The Strippers, Unicorn Computers and Martian Watches of Computex

I've been to plenty of technology shows around the world but never one as diverse as Computex, where you'll find single-board industrial computers side-by-side with strippers. Wire strippers at Computex What a tool All stripper jokes aside, to understand Computex you need to know that there are lots of scantily-clad young …

[frank ly]

Sandwich board-bearers: they missed a trick

If they carried logo-tattooed scantilty clad models on their shoulders, the organisers would have a queue of volunteers to choose from.

[LarsG]

Are the 'showgirls' outside the cave for sale?

[Ralph B]

Re: Sandwich board-bearers: they missed a trick

> If they carried logo-tattooed scantilty clad models on their shoulders, the organisers would have a queue of volunteers to choose from.

Why? Because having the back of your neck between a scantilty clad model's legs is somehow the same as having your penis there? Nah. It isn't. Carrying people on your shoulders leads to backache. And backache is bad. Trust me on this.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Re: Sandwich board-bearers: they missed a trick

But most of them would be complaining about Maven.

[Anonymous Coward]

Manga

Looking at the cave picture makes me wonder - could any other nation have produced manga art? Given the influence of USA culture it is interesting to see healthy body shapes that are neither heroin-chic nor Venus von Willendorf.

[deadlockvictim]

Re: Manga

Manga is from Japan and this event took place in Taiwan.

Are Raidmax a Japanese company perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Manga

Oops! My mistake. Apparently Raidmax are based in California and manufacture in Taiwan. So no Japanese connection.

[Cuddles]

Doomed?

Not sure why Qi wireless charging products are labelled as "doomed". Plenty of people have signed up for A4WP and on paper it has some advantages over Qi, but as things stand paper is all it has while Qi has actual products. Some of them from members of the A4WP consortium. You can't have a format war if one of the participants refuses to actually release anything, and it's looking more and more like Qi is going to win this one by default.

[Mage]

Re: Doomed?

Yes, because Wireless Charging is an expensive gimmick. It needs a power supply and cable. Not hard to plug cable directly or have a speaker + keyboard charging dock.

Wireless Charging is an expensive low functionality wireless dock. It's in reality no more wireless than a Cordless kettle.

Also if travelling a "Wireless" Charger is more bulky to carry than an ordinary USB or jack based charger. I wish Phone and Kindle had 2.5mm jack as well as USB as a Charging option.

[Bassey]

Re: Doomed?

Actually HAVING a Qi wireless charger that I use every day I do feel qualified to disagree with your ill-informed rant. My charging plate cost £8 off eBay, is a few mm thick, weighs next to nothing and seems to charge at a similar rate to a standard charger. I say seems to. Life's too short to actually sit there with a stop watch...

Having used one for about 8 months now it seems inconceivable that others fiddle about plugging in non-reversible Micro-USB cables rather than just put their phone down. I don't even have to line it up or make sure it is the correct way around (other than face-up). It just works and is something that, once you've used, you KNOW everything will have it at some point because it makes the current way of doing things seem daft.

[Goobertee]

Re: Doomed?

I thought wireless charging was an expensive gimmick, myself...until our family's second broken/worn out charging port. Had they been wireless lay-it-on-the-charger devices, they would probably be still in service.

Of course, making the charging port more durable would have dealt with that, too, and probably for less money. Wonder how the manufacturer figured out how to make the connector on my phone last until just a few months after the contract was over.

[Geoff Campbell]

Re: Doomed?

Absolutely. Wireless charging is now a non-negotiable requirement for any phone I buy, having had it for a year or so now. A pad by the bed, one by the desk, and a 20 minute modification to my car to add Qi charging hardware under the phone-holding tray in the centre console, and in combination with Bluetooth I need never plug in another cable.

Which isn't just laziness. The one and only phone hardware failure I've suffered in recent memory was a USB port falling apart, so only using them when I absolutely have to makes a lot of sense.

GJC

[Matt_payne666]

Re: Doomed?

I'm another wireless charging convert... my 920 had a free charging pad when I bought it and it lives on the bedside table... I go to bed, plonk the phone down and in the morning its charged... no more messing about, sliding a pug along the bottom of my phone trying to find the charging hole... and no more picking up the phone, only to realise the charging lead is 2" too short, no more rooting about between the bed and table to locate a lead that's slipped down out of sight...

And when the phone is in its waterproof case, I can still charge it without having to unbuckle the thing...

When I go on holiday I just bring a micro USB cable with me - like any non-wireless charging phone.

My next phone - I WANT it to have wireless charging, its not a deal breaker, but if there were two identical phones, one with and one without, then Id choose the one with... no question

Your analogy with a cordless kettle is a little off... but it is also quite good... how many people choose to buy traditional corded kettles? Other than cheapskate hotels, I have yet to see a kettle lead actually used in a kettle...

[Arctic fox]

I'm chuckling, not quite sure why but I am.

"...........or unlikely homages like the flock of iPad cases with keyboards that are seemingly based on Microsoft's Surface."

[Zog_but_not_the_first]

Is it my eyes...

...or does the Cougar's gaming mouse look like a pimped K9?

As it's Friday, this probably isn't helping >>>

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is it my eyes...

Could be. I thought it was a Transformer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is it my eyes...

Either way, it aint no mouse...

[Anonymous Coward]

E-ink

I chose this case because it is a little bit innovative and also because the E-Ink folks on the stand told me they've just launched full-colour E-Ink for digital signage. There's also a new range of two-colour E-Ink tags to place on supermarket shelves that suck in new data over Zigbee so retailers can update them at will.

E-ink has been promising this since...forever.

My company called them on it a few years ago...we wanted to do a combination whiteboard/digital message board with a clock built into it. Something a bit bigger than a B-size sheet of paper (11"x17"). Nope, can't do it, they told us...only what we offer now, we don't do specials (except for people like Amazon) We were looking for B&W, not color.

[Gene Cash]

Rosewill

Go to NewEgg, you'll see an metric assload of Rosewill products there.

[Bob Merkin]

Re: Rosewill

I thought the same thing. The reference in the article makes it sound like they only make these obscure batteries shown here. They've been all over Newegg in dozens of gadget categories for years. I've been hesitant to buy their stuff just off of lack of brand recognition, but they're frequently highly rated. I'm sure I've got more than a few of their products like hard drive enclosures or memory card readers that just work and you don't have to think about again.

[Dave Bell]

The whole sex-in-advertising thing is provoking commentary, and those pretty girls are part of it. Do we remember the girl or the product?

And why do people think we guys are going to fall for that trick again?

I can think of worse things, but it's a combination of visual noise and signals of a rather unpleasant attitude lurking within society.

What would Sheldon say?

[Adrian 4]

Depressing marketing non-science

Please ditch the use of dumb terminology such as '3000mAh'. Or worse, the totally incorrect MaH.

Ah means amp-hour. The amp (ampere) is named for André-Marie Ampère and so gets capitalized. H for hour doesn't. It's the amount of electrical capacity needed to supply 1 amp for 1 hour, and is largely meaningless unless you also know the voltage it's delivered at.

mAh means milli-amp-hour. That's not a single word, it's amp-hour with a milli- prefix indicating the units are 1000 times smaller. You can read it as 'thousandths of an amp-hour'.

So 3000 mAh is read as 'three thousand thousandths of an amp-hour'. Which is absurd. It's simply 3Ah, 3 amp-hours.

MaH is much, much worse.

M is a prefix meaning mega - a million. aH isn't a unit (it might mean atto-Henries, which would describe the inductance of a uselessly short piece of wire), but if we assume you meant Ah then a 3000 MAh powerbank is somewhat impractical as a portable charger. A lithium 3.7V 3000MAh battery would be something like the size of an olympic swimming pool, or more than 4 million bulgarian airbags.

[rh587]

Re: Depressing marketing non-science

Whilst MaH is fairly unforgivable, the usage of mAh in itself is a matter of context.

Whilst 3000mAh is indeed 3Ah, it's at the top end of capacity within it's category, and when you're comparing it against smaller batteries, as small say as 800mAh, then it's appropriate to continue with the same notation, even if it's a little clunky.

If you were comparing car or leisure batteries by contrast, you would never use mAh because no such battery has a capacity of less than 1Ah.

By way of example, lets say you had a bunch of products differentiated by length. Most were between 200mm and 900mm, but a few at the top end a few stretched out to 1500mm.

You wouldn't use metres for all of them, because 0.295m is unwieldy - you'd just say 295mm.

Equally however, it would be silly to have half your product line marketed in metres and the other half in millimetres.

Yes, people would understand if you said "this is our 900mm product, and here is the 1.2m version" but it's ungainly - you'd say "here the 900 and the 1200 options".

And so it is with mobile tech batteries which have developed from hundreds of mAh (where it's perfectly sensible to use that notation), through to predominantly thousands of mAh, but the notation has stuck for the sake of (now) bottom end products.

Also, fundamentally, it's what's printed on the side of the product. It could be considered remiss in some journalistic circles to paraphrase the manufacturer's description of the product.

Is it really a problem? No. Not really. Not until phones start regularly hitting 10000mAh levels at which point pretty much everything below it will probably be at least 1000mAh and it becomes a lot more wieldy to use Ah as the frequency of products less than 1 will be small.

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel tablets

I like how Intel is saying it trounces the competition when its "preferred benchmarks" are used. Have we forgotten the AnTuTu business already? I hope not!

As for seeing a lot of Intel tablets, that's because Intel is buying market share (now they call it "contra revenue" instead of "market development funds", but it is the same thing)