Posts by Thomas Davie

Not fast enough to get there ever

At that rate, the answer is never. Every day, 2000 people are born in the UK, so they'll never manage to keep up.

Paris, because she must have been doing your sums today.

This, folks, is a lovely example of "irony".

A use of words expressing something other than their literal intention? I don't get it. Which word is it?

Quite right too

You only need to look at how much flack Microsoft catches for their customers not updating to see why an ultra-hard line approach is so appealing.

Coprocessors came back a while ago

I have a Floating point Coprocessor in my machine, it's just most people would call it a Graphics card.

Seriously though, that's exactly what we're staring at – OpenCL and CUDA make these things into big massively parallel FPUs

@Law

You do realise that with the big buttoned track pads you can use the exact same movement as you would with the old ones to click and drag... Hold the track pad down with your thumb, and drag about the place with other fingers.

Doesn't sound likely

Predicting a 1% market share per year gain for a platform that's been gaining 5% a year so far... Doesn't sound so likely, does it?

MacBook Pro competitor

Finally, a laptop almost as thin as a MacBook Pro?

What's that you say, it's only 1.4Ghz for the same price as the 2.8Ghz MacBook Pro?

it's only got a GMA X4500, not a real graphics card?

What are dell thinking? How is this actually meant to compete?

Huh?

They claim 125/130MB/s because that's the speed the disk can read at. If the disk can't saturate USB3, of course you're not going to get USB3 speeds!

@/\/\j17

So you're saying that the DS is better because it's a device with a slower CPU, worse graphics, worse screen, worse interface, and made out of cheep plastic? What exactly is better about "how it hangs together", remembering that apple is king of devices that "hang together" well.

Yet another Air competitor...

That's strangely thicker than the MacBook Pro.

Vaio and LifeBook Comparisons are nonsense

Saying that it's competitive with similar machines from sony and lifebook is a bit of a nonsense. Both the machine's you compare it to are thicker than the MacBook Air's bigger brother, the 13" MacBook Pro, which is significantly cheeper than them.

@ Soruk

It's not that the blame for your slow line lies on the ISP, it's that the blame for advertising something you can never get lies with them instead. If their connections in reality top out at 6Mb/s, they should be advertising that

Just to complete the MS shenanegans going on here...

The machine that apple sell that's comparable to the XPS laptop that they buy in the comercial is actually the MacBook -- which is only $999, so yeh, there's a deal of lying going on from MS here. Not forgetting ofc that the person in question here could have got a student discount from apple, meaning it's only $949, and gets an iPod Touch thrown in for free.

Apple isn't such a bad deal after all.

@AC (Express gate)

Why on earth would you turn a laptop off? These things have a battery for a reason. My mac gets to mail/maps/news in 1 second not because of some fancy tack on feature, but simply because it wakes from sleep nice and quickly.

@Danny 14

Why on earth would you be restricted to WiMo? The iPhone has POP, IMAP and Exchange support built in.

@Chris 19

Gb, and yes.

@grant

The games you highlight point out exactly the problem el-reg are getting at. You list several games, all of which come with their own gadget, because they can't rely on you having one of them already. The point was not that no games will ever use gadgets - instead, no game will rely on you having already bought a gadget from Sony, rather than buying it with the game. Clever developers sneak round this by using the eye... but honestly, you expect them to do motion tracking with the camera, and no known items in the world to track? The fancy pants new controller already needs the camera to track it!

As for seperate CPU etc, woop-de-doo, it's well known how to write a game in a way that's portable between at least XBox and PS3 - as demonstrated by the fact that 99% of games come out on both of them. The only time we ever see an exclusive is when games company is paid to do it. In the mean time, changing the control system of the game and as a result, the game mechanics is a much much more major change than just doing a port. Note also here, that your statement about all consoles having different controllers is just pure bullshit... compare an XBox and PS3 controller. Both have a central PS3/XBox button, surrounded by a select/start pair. Both have an analog stick either side, both have a D-pad on the left and 4 random buttons on the right, both have 2 analog buttons on the top, and both allow you to push the analog sticks in. That's it... they both use *identical* controllers other than the shape.

@AC(Silly speed?)

The current 3Gb/s uses 8/10b encoding, so it's maximum speed is 300MB/s, minus a tiny amount for data transfer overhead. If you look at really good SSDs, you'll see that they really are approaching this speed cap, so a 600MB/s standard really is welcome for them.

Less Capacious?

SSD's are more capacious than HDDs in the 2.5" arena – 512GiB ones exist, like this one http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Toshiba-512GB-SSD,6716.html

That's even 512GiB, not GB, so you get an extra 49GB in there for your money (lots of money that is).

@Samuel Pickard

No, it means that you go through the same method as you would have before – you use that company's private section of the iTunes store.

Hahahaha

Inspired by the MacBook Air... Which is why it's an inch thick – thicker than the MacBook!

It looks like the most flimsily built thing I've ever seen too, the little plastic cord covering the ports is going to break in seconds.

@AC on price hikes

Look at the prices in the US – they didn't change. The only thing that's changed is that we brits aren't working hard enough, and the GBP is worth fuck all.

Re the mehness of these updates. I don't think anyone thought these would be spectacular. It was well known that the graphics options across the board on desktops were... shit, now they're not, and to boot we even got Nehalem CPUs on the MacPro... Sounds like a good batch to me, just not spectacular.

Oh dear

"Yes we know our site is buggy and pathetic, bet we're not going to direct any resources to making it work."

I hope they don't apply the same logic to their planes!

@Adrian

Faster than USB2 – while it may have a slower paper speed, it also has a speedy peer to peer protocol that doesn't involve your CPU at all, in practice, a USB2 hard drive will be lucky to see 35MB/s, while a FW400 one will get up to 50MB/s

Not bad at all

Considering you could pack 800 of these into the space of an AA battery (with no connections though), that's not shabby at all. The question is, how long can it provide its 1mA for?

@Rob

FCP is probably one of the only reasons to still get a Mac if you work in the creative industry though, in terms of what a Mac used to be for in regards to design work, was all blown out of the water when they shifted from RISC-based to Intel.

Pardon? Exactly what benefits did the aging PPC chip confer on designers. They were slower than the Intel chips apple swapped to in every respect, and I can't think of a single advantage of a RISC architecture that has any direct relevance to designers.

Not Chrome

While Chrome may be powered by WebKit, these changes aren't going that way. For two reasons, first, google made modifications to WebKit that means it doesn't score 100/100 -- it only scores 72. Second, the reason that the WebKit nightlies pass now is because SquirrelFish Extreme (their javascript engine) is now so much faster than google's V8 engine. Paris, because she must be working for el'reg with her amazing reporting skills.

Alternatively...

Users could just use recent WebKit nightlies featuring Squirrelfish Extreme, which is both faster than V8 (see sunspider, or dromeao tests, it loses slightly in V8's own benchmarks, but it's very tight), and more accurate (see Acid 3 passing, and even passing the timing test now).

Mine's the yellow one with reflective bits hanging on the big red truck.

Uh, k?

There's a language setting on the iPhone, that changes the autocorrect language too? Is this the petition of people who are incapable of searching for settings?

The same bug existed in OS X for a while

Almost exactly the same trick could be used in OS X for a while (until I reported it and it got fixed). In various versions of panther, one could unplug your mouse at the login screen, resulting in a bluetooth mouse pairing screen coming up. Clicking the help button on it got you into the help viewer. Searching for "iPod" got you a URL link to apple's website which launched safari, and finally, typing in a file:// URL got you a finder window. All while logged in as root.

You would have thought they'd learned

They don't get it

Linux users commonly miss the really really simple things that add up to a better user interface. It's not about looking prettier, it's about working better. A perfect example -- ubuntu actually looks pretty damn nice straight out of the box (although a bit brown), but then you right click on a disk, and are given the option to "unmount" it. No one other than a geek actually knows what unmount means -- what's wrong with "eject"?

The iPhone SDK hasn't appeared yet either

"By the time this thing appears - if it appears"

From anything I've read about this, it's going to appear at WWDC, before the iPhone SDK is finalised. So I really don't see there being any cross platform issues at all.