* Posts by Thomas Davie

85 publicly visible posts • joined 15 May 2008

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Web stat WTF: iOS beats Android 3 to 1, iOS and Android tied

Thomas Davie

I suspect it actually means that many people with Android devices only have them because it was a free phone on a crappy contract that allowed them to use a facebook app, and don't realise what/don't want to do the other things they can do with their phone.

Thomas Davie
WTF?

What I find odd..

Is StatCounter's insistence that Symbian is bigger than Android and iOS in terms of actual page views... Frankly, I don't believe it.

Ten... dual-band wireless routers

Thomas Davie
Thumb Up

Surprised...

You omitted Apple's – To be honest, it's the fastest, most stable, and easiest to configure router I've ever owned.

Retina Display detachment

Thomas Davie
Facepalm

I don't get the fuss

Removal of optical drive: What makes you suppose the guy is any more likely to forget to copy some movies to his computer than he is to forget to pack some DVDs in his hand luggage?

Removal of ethernet: If you need etherenet, you need to carry around the cable with you as well, because there's *never* one where you need it... Just attach the thunderbolt dongle to the end of your carry around cable, and you're done, it'll even handily protect that stupid plastic clip from breaking.

Lower storage: uhh... you can buy a 768GB SSD for these things... that's more than apple have ever offered on any laptop (including as a spinning platter).

Apple's Retina Macs: A little too elite?

Thomas Davie
Facepalm

Re: Professional video editing... on a laptop?

Which desktop screen (that doesn't cost as much as the laptop including the big SSD) is this high resolution?

Sharp to show OLED 'retina' display for laptops

Thomas Davie
Stop

Uhhh...

If it uses TFT technology, since when is it OLED?

Facebook button triggers tidal wave of human organs

Thomas Davie
Stop

Re: Good to see

you mean that it presumes the state owns your body once your brain isn't using it... Which is fair enough.

Osborne names UK cities to land £100m broadband bonanza

Thomas Davie
WTF?

This really frustrates me...

Why do it in cities – one of the great things about this kind of service is that it allows us to get on with useful work without needing to be in a city. Shouldn't we be pushing to make sure every town has it first so that we can stop with the overcrowding and crime problems that cities produce?

Fragmentation bomb wounds Android in developer war

Thomas Davie
FAIL

Re: and

Not really true at all. Android has far far far more variation in hardware specs. This can impact on devs in trivial ways (e.g. having to support every screen resolution from 120x80 to 1280x800) to extremely difficult to work around ways (e.g. having to support everything from no graphics card at all to Tegra 3s). Either you cut your available market, or you have to target some pretty insanely low end hardware.

Compare this to the iOS world where you must support exactly 2 resolutions – 320x480 and 1024x768 points (note, points, all you do to support retina displays is provide images with 2 pixels to the point), and where you can rely on every single person with an iPhone in the last 3-4 years having at least a PowerVR SGX 535, and an iOS you're *way* better off.

Note – this is the most commonly used logic in industry for not supporting Android, along with the fact that users seem far less willing to pay for software on Android than on iOS.

'This American Life' disowns Apple-bashing blockbuster

Thomas Davie
Mushroom

Re: Nope

I take it then that google should be pounded at relentlessly for making their company MOTO "don't be evil"?

iPad 3 benchmarked

Thomas Davie
Holmes

Downgrade in fact

You're buying a performance downgrade in fact, thanks to the GPU being twice as powerful but having 4 times the pixels to deal with.

Mac OS X ARM port by Apple work experience kid revealed

Thomas Davie
Facepalm

Nothing to see here, please move along

Didn't we have an article less than a week ago about how new staff at apple typically work on bogus projects for a few years to see if they can be trusted with the sekrit speshul sauce?

Google boots out contractors for allegedly damaging OpenStreetMap

Thomas Davie
FAIL

It's not whether or not they were to blame that's in question – it's whether they were booted out, or simply had their project end a few weeks ago.

Not so fast: Italian boffins say neutrinos not faster than light

Thomas Davie

Except...

Saying "we have this mathematical model for what's going on, the results don't agree with that, therefore the results must be wrong" is exactly the opposite of what scientists should be doing. Instead, they should be going "hey, that's weird, we need a new theory (once we've verified the results)"

Apple gets patent for ‘unlock gesture’

Thomas Davie
Trollface

Which

Got an example of a device prior to apples that used sliding your finger around on a touch screen to unlock it?

Thomas Davie
FAIL

Nonsense thrown into sharp relief

The only nonsense thrown into relief here would be you trying to ignore our legal system.

Apple wins for now: no Galaxy 10.1 in Oz

Thomas Davie
FAIL

You know what...

Had you ever thought that the fact that it's being so consistently banned over and over across the world might point to... you know... that apple might actually have a valid case?

Thomas Davie
FAIL

Because as far as I can tell this is a copyright issue, not an IP issue.

^ And that right there – that tells us how much you understand about this issue.

Deep inside Intel's 'Ivy Bridge' chip

Thomas Davie
FAIL

Uhh

Or... it could just be that there's a big hardware show going on and Intel and AMD are both there telling everyone about their products. Note – Ivy Bridge is due in early 2012, not 2013.

Average sozzled Brit sinks 5,800 pints during life

Thomas Davie
Facepalm

Yes...

You forgot about all the wine and other drinks listed.

Samsung offers eco-econo green DRAM

Thomas Davie
FAIL

4.5W/h?

Wow... That's gonna be a lot of power it's sucking up after a few years in the server rack.

Apple iCloud pricing revealed

Thomas Davie
Thumb Up

Given...

Given that we pay VAT at a higher rate than 14%, that's not a bad deal. Good on apple for making it cheaper in the UK than in the US.

Canon EOS 600D 18Mp DSLR

Thomas Davie

EF lens mounting makes it

I don't understand why anyone would buy a Nikon starting out at the moment. Canon allowing their low-end DSLRs to use EF lenses (admittedly at a crop) makes them infinitely superior to me. It allows you to buy a beginners body, then buy lenses that will work on a future better body.

HP's fondle-slab dilemma: What to do when you're No 2

Thomas Davie
Stop

"No one knows what to do with one" is getting old

If you asked most people what they do with their computer, they wouldn't be able to tell you. The reason – because they use it for a lot of random small tasks, not one major task.

Some examples of what I do with my iPad:

1) Read recipes off it in the kitchen.

2) Take notes in meetings on it – being able to draw diagrams and take photos as well as just type is bloody useful.

3) Play games.

4) Sit in bed and browse about the place.

Thomas Davie
FAIL

"perfectly good"

This is the geek definition of "perfectly good" right? The one where it actually means "well, it works 60% of the time, if you spend 3 hours tinkering with it first". I've never met one single person who actually uses DLNA for anything, and that's not through lack of trying – they just can't get it to work reliably enough to not tear their hair out.

Suspects in PayPal web attack not so anonymous after all

Thomas Davie
Mushroom

I don't know

I've met a lot of programmers who have a weird "if it's beneficial to me, screw them" version of morality that really conflicts with the way our law works. I can imagine this is just the sort of thing they might think is legal.

Apple MacBook Air 13in Core i5 laptop

Thomas Davie
Facepalm

I get that you're trolling...

But honestly, you're comparing an Atom to a Core i5?

Thomas Davie

You mean...

Like the Apple Cinema Display which does exactly what you ask?

Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part Two

Thomas Davie

Nope

Time Machine has been greatly improved, and now plays nicely with encryption.

Thomas Davie

odd

I'm actually somewhat surprised that you can't goatse a finder window to scale the icons.

Intel 320 SSD bug causes forum despair

Thomas Davie

For a reason

The write lifetime "issue" is swept under the carpet because it's a non issue. For any reasonably large SSD (read around the 128GB mark) the point at which they'll hit the write cycle cap at *maximum write speed* continuously is around about 5-6 years down the line. Given that that's about the average lifetime of an HDD anyway, and a vast underestimate of life time, that's fine.

Aussie retailer accuses UK shops of HDMI 'scam'

Thomas Davie
Devil

Or...

They're spending £4 per john lewis/curry's consumer who hears about this deal (a low number) in exchange for getting a load of free advertising in the tech industry to people who might actually buy from them ;)

Has Steve Jobs killed the consumer hard disk industry?

Thomas Davie
Stop

Not really

When you consider the consumer space. Current consumer wired networking will get you 100Mb/s in theory, and about 80Mb/s in practice. Current consumer wireless networking will get you 300-600Mb/s in theory and about 150Mb/s in practice.

Simply viewing Apple kit provokes religious euphoria

Thomas Davie
FAIL

Yeh...

Now go watch the documentary, and observe that followers of other brands at least behave similarly... Unfortunately, they didn't subject them to the same testing. Bias at all?

Survey shows slab-fondlers are loving their iPads

Thomas Davie
Thumb Up

Producing info on them is great... in the right circumstances

If you're in a meeting or a lecture fondleslaps are great. The touch keyboard works almost as well as a normal keyboard, you don't have a big screen in front of you, and you can easily draw diagrams/take photos. Way better than a laptop.

Is iPhone data collection legal?

Thomas Davie
FAIL

The key...

Is that Apple at least, is not collecting your data – they're sending you data. They're sending you the location of towers near to other towers you just connected to so that the phone can look them up fast.

Apple: If you're under 17, you can't use Opera

Thomas Davie

Yep

... That would be because Opera fails to implement the parental controls system in the OS... All applications with internet access that don't implement this get the 17+ rating.

Samsung intros 10in Android tablet

Thomas Davie
Headmaster

Actually...

It's very useful for a tablet. My primary use case for such a device is sitting on the sofa chatting to people on skype... If I want to switch to showing them the baby instead, the back facing camera is absolutely a boon. I don't get why it needs to be so high res (especially when it certainly won't have the optics to match), but it's certainly useful.

Cinema chain bans laptops, tablets

Thomas Davie
Badgers

It's not about video recording kit

They're just trying to come up with a semi-viable excuse to search people's bags for food not bought in the cinema building.

Jobs takes swing at Google over Android activations

Thomas Davie
FAIL

Duh...

The iPhone 4 users dumping an iPhone 3 would be counted in the upgrades... that's what upgrades means.... They're getting 230,000 *new* activations a day.

Leicester City councillors eye up iPad to save £90k a year

Thomas Davie
Go

Seems resonable

Other people have pointed out that your cost estimation is probably low; but even if it isn't... The number sounds ballpark right. I can imagine that each of these councilors is printing out at least one new report or draft of the same report from yesterday, every single day. It would only take a 100 page report a day to roughly hit your estimate.

Fanbois end Judas Phone 'Death Grip' with, um, SIM tape

Thomas Davie
Megaphone

Left hand

Could it be that when you hold it in your left hand, your middle finger rests on top of the metal sim tray? Could it then be that the issue is not bridging GSM to WiFi, but instead bridging the GSM arial onto the SIM itself...

iPhone 4 vivisected in 'first legal teardown'

Thomas Davie
Stop

Probably not 1Ghz

I've not seen the clock speed officially posted anywhere, and early benchmarks seem to suggest it's about 20% slower than an iPad, so it looks like being 800Mhz, not 1Ghz

Apple sells 2m iPads to hungry fanbois

Thomas Davie
Flame

because

It's reported because no other tablet has ever sold in this volume. I might suggest that your console's shipping numbers are unimpressive because McVitties have sold a crap load of digestive biscuits, way more than the Wii has sold in fact... Doesn't make it relevant.

Queuing for an iPad? Why?

Thomas Davie
WTF?

Pardon?

1) You claim the iPad doesn't work as an eBook reader because it doesn't last for weeks on battery. I ask instead, why I'd want that in my house. I don't read for weeks on end, I might push 10 hours on a *really* long day with a *really* good book, but that's about the limit of reading realistically. After that, I dump it in a dock, and am done, simple. The only time I can think that you might want ultra long life is while going away on say, a camping holiday, and well, that's never been a problem for all our mp3 players for example that we'd want to last all week either.

2) You claim that the VGA output doesn't work with keynote, which is just plain wrong.

3) Your article actually really neatly sums up what the iPad is for, as you mention so many things you might want to do with it – it's for *everything*, it's good at all sorts of little things that you don't want to have a full size laptop about for.

Labour shock pledge: 16.8-meg broadband for ALL by 2012!

Thomas Davie
WTF?

This ofc being wrong too:

2 x 8 x 1000 x 1000 = 2MB

2 x 1000 x 1000 = 2Mb

2 x 8 x 1024 x 1024 = 2 MiB

2 x 1024 x 1024 = 2Mib

BBC ices launch of free iPhone news app

Thomas Davie
WTF?

The license fee gets less and less relevant

One of the major points of paying a license fee was that the BBC would provide everyone with easy to access, free (other than the license), unbiassed (theoretically) news. Why are they being told that they're not allowed to carry out their basic remit?

Steve Jobs Flash rant put to the test

Thomas Davie
Stop

Missing the Point

The point here is that Apple controls the HTML 5 implementation on the iPhone. The test shouldn't be comparing against *all* HTML5 implementations and concluding that lots of them suck so flash is no worse. Instead, it should be comparing against the HTML 5 implementation written by apple, on an apple designed platform and concluding that HTML5 is 2 to 3 times more efficient than Flash. It's no good claiming "flash is at least as good" because Mozilla's implementation is the same speed, when Mozilla's implementation won't be used – apple's will.

Y2.01K hits Garmin satnav

Thomas Davie
FAIL

It's a regression

I have a Garmin GPS from 1983, it still knows what the date is just fine!

Dell servers block un-Dell HDDs

Thomas Davie

Giggle

The amusing thing being that an iPad or an iPhone *can* run your email and calendar at the same time.

It's only 3rd party apps that can't multitask. iCal and Mail both being written by apple are allowed to (and do) background.

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