Posts by Fuzz

Is this voice control thing new?

I just checked and my windows phone can find me a local greek restaurant.

Turns out voice control isn't all that. It's a great party trick to show off to your friends, but I didn't use it when I had an Ericsson T28 in 1999 and I still don't use it today.

Good for pubs

This ruling is great for pubs, unfortunately it doesn't help people at home much. A subscription to any EU based premier league football will set you back more than a sky subscription so isn't worth shopping around.

I don't think Sky will lose too much sleep over it. 1 pub is only equivalent to 10 homes in terms of revenue. Also most pubs I go to that have an alternative satellite system have it just so they can show the 3pm games and they also have a UK sky system for everything else.

bending the truth

"The cheapest Kindle on sale this morning sets you back $139, or $189 for the 3G model. The floor now drops to $79 and $149."

Is this a quote from Jeff?

The old 3G model is $189 without ads, that's the same price as the new 3G touch without ads. With ads the old 3G model is $139, $10 cheaper than the new model.

My guess is they'll kill off the old model in favour of the touch screen model, I guess that's a good idea the keyboard doesn't get much use so it just takes up space.

Has anyone seen the new basic model in action? How do you find books on the store when there's no keyboard? I guess it's a case of: left, left, left, click (A), right right down down click (space) I'd stop being such a cheapskate and pay the extra $20 to get the touch screen.

Unsurprisingly there's no 3G on the fire, it's one thing giving away free 3G for an e-ink device but on a colour tablet with a proper web browser you're going to incur some serious charges. It'll be interesting to see how locked down the tablet is. If it's a fully functioning Android tablet with the only condition being you have to get all your apps through Amazon it might be worth it.

I'm a big fan of Firefox but I've given up believing their claims of better performance or less memory. I like the feature set and I'm used to it so I keep it.

Firefox 7, 1 tab open (this one) firefox is using 120MB of RAM.

IE9, 1 tab open same page 62MB

Chrome 80MB

Opera 62MB

So looks like still a way to go.

Java

Java is a menace, if you have an application that mandates a particular version of Java then you can't update. Obviously this is just sloppy coding that ties an application to a version but it means that corporate desktops are wide open to this kind of attack.

Flash is very nearly as bad. The auto mechanism requires you to be an administrator on your computer. Keeping flash up to date using group policy requires you to constantly check version numbers.

Say what you like about Microsoft but WSUS is a fantastic tool for keeping all your Microsoft software patched across a large deployment of computers.

idiots

Why on earth would a chat client need to interpret javascript?

Blame

I don't see how this was the hospitals fault, they had a system in place to only allow the use of approved memory sticks. If the student was stupid enough to think that making a copy of that data was OK then I don't want that student to become a doctor.

£175?

£175 is a lot of money for this. You are comparing the price with dropbox which isn't really a backup service. Dropbox is a service for synchronising files between computers.

LiveDrive is £4.95 a month for unlimited storage.

Non issue

The only option I use on a menu bar in explorer is folder properties, I do everything else using shortcuts or right clicks.

The office ribbon bar is a huge issue because people are so used to the old way.

I can only see a ribbon bar being useful in explorer, however I would like a way to hide it so it's not using up my precious vertical pixels that hardware manufacturers seem intent on slowly removing.

Google and Apple

Of course, the people who know a huge amount about the mobile network are Google and Apple. The location service automatically sends this data back to them so maybe they're the people to ask.

I don't get it

17" laptops should be like portable desktop computers. a 17" MBP should be the pinnacle of this kind of machine. So even though it doesn't look neat it should have 4 USB ports and a VGA port. DVI and HDMI adapters should be included. The optical drive should read and write bluray it should come with 8GB RAM as standard along with a 128GB SSD and a 1TB spinning disk.

Whilst I kind of applaud Apple for trying to stick it out with thunderbolt, they need to learn from past history. In many respects firewire is much better than USB, it was way better than USB 1 but the interface you find on everything is USB, firewire has its home with video and audio gear. From what I've seen USB3 is better than firewire 800 for harddrives and the cost of thunderbolt drives is always going to be high because the connection isn't going to be on anything but really high end computers.

All gone?

Looks like I missed out by seconds, it showed up at £115 but as soon as clicked on the link they were all gone and the price was back > £400

Shame the 16GB model would have been ideal as a living room, instant on, web machine and £89 would be about the right price.

SSL

I have in the past used my t-mobile phone as a tethered modem. I find it slow and unreliable, that is until you go to an encrypted site. As soon as you hit one of those and you're bypassing the "transparent" proxy, everything speeds up.

If I have to use one I just open a Citrix session to work and browse out from there.

Openzone and FON

So skype charge you 11p per minute to borrow somebodies bandwidth via Open Zone. Is the BT customer who's bandwidth you're borrowing getting a cut of this 11p?

How is this different?

Not sure how this is different to my friends syncing there phones with any other online service. I have my contacts synced to my gmail account. My Windows phone also pulls in my friends from facebook and if they have shared their numbers with me I also see those.

A lot of my friends will be doing similar things, so my number exists on Google's servers, Microsoft's servers, facebook's servers, Apple's servers and any other sync system my friends maybe hooked up to. I haven't given my numbers to any of these companies but they have the numbers anyway.

Personally I don't worry about it, at the end of the day the worst thing that can happen is I need to get myself a new number. An inconvenience but not the end of the world.

capacity

"Millenniata says it can store three hours of video, 1,200 photos, or 100,000 documents, which might mean anywhere in the 20 to 50GB range."

Nope, 1200 photos, three hours of video, sounds like a standard 4.7GB DVD to me.

sounds good to me

I had a Motorola Windows mpx200 years ago. I seem to remember it was great as long as you didn't let the battery run out.

£240?

Why so much money? A 120GB Crucial M4 is only £180 and looks to be very nearly as quick.

Good but expensive

I've got one of these and it's a decent tuner, note that USB tuners aren't just for laptops. Mine are connected to my Acer Revo which has no PCI slots so no other way to add tuners.

I've not installed the software so can't comment on whether or not the HD EPG is decoded. I use mine with Media Centre which downloads the guide for those channels from the net.

It's a shame Media centre isn't capable of pulling multiple channels from a single multiplex. All the freeview HD stuff is on a single multiplex so that would mean you only ever need one DVB-T2 tuner. I think I paid £75 for mine but that's still a lot of money for a single TV tuner. My dual DVB-T tuner cost £20.

Hopefully more manufactures will get products to market as the standard is adopted in more countries.

Also this nanostick isn't just a rare beast among portable tuners, it's rare amongst all tuners. I only know of two tuners on the market that can receive DVB-T2.

Get a decent mouse?

My logitech does 18 months on a single set of batteries.

Software on the computer tells me when the battery is getting low to give me plenty of time to plan a recharge or buy some new batteries.

One of the points of having a wireless mouse is to reduce desk clutter, this just increases it.

Media PC

Take the bottom model, put Windows 7 on it and you have a very nice Media PC.

Smaller and faster than my Acer Revo but also more than twice the cost and is a mouse and keyboard still extra with the mini?

Still I think it's a good price for what is essentially a 13.3" Macbook pro without the keyboard. touchpad or screen.