* Posts by JDX

6847 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2010

iPad Air 2: Vulture chews on new Apple tablet

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16GB would be fine in the scenario described, but as mentioned it can fill up quite easily if you install games or videos

FATTIES: Boffins say their miracle sunshine skin cream 'prevents obesity'

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Re: FFS There is NO miracle cure

Oh dear. Someone has a metabolism which means they don't put weight on easily and has combined this with a GCSE in physics... what's that saying about a little knowledge being dangerous?

"If you want to lose weight you need to have less calories coming in than are going out" is at a similar level as "you are less likely to be in a car accident if you don't drive".

The human body is incredibly complicated. The basic calories in/used argument is obviously true but if you take two people they won't gain the same calories from eating exactly the same food and they won't use the same calories from doing the exact same activities.

For all those who think they can apply conservation of energy blindly, go work out the mass-energy equivalence of the calories contained in a big-mac.

And OF COURSE diets work. "Eating sensibly" IS a diet, you muppet.

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Re: Also

Really? What do all the skinny women you know eat?

Meet Mr Gamification: He's got a NUDGE or two for you

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Re: The event sounds awful...

Gamification != a game

But adding scoring metrics and goals means users are motivated to try to better their score, and continue using the simulator longer than they would otherwise. Clever metrics will motivate them to focus on important aspects more.

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Re: The event sounds awful...

The moment you add goals or scoring metrics to a simulator, that is gamification.

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The event sounds awful...

...and rather spoiling the image of gamification which certainly CAN be powerful and very serious. I developed a training simulator teaching doctors how to perform a surgery which used this idea, and they liked it very much.

Lumia 830: Microsoft hopes to seduce with slim 'affordable' model

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Impressive

Removable battery, SD and Qi built in, all in the same phone. Is that a first in the Lumia range, most seem to have one or two?

Fanboi-and-fanfare-free fondleslabs fail to fire imagination

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They're incremental updates

Adding the finger-print doodah is the one real change, because Air and Mini-retina were the big upgrades... we don't NEED another big one. I don't think even Apple expect people to upgrade every generation, this is just keeping the lineup fresh.

Google Glassholes are undateable – HP exec

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Re: Downvotes

Rather than being distracted by Glass, you could use it to record the date for hours/days/weeks of introspection "what he mean when he said that" "is she giving me signals when she touches her hair" etc

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Pretty arrogant

If you're the type of person who would wear Glass on a date, the chances are the type of person who would date you would also be a big nerd. They might be interested or even turn up wearing Glass themselves! Maybe Glass is how you got talking to each other in the first place, I imagine if two wearers see each other they often say hello.

It rather suggests only men would wear Glass, and no women are nerds, or want to date nerds, which is hardly the case and is actually kind of sexist. Some of the biggest nerds I know are women.

Mars needs women, claims NASA pseudo 'naut: They eat less

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Re: Serious question

Why do you think femonauts would be permitted to menstruate while in space? It seems foolish to have to ship sanitary products so I very much think they'd be forced to be on the pill (or similar).

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Re: Missed the most crucial point

Yeah, isn't casual sexism funny.

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Re: You seem to be confounding weight (or lack thereof) with mass.

Nope, you are confusing real life with GCSE level physics. When you carry something heavy from point A to B, the vast majority of the work done is not accelerating the mass, but fighting the gravitational force. In free-fall, moving a 20Kg sack of spuds involves a simple push at the start, let it float across and another push to stop it. About 2 seconds of physical activity, regardless of the distance. On earth, you have to trudge/drag/pull it the whole way. On Mars, the same but it's far easier.

The wrench example is correct but considering the whole point of the wrench is to overcome physical weakness in humans in the first place, just making the handle 1 inch longer would overcome the issue!

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Re: Who would deal with the spiders from mars?

How much heavy lifting do you think will be involved in weightless space travel and low-weight conditions on Mars?

And if you want to just say "men are better than women" stop beating round the bush and just say it.

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Re: Calories = work

20% isn't "a very high percentage". Although in a largely sedentary environment especially with weightless conditions, I'll grant the proportion might be higher.

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Re: Calories = work

If you weigh more, it takes more work to do the same motion. So you may have it backwards - men burn more calories because they tend to have heavier skeletal systems and more muscle mass.

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Re: This'll never work

Somehow I rather think that if they are worried about the different mass of food eaten by women and men, they will not be willing to send up a shed-load of tampons and will require all femonauts to be on the pill in some form (implant perhaps)

Boffins who stare at goats: I do believe they’re shrinking

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So as long as climate change isn't reversed the goats will be fine, as the harsh winters aren't happening. In fact, we'd be endangering the goats if we DID reverse CC?

Facebook pays INFINITELY MORE UK corp tax than in 2012

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How does Ireland make any money by being a tax haven ?

You have to pay tax somewhere but if you funnel all your profit into a country with a much lower taxation rate, you pay far less tax - but that country gets all of it. So for example Ireland might get tax on all of Google's EU profits, in a simple example.

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I don't think a terrible idea is better than no idea. Forbidding all these companies from operating in the UK is an idea.

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Taxing revenue is a stupid idea. My 1-man company's profits are something like 80% of revenue, for large corporations it could be only 2% if they rely on bulk sales at tiny margins.

And, personal tax sort of taxes profit rather than income by giving you a tax-free earnable allowance; you only pay tax on earnings after (approx) £10k. If you tot up your essential expenditure (averaged over adults in your home I suggest) where does it come relative to that? At a very rough guess in our household the allowance is about 2/3 of the per-person spending so not great but not a million miles off either.

Back to the ... drawing board: 'Hoverboard' will disappoint Marty McFly wannabes

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Battery life isn't a problem

7 minutes is more than long enough to fall off and crack your head. And it would probably take a while before most of us had the fitness to use it more than 7min anyway :)

Apple flings iOS 8.1 at world+dog: Our AMAZEBALLS 9-step installation guide

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Remember your PIN

So they removed the finger-print unlocking on the iPhone 6 then?

Doctor Who and the Dalek: 10-year-old tests BBC programming game

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Re: Never quite sure of the value of all this...

Not everyone needs to know how to add fractions or ask where the swimming pool is in French. But finding out what you're good at and like when you're young is worthwhile.

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You mean they actually made a programming tool that is useful AND fun?

I'd never have guessed that reading the half-baked ideas floating around. Well done, I think.

#Help. There's a STRANGER in my Twitter timeline

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Re: I must be too old

That would've made an excellent tweet.

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I'm always getting emails "do you follow X" or "do you know Y" from them. I'd much rather see this in Twitter itself because then I'd only be bothered by it when I was using Twitter, which is not very often at all.

I think they have a point, that these days Twitter is how many people would find out about people they'd want to follow on Twitter. Well, by "many people" I mean "many Twitter users".

Apple's new iPADS have begun the WAR that will OVERTURN the NETWORK WORLD

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"It isn’t hard to imagine a network failing Google’s beauty contest"

If only the governments of nations were able to force their hands on such matters. Wait, they can - they can force Google over "right to forget", etc, etc.

iPad AIR 2 and iPad MINI 3, 5K iMac: World feels different today – and it IS

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You're spending 5k on a computer and you aren't paying for proper broadband?

You're spending 5k on a computer to watch a movie on?

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Re: The company also bumped up the hardware specs on the Mac Mini with faster processors

Refurb emptied of Mac Minis of all types earlier today, before I could get one.

Luckily I have a mate who works at an Apple Store who snared me a new one at a discount.

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re:5K for a desktop that doesn't even have an optical drive?

Damn right. For 5k you should get an optical drive with BD read-write, at least 2 floppy drives (so you can copy between disks) and a ZIP drive.

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Re: the Atom in this one is plenty zippy for web browsing and office documents

If that's your use-case, you shouldn't be buying Surface. The whole point is it can run regular Windows applications, it's a fully specced PC.

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The company also bumped up the hardware specs on the Mac Mini with faster processors

But now no option for quad-core at all, even on the top-spec model? That was the key difference between the two models previously, the more expensive one could support a quad-core i7.

I was waiting for the new models to consider getting an iMac; now I'm wondering if I should be trying to buy the previous generation (where do you get those from now)?

Watersports-friendly e-reader: Kobo's Aura H2O is literary when wet

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Reading in the bath

Surely I'm not the only one who does this... I put my (non-touch) Kindle in a clear sandwich bag :)

Is living with Dolby Atmos worth the faff?

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Re: OTT

When all the film has going for it is the GFX and SFX, you want to get the most out of them!

Securobods RAGE over $600k Kickstarter Tor box components

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Re: Kickstarter - why?

Generally because it's a product that doesn't exist already, not some variant on an existing product you could just buy on Amazon.

Hollywood's made an intelligent science vs religion film?!

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Re: "an INTELLIGENT science vs religion film"!?

Not teaching children about religion for fear of indoctrinating them rather risks indoctrinating them in the opposite direction. It is a careful balance.

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I find the Anthropic Principle to be the ultimate cop-out/

Aboard the GOOD SHIP LOLLIPOP, there's a Mobe and a Slab and a TELLYBOX

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Re: there's now an Amazon Prime Android app

whoa, there is? Has it literally just come out because we were looking only a week back and couldn't find one (and couldn't decide if sideloading the Amazon store was possible)?

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Re: 64 bit processor support

It's a fair question. Even on desktops it is pretty unusual to need 64bit!

I assumed it simply had performance implications to be able to work on 64bit registers, e.g. for the same volume of chip or amount of electricity, a 64 bit chip is more efficient.

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3D animated buttons

Just what the world needed

Facebook, Apple: LADIES! Why not FREEZE your EGGS? It's on the company!

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Women who are set on children know they need to leave a safety margin to have a strong chance, so that's basically early-mid 30s. Leaving it until early 40s, many women can have kids but the level of risk/doubt is much higher so you wouldn't do that. Knowing you can confidently get pregnant at that age might well mean many wait an extra 5-7 years, and those are quite possibly your most valuable years - you're an expert in your field, doing something quite senior. And yet you're still pretty young and healthy.

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Re: As a parent I frankly disapprove

People at 60 today are often as healthy as 45-year-olds were in the past. However menopause has not moved and is now relatively earlier in a woman's life.

Influential scribe Charles Petzold: How I figured out the Windows API

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Re: Face it, Windows is no longer the dominant OS on machines connected to the Internet

Of course it is.

Change "machines" for "devices" and you might be right although it would be interesting to see stats for total number of pages loaded across desktop & mobile OS, not number of unique devices, to measure where the bulk of usage is coming from.

Apple's new 'iPad Air 2' sliced open, revealing (possible) A8X core

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Re: "But maybe it's been a bit too long since Apple did anything really exciting and innovative."

I don't really see how the fundamental design of the iPad CAN be improved. I'll probably look back on that comment with hindsight but it's basically just a screen. Adding stuff for change's sake would more likely be gimmicky than innovative.

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Re: I suspect

"I guess it's not Haswell but the Mini is only incrementally behind state-of-the-art.

The current Mini is still a pretty good deal. It's hard/impossible to find or build a PC that size with comparable computing power and storage and an integrated power supply."

Neither the price nor the spec has changed for 2 years. You wouldn't pay today's prices for a 2-year-old PC normally.

It might be good value for the size (in fact I'm sure it is) but that's not an issue to me. It's just the cheapest way to get a decent spec Mac and PC, and by the time you put in a quad-core CPU it's rather expensive. The price creeps up on you... so a refresh would be nice even if only so I can buy a 2012 model more cheaply :)

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Re: Minor bump

I don't know how I'd tell if I was running up against the RAM limit as a user running multiple apps but as a developer you have memory limits and increased RAM presumably increases those. For serious apps/games, you can easily use that much memory. Not just in terms of bigger resources, but some algorithms can trade CPU for RAM, etc.

I'm not saying we should need 2Gb, but doubling the RAM is not insignificant.

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Minor bump

1->2Gb RAM is rather a big improvement really

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Re: I suspect

I really hope we see a new Mac Mini - I've been considering replacing my old Windows desktop and old MacBook with a single machine for a while, but have been waiting for a newer Mini since the spec is so old.

ONE MILLION people already running Windows 10

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Re: Yeah But

I bet ANY beta of this type has a very large proportion of people who register but never install, or install but never use, or install and use for 5min and then get bored. That's nothing unusual at all.

Even if only 5% of people give it a proper test, 50,000 active beta testers is huge at this early stage.