Posts by Miles Bader

eSATA: A doomed stopgap?

yeah right

Esata seems like a no-brainer -- a straight-forward extension of the existing internal sata bus, and because of that, obviously pretty fast (and presumably very cheap and easily supported as well). Why _wouldn't_ a manufacturer add it?

USB, on the other hand, while a convenient way to hook up low-speed devices, has a long history of unsubstantiated hype (aka "lies") and crap implementations when it comes to more demanding applications.

I'm sure USB3 will get support, but it seems far to early to assume it's actually usable or good.

Amazon pulls Japanese rape simulator from shelves

the LORD

Good point Graham

Perhaps a rape-simulator game would be ok if the protagonist was Jesus.

He couldn't waste his seed though, so I supposed there'd have to be a little cup or something.

Toshiba wows crowds with sexy touch smartphone

one huge problem

Ewww, Windows mobile....

Android it!

Transmeta IP sold to not-patent troll

troll

Would you trust someone named Nathan Myhrvold?

A trollish name if I ever saw one... and he's a former MSoftie, so well attuned to the ways of evil.

Top aero boffin: Green planes will be noisy planes

no, trains are not really all that noisy

... at least if well designed.

I live (and work) quite near the tracks of the toukaido shinkansen (one of the busiest HSR corridors in japan), and it's quite innocuous really. It's louder than the nearby big road, but only just. For purposes of travel, the shinkansen is hugely more convenient, cheaper, more comfortable, and actually faster than air unless you're travelling to the far end of the country. [Granted, Japan has a very good rail system, but then their air transport infrastructure is world class as well.]

Planes are far louder, much less fuel-efficient, more costly to run, and generally not particularly well suited to general travel in smallish densely populated areas like Europe and the UK.

Certainly there's a place for air-travel in the transportation system -- sometimes you really do need to get to someplace very far away, very quickly -- but really, for many purposes, trains are a better solution, and are where the emphasis should be.

Oxford don offered $10,000 for proof terrorist penned Obama memoir

what fun!

Hee hee, it's awfully entertaining watching the republicans flail about in desperation like this!

Sony pumps up PSP screen

yeah, the controls are the really horrid thing about the psp

Sony spend ages and vast sums of money obsessing over the screen, and yet keep the same awful control setup unchanged. It's almost as if they _want_ to cripple their customers' hands... could there be some nefarious motive behind this?

US PS3 sales fell 45% in July

no headline because

One month spikes are not interesting, in general.

People care more about trends.

Nude Marilyn Monroe flambés dog, serves atop fire extinguisher

less filling

Come now, Haggis is delicious, but one of the densest foodstuffs known to mankind; a couple of bites and you're set for a week. A Chihuahua, on the other hand, hardly seems filling at all, more of a snack.

Also, the Haggis is cuter.

BBC redesigns and 'widgetizes' homepage

Quite awful

What strikes me immediately about the new homepage is that it offers _much_ less information than the old one -- there are many fewer headlines, and much less story text (snippets from top stories) -- and yet at the same time the new site is even _less_ readable/usable!

The new homepage also appears less organized: the old one has a structure, but the new one appears to have sacrificed most of that (in the name of widgetization?).

It's all in-your-face huge graphics and colors, and these also serve to distract one's eye from the actual news.

Oddly enough, it's not even more attractive than the old homepage, just different.

It looks like someone went all buzzword happy and forgot to actually think about what the site is for...