* Posts by Craig Vaughton

140 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Apr 2007

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Queen Elizabeth has a soggy bottom: No, the £3.1bn aircraft carrier, what the hell did you think we meant?

Craig Vaughton

Re: There it is...!

Which begs the question... given that HMG requested that spaces were made in the original design to enable CAT/TRAP gear to be installed (just ignore that when they returned to ask how much it would cost they discovered that leaving spaces is one thing, but coming back later to fill said spaces with the actual CAT/TRAP kit to make the ship useful meant a huge bill to cut the ship apart) what would Bae have used to provide power for CAT/TRAP?

US government charges two Chinese spies over jet engine blueprint theft

Craig Vaughton

DECU

The crucial bit the Soviets didn't get hold of was the digital engine management system if I recall. Hence the Tu-144 guzzled even more AVTUR than Concorde did, making it even more inefficient.

Microsoft returns to Valley of Death? Cheap Surface threatens the hardware show

Craig Vaughton

I wonder if this is where Windows 10 running on ARM/Snapdragon 845 comes in? No Intel tax, potentially longer battery life, cooler running and limited to the Windows Store so you can only install ARM vetted applications.

So lets see, a Windows powered iPad but without the depth of App Store, surely a winner.

Whoosh! China shows off J-20 'stealth' fighters and jet drones

Craig Vaughton

F-22?

Not sure I agree the tit looks like an F-22, to me it's more like they borrowed the only Su-37 Berkut they built from Sukhoi and stuck the wings on the normal way round? Maybe their carbon fibre skills aren't quite up to mass produced strengthening for forward sweep?

So, what's happening with LOHAN? Sweet FAA, that's what

Craig Vaughton

Why Not Ask?

What about asking the British National Space Centre and launch from their extensive facility near Leicester?

The sign on the M1 makes me laugh every time I see it. Oh what could have been barring a government with no idea.

iPhone 6s and 6s Plus: Harder, faster and they'll give you a buzz

Craig Vaughton

All S Good

With 2 year contracts, I'd guess most users will be either on a non-S or an S upgrade track, if you get my drift, so I've had 3GS, 4S and latterly 5S. Naturally, my 6S arrived last week and It's a decent step up from the 5S, but as mentioned, 6 users aren't missing much.

Question is, why do they phones keep getting longer? The 5 & 5S were about right length wise, if they'd make a 5/5S sized phone with the 6/6S rounded shape.....can someone tell them that one size doesn't fit all, or in the case of the Plus, doesn't fit anyone's trouser pocket at all! Cargo pants excepted.

If they want an idea for the iPhone 7, could they incorporate diopter adjustment in the display? It might be retina display, I might be able to increase the font size, but without glasses on it's still blurred!

Just ONE THOUSAND times BETTER than FLASH! Intel, Micron's amazing claim

Craig Vaughton

Just imagine...

..if someone could come up with battery technology that delivers advances as big as this claims to do, we'd all be queuing up to buy it.

HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt, put on this tie

Craig Vaughton

Schools?

Are the people running HP ex-UK school teachers? More concerned about the right colour black trousers than actually teaching kids anything useful?

Carry On Computing: Ten stylish laptop bags for him

Craig Vaughton

No SF Bags?

Expensive with the International carriage, (customs duty wasn't bad, it was the glorious Royal Mail who single handedly virtually doubled the price!), but I'd have another bag from Waterfield Designs /SF Bags any day. https://www.sfbags.com

Apple: Fine, we admit it – MacBook Pros suffer wonky GPU crapness

Craig Vaughton

Not the first time

Not the first time Apple have had what looks like the same problem. They were forced to recall and replace motherboards for 2009 pre-unibody MBP with nVidia chipset that cooked itself, but that time nVidia coughed up to do the work.

Mastercard and Visa to ERADICATE password authentication

Craig Vaughton

In the meantime

So until VbV goes, I'll have to keep turning Adbloc Plus off if I'm using Safari on my Mac or keep using Firefox.

It was quite amusing when Safari wouldn't display the VbV screen when you're trying to pay for concert tickets and the timer on the main screen is counting down! Quickly re-enters all data into Firefox session, finally gets tickets paid confirmation, then spends an hour or so working out why Safari didn't work in the first place.

How the FLAC do I tell MP3s from lossless audio?

Craig Vaughton

May The Source Be With You*

Unless you're paying huge sums for actual hi-fi headphones, as opposed to relatively huge sums to walk round wearing a mediocre fashion statement (sorry Beats users) or Bose, then I really doubt you can tell between FLAC and MP3.

But sat in the comfort of your own home, that's a different matter. As others have said, at least with FLAC the data is all there for a time when you can either afford something good enough to extract it (at the minute start with a Naim Uniti and work upwards) or when something new comes along to use it to the full.

With MP3 though and CD for that matter (the data is there but 99% of CD players can't extract it fast enough and decode it real time), the "missing" bits you may not be able to hear affect the room you're listening in, feed their resonance or echo or whatever into the music you can hear and hence how your ears hear the rest of the music. Another reason to make friends with your hi-fi dealer and borrow or demo speakers in your home.

*You have to be old enough to remember adverts for the Linn Sondek LP12

Chromebooks to break out of US schools: Netbook 2.0 comeback not just for children

Craig Vaughton

Re: Cheap Windows PCs with Bing

Because unless you buy Windows 8.1 Pro or Enterprise, the facility to join a domain isn't there, same as Win 7. I can't see Microsoft supplying 8.1 Pro with a $/£300 laptop, when the standalone license for Pro is £160 on its own or £85 as an upgrade from 8.1 Basic.

Google Maps adds all UK public transport timetables

Craig Vaughton

Pointless

Waste of time for Sheffield's bus service, there's a timetable, it changes occasionally after they've "established passenger patterns", but the end result is the same; stand at the bus stop and hope.

The trams generally run to time, but rather cleverly don't go where most of the people live and are only useful to students as they pass the university and Meadowhall if you want all the shops that the city centre doesn't have (so everything aside from John Lewis). As for calling it South Yorkshire Supertram, that's only because Sheffield is in South Yorkshire, it doesn't mean the tram goes outside the boundaries of Sheffield.

STRIPPED DOWN and EXPOSED: Business kit from the good old days

Craig Vaughton
Mushroom

Missing something

Other than the respirators being useless without the active filter that attaches to the hole on the front...

I don't suppose you found some loose doors stacked up in the same room as the drawers with the respirators in, when you've pretty obvious you've got a full complement attached in the relevant doorways, possibly unfilled sandbags and definitely pamphlets labelled "Protect and Survive"?

Are you for reel? How the Compact Cassette struck a chord for millions

Craig Vaughton
Thumb Up

To the moon and back?

I daren't think how many miles I did between home and which ever RAF station I was stationed at the time were accompanied by the scatter of cassettes on the passenger seat / floor / actually in the box. Certainly enough to know exactly which track on which tape was where the tape had stretched with customary "fall in audio quality".

Thank you Phillips for helping provide the soundtrack some very happy days.

Nasty BOFHses. It burns us! It burns...

Craig Vaughton

I'm so glad I wasn't sat at my keyboard with a mouthful of lunch, as is usual for reading BOFH. Saved at least another keyboard.

Fantastic!

Love in an elevator.... testing mast: The National Lift Tower

Craig Vaughton
Thumb Up

Now that's a Tower of Terror!

Disney's isn't a patch on this...

The bunker at the end of the world - in Essex

Craig Vaughton
Mushroom

Pity

We could do with a real "Threads" in Sheffield city centre now. We'd get rid of the useless council and run down shopping area in one fail swoop!

Murdoch hate sparks mass bitchin', rapid evacuation from O2, BE

Craig Vaughton
Thumb Up

An El Reg survey?

Come on El reg, all these people looking for a new ISP, surely its time for some investigative journalism and find us poor soon to be ex-O2/Be customers a new ISP with the same values as we've been used to?

Totally unlimited broadband, really helpful support when needed, speeds as fast as BT's Victorian copper string can cope with and better still, not owned by a megalomaniac!

Sheffield ISP: You don't need a whole IPv4 address to yourself, right?

Craig Vaughton
WTF?

Sheffield ISP

You mean that wholly owned subsidiary of BT?

O2 refuses to deny plans to offload home broadband product

Craig Vaughton
WTF?

Planned Migration

Be have been superb, there again anything after Tiscali wouldn't have been hard, but they've genuinely been excellent.

If this comes to pass then it will be time to move and like a lot of other commentators here, the big question is where?

Might be time to try one of the smaller local companies in South Yorkshire running off "Digital Region", all offering high speed off newly laid fibre to cab. Or if desperation sets in, try VM as we had their cable when it was Telewest. Just hope VM made sure Telewest staff took their horses with them...

All your audio, video kit is about to become OBSOLETE

Craig Vaughton
Mushroom

What's New?

They've been saying my audio kit is obsolete for years, but strangely the demand for the the black round things to play on is rising.

As for Super HD TV, makes no odd how good the picture is, the content will still be 90% crap.

Where's the grumpy old man icon when you need one?

Slideshow: A History of the Smartphone in 20 Handsets

Craig Vaughton
Coat

Palm 600

Palm Treo 600 as the title, with a photo of a Treo 650? I'll get my coat.

I had a 600, 650s and two 680s, all great phones, though a tad heavy in your pocket! Used to love PalmOS and Graffiti, despite a few glitches they never really fixed. Shame HP bought Palm and WebOS got lost somewhere along the way.

Vote NOW for the vilest Bond villain

Craig Vaughton

Obvious

Has to be Trevelyan, he's a Blades fan....

New broadband minister snubs 'ugly' fibre cabinet gripes

Craig Vaughton
WTF?

Locally

Getting the boxes in is one thing, getting anyone back to cable them up seems to be another! They've planted a string of these around us in part of Sheffield, but that was the last we saw of any activity.

Old men who use computers less likely to get dementia

Craig Vaughton
Terminator

First the good news

So using a computer once I retire will reduce my chances of dementia, great stuff.

Sadly, having worked with the bloody things for 20+ years already, by the time I'm supposed to retire I'll already be sat in a chair drooling and rocking to myself!

Apple: You'd want hi-fi streamage from us, not poor-people Wi-Fi audio

Craig Vaughton
Thumb Down

re: Digital to Analog?

You've got to do DAC somewhere, less see you feed a digital signal to a pair of speakers.

Dell airdrops military-grade data-centre-in-a-crate

Craig Vaughton
Black Helicopters

Not for UK Forces

No good for any of the UK armed forces, doesn't fit in the back of a Land Rover. We might have one of those spare, if we can find a driver who's not been seconded to somewhere G4S haven't screwed up!

Black helicopters - we've probably scrapped those too!

Bill Gates: iPad is OK, but what Apple really needs is a SURFACE

Craig Vaughton

3 Words

Gate, Horse, Bolted

BMW, Toyota to build fuel cells for sports cars

Craig Vaughton
Unhappy

Re: Why on earth

BMW diesels may top MPG leagues, but those are created following slightly artificial EU enforced rules. Toyota's road figures tend to be closer to the official test figures, or better. A fact I didn't appreciate until it was too late!

WD beams in 802.11n Wi-Fi stations

Craig Vaughton
FAIL

Time Capsule

Why would you buy one of these if it's dearer than an actual Time Capsule? Well at least at the prices quoted.

Strong ARM: The Acorn Archimedes is 25

Craig Vaughton
Thumb Up

25 Years...NOOooooooo

I can't believe its 25 years, feels like 25 minutes.

I remember talking to the owner of a little computer shop in Stamford near where we lived at the time and who had the A310s in when they first came out. He said one of his customers bought one to replace an Acorn Electron he used to help run his business. He said the chap came back in a few days after he'd bought it and told him he'd transferred the application he was using (sorry, brain needs a defrag, no idea what it was) from the Elk to the Arch and ran it as normal. He went off to make a cuppa and came back, with the Arch claiming it had finished. He thought he'd done something wrong so checked it all out, but his results were all there. The surprise was the Elk used to take all night to do the same processing!

Lytro light field camera

Craig Vaughton
Coat

Focusing

"struggle with the finer points of photography"

Since when has focusing been one of photography's finer points? It's either in focus or its not and then its simply blurred. The Lytro simply lets you make the decision of the focal point after you've taken the photo.

I'd guess the Lytro will appeal to women, means they can change their mind after the event....

Lenovo readies Yoga Ultrabook-cum-tablet for Blighty

Craig Vaughton
FAIL

How much?

Sorry, at £1200 any laptop I'd buy would say MacBook Pro on it! I don't care if it doesn't have a screen that folds to make a tablet.

Better still 13" MacBook Air and £100 change.

Mega-star HD 10180 could have more planets than the Sun

Craig Vaughton
Devil

Bode's Law

Assuming this to be accurate, is the end result similar to that of the Babel fish? "and god disappeared in a puff of logic"

Chelsio box-o-SSDs does 1.1 million IOPS

Craig Vaughton
Happy

Faster?

Will this make iTunes run any faster?

BOFH: Dawn raid on Fort BOFH

Craig Vaughton
Pint

Too long

Judging by the comments, everyone laughed the contents of that box.

We've all been doing this too long.....

...sod it, its Friday

Vendors smack Thunderbolt punters with massive pricing markup

Craig Vaughton
Thumb Up

Re: Why the surprise?

Been there, snipped them, so now I can buy what tech I like and the wife can.... Oh, she's already had them.

FW800 is seems fast enough with a few year's worth of RAW files (420Gb) as part of a Lightroom library. This years photos sit on the internal drive of my iMac and I can't tell any real difference in performance when I have to go back and grab a copy from the external WD Studio drive.

Of course, hopefully the price of Thunderbolt kit will drop and when its time to replace the iMac, the external drive will get replaced as well.

New Mac OS X: Mountain Lion roars at unauthorised apps

Craig Vaughton
Go

I Don't Care

Say what you like, I sit in front of a Windows PC all day and its a pain, partly because of all the rubbish the company insists is installed and partly because of Windows. Things are only going to get worse once we get Windows 7. (Don't laugh, Windows 8 will be on sale before that happens at the rate we're going!)

I come home, sit in front of my iMac or MacBook Air and simply enjoy using them, because they just work. I'd take OS X over any other OS, simply because its nicer to use than the rest. I've got a Win7 box at home as well and it dual boots to Ubuntu 10.04, so its not like I'm not covering all the bases.

US military access cards cracked by Chinese hackers

Craig Vaughton
Mushroom

The Next War

The next war has already begun and the bad news is we're already losing!

Sony NEX-C3 compact system camera

Craig Vaughton
Coat

Handling!

I looked at the NEX series whilst looking for a "travel" camera, lighter than my DLSR + lenses but without the restrictions imposed by even the larger compacts like the Canon G series.

The images off the NEX are great, but its horrible to hold, it just doesn't balance nicely with the lens at one end. I opted for M4/3 in the shape of an Olympus EP-1, but it was a close fight between that and the Lumix G series. The added benefit to M4/3 is you can buy an adapter and fit Olympus OM mount lenses, the results are impressive!

Only drawback so far are; there's no viewfinder, I've lost count the number of times I've gone to take a shot expecting one with suitable embarrassment as a result and the auto focus system is easy to fool, leading to shots with the wrong thing in focus if you're not careful. Both Lumix & Olympus now have models out that have expressly addressed the focus issue, so it could be upgrade time.

Amazon, MS and Nokia sniff around RIM

Craig Vaughton
Trollface

What if...

I'd really laugh if Apple bought them (guess have a few $ spare down the back of sofa somewhere without touching their cash pile). Can you imagine the lawyer feeding frenzy with all the IP lawsuits that could doubtless generate?

It'd be the only way they'd get into some corporate businesses as well!

Laptop bags: 15-inchers

Craig Vaughton
Thumb Up

SFBags

Have to agree with AC, Waterfield Designs from www.sfbags.com are superb. Bought one for my MacBook Air and they are top quality.

A word of warning though, expect to get stung by UK Customs and Royal Mail! By the time they'd taxed it (a reasonable £7) and charged £23 to deliver it (which compared to $50 to do 5000 miles is a bit steep shall we say) once it arrived, I'd ended up paying as much for the postage as I had for the bag!

Gadget-hackers post how-to on BlackBerry PlayBook jailbreak

Craig Vaughton
Thumb Down

What should they do?

They should either release an OS upgrade that makes the thing worth buying or let people jailbreak them in the hope of selling a few so people can put a decent OS on it.

Will they do either? Not a chance

NASA wants space washing machine for ISS, Mars bases

Craig Vaughton
Thumb Up

3-4 Days?

Smeg, Kryten knows if you turn pants inside out and they'll last at least 2 months.

Man uses CAT scanner to copy Stradivarius

Craig Vaughton
WTF?

Why?

So nice to see all this technology being put to such good use. It'll still sound like a load of strangled cats.

Mind you, if it was to do the same thing to reproduce specific Fender or Les Paul.....

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