Posts by RightPaddock

Frenchies, Germans wave fat pipes at embarrassed Brits

Mythical Challenge tor the Aussies

>> Also languishing at the bottom, although arguably with a tougher geographic challenge, are the Aussies with 0.4 per cent

Australia is a highly urbanised country, more so than the UK, Germany, France, indeed the only European countries that are more urbanised are Belgium & Luxembourg.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_urb-people-urbanization.

The vast majority of us live in coastal cities within a 2-4 kilometres of an exchange. In urban areas the telecoms ducts are underground, with a junction box by the front gate! Major population centres are interconnected via multiple high speed fibre trunks and multiple undersea cables come ashore on the east, north & west costs. The multi-terabit PPC-1 link being built across the Pacific will double the intercontinental internet capacity.

So just where is the challenge to do better than 0.4%. Our government is planning to do it, for a about $40 billion bucks.

RightPaddock

Apple Magic Mouse

sigh sigh

looks like yet another example of Jobs obsession with the triumph of form over function

Mozilla plans to tie Firefox 3.7 pigtails in pretty Ribbon

Let's be Honest

If Google or Apple had developed the Ribbon it would be hailed as the greatest thing since Xerox Parc Place developed the WIMP interface in 1980. I'm old enough to remember when all computers had were paper tape reader/punches and a drum and you could watch the memory bits flip -- I've had no trouble adjusting to the Ribbon in Office 2007.

The only people who think Moz will use a Ribbon in Firefox are journalists and the like. If they bothered to READ the Moz wiki's where these things are discussed then they'd find almost no talk of doing so. There's a lot talk of Chromifying Firefox, such as putting the tabs at the top of the Window; an equally daft idea, those who suggest it obviously don't know Fitt's Law.

MS has guidelines for Ribbon usage -http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc872782.aspx#galleries - there are lots of do's and do not's - such as this one

"If your ribbon consists mostly of menu buttons when displayed at full size, you might as well use a menu bar"

A phone in every car gains hard-won GSMA support

GSM Tracking

@DavidKelly 2 - location tracking via mobile networks is already here, see http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10115350-233.html

If it can tell you where you are then it can tell other's too, and you wouldn't have to be carrying an iphone - all gsm phones are seen by all "in range" gsm antennae, irrespective of the phone company.

When is an operating system not an operating system?

what a boring question

When is an operating system not an operating system? When it's not, operating!

EC criticised over Intel case

The real issue here is not Intel but the EC

The case against Intel has been found, they've been judged as being guilty as charged.

The issue here is, in bring those charges before the court and in presenting its evidence did the EC itself break the law, by withholding and distorting its own evidence.

As ToddRundgren has remarked, and to which I shall add, the EU Commissioners are a bunch of unelected, know nothing, paid up card carrying members of the European Society of The Good and the Great. In medieval times these people were given titles like Baron, Earl and Duke, now they are EU Commissioners.

Read what Marta Andreasen the former Chief Accountant at the EU has said of it's practices http://policyinstitute.info/news-events/marta-andreasen-lecture/.

Ms Andreasen is now a UK Independent Party (UKIP) Member of the European Parliament.

UKIP has a primary objective of getting the UK out of the EU, and perhaps in so doing to destroy the EU and its Commissioners; just as other European totalitarian dictatorships were despatched in earlier times. So Barroso will suffer a similar fate as the likes of Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Cromwell, Robespierre etc, and if Bliar were to gain the EU Presidency then it would be off with his head too, oh that such a joyous day might prevail.

RP

BT's giant new faster broadband boxes blocked

Should have used FTTG

The problems of providing power to the cabinet/node has been known for years. They should take the fibre to the gate. Then each premise can provide its own power to convert the optical signals on the fibre to/from electrical signals on the premises copper circuits. Also means you don't have 1,000's of cabinets strewn across the entire country for vehicles to drive into, goths to vandalise, burst water mains to flood etc etc.

As for Muswell Hill, about 40 years ago Joni Mitchell wrote those immortal words "they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot", there's no reason not to do it again, is there?

One in three Europeans never been online

so what, who cares ?

How much did this study cost, who authorised it, what truly useful knowledge did it produce and what's a European anyway

Does the EC's definition include Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkey etc - I suspect not. Yet according to the Council of Europe and the OSCE those countries and many more beside lie within their bailiwick, although few non Europeans would agree with that assessment . And what about Albania, Bosnia, Serbia which most non Europeans would regard as being European, I suspect the EC has excluded them on the basis that they are non EU members, but they probably included Switzerland and Noway which are also non-EU members.

The EU and its Commissioners are just a bunch of spendthrift purveyors of mistruths.

Adobe tries to rub out LibDem airbrush claims

Nanny State Needs A Permanent Holiday

Burqa's are so yesterday, now Photoshop's in the frame as the root cause of the never ending woes of the female gender.

It seems that the Taliban have not only taken over the TUC who want to ban high heels, they've now acquired the Lib-Dems too. I wonder if Ms Swinson takes her orders from Brother Mullah Omah or Comrade Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Microsoft's Windows 7 price gamble - and why it's flawed

Too complicated for me

Apple as many others have already said ought to be irrelevant, I very much doubt that price is a factor for the vast majority of OS/X users. MSFT should be targeting existing Windows users.

Why not just have 1 product - with a fixed price of US$80 irrespective of what your currently using. If you have Vista you can upgrade it, otherwise you'll have to install it. Microsoft must have to bear a cost for all these different editions and pricing options, which inevitably get passed onto consumers.

Consumers with multiple machines could buy discounted (say 30%) for packs of 2, 3, 5, 7 or 9 licenses; beyond that there would be alternatives targeted at small, medium & large businesses.

At those prices many individuals & families would upgrade. That means that within a couple of years most of the XP (& IE6) and Vista legacy would be eliminated from the consumer market, at least in the developed world.

I don't anticipate getting a new system built for at least 5 years, by then I suspect W7 will be superseded by W8. Until then it looks like I'll stick with XP/64 running on my existing quad processor with 16Meg of memory.

Ballmer: People don't 'get' Microsoft's Yahoo! marriage

Me Neither

Good I'm glad there are others who don't get it either. Steve Ballmer couldn't convince me that anything he does will be helpful in restoring Microsoft to a pre-eminent position, I suspect the finance guys might have some problems on this one.

The whole idea is MAD, of the doctrinal kind.rather than the Alfred E. Neuman kind.

Best thing Ballmer could do would be to engineer a takeover of MSFT by IBM.