make a profit for a hundred years. http://www.delainebuses.com/ They manage to purchase the first version of new models, run a regular service with clean reliable busses, and organise a heritage bus procession from time to time.
I like this page:
http://www.delainebuses.com/Fleet/Gallery/1920s/pages/1.htm
I tried the sms short codes on Manchester bus stops last week. They seem to use the same code on both sides of the road, and the software supplies times for one direction only. Not bright.
Then I noticed a 12 minute difference between the times I was texted and those on the paper timetable glued to the bus stop. The busses appeared to be reading the paper timetable.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
