Posts by DRendar

If it were built by anyone else...

If it were built by anyone else I'd be a little excited, but as it's by Motorola, I'm not.

They are a bunch of lying sacks of shit, and once they've sold the units they won't release updates, and will probably require digitally signed ROMs like they do with all their current Android Phones.

The refuse to provide updated ROMs, and prevent anyone from doing it for them. Nice.

Milestone user here still waiting on 2.2 and Flash :-(

Composite not an issue

OMG! I would have to go out and pay 90p for a SCART -> RCA connector.

THOSE BASTARDS!

How dare they remove an outdated connection type, even if the picture quality it produces is complete shite, and every device that uses it that was ever shipped in this country comes with a SCART adapter.

They should knock at least £500 off the cost of the unit!

Sweet

Tiny little low powered XBMC machines with VDPAU support!

Spanking.

None of these are compacts.

Compacts are roughly cuboid shaped one-piecers that fit easily in your jeans / jacket / handbag.

All the cameras here defy the dictionary definition of the word compact - they're just slightly smaller DSLRs (albeit without the optical viewfinder).

FLOPS per second.... EH!?

"The six-core Xeon 5600s do 24 flops per cycle and there is a less-cored version of Sandy Bridge that will do 32 flops per cycle. The current twelve-core Opteron 6100 chip can do 40 flops per cycle."

Urm... FLOPS = Floating-point Operations Per Second

How does a chip do "Floating-point Oerations Per Second - per cycle"?

Does it run at one 1Hz ?

I'm fairly sure you meant Floating Point Operations Per Cycle?

Or Perhaps you meant FLOPs per cycle? (FLoating-point OPerations per cycle)

Either way you need to capitalise your acronyms.

HTPCs

These would be ideal for use is low-power, small size HTPCs

Well... they *would* if AMD/ATI pulled their fucking thumbs out of their arses and released a driver with access to an HD decoding API. (that actually works)

NVIDIA released VDPAU donkeys ago and within WEEKS the Open Source community was able to use it.

More than a year after AMD release VAAPI and it still produces hundreds of rendering bugs - making it as useful as a chocolate teapot.

My HTPC running XBMC at home can decode a 1080p x264 MKV with the 1.8Ghz single core CPU bimbling along at about 5% utilisation. The heavy lifting is offloaded through the VDPAU API to a fanless GeForce 9400, which cost me about 30quid over a year ago.

I've yet to hear of anyone who's got hardware accelerated video decoding working reliably on ATI GFX hardware in Linux/BSD

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

"That may explain why 85 per cent of all the HD TVs sold this past summer did not incorporate a Freeview HD tuner, by Freeview HD's own admission"

Ummm - that's probably because 50% of those people buying a new telly already have either Sky or Virgin Cable.

If I had the option for my next telly it wouldn't have ANY tuner built in at all... I get all my media through Sky HD, my XBMC Media Centre plus various consoles, all of which connect though my Onkyo Amp. The TV tuners just get in the way. I just want a 50" monitor! LOL

</side track>

As others have said - probably 80% of Joe Public doesn't know that FreeviewHD even exists, and those poor sods who know nothing about it, will just go out to buy "One of them big flat tellies like our Tarquin's got" to watch Jeremy Kyle on - and will believe the lying sack-of-shit (or clueless) salesman who tells them that an HD ready Freeview telly can get all the channels.

To be fair - 15% of all new Tellies sold this summer having FreeViewHD built in is bloody good going!

Dash

BIG difference between jailbreaking iPhone and rooting Android

BIG difference - HUGE!!

For iPhone it's being able to install apps that have not been approved by Apple. If you don't Jailbreak you're iPhone you can ONLY install the censored, Apple cult-friendly stuff from the marketplace.

This is NOT why you root an Android, as all android phones can install any app they want (you just have to tick a setting to permit the use of unsigned apps, then load the apk from your sd card)

What rooting an Android phone does is give you ROOT access to the OS. This is necessary in order to get direct access to, for example the ipStack, network interfaces and the clock.

Without rooting the phone, Android (lamentably) is unable to establish an IPSEC VPN to 90% of VPN devices out there. - See http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3902

You are also unable to accurately set the clock on an Android phone (i.e. you can set the hour and minute, but not the seconds) and while Android is capable of syncing its clock to the Mobile Carrier using NITZ - this is not something we have in the UK This means that there is literally no way to have the clock accurate on Android for many people. Getting root access allows you to set the clock manually, but also give apps such as "ClockSync" (Which is on the Android Market!) the ability to set the time from an NTP source. See http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4581

One other reason to root your phone is to turn it into a WiFi Hotspot - again available through the Market. Although this feature is being included in Android 2.2 (Froyo)

So you see - they're vastly different, and shouldn't be compared to each other.

Dash

Sorry...

But anyone who walks away from their car, pressing the button to lock it without listening for the thunk of the central locking, or looking for the lights flashing is just asking for their stuff to be nicked.

The same thing would happen to them if the battery in their key died.

One more way for the criminal element to prey on the stupid.

Milestone V1

I Also have a Milestone V1 running Android 2.1

When it arrived it had prominently displayed on the box "The Phone Without Compromise"

What a total load of bull.

No FM radio - can't even stream radio over the internet reliably as the BBC keep changing iPlayer to prevent 3rd party apps from working, and their own app only allows access to pre-recorded stuff (not live)

Camera is a Joke - If you are in nice brightly lit surroundings, then the pictures are pretty OK, but as soon as you try to use it in even the slightest low-light situation, like in a pub, or slightly dark office, then all you get are awful grainy noisy pictures that I'm embarrassed to show people. My old Nokia N82 took photos that absolutely blow this phone out of the water.

Time - The phone is incapable of having the correct (precise) time applied to it. By this I mean that you can change the time (Hours & Minutes) but cannot change the seconds. Most Digital clocks from 20 years ago get around this by resetting the seconds to zero when you change the minutes, but Motorola / Google decided that 2+ decades of wisdom regarding setting the time should go out the window. If the clock is currently say 10:20:23 and you set the time to 10:22 then the time will actually be set to 10:22:23 instead of 10:22:00

What this means is that apps which rely upon time synchronisation between the device fail miserably. Google Talk is the prime example - during a conversation any messages sent TO you will have a timestamp set by the GTalk server, but they are displayed on screen according to the phones internal clock. This means that you end up getting replies to messages you sent appearing in the thread before the message that it is in reply to - which is just bonkers.

To add insult to injury, the OS has been specifically built so that user apps are not permitted to change the time, so using NTP is out of the question unless you root the phone, which invalidates the warranty.

The ONLY way to sync time on the phone / OS is using NITZ (Network Identity and Time Zone) which guess what? Isn't used in the UK.

VPN - The device is advertised as supporting IPSec VPNs - Yeah - only if you use totally obscure devices as your VPN Concentrator / router. Connecting to an IPSec VPN using the massively ubiquitous IPSec VPN using group ID & Password (Like Cisco) fails as there is nowhere on the phone to enter these details.

To make matters even worse is that Google completely ignore user requests:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3902

The request to add proper IPSec capablilities to the OS has been in place for nearly a year, and it still hasn't been assigned to anyone - it is currently the second most requested feature after arabic language support, but has actually been up for much longer.

Fan Effing Tastic.

</rant> Sorry that turned into a general android bashing, but had to be done.

32Bit

"Other features include 802.11n wireless, Gigabit Lan, an ambient light sensor, fingerprint reader and Windows 7 Professional 32-bit."

Why for the love of all that is holy is anyone shipping NEW machines with 32 Bit versions of Win7?

I mean for that matter why did M$ even MAKE a 32Bit version available? It's not like there are any machines running with 32Bit only CPUs still out there that could run Windows7 comfortably FFS

Or maybe they WANT people running P4 1.6Ghz installing their OS, so that they get pissed off with it being so slow, and go out to buy a new computer, which nets M$ another License?

It is baffling.

Uses the ribbon

Uses the ribbon = FAIL

My productivity has dropped massively since this god-awful UI downgrade was forced upon us in Office 2007.

Have now installed a hack to get the old menus back, but still some stuff doesn't work right, and some of my keyboard short-cut combinations that I've taught myself over the past 17 years don't work either.

I don't trust Micrsoft to do ANYTHING internet based correctly. Not as a web server, email server, not as a firewall or Proxy, not as a webmail provider, and certainly not for storing and editing my documents online.

</title>

First BOFH in a long time that I've actually Laughed Out Loud to.

Well done Simon! Keep them coming!

HELL NO! No MinMo!

"The handset runs Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional"

This guy is an idiot

He sells Satellite Internet FFS, which is useless for anything but (very slow) browsing and streaming.

Gaming, IPTelephony, Hosting Services etc. are practically unusable due to the horrible latency, so he's just having a pop at trying to swing users who want to stream iPlayer onto his services.

£16 for 10 Gig is total nonsense - I pay £18 for an "up to 24Mb" (actually 19Mb) UNMETERED ADSL 2+ service from Be. Sometimes I download only a couple of gigs, sometimes I download 300GiB.

If some suppliers started charging per Mb then there are plenty of other suppliers who will continue to provide unmetered services. The exchange unbundling is bringing about cheaper services, not more expensive ones...

And the only roads that need to be dug up are where there currently are NO existing fibres. Has this guy never heard of DWDM?

You can now push multiple TERRABITS of data down a single fibre, using different wavelengths, and it's not even that expensive to do... Need more bandwidth and run out of fibre? No problem, just light up another wavelength and add another 10 Gb.

Pfff.

I don't want a damn titile!

"Some models are designed for Layer 2 in the network (LAN Base) while others are designed for Layer 3 (IP Base)."

Not quite - you are referring to the software version. there are three - LAN Base, IP Base and IP Services... The HARDWARE is identical - just as you can buy an IP Base 3750 now and drop IP services onto it without so much as a peep from it.

Yes it breaks some kind of licensing rule, but when you have a network of hundreds of the buggers, and a hardware support contract approaching £millions. The odd IOS upgrade is overlooked.

"The 3750-X also supports Cisco's StackWise Plus clustering technology for switches, which allows for up to nine switches to be lashed together as a logical group with a master node switch being designated as the king of the routing table for the group and updating the others."

Erm NO. Stackwise allows you to 'lash' up to 9 devices together into one logical DEVICE with a 64Gb backplane, not group of switches. It has naff all to do with clustering. When a device is added to the stack it becomes an actual part of it, so put two 48 port switches in a stack and you get one 96port switch, not two switches controlled by one of them.

"This means a switch in the group of nine can be taken down and replaced without network traffic being affected."

Other than the devices attached to the unit you're replacing! LOL

And as long as you have multiple uplinks from multiple members of the stack

It's great news about the 2960-S though - FINALLY CISCO!! you've got stackable edge switches.

About F***ing time!!!

School board president Rita Peters protested:

that she had a ridiculous name.

ROFL Rita Peters! LOL

Ads? What ads?

Gmail is hardly "ad-laden" as the author describes... Has he even ever used it?

The ads on there are EXTREMELY unobtrusive - they don't bother me in the slightest - unlike Hotsnail and Yahoo, which have banners frigging EVERYWHERE.

And if you don't like the ads - block them!

Fog Lights

Not to mention that their constantly leaving their front Foggies switched on will reduce that range considerably.

@AC (@Drendar) Friday 6th November 2009 19:02 GMT

AC: "XBMC on Xbox1 is great for SD content, but it can no way cope with HD, I get 5 fps at best."

Erm. Did you even read my post?

Drendar: "As you're only running CRT, you don't need the HD playback, which is quite literally the only thing XBMC_on_XBOX can't do (well it can - just not smoothly)"

LOL

No Flash + Crap Camera = FAIL

Aaaaargh!!

FAIL FAIL FAIL!

This was so close to perfect.