* Posts by Giles Jones

2536 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Dec 2006

Sony calls time on 8mm video format

Giles Jones Gold badge

Sony Cameras, never again

I've had similar, except it was the eject mechanism that failed, so I couldn't even load the tape.

Two reasons why I'll never buy a Sony again:

1. The CMOS sensor on my camera was encased in resin and melted. Sony offered to replace them under warranty but it showed the cheapness of construction. Is a ceramic casing really so much more expensive?

2. Proprietary head cleaning tapes. My MiniDV camera picture showed banding on the picture. So I bought a cleaning tape (not from Sony) that didn't work. I bought a second cleaning tape that also made no difference.

So in the end I bought a Sony tape that worked fine. But I noticed it had electrical contacts which obviously "reset" some circuit internally to clear the problem with the picture. So the heads didn't need cleaning at all, it was just some software routine in the camera designed to sell cleaning tapes.

On first day, Apple sells 50 Lions for every lion

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Spotlight

After the install Spotlight will be reindexing all the drives. Hence why it will be slow for a while after install.

Microsoft surprises Street with double-digit growth

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The Sony effect

Many PS3 owners ditched their consoles and went to XBox.

So surely much of the recent console sales are just due to the failures of Sony? Kinect has helped too and making a SDK for Windows was a smart move.

Gamer claims complete console collection

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No C64GS

No C64 Games System either. It was basically a C64 with no keyboard and the cartridge slot moved to the top.

Nokia posts massive loss, blames 'ambiguity'

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Look but don't touch

Nokia's have always had lots of features. The problem is you needed about 10 keypresses and a trip down about 5 menus to get to them.

If they had adopted touchscreen much sooner then things would have been different.

Going back about about 5 years, dumbphones from Sony Ericsson were much cooler, nice animations, nice user interfaces. Nokia's phones however were clunky, ugly and much more basic from a user perspective. The only think about a smartphone that was smart was being able to install software. But since there were no easily accessible app stores then I would imagine few people bothered. I can only recall installing one application on my Nokia, *one* app. Sure, lots of things were built in including Sat Nav.

Apple and Google make smartphones slicker and more user friendly. Nokia got left behind and people don't tend to want to go back unless the offering is much better. But Nokia's modernisations weren't enough, it looked like the same old tired Symbian with a facelift.

Giles Jones Gold badge

Mission Crash and Burn

1. Plant Microsoft friendly exec at Nokia - Completed

2. Drop existing platforms for WP7 - Completed

3. Massively devalue Nokia stock - Completed

4. Microsoft buys Nokia/Nokia patents - Pending

'There's too much climate change denial on the BBC'

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Erm.

Science has given us all the things we take for granted. Computers, electricity, cars, medicine and health care.

Why should all that be dismissed because a bunch of oil lobbyists are funding research against the viewpoint of the majority of scientists?

It's very easy to bury your head in the sand because you want to drive a big gas guzzler and fly around the world with a clear conscience.

Even if CO2 was found to not be the cause, we still have a crisis which is the lack of land and water required to produce food. Chopping down the rainforests to produce cattle feed and palm oil isn't doing the world much good.

Nokia ‘giving away phones at cost’

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Dumbphones

Nokia always made better margins on dumbphones, this is why they have started to falter as smartphones are no longer the realm of the geeks.

Intel CEO: 'Ultrabooks' will be 'holistic' success

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'ARMless tactic

It just seems like another attempt by Intel to stay relevant for the future while everyone else starts to shift to ARM.

Major overhaul makes OS X Lion king of security

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ASLR is pointless?

ASLR is largely pointless unless you reboot regularly. Most laptop owners (and laptops are one of the most common home computers now) just let their computer hibernate or sleep.

Giles Jones Gold badge

Yes but..

That's on top of a Unix security model that is fairly tried and tested.

Where as Windows tries to offer backward compatibility which weakens security.

Apple unveils 'World's First Thunderbolt Display'

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It's PCI express over a cable

Given many graphics chips and other ICs are designed to interface to either PCI express or USB then if you want to provide a high end expansion bus then making it supply PCI express signals means you need very little additional components.

Thunderbolt is not proprietary, anyone can use it, although PC makers won't as they only like to fit cheap crap to their computers. There is plenty of need for something better than USB as even USB3 is lacking DMA, something that even an Amiga 1000 from 1985 had.

Do you remember how much faster EIDE discs became when they went from PIO to UDMA? well that's the sort of difference between USB and a decent bus like Firewire or Thunderbolt.

Not to mention Thunderbolt is like SCSI in that you can daisychain multiple devices from one port. So no need for 6 USB ports wasting valuable space.

OS X Lion roars, coughs on appearance in App Store

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Software

And what are you going to run on this mythical perfect OS?

Photoshop? nope.

Logic Studio? nope.

Aperture? nope.

Lightroom? nope.

Final Cut? nope.

Office? (I'm not a fan but many are) nope.

There's a reason Linux desktop market share is so low, it doesn't run any decent commercial productivity tools.

It's great as a general purpose computer or net box or if your needs are pretty simple.

Apple to release Mac OS X Lion on Wednesday

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LOL

Never encountered an OSX bug ever!

Do Microsoft and others never have any bugs?

Everyone has bugs, why should Apple be any different? they at least have less problems from dodgy 3rd party drivers to worry about.

Apple Store down for Lion tweakage

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Doh!!

They do it for a good reason. It stops people buying the older model and then whining about how they missed the latest generation by minutes.

If they didn't take the store down they would have to deal with thousands of support issues about refunds or product exchanges. Taking the store down reduces this slightly.

It's also a symptom of Apple not announcing products far ahead of availability due to the "wait for the vapourware" brigade. People who put off purchases for six months to a year as they must have the new product.

Apple said to be sampling Samsung, LG iPad 'retina' screens

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Yesterdays technology?

Just because OLED is newer does not make it better in all situations.

It has a shorter lifespan (especially the blue transmission) and as a result they make the blue and red larger. That makes things looks a bit odd and the colour reproduction accuracy and screen resolution is limited, hence why the "retina" display is higher resolution and looks more accurate and not over-saturated.

Of course OLED will improve and then there will be no contest, but OLED is not there yet.

I'd sooner stick with tried and tested technology that gives me what I want (resolution and good colour) than go for something new which doesn't.

Nokia reportedly readies mass price cuts

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Eh?

Why downrate? it's largely true.

My last Nokia (6110 navigator) had the sliding front piece misaligned slightly. It crashed a few times (once when I was at a train station meeting a friend). The OS was rather poor, too many clicks to do the basics of making a call (choose contact, click to make a call, then a selection of voice or video call, click again).

Underpowered processors? if you're specs whore then yes. But having a simple OS that is written in C++ (albeit a rather odd version of it) means it is a lot more efficient than Android or WP7 with their virtual machine runtimes. iOS is Objective C which is close to C++ but still it's an OS that was developed for a desktop. Symbian was developed for palmtops then mobiles.

HTC loses prelim patent ruling to Apple, takes stock hit

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LOL

If so many others have implemented such a notification (as admitted in your email) then the concept is wide open and anyone can produce their version of it.

It is unlikely to be covered by a patent.

Sometimes there are only so many ways you can implement a feature. If you want to display a list of information to a user then how are you going to do this without making it look like other systems?

Have you noticed menus tend to look the same, big square boxes with lists of things to pick?

Have you noticed how a list of emails in an email client looks similar to that of another email client? these are a list of "notifications" of events and information, ie. you receiving a message. With outlook and other systems you also receive meeting requests and other notifications which also appear in this list.

The concept of mixed notifications in a list is a very common concept, good luck defending that patent (I doubt it even exists).

Giles Jones Gold badge

Standards?

If you don't invent anything and use standards you're evil.

If you invent proprietary technology and don't use standard then you're evil.

So which is it?

Anyone can patent an idea, you don't have to have produced an innovative product.

IBM and Microsoft have some of the largest IP portfolios and yet both of them are perceived as dull and produce nothing ground breaking.

AMD says Xbox 720 graphics to be good as Avatar

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Erm

Except that developers take a long time to get the most out of the hardware since they make it too complex to program.

PS3 for example, CPU, GPU and about 8 maths engines (FPU type thingies). People thought the PS2 was bad enough.

People rave on about Minecraft and that looks naff, which shows that realistic imagery is for people lacking in imagination.

Ion Audio iCade arcade-style iPad cabinet

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Erm.

Except it's not made by Apple and it's the only one of its kind at present.

Segway death blamed on good manners

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Ride a bike

The human body is a great motor and most people have plenty of fuel stored up (fat). Regular cyclists can do 20-30MPH on the flat.

Why would you want to legalise something that creates even more fat unhealthy people? the cost to the NHS would be huge.

Samsung Chromebook: The $499 Google thought experiment

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Wasn't the manufacturers

It was Microsoft who killed the cheap netbook along with the inability of the public to adapt to Linux, largely because the salesmen giving them away with mobile broadband contracts failed to mention it was a different OS.

Giles Jones Gold badge

Hobby

This is just a hobby for Google. There is no market for it other than Internet cafes.

It would be better as a tablet OS but people prefer Android for that due to the amount of apps.

Microsoft rolls out One Big Windows strategy

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Indeed

Windows Embedded never took off because it added a lot to the cost of anything using it and you didn't have the code to customise the OS.

Where full blown Windows has been used you see a lot of failures. Asda self check out machines, railway station signs and so on.

Mole says Apple A5 chip runs too hot for iPhone

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Erm

The value is in that fact that the iPad has loads of quality software while most Android tablets are running software that is just being scaled up. 100,000 applications.

The value of the iPhone is having a phone where you get a few years of upgrades and the updates are available worldwide to anyone, not just those who happen to have a phone from a manufacturer who is feeling generous.

Not to mention if you buy HTC you're paying the Microsoft patent tax.

'Bluetooth sniper' Windows vuln fix in light Patch Tuesday

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Limited use?

Thankfully few PCs have bluetooth hardware built in. So this is surely of limited use?

Moto cold shoulders upgrade-hungry Xoom users

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DIY

Maybe because the updates are over the air and getting access to the ROM is beyond the capabilities of much of the non-geek user base?

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How so?

Apple's support period is industry leading. 2-3 years of updates with more than just bug fixes.

In this case Motorola can't even update users of its current product, never mind owners of older stuff.

Marathon for iPad

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Easy

Simple reason, it's not a standard part of the device. If it had shipped with a bundled keyboard it would have been different.

Just like all the XBox 360 games don't support Kinect when it is plugged in. It requires the developer to add support for it.

HTC 'dismayed' by Apple's bizarre patent allegations

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M$

Probably because HTC is a "partner" of Microsoft. They make a lot of phones with WP7 on it.

HTC has no working relationship with Apple.

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Freetard are we?

So I assume you are writing your reply on a Linux machine with a non-Intel processor? because Microsoft are just as controlling, as are Oracle, BT, Intel and other tech giants.

Brussels acts to ensure arrival of new, unknown legal highs

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Yawn

It's a moral and personal matter so long as you:

1. Manage to hold down a job and your work isn't affected.

2. If you don't manage to hold down a job you don't resort to crime.

3. You don't expect the NHS to fix any health problems you get as a result, boozing is bad enough but at least they know what it is and what it does. With some drugs there's more serious unknown about what it does to mental health.

4. You don't become mentally ill and start killing people.

We have enough problems with alcohol, we don't want drug use to become more socially acceptable just like drinking yourself stupid appears to be.

The problem with the "legalise it" crowd is many of them are drug users, so they obviously want their habit to be made legal.

You can't advocate the legalisation of something when you have a vested interest in it.

Apple ordered to pay $8m over playlist patents

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Exactly right

If you patent an idea then don't make a product with it then how can you say someone else copied your idea when they can never have seen your product or your idea?

How can you claim the success of your product has been damaged if you don't have one?

HTC says smartphone bootloader unlock software out next month

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DIY

It does seem a bit like a "go fix it yourself" sort of move.

But we've always known that the phones are good for a lot longer than the makers point out. They can say the phones don't have enough RAM, but it's probably because the OS system has lots of things running that don't need to be.

Bug-Byte Manic Miner

Giles Jones Gold badge

C64 demo scene was the best

Towards the end they managed to get a lot more out of the C64 graphically and sonically. They managed to get more RAM, sprites in the borders and sound improvements.

Recently they managed to do a music replay routine for the C64 that gave it 4 channels of digital sample playback and two synth channels. Both can be filtered!

Quite impressive given it didn't have sample playback facilities at all (they exploited a click bug in the chip) and it only had three channels of synth playback.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6mXLxUZvzg

Giles Jones Gold badge

PlayTZX

If you want to load stuff into your Spectrum but don't have the tape or tape recorder then get a TZX file and use PlayTZX, works for me.

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Classic gaming

My first memory of this game was seeing it on TV. It must have been one of the first computer games to receive some coverage on TV.

Then of course a few years back it was back on TV along with Matthew Smith who simply had no idea that 8-bit nostalgia existed or that Internet community were wondering where he was.

For those who didn't see it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWmmMZlhcqU

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BBC version

Indeed. I did wonder what that was all about.

After some Internet research I believe that's from the BBC Micro version.

HTC ChaCha Qwerty Android smartphone

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Form factor

Erm Nokia and others have been doing the whole landscape orientated screen with buttons for ages. You can't really copyright that form factor, calculators have been doing it for years :)

It looks nothing like a Blackberry anyway. They're usually dull sober colours, almost like you've dressed up your phone in a suit. Although I did see one with some clip on back the other day that was rather colourful.

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Quids in?

You do wonder if they get a few pennies from Facebook for plugging their site?

Sony to can MiniDisc Walkman

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Indeed

Indeed. SImply because it was a pure uncompressed (data compression) format. DCC and Minidisc were lossy and you don't spend thousands or millions recording an album to then throw away much of the signal.

Sure, you can do that when you're on the move and portability is key.

It may have caught on but the RIAA in the US hated the idea of consumers making exact copies of CD. It was always quite expensive too as it was more like an audio VCR with it's helical scanning head.

Of course if CD recordable had been around I think things would have been a lot different.

Oracle coughs up Java 7 release candidate

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Erm

Perhaps you forget that Java is an abstracted runtime and language that tries to allow code to be written once and ran on multiple platforms?

Such native IO was hard to do in a way they would work on Unix style systems as well as Windows. Both are worlds apart underneath the hood.

Naturally it is easy to create code in C++ that stands a chance of compiling and running on multiple platforms. You're linking against libraries supplied by the OS or compiler vendor. But you can't take the executable from one platform and run it on another platform.

Deep inside AMD's master plan to topple Intel

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Not quite

Transmeta were ahead of their time.

In their design the CPU or processing engine could be anything and the instruction set be a sort of software running on it.

But obviously the future of x86 is a little hazy given ARM based devices may start to dominate the personal computer market.

Only jailbroken iPhones, iPads can be safe from latest vuln

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LOL

Nice way of spinning jailbreaking as some sort of security upgrade.

In reality you've deactivated many controls and safeguards. Having SSH enabled for instance is pretty dumb.

It's like saying running everything as root gives you the "freedom to do what I want to do with my device".

Nokia X7 Symbian Anna smartphone

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Solid?

We've had a couple of Nokia model phones at work. One was so buggy that it would switch to speakerphone and you had to pull the battery out and switch it on again to fix it.

Benefits of boozing outweigh harms, says survey

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Not at home

Only if you drink socially and sensibly. Downing bottles of cider, gin and whisky alone at home is not a good thing.

NotW accused of hacking Milly Dowler's voicemail

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False hope

Indeed. The person accessing the voicemails deleted some and this gave false hope to the family that she was still alive as they could tell someone was listening to the messages.

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How did they know her number?

You do have to wonder how the paper got hold of her number as it would be required to access the voicemail.

Must be a bent copper around somewhere selling information?

UK will obey Euro unisex-insurance rules from 2013

Giles Jones Gold badge

Lawyers are the problem

The problem is the insurers aren't really making any money. They are being cleaned out by personal injury lawyers who hound people involved in an accident until they make a claim, even if they aren't injured!

There's a whole series of information sales in the event of an accident. Your contact details are worth hundreds and get sold to car rental places, garages and so on.