Posts by John H Woods 3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007
If you advertise up to x Mb/s, then 20% of your customers should get better than 80% of this speed, and 80% should get better than 20% of it.
If you advertise a service as unlimited, the correlation coefficient between usage and speed should not be significantly different from zero.
If you claim 24 hour service, 80% of the time you should provide 20% of that users maximum service.
never gonna happen, I guess ...
... Humphrey Littleton's characterisation of the Today Programme as '20 minutes of news and comment packed into an exciting two hour package' has never been truer. Even in the 30 minute six o'clock news they stop about 17 minutes in to give 'the headlines again'. For goodness sake, if my attention span was that poor, I'd be listening to Radio 1.
Rolling news is just the same half dozen stories over and over again for hours. *THAT* is why the Internet is so much better for news, and why the serious news programmes are starting to bore people senseless. Just as someone pointed out above, you get actually get a greater breadth of news from satire: waiting a week then watching Mock the Week / HIGNFY or listening to the Now Show or the News Quiz. Or waiting a fortnight, then reading Private Eye.
Most people think that it's completely wrong for companies to buy huge numbers of tickets of highly anticipated events such as pop concerts, for the sole purpose of selling them at inflated prices later. I'm struggling to see how your justification of squatters doesn't apply to ticket touts. Or do you think that ticket-touting is legitimate business?
If you are travelling at half the speed of a bullet and you measure a bullet going past you it looks like it is going half the speed of the bullet.
If you are travelling at half the speed of light and you measure a beam of light going past you it looks like it is STILL going at the speed of light, not half the speed.
It is this behaviour of light - that it does not behave like bullets - that gives rise to relativity - something has to give and that something is TIME (simplifying a bit here).
... Feb 2010. Had to argue with the school that it really was worth taking my kids out during term time for what was going to be the last ever night time launch, followed by the (daytime) launch of the SDO a few days later. This article brought it all back for the second time (the first was seeing the Aurora Borealis over the West Midlands as predicted by the SDO). Thank you so much for reminding me - especially of the sound which was simply unbelievable.
... and a mouse replacement? I developed RSI 20 years ago and although it is still occasionally a problem I have found that avoiding mice (e.g. by using a nipple, a tablet, a touchpad or a head pointer) and using a Dvorak keyboard I have managed to get it under control. Anecdotal, sure, but you could give it a go and see if it helps. Very best wishes for your recovery.
"I suppose if it was really accurate you could keep dinging the same piece of body armour until it finally gives way."
AND ... you can fire all but the initial shot from behind full cover - you only need to pop out to hit the target with the 'tag' (like the Bullseye rifle in Resistance).
... you just didn't pay attention - at least if you're in the UK. UK Phone books are slim these days because many of those who actually listen to the question 'do you want to be listed' say no. And you do NOT have to pay extra not to be listed, nor to have a withheld number, nor to withhold your number on a one-off basis (by dialling the prefix).
... not sure why you got downvoted, it seems a very sensible approach. Not saying that it is the upgraders' fault that the non-LTS releases are so flakey - that's Canonical's fault. If I want fancy UI elements on my LTS installs I add them under my own control - like the Cairo Dock.
Furthermore I almost never upgrade OS. I take a fresh machine (often a fresh virtual machine for a newish release) and try it out there. I would also never run the risk of breaking a working machine by repartitioning and converting to dual boot: you can always just pick up a small idle hard disk salvaged from an old machine, swap it in and try your hardware with the new OS.
Canonical have not just released a not-quite-ready OS, they are guilty of making it look like the upgrade is straightforward. (Note, whenever installing Ubuntu for friends and family I always switch off distribution upgrade notifications - at least nonLTS distro upgrades).
I prefer to be pessimistic and then pleasantly surprised, rather than optimistic and horribly disappointed. But, although years of experience has given me this attitude I do not for one minute blame those who have tried the optimistic approach and lost out - I know that horrible sinking feeling too well to be able to gloat, even if I wanted to.
The best they can do then is terminate your unlimited data before the 30 days you paid for. They don't even know my name and address (cell triangulation excluded), so they'll have a hard time hitting me with a bill I don't expect.
Having said that I've had 5GB off them in 2 weeks, never less than 2Mb/s on speed test. I've been using my phone as a portable internet radio streaming device all round here (Stratford-upon-Avon area) with no problems. Best 2 things I've done recently (1) superCID my (Orange) Desire HD and (2) got a 3 payg sim.
... that mobiles cause a very slight increase in heating? Maybe just the warmth of the phone rather than the microwaves, but yes - a very slight increase in heating. Pretty much all metabolism goes faster (up to a point) with a small increase in temperature, it is just chemical reactions, after all. Glucose metabolism is probably simply the easiest one to see because it is such a major pathway for the vast majority of cells, certainly for neurons.
He tells me that 'v.' stands for 'versus' but should not be written 'vs' or 'versus'.
It is pronounced 'and' in civil cases (Smith v. Jones) and 'against' in criminal ones (R. v. Jones) where R. is Regina or the Crown.
I asked him why and he said he didn't know, but thought it was useful for working out if people knew what they sounding off about. When I said that was typical of lawyers to be deliberately arcane he pointed out that I had sniggered when he had referred to his desktop computer as 'the hard drive', and he suggested that 'geeks' probably use a similar strategy to assess the competence of the folks they are dealing with.
I was very fond of referring people to this case but an acquaintance told me that one risks exposing oneself as a legal ingénue by using the word 'versus' in the context of an English civil case, Apparently if you want to do it properly you should write it 'v.' and pronounce it 'and'.
IANAL and would be glad to hear if this is useful advice or if I was being fed a line ...
... if you want to find good Android apps then use AppBrain (an app recommendation service) or just use an internet search for 'best android apps'. I only ever use the search function of the android market for finding apps that I already know I want - I can imagine it would be terrible for just browsing the market.
I bet that's why the app is too big. Most people use 5000 words maximum - Swype and T9 dictionaries (and all spell-check dictionaries) should be small (say 10k words) and extensible. Only crossword solving dictionaries and their ilk need to be huge.
For instance, I was outraged recently to have Swyped 'tine' rather than 'time'. How many fucking times do you want to discuss fork prongs in SMS? It is much, much better to confirm the occasional use of a word outside the top-frequency list than it is to accept mis-spellings because they happen to be obscure or archaic words.
Place names especially should not be present in such dictionaries. Although I have to say that Swype does give you a better class of typo. As I wrote last week - this is Tuscaloosa (Ridiculous).
In other words, a post-sale change made by a manufacturer doesn't count because it is not something in which you are interested?
You say "SONY had the right to change it." That, my friend, is what is called begging the question - you are assuming the very point that is at issue. Naturally, if everybody agreed with you that SONY had that right, you would be entirely correct. But they don't, so you aren't. What you need to demonstrate, if you wish to be taken seriously, is some supporting evidence that SONY have the right to make such changes in the first place.
Of course this is all slightly off topic but, considering the timing (virtually contemporaneous) and the subject matter (ownership of intellectual property) it is hardly surprising that the matter has been raised.
I personally don't give a toss about OtherOS, even though I experimented with it. But I can see why people who DO give a toss about it are aggrieved and, at the moment, I think they are correct that SONY have been (at the very least) unfair. No wonder they are pleased to see SONY getting some 'karmic retribution'.
... as my old Dad liked to point out, if you spoke to an expert in 'x' for long enough, they would eventually tell you how everything written about 'x' in the media was pretty much rubbish. As you went through life, and met more people, you found that this was true for a pretty large range of 'x'.
... showing two old geezers in their high-sided chairs surveying the not terribly interesting proceedings at the old folks home where they live. Caption: "If we hadn't given up smoking and drinking, we'd have missed all this!"
BTW it's more useful to think of a unit as 10ml of alcohol rather than 8g.
"Record researcher Samantha has made one of her customary visits to the gramaphone library, where she runs errands for the kindly old archivists, such as nipping out to fetch their sandwiches. There favourite treat is cheese with homemade chutney, but they never object when she palms them off with relish."
"When the Iphones didn't have it for years, it was deemed unimportant. When WP doesn't have it for a few months, it's considered a major flaw."
This would only be an "inconsistency" if they had been released contemporaneously. Would you claim I was inconsistent if I criticised a new make of car because it didn't have airbags, and I hadn't taken into account that the first Fords didn't have them either?
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