threegee

Quote? Where from? There are uninformed views and informed views. When there's nothing to back up a view it's fair to say it falls into the first category. I use FF simply because it's the default browser for Ubuntu Linux, no religious belief is involved; except... that long experience convinces me that open source software is inherently better. Hiding your mistakes (with a likely view to profiting from them) is no substitute for letting other experts look over what you've done and picking up potential problems you've missed.

By some drastic oversight this feature was somehow omitted from Chat Central. Problem now fixed - rate away!

I've collected stacks of books in .PDF form and don't want to be tied to a computer screen to study them. I want to read them around the house, read them in bed, out in the sunshine, in the dentist's surgery, even beside the computer like a regular textbook when I'm working. A few weeks back I though: OK I'll have a surf and then select a suitable LCD type reader that displays an A5 and maybe even an A4 page at good contrast even in sunlight. Trans-reflective screen technology is good enough for this these days - my old PDA and phone prove this, and I'd expect these types of displays have been improved since then. I don't want to write on the device, or play music, or videos. I don't need a power-chomping backlight. I just want it to be good to read .PDF files in daylight and at near normal book page size. No WiFi, no Bluetooth, no loudspeaker, just a navigating and page turning button, and as thin and light as possible. So what's out there? Essentialy b****r all! Amazon Kindle: proprietary format, no new ones available anyway. Send a bank draft off to China and hope that someday you will get something usable back. A Canadian book club that won't send their cheap (but too undersized, and looking rather dated) device outside North America. And a Sony offering which is, too little, too dear, and er... too too Sonyfied! Someone sell me a zero featured eBook reader that's not part of someone's devious scheme to corner the market for the printed page. One that is thin, light, and can be read in all conditions a printed page can be read. In the process you will meet a huge unmet demand and make yourself a fortune! Has anyone registered iBook?

Rumor has it that this guy is a known offender and is/was in custody.

"Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7784908.stm Useful links: http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

Called Real Life. Why people spend so long on the Internet etc!

No, you are getting confused! You mean: being moved was removed because moving it removed any confusion people may have had had it not been moved thereby removing any need for removal. Although I'm at one remove from the move and the moving plea about removal I trust this removes any doubt about the removal or need for moving and enables us to move on to more moving matters than the simple move (or suspected remove) of a thread that everybody agrees required moving and not removing as removing it would have been a move too far. I move to dismiss this thread, or maybe just move it.

Arrhh The Journal Bedlington.co.uk's most ardent new member. Wonder why they keep joining but never contribute anything? Seriously though, I'm told the local press is having a very hard time of it at the moment. One contact told me things have never been so bleak on the advertising revenue front. I do hope they survive Gordon Brown economics, as we will be a poorer community without them.

Yup, considering it used a Motorola 68000 running at just under 8MH/z it was really fast action. The Amiga had some specialist chips though to assist the CPU. Tele-tennis is a decade or more earlier; way back to the mid 1970's. They were dedicated machines that didn't even have a microprocessor! It was all done with basic digital and analogue electronics, not even any RAM or ROM. The first tele-tennis I saw was in a cafe on a Paris boulevard not far from the Sorbonne University around about 1973. Despite the crude hardware and limited B&W display it was really adictive. It was a few years before the idea was integrated into a single chip and sold as a home console. Sometimes there was a slider switch to select a number of game variants. Real collectors items now!

Buggy Boy for the Amiga. Hours of pointless fun. What's an Amiga grandpa?

Yes folks - straight from the horse's mouth. Despite all appearances to the contrary, Bedlington does have some of y'er actual business enterprise. At a time when others are throwing up their hands in horror at the Brownian financial mess we're all in, we have a pearl (or two or three) growing in the mucky oyster that is Bedlington. Nothing the WDC helped with mind you, more like hinder. Nothing local politicians know anything at all about (and do they even care?). Enterprise Centre I hear you say. More local enterprise coming to our long-suffering abode? I feel it in my bones! P.S. to Journal: Just having a bit of fun. Go forth and multiply the good news; no credit necessary.

Obviously not one of the green lobby then! If you'd read the short article you'd have seen that the i7 is quadcore, and it will scale to eight cores each hyperthreading to look like a 16 core device to the OS. Also the elimination of the FSB should remove a major bottleneck. i7 will likely leave the AMD Phenom in the dust! I'm very much an AMD supporter, they've kept prices low for everyone for a long time, by giving Intel much needed competition. But, unfortunately they are struggling to keep up at both ends of the market these days. They simply don't have the R&D bucks to throw at problems like Intel does. I don't think they even have a workable 45nm process yet. Anyway, it's not what you've got it's what you do with what you've got that matters!

...well almost! Now where's that old Mac I can convert into a digital wall clock? Got to be the most useful thing anyone has ever done with one.

Full Story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/7766969.stm

"While one passenger may have reported the man wearing a belt with wires coming out of it - the man was only guilty of being an electrician." Safety is one thing, but when the outcome is mass hysteria on behalf of the authorities resulting in summary execution (and the de Menezes case was by no means the first time this sort of hysteria has happened) then it's manifestly unsafe to install such things. The fact that they work a few times results in lazy thinking - they become a substitute for common sense. I wonder what the ratio of genuine terrorists stopped to innocent people killed currently stands at? In fact have the police ever shot a genuine terrorist in order to stop an act of terrorism? I can't recall a single case.

Seamonkey needs adding to the list. Was having a play with it the other night because it has a web editor add-in which is more than passable for editing HTML text pages, and of course a freebie. Has a very Netscape Navigator feel to it so I presume it comes from that root? Better of worse than FF? Dunno just yet. ________ P.S. to MONGO: Like the new picture. Much more subtle than the last few, and oodles more subversive.

Nice short simple explanation of i7 here: http://computershopper.com/feature/what-is-the-core-i7 I like the idea of unused cores going to seep to save juice. But I'm really a flea power computing person who's happy with the new Atom desktop machines. Still, would like a genuine dual core Atom machine sometime though.

Cue to reveal that Bedlington.co.uk has some full colour footage of a late 1950's Miner's Picnic that's never been seen in public. This from the days when most stuff - if it exists at all - was in B&W. Getting it off Standard 8 onto the web, at best quality, and without damaging it, may take a little while though.

It's not instead of it's in addition to! OK then, place a value on what would be reasonable to pay for "this convenience" of an ID card? Civil liberties issues aside, let's decide if the amount the government is mooting charging us is really a tax by another name, or a service that is worth paying for.

And now MFI is in the hands of liquidators! Who next?

ID cards are now being issued to foreign nationals. As the Lib Dems say: These people already have passports with visas on them, so, if taken at face value, there is absolutely no point in this exercise. That's unless there is a hidden agenda at work!

A fall in VAT to 15%, offset by rises in fuel, alcohol, tobacco duties etc. Only to be revoked in December 2009. Who is to say it won't be restored at a nice round-figure 20%, purely "in the national interest" of course! Yeah... well... because of this I'm going out to max my credit cards on Chinese goods, just to help the manufacturing base you've had a hand in destroying Mr Darling. Or, maybe, like any genuinely prudent person (and the Banks) I will take any meager and very temporary relief to try to help rebuild my own balance sheet. Rises in National Insurance for all concerned - no doubt to encourage employment during the recession? A 45p tax band on the "super-rich", just to keep the few remaining deluded dinosaurs in the Labour party happy. On best estimates the latter will raise a paltry £700m, on worst estimates it will be counterproductive and cost jobs (unless you work in the booming tax avoidance industry). At this point the phrase rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind. Two simple facts: 1) You can't borrow your way out of debt. 2) There is no easy recovery mechanism - Keynesian economics don't now apply! That's because all this so-called fiscal stimulus will do is suck in a few more imports, and keep a few burger flippers in employment for just a few months longer. Ordering another round of drinks only defers the bill. We pinned our flag to the mast of "financial products" and destroyed our real wealth-creating base. We spent everything and more during the good times. The workers from eastern Europe are going home where the prospects are brighter; and who can blame them. But the biggest home truth is that it isn't an International crisis, as you are spinning whilst you jet around the world telling others how to fix their un-broken economies. It's a crisis that YOU - Mr Brown and Mr Darling - have had a very big hand in creating. Dr Death and nurse Darling are visibly busy administering the cure for their own poisoning. So, why should we be worried? ____________________ P.S. to Malc: I wouldn't extrapolate anything from Italy. It's not an economy in the real sense; just tens of millions of micro-economies riding around in exceptionally well-dressed and well-nourished people's back pockets. And, the Italians wouldn't have it any other way!

I don't mind all the banks going bust, or the B.Socs folding, but when Woolies is going down the pan - well - that's the end of civilisation as we know it! Election now I say, whilst there's still something left to save from Gordo's "prudence"!

'ees not a celeb, 'ees just a very naughty boy! Is the last one Chiang Kai-Shrek?

My first "on-line experience" was browsing round the Zenith "Heathkit" store on the North side of Dallas in February 1982. I heard relays clicking in a quiet corner of the mostly deserted place, and when I walked over to investigate discovered they'd lashed up an electronic bulletin board. You could see the messages coming in on a dumb terminal. There was probably only one or two lines and of course on POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) no way to share access - you just had to wait for a free line to read the board and post a reply. However the idea instantly appealed to me and I just had to do something back in the UK. I'd actually gone there to buy one of their terminals, and amongst other items brought back a kit of parts (including the green phosphor CRT) in the overhead luggage rack of a Braniff 747! Back in the UK I imported an early 300 baud free-standing modem. There never was very much to connect to in the UK, and it was excruciatingly expensive to access US services. Just getting a bit of text dribbling back was an achievement. But... one day !!!