Re: This is how you build a PC?

"If" Google started selling their own hardware? The company bought Motorola, and right from the start favoured individual OEMs with close collaboration over the Nexus phones.

I can certainly understand Acer and Asus being rather upset that they didn't know about this prior to Monday's announcement, because it's blown a pretty big hole in their Win8 Ultrabook plans. But if they hadn't been so rubbish in the first place this wouldn't be necessary.

Yeah, but...

On the other hand, Grand Prix Legends was substantially more difficult than actually driving a real car around a racing track, too. Not least because GPL is purely simulating 1960s F1 cars that had tonnes of power and approximately zero grip, traction control or anything else, rather than a modern vehicle with handling designed to keep you alive. Difficult doesn't equal realistic, per se. Forza 4 is designed to be at least nominally playable on a joypad, rather than being wheel-only, so there are always going to be compromises there, too.

All I know is that driving my car in the game, it reacts similarly enough to the way my real one does to make the handling vaguely predictable, and I can't ask more than that.

Only technically a lack of Porsches

Just as any Project Gotham Racing, Gran Turismo and so on veteran will recognise, Forza 4 is lacking 'proper' Porsches, but has plenty of RUF re-tuned ones. Which I suppose a real obsessive could probably paint over the badge on and de-tune back to stock, if they chose.

But that's the point

"It is funny though, Samsung that has patents on actual inventions can't use those patents as they're standards, while Apple can use it's patents on junk and jibberish that aren't inventions."

That's exactly the issue, though. Samsung can't win patent claims because they've pooled them in the standards - it's impossible to make a phone that works without infringing them, so Samsung are obliged to use FRAND licensing.

Meanwhile, Apple's "junk and gibberish" isn't required to build a working telephone at all, which is why other Android developers manage to avoid violating them perfectly well. As a result, it's a lot harder for Samsung to claim they were doing anything other than trying to imitate iOS.

So you've got the One, True definition of creation?

You're correct that the lack of keyboard makes tablets a bit rubbish for extended coding or writing sessions. Lots of 'creation' is possible of a tablet, however. Whether that's music creation, sketching, and so on.

I've got the further up, but older, 806. And while I get a Phono stage, it's not that hot. It's just not worth looking for them on A/V amps these days, as they're such minority requirements the money doesn't get thrown at them even when they are present.

You're much better off buying a separate Phono preamp, like the ones from NAD or Pro-Ject, and not worrying about internal phono stages at all.

As for recording, I can't remember the last time I recorded audio, rather than ripped it - the MiniDisc recorder got removed from the hi-fi stack on the last tidy up because it had been so long since it was turned on. But still, it's a pity.

re: Notebook?

No JDX, you're thinking of Netbook. Notebook is just another term for all laptops, because most people don't use them on their laps these days (not since they started generating so much heat, really).

4k is just the digital master

Everyone with an ounce of sense (so, that's everyone other than George Lucas, who doesn't want his Star Wars trilogy to look embarrassingly better than the prequels he shot digitally at 1920x1080) is scanning and mastering at 4k these days where possible. The difference is visible on big cinema screens, and a nice bit of anti-aliased scaling down to Blu-ray resolution looks nicer than from a 2k source too.

The biggest quality problem being faced is that even if you're not Lucas testing out shoddy new camera tech, a lot of late 90s to mid 00s films went through a 2k digital intermediate, and so the source data just isn't there. That's why the current Blu-ray of The Fellowship Of The Ring looks all waxy; a straight comparison between the Bridge of Khazad Dum shots in it and the beginning of Two Towers shows a huge difference as the tech had come along in that time.

As for Titanic, it's quite fun in a spectacularly dumb way once the ship starts sinking, so I might grab a 2D Blu-ray (somehow I've manage to lose VHS, DVD and even Laserdisc copies to other people over the years). But I hate 3D films, so I'll skip the cinema run.

re:Right that does it...

It's worse than that. What Real actually did was pull an extremely questionable hack to get their files encoded by iTunes with encryption. Apple fixed the security hole that they used to perform this probably-illegal trick, and so it no longer worked.

Base your business on dodgy security holes, and find things don't work when they're closed. Enough malware writers have hit the problem on Windows, but you don't see them whinging.