It was: then New Labour decided the best route to winning elections was to be more like the Tories. I now present to you modern Britain.
(that and the fact that while censorship per se was a more Tory thing, populism is unmistakeably a Labour thing, and with the rise of the current FUD climate in the UK, anything that can be spun as Stopping The Bad Men That Hate Us And Are Paedophiles to the average Mail reader gets railroaded through the Commons)
Hey hey now, the charity radio station I contribute to has three of the overpriced, clunky and slow desktop MD decks, and they do perfectly well making complex technology accessible to the out of touch by rendering it about as mechanistic and failure-prone as a steam-driven phonograph.
Wait a sec...
(Disclaimer: Yes, I own an iPod video (1st gen) and an iPod touch, and use them regularly)
I noticed the same sort of behavior when I was glancing at the iPod touch pricing. $299, $399, $499 for their three models with---whaaa?? 8, 16 or 32GB of storage. The original iPod is up to 80 (or more?), which makes it fairly clear to me that they're just playing games and offering you super-expensive, shitty-sized storage now so they can go "LOOK, DOUBLE!" six months from now. To screw the early adopters, in other words. Comparing the capacities on the hard disk and flash iPods is comparing apples (hah!) and oranges (or to use the obligatory car analogy, mileage in a 3-cylinder 2-stroke and a V12): show me a 160GB flash disk that fits in the form factor of the Touch and I'll gladly hack it in in place of the 8GB wafer in there at the moment. That said, to say that 8GB to 16GB costs the same as 16 to 32 is daylight robbery, and $99 (or £70, if you pay the non-US tax) for 16GB of flash memory is pretty steep as well.
That said, I'd have a 160GB hard disk Touch, if they made them.
Unfortunately (stupidly), no. In the UK, "wireless broadband" as advertised all over the place = an 802.11b/g router and modem, with possibly a few 10/100 Ethernet ports: you can hit the admin page from a wireless IP as well as a wired, and on mine (SpeedTouch 780), there's no obvious feature to disable it.
The point is, though that 96dB of headroom is there, it's not used. Peak levels are now only a few dB above the average level. There's no problem with the technology.
Slashdot Mirror
the player-driven economy has gone to hell these days though.
It was: then New Labour decided the best route to winning elections was to be more like the Tories. I now present to you modern Britain.
(that and the fact that while censorship per se was a more Tory thing, populism is unmistakeably a Labour thing, and with the rise of the current FUD climate in the UK, anything that can be spun as Stopping The Bad Men That Hate Us And Are Paedophiles to the average Mail reader gets railroaded through the Commons)
Hey hey now, the charity radio station I contribute to has three of the overpriced, clunky and slow desktop MD decks, and they do perfectly well making complex technology accessible to the out of touch by rendering it about as mechanistic and failure-prone as a steam-driven phonograph. Wait a sec...
Unfortunately (stupidly), no. In the UK, "wireless broadband" as advertised all over the place = an 802.11b/g router and modem, with possibly a few 10/100 Ethernet ports: you can hit the admin page from a wireless IP as well as a wired, and on mine (SpeedTouch 780), there's no obvious feature to disable it.
The point is, though that 96dB of headroom is there, it's not used. Peak levels are now only a few dB above the average level. There's no problem with the technology.
http://speedtest.net/ is my DSL comparison of choice, and does comparisons over time.