et en Francais?
In these internationalisation days, I wonder if the same fuss is being made in French, Urdu, Mandarin or Welsh?
Thought not.
Posts by Robert E A Harvey
3010 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2006
Page:
Microsoft disputes Apple's 'App Store' trademark
Space boffins save BT's satellite station for Mars missions
Tuesday 11th January 2011 23:44 GMT
Transit passes
In about 1969/70 I was on a tanker with a satellite dish. To call goonhilly you had to stop the ship, get a really good nav fix (probably bearings off a pair of radar beacons) and contact Portishead Radio by morse on short wave with the details. If you were lucky you got a timeslot, transponder frequency, beacon frequency, rise time, rise azimuth and orbital inclination.
At rise time you steered the dish around the rise azimuth till you saw the beacon on the spectrum analyser, then started tracking up the inclination. although semi-automatic some manual steering was still required. Then you tuned the transciever to the transponder & listened to other peoples calls till your timeslot came up. The Skipper or the Chief engineer then spoke to head office for a few minutes till the end of your slot. Typically a 25 minute pass was split into 2 minute slots.
Frankly, compared to SSB on short wave it was a right palava. It didn't really catch on till Inmarsat A came out.
But I loved it. Real satellites. Goonhilly. Mechanical x-y resolvers to do the tracking. GOONHILLY! I was talking to Goonhilly on a sputnik! spectrum analysers, double logarithmic AGC Cascaded filters, link budgets, sun avoidance, band choice, horizontal sextant angles, low-elevation diffraction, 350ms propagation delay, true and false horizons. Goonhilly. satellites.
God, it was dodgy and awkward and unreliable, but it was so much fun. Now THAT was cutting edge
T-Mobile imposes swingeing cuts on fair use data limits
Monday 10th January 2011 19:55 GMT
inevitable
I never trusted this mobile internut idea. They hopelessly over-sold what wap could do, then a few years later tried to cash in on a bit of unused bandwidth. That sold, rather to the telcos surprise, so they exploited it as a new cash bonanza. Did they build a matching infrastructure? did they bollox.
When people tried to achieve what they had been sold, the telcos - who already have the cash, just withdrew the service.
Same sort of scam as adsl, but with even less chance to deliver.
DisplayLink tools up iPad as wireless Windows screen
Ofcom preps 'digital dividend' selloff, kick in the (foot)balls for Sky
Philips 46PFL9705H Ambilight 46in LED 3D TV
Motorola dual-core Android phone to pull off laptop trick?
Amazon slips out Microsoft's Windows 7 Family Pack kill date
AMD gooses graphics, specs first CPU/GPU mashups
Tuesday 4th January 2011 11:50 GMT
Transpondian Lingo
I have noticed several stories talking about Goosing things, and am having a reality failure. Where I come from "goosing" is a less-than-innocent intervention of one [fully dressed] adult upon another. The sort of thing made famous by Beryl Cook:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/05/31/article-1023215-016E7ADD00000578-405_233x312.jpg
(sorry about the origin of the image, google images has no taste at all.)
Can someone offer a translation of the Left-pond usage for a rather startled brit?
BT confirms broadband upgrades for rotten boroughs
iPad's biggest rival? Microsoft's dead Courier
Labour moots using speed cameras to reward law-abiding drivers
LG uncloaks six-foot 3D TV
Tuesday 28th December 2010 16:00 GMT 
It's really Steroscopy
I can't be doing with it all, I really can't.
Its really hard to justify HD, let alone 3D.
Pubs are full of Giant 625 line screens showing footie to halfwits. I've never once heard a knuckle-dragger complain that there weren't enough pixels on that.
The more pixels there are the worse the compression artifacts get. You know those amazing shots of the start of the London Marathon? or of flocks of barnacle geese all changing direction at once? I've seen those block-and-freeze on ordinary dtv. 3D must have twice the pixels. No thanks.
Standard smartphone charger to dominate in two years
Mozilla takes on web data miners with privacy icon release
iPhone outlook goosed to 21m for early 2011
Vulture falls asleep in front of Christmas TV
Mind your own: Scotland unveils privacy principles
UN defends human right to WikiLeaked info
London's tube demands faster-than-NFC ticketing
Friday 24th December 2010 11:18 GMT
German
Our German friends do that with the trams. But you need a rules-complaint population.
In some cities if you buy a one-use paper ticket you are supposed to stamp it as you get on to stop you using it twice. I've seen people in Hannover get onto a tram with a broken stamper, and then get off to wait for the next one so they can remain compliant.
2011: The year open source (really) goes capitalist
O2 promises to tap-up customers in 2011
Microsoft ARMs Windows for iPad assault (allegedly)
Ubuntu Wayland: Shuttleworth's post-Mac makeover
Wednesday 22nd December 2010 21:38 GMT 
Innovation is good
I am delighted that some people have the balls to be different. Innovation is what we need, and its not as though X, gnome, kde, etc.etc. will cease to exist.
Contrast and compare with windull, where you get the choice of one filesystem and one ui. And every bit of hardware comes with disks that patch the OS to make then work.
Ofcom proposes UK phone numbers prefix re-org
Monday 20th December 2010 11:05 GMT
Oh ffs
Can't we stop fiddling with things for half a minute. I DON'T WANT TO CHANGE MY SODDING NUMBER AGAIN.
When I got a phone it was Bourne xxxx. Then 0476 97 xxxx. Then 07842 xxxx Then 0780 42xxxx Now it is 01780 42xxxx . My mobile started out as 0658 xxx xxxx Then 089 xxx xxxx Now it is 0789 xxx xxxx
had a shop for 12 years. In that time I had to reprint the stationery 4 times for number changes, & once when they did away with telex.
Orange to ship 0.5m touch-pay phones next year
Scientologist overlord declares victory over Anonymous
Intel and AMD in third quarter stalemate
Man caught w*nking over Alan Sugar's autobiography
FBI 'planted backdoor' in OpenBSD
Ad networks owned by Google, Microsoft serve malware
Ten... sub-£150 PMPs
Wednesday 15th December 2010 11:58 GMT 
Sansa Fuze+
They've dropped the timed FM recording that the original Fuze has, and have not implemented folder navigation even though they provided that on the Clip+. The touch interface got a serious kicking on the Sansa site forum, although nearly all the critical messages have now been removed.
I can't see any advantage over the original Fuze, and won't be buying one.
EMEA server market grows some legs
EU telecoms to Apple, Google: 'Pay up!"
Thursday 9th December 2010 07:57 GMT 
Hmm.
'you break, you pay'? sounds reasonable at first.
How about 'You promise, you deliver.'?
All these telcos & isps sold us a service where we could stream video, download isos, share pictures, really quickly. If they can;t provide that for the quoted price that is their fault, surely?
All together now. 'You promise, you deliver.'
My Droid EXPLODED mid phone call, says Texan
Ten... dirt-cheap voice phones
Free software repository brought down in hack attack
'Smear agricultural land with human poo'
Wednesday 1st December 2010 01:37 GMT
Serpently
Sludge from the sewage stations is regularly added to the land round 'by 'ere, although more as a soil conditioner than a fertiliser: By the time they dig it out of the tanks most of the goodness has been washed out AIUI
Big issue is parasite cycles. If you can separate the location where you dump yer dung from the one where you grow yer food by a fair bit, the chance of a build up of parasites is reduced. So we need to take french shit and sell them ours. Really.
Android out-runs Windows Phone 7 on price comparison site
Tuesday 30th November 2010 00:55 GMT
Don't matter
It doesn't matter how much code is old or new, if this is no. 7 they have at least 6 previous systems to use as 'prototypes' not to mention everyone elses's products as a working model.
There should be nothing wrong with this one, there is a huge history of what to do & what not to do.
US woman @theashes stumped by cricketing tweets
WP7 vs Android: a struggle for supremacy
Monday 29th November 2010 10:01 GMT
like GM
One of the former bosses that used to run GM in the 1980s said "There is never a problem in the car business so big that it can't be solved by making better cars". (They then went on to make crap ones)
If Microsoft make a better phone than Rim and Google, it will sell in boatloads. If they don't, it won't.
Microsoft have promised a better phone than WP6.x . Remains to be seen if they built a chevvette or a quattro.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
