Posts by Robert E A Harvey 3010 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2006
First they ruin my pension, so will have to work till I am 90
Next they put cameras in every bodily orifice so they can spy on me all day long.
Now they want to ruin both the BBC and radio, so my last remaining pleasure is denied me.
Evil flipwits (news quiz passim) the lot of them.
Is the main reason they want to outlaw analogue radio the ease with which suruptitious transmitters could be set up? Or just to stop me listening to Hilversum and Berlin?
I can't see that, once there is a button that will fetch IE - and only IE - the offering is distinguishable from having IE there in the first place. After all most versions of an OS will fetch allsorts of stuff when they first wake up, if only security updates.
The regulators need to insist that whenever there is a choice that consumers get a choice.
Next they need to uncover strongarming on hardware vendors to exclude other OSs from the marketing material.
You are right - innovative products are the key
The original Palm Pilot - Mine only just stopped working - was innovative and original, it crowbarred itself into a market that did not exist. The Pre is 'just another smartphone', and even though Palm may have helped create the concept.
I could display NMEA dialogues from navigation systems on my palm, using the RS232 input. I had the modem, an ethernet adaptor, and could use it as a remote control on my TV. In 1997.
Where is the innovation today? What about a simple programming environment that would let engineers turn their devices into oscilloscopes, spectrum analysers, data loggers? What about a couple of analogue inputs? Digital Radio Mondiale?(DAB will take too much battery power!)
We need a sort of technical lego - ultrasonic distance or beam-break event detectors, light and heat sensors, oxygen sensors, voltmeters, ammeters, relay outputs and opto-isolator inputs etc etc all with a short range radio link simpler and more reliable than bluetooth and capable of handling multiple devices, like small motor actuators, buzzers, valves, and the like. All programmable by something as simple as ladder logic or function blocks. Have a PC adaptor and one for the PDA, develop the software at your desk and use it in the field.
Or what about opening your front door? For 20 years cars have used 'blippers' to unlock doors, and recently to open the bootlid. Why can't I do that for my house? As an accessory from Palm? What about leaving my burglar alarm on all the time, but set the pre up to identify me and let me move about without triggering the bells?
Why can't it have an ultrasonic device I can use to train my dog? Or switch automagically to low power when e.g. it gets after 5pm and I never make or get phone calls after 5pm? Or turn itself off at airports? How come I can't point it at the meat in a carvery restaurant and read off the temperature? or have it beep when I go near a CCTV camera, or use the same telemetry link as my heart pacemaker and tell my my recent cardiac history? Why won't it let me open my hotel bedroom, or exchange funds with a one-touch cashless terminal, or pay the London congestion charge, or have it read my iris before it will turn on in case someone nicks it?
Me-too design and marketing is not innovation, just an attempt to run a business that has no ideas of its own.
What is this fixation with taking things to bits? It seems as empty as you-tubing yourself unpacking the shipping boxes.
I just want to know if I can sync the address book with anything other than MicroDim's LookOut, and if I can load it with music from my linux box. Oh, and when I can get a second hand unlocked one from the nice lady on Lincoln Market.
play mp3s in file name order without mp3 tags? Like, for example, episodes of a detective story?
stream .ra from iplayer over the wifi?
make sheduled recordings from the FM radio? While you are listening to something else?
I notice it does not include DAB radio, an increasing omission in consumer gadgets. I reckon DAB is dead if it can't be crowbared into something like this.
Another important one "The debt to society paid".
When I was brought up it was drummed into us that someone released from prison had paid their debt to society and the slate was clean. Now we have sex offenders registers, and talk of a violent offenders register. People applying for jobs have to reveal their past criminal record. Persons wanting visas to work in the USA or Australia are refused for periods of imprisonment decades before. Even car insurance companies want to know your criminal history.
The sex offenders one worries me. If, when people are released from prison, they are still a threat to young children Why were they released at all?
>claim a refund from Microsoft for the unused XP license.
My understanding in the UK is that you have to claim the refund from the vendor you bought the PC from. laarge vendors seem to make a habit of accepting the EULA for you before they hand the machine over, so you don't get the chance. It certainly cuts the ill-informed out of their rights.
The only succesful attempts I have heard of involved Photographing each screen during the initial power up process, including the EULA rejection; going via the weights-and-measures people; and issuing a claim in the small claims court.
I think this sort of thing should be on the EU's agenda, as uk.gov would certainly side with M$
I think the publishing houses need to get together and agree a portable format for all ebooks if they don't want to hand control of their business over to Amazon & Sony.
Just imagine what would have happened in the 1920s if Marconi had made 60 rpm gramophones and Bush had made 80 rpm ones.
We just lived through the vhs/betamax wars, the triumph of blueray over h-dvd. A lot of programme providers got badly burned backing the wrong horse. Has the book market not been watching?
Since W7 is just vista-with-knobs-on it can be released as soon as there are enough shiny new knobs available. Any time really.
The driver model is undisturbed vista, and the rest of it is windowdressing.
Meanwhile Ubuntu 9.04 installed itself over 8.10 when I told it to and everything works perfectly.
my Palm Pilot was the first PDA I ever owned, and the only one with which I was ever totally happy. My employers, of various kinds, have issued various ipaq and other windows based machines which were clumsy, slow, and had poor battery live compared to the old palm V.
I had a tungsten too, till some lowlife nicked it. I'd have bought a lifebook if it had had vga screen resolution and wifi.
I suspect that the pre could save the company, but if they tie it to one service provider they will slice the potential market to less than half. I want one, but I want one sim-free and untied please.
When you said Tyke, I thought you mean someone from Yorkshire, which would have been quite an important discovery. A yorkshireman with functioning trouser pockets? Shirely knot! A Yorkshireman who had bought an iThing? Unlikely in the extreme.
But then it transpires you were talking about someone from far far away, and I know nothing about the fiscal tightness of Kentuckians.
Mines the one I nicked from the county council.
Network tied handsets do just that - they tie you to a network.
I have a perfectly good virgin PAYG sim, and put it in my sim-free phone. When I go to Germany I take it out and put a German Selphy sim in. In Korea it gets my KPN sim stuffed up it. In Bueonos Aries I stick in a t-mobile sim.
Where I live Orange has the best coverage. Where my sister lives it is T-mobile. Both of us have sent back O2 phones because they are a brick 90% of the time.
Why should we be blackmailed into using an inferior network just to get a decent phone? It is a very stupid decision by Palm, in my opinion.
When I have twice read a £6 paperback I can leave it in a hotel library, give it to the local charity shop or flog it for 80p to the bloke on the market. It can keep moving around and being enjoyed by different people for half a century it it wants.
How do you do that with Kindling?
'Twatdangle' requires no deep etymology. It just came into being when it was so desperately required.
I agree that 'GitWizard' was similarly essential, and admire Mr Bruggstoke for his part in it, but surely we can just rejoice that there are two words for Blaine which are so perfect as to be nearly onomatopoeic.
I bet you could try either of them out on an impartial observer and he would guess the subject and the context without error.
paris, 'cos even she would understand.
I am disturbed by the behaviour of phone companies who continue to build on Windows Mobile, despite its desparate and obvious shortcomings. Not that Symbian has forged a better ploughshare either, of course.
The market for phone OSs is evern more distorted than that for PCs, with the poor sods who get the devices having very little say in what they do or who provides the OS. Innovation has stalled and we are offered devices little different from those of 5 years ago, despite huge advances in hardware design.
My judgement is that we have another Betamax saga, with the world electing for the worst solution by a process of indifference and disguised decisions.
>Microsoft would like the public to call their new version "Windows,"
I have had 3 phones with various iterations of windows muddle on them, and although each was different from the last I would not have characterised that difference as 'progress' in any way.
I have called the last 3 versions some very odd things. What the next one is called may end up being nothing to do with me, as I am trying to find the phone I want without any of their nasty snarfware on it.
.... just 'take-off' and 'landing'.
No-one describes a commercial jet as 'Thundering Down Out Of The Sky In Reverse Thrust And Bouncing From One Wheel To Another Before Slamming On The Brakes In The Hope You Won't Hit The Chap Who Landed 23 Seconds Ago' (TDOOTSIRTABFOWTABSOTBITHYWHTCWL2SA). They just call it 'Landing'
Why do the military need all that detail to describe 'Stopping Without Crashing' (SWC) ?
- Mine's the one with the old boarding passes in the pocket
The big puzzle is why the traditional recording industry thinks it has a right to survive in the 1920s form that it has perpetuated for so long.
Entertainment changes all the time.
Where are the sheet-music stores that used to be on every high street, in every department store?
Where are the variety shows, at the end of the pier or on TV?
What happened to Top of the Pops or the 6:5 special or Juke box Jury?
When did you last go to a dance in a village hall?
where are the music halls?
Where are the Town Waits, combining music with guarding the walls?
I think that the 'record labels' may well go the same way. I don't think they will be missed.
Paris, cos she can normally spot when things have finished
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