Posts by Fai

Playing by stealth: Twelve gaming headsets to plonk on your noggin

Re: I recognise those headphones..

I have the Kingston variation - and they sound fantastic. I have Yamaha IEMs costing around £100, and wearing these cans, I don't feel like I'm missing fidelity. Not sure what the reviewer was harping on about wanting it to look more like the Steelseries designs - they're slightly more audiophile looking without being brash (although once you're wearing them you wouldn't be looking at them anyway).

Wearing with glasses: together it's ok - not so gentle I forget I'm wearing glasses with a headset over it, but it doesn't noticeably affect the placement, and I can still adjust my glasses.

Just a note on surround sound audio cards that reviewers seem to miss:

If your computer can already process audio to output to 5.1 setups or mix/reprocess these down to headphones / 2 speaker setups (virtual speakers or the Dolby Headphone feature), then you could actually just purchase a decent headset with the standard 3.5mm jack and save money on skipping the USB audio box that comes with 'USB headsets'. Gaming headset manufacturers seem to add a large premium on those - like the Astro mixamp pro which cost £100 (though it does look nice).

If you have a (for example) Xonar DX, then this should already have decent audio processing.

EU move to standardise phone chargers is bad news for Apple

Re: Standardised connector... like, err, Micro USB

Just to correct you, Ericsson from 2000 (and thereafter as Sony-Ericsson) only had two types of connectors before standardising on Micro USB. The latter of the two appeared around the time of the first Cybershot/Walkman-branded phones.

Sony, before Sony Ericsson, had their own connector.

With Nokia in the early 2000s, it was pretty much expected that if you asked someone if they had a spare Nokia charger to top up your phone, you'd find one. Several years later on , it was pretty easy to find Sony Ericsson chargers when the Walkman phones embedded themselves into the public consciousness.

Drupal hacked, resets passwords after millions of accounts exposed

Obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/936/

I'm wondering how long it would take to decrypt a bookload of bcrypt-hashed accounts (assuming Drupal used bcrypt by default with phpass), though the groups site using an "older" hashing algorithm would make that a moot point.

'Untidy' Shoreditch just CONFUSES American techies - Olympic hub team

Re: Missing the point

Stratford to Liverpool St is 7 minutes on the national rail lines if you want to start nitpicking!

Apple's next OS X said to be targeted at 'power users'

Re: forced obsolescence, Apple douchebaggery

Macbook Airs from 2008 are going for around £3-400 on Ebay. That's almost halfway to a new Macbook Air. I know because I just sold one - and there's others going for a similar price.

Dead Steve Jobs tried to KILL Ashton Kutcher from beyond the grave

Eating fruit alone, and nothing else, as fruitarians may do is one way to put your body into serious whack. You're not meant to process so much fructose at once - it has similar effects on your liver to metabolising alcohol without the mind-altering effect - you'll damage your organs eventually.

One piece of fruit a day is not going to harm you, with the package of fibre and vitamins, but as with anything else out of moderation, you're just self harming. Wonder why the USA where they have high-fructose corn syrup in everything instead of cane sugar has such high levels of obesity?

Ten affordable mid-sized Full HD monitors

Re: Asus PA248Q

As a proud owner of the PA248Q, I've not had issues playing Crysis nor CSGO on it.

Sir James Dyson slams gov's 'obsession' with Silicon Roundabout

Re: Web fads and video games@Captain Underpants

One bad Dyson does not mean all of them are bad.

We've had the DC02 for 15 years! It does the same job as when it was brought in the 20th century, and although some of the springs (cable rewind seems to be a common issue - other working DC02s I've seen suffered the same issue) and cover latches are a little loose, it still works. For a first generation mass-produced product (not counting the Japanese version), it's a good demonstration of British engineering.

Not to discount the Numatics - the Henry we had for industrial use just works solidly day after day - and the outward design hasn't changed in decades, though I'm sure the internals have had steady improvements over the years.

USB 3.0 speed to DOUBLE in 2013

USB 3.1 SuperSpeedPlus

There sorted, now go release.

Flash memory made immortal by fiery heat

So memristors will have more time to mature before mass adoption (if they are indeed going to fulfill their potential to be more capable than current memory tech), just as SSDs were slowly reaching affordability vs spinning platters of glass. It'll perhaps prolong the transition period of existing NAND-based memory.

I think what will happen is that if thermal annealing really does become a prominent feature of flash storage, it'll start to look like a hybrid of PCM and current flash where thermal annealing is a regular activity used with TRIM and wear levelling to manage the drive state - especially if the cells lives are reduced to something like 10 writes through process shrinks and high MLC levels. Perhaps this is what keeps Moore's Law alive for flash memory.

Incidently I read about this same topic on Ars, and it was surprising to see the number of commenters there who'd not read the article properly about the localised heating - so to Reg's credit it's refreshing not having to read comment after comment of 'ovens in your pocket fail'.

Apple's new 'Assembled in USA' iMac a bear to upgrade, repair

Re: This article is STUPID and WRONG

Only on the 27" model - this is the 21.5" model.

Hong Kong visitors get all-in-one guidebook and phone

It's pretty easy to buy a Three PAYG simcard from one of the shops in the airport. Or even easier, any other networks from the 7-11 in the arrivals area. They're pretty cheap, but it does take a bit of wrangling around with the call menus (and instruction booklets) to sort out the unlimited data packages, daily or weekly.

Interestingly enough, I noticed quite a few vending machines in Heathrow T3 selling prepay packages.

Online criminal records checks to save Surrey council £300k

Security & ISAs

The CRB will make registered bodies jump through hoops before they can process disclosures electronically. In fact, more so than processing paper applications as computer systems have to be locked down to pass the relevant ISOs required. Certainly though, this doesn't stop other council departments handling different sets of data from being irresponsible, but as a commercial umbrella body, everything has to be tightly controlled.

Regarding V&B aka ISA, we (at DDC) had this in place ready after months of development, but as the new Coalition government rolled in, this was halted and abandoned (pretty much like many other Labour-led projects really). It would have signalled a revolution otherwise as it places the onus on the applicant rather than the employer.

However, the move to e-Bulk 4 years ago has really made a difference to the turnaround - a good number of applications nowadays come back same day! Against the 1-2 week turnaround for the paper-process, this is a massive improvement, just as how email is now preferred instead of regular old postal letters.

Spotify ports its music streamer to Linux

Already a linux client...

that's open source.

Despotify is your friend. You'll still need a premium account to use it though, ever since Spotify decided it didn't want it freeloading songs without ads. (or hack the code yourself)

Vodafone offers customers chance to pay for own infrastructure

Whatever happened to

UMA? Orange supports this with the blackberries (plus a few of the Samsungs and SEs when internal politics don't stop them from being released in the UK).

It seems to work well (most of the time, when it doesn't bugger up), especially when switching between the no-reception area that is in some parts of London indoors onto wifi and the outside network.

3G to your mobile via your own wifi network - now why aren't more phones and networks doing this?