Posts by arober11
14 posts • joined Friday 16th July 2010 03:20 GMT
The Starbucks factor
I've encountered the odd project manager who permanently boots to Windows on their work MacBook, and probably has no idea of how to boot back to OS X, if they new what it was. Their world / skill-set is limited to MS-Project, MS-Powerpoint, MS-Dynamics, MS-Outlook, Skype and possibly HP Quality Center, so OS X would be unworkable for them even if they did dual boot.
The primary reason for them having talked their companies into forking out the extra for a MacBook, with a separate Windows licence, and several hours of technician time for a custom build, was to not look out of place in Starbucks. The number of these style junkies is probably insignificant, but best not to assume all MacBooks run OS X the majority of the time, or that all Boot-camped Mac Books are down to skill-set of the present keeper.
Appears Amazon now supports Welsh on the Kindle:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Welsh-Kindle-Celtic-Languages-Books/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A13435831%2Cp_n_binding_browse-bin%3A368165031
Posted in Intel, Apple forging chip-baking deal?
iPhone / iPod only
Intel's been happily licensing, adapting and baking silicon using non Intel designs for years e.g. The ARM based XScale range and the amd64 derived Atom and Core i cores.
Wot no FON
Why no mention of the [BT] FON network, as it's the largest Wi-Fi network in the country (thanks to BT's participation), and open to all (not just BT customers): http://maps.fon.com/?lang=en
iPhone / iPod only
Wonder when the iPad version will appear, guess I'll have to stick to the web version for now.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/unhappy_32.png
It Dosen't take an Einstein.....
It dosen't take an Einstein to conclude that this supposed invention is neither novel or non-obvious; perhaps it's time for the USPTO to thumb through it's mass of patents (possibly the first time they've bothered to read them) and see if there is anything on it's books that covers the cloning a certain Austrian Patent clerk. If they do I's suggest they contact the filler immediately and ask for a few hundred clones, it will save much litigation :)
We've been here before: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva75.html
FYI: For Winnie-The-Pooh see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._A._Milne
Posted in FaceTime now on patent troll list
All standardised in the 1990's by the GSM and IDEG/WP4
I'm sure this wall all standardised by the GSM and IDEG/WP4 working groups in the mid to late 1990's.
Some background reading: http://www.scribd.com/doc/83516481/33/The-Beginning-of-IDEG-WP4-and-DGMH
Posted in Skype touts FREE* Wi-Fi across the UK
FON have been offering a similar service for years, along with the option to charge
Nothing new, FON have been offering a similar service for years (4 million hot-spots), along with the option to charge for the bandwidth: http://corp.fon.com/en/this-is-fon
Re: Blast from the past...
Acorn's Arthur OS and RISC OS pioneered docks long before Steve was pushed. They even had an ARM powered touch screen tablet computers, with an icon bar at the bottom and icon's scattered across the screen back in 1994 (Google "NewsPad")
Posted in Acorn Archimedes is 25
Anyone get their RISC OS fix via am Emulator
Wondering if anyone is still secretly satisfying their: Zarch, Elite, Chocs Away.... addictions through a virtual hit on one of the many emulators e.g.
http://www.riscosopen.org/content/sales/risc-os-usb-sticks
http://acorn.revivalteam.de/?site=Emulation
?
(Many years back I was a Red Squirrel addict)
Re: *rolls eyes*
The desktop mode is a stub (No "Start" - button), breaking it for those who want to play on a non touch device, also not brilliant on the works Dell XT2.
In desktop mode your forced to switch back tothe swipee Metro interface (via a key combo or a painful hot corner - especially if running via a VM on a Mac), to swipe around, and find and Start an un-pined program.
Same goes for login / unlock, you need to swipe up, to get the login prompt to appear (took a min or two, to work that one out), and working out how to Shut Windows 8 down wasted another few min's.
Posted in HP Officejet 6500
Two for half the price
My old HP C5180 started to play up a few week back, so though it was time to replace the device with something a little faster, could print double sided, along with having a sheet feeder, as I scan far more than I print.
A quick Google and this model leapt out as the best value device around, especially as the Web site of a certain major retail park vendor was offering the device @ £109.10, so a few clicks later I was off down the road. Got the brute set up in around 15 min's, and started to play.
Print quality / speed are fine for a SOHO set-up,
Then started to test the scanner / sheet feeder, a small document scanned just fine, but when I attempted to scan a couple of Pic's, via the flat bed scanner, the scanner head strangled itself, on it's own ribbon cord, and resulted in a Scanner Failure message a power on / off couldn't resolve, so a quick phone call and back down the road to swap the unit.
The replacement unit is mechanically sound, but have noticed while creating searchable PDF's, on Windows 7, the OCR software occasionally locks up processing complex multi column / oriented text documents, sometimes it sorts itself out, after a min or two, other times it just bombs out, annoying when it's on the last of a 30+ page document. Along similar lines I've managed to get the scan software to bomb out in the results preview, by simply paging through / back through the scanned page images, you appear to be fine if you don't hold down one of the cursor keys. My last gripe on the scanner front is the lid, it only rotates through 90'ish degrees, so unless you find a perfectly levelled surface you may need to wedge a few sheets of cardboard under front of the device, to prevent your knuckles being whacked by the lid and attached feeder tray every time you use the scanner.
As a printer or single page scanner the device is fine, but on multi-page documents the supplied Windows scanner software appears to be a work in progress.
Oh the device also offers a "FAX" capability, haven't a clue why, as that fad died out just after we stopped sending children up chimneys and loading computer programs from cassette tape.
