That is why I was so thrilled when the Glide patch came out for the original. Voodoo a-go-go. I don't think it ever slowed down (but then it's been a while so I may have my rosy specs on).
Don't forget that Aleph1 offered a podule with a Cyrix 486SLC to fit into the 300/400/500 series. Not as tidy or capable as the RiscPC option (which would take a Pentium Overdrive chip (remember them?), but bloody clever, and a big step up from the 80186 offered by the software emulator.
The A3000 wasn't out until about 1989/1990 - the 1987 models were the A310, A410 and A440 if I recall correctly. I had the A420/1 which came out in 1989, and the A3000 came out soon after. A great piece of miniaturisation, but hamstrung slightly by the lack of a hard drive. 2.5" drives appeared that could fit inside later.
As for the Mandelbrot drawing, I converted a BASIC program to ARM assembly and then hand-optimised it. The innerloop was 13 instructions long, and the rest of it was just dumping a value to the framebuffer. It could do 320x256 fractals at 5fps (although, to be fair, it mirrored one half, so 2.5fps). Such was the power of hand-optimised ARM code. You could bash out a program like that in half an hour, and then spend a week teasing out every extra clock cycle. And figuring out that ot only was inline conditional execution faster than branching, but LT is faster than GE (by one cycle).
Still that was ARM2/2.5/3, so I guess things have changed since. Now please excuse me - I've been typing this whilst being assaulted by a 3-year-old...
"The lack of competition and higher prices probably aren't important to enterprise buyers - it is just a marginal inconvenience, but a very small bump in the costs of a datacentre"
If you can get the drives. Maybe it's different for big enterprise, but for SME it's virtually impossible to get your hands on SAS drives.
Re: Getting in on the titles-you-didn't-pick wagon...
Zalaga - responsible for the total destruction of the switch under my Return key.
Frak! - impressive graphics handling, but ultimately quite slow.
Firetrack - A fantastic game; one of the greats on the Beeb. I remember the author (Orlando) telling me that the music from the loading routine was called "She's The Main Attraction". He's your cousin? Say thanks for me, please!
It all depends on where you are. 1000W/m^2 is regarded as Standard Test Conditions, and is what the specified output of the solar cells will be reached under, but there have been a few occasions this month where my own installation has exceeded STC output, and that's in Scotland... Certainly if you were to use the same panels on the Isle of Wight, they'd produce significantly more given the same cloud coverage.
I've been trying to find a solar insolation map to tag onto this, but they all deal with average kWh/year, which I suppose makes sense. Ho-hum.
I hardly stream anything from LoveFilm. Wife's watched a couple of TV series, and I've watched a couple of movies on my laptop, but while I can't do streaming to my XBMC I'll keep pestering the post office.
I want my movies on my TV, and I want my soundtracks through my 5.1 amp. And the reliable way of doing that is with plastic discs right now.
Now I'm usually quite vocal when it comes to bashing Apple's more idiotic products, and I have no great love for a giant mobile phone, but this seems to be a non-event. What, 44 deg C? Meh. So it's working harder than the old version - not a big surprise, especially given the battery. Maybe the backlight is getting hot, in which case it may be wise to turn the brightness down a little (and vastly increase your battery life). Maybe the CPU is getting hot, in which case I'm sure a patch will come along soon that'll throttle it to keep it within reasonable thermal parameters.
Let's be honest, it's not a supercomputer, so it doesn't need to run full-throttle all the time. Especially without Flash support...
I still feel that they should have shipped a sort-of iPad 2+ with the faster CPU and huge battery, but the old screen. Would have had fantastic battery life, and probably have run cooler to boot.
Re: Apple are successful and that isn't going to change soon
Yep - for a company that doesn't issue a dividend, and has too much cash in it to be subject to a takeover, I can't for the life of me see why the stock is valued so highly. Sure, it's a stable, profitable company, but if shareholders can't realise a return from investing then what's the point?
In a nutshell, the price can't keep rising at this rate. Not forever. That's when the bubble will burst. Hell, it might not even burst, but just settle and stop - then a lot of people are going to be sitting with very expensive pieces of paper...
Either Apple have got their supply and distribution in order after the debacle of the iPhone 4S, or purchasers have realised that it's basically the same thing as before with a few upgrades and haven't whipped themselves into a frenzy...
@the hot stick melts the shiny stuff - I may be drunk but that sounds awfully like my own soldering. Made me chuckle regardless - I'll give you a thumbs-up for that, but that alone.
The world is full of mediocre people trying to cruise by on as little effort as possible. A small percentage of people actually stretch themselves to try to achieve their goals. And a small percentage of them charge in grasping a particularly unpleasant nettle and promise the world in return.
Of that last group, most will fail. There's no getting around that simple fact. But the few that succeed will be glorious, and their legacy will be touched by a spark of the divine. (But not in the ethernet jack, because that'll ruin it, obviously.)
I say good luck to them, and if I get my arse in gear I'll probably end up with a half-dozen of them at least...
I was going to have to write something similar, but you beat me to it. I don't shoot or own a gun, but in the past I have been taught good gun discipline, and it's amazing how hard it is for some people to pick it up.
At the end of the day, the lamp is only a toy, but I don't think that justifies all the downvotes for a guy who uses real guns as a hobby in a country where it's permitted (and appears to be doing so very responsibly).
Beta Grove put the shitters up me, and Edward Diego's reappearance at the end was magnificent. I suggested calling my son Edward Diego, but was overruled (probably just as well).
They offered me a job at Trioptimum. It never occurred to me to accept. Old habits die hard.
My plasma is 10 years old this year, and going like a trooper. Great colours, great blacks, so ghosts. It's only SD and has no HDMI which is a bugger, and I paid through the nose so you guys can get cheap-as-chips screens today, but I don't grudge it anything by now.
Go back 15 months or so, and the FiT was 41.3p/kWh. A 4kWp system was about £16000-£18000. That gave a payback in 15-18 years which was nice, because anything after that was your bonus for being an early adopter and helping to kick-start the govertment's chosen renewables industries.
Now you can put 4kWp on your roof for £8000-£9000. So the FiT has dropped to 21p - that's actually a good number for it to be at. It keeps the payback at a similar rate to what it was before, and you still get a (smaller) bonus at the end for being a not-so-early adopter.
I've spoken to installers who've said that the 21p is not a terrible rate (though generally 25p is regarded as more sensible), but it's the suddenness with which this bomb was dropped that's the problem. If the rate had dropped in April 2011 by 5p (instead of going up by 2p), then again by 5p in October 2011, and then again in April 2012 by 5p it would have been down to 26.3p/kWh, would have saved a big pile of billpayers' cash, would still have given an excellent ROI, and would have not been a kick in the balls for the honest businessmen who're trying to make this their career. (No, I don't include double-glazing salesmen; I had a price from SafeSeal for an installation, and I felt they were taking the piss charging double what I could find from a specialist installer.)
The legal argument is that the rate was changed before the consultation period was over. That's where the government has caused itself problems. If they'd had the rate change scheduled for a week later they'd have kicked the installers just as hard, but because the consultation was over there's nothing that could have been done. (Or very little, at least.)
Nope, I'm not in the PV industry, I've just chatted to a few people who are. And most of them are honest people just trying to provide the best service they can.
Well, it-slayer covered most of the cost aspect. As a retro-fit it's a pain in the ass, but it's easy whilst building.
Where to put sockets? When the houses are designed, they have people design the room layouts and plan on where to put power sockets and aerial sockets. It'd be figured out then.
Not saying you wouldn't need wireless, but that you would want wired for many appliances.
I remember thin-ethernet, Cat3 etc. But any cable I've been involved with installing in the past 10 years has been Cat5e / Cat6. They're all good for 10Mb/sec to 1000Mb/sec and beyond. That's the cable spec that the IEEE work to.
Many people won't care, but you're suggesting that only 25 homes in the UK would use it? Exaggeration, I suspect. As more devices become connected, it'll become far more convenient and reliable to just plug them in rather than rely on wireless. Especially for devices that may be so cheap that they can't warrant a wireless card, or those that need a lot of bandwidth or low latency.
Cost? Peanuts in a new-build.
As for Charles, I did specifically mention rented accommodation. That's a bugger. And I know that most housing stock in the UK is not new-builds. But unless the cabling goes into the new-builds it won't be there when the houses are re-sold. As I said, wireless is a good fallback, when you can't sling a cable in or when it'd be inconvenient. But it seems to be being adopted as the default position. I've yet to need/want more than 802.11g at home because the high-speed stuff is wired.
I'm not picking on the new spec (other than that it'll take bloody ages to get released). It's very clever, and progress is generally a good thing. I'm taking a shot at the housebuilders who have the opportunity to get us all hooked up from the start, but won't take it. That said, looking at the new-builds near me they can't even build the bloody roofs properly, so maybe that would be a better priority...
The cheapest kWh is the one you don't have to generate. We've come a long way on energy efficiency over the years, with better insulation and low-power appliances. Of course, there's a limit to that too. Have a look at the difference in purchase cost vs running cost between an A-rated fridge-freezer and an A+++ rated one...
That's the point where you need more generation.
(Also bear in mind that in environments that need air-conditioning, solar is often a savvy option, because it generates at the time you're more likely to need that power. It's a fringe case, yes, but I'm just pointing out that solar/wind are not completely dead ducks.)
I had a bit of a diatribe written about wireless networking and how every time I think the new standard could finally rid me of copper at home, yet by the time it's available my needs have moved beyond it. I deleted it because it was a bit rambling, and I have a better point to raise.
Why do so few new houses these days come with data cabling? Seriously, it's a wired world. 802.11 is all very convenient, but for throughput and reliability you can't beat a bit of copper wire. TVs are coming with ethernet ports, surround-sound receivers are coming with them, as are telephones, DVD/BD players, games consoles, network video players (well, duh...), printers, music players, you name it. Sure, some of them come wireless too, but for streaming data (for video in particular, but also games or software updates) a wired connection is just better.
It wouldn't add much to the cost of a new house, and it would be a value-added differentiator in the market. As would under-floor heating and solar water-heating panels.
Anyway, 802.11ac - all jolly clever and a good fallback for when there's no cable. But why the hell is there never any cable? And my sympathies to the folks in rented accommodation who have *no* chance of running cables...
I'm sitting here imagining a bunch of Dr Strangelove-style half-lunatics in white coats wrestling with each other over the minute hand of a giant clock (not unlike the one on Countdown). I really hope I'm wrong and they all have "proper" jobs to go to as well...
How long before someone manages to hack a live video feed out of it. Excuse me while I adorn the front of my astonishingly expensive (and achingly pretty) OLED telly with gaffer tape. Bah.
I'm guessing my point was completely missed. Stop and think about product names. And how many of them are actually pretty stupid. iPod was the first that sprung to my mind. Hoover would be an equally good one. Pepsi. Whopper. Walkman. None of them are exactly inspiring names, but because they've become household brands we accept them.
Never judge a product on its name. Unless it's "Crapmobile" of course.
I guess the implication is that we should be delighted by the hike through to Glasgow. That said, there's a reseller in Edinburgh (can't remember who it is), and on the couple of occasions I've been in there the staff have been excellently friendly, courteous and knowledgeable (and I think they outnumbered the customers).
There used to be an Apple store in Edinburgh, on Hollyrood Road. That's going back to the mid-90s though (from my recollection) while Apple were busy trying to flush themselves down the toilet. Maybe it was a particularly poor site and they don't reckon there's a market. That said, they weren't very good. I remember being demoed the top of the range Mac Quadra and the top of the range Laserwriter GX(?), and it took 10 minutes to put out a page. Embarrassing for us all...
Poor people to align their interests with rich people?
You've never had to deal with rich people, have you? Their interest tends to be themselves - that's why they're rich. For poor people to align their interests with the rich people means serfdom. Or Cristal and foie gras.
Not really the champion of the working man there...
(A Fool) <----------- easily parted ------------> (A Fool's Money)
Need I say more?
I had thes out in a hifi shop, and the chap conceded that once you got up to £20 SPDIF cables you really couldn't tell the difference on double-blind testing, and that some people were happy enough with bell-wire with a couple of coaxial plugs. Not USB, mind, but much the same principle.
Not so much. From here at my desk I could probably get to Dalgety Bay in about 30 minutes depending on traffic at the bridge.
I'm not going to suggest that diets in Edinburgh are so much better than in Fife, but even I'll draw the line somewhere. That said, apparently some chippies in Dunfy are doing deep-fried Maltesers, which sound incredible if not *entirely* the lighter way to enjoy chocolate...
That's just cruel - it's bloody freezing out there! The only ones that'll survive the cold today are the ones that you really don't want to see in their undergarments.
Heated handlebars all the way to work today - brrrr.
My first networking experience was getting IPX drivers to work so that we could play Doom. And yes, 1.0 had a knack of swamping the network, but on the other hand it let you get 3 computers together and have 'side' views.
After a marathon session of E1M1 on turbo255 with 4 players I had to drive home. I would have sworn to a court that I was only doing 30 had I not looked at the speedo. Oops.
Don't forget that the Kingdom of Fife is the birthplace of that most hallowed of meals, the deep-fried Mars bar, or so they tell me. Quite proud of it in Dunfermline.
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205 posts • joined Monday 18th October 2010 15:48 GMT
Page:
Re: Wow
That is why I was so thrilled when the Glide patch came out for the original. Voodoo a-go-go. I don't think it ever slowed down (but then it's been a while so I may have my rosy specs on).
Ping
Quake. Deathmatch. Now.
Quake - I'm showing my age now. Sorry - I'll get back to work...
Re: Acorn for schools
Don't forget that Aleph1 offered a podule with a Cyrix 486SLC to fit into the 300/400/500 series. Not as tidy or capable as the RiscPC option (which would take a Pentium Overdrive chip (remember them?), but bloody clever, and a big step up from the 80186 offered by the software emulator.
Re: Great article
The A3000 wasn't out until about 1989/1990 - the 1987 models were the A310, A410 and A440 if I recall correctly. I had the A420/1 which came out in 1989, and the A3000 came out soon after. A great piece of miniaturisation, but hamstrung slightly by the lack of a hard drive. 2.5" drives appeared that could fit inside later.
As for the Mandelbrot drawing, I converted a BASIC program to ARM assembly and then hand-optimised it. The innerloop was 13 instructions long, and the rest of it was just dumping a value to the framebuffer. It could do 320x256 fractals at 5fps (although, to be fair, it mirrored one half, so 2.5fps). Such was the power of hand-optimised ARM code. You could bash out a program like that in half an hour, and then spend a week teasing out every extra clock cycle. And figuring out that ot only was inline conditional execution faster than branching, but LT is faster than GE (by one cycle).
Still that was ARM2/2.5/3, so I guess things have changed since. Now please excuse me - I've been typing this whilst being assaulted by a 3-year-old...
Re: WD, Seagate, and ... anybody else? Anyone?
"The lack of competition and higher prices probably aren't important to enterprise buyers - it is just a marginal inconvenience, but a very small bump in the costs of a datacentre"
If you can get the drives. Maybe it's different for big enterprise, but for SME it's virtually impossible to get your hands on SAS drives.
Some great 8-bit games post-1984...
Revs, Stryker's Run (and its sequel, Codename Droid), Zalaga, Repton (and especially Repton2), and, of course, Exile. Exile was truly epic.
You can tell I had a BBC Micro...
Re: Getting in on the titles-you-didn't-pick wagon...
Zalaga - responsible for the total destruction of the switch under my Return key.
Frak! - impressive graphics handling, but ultimately quite slow.
Firetrack - A fantastic game; one of the greats on the Beeb. I remember the author (Orlando) telling me that the music from the loading routine was called "She's The Main Attraction". He's your cousin? Say thanks for me, please!
Re: Err, limiting factor.
It all depends on where you are. 1000W/m^2 is regarded as Standard Test Conditions, and is what the specified output of the solar cells will be reached under, but there have been a few occasions this month where my own installation has exceeded STC output, and that's in Scotland... Certainly if you were to use the same panels on the Isle of Wight, they'd produce significantly more given the same cloud coverage.
I've been trying to find a solar insolation map to tag onto this, but they all deal with average kWh/year, which I suppose makes sense. Ho-hum.
Re: The elephant in the room which everyone appears to be avoiding commenting on .....?
Good point. Without the bankers, accountants, lawyers and myriad other hangers-on he's probably actually got a bargain!
Guess I'm not normal then...
I hardly stream anything from LoveFilm. Wife's watched a couple of TV series, and I've watched a couple of movies on my laptop, but while I can't do streaming to my XBMC I'll keep pestering the post office.
I want my movies on my TV, and I want my soundtracks through my 5.1 amp. And the reliable way of doing that is with plastic discs right now.
Wake me up when it's news...
Now I'm usually quite vocal when it comes to bashing Apple's more idiotic products, and I have no great love for a giant mobile phone, but this seems to be a non-event. What, 44 deg C? Meh. So it's working harder than the old version - not a big surprise, especially given the battery. Maybe the backlight is getting hot, in which case it may be wise to turn the brightness down a little (and vastly increase your battery life). Maybe the CPU is getting hot, in which case I'm sure a patch will come along soon that'll throttle it to keep it within reasonable thermal parameters.
Let's be honest, it's not a supercomputer, so it doesn't need to run full-throttle all the time. Especially without Flash support...
I still feel that they should have shipped a sort-of iPad 2+ with the faster CPU and huge battery, but the old screen. Would have had fantastic battery life, and probably have run cooler to boot.
Executive summary: "So what?"
Re: Apple are successful and that isn't going to change soon
Yep - for a company that doesn't issue a dividend, and has too much cash in it to be subject to a takeover, I can't for the life of me see why the stock is valued so highly. Sure, it's a stable, profitable company, but if shareholders can't realise a return from investing then what's the point?
In a nutshell, the price can't keep rising at this rate. Not forever. That's when the bubble will burst. Hell, it might not even burst, but just settle and stop - then a lot of people are going to be sitting with very expensive pieces of paper...
One of two things:
Either Apple have got their supply and distribution in order after the debacle of the iPhone 4S, or purchasers have realised that it's basically the same thing as before with a few upgrades and haven't whipped themselves into a frenzy...
Frankly, etiher option is good.
Re: Guess what
@the hot stick melts the shiny stuff - I may be drunk but that sounds awfully like my own soldering. Made me chuckle regardless - I'll give you a thumbs-up for that, but that alone.
Re: This just reinforces
@Aaron Em
The world is full of mediocre people trying to cruise by on as little effort as possible. A small percentage of people actually stretch themselves to try to achieve their goals. And a small percentage of them charge in grasping a particularly unpleasant nettle and promise the world in return.
Of that last group, most will fail. There's no getting around that simple fact. But the few that succeed will be glorious, and their legacy will be touched by a spark of the divine. (But not in the ethernet jack, because that'll ruin it, obviously.)
I say good luck to them, and if I get my arse in gear I'll probably end up with a half-dozen of them at least...
Christmas present?
What tightass give fake stock to her daughter for Christmas? I'm sure she'd much prefer some of the real weed that was being grown...
Saved me a job
I was going to have to write something similar, but you beat me to it. I don't shoot or own a gun, but in the past I have been taught good gun discipline, and it's amazing how hard it is for some people to pick it up.
At the end of the day, the lamp is only a toy, but I don't think that justifies all the downvotes for a guy who uses real guns as a hobby in a country where it's permitted (and appears to be doing so very responsibly).
Fantastic game
Beta Grove put the shitters up me, and Edward Diego's reappearance at the end was magnificent. I suggested calling my son Edward Diego, but was overruled (probably just as well).
They offered me a job at Trioptimum. It never occurred to me to accept. Old habits die hard.
Keep the fries salted!
You'd want dedupe.
But at the same time I wouldn't choose to bet against you. :-/
Ditched their plasmas?
My plasma is 10 years old this year, and going like a trooper. Great colours, great blacks, so ghosts. It's only SD and has no HDMI which is a bugger, and I paid through the nose so you guys can get cheap-as-chips screens today, but I don't grudge it anything by now.
Happy Birthday, TH37PW4B! They grow up so fast...
@Peter - Sort of but not entirely.
Go back 15 months or so, and the FiT was 41.3p/kWh. A 4kWp system was about £16000-£18000. That gave a payback in 15-18 years which was nice, because anything after that was your bonus for being an early adopter and helping to kick-start the govertment's chosen renewables industries.
Now you can put 4kWp on your roof for £8000-£9000. So the FiT has dropped to 21p - that's actually a good number for it to be at. It keeps the payback at a similar rate to what it was before, and you still get a (smaller) bonus at the end for being a not-so-early adopter.
I've spoken to installers who've said that the 21p is not a terrible rate (though generally 25p is regarded as more sensible), but it's the suddenness with which this bomb was dropped that's the problem. If the rate had dropped in April 2011 by 5p (instead of going up by 2p), then again by 5p in October 2011, and then again in April 2012 by 5p it would have been down to 26.3p/kWh, would have saved a big pile of billpayers' cash, would still have given an excellent ROI, and would have not been a kick in the balls for the honest businessmen who're trying to make this their career. (No, I don't include double-glazing salesmen; I had a price from SafeSeal for an installation, and I felt they were taking the piss charging double what I could find from a specialist installer.)
The legal argument is that the rate was changed before the consultation period was over. That's where the government has caused itself problems. If they'd had the rate change scheduled for a week later they'd have kicked the installers just as hard, but because the consultation was over there's nothing that could have been done. (Or very little, at least.)
Nope, I'm not in the PV industry, I've just chatted to a few people who are. And most of them are honest people just trying to provide the best service they can.
That was pretty funny
I'll probably have a proper listen later when I have headphones and no 2-year-olds climbing on me...
RTFM
Literally...
@AC 09:52 - issues with my plan
Well, it-slayer covered most of the cost aspect. As a retro-fit it's a pain in the ass, but it's easy whilst building.
Where to put sockets? When the houses are designed, they have people design the room layouts and plan on where to put power sockets and aerial sockets. It'd be figured out then.
Not saying you wouldn't need wireless, but that you would want wired for many appliances.
I remember thin-ethernet, Cat3 etc. But any cable I've been involved with installing in the past 10 years has been Cat5e / Cat6. They're all good for 10Mb/sec to 1000Mb/sec and beyond. That's the cable spec that the IEEE work to.
Many people won't care, but you're suggesting that only 25 homes in the UK would use it? Exaggeration, I suspect. As more devices become connected, it'll become far more convenient and reliable to just plug them in rather than rely on wireless. Especially for devices that may be so cheap that they can't warrant a wireless card, or those that need a lot of bandwidth or low latency.
Cost? Peanuts in a new-build.
As for Charles, I did specifically mention rented accommodation. That's a bugger. And I know that most housing stock in the UK is not new-builds. But unless the cabling goes into the new-builds it won't be there when the houses are re-sold. As I said, wireless is a good fallback, when you can't sling a cable in or when it'd be inconvenient. But it seems to be being adopted as the default position. I've yet to need/want more than 802.11g at home because the high-speed stuff is wired.
I'm not picking on the new spec (other than that it'll take bloody ages to get released). It's very clever, and progress is generally a good thing. I'm taking a shot at the housebuilders who have the opportunity to get us all hooked up from the start, but won't take it. That said, looking at the new-builds near me they can't even build the bloody roofs properly, so maybe that would be a better priority...
+1 on that
The cheapest kWh is the one you don't have to generate. We've come a long way on energy efficiency over the years, with better insulation and low-power appliances. Of course, there's a limit to that too. Have a look at the difference in purchase cost vs running cost between an A-rated fridge-freezer and an A+++ rated one...
That's the point where you need more generation.
(Also bear in mind that in environments that need air-conditioning, solar is often a savvy option, because it generates at the time you're more likely to need that power. It's a fringe case, yes, but I'm just pointing out that solar/wind are not completely dead ducks.)
Gotta love copper
I had a bit of a diatribe written about wireless networking and how every time I think the new standard could finally rid me of copper at home, yet by the time it's available my needs have moved beyond it. I deleted it because it was a bit rambling, and I have a better point to raise.
Why do so few new houses these days come with data cabling? Seriously, it's a wired world. 802.11 is all very convenient, but for throughput and reliability you can't beat a bit of copper wire. TVs are coming with ethernet ports, surround-sound receivers are coming with them, as are telephones, DVD/BD players, games consoles, network video players (well, duh...), printers, music players, you name it. Sure, some of them come wireless too, but for streaming data (for video in particular, but also games or software updates) a wired connection is just better.
It wouldn't add much to the cost of a new house, and it would be a value-added differentiator in the market. As would under-floor heating and solar water-heating panels.
Anyway, 802.11ac - all jolly clever and a good fallback for when there's no cable. But why the hell is there never any cable? And my sympathies to the folks in rented accommodation who have *no* chance of running cables...
Dammit!
Where will I get my Father Ted episode guides now? :(
I didn't get a dowry
Now even a goat. Now I have to cut my own bloody grass.
Eggs halt iPhone 4S
Is this why it took 4 weeks to get my boss' 64GB 4S delivered? Should I not have posted that egg sandwich off with the order?
I think it's Return of the Jedi, when C3PO is playing god with the Ewoks. But yes, it's been so long that I'm a bit hazy myself...
Setting the Doomsday Clock
I'm sitting here imagining a bunch of Dr Strangelove-style half-lunatics in white coats wrestling with each other over the minute hand of a giant clock (not unlike the one on Countdown). I really hope I'm wrong and they all have "proper" jobs to go to as well...Toronto? Gosh!
That is all.Camera? Bloody hell.
In Soviet Russia, TV watches *you*...
How long before someone manages to hack a live video feed out of it. Excuse me while I adorn the front of my astonishingly expensive (and achingly pretty) OLED telly with gaffer tape. Bah.
Billing customers
I guess they'll bill the customers every 2 seconds as well. But you'll get about £1800 off per month if you opt out of paper billing...
Okay - I'll get back to work.
Wow - 3 thumbs down?
I'm guessing my point was completely missed. Stop and think about product names. And how many of them are actually pretty stupid. iPod was the first that sprung to my mind. Hoover would be an equally good one. Pepsi. Whopper. Walkman. None of them are exactly inspiring names, but because they've become household brands we accept them.
Never judge a product on its name. Unless it's "Crapmobile" of course.
Ridiculous Name?
Just like iPod, and you can see how that bombed in the market...
Oh Brave New World...
Heralded by Strictly Come Dancing. What a fucking disgrace.
I'll probably sit watching Christmas movies. Die Hard, anyone?
And yet there's one in Aberdeen
(No offence to residents of the granite city.)
I guess the implication is that we should be delighted by the hike through to Glasgow. That said, there's a reseller in Edinburgh (can't remember who it is), and on the couple of occasions I've been in there the staff have been excellently friendly, courteous and knowledgeable (and I think they outnumbered the customers).
There used to be an Apple store in Edinburgh, on Hollyrood Road. That's going back to the mid-90s though (from my recollection) while Apple were busy trying to flush themselves down the toilet. Maybe it was a particularly poor site and they don't reckon there's a market. That said, they weren't very good. I remember being demoed the top of the range Mac Quadra and the top of the range Laserwriter GX(?), and it took 10 minutes to put out a page. Embarrassing for us all...
@LPF
Iranians are Persian, not Arab. Might as well call you Mexican, eh?
Seriously, if you're busy itching to bomb someone back into the stone age you could at least find out who they are first...
Poor people to align their interests with rich people?
You've never had to deal with rich people, have you? Their interest tends to be themselves - that's why they're rich. For poor people to align their interests with the rich people means serfdom. Or Cristal and foie gras.
Not really the champion of the working man there...
Damn you!
That tune's in my head now. Grrr! <shakes fist>
BEST COMPUTER EVER!
And it could play Crysis - so there! :P
Skinnable?
How long before it's wearing a porno skin?
Biology teacher?
Well, if she wasn't before, she certainly is now! Nothing quite like holiday-sex, eh?
Wow
(A Fool) <----------- easily parted ------------> (A Fool's Money)
Need I say more?
I had thes out in a hifi shop, and the chap conceded that once you got up to £20 SPDIF cables you really couldn't tell the difference on double-blind testing, and that some people were happy enough with bell-wire with a couple of coaxial plugs. Not USB, mind, but much the same principle.
@Harvardyard
Not so much. From here at my desk I could probably get to Dalgety Bay in about 30 minutes depending on traffic at the bridge.
I'm not going to suggest that diets in Edinburgh are so much better than in Fife, but even I'll draw the line somewhere. That said, apparently some chippies in Dunfy are doing deep-fried Maltesers, which sound incredible if not *entirely* the lighter way to enjoy chocolate...
You want bikini-clad Scottish women?
That's just cruel - it's bloody freezing out there! The only ones that'll survive the cold today are the ones that you really don't want to see in their undergarments.
Heated handlebars all the way to work today - brrrr.
Doom started my career
My first networking experience was getting IPX drivers to work so that we could play Doom. And yes, 1.0 had a knack of swamping the network, but on the other hand it let you get 3 computers together and have 'side' views.
After a marathon session of E1M1 on turbo255 with 4 players I had to drive home. I would have sworn to a court that I was only doing 30 had I not looked at the speedo. Oops.
Health risks
Don't forget that the Kingdom of Fife is the birthplace of that most hallowed of meals, the deep-fried Mars bar, or so they tell me. Quite proud of it in Dunfermline.
But does it work?
XKCD ahead of the curve again...
http://xkcd.com/937/
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