Posts by Jolyon Smith

Silent because....

Projectors need fans for cooling. They need cooling because the lamps in them get very, VERY hot. Typically the brighter the lamp, the more heat it generates and the more cooling it needs.

This projector on the other hand is not only not as bright, but it uses an LED lamp which in comparison with traditional projector lamps are very, VERY cool (thermally, not just because they are a hip and happening tech).

So a projector that uses an LED lamp should not need as much active cooling so fan noise should be vastly reduced if not entirely absent.

Yes, HDDs/memory sticks are cheaper, but DIFFERENT

Using a memory stick/card/drive or a hard disk drive to simply MOVE data is one thing, and clearly more cost effective than a BluRay disc.

But I don't think anyone would buy a HDD or even a memory stick in order simply to give a copy of some data to someone else, especially if the data was required to be read-only (or at the very least is NOT required to be updatable "in situ" on the media.

If nothing else, the cost effectiveness argument starts to fall apart in some situations.

A 250GB HDD may be a cheaper way of handing out 250GB of data, but it's an expensive way of handing out 80GB.

And as for video/movies being the only application, I seem to remember that the same thing was said of DVD "back in the day" (not necessarily by this site). The one thing that is clear from the history of data storage technology is that applications soon grow to fill the capacity of *any* available storage tech.

This device should have been reviewed on the basis of it's execution of the technology, not the reviewers opinion of whether the technology would be of use to anyone.

That's for those other people to decide, based on what they need from the technology - the reviewers job is to help such people decide which execution of the technology is the better investment for them.

4/3s "format" - virtually no downside

I have a long in the tooth E300 and it regularly produces pictures that make more expensive equipment (looking at you Nikon and Canon) look even more overpriced than they already are.

The 4/3 format allows lenses to me lighter and more compact and having IS built into the body not only works the same way but also means that ALL lenses benefit, not just particular ones (although of course how MUCH they benefit depends on the focal length of each lense).

I've been casting covetous glances in the direction of the E-520 for months now, and I'm glad I didn't succumb, cos now I get to covet the E-620 instead, and this time I'm definitely going to turn that coveting into a purchase.

Keep it up Olympus!

Just goes to prove the old adage....

To become a small businessman in the UK, just by a big business then wait.

Why buy stuff...

when you can just jack a car and drive it through the windows of a retail store to get stuff for free without having to work to earn the money required to enact a purchase.

Delphi's TThread

Was and Is great but also sucked some serious butt in many respects. The lack of any provided mechanisms for simple messaging between threads was one, the lack of a provided pooling mechanism or any flexibility in thread lifetime management, the fact that the app main thread wasn't actually represented by a TThread was another. etc.

Fortunately Delphi being what it is, and with full source provided, the VCL TThread class itself proved invaluable to me in gaining an understanding of the Windows thread related API's and gave me a great jumping off point to create my own far richer and more flexible threading support for my Delphi code, taking all the great things that TThread did and adding SOOO much more.

And yes, making hard jobs easier for those who don't fully understand the problems they are grappling with is a fundamental pillar on which the Law of Unintended Consequences rests.

Writing parallel code is easy.

Writing parallel code that works is not.

Unless of course you employ a (correct) implementation of the Active Object pattern, in which case massively parallel code can be written by pretty much anyone.

Someone buy the reviewer a dictionary

I think they're more than a little mixed up at what "immersive" means.

Something that makes an intrusive aspect of a design less intrusive is not immersive.

"Distracting", maybe.

"Diversionary", possibly.

If there is anything "immersive" about the way this frame works it certainly doesn't come across in the review.

Mines the one with "Bravia" on the back, a Freeview HD decoder built in and lovely deep blacks without having to resort to tricks in the frame.

It's digital dude - the "original picture" was lost long before it reached you!

"For example, I imagine the producer, director, editor, etc of a motion picture just might think that their original picture is better."

Indeed they would. And it's for this reason that the TV does it's best to recreate that original picture. The picture source is NOT the image that the producer/director/editor created. Even broadcast TV images are not received at production quality - the pixel resolution may be the same (with digital transmission), but the content of those pixels has been squeezed and colour mapped to fit into the available space in the airwaves.

The same applies, to a lesser extent obviously, to DVD and even HD/BD content.

Even movies created for digital projection are of higher resolution than Full HD.

You could watch the content as unprocessed as possible (beyond raw MPEG decompression). Or you choose the best video processor in your input chain to extract as much picture INFORMATION from the picture DATA as possible. That might be your DVD player, it might be a dedicated video processor or it might be the circuitry in your TV (or projector etc).

So now Toshiba have (or claim to have) improved the ability of the TV itself to do this, so you should get the best display for all your source material, but if you already have acceptable or preferred video processing applied to some of those sources, presumably you can tune the additional TV processing, or even turn it off.

T's & C's Actually Apply, in "We Warned You" Shocker!!

Geez, whatever next.

"FURORE AS DRIVERS TICKETED FOR EXCEEDING POSTED SPEED LIMITS"?

"FURORE AS PSYCHOPATHS LOCKED UP FOR MURDERING FELLOW HUMANS"?

"FURORE AS BOOK LOVERS FINED FOR NOT RETURNING BOOKS TO THE LIBRARY ON TIME"?

"FURORE AS 11 YEAR OLD REFUSED SERVICE IN LIQUOR STORE"?

Must be a slow news day in The Register offices.

And after ...

... the marketting legs of "The Cloud" have been well and truly run into the ground and everyone realises that actually "The Cloud" is little more than a 21st century "mainframe", with desktop PC's relegated to little more than "dumb terminals" (ok, slightly smarter terminals than before), and then remembers all the reasons why that model died ....

... Microsoft and Google will then be offering Silverlining 1.0 and the merry go round can start another revolution.

God knows it's the only revolution we're ever likely to see in the industry these days.

The Devil in the Details

From the "99.9%" SLA:

"Intermittent Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted towards any Downtime Periods."

Who defines "intermittent"?

At it's most extreme this could mean that Google Apps is only actually "up" for 9 minutes out of every ten in an entire month - 10% uptime at BEST - but they could still claim a 100% uptime for that month since all the downtime periods were intermittent and no single was 10 minutes or more.

It's not even particularly deeply buried in the fine print.

It beggars belief that this can even still be called an SLA.

Paris - because their isn't a Dr Cuddy Pole Dancer icon.

Garbage In....

"What do we have for our current popular languages? C++, which is a bad preprocessor hack, and Java and C#, which are kind of cribbed from C++. And what do we get from all of this? Garbage."

Which is of course why Java and C# both incorporate GARBAGE COLLECTORS.

Oh it kills me, it really does. (wipes tear from eye holding sides in blissful agony)

Before Anyone Get's Too Smug...

The bandwidth necessary to do this with music has been available for years, and the idea was even tried for a while, if memory serves. Didn't ever get off the ground of course, because it's not about what the technology is capable of, but what consumers WANT.

Online music stores have achieved a certain amount of success of course, but have also exposed Joe Consumer to the wonders of DRM, and Joe Consumer is increasingly "not impressed".

And the sector of the music industry enjoying the largest growth currently is.... VINYL!

But with an important industry player putting their money where their mouth is, this MUST be the way of the future, right?

Well, let's not forget that this is the same company that not so long ago thought that HD-DVD was the future.

As far as crystal balls go, Toshiba's looks to be on the blink.

It is more likely that having lost the HD/Blu battle (it was hardly a "war"), Toshiba cannot stomach the loss of face that hitching to a competitors band wagon would entail, AND if they are to have ANY hope of saving face, backing another possible rival gives them their best shot of pulling out a lead once more.

Whether they will prove clairvoyant or merely insane remains to be seen.

- Paris cos she goes down loads.

Not so fast with the "first"

"first merging of previously separate development environments"

Nope. The only "first" involved is the first time that new standalone Delphi and C++ Builder versions have been released simultaneously.

Delpih and C++ Builder used to be separate products with separate release schedules.

Then Borland combined them in the multiple-language Borland Developer Studio (latterly RAD Studio), incorporating Delphi, Delphi.NET, C++ and C# all in ONE IDE.

Then the Turbos were created as individual language versions of BDS, separating them once again for the Turbo line.

Delphi 2007 and C++ Builder 2007 were released at different times once again, but RAD Studio continued to offer an integrated, multiple language IDE (Delphi, Delphi.NET and C++ - C# support became a little limited however).

With Delphi 2009 and C++ Builder, what is being released are the INDIVIDUAL, stand alone single language IDE's. What is different this time is that (apart from the Turbo's) this is the first time that BOTH otherwise separate products have been released at the same time.

C++ Builder historically used to lag behind it's Pascal cousin.

The fully "merged" product - RAD Studio - will as before be released later, presumably including an update to the Delphi.NET personality that it includes in addition to Delphi and C++.

Hopefully that clarifies things.

("Yep, clarified as mud")

:)

Mines the one with the Pascal in the pocket.

What you "see" and what you THINK you see

"You see someone's legs get broken"

No, actually, you don't. You see the legs of someone hitting the ground, having fallen from a fair height, a height which we have already had established is not going to be fatal.. Legs in trousers, no less.

You don't see bone protruding through flesh. You don't see blood. You don't even see much in the way of any physical deformation that might arise from such a fall.

What you SEE is more than likely someone jumping from a short stool. A very short stool.

And all this happening to a not very nice man that we are not invited to sympathise with one iota.

Compare and contrast with Watership Down - which we happened to watch at the weekend.

In which we see cute fluffy bunnies literally being shaken to pieces and tossed around by an enraged dog. Blood and bodies everywhere.

And this in a PG!!!!!

But it's a cartoon so it doesn't matter. Riiiiight?

Newsflash: The Dark Knight absolutely is NOT a kiddies movie. But in the same way that The Hunt For Red October is not a kiddies movie, NOT in the same way that SAW is.

--

Paris - because the other options are boring or butt ugly. <shrug>

Harlequin and Penguin

Riddle? Joke? A fine line between the two.

The Riddler is a little too close to The Joker in my mind, certainly the TDK Joker, although if Riddler were to come back I'd like to see Jim Carrey return but NOT to reprise the Batman Forever, Riddler, but to invent a new interpretation under Nolan's direction.

Depp? Meh.

Penguin on the other hand, as others have said, can easily be rendered into a real world, just as the previously extreme Joker characterture (deliberate misspell) was stunningly realised in TDK as a psychopathic elemental force, but still recognisably The Joker.

But Harlequin provides a potential continuity and to explain the Joker's being missing from any sequel (being securely confined in Arkham).

No need to have her wearing a costume the whole time, she could be the shrink assigned to the Joker at Arkham, who got too close, falls under his charms and comes to believe that Batman is truly evil and responsible for The Joker's state of mind.

She'd already be placed on the side of the "good guys" trying to hunt down Batman. It would set up an interesting tension with Gordon forced to try and protect Batman whilst also being responsible for tracking him down. As Harlequin realises that Gordon is foiling the investigation from inside, that would reinforce her paranoia, and she would turn on the authorities.

Gamekeeper turned poacher.

I think there's definitely potential there.

- Paris, to keep me company through those long dark nights.

It IS an SLR

As previously pointed out, whether it has interchangeable lenses is irrelevant to a camera's designation as an SLR or not. What the previous poster failed to identify was that there IS evidence in the article that confirms the SLR nature of the beast. The photo's.

At the rear it has a view finder AND an LCD.

At the front it clearly has only ONE lens. One. SINGular.

That lens MUST be providing the source for both the picture taking AND the viewfinder, hence, by the VERY DEFINITION OF THE PHRASE, this camera is indeed a SINGLE LENS Reflex device.

- Paris just because.

Just a "normal" user.... ?

"connected to my internet connection via a gigabit wired connection"

WOW! GIGABIT?!?! Your internet speed must ROCK!

No, wait. Isn't your speed going to be limited by your internet connection anyhow? Having a Gigabit connection to your router is like having a 12 lane autobahn for a driveway - your car still has to obey the speed limits and get just as stuck in the traffic jams once it completes the 5 meter sprint off your drive and hits the public roads.

ROTFLMAO

And let me get this straight....

You just happened to have a spare HDD sitting waiting to upgrade your PS3? (Q: Was it "spare" or was it "waiting to be fitted"? Either pretty much excludes the other. Something doesn't ring quite true in your story)

But in any event, here's a question.... knowing that you were going to do a firmware update AND a HDD upgrade, why didn't you back up your system BEFORE updating and then apply the update AFTER having upgraded? Y'know, seeing as how you were going to upgrade the HD ANYWAY and that backing up is, you know, a necessary step in THAT process.

Then you wouldn't have a "scrap" HD, you would have one of those, oh, what do you call it.... oh yes.... a BACKUP.

Again, something not quite ringing true.

I suggest you double check and make sure you really do have a PS3, and not one of those Ex-Box things. You know the ones I mean.

They come with those obsolete HD DVD drives, and when they brick, they REALLY brick, and if you want to upgrade your HD you have to go cap in hand to MS (remembering to truly STUFF that cap with $$$'s for the privilege).

;)

Situation normal - no problems to report

Updated my < 3 month old 40GB model to 2.40 without a hitch so it's not a "problem with newer models".

I had already (and recently - like, in the past week) upgraded the 40GB HDD in my PS3 to a 120GB unit. Also without a hitch.

The 2.40 update went smoothly despite my PS3 having been upgraded by me.

I can't help but wonder if there might be something extraordinarily unusual about the "victim" machines, or perhaps something as simple as a corrupt download or dodgy HDD sector (does the update/download service incorporate a verification checksum procedure? I would have thought so, but....?)

Paris because she knows that trophies are for boys - real men don't need to compare theirs with their friends.

NIce to see a good product NOT ruined by new owners

I have a 2nd gen SqueezeBox that has given good service for many years and continues to do so.

Probably the biggest problem that these devices suffer from is that, as the review says, they "just work". And they KEEP ON working. So whilst the new remote looks OMG drop-dead sexy, I simply have no reason to upgrade my 5 year old device.

I've been expounding the virtues of SlimDevices for years - it's wonderful to see that I can continue to do so under the ownership of Logitech.

And for those suggesting a PS3 as an equivalently capable product/device/solution....

I have a PS3... I *tried* setting it up as a client for the DLNA server built into MediaPlayer 11. It didn't work. It seemingly doesn't work if you have more than a handful of files in your library. It took me hours of frustration to figure this out and give up trying to make something work that is fundamentally broken.

But even if it DID work, needing to turn on the TV to play music is just a teensy bit dumb, donchyathink?

(for sure, if you're using a PC to host your library, then it too needs to be on for SlimServer to be running, but the PC I use it a monitorless device that sits in a cupboard in my office, communicating seemlessly, silently and wirelessly with the rest of my home LAN)

Now, was the problem the PS# or was it MediaPlayer? I dunno.

I tried to find some alternative DLNA servers - there are quite a few. Not ONE of them was as plug-and-play "It just works" simple as SlimServer to set up, and I gave up.

Me. The technical/computer/gadget "Go To" Guy of our household, family and indeed neighbourhood. Gave up.

Sometimes grappling with technology can be fun. But when I just want to listen to my music, it needs to "just work", as easily at least as just dropping a disc into a player.

SlimDevices got that. Logitech still get it.

Way to go SqueezeBox!

Paris, because I would. And really, does anyone else EVER need any other reason?

Properties an "entirely new language feature in .NET" ?!

...only if you were completely ignorant of other languages that had precisely the same language feature for years before .NET was even envisaged, i.e. Delphi and heck, even VB!

It's this sort of technical slip up that fatally undermines the credibility of any technical article, no matter how salient the points may be that it is conveying.

Paris because she delights in making her private parts public.