Posts by stu 4
324 posts • joined Wednesday 24th June 2009 12:18 GMT
Great way of killing 2nd hand market too
You can get something like CS3 or CS4 boxed for a good price online 2nd hand.
It's a great way of getting powerful software as a power using amateur.
That, of course only benefits us users... not Adobe.
IF they had a subscription model that did not allow commerical use, then they might be able to argue that we amatuer power users are still covered by the cloud model - but they don't and we ain't.
fair enough
He should replace the lenovos with a couple of AMD jobs then - just to show them.
Anyway, top marks to Davros for taking a stand.
To suggest that just because something he uses is made there, means he can't disagree with Israel's determined efforts to recreate the Warsaw getto, but with them on the outside this time is moronic.
In my professional dealing I try to avoid all dealings with Isrealli companies for the same reasons.
Yes, my mac has an i7 in it, but I don't remember ticking a box saying ' I agree that by buying an i7 I am happy with Israel's (american funded) policy of eradicating Palestinians from the last part of the county we (the UK) were stupid enough to give you in the 50s.
Posted in Ten ancestors of the netbook
Good article - and an excuse to post my PDA cabinet again
clue - at least 3 in this list are in there.
http://powerlord.smugmug.com/Gadgets/PDA-cabinet/
stu
Re: Does this £1/day include energy costs ?
ah.. but how many calories do these bacteria have.. that is the question ?
:-)
spaces, full screen and multiple monitors
yeh - its a bit pants - but not as bad as it sounds to non mac folk reading the article:
I run my imac27 with a 20" either side.
Basically all it means is that your 'space' is 3 monitors. So as you move to another space, you get 3 more monitors of space.
i.e. set 4 'spaces', end up with 12 desktops of space.
What you can't do, is move say desktop1/space1 to desktop1/space2 - but I've never found that a hassle personally. you can easily move apps between spaces just like normal.
full screen is rubbish - as it just blacks out the other monitors. However, I'd argue full screen is a waste of time anyway as it pretty much is the same as maximising a window (which works fine on multi desktops - ie max on one desktop, can still use other 2).
There is only the odd app, like photoshop where an uncluttered full screen would be good while still having apps on your other desktops.
On the other hand, watching movies, the present behaviour is exactly what is wanted.
Re: forced obsolescence, Apple douchebaggery
not strickly true - older macs are still supported - support means OS big fixes, security patches, etc. And they all still happen on pre-lion.
Yes, you can't put lion on them, but that doesn't mean they are unsupported.
Re: PathFinder
Its ok - I just found it a bit slow.
I tried this a few weeks ago and find it really great - and free.
Xtrafinder - tabs, colour, directories at the top, right click create a file, yada yada.
2 weeks on and I'm loving it.
Re: Does this £1/day include energy costs ?
in that case, probably worth boiling up the rice in just two batches for efficiency ?
2 because I'm assuming use of a fridge is cheating.
I must admit, I'd have just went for making a big veg soup (+ the bones - that was a good idea), and maybe a bunch of flour (50p 2kg bag would make loads of bread). Nice soup and fresh bread ! soup would only need cooking on day 1 and would last all week. Only other need for cooking would be a batch of bread on day 1 and day 3.
- Just made enough leek and potato soup at the weekend for 6 meals: 3 quid. (2 leaks, potatoes, onion, stock cube)
stu
Re: Soup.
hmm... I'd suggest actually MAKING soup.
leak, potatoes, etc. You can make enough for 5 days for 3 or 4 quid. - I do often.
Posted in Sord drawn: The story of the M5 micro
Re: 30th anniversary of every man and his dog releasing a Spectrum-basher
Apart from ARM - the most successful technology company in the history of the world....
man - that would be awesome
It would be the tech I've been waiting for to make electric paramotors that weighted nowt, and had a massive range. bring it on!
stu (google 'powerlord69' if you don't know what a paramotor is)
DRM mince
If Netflix truly is as big as it says it is now - the time has come for it to stand up to the content providers like Apple did - and insist on no DRM from now on.
Streaming is all well and good but unless content can be watched offline (and on what I want to, when I want to, for as long as I want to) it's FA use to me, and probably many others:
1. even when at home on broadband there may be other things I or my family want to do with the bandwidth at that point - I don't want it clogged up with a streaming movie.
2. the bandwidth might be crap at the time I want to watch - we are going to get into a sort of electricity model of massive bandwidth being required 6pm-10pm through the county if we don't kill streaming models now.
3. A lot of the time I'm not at home. I'm on a train, on holiday, in a hotel - places where I can't stream.
It's like the apple podcast app - "you don't need to worry your little head whether its on your phone or in the cloud" - yes I fucking do - because unlike you, Mr Apple engineer, I have holidays abroad (thats outside the USA for americans wanting a definition) where roaming costs a fortune... and you know on trains, in the country, etc where starbucks wifi is not available....
Re: is this the same
""no obvious financial return (e.g. some drug research, etc"
you are aware that some of the most sucessful and profitable companies in the world do drug research???"
er.. yes. are you aware of the way drug research works ?
you spend money on creating drugs that make money, not 'cure people' or stop suffering.
My point (which I though was obvious enough to a reg readership to not need pointing out).
Aids got drugs developed because wealthy white folk got it. If it had remained in Africa they'd have been no research, and no drugs as an example.
Ben Goodacre for example makes a good point about drug research being made independent from industry funding for those very reasons.
However, expecting the government to say, invest in your companies wish to build faster networks is moronic.
And Governments haven't funded universities much for decades. Most research is commercial short term privately funded.
Re: is this the same
"If so then tell me again why it is that she helped innovation"
ok - she made it PRIVATE.
It can't be helped if the then private companies like BT were too fucking stupid to invest in research -it's not the government's job to invest in industry research surely - it's the bloody companies ??
A case can perhaps be made for government to step in where research is required for the good of the populace, but which has no obvious financial return (e.g. some drug research, etc) but clearly not in something like optical fibre!
Unfortunately, what Maggie did not do when she privatised companies (like BT) was sack all the work shy, unimaginative tossers who worked for those companies - people who worked there precisely BECAUSE it was required their unimaginative dossing skill set.
Only natural wastage over the last 20 years has finally started to make companies like BT innovative again - though the pre-privatised management tended to employ their own kind through the 90s - so there's a way to go yet.
RIP Mrs T
I thought the film was good.
She came at the right time to kick the unions up the arse. And I can't think of any contemporaries who would have went into The Falklands.
She didn't kill manufacturing - global markets did that surely ? or do you think we could persuade northerners to mine coal for 10p an hour like the million Chinese do ?
I'm a scot - so it's not just southerners who thought she did the right thing.
I was 8 years old when she came into power, and I remember 70s Britain - its strikes, the work attitude of the state owing everyone a living and strikes all the time, and I remember the tide seeming to turn in the 80s as those same people that had been paid a fortune (growning up next to ravenscraig steel works in scotland for example - the amount the unions forced the steel works to pay for unskilled people to do utterly FA was staggering) suddenly realised that the game was up
- the Unions that had been set up in the early 20th century to protect the worker had become a massive machine around which businesses were forced into paying idiotic salaries for unskilled work or face strikes - with 'free speech' an unknown concept - you striked or you were a scab. Now THAT was the true monopoly. And for me, the main monopoly that Thatcher smashed.
RIP Mrs T.
Oh Man.... I am lost for words
That is fucking rich, Livingston.
You were in a position 20 years ago to fibre up the UK. But refused to do it without guaranteed cash from the government - and arguably held the UK back 10+ years in the broadband stakes.
BT haa a perfect position (as a monopoly) to invest and make the UK the first country with fibre to the door. Instead they fannied about for years until they were basically made to do it - after THEY had sweated every bit of life out of their crappy copper they could.
bunch of utter short sighted wankers.
I remember as a BT graduate in 1993 standing in front of the then MD of BT and 200 other graduates, giving a speech about the benefits of the (newly invented) WWW for work usage - and why every worker should have access to it to help with their job.... And I was more or less laughed out by the MD and other management at the this zany idea....
morons.
japseye bag
I was thinking - as long as your primary purpose was family planning and not disease control - what you want to a wee inflatable bag you stick in yer japs-eye - sort of plugs in with an expanding plastic plug.
has a wee rubber teat on the end that hold the man juice.
pros: no loss of feeling
cons: might be a bit of a difficult sell to get folk to plop into their bell end.
Re: back in the day...
>Had a chat with BT's own futureolgoist as well, which was an eye opener.
Was the eye opener "what a fucking arse-piece - the only thing imaginative about him was his octagonal glasses"
Ian Pearson - a man devoid of any skills whatsoever. And for whom, imagination was an anathema.
you'd often see him in the canteen with a film crew he'd manage to get in to shoot him with his crappy mock up 'computer on a wrist' ...." in the future we'll all have like computers on our wrist and... er... you know avatars and er.. some other shite I've just made up with my limited imagination"
research my arse
There are only a handful of engineers doing real research at Adastral these day - 200 max.
The majority are just churning out software.
And I notice no mention of the fact that a large proportion (500-1000) of the staff are actually near shore Mahindra (cheaper than the locals).
stu - worked there for 10 years - and have lots of mates who still do.
Posted in Review: Renault Zoe electric car
Re: Fail
>What a stupid argument. Lets all buy 2nd hand cars because clearly then we'll never need new ones.
good idea. why not ?
>The point is that the new cars being introduced as old ones wear out should be as clean as possible, not that >everyone should ditch their car for a new e-car. It's a long game, there is no infrastructure for everyone to switch >anyway.
does your house wear out ? Do you sell it and get a new one every 5-10 years even ?
no - of course not - you 'maintain' it - and by doing so it last indefinately. Sure, in the end after maybe 100 years there's some 'ship of theseus' going on, but have economically replaced old parts as required, recycling them as necessary.
Do we still need new houses ? sure - growing population, and a small amount of poor housing being renewed - but would you ever even consider knocking a house down after a certain number of years just because it's old ? of course not - it would be mental. And yet we do exactly that with cars.
A modern car is much the same as a new and has arguably no defined maximum lifetime anymore than your house does.
My X5 has done 150K miles and drives like it's just came out the showroom. In other 50k it might need a reconditioned gearbox, perhaps in another 150K miles, a new engine. The bodywork shows no signs of rust whatsoever after 11 year, so I imagine that will be just as good in 10 years time.
The people buying new cars are not the people who have previously run a new car for the last 20 years until it was no longer maintainable - if they were you might have a point. They are people, that 'buy new cars'. They are the main contributors to any environmental pollution. It doesn't matter whether they are buying an EV, a diesel or a ferrari - they are still the no.1 polluters.
The economics of new cars, now only works with a worldwide market because of the longevity of the cars these days. How many 10 year old cars do you see on British roads ? Not a fraction as many as there should be - because they have been shipped out to eastern europe, china, etc.
As long as the supply of new cars continues unabated, the supply of 10 year old cars to china is unabated, and the inefficient recycling of perfectly good 20 year old cars will continue (since who in China will want a 20 year old car, when 10 year old one are coming in all the time).
stu
Posted in Review: Renault Zoe electric car
Fail
Or - buy a 3k decent car and:
1- avoid another car being made
2 - use yer car less (cycle, public transport, etc)
I have an 11 year old 4.4 litre V8 X5. I bought it when it was 3 years old - so didn't create the massive environmental ming of a new car being made for me... and I keep the mile down to 4k a year or so. It does 20mpg - but I do very little milage, and when I do, I have a nice luxury motor. Real running costs are far less than any new car purchase... what's not to like
I maintain that that makes me far more green than buying a new electric car.
Sticking up for Gopro a bit
On the other hand - building a well respected and well known brand is a black art.
and the littlest thing can start to undermine it.
Gopro is perfectly in its rights to choose who is allowed to sell their products as 'official' resellers - apple does the same, so do sony and others.
That allows them to not sell to, say stack em high, sell em cheap, but we don't know what the hell we are selling places, etc. which may be beneficial to their brand.
It's not illegal of course for DigitaRev to sell gopros - but as they are official resellers they aint gonna get proper backup, etc perhaps. Also, I imagine only resellers have rights to use official photos, etc.
I agree gopro has fecked up the handling of this - on the other hand they wanted it to be clear that digitalrev was not selling something they had official permission to sell.
rock and a hard place imho.
stu (biased as I do have 3 gopros..)
lap dancing
yeh.. I had to read that 3 or 4 times closer and closer to my screen... ah.. TAP dancing...
still inappropriate for a launch event, but not as much as an 8yo lap dancer.
perhaps I shouldn't run my mbp in full retina mode....
stu
Posted in Trip the fight fantastic
fah
FPS on a console (no keyboard and mouse) is like sex with the world's thickest condom.
Fluffer
Sounds like what is required here is a professional fluffer to 'service' the dolphins.
Don't all queue up at once....
another excellent speccy article
ideal reading over my morning coffee.
I remember looking at these in boots/etc in 83/84 as a spotty 12yo (who'd just had his first speccy educational game published) with very envious eyes.
never happened though - I ended up moving to an Amstrad 6128 - which seemed relatively spaceage at the time - real colour (it even told you what they all were on the top of the disk drive), AND a proper disk drive. It was like scifi had landed in my bedroom (even though my budget didn't extend to a monitor - so it was still plugged in to the 1978 hitachi tv.
Re: let's be completely honest
fair point I think.
Though it is something I do thing is very very weird. 2 things that seem to really stand out if you look at people these days that seem, just, well illogical:
ties. I mean what do they do ? it is such a stange decoration to have which has no purpose. And yet has taken over the western world.
makeup: painting your face with coloured stuff. Just utterly mental. It's like something we'd see folk doing in the amazon and thinking 'how quaint' and yet as you say, nearly all western (and some eastern I suppose) women do it. Just seems utterly ridiculous. And then they put on their 4in tall clown shoes too.
And at the end of all that stupidity they complain that 'pictures in magazines don't represent them' - eh ? you don't represent a human female woman yourself !! lose the clown paint and the shoes then we'll talk.
Re: They're not meant to be "natural", they're meant to be real ...
>Fuck soap
never heard of that product.
Is it like KY jelly but with cleansing powers ?
I suppose the friction helps it lather ?
Posted in Larry Ellison buys airline
Re: Collapse of the US
er.. to Hawaii ?
you do know it's not some sort of weird coincidence that they use US dollars there don't you ?
Posted in Review: Sony Vaio Duo 11 Ultrabook
eh?
>Q: Why is everyone "ohhh I loose the stylus" when they are prefectly capabel of keeping track of ballpoint pens?
speak for yourself - I can never find a pen when I need one.
at least I can then just buy one for 10p though....
Posted in Review: Sony Vaio Duo 11 Ultrabook
useless
I've got a vaio picturebook C1XD in the house - same size more or less, circa 1999. No touch screen, but similar size/market.
I've also got a vaio UX in the house - smaller umpc - touch screen, slide out keyboard, wifi, gprs, etc from 2003. Arguably exactly the same functionally as this thing.
10 years later and I'm looking at the same thing - still with all the same crappy limitations that made the other 2 interesting, expensive gadgets that were ultimately not useful for much real work.
Your analogy of motorbikes is a good one - but it shows the real lack of any real vision and end to end design in the PC market - and particularly in that, once king of consumer gadgets, Sony.
The next sentence is where i get a kicking from anti-apples - but say what you want about the company - with the exception of the odd 'play product' like the ipod mini - they don't bring something to market till it has been thought through and the tech and software is there to make it work. They then steadily evolve it.
Where is the evidence of this here ? 10 years on we have the same shite.
Polymorph
I think I'll stick to Polymorph - an awesome nylon plastic which is mouldable when heated (with hot water).
I use it for everything under the sun. great stuff. and costs buttons.
Posted in Apple refreshes MacBook Pro range
quite
I have the 15"er.
With QuickRes and can easily swap between 1900x1200 (where it looks better than my old 17" matte MBP looked at the same res) and full 2880x1800 when I'm working in FCP and want to edit with full HD video, and still have space for loads of 'tracks', etc.
It's the mutts nutts.
And 400MB/s SSDs are a revolution - folk who've not had the pleasure really don't know what they are missing.
It's a premium product, for a premium price.
Though I got mine from a US seller on ebay, selling in UK - 400 quid less than RRP. And only difference is a US keyboard - worth a look if you want to save cash.
One thing I do find annoying is that at 1920x1200 it still tries to display 'best for retina' artefacts. i.e. in CS6 and FCPX it shows things as '100%' when in fact they are not - you need to display at 133% to actually get 1:1 pixel for pixel (due to the upscale rendering you mention). I thought they'd have release a patch fix for that by now, but it looks like thats not gonna happen which is annoying.
Re: I Hate Cats
"Best place for sick fucks who enjoy animal abuse is in prison."
why ? there's no animals to abuse in prison... Surely sending them to a zoo would give them far more enjoyment ?
Re: So essentially what you're saying
Hmm... I know which one I'd rather shag...
uhu
"If they wished I would connect them to BusinessBB sales so they could move/upgrade their service to the same shit service, packaged as a business product for 5 times the price."
BBC handling
While I agree, I do feel the BBC's handling of this has been all 'fingers and thumbs'
thank you and goodnight.
geeks and guns
Well, at 212 comments and counting, I think we can safely assume there is a link between geeks and guns...
shittest demo of all time
man - that's like a Boots 'before and after' nano-makeup mince advert that !!
have cisco never heard of colour correction ? WTF is the point of asking people to tell the difference between 2 streams when you havn't even managed to get them colour balanced!!
And as the other commentards have already pointed out - a fucking demo of 'amazing new codec' where nothing fucking moves in the pictures..... jesus christ.
here's mine - on the left is a jpeg - it took 200kbit for 1 second, then fuck all... and looked the same.
arseholes.
stu
shooting Glock 17 from a UK newbie.
Was in Florida for 2 weeks in November there, so wandered into gun shop/range and borrowed a glock for some shooting practice. First time I've ever shot a handgun. Quality america safety briefing : "here's a pair of ear protectors and shades. how many boxes of ammo do you want?".
luckily I'd watched enough TV to work it all out.
really nice gun - amazed me how light it was - feels like a toy... till you start blasting things with 9mm bullets :-)
I had a go of a 45 too. Was amazed how much bigger the bullets were. And the gun felt more unwieldy. Though you could feel the extra kick.
Still amazes me you can wander in off the street in the USA, not knowing one end of a gun from the other and 5 mins later be shooting up a range with a 9mm handgun... whereas over here even an SAS bloke gets locked up for years for having one in his house....
stu
mac minis
I'd have thought mac minis and a decent switch would be pretty efficient for this sort of thing ? Massive savings in power and space too?
Re: AltaVista.digital.com
hehe.
reminds me of my time in the early days at BT Laboratories in Martlesham, Suffolk.
Around the same time, it decided to rename itself to Adastral Park. A contractor got wind of it, and registered adastralpark.com and tried to sell it to BT. BT refused and until recently it was a NSFW swingers site.
Re: Geeks have macs too
er - I was referring to the fact he says he now uses macs, not PCs (or linux).
An Apple II, is a 'II' not a mac...
Geeks have macs too
May this finally sound as a death nell to the 'form over function' and geeks use PCs/linux pish...
you don't get more geeky than the first virus creator!
-a fellow (mac owning) geek
Re: fuss over nothing
'That's not the norm, though'
says who ? apple have among the highest customer satisfaction rating* in the business. you mention my 'anecdotal' evidence (sure, it's my personal experience), but you appear to be doing the same thing (or is it just something you'd heard ?
There isn't a consumer electronics company out there that doesn't invalidate warranties unless they are repaired by a qualified repairer (and there are approved 3rd party apple repair shops). desktop PCs have always been the strange and singular exception to this consumer electronics rule because of their componentized/standard based construction and a historical accident caused by IBM in the 80s.
I would personally argue that that has given us one very good plus and one very bad minus:
+ cheap PCs
- tie in to archaic standards like BIOS, IDE, PCI that should have died years ago.
Have a look at Sony's equivalent all in one (SVL2412Z1E) and tell me how apple is really any different in support and upgradeability ?
*top of ACSI, top of JD Power, etc.
Re: fuss over nothing
yes - there are parts that are expensive - bespoke PSUs will be expensive whoever makes them.
And I am not arguing that parts are as cheap as you can get on ebay - but sony repair vs apple repair vs dell repair vs HP repair : all overcharge - apple no more than others.
I have had around 5 macs repaired now - all were:
1. fully investigated and tested free of charge by apple
2. a detailed guaranteed quote of the work with breakdown in parts and labour given to me.
3. the work completed exactly as promised.
In all cases, in less than 2 days to repair (less than they promised).
And in one case (my 2007 iMac - in 2011 - 3 years out of warranty), a complete new LCD screen was fitted free of charge as they said it was a known problem.
I'm sorry you have had bad experiences dealing with Apple, but this has certainly not been my experience - along with Amazon, they have provided me with above and beyond levels of customer service over the last few years to the extend that I now find all other companies, previously considered adequate, levels of service disappointing.
When asked what PC to buy I will continue to recommend they buy a mac.
Too expensive ? Buy a 2nd hand mac.
Re: fuss over nothing
and one of my points was that: the parts are actually very reasonably priced. and that apple labour charge can only be described as extremely cheap.
all-on-ones have always been more 'laptop' than desktop in terms of parts - that's always been the case. clue is in the name.
fuss over nothing
Really, in my 20 years with PCs, I've never met anyone other than a geek (like me) who has ever even opened their PC up, never mind upgraded it. Yes I used to do it all the time, but I realise I am the exception.
They expect someone to do this sort of thing for them, either by a technician at work for work laptops, or by a specialist they take it to.
changing batteries in a remote control is about as complex as most people want to get.
Look at cars: do we see 'how easy is it to change the oil in the new Ford Focus? How easy can the gearbox be changed?' when a new car comes out ? do we buggery - because hardly anyone services their own cars these days.
30 years ago, it was pretty normal for your average joe to do most car servicing tasks (I know I used to), now hardly anyone would consider it :
1. because we have come to expect the service industry to do this sort of stuff, and a higher standard of living means we don't mind spunking out the cash for a wrench monkey.
2. cars became more complex and harder to DIY as a side effect of technological advances, etc.
I don't see how apple's approach differs in any way ?
I had my mate's macbook pro fixed a few weeks back by apple: internal fan buggered, and dvd drive shafted. parts: 80 quid. labour: 30 quid. and turned around in a day. Why would anyone do it themselves ? truth is: apart from a few geeks like you and me - they wouldn't.
NEVER give police extra powers
"Let us do X please, we'll only use it for this wee thing"
is constantly their cry.
And time and time again, they are given power to do X, and after a short interval make use of it wherever they can possibly use it.
I'm always stunned at the way Britain in the past 20-30 years seems to have totally abandoned all principles of 'seperation from the state'. As a previous commentard pointed out - we used to uphold our principles of privacy and freedom of speech.
Yet now we are all happy to be videoed 24/7, monitored about where we go, what we buy and who we do it with, and are quite happy when people get locked up for having something written on a t-shirt.
Have we invented a new kind of democratic fascism ?
In a sense I hope it all blows up in their stupid faces and they get what they all deserve.
Unfortunately as I live here too, I'm sure I'll also be its recipient.
stu
