Posts by n4blue

Sane countries

Not sure I'd class any of those countries (except perhaps Finland) as entirely sane.

I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the consumer demand for unlocked phones, and that this is driven more by the need for international roaming than the desire to switch domestic operators.

In a country like Singapore, where many of its citizens regularly cross the border into Malaysia or Indonesia, not being able to swap your SIM would create a big backlash. In the U.S., where only 30% of the population have a passport, this is less of a problem. Note that AT&T unlock iPhones for free for U.S. service personnel stationed overseas.

Lazy coders

If you want to see the result of coding laziness, try looking at what Excel thinks is the day after 28 Feb 1900. This is a carry-over from 1-2-3, whose coders decided a leap year should happen every 4 years with no exceptions. It also shows Microsoft's obsession with backward-compatibility (at least at that time).

Re: Bread.

"Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every ad that proceedeth from the servers of Mountain View.' Gospel according to Eric

Re: 'Sales, what sales?'

Well exactly.

They're all taking a low risk approach because no one knows if Windows RT will actually sell. This is precisely why (I think) MS decided to make the Surface, beacuase they knew the OEMs wouldn't make the risky investment in developing sexy hardware for an unproved OS. They saw what happened with the WP7 launch - innovative software hamstrung by a sorry-looking collection of year-old hardware. They tried to fix this with Nokia, but by then most of the impetus was gone. This time round they've got the flagship Surface in place. If it fails, it fails, but they're giving it a shot.

Re: So-

"Does it actually DO anything?"

Of course not. It's intended to compete with the iPad.

Unless there is a large segment with phones and no internet?

I wouldn't be surprised if that is in fact the case in China and other developing markets.

"the speed at which it happens..."

...is also (inversely) dependent on the amount of money Google throws at the US Govt

Re: Apparaent distance-time anomaly explanation required here

I can't get my head around this.

If the big bang happened 13.7bn years ago, then the matter that makes up those galaxies and the matter that makes up us were in the same place 13.7bn years ago.

If the light from those galaxies took 13.2bn years to reach us, then 13.2bn years ago (500m years after thr big bang) those galaxies were 13.2bn light years away from us .

So over a period of 500m years the matter in those galaxies moved 13.2bn light years away from us, at a rate of over 26 times the speed of light.

Is that correct?

Re: But Surely

Yes you're right. Apparently iOS 7 will include iFart. It won't be as good as any of the other fart apps available but you'll at least have MORE free farting choices on iOS.

Re: BBC NEWS

...and down 13% at the close. I expect this is because there was no detail of pricing or availability. Not only that, but it looks like neither the phones or the OS are anywhere near as ready as they'd like them to be - I doubt if they'll be in the shops before the end of October.

Since the iPhone 5 will be announced next week,and will probably be available almost immediately, that's a big problem. It may not have everything that Nokia has added to the Lumia, but doubtless it will have plenty of new 'magic' to get people excited.

Getting the Lumia announced before the iPhone was probably the right thing to do, but every week that goes by without it being available will just mean more lost opportunity and more sales of the S III and iPhone.

I seriously doubt whether anyone has ever created a facebook account just so they can rate a video.

I also seriously doubt that YouTube has hundreds of millions of user accounts - users, yes, but accounts, no.

Re: I'm not sure if it counts as nostalgia...

IIRC there was an address on the Spectrum you could poke with a value that would offset the pointer to the start of the character set data in ROM, which made all text unreadable.

Re: O/S

If you don't have Java on your Mac then you should be safe, yes.

It's not the fault of Adobe (this time). The security 'hole' is in Java. Oracle patched this particlar hole in February, but Apple maintain their own version of Java fo OSX and it took them until Tuesday to issue a patch.

Re: The end is nigh...?

"most Windows users haven't actually enjoyed using Windows and have been yearning for the opportunity to use something else"

Well yes, I would love to leave my Windows PC and use something else, maybe a sun-lounger or a hang-glider or a snowboard. Not sure my boss would approve, though.