Posts by That Awful Puppy

Hasselblad H4D-40 Stainless Steel 40Mp camera

Oh dear

I hope you're trolling. I really do.

Pro equipment

That's perfectly true. But sometimes the clients want a higher MP count. Do they need it? Probably not. But they pays their money, they makes their choice.

These MF cameras are really pro - their primary purpose is to generate income for the photographer, and if they generate it by allowing the photographer to say to the client: "40 Megapickles? I can do that," then they do their job perfectly.

It's pure physics

In very general terms, the larger the sensor, the larger the aperture and the longer the focal length, the less depth of field.

Which is why everything is in focus with a compact (tiny sensor, f/4.0-ish max aperture, 10-30 mm focal length) and you have to stop down like a mutha to get acceptable depth of field with a medium format camera (huge sensor, f/2.8 lens, which in the case of a duck was stopped down to f/5.6, 80 mm).

The depth of focus, as you term it, could hardly be called disappointing, much in the same way that the kinetic energy of a 7.62 mm bullet could hardly be called disappointing compared to that of a 150 mm artilery shell. Different beasts entirely.

Looking for noise performance in a MF camera is also very much meaningless - these things are designed to perform superbly at low ISO settings, but for anything else, a Nikon D3s will wipe the floor with them. But at ISO 200, the images from the Nikon will look terrible compared to those from the Hassy.

I do think the sample shots are even worse those usually posted by the measurebators over at DPreview, though. C'mon, El Reg, get me cameras to review, and all the sample shots will be of models that could make the Eee babe green with envy.

Leica S2 professional medium format DSLR

Oh my

I want this so badly. And a complete studio setup, too. Anyone interested in a low-mileage kidney?

Apple MacBook Air 13in late 2010

OK, I want one

Happy now?

Hands on with the new Apple MacBook Air

Best be trolling, person of colour*

"About the same size" is obviously newspeak for "nearly twice the thickness and nearly 50% heavier", then? As to performance, well, I'm quite sure a dual-core Atom will just wipe the floor with Core2Duo.

* before the PC police shoot me in the face, it's a bloody meme, I just substituted the nasty word for a more acceptable phrase.

WD thrusts forth its mighty 3TB internal hardness

You win 9k+ Internets, good sir!

The headline is just astonishingly good. In related hardness-thrusting news, please also cover the fact that IBM has a technology called MaxCore.

iOS 4.1 out today, iPhone hackers say

Well, boo-hoo

With 4.1, my factory-unlocked 3G feels young again, and to me, that's all that matters.

(Yes, yes, I know, Apple sux0rz because 4.0 rendered the 3Gs barely usable, yaddayaddayadda, Android FTW, yaddayaddayadda, haha, I'm a tard for paying so much for an inferior product, etc etc etc. Well, my phone manufacturer actually cleans up their mess. How's your Android update for, erm, just about any operator-branded phone going? Not so well? Ah.)

Apple releases iOS 4.1 into the wild

Works well on mine

My battered old 3G is now a metric f*ckton faster than it used to be. So try upgrading to 4.1 first, then decide on the downgrade.

Group Test: smartphone satnav apps

Ovi is nice

I used iGo on a stand-alone satnav and it wasn't very good, very prone to crashing. Mind you, the satnav was Czech in origin, and the only things they seem to do well is girls and beer. Not an insignificant contribution towards making the world a better place, to be sure, but that doesn't make their satnavs any less rubbish.

Navigon I tried on the iPhone 3G and it works reasonably well, but is prone to crashing. Also, it seemed quite dear for what it did. So then my contract was up for renewal and I bought a Nokia E72.

Ovi Maps, daft name notwithstanding, does the job well, although the maps for my particular region seem to be quite old, but they are very precise. The user interface is nice enough, and the guidance is generally spot-on. All in all, the phone is awful as far as the software is concerned, but the keyboard is great for texting and the satnav works well enough. I'm not buying another S60 phone again, but give me a nice featurephone with a QWERTY keyboard and Ovi Maps, and I, an iTard of the highest magnitude, will happily use it as my second phone.

Mariposa mastermind arrested in Slovenia

Right

That ought to put our tiny, adorably f***ed-up country on the map.

Apple's fresh Mac mini stripped naked

Why ruin it?

OS X does home theatre very nicely. And everything else, too, especially for dumb users like yours truly. Or is 2010 yet another Year Linux Takes Over Desktops(TM)?

Of course, halving the price would just make it a nasty little computer like the ones punted by Dell, and we know how successful those are, don't we?

Nokia C5

Want!

A perfect second phone to my (oh so old) iPhone 3G. It does texting, calling and satnav, the three things I actually use on my second phone, and the battery seems generous enough.

Superslim iPhone 4 enough to fend off Android?

Oh.

Right. My bad, I meant pictures from that 12 MP phone camera.

Although I like my 10 MP DSLR just fine - shot with an EOS 7D the other day, with its eleventyhundred megapickles, but the tonality was just wrong, and don't get me started on user interface - Canon could learn a lot from Microsoft, and I hate Microsoft's UI design.

Nice, with just one giant fail

Ever seen the pictures from that 12 MP camera? Yes. They suck. All they do is take up memory.

Otherwise, a pretty decent article with some nice insight.

See also:

http://www.iainclaridge.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/merkley2.jpg

Needs moar megapickles, as the fine gentlemen of /p/ would say.

Audi dreams up App Store for user-designed cars

Oh god, yes please

Or an app that forces them to keep a distance of at least one iPod from the vehicle in front ...

Only two people I know who drive Audis aren't complete twats. And both of them can be right berks at times.

Microsoft's Courier tablet dies before it lives

Right, that's the iPad sorted

I distinctly remember all the fanbois shouting at the top of their lungs as to how the Slate (and other vapourware) will spell the death of iPad, which is, of course, utter sh*te for not having all the USB ports a geek would want.

Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx: A (free) Mactastic experience

Good, now all they need is apps

Yes, I'm talking about an office suite that isn't quite as terrible as OpenOffice, an image editing app that isn't quite as useless as the GIMP, and some sense of what's important.

Oh, and yesterday, I saw a truly sad sight. A severely overweight freetard with a GPL 3 T-shirt. I bet that particular piece of apparel has all the pulling power of a snail.

Official: Apple iPhone is a chick magnet

No.

Women are sensitive to industrial design. Smartphones, with the exception of the Cupertinian underwear remover, are designed by geeks, for geeks. Badly.

Dell Latitude Z

At least it's not overpriced like a Mac

I mean, for just 300 quid less, you could buy a Macbook Pro with vastly superior specs, at the expense of an added pound of weight and 4 mm of additional thickness, but a smaller overall footprint.

Yay for Dell!

Leaked details on HP iPad challenger reveal tight fight

Good

Because all I really want is a tablet with a desktop OS with some touch functionality tacked on and a short battery life.

On the other hand, they may sell them in the exclusive "Slate by HP. Sweat by Ballmer." edition.

Turk unwraps doner kebab robot

Kebab is for kids

Britain has apparently yet to be exposed to the deadly delight that is authentic Bosnian burek, a product so saturated in fat that it can turn everything it touches, including walls, transparent.

Oddly enough, it tends to turn people quite opaque and corpulent.

Apple uncloaks deep details of its 11 iPad apps

Quite

Of course, your Tablet PC is also incredibly user friendly, has dedicated apps designed for the tablet interface and isn't bulky or expensive ... Right?

Nerd alert: First Lucid Lynx Ubuntu beta fun

The hurt of the butt

Butthurt much? All the fine specimens of hackerdom you mentioned are perfectly happy to work for free - in fact, I'm sure they evangelise their position to anyone, whether they want to listen or not. Ubuntu use this to their advantage, and to the advantage of their users, who mostly won't give a thimbleful of fresh iguana faeces about who wrote the stuff anyway.

If they actually manage to turn the egofest of criminally abysmal user interfaces that is Linux into something that is viable for consumers, so much the better. Not that I'm likely to switch from OS X anytime soon, of course, but then again, unlike most Linux advocates, I actually use my computer to earn money*.

* for values of money approaching a bloody pittance.

Crap Scottish weather favours ginger hair

Gingers

Pale, freckly gingers, preferrably with sizeable, milky white chesticles ...

Mmmmm.

(Mine's the one with Firecrotch Mag in the pocket.)

Nokia No.2 is so sorry for N97 debacle

Nokia is going to hell

My first Nokia - I had Siemens phones before that, and they were just lovely - was a 6280, with S40. Which was nice, because it was fast.

So, I bought my second Nokia, which was a forgettable S60 handset. Rubbish, absolutely rubbish. Sure, I could install anything on it, but that didn't make it any less rubbish for making calls and texting. And then, because I'm a gadget obsessed moron, I bought the N78, because it had GPS and was cheap. Oh dear lord. They managed to make it even worse. Sure, it was a bloody multimedia computer, but I just wanted a phone with GPS. Which it wasn't. Vodafone customization wasn't helping any, either.

I then bought an iPhone. While I miss a physical keyboard for blind texting, it does everything else superbly. My (recently ex) GF has a Sony Ericsson slider, and if I needed a second phone, I'd buy one of those, their UI seems to be pretty good. But all in all, nothing beats my iPhone for user experience.

Nokia gained their market share with great products. They are losing it with stupid management who believed the Web 2.0 hype.

Windows 7 soars while Mac OS X trips online

Lovely.

Oh yes, please, let me have wobbly windows and desktop themes rather than a system that works with, well, you know, real world apps. As in office suites (and no, Open Bloody Orifice does not count, because it manages to screw up even simple Word documents in a spectacular fashion) or Photoshop (GIMP? Knee grow, please ...).

Linux is like the kit Lancia Top Gear tested - great fun to tinker with, looks lovely, shame the brakes jam up after a few laps.

Fanbois Apple buyers howl over crocked iMacs

What a lovely list you have

Re: 1, 2, 3, and 4

Some of us prefer screwing around with things other than computers. Like girls, who, unlike even the prettiest iMac, are soft and smell really nice.

Google open sources flash-happy Chrome OS

So, it's just like every other consumer Linux, then?

Bloody useless, I mean.

(St. Jobs for he doth bringeth me great joy with his mobile offerings.)

EU sweeps up dodgy ringtone companies

Good

Hanging's too good for the likes of them.

A grenade up their backside, though ...

Microsoft pimps bogus Windows 7 'launch parties'

Oh FFS

I just knew there would be one of those smug freetards going on and on and on about Ubuntu launch parties.

You know what, I googled them. And this is what came out (links perfectly SFW, but may cause terminal boredom):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/freeculture/sets/72157607438938969/

http://photos.jonathancarter.co.za/v/ubuntu-party-7-04/

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArizonaTeam/Installfest/Jaunty-Tucson

Quite frankly, I'd rather be trapped in a burning bus with Microsoft's stock models than attend one of these.

So please, do kindly shut up about your computer club meetings or at least have the decency to stop calling them "parties".