* Posts by James Hughes 1

2645 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

One-third of US consumers will buy an iPhone 5

James Hughes 1

@ThomH

Interesting post. Apple have brought out new ideas just when their old ones start tailing off (i.e. when competitors start catching). I wonder what their next big thing will be, or have they run out of ideas? New versions of existing product won't keep them going forever.

ARM scooping in cash but remains cautious

James Hughes 1

My thoughts entirely

But then wondered if bumping their license fees would be counterproductive - i.e they sell less stuff. ARM seem to be playing a long game here - ensure their market stays with them - rather than go for all out profit and succumb to Intel.

Still, 54mil profit out of 117m rev is a pretty good percentage. Must keep them in beer and skittles.

OS X Lion paves way for "Retina Display" monitors

James Hughes 1

Er, what?

All this guff about problems scaling icons etc. It all pretty simple, don't know what all the fuss is about. People have been scaling icons etc for donkeys years to match display resolutions. Have icon, have box to put it in, graphics manager/card/whatever scales it to fit.

Of course, making a display at the resolutions described, and a graphics card fast enough to actually stuff data out to it fast enough is another matter (at an acceptable price). Sure it will come, though not holding breath.

Dongling P2P downloaders 2nd-biggest mobe data users

James Hughes 1

Analysing traffic?

In the example given, surely just seeing if you are sending or requesting data to/from Facebook, isn't analysing the content of the traffic at all. Of course you could argue that even the destination is your private information. Not sure that would wash though.

Corporates love iPhone, iPad more than Android kit

James Hughes 1

Tablets

Surely the tablet figure is grossly distorted by the fact that iPads were by far the biggest (only?) seller at the time. Decent Android tabs were few and far between. Android tabs are now gaining traction, so I would expect the figures to skew in their direction.

Not going to argue with the phone figures though, although same may apply.

LulzSec says it will partner with media on Murdoch emails

James Hughes 1

27GB

Is about 27 Encyclopedia Britannica's. You type a lot.

(Or just perhaps you have lots of image data in there. Which a hack probably wouldn't bother to download because of the time to do it. In which case, 4GB of email TEXT is a hell of a lot)

My Translator Pro UK

James Hughes 1

I'm not dissing the work involved

Just that the work is pretty trivial - and that real innovation seems to be somewhat missing in 'app' space. Even Angry Birds, the current poster child, is just a knock off of previous 'chuck stuff at buildings' games. With pretty graphics. And pigs.

(Not that I could do any better, I've had all the innovation beaten out of me over the years)

James Hughes 1

So let me get this right

Somebody has released an app which is basically a gui on to Googles translate system...and charges 0.69p. (OK, not a lot)

Is anyone out there actually doing any real innovative work any more? Or are all these 'apps' TM just piggybacking on others efforts?

Your mom, girlf, boyf: Spying on your phone and email

James Hughes 1

I'm with Paul Rogers

Although incidence of troubles are greatly reduced as commented above, that doesn't mean that there isn't a problem, and I think it's wise to at least be alert to those problems, and to do something about it where appropriate.

Or you could just stick you head in the sand and hope your child doesn't become another statistic (even though that is very very unlikely)

James Hughes 1

Not sure you have noticed

But things are a LOT different now to 10 years ago.

My parents did a good job on me too btw, which is why I want to do the same for my children.

Google turns off sidelined Labs section altogether

James Hughes 1

I wonder

If all the patent crap being thrown Google's way is partly behind this. Google seemed to be one of the few companies not interested in patenting everything they came up with, but now because of the ridiculous patents being granted to everyone else they are finding they are having to patent as well. Taking Google Labs offline means all that stuff goes underground are more patentable.

Just a thought.

The patents system certainly seems to stifle rather than encourage innovation.

Biggest ever jump in web, non-store retail sales for June

James Hughes 1

Inclined to agree on the fuel thing

It now costs a noticeable amount of money to 'pop down the shops', making online purchases even cheaper. Add that to mental parking costs (I give you Cambridge as an example), and less available time and its easy to see why people go online.

Apple unveils 'World's First Thunderbolt Display'

James Hughes 1

Bad article

As I had to read the comments to understand this wasn't just an expensive monitor. As is, sounds quite interesting.

More details next time (like, WTF is this Thunderbolt thing?). And queue all the pedantards saying I could have looked it up. Had Thunderbolt been a popular I/F then perhaps yes, but since this is the first product to use it, perhaps some more detail would have been appropriate.

Baidu apes Google with Chinese Chrome

James Hughes 1
Happy

Tough one

All those Google haters proclaiming evil, and the (future) alternative is a Chinese knockoff with even less control.....

Still, at least their version of Android won;t be susceptible to all those dodgy patent lawsuits. Well, it will, but they won't give a sh1t. Actually, a bit like Google really.

Robots form band, rock out to Marilyn Manson

James Hughes 1

Live concerts?

I volunteer not to be in the audience if this lot start stage diving.

ARM to wrestle quarter of laptop market from Intel

James Hughes 1

@Matt - which vendors would those be?

The mobile manufactures? Nope. Ah, you mean the desktop. Intel/AMD may have a monopoly there, but not in the mobile space where 95% of kit is arm based. That's a lot of Arm experience that just gagging to move to new markets. And now we have Linux already and Windows soon on Arm.....mobile is where the money is being spent.;

Yes, Intel do have lots of marketing muscle, but so do Arm via their licensees - count the number of manufacturers making Arm based chips vs those making x86 chips....that's a LOT of Arm chips being made.

Come back in two years and review your post. I think you might be surprised.

James Hughes 1

Hmmm

>>>

ARM will grab the most share in the low-cost laptop business where price is a more important purchase consideration than performance. So while Intel will lose market share by units, the cut into its share by revenue will be much smaller.

<<<

Although in a couple of years the multiple core Arms chips are likely going to compete fairly well on performance as well.

>>>

And that assumes Intel's continuing efforts to drive down the power consumption of its processors doesn't allow it to deliver chips that provide better performance at a comparable price and power draw as ARM offerings.

<<<

Unlikely - Arm designed from ground up as low power. Intel, constrained by X86 have no such option. Arm more likely to catch Intel performance at low power, than for Intel to catch Arm in the low power high performance category.

HP TouchPad 32GB WebOS tablet

James Hughes 1

@Gordon 10

Of course the firms realise they need to get stuff out, but there is only so fast you can do these things - they are late to market and suffering. You cannot just throw people at the problem.

Of course, they could rush this stuff out, which means it will be full of HW and SW bugs. Is that a good idea?

AMD says Xbox 720 graphics to be good as Avatar

James Hughes 1

Some interesting 'facts'

According to Wikipedia...

"To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000 sq ft (930 m2) server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores running Ubuntu Linux and the Grid Engine cluster manager. The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers"

Can't find exact figures, but render time of 5-8hr per frame doesn't seem too absurd.

Of course this render farm was created 5 years ago, so is pretty outdated now. And of course they use CPU's to do all the rendering, not GPU's (AFAIK). Avatar was 4k I think, so rendering at 1080p also gives you quite a speed gain. ie about 20minutes per frame at 1080p.

So a state of the art multi GPU based console running at 1080p would need to be 480times faster that the individual (5 year old) servers used on Avatar, which actually seems vaguely possible.

SpaceShipOne designer produces hybrid flying car

James Hughes 1

Clever bloke that Rutan.

Designed some weird looking planes too!

Atlantis computer goes down: Fixed by 'nauts

James Hughes 1

That as maybe...

But will it play Crysis?

One-armed Belarus man monocuffed for clapping

James Hughes 1

No one's mentioned

"urinating in a public convenience."

Romanian NASA hacker fights 'inflated' damage assessment

James Hughes 1

The fine isn't the deterernt

The deterrent is the prison sentence. The fine is for damages causes to the system, which do appear overinflated, given that much of what seemingly needed to be done using that money was stuff that should have been done anyway, in order to make the system secure.

I'm not saying what he did was right - it wasn't - just that the damages claim is over the top.

Amazon's anti-iPad arises 'in October'

James Hughes 1

@Tony

I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone (sane) would downvote your post, so have a textual upvote from me.

James Hughes 1

I'm finding I have to agree

Never had a problem with Amazon either, and I do like my Kindle too (and as I have said before, I have never purchased a ebook - all free so far)

They are a prime example of good customer service, good pricing and good product.

I'm sure others will have had opposite experiences though.

James Hughes 1

Not irrational.

They may well come out with the perfect product and the right price (Maybe the former, unlikely the latter in my case), but you may still disagree with their walled garden approach. Although in that case, I suppose it doesn't do exactly what you want....

James Hughes 1

Hmm

I'd have a desktop to do the real hard work, and remote desktop in to it from the tablet. Dunno whether that's possible at the moment, I presume so, I just don't have a tablet to try it.

Although in a year or so's time the new tablet CPU's coming out might do what you want anyway.

As long as your dev tools run on Arm anyway.....

Ballmer's breaking point: Is Windows 8 already too late?

James Hughes 1

made up word alert

"eventuate"

James Hughes 1

@ Boo Radley

Give Ubuntu or similar a go - think it can do all you ask (maybe not the games, depends what you play), and you will get decent security. Performance should be pretty good.

James Hughes 1

We had Notes.

Been replaced by Sharepoint.

That's shit too.

Console gaming giant goes into handjobs

James Hughes 1

Whuh?

Popcap have over 400 employees. That's not small or casual.

And they do pretty well.

Marathon for iPad

James Hughes 1

Superfluous maybe

But not bad grammar.

MS to WinXP diehards: Just under 3 more years' support

James Hughes 1

Would two years

be enough time for Canonical (or whoever) to get Linux up to a position where it can replace Windows completely even in the corporate environment?

Possibly.....

LibreOffice is almost there (and is already good enough for most).

Security, well, that's a given.

Backoffice, hmm, some work to do there

IE 6 compatibility, oh, damn.

ISS and Atlantis crews face 'daunting' box-shifting job

James Hughes 1

Let's be honest

It's not like they have anything else to do.

Contour GPS Bluetooth camcorder

James Hughes 1

Quite expensive

Although image quality is OK.

CPU/Encoder/decode chip $15, camera sensor $15, GPS $10, PCB $5. Case $50 (?), optics, hmm, dunno. Software development, well not enough it sounds like.

End user cost $450

Still, all prices come down fairly swiftly nowadays.

Doom guy: tablets, phones to be gaming platforms of the future

James Hughes 1

@Ian Yates

Please read the post. I said BY VOLUME. I deliberately ignored price.

Unfortunately for the console gamers this will push developers in to the larger market - the games are cheaper to produce (or are at the moment). This means if you make a turkey, you haven't lost as much - its a safer market to be in. Spending 5mill on developing a game for a console/PC when you can make more money on mobile devices? Where would you rather be?

I predicting what will happen is that people will just wirelessly connect their mobile device to their TV/monitor, turn on their wireless controller, and play games that way. The devices will be perfectly capable of running the current crop of high end games, if not more. That will be perfectly sufficient for most people.

James Hughes 1

@AC 13:19

Er, do you even read the title you copied from my post? It says NOW - so I'm saying that in a couple of years the CPU/GPU combination's in mobile devices will be on a par with what PC have NOW. Of course PC's will get faster. RTFP.

And I am saying it because it will happen. Just look at the roadmaps for these mobile chips.

Yes, I am aware that some powerful hardware is initially hot. But I'm not talking about Nvidia's/Intels hopeless efforts to reduce power consumption - I'm talking about chips that have been built from the ground up to be ultra low power, but ultra high performance. 2 years away. Max.

And I don't know if you have noticed, but some mobile screens are now on the resolution level of most TV's/monitors, if not higher, so the pixel rates required are certainly of the same order of magnitude.

James Hughes 1

WTF

Are you talking about...? Are you implying John Carmack is a has been? The guy who invented the first person shooter? The guy who runs his own successful rocket company ? The guy who wrote Doom, Quake, Rage etc? Are you saying Carmack and ID are just going to move in to Farmville style games?

I agree with Carmack, most gaming (by volume) will move on to tablets and handhelds, because, as he said, the processing ooph in a couple of years will be more than we have on PC and consoles now.

Angry Birds had sold 6.5 million copies just on iPhone as of 2010. Halo 2, I believe the best selling Xbox game, sold 6.3 million. (Figures out of date but still I believe a good example). Multiple that by the number of games on each platform, and you begin to see the way the market is going.

NHS told: freeze all Microsoft spend

James Hughes 1

@AC

But, with the money saved you could rewrite/port all those bespoke applications.......

Well, maybe not all, but you get the gist.

As OP said - 90% of the work done on MS product could be done on LibreOffice on Linux or similar, and the HW requirements would drop too..

iPad 2 to gain double-res display - but not until 2012

James Hughes 1

I agree

Not sure who makes mobile low power GPU (or apps processor with GPU) that can actually run that display. Nobody at the moment I would suspect. Note I said low power. I've sure some can do it at the expense of short battery life.

More to the point - why bother? My desktop monitor has a lower resolution than that. 1080p video needs at most, er, 1080 vertical pixels. Whilst the retina display on the iPhone looks great, I'm not sure the benefits (looks nice) outweigh the drawbacks (see above) on a tablet device.

El Reg to unleash rocket-powered spaceplane

James Hughes 1

Or you could look up the definition of space

And find that anything over 100km is classed as Space, and therefor Branson's effort does get to space (unlike regs 100kft thingy here).

You don't have to be in orbit to be in space - a common misconception. Apparently.

James Hughes 1

Good luck with that

You'll need it. And a lot of permits to fly it too. Autonomous aircraft need an (expensive) permit I believe, although not sure about Spain, but I expect so. Even small ones. The flight control software needs to be completely foolproof and tested to the nth degree (imagine it going wrong and crashing on someone - you'll need insurance).

Anyway notwithstanding that, flight control software is pretty difficult, as is rocket ignition in flight.

Still, like I said, good luck!

Mystery of David Attenborough's garden skull cracked

James Hughes 1

Reminds me

of an aquaintance who was digging the footings for a village bench and dug up a skull. He was inclined just to stick it back in the ground, but eventually reported it.

Police were not overly worried about it to be honest, the bench was being installed in a graveyard.

Earth orbit for £1,000? You must be joking

James Hughes 1

Nope

The velocity of the projectile as it leave the barrel would either vapourise the projectile, or, if that didn't happen, air drag would reduce the velocity so rapidly that it wouldn't make it in to orbit.

James Hughes 1

@JC 2

unless you are John Carmack (are you?), then perhaps looking up some of the teams who are currently beavering away on this - and there are quite a few - might be a good idea before gobbing off?

Plenty of project team websites to peruse, please note, this prize has been on offer for well over a year already, so there is quite a bit of progress in the various areas.

James Hughes 1

Carmack Prize

You could always try for the Carmack prize instead. From John Carmack of Doom, Quake and Armadillo aerospace fame. $10k for a rocket to over 100kft (and it must do 100kft under its propulsion - ie from point of ignition, so Rockoons no help).

Even that is very difficult, as no-one has claimed it yet.

Ofcom slaps Channel 5 for loud PlayStation ads

James Hughes 1

Always annoyed me

How the advert are almost always louder than the programs they surround. What's the point of being woken up for the adverts?

Anyway, its all so counterproductive. I either change channels or turn the volume down - either way, I don;' pay any further attention to the adverts.

Nokia X7 Symbian Anna smartphone

James Hughes 1

Not just the CPU

The GPU also needs to be very power efficient, either on CPU or as a co-pro, and I think I am right in saying the GPU in the N8 and the rest of the current Symbian range is the lowest power and once of the highest performances available. Certainly considerably lower than the GPU's used in the iPhone and Androids. All that fancy GUI, HD playback and record etc stuff needs some grunt, and low power parts make a big difference.

Telcos: up your prices, lose customers

James Hughes 1

o2

Although I didn't leave them I went from a pay yearly tariff to PAYG when they changed their pricing. I was paying £25/year ish as I use the phone very little, but that would have risen to >£110. Now I have a £20 PAYG, which will last me all year.

So, although they didn't lose a customer, they lost money with the tariff change.

Amazon Kindle Lighted Leather Cover

James Hughes 1

Kindle £111, Case £50

Hmmm. £50 For a bit of leather and an LED, against a sophisticated electronic device with screen, batteries, keyboard, wifi etc at only just over twice the price.

My case cost £10. Still a bit much for a bit of leather, and no LED, but I do have a bedside light, and the missus stays awake longer than I do anyway.