Posts by Fuzz 989 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2007
Unless I'm mistaken, lifetime support, lifetime warranty, lifetime guarantee, lifetime updates, on any gadget, refers to the lifetime of the gadget rather than the owner.
This means that you will get map updates for the time the device is on sale plus some unknown time that mio will continue to support the device for. My guess is that you will get 2 or 3 years of map updates which is still better than nothing.
Is that data plan for real? It's better than most ADSL packages in the UK. It's that kind of deal that is required to make cloud computing work.
Also, if it's possible to make a tablet with decent battery life and a 1920x1200 screen, can I please have a laptop with a 12 or 13" screen with a similar resolution. How hard can it be?
There's a good reason why Amazon have 20% of the US market and it's because the released a tablet for $200. The new models beat the nexus on spec and/or price so the question is just whether you want Google play on your device, or if you're happy with the Amazon app store.
For all those who can't see a use for this, I think it's more aimed at enterprises who want to be able to restrict certain features of their staff devices in certain areas of the business.
Only thing is I thought you could do this already based on wifi connections. I'm sure I've seen the option on some device management software.
From what I've seen elsewhere it seems the 920 comes with 32GB of onboard storage but no SD card slot, where as the 820 has 8GB onboard but you can add your own with an SD card.
I think this is a real mistake, 64GB SD cards are now available for around £50. 96GB is going to come very close to holding my whole music collection finally pensioning off my ipod.
If you want to cut down on piracy then create a viable alternative. I have friends in New Zealand who tell me that CD albums cost around $35. If you charge that kind of money for music then you will encourage piracy.
The problem the record companies have now is that pirating music is now an everyday activity. Their failure to act quickly has meant that a lot of people simply aren't going to change their ways, even when that alternative comes along.
As to the tribunal, how is the evidence tested? Do the rights holders turn up with ip addresses they wrote down on post-it notes asking for $15000?
The problem with the live tiles is that most developers haven't found a decent use for them.
I have one app that has a decent live tile, the unofficial giffgaff app gives you your balance and remaining airtime on the front screen of your phone.
Most of the other apps I've seen with live tiles either don't work properly, or they don't give you enough information. The weather tiles are an obvious example they all show you the current weather in your current location. As pointed out I know the current weather in my current location because I'm there. If they could find a way of displaying future weather for my current location in an easily readable way it would make more sense.
I think the live tiles will improve a lot when Windows 8 comes out and there are more options for the size of tile, there just isn't enough space on the current tiles to show a useful amount of information.
It doesn't matter how you set the "privacy" settings your personal data can always be shared by others.
If you upload a photograph to facebook and tag one of your friends that picture can be seen by all the friends of your friend. Those friends of friends are free to comment on your photo, when they comment on your photo their friends (3rd generation) are now able to see the photo and the comment.
So the only answer to facebook privacy is not to have a facebook account.
Thing about Kindles is they're never off. Most people who have one probably don't even realise that unless the radios are turned off it periodically scan for networks and check back with Amazon to look for new updates, books etc.
I doubt that most people owning a kindle or an ipad (other tablets and e-readers are available) would know they have a flight mode. With phones people know about flight mode because phones on planes are bad so they know there is a special way to make them safe.
If there was a chance of anything bad happening then it would have happened because I'd guess most planes these days have at least one device that has been accidentally or unknowingly left on during take off.
The differences are explained right at the start of the article. A photo printer generally has more than 4 inks, some offer CD/DVD printing and some have negative/slide scanners.
The truth of all this though is that printing photos at home is a waste of time and money. Online photo printing services can have the pictures out to you next day and they'll be better quality and cheaper than you can possibly achieve at home.
When my current printer dies or the ink becomes hard to find I'll be getting myself a laser, probably black and white, and all my photo printing will be done online.
If fibre is already available in the cabinet then premises can be fibred to the cabinet. As long as the cabinet has enough back-haul to the exchange there's no need for every property to have its own fibre back to the exchange.
I doubt the length of fibre costs much more than the length of copper the real costs are in the terminations and the transceivers. With a system like this though you could use cheaper multimode and still get 1Gb connections within 500m of the cabinet.
I think BT already have a system like this on trial in some areas, at the moment targeting businesses but there's no reason it couldn't be extended to homes for those that want more than VDSL is providing.
hardware encrypted sticks are actually pretty cheap these days. You still need some software so you can enter the password to decrypt the stick. The software on all the ones I've seen runs on Windows and OSX. I guess some of the expensive models might also have a linux version.
The problem here though is that the files were almost certainly once encrypted. Contractor requires plans of buildings, client sends plans in an encrypted format. Contractor decrypts plans and sends to sub contractor who places them on a stick and loses them.
OEMs are only worried because the surface looks good. Of course at the moment we know nothing about price or any real specs but if MS sells a tablet that is better than yours for less money why wouldn't you worry.
MS should do the same thing with laptops, turn out something with a decent resolution so the OEMs have an idea of what a laptop made in 2012 should look like (hint, it should probably have better resolution than ones sold in 2002)
the drives that go into servers are already thicker than laptop drives however they tend to spin a bit faster than 5500RPM
This drive would be OK as an external I'm just not sure what kind of application you're going to want on 5500RPM drives that would benefit from the 2.5" form factor.
So these LTE phones at 2.6GHz and 800MHz are they ready to go? What about 1800MHz?
Are LTE phones comparable in terms of weight and battery life as 3G phones or is this going to be like when 3G phones first came out? I don't want to go back to a time when phones were huge with batteries that only lasted a day and were full of features you didn't want to use ... wait a minute.
The problem with trying to work out what people are prepared to pay to use a social network is that the value goes down if less people use it. So I put up with facebook because all my friends are on there, some of my friends might be prepared to pay to stay on facebook some wouldn't but if half my friends that weren't prepared to pay left then the half that were prepared to pay would no longer see the value in paying for the service.
If you are trying to start a service from scratch and you want to charge people you aren't going to attract anyone because nobody else is using the service.
It turns out (friends reunited) that charging people to use a social network doesn't work.
Of course if there is an actual product for sale then you it is possible. I pay for a flickr account, but for that I get unlimited space to store full resolution versions of my photographs together with the ability to download them as required.
I'll add this one to the list of reasons why people shouldn't use dropbox for anything that they want to keep private.
I'm a big fan of dropbox, I find it useful to transfer files between computers, but I wouldn't dream of storing anything sensitive on there.
I'm glad to see that the employees are entirely convinced that the service is secure and are seemingly unaware of the security hole they are peddling.
Why?
Bluetooth mice and keyboards are a pain. They use far too much power and, in my experience, loose their pairing far too often. I have a really nice logitech bluetooth keyboard and I never use it because it always has to be left on charge and half the time when you load it up you need to pair it with the computer again which requires you to find another mouse or keyboard.
By contrast the wireless logitech keyboard and mouse I have are fantastic, they use 2.4GHz so the range is very similar to bluetooth. Pairing is hardware based so the keyboard and mouse are paired with the dongle, you can move the dongle to another computer and there's nothing to install or configure. The batteries last years (I've had the mouse over a year and battery life says good, the keyboard should be OK for 3 years).
The problem with the logitech system is that it takes up a USB port. What we need is better bluetooth profiles that allow keyboards and mice to operate in the same way with lower power usage and hardware based pairing.
There's no real need for a standardised dock connector. What we need is for someone to sort bluetooth out so that you can control a media player nicely. I'm talking being able to browse a library of Artists/songs/albums etc. With transfer of track information and album artwork during playback.
Then sort out wireless charging and you're sorted. Just stick your phone on top of your dock and some sort of NFC initiated pairing happens and you're docked.
Recently I've found myself using my phone to playback audio in the car more than my ipod. Problem is that choosing music is a pain on the phone whilst driving where as the ipod is controlled by the car stereo.
I thought this was going to be an interesting article about how a school's sysadmin had built a new, easily expandable, storage system using off the shelf commodity parts. Or maybe an article about how the school has employed some new dedupe software that's really good at reducing the size of Justin Bieber videos. Instead it's just an overview of a Dell case study.
problem is that most UK backboxes are 25mm deep. That means there is no room for anything to be mounted inside. You'd have to pull out the existing backboxes and replace with 45mm ones including chasing out the brick/block behind. If you're going to that much trouble it's much easier just to fit cat5E externally around your house.
actually it turns out I've been generous, since the Virgin traffic shaping is always applied for 5 hours at a time you are guaranteed 10 hours of shaping over a 24 hour period if you are maxing out your connection. This means that it doesn't matter if you are on the M or L service you will still get 14 hours unshaped and 10 hours shaped so the maximum you can download over 24 hours is 72.5GB
http://bit.ly/cdOjte
"These restrictions were not applicable to all providers because some services, like those offered by Virgin [Media], were not delivered over a copper wire."
Really? What are they making coax out of these days?
Also their sums seem to be wrong
The 10Mb M Virgin service used flat out gives you 14.5 hours at full speed and 9.5 hours at 2.5Mb/s over a 24 hour period. I make that 74GB in 24 hours even the 10Mb L service only gets you an extra half an hour at full speed which takes the total to 76GB.
The Sky service at 7.5Mb/s average as described by Virgin would give you 79GB in 24 hours.
Also since very few people use their Internet at full whack 24 hours a day preferring instead to use it either in the evenings or afternoons I think that a fully working Sky broadband connection is going to be far better than a fully working Virgin connection.
Personally I don't have a problem with the lack of support in WP8 for my phone. I've got one of the original WP7 phones the HTC Mozart. I've had it long enough that I'm happy with the intended upgrade to 7.8. I'm far more accepting of this than I am of the lack of a promised upgrade to my Motorola Xoom, Motorola have promised ICS since the start of the year but it still hasn't arrived.
However I can see how the people that have just bought a Lumia 900 are going to be pretty annoyed that their flagship phone can't be upgraded to the latest OS version. We've got a fairly large deployment of HTC Radars at work and the staff really like them.
Microsoft need to go after the business market we need tighter management of the devices e.g. the ability to push out apps and OS updates remotely. It would be nice if the find my phone system reported the location back to work so we could see at a glance where all our phones are.
I had a quick play, doesn't look to be much of a change over 2010 other than the new GUI. My only problem with the new GUI IS THE USE OF THE CAPS IN THE MENU that's just wrong. People who are moaning about the lack of separation between buttons, take a close look at 2010 and you'll see that there are no buttons drawn there either until you hover over them.
I haven't used it on a big enough screen to see if the full screen file menu is an issue but first impressions are that it's one to skip if you already have 2010 but worth upgrading to if you are on an earlier version and need some of the features. Mostly this will be people running Outlook 2003 against Exchange 2010.
All ultrabooks have to have some sort of flash, either a full blown SSD or a flash cache. Manufacturers are milking the idea of a price differential.
750GB 7200rpm drive will cost me £75
128GB SSD will cost me £90
256GB SSD will cost me £150
With the 750GB drive the manufacturer has to also include a small amount of flash to act as a cache. This means that a 128GB drive costs about the same and the 256GB drive is only £60 more. SSDs aren't a high end option any more they are simply a choice between speed and storage space.
The Sony Vaio Z is a prime example of this, if you want 8GB of RAM you have to get the 256GB SSD (I'm guessing Sony's Windows install is so bloated that the extra page file used for 8GB RAM consumes all the remaining space on a 128GB drive). The 256GB drive is an extra £400 on top of the 128GB.
but if you look at the other side some programs would never have been successful. I don't think I would have paid for every episode of the wire on the strength of the first episode. I would have deemed it a bit slow and boring and not bothered shelling out of any more episodes.
I'm confused by this article, it seems to suggest that the movies will be available at the same time as they are released on DVD (fair enough) and it also seems to suggest that a subscription to the service will get you the movies faster ?? Since the DVD release for a movie is now generally 6-12 weeks after the cinema release I can't see how Sky are going to get them any faster than this.
Anyway, wake me up when the service is HD (1080p) with 5.1 sound in a format understood by surround decoders. And when the service can offer me better highlights than the 3 on the nowtv splash page (green lantern, x-men first class and bridesmaids)
This class action thing? I'm from the UK so this isn't for me but if I were an American do I get $25 flat amount or is it $5 for a laptop $10 for a small TV and $15 for a big TV. What if I've bought 10 laptops and so's my wife?
What about buisness if I bought 500 laptops can I get my $25 back for each of those?
It's not paticularly fast, not that light, not very thin, the design isn't new, screen is standard, hard disk is basic RAM is minimal. So it seems the only thing really good about this laptop is the build quality and yet it costs £999.
I can't believe people who buy these don't feal like mugs.
I remember when the reason macbook pros were expensive was because they were the best components squeezed into the smallest, lightest package.
I did wonder that but I'm guessing that either these were machines sold with a different OS or they were sold with Windows home and the pirates (aaaarrr) were installing pro or ultimate on them before sale.
I know HP make models with linux or some form of DOS installed for certain markets.
The first digit is for dust, the second is for water, technically you would need IP68 for complete protection but IP57 is just as waterproof as IP67.
Interestingly level 7 only states that that water will not enter in quantaties sufficiant to damage the device. So it's fine for using in the rain and it will save the phone if you drop it in the bath but it's not really designed for taking the phone swimming.
Getting rid of enterprise is a good thing. The standard license covers you for two processors and they've now removed the stupid limit on the amount of RAM so for a two socket physical machine, standard is all you need. If you have a four socket machine you just buy two standard licenses.
Same goes for virtualising, you buy one standard license for each two VMs running on a single box. Once you get to around 20 VMs on the same box it becomes cheaper to buy the datacenter version.
One thing that seems to be suggested is that for a two socket machine you now only need one datacenter license, whereas before you had to have two.
Whilst I appreciate the effort that has gone into TFMCE it only really works for BBC content that can be streamed using wmv. I can't remember a time I've ever got it to successfully play a flash stream there's always a box you have to click on or a tick that needs placing in a box before it will open up full screen. I always end up grabbing the mouse and loading up a web browser. The other problem is that it never seems to be up to date.
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