It was just a practice run for next year.
Posts by Dick Emery
841 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2008
Earth escapes obliteration by comet
Google indoor Streetview images go live
Disk drive crisis: Economists are terrible weathermen
I would hope this is taken as a lesson learned by the manufacturers not to put all their eggs in one basket so to speak. I don't mind paying a little extra in order to ensure supply meets demand. This shortage malarkey is just silly. I feel like there are leaves on the train lines again.
There is possibly an issue with getting the goods from the factory to the cargo ships and not flooding of the factories or lack of workers due to the floods.
Anyhow as soon as I heard I ordered a new Seagate 2TB HDD off Ebay where prices can't go up as quickly.
Apple's iPod: ten years old
I have a iRiver H140 which I rarely power up with Rockbox on it. Too bulky and heavy. I also have a first generation iPod nano which is still my main workhorse. Also running Rockbox on it. I have a cheap Chinese iPod Nana v2 knockoff I use in bed for distraction from chronic tinnitus (a side effect for the iPod generation).
Samsung Galaxy Nexus comes up short on sub-pixels
Thai floods flush storage channel clean
World+Dog goes bonkers for iPhone 4S
Samsung, Google to out Ice Cream Sarnie next week
Sixth of Britain's cellphones have traces of poo on them
Belkin Conserve
Ten... earphones for mobiles
Bluetooth
Bluetooth uses compression and degrades the sound. This test is about best sound quality and that requires a wire (unless you use Creatives propietary wireless system that few others support). Also it's for phones and for phones it requires and inbuilt microphone.
'Ten... earphones for mobiles'
Don't you guys bloody read?
Spotify 'sold soul' to boy king Zuckerberg
RIM: 'Faulty switch took out faulty-switch-proof network'
Old Napster guy’s fan letter to Spotify upstart
Ten... Androids to outshine the iPhone 4S
Five... great iPhone racers
Anonymous hacktivists turn rapper on YouTube, iTunes
Amazon revamps E Ink Kindle line
Apple loses bid to trademark 'multi-touch'
Brits not keen on 3D, reveals poll
New flash RAM tech promises 99% energy drop
Apple staff in UK told to cancel holiday in early October
Rogue toilet takes out Norfolk server
Acid3 browser test drops DOM tripper-upper
Lancs shale to yield '15 years' of gas for UK
If fuel prices continue rising like they are doing the greenies will hopefully get shouted down by the majority. The problem has always been that minority groups have too much sway in what gubberment does. They are usually the noisiest too. It's also hard to know whether fuel providers will buy from a local provider and sell it on cheaper than they currently do. Mores the likely they will carry on profiteering claiming they must invest in infrastructure to meet the demands and any savings get passed along to their shareholders instead. Call me pessimistic but that's how I see it panning out. The gubberment needs to put the boot in but they won't.
OnLive pushes game stream service to UK punters
if they can get this working smoothly on Android I can see a lot of potential. The problem has always been the hardware being underspecced for games. I wish there was a decent video streaming service in the UK for the latest movies and TV shows. No Netflix equivalent over here yet. On a sidenote I noticed Disney are now offering a stream anywhere service for anyone who has purchased one of their movies and provides a unique unlock code from the disc.
Samsung may try to block next iPhone in Europe too
EU recording copyright extension 'will cost €1bn'
The job of every company is to keep the money flowing into 'their' pockets and not into anybody elses whether it be for the greater good or not. That's capitalism for you. The copyrite should ALWAYS remain with the creator until their death and even then may be passed on to their relatives. The problem comes from the shitty contracts artists are required to sign in order to get their material out there. The record companies take away the artists right to take their wares to another company for a very very long time indeed. Really the shoe should be on the other foot. The companies should only own the right to reproduce such works for a limited period where they can reasonably expect some profit to be made. If a work does not make any profit during that period the right to take it elsewhere where it may make a profit should fall back to the artist. See why some artists have taken the record companies to court over this very issue.
Samsung preps anti-iPhone 5 lawsuit before it's even out
Hackers break SSL encryption used by millions of sites
Netflix: How to completely screw up
Dyson spouts hot air
Deep inside Intel's 'Ivy Bridge' chip
Malware burrows deep into computer BIOS to escape AV
Ten years after the Twin Towers: What's the Reg angle?
Seagate GoFlex Satellite 500GB wireless hard drive
Seagate pulls out the biggest hard one in the industry
moving parts are so yesteryear
I'm growing weary of spinning platters. They cost more to run, have heat and reliability issues and occupy too much space.
SSD's are the future and for files that change infrequently are ideal. I wish they would me 1TB SSD's with low read/write speeds for the price of a 1TB platter disk rather than concentrate on speed and keeping the price artificially high.
CERN: 'Climate models will need to be substantially revised'
Hey, Music Industry. You're suing the wrong people
Devaluation in a capitalist world
What I see here is only what is the tip of a very large iceberg. In the 'good ol' days' the main driving factor for technological advancement were wars. These days however technology is driven by consumerism (cAKA capitalism). It's a keeping up with the Jones's society. This has led us all towards the brink of world financial bankruptcy. Everybody has been living beyond their means on loans they could never really afford to repay. Including the banks themselves.
The iWants and iHaves have forced a burden onto the iNeeds and iCan't afford's of this world. Market forces are showing that the type of capitalism pushed by the greedy few does not work. At least not anymore.
Everyone dreams of a better and prosperous future but we are now forced by circumstances built into the very fabric of society to work towards ever higher goals. That nice place to live (A house/flat which is the biggest fininancial drain on our incomes), our childrens upbringing, a car (usually at least two or more because our transport infrastructure is crap), the big screen TV, games consoles, computer and all the other technology pushed upon us. We are now told we must all have an internet connection in order to do things we did not need to do when it did not exist. Many high street chains are closing and only exist souly in the iWorld. Physical objects are beginning to become less tangible as they get converted to bits and bytes in the virtual world.
Now we hit an economic pothole because of all that has gone before and right at the point when physical media such as CD/DVD's etc are really not needed anymore and the companies that existed purely on sales of said physcial media don't understand how to scale it to a digitally connected world. It's a case of futureshock in it's purist form.
Now we have the 'Can't affords rioting and pillaging on the streets and everyone moaning about how the 'yoof' of today has no respect blah blah etc. Well guess what. We all bought this upon ourselves.
I don't entirely blame the media industry. The real blame lies with us. For wanting more than our fair share and for allowing those in power to lead us on with false promises of a better life if you tick this box on the balot paper.
Paris for obvious reasons.
Paris because she knows all about consumerism.
Scientists devise 260GB CD-size glass disc storage tech
Mozilla strokes coders with Firefox 6
HP confirms faster, paler TouchPad tablet
Snap said to show iPhone 5s being stacked by bunnies
Google SHOCK! Snaps up Motorola phone biz for $12.5bn
People don't want tablets, they want iPads
Android is the problem
I have an Asus Transformer with bundled dock. Despite some quality problems (I've had to RMA it twice) it's an OK peice of kit. However the biggest problem is Android itself. Honeycomb was a rush job and it shows. Google even know this which is why there is no source code provided for Honeycomb. They have promised to open the source code for Icecream Sandwich when it arrives later this year. If and when they do that then perhaps we will see some movement as there is a thriving community of developers eager to get their mits on the source and by way of a rooted device this will allow for some interesting developments. Perhaps even innovative ideas will appear.
Google need to get ICS out ther and open the source code.
The other reason the iPad sells so well is because of *ACCESSORIES*
No other manufacturer has as many iThingies as Apple. Asus tried to pull an Apple with their own propietary (and very short) power + USB connector. This has left a bitter taste in many of their customers mouths as they have withheld the charger and connector from being purcahsed seperately (Possibly in order to try and shift more docking keyboards). In fact you still cannot buy the cable seperately and instead have to buy another charger in order to obtain a spare cable.
The sheer dearth of accessories for the Asus Transformer which is one the the better selling Android tablets is mind numbing. Compared to what Apple's third party sellers have out there it's a drop in the ocean.
You buy an iThingie for the whole ecosystem that goes with it. Not just for the item itself.
Until someone comes out with a Android tablet that is universally compatible with a wealth of iPad accessories (which will most likely result in being sued like the Tab) or is good enough to generate a multitude of third party addons of their own they will continue to fail.
Galaxy Tab still legal in the Netherlands
Googorola versus the Android ecosystem
Apple patent disputes Xoom towards Motorola
GE brings holographic storage back from the dead
Optical media heading for the scrapheap
Spinning media is good in one way. It requires no power to store. However if you have a large archive it takes a bit more effort to keep it organised and then you have to go digging for it. HDD's are good and RAID arrays are better. However it takes power to keep it up and running and drive failures are a fact of life. Also we are now having to swtich from IDE to SATA as the interface gets phased out on modern motherboards.
I am looking forward to SSD's becoming larger and cheaper. They take less power, cause less heat and should be much more durable than spinning media. Also RAID should be needed less. Since SSD's being used for storage requires few writes, they should theoretically last a lifetime (assuming there is hardware to read them).
Eventually though we will have a small matchbox sized unit for local storage and everything else stored in the 'cloud'.