* Posts by Martin-R

106 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2010

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IBM insider: How I caught my wife while bug-hunting on OS/2

Martin-R
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Oh what memories this brought back - especially that random crash when exiting a subroutine. I was working on Person to Person for OS/2 as IBM were working on a point release (1.3 I think?). Fortnightly drops of the OS had to be installed from floppies - what fun! The desktop video conferencing element was probably a bit ahead of its time - 4Mbit token ring in the office was bearable, but ISDN down to Hursley was a tad painful Mind you, if you know where to look, you can still see some of that code running in today's descendants of P2P, so it can't have been too bad :-)

Army to deploy jumping robots in Afghanistan

Martin-R
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Fallable?

Watch the whole vid! It does snow, ice, being kicked, mud, piles of blocks... very impressive bit of kit. If you poke around their site, it's one of a number of designs; this one's obviously intended to be a modern take on the mule, to carry extra kit for a squad - though it'll need to be a bit quieter before it goes on any special ops missions

Mac Lion's breath causes Celerra NAS storage to die

Martin-R
FAIL

Not a bug

but a deliberate upgrade with no obvious back compatibility options. Time Machine backups to most NASs and WHS shares now fail, which is, to be blunt, bl**dy annoying!

Virgin and Spotify: A step forward for digital music

Martin-R
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Well done VM (for twice)

What with this, and the rebate on the Tivo box for early adopters, I'm really starting to wonder what's going on at VM - they're in danger of becoming positively customer friendly!

But what's still missing is the ability to play back content recorded on the tivo elsewhere in the house. On one of the two V+ boxes in the house would be a good start, but on any device in the house (PC, mac, iPad, Android phone...) would be even better!

Virgin Media kills 20Mb broadband service

Martin-R
FAIL

Actually getting 20Mb would be nice first...

4Mb was about tops over the weekend, apart from when it was down altogether :-( When it's good, it can be very good (18.5 on speedtest.net) but it'll have days at a time where it's up and down - is upgrading to 30MB going to help that?

iPhone mag-stripe reader stalled

Martin-R
WTF?

But why?

About all you could do is hook up a PED that does all the encryption on the device and then just use the iPhone as a modem back to the authorising software - but by then you're lugging around half a brick, plus its power supply, which rather cuts down on the portability aspect! I rather feel this falls into the solution looking for a problem category...

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