threegee

Yes, Marconiphone was the fourth brand that came off the production line. I knew there was a fourth one, but the Pilot brand kept coming into my head, and that seemed to me wrong. Marconiphone was different from the other three brands in that it was sold through wholesalers, and not to Radio and TV dealers directly. Thanks for the memory jog! Fidelity remained an independant company for much longer than most. They were associated with cheap audio rather than TV. A large range of "trannies" ( transistor(ised) radios ) kept them going in the 1960's, until the inevitable rise and rise of far eastern imports swamped them. Wasn't the Fidelity name finally bought by Amstrad?

Thorn - without the e - actually! But it was an independant company before Sir Jules Thorn (British Radio Corporation part of Thorn Industries) bought the consumer side back in the late '50s or early '60s. Ferguson was his main brand; he also had HMV. And (like the British Motor Corporation in those days) branding differentiation ultimately reduced to name stickers and a different bit of glitz on the cabinet. At times they even managed to get the wrong BRC brand in the right box. Ultra still has some professional electronics interests I think; military radios and things if my failing memory serves me right. Under BRC Ultra was always quite flashy and "modern" looking, even if the guts didn't always live up to the good-design image. One particularly iconic bit of advertising showed a female sitting in one of those cocoon hanging chair things - "ultra" sheek in the '1960's, and they still look quite cool. The original company's consumer products were a bit more mundane than under the BRC marketing guys, but that was mostly before my time. Pity you hadn't kept it; I'm likely one of the very few people still around with enough design knowledge of how it worked to fix it - using modern parts! LOL

Yup, +2.9% for the eurocrats is being hailed as a Dave win! -10% would have been a win - pointing to the -20% that our own govt. departments have suffered. The euro gravy train only travels in one direction, and there are no red lights! They're smiling all the way to the celebratory all-expenses-paid nosh-up!

Hmm.. to be #1 we need 2800 votes, and we have seventy odd! With the level of social cohesion we have here I can't see this happening this millennium. If you had a team of several hundred highly motivated door-knockers it would be still be touch and go. Always worth trying - someone has to - but from my own point of view I wouldn't give BT Internet the time of day since they literally stole over £100 out of our account some years back. Sounds like this level of trust is relicated amongst BCOUK workers too! Brave try, but can we try someting easier first, like.. launching our own Mars probe? http://discovermagazine.com/2007/space/how-to-assemble-rover

Didn't someone post on the board about buying some BS title a good while back? Now if he'd though to mention in passing that he was a millionaire we'd have told him... errm... If you are reading this m'lud please come back, we didn't mean to take the !*!@# . You need to understand that it's an ancient imitation ceremony that all Bedlington gentry are required to go through. In order to validate your title of Honourable Sir of Bedlington County it's necessary to sign this small rectangular - but mostly blank - bit of paper bearing the letters patent (H.S.B.C.) in the lower right-hand corner; then stand on the ancient Market Cross and proclaim to everyone on the Front Street the traditional cry "The pints are on me!". You will then be taken by your grateful subjects on a guided tour of all the places of interest in your realm - thus completing the time-honoured ceremony.

Update: Product existence and forthcoming launch confirmed by Nokia: the N9 to be launched at a Dublin event in the first quarter of 2011. So not too far away, and it will sport MeeGo from day one. Rumoured to have an AMOLED (Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) display and a 1GH/z snapdragon CPU, but AMOLED seems unlikely on such a short timescale; more likely in the next generation device with an Intel CPU. That nextgen device could come before the end of next year though. We are already seeing the first MeeGo tablets coming to market. Prediction: Wall to wall Android and MeeGo tablets by the end of next year at prices little more than a third that of an iPad. Apple will need to slash prices, add features, and turn up the propaganda even more just to stay in the low-end tablet game.

Later this week Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary, will get to his feet in the commons to announce the sites of eight new nuclear power stations. That's fairly unremarkable except that... he knows that a majority of Lib Dem MPs will vote it down. But... he's not worried about this because he knows he'll still get them built - because... Labour MPs will support him! Confused? It all becomes clear when you recall the LibDem election proposition: a vote for us is a vote for change.

Probably the last ARM base Nokia pocket computer. 2011 / 12 will undoubtedly see an Intel base one. http://vimeo.com/12925392 This is the successor to the N900 - which I now have - and blows the socks off the over-hyped and grossly over-priced iPhone 4. The operating system is MeeGo, which I've mentioned here before. This is a merging of Nokia's open-source Maemo and Intel's Moblin (Mobile Linux). Just like Google's Android (another Linux derivative) you'll soon see MeeGo on other manufacturer's machines too.

LOL Recently saw a post for a "Randomisation Officer" advertised. I've since been trying to figure out what the duties would be, and whether you'd need to supply your own coin.

a ) I'm not a Tory - out and out or any other kind! Though - like all current political parties - I believe in free markets. b ) This sounds straight out of Marx! That's not how modern industry works. Not all union activity is bad, but in recent decades much of it has been completely counterproductive. That's been particularly the case when it has been used to further someone's political ends in the guise of improving working conditions.

A complete myth, though one that the unions would like you to believe. Market forces are responsible for the advancement of living standards, and the unions have been a huge drag on the working man and our country for the past 50 years or more. Yes, there was a time, but both the Labour Party and the Trade Union movement thrive on the past. The traditional unions have destroyed jobs and discouraged the creation of new ones. You've just got to look around the world to see the decline in traditionally unionised industries and the rise in non-unionised ones. Companies only grow when everyone is singing from the same song-sheet, smart managment knows that and smart labour knows that. Them and us, and everybody loses! Anyway, a great day for the Tory and LD parties; they must have been praying for Labour to "return to it's roots" as the unelectable face of class-war! Even (especially?) his own brother knows that this is all going to end in tears for the party.

Wot no Carla Bruni?! Anyway, I predict legal action from the Pasedena Roof Orchestra.

Ah another David Bailey type! Can't give you any advice on camera backs or fronts or bottoms or tops but you'd near certainly do better to buy it in the US of A, providing it isn't going to need an EU warranty repair AND you can get it past HM Customs without getting stung for VAT and import duty. Me? At about the three megapixel mark I bowed out of the expensive camera thing. It's the shot that matters. Most often life delivers you only one opporunity, and you can easily fluk it trying to get the numbers right. My new phone is better than the best digital cameras of ten years ago, and it's always on and always with me.

And who can remember the 'V' Bombers (Victor, Valiant, Vulcan) at the Acklington air shows around 1960 when they were fully operational? Without today's H&S and security hang-ups you could get almost close enough to touch, even when they were taxiing. Real flying displays by the early jet fighters, and not simply static exhibits. The RAF had a genuine German V1 that you could walk around and inspect close-up, and many other interesting exhibits in the Acklington hangars.

We've now had the frank - but long overdue - admission from the BBC that it was "massively biased" in some of its political coverage. http://www.telegraph...k-Thompson.html But is this simply a step on the path to cosying up the the present government? Secret talks on how to break the bad news about real extent of the cuts to the great British public would seem to indicate this. http://www.telegraph...g-the-cuts.html If the BBC is entirely independent of the government, as we've always been told, why shouldn't we be allowed to examine what is being discussed? It is after all our newly *elected* heads of government who are discussing what the BBC should be allowed to charge US, and what portion of that Mr Thompson can hold on to. But hang on, I've misunderstood; that's not what these secret talks are about at all! They are apparently about how the government cuts can be sold to us in a gentle manner. So should these discussions even be taking place at all? Unless, of course, they are really about the aforementioned "what the BBC should be allowed to charge US, and what portion of that Mr Thompson can hold on to". The overwhelming likelihood is that the two matters are mutually dependant, and we really can't be privileged to know any of the dirty details. So, once again, the ongoing myth of the Beeb's total independence hits the buffers of political reality.

The explanation is both simple and embarrassing: we ran out of HD space late last night! This has accelerated our plans to move BCOUK to another, currently grossly underused, machine with a much bigger Hard Drive. This should improve the response times for locals too. A few weeks maybe; meanwhile we will watch the disk space issue carefully.

Yeah, looks like it. That would be because we used Wordpress for the news content for a while, but we've now moved on to a fully integrated solution. Now you only need one login site-wide - including forthcoming B-Mail. (Umm... is B-Mail common knowledge now y'all? ) Back on thread: well... The Bedlington Academy joins a long list of might-have-beens. Who is to blame on this occasion? Well no one in particular it seems. It's simply a hapless victim of Gordon Brown's phony economic cycle. I'd be more than interested to hear what our new MP has to say about this though.

Beware of buying cheap memory - particularly cheap flash memory - on e-Bay. A 32GB memory stick for £20 seems like a bargain. To some it is, because all they do is plug it into their machine and move a Gig or two of files onto it. Weeks or months later it goes faulty - or that's how it seems. The fact is it was never a 32GB (or 64Gb or 128GB) device in the first place. It probably won't even give you the full capacity of the 4GB chip inside either; because that's a factory reject with too many bad cells to make 4GB USB sticks with. These chips should go in the bin; and they probably have, before being fished out by low-paid workers and sold-on to back street factories to make "high-capacity" memory sticks with. Your computer believes what the device says about its storage capacity, and you believe what your computer tells you. That's how they get away with it for just long enough to disappear with your money. Don't pay any attention to the positive feedback either. That conman or woman working from a Far East flat has built it up by shill bidding on their own stuff. And they are happily building up fake feedback on other accounts to switch to when the heat is turned up on the current ones. Some of the early buyers they have duped will help them along with this too. Save the link and revisit later to see what real customers think. http://feedback.e-bay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback2&userid=aaaservice_2010&ftab=AllFeedback (Note: remove dash in e-bay to get link to work)

Yeah, that extra 6mm in depth (in a slightly smaller device) has to be a deal breaker if you don't want a real computer with real keyboard, all the extra features, and a proper phone with 80 minutes extra talk time.. Then again if you don't you'd be far better off with a cool N8 than a clunky iWorshipSteveJobsPhone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N8

Seems like a nice guy! I'd much rather be shot by him than by a half-crazed Nothumbria Police gunman. They don't plant grass for children or fly prettier flags. And his policy on traffic violations is much more user-friendly too - y'all!

Thought I'd share this one with you, though it's sooo obvious once you do it! Edit Menu --> Preferences --> Select the Advanced Icon (the Gear wheel) --> Select the Network Tab --> Hit the "Clear Now" button. This clears the browser cache, and this will probably do the trick on other browsers too.

Ah, the vapourware peddlers are at it already: http://www.play.com/...p/Product.html# Think I saw a £999.99 price in there somewhere. Which is probably what you are going to have to pay to get one this side of Christmas. But if this if the model without HSDPA then having to use a USB dongle is a big let-down, and it would certainly be better to wait. Me, I will pick one up for South of £500 sometime - unless something better presents itself in the interim. BTW I got that Nokia N900 sooner than I though, but fourgee (anyone want to but an iPhone? ) is "testing" it for me just at the moment. Review coming.

That is just for the CPU. But thanks for confirming that it's about ten times the price of the iPad's ARM chip. Not sure about the screen cost, but I'd think that for those advanced displays you'd probably be about right. Then there's the rest of the chip-set, the memory devices and DIMMs, the support chips, the graphics, the 64GB SSD, batteries, two expensive multi-layer PCBs, several hundred SM components, and cabling. Then there's the WiFi and Bluetooth modules, and the 3G module. On top of that there's the licence fees to M$ and to the BIOS manufacturer. In the quantities they are envisaging the casings alone will probably cost more than the total ex-factory cost of an iPad. That's before you even get to setting up the placing machines for assembly, hand assembly and testing, distribution and retail packaging and promotion costs, import duty, dealers margin then VAT on top of everything! After that the support costs and guarantee wastage. If you are only making say 5000 then there's little chance of getting any real economies of scale, and you are looking at about £800-1000 in the shops before you make a bean. And that's assuming you sell the lot at full price - which seldom happens these days, hence the huge number of price cuts.

Only one screen for a short while - that's a disaster! Of course there are some devices that have only one screen all the time, and some of those have touch screens that occupy almost all the viewing space some of the time. Haven't heard any complaints about this though. There are even devices that waste huge areas of interface space up front with a clunky mechanical keyboard that just says QWERTY most of the time, and that you have to make, and distribute, in 38 different versions to keep everyone happy. The Intel CPU alone will cost Toshiba three figures in 1000 off quantities. - this isn't a weedy $10 ARM chip. Their bulk buy-in parts cost must be way over £500 a unit on this baby. Something like four times the production cost of an iPad I'd guess. Price up that SSD before you make silly statements like that. Probably why it's just a limited edition: they don't anticipate making any money out of it - even at a grand retail!