* Posts by pear

83 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Apr 2011

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Intel pulls plug on mini-PC NUCs

pear

ASU’s taking over

They’ve done a deal with asus so the NUC line will sort of continue under them.. which is probably ok

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

pear

Weakening Case

I think this argument was pretty strong 10-15 years ago, however the drop in costs of renewables and advancements in storage have weakened it somewhat with nuclear still being rather expensive to set up and maintain. Any new nuclear plant not already in development will likely not come online for a decade, making it something of a moot point.

LG Electronics finally gives up cellphone business

pear

Eh

Eh I had a G4 with various issues, it was repaired/replaced and then continued to have battery issues later.

They did seem to be putting out some interesting stuff, mind.

Switched to iphone and it was just less hassle overall.

That 'Surface will die in 2019' prediction is still a goer, says soothsayer

pear

best in class

Problem is no one is really producing high end windows alternatives to surface, so if that's what you're looking for - you buy the surface.

Official: The shape of the smartphone is changing forever

pear

Phone vendors are being a bit anti-consumer

I'm not especially bothered about aspect ration as long as I can hold the damned thing.

By Nokia 808 was a technological marvel. Small but weighty and seemingly indestructible.. ok after many years the xenon flash stopped working (remember those?) , easy to hold, industry beating camera and sound recording (never really surpassed though cameras now have some useful tricks and are much faster), oled screen replaceable battery, absolute works but Symbian effectively died.

I then switched to an LG G4, which was a total fail, the thing was huge and by modern standards it's not even considered that large. Not to mention bootloop and battery issues.

Phones that I can fit in my hand are rare, I ended up with an iphone se which is a near ideal form factor, I could take some a little larger - say a 6s, but i think even just reducing bezels would be sufficient.

I would quite gladly have continued along apple road but getting rid of a headphone jack is just stupid and benefits no one. Then, android manufacturers in their stupidity join that party as a feature so that they can make the phones even thinner and more fragile.

Google were joking about it one year and then removed it from the pixel 2? At least that isn't giant and would be appealing but they decided to get rid of the main thing pushing me from upgrading to a new iphone.

There are clearly gaps in the market but the designers seem keen on not filling them.

They grow up so fast: Spam magnet Hotmail turned 22 today

pear

Works fine for me

Tried switching to gmail years back and couldn't stand the interface.

The junk filter is good, although in recent months a little too good (It sometimes thinks El Reg is spam)

Good linkup with Windows ecosystem these days, can access my gmail directly, allows me to have a bunch of aliases, effective folder rules and the like.

Hardly a relic

The wait is over ... Nokia's BACK!

pear

Hope it works

Nokia produced some consumate pieces of enginering back in the day

My Pureview 808 (now pretty much retired) is simply the most brilliant phone and way ahead of its time. The camera is amazing, it can handle recording stereo sound at heavy metal gigs, great headphone output. Had offline GPS, and various other cool stuff - back in 2012. Now all we get is these flimsy battery draining slabs.

Sadly they will probably just mostly be following the crowd

Forgive me, father, for I have used an ad-blocker on news websites...

pear

stop being annoying

People generally don't mind adverts, they mind them being annoying. If they stopped randomly playing videos, making pages unreadable and such people would ease off the blocking

There’s a module for that: LG launches G5 smartphone complete with 'friends'

pear

camera

The annoying thing about this phone is that they put in a significant camera hump and instead of actually putting in some serious hardware they went for a ultra wide angle-lens add-on weird thing... eh?

The G4 camera is decent but still way behind my Nokia 808 which is many years older

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Star Wars Special Editions

pear

mneh

There's two and a half issues I think

One is the refusal to maintain the original editions. The other is that some of the changes are just outright bad and often technically poor. The half issue is the latest blu-rays have some very strange colour grading/tint at times.

Cleaning up/enhancing special effects I have no issue with at all. Darth Vader shouting Noooo is just ridiculous. Adding Jabba is pointless and poorly implemented.

Replacing Lapti-nek with "Jedi Rocks" is awful, however I rather prefer the "victory celebration" music to Yub Nub. In '97 that's all they did, cool, but in more recent versions they kept adding ridiculous things on other planets and got rid of Sebastian Shaw and replaced him with a creepy young Anakin.

Heavy VPN users are probably pirates, says BBC

pear

Re: BBC Worldwide

Well, to be honest, one is a bit racist.

Microsoft ropes in Opera Mini as default Nokia dumbphone browser

pear

SHould have been done years ago

I use an 808 and the inbuilt browser is beyond woeful.

opera mini provides an acceptable experience, except sometimes the links get messed up , you click on one hyperlink and it opens another on the page.

Cor blimey: Virgin Media pipes 152Mb fibre to 100,000 East Londoners

pear

Hipsters set to consume...

More memes than their brains can handle.

ASUS launches 5-in-1 Android Windows Phone laptop tablet (breathe)

pear

How long till they make the tablet android and put a Windows phone in the dock?

Gigabyte Brix Pro: You don't need no steenkin' Xbox... when you have 4K-ing amazing graphics

pear

Not quite there

Sounds like we'll need another iteration or two before these things become more credible.

An AMD APU would probably be more balanced for gaming.

4K-ing hell! Will your shiny new Ultra HD TV actually display HD telly?

pear

Grumble?

I'm all for high res content but for broadcast they really need to sort out the quality of "HD" before they start broadcasting 4k. I'm glad, at least, that pretty much everything BBC is now broadcast in 'HD' and it's not bad.

Compare itv hd to NHK and you'll wonder why itv are allowed to call it "HD".

As for content distribution the failure of Sony et al to produce an optical disc format will make it hard for it to take off.

Universal's High Fidelity Pure Audio trickles onto Blighty’s Blu-Ray hi-fis

pear

Music industry digging a hole

So few people want this.

Just using the analogue outs on a standard blu-ray player or ps3 will sort of kill any benefits of the high res, so you'll need some sort of dac to get any benefit, if there is indeed any at all.

The future of cinema and TV: It’s game over for the hi-res hype

pear

HFR?

I think you fall in to an uncanny valley, quite frankly it looks weird, even if it does looks sharper etc.

Living with a 41-megapixel 808 PureView: Symbian's heroic last stand

pear

Pretty happy with mine

I just need to use it more often for photos!

Ed Miliband brands Google's UK tax avoidance 'WRONG'

pear

Re: Tax Laws

Isas and pension tax breaks are deliberate and the government encourages you to do it. E.g it does not expect you to pay tax on the interest of your first 6 odd grand of savings that year.

An individual can't be attacked for doing this, in the same way people shouldn't be attacked for claiming child benefit to which they are entitled. You could argue that we shouldn't have ISAS or similar things at all but not that people shouldn't use them when the government puts them there.

The government doesn't intend for Google to pipe money all around the world just to avoid paying UK tax. The loopholes which Google are using are not intentional tax breaks.

Anonymous blitzes Israel in new attack

pear
FAIL

Vigilantes

Anonymous appoint themselves as judge, jury and executioners of the digital world. Their idea of fairness and justice are seriously warped.

IT'S HERE: Seagate ships 'affordable' desktop hybrid drive

pear

enough?

I have a corsair accelerator with 40gb

it works well though run with some background software which is not ideal.

Microsoft Office 2013 vs. Office 365: Is either right for you?

pear

thankfully I was a student once

Still rockin' on the 2007 ultimate version I picked up as a student for £40. I suspect it will last quite a while.

Tell Facebook who's the greatest: YOU are!

pear

Re: Mourning HMV

My treat for taking the bus in to work (here and there) was to go in to hmv at 9am when o one else was in there and sock up from the 2 for £10 section. Served me well.

I went in to the trocadero one recently, managed to find the obscure ps3 accessory I needed and went out. Simply because there where too many people in there to browse properly.

Fopp in covent Garden was ok though

Sony PS3 extends lead over Microsoft's Xbox 360 by a cool million

pear

Mine is a my blu-ray player that happens to play pro-evo

Nokia chief Elop: 'Android? Hey, anything's possible!'

pear

Re: Hmmmm

pfft I <3 my n97

Samsung gobbles flash upstart for starters ... Servers for main?

pear

well there goes my support

For my Corsair accelerator, which works rather well I must say.

Simpler than Intel's SRT

Sony KD-84X9005 84in ultra-HD TV review

pear

Re: I regret the move to HD...

I walked past Hugh Edwards at bbc studios, looked like a plastic doll

Windows 8: Is Microsoft's new OS too odd to handle?

pear

when I build a new machine

I won't bother to "upgrade"

I tried that with the preview, it didn't really work too well, ended up formatting to go back. The "apps" page was such a mess

Some things wound me up too much but I liked others so not rushing but won't avoid.

Cloud company foraged for hard drives to stay afloat

pear

kudos imo

Hard to say they've really done anything wrong at all.

Costco is a business oriented bulk buy store anyway...

4K vs OLED: and the winner is...

pear

Rumour has it that Sony's Crystal LED could undercut OLED costs so we could be in for a surprise here.

Personally think that plasma still rules the roost.

Intel's chief chipman: '22nm better than expected, 14nm on track'

pear

They work well at the frequency they're supposed to

99.9% of people do not overclock their cpus

German Pirate party punters 'don't pay their membership fees'

pear
Mushroom

german pirates..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEk-NeRizMA

Nokia apologizes for faking Lumia 920 ad

pear

Re: And still down-playing themselves?

The lens is house in a gyroscope type device.

It's also used so that longer exposure times can be used in the dark without blurring.

Obviously a camera on a phone won't replace a dslr, the point being that you don't take your dslr everywhere you go, at least most people don't. If you have a respectable snapper to hand you can capture anything that you happen to stumble across.

pear

It'll still be a decent camera compared to the competition

The use of the "pureview" brand following the 41mp 808 is misleading to some extent, essentially it's their version of the cybershot brand.

There is virtually no way they could have realistically transplanted that technology in to a svelte design like the 920.

It would have required an additional processor just for the camera.

If you read the white paper it does make some sense as to how they've tried to compensate, part 1 is using a lens with a massive aperture and 2 is to add OIS so that longer exposure times can be used. The focus is different, where the 808 was all abut detail and the ability to zoom the 920 is about low light performance and video stability. Lots of people take pictures in the evening at parties or outside blah blah blah so it's a sensible move.

I'm sure the oversized sensor(s) will return, it might take a while for that to happen, I'm fairly sure the 920 won't be as impressive a the 808 but despite all the marketing failings I suspect it'll be amongst the best if not the best mainstream smartphone camera out there.

Note that with this phone if you are prepared to knock down the output resolution you should still get some of that oversampling/lossless zoom goodness. A good quality 2mp image is completely fine for a standard print/web use.

SanDisk flogs strap-on to speed up your lazy Windows 7 PC

pear

worthwhile

I've found my corsair accelerator a worthwhile addition, more suited as an add in than for a new build but for those who can't be bothered using different drives and partitions it's a nice compromise.

Broadband minister Hunt LOSES portfolio, takes on national health

pear

Re: In slight tiny almost defence of his Homeopathy support...

Pretty sure acupuncture is load of codswallop too though.

Party like it's 1999: CDE Unix desktop REBORN

pear

I still have to look at scenes like those :(

Microsoft: Gmail rival Outlook.com will 'look good on your iPad' 

pear

seems ok

just looks like hotmail but with more blue but tbh I find hotmail.com absolutely fine and considerably better than gmail.

What I might approve of is if they gave the option of the clean exchange webmail type view

All-in-one PCs: bright star of the desktop biz, says analyst

pear

Re: Not here..

Surely they could still have a second monitor?

although, yes it would seem a bit pointless over a regular desktop

Chinese toothpaste biz wants £50k from Apple over 'Snow Leopard'

pear

*bangs head*

Ultrabook demand soars Stateside

pear

The thing is that it's not that people aren't using less pcs and laptops, it's just that we hit a point when things became powerful enough and people aren't needing to replace them.

Nokia details 808 Pureview release

pear

'tis odd

For a phone with such an impressive camera th decision to use such a screen is a bit baffling. One can only assume power savings and/or lack of gpu grunt?

Microsoft Surface: Join the Windows 8 teardown

pear

Re: Yeah

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with x86, all depends on the implementation and right now it's only getting better. The latest atom chips match ARM foor power/performance.

Have an ARM cpu running full blown windows and it will also use a shed load of power

Windows 8 Release Preview open for download

pear

Upgrade?

I tried it out for a few days as an os update. It wasn't awful but it was frustrating. It would be better when all the inbuilt metro apps work properly.

The apps and people page look awful, and not customisable in any way.

Top Facebook exec begs students: 'Click on an ad or two'

pear

FB adverts are s**te anyway

They suggested that I "like" the Conservative party.

Phools.

Mostly I don't even notice them and use the desktop site less and less.

Hated Visual Studio 11 beta in HIGH-ENERGY colour blast

pear

Using the dark scheme, is great for my eyes having less light blaring at them. Genuinely happy with 2011. Sure the buttons are a bit dry but it's good for a long day of use.

Microsoft kills Windows Live brand

pear

Re: bring back outlook express

Windows live desktop I found to be considerably better than outlook express. Must admit the webmail is genuinely very comprehensive and I rarely use the desktop version.

Nokia's 41Mp cameraphone shoots towards retail

pear

Different competition

This isn't supposed to be in competition with DSLR cameras and what not, it's supposed to be a replacement for point and shoot, providing good image quality in your pocket without the need for a separate device as most people don't walk around with dedicated cameras in their pockets or bags. As mentioned earlier default setting is 5mp shots which is in line with other phones, it uses the high res sensor to remove noise, not create massive photos. In fact the original idea behind it was that you could zoom in 3x and get a true 5mp camera shot. Obviously the more you zoom the less noise reduction you get.

Also nokia camera already lets you control ISO, shutter speed etc

Samsung... no, Apple... no, Samsung tops Q1 smartphone sales chart

pear

Define smartphone?

could be a problem ^...

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