Posts by John 62

Sensitivity priority and it's inverse

Sensitivity priority sounds more like the gimicky feature than its opposite. Nerds might like to hold an ISO setting to minimise noise, but photogs would probably want to hold a specific aperture and shutter speed and let the camera care about ISO.

1024i at 30fps sounds like a weird option. Can't say I'd ever want to use it. Otherwise seems like a top camera.

One of the sample pics was slightly freaky, definitely one of those 'when you see it, you'll ejest bricks' pictures.

One final note on the sample pics: the bookshelf is too colourful to show up noise at a glance. So some people hate the blue door, I don't care, but a more uniform slab of colour helps to highlight noise.

I'll get one...

If I can read Charles Fort's 'Lo!' on it

what happened the blue door???

It might just be my opinion or it could have been the poor autumn light, but those test shots looked a bit under-saturated and cold to me.

The CX2 might not be optimal for consumer slow motion video, but 120fps sounds like it could be an option if you were so inclined.

Seinfeld

I thought Risk had already been in an episode of Seinfeld.

A far better game would be Jumanji. You could could make a film out of that! Oh, wait...

Why I want Opera on iPhone:

Opera has consistently led the way in improving a browser's UI, except for skins. Of all the official and 3rd party skins only 1, Carthago is worth looking at (though the BeOS one is quite nice).

Even if Opera just puts a wrapper round MobileSafari.ipa to give it a better UI I'd be all for it. Feature request #1: manual rotation control - sometimes I don't want landscape when the phone is sideways, and vice-versa

3.5mm jack

I have only used my line in once or twice, but it is extremely handy to have. the only way to have sound in and out at once with one of these is by using USB.

I agree with sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD. Creative and Amazon sell RAM and HDDs cheaper than Apple, but at least it's better than in the past when if you got the one with the least RAM it had the slowest processor.

new form factor?

It's called the Mac Mini. Some companies have been known to offer rentals of Mac Minis instead of other types of dedicated boxen/blades.

sensible utility ftw

I'm sure the 90% of computer users running Windows will prefer to let Be and Amiga and the rest do the visionary stuff while they get things done.

why nation-build in Afghanistan?

Because it's cheaper than doing it directly in Iran. It's a shame we're leaving much of Africa to rot under the discarded AK shells of guerrillas, particularly the places where Islamic terrorists are recruiting and training. But Iran is the real enemy here and there is at least a bit of geographic space between Iran and Africa, unlike the mere border between Iran and Afghanistan. That's why the US tried to install a friendly regime in Iraq. Who's to say Iran wouldn't have invaded Iraq had Saddam become even weaker or when he died? One reason Saddam boasted about WMD and kept out the inspectors was because he wanted Iran to at least think he had them. There could also have been a civil war after Saddam died that the West might have had to clean up anyway. That may be speculation, but you pays your money and you takes your chances.

On the drugs trade: I still can't get why NATO/ISAF doesn't buy the opium to sell to pharmaceutical companies, or would people start chanting 'Death to Obama' and 'No blood for poppies'. Maybe it's all a conspiracy by the Australian poppy farmers.

My final point is that sometimes the US misses the point of how it came to be. The framers of the US constitution made it the way it was because of a certain kind of British misrule. The reason the 13 colonies were able to rise up and defeat the British was because the people were relatively well off and could afford it. They didn't rebel because they were poor but because they knew they could be better off if they ran their own affairs. Probably that was why Britain lost the US, but kept the rest of its empire - the rest weren't rich enough to rebel and win. Maybe that's why the Taliban/Al Qaeda keep going, the leaders are rich on heroin. That's not to say the Afghan people need to be put in deeper poverty to keep them from rebelling, but that the Afghan people need to be made rich and the jihadis need to be made poor. And someday I need to read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tom Paine beat me to it

Exile on Coldharbour Lane had some cool songs. Certainly the producers of The Sopranos thought so. There's also a minor connection with the criminal underworld in that one of the band is related to Ronnie Biggs.

I was even inspired by 'Converted' when doing an epilogue at my church's youth club.

'Mao Tse Tung' and 'U Don't Dance To Tekno Anymore' are classics. Don't you go to Goa either, little man in your spandex psychedelic shorts.

SHOCK: warmth is not a problem for rain forests

I'm not a raving eco loony, but I don't think anyone who is would be surprised to find that rain forests flourish in warm environments. What's killing our rain forests is unscrupulous loggers, cattle ranchers and palm oil plantations. Buy Northern Irish beef! We have loads of land that can't be used for very much other than grazing cattle.

He'll probably be MVP again soon

Most Valuable Parent, see here http://www.moms4mom.com/users/111/jon-skeet

will the world actually notice?

I never set up MMS on my SE k750i and I don't think I ever missed out. Though before that I think someone did try to send an MMS to my Nokia 5510 (yeah, the 3330 with qwerty, 64MB flash and a music player).

As an O2 iPhone user I got MMS enabled a short while back, but still haven't felt the need to use it

seems they made them crap on purpose

maybe it's to boost male soldier morale with an impromptu striptease. though i think even the more red-blooded swedes would pissed if that happened under fire.

but is there a reason the ladies don't or can't buy their own more suitable Anna K-style sports supports?

@AC 14:29

I just read Moonraker. They could do a proper version of it (though Die Another Day bears a bit too much resemblance). We may have moved on in terms of rocket science, but I liked the drama in Moonraker.

I'm shocked

there've been a few t'orange comments, but no-one's done the Peter Kay one:

Get on t'internet wi' t'orange!

Chorely FM... etc.

Someone has to classify the stuff...

Granted it's a pretty horrific job for the people who prosecute child porn offenders, but I think of the rush of applicants for job of classifying all the less cut and dried material. Makes you wonder if government officials ever think these things through.

CRAC Dealers, lol

Excellent.

However, one reason to keep data centres below 30ºC is if you ever have to send humans in to do some manual work.

as the other Opera user...

I use Opera because of the Carthago skin. Best skin ever. also because I can turn off gif animation, and then there's paste and go, creating custom searches from the address bar (all these things Chrome is finally catching up to). Opera also has a fantastic zoom feature, allowing me to watch Homestar Runner at 150% and not have to squint. And when I'm using a mouse I do like Opera's gestures. Finally, Chrome comes closest to Opera in allowing you to run without a status bar (even though the fools at Opera turn it on by default for new installs). Why waste screen space in the status bar when you can have progress in the address bar and link destination in a tooltip. FF 2 had a plugin for that, but FF3 doesn't yet (at least last time I looked).

Yes it is a shame about intercepting right-clicks. It does annoy me when I have to use Safari (on OS X) or Chrome (on Windows) to use Google Maps.

But I use Safari sometimes on Windows when I need a fix of properly rendered text, since Cleartype does not accurately represent glyphs.

Anyway, in my opinion, while Chrome is fast approaching Opera's level of coolness, I still regard Opera as the only proper browser, a tool for heavy duty surfing. The others are all only useful for looking at the odd webpage every so often.

Re: Shares stuck at 5c ?!!??

Shares in NT were suspended, but NTRLQ has been trading in small volumes in Canada.

stackoverflow.com

I know PerlMonks is very much more than it's Seekers of Perl Wisdom function, but I think that's what most users originally joined for (and a few stayed for the other community features). Hence much PM traffic went to Stackoverflow.com. Not to mention that even before Stackoverflow, with the lack of momentum for both Perl 5 and 6 and the inexorable rise of PHP, Perl was losing mindshare and hence the monastery was pretty much only for the masters of the deepest Perl secrets and initiates who only had Perl problems because of legacy code.

Anyway, my point is that Jeff Atwood, who co-created Stackoverflow.com wrote several articles about plaintext passwords a long time ago. Then again, someone guessed his admin password for stackoverflow (or was it codinghorror, can't remember).

I'd get it

just because the UI looks like LCARS!

missed one thing

Reg Hardware news said a while back that Toshiba was working on technology to equalise sound volume between TV and adverts, so does this model have such a feature? (Would be handy for DVDs too: on my TV's speakers movie DVDs are about half as loud as TV at the same volume setting. breaks your ears if you forget to turn the volume down when you switch sources)