Posts by Dave 126
2701 posts • joined Wednesday 21st July 2010 13:57 GMT
Page:
Re: Typical media stupidness
I liked the Zune colour scheme... but making its USP (share music wirelessly! Kind of! With limitations!) reliant on actually meeting another human being who owned one was a just little bit optimistic on MS's part.
I've only ever met one person who has owned a Zune.
I used to have a iRiver H320 harddisk player (same battery, Toshiba HDD and form factor as an iPod, but with good quality ADC / DAC ) that could act as a USB host and snag music off any MP3 player that supported MSC - i.e, the same trick as the Zune, but better, and earlier.
Shame they stopped making the H320 -it's the Nokia 6210 of the PMP world.
Re: whats the point?
I don't have an issue with the keyboard - seems as good a design as any. It folds out of the way - or is removed - when you are just watching movies on the sofa, and is there if you want to tap out an email.
Some people actually proof-read their written work- being to get from their desk and sit in a different chair can only be a good thing, ergonomically. ("The best position is the next position" - some chiropractor)
Re: Presumably, since its ARM
The trouble with 'pro' features is that even a causal user can sometimes run into situations where they need the functionality that only the 'pro' version provides- even if it is only twice in a year. Paying hundreds of beans extra for a feature you only use for 10 minutes is annoying- and is, I guess, an argument for pay-per-use.
Re: Starting from the wrong place...
MS released a mouse in 1983.
It's worth having a look at the collection of HIDs that MS researcher Bill Buxton has accumulated over the decades:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/bibuxton/buxtoncollection/default.aspx
A rather fun collection of devices, I hope you will agree.
Re: "Mr Shatner was not above making jokes at his own expense"
Jeebus! George Takei... Strewth! True what they say about watching out for the quiet ones! Heck.
The link in the above post definitely needs a NSFW tag, unless you work in an all-night sauna!
Re: "If he came we could show him"
That's worse than "Felixstow, I'll shag him!" for the lady foot fetishists out there!
Re: Flight?
It not all glamour, you're right. When first in orbit, you are likely to find yourself with your trousers around your ankles whilst vomitting, being injected with anti-nausea drugs in the buttocks. Nice.
In space you are moving, your trajectory influenced by gravitational forces - just like an object in ballistic motion. By your argument, birds, planes and wasps fly, trebuchet-launched pianos don't.
Re: What "tourist" might mean: Someone is clearly sleepwalking through life
If the humans aren't landing on the moon, I can't see an institution sending a scientist- what can he/she do that a robot can't?
Re: Wow.
Re Big Brother TV show in space: could work, if you choose which cretin goes out of the airlock, especially if they did that Total Recall style eye-bulging asphyxiation routine.
I once heard someone suggest putting a mission to Mars on pay-per-view, making it self-financing. Anyone car to throw some back-of-a-beer-mat figures at it?
300 million subscribers, at $50 dollars a head, = £15 billion... is that the right ball park?
I think Quake was released under some flavour of open-source licence a few years back, so consider it 'donated', not 'abandoned'.
AFAIK, 'vapourware' is a term for promised products that don't materialise (see DukeNukem Forever, which has proven itself not to be vapourware), and 'abandonware' is the term used when developers don't bother enforcing copyright through lack financial incentive.
I take you were a Descent fan? : D
At least Doom was try before you buy, so you didn't loose out (except for waiting for a BBS that was swamped with demand)
@TeeCee
Thank you for a considered and concise review that answers the questions I had. Atmosphere is what I got from the original... My PC was behind when Doom3 came out, but my engineer house mate used it for testing his, ahem, workstation.
The first time I encountered one of those pink gorilla things in Doom (level 5?), i only heard it grunting in a dark corridor (Thank you Gravis) and nearly shat myself, shooting it point-blank with the rocket launcher, killing myself. I also remember running the audio through a loud HiFi, and the sound of the shotgun causing my mate's kid brother to run out if the room in tears.
Hehe
Assange was on a rather bad phone-line to Phillip Adams' Late Night Live on Australian Radio the other week.
Amusingly, the next day's guest was the director of Stratfor, in which he talked about the geo-strategic situation of Australia, and surmised that they have always joined in America's wars (Vietnam, Iraq, etc) because they require protection of the sea lanes by the dominant world sea power (The US, currently). Australia is dependant on imports and exporting raw materials. Australia is beholden to the US.
He then discusses how bigger links to Japan in the nineties were considered, and how Australia might side with China in future, should the US prove to be an unreliable ally and a diminishing military power (even top generals in the states recognise that military power comes from economic power and the military is costing too much)
Adams then asked about the Anonymous data snag... and about Assange, whom he described as a fault-line in his friendship with Stratfor's head.
[Adams describes himself as an old leftie, but is the man who helped bring us the 'One Eyed Trouser Snake' song in the same film that brought up Foster's from obscurity]
Re: I really, really love the galaxy note
I had considered combining a blue-tooth headset with the stylus... but on second thoughts you would't be able to make handwritten notes whilst taking a call (just qwerty notes). But on second second thoughts, you can't do that with the handset against your ear anyways, so maybe it'd work.
Devon wide?
That's what Viz would call your 'Carbon Cock Print' - CO2 released by travelling on a promise.
Re: Can we knight the Shat ?
Or indeed the time the Shat rolled up into a WWF match in the mid-nineties - I know it's choreographed, but he was hardly a young man even then!
Oh, and the Shatner version of 'Common People' is superb, though he delegates the chorus to Joe Jackson.
N Devon - similar landscape to Wales, but the beer is better. I don't know- or care- what punternet says about Swansea.
Re: Punternet only provides reviews,....
The best pasties in the South West come from East West Bakery on Butcher's Row, Barnstaple... a sensual pleasure of a different kind.
[ Sorry if this post violates El Reg's spamming policy, but they are tasty]
Re: Has the esteemed councillor
Town councillor posts don't attract the best talent, though if you are lucky you will have a human being or two amongst them. One mate of mine wrote to our town council, just to enquire into the process of becoming a councillor of of curiousity... they wrote back offering him the role!
Before a rather good woman joined our council, their argument for not reserving space for a skate-park was: "Skate parks attract young people. A group of young people would attract drug dealers. Drugs are bad, m'kay?" Never mind that young people here took drugs because there was fluff-all else to do...
Re: Can we knight the Shat ?
Can we knight the Shat?
Yes and no - Canadians can be knighted, but they don't tend to be because of the Nicle Resolution. However, he has played a part in a show that attempted to envisage a better future world (by fighting and copping off with aliens)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_titles_debate#The_Nickle_Resolution
> inaccurate off-the-cuff comments on things he knows little, if anything of.
It was a joke. The whole point was that everyone knew that Shatner had never been to Ilfracombe, prompted as it was by his mispronunciation of the town's name. It was not a attempt at social commentary, FFS. A joke. Mr Shatner was not above making jokes at his own expense, and generally came across very well.
Posted in Speedball 2 Brutal Deluxe
Absolute classic. From an era of British classics, Bitmap Bros, Sensible Software, Code Masters, Team 17, Bullfrog...
The Bitmap Brother's The Chaos Engine deserves mention in any compendium of the Steam Punk sub-genre, too, taking as its premise 'What if Babbage's difference engine had gone a bit HAL9000?'
The closest I have experienced in recent times is Wario Stadium Soccer on the GameCube- takes the sensible step of not aping too closely the sport it is based on. Trying for and failing a slide tackle on your opponent gives them the opportunity to drop a massive Kooper Shell on your side of the pitch. The automated goal keepers are crocodiles... Superb mayhem.
@ Sir Runcible... Very vaguely, from the pages of PC Zone... there was what looked like a rugby pitch with bombholes in it...
road network of dodgems
They have them in France, almost. They are nicknamed 'Cars for the blind' and can be driven without a licence - even if you have your licence through drink-driving. They were designed for old people who either never had a licence or are considered too frail to drive a normal vehicle. They sound distinctly agricultural.
I also noted that the French treat their rural teenagers better - I spied a few teenagers on mopeds taking their girlfriends for a ride, whereas here in the UK they can't whilst they have their (seemingly permanent) L-plates.
Re: "GPS in every schoolbag"
"GPS in every schoolbag"
It does sound stupid. Some children, unfortunately, are reliant on being able to find a hiding place from abusers in their families- cases like this are far more common than abuse perpetrated by strangers.
A better system might be for some of the meat-bag avoidance systems to be offloaded from the car to the street - ie around a school, you have post-mounted infra-red cameras that track the position of warm bodies and generate alarms if one darts towards the road... A car sensor will be hard pressed to detect a child if it darts out from between parked cars. Obviously the car should be doing no more 20mph before braking, hopefully making any collision an educational rather than final experience for the child.
( just a first thought, I haven't thought this through)
Before throwing high tech at a problem, better planning can be employed. Don't place busy roads next to schools etc
Re: Or just use buses
>[Busses] you don't have to spend 10 minutes to find a park place.
Good point. Bicycles too, they take you door to door. There are things that can be done to promote bicycle use, and I'm not thinking of box-ticking cycle lanes (check out the book 'Britain's crappest cycle lanes' to confirm your worst suspicions of local authority incompetence):
-Security of parked cycles. Force employers to allow bicycles into the building, rather than hide behind 'Fire Safety' regs- within reason, obviously.
- Shower / wash facilities, where practical. In some cases, this can prevent a journey (shower at work and head to the pub in town, rather than head home and back for a wash first)
Re: Or just use buses
How do you cope with the nausea-inducing movement of the coachwork and the sod-casting teenagers?
I did like the scene in StarTrek IV where Spock administers a Vulcan nerve pinch to the bloke with a ghetto-blaster - but I would take listing to someone's ghetto-blaster over some twerp's tinny mobile phone speaker any day of the week.
Good points.
Just on the road signage... I would have thought that machine-readable signs would just be used as a backup to the GPS- (ie, the QR code or whatever on the sign tells the vehicle where it is on which road- a secondary back up would be an inertial dead-reckoning system): the actual content of the signs (ie, '50', 'Give Way', 'Danger of Falling Rocks' etc) would be stored on board the vehicle.
I would have thought that a passive RF system would be more resilient to bird droppings and buck shot than a sign-mounted optical system, too.
Obviously there will be other systems too - should a vehicle activate its air-bags, it will transmit the fact, over both a cellular network and locally.
Re: Wait a second...
I've seen a few, but I fell off it. I loved the original film (following Clarke, Bester and Gibson), enjoyed the second, and have yet to meet anyone who has seen Avalon by the original GITS director- live action filmed in Poland by a Japanese crew.
But yeah, seeing that visual - that's what the internet is SUPPOSED to look like. Now, where's my Ono Sendai deck?
Was Doom 3 any good? A good part of my youth was spent playing the originals, but Doom3 just looks a bit generic.
(Cue blood-tinted spectacled memories, especially the sound of the shotgun reloading and the rib-splitting gut-spilling that ensued if you blew up an oil drum next to an enemy.... IDSPISPOPD, a brace of 486DXs with a null-modem cable, native support for the Gravis Ultrasound etc. )
User contract
'All' Facebook provides is the infrastructure- people go onto FB for the words and images created by their own friends. It seems quite different to the implicit contract of commercial TV - 'we entertain you for 25 minutes, you watch our sponsors messages for 5'.
The cost of developing and maintaining FB's infrastructure must surely be tiny per user. Since for many FB has become a de facto address book and in some parts of the world (see Arab Spring) a very real form of political interaction, governments really should do their job of standing up for their citizens, and legislate. If this results in a massive devaluation of FB's stock, so be it. It will only hurt those who invested in exploiting other people's data.
<end rant>
Posted in Sony Xperia P mid-range Android
Re: vs..
Options:
There were those Japanese cameras with a phone bolted on (rather than the other way around)... what happened to them? If you want to compromise on the phone side, might you get a small Android phone and a small compact camera, or do you need to upload / email photos whilst on the hoof? If so, you might be able to accomplish that by using a micro SD adaptor in your camera and then popping the microSD card in your phone. Or use a MiFi card if you're feeling fancy - I believe they can work ad-hoc now.
Otherwise, search Google for "Best Android Camera"... though the nod tends to go to the Nokia N8 and Apple, the Galaxy SII and T-Mobile MyTouch Slide score well- though such tests probably don't include this Sony handset.
After being told that the low light performance of this Sony is good, it would have been nice to have seen a picture of a pub! : D
I'm actually a hypocrite- whilst I knock the idea of carrying around a £500 phone, I usually have a chunky premium compact camera in my jacket pocket.
"theories of obesity that the mainstream "scientists" won't tell you about"
> "theories of obesity that the mainstream "scientists" won't tell you about"
Hell, you sound like you're trying to sell something to Homer Simpson. : D
Shit, scientists will tell you things all the time, if you only seek it out. Try Scientific American, or New Scientist or whatever- they're not Nature, but they're a start. Any scientist will tell you that weight gain is complicated- if they don't, they are a snake oil vendor. Things known to help are:
-high intensity exercise for short periods (rather than flumping around the park for an hour, which will only kill your knees)
-not eating carbs in the evening (steak and chocolate is fine, though),
-eat a fatty breakfast (tells your body to expect fat that day, and it adapts)
-fidgeting (though I don't know if you can learn to fidget)
-Eat all your daily meals within a single eight hour period
-drink coffee
And after all that, yeah, some probably will be genetic. But try the above first. Or take up smoking, whatever.
You mean your moon laser's still not finished?
"But to do that would require some sort of doomsday device... Oh well, I suppose I can spare one"
Re: Poor Choice!
Assange wouldn't- he was telling Phillip Adams* last week that Sweden's prisons were the worst in Europe. Amusingly, Adam's guest the next day was the director of Stratfor.
*probably most famous in the UK for being the producer of 'Barry Mackenzie', the film with Barrie Humpries, Peter Cook and the 'One Eyed Trouser Snake' song
Re: Do no right?
The article was having an implied dig, Daily Mail style, and my comment "Can the author of this article outline the process they would have used to determine the correct price to charge Google?" was an attempt to make it explicit.
A British charity, with the aim of promoting the waterways, has released its data to a map service that many British people use... Seems win win to me. Nowhere was there mention of the data not being available to any other party.
I was hoping the author might acknowledge and expand upon their unease with the situation for our, the readers benefit, but no.
?
Someone might be caught sunbathing in their garden at a 4" resolution. Wow. Is anyone with access to the internet going to spend time ogling 600 pink pixels, when they can easily find high res smut elsewhere?
Re: Magic Number?
I've had a UK distribution manager for a consumer goods company tell me that we should pitch our product at £50 or £100, and not mess around in the middle. It seems that if it were £70, you lose the people who won't pay more than £50 (losing volume) whilst the people who will pay £70 would happily pay £100 (so you lose margin).
Obviously its a fast and loose analysis, but seems there may be some truth in it.
Re: R&D and payback
Prior art applies to patents, not licenses. (obviously if the patent was ruled void, the license would be too). Whether or not Vertu a) used the same material that b) processed in the same way as that which Apple have licensed, I don't know. But had it been licensed to Vertu for a limited period (and there was another phone manufactuer who used it too, but seemingly only for models released in Russia) and that license expired, Apple would be able to hold the exclusive license for consumer electronics.
Apple's agreement doesn't prevent, say, a manufacturer of medical equipment using the stuff.
That the stuff is easy to work with is telling. The Vertu could have been using the same stuff but processed in a trickier, more expensive way. And being a Vertu, it would spin that into a virtue - as it does its sapphire screen and jewelled button bearings.
Re: Colour me confused!
Er no, its a surface area relation. Aluminium powder has been used in solid rocket boosters- solid magnesium alloys are already used in ultrabooks and MP3 players, since it is easier to cast than aluminium - and magnesium is often alloyed with aluminium to make complex shapes easier and cheaper to cast. Motorcycle brake levers are an example. It is soft though, so you often see it powder-coated.
Even steel wool is fairly easy to ignite with a lighter- due to the large surface area.
Or, just have the clone look at pr0n, whilst you look at basket weaving. That way, when you stand accused of ogling nekkid bodies, you can plausibly blame your 'clone'.
Re: how have they screwed up?
>two-pane e-reader
They called it the Courier. Curiously, Sony have tried the same folding two-pane design on an Android tablet. It seems a sensible design for everything except video, and MS were pitching it as a pocket diary and scrapbook, a way of collecting doodles and ideas whilst on the hoof.
I mention Sony, because they have tried making UMPCs (ultra-mobile PCs) with Windows XP for years. No one here has mentioned XP for Tablet Edition, because the hardware was too heavy to hold comfortably.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20128013-75/the-inside-story-of-how-microsoft-killed-its-courier-tablet/
Re: ARMvsIntel Win 8
>one of my big dreams was of a Mac tablet that could take stylus input
I've commented before that the iPad does seem to have missed a few tricks... such as taking charge all the Photoshop tool palettes and leaving your Mac's monitor with the workspace. One would have assumed that such tricks would be easier for Apple to accomplish than anyone else, by virtue of its having control of all the software and hardware.
The reason they haven't is that they don't need to; the iPad is already selling very nicely.
Ho hum.
Posted in New Samsung chief: I want SOFTWARE
>fast forward to the end of a movie and hit PLAY
Whilst I admire your exhaustive testing, under what circumstances would you do that?
Can the author of this article outline the process they would have used to determine the correct price to charge Google?
Re: How much?
Yeah, I double read that part... I think we're all assuming they meant '+70% of the [human] biomass on earth'
Sorely disappointed by the lack of Terminator 2 references on this thread...
... What, you think El Reg have this icon just for fun?
Re: It's been done.
AFAIK, for you to use the toothbrush style charger, you would need a hole in your phone. It requires a doughnut, sorry, toroidal shape.
Re: Spending extra time
I'm not a gym-rat, but I did discover that after doing a modest number of push-ups, like five, my body would automatically move into an upright, comfortable posture when I stood up again. Someone suggested it was due to stretching the muscles across the chest, and that the same benefit my to posture could be achieved by placing a hand in a doorway, and rotating my torso away from it (then repeat for the other arm).
Ernest Hemingway was famous for only writing whilst standing up at a lectern.
Re: For what it's worth..
I did see an abstract of a study some years back that suggested that Italian feel less sexually confident if deprived of their mobile for a few days.
(the study used Italians, it wasn't suggesting this only happens to Italians)
Um... please can you repost - it's just that I'm having trouble grokking your post as a whole.
I did hear a report on the traffic crossing story on R4's PM, but can't grasp the link to childcare, the BBC or to working hours.
Cheers!
Looking at the video you linked to, it seems that the timing of the crossing is fine, but that the drivers don't know their highway code (amber flashing lights are a sign that a car can proceed ONLY if there is no pedestrian on the crossing... the lady makes it safely across whilst the lights are still flashing orange. 'Driving without due care and consideration for other road users' is what these cars are doing *) This BBC report does nothing to re-educate drivers of the Highway Code as it relates to pedestrian crossings. So much for 'inform, educate and entertain'.
*just like people cruising in the middle lane of the motorway, driving up your rear bumper, driving too slowly for the road without pulling over occasionally, and driving a silver car in the rain or mist without their side lights on...
