threegee

I can now be revealed that: ????? = Mark Papermaster http://www.loopinsig...e-antenna-woes/ What a wonderful company to work for; Jobs takes all the glory, and some other poor bee takes all the blame!

LOL - you obviously didn't look at the videos. It's not just a soft keyboard - desireable though that is for the spilt coffee, and customisation angles - it has both tactile feedback and it doubles as a proper screen extension. People who've tried it says it's in a completely different class to the iPad and a pleasure to type on. And, of course, the "main" screen is touch too. Lot's more CPU power than the tablets that are coming, and a four hour battery life is easily good enough for me providing the device is pocketable. Anything under £800 and it's a steal, esp if it has HSDPA built-in. Ten times more of a computer than the iPad! Though only a limited edition, it shows what is on the way with the 32nm Intel CPUs that are just around the corner.

Only 700 grams in weight, and with 'N' WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1. Supposed to have built-in 3G radio too (presumably HSDPA/HSUPA) so that would be just brilliant. It would be a shame to have to use something this cool with a USB dongle when you are out and about! The real problem here seems to be that with a limited edition there's going to be no second sourcing of the custom batteries. You will never see anything like this from Apple, because there's just too many expensive bits in it, and at their mark-ups the price would be so astronomic they couldn't even sell them to their biggest Fanboys!

Same thing happening with TV; HD is going to be almost all subscription if not PPV. The new ITV HD channels are going to be exclusively on Sky satellite, where they can tap into the revenue stream. There's a degree of this going on already on the net: high bandwidth sites have to pay for faster content delivery over dedicated links. If they didn't they'd rapidly become unusable. The problem chiefly occurs at the consumer end where ISPs are effectively subsidising the process. The iPlayer trick is to offload the distribution onto other people using Bit Torrent technology. That begs the question of whether some of the licence fee should be redistributed to UK ISPs, as the Beeb is sidestepping its traditional role of transmitting its own material.

Fires in Russia destroying crops and whole communities. They are pondering stopping grain exports as they need it themselves. Bread prices will inevitably rise. Hoard flour you cooks! What's even worse is the current Marmite shortage in the Med; send supplies - urgent!

I'm gonna say that it has a certain inevitability to it. And, of course, I'm going to say that - as Apple is the antithesis of open source - it was only a matter of time. The really sad thing is that the people who were conned by the Job's Marketing Machine won't even understand the implications. They will continue to buy overpriced CrApple at every new flawed product release. However, the majority will still buy into the proposition that you can have closed source without any one person's "grand vision" of how it should all be. A trade-off between a bit more hassle and a fair bit more flexibility, all at a significantly lower perceived price. That's still the overall winner as far a Joe P. is concerned. That there should be a third way that's both better and toll-free, is beyond the bounds of credibility. Yes, "Free" is a really tough sell when it involves turning your brain on! And here I include many supposedly computer literate people.

"once-in-a-generation" space storm http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7923069/Nasa-scientists-braced-for-solar-tsunami-to-hit-earth.html One of these days the "man-made global warming" lobby will make the perfectly obvious connection between solar activity and Earth temperatures. But, for now at least, why let the obvious stand in the way of making a political statement?

http://www.telegraph...0-on-iPads.html You really couldn't make this up if you tried! 54 or so technologically-challenged "public servants" seem to think that the most transitory closed-architecture gadget from Apple is somehow going to transform their productivity. Amongst the reasons proffered: Actually, councillor, the best way to save the Council money would be to replace you with someone who knows how to use the technology you've already been provided with at considerable public expense! And, no; that wasn't a Labourite Thickie. It was a New-gen Cameronian Tory councillor. Though the Labourite Thickies are in on the very same plot!

Ouch! No more dirt cheap RAM! Went to buy 2GB SODIMMs which cost £15 to £17 at the beginning of the year, and the same parts are now over £37 at the cheapest supplier, and generally well over £40. Flash of all kinds is up sharply too. Maybe the first time for decades that hasn't regularly fallen year on year. Still cheap compared with other things, I suppose, but no more free lunch. Thought: If computers are still falling in price (and they still seem to be), and the chips are going up rapidly, then that's an "interesting" situation.

I think maybe you are wrong here. Way back I seem to remember using Windoze loader to kick into Fedora. I can't see any reason why it wouldn't, seeing that you are simply transferring control in just the same way as it does to its own active partition. They'd have to be working hard at it to *stop* you doing this. Anyway, it turns out it wasn't even necessary to manually edit the Grub configuration file, as I found a GUI to do this in YaST. Used it to make Suse the default o/s, and move Windoze XP down the list. And... it didn't complain about my manual daubings in the file either! Now to use the Suse live-boot USB stick I just created to rescue a poor deluded Windows user who's registry has just gone TU! Let's see if Suse can restore it from a backup (yes - amazingly, there is a fairly recent backup!) without having to seek out a Windoze rescue disk. Or - like yer average Windows user - reformat and re-install with total data loss!

If your data is more valuable than the hardware often there's no alternative. Particularly true of a pocket machine which is near certain to take a drop at some point in time. Also uses a lot less power, has no spool-up time, and is in most cases faster - particularly for reading. This hybrid is not that much dearer than a regular hard drive, so it might just catch on in the mass market. We'll see if other HD manufacturers bring out similar.

The problem is getting worse by the week. The lousy and uneven milled edge is the give-away, with the cross on the edge often missing or poorly marked. And when you turn them between your thumb and index finger the faces of the fakes seldom line-up with each other. Many of the fakes are poorly stamped - way off center, and not at all distinct. And the lettering on the edge is often in a PLAIN typeface that has no SERIF, and is just too sharp.

Too silly! The boot loader isn't really part of the o/s at all; it's just a way of getting to it; been and gone in a few seconds. You can use any boot loader you want with any Linux - even Microsoft's lousy effort if you can figure the limited poxy documentation. If grub fails you either haven't got your hard drive partitioned properly; haven't told Grub about where the bootable partitions are properly; or you have bad hardware. Grub is very flexible because to accommodate lots of o/s' and lots of different hardware and file systems it needs to be. This really isn't a problem to the average user because they get a simple menu, and a few seconds is all they ever see of it. But if you start playing on with partitioning and multiple o/s', and don't know what you are doing - well - you'd better find someone who does! WTH is ninja? There's no comparison between Linux and Windows XP on this machine, and I alternate between them regularly on the same hardware. At the moment if I boot XP it gobbles all available (1.25GB) of very expensive micro-SIMM RAM, takes an age to boot (and I've removed loads of crap and optimised the boot sequence), and IE goes away for ages and often becomes totaly unresponsive on heavy JavaScript pages. Running Linux - as I am at the moment - it is showing 370MB (30%) of that 1.25GB in use, with lots of stuff loaded, four active desktops, and listening to BBC iPlayer as I type. Also Firefox is really responsive and a pleasure to use. This is a 1GH/z ultra low voltage Pentium CPU that's now over six years old!

Ed to quit? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/labour/7908683/Ed-Balls-considers-quitting-Labour-leadership-race-after-union-snub.html But, does he have enough of them to go through with it? So... it's either Milliband or Milliband then. My money is on Milliband!

Well that's obviously not true, because we've already found an offer that they haven't! And, I think you'd be silly to ask for more than you need and are going to use yourself. Networks must keep a tally of how many sent to a specific address, and maybe log how many of those actually get activated. So when you go back for another one, or someone else a your address does, the request will be ignored.

Straight from the FT: Well, times are tough! And... I think the Financial Times means Channel Five.

Orange: http://freesim.orange.co.uk/6?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=PPC&sissr=1

Not so! With my 3 PAYG I earn free minutes which nearly always expire before they get used, and 0800 etc.. doesn't generally count for deduction from your allowance. It depends entirely of your phone company, so you need to check the tariff. But it's certainly not going to cost you more - so there's no point knocking it! And that's another money saving tip: shop around and see if your tariff is the most suitable one for your usage. Millions don't, and the phone companies make millions in extra profits because of this. Consider carrying multiple SIMs to get the best deal at all times. An unlocked phone allows you to keep multiple SIMs and swap networks to optimise your usage, and also to take advantage of special offers. Locked phones on contracts generally work out a lot more expensive in the long-run than simply going to a shop and buying an unlocked one, and then selecting the network yourself. And, at the end of the contract, you could get charged extra to unlock it too - so you've got to add that to the cost of ownership. Locked phones are worth less on the second hand market too, so you're not going to pass that cost on to someone else. Compare the cost of buying the phone on credit with the cost of signing the contract, and disregard all the free minutes you realistically know you will never use. It's unlikely you are going to change your usage pattern significanly, so learn from yourself! Also take into account that you might want to change the phone, or the tariff, before the contract runs out. Don't be pushed into signing; take your time and do your homework before you agree to a contract. Generally speaking contracts are not the best option - unless someone else is paying the bill! And.. if your contract has expired take the thing straight to a phone shop and get it unlocked, even if you have no immediate intention to change networks. Inertia makes money for phone networks. And here's something else you should consider before signing a contract: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10185221 With PAYG when the credit is out the credit is out, until you chose to renew it.

U can bun if you want tu, but after downloading several current Linux distros there's clearly one that's head and shoulders above the rest. A superb install; no hardware problems; instant recognition of everything on this ancient netbook; access to huge application repos; and a really really good feeling environment, without clutter. There are several Live CDs available to try SUSE without installing it permanently, in fact they encourage you to author your own live CD. You can, of course, also install to a hard drive from a live CD - just don't make the mistake of downloading and burning the full 4GB+ DVD, as the YaST thingie can grab all the extras you require in no time. It only took an hour or so to convince me to do a full install. Only problem I had was that I installed it over the top of another Linux that had already been installed on top of Ubuntu. At that point previous incarnations of the Grub loader had been overwritten, and so the boot sequence had lost all track of Windys XP. Solution was to add Windys manually to the /boot/brub/menu.lst file and now I've got a multi-boot machine again. Didn't want to go anywhere near Microsoft's >fixmbr which has been disastrous in the past. SUSE automatically mounts the Windows NTFS partitions as windows/C and windows/D, so there are no problems accessing existing data. If only Windows was as friendly towards ext3 and ext4 partitions! There's also built-in recognition of the Windows network. Bluetooth is "simply there" too; I've never found it so easy to connect a Bluetooth mouse through a third party BT dongle before: you move the Bluetooth mouse, an O/S dialogue pops up telling you that it wants to access the machine, you hit the mouse's BT reset button, and so complete the permanent connection. No disks, no drivers, no even thinking about having to configure the dongle first - simples! A WiFi connection is established with the same ease. http://www.opensuse.org/en/ SuSe is an 18 year-old fraulein from Nuremberg, and you won't regret taking her out!

Yup, Tony did the deal for the release, and Jack Straw told the folk North of the border what to do. The truth about that will come out - because the present lot want it to! The truth about Megrahi and the CIA won't come out until no one gives a damn about it anymore, if ever! Why did he have to withdraw his appeal before they agreed to release him? The only logical explanation for that is that they knew they were going to have to release him anyway, so better to get something for it (a mega oil deal) and remove an upcoming major embarrassment at the same time. Win-win and the truth go hang!

Of course I read the "disclaimer"! Which is why I inserted the link to full details. Whatever way you use the service it still saves you money if using a *mobile* phone - the purpose of the post. Where's your helpful money saving idea?

Else you pay! Instructions for free calls: Dial 01224 39 0800Enter the 0800, 0808, or 0500 number you want to phonePress # to start the call Put this access number on your mobile right now. Full details: http://www.0800buster.co.uk/

'Course he's still alive! He's in the sun, with his family, and not rotting in some dark, damp, Scottish dungeon. He's also still innocent (whatever else he got up to for Gaddafi) of planting the Pan-Am bomb. The CIA know this because they framed him - helped an awful lot by the Scottish "justice"system. Senior officials know this, everyone knows this. Except... the idiots who believe that, where the machinations of various secret services are at work, it's possible to get at the real truth. It wasn't even Libya that planned it!

Really neat idea: a combined Hard Drive and Solid-State Drive (4GB). http://www.dabs.com/...4948244#filters Monitors the hard drive usage and stuffs the really frequently used stuff in SSD. For a frequent on-off cycler of a netbook this would obviously be the boot sectors, most of the operating system and the most often used apps - like the e-mail client. Would be even neater if there was a utility to include/exclude files or sectors. Careful selection would also render the machine still bootable after a nasty drop. I'm assuming the SSD mirrors and not completely replaces the HD data. Would order one instantly, except my two most frequently used netbooks use IDE drives, and aren't modern enough to have SATAs. One day soon'ish!

Now a Samsung 2TB for under £80! http://www.dabs.com/products/samsung-2tb-spinpoint-hd203wi-3-5--sata-300-5400rpm-32mb-cache-6L7F.html < £4 for 100GB!