Posts by JaimieV

iPhone 5: skinny li'l fella with better display, camera, software

Re: What would I have liked?

I've *got* root login and an ssh server on my iPhone, as well as a BSD user environment.

Higher res display would be a bit pointless as you already can't see the dots - it'd just suck more battery for no reason.

Nintendo Wii U launch and pricing disclosed

Re: As the Emperor nearly said to Mozart

It also uses Wii remotes, by the way.

Deadly pussies kill more often than owners think

There's a fair bit of literature on it

Here's one of the biggest - synopsis and free download of the paper from http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/273/1602/2749

Airline leaves customer on hold for 15 hours

Re: EDF Suck

EDF now accepts real readings that are lower than the estimates - I did that a couple of weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised, after getting irate at them about it somewhere around the start of the year.

Apple Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion review

Re: For me, Lion sucked donkey balls - is this any better?

"Save open apps" is now fixed, remembers your setting. Local TM backups still exist, same fix as before to disable them. Bluetooth I don't know, never had an issue, but the stack has changed to include Bt4.0 support so perhaps. Wifi is reported to be pretty solid, but I never had trouble before...

You can legitimately install ML into a VM (as long as it's hosted on a Mac) to trial it.

Re: Word of warning.....

You can make your own USB stick out of the downloaded "Install OS X Mountain Lion.app" (which autodeletes after it installs itself, so take a copy), search "InstallESD.dmg" for instructions.

Apple rejoins EPEAT green tech cert program

Disassembly is easy, even with the new kit

Just takes a couple of screwdrivers, go check ifixit.com.

It's taking it apart in a way that you can then fix it *and then put it back together again* that is tricky for some parts, like the screen and battery/case assembly. This is not a consideration for recycling, where all the bits are to be separated permanently.

WD: HDD prices won't fall to pre-flood levels until 2013

Re: SSD prices heading down fast

> Limited write cycles are still an issue

Not really.

Take a current 240gig SSD based on MLC. It reckons on getting at least 3000 rewrites out of each memory cell. Worryingly low, you might think. But because the drive makes sure that each cell is used more or

less equally, including shuffling rarely-used data around occasionally to get to the underused cells.

So add it up. 3000 rewrites of 240gig is 720,000gig. If you write 10 gig of data to your drive every day, which is an awful lot (comparable to an OS reinstall with all apps, or adding a couple of big games *every day*), then the drive would be failing after only 200 years.

The shuffling and other factors will reduce this, but even if *100gig/day* of data is written to the drive you're still looking at 20 years. By which time there'll be petabyte storage the size of your fingernail.

So under very specific use cases (enterprise caching arrays perhaps?) SSD write cycle limits will be a drag. Under general use? Not a problem.

Study: Climate was hotter in Roman, medieval times than now

What have the Romans done for us?

They didn't regard it as habitable - they hated the cold wet place and had to design new dresses for their legionaries to wear to keep their knees warm. They couldn't wait to Romanise the locals and hand control back over to them - letting them get back to Rome where it's nice. Check out any of many "Romans in Britain" histories.

Apple's iPhone 5 connector said to be a control freak

Re: Proprietary

They were both poorly designed bits of crap. The necklace thing could have used the 30 pin connector for both physical support *and* analogue audio, using the headphone socket was completely unnecessary.

HDD oligopoly to keep post-flood prices high till 2014

First, 2.5" drives weren't affected anything like as much as 3.5" prices.

Second, you're comparing a Momentus XT which is a hybrid device, not a plain HDD.

Strong ARM: The Acorn Archimedes is 25

Re: Memories....

I recently did the same for my Amiga 1200, replacing the 3.5" Seagate (2.5gig) with a 4gig CF - it's about three times as quick now.

I came *so* close to getting an A3000 when I was a kid. Summer job terminated £100 short of the price, sigh.

Wealthy Kensington & Chelsea residents reject BT fibre cabinets

Re: What happened to miniaturization, micro-electronics, etc?

It's only partly to do with the size of the clever bit of kit, which has to go into the cabinet in addition to everything that was in there before. And what was in there before it's the wiring, which isn't shrinkable.

VMware sees Mirage, buys up company

Re: "Layers"

All these are just files on virtual disks, so the same techniques that work so well for taking snapshots can be re-used to merge the layers.

Windows very kindly already splits the registry db between files for the system and files specific for the user, so there's likely not too much for the Mirage software to do there.

Other OSes don't use a registry, so there's your independence.

Apple OS X update puts elderly Flash out of its misery

Re: Come on Apple

Or in Finder, hold alt while the Go menu is open.

Red faces abound as boffins build gamma ray lens

Re: Researchers...

Sounds like a classic "That's funny..." moment, to me.

If you're doing something that involves using machined chunks of silicon in the path of gamma rays for some other reason entirely (perhaps they're to neutrally mount some other material that you're irradiating), and then you find that your gamma ray detector isn't getting any rays.... after uttering the words above, you mess around with the layout and discover that removing the silicon sorts it. Rather than going "phew" and carrying on with the original experiment, you say "that's very funny..." So you put the silicon back, move the detector around, move the silicon around, discover silicon refracts the gamma rays. "Eureka!" follows.

Science happens like that all the time, the serendipitous surprise is a major component of the fun. As are the celebratory beers.

WD bigshots spin superfast disk roadmap

Dodgy fixative on numbers

Looks like the 0 from "7 per cent of all the shipped petabytes were HDDs" has slipped down to land "in a 5000GB drive".

Lenovo U300s Ultrabook

Upgrading doesn't invalidate the warranty (on Lenovo or Apple). Breaking something while you're in there does, mind.

US doc finally fingers elusive G-spot

What amuses me

is that there are never any female scientists on these research teams.

Lytro light field camera

Re: Alternative

Works fine for still scenes, very poorly for ones with any movement.

Apple flooded with iPad 3 wireless connection complaints

Apple have been replacing any iPad3's with the wifi issue

since *two days* before this article was published. Do keep up, Myslewski.

http://9to5mac.com/2012/04/04/apple-investigating-new-ipad-wifi-issues-tells-applecare-to-replace-affected-units/

The iPad 3 would make me so horny...

Re: PenTile?

They're not using pentile, it's RGB triplets like the older iPads, just four times as many.

The display only looks worse when showing old-res stuff because you've seen new-res stuff on it - often on the same page, as the OS renders type at the new res but buttons etc at the resolution the app supplies. Sharp text makes the iPad1/2 res old graphics elements look bad *in comparison*.

Putting an iPad2 and 3 side by side, running an old-res app, shows they look identical.

Apple files patent for 'polished meteorite' keyboard

Re: Re: Re: Funny, but I can't see the keys when I am using...

Form and function are not two separate things - they have to work together. Bad form makes excellent function impossible to use; bad function on good form takes us back to the "thin veneer on shit" quote.

Suitably geeky folks can get around bad form, but geeky folks make up a tiny minority of the purchasing public.

Apple will not kill iPad 2 at iPad 3 debut

Because Apple are buying up almost all the production capacity

(points at rumours of double-resolution MacBook series laptops)

Whether your work considers those business laptops or not is another thing entirely...

Apple Thunderbolt Display 27in monitor

It will work as a screen on a displayport machine (Mac or otherwise, if there are any others!), but you'll lose out on the extra functionality.

The USB, firewire, webcam, and mic will not be available. The speakers might well work, since DP carries audio - I can't find any evidence either way.

You will get to use the magsafe power cable!

ASUS: 'We run out of hard disks at the end of the month'

Better start buying then

Read and learn -

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

Ten... earphones for mobiles

Think of it

as evolution in action.

Speak for yourself

My current £80 buds have been in use for about five years now, including much exercise time, and they're still working fine. Great sound, good isolation, no wire noise, no longer for sale so I won't bother mentioning what they are.

Perhaps you should look into why yours aren't worth spending money on?

One in 10 Brits leaves web passwords in their will

What death?

Printers still appear to exist, as does paper. If you don't want to handle it yourself, outsource: Many photo apps have builtin links to assemble and print hardcopy albums of your chosen pics, for example, let alone text binding services at your nearest copy shop. Not using the facilities available doesn't mean they're not there.

It's a good plan, apart from the vendor lockin

More generically, www.crashplan.com gives away software that'll automatically backup to friends and family for free.

In terms of home NAS, for the more techie-DIY inclined: HP Microserver N36L's are dirt cheap (£100 rebate means ~£130) right now, and by far the cheapest way to build a NAS of more than two disks if you want to go that route.

iOS update woes prompt gnashing of teeth for Apple fans

Early reports say

that it's better than 4 on a 3GS. There hasn't been much time to really tell though.

What's not in the iPhone 4S ... and why

On the iPhone too

Siri was (past tense!) available as an app for previous iPhones for over a year.

iPhone 5: Apple 4S, pundits 0

Siri on the Piccadilly line

wouldn't work anyway, since it needs an Internet connection to function, at least in the demonstrated cases.

iPhone 5 a no-show at Apple's 'Let's talk iPhone' event

Imagine!

Talking to your phone. What a curious idea.

'iPhone 4 to be free' when new iPhones ship

Inventory management

Apple loves to minimise its SKUs. If they've sourced a chip that talks both cheaply, it's a lot easier than handling two similar-bit-indistinguishable product trees and the support annoyances that go with that.

Fire burns away the Kindle dream of interactivity

And for everyone doing the maths

* The US prices are WITHOUT tax, while the UK is WITH 20% VAT.

* The $79 Kindle is an ad-supported $109 Kindle, and there is no ad-supported version in the UK.

Apple gives green light to Eton solar cell iPhone case

You forgot GPS

which is very useful, particularly when out of signal areas.

This is a terrible looking case, though. I use a separate PV+battery unit that can be tagged onto a hat/rucksack and then plugged into the device when necessary.

UK is rarely the best place to buy cheap electronic stuff

http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=777_12&products_id=108418

Mac Lion's breath causes Celerra NAS storage to die

The lion's share

For Time Machine, your NAS needs to be running an AFP 3.3 compliant firmware - which means netatalk 2.2beta2 or later. This is from March, and few NAS makers have yet included it in their firmware particularly since it's still only at beta4.

For plain AFP shares, your NAS will still work fine.

For passworded AFP shares, the NAS either has to include the DHX2 library with netatalk (few do but it can often be added by a technically proficient user), or users must train their Lions to use deprecated security protocols instead, eg http://www.alexanderwilde.com/2011/04/os-x-lion-connection-error-with-afp-and-workaround/

For Windows shares, those will still work fine. Unless you're using a Celerra array without the latest patch, in which case your IT department is going to freak out massively.

Apple kills MacBook, soups up MacBook Air

Hasn't been a blackbook

for about four years. They were a very shortlived offering.

iOS 5 files restoke iPad 3 retina display rumour

Lack of resolution independence

OSX and Windows have both toyed with resolution independence - scaling the various widgets to whatever PPI you like - but neither have really got it working.

Without OS support you don't get 2560x1440 15" screens, because without decent scaling built into the OS you wouldn't be able to read the screen from a normal position.

There have been similar hints that Apple might be looking at double-res screens in the nearish future for OSX Lion. I haven't heard of anything in Windows. Linux surely has many unpopular ways of doing it that won't have a chance of affecting the market.

MS advises drastic measures to fight hellish Trojan

"Use a recovery CD to restore your system to a pre-infected state"

You're correct, but MS are clearly advocating scorched earth policy here.

All recovery CD/DVD/partitions offer a blitz and reinstall, a few offer "repair". If the infection is as bad as it sounds, then fixmbr and blitz would work, while repair certainly wouldn't.

And kudos to the Windows security model once again. Slow clap.

Formula 1

It would if it had a

"Make it rain" button.

EQu

There was

a method to update all your DRM'd tracks to higher-quality open ones. I've no idea if that's still running, but check in iTunes, Store, iTunes Plus on the far right.

IAEA: Handling of Fukushima has been exemplary

Of course, they should do that right away.

It's far more important than ensuring that the other damage by the quake and tsunami is repaired, after all. These Japanese have no sense of priority.

Tragedy nurse's boyf fined over medical records abuse

Makin was the nurse girlfriend

She was sacked and later went psycho, apparently killing her child and attempting suicide. The ICO didn't bother chasing her because she's already well cared for at Her Majesty's pleasure.

They did however take the boyfriend Campbell to court, where he was found guilty.

Do read the article, eh?

Microsoft Skype: How the VCs won and Ballmer overpaid

Semi fail at worst

Your first post is flailing in the wrong direction.

Perhaps you aren't aware that

a) Skype calls are gatewayed into national phone networks worldwide, leading to local call prices for many (maybe most) skype-to-landline or skype-to-mobile calls

b) Skype will happily sell you a voice line number located in the geography of your choice, and will then route calls to that number to your Skype ID

Only one end of that gateway is using open standards, and it's not the Skype end.

UK's oldest working telly up for sale

Custom work

If you want a 50" screen in a mahogany box I'm sure you could find a decent artisan for half a year's wages!

Nintendo notches up record sales for 3DS

It's kids brains that are the trouble

Before the age of 4-6, they haven't finished wiring up the links between their eyeball muscles, focal changes, reflexes and signal analysis necessary to construct full depth perception out of two eyes. After they have that sorted, fake 3D like these won't unwire it.

Any problems adults have with it are therefore entirely their own. Lots of folks get motion sickness from playing first-person games on a normal screen, after all - or headaches from trying Magic Eye pics.

On top of which, everyone I know with one of these is an adult - too expensive for kids!

Another year, another iPhone time slip

Networks often *try* to set time on phones...

I was out of the UK last week, and as I do every year or so I experimented with setting my phone to "auto" rather than manually set time for the trip back. I've long been used to "auto" working outside the UK, pretty much everywhere.

For the first time ever, Vodafone UK succesfully changed the timezone when my phone re-registered after wandering off the plane. I was quite startled, I've been waiting for that to work for about ten years.

It's an iPhone4, but I don't expect that makes much difference.