Posts by M Gale

Review: Britain's 4G smartphones

Re: Pathetic: 500MB for 31 pounds

"Why would you want to be watching a HD stream on a mobile device anyway? The screen needs to be bigger than 30 inches for you to notice any difference."

Maybe on a 30 inch screen sat across the living room from your eyeballs.

On a bus where the 10 inch screen is about a foot and a half from your face, you'll notice the difference.

As for whether it's worth me swapping from the unlimited-means-unlimited rolling monthly One plan from Three, and then forking out for an expensive new phone that has a battery-sucking 4G chipset in it.. nah.

Sony promises PC-based PlayStation 4 for Christmas

Re: Nice

Thre's actually a whole load of "API crap" between the programmer and the hardware on a modern games console, too. In fact, consoles are historically a bugger to program for because they are a whole new bespoke architecture each time. Usually a horrible mash of intermingled subsystems that have changed a few times in development, too.

Re: What a shame! What a fraud!

"I remember a 166mhz Pentium PC being over £1000 when the original Playstation released. It was a lot longer than 6 months until the PC could do anything approaching decent Arcade racers, beat em ups and platformers"

PCs didn't get decent cheap 3D acceleration until 1996. However, I call bullshit on your examples. Only 2D sprite-based platformers used to suffer on the PC due to absolutely zero acceleration in those days. Anything 3D made the consoles look like the primitive last-years-tech that they really were, before they were even released.

You might have heard of this little game called Doom? Or Quake? Or any flight sim ever? Good luck attempting any of those on the Saturn or PS1.. in fact, Doom was ported, and on both machines it had a border around the edges and a crap resolution.

Then the 3DFX card came out and the rest was history.

These days, yes, console releases tend to follow the pattern of being decent for six months, then utterly humiliated in the polygons-per-second fight by cheap commodity PC hardware.

Re: What a shame! What a fraud!

Who cares? It's a games console. You know.. a toy.

Following the same pattern as every other games console release: Fairly beefy on release. Outdated within six months by £50 graphics cards on £100 computers.

Difference is, the games are usually designed around that less-than-optimal hardware so that they still run smoothly. I have a DS and 3DS here that probably have less poke than your average Android phone. The games are still awesome, though.

Boffins use DVD burner to scale graphene supercapacitors

Could you get hold of a few for LOHAN tests?

See title. Wonder if a small prototype would hold a charge all the way up to however-many-ISS-lengths high, and dump enough current to start a rocket motor up?

This 320-gigapixel snap of London is size of Buckingham Palace

Re: how long it would take to trawl through 320 giga-pixels.

Probably about five minutes given a decent machine and competent software?

Quit the 2D internet, flee your cave, and GET LAID, barks rock star

I know someone who's like that.

Telling me about how I should go out and do stuff.. usually while I'm out and doing stuff with him.

He's suggested going out on some camping holiday at some point. Because being stuck in the middle of a field with a canvas rain-attraction device and having nothing except a transistor radio and a supply of marijuana is always preferable to sitting indoors with central heating and a roof that works.

Jack says I'm living life two-dimensionally? I say he doesn't know Jack. Now excuse me while I go out, in this case having fun with the Hubsan X4 quadcopter. Available on the Internet for about 35 quid.

Or you could, you know, buy it from a bricks and mortar Maplins store for £50. Your choice. I prefer living life hyperdimensionally, myself.

Nasuni fondles clouds, says Microsoft's is nicest...

"Microsoft is more than twice as fast at deleting files as its nearest competitor."

The jokes. They write themselves.

iOS 6.x hack allows personal data export, free calls

Re: its not exactly very usable

Phones are often left out on coffee tables, desks and random bars (where they sometimes go missing, especially prototypes). Less so front doors.

Micron glues DDR4 RAM to flash, animates the 256GB franken-DIMM

Re: Instant on computer

I hope the distinction between RAM and storage never goes away.

Might sound like heresy in a forum full of coders and hackers, but think about it: Right now you can solve 99% of OS hiccups by turning the machine off and on again.

Cambridge White Space boffins cook up Weightless chips

10km point to point?

What, without a backbone tax or license fee in the way?

In the UK?

Madness.

Register reader Ray revs radio-controlled Raspberry Pi race rover

I have to wonder

Separate servo controller when the Arduino has more servo channels than you can shake a stick at?

Nice car though. My own Arduino is still sat here waiting for me to think of something to do with it.

Lewis Page: Space Marine

Lewis Page: Space Marine

See also this post.

So if by some miracle a slot on the ISS came up and could be paid for, what sorts of LOHAN-related and other experiments could you fit into a week of zero G?

Bear in mind it would be a once in a lifetime chance to fit something involving bulgaria and airbags on board a bazillion-dollar orbital research facility, as well as maybe do something useful.

British games company says it owns the idea of space marines

Question to The Reg

How much to send Lewis Page up to the ISS on one of the tourist trips? If only so you can say you have a Space Marine on staff. He might even be able to do some LOHAN-related experiments.

Maybe crowdsourcing could come up with some of the cash?

How much for a 4 inch high plastic model?

But, but, but.. it's a titan!

On top of the White Metal thing, this does not surprise me at all.

Now UK must look out for crappy SPACE weather - engineers

I'm pretty sure that the GPS constellation isn't the only accurate time source out there, even if it is a handy one. Hell, you can buy your own 1-second-in-1,000-years atomic clock for about $6k USD. Not cheap, but you don't need many.

In fact, I have to wonder why the mobile operators haven't got into positioning systems? They know where the masts are, and radio navigation can be accurate enough even with the transmitters on the floor. Note, actual radio navigation, not the "you're somewhere within a mile or so of the mast" Google Maps thing. Make it work a bit like LORAN and offer it as a "get an extra-quick position fix" service to customers, who might be individual consumers who have it bundled onto a plan with a phone that can use it, or who might be TomTom, Garmin, etc.

Why would a mobile network depend on satnav anyway? The base stations are somewhat fixed in place, and you don't need 1cm positional accuracy in order to fart out radio waves.

Microsoft 'touches 16k shop workers' to flog Windows 8 hard

Re: And todays Microsoft rep on a comments thread is...

You guys should really try using Win 8, it'll be quicker than me trying to train you all up myself.

I have a free copy thanks to Dreamspark, but there's little to no chance of it escaping its virtual machine. Tried it, didn't like it. If I want a games console, I'll buy a games console.

Re: "Ambitious" as synonym for "Awful"?

Also what happens when you minimise an application in TIFKAM?

Nothing. The application carries on flicking between running and suspended states in the background until such time as the OS decides it needs more memory. The program then gets a short time (5 seconds if I remember that lecture correctly) to save anything important before it is forcibly terminated.

See also here.

So in the future when everything's Modern, will I watch everything slow to a crawl if I enable power saving, because there's no close button on the million and one store apps open? Or will I end up with the system deciding what apps I get to have immediately available and what ones get extra added switch times and the uncertainty of whether they really did manage to save everything in the time required?

Someone really should apply a chair-end to Ballmer's cranium and tell him a PC isn't a games console or a phone.

BSkyB to flick switch on network-level smut-'n'-violence filters

Re: OpenDNS

settings->network

Long-press the desired network

Modify network

Scroll down and check "show advanced options"

Select "static" as your IP settings, and you can now adjust DNS. Unfortunately this also disables DHCP, but it will show you your current IP/DNS settings, so perhaps useful to switch on and off again.

(disclaimer: Tried this on Jelly Bean on an Asus TF201. YMMV.)

BANG and the server's gone: Man gets 8 months for destroying work computers

Re: Where I work -

I guess the machine also weighs chesticles?

World's 'most green' supercomputer in red-hot battle between Intel, Nvidia

Re: Other purposes

But the idea of a gazillion sterling engines or thermoacoustic thingumyjiggers stuck on a radiator and whistling away into piezoelectric elements does amuse.

Hey, wonder what you could do with MEMS?

Meet قلب, the programming language that uses Arabic script

Re: Computer Languages

class MyValue{

public:

MyValue(int initVal){

startVal = initVal;

};

~MyValue();

operator=(int newVal){

endVal = newVal;

};

int get_val(){

if (endVal){

return endVal;

}else{

return initVal;

}

}

int get_initval(){return initVal;);

int get_endVal(){return endVal;};

private:

int startVal;

int endVal;

}

...I got bored. Haven't even tested it. It's up to you to override things to support more than just ints.

China may axe 13-year console ban, games OK for kids after all

Re: Puzzling

Given how many firearms are made in the UK...

Biz users, hard-up punters: Nobody loves Windows 8

Re: I really like Windows 8...

"Careful, any even vaguely positive comments about Win8 upset The Register's hivemind. My limited experience matches yours, FWIW."

I'm just amused by the "I love Windows 8 once I've made it look like Windows 7" comments.

Most of the complaints are about the user interface, not that they finally support USB3. They're foisting something made for fondling with your fingers into an environment where the 20 to 50 inch screen is sat out of arm's reach in a lot of places. It just doesn't work as well or as easily as what it has replaced, and all in a glory-or-bust attempt to make 2013 the year of Microsoft on the Fondle Toy.

Canadian astronaut warns William Shatner of life on Earth

Re: Free-fall

To paraphrase.. Achieving orbit is learning how to throw yourself at the floor and miss.

Just remember: Don't Panic.

Polaroid plans retail Fotobars to print out your pics

Re: Oh yes...

Noy only that, but from what I know the police like to use Polaroid-brand cameras. The quad-lensed sort that print out four copies of what you take. There's just not many other solutions for having hardcopy of what you're pointing the camera at right now (or at least, in 70-90 seconds).

'SHUT THE F**K UP!' The moment Linus Torvalds ruined a dev's year

If I may humbly submit

Something like this?

Replace text with STFU <victim>, have fun.

China turns the screws on netizens with real-name registration plans

I'm pretty sure Virgin, TalkTalk et al have your real name, or at least the name your bank account is registered with.

The 'Digital Economy' in 2012: A big noisy hole where money should be

This video has been removed by the user

Sorry about that :/

Motorola pulls out of China, leaves locals behind till of Android shop

Re: Fine

"Google can't even write decent usable (by normal people, not geeks) software in English, so doing so in Chinese will be a huge challenge."

Duhhh click da maps button.. whee maps.

Duhh herrr.. I wanna search. Tappity typy, click da search button. OMG RESULT!

Da phone! I pressy da phone icon, whee a phone pad!

Dat took me aaaaaaall week to learn da stuff. It wuz hard. Ur right, da Google stuff needs a pro.. ffes.. or.. thing.. to undastand.

NYC mayor pins crime rate spike on iPhone, iPad theft

Re: Just ban Apple products

Many car stereos now come with a removable front plate, without which they are completely useless.

Of course, putting the front plate in the glove box is an easy way of negating all advantages of this security measure. Unfortunately enough people do this that thieves find it worth bashing the window in just to check.

The amazing magical LED: Has it really been fifty years already?

Re: leds for home/office lighting

Producing a pleasant warm light (<4000K) is still a big challenge, and as someone above mentioned, that is a must for US/EU markets.

Perhaps, but there's plenty of manufacturers rising to the challenge successfully. It's actually hard to find a "daylight" LED bulb around here, with most of them being 2300-2700K. Yes, there is always the Internet, but that's not "round here".

Gotta wonder what anybody snooping at my bank records must think when they find purchases for 30 watt CFL grow-lamps with a 6500-7000K temperature. It's probably not "well he doesn't like yellow then".

Re: Bored of Blue LED now!

In the 70s and 80s, high technology came with a wooden veneer and lots of lovely knobs, flick switches and dials.

In the 90s, it was CHROME, CHROME EVERYWHERE.

Now, high technology glows blue.

It's just one of those things. Next it'll be touch screens on everything.

Re: LED lighting instead of fluorescent 'haz mat'

You'll find that our sun is mostly white, and that rayleigh scattering makes most of the light that hits this planet end up as a slightly blue colour during the daytime. "Yellow" is only relative to things like red giants and the super-hot blue stars that burn themselves up in a comparitively short time. Sol certainly puts out a whiter light than your average 2300k "warm white" CFL.

There's also a few stretches of road near me that are part of some government experiment for LED street lighting. Each pole has a cluster of some 5x5 or so grid of super-bright white LEDs. It works, rather awesomely well. Nice to be able to see in colour under a streetlight.

The LINUX TABLET IS THE FUTURE - and it always will be

Re: It's the interface...

Android is a bit more than just a GUI. It's a whole stack of software that basically uses Linux as a hypervisor to run each app in its own VM. Not quite the same as selecting "Android" from the drop-down list of KDE, Gnome, XFCE and whatever other X window managers you have installed.

Would be nice to see an official Dalvik for Linux though, made as easy as clicking an "androidclient" icon in the package manager, with Google apps support, and maybe with some kind of copy/paste and file support through to the host OS. Maybe have a go at showing Microsoft how you do "everything at once".

Baby got .BAT: Old-school malware terrifies Iran with del *.*

Re: Frightened by del *.*?

"What's the singular of MS Windows?"

TIFKAM.

It's official: Mac users are morally superior to Windows users

Re: Just goes to show...

El Reg Commentards in Not All Being Frothing Fanbois SHOCKER.

Average salary of Mac vs Windows PC owner?

Just wondering. I'm no Christian, but I do recall some parable about a rich guy putting a hefty chunk of silver on the plate, and a poor man giving away a few pennies.. everything he owned, basically.

No, I'm not so petty as to accuse Mac owners of being misers. They're as much a victim of lock-in as Windows slaves, moreso in some ways. However, it may explain an increased absolute level of donations.. because that doesn't take proportion into account.

Re: Linux users.....

Look at the cute little troll. It's almost like he's intelligent.

Microsoft to Moto: We'll give you $1m a year for your patents

"Don't make it a standard if you want to charge whatever you want."

Someone should have told Microsoft that, some 30 years ago.

Facebook: 'No merit' to claim we broke German privacy law

Re: How would they know?

"In the end though, Zuckerberg and his lawyers can, and probably will, say that Facebook is voluntary, and if you don't like the rules, get out of hte social medium. And he does have a point."

Perhaps it's just wishful thinking that he does say that, and that everyone takes him up on the offer?

Anyway, G+ has the same problem. That and the desperate attempts to make it so you need a G+ account in order to fart, is a real reason to hit Google. Not this shit with newspapers and linking to search engines.

Germany sets date for Google vs newspapers smackdown

"Let big internet companies like Google, Amazon etc have to pay rent on their bandwidth usage."

You'll find that once a service provider grows big enough, and contains enough content, they tend to arrange peering agreements rather than pay directly for bandwidth.

And why not? Surely content is king? And who will they pay rent to, anyway? They ARE the upstream provider.

Google already flipped a big "FU" at the Chinese government and pulled out of there over censorship issues.

What's the reckoning they'll do a quick calculation, find out they'll pay more in fees than they'll lose by getting out of Deutschland, and take the fiscally appropriate action?

As I've said before on the subject, it's like some newspapers are wanting Google to pay them for sending more traffic their way. It's not hard to set up a robots.txt barring the Googlebot from trawling their site.

New Forum Wishlist - but read roadmap first

Private Reg front page

As first suggested in here.

Though for BOFH's sake, make it an option and not mandatory.

Sorry, Apple - China's just not that into your iPhone 5

Private Reg front page

Actually, that's a damned good suggestion. Something like an iGoogle-style thing for logged-in users which will promote certain types of stories to the top for your perusal, should you set it up to do so.

Something to suggest in here, perhaps?

You mean this article?

Posted at 06:19 this (17th December) Morning.

John Lewis agrees to flog Microsoft's Surface RT tablets

Re: Err...

The difference is, you can find more "anecdotal" evidence of the apathetic-to-negative general reaction toward TIFKAM, by asking pretty much anybody who has ended up having to deal with it. Go on, I dare you.