Blimy, yes
I built a controller for a rising-quadrant receipt printer out of a scamp. I think it was a 8050 SC/MP-1. No stack pointer, no subroutine calls-and-return. Good enough though.
3010 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2006
Even a decade ago no-one would have dared to imagine this. Now the importance of the component industry is lost in the glare from Intel, Apple, et.al, and the politicians are less likely to cut up rough.
To their eternal shame.
This deal is as significant as M$/Nokia as signalling the decline of the west. Lights out, lads.
I am increasingly alarmed by the idea that the success or failure of vast financial services depends on a few nanoseconds on clock edges. And now the cost of n* 126 watts over n*95 watts can tip that balance back the other way?
Does no-one else think something is out of control here? This is some sort of something-out-of-nothing flim-flam? It seems to me like the Laplace Transform of a ponzi scheme, escalating infinitesimals rather than volumes.
Oh, and it also seems like cheating. No-one made anything new, grew anything, or improved the lot of the masses. They just stuck a waterwheel in the flow of real commerce and are leeching off what other people do. Parasites.
No-one has explained how Unity integrates with GDM. On nearly every linux system I've used you can install alternative desktops and switch between them at the login screen. No-one in any review has told me whether Unity works like that, or whether Gnome, KDE, etc. become mysteriously unavailable.
Quite well.
You agree to meet someone at 9:00 on Monday.
It's monday, you get up at 06:00, wash, get the bus and meet him at 9:00.
The government announces that on Saturday the clocks will change. On Saturday you change your clocks. On Monday you get up at 06:00, wash, get the bus and meet him at 9:00.
See, no drama.
I'm tempted to join the "It's a comedy show" comments, but in this case I actualy thought it was a nasty hatchett job and a bit put up. They've fixed petrol cars after breaking them, and re-tested them.
I think in this case my feelings are with Tesla, although I do think that suing is blunt instrument.
Oh, and @MisestoPisces, yes. Clarkson is a twat. Hammond is a pillock, and I quite like James May, when he isn;t playing the buffoon.
A large, long-established retailer with a simple, uneveolving, business plan incorrectly guessed that their sales would go up during a recession, and look like idiots because of it.
Yet people in padded chairs can predice "107%" increase in sales of apple products 3 years hence with no idea how apple may change their business plan in the meantime.
Predictions now are no more worthwhile than they were from Nostradamus.
Another money-spinning act of fawning sycophancy by the department of wishful thinking.
I'd like to add my own predictions that in 3 years time:
* Unemployment in Teeside will have fallen to 0.1%
* Stilton cheese will be outselling Brie throughout Europe
* Gordon Brown will have regained the Labour leadership and won a General election.
Is this Vapourware, or the future of a once-mighty empire going up in Smoke.
How can it be that with that many highly paid brains in one building they havn't had something ready for five years?
It is customary for commentards like me to suggest that M$ never innovates. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present the evidence.
I said 3 years ago that Vista would cost them the farm, and I still believe it. Have you heard the mutterings from anyone who pays 450 quid for a laptop with W7 basic and then faces a bill for half as much again to make it do something? or people who discover 30 days in just what that "demo" version of office was really all about? Office + W7 premium can come to more than the cost of the laptop, the bastards.
This organisation has seriously lost the plot, and if they think they can derail the whole industry for the 13th time with promises of vapourware at some distant future date, then I think they will learn that the industry finally grew up. I really, really, home that they are doomed, and doomed properly.
A pox on them, the whole miserable crew of them.
I can work round this. We need another clause:
* People for whom the chicken dance presents physical or cultural challenges may substitute any other activity considered similarly ludicrous in the appropriate culture or lifestyle. Nudity is not necessarily discouraged, but should be used to produce hilarity, not arousal. footnote: stage arrows through the head were never funny.
>The planned Paramount Pictures movie adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune has been cancelled.
Thank christ for that. They bolloxed it up badly enough the first time. It's a massive, intricate, saga that you don't come to understand until quite a long way in. It's a book, not a film, leave it alone!
I was just 13 when this happened, and had to explain the concept of orbits to the whole class - and the teacher - after we had heard about it that morning. No fax machines or internet in 1961, the education department in Chelmsford ran some banda sheets off, and sent men round on motorbikes to deliver one to each school. The head came and read them to each class in turn. I knew the news before I got home, which startled the family.
SPACE! someone had been into space! You know, the thrill of it never leaves me. I spent 25 years of my life as a seaman, partly because of the wanderlust that awoke in me. If they asked me to board a rocket ship instead I'd be there tomorrow.
Not only giving HP a shoeing, but also making Intel's announcements for them. Big business really is a forest of bastards, isn't it?
This has all the hallmarks of manipulation. Whatever Intel's policy on the itanic (kudos!) was, I bet that by tomorrow it will be whatever Elison says it is.
I feel a bit like I did when Dr Beeching closed the railways. Let down, mourneful, sad and full of rage. For Glod's sake, surely diversity is good, not bad? Who is going to do a Flanders and Swann for cpu architectures? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6OHD2uCpfU
As you say. Crap. As long as the OS can get your image off the hard disk and into ram, and connect you to a few network sockets and HID things, the rest could be up to your browser. If chrome & firefox can do it, refusal by microsoft is either lies or manipulation. Or both.
Fair comment.
I only gave the number to my customers and employers. It worked for me. Mine was an 0845 number but it still cost them 12p/min (of which I got 2p). being paid to listen to yer boss ain't bad.
'course, said customers and employers were shipowners and oil companies, so I need not feel bad!
One disaffected youth dripping superglue into ball-style mouses on the management floor, and another doing neat tricks with the photocopier paper. screen printing rude words into a whole stack with lemonade. Once dried the copies were fine, but if you stuck them back in to make secondary copies the rude words fluoresced and came out vivid black. Nowadays you can use a stencil and a security aerosol.
Then there was the autocorrect gag - an autocorrect file on the secretaries computer that changed the letters after the director's name - MBE became MZM and it was months before anyone noticed.
>what time span of official support you should expect for a non-shipping device?
In my view, length of warranty +one year. EU rules imply a 2-year warranty so that would probably be 3 years.
But I also favour a £10 per year subscription solution for up to 5 years.
That said, people often pass ex-contract phones onto relatives. If some vulnerability were being exploited that might lead to fraud or loss of money I would expect it either be fixed or a warning issued to stop using the devices, up to (something like) 6 years. Out of simple decency.