Posts by jubtastic1
778 posts • joined Thursday 11th May 2006 09:53 GMT
Re: We've become innured.
They don't want that (HOLO TV), either, I mean sure it will be fun for a while but ultimately who wants to have to keep moving around something to get the best angle? Isn't that what we pay cinematographers and directors for? To frame the action so we get the perfect view from our comfy sofas?
How many arguments are going to kick off over the best spot in the room when the other spots aren't just viewing at an acute angle but actually have some of the content obscured from view?
Posted in Does Britain really need a space port?
@nomnomnom
Top trolling sir, +1 would read another.
Just a stab in the dark
But I suspect Apple's objection to a tray less design is because either the sim is going to be visible from the outside, like a SD card in a MacBook or necessitate some sort of swing out surface panel for it to hide behind, or heaven forbid, require a design with a removable back.
Basically I think the tray design is a lesser compromise of their design ethic.
Re: Old Macs
Older trackpads don't get all the gestures, mine only does two finger scrolling for example but that won't stop Lion from installing. I'd give it another go and google the error message if it fails again.
A search engine that understands natural language you say?
Sounds like a good idea, nice fit for a smartphone I'd have thought.
Reminiscent of the Burglariser FAQ
"Can Burglariser really unlock any dwelling?"
"Yes, by simply utilising a dwellings access key that you have previously obtained, Burglariser will give you free reign to the contents of that dwelling. If you do not have an access key don't fret, they are very easy to locate, there is generally one hanging on a key hook inside the dwelling or you could simply use social engineering to recover the key, threatening the homeowner with a beating for example"
Couple of things
Firstly, aside from the iPod touch, every product line they have increases sales about 10% a quarter, so it may well be that this contract just reflects that increased requirement and ongoing purchases with the other manufacturers will remain the same.
Secondly, keeping a third manufacturer afloat is good news for everyone except the other two players.
Re: Old Macs
All the Core2Duo MacBooks will run 10.7, which is all of them shipped after November 2006, the reason your friend can't install it is because they've got less than 2GB of RAM, I'd go with a 4GB upgrade though unless you have some sort of disease that makes the world appear to speed past in a blur.
But for that "feels like brand new" feeling you cannot beat an SSD, and 128GB drives are getting pretty cheap now.
As an aside, RAM and HD's are piss easy to change in those old MacBooks.
They might as well rename them Lolcoins
Also hang a sign up at the exchange "Days since last pwning"
In the same boat
Their argument is that you can do target mode over Thunderbolt, but as a tech that means I'm stuck with one of the current (Thunderbolt + FireWire), models as I'm bound to come across broken kit that's FireWire only for a long long time. Can't remember the last time I used my lappy as a target mode DVD drive, so I could get away without the optical but no FireWire is a show stopper.
Re: Retina
Retina means 1 pixel/arc minute at normal viewing distance, which equates to "pixels can't be resolved by user with 20:20 vision at normal operating distance" as such the actual dpi of the screens on various devices will differ, higher for devices that are held closer, like a smartphone, lower for devices that sit further away, a TV for example.
Pixel doubling on iOS devices happened because it was easier to implement, the iPhone Retina display is actually over 1 pixel per arc minute, But for most people that difference can't be perceived, so they're effectively redundant pixels, but going a bit over the spec turns out much easier for everyone than scaling existing stuff to ~94%.
Mac OS X on the other hand, has always dealt with a variety of display resolutions, Applications are usually windowed and designed to stretch to accommodate various aspects, so Laptops and Desktops just need small bumps to hit Retina Resolutions bang on the nose, note the MBPS 17" is already a Retina Display.
Maths here: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/03/01/retina-display-macs-ipads-and-hidpi-doing-the-math/
Because it's better
Sure you can hook up a PC to a telly, but unless you like buying and then trailing extra long video cables across your lounge you have to get up out of your comfy chair to change channels*, and if the content you want to see is on your phone or fondleslab, you'll be arsing around switching cables over as well.**
Compare this with a proposed iTV, want to change channel? Voice control or app control from comfy sofa, Impromptu baby photos? AirPlay. Guest comes round with a film on their device? AirPlay. Streaming video or music from the Internet on your phone? pop that stream on the TV with AirPlay, using your fondleslab to browse the enormous film library you've acquired in Plex on your PC? you can watch it on your device or the TV with a tap.
Easy, Better, way less "hold on... I think the TV is set to the wrong input..., no wait, it's the lappy displaying on the wrong screen, just need to tweak the resolution... FFS now the aspect is wrong... " and so on.
NB, 720p projector and surround sound hooked up to my PC, not hard to appreciate the value proposition here though.
* Actually, I don't get up, I have a remote app on my device, but while sometimes it works perfectly, often it would be quicker to just go over there and do it the old fashioned way anyway.
** There's no way my wife is going to mess around with cables, so any solution that relies on them will always be my job, as is she leaves the bloody cursor on screen when watching catchup, it's poking up people's noses most of the time, drives me crazy and is probably just a little psychological warfare on her part for me making her get up to put her next show on.
Re: Fly home....
Totally agree, sending them back to base for recharge/checkup would not only mitigate the danger of unmaintained personal vehicles crashing through your roof but also mean all the vomit had been cleaned from your sky car when you were ready to return home.
Posted in Facebook tests paid post promotion
The Rise and Fail of a Social Network
PHASE 1: Hip young thing.
Characterised by: It's where the cool kids are.
PHASE 2: Exponential growth AKA Middle aged spread.
Characterised by: Everyone and their mother joins.
PHASE 3: Increasingly desperate attempts to monetize the user base.
Characterised by: Unlikely sounding business plans mocked by the media.
PHASE 4: Vicious cycle of lame AKA The users are revolting
Characterised by: Attempts to generate any sort of profit are vigorously rejected by user base.
PHASE 5: Undead Army
Characterised by: Mass abandonment of accounts, site fills up with advertising as no one is complaining about it any more.
PHASE 6: Caveat Emptor
Characterised by: Sold for obscene quantity of cash to people that should know better.
Posted in Facebook tests paid post promotion
PHASE 3
Increasingly desperate attempts to monetize the user base
A short but pivotal phase of the social network lifespan that quickly slides into Phase 4: The vicious spiral of lame.
Re: Come on Apple
Agree with this, Library folder accidentally filed by user has happened a few times and it's a PITA to sort because it's recreated almost immediately by anything saving user prefs or hitting the cache.
[CMD+SHIFT+G] ~/Library [return]
Not hard to find.
Is this at all related to the VM service going down last night?
Went down at about 8pm, started coughing and spluttering at 9:30, back to life at 11ish the missis was not pleased about her catchup Emmerdale being offline. lol
Re: This will be interesting
I suppose I should have thrown in some reasoning, the main point is that it's going to be a 1080 tv, not a high res color accurate computer monitor, panels for TV's tend to be way cheaper. The computing guts are already on sale in the ATV, which retails for $99, it's worth noting that apple is churning out variants of these systems (iphone4 etc) by the millions, so economies of scale apply.
But the main reason its going to be cheap is because all their new stuff comes out at around half the price people were expecting, for example, MBA refresh, was $1700, drops to $999, iPad expected at $1000, debuts at $500, even the ATV came out at less than half the price of Logitechs GTV box. Basically, if Apple are going to sell TVs you can be damn sure that there're going to be competitively priced from the off, and that means around the $500 mark for a 32" set. There will be a lot of disruption.
Regards,
Jubs
Re: This will be interesting
You may be expecting 2k, Im thinking more like $500 for a 32" 1080 set with AirPlay and Siri for recommendations, recording, notifications etc.
IANAP
But isn't this exactly like saying that the batton in a relay race travels faster than the runner carrying it on account that it starts from his back hand and finishes outstretched before him?
It doesn't matter if those points are 2mm apart or 2ly, is still only going to make 50ns difference.
I had no idea
That MLC was cheaper to manufacture than SLC, blows me away that simple low capacity flash is harder to produce.
Is this down to manufacturers concentrating on MLC production?
Posted in EA unplugs Rock Band for iOS
Heh
EA: "Rock Band for iOS will remain live - the in-app message users received yesterday was sent in error. We apologize for the confusion this caused. We're working to clarify the issue that caused the error and will share additional information as soon as possible."
Behind closed doors: "Oh shit, we've been rumbled, blame it on a rogue engineer and we'll have another go in 6 months"
Death by Snu Snu?
Aww... Yay... Aww... Yay... Aww... Yay...
Re: Ultimately
Whitelisted Internet?
I suspect you don't work in IT but please stick around because that's the funniest thing I've heard all week
FFS
They say 'database' but they mean 'excel spreadsheet'
6 petabytes
Is that after compression? Because you'd think you'd get fairly exceptional compression ratios on the black bits.
Anyone here knowledgable about the implementation of a petabyte sized storage array? Doubtfull anyone will ever ask me to build one but I'm curious all the same.
*Shifty eyes*
Sorry guv, doesn't work like that, but you know that unbreakable crypto you're using?, yeah that's all fucked now.
This is encouraging, but...
I honestly thought that by now we'd be able to hook directly into the nervous system, to send and receive signals for natural feedback and control of prosthetic limbs, seeing that skull cap leads me to think this is still way off even if cochlear implants are basically doing this to restore hearing.
<tangent>
It's weird how the some of the things we assume will be sorted during our lifetimes remain forever on the brink of being realised (AI, fusion, cure for male pattern baldness), while others come storming in straight out of left field, like cloning, never saw that coming, wonder what happened to Dolly? I guess I could ask the Internet, one of the things that did pan out but on reflection I think I'd rather remember her as she was.
</tangent>
Wouldn't surprise me
I dont see many 17s these days, most have lumped for an external monitor on a 15 and unless you're going to do edits in the field you can get away with much less, phones and tablets hook up to monitors and projectors for presentations just fine.
Not saying it wouldn't be a kick in the face to people that absolutely must have a 17, but design and tooling costs are out of proportion to sales and Apple have previous in ditching tech that's not pulling it's weight.
Good and bad memories
Spending hours typing in code distributed via magazine (was it Crash?), only for the speccy to reset because someone breathed on the power supply lead, or saving it to tape and crossing your fingers that it would ever load again.
But writing my own code, and seeing a poxy sprite wander across the tv, trailing lines no less with all the precision a slightly knackered Kempston joystick could offer, like a god I was.
Happy Birthday Spectrum, you made me into the nerd I am.
Re: Still too expensive...
Pixelmator is a good alt for the Mac, does most of the stuff you need from Photoshop for a fraction of the price, $30, free trial.
Re: What resource?
Well most of the investors are American, and coal still accounts for over 40% of their energy supply so they probably looked at all those C type Astros and wet themselves.
"it says they're 3 times further out than Earth, how far is that James?"
"it's not very far"
"What about these silica ones, are they any good"
"well silicon is used in computers, and everyone wants computers right?"
"let's do it, anything we find that isn't coal or sand is just gravy"
And that's how James Cameron, the first man to solo dive to the bottom of the Ocean also became the first man to stand on an Asteroid.
Posted in Ten... mad materials made into tech
Re: Liquid Metal
Instead of equating it to glass, consider Perspex (Plexiglas if you're from the US), instead, this also has a glassy amorphous structure but you wouldn't expect it to shatter if you dropped it.
I think the interesting properties of this material as far as Apple are concerned are that it can be injection moulded, its very strong and has extremely good wear resistance.
No sympathy
I've got four kids, they don't get the password for the credit card, just recently one of them wanted to download Temple Run, which is free, she argued, she begged, she pleaded, she tantrumed, she had to wait until she brought the phone home so I could add the game. This is for the very simple reason that it would be ridiculously irresponsible of me, on a number of levels, to give a child free reign on a credit card.
Remember when your phone asked if you wanted it to remember your purchase password for you?
That was a test, if you answered in the affirmative you failed, do try and learn from it because fools and their money testing is ongoing.
Posted in Global chocolate crisis looms
Re: 2 birds one and a half cups
That particular idiom is forever ruined for me, damn you internets.
Loved that
More of this sort of thing please.
Re: I don't understand
Because it makes use of existing cheaper tech than the stuff used in the 4S and iPad3, an iPad mini would be based on an ipad2 but with the same screen process (cut larger) used in the 3GS, materials costs are similarly reduced and the battery can be smaller (cheaper) than the iPad2.
I suspect the margins will be lower, although they'll still make money on them, but at a $250 price point they'll compete directly with Amazon who at this point is the only other player in the Tablet market that has the ability to threaten iOS.
Posted in BYOD sync 'n share
Re: Good enough
You've got that slightly wrong, Dropbox refused to sell to Apple, Steve told them that to try and get them to sell.
Dropbox does its thing very well but it's only doing the most basic of syncing, to the point that I've seen files fork from nothing more than two users reading it at the same time, it's a long way from OS integration.
True syncing, as end users expect it to work, which is to say magically, is really really bloody hard.
Re: Java or Office?
Appears to be a spear phishing operation, MS word exploit used to install a java exploit, the version they just found has been nullified due to DNS resolution for the C&C being pulled but an earlier variant had the IP hard coded: 199.192.150.X so it might be an idea to check your routers for connections to that block, better safe than sorry.
Only one of my clients uses java company wide, the rest are going to have if disabled and or removed tomorrow, life is too short for us to waste time making sure they are protected against exploits in software they never use.
Update
Turns out its sorta bullshit, was designing a boat for Jobs.
http://allthingsd.com/20120413/apple-we-dont-know-what-philippe-starck-is-talking-about/
Re: eulampios
No, I'm not making it up, I've actually read the reports on this infection, as such I know that it's a Java rather than a JavaScript exploit and that it checks that a number of apps aren't present before installing, these include: Xcode, Little Snitch, and Microsoft Office 2008 or later.
From this I infer that they're avoiding developers (Xcode), clued up users (little snitch) and managed workplace machines (recent MS Office), all places where they are likely to get noticed, clear now?
I don't get it
There's a flamboyance to Starck's minimalism that seems at odds with Ive's work, which is arguably setting design trends for the entire industry. Starck designs are also usually expensive, which Apple certainly used to have a reputation for but which doesn't seem to be the case so much these days.
Really can't see a Starck iTV or projector hitting the shelves, those projects seem a better fit for Ive, maybe something more personal, a watch or glasses, either of those could be described as 'sort of' revolutionary, given they've already been done.
On the other hand I'm sure I read somewhere that before he shifted off this mortal coil Jobs fixed Ive in an unassailable position, which suggests that Ive may not be all that popular behind the scenes, so maybe it's politically motivated, or disinformation or simply bullshit.
Re: Strangely...
I haven't found any either, but that appears to be because the malware is really picky about what systems it will infect, excluding dev, managed and "user has a clue" type systems by checking for the presence of some fairly common applications.
Your typical infected system is likely to be a home user with limited tech support and either a free open source office or a really old version of MS office because who wants to spend a lot of dough for the odd letter, seems to have kept them under the radar enough to capture a peak of 500m+ systems so HUGE SUCCESS. It's probably hard to overstate their satisfaction.
Re: "Foxconn-rebrander "
Either that bridge was not sufficiently burned for El Reg's liking, or in shock at the spate of recent unexpected replies from Apple PR, they've regressed to a schoolboy response of calling names and pulling hair.
I'm sure there's been discussion about this insult at Vulture Central but the Ayes have it as they seem to be running with it.
Posted in Teens break up with Facebook
Live and don't learn
Geocities, Friendster, MySpace, facebook, and on and on, each bigger and cooler than their predecessors, each of them struggling to capitalise on their millions of teenage users before they scoot off to the next big thing. Rats are deserting the ship Captain, better get the IPO out pronto.
N.B. Not including twitter because it's more akin to AIM and MSN than a weblog, also continually amazed by Google's ability to screw up social when by all rights they should have won by default years ago.
Skipping to the end
When the bugs are ironed out and this tech is small enough to be buried in a chip, or whatever passes for a chip, the network topography would be interesting, paired units suggests one end in a device and the other plugged into a switch in a datacentre, with a trade off between lumping as many as you can in the same place to increase interconnect speeds against the potential for massive disruption should that node go down.
Seizing servers is going to become nigh on impossible, at best you could play whack a mole but when putting them back online is as simple as just switching to a different network pair, a lot of governments and industries are going to be somewhat unhappy.
If we can send data through entanglement can we send power? Smartphones that never need charging and are always connected, real time communication with colonists on mars, or robotic probes orbiting distant planets?
This is a pretty awesome time to be alive.
Chinese forks
Dont these cheap Chinese handsets tend to use Baidu rather than Google for searching? no access to Google's app/content store, and so on. These are Android phones like the Fire is an Android tablet, great for the manufacturers but sod all use for Google.
Posted in The iPad 3 would make me so horny...
Re: thad
Downvoted for such a ridiculous statement.
Even ignoring that iPads have been very competitively priced from the off, Apple don't set their competitors prices.
As for the article, the author lost me when he suggested that the "it's just a great big jpeg" style of digital magazines were anything other than an abomination.
Short version; I don't like it.
It looks doable, well, there would be a wire running from the glasses to a smartphone, and a wire running from the smartphone to a honking great battery pack, but it's just as doable now as its been for the last decade.
I'm just not sold on the idea though, I think if my input is going to be spoken I'd rather have audio cues, "message from Tom", "turn right at the next junction" etc than have to wear a clunky headset, I suppose I'm more drawn to the idea of a personal PA that doesnt speak until spoken to than the visual shotgun approach demoed here, I'm thinking that even though road signs are enormous great things it still takes a concentrated mental effort to decipher them when I'm speeding down the motorway whereas the voice from a satnav is effortless.
I can imagine groups of people staring into space, grunting their answers to unheard questions, the tippy tap of fingers on buttons and screens replaced with short bursts of random speech, is this progress? Do we do what we must because we can?
But mostly I'm thinking supplying an advertising company with a real time feed of where we are, who we're talking to and what we're looking at seems like a really bad deal even if they paid us to wear them.
Quick poll of this demographic
Non Representative Sample of four teenagers addicted to BBM.
Me: "If you had a job and money for a contract phone, which phone would you get"
NRS: "iPhone"
Me: "iPhone? Not a better Blackberry? Not Android?
NRS: "nope"
Me: "Do you think your friends feel the same?"
NRS: "yeah"
The problem here is that while they're reliant on someone else picking up the tab they'd like the best Blackberry they can get, because the BBM service trumps everything else on the PAYG market, but they're very aware of the phones shortcomings, especially with regard to apps "I can't get anything on this, a bold would be better" etc.
I mentioned that RIM has new phones scheduled for November based on a modern OS, then explained what an OS is and that RIM have picked a good one, which was met with normal teenage indifference.
If RIM is going to keep these kids they had better have something pretty compelling in the pipeline
