quite
The idea that 32" is 'compact' almost made me choke on my bacon butty. I was expecting to read next that it was good enough for the nanny's flat.
3010 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2006
I reckon the readers are pretty good already. What puts me off is
* the risk of lock-in to one or two formats
* the limited range of titles available
* the pricing, which seems remarkably close to the cost of a paperback
* the licencing, which means I can';t give my surplus ebooks away or to the Oxfam shop
is where all these computers with no virus checker come from.
You can't get out of PCwhirled without climbing over mountains of Norton boxes, and every laptop I've ever had to sort out for one of the great unwashed has had some sort of virus checker on it, OK, a proportion are out of date, but I have never seen a naked windows install I did not install myself from scratch.
We need a big ? icon
When I was a kid the Eagle comic had a strip about an Australian family who lived in a boat-shaped vehicle called a Bushwacker. It had wheels on outriggers from the hull, a jet engine at the back, and mast which could be used for propulsion under sail. The mast split into 3 rotor blades that let it fly like a helicopter.
I've been waiting for years for someone to build one. The cartoon-like drawing of the flying jeep reminds me just a little bit of it, and I still want my Bushwacker. Please.
When the defence review said that cybercrime was the biggest security threat to the UK, I knew that we would all end up being monitored.
And if I knew it, I suppose they knew that I knew it.
The only way to be secure is to have no secrets. I shall be posting my inside leg measurement and my library ticket number on the web tomorrow.
A chum of mine has a french car, which uses a proximity-detected card to enable things. You don't need to stick it in a slot, just have it in the car.
So last week his wife dropped him at the airport, and he went off with the card in his pocket, but she still had the engine running so she was able to set off for home.
She stopped to do some shopping, only to discover that she was 200KM from home, had just stopped the engine and had no way to start it again.
Genius.
This idea is just as daft.
"Annual shipments for tablet devices will reach 81 million by 2015, as new players and handset manufacturers flood the market." - Juniper story last week.
Another yawny pontificate.
Plan A: make somethng really good that is unique - result sales explosion
Plan B: mee-too yourself a slot in existing maketplace - result sales trickle
Nothing wrong with plan B - if you are underpinning foundations or re-plastering cracked walls. To throw up a palace in a swamp you need plan A
Instead of inventing something new, the planet seems to be full of people micro-differentiating the same market into thinner and thinner slices.
Nice product, shame about the price etc etc etc.
What ever happened to wearable computers, to merging all your home devices into some sort of multiprocessor farm, to truly functional shirt pocket things (what now resembles the original palmVX?), to voice op, to natural language processing?
Why can't I look up an itinerary on google maps, have it magically and silently shunted into my phone without button presses, and then shunted out into my car GPS when I get in the car?
Innovate kids, that is what will make things sell. Not ever prettier versions of something I already have.
So we have all this glorious technology, and the objective is what?
To reduce suffering in the world?
To eliminate animal testing from drug trials?
To improve agricultural production, or to provide home automation for quadraplegics?
No. We want it to make very rich people fractionally richer!
I am so pleased about that.
The tom tom linux implimentation seems simple: you can see the file system in usb connection, and the whole experience is straightforward and unremarkably simple. It plays music from an mp3 directory and displays graphics from a picture directory. What's not to like?
Unfortunately the 'home' application needed to manage maps runs only on windoze, and there seems no excuse for that. When you are running it, however, it does everything you want. Although moving maps from the internal memory to the SD card requires an act of faith. You have an option to copy maps to the PC and to delete them. The obvious 3rd step, to copy them back to the device, is there but not visible until the situation arises. So the 'home' application ergonomics could be better, but it actually does everything it needs to.
But the overall package is excellent, and I think they remain the market leader, although I am not happy about their lastest pricing either for hardware or for the more advanced subscription services. I think they have started milking the cow.
>I received a call from MS, they've noticed a discrepancy in our number of
>licences and they want to do an audit.
I should tell them to P*ss R*ght Orf.
If I go into the co-op and buy 3 pairs of shoes they don't accuse me of shoplifting 3 pairs of socks.
Tell them that for security reasons they have to be accompanied at all times by someone who will cost them £45 per hour.
Time to install a linux server and some samba goodness, I feel.
Migration training has been necessary for lots of MS re-issues, where they just changed stuff.
unfortunately I now work for $MEGACORP which thinks we should pay for our own migration training in our own time. Instead I just get slower and slower at my job.
And I run Debian at home, which has the side effect of ensuring I don't accidentally train myself for them.
You provide a link to the manufacturer's coverage map, which is rather neat: the transmitters are shown on a mashup map, with neat colour coded concentric rings, and the colours map to a colour-coded range of products.
Two snags:
* The coverage areas round TV transmitters are not circular, but rather odd shaped, conditioned by beams and by the landscape
* The oneforall web page won't display on the rather short screen on my netbook. Oh, I get a scroll bar, but scrolling it does not change the bit of the page I can see.
http://www.thebigtower.com/live/Belmont/121P24000703011.htm
http://www.mds975.co.uk/txmaps/belmont.html
Do those look like circles to you?
I agree entirely about the parkable phone idea. It would be brilliantly small, only needing enough battery power for half an hour max.
I have another idea. I have a bluetooth earset that parks in its own battery recharging lump. A parkable bluetooth headset that would recharge from the larger battery would also be cool, and could be paired with the parkable phone too.
>so why hasn't OSS triumphed?
The power of marketing?
The common 'plaint against M$ is its abuse of monopoly. The two local computer stores in my home town have both told me this week that they are 'not allowed' to sell me a computer without Windows,
But it is still the case that the fundamental weakness of FOSS is the absence of a huge marketing department.