urbanglasgow.co.uk

cybers · Posted: Sun Nov 15, 2009 10:28 am Post subject:

PMSL Criminal just criminal

http://www.thesun.co.uk/scotsol/h...ris-speaks-about-their-lives.html
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Lone Groover · Posted: Sun Nov 15, 2009 10:44 am Post subject:

Doorstop · Posted: Sun Nov 15, 2009 10:53 am Post subject:

You drink in Partick don't you LG mate?

I'd have thought you were regularly surrounded by Dum-Dums.

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james73 · Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2009 10:17 pm Post subject:

CD player production ends at Linn (BBC)

A manufacturer of hi-fi systems has sounded what it said could be the death knell
of the compact disc player.

Linn Products has become the first manufacturer to announce it will give up
on CDs from the start of next year. Instead, the niche company, based in East
Renfrewshire, will focus on producing digital streaming equipment.

The firm, which makes systems costing from £2,500 to more than £100,000,
said discerning customers recognised the superior quality of digital streaming.
Yet it continues to make turntables for vinyl records, as there remains a demand
for the quality of sound compression offered by older record technology.

Linn, which has its own small record label, foresees a move to what it calls
Studio Master Quality material, available for download.

Digital players

The shift from CD players to digital music streamers has been very recent. It
was only during 2009 that the digital players outsold Linn's CD players. The
newer technology allows digital streaming through other operating systems,
including home computers and networking throughout homes.

Gilad Tiefenbrun, managing director of Linn Products, said: "Our customers
have fast recognised the limitations of CD players and in the age of home networking,
people now want better control of their music and the ability to enjoy it in any
room of their home.

"CD players no longer belong in the specialist domain."

The company reckons that the CD format will continue to be useful as a way
of recording and storing music. It claims that a CD recorded onto a hard disk
can achieve a higher quality than one played on a CD player.

Falling CD sales

Compact discs began commercial music sales in 1982, replacing the cassette
tape as well as vinyl records. The shift from compact discs to digital downloading
is again changing the music market.

BPI, representing the British recorded music industry, announced last month
that 2009 had already broken last year's record number of legally downloaded
single and individual track sales. Of 117 million sales, nearly 99% were digital
downloads.

But there is a different market for album sales. CD sales continue to dominate,
but their share of the market is sliding. In 2006, there were 154 million album
sales, of which CDs accounted for 151m, and digital for 2.7m.

In 2007, with 138m sales, 131m were CDs and 6.2m were digital.

In 2008, there were 137m album sales, with 123m CDs and 10.3m digital downloads.
Vinyl records, cassettes and other formats accounted for around 300,000.

James H
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cybers · Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2009 12:14 pm Post subject:

I was sure a Missing Cat broke this story on here last year with the launch of the Linn Sneaky

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AlanM · Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2009 1:25 pm Post subject:

You'll probably want to pick up Scotland on Sunday today, it has a photo supplement called the Story of the Clyde, with lots of cracking pictures.
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james73 · Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 11:21 pm Post subject:

Paralysed Belgian misdiagnosed as in coma for 23 years (BBC)

A Belgian man who doctors thought was in a coma for 23 years was conscious
all along, it has been revealed.

Medical staff believed Rom Houben had sunk irretrievably into a coma after
he was injured in a car crash in 1983. The University of Liege doctor who
discovered in 2006 that, although Mr Houben was paralysed, his brain was
working, said the case was not unique.

"I was shouting, but no-one could hear me," Mr Houben, now 46, was quoted
as saying by a German magazine.

According to Der Spiegel, Mr Houben, who can now communicate by using a
special keyboard, has described how his body did not respond when he woke
up after the accident.

'Second birth'

He has also said that he felt powerless as doctors and nurses tried to speak
to him before giving up hope, and that he "dreamt the time away" as the years
passed. It was only in 2006 that a scan revealed that Mr Houben's brain was
in fact almost entirely functioning.

"I will never forget the day they discovered me," Mr Houben was quoted as
saying. "It was like a second birth."

Mr Houben's story was revealed in a paper written by Steven Laureys, a doctor
at Liege University who wrote a recent paper that detailed the case.

In it, Mr Laureys said that in about 40% of cases in which people are classified
as being in a vegetative state, closer inspection reveals signs of consciousness.

James H
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james73 · Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 1:23 pm Post subject:

Ordnance Survey maps to go online (BBC)

Ordnance Survey map data will be freely available online to everybody from
2010, the Government has announced.

The move will allow people to interpret public statistics about crime, health
and education by postcode, local authority or electoral boundary. Currently,
the geographical data is only available free of charge to small scale developers.

Opening it up is key to the success of government plans to free its data via
data.gov.uk, say the site's creators.

"Making all that data available doesn't make much sense without the geography
to tie it all together," Professor Nigel Shadbolt, one of two Information Advisers
to the government, told BBC News.

"Time and place are the two things that make sense of other data. Which hospital,
where, when, for example."

The other adviser is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web. He and Prof
Shadbolt have been tasked with guiding the Making Public Data Public project.

It is a commitment to make a wide range of non-personal data collected by
the government on subjects such as health, crime and education available online
for free in a raw form.

Developers can then use it to create mash-ups - a web page that combines
sets of data to link up results. For example, combining the road traffic accident
statistics of a certain area with the amount of local vehicle thefts could reveal
whether there is a correlation between the two.

James H
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The blinding obvious is what you showed to me.....

james73 · Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 1:30 pm Post subject:

The driverless taxi of the future (BBC)

Welcome to the shape of things to come - the driverless taxi. The world's first
driverless taxis are being installed at Heathrow Airport.

The futuristic vehicles will carry passengers from the business car park into
Terminal Five in less than five minutes. The driverless taxi, or personal rapid
transit, drives itself around a network of guideways using a combination of
systems including laser sensors and computer controls.

The electric vehicles look a bit like the futuristic transport pods used in James
Bond movies. They can carry up to four passengers and their luggage, gently
accelerating up to a speed of 25mph (40kph).

The driverless cars are the brainchild of Professor Martin Lowson from Bristol
who has been developing the system for 15 years. He sees it as a possible
solution to our congested city centres.

There is still a lot of work to be done before the vehicles are available to the
public but the Heathrow system has just started testing with passengers.

James H

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