Posts by DMH

Fear not, humanity – Saint Elon has finished part two of his world-saving 'master plan'

Re: Reaching

The article has got it wrong. It's panels on your house roof, not your car.

Tesla books over $8bn in overnight sales claims Elon Musk

Re: I know a few people who put in their orders.

"an electric car just doesn't meet my needs for the occasional several hundred mile getaway"

You're missing the point here. The whole reason Tesla has attracted such interest is they are producing cars that DO meet that need. People are driving these things all round Europe. For free, too.

Re: Great looking but...

The general idea is that you fit one if you get an electric car. If you have street parking, some councils are looking at fitting sockets to lamp posts and setting up dedicated EV spaces. The other option, that some people do currently with their Tesla, is using Superchargers exclusively.

Re: 198,000

He said the factory has in the past been capable of 500,000 per year, and that it would be possible to reach that level again.

jQuery 2.0 kicks old Internet Explorer versions to the curb

IE8 / XP

I'm with you on this. I have a customer that is currently transitioning to IE8. That's right - IE8 is new for them.

The reason is that they run XP internally and must run IE as they have internals apps that demand it (which is lame, but common). XP can only go as far as IE8. Upgrading to Windows 7 or beyond is a much bigger deal.

I think this situation is not unusual for large corporations or government bodies. As a developer I'd love to ditch support for old browsers, but it's just not realistic.

It seems odd to me to branch the project for a 12% reduction in code size due to removal of legacy features. In my view with the current market share of IE7 and IE8 that means jQuery 2 is unlikely to be of use in a real-world setting for some time.

Holly(oaks) talking head is FUTURE of face messaging, claims prof

Re: Douglas Adams thought the idea ludicrous 30 years ago, and this version is no better

That's only in that particular use case. Where I think this might be useful is in human-computer interaction, for example, giving Siri a face or making characters in computer games more realistic and variable.

Tesla vs Media again as Model S craps out on journo - on the highway

I don't know about this case, but in the other two cases referenced Tesla was absolutely right to object about the poor press coverage.

The Top Gear episode - they faked the whole thing - the Tesla Roadster didn't run out of charge on the track as depicted.

As for the BBC's experiment with the Mini E: it has a range of 100 miles so I'm not sure what attempting to drive it to Edinburgh was supposed to prove, other than the stupidity of the BBC reporter. It's not a long distance vehicle - it's meant to be used for the 95% of journeys that are well within its range. I was one of the public 'beta testers' and had the car for 6 months during which time I drove over 4,000 miles at a total electricity cost of £52.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but something was definitely a bit fishy about both of those items.

Elon Musk envisions small town of vegetarians on Mars

Why?

Apart from the novelty, which would wear off quickly, why would anyone want to do this?

In many ways the polar regions of Earth are much more hospitable than anywhere on Mars but there aren't many people that want to live there.

Thank BRIT eggheads for new iMac's sexy seamless knife-edge

Re: That thing looks very thin

What a con! Surely they can fit an entire PC in 5mm? ;)

Photo of the bulge:

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news-gallery/48125/apple-imac-2012-preview-pictures/11

Lawyer sues Microsoft rather than slot an SD card into his Surface

Windows and the bundled apps took up 16GB? That's pretty impressive.

China's Goophone unveils US$99 Android iPad Mini clone

Re: Howexactly is this an iPad clone?

Only if your Lenovo is absolutely identical to a MacBook except for the logo.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ma4codHPTG1r34swho1_400.jpg

McDonalds staff 'rough up' prof with home-made techno-spectacles

Cyborg uprising

Kudos to the McDonalds staff for their "hit first, hit hard" policy with regards to the impending cyborg uprising.

Trekkie wants to build USS Enterprise … in twenty years

Maybe one day

If we ever reach the level of something like Ian M. Banks' "The Culture", with highly advanced technology and infinite resources, then we might build a replica of the Enterprise one day. Just for a laugh. A bit like the way we build working replicas of old navy ships today.

Bookeen CyBook Orizon

Lock in?

The Kindle supports the MOBI format, plus PDF and HTML, so it doesn't have to lock you in to the Amazon format.

Panasonic SC-BT735 Blu-ray home cinema kit

Yes - the same

Yes - the output should be the same. We're talking about digital data being decompressed and output via a digital signal. The old analogue ideas about signal quality don't apply here.

Picture quality

I don't understand why this review, and many others, comment on the quality of the HDMI output of Blu-Ray players. Unless the player is upscaling / downscaling content (which it shouldn't be for 1080p discs output to a 1080p TV) shouldn't the HDMI output be identical for a given disc from player to player?

As far as I know, the player shouldn't be tampering with the data in any way, it's just decompressing the video data and outputting directly to HDMI. Or am I missing something?

Apple to take iPad orders this week?

A couple of uses

A few of places where I thought the iPad might be useful:

- Messing around on the web while watching telly. The iPhone works for this but the screen is a little small. Netbooks/laptops aren't great for this in terms of ergonomics.

- Catching up with news at the breakfast table. Newspapers will be produced that are designed for the iPad's screen, which seems pretty handy. I would't read a book on this thing, but for news it seems ideal.

- Taking notes and writing documents in meetings. The iWork demo was good and made it seem ideal for this. Maybe business will be a big market for this.

Toshiba tunes into TransferJet

Avatar?

If so implemented this could work like the scene in Avatar, where the scientist touches his iPhone like tablet to the computer screen and swipes a 3D image off the screen on to the tablet. He then walks across the room and swipes the image on to a window.

I wonder though if we'll have to endure Bluetooth-like authentication and related clunkiness.