Not like Skype then
Not another popular open source project which is bought commercially so that it can be "enhanced" by persons unknown.
858 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jun 2007
I got a complete satellite TV kit from Screwfix for GBP 49.99 and it works great. There is a fuge number of free radio channels. They come in at decent technical quality as well. OK no good in the car obviously but fine for home.
@monkeyfish yes I could have used the Pound sign but you never quite know how it is going to come out. BT sent me a phone bill for so many Dollars once and they were well miffed when I actually wanted to pay it.
I bought a car stereo from Comet. Not only did it stop working but it chewed to pieces my saved-up-for Uriah Heep cassette. Comet took the whole tangled mess back for "repair" and I never saw it, or my money, again. I vowed never to buy from them in the future and I never did. It can't just be me. Why would anyone want to put money into a brand like that.
Originally my joining their site coincided with the start of a new real-life social pastime and I found it incredibly useful because it automatically served me up with what I wanted to see. Fast forward to the present and you have to make too much effort wading through stuff. I barely do anything on it now.
I think it will be a long slow popularity decline but what if instead one day they finally cross the line with that one tweak too many and people just overnight give up on it.
It's not about radio interference.
If something goes wrong and you're in a crashed plane on the tarmac then you will likely have swimming-pool sized amounts of jet fuel sloshing about. In these circumstances you don't want lots of broken electrical gadgets sparking the place up.
So long as you played the game and kept taking dozens of exams they had an enormous entertainment budget. I went to endless freebies, parties, days out, I remember a mini-olympics like the one in the article, all-expenses paid trips to their annual conference thing in Utah. Good times!
My distance vision is borderline but I don't normally wear glasses. I went to see "Prometheus" and unexpectedly it was in 3D. Did not have optical glasses with me but watched film anyway just with the 3D glasses.
Result: did not enjoy film and absolutely splitting headache for hours afterwards. Strangely enough I have not felt like ordering a 3D telly.
They vary but I talked to the callcentre lady for one of the companies and she said she had it in her own car and loved it. You pay a premium in the normal way but they give you a web account to which you login every week and see how many discounts you got for keeping your cornering, braking, acceleration and speed within the parameters they like. She said it had made her more conscious of her driving which yes I suppose it would really if you knew that scorching away from the lights actually cost you money.
I recently spent a huge amount of time looking for insurance for my teen son and his first car. Insane amounts of money were quoted but the cheapest was not actually the telematic. The whole thing is a very expensive mystery for example the company I eventually went with offered me fully comp more cheaply than third party fire and theft.
The premium for the rejected telematic quote was £100 per hour extra for driving after 11:00PM. I can see why they would want to try and deter night-time young driving but don't forget a young person is likely to be a student and thus to have a part-time evening job and so it is with my son he clocks off at 11 and obviously needs to get home from work.
In the old days I typically used to pay quite a lot for something like a Nokia series 40. The "user experience" was never all that configurable, iut was take it or leave it, and I just had to get used to working around all the things I didn't like.
Now for what seems to me like much less money I can get a much nicer phone with which I can do more or less whatever I want. Android FTW all the way.
I spend a lot of time in clubs and the DJ comes along with his laptop and plays an MP3 which sounds great to him ON HEADPHONES. Sounds terrible however on big speakers. I'm guessing it's something to do with the psychoacoustic model.
I approve in general of what he is doing but I wish he wouldn't make it sound like he is going through such hell. His colonic eruption piece yesterday was funny but it's not helpful to encourage people to think that healthy/frugal/whatever eating is something you do for a limited time as a sort of penance which brings nasty toilet consequences. I am sure his guts really do feel a bit funny but this is actually the result of suddenly loading his body with high-fibre food when it has previously been used to an easier ride. If you eat this sort of food all the time you are no more gassy than anyone else. Just sayin.
Seriously we should all do more of this. You can get fantastic nutrition out of cheap veg and pulses and I do get tired of hearing "poor people are malnourished because they can only afford mac fry king burgers."
Slight shock when I speed-read the article as "while peeing occasionally into the bubbling broth"
If you are a business then OK maybe there is a reason to sign up. For the average person it's difficult to get value from these typical one-sided mobile contracts. They dangle the shiny "free" smartphone to get you on board but after that you are powerlessly over a barrel paying through the nose for two years. Stick with pre-pay, save money, and have the satisfaction of disrupting their extorting business model.
Yes of course I read it, and used my biro to delete that and a couple of other daft clauses. They accepted the amended contract, no doubt because I was bringing my own hardware so they were not subsidising me . Did not stop them half-heartedly trying it on later when I terminated.
I was just making the point that the current two-year lock-ins are NOTHING! People should stay away from contracts altogether - if the operator finds a reason to surprise you with a huge bill there is little you can do about it. At least with pre-pay the most you can lose is a tenner or so.
My first ever (1990's) mobile phone came with a TEN-YEAR contract with Nokia Mobira. I was able to get out of it but since then have never trusted contracts and prefer the way pre-pay puts you back in control. There is always an affordable handset which is nearly as shiny as the expensively subsidised ones - currently the phone modding community likes the Huawei Ascend G300. So, 100 quid for a very capable rooted phone and £7.50 a month with unlimited data.
Google Latitude is interesting but scary. If you let it, it will produce a fascinating report with pie-chart showing how much of your time you spend at work, at home, other places (complete with addresses), your airline flights, plus detailed log of your movements day by day. All without you doing anything apart from install the Android app and letting it run.
I went there as a child too. The smaller dish (still looked big to me) was designed to pick up radio signals from the sun. They displayed the sun's position and if you steered the dish right (using the joysticks) then you were rewarded by an oscilloscope display of solar noise.
I remember feeling smug when I did it but was immediately told off by some other kid's dad for hogging the controls. The other kid then proceeded to drive it around some random and very unsolar directions :(
That is where we all lose out by saying goodbye to a very handy Google feature.
If Google is actually caching the data then their argument is a lot weaker than if they can say "but we are merely pointing to something that is legitimately there." Google know this so they are phasing out their cache availability. Cached content is already a lot harder to access than it used to be and I expect Google will eventually cite the decline in usage to get rid of it altogether.
The pub near me offers free wi-fi but it is a lot of trouble to use.
How would the average person understand why their tweetbook app is reporting "no connectivity" despite the wi-fi icon being lit?
Even if they can figure out that browser-based signup is required they still are faced with typing in several fields of registration data. Simple on a laptop but irritating on your phone keyboard. Then a password a random mixed case string which really is tricky on a phone especially when fighting against the spelling corrector.
The owners were quite proud when they put in the free wi-fi but I suspect they are disappointed at low customer take-up...
Anyone with basic webmaster experience knows that putting un-password-protected content on your website implicitly means you are granting access for world+dog to see it.
If you are OK with that but specifically want Google to keep its nose out of your content then use a robots.txt and Google will stay respectfully away from you.
I just happen to have some large traditional-style databases within which I suspect there is valuable information I am not finding. I would like to experiment with "big data" (whatever it's called) alternative approaches, hopefully bolstering my CV in the process. Now what?