Posts by Piro

USB charges up to 100 watts

Re: Standards

Except that didn't happen. Almost every phone now uses microUSB to charge, instead of a mess of ports we had before.

Re: I hope they up the voltage

Yup, Firewire was an awesome standard that didn't catch on...

Humanity increasingly sitting on collective arse

Re: Yup

I'm forever seeing cyclists holding up traffic on busy roads, while the purpose marked cycle path is literally visible from the road.

I don't know about you, but if I was out cycling, I'd want to keep far away from fumes and angry motorists if possible.

Drives me up the wall. My commute to work is on a busy road that has a cycle path running parallel to it for ALL of the length, so I am at a loss as to what the excuse is.

LG Optimus 4X HD quad-core Android phone review

Re: Not another 5in screen...

What the hell are you babbling about? Fandroid? What is that junk?

Excellent

Thin, but has a microSD slot. Thin, but has a very nice capacity battery.

My only slight concern is that LG has been pretty poor at rolling out updates in the past, and that at 4.7", this thing is a bit of a slab.

Nearly 2 MILLION US Facebook users quit social network

Re: Fashionable to hate Facebook / two sides to a story

It's fashionable to hate Facebook now?

Who would actually hate Facebook anyway? Surely they would just have slightly negative opinions or indifference.

Unless Mark Zuckerberg had relations with their wife..

Sony preps PS3 with old-school design

Re: Old School

I don't really care about Linux support, although it was no doubt a fun toy, but the PS2 backwards compatibility is what kills it for me.

I have an original fatty PS2 with a hard drive, and it works fine, but it'd be nice to have one machine that could play PS3 and PS2 games so I could store it away. I don't have a PS3, but the odd game has taken my eye. Not enough to buy one though, especially with the lack of backwards compatibility.

Surprise! BT pockets £70m North Yorkshire broadband rollout

Great..

Meanwhile, in a relatively central area in the south, a village where I live, I average about 1.6Mbit/s, 2 if I'm lucky, with a terrible upload speed.

How about we work on getting everyone up to a decent standard of say 10Mbit symmetrical, instead of working on giving a handful of people 80Mbit for a high price.

Dell Inspiron 17R SE 17in Ivy Bridge notebook review

Re: 5400rpm drive?

Although Seagate's specs for their 7200 RPM laptop drives show them using LESS power than their 5400 brethren.. probably better components.

Behold: First look at Office 2013, with screenshots

Metro aesthetic..

.. Does anyone like it?

It's bland, bland, bland, and all caps in the ribbon? Just foul.

Lego ponders Portal pack

Re: re: what next?

That would be most excellent.

Disable Gadgets NOW says Redmond

I don't now..

But when I used Vista at work I had the whole sidebar filled with Sticky Notes. The only actually useful gadget. The rest are just silly. Who cares how much CPU time or RAM I'm using?

Retina MacBook Pro nukes Apple's green credentials

Re: Doing it wrong?

It's confirmed that they have to replace the entire upper part of the Macbook Pro - including the trackpad, and keyboard and so on, because the battery is bonded to it.

Japanese boffins demo EV on-the-move charging

Re: me n my car weigh 1500kg

I don't know about you, but the village I live in hasn't had a shop/post office for many years. You need to get in the car to get anything.

Panasonic Eluga DL1 waterproof Android

Re: Why is battery life not a desirable feature anymore?

Motorola RAZR MAXX is basically the only game in town when it comes to battery life. It'd be nice for some others to get a clue, you're absolutely right.

New UK network touts FREE* mobile broadband

Re: Where do I sign up

No doubt...

Review: Samsung Chromebox

329 quid, what?

That's all I needed to know. That's insane.

What's the point at that price?

Facebook: Our phone app DID seize your email

Good thing I've never used Facebook then..

Nothing to change my mind here..

Google Maps takes shelter from the British summer

Re: Maps?

Then you can correct those inaccuracies.

Right click, Report problem here...

I've done so before. Not perfect, but Google does provide a very useful service in this area.

'Young people don't want to become like us', say IT pros

Huh

You're reading my mind. Interested in IT from a young age. Been in IT now, going on 10 years. Pay is poor, been from place to place, nowhere has been exceptional, the way IT is treated within any business is horrendous, regardless of our attitude and turn around times, it seems they think we'll be happy with some tea and biscuits, when what we need is a pay rise..

Undervalued and tired of pissing my life away staring at a screen and fielding questions from people who don't even try to learn the basics.

How nice it would be to get away from all that from time to time and do something simple..

B&O Beoplay A3

Cute.. but..

Jesus Christ, what kind of cost is that? Oh, Denmark, your tax policies have made your country out of touch...

Panasonic chief says no to low-cost OLED TVs

Re: Telly upgrade

Nothing, that's the thing. People will replace their busted or very old tellies with a new shiny one, but I very much doubt people will ditch their 1080p LCD TVs for anything else soon.

But..

.. Maybe it is a Panasonic. I know somebody that still has an old 4:3 Panasonic CRT telly and it works just fine to this day.

Brit global warming skeptics now outnumber believers

That's what you get when you cram it down our throats..

... without asking nicely, we spit it back out.

It's the extra costs under the guise of being green that get me - being green is surely nothing more than being more efficient, which should inherently cost LESS. Nowhere in green thinking should we have to spend MORE for less, it makes no sense at all.

Fujitsu raises UK minimum wage to £14k

Re: National?

To be fair, £14k pre-tax is next to nothing in this day, so it's not as if they're pushing for something horrendous.

HP open sources WebOS TouchPad tablet GUI

Re: No, we run WebOS as ICS is a bugfest...

It's odd, I hear these bad things, but I gave a firesale TouchPad to who is effectively my mother in law, and she loves it, and uses it every day, so much so that she got a second hand Pre 3, and likes the consistency between the two. Also, touchstones for both. In constant use. She doesn't even have TV any more, and uses the touchpad all the time.

Dell extends XPS laptop line

900p..

1440x900? Nope, 1600x900 by the looks of that screen bezel.

Lithe British youngsters prioritise fun over privacy and security

Re: Paid security suites?

I didn't imply all paid suites are bad, just some of the household names, that's all.

Kaspersky is often very highly rated, as is ESET NOD32, F-Secure... probably a handful of others.

That said, I think MSE is good for most home users, a better browser than IE, some addons to kill ads (firefox + adblock plus comes to mind), and then you save yourself the money and are going to be pretty safe unless you really go out of your way to install dodgy stuff.

Paid security suites?

That says to me that the oldies are being scammed - they're paying for Norton or McAfee, most likely, which only means you are paranoid and not savvy.

Even Apples sometimes have worms in them, admits Cupertino

Media Access Control

(Address)

Apple's iPhone 5 connector said to be a control freak

Some crazy thinking here

Why can't part of the connector be plain microUSB?

That is to say, have a microUSB connector, then a small gap, then whatever abomination Apple wants, all in one plug.

That way, they get a new dock connector, and everyone else can just ignore the cable and use microUSB.

Oh wait, that would be ACTUAL good design as opposed to purely aesthetic design: see: MagSafe 2, changing your stuff for no reason.

Apple wouldn't do that..

Sony deploys 11in Vaio to battle Apple Air

Re: Huh

Not really, very little difference, I believe. Check out any manufacturer's spec sheets, here's an example:

http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/en-GB/datasheet/disc/momentus-family-ds1701.7-1109-gb.pdf

For a 500GB middle of the road option, the 5400 RPM is recorded is 1.54W seeking, the 7200 RPM as 1.5W. Less, for some reason. Idling and under load.

I guess the point is, the drives have so little friction anyway, that once the platter is up to speed, the energy required to spin that tiny disc is pretty small.

Huh

This is actually a very attractive package. 1366x768 nonsense aside, that's passable in 11.6".

I do wish that 5400 RPM HDDs were banned, though, they're barely pennies cheaper than a 7200 RPM equivalent. Obviously an SSD is something you do yourself to keep the base cost low, and I'm fine with that.

One court order could gag EVERY ISP in Denmark

Lots of things are illegal

But the government in these cases are basically working by using taxpayer's cash to protect American giants of music and video, which is not a good use of time.

Also, since when has trying to stop people doing illegal things in this way ever been common? This would be like all cars having speed limiters for the roads they're on using GPS tracking, or having copy and paste disabled on your computer so you can never duplicate copywritten text to cite.

It's simply wrong, no matter what, it's a waste of government time and money, and does not benefit they people they claim to serve. It's also very choosy and picky about who it protects. It has absolutely nothing to do with killing crime, and all to do with big publishers throwing their toys out of the pram.

Turing Machine brought to life with Lego

Re: What a job

What happens if that was the Carling or Foster's brewery?

Larry Ellison buys island 1000x bigger than Branson's

Re: Meanwhile on Branson's island..

Yup. That's what I'm thinking. Buying land that's too large gets you too much you can't control.

Apple's Retina Macs: A little too elite?

Re: Apple has to be ahead of the curve

The Mac Pro is the worst, how about a 3 year old mid-range card and a 3 generation old Intel CPU for the price of a modern workstation?

Volkswagen Up!

Re: 52MPG ?!?!

I know, I'm not exactly thinking in the realms of what's there, just daydreaming a bit.

Re: 52MPG ?!?!

That's what I was thinking, I'm not sure where you're winning here with the Up!, although admittedly it is a very nicely packaged car. I get 50+ MPG from my '07 diesel Astra Estate, which I can then haul almost anything around in at will, instead of being stuffed in a tiny box.

How about giving it some unique character? Get the 1.2 TDI from the Polo Bluemotion, stick it under the boot, raise that boot floor to be completely flat when the back seats are down, stuff the spare tyre in the space where the engine used to be at the front.

A unique 4 seater RWD hatch, and I guarantee with that engine on board, you'll get absolutely ridiculous economy.

Apple introduces 'next generation' MacBook Pro with retina display

Re: Only 2880H pixels?

Sorry, but you're measuring this all wrong, you're assuming the screen would be against your eyeball.

Nah, wrong

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-macbook-pro-handles-scaling

1920x1200's worth of space is one of the default scaling options.

Default is 1440x900's worth, then 1680x1050, then 1920x1200.

Ten... Sata 3 SSDs

Re: Reaching parity with HDs

No, HDDs have been increasing in capacity and dropping in price far faster.

You can't underestimate that old design classic.

There's not enough flash production, nowhere near, to replace all the spinning platters around today.

Re: shame no random write figures!

Nah, sequential is often weaker than good old platters, but random is sky high. To find a real problem with that, you need to go back to the bad old days of the utterly terrible jmicron SSDs.

Hauppauge MyTV 2Go

Huh

Actually a pretty awesome idea. No ridiculous cabling, and you can actually position it where you might get a signal! Not bad! A bit costly though.

HP Z1 quad-core Xeon 27in PC

Almost there, really

Needs to use a standard ITX board of some description, a standard PSU of some type, and have support for at least a dual slot full length PCIe 16x GPU.

Vauxhall Ampera hybrid e-car

Re: Ripoff price?

Yup, ripoff, nothing else to it.

Taking the US price, converting and still adding 20% for VAT ends up being 24k.

So that should be 24k after the subsidy, yet it's nowhere near? Not seeing where the extra cost has gone.. A bit of plastic changed up front?

Barclays online banking falls over in outage riddle

Bunch of clowns

When they introduced the new site, your entire old payees list was simply deleted. Not there, not carried over, new database.. gone. Called them up and they said.. uh, tough.

'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8

That would require..

The presence of said functionality.

I don't think Windows 8 has any.

Smoke-belching flash drive self-destructs on command

Military use

I love the idea that it wouldn't be allowed, but deadly firearms would be.