Posts by Neill Mitchell 482 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Mar 2007
Cockbush Avenue in Hertford, UK
Cum Cum Hill at Little Berkhampstead, Herts
The latter was removed for a while after a posh new golf club opened at the top of it. However, it's loss was clearly mourned as the sign re-appeared about a year later. Raised a little cheer in our car as we drove past.
I guess any golf club member with a iPhone will be getting lost shortly then.
Shipping devices with Android 1.5 with continued failed promises to provide 2.X upgrades is just hopeless.
Unfortunately Archos have a very poor reputation for providing their paying customers with new firmware. Worse still, they make claims about future upgrades that they often renege on. For example, the tech spec page for the Archos 32 is just misleading. It currently ships with 1.5, which they don't mention at all. They list it as a Froyo device and then in the small print talk about October. With their track record don't hold your breath.
"It's absolutely untrue to say you're locked into Amazon's closed ebook world with the Kindle. It's very easy to convert ePub or any other format into mobi format"
You cannot convert DRM'd ePub files with Calibre! So you are tied in to Amazon. How many times does this have to be said!
"I've seen both the 350 and the 650, but there's no way I'd say either device's screen was as good as a printed book."
Are we talking paperbacks or nice high quality hardbacks here? I'd honestly say that my 650 is easier to read in low light than a book. In fact, I tried the paperback edition of a book next to the 650 version the other night in bed and was pleasantly surprised how much better the electronic version was.
You can also zoom the font of course and you don't have the bother of trying to hold a book open to read both sides whilst lying down.
One other cool thing for the brave is to flash the device with Boroda's custom firmware that allows you to change the fonts. I now run with Liberations Sans and books are a joy to read.
The Kindle does not have a touch screen. The touchscreen GUI is really rather good. I guess you are paying for this and the sleeker design if you choose the Sony.
Also remember that the Kindle does not support ePub (and Calibre cannot convert DRM'd ePubs). So you are tied to Amazon and cannot borrow ePub books from UK libraries.
Perhaps the 650 is different, but one of the first things I did was drop a PDF of the London Tube map on mine and it worked fine.
Your pictures of the screen don't do it justice by the way El Reg. The 650 is the first reader I've owned where the screen is finally better than a printed book IMHO.
Finally, the lack of wifi. I guess it's a choice Sony have made to maximise battery life with a decent form factor and weight. I sync mine once a day and have never thought I'm missing out on wireless connectivity. Sony's are primarily book reading devices, and they perform this task very well.
"If Kindle supported ePub they would kill the Sony readers stone dead."
Unless you like touch screen interfaces. The Sony 650's is fab.
Plus I don't have to worry about specific vendor lock in. One thing not mentioned about ePub conversion with Calibre is that it obviously can't convert DRM'd files. So it can't convert Waterstone or WH Smith downloads to Kindle. It also can't convert downloads from UK libraries for the same reason. So unless you go all illegal and somehow strip off the DRM., you're Amazon only with Kindle. Not to mention that the AZW format is not as sophisticated as ePub. Try comparing, say, history books with illustrations and tables between the two readers.
I'll stick with a reader that supports the dominant standard thanks.
£200 buys you about 20 hardback books from Amazon, even fewer from Waterstones. Try carrying them all onto a train, let alone trying to read such a heavy tome whilst standing next to irritable commuters on a packed train.
My only gripe with eBooks is the likes of Waterstones selling the file for more than the printed hardback and then selling you exactly the same file 3 months later for more than the paperback price. The publishing world just can't handle ebooks yet.
Even more amusing is my local library. You can now download eBooks, but they only have one copy (in some cases for the whole of London). So you have to reserve them. Worse still, you book it out for two weeks and there is no way to hand it back early.
Luckily there are loads of free books to keep me amused.
The price of the Apple and Samsung devices is just lunacy possibly? Don't forget Apple fleece their customers with a 43% mark up. Samsung and all the others have also got their snouts in the trough.
How do you know this device is rubbish? It may make a perfectly decent PMP at a price that these class of devices used to sell for before the phone manufacturers screwed the pricing model.
Well, this is all down to inflated phone prices. If their Galaxy S phone (pretty much the same guts) is currently selling for around £450, they are going to have to sell the Tab for more or their phone punters (and investors) will say "now hang on a minute".
No way will this sell in quantity at this sort of price. Crazy phone prices have come back to bite them in the ass. Silly sods.
HTC and Samsung used to undercut the competition, now they've got a good chunk of the market they've just joined everyone else at the trough.
When will the bubble burst I wonder. This is unsustainable, especially now everyone is in 18month and 2 year contracts.
If they actually throttle the speed then it's not so bad. However, if they continue to achieve their "throttling" as they currently do, namely by massively increasing the packet latency, then this will be a disaster. The time I triggered the "throttling" (after downloading a Linux distro I hasten to add) my link was totally unusable until it lifted due to the massive packet latency they'd applied. 75% speed cut my arse.
As someone else said, it's nice to hear this via a news website rather than Virgin themselves. They are very bad at publicising their usage policy. It's not mentioned when you sign up. I only got directed to their policy web page after phoning them up about it.
Good news about the upload speed increase though. All providers rely on Joe Public ignorance about MBit/sec versus MByte/sec. 512MBit or 64MByte/sec theoretical upload is actually pretty crap when uploading home movies etc.
Once again they are just trying to prove to the shareholders that they are doing something about their monstrous debt.
In reality of course, the money saved is a drop in the ocean. Worse still, the business will inevitably lack vital skills and it will be the paying customer who ends up getting a crap service. Result is a poorer business. Why do these people not learn? Total knee jerk short term thinking.
"From now on, though, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers."
Now any committee is usually bad enough, but a committee of developers fills me with absolute dread. Let's hope at least of these developers cares about usability or we're in for a geek fest of bad UI decisions. Let's also hope they resist the urge to rewrite vast swathes of code in an attempt to achieve some ridiculous code purity goal. See this time and time again unfortunately and it usually ends with a stagnated project.
They know the poor sodding company on the receiving end may go bust if they choose to fight to the end. Even if they have insurance, all their subsequent premiums are going to sky rocket. This is going to cost whoever covers them a bomb.
This is just another example of bully boy tactics from Apple. Shameful.
The trouble is that all the mobile phone manufacturers have got used to the operators subsidising the users. So they all upped their prices to truly ridiculous levels. It's all skewed to hell.
It's all going to collapse like a pack of cards eventually. Especially now consumers are being tied into 2 year contracts. The market is shrinking spectacularly and these greedy bastards wonder why.
Let's face it this thing is a glorified PMP, but call it a phone and they more than double the price. Apple does the same with the Touch and iPhone. How much can a radio cost (even with certification costs factored in)?
It's been proven with some hard and fast data that this is directly attributable to the iPad?
Perhaps an ongoing worldwide recession has also dented sales? Perhaps the netbook market has just been flooded? Perhaps the steady creeping up of netbook prices for little additional functionality has affected sales? Loads of factors at play here.
I love the way the article says "low-cost laptops". I don't call £429-£699 cheap!
I think most people are dismissing this device because it is Android 1.5, resistive screen and made by Archos who are notorious for releasing barely functional buggy code on their long suffering customers. They are also notorious for dropping all support and updates for a device when a new incarnation is released. I bet you will never see V2.X for this device.
The other thing this review didn't mention is that the multimedia playback his handled by the old Linux OS. So there is a huge delay when switching to media functions as it boots up the other OS. It's a complete botch.
Goodness knows why Archos has gone down the Android route when the Linux OS was perfectly functional. Especially as they clearly have insufficient development resource to support Android updates. They obviously can't even port the 5 IT's V1.6 to this new device, how rubbish is that?
At least they are shipping a power adaptor with this one though ;)
>>What's that old phrase by Brendan Behan?
>>"There is no such thing as bad publicity."
Whilst this may be true for celebrities, it is most certainly not true in consumer electronics.
Antenna problems or not, this uproar has uncovered a strong backlash about Apple and it's methods. Unprecedented numbers of people are wanting to see this Apple fail on this.
Vista aside, I can't remember a time when so many people are taking such utter delight in a company releasing a flawed product. If I were Jobs, I'd be more worried about that than the actual phone problem. Yes, no doubt someone will say that they are selling these by the million. That might currently be true. But to quote another well used phrase - past performance is no guarantee of future growth. Apple's arrogant handling of this has dented the brand.
I take heart in one way. This is an example where clumsy spin is failing to quell the issue. Perhaps people are finally getting wise to the bullshit methods being employed as a matter of course these days.
"Upgrading these systems to IE 8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users.”
Weeks is not "a very large operation", especially in Government I.T. projects.
For goodness sake stop making excuses and just get on with it. You've had long enough. Sticking with an unsupported 9 year old browser that is open to exploits is simply negligent. How long before we get another data theft scandal?
It's based on the venerable MOBI format and lacks many of the features that the more modern ePub format offers. It's really just HTML with limited CSS support. Amazon don't seem to be investing in improving it either.
It's shocking that Amazon are releasing a device that does not support the ePub format.
If you do buy a Kindle you should definitely checkout Calibre. It does a pretty good job of converting just about any format to any other. It does clever stuff like convert ePub SVG graphics into JPEG that the Kindle can render.
Come on, par for the course and all that. Don't let this thread down! I'll kick off.
Some people buy Bugatti Veyron's because they like the craftsmanship that has gone into it. Is is a practical car - no, but boy is it damn sexy! Or you could buy a Ford Fiesta.
There. Pointless enough to stop further ones? Good.
I think we'll now see the return rate go up. People were waiting to see what Apple would do. Now that the answer is arrogant bullshit a lot more people will probably vote with their feet.
I for one would not like to encase my expensive sexy new phone in a crappy strip of plastic just so it can reliably make calls.
You often see the argument "well, most people put their phones in cases" Yeah, slip cases that they take them out of to make calls and show their gadget off to their friends. The iPhone 4 bumper is effectively a permanent addition.
It will be interesting to see if the number of returns now shoots up. Jobs was saying there can't be a problem because they have had a tiny number of returns. This could simply be down to the fact that people were waiting to see what Apple would do.
Now customers realise the "fix" is bullshit, the return rate will probably shoot up. I can also see people getting upset because they can't have the official Apple condom instead of the 3rd party one being offered when the stock rapidly runs out (if it hasn't already).
Yes, but Landrover aren't sticking their customers with a 43% mark up. They'd go bust if they did.
There's also a helluva difference between the price of a car and the price of a laptop. If you can afford a Landrover (assuming you don't mean a 1978 rust bucket) then you aren't exactly strapped for cash. However, a Joe Public purchaser of a laptop might stretch themselves a couple of hundred quid. So the analogy doesn't really stack up.
What is it with Apple users and dodgy car analogies? You see at least one every time.
Unfortunately too many people are daft enough to pay Apple's 43% mark up for pretty design.
Apple doesn't have to be price competitive whilst this situation persists.
Yes the machines are very nice to use. Yes the OS is very good. However, these arguments are no excuse for a such a stupendously greedy pricing policy. Apple even made a smug comment about their mark up when they published their last results. Like they were so clever and cool that they had achieved 43%. It's not cool, it's kicking their loyal customers in the teeth whilst stealing their wallet.
It's also a major barrier for potential customers.
Only two USB ports, no HDMI and bloody DisplayPort? Imagine the score and the comments if this was an HP being reviewed at this price point and spec.
Whilst having secure payments systems is obviously a good thing, the banks are shamelessly cashing in on this by insisting on performing expensive audits before they'll talk to you. This, of course, leads on to the bank hooking you into using their costly systems because you fail their audit.
"Through adoption of a best practice approach, companies can actually save themselves money in the longer term, and may even avoid the need to hire an expensive consultant who may not actually tell their board anything extra that their IT department doesn't know already,"
Sums up the "big guy" mentality at work here. For many thousands of small Internet shops, the I.T. department in question is probably the wife or brother in-law who won't know already. High short term costs can kill these kind of businesses.
The backup to USB drive feature is seriously buggy. You cannot interrupt a backup and then have it pick up from where it left off. It just starts all over again.
Much worse still, if you have a scheduled backup, but the drive is not connected when it starts then next time you do a backup it also starts from scratch. It also deletes all the files of any previously successful backups! Not good.
Finally, unless your external drive is formatted ext3, it will take literally days to backup just a couple of hundred gigs. Couple that with not being able to restart failed or cancelled backups from where they left off and you are in big trouble unless you can leave it on 24x7 for days at a time with the USB drive connected. Kind of negates the usefulness of having an offsite USB drive backup.
One other gripe. It starts thumb nailing any pictures you put on the drive. This took two weeks (yes you heard me right) to complete with 2500 pictures. The thumb nailer process burns all the CPU, so whilst it is going on the transfers rates are right down. The only way round this is to manually ssh into the NAS and stop the thumb nailer service manually.
Shame, because it's basically a nice box.
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