• Microsoft’s new Windows Live calendar released. It just stinks. I review it today.
• HP bails out of the digital camera business. Look for a sale!
• What’s a boffin anyway?
• Sony looking into holographic recording after all.
• Cranky Geeks like the Google phone.
• Advertising revenues to double online.
• The e-Jihad predicted to be a flop.
Click to listen:
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I had never heard the term “boffin” before, but Wikipedia’s got a good article about it.
Why is the player now QuickTime? I will not install it on my PC. It has never worked well on Windows.
A “boffin” is British slang for a scientist, techie, etc.
Quicktime for XP, or Vista?? YUCK….
Im on win 2000, and WONT upgrade…
WHY the F…Did you go with quick time…AT LEASt do WMA..
I think the first time I ever heard the word boffin was in “No Highway in the Sky”, a 1951 movie with James Stewart, Glynis Johns and Marlene Dietrich — a great flick!
I had no problem playing the mp3, both from the blog listing and the URL. I never use that URL, though — it’s WAY too ugly! I go to the URL listed with John’s other columns and shows on the left side of the page. I always thought the reason it plays in QuickTime on my system was some relic from when I set it up three years ago…
#5, maybe I should upgrade to 2000; 98 is getting a little long in the tooth and ragged around the edges….
I tried both browsers with Live Calendar. The IE definately works better but you have to try two or three times with either browser to do “ajaxy” stuff. The Ajax libs are AJAX.NET (nee Atlas) which always work better on IE. For example, drag and drop sort of works but is slower.
Things generally require two or three steps more to do anything than in Google Calendar. Two clicks to start adding an appointment for example – and you have to click small links. Popups informing you that you’ve just done something so extra clicks to make those go away. Extra web page wizards to to simple things. Fill in several fields where one would do.
It’s also missing major features. Notification is lame. I’m not sure if you can invite people to a meeting – it’s not apparent. And (my favourite) if you use the search feature at the top of the calendar page it doesn’t search your calendar but does a Live Search of the web.
It was designed by a committee in meetings with middle managers sitting around answering emails and approving features at the same time.
Quicktime??? Really? This is very disappointing.
So is apple your new sponsor?
What did you do? When I open the main page in FireFox the tech5report autoplays and there is no control visible. Can’t kill it. Add my “no” vote to Quicktime.
Very sad. I listed religiously to every word John had to say since the pod cast started, but alas no more. Deeply disappointed in you John. Not too late to change. I think you are going to loose a lot of listeners on this blog.
Using Firefox with Quicktime Alternative 7.2, and I get the “missing plugin” banner. No way I’ll install the genuine QT.
LOL, It works fine in Vista, using IE, and the embedded player on this website. I’m just sayin……….
QUICKTIME?!?
Vommmmiiiitttttttt………….Retch, Hack, cough, poop…..fart……
I heard it fine on Firefox on Linux.
I don’t understand why John didn’t just look ‘boffin’ up if he didn’t know what the word meant. Here is the OED :
‘boffin (______). slang.
[Etym. unknown. Numerous conjectures have been made about the origin of the word but all lack foundation.]
1. An ‘elderly’ naval officer.
1941 C. Graves Life Line 143 Their ages are as youthful as air crews. Thirty-two is considered the maximum… In H.M.S. Wasps’ Nest, anyone aged thirty-two is officially a ‘boffin’. There is even a song about them… ‘He glares at us hard and he scowls, For we’re the Flotilla Boffins.’
1942 ‘Sea-Wrack’ Random Soundings 71 We were ‘Old Boffins’, the Pay. and I. He had been in the Bank of England for many years, and in the R.N.R. almost as long… I hadn’t been to sea in a professional capacity for some eighteen years.
2. A person engaged in ‘back-room’ scientific or technical research. Hence
‘boffin(e)ry, boffins collectively; also, the activity of a boffin.
The term seems to have been first applied by members of the Royal Air Force to scientists working on radar.
1945 Times 15 Sept. 5/4 A band of scientific men who performed their wartime wonders at Malvern and apparently called themselves ‘the boffins’.
1948 ‘N. Shute’ No Highway iii. 61 ‘What’s a boffin?’ ‘The man from Farnborough. Everybody calls them boffins. Didn’t you know?’.. ‘Why are they called that?’.. ‘Because they behave like boffins, I suppose.’
1948 Lord Tedder in A. P. Rowe One Story of Radar p. vii, I was fortunate in having considerable dealings in 193840 with the ‘Boffins’ (as the Royal Air Force affectionately dubbed the scientists).
1952 Picture Post 30 Aug. 20/1 Only a backroom boffin out of touch with the classroom could hold this pious belief.
1954 Economist 19 June Suppl. 6/3 The graduate from research–roughly..the boffin of industry.
1957 R. Watson-Watt Three Steps to Victory xxxiii. 201 The proud title of Boffin was first conferred on a few radar scientists by Royal Air Force officers with whom they worked in close co-operation… I am not quite sure about the true origins of this name of Boffin. It certainly has something to do with an obsolete type of aircraft called the Baffin, something to do with that odd bird, the Puffin; I am sure it has nothing at all to do with that first literary Back Room Boy, the claustrophiliac Colonel Boffin.
1958 Times Lit. Suppl. 14 Feb. 83/3 In one of those diverting interludes..he writes an anatomy of Boffinry.
1958 Economist 25 Oct. 298/1 The unexpected success of the boffins’ conference at Geneva..ending in agreement on the feasibility of controlling a nuclear test suspension.
1960 J. MacLaren-Ross Until Day viii. 132, I was engaged in some boffinery in a blasted back-room unit.’
Agree completely with the Calendar comments. Swing and a miss. Ajax Smajax – there’s other much more basic problems with this Calendar. The one most irritating to me is that an all day appointment displays as starting at 12:00am – What’s up with that?
And why can’t I sync or view the calendar with a mobile device?
If their results are so poor why even bother? Sometimes it seems that they do something just to be able to say they did it.
Sorry about the Quick Time fiasco. We were just trying to tweak things so that there was a volume control on the player. The old one is back.
Quicktime is probably the only turd even Mac fans hate.