Being that I care so much for then environment I was interested to find out that I had travelled just 20,000nm this year. Not bad. 
Roll on 2008.
Found this out because of Euan and a site he has found called Great Circle .
Month: December 2007
I've seen multi-touch before and everyone knows about the iPod Touch and iPhone, but Microsoft have gone one step further with "Surface " and produced a commerical product which has much greater potential for social interaction:
So…
It's been bugging me for some time that I have this application running in the background on my machine, "Install Shield Update Manager". It isn't as useful as it would like to be and I am unimpressed that I had to download a 2.2MB application just to remove it . I think about the waste, how periodically commercial software is updated and then realise that I don't need something in the background wasting my systems resources.
I've used their feedback to tell them as much and I've removed it, hopefully.
Grrr.
Update:
Now I am truely p*ssed off, I read on here and found that apparently the "uninstaller" doesn't do anything except hide the "Update Manager" even further. Inspecting my task list with Process Explorer I find it still there. Terminate with extreme violence!
So, I confess my father is a Baron, not a feudal type Baron or the enemy of Dangermouse, but a "Baron of the Cinque Ports". There were traditional rights and I wonder how many of these still apply because no one actually revoked them.
Looking at the news that NASA may support the UK plans to launch a Moon orbiter I couldn't help but chuckle at a comment made by Alan Smith of the Mullard Space Sciences Laboratory:
"We've got to get our ducks in order, but I think the plan ticks all the right boxes and it's extremely likely that we will have the first British mission to the moon launched in 2012,"
Should someone from Mullard use the phrase "Ducks in a row"? Mullard? Mallard? Oh dear.
Now that my profile has become a fair bit more public I get asked quite alot if people can have pre-release hardware for products that are arriving soon. The truth is, it's not that simple, we are a mass-manufacturing company and for us to produce something in low volume (such as samples) it is incredibly expensive. It takes a certain amount of time to set-up a production run, then the sample run may only produce a fraction of a full production run, or another alternative is that the boards assembled by hand, anyway there are various methods all producing expensive hardware. This can be one of the most significant single expenses we might have in development after paying the developers.
Once the software is tested and all the bugs tidied up we can actually start manufacturing completed products in a couple of days, the turn around is amazingly quick because of the preparation that happens in advance. So the time between the last bug fix and the shelf is actually very short when there is a pressure on time from the customers.
So, please, first there is no point in asking for prototype hardware, it's too expensive and second you'll get products when they are ready we don't delay for our fun! We need the return on investment as soon as possible, so we release at the most appropriate moment for everyone.
Some fun error message images that I have found on my travels…
It might be of use to someone, so I published an article that has languished on my hard disk for some time. Give it a read and see what you think. But set aside some time, it’s not a little one!
Preface
This is an article I offered for publication to the BKSTS, but after a couple of revisions it kind of fell by the way-side and has laid neglected on my storage since. So here it is, an analysis of satellite technology from the viewpoint of its use in D-cinema distribution. I hope it proves useful to someone and that some insight can be gained into the various technologies available.
(copyright Bob Hannent, do not reproduce without permission, yada, yada, yada…)Continue reading “Changing satellite techniques and their potential in D-Cinema”