Don't think the processing will be that hard.

I've done some pretty good approximations for RGB->CMYK->RGB conversions in Javascript before now. As the screen itself is probably going to have an awful refresh rate anyway, you could probably get away with some cheapo embedded microcontroller that costs about 5p when bought in bulk.

"and all the rest of the non-current, non-popular printing machines?"

I seem to remember that Vista broke most of those.

Now that's an idea.

See title.

Only for a fair comparison, if the Linux distro is something awful and techie like Slackware or embedded-linux-for-routers, then the Microsoft option has to be MS DOS.

Ubuntu vs Win7 vs OS X perhaps? All running on certified hardware to remove any issues over "oh but you were using dongle Foo when dongle Bar is so much easier to set up.."

How many dear old aunties with the requisite lack of computer knowledge are there amongst Team Reg's relatives? And what tests would this hypothetical gauntlet to be ran contain?

Steam is currently being ported to Linux.

...though god knows why I'd want it.

Well lasers are pretty wicked.

And cool.

But only in a metaphorical sense.

apt-get dist-upgrade

Or the pretty graphical version "click the button that says upgrade".

I don't see any option in Windows XP or Vista that lets you upgrade to 7, outside of paying Microsoft a lot of money.

Don't forget that UAC is a poor rip off of the sudo/gksu/kdesu commands.

Oh and.. boot from a CD to grab files from a b0rked OS install. BartPE does not count, as it is illegal.

While we're at it, I still have yet to see a Windows firewall with the functionality of iptables. Geeky and technical, yes. There are graphical front-ends though, and Windows still is hopeless compared.

Oh, you also can't run Compiz in Windows.

Also, plugging a wifi adapter in without fucking about with drivers.

Also, connecting to a wireless network without having to right-click "troubleshoot problems" to kick the thing into life every other time you try to get online.

That enough things? I'm sure various people can think of more things that various Linux distros do, that you can't do in Windows.

Sticky issue.

When does "comforting a crying child" become "spoiling a little brat who's learned that all s/he has to do is bawl"?

As the title says.

"It's only video games that are keeping the PS3 alive for now..."

Asides those early adopters willing to shell out 400 quid on a toy, who seriously buys a PS3 primarily for playing blu-ray disks now?

The game is just the start? No; it's the start, end, and middle too. At least, ever since Sony got rid of Other OS. Now that's a decision that I think some execs are kicking themselves over, given recent events.

Poor old Sony, I almost feel sorry for them. They've had nothing but cock-ups the last few weeks!

A bit like SRS then?

And yet SRS does manage to widen the sound a lot, if not quite being the "two speaker surround sound" that it alleged to be on launch. Was still pretty amazing all those years ago when I bought my little NuReality box.

Not that I know how this pseudo-3D works, but I can guess with a bit of edge detection, shape recognition and other such funkiness then yes you can turn a 2D image into 3D, if not a completely authentic 3D.

Plenty of laptops, not just Sony, call it "i link".

Or alternatively, IEEE1394. Though I think "i link" specifically refers to the mini Firewire ports that a lot of lappies have.

Second Reality ftw

Future Crew, please come back and show the modern pretenders how it's done!

(that said, Farbrausch have done some p. cool stuff...)

"Yes, that's what my Galaxy S does."

Funny, my Galaxy Tab doesn't. Neither does the ZTE Racer. Neither did the Commtiva N700. Neither does a friend's Galaxy i7500 (the one that Samsung rather unforgivably dumped and left with 1.x). Neither does the Dell Streak. Or the Motorola Xoom. In fact I have yet to see a single device, Android or otherwise, that automatically connects you to an unknown network without some serious hackery going on.

Are you sure you haven't just remembered an open access point called "NETGEAR" or something, and still have its profile? Android (and a lot of other OSes) uses the SSID to determine network identity, which is really annoying when you have two people, with two different security set-ups, who both have routers called "dlink".

Try locating the offending profile and giving it the old heave-ho. Shouldn't be too hard. Tap on the entry then select "forget".

Re: This is why

Uhm, you do know that phones have been able to run apps for several years before the iPhone was a twitch in el Steve-o's pants? It's called Java/J2ME, and there are snoop apps for bog standard Nokia "dumbphones" too.

And no, the PI would not be able to just "send it to your phone". Google and Apple might be able to do sneaky things like that, but your wife's PI has absolutely no chance. They'd have to have access to the device, and even then you might notice an extra "McSnoopSnooperson" app in the list that wasn't there before.

So, carry on banging the secretary, eh?

Re: I regularly get updates from Samsung

I went ahead and installed Kies specifically because of this article. And Geoff Campbell, I'm well aware of Gingerbread ALLEGEDLY about to be rolled out since I did just post the link about it up there.

My Kies information:

Current firmware version: PDA:U7 / PHONE:JKS / CSC:U5 (CPW)

Latest firmware version: PDA:U7 / PHONE:JKS / CSC:U5 (CPW)

So no, Samsung do not update regularly, and never have. That is unless I bought a Tab that's been sitting in the warehouse for however-long with the latest firmware somehow magicked onto it. Their Android update support is infamously crap, hence my utter surprise at this latest announcement.

Also is it just me, or is Kies an awful, slow POS that makes iTunes seem almost slim?

Fortunately...

...the only people who've ever seen that line of terminal gunk are likely people who know more-or-less what it means.

And in the spirit of Joe and Jane Public...

...SE What?

chmod what?

modprobe wtf?

This is shit. Give me my Windows back.

To be fair...

...this old G3 Power Mac thingy I have here has a Quantum Fireball in it.

However the power supply was what blew, and it's a godawful no-name Chinese thing with a 20 volt line and an odd pin-out so you can't just bung a PC ATX supply in it without some serious tinkering. Apple G3 power supply? Oh that's about £250 unless you want to risk Fleabay. £1 per watt, just to get a system with the approximate power of a Pentium 2 running again. Bargain!

This is what warranty tags are for.

...and if your place isn't using them, they should be.

Once the warranty has expired of course, the consumer can clip that tag off with some side cutters and hack at the guts of the things without wrecking a nonexistant service agreement. Little easier to remove than a boatload of epoxy, don'tcha think? Cheaper too!

Sarcasm detector?

Maybe.

Scary thing is a fair amount of people do think like that though, and it seems a significant proportion of those tend to post on webby forums. Sometimes the ol' cat's whisker needs a bit of a tweak, y'know?

Batteries charged in an hour and a half will not cycle 1000 times.

"Starting a couple years ago, they said a MacBook battery should be able to go through 1000 charge cycles before it loses 20% of its capacity."

That's about the standard figure for any Li-Ion or Li-Poly battery, and you can guarantee you won't get anywhere near that. Not unless it's charged so gently you're waiting until next week to use the thing. Think of the 1000 charges as being like a hard drive manufacturer promising "1000 gigabytes" or USB 2.0 promising "480mbit/sec". Theoretical but never-actually-reached maximums.. or just plain old marketing bullshit in the HDD manufacturer's case.

Already exists, just hasn't been mass produced yet.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/04/new_flexible_oled_displays/

The Sony version of events looks rather cool. There's a vid somewhere of one of these screens being repeatedly rolled around a pencil-thickness rod, while active and displaying a movie.

I believe the term is...

...an Orbital. Or for the uninitiated, a small planet with a Mind in it. Capital M to indicate the hyperintelligence levels.

And there was me thinking I'd be different for making an Iain M Banks-related post on some other article. Oh well, I'm just waiting for the BBC to (refuse to) play David Bowie's Space Oddity on request for "the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail aboard her."

Also...

...if That Ship were in orbit, I don't think we'd have much of a problem with dictators and ..well, politicians in general any more. As I understand it, Grey has something of a.. fetish, with regards meting out psychopathically righteous and ironic "justice" to genocidal maniacs and other ne'er-do-wells.

I think it (she?) would find Earth to be a positively orgasmic source of fun!

MMmm computer games.

I like the X3: Terran Conflict approach. Fit a Boron Kraken (that's, err, a rather large missile frigate) up with as many auto-targetting, re-targetting FoF heavy torps and swarming missiles as you can cram in. Jump it into a sector heavily populated with enemy fighters and capital ships and issue the command "missile barrage". When it asks you how many you give it the number "-1" which means "oh fuck it, just dump the entire freight bay into the launchers." Well over 1000 screaming streaks of death emptied in, oh, about 10 seconds?

Watch as the entire sector explodes and your graphics card hates you forever. Missile Frigates: For when you absolutely, positively got to kill every other motherfucker within a 100km radius no matter how many countermeasures they can deploy, accept no substitute.

(you may want two or three large-ish production complexes going to keep one of them fed, though.)

What is it with Culture references lately?

See title.

LOVEGOD?

Oh you silly Martian, you.

I still think you're like, some kind of Culture ship Mind that's gone a bit eccentric and is having fun with obscure Terran tech mags. Or maybe I've been binging on Iain M Banks books a bit too much.

2+2=10

...IN BASE 4. I'M FINE!

How a Microwave oven modulates its power.

Most of them don't. While some more advanced microwave ovens can indeed operate at "half power" or whatever, more operate just by running the magnetron at 100% power with say, a 50% duty cycle. In simple terms, it switches itself off and on.

And Apple are still being shitty. The first thing your average consumer will notice is when it breaks and instead of a bill for £50 plus £20 labour, it'll be £200 + £30 labour and the special hard drive will take two weeks to order from Apple. Just because most consumers couldn't give a shit about what goes on inside their machines, doesn't mean that those of us who make it our business to know about what goes on inside a computer should not point at shitty practices and say they are shitty!

Re: Banning AGPL projects.

To quote a Mr Chris DiBona:

"Basically the answer is when I, Fitz, Greg or the team think it is popular enough. I know you guys think we don't like it for nefarious reasons, but what you're missing is we dislike -all- new licenses that are unpopular. They lead to bifurcation of the open source development world and that is a high price to pay. "

So AGPL was apparently banned not for being open-source, but for (at the time at least) being an obscure branch of the GPL that next to nobody really new or cared about. What do you know though, two years, some harassment from the FOSS crowd and an acceptance by the OSI later and we have this:

http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=3785

Google Code now accept any OSI-approved open source license. That includes the Affero GPL. Now, have you and Mr Asay got any more examples of how Google is really Microsoft in disguise, or are we all done here?

Well to be fair...

...fixing a screwed up BIOS setting is usually as simple as "load optimal defaults? (y/n)"

Yon venerable old PC bootstrapping mechanism has come a long way since 1980. They even detect hard drives themselves!

Though, I do miss the IDE low level format option.

lolfud

"just look at the amount of apps they've been throwing out of their market. Figure it out."

Hang on, what? You mean the illegal ones like rip-off game copies? Or malware? Unless you're suggesting that Sega and Nintendo both are licensing the gigacrapload of ROMs you can download?

If Google were removing apps based on "we just think it's crap", then most of the Papi-something games wouldn't be there. If they were removing them based on some Appley "you're making something we do better than we do it", then you wouldn't see the media players and home screen replacements would you?

Google, "once bastion of openness"? I think you've been reading Matt Asay articles and taking them to be Gospel. Google have always been a Linux shop and they seem to be doing quite well as far as their GPL obligations go, but they are a search and advertising company and their secret searching sauce has never been open.

Plenty of things you could bash Google for but, in trying to defend Apple's awkward practices, you could pick a much better point than "GOOGLE ARE KEEPING THEIR LATEST OS UNDER WRAPS UNTIL IT'S READY. THEY MUST BE TURNING INTO MICROSOFT." Christ, talk about FUD. If the infamously zealous EFF don't have a problem with this.. hell, if Linus bloody Torvalds doesn't have a problem with this, then why do you?

EFI 100x better

Well, it could be. I mean, it's a Hypervisor. It could theoretically give you the Xbox-style ability to pause current OS and just flick to another one in the middle of something, like how you can press the green button and stop your running game to go to the system menu.

However, what is EFI's main use in Apple machines, asides making it awkward to just bung OS X on an Intel x86 PC? Come on, Boot Camp? Having to reboot the machine to start up some other OS? How is that different to every other PC in the world?

Err...

...you can add a NAS box to any network. Doesn't cost much, almost certainly less than a Time Capsule, and you can use it on any computer INCLUDING Macs! (Well, for now anyway)

However, a gigabit network link still has nowhere near the throughput of a SATA cable, and Apple are still being shitty by making you buy a speshul Apple hard drive for WTF prices.

Get a couple of multimeters.

Wire them up to measure volts/current so you get an accurate reading, Do it carefully because the mains supply in any country is rather nasty. Then try shoving an Ubuntu Live CD in them Windows PCs. It's bloody amazing how much difference using a half-decent OS without a shedload of bloatware bolted on can make to your power consumption figures.

Really, try it some time. The fans on my PC and laptop both thank me with joyously low revolutions whenever I switch that damned Microsoft monstrosity off in favour of Canonical's distinctly more svelt baby.. and Ubuntu is supposed to be a kitchen-sink distribution too!