wow
That is some impressive circuit board part density going on there.
63 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Dec 2007
o2 should have 3 options in my opinion:
12 month contract - expensive line rental or low minutes included.
18 month contract - as is, no early upgrade but less minutes /more line rental than 2 year option
24 month contract - but that anyone who has this can upgrade to a new iphone after 12 months at whatever the cost for a new customer is, at this point the old two year contract is removed, and you get a new two year one. This way anyone who wanted to could update annually to a new phone without disadvantage, but if they wanted to leave then they would have to wait the full 2 years (one of which would be staring at an iphone which was newer than the one they possessed), but they get full advantage of cheap calls loads of miniutes free phones etc
The compass isn't really about having a nice compass app which most people won't use. Working out the orientation of the iphone in 3D space accurately is impossible without it. The compass can tell about rotation about the axis coming straight out of the screen when the phone is heald flat, which is necassary for gps navigation if you are stationary and great for doing augmented reality apps using the video camera.
For those wondering about costs
18month contract pm/purchase
16gb £29.38/£184.98 £34.26/£184.98 £44.05/87.11 £73.41/Free
32gb £29.38/£274.23 £34.26/£274.23 £44.05/175.19 £73.41/96.89
24month contract pm/purchase
16gb £34.26/£87.11 £44.05/Free £73.41/Free
32gb £34.26/175.19 £44.05/96.89 £73.41/Free
So basically it is more expensive than last time round, and o2 want you fro 24 months, and they won't let you upgrade.
@Jonathan Cohen an lg (or any other phone for that matter) could have 3mp or 300mp, it will still take s*** photos compared to a proper camera with proper glass elements or s*** video compared to a decent camcorder, if you want hd video for non youtube purposes, buy a decent camcorder. Infact there is an argument for syaing that mobiles with silly pixel counts like 8mp or higher just take noisier crapper photos.
Alternatively as stated they are using the lossless form of DCT. There were a couple of articles on lossless DCT in the IEEE archives if you are interested.
Mind you such schemes are only marginally better than lossless jpeg, so there scheme sounds like a lot of effort for not much gain.
I was 4 at the time, and I was sitting on my dads shoulders at an agricultural auction at the local auction house, everyone was putting up their hands when the man said some numbers, looked like a fun game so I joined in. My dad was then the proud owner of a combine harvester, and had to apologise profusly and question why the auctioneer was taking bids from a smal child, luckily they saw the funny side and re-auctioned it a few lots later. needless to say I haven't been allowed back since.
Furthermore, in light of the south koreans developing kim chee for their astronauts, and the indians developing a suitable space based curry: It raises the question, will a group be assigned (at vast expense) to develop a suitable method for brewing a good cup of tea, and will they also be providing a british menu for our brave spacefearing ginger, perhaps jellied eels, pie and mash, a full roast beef dinner, and the full english to wake up to in the morning?
Shame that it;s the last time that will be happening as well. For all the people saying shuttles are rubbish, they don't go very high, can't do very much, cost too much, I personally like them, they are actually quite graceful. If I win the euromillions tonight (unlikely) then I would be tempted to buy one of the old ones and bung it in the national space museum.
As google are already recording EM waves in the 400THz to 790THz frequency band and displaying them in map form, why not add some seperate detection equipment to the googlemobiles to detect in the 10Mhz to 10Ghz range at the same time and display them as an additional overlay on the map? Would give the tin hat brigade something to worry about and therefore the rest of us to laugh at.
I give only a couple of years until walkera have hacked apart the software and put it on their helicopter range
Lose the camera and GPS, but use the software these guys have developed to make an easy to fly 6 channel rc heli. It would make the proper rc helis much easier to learn to fly on as you could continually dial down the stabilisation software until you were a great flyer. I.E start with the heli doing almost everything, until you do it all and the heli software is turned off,
Having said that for 400 sized helis (around 40cm) there are several diy arduino/sparkfun autopilots available that can help fly a helicopter hands off
It goes the other way as well. I bought a linux Aspire one, got it home and put XP straight on. It's all a matter of personal preference really. Mind you the sales person said if I wanted to run linux on it with the wireless I needed to hack around with the wireless drivers a bit or buy myself a usb wireless stick as the built in wireless has a knack for turning itself off after an hour and refusing to come back. People can b*tch about how linux is better all they like, but if the netbook companies can't supply a decent working distro installed out of the box with a stable driver base for the hardware and common external hardware then quite frankly the linux is more useless than vista. At least XP just works as it has had so long to mature, personally I would like to see them drop the win 7 extra basic version, drop vista , and have win 7 for laptops, desktops etc and a £30 version of XP Pro available for people who want that instead.
That when the astro/cosmo nauts are up there, they won't give a shit about the politics of toilet usage and exercise bikes, and just use whatever. At the end of the day it's not like a US congressman can go up there and give them a ticking off in person, (unless John Gleen is up for a quikc jolly) so I guess the ISS residents will say piss off and make me.
I think a massive price increase vs the £99 retail of the 3G woudl be too much to swallow. Therefore I think when they bring out a new model, they will either keep to price the same +- 50% or they will have and expensive high end one and another one that will proably be a version of the current iPhone 3G still at the £99 price point.
I recall a 150 mile journey I used to have to make back in the past, it started at a rural station with no ticketing facilities, and ended at a rural station with no ticketing faciliies, With no conductor on the train that I could find, I had several free trips as there was literally no where or no-one to buy a ticket from.
Open source hardware is already here, and popular in some circles (look at arduino), and it is now getting much cheaper for indivduals to get high quality low volume pcbs to design their own things. Seeedstudio in china will print pcb's for you at very little cost for very small runs (e.g 3 - 5 boards) as long as you make your designs open source, They print off your boards, as well as some for them to sell in their shop, and will host the designs and documentaion on their website, everyone wins
Everyone I know who has bough Acer Aspire ones or EEEEEEEEEEEpc's has gone for the cheapest linux version that satisfies their needs, and then formated and installed XP. Subsidising linux is unlikely to stop this, so someone somewhere would be losing money. I'm not saying linux is a bad product, I use some heavily customised distros for certain things and for that job they are perfect, but a large % of the general public (and even quite a lot of IT knowledgable people) will want XP because they are used to it, it works well and the programs/toolchains they want to run are well developed on XP
"To 1 atom of Helium 3, add nothing.
Or did you mean creating it from hydrogen and deuterium"
NO, I was thinking more along the lines of HOW THEY ACTUALLY MAKE IT ALREADY
Take some Lithium bombard it with neutrons to make tritium, and then collect up the helium-3 from the tritium decay. No nuclear fusion of Hydrogen isotopes necassary. It's just a byproduct from a nuclear fission reactor. The second part of my statement "And even that would be ridculous." is why bother with 2nd generation nuclear fusion reactors on earth when A) First gen ones aren't making energy constantly yet B) The fuel is to expensive C) It is cheaper to make it on earth than ship it from the moon anyway.
And not affiliated/connected with/sponsered by any airline/airport related company.
I like the fact you can get a plane to anywhere major without having to change if you go via heathrow, if the main european hubs were france or belgium it would add £100 and 3 Hours to flights. I say sod it , make the place more useful lets have another runway and another terminal. then we can have more planes per day and we'll be able to travel at more convienent hours.
Sadly no matter how many times/ how many people try and teach my parents to learn what every little thing or their computer means and does, they still fail, some people just have an inability to learn above basic tasks.
I am always getting "support calls" from my parents, what does this popup mean, how do i change this setting, where have I put that etc. If I could remote login from anywhere to fix the problems it would be great (just have to wait till my current phone contract runs out and I can get an iPhone)
Much as this new macbook is nice, I think that apple got it wrong this time round. I would have kept the features/price the but called it a macbook pro, thus having a smaller cheaper bottom of the range macbook pro @1K
I think they should have replaced the old macbook with something that starts off cheaper (maybe ~ £400) , uses plastic to cut the costs, still has the 9400M maybeand tops out at around £800. That way they could pick up a bigger market share.
off topic I know
From what I've played of open Transport Tycoon, it is a very good game, done to a proffesional standard, - So thanks to your friends who have put the time in. (and also to the people who ported it to UIQ 3 so that I can play it on my P990i). A testement to the work of coders who do things in their spare time for fun.
Didn't someone come up with an idea where you could convert sellafield for about £4Billion to recycle both existing and projected uk nuclear waste, an option which would supply the same amount of electrcity from nuclear power as the uk currently produces, but without having to by in fresh fuel for a period of about 100 years? I seem to recall we would offer to be the worlds recycling bin and other countries would pay us to take their nuclear waste of their hands, whereupon we would recycle it by putting it into our special reactors several times over to generate our own electricity?
M$ will learn from their mistakes and make windows 7 a decent product. Personally I would right off vistas codebase for windows 7, and start again. Have a nice compact and efficient kernal, one in a much more unix based style, that can run virtual copies of old os' in it (maybe even in a very bold move, include a copy of virtual 98 and XP in with the license - though restricted to only work with that installation). On top of that basic kernal, offer modules that tightly integrate with it, ONE for buisness, ONE for home use (which would include media) and maybe ONE for optimized performance (e.g gaming, or older specs), then you could select what you actually want from the OS, (e.g. any combination of packages or none at all). strip all or most of the DRM crap, and price it cheapish so that people buy it. - doubt they will do any of the above, for now I shall stick with my XP/Leopard combination, both of which work well in my opinion.
All I can say is at least the father is garaunteed to be there for the birth
Seems alright for the Mother(non pregnant one), won't she get maternity leave?(if it were the uk, maternity leave is quite long) which could last ages.
As for the Father/(pregnant Carrier of the baby) if he only gets paternity leave (usually a couple of weeks if it were the uk) seems like he got the short end of the stick.
This is unless of course the couple have understanding employers, or they can somehow get the court to swap the rights or default over to the rights you get if you adopt where the leave for both is usually longer anyway
I quite like DAB, chill especially, refreshing to have commercial radio with no adverts. Besides I can get DAB reception at home where I can't get analogue.
TBH I have more of a problem with BBC Radio 3 than I do DAB
Why does the BBC waste £35.9 million a year chasing 700k listeners of Radio 3?
and then only spend £30 million each on Radio 1 and 2 which pull in over 20 million listeners between them? Doesn't make economical sense, Classic FM are a) (adverts aside) better than BBC Radio 3 , b) seem to do ok with pre-recordings c) do so with a compartive shoestring budget.
I say spend £10 million a year on Radio 3, and use the money saved elsewhere, oh and can bbc local radio on DAB as well, it will free up valuable badwidth for other channels