Thank you. 
Nerd/Boffin Technical corner. Page 60
Microsoft have also got a phone OS although it's nowhere near as popular as iOS or Android. The Nokia Lumia phones (800 and 900) are supposed to be very nice. Microsoft are going to shortly upgrading the OS to Phone 8. The change is a major one and it means existing hardware won't be upgradeable. This may mean you can pick up some very nice phones at a decent price though. I've personally had an android phone (HTC Desire) for two years now and I'm very happy with it but I certainly wouldn't discount a phone with a Windows OS on it.
I have to have one with a keypad.
I have a Blackberry Torch where as it's keyboard is tiny it has lovely chunky keys. That can handle my enormous thumbs.
Blackberry is very much a Ronseal phone. It'll forward your emails, facebook doodads etc nice and fast (unlike some fancier phones) the battery lasts and like I say nice keyboard.
Sound and speed etc I have no complaints.
Also with the Torch the touchscreen is as responsive as anything I've seen.
For work I've got a Blackberry curve. And for a tiny phone (it really is the size of a large biscuit) it does everything you could ask of a smartphone.
Quote: Loopey @ August 13 2012, 1:18 PM BSTI have to have one with a keypad.
Then Blackberry all the way.
Has there ever been a time in the history of email where it has mattered if an email address is in upper or lower case?
No. Never.
9,100! I do like a round number.
What, like '8' before it got the too-tight belt?
*awaits MBE for services to comedy*
Quote: Ben @ August 25 2012, 1:28 PM BSTHas there ever been a time in the history of email where it has mattered if an email address is in upper or lower case?
Not with the SMTP & POP3 protocol currently in use, but earlier versions of email systems were sometimes case sensitive on the user-name portion in front of the @ sign.
As far as I know the standards for domain names and sub-domains (the bit after the @ sign) are defined that they must not be case sensitive.
Thank you, Bill. That's very interesting.
eMail started as message passing on a University campus (I've forgotten which) and they were using Unix computers.
Unix and its successor systems (Linux) are case sensitive on names and almost certainly on user names too, so the very early emails would have had needed to have case sensitive user names, because a Unix computer could have two different users, one named Ben and another named ben
~~~
It tends to amuse me when I hear a Linux/Unix enthusiast extol the virtues of having case sensitive file name and Variable's names (in programs). Actually IMO it is a pain-in-the-arse and responsible for lots of computer bugs. Yet almost certainly the case sensitivity arose simply because it takes more programming instructions to cope with treating a-z the same as A-Z and there simply wasn't enough room for those instructions on the logically tiny PDP8 computers that Unix was created on.
Then before that was sorted out IMO, early Unix programmers started using the fact that a Variable named Alfred was a different Variable from alfred and the case sensitivity got embedded in language C and in the coding of Unix itself, (which was written in C) so it propagated, became set in stone and we are still stuck with this annoying case-sensitivity & the annoyances and bugs that it causes.
Quote: billwill @ August 25 2012, 2:56 PM BSTIt tends to amuse me when I hear a Linux/Unix enthusiast extol the virtues of having case sensitive file name and Variable's names (in programs). Actually IMO it is a pain-in-the-arse and responsible for lots of computer bugs. Yet almost certainly the case sensitivity arose simply because it takes more programming instructions to cope with treating a-z the same as A-Z and there simply wasn't enough room for those instructions on the logically tiny PDP8 computers that Unix was created on.
Then before that was sorted out IMO, early Unix programmers started using the fact that a Variable named Alfred was a different Variable from alfred and the case sensitivity got embedded in language C and in the coding of Unix itself, (which was written in C) so it propagated, became set in stone and we are still stuck with this annoying case-sensitivity & the annoyances and bugs that it causes.
Actually Windows file names ARE case sensitive, if there are two files with the same name but different case. Frankly that is far more likely to cause confusion and bugs, especially for people not used to paying attention to case because they use Windows. It's one of those things where an attempt to make something simple actually makes it much more complicated.
It's more that being case sensitive is the way a computer behaves by default that meant file systems and compilers have (and mostly still are) case sensitive. Windows came along with its attempts at making computers easy to use, which is great, but they screwed up the file system pretty hard (If you want a chuckle check out how it used to handle spaces in file names and the issues it caused ).
WRT variable names: There's usually a case convention in programming languages where varaibles and methods are lower case, and packages/classes/modules are title case, so it's not an issue.
For the record, I use Windows at home, but Linux at work because it's a lot nicer for development IMO. I like Linux, and would like to see it do better on the desktop, so I guess that qualifies me as a Linux enthusiast
Lol, not looking for a fight, just chucking in my 2p
I know, just being silly.