Cllr. Gavin Ayling

It’s too early to say whether the police have made another foul-up or whether one brother shot the other.

What is certain, though, is that the BBC has no idea how to abide by their responsibility not to incite unrest. Last night the BBC spoke of the need to consider the concerns of “the community” when making arrests.

Previously, I had sat in disbelief as local residents spoke, not of their shock that their neighbour might have been developing or planning to deploy chemical weapons, but that the police raided their friend’s house.

Clearly the local people should stop thinking of themselves as victims of police-oppression and the BBC should stop telling people that there is some relevance to the race of any fundamentalists involved:

Making sure relations between the police and young people in the area do not break down could be their main task.

Source

Race relations and crime, while they have statistical relevance, should not be part of an impartial broadcast. The apparent victimisation of the only community that has created suicide bombers is laughable.

I pre-ordered the Samsung Q1 and it arrived on 1 June!

Now I’ve had a couple of days with it I thought I’d give you some of my thoughts.

First, the software seems to be very accomplished. Even though it is a new product and a new type of product, the software seems fit for purpose and, in some cases, beyond my expectations. The program launcher and bluetooth capabilities, particularly, should be mentioned in this respect.

One of the best features is the quick-booting copy of Windows XP which can be started by pushing the power key in the ‘wrong’ direction. It allows media on the PC to be opened without having to wait for Windows XP to start. Of course what I really want is to be able to quickly turn on the PC and surf to a website without having to wait for Windows, but that’s asking a bit much!

Windows Journal, which comes with Windows XP Tablet Edition, has some genuinely amazing character recognition capabilities — it could recognise my barely legible scawl making only one mistake when I used the ‘+’ sign in a sentence. Also as part of this version of Windows is a voice recognition system which, while I haven’t yet trained it much, doesn’t look like it’s a massive improvement on Via Voice ‘98 which is the last piece of voice recognition software I used.

The Celeron M processor is nippy — much nippier than I would have expected and the graphics card, while the screen is in its native 800×400 resolution, has no trouble redrawing the screen. I’ve added Office 2003 with OneNote and they run as quickly, if not more quickly, than on my 3.2Ghz home PC.

Networking is painless:
- First I connected to a Wireless LAN in my best friend’s house which uses 802.11g and that was great — fast and a sinch to set up.
- Then I went home and did the same on my own 802.11b network — not really a passable speed when using the network drives, but more than fast enough for internet access.
- Then I plugged a network cable directly into the hub — worked straight away
- Then I connected to the internet through my 3G mobile and, following some excellent customer service from Vodafone, I was connected at 112.5kbps — with no effort at all!

I then tried to make a phone call and discovered that the PC was providing bluetooth services too — it didn’t stop my Nokia 6680 from working, but it gave me an alternative way of making calls.

Finally, on connectivity, it also provides a network-by-bluetooth option for those times when you’re not near Wifi or a mobile telephone.

Now for the bad news:

- To right click you hold the cursor still and, while this works excellently 95% of the time, when you try to right click on items in the start menu, the decide to open instead.
- The battery lasts for the 3.5 hours advertised. Not really long enough for a day on the move (I bought it knowing this, so no complaints from me).
- Dabs.com promised a free keyboard and organiser neither of which has arrived with anything so much as a “it’s on its way” and the website says “order status: completed”. We’ll be having words. If they respond satisfactorily, then I shall let you all know here!

Finally, if you read the reviews out there, people ask “Who’s it for?”. Well I’ll be using it to take notes at work and at Council and I’ll be using it to play games on long train journeys and for surfing the internet from the sofa at home. So there!