* Posts by John 62

1038 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2009

HTML5-juiced mobile YouTube refresh dates iPhone

John 62

re-encode

If HTC (or at the lower level Broadcom/Samsung/TI/Freescale/etc) puts hardware WebM decoding into their devices, perhaps. Until then, everyone's using h264 because the SoCs are designed to decode it efficiently.

John 62
FAIL

vuvuzela button

it's useless without the vuvuzela button. bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

http://twitter.com/youtube/status/16906401719

Mega new climate science: 'Runaway' effect exaggerated

John 62

plant respiration

Was plant respiration taken into account in the original paper? The article doesn't say if the rainforests were absorbing overall, or that was just the amount of CO2 they took in due to photosynthesis. Plants still give off CO2 when there's no light.

Microsoft's past - the future to Android's iPhone victory

John 62

cost in India/China

In India and China there are a lot of extremely rich people. Maybe the absolute price should be more equivalent to what's charged in the US, but the target market is Bollywood stars and captains of industry. Do you think people in the slums will flock to a device that costs merely 50% of their yearly income rather than 70%?

Airline passenger videos Atlanta maggot horror

John 62
Coat

those are

pretty small snakes.

spoiled meat? or maybe the captain's weekend fishing bait got loose.

Google: Flash stays on YouTube, and here's why

John 62
Jobs Halo

codec

the reason Apple backs h264 is because it can be decoded in hardware on small devices, like the iPhone. Maybe to piss off Google, too, but I'd say it's primarily because of the decoders.

Korg NanoKey MIDI controller

John 62

octave lights?

valuable information, surely, but would a 7-segment display have been _much_ more expensive?

Russian spy ring bust uncovers tech toolkit

John 62
Big Brother

wifi rocks!

Oh, wait... the British did that and it didn't work

First MeeGo Linux needs love and scrub up

John 62

don't like tap to click?

must be a driver or touchpad problem. I can't live without it on my MacBook. I very rarely use the physical button.

England beat Germany - what are the odds?

John 62

Oops

Got my IFAB numbers wrong, but Home FAs still get huge percentage of the votes compared to the rest of the world

John 62
Grenade

Never!

I am an happy subject of Her Majesty, but I expect a united Ireland before a united UK team!

First, the general publics love their national teams and the rivalry with England. Northern Ireland especially remembers David Healy at Windsor Park beating England 1-0!

Second the home FAs love the glamour of their world status too much. Apart from playing on the world stage, I looked up the off-side rule a year or two back and discovered there are 5 votes on the FIFA rule-making committee. One each for the FA, SFA, WFA and IFA (not to be confused with the FAI) and _one_ for the _rest of the world_. You think the smaller Associations are going to give that up voluntarily?

Third, what benefit would a united team be in terms of quality? Who in the other Home FAs would get into the England team. Ryan Giggs? And would they be any better as a _team_?

"Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head. The stars in the bright sky looked down where HEALY, HEALY, HEALY, HEALY, HEALY..." :D

The long and the short-term of it: Apple's future

John 62
IT Angle

Apple?

Nice article, but I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Apple. You could equally argue the investors are being short-termist in investing in the company with the shiniest gizmos now, but which could also have nasty anti-trust actions happening against it in the longer term.

Laser-toting robots take over UK hospital

John 62
Terminator

Re: 3 Laws ready?

Disclaimer, I haven't read the book, but I did enjoy the film.

We can assume that the robots will then understand that the only way to keep the 3 laws is to lock up all humans :)

Microsoft inks search pact with...Opera

John 62

a separate search bar?

lol! how quaint.

I've used Opera's keyword address bar search since it started. doesn't have autosuggest, but hopefully that'll come before too long. the convenience of doing a Google web search by typing "g search terms" or a Google image search by typing "i search terms" or a Youtube search with "yt search terms" or an Amazon search with "az search terms" or ... (you get the idea) is quite the win and I prefer it to Chrome's way of doing things.

Need an icon of The Cheat saying "Meh"

Did the iPad just save Wired, and Conde-Nast?

John 62
Boffin

note for US readers: An Infiniti...

isn't a Nissan anymore, it's a Renault :P

though soon they'll all be Mercedes Benzes.

John 62

@Steve Jobs

Sean O'Connor 1 wants you to take more of his money

New wave of superphones poised to challenge iPhone 4

John 62

iTunes :)

It may be bloatware, but you plug in your phone and it updates it. though granted an updater by any other name would be just as sweet.

I also detect "why would it need updated?" smarminess and will concede that in many cases it would be nice if more things could silently upgrade themselves the way chrome does, unlike a reboot for Safari 5.

John 62
Flame

handwarmer

get a folding at home client and you can keep your hands warm on a cold day.

Suspended-animation cold sleep achieved in lab

John 62

wakes

Probably a dual-purpose tradition. Apparently lead poisoning used to be a problem, but this is Ireland we're talking about! If you're going to put a body in a room in a house so people can pay their respects and support the bereaved, you need to heat the room so the living don't die too!

MS names 'Natal'... Kinect

John 62

reminds me of

Sega's 32X :)

iPad's brain not so unique

John 62

ecomonies of scale?

in terms of not having to spend 1000s of man-years designing another core, yes, but it has nothing to do with manufacturing since the whole CPU/GPU/whatever package is a system on a chip, so Apple and Samsung will get their chips from separate dies. Though they may well be coming from the same fab. The desktop is a different physical architecture so using Intel did gain cost savings in manufacturing scale over PPC.

Superslim iPhone 4 enough to fend off Android?

John 62
Jobs Halo

another megapixel comment

At the risk of sounding like a fanboi I'm going to suggest the author rethink his comparisons with other phone cameras. If he'd said that 5MP was going to be a tough sell in a market that wants a single number to measure a camera's performance that would be fair enough, but he didn't. Hence I'm jumping on the bandwagon to figuratively flay him.

I understand that my iPhone is not good for 'real' photography, but I have a 'real' camera for that (with large a 10MP sensor). On the other hand, with good light my iPhone takes great pictures and 2MP is enough and there have been comparison shots to show that the 3G's 2MP sensor gives better low light performance than the 3GS's 3.2MP sensor.

By all means, pile on Apple for their App Store policies, the lack of wireless sync, the bloatedness of iTunes (though it does give the advantage of not relying on the manufacturers to do OTA OS upgrades; manufacturers who won't want you upgrading your phone, but rather getting a new one 6months later because that's the only way they make money, they don't get a cut of app sales or ad revenue), but a high quality 5MP camera on a phone is not a problem for Apple.

John 62

eBay training

people do buy books on how to buy and sell on eBay. But the point about enterprise software stands.

Ten Essential World Cup Apps

John 62

comments as well as suggestions

because we want to vent our spleens over the scores! not just suggest other apps. 80 & 75%s?

I liked the vuvuzela app that proclaimed "We work of almost all phones!"

Also the ad about prayer. England will need it, though obviously they'll have to be fervent and righteous to be effectual and availeth anything (James 5:16 in case you had to ask)

Sony BDV-E370 Blu-ray home cinema kit

John 62

backplate

I love the backplate. So it's not like an Apple device that's almost as nice at the back as it is at the front, but it's like the engineers are answering the question of why it needs a noisy fan: because it has Java!

(though we have a Philips VCR/DVD combi that has a noisy fan without using Java)

Stephen Fry's truly terrible mistake

John 62
Badgers

Direct quotes

you pays your money you makes your choice. go to a comparison site where they get a slice of the commission so they can make ads with meerkats or go direct where they use the money to render a telephone on wheels.

Badgers, cos it's the closest thing to meerkats

John 62

Internet radio: PC

I think he meant that you only needed a PC to start broadcasting internet radio, whereas broadcasting over the air needs expensive transmitters (and a PC to get the signal to the transmitters).

John 62
FAIL

DAB's real problem

the real problem with DAB is that the pips are late. Try having an analogue radio in one room and a digital radio (DAB/Freeview) in the next.

iPhone 4 splashes down on both sides of the pond

John 62
Troll

weak, this troll is

Are you a man or a troll!? Troll up! A true troll would never admit to an irrational hatred. pfft.

TomTom Start2 satnav

John 62
Flame

Road Sign font

Gah! they used Arial on the road signs!!!! UK road signs use a fantastic font called Transport*, which is FREE (though there are paid-for versions with extra weights and unicode support). Not to mention the French and German road sign fonts are free, too, which would be a good way to make the traffic signs look more authentic.

* for a road sign font, the interesting thing is that It's largely based on Akzidenz Grotesk, the precursor to Helvetica, and was probably developed to reduce the amount of Akzidenz Grotesk on the roads - geddit?! lol :D oh, typography jokes are the best

Flames to burn Arial.

Tesla Motors: Elon Musk's divorce won't sink us

John 62

SXi

The one with the sporty trim like the SRi, but a smaller engine :)

Bookeen Cybook Opus e-book reader 2010 edition

John 62

slowly

slowly getting to the price point and feature set that will get me to buy an ebook reader (well, I'm reading Robinson Crusoe on my iPhone right now, but I'd prefer a bigger screen). For about 100 quid I'd probably buy one (in black to my my MacBook :) ), but only if I can get Games Workshop's Black Library on it. There's a ton of paperbacks I want to read, but don't need the hassle of them clogging up the house, or having to go to bookfairs/car boot sales to get rid of them after.

HP's Palm buy was all about WebOS

John 62

one more OS in the collection

How many OSs does HP have now?

HP-UX, Tru64, Non-Stop and now WebOS. Tru64 will probably pass away as Alphas die, but there's a lot of effort in supporting them all right now.

Top 500 supers – The Dawning of the GPUs

John 62
Welcome

WETA

I had a look at the BBC page too and New Zealand, or rather WETA on it's own, has more computing power than most of the world's countries.

The Master program will be making us all ride lightcycles soon enough.

Approaching space object 'artificial, not asteroid' says NASA

John 62

main theme only

in my not so humble opinion, it's only the main theme that's worth listening to. Ba ba baaaaa, bababa bababa ba ba baaaa

Honda CR-Z sporty hybrid e-car

John 62

CR-X

I've no idea what the different CR-X models were like to drive outside Gran Turismo, but hopefully this one's like the Mk2, not the mk3/del Sol

Plus, Nissan's French. That's why it has this outrageous accent!!

Regent Street blocked by iPad fanboi swarm

John 62

95?!

begorah! what's that new-fangled Windaas 95 ye speak of, boy?! bejayzus, I'm glad it comes on floppy disk or we'd have to go to the big smoke to get a SEE DEE droive. top o the marnin til ye etc. EOI agus slainte

John 62
FAIL

flat keypad

the first one had a totally flat keypad. Obviously you didn't watch the BBC's docudrama about Sinclair & Acorn.

John 62
Gates Horns

nice

way to alienate potential customers in the queue who deemed to buy a box for blu-ray/games, not a tribal allegiance :)

Teletext licence holder fined for killing service early

John 62

I stopped reading

when Paul Rose left Digitiser.

Mr Biffo, Beat-box snakes, Morse & Lewis, Man with the big chin and the low score for a 4th FIFA game in 12 months (must have been world cup year, prob 98) were all high-lights of my sad, tramp-like and gin-soaked life. Do you see! (plus Violet Berlin's occasional columns were good)

Moc-moc-a-moc

Bamboozle was good for a while, too, dear.

Gizmodophone may have forced Jobs' hand

John 62

egg on face

according to wikipedia, teh Steve is a vegetarian, so I'm sure egg is most definitely off the menu.

Searchers say bug bars way back to Google

John 62
Grenade

they all do that

Almost everything on Windows replaces the desktop icon when installing a new version. I got blase once and thought I'd dragged some icons onto the recycle bin while holding the shift key. but windows somehow bogged itself down doing something else (probably McAfee related) and it actually thought I was making a selection box when I thought I was dragging things into the bin. lost a couple of documents, but they weren't hugely important.

Grenade to destroy all those desktop shortcuts I don't want

John 62
Thumb Down

maybe normal

but somewhat annoying. shouldn't need a redirect unless it's an interstitial saying Google thinks this is a malware site

Murdoch's paywall: The end of the suicide era?

John 62

WSJ is becoming generalist

I heard someone from it on R4 the other day saying about how they used to pass over many news stories because someone else in one of the virtual monopoly papers would cover it (NY Times/LA Times/WaPo/etc). but then they saw the metro dailies were getting into trouble and they realised they could add general news for little extra money so people wouldn't need their local mono-daily.

John 62

for whom should you vote?

The Guardian didn't _tell_ people for whom they should vote, but they did back the Liberal Democrats. I remember Charles Moore, when editor of the Daily Telegraph, told the people of Northern Ireland to vote for Ian Paisley, so it's not only Murdoch.

Queen's speech pledges faster deficit cut, 'freedom bill'

John 62
Boffin

2039?

Civilisation, nay the world, will be gone due to the 2038 bug.

Windows 3.0 turns 20

John 62

too much computer in your computer

something similar happened Strongbad, who was used to a CLI on his Compy386, when he tried to check his email on The Cheat's iMac.

Cray-1 resurfaces in pieces on eBay

John 62
Boffin

depends on who you want to talk to

tell the (prospective) significant other it's a designer chair :)

Google mocks Jobs with Flash on Android

John 62
Badgers

froyo?

I always called it frogurt.

.NET for iPad stretches to Google's Android

John 62
Gates Halo

not a VM

.NET on Windows and Mono on Linux run in what is to all intents and purposes a VM*, but C# on iphone compiles down to native code instead.

* that sounds technical, but I don't have a clue about the details of the differences between the JVM and the .NET runtime