Posts by Bruce Hoult 197 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2008
The funny thing is, when I was camping in some remote spots this (southern) summer, very often the people with iPhone 4's were happily using SMS or on the internet while other types of smartphones had nothing at all.
When you're not bridging it, the external antenna works brilliantly.
The privacy problem is obvious. When a message is too long for twitter it is further truncated and a URL is inserted to the full version stored elsewhere. Something like http://tweet.dk/x17dg for example. The problem is the URL is too easily guessed and thus accessed by people who can't see the tweet itself. It might even be listed under the user's name.
They have chosen to fix this by simply not allowing long messages in private messages or if you have a locked profile.
A better fix would be to use the MD5 or SHA1 of the long message as its URL. e.g. http://tweet.dk/8ed3f9c68c4313a70b3dce05391e805c.
That's 48 characters but could be shortened to 38 if it used base64 instead of hex. Worse than the 20 or so now, but not too horrid and far harder to guess.
The Drobo S is a crazy price! Almost double the price of the original Drobo for what? eSata, 1 more bay, and the option to enable double-failure protection (which then uses up that extra bay...).
It makes the US$349 pricing on the original look very reasonable.
As for rolling your own using a PC chassis with lots of drive bays ... that's fine except when you run out of capacity. With standard RAID software you'll either have to add a new RAID array (yes, even if you use ZFS you can't just add to an existing RAID set), or you'll have to replace all the existing drives at once which is also going to require a 2nd RAID array at least temporarily while you copy the data.
It's the ability to expand the storage literally by pulling out one drive and pushing a new one in that makes the Drobo attractive. I've currently got 3 x 1.5 TB drives in mine and it's about 70% full. By the time I need more space I'm hoping that 3 TB drives will be the cheapest per byte (the 2's are at the moment).
I've had a 2nd generation 4 bay Drobo for nearly two years. That's with Firewire800 instead of USB-only, and a much improved controller which can actually give a decent data transfer speed (I just checked and got 23 MB/sec copying a movie from the Drobo to this PC over my home network, and 10 MB/sec to an old MacBook Air over WIFI).
The prices charged by the Australian and NZ agent have been quite obscene -- over NZ$1000 two years ago and still $750 now. I bought mine from Amazon for US$349 (NZ$500 at the time) on a trip to the USA.
As far as I can see it does the job and does it well. As an earlier commenter suggested, I have all my CDs and DVDs on it (in both lossless and lower bitrate versions), and also backups for my various PCs.
Everything that is on the Drobo that is not just a backup of another machine, I also have on a stand-alone (non-redundant) external drive. Maybe the Drobo can get corrupted somehow, but for sure someone could steal it.
If they could drop their prices a bit (and I don't see why they can't), I'd recommend them to a LOT of home users I know. But at the moment it's far cheaper to just buy a couple of those 2 TB WD external drives that go for about $100 each.
The press release said that iPod sales are down another few percent, but something interesting in the analyst call was that the iPod touch made up more than 50% of iPods sold in the quarter. That's pretty amazing considering how good the Nano is (and how cheap the Shuffle is).
So that's around 10m iPods touch to go with the 16.24m iPhones and 7.33m iPads, for a total of 33.5m iOS devices in the quarter (not counting AppleTV which I haven't seen figures for).
Note that while you can't increase the 2 GB RAM once you have the machine, if you know you're going to need it you can order one with 4 GB from the factory. That should be enough for most people for a bit longer yet.
Twice the price for twice as fast isn't a terrible trade-off, even ignoring the thin and light side of the equation. If it stays a viable machine for twice as many years (which seems entirely possible) then it's hardly a trade-off at all.
I don't understand most of the comments here, or the snark in the original article.
If they were 100% sure everything was going to work perfectly then they wouldn't have called it a "test", would they?
It appears it wasn't the big laser that failed. They didn't get around to turning it on because the targeting didn't lock on. That seems like a good thing to me -- wouldn't want to go spraying that thing around at random.
Java has never had a good UI story anywhere. Java on the Mac was perhaps the best one, due to all the work Apple did (yes, probably using secret APIs) to integrate it tightly into OSX.
If Apple stops support it (and who is really using Java for Cocoa development anyway), then it's no big loss.
Anyone can port the regular JVM to OSX and write server and command line apps using databases, J2EE, the internet and so forth to their heart's content. In other words the same as any other platform with Java.
So in case anyone missed it, the new 11.6" MacBook Air has a 1366x768 display, 1.06 kg, 1.4 or 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 or 4 GB of RAM, 64 or 128 GB of flash disk, 5 hours of "wireless productivity" and 30 days of instant-on standby time.
The lightest machine in this review is 1.4 kg.
"Anyone else miss the old 12" 4:3 sized machines. Especially the old 12" G4 Powerbook. Not everything has to be wide screen, for web browsing and general work I'd rather have the relative screen hight."
Yes, it was a great machine for its day, but lets not forget it only had a 1024x768 screen.
I love seeing a lot of lines of code too (the 640x870 "Portrait" displays in the 80's were great for programmers in their day), but there's no respect in which 1280x800 is worse than 1024x768.
"Given the point of these machines, to by very portable, would you mind adding a bootnote to say how much each machine weighs"
Yes, I wondered as well. So I looked up their specs.
Every single machine reviewed weighs as much or more as my original model, nearly three year old, 13.3" MacBook Air's 1.4 kg. Most are 1.5 - 1.7 kg.
I don't see where it's going since only one of them has an optical drive and they've got smaller displays than the Air and are plastic vs the Air's solid block of aluminium chassis.
That the new AppleTV runs iOS has been obvious since the moment it was announced. The only real question is how long it takes until version 1.x (2.0?) gives access to the AppStore.
The more interesting question is whether the new Nano run iOS too, or whether they went to a heck of a lot of trouble to recreate a pixel perfect copy of a lot of the iOS user interface just for it. Apple doesn't usually duplicate efforts like that — their development teams and R&D spending are absolutely tiny compared to a Microsoft or Google.
Note that Peraves has been making BMW motorcycle powered and fully road legal versions of these since 1984 and has sold several hundred of them.
I don't know if they do 100 mpg, but they can't a long way off it — my 1995 BMW R1100RT (1100cc) does 60 mpg with two people and luggage and that's a normal shockingly unaerodynamic motorcycle with a big engine.
Peraves emphasis has been on comfort, safety, and motorcycle performance including acceleration and 200+ km/h autobahn speeds.
So I've been to the meeting.
I think the biggest problem here for the rest of us is that Martin is quite dismissive of the internet and is still being quite Secret Squirrel about things.
He did have pretty good answers to most of the questions though.
First thrust. They've steadily increased it. Yes, in 2008 it could lift his 60 kg son, but not him at 100 kg. Now in their demo videos you can see the engine at about 45% power flying with an 80 kg pilot.
The latest turbine is 92% efficient at turning mechanical energy into thrust. I'm not sure what to make of that but it seems pretty damn good. I guess the bad news is there isn't much more scope for improvement.
Control: the version shown in 2008 at Oshkosh was flown manually. They now have it computer stabilized (if you take your hands off then it goes into a stationary hover at fixed height), and remote controlled. They can program limitations such as maximum altitude or speed into it (much like a Segway in beginner mode). And they have it remote controlled. This is useful both for UAV applications and for teaching. They can now strap someone in with just a few minutes' instruction, put them in the middle of a field, and let them fly around (none of the helpers nearby you see in the earlier videos). If the student/joyrider makes a sufficiently bad mistake, an instructor can take over via remote control.
This is all working today.
The only remaining thing to do before first commercial sales is a BRS (emergency parachute).
Limitations. Under the assumption that the main use is recreational flying by unlicensed pilots (whether owners, or one-off joy riders like bungy jumpers or tandem parachutists), they're working to some FAA Part something which I stupidly didn't write down. Anyway, under these regulations they are limited to something like 250 kg weight (500 lb maybe?), 55 knots top speed, and 5 liters of fuel.
If other customers don't have these restrictions then they can easily be relaxed. A bigger fuel tank is easy, and changing a computer parameter would allow the current model to go probably 50% faster.
Applications: the military UAV applications are not to fly a long way or for a long time. They are typically something like taking off from the back of a truck and landing on top of a nearby building or hill top to serve as a communications relay.
They think they can see a near term market for 3500 of them, and can make a profit at that level. That seems entirely achievable.
I'm a kiwi, a pilot, extremely interested in everything aerospace — I went to the first 100 km high SpaceShip One flight, and helped some friends demonstrate their rocket-powered aircraft at Oshkosh. NZ has a fine record of pioneering inventions in a number of fields.
As far as I can tell this thing is bollocks.
They've managed to fool some government bureaucrats who want to "pick winners" into giving them public money. That's pretty much an anti-recommendation in itself.
I recall when they first demonstrated this it could not lift the inventor (who is fairly ordinary-sized) but only his teenaged son.
It's great that they've at least managed to get it working and from the videos it seems quite controllable and stable (no doubt computer-aided).
But what is the market?
- it can't lift much
- it's noisy
- it's slow
- the range is horrid
- the fuel economy is horrid
- the failure modes don't bear thinking about
I can't see any application, civilian or military in which it would be superior to either a conventional personal helicopter...
http://youtu.be/BNuW6Bfx840
... with far more performance and safety for a quarter the price, or a stealth attack by gliding parachutes dropped 50 miles from the target.
There's a public lecture here in Wellington tomorrow by these guys at 7 pm at the Paramount theatre (25 Courtenay Place). I'm going to go along but .. well. I hope they get asked some hard questions.
Naturally when you're looking at an exponentially growing product the average over the last three years is going to be far lower than the current rate.
Even the average in the last two quarters is going to be lower than the current (and ongoing) rate.
All the same, you came up with a figure of nearly half the claimed 230,000 a day, just from the iPhone alone.
Jobs said "iOS devices". That includes the iPod Touch, which they sell very roughly as many of as iPhones, and one or two iPads recently as well (about a million a month or 30,000 a day).
Double your 95,000 and add another 30,000 and you're near as dammit to Jobs' 230,000.
Kudos to the devteam for publicizing this bug.
You can depend on Apple to have a fix out by the end of the weekend, if not before.
Apple really don't care too much if you can jailbreak by modifying an OS image, installing it on a device you're holding in your hand (thus wiping all user data from it), and then restore user data from your last backup. There are no security implications.
But a remote root exploit is an entirely different beast and will not be tolerated.
Is it for normal car park space, or for the odd little places that you can't fit a car?
Here in Wellington, NZ, the council is reasonably motorcycle-friendly. Every block or two there is a space the size of 2 or 3 normal car parks, marked for free use by motorcycles. The various parking buildings all have little spaces where they allow motorcycles to park free, often under ramps or beside pillars. One of the ticket machine barrier arms will be shorter than the others, such that you can ride around the end on a motorcycle. There are even a lot of motorcycles parked on footpaths and in alleyways and while technically this is illegal they are not molested by parking wardens if they aren't blocking access.
I hear that Berlin is similar but at one point there was a move to ticket motorcycles parking on footpaths. Motorcyclists responded by organizing to arrive early in the morning and take as many car parks as possible (paying the normal fee of course). This created such chaos that the authorities relented.
The ability to sample is handy for sure, but you're misrepresenting iTunes.
Everything on iTunes has been DRM-free for several years now and can be easily loaded onto any device that supports AAC -- which is virtually everything, including Zune, PSP, SanDisk, and phones from SonyEricsson, Nokia N and E series, Blackberry. Or you can convert it to MP3 if you must, right in the iTunes program.
I don't see how a recall is either possible or desirable. It's working as designed.
Apple chose to put the antenna on the outside because it offers improved ultimate performance.
If you don't know how to use it then you can, in a poor signal area, degrade the performance, but if you know how to use it then it will hold a signal where previous phones would not.
This is like people used to automatic transmissions buying a car with a stick shift than then complaining that they're stalling or bunny-hopping or burning out clutches or over-revving the engine. And demanding that their car be recalled and an automatic fitted.
It is what it is, and for valid reasons that some, including me, appreciate. If you like it then buy it, if you don't then don't.
Easy.
In the past the iPod touch has been missing much more than just the phone. It's also been without camera, GPS, speaker, microphone.
However Steve Jobs is on record as saying that Apple will ship "tens of millions" of FaceTime-connected devices by the end of 2010. That's been widely interpreted as meaning that the iPhone 4 won't be the only FaceTime device available for Christmas stockings, so it does seem very likely that the iPod touch will get the necessary hardware.
I would also be quite unsurprised if Apple's AIM/ICQ/Jabber program on the Mac, iChat, gets FaceTime compatibility at or about the same time as the annual iPod event.
It doesn't take much time examining temperature reconstructions to see that the earth has repeatedly been both a bit hotter than now and cooler than now. Given that there hasn't been runaway heating (or freezing) in the past it would seem that the obvious way to bet is that there are strong *negative* feedback forces at work.
A global thermostat, if you like.
I guess that doesn't attract as much research funding.
@Captain Underpants:
Maybe I'm just thick, but why do you need next day (or same day) manufacturer support on items that you own a couple of hundred of (or at least a dozen, even in a small company)?
Surely it's far cheaper and much more effective to just buy a few extra and put them on the shelf and instantly swap out any that malfunction?
I can understand the onsite support thing when computers cost a million quid and you only had one of them. But now?
@moth:
Yeah, definitions are tricky. The original R7 had a central core with four chambers, which served as both part of the 1st stage and the entire 2nd stage, plus four strap-on boosters with their own fuel tanks to serve as a 1st stage, much like the SRBs on Shuttle, except they were similar in design to the core.
Given that the N1's problems were due to the plumbing complexities of running a number of pumps and engines off the same tank, I think the separation of those in the (earlier!) R7 mean it doesn't count for this purpose. Each of the nine engines on the Falcon 9 has it's own nozzle, chamber, and pumps, and they all feed from the same tank.
A really great effort!
I'm not 100% sure, but with nine 1st stage engines this may set the record for the most ever in a successful stage. Saturn V had 5 in each of the first two stages. The Soviet N1 moon rocket had 30 in the 1st stage and 8 in the 2nd stage but it never successfully got to the end of the 1st stage burn.
SpaceX made a few mistakes along the way and learned a few lessons, but they seem to have managed to do all the learning with the much smaller and cheaper Falcon 1, which had only 1 of the same kind of engine in the first stage. There is a large amount of commonality between the two rockets.
A friend of mine has a dynamo in the hub of his front wheel providing regulated 5V power via a USB socket. He used it over the just ended summer to keep his iPhone 3GS charged while he bicycled 4000 km around New Zealand. The iPhone was recording GPS coordinates continuously (and uploading to RunKeeper.com) as well as being used as a still and movie camera (uploaded to twitpic and flickr) and everything else you'd expect to do with your phone.
Does anyone really use virtualization (in the server room, not desktop) for more than:
1) trying to persuade a WIndows box to do more than one trick without crapping out, or
2) giving hordes of paying customers something they can have root privileges on
i.e. does anyone who isn't an ISP and isn't using Windows use it?
I love those guys and respect what they did, but the start of the "long downhill slide to mediocrity" happened in the 70's then they crippled the Shuttle to make development cheaper at the expense of operating costs.
Anyone in NASA who knew how to design a new engine or rocket left or retired decades ago. A prime rationale given for Constellation was to train a new generation but it's a very very expensive way to do that.
Other Apollo astronauts, for example Buzz Aldrin, have rebutted the claims made by Armstrong & co.
3.5m a ship is pretty cheap.
More to the point, the total cost is hugely cheap -- far far less that the world is poised to spend on carbon credits.
Will it work? I don't know if it would be enough, but it clearly ties in with all the research that says clouds cool the earth.
Jailbreaking doesn't by default install the SSH server. You have to do that yourself, presumably because you want to use it.
So the instructions given for changing the password are a bit silly. No need to install MobileTerminal specially. Just ssh in over wifi (it's why you installed ssh, right?) and run "passwd".
It's hard to believe that anyone who knows enough to want to SSH in to a Un*x system doesn't know how to change a password.
Just to clarify one point. Prostitution -- that is the exchanging of money between people having sex with each other -- has been perfectly legal in NZ for many decades.
What changed a few years ago was that it stopped being illegal to be a pimp/madam, or to approach someone and ask if they'd like a good time.
> In other words, not only will your iPhone not know where it is, but neither will your
> geotagging camera accurately insert location info into your photos' metadata, nor
> your car's navigation system help you find your way out of the morass of freeways
> that is Los Angeles.
Bullshit.
What they're worried about is that they might not be able to keep a complete set of 24 satellites going, in order to enable most places to always have at least eight visible. But you only actually need to have four satellites visible to get a 3D position with plenty of accuracy for uses such as navigation in a car.
Their spec says they'd like to have 24 going, but the deterioration of the service is gradual, and even half that number would work fine for almost any civilian use other than high precision surveying.
The KERS systems being used in F1 this year are almost insignificant on an F1 car -- they are by regulation limited to 60 KW charge or discharge rate, for a maximum of about seven seconds (400 KJ capacity, to be precise). That's fairly small when you have a petrol engine putting out 600 KW as well.
But for conventional cars it is quite a lot of energy. It's enough to accelerate a small car from 0 to about 70 km/h using the KERS alone. It's about one third of the battery capacity of a Prius, but a flywheel will take vastly more charge/discharge cycles than a battery will -- and at far higher rates too.
If this year's F1 experiment is successful and safe then they will allow larger amount of energy to be stored in later years. That's when it becomes really exciting for road cars, but even this year's units are quite a useful size for stop/go city driving in smallish cars.
I can't believe how many books I've read on my iPhone -- more in the last six months than I'd probably read in the previous five years. It's smaller and lighter than a paperback (and zero *extra* weight given that I already have it), but the screen is still quite large and works in any lighting condition.
I find myself pulling it out of my pocket and reading any time I have two minutes to kill in a line in a shop and it really adds up.
As for scrolling ... the program I'm using gives a choice between continuous scrolling at a user-settable speed, smooth scrolling by dragging on the screen (as with anything else iPhone), or tapping on the screen for the next screenful.
I'm typing this from Space Acess '08, where XCOR made a presentation on Lynx a couple of hours ago.
Lynx Mk2 will go over 100 km and truly into space, but they decided to cut a little capability and cost out of the first airframe in order to get it flying as soon as possible.
200,000 ft is twice as high as you can go on any other ride (e.g. Mig 25) at the moment, and is performance they know they can meet and exceed.
I'm in NZ and my iPhone (with Vodafone prepay SIM) works just fine with various number formats. I seem to recall that very early versions of the software didn't work terribly well in that regard but it's been just fine since .. 1.1.0 or so???
I have a healthy mix of +64 4 1234567 and 04 1234567 numbers in my directory and they all work.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
