What the heck, let’s pretend you read this.

I’m a bit of a tech geek, and I love all sorts of gadgetry, but to be honest, I don’t give a fig one way or the other about this particular device.

However, I felt compelled to comment because you made me throw myself back into my thoughts of Douglas Adams, and I had not strolled the lane with him in quite a while.

I didn’t know him. I’m just a fan. I first read Hitchhiker’s when I was… I think… about ten. There are a handful of authors who you feel you know pretty well when you read there work. He was one.

Thanks.

Marc Eastman

They have nothing more to say. In the meantime, for a few quid you can buy an MP3 player that’s as handy for passing music on to a friend as a CD, assuming anyone bothers with CD players any more. Soon, as you say, they’ll be giving them away at the bank.

I look forward to the day when I can Bluetooth all my music to an implant in my erm tooth, which I’ll listen to via a tiny speaker in my skull. Nobody else on the bus will be able to hear a thing.

That day will probably be a week next Tuesday, at the rate things are going.

What if the scientists capture an image of the particles that result from the initial collision and they see the number 42? Now that would be something.

Cheers.

I’m wondering if the future might be that of larger, PDA-sized phones such as the iPhone, but with the use of headsets becoming more common? I am reminiscing back to the late nineties when I had a Sony Minidisc player (I held on for the longest time hoping the minidisc format wouldn’t die…). The Sony minidisc players had remote controls attached to the headphones, with a small display. I really miss having all the buttons of the music player clipped on to the front of my jacet, with no need to reach into my pocket/backpack/handbag to change songs or stop the music.

The obvious downside to this, though, is that the remote control is bound to die before the gadget itself (practically a law of nature), so one would have to be able to buy a replacement without having to buy a whole new gadget.

Now. What I would *really* like, is for some major company to give customers the possibility to custom-build (a-haha. Pun!) their own gizmos. “Yes, I would like a cell-phone-sized thingy with an FM-radio, GPS and 20 GB of memory, but I don’t need a camera, darnit. Gimme!”

I wonder what the future holds BTW, you can see what the future thought it held in the past here: http://www.paleofuture.com/

By the way, I love how this forum isn’t a flamewar It’s so good to see that there are still civilised places online!

As a technology journalist myself I reviewed the e260 back in July 2006 and I was highly impressed.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/mp3/review/2006/06/20/SanDisk-Sansa-e260-nano-Killer/p1

That said, I could read you review a year old packet of pork scratchings!

Warm regards,

Gordon – News Editor, TrustedReviews.com

Surely such abbreviations as BPS, ISP and DRM are just that, abbreviations. As I’ve always understood it, an acronym is an abbreviation or initialism, which forms a pronounceable word (e.g. NATO). My experience is that the misuse of ‘acronym’ seems to have crept into the IT industry – and probably others – during the 1980s.

Given that Stephen Fry is the author of the referenced post, I can only assume that either,
a) My understanding of the definition of ‘acronym’ is incorrect, or
b) Mr. Fry’s original text fell foul of a Grauniad editor.

As I often say, Associated Constituent Roots Only Numb Your Mind.

Mr. Adams was a truly amazing man. My sister and I are both eagerly looking forward to sharing The Hitchhiker’s Guide with our daughters.