Posts by lemmac 35 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Oct 2011
Although my original battery was nowhere near dead ( it had hardly been used, laptop big to carry around, saved that job for the 1000h eepc) i couldn't help buy another when i saw them selling (in copius quantities) on ebay for around £12. They are hardly difficult to get hold of and definitely not expensive. Still using the same Toshiba satellite m70 from 2006, upgraded cpu from 1.73 to 2.1 ghz for £8 just recently, another £8 for broadcom wifi N card. It is happily running both linux mint and win7 far better than it ever did xp.
Mount a curb in an offroad capable vehicle? You are kidding right? I pass many on the single lane country roads around here and it's me in my little hatch that has to drive up and into the hedgerow while the 4x4 is half a yard away from the verge on their side. Maybe it's because most are women drivers, maybe they just find it harder to judge distance from such a vantage point, who knows? One thing is for sure the last thing drivers of your typical Chelsea tractor will contemplate is to mount a curb!
Tv's, dvd players, set top boxes - of which i've had many, all had ability to update FOTA. How many updates did i get? None, ever.
The worst was my first DVD player, bought on the strength of playing MP3 discs. It's interface was unbelievably bad. The left hand side of the screen was reserved for folder structure, the right hand side for tracks. Both sides could only show a maximum of 8 characters in a name ( i measured the available space left over and it would allow for 40 characters each side!) which meant every folder by the same artist was named the same if the artist name was more than 7 letters, the same for the tracks when tagged artist/album/track. Only when i played a track would the full title appear except that any spaces, dashes or hyphens would appear as zeros! Totally unfit for purpose. Needless to say i dumped the dvd player and connected my pc to the tv instead.
My current tv has a guide, selectable by pressing the guide button. It splits the screen into three vertical columns and two horizontal. The bottom left hand side is reserved for channel numbers/names and is basically empty space, the other two bottom panes show Now and Next. They can show 30 characters along with '...' if there are more than 30. The top of the screen has PIP on the left third and programme details on the other two thirds. The details of the current selected programme has acres of space but again will only show about 6 words followed by '...'. I can press the info button on the remote to get more info in a pop up window, it can show about 10 words including the first 6 that were already available on the guide. I can't press the info button again to close the window, instead i can press the return button on the remote (will remove the pop up but keep the guide open), the exit button on the remote (will close the guide as well) or navigate to the onscreen 'return' button and press the ok button on the remote (will remove the pop up and return to guide).
If i forgo the guide and press the info button while watching a programme it displays the same 6 word description as the guide but this time it occupies the full width of the screen via a drop down menu, again with acres of empty space. I can now close this by pressing the info button again, or usefully press the red button on the remote for information? Doing so will now display the full text of the programme description in a pop up window. This pop up can be closed by pressing the ok or exit button on the remote but not the red button a second time. The pop up window is only half the width of the screen but with larger text than either the guide or the info button drop down uses but can manage to display all the programme information in far less space!
I fail to comprehend how something could be made so unintuitive without special effort and struggle to accept that someone was paid (probably good money) to make it so. Oh and i've had the tv for 3 years without a fw update...
"Email and SMS were not not available because they were sealed off from the hijacked Safari process and separately encrypted."
+
"The CEO of a company should never be doing e-mail or anything of value on an iPhone"
/
" There are a lot of people taking photos on their phones that they shouldn't be taking."
= WTF???
"there are thousands of possible combinations of screen resolution, processor speed, memory, GPS, Bluetooth, etc."
Hmmm, sounds just like a pc... i'm sure they were quite successful. That was back in the days when software was called software though so i guess its only 'apps' that face the problem you mention?
"I'm struggling to see why hardware ideas (Dyson cyclone for example) are offered patent protection, where as software ideas aren't?"
I guess it's because the cyclone functionality is essentially to 'suck' - how one gets something to to suck is patentable, but the act of 'sucking' surely isn't.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/fail_32.png
Not at all, i haven't clicked on an add since the early days of 'punch the monkey' and don't intend to do so - so where is this money i would be otherwise generating coming from?
"notes in particular the harrowing scenes in which a London Underground train is bombed by terrorists, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the tragic events of 7 July 2005"
forgetting of course the rest of the game's remarkable resemblance to the myriad of Western led illegal wars and intervention in Middle Eastern, South American and African countries for political and economic gain waged against a fictitious 'enemy of the day' thinly veiled behind the guise of democracy and human rights and the need protect our so called 'freedoms' to such an overwhelming extent that even our own civil liberties are seen as obstacles to that same end...
...erm... yeah, right
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