Posts by Robin Mosse

Violet Mir:ror DIY RFID kit

cat flap

now if it could read an embedded pet RFID tag rather that its own propprietary ones and then acivate the solenoid that unlocks the flap.............

CatMates solution is lame.

Available to buy: your own frakkin' 7ft Cylon

invented Aluminum?

Cool! can I invent an element?

Yes! It's... er, the VoIP mouse

Could be worse

I've seen a worse version! In Farnell/CPC the other day there was a mouse that folded open to reveal a skype phone... errrgggh

Virgin Media trashes patent infringement accusations

CrudSTAR

Gemstar is crap, it's what makes so many PVR's fail to do what they are asked and the idea of patenting something so flaky and obvious is absurd. Go Virgin! Kick arse!

Has SKY paid up I wonder.....

Hundreds for chop as Tiscali launches Pipex jobs purge

try any entanet reseller

fast, no hidden sneaky bandwidth caps, line bonding and even in some cases fairly good hosting packages. sensible but not bargain basement pricing.

I switched to ADSL24 from Pipex, adsl24 side was online quick and painless, getting a mac code from Pipex involved 15minuites of wheedling and discount offers from some twirp in the manchester office. How many times I said "no thank you I just want a MAC code" is confounding to say the least

Asus launches tiny PC

asuslaptops.co.uk

appear to be offering a 2G/768Meg one as well for another £12

ABN Amro customer deets tip up on BearShare

Title

never mind a non work machine, this data should never be anywhere but encrypted on the network and accessible only via secure vpn externally. Whats with these clowns letting their workers lug this data around or even be able to make dumps of it at all?

Google's PowerPoint beater beta is go

spoof

I always spoof my browser when using Seamonkey, keeps things like Scalix happy.

Microsoft remedies failed to create competition

Nobody is ready to take their place

M$'s position is pretty safe for some time to come. At work, at least for us, its not Office or exchange or hardware compatibility that everyone seems to think is the problem ties us to Windows. Instead it's all the other more specialist software, you can't really knock up a quick Advert for next weeks Farmers Weekly in anything I've seen on sourceforge. You sure as hell can't replace Protel/Orcad with anything on *nix or run it very well under wine, and now that we have it we're not wasting the £5k it cost looking at other platforms! Likewise our Accounting/Stock package-windows only as are all the others we get offered. Considering its such an engineer friendly platform, seen any PIC/MCU programmers/IDE's for Linux recently -- no didn't think so.

And why is it Windows that has all these programs (apart from everyone has it)? Easy, pickup a copy of Visual Studio or Delphi or WinDev and you can write some apps mostly using the mouse. Anywhere else you'd be coding everything in some glorified version of notepad from 'i want a popup box' to 'connect to this database using this protocol zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz' from where I stand as a begginer with limited time this is not just daunting it's mad.

Whihc begs the question who is going from Delphi to Eclipse? I just don't see it - Eclipse=some mad framework with lots of barely functional subprojects Delphi = functional nice RAD IDE, and the RAD bit is important, at least to me.

Now if someone wrote a RAD IDE with all the functions of delphi/Visual studio that used wxwidgets or something similar I for one would develop for platforms other than 'doze. Oh and please don't point out pieces of software like Lazarus/DialogBlocks, not even close!