On 20/02/2011 11:10, Paul Terry wrote:
In message ,
" writes

There was something on BBC this morning that a Chinese company is
investing £50 million to install coverage on the tube.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110220...ansportoly2012


I can't help thinking that it sounds a bit like foreign aid for Britain.

Yes, that's what they said on the BBC. I think there was also some
mention of the strategic implications were such a project to go ahead.

"Tom Anderson" wrote in message
rth.li...

... it would be a monstrous pain to have to put my earphones in every
time someone phoned me!

Life is SUCH a trial sometimes.

:-)

--
Brian
"Fight like the Devil, die like a gentleman."
www.imagebus.co.uk/shop

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 05:46:04AM -0800, john b wrote:
On Feb 18, 10:37=A0pm, David Cantrell wrote:
this is why I carry an iPod as well as an iPhone - the iPod is a
*much* better device for listening to music.
I'm assuming by "better" you mean "holds more", here? My flatmate's
iPhone has a better music interface than my iPod Classic, sadly you
can't get a 160gb iPhone yet.

That's certainly a point in its favour. I don't have to worry in
advance about what music I might want to listen to in two or three days
time, as it just holds everything. But the huge advantage that an iPod
has over an iPhone is that it has Album Shuffle. That means that I can
let the device pick stuff at random, but that each time it picks, it
then plays the work all the way through. Obviously this doesn't matter
for the doof-doof noises that Apple's fashionable staff listen to, but
it most certainly matters if you listen to actual music. Playing
something like Dark Side Of The Moon in the wrong order, or just a
single track from Janacek's Glagolitic Mass is a Sin.

The really stupid thing is that early versions of the iPhone also
supported that, but there was no user interface for accessing it - you
could turn it on if you had a jailbroken phone and edited a config file.
Later versions don't seem to even have it as a hidden feature.

--
David Cantrell | Cake Smuggler Extraordinaire

I apologize if I offended you personally,
I intended to do it professionally.
-- Steve Champeon, on the nanog list

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 04:09:30PM +0000, Michael R N Dolbear wrote:

Until screens that roll up or fold up are available the size is
necessary for a pleasant reading experience. The Kindles (and Sonys and
Nooks) are about the size of a thin paperback (original Penguin) and
most of this is screen area. An iPad is still bigger.

I find that my phone's screen is big enough for a pleasant reading
experience. It's the words that matter, and provided that it's easy to
get to the next page (which it is) then I don't particularly care that
it doesn't look like a physical book.

Obviously a bigger screen would be *better*, but that would be
outweighed by the costs - that of having to carry more devices because
if the screen were much bigger it wouldn't be possible to use it as a
phone, and that of it not conveniently fitting in any of my pockets.

What you get, built in to the device, is weeks of use between recharges
(if you don't use wireless much), capacity for vast numbers of books (I
have hundreds, having been buying for ten years) search, large print
and Text-to-Speech. If you are not accustomed find 3 or 4 books with
you on holidays and trips not enough this won't mean much and if you
don't buy dozens of books a year the savings there won't be much either

I agree that being able to carry lots of books easily is a Good Thing - I
currently have 28 books queued up on my phone as well as the one I'm
reading right now. Thankfully, it's exceedingly rare for me to be away
from a mains socket for long enough for battery life to be a limitation.
The phone user interface isn't quite as good as on a dedicated device -
it's particularly poor when it comes to bookmarking particular pages and
adding notes - but that's not a "must have" for me. I only really need
to do that on the very rare occasions that I'm editing a book, or peer-
eviewing it before publication, or if it's a text book. And I don't have
many electronic text books because ...

I don't buy e-books. I refuse point blank to buy any media with working
Digital Restrictions Management features, because I insist that after
I've bought it I should be able to use it for ever on any device. Well,
OK, there is one exception: I buy e-books from Baen, because they don't
have DRM.

I don't find that search works very well for large documents - you get
too many results, most of which are not what you want. Good hyperlinking
and an index are much better, and large print and text-to-speech are
utterly irrelevant to me, although the application I use on my phone
can, I believe, at least do large print.

--
David Cantrell | Godless Liberal Elitist

The test of the goodness of a thing is its fitness for use. If it
fails on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or finish will
make it any better, it will only make it more expensive and foolish.
-- Frank Pick, lecture to the Design and Industries Assoc, 1916

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 12:57:22PM +0000, Tom Anderson wrote:

Is there any reason *all* mobile devices couldn't or shouldn't be
headphone-only for music, and indeed everything except phone calls?

Because there are legitimate use-cases where a speaker is better. Such
as listening to Radio 4 podcasts while I cook my dinner.

--
David Cantrell | Reality Engineer, Ministry of Information

fdisk format reinstall, doo-dah, doo-dah;
fdisk format reinstall, it's the Windows way

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 01:27:45PM +0000, Tom Anderson wrote:

Oh christ, speakerphone. I'd forgotten to mention that another arm of this
plan would be that any use of speakerphone would be punishable by summary
execution.

What, even when it's just me talking to my mum while I cook my dinner?
I can't hold the damned thing to my ear because I need both hands for
peeling the spuds.

--
David Cantrell | Minister for Arbitrary Justice

Vegetarian: n: a person who, due to poor lifestyle choices,
is more likely to get arse cancer than a normal person

On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:55:28 +0000
David Cantrell wrote:
On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 01:27:45PM +0000, Tom Anderson wrote:

Oh christ, speakerphone. I'd forgotten to mention that another arm of this
plan would be that any use of speakerphone would be punishable by summary
execution.

What, even when it's just me talking to my mum while I cook my dinner?
I can't hold the damned thing to my ear because I need both hands for
peeling the spuds.

Kill 2 birds - get your mum round to cook your dinner and talk to her
while she does it.

B2003

In article , d ()
wrote:

On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:55:28 +0000
David Cantrell wrote:
On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 01:27:45PM +0000, Tom Anderson wrote:

Oh christ, speakerphone. I'd forgotten to mention that another arm of
this plan would be that any use of speakerphone would be punishable
by summary execution.

What, even when it's just me talking to my mum while I cook my dinner?
I can't hold the damned thing to my ear because I need both hands for
peeling the spuds.

Kill 2 birds - get your mum round to cook your dinner and talk to
her while she does it.

Or don't waste good vitamin C and don't peel spuds!

--
Colin Rosenstiel

On Feb 22, 1:55*pm, David Cantrell wrote:

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 01:27:45PM +0000, Tom Anderson wrote:
Oh christ, speakerphone. I'd forgotten to mention that another arm of this
plan would be that any use of speakerphone would be punishable by summary
execution.

What, even when it's just me talking to my mum while I cook my dinner?

Yes - there's no mercy in this hypothetical world...


I can't hold the damned thing to my ear because I need both hands for
peeling the spuds.

"Mizter T" ha scritto nel messaggio
...

On Feb 22, 1:55 pm, David Cantrell wrote:

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 01:27:45PM +0000, Tom Anderson wrote:
Oh christ, speakerphone. I'd forgotten to mention that another arm of
this
plan would be that any use of speakerphone would be punishable by
summary
execution.

What, even when it's just me talking to my mum while I cook my dinner?

Yes - there's no mercy in this hypothetical world...


I can't hold the damned thing to my ear because I need both hands for
peeling the spuds.



I liked the fantastic pizza in bayswater but I cannot remind the name of the
cafeteria bar--
but it was special with those tasty sauces.