Posts by fluffy

"no software to download"

Quite untrue. You had to download a Windows-only browser plugin, which had this terribly annoying habit of making sure that I always had a URL shortcut to lively.com on my desktop (which it would recreate every day).

Sadly, there is way too much prior art for this to remain valid

Meanwhile, this story is like every yro.slashdot.org story rolled into one...

Hopefully, by the time this affects my old G5,

a decent phone running Android or the new Linux-based PalmOS will be available.

The real irony

is that nobody here apparently knows what "ironic" means.

@Alex Tingle

I have one of the new MacBook Pros, and I can attest to the fact that the new unibody construction is by far the most rigid laptop I've ever felt. Aluminum isn't flimsy, it's thin sheets of stamped aluminum which is flimsy. This is not stamped aluminum.

How much did the brewery pay for the free app?

He might be considering his marketing idea to be what's worth $12M, not sales of the app itself. Still, pretty ridiculous.

Aside from the size, two other differences

The MacBook Pro has faster 3D graphics, and it has slightly more connectivity (FireWire and ExpressCard 34, both missing from the MacBook).

I think for me personally, the smaller size and much lower price tag (and otherwise identical specs) win out, even though it means I'll have to buy yet another new audio interface. Even the low-end graphics are quite capable for what little computer-based gaming I do.

Tariffs

I don't know what the contract and data situation is in the UK, but in the US, T-Mobile is VASTLY cheaper than AT&T for the same service. When I was on T-Mobile I had 300 anytime, unlimited weekends and M2M, with unlimited data (meaning unlimited bandwidth, although limited to web and email, but tethering was actually allowed!) and 100 SMS, for about US$40 (after taxes). This was the lowest service level with unlimited data, and was more than sufficient for my needs.

Eventually I got the odd notion that I "needed" an iPhone and so I switched to that. Now my bill is nearly doubled (about $70 after fees and taxes), and while the actual numbers for the service I get have gone up (450 anytime + rollover, unlimited nights + weekends), and the data service is now theoretically not restricted to what ports I can use (although for all practical purposes it is unless I jailbreak my phone), I was hardly coming even close to my previous plan limits, and while my iPhone certainly is a better web browsing and music-listening device, if I had just unlocked it I could have done all this for half the monthly price.

One thing to note, by the way, is that in the US, T-Mobile doesn't provide any sort of PAYG data (except on the Sidekick), unlike AT&T which has a wide variety of overpriced PAYG data products (and in order to use the only economical ones you have to have a monthly minute plan which is for all intents and purposes even MORE expensive than their contract fees).

Basically, cellphone service pricing in the US is completely out of whack.

Also high-bitrate mp3 is perfectly fine for classical

mp3's algorithm is excellent at things which can be encoded as a combination of sine waves (MASSIVELY oversimplifying, of course); where mp3 falls down is things like square waves and white noise, which frankly don't come up that much in classical/symphonic works.

Their simulation technology needs work

It sounds like it's being plucked by a mechanical plucker, and every note ends up sounding identical. The end result doesn't sound any better or more realistic than what you get from the Sculpture modeling synth that's in Logic.

So like everyone else has said, it might have worked out better if they just built one.

Sony DR-BT30Q

I'm a bit confused as to why the "10 best" list included the crappy Creative ones but ignored the vastly-superior Sony DT-BT30Q.

What do you get when you cross a bridge with a car?

You get to the other side.

@pimlicosound

"These are probably just Photoshop images."

Gee, ya think?

Native JSON parsing?

Isn't the whole point to JSON that it's ALREADY natively parsed by Javascript?

This is why I switched to ClamAV

Free-as-in-GPL, no advertising dollars, no stupid crap, just a solid scanning engine which gives you complete control of when and what it scans.

Also it's ridiculous for AVG to scan HTML pages but not images - consider how many exploits there have been based on bad image decompression and render bugs!

@Dave

I'd have written that as 33e5, personally.

@ both Adams

First Adam: Funny, most people consider Linux to be the OS you want running in a cupboard.

Second Adam: This service is running an app on one system and displaying it remotely on the other. I fail to see how that's the other way around from running an app on one system and displaying it remotely on the other.

Blue screens for the bluehairs?

(nt)

On the flip side:

Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) actually do provide a somewhat better picture even for SD televisions. A 1920x1080 JPEG stored at 95% quality downsampled to (effectively) 852x480 is going to look a lot better than a 720x480 JPEG stored at 40% quality stretched out to 852x480, which is pretty much the rough comparison between the two (assuming a square-pixel 480p 16:9 display). Not to mention the lack of interlace motion artifacts.

Here is a page with side-by-side comparisons of the DVD and HD-DVD versions of Lord of the Rings at 480p resolution: http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/

There's nothing "freetard" about this

"Freetard" is Fake Steve Jobs' invective against the free/opensource movement. There is absolutely nothing free/opensource about this web-based app. Plus, as others have said, you certainly are running the word into the ground, seeing as how freetard it is freetard about the every freetard third word you freetard use.

@tony re: repartitioning

I don't know if you're aware of this, but Leopard allows you to non-destructively resize HFS+ partitions. If your external media drive is in HFS+ format, then you should be able to repartition it for Time Machine without having to go through contortions.

@ Glenn Alexander

You might want to read up on statistics, notably the Poisson distribution. The chances of any random event occurring during a limited time frame is greater than zero, and the more time frames you observe, the chances of observing the event go up to 1. So the more street lamps you walk under, the more likely it is to observe a street lamp popping.

You only remember the time the lamp pops, not the 99.999% of lamps you walk under without popping.

Interesting he'd be bringing it up now

Basically every single cellphone made since 1997 has had this capability,

Patents need some basic reform. Show damages or GTFO.

How did you get that video?

When I was at their booth earlier today they were very adamant about no photography and no video. Did you do it on the down-low?

Think of the possibilities!

You can soon do a Google maps search for the INVISIBLE BICYCLE, and also find MAH BUKKIT, which theys be steelin.

There are new claims they want to protect

Anyone who's actually written patents knows that patents are incremental, and any sort of new work needs to be patented if it's going to be afforded the protection of the patent system. An integrated display and a low-footprint vertical dock are both new, and the integrated display itself makes it a much more different beast than current and former docking solutions. Also, remember that many patents cover things which are obvious-in-retrospect, but can anyone complaining about the patentability of this innovation honestly say they came up with this idea first?

Also, the DuoDock did more than just improve the video and audio; it also had slots for its own RAM and FPU, to actually vastly improve the capabilities of laptops (back when RAM densities were so low and FPUs were so large that they actually made a noticeable impact on the size of the notebook).

Compares nicely with the W580i

I've had a W580i since it first came out (and it's certainly the best phone I've ever had - and I've gone through quite a few), and they sound like very comparable devices. The W910i looks a bit slimmer, and it has an additional camera, and HSDPA instead of EDGE, but otherwise they seem pretty much identical.

The only downside to the W580i is the same one mentioned regarding the W910i - the charge/headphone connector going on the side. I ended up getting some Bluetooth headphones to mitigate the nuisance of the headphone adaptor, and now I have only one device in my pocket where I used to have three (phone, iPod, and PDA); of course, my phone+PDA combination has been taken care of nicely by Sony Ericsson phones for quite some time.

Also, the shake-to-shuffle doesn't seem to actually do anything, but I'm actually a bit glad for that since I like listening to music with album-based playlists (generated by SyncTunes for OSX) and I'd hate for my music to get disrupted every time I have to run to cross the street or whatever.

Thank you!

You have exactly summed up why single-return code isn't necessarily a good thing. In fact, ALL religious coding practices are problematic. Having general guidelines (such as "don't use break or continue in loops") is okay, but having specific mandates (such as "NEVER use break or continue in loops") leads people to slavish devotions to practices which end up making some pieces of code look WORSE than the problems that the guidelines are trying to avoid.

I really wish that more people would understand that rules of thumb are guidelines, and that it's okay to not have total devotion to them.

Why should they be encumbered by the past?

They're obviously trying to reinvent themselves as Web2.0 these days, so why should they care about things like reliability, or faithful users which predate AJAX?

@ AC "on a standard DVD"

This isn't HD on a standard video DVD, this is HD video in AVCHD format stored on DVD-ROM, which is rather different. You won't be able to play these DVDs on a regular DVD player, just on a DVD-data device which supports AVCHD (such as a PC or PlayStation 3 or whatever).