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Oh great...
Daddy, can you please buy me a copy of "Pell Cry dau ar bymtheg"?
1244 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2007
There could and perhaps should be a Firefox plug-in to change the FFF7EC to something a bit more contrasty to the white FFFFFF.
Over the years, I've seen them slowly increment the colour of the Ad section closer and closer to white. Once upon a time it was quite distinct. They've been narrowing the gap over the years.
False in the sense that you're writing only for a northern European audience, perhaps forgetting that el Reg is popular around the world.
True in the sense that if someone doesn't have access to the Internet, then they're not reading this article anyway.
False again in the sense that perhaps they're reading it over a link that can be improved by O3b.
True again that that's probably "not that many of us".
Yeah, and there were probably petrol fanbois back in 1886 that failed to understand that it would be *decades* until the petrol powered car became truly and honestly practical.
Seems like the same thing here.
Look at the bright side. Every outrageous over-hyped BS lie about the practicality of a new technology eventually becomes true. E.g. 1970's AI to IBM's Watson, how many years?
It's the current battery technology that's not quite ready for Prime Time. It needs at least one more doubling of overall performance, preferably two.
The other annoying aspect of e-cars are the idiot fanbois (the vast majority of whom couldn't afford a Tesla) that fail to acknowledge the cold hard reality that "The Battery Problem" is a genuine problem. They're simply not being honest with themselves. They should really try to cut back their Kool Aid consumption.
Today's example just landed in my Inbox.
Headline = "Researchers 3D print microbatteries"
Details = "Microscopic electrodes extruded... ...3D print precisely interlaced stacks of tiny battery electrodes"
Spot the difference? Complex batteries vs. simple electrodes. They did *not* "...3D print microbatteries." They did 3D print some homogenous metal electrodes.
They're not printing things; they're printing *parts* of things.
The stench of hype wafts across the landscape.
In general, 3D Printers don't print things. They print parts for things. Unless the thing is one part, then the part is the thing. There are exceptions, such as printing an already-interlocked chain just for fun.
When I ask when a 3D Printer can print another 3D printer, the brain damaged idiots reply "But we can!" and they point to a plastic bracket. They completely fail to explain why eBay is awash with all the stepper motors, cables, control circuits, etc. required to make it work - comprising 20% of the mass, but 99.99+% of the complexity. Those Chinese parts and sub-assemblies are cheap and often include free shipping.
But they're not 3D printed. At the risk of being proven wrong in about 25 years, they never will be.
Under Settings, General, Accessibility, set 'Invert Colors' = ON. One may program the Home button triple-click to toggle this setting.
Would it really be all that difficult to provide more than one user delectable theme? It seems as if there's a band of GUI Nazis running around imposing their weird-ass Win8 Metrosexual, now iOS7 Klaus Barbie, Flat / Non-skumorphic belief system on all of us. They must be enjoying the reaction because it would be trivial to avoid if they wanted to avoid it.
I don't like Nazis.
Every tiny one square cm image must be full resolution, at least 24MB each.
Do not under any circumstances scale the images' resolution down. Do not compress the images.
It's critical that the audience actually see the images being slowly drawn on the screen.
Having a 200GB ppt file also helps with file security, and indirectly helps to ensure full employment within the agency.
"...It's possible to make that a 'silent' update not visible to the user..."
It'd be nice if the moronic PC programmers of the world (MS and Linuxtards too) would try out this technology. Updates not being a complete frickin' Dog and Pony show each and every time, combined with beeping and bopping and rebooting and deleting the MBR by accident. Idiots!
Many (i)Phones will drain their battery in a couple of hours if you run the GPS much *. A battery that normally last all day will mysteriously be flat by mid-afternoon if someone is remotely tracking you - such as your government or spouse.
(* Your Battery Life May Vary.)
Perhaps the Government spooks can send power through the air to compensate. LOL.
Our household has some that are up until as late (early?) as 6 am, and others that wake up at about 5 am (roughly). Most of the time there's no gap. Odds are high that it would end very badly for any late night 'creepers', especially if they ran into Grandpa in the wee hours (raised in the jungles of Asia, wrestles carabao, juggles knives, etc.).
NOOB> "You have selected the 'RISC OS' ..."
NOOB> "Confirm. Please press the *middle* mouse button to continue."
NOOB> "No, I said *middle*."
NOOB> "Please press the *middle* mouse button to continue."
NOOB> "Middle!"
NOOB> "Please press the *middle* mouse button (try pressing the scroll wheel) to continue."
NOOB> "Middle, middle, middle. Not Left and not Right. Middle."
NOOB> "Please press the *middle* mouse button (try pressing the scroll wheel) to continue."
NOOB> "Please press the *middle* mouse button (try pressing the scroll wheel) to continue."
NOOB> "It appears that your Dollar Store mouse doesn't offer a middle button."
NOOB> "Please Select Your OS Choice." [with RISC OS greyed out until next reboot]
Reportedly... buried deep inside the registration page is a tick-box to allow scraping all your contacts. Then FreedomPop starts spamming away, and (according to this report) simply will not stop.
Just today I received a spammy email from FreedomPop, mentioning by first name some unknown 'friend' that what was probably a PayPal contact arising from an ebay purchase. It was pure spam, and obviously matched the process described in the news.
Based on the report combined with my own experience (just one email so far), I recommend that Google Gmail and other email providers assign FreedomPop the Spammer flag and redirect their items to the Spam folders.
FreedomPop might wish to adjust their approach. Otherwise their reputation will be further self-trashed.
Instead of paying $XX per month to the Cable TV or Satellite TV, we instead can ultimately pay $YY per month to each of several different Internet Streaming TV services such as Netflix and Amazon and etc. etc. etc.
Let me guess... $YY multiplied by several necessary providers is going to end up being pretty close to $XX.
How much power does it consume when it's on?
How much power does it consume when it's in Stand By ('Off') mode?
How long does it take to boot up from the totally-powered-off state (e.g. power failure)?
How long does it take to switch channels?
How inconvenient, intrusive and fragile can you make the inevitably-required software update process?
Perhaps, one day, in the far and distance future, then boffins will think about such things from the outset.
BBC World Service on SiriusXM satellite radio in North America, the Top-of-the-Hour beep is about 15 to 18 seconds late even now. It's a bit pointless (the delayed beep).
Watching NASA launches via several feed options reveals latency variations of up to 20 seconds! That's just the delta latency from one feed to the other.
At least they've made some good progress on Lip Sync. It used to be a very common problem, but seems to be rare these days.
The axis of time folks, the axis of time. Don't forget the axis of time.
"...you only need one person to succeed and then **it** gets shared the world over."
You probably intended the 'it' to mean the media files stripped of DRM.
The other option is 'it' being the piracy-enabling app that performs the technically-challenging task with one click.
It's an obvious point, but I still see some clinging to the obsolete position that if something is technically difficult, then it helps to protect DRM'ed content. They overlook the obvious fact that computer processors exist in the wild.
"I understand that there needed to be 1 interface..."
False *. No more than the 'need' to force everyone to use the same user interface language, or other localizations. It's called Consumer Choice - ignore it and we'll ignore your products.
(* Provided that they also provide a quick and easy way to switch between the various interface choices so that the IT Support hired help can issue one command to reinstate the normal default scheme.)
Perhaps this carriage of Nork Radio International on WRN helps to explain why SiriusXM satellite radio (North America) recently dropped WRN from the channel line-up. ...Probably amongst other pressures on the bandwidth.
As an old-fart shortwave listener, it's been a hoot to drive around town listening to assorted 'foreign' broadcasts. We're down to having the BBC as the only 'foreign' channel on SiriusXM now.
Reminds me of Taiwan circa mid-1980s. While watching a movie in a huge theatre, the projectionist would slide a handwritten message into the projector so that it was projected along the right hand side of the big screen for all to see (not that i could read it). Somebody would gasp, jump up, grab their coat and run out.
Yeah, that's what I want to reproduce at home. Taiwanese doctors running through my house, on their way to deliver a baby.
QUOTE ...the system being fed by: “... a TRIAC power regulator device which interrupted each phase periodically, in order to modulate power input with an industrial trade secret waveform.”
So, I'll place a bet on the root cause of this 'excess power' stemming from them using a meter that doesn't measure RMS voltage / current / power correctly with funny waveforms.
Oh_Really?
Therefore I hereby formally Publish (above) and irrevocably place the above described Business Model(s) and any related Utility Patent worthy inventions that may be inferred into the Public Domain.
Excluding the Business Model of equating the US Dollar and UK Pound as being approximately the same value. That brilliant concept is *mine* and intend to pursue a worldwide Business Model patent on it.
An entrepreneur could create a new paid service to make life easier for the public.
This new system would have thousands of cheap Internet phone lines. Their system would constantly call the most popular call center numbers, and cue-up various popular but deeply-buried end nodes of the menu. It would use all sorts of tricks to keep the call center menu system on-line (perhaps backing-out and then moving further-in in an endless repeating loop to keep the system on the line).
Meanwhile, the impatient punters would call up this service via a certain defined short-cut telephone number, and (for a Dollar, or a UK Pound [same thing]) be instantly connected to the deep node of the menu within a given call center.
More aggressively - perhaps even get the call center human on the line, and then make some fake throat clearing noises to keep them on the line for a few seconds waiting, just in case an available punter wants to speak to them in that duration. This is a reverse version of the 'predictive calling' feature used by outgoing call centers. Right back at them.
Also, the fact that the call center's incoming lines are all plugged up by the service's robots would only help to ensure a successful business model.