Posts by TheFiddler

Guess this has some benefits

So if you register alongenoughemailaddress@gmail.com you can then work your way through many free 30 day trials all by working a load of dots through your email address.

Sounds a lot like most of the reasons I backed the Planet Gemini, only this thing is stuck with Windows and won't fit in my coat pocket. It'll be interesting if you can replace Windows on them with Linux and make them a potentially much more useful machine.

One of the best games they ever made...

... was Confrontation, and they gave the rules away in a few copies of White Dwarf back in the day. Once my friends and I discovered that it lead us to drop the rest of the GW titles thanks to it's fast gameplay and developing your gangs. We tried Necromunda when that came out, but it felt too dumbed down from the original, but at least it's release meant we could get proper models for the game rather than adapting models from other things to play it.

Am I the only one who likes the new keyboards?

I actually like the new keyboards, I've got a T430 for work, and have a Thinkpad Yoga for home use, prior to that an X120e which was perfectly comfortable to type on despite the slightly smaller keyboard size. I've still got a Z61m that my wife was using as her daily until recently and an X61 tablet that I keep around as the software that my wife's embroidery machine uses doesn't work on anything beyond Windows XP and the tablet eases the design work. Jumping from chiclet keyboard designed thinkpads back to the oldskool ones I definitely feel that the chiclet keyboards are a step forward. Though I do find myself using an old style Thinkpad usb keyboard on my desktop, it's not that much different to justify the cost of upgrading to a newer chiclet style one.

That said I'll agree that the chassis doesn't feel as tough on the newer ones and the size of the pointless touchpad on the new ones is far too large leaving me palming the mouse around when typing unless I disable it. Which with integrated buttons on the one on my Yoga meant lots of faffing with my xorg configs to disable it and keep the buttons working. I'm glad the wife's new X250 has the proper buttons back for the touchpoint. I'd also love a better resolution 16:10 screen, the screen on my old Z61m still looks cracking even at it's 'low' 1680x1050 resolution. Battery life on the wife's new X250 is amazing, it really does go all day from an overnight charge, something like that in a tank-style thinkpad would be awesome.

Looking forward to getting mine.

I backed the phone at the start, in part because I liked the OS and preferred how it worked over Android and iOS in it's Nokia incarnations. Sailfish is a wonderful user interface and I much prefer it over everything else I've tried. The only thing I didn't like was that Jolla didn't produce a keyboard other half and have had to wait for the kickstartered TOHKBD in order to get one.

Either way, the preview snippet intrigued me, I was kind of hoping for a new phone with updated hardware. So I watched Marc Dillon's piece at slush and was a bit disappointed with the launch of a tablet. Didn't really fancy it but when I saw the specs for $189 it seemed rude not to. Time will tell whether it'll be a well used device or dust catcher though. In the short term it will nice to see how Sailfish translates to the tablet form factor and screen resolution.

How do they plan to keep interest

As someone who has been programming for the last 2 decades and quite enjoyed the time spent, I'm strongly aware that it's not exactly a spectator sport. In fact I'd go as far as to suggest someone typing seemingly random strings of crpytic text into a computer may fall into the category of dull. So I'm struggling to see how they can put together shows that will compel kids to copy the on screen programming that is taking place. The app programming seems a good suggestion but it's a far cry from some copy and paste from a magazine onto your BBC Micro that hooked us in the 80s.

Still waiting for my Jolla despite ordering on the 28th. Impatience may see me putting this on my N9 later.

Looking forward to this

Feeling the need to replace my N9. Not through any real need, just for a newer shinier shiny. The thing stopping me so far is that both Ios and android have such clunky feeling UIs in comparison to the N9's and the multitasking is abysmal. Jolla should hopefully provide me with a device I can use without swearing at it when trying to use it.

Linux

Has anyone succeeded flashing these Windows RT tablets with a Linux distro? The limited Windows RT apps may be a pain but a linux desktop with the accompanying healthy amount of available applications and that battery life would be awesome for the money.

Finally those cop shows can be realistic...

...where they randomly sharpen bits of the photos to see what's happening in the background.

Someone stop this guy

They need to come up with a way to stop this guy "investing" in businesses and trying to tear them down. Maybe if we called his behaviour business terrorism he might get a visit from the nice men who read all our internet traffic.

"The Steam Controller also uses a central high-resolution touch-enabled screen that can display maps, allow users to scroll through menus, or just add extra buttons as needed for individual games. "

Sounds like they are taking the concept of the old Jag Pads and updating them from a button-grid and game based overlay to something more modern. Still won't have me surrendering my keyboard and mouse though.

Want to differentiate?

Then give me a proper keyboard built in like the old Nokia Communicators, not something like those crap blackberry keyboards but a decent sized for speedy 2 thumb typing. People seem happy to accept larger phones again so I can't see it being that hard to market.

Problem with consoles

The problem I have with consoles is that in the living room they are then fighting against the other members of the house desire to watch TV. There's also that the joypad is a poor control method compared to keyboard and mouse. My PS3, once replaced by a shiny new blu-ray player, actually got more gaming use hooked into the monitor that my gaming rig uses. Granted that still wasn't a huge amount of use, but it was mostly bought for it's blu-ray playback.

Leading from this I can't see the draw for a Steam console as it faces the other console drawbacks and the majority of people already in the Steam ecosystem have gaming PCs already set up for it which will no doubt run better hardware than a low cost SteamOS box would cost. The only vaguely good side to this I see is the chance that they may use this to push Linux porting to more developers, which as a Linux gamer would be nice to see.

It's lacking a lot

I've been running the developer preview on a Nexus 4 for a month now. At the moment all that's really working right is the phone and SMS. The built in facebook and twitter feeds have never reliably remembered my account information and many of the other apps seem to open a white or black screen and never finish loading (at least not with my patience). The most glaring omission at this point is the lack of an email client and I can't see hide nor hair of one in the core apps section at Ubuntu's website so the Gmail browser-window-app is pretty much all you have. At least an ability to show if you have unread mail in your mail would be nice. I do like the UI though and that feels rather polished and nice, I'm interested to see if they can bring the rest of the OS up to the level in the next month.