Posts by Stu 560 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
Who else amongst El-Reg afficionados has the work of an axe murderer actually running on their system(s)? Or on an install disk somewhere?
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I'm going to burn my purchased copy of Suse Linux. I dont actually have it installed anywhere, his data is only on the install CDs.
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Mind you Suse Linux sucks donkey balls too and I need the shelf space back.
Well today is the 8th July, and not a one PCWorld branch within 30 miles of my home town has any in!
Are they just liars, because that expectant date has been pushed back at least once? Last week it was the 7th July.
We could do with one at work for our showcase lab, but I would wager we can expect decent stock levels only after its base model, the MSI Wind is readily available.
Only trouble is our budget is 'expiring' end of July and theres no money allocated next year for this sort of purchase!
Oh well. PC World loses out on a sale because they can't get them out the warehouse quickly enough.
...even those crappy £20 boxes from Tesco have a better pic quality than this lump.
Your priorities seem reversed - I dont care whether it sits under my telly or not, what I do care about is picture quality because thats what you have to live with day in day out.
I bought a LaserKey CL850 Laser projection keyboard for work the other day from our innovation budget. A FAR more interesting thing to be reviewed than a Digital TV tuner!
Bought it from Maplins, check it out, its great fun to use, if not a little niche, difficult to find a practical use for, but at least when wired it presents itself as a USB HID keyboard and mouse. Yes, mouse!
Review that instead.
...when you consider another energy story today about wind power generation not being able to provide a sustained energy source - surely this tech can take up the slack for that, when the winds die down throughout europe!
But yes the UK would probably see a very small fraction, perhaps 1/100th of that sunlight, until we get a lucky summer - this year hasn't been all that bad - I've got my dinky experimental 2.4watt solar panel powering a small 12v computer case fan permanently blowing into my dining room!
But the thing stops spinning as soon as the thinnest sliver of cloud covers it up.
I reckon it'll take about 10 or so large car batteries with some serious solar panel surface area (costing thousands in all) to even have the slightest chance of running my electrical needs.
Even boiling a kettle will take serious amounts of energy, and probably kill the batteries with its fast drain rate.
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Lets not forget these curtains dont work without somewhere to store the energy - much more costs, less reason to come off the national grid!
...I thought the UK release of 2.4 was to be made after the US one by at least a day or two.
Either way my PS3 didn't state I needed to download 2.4 last night, so either it wasn't released for UK PS3s or I missed the update before they pulled it.
Either way, the US seem to have been good beta testers for us Brits!
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@Joe K - This problem has little or no relation at all to the XBox RROD problem! One is hardware related (GPU overheat/bad thermal contact with heatsink), the other is firmware (written code by Sony). No point even mentioning it in the same context.
Its worthwhile mentioning that the Lenses are the real investment point when buying an SLR, not something immediately obvious to most, to me either before I bought my EOS 400D.
Factor in the cost of the camera AND a good 300mm (aroundabouts) telephoto zoom lens just to allow you similar zoom range you'd expect from a reasonable digital compact.
Unfortunately Canon charge a small fortune for their lenses. Sigma is a reasonable bet though.
I looked at getting a lens nicknamed the Bigma, a 50 to 500mm lens offering some serious zoom capabilities. Imagine my shock and total failure in justifying the outlay after realising it costs £500, and thats your typical 'Ebay special' price.
Digital compacts can sometimes offer a 500mm equivalent, aroundabouts 10x zoom depending on your cameras sensor size for a fraction of the combined cost.
If you're not going to make money from your photography, and in this day and age, its difficult, its just not worth the outlay if you're poor like me! Its all too easy to justify it in your mind by 'saying' you're going to get my photos published, but you know it wont happen!
I'm sure I'd get het up enough to generate my own power source seeing these babies in action, n-ot ahhm sayin? eh? eh? eh? sayyyyy no more.
@Sarah Bee - You're like the sole female commentator/moderator in a sea of testosterone. The only thing missing is a webcam on you. "Give us a twirl baby...". ;-)
You guys sound kind of like physics profs. Semi convincing, but then somebody could show me any figures and I couldn't tell if they were correct or not.
One other question then -
Are all the different cosmic energies / particles / strangelets / waves / etc that have always struck Earth EXACTLY the same as those that can be generated by the LHC?
Could there be any particular property of the LHC particle acceleration process that is different enough from your common or garden Cosmic Ray(tm) to possibly have a different outcome?
If not, thats the most convincing argument I've heard for its safety ever. Scaremongering gits @ News Assoc.
Great, but they missed a trick -
Super-pursuit mode button - Fastest route ignoring speed limit.
Pursuit mode button - Fastest route with speed limit.
Cruise mode button - Shortest / Economical route.
Turbo Boost Button - A whooshing sound effect which also pumps a little bit of nitro into your engine block!
It must have the best voice recognition capabilities out there too.
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I'm liking this thing, but they should have added some extra likeness gubbins, buttons adorning the left and right of the KITT voice lights, an animation effect for voice lights, and maybe a replacement complete dash for your make of car, CRT TV screens et al.
Maybe I'm getting a bit carried away. ;-) I is luvving it!
I've got it!!
As a short experiment - How to convince the criminal 'fraternity' of such ridiculous things just cos it sounds techy. I may carry this out myself -
1 - Set up an ongoing Ebay page something like - PS3 console Mod Chip.
2 - give it a description something on the lines of "For sale - one PS3 mod chip based on the popular bog standard household electric doorbell technique, used for playing games downloaded off teh intarnets."
3 - develop the idea/description - "Learn the knowledge Sony dont want you to learn - Using a mere front door household doorbell, your PS3 can play backed up BluRay titles (even from 1.44mb floppy disks). YOu will receive one, off the shelf, bog standard doorbell and full colour video instructions on a sheet of paper on how to install it. The doorbell button will become the on-off switch for running your pirated umm backed up games. "
...or maybe something more imaginative.
4 - Sit back and watch your dumb types buy your item. If somebody falls for it (they will) just send them a cheap assed doorbell, and a sheet of inexplicable tech-wordy instructions (involving dissecting the PS3 console to an unrecoverable degree) and you're covered by Ebay policies.
5 - Just sit back and read the news (L.Haines news) as your typical chavs go on doorbell thieving sprees throughout Staines. But they'd have to knick the consoles first of course.
A new olympic sport methinks. I mean lets face it, Ebay is just such the Den of corruption and crime where such stories could have been started.
I too agree with the 'knowledge is power' thing, thankfuly its nice to see 'modern' tools, such as remote desktop/assistance or LogMeIn which show us end-users' systems directly, help to eliminate communications difficulties with customers and help the technician focus on the real technical aspects of problems - this is what is more important to be shared around the 'water cooler' so to speak!
(Yes I know remote viewing of user sessions has been around for decades, but they are more ubiquitous and much friendlier to use nowadays).
But yes Remote desktop can hardly save us from users who have their monitors upside-down, or insert their 'laser-disks' upside down! Perhaps webcams could come to the rescue - at least they'll save expensive onsite drive-outs.
I can see entirely how somebody might wake up, do a semi complicated activity like this, then go straight back to sleep.
Consciousness is not 'entirely' an on-off switch, I feel like its more of a gradient, with a kind of consciousness cut off point (If that makes any sense) that seems to vary depending on tiredness levels, for me at least, and the amnesiacal properties dont seem related to any particular level of consciousness either - not that I could argue this part very well!
I've awoken at some dark hour on many an occasion, sometimes to go and get some painkillers or something, you feel so drowsy, consciousness verging on non-existent, like you could just slip right into unconsciousness in an instant without even wanting it to happen. I see no reason at all why I couldn't ever have done an activity like this without realising afterwards.
I remember seeing some sleep-scientist type on TV - a presenter/reporter of a show covering some sleep related article swore blind he was awake throughout a sleep experiment he partook in, but then some arrogant scientist looked at an ECG reading or whatever, and decreed him to be asleep! "No you were actually asleep.". "No I wasnt!!".
I mean how arrogant must they have been to think its just a simple on-off switch? I'm surprised that so many people still see sleep as being so 'boolean' in nature!
...I mean, come on, not one mention of the supposed owner species!!!
Bears have feet too you know, they just go by the more traditional name - Paws.
They are still feet though - I quote the always accurate (???) Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot.
There are animals all over that page! ;-)
Now isn't a tent a bad idea in high winds? Even one shaped like a pyramid will fall over or flex badly at the first signs of our British summer winds - especially if it has a wide open door to collect the air and turn it into one big parachute!
If Orange are to roll them out across the country, they should ditch the tent bit, give it a deep foundation, make it look somewhat like a lamppost.
A hell of a good idea, its a shame that peoples mobile phones generally end up being one of the least energy thirsty gadgets of all - arguably the most useful in emergencies though.
Now if only they'll make one that can feed an electric car - I fear such a wind turbine will need to be the size of Wales to do that though.
Heart icon - I is luvvin the idea.
"Around the turn of the century a crack commando hacker wasn't sent to prison by the UK government for a US crime he did commit. This man promptly found himself up for extradition by the US Government, is likely to fail and will be extradited. Today, still wanted by the government, he survives as a l33t hacker of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire . . . Gary McKinnon".
Duuh d duuuuhhh, duh duuuh duuuh.
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Mckinnon needs to get his ass into hiding asap. No chance of a reprieve from the old folks House of Lords.
Kudos where due, the Havok engine is amongst the best known and revered.
Not sure if its efficient or well designed though, but if Havok can provide hardware abstraction in the same way as 3D graphics acceleration works, it means games physics can be interchangeable between hardware acceleration and software where no hardware acceleration is present.
Very cool!
But for the meantime, I'll be sticking with my Quad core Intel and my Nvidia 8800! ;-)
FIRSTLY - How can the Roomba NOT know where it is if it can make its way back to its base station for recharging?
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About all the previous comments from ppl who own Roombas - I seriously wish you guys to be correct about the Roombas cleaning abilities, I really do as my house is a tip, but are you not showing a certain degree of favouritism and justification for shelling out on such an expensive cleaning machine?
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I'm actually seriously thinking about buying one myself as I live on my own and dont do ANY cleaning save for the odd muck/spillage cleanup, I fear though its small capacity wont suffice for my floors, at least the first few (hundred) trips round the house.
Your typical house gets vacked maybe once a week though, if this baby were doing it every day, this should make a difference. And I'm sure I can stretch to emptying its holder every day.
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Whaddaya say guys, would you recommend one for me? For a house that is barely maintained to begin with, but does have a lot of wires running around the place - I have a length of CAT5 running between three rooms!
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But then why dont I just bring in a hot phillipino minimum-wage maid? I know the Roomba is fun to watch, but she would be MUCH better to look at.
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'IT?' icon cos, well, yeah.
I'm thinking this baby could singlehandedly increase laptop thefts quite a bit.
Think about it - when credit runs out every so often (why no info on the durations available?) there will always be some putz who will leave the laptop behind on the table while they do it, turn around and the machine will be gone.
All a thief needs to do is go looking for shops with this in, and they just hover like vultures.
not at all mitigated by the fact that, to be safe, you'd need to wield your laptop in one hand, and fish out small change from your pockets with the other! Whos going to want to keep doing that!?
I for one can see our older more forgetful/doddery IT colleagues falling foul of theft here, more so than your cynical younger types. No offence!
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Good idea in general. But lets be clear here - This device was created solely to take workload away from your typical coffeeshop waiter/waitress.
That is classic, I think it looks pretty authentic.
I loved the bit in the security cam footage when he kept hitting the photocopier - one point it pathetically spurted out a sheet of paper, like it was feeling getting hit!!!
:-)
Just great!
Anybody know what supposedly started him off?? - his colleague was picking papers up off the floor for him - perhaps it was sparked by a snidey comment thrown in about his papers not being neat and tidy. I know I'd do the same if somebody told me my desk was untidy - wait - it IS untidy. AAAAARRRGGGGGHHHHH I've gone on a rampage.
On a sadder note, I would imagine shortly after that outburst, he must have ended up in a padded cell, and is currently undergoing months of rehabilitative psychotherapy.
Anything at all to say about lens availability? Because the Canon lens range is very expansive, and expensive too! Would be interesting to see where they compare here because the lens is likely to multiply your investment 2x, 3x or more!
Its kind of a necessity to go out and at least get a cheap 300mm lens, because I for one was disappointed when I bought my EOS 400D (any SLR owner would be) because it didn't zoom anywhere near the levels of my digital compact camera - pay more, get less zoom!? :-(
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Apart from the ISO 3200 mode and IS out of the box, it looks very very similar to the Canon EOS 400D. Replete with both the 10MP sensor, image sensor shaker, and the full sized settings summary screen.
I'm not suggesting any Canon technology crossover, but it seems likely Sony at least based its design on the features of the EOS 400 and knocked some beef off the price too.
I would like to think the EOS 400 has been a good success, so a shrewd move by Sony - the masters of gadgetry.
I've had my 400D now since aroundabouts mid 2007, and I'm very impressed. I had originally bought the 350D, but I kept complaining to Jessops about dust marks on the image sensor. After repeated attempts at getting a decent 350D without marks on the sensor out of the box, I finally opted for the 400D upgrade.
They even price matched it with WarehouseExpress website pricing and I paid only £20 more for it over the 350D!!
The 400D comes with this image sensor cleaner, and it most certainly makes a vast difference! the 350Ds I owned kept getting dark blotches on the images, the 400 shakes the bigguns free every time! Its not perfect, some blotches are still there, but is well worthwhile.
I'm surprised this particular feature wasn't mentioned in your review.
Also the 350D used to appear to the installed software as a mass storage device to the CF card, this is no longer the case. Whilst this can be a major pain for downloading images off the camera for the 400D as you are forced into using their rather slow image transfer software, you can bypass all this by ejecting the card and putting it into a CF card reader on the PC.
Other than that the included software is very powerful, and can glean great unseen detail from the RAW format.
I opted to shell out for a 75-200mm sigma lens, and an 17-80 something Canon lens, both cheap-arsed but reasonable.
In time I want to get an image stabilisor and/or high quality Canon optics lens with deep telephoto. These are surprising expensive, but very very good, so look at adding a grand to the package for deep telephoto and good optics, or aroundabouts £500 for 'good' optics at medium range.
The same, though, can be said of the Nikon range.
One real annoyance is the screen on-off sensor, its the little gadget that switches the back-screen on and off depending on whether your eyes are up to the viewfinder. A good idea in theory, bad idea in practise, just imagine how much of a total pain it is switching on and off a bright display right under your eyeball during night shots - I've been slowly perfecting the art of moon shots for a while now. The sensor just doesnt work well in such circumstances.
A good camera in my opinion though - but will somebody explain to me why I keep having pangs of jealousy towards Nikon D80 owners!? ;-) As far as I can work out they're much of a much-ness except maybe for this unimportant auto-ISO thing.
Does anybody (the article author included) want to explain to me exactly how BIOS passwords should be regarded as a security measure at all!?
I expand this further to include even Windows login and user permissions.
Just try it - take a normal unencrypted NTFS volume with some files on it and set some heavy user access permissions to prevent users seeing them. Take it out of the PC and install it into another one, then ghasp in awe as all the files show up in Explorer, visible for all to read and copy!!
After all, its important customer and government data which is being compromised, the hardware is secondary to this and renders BIOS protection totally irrelevant.
Amazing bandwagon jumping there John Leyden. Journo awards coming your way?
IT icon cos you guys really need to learn it!
Anybody heard of this little thing called resilience nowadays!?
I was in awe of the first paragraph - ONE server for how many chavs I MEAN respectable customers!?
I mean in our lowly establishment, even we realise the importance of a simple failover or load balancing arrangement, so much so that we'd have our balls in a sling if we implemented a new system without it.
As an absolute minimum, if it were a system so badly designed that it couldn't be made resilient, we would recommend alternative products wherever possible, or put in place some kind of manual quick-restore procedure, such as standby hardware ready to accept one half of a Raid array for restoration.
I despair. Wasn't there mention of some kind of computing skills/systems design crisis back in the 80s? Its far worse now due to computing ubiquity.
...a woman would come and live in my wardrobe! Hell I'd settle for them living in the shed or in the loft!
Perhaps I'd come home to find the place mysteriously tidied up and the washing up done. I'd leave hints on post-its around the house - "Mr/Mrs poltergeist, please mow my lawn."
@Roger Heathcote - I think I'd rather be an emotionally stunted odd-ball than be you sir. No matter how old and dull you get, you should always retain a modicum of SENSE OF HUMOUR and more importantly just chill-ax! Kick off yer shoes, wear a bermuda shirt, go to a park and play ultimate frizbee with some kids, anything to avoid that coronary at 35.
Sod the headset profile, Is anybody here using the Bluetooth SPP?
I am, its ideal for small data transfers, such as between a phone and a bluetooth GPS receiver. But it seems now GPS is being added to more and more devices, this may become less attractive.
At the mo, it saves me shelling out more cash for a TomTom Go.
All I need do before long car journeys is take out my BT GPS receiver, plonk it on my dashboard under the windscreen so it has a good signal, then fire up TomTom on my HTC Tytn 1 mobile phone (the earlier TyTn without built in GPS) and put the phone in my in-car cup holder! Job done!
TomTom also switches on your BT adapter in the phone, so once initial set up is done, you dont need to sod around switching things on and initiating connections before launching the satnav software.
Fantastic. Connection initiation is quicker than the GPS can lock onto satellites even during warm startups.
Its ideal because I can put the GPS in the position best suited for GPS signal acquisition too.
Bluetooth is far from being defunct. I never saw it as direct competition with WiFi, its just not for that, whatever happened to the PAN acronym? It was inevitable that most of the profiles would not be adopted anyway.
Bluetooth SPP is also great for hobbyist electronics / robotics work too - there are small modules you can buy which just act like serial ports to microcontrollers! Great fun and far better than trying to get a low end microcontroller to talk USB or a full WiFi TCPIP stack set up.
Just recently I bought a Solar recharged Bluetooth GPS receiver from Maplins!
Solar power is coming along leaps and bounds as a good supplement to battery power, better in places like Florida though. Over here I suppose you could have a wind powered iPhone, complete with a pop-up propeller blade . . . maybe not.
But renewable supplies are free and getting better!
...and they laughed at me back at school (20 years ago now!) for proposing I work on a Solar powered torch! And lo and behold I see such things for sale now. Idiots.
Too right, I'm sure most people will notice a crew maneuvering a telescope and training it at them 10m - 30m away, especially seeing as it would be happening in their normal field of view. 30 metres is the main limiting factor here clearly.
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But what next though? A hi-res firewire digital camera telescope, with reflection tracking software for auto-surveillance? You can even get it to filter out the general surfing/document writing, and capture all the really juicy tidbits.
Just remember to put it behind that special glass the cops use for identity parades, and keep the lights off, eh?
http://www.perceptivepixel.com/
Far better - there is a better visualisation of different types of data in the video on their homepage, and was done before MS claimed the whole Multitouch thing for their own, what with Surface.
MS Innovation - I think not.
Perceptive Pixel seems to be the spin off company from Jeff Hans famous work, probably including the man himself as CEO, I dont know.
Thats the funnies side by side comparison shot I've seen in ages.
Professional looking (albeit unusual) Laptop bag shade AGAINST pink cat tent with paw prints with obligatory moggys head poking out!
Utter genius!
A prize to the first person to photoshop the laptop in the moggy tent, and the cat in the laptop bag!
:-)
I have GTA4 on PS3.
Well to me it just looks 'Hi-Def'. It looks good. My TV reports it is in 720p when playing. I cant say it looks any less sharp than, say, Assassins Creed.
But then I've not payed much attention, and are ACTUALLY PLAYING AND ENJOYING IT instead of bitching and being a pedant.
But from what I hear, the PS3, being newer and technically more powerful, is supposed to be doing a better job of view distances over the XBox version, i.e. seeing miles off into the distance with better detail.
I havent seen the XBox one so I couldnt say myself.
However I am ever so slightly disappointed about drop-offs of frame rates during 'busy' scenes and action. This makes playing it during such moments a little more difficult because you are likely to have missed some action due to the drop out.
Its not a serious thing at all tho as its not as bad as it could be.
All in all, I love GTA 4. Its a pinnacle title from the games industry - even El-Reg featured 4 or 5 stories about it in one day! I mean what other title can achieve that status!?
I'm just wondering why the BBC wrote an article about GTA 4 going up against the Wii-Fit!! That may be, in terms of sales, but in terms of technical achievements - Wii-Fit sucks donkey balls in relation! What with its 5 to 10 year old style visuals.
The delivery van driver dropping off my copy of GTA IV special edition stabbed me in the head too, and ran off with it, the bastard!!
The knife went right thru the skull, I have a slight headache but I'm alright now.
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Moral of the story - If you're buying a copy of a game from a hellhole of a games shop in a hellhole of a town like Croydon, expect such behaviour - its not news to me.
I would have been surprised if NO such stabbing occurred at least once somewhere like that.
Having said that, Manchester seems to be a bit too peaceful at the moment!!!
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To start with, more functions would equal a higher price and in the real world 'high price' and 'tough' are mutually exclusive.
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True, kid gloves aplenty, except theyre not mutually exclusive given the majority of electronics gadgets naturally cost a lot more when adding ruggedisation (wow a new word!) - take any ruggedised laptop, generally underpowered, but bump on at least £500.
I like the phone from what you write about it, but again think this is overpriced for what it truly is. It shouldn't cost £50 over the odds just because they added rubber padding and used higher compound plastics and metals! Raw materials like this over the normal thin plastics just dont cost that much.
Typical Sony manoeuvre - piss gamers off by making them wait months or years, then they STILL release a half completed pile of poo.
I would at least wager that this is partly to do with the games developers not providing good support for integration or game launch from within Home in their titles.
I WANT HOME NOW!!! In more ways than one!
Oh wait, Look at that UFO, bottom left, hovering over the grass field, but the pic quality is so bad you can't make it out. Sorry.
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This pic must be just ripped off Flickr of somebody who put together their (and their friends?) collection of phones over the last two years.
They probably even announced this on the Flickr page, but the cretin who picked this up wanted to perpetuate the 'new HTC device' thing for his own personal gain, and now El-Reg is helping perpetuate the same stupid idea.
Happens all the time.
And 8 phones down on the concrete, with such bad pic quality, doesn't exactly lend weight to them being from 'top secret' HTC labs now does it?
The bottom right two phone don't even look HTC at all, even the user interface doesnt look right. The pic is such low quality you cant make out the label, probably purposefuly. They could be Sony Erricsons for all we know.
Thanks, great journo work El-Reg.
Anybody smell a rat with SP3?
MS want people to buy Vista - vis a vis, to do this they must show how much 'better' Vista is in relation to XP.
What better way to do this than throw in very small, annoying bugs into their earlier product. Lots of them. Nothing that'll bring the house down, just enough to make it that little bit worse/annoying/slower to use than the Vista experience.
Say helllooooo to XP SP3.
Oh wait, Vistas pretty bad too. SP3 must be a fucking nightmare. I'm holding off judgement it till its done the rounds with all you other suckers!
This 'small-print' stuff needs abolishing from the get go - just imagine how many people who paid good money for this to find they couldn't even do DirectX visuals over it. This stuff should be in plain text on the rear of the box, not hidden in a manual. Derty money-grabbing feckers.
It all seems to me you could just run a DVI to HDMI cable straight to your telly.
Sure its not wireless, and cable runs are short, but all the advantages are there - no extra box to stash under your telly draining power when not in use, no sacrifice of your WiFi traffic bandwidth, full support for DirectX and any visual content, lag free and inherently real-time, no limits on picture resolution except that of your TV, oh and a good cable will cost about 1/10th the price of this pile of junk.
Seems to me that a DVI->HDMI cables advantages outweight the disadvantages 3:1.
NO SALE.
No thanks Cowon.
I'll stick with my PSP and multiple memory sticks.
I know the PSP doesn't play formats this beast does, and is lacking in total capacity and screen size, but whats the point hauling that block of resin around when you can slide a nice slim n lite PSP into your trouser pocket + four 8Gb Mem sticks.
The cost of a PSP and four 8Gb memory sticks STILL come to less wonga than this.
Oh Noes, but the PSP has a smaller screen! I think I'll live.
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Oh and the PSP has a removable battery.
First the T5 fiasco, now this!?
I take it this has begun a series of cool Lego/Duplo or whatever spoof pics???
Lester you could come up with one of those fashionable coffee table books - "Major world events in glorious Lego-color". Get Penguin to publish them! ;-)
Quite how you'd represent 9/11 might be tricky tho.
The last coffee table book I bought was "The bumper B3TA book of Sick Jokes". Highly recommended.
This is a little silly now - HTC are stuck in this '320x240' camp.
It seems every other new mobile device screen now, has at least a smaller 'pixel per inch' than all HTCs I think.
If HTC would at least acknowledge the whole higher resolution and/or PPI thing, AND implement proper acceleration - the chipset that's been present physically in their devices for years now, then I might be interested in upgrading from my TyTn v1.
-Also, no WiFi? Thats a killer for me. So they put something good in, take something good out . . .
Yes I wish ppl would read the comments before replying.
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Dont get me wrong here - I love the whole iPod Touch / iPhone thing - its a great platform, but its brand new - and Apple are not (imho) being very conducive to its overall development and improvement, what with their software release policies and what they think the whole iPhone experience should be like (no background apps for instance).
They are being far too big-brother-ish over its nurturing, saying what can and cannot be done with quite a bit of restriction.
Lets face it, we all pay good money to Apple for, even, the iPod Touch - I'd like to do what I want with it (but not writing viruses of course) - especially if I put the time into developing the app for it myself.
Thats why I'll stick to hacking open my iTouch and will eventually get round to looking into developing for it, all without using the official SDK - OR Apples approval.
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What I was referring to being a 'pile of poo' though, is the Macintosh platform. But Phil if you prefer - okay its a pile of utter SHIT. Better?
I'm sure I read somewhere that even VoIP over WiFi was actively discouraged - to protect the Mobile network operators interests and profit margins.
In fact I would think that any app that would use a totally unsanctioned hardware addition to the iPod Touch (the 3rd party mic) would not be accessible via the official Apple SDK - the iTouch wasn't supposed to have 'Audio In' capabilities.
Does anybody know if the SDK allows access to audio input from a microphone on an iTouch? I've not got a Mac to find out.
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Another restriction - They've only come up with the SDK for the Macintosh. I for one ain't going out to buy one of those piles of poo just to write code for my iPod Touch. I am neither a Mac fanboi or a Windows fanboi.
Perhaps you should do your research before posting stupid comments like that.
Apple are being extremely restrictive over what you can do with your iPhone/iPod Touch, eg a VoIP client will likely be out of the question - a kick in the teeth for the iTouch (A 3rd party microphone has been developed for it).
Also you cant implement anything that runs in the background, such as any instant messaging clients or anything that pops up messages or completes tasks whilst doing ANY other thing on the phone - it must be launched from the springboard in a wholely 'modal' manner (A Windows'ey term meaning only one functional window useable, until you dismiss it). Very old hat.
I for one congratulate the iPhone Dev Team for the iPwnageTool - simply because it liberalizes the iPhone platform.
Although very retro and kewl in appearance, I'm sure from my years of ye olde Atari ST usage back in 80s-90s that I got RSI From using such an elevated keyboard.
Healed up nicely now though! ;-)
And yes, I agree with the comment above - I'm not sure I'd want all the humming PC gubbins right under my fingers and taking up desk space. As I type this out now, I have a lot of desk space either side of me because the PC case is under the desk nicely out of the way.
Although I do like the idea of combining the touchpad & keyboard - IBM sent us a combo keyboard touchpad unit for using in KVM trays, they're great all-in-ones for plugging into development PCs dug straight out of storage.
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