Posts by Station Grey

Feuding fanbois in a flap over piracy haven in new iOS 7 jailbreak tool

Re: Stupid enough?

The Chinese perhaps?

NSA sez NO to prez: Spooks ban Obama from using iPhones

Wow, you're either very bad at this or your country is. Freeview HD TV, free, decent iPhone PAYG SIM from Giffgaff, £10 a month and maybe 25 quid for line rental and a reasonably fast 30Mb connection.

And landline? What's that for?

Total, a £35 a month.

Apple's brilliant plan to fix iOS Maps: Get YOU to do it

It's hugely interesting that Reg's good review of the iPhone 5 and subsequent reporting of news stories around it seems to go down so badly with commenters on here these days. In the comments above, and over the last few days, are various mentions of impartiality on the part of El Reg, even kickbacks from Apple, and constant jibes about iSheep, Apple fanbois etc. There are also constant pro-Android statements and attendant back-slapping, and almost any comment with even a slight perceived Apple slant gets marked down hugely while anything anti-Apple or Pro-Android gets marked up.

It seems to me, as an impartial observer with a good working knowledge of all the devices at stake, that it's not so much that El Reg has changed in any way but that the readership (or commentship at least) has. Why does any post regarding Apple suddenly feel like the comments section of a YouTube video? Where did all the insightful wit go to be replaced by a team of ignorant Android evangelism?

It all feels very 1995 to me. But I now expect a torrent of red arrows for not slagging off the biggest company in the world. I must be a communist or something. Go Android! Woo! iSheep suck! Woo! etc.

Hands on with the Apple iPad 3

Re: Retina display??

They did explicitly point out that the 'retina' aspect is a subjective one and dependent on your eye's distance from the screen. From 12" away it's still 'retina'.

TBH, the whole 'retina' naming is slightly childish I think. I know what resolution means and I know what pixels are. 2048x1536 is a lot and plenty whatever way you look at it :) I don't care what it's branded as.

Re: All good-

There are several apps available that let you use the iPad/iPhone as an auxiliary monitor, and have been for a few years. They work over wi-fi and work well. Not fast enough refresh for gaming but entirely usable for working on.

Air Display, iDisplay, Spashtop XDisplay, DisplayLink, iScreen and others. Essential for app design are also more specific apps like XScope that will let you view a fixed portion of your desktop display on the device even as you move your (Photoshop etc) document around the screen so you can see how it will look on the device.

Re: Connectivity

Works perfectly well with the several EOS cameras I've tried with it, as well as others I've used. Not heard of anything that doesn't work and not seen this myself. It uses either SD cards or USB so that covers every camera in one or two ways.

Canon focuses on 25th birthday EOS DSLR

Re: How Much?!?!?

The launch price of the MkII in the UK was £2299, which equates to around £2500 with inflation. So the MkIII *is* more expensive, but by around 500 quid, not 'over £1000'.

It might be double the current cost of a MKII, but that's because it's a 4 year-old camera that's just been replaced!*

*Well, sort of.

Pentax Q compact system camera

Bokeh?

Can I just pedantically point out the misunderstanding of the term 'bokeh' in the article, as misused by ignorant forum commenters everywhere but, ideally, not in proper reviews themselves.

It's a horrible-looking work, but 'bokeh' refers to the visual *quality* of the out of focus areas - ie. the shape of the artefacts, the smoothness or otherwise of the effect. It's not the fact in itself that a low depth of field has been used to produce these de-focussed areas.

You can't say "The aperture opens wide enough to allow some degree of bokeh" because it's like saying it "allows some degree of nice". You mean it allows a shallow depth of field, or background de-focussing or whatever. You can then go on to discuss the quality of the bokeh if you like :)

iPad 2, iPhone 4S finally jail-broken

That's like saying I've noticed that my alarm going off coincides with it getting lighter in the morning and therefore my alarm clock must be in cahoots with the sun.

Jailbreaks come out sometime after a product is released. As do replacement products. Neither can realistically come at any other time. But as it happens, the two are rarely anything close to one another at all.

You do realise that it's not Apple who release jailbreaks, right?

Anyway, I for one am one happy bunny. At last my 4S works properly without being pointlessly restricted. Good work Geeky Hacker Dudes.

Nokia rolls out N9 across Europe, avoids UK

Camera resolution

I've not used the camera on either the N8 or N9 so can't compare them, but a greater resolution does not in any way guarantee an increase in picture quality, and often reduces it. The megapixel count just tells you how many pixels there are, it doesn't cover the quality of the image they capture. Increasing resolution on a given sensor size just means smaller pixels - and these capture light worse than larger ones.

Higher resolutions can be useful for cropping images or for printing, but for viewing on a camera or a monitor it's generally better to have a lower megapixel count. If you think about it, even a modern 20" widescreen monitor at 1600x900 resolution can only display a 1.4MP image. Any more than that is only going to be visible by zooming into the image.

OS X Lion roars, coughs on appearance in App Store

Any real point?

Bit of an odd article. How is it "the first major operating system upgrade"? The clue's in the name, it's called 10.7. It's the seventh major OS upgrade according to my maths book.

And why are they fanbois for downloading an OS upgrade? Isn't that what people normally do? Is everyone that uses W7 a fanboi then? Very odd.

And on what level is it a 'soft upgrade'? According to who? Not Apple certainly.

Seems like mild mac-bashing with no real meat to it. Though it's quite amusing to see people gurgling with joy while missing the author's point when he used 'twat' as the the singular of 'tweets' :) Doesn't everyone call them that then?

Apple iMac 27in

Overpriced

I have the last model 27" with the i7 processor. Lovely machine.

Was it expensive? Yes... though buying from Apple's refurb store will save you a large wad. Was it overpriced compared to the competition? No, it was cheaper.

Sure you can buy the equivalent components for less and build yourself, or even go to a small independent company and have them do it. But go to a comparable big name and you'll pay more for something probably lower spec.

So it's entirely fair to complain that big all-in-ones are expensive but irrelevant to say that this iMac is overpriced.

As said, even buying separately won't be cheap.. a Dell 27" IPS monitor is nearly 700 quid. And it doesn't have a Mac squeezed inside it.

FT sticks it to Apple

Your choice

You don't 'need' a web app. Nothing stopping you accessing the full or mobile ft sites. But if you want to download the entire edition to read offline, or just want a site optimised for touch screens then a web app is better.

Platforms

If you read the blurb on their site, they say that other platforms are coming soon.

It's all very well to say that a site/web app should be device-agnostic, but they still have to be tweaked and tested for each one. Makes complete sense to provide for the biggest player first.

iPhone users get more sex than Android fans

Exaggerating?

It does seem a little odd that the gadget users that have most sexual partners are Panasonic SLR owners... especially considering Panasonic don't actually make any SLRs.

Microsoft digs Macs in back-to-school ads

Wrong joystick

Kid, you need to have sex with someone, and soon!

Wouldn't work anywhere else

If you consider buying a BMW instead of an Audi, you'll find the BMW might spoil your fun.

For example, you'll find that some of the seat colours available in your Audi just aren't available on any BMW.

You'll also find that it's more inconvenient to service because your current Audi dealer doesn't support BMWs.

Also, you'll find that all spare parts designed for Audis simply won't fit it a BMW.

Some of the controls you're used to just don't work in the same way either - for instance, the button second to the left from the main control panel operates the rear heated window, and not the air recirculation that you're used to.

BMWs just aren't very good at multimedia - if you bought the Audi DVD player you'll find it no longer works in a BMW.

You might find the steering wheel works differently in a BMW than in your Audi*.

*I don't understand this one either.

Beeb, British Museum face smut issues over saucy pot

Oh dear

Much more worrying than the story is the headline. It's the first time I've noticed our poor Reg slipping into the abyss of the US style of confusing commas and the word 'and'. Is 'Beeb' a place in the county of 'British Museum' or is it just gobledegook?

When are you going to start capitalising all words in a headline for the sake of it and putting Zs in as many words as possible?

Brit consumers shun the iPad - for now

Expensive?

Frankly, I'd find it hard to 'justify parting with at least £500 for one' too when they cost from £429.

Anti-Internet Explorer 6 protests grow with online petition

Recommendations to update to IE7?

Surely recommending the NHS (or others) upgrade from IE6 to IE7 is like recommending they upgrade from carrier pigeons to telegrams. What's wrong with any of the range of modern browsers?

The implicit assumption that Microsoft are in some way a 'default' or ideal candidate is ludicrous. They've never shown any ability to produce a decent browser and nothing in their roadmap shows they've any plans to. For developers, designers and content producers of all kinds, it's thoroughly depressing that MS are almost being encouraged to hold up development of the internet. Nobody with any kind of public responsibility should be seen advocating IE usage in any way. Firefox, Safari, Opera, even Chrome (I just don't get Chrome) - there's a wealth of choice.