Posts by stu 4 775 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
agreed. If it has mini display port, then it will have analogue/VGA connectivity.
One of the big benefits over an HDMI connector.
So the reviewer seems to want it both ways.
There are still a hell of a lot of VGA type things I want to plug my laptop into , so mini display port seems the way to go to me.
Finding that miracle of miracles, my parents had found a 48k spectrum.
I had donkey kong, and later that day, TTL to play.
But the star of the show was the basic manual.
I read it from cover to cover, and by boxing day had my first program:
- some flashing colours and text, and an 'enter password' screen with me and my mates 'handles' as passwords.
get it wrong, and go no further,
get it right and be granted permission to the 'secret screen'.
By April 1984, aged 12 1/2 I was producing an educational maths platform game for 'Poppy Sotftware' after finding their games in the local library and contacting the company.
I still have a printout of some of the code - I remember I couldn't really get my head round sub routines, so would sort of use them, but have a GOTO to somewhere else, and then a GOTO to somewhere else, etc... it was an absolute mess. I'd added various machine code routines for fancy stuff, masses of bin arrays for character sets, etc... and all relying on a temperamental tape recorder for backup.
38 years later, I'm still coding.
kids these days - don't know what they're missing.
knifes do not 'stay sharp'. that is the common misconception that leads people to buy expensive knifes - usually japanese as they keep their edge a bit longer (see below).
the best thing you will every buy for the kitchen is a steel bar. Use it after EVERY TIME you use the knife.
yup - not once a year. or once every now and then. EVERY TIME. EVERY DAY.
I have a nice 10" from ikea. cost a tenner. cuts through anything like butter. had it for 2 years and use it everyday (with the steel bar).
the japanese tend to use sharpening stones for knifes rather than a steel bar, which leaves a sharper blade for longer, but then needs the stones again, plus it wears the knife out more than a bar.
It's horses for courses, but it is one of the reasons folk get lured into buying expensive japanese knifes.
How many folk have one of these 100 quid knifes in their kitchen and no sharpening device at all ? my bet is the majority....
stu
stu
Surely El Reg you have just posted this story a week early ? I refuse to believe my El Reg is so gullable...
I fly a paramotor: my wing is 29m2. that is about 6 or 7 times the size of these wings.. and I need a 20hp engine with a 1.3m long propeller hanging from my back rotating at 400mph to get off the ground...
It's a bit of fun I suppose, but I do get depressed with stuff like this - that peoples grasp of science seems to terribly basic as to think this is real.
Does it annoy anyone else that they keep making such a big thing about this stuff ?
1. if 'we'/Neanderthal/hobbits/deer people interbred then we are not really a species are we (at least not by Dicky Dawkins main criteria).
2. If above is accepted, then we are amalgam of all the different types - just like different types of cows.
what I don't get though is the resolution. I have a couple of wacoms - a wee portable bamboo for on the move, and a big A2 tablet for home use. they both have very high DPI (500-2000 per inch). This makes sense because you can get a lot of detail in a small drawing space. i.e. there is no direct link between the DPI of the tablet, and the screen.
With the Contiq's this ain't the case... so you have a 500dpi 'tablet' tayer onto of a 70dpi screen.
I don't really get that? I'd be interested in user's takes on it, but when I used one, and in fact it was the reason I bought an acer tablet pc back in 2004 (it had full pressure sensitive wacom support) I found it nasty to sketch on, as I was always limited to that screen DPI effectively for feedback.
stu
full page adverts in the Metro most days. before and afters of some bird with filler and without it.
Who is stupid enough to believe this crap and pay 30 quid for a 30ml tube of goo ?
Unfortunately lots and lots of (female) idiots.
It's basic logic that if you lack any sort of understanding of science, then snake oil pish like this is just as believable as anything else you read.
I reckon probably wimin are a bit worse off than men as regards scientific knowledge (it's just the way we bring em up...).
However, it is simply the mainstream extension of herbal pills, vitamin supplements, 'anti-oxidants' and a whole lot of other useless shite - most of which is bought equally by both sexes.
WTF is that monstrosity!
And why oh who do they keep making stuff that is right handed!
We are 15% - What sort of F*ckwitted company eliminates 15% of sales immediately ?
And I'm sure it's no coincidence that the products tend to be hideous - probably designed by plodding right handed fools with no imagination...
convert the household/family to osx.
if you must have central control, osx server is 30 quid. job done.
I still have to use windoze for work and use parallels for that - and bin/clean/snapshot as necessary, but I've never had to rebuild a mac in 5 years because of crapware/viruses/weirdstuff.... AND time machine backups can be restored onto any intel mac hardware so no more 'my windows backup is not good cause my new machine has different north bridge/graphicscard/squirreltrap/etc.
e.g. got new 2011 MBA. Got 2008 MBP all setup and updated to Lion with all my apps, settings, firewall, blablabla.... the usual thing that with windows would mean no option but to install em all again. On new MBA:
switch on
point it at MBP time machine backup
restore.
20 mins later my MBA has all the MBP stuff and has adjusted kexts as necessary automatically to new hardware, etc, etc.
For me anyway that was a MAJOR surprise and took away one of the main reasons I was using VMs sometimes when I used to use windows.
anyhoo - just my 2c. not a mac rant - just credit where credit's due is all.
When I was 12 years old I was working on an educational platform game for the speccy.
It was about 80% complete and I had a deal with a publishing company all ready, when I took it to a computer meet and had the misfortune of setting up near a C64 + tv.
a few days later - the tape has been corrupted by the radiation coming off the C64. When I moaned about it, I found most of the grown ups there all new that it radiated tapes.
arse. set me back more like 6 months as of course I didn't have a printout or anything, as I didn't have a printer :-(
Just reading steve jobs biography just now, and am surprised how little mention is made of the amiga.
It came out, what, 6 months after the mac and yet was lightyears ahead of it.
It's funny how history recorded the mac as being the amazing game changer.
It's a real pity jobs didn't buy into amiga before commodore - amiga hardware with nextstep (i.e. inin this alternate reality steve stayed at apple, macos was never written and the team did not leave apple, but created nextstep in apple)would have absolutely wiped the floor with x86. I think that combination would probably have been enough for IBM to stick to their original nextstep agreements
It would probably have killed the 'PC' market dead, and have had 25 years of awesome OO software on amazing hardware rather than the crappy x86 platform and M$ shit.
last year - I was you. I read 30-40 books a year. I liked getting them from amazon, etc. Reading the physical things, storing them in my bookshelf, lending them to friends.
But now I travel more, and was finding lugging books around a pain.. so I decided to give a kindle a try.
A year later, I have read over 100 books this year -all on Kindle. Mostly ones I'd never read before as they were free kindle ones. I still read in the hot tub, etc and I still lend books to friends (if free ones).
I really can't say I miss paper at all and I'd say it's pretty much revolutionised my book reading.
I have also converted both my mum and dad to kindles (where I use Calibre on my server at home to scrape and send him the daily papers every day for example).
give one a go - you might be surprised.
I've got an iMac 27. I imagine it does depend on your home lighting, but really I've never noticed any glare.
And you're talking to a bloke who took back his MBP17 for a matte version because the glossy one was unusable.
The difference from a laptop is it is in one place - and in that regard it's no different from the CRT monitor that used to sit on the top of yer PC - you placed it in the room with reflections in mind.
The filters are key to this, and not an area that was investigated really in the interview.
The fact that they are 'filtered' means FA. filtered for what ? And more importantly - what controls the filter ? is it fixed ? is it controllable by these control SMSes ?
If, as I imagine it is, an SMS controllable filter, then what's to stop a control SMS saying - for the next 24 hours filter out nothing - upload it all.
You'd have to be very privacy conscious to NOT design the filter control to be general enough to work like that - that would be the easiest way to code it - i.e. have an 'exclude XYZ || include XYZ' ACL type mechanism.
So did the IQ bloke lie - no. Was he asked the right questions ? no.
me and all my mates got species or C64s..
except one poor bastard, who got a VIC20.
It broke.. so his mum took it back and they didn't have any VIC20s.
YES!! He thought = at last a speccy or C64.
His mum came back with the dragon32.
I think he's the only person I ever met that had one.
We had a guy who had some work stuff on his USB - innocently put it into work PC to copy the files off....
Work scanner got to work in background checking files... and 10 mins later (usb back in his bag by now) security appeared, and he was marched off site after working for employer for 10 years.
- scanner checked for certain file names, and unfortunately for him he had some pr0n on there with names like 'lezzer 69', 'blow job1', etc...
poor bastard.
I bought 4 of those t-mobile rapports for family at xmas. They are now only 49 quid. come with 2gb card. bloody great wee things - google maps (gps), wifi, etc, etc. Absolutely ideal to get the parents into mobile internet. really responsive, fast for surfing. plays angry burds. what more do you want for 50 squid
came out at 140 quid so still a good deal.
I didn't expect to be able to download much from amazon being in UK - but to find I can't get free apps either is a bugger... even side loading apps seems to require installing a file manager app first (from the amazon store)...
anyone got any idea how I can side load apps on it if I have no access to amazon store ??
I moved to them a month ago from BskyB for the able broadband. I was getting about 6 or 7Mb over ADSL with sky, I am now on the 50MB vm service.
I pretty much always get the whole 50Mb (just over 6MBytes/sec) which lets me download a 10 gig HD movies in no time at all.
so far, nothing to complain about tbh.
I have 4 sets of lcd glasses. Though I cut one set up to make a single head up monocle for when I fly my paramotor. Without exception they all never match their hyped specs. I have been waiting for the HMZ-T1 reviews for a while. It's a pity they are so expensive, but the main omission if lack of portability for me - what are sony thinking. surely the OLEDs are pretty low power.
Also, the fov is still very narrow at 50º. 90 would be a minimum for me, and for gaming you'd want more like 120º. You'd think it would be possible for them to provide 2 or 3 different optics that could be swapped in to provide different FOVs.
the last dave specials were shit enough.
let it die. please let it die.
on the one hand - faulty towers - truly amazing comedy - writer/star: Cleese. He knew 2 series was enough and he quit. He had plenty other stuff he wanted to do. Gervais - same story.
on the other hand - red dwarf - great comedy (up to about series 5/6) - writer Doug Naylor. He knew he had fuck all else he could work on, and since Rob Grant went, was basically a waste of oxygen.. so licks every producers rim under the sun to secure more sub-standard rubbishy written scripts he's managed to spew out to avoid collecting a dole cheque.
I'm thankful that at least only Dave gave him any cash.
my 2c is that if you are going to take the bull by the horns and try to replace the combustion engine - that's the ideal time to sit back and redesign 'cars' from the ground up... as an engineer - if I was looking at them for the first time and told that they are used to move people about (usually just one) I'd think it was the worst most ridiculous design I'd even seen.
Here we have a massive steel thing weighing upwards of a ton - travelling on massive wheels (because of the weight), needing massive roads (because of the size), etc, etc.
It's absolutely mental.
If I build a sort of lightweight electric bicycle it could undoubtedly be made to do 50/60 mph easily. Provided it didn't need to be build to withstand hitting a 1 ton vehicle.
So - why don't we take the opportunity to throw out these mental things - maybe a protected 'light vehicles' motor way lane ?
It should be possible to make an electric 'car' for 4 people that weights 20 or 30 kg more than the batteries and power train (say 500 total). Will it withstand crashing into a range rover ? not a chance. but so what ? remove the range rovers. As for crashing into other things at speed - it's simple momentum - less weight overall - lighter lower strength protection needed. By making the drive train and batteries effectively a separate chassis from the passengers, you could easily remove 90% on the momentum in an accident anyway - so all your 'cage' needs to do is be strong enough to keep the occupant in the car - and deform the impact of, basically their weight.
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