Happy Days
Far far happier days!
140 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Apr 2007
What's the difference in having a SIM as part of the main board & one in a socket? Generally anyone who wants to use a smartphone has signed an x month contract anyway so they're tied to the SIM.
End of contract, decide to keep phone but move provider: Apply for PAC code, Apple by then have added "New Operator" feature into iTunes, insert PAC code into dialog box, job done.
"Apple will also need to get the network operators to hand over the secrets for embedding into iPhones. Our first thought is that this could never happen,"
Yeah, they said something like that about getting music companies to sell tracks for $.99 each
Why not replace the terrain following radar unit with something similar based on a laser? Surely if if you can have laser guided missiles that home in on a laser source, you must be able to build a similar seeker function into a nav system, with a terrain "designator" laser to accompany it? That sort of tech has been around since the 70's
How much in the way of EM emissions from one of those?
Its not as though a H-60 does 200+ Knots at treetop height either, so the processing requirement must be less than fitting something similar to a fast jet.
So lets see, no BMM or onboard mail in your first release, but you boldly keep at it. iPad2 sells by the bucket load and before Xmas arrives, Amazon launches the Fire (in the US only it seems) and you're 2-0 down by half time at the the of the year.
You make an attempt at pulling a goal back by releasing an update, but still omit BMM and score an own goal instead, then Apple show the iPad3 a month later, possibly introducing a smaller form factor as well or even making the iPad2 the cheaper version as they have with the iPhone.
Come April, you're relegated to either axing the playbook altogether, or cutting the price so any mug buys it. I'd be worried about letters of support from the board in the meantime as well!
How long before the idiots we elect to govern, regardless of political persuasion, realise that unless they spend billions in research into fusion (cold, warm, tepid or whatever), building new or replacing old fission reactors is about the only reliable way we're going to keep the lights on around these parts in the not too distant future?
Short of surrounding these shores with flocks of whirling windmills or tidal flow turbines and continuing to plant even more in what's left of our green and pleasant land (before the new planning bill covers it in concrete & tarmac) , use what's left of our coal reserves (heresy, fancy thinking of that) there's no RELIABLE, immune to changes in weather, wind, whatever, electrical source to provide enough to keep my Mac running so I can read El Reg.
Build enough and we might be able to sell some of the output back to the Germans?
"you have to wonder what exactly US and European firms are going to be doing."
The ones still doing anything will be doing what the rest already were, nothing!
Their owners only see the bottom line and if it costs x pence less to manufacture overseas, then that's what they'll do.
As for patents, that means spending money on R&D and where's the profit margin in that.....
This is what you get when you're lead by beancounters.
Seeing as their web prices are the same as the shop, you'd hope that to get people to come into their shops to buy a book, rather than wait for it to arrive by post, their "Check local store" type search would be up to date? Sadly not.
So my usual process for buying a book goes something like this:
Find book I fancy - see if Waterstones have it locally so you can have a quick look - go to store if it says they have it - find they don't - check Amazon and find its a good few £s cheaper - order from Amazon.
If the shop price was a couple of quid more than Amazon, you'd often buy from the shop to get instant gratification, but when its more often than not half the shop or Waterstones web price, its a no brainer.
As for e-book prices, forget it, still cheaper to buy the paperback most of the time and its still easier in physical format for technical books and non-fiction with colour photos.
How to kill time and not realise it?
"Just one more turn...", "I'll just capture that city and I've wiped out the Indians..." Then with a peek out of the window of the room where the PC was it still looked dark, trip across the landing to the bathroom before bedtime and you wonder what that dim light is that's starting to break through the frosted glass, that would be the SUN!
Oops, another grouchy day at work after <4 hours sleep.
It was a slippery slope after Civilisation: Railroad Tycoon, Command and Conquer, Alpha Centauri all conspired to deprive me of sleep.
Excellent game and now I feel really old as my son is playing Civ IV.
What's wrong with the keyboard? I'd rather type on one of them than any other I've used since my last original IBM PS2 keyboard died! And yes, I've had plenty of machines from the dark side, except now I can run Win7 as a VM when I'm desperate.
As for the OS, each to their own I suppose, but if pushed, I'd only swap OS X for Linux.
I'd also lay good odds that in 3 years time, OS X 10.8 (?) will work just fine in 4Gb of RAM and leave at least 120Gb of space on a 128Gb SSD. I even expect it to run on my now last generation MacBook Air. I very much doubt Windows whatever will run as well on a PC of equivalent age.
My boss summed up the Air and the iPad, when I turned up with my 11" Core2 Duo Air. "An iPad is an iPod Touch for people with bad eye sight, and Air is a Netbook done properly" Fitting i5 and restoring the illuminated keyboard just makes it even better.
Thunderbolt will only be OK when there's something useful and affordable to plug in to it. New Cinema Display is useful, but rather fails th either bit!
I don't have problems linking Apple mice, keyboards or phones to my iMac, or MacBook Air, or Apple mouse to Linux box for that matter.
Which is more than can be said for my work Lenovo laptop and MS mouse. Go to a meeting, stay longer than an hour, come back and the only way to get the BT mouse working again is a reboot.
I've tried a few other "wireless" mice over the years, all with Windows PCs and they've all not lasted that long before I reverted to a wired one.
Omit USB 3.0 because you think Thunderbolt is better; now that's dropping the ball when a cable for Thunderbolt is £50 and there are virtually no devices available yet to use it anyway. How much to use USB 3.0 chips instead of 2.0? Come on.
"They promise open, glass storefronts with no posters or signs obscuring the view.
Phones and tablets on display will be functioning devices, not dummy devices, "
My my, I wonder where they got that idea from?
Good luck to 'em. Unless 02 match what T-Mob want for next iPhone when it arrives, I'll be wandering in if we get a store nearby.
From experience I suspect there are more factors involved in the likelihood of getting prostrate cancer than a few cups of hot lava java. I'd also suggest they look at the impact of tea!
Grandfather - Died age 96, basically of old age. Never smoked, hardly drank alcohol, drank tea by the gallon, but never drank coffee. Kept active until his knees let him down in his 80's
Father - Died of aggressive form of prostrate cancer at 68. Didn't touch coffer or tea. Smoked, drank and sat on his arse for 40+ years.
You can draw your own conclusions.
Despite all the signs in store that said "take me home today", despite us being willing to take the display model that nobody would be able to see for 2 days as it was 3pm on Xmas Eve and that our fridge had packed up (taking the turkey et al with it) they wouldn't sell us a fridge.
Maybe they were getting their own back for me point out to a friend on a previous that you could buy the same item he was looking at for 20% less than the shop price, from their own website!
It looks very nice, but if you want a fixed lens compact camera with a near full size "sensor", go and buy a second hand 35mm Leica. The lens is second to none, it won't be obsolete when the next model arrives and at the end of the day, it will be worth more in a couple of years time because its a Leica.
So no email client or BB Messenger, few apps and you'd expect, being a RIM device, a price premium?
Meanwhile, there's another slightly larger device thats already sold 30-40 MILLION units, has thousands of apps and is likely to be about the same price you'd think, seeing as you have to pay a premium for those as well (they say).
Or there's the raft of Android wannabes that are a similar size to the PlayBook, but at least have email and plenty of apps as well as probably being a bit cheaper.
Anyone remember the Palm Folio? That sank without trace as well.
Not being able to field a carrier in a fairly limited action like this should be a very stark warning of what's liable to come. I'll give it a couple of years at most, by which time the Harriers will have been scrapped (they won't be sold, too much US kit on them) and by which time someone will have found decent reserves of oil around the Falklands. You can guess the rest.
As for buying Rafale, if we hadn't been so pig headed way back when both Rafale and Eurofighter were still paper planes, we'd have had Rafale in service already, which would have saved us and the French a lot of money.
PDP-11/34 seemed so high tech in 1988, yet I suspected I had more power in my Atari ST at home? Had to use one to download data from flight data recorders on GR5 Harriers!
Plug in the "Black Box" which is actually bright orange, (only goes black when it gets burnt, but it is fireproof) select the data sources you wanted, get a print out on some weird multi trace wet plotter, then hang the traces to dry or all you got was a huge multi-coloured smudge.
Aside from the fact that unlike a "real" book, I can't lend an ebook, give it to anyone else or even donate it to charity, you are to an extent paying for the convenience I suppose. But like the record industry with CD prices, you do get the feeling joe public is once again being bent over and shafted.
What should be investigated if it comes to pass, or maybe do it anyway, is investigate how Apple can force anyone wanting to sell e-books via the iOS App Store to pay Apple's 30% tax! Apple's servers only hold the applications. If the likes of Amazon and Sony want to sell ebook from their own servers, why should Apple get a cut?
This from a Mac/iPhone user who won't be buying an iPad as an e-book reader!
Never mind dinky little used toy boats, real rich people have their own boats built. Not quite as big as Chelsea owner Abramovich's soon to be launched 540-foot "Eclipse", but for cutting edge looks, check out Andrey Melnichenko's 394-foot toy boat "A". Now that could be in a Bond film!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303695604575181911796253780.html
Apple may have signed up for this, but does the doubtlessly huge tome sent out by the EU actually say the standard charger must actually connect to the phone directly? If not, Apple will simply include an adaptor, with a dock connector on one side and a micro-USB socket on the other.
That way they adhere to the letter of the EU edict, whilst keeping everyone with a dock of some sort happy at the same time. You really can't see Apple simply adding a separate charging port and hence another hole in the iPhone case, that would be too easy and spoil the aesthetics....
So long as the EU don't finally get round to standardizing mains plugs and foisting some useless 2 pin, un-earthed plug on everyone, when the UK spec 3 pin is better, safer and doesn't fall out of the socket every chance it gets, I don't care.
Assuming that there's scope in the carrier design to incorporate catapults and arrester gear, steam or otherwise, would they be able launch some nice cheap A/F-18s off the new carriers? Or dare I say, Rafale's if we want to creep up to the French and look like a Euro Navy?
Take your pick, just enough (if you're lucky) hi-tech F35s for one carrier, or a full set of something cheaper?
Better still why not highly capable and probably quite cheap Su-33s. There again the MoD would screw that up by demanding we build them here and fill them with UK spec kit that will take years to talk to the rest of the plane or each other.
I have to side with Mr Page, an aircraft carrier is much more than just another boat, even with his cut down escort units around it and if they build them with a catapult, steam or mag, better still. The Harrier did a sterling job, the STOVL F35 might be better, but for something with decent range and warload plus be able to launch a proper AEW bird and heavy COD, you need catapults. Plus its a good bet the Labour govt signed such a watertight contract, it would cost more to cancel than it would to build, even if we flog them to the Indians.
Those who suggested closing the German bases have to be right. There's little point in housing thousands of troops, expensive to maintain tanks and other AFVs in Central Europe, whilst paying out LOA (or has that already been axed?) just to have them primed to flood the Fulda Gap in one last heroic charge (before they got fried with a couple of TAC nukes). when the enemy they were set to fight headed East 20 years ago. They've already lost permanently based RAF air support and the Harrier squadrons stopped playing in the woods years ago.
Nimrod MR4 hasn't been mentioned? Come on, why are we still trying to extend the life of a hand built 1950s civvie jet? Apart from to prop up BAe. Is it too late to save anything by stopping this particular gravy train?
Axe the Tornado squadrons? I hope BA and the rest need some pilots, because this has been on the cards for a while. Buy ground launched Tomahawks for the long range work and some decent drones for the shorter range precision stuff, no huge bases to man or protect, stop recruitment of techies for a while (another money saver) and re-assign the GR4 ground crews to whatever jobs they've not already outsourced to the civvies. They won't get much for real estate that houses the tonka toys though, Lossie is miles from, err, anything and Marham isn't much better, just not as cold and wet.
As for the last time the RAF shot down any sort of plane air to air, I suspect that would be May 1982 when a 92 Sqn Phantom splashed a 14 Sqn Jaguar. Jag pilot got his MB tie and ended up with a second one some months later when he banged out over Scotland.
Not the first time MB have delivered duff seats, but at least the Saudi pilot knew he was ejecting. If memory serves, the Harrier GR5 test pilot didn't when the seat head box barostat triggered the drogue 'chute charges and dragged in out through the canopy without the benefit of setting off the MDC first!
Last seen flying on regardless by a KC-135 that was inbound to the UK and was vectored onto the now pilotless machine, the GR5 finally came to grief in the Irish Sea. Naturally enough the GR5 fleet was grounded until that was fixed as well.
There again, at the time the UK spec INS platform wouldn't speak to the rest of the systems, the new Aden gun hadn't arrived yet and when it did fell off, but they're another story...
It may well behave with multitasking already, but could they please include a "close app" function? Because that would be much simpler than wondering why your battery is virtually flat after you've used TomTom and why your leg is getting really warm under your iPhone!
£42 whatever, so you're saying I have to buy the new version rather than get it as an upgrade for either free or a lot less? Sorry, not going to happen.
Flames for obvious reason.
Lets face it, come the sad day they should ever be needed, we wouldn't want our buckets of instant sunshine mounted atop Trident to fly a few thousand miles, spoof its way through any defense systems and arrive on its target only to go pop when the detonators go off, rather than obliterate the poor sods underneath it.
Much like flying manned bombers in there and dropping leaflets; if you've gone that far, finish the job properly.
We could always go Euro and buy Rafale's off Dassault?
Oh wait a minute, couldn't we have done that ages ago instead of developing Typhoon? But no, we threw a strop because the French wanted design authority, wanted to keep the weight down to operate off their small-ish carrier and wanted a single engine. I can appreciate the twin engine bit, but at least Rafale is in service (though it did get fat!) ! Meanwhile we eventually get an even more over budget plane that's useless as a ground pounder which is what we need now, unless we fork out even more to the Preston mafia.
We could always navalise Typhoon I suppose? Ok, maybe not...
£25k for some interestingly designed speakers, but if the relatively cheap £500 Japanese amp that drove them is anything to go by, its no wonder they didn't sound that impressive and no mention of what was providing the input, CD, SACD, turntable?
There again, if the accompanying photos show the only set of speaker connections, then your £25K is simply buying a pair of expensive glass boxes that happen to double as speakers; what no option to bi-amp or tri-amp? I'll pass.
*Old hi-fi lovers will know where that comes from.
Imagine all the press hacks jockeying for position at some event or other, thrusting their latest N99 or whatever at the assembled celebs, or the sports mob entrenched behind the goal at Wembley, forsaking their fully weatherproof Eos1D MkIV's and fast 300mm L series lenses etc (Say £7000 of kit?) for a camera phone. I suspect not.
JB. As for Chrome Dioxide tapes having lovely sound quality? Nakamichi Dragon or the like to play them on or not, even I'd rather have MP3. MP3 over vinyl, that's different!
Can't we keep more people happy by splitting the order?
Why not buy x amount of off the shelf Corvettes to keep the wannabe admirals in a job and give them something to steer, don't Vospers still make these? Then we can fit whatever makes them useful; mirrors to make them look bigger maybe and a nice new jib for the all the existing admirals personal barge's.
Then order something bigger, cheap and more useful, but hopefully rather more combat ready and survivable than a CAM Ship to house helicopters, Tomahawks, Marines etc. Better still, make them nuke powered and save on fuel, plus have sufficient electricity available for rail gun or a laser later on?
Or would that upset BAe as they don't make Corvettes and don't have the capacity to build cheap combat capable semi-merchant ships.....shame.
PS What happened to the proposed shorter wider frigate/destroyers someone came up with that were supposed to be more combat survivable and have a bigger heli-pad on? Or did these quietly get pushed to one side because BAe didn't think of them or only had the right width boat yards to build pointy grey boats? :-)
I was stationed at RAF Wittering in the late 80's and at the last "At Home" day before I moved on, we were treated to a 3 ship scramble take off as part of the proceedings.
Never was a name for a plane more apt! A dozen Olympus at full throttle and the ground shook as they rolled down the runway, anything missed on the FOD sweep came scuttling back towards 1 Sqn hangar and the crowd line at a great rate of knots. They didn't need as much of the runway as you'd think, an empty bomb bay makes such a difference! As soon as the wheels went up, they each went their own way, off to disturb the rest of the locals Sunday lunch.
Happy days.
OK, so one one hand they cut the funding and canceled Ares/Constellation, but now they're saying they still expect NASA to get to Mars or the Moon.
Have this lot been taking lessons from the UK government? Because its the same sort of thinking and economics they apply to our armed forces!
I'm sure Disney would love a few real astronauts for Mission Space at EPCOT?
No need to move house, its just down the 528 from the Cape. But bring your own uniforms.
It's sad really, we have to get of this rock somehow, because if we're the only sentient life form in the galaxy, we're in trouble!