Posts by Dave 126 10667 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
>always loaded down with shitware... ...I'll take a Thinkpad
Um.... Okay. I can only assume that in the wake of their shiotware scandal, Lenovo have re-thought their policy.
Still, Lenovo, like Toshiba and Macbooks tend to score well in the independent measures of reliability that I can find on-line.
Bizarre:
If you want anything other than 16:9, your new laptop choices are:
Apple, Microsoft or Google.
Various Macbooks: 16:10
Surface Pro 3: 3:2 (15:10)
Chromebook Pixel: 3:2 (15:10)
If anyone here can add to this list, please do! :)
Still, my old 17" 1920 x 1200 Dell keeps chugging along on its Core 2 Duo T9550. Really though, it's so heavy that it doesn't usually travel, so I could replace it with a desktop and a large 16:10 monitor (still available).
That's a good point. It may be that it is selective about the axis and magnitude of rotation / translation that turns it on. Otherwise, it could be mitigated in software - i.e if the master phone is connected to a car system, it won't turn on.
The concept is far from new, some Casio G-Shocks could have their electroluminescent back-lights activated by a twist/jerk in the late '90s - and it could well pre-date that.
Off topic:
Check out the Citizen Scientific Calculator Watch:
http://www.digital-watch.com/DWL/1work/citizen-scientific-calculator-watch/
Not to mention the idea that some of Omega's best known watches (besides the Speedmaster) boast a very 1970s design.
Take this Seamaster, for example:
http://41.media.tumblr.com/4389014dc8c8b6c8c48c28d78fe27cf7/tumblr_mmjyw4Dvyu1royoxho1_1280.png
Or Omega's Project Alaska, for those who just need more anodised aluminium iun their life:
http://www.watchlinks.net/Basel08/Basel08/omega11.jpg
Or this, based on a 1969 design (or based on a Cylon's head, it would appear):
http://www.ablogtowatch.com/omega-spacemaster-z-33-watch-review/
>So basically after many pages we all find out what we knew anyway. That its a piece of overpriced cr@p
Is that genuinely what you understood the bottom line of the review to be? You have an opinion and that's fine, but misrepresenting the views of someone else is disrespectful. A normal person would parse the review as being more like:
Useful for some people, comes across as a version 0.9 product, software needs some tuning and that will probably happen... if it's your sort of thing then maybe wait until hardware MKII, and even then it won't suit everybody - and that's fine.
Really, no iDevice ever came into its own until at least version 2.
If we can't have fewer notifications, I'd rather the process of finding out whether I can ignore one doesn't involve digging my phone out of my pocket.
The Apple Watch is overkill for me, as is Google Wear and even Pebble. Martian Watch are on the right track, a small functional module that can be incorporated into a traditional analogue watch without too much of an aesthetic compromise.
I don't mind the Reg coverage of the Apple Watch too much, but it would be nice if they gave some time to non Apple, a Google or Pebble watches.
> Developers countered this by being more and more creative, and rising to the challenge by optimising their coding.
Nowadays, the game developers tend to use an off-the-shelf game engine, or an existing in-house game engine, so they aren't in the position to tweak it as much. However, game engines and drivers (and the line between them is blurring) do improve a bit over time.
... a car that doesn't have bumpers matched to the body colour. The vast majority of cars on the UK roads do, and it is a silly idea - since the idea of a bumper is to shrug-off small knocks, bumpers that are easy to damage cosmetically are just daft.
I think the UK's Consumer Association looked into the issue a few back, and found far too many cars had bumpers that were damaged at collisions of less than 5 Mph, and that said bumpers often cost in excess of £300 to replace.
The cost is born not just by the person who chooses a car with unfit-for-purpose components, but by all motorists through their insurance premiums.
The Oxford English Dictionary has Android as meaning 'having the likeness of a man'.
The rough convention in technology and science fiction is: Androids are robots, but not all robots are androids. I say 'rough' because of course the fun of the genre is that writers can make their own rules and play with boundaries
Androids are robots designed to look human or near enough, so: Simulants from Blade Runner, some Cylons from the new BSG, Ash and Bishop from Alien, Data from StarTrek, and R. Daneel Olivaw as examples.
The middle ground would be C3PO from StarWars - not designed to pass for human, but to operate well in human environments. Of course 'man-like' is open to interpretation.
Thank you Dan 55 for that link. It makes things clearer - the accused accessed information destined for 3rd party developers. These developers would have used fairly standard x86 AMD machines to develop the XBOX One games. This makes sense - they start developeing these games many months if not years before the actual console hardware is finalised,
True, Rolex are the go-to watch for people wanting a status symbol. However, they are very well made. Here's a look inside Rolex's manufacturing facilities, from a popular watch blog:
http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/inside-rolex
For juxtaposition, here's an Industrial Designer looking at the processes used in the Apple Watch. You don't need to be a Apple fan to find it interesting, a passing interest in manufacturing will suffice:
http://www.core77.com/posts/34524/Industrial-Designer-Explains-Production-Methods-Shown-in-Apple-Watch-Manufacturing-Videos
Due to Apple's volume of production (and their confidence in their projections) they can use processes that others probably wouldn't.
Yep, when I was in school in the mid-nineties, we each had our own storage on the server, and it was drummed into us that we only use local storage for the duration of a session before moving our files to the server. We would have had no need for a single Gigayte, let alone 20 - admittedly we weren't using video, but most school classes won't require that.
>Is there an advantage in giving kids a god awful office suite so that they can cut and paste nicely formatted crap immediately or would it be better to give them non linear tools like pencil and paper and give them time and techniques to complete a task?
Like any tool, it depends upon how it is used. When I was in secondary school, we learnt the basics of engineering drawing by hand - fifteen years later, that same school room is filled with SolidWorks workstations. I only started using parametric CAD at university, though having the hand-skills was a good foundation.
The technology that I feel really aided my learning in school was a Casio graphics calculator - allowing me to quickly visualise equations and thus understand calculus more easily. However, it was still useful for me to plot graphs by hand (something about doing a hand-eye task allows the brain to do things in the background).
Windows isn't just Office. Most industry-standard software - in whatever field - is available for it.
>Basically, what this does is to force users to get all Windows applications and updates from the MS Store; and we all know the delights of walled gardens...
My toaster is a walled garden. My kettle is a walled garden. My clock radio is a walled garden, and it never asks for updates. They are fit for purpose.
Walled gardens suit some people just fine. If a person doesn't know enough to turn this feature off, there is a fair chance they would be better off inside the walls.
Most dogma (such as 'walled gardens are always bad') are mental walled gardens.
>I fail to see in what way shape or form this will benefit the vast majority of users.
If you become the administrator for your granny's laptop, you won't have to answer phone calls asking what some obscure security dialogue box means. Basically, you will impose a walled-garden on them, giving the same appeal as a Chromebook or iOS device. Many users won't be bothered that they can only use MS-approved software, since it will cover all their needs (email, skype, photo-editing, office tasks etc).
I'm over-simplifying, but I'm giving an example of how a home user *might* find this useful.
>Windows will not die because some other OS takes its market share by storm, it's going to die fibrillating in the throes of its own morass, and other OSes will just have to fill the void.
A trend that has reduced the amount people use Windows is a lot of productivity work can be done in OS-agnostic web browsers. This work can be responding to emails, or it can be CAD modelling hosted on AWS, as examples. Another trend is the use of mobile devices, mostly running Android or iOS. Still, I haven't seen anything that suggests the imminent demise of Windows.
Gecko feet and hands would be perfect for astronauts... much like the Velcro-shoes worn by the cabin crew in Kubrick's 2001 on the way to the Moon.
I once read in New Scientist that Velcro wouldn't be strong enough for that task, but mini suction-cups would be (or vice-versa, it was a long time ago). As any fule knos, geckos feet provide a huge surface area; their pads are structures that are subdivided many times over down to the microscopic level.
That might bring Google afoul of various Monopoly Commissions. Also, such a service couldn't be advertised as 'internet'. Thirdly, Google make money from people visiting the sites of companies who advertise on Google; an advert for BobsCarRental.com would be useless if the user couldn't visit it. Lastly, people remember the horror of walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe.
Other than that, you plan's a good un!
>It's a hybrid of the business plans of Ting (variable month-to-month pricing without penalties), T-Mobile (free international texts and data), and Apple (special SIM card).
The difference is, Google isn't doing this to make money directly. Google is doing this to put pressure on the established network operators to give users a better deal on data (and therefore use Google's core services more).
I I find most interesting is the flexibility: Going to work? Grab your normal smartphone on the way out of your house. Going camping? Grab the toughphone with the big battery. Going out to get really really drunk? Grab the cheap, lightweight semi-expendable phone.
Quartz watches are a great example of good technology - smaller, tougher, more accurate and far cheaper than what came before.
Quartz analogue versus quartz digital is mostly a UI question. For most time telling, analogue suits me better. There is probably some serious data somewhere (think airforce or NASA studies) about how long it takes a human to grok information from displays.
It is interesting to read the AMA thread whilst thinking about OSS.
- Power Users. He makes the point that "it sucks to be a power user because you will always be in the minority, and people design for the majority because that's where the marketshare is".
Because the ethos of OSS is that users are knowledgeable enough to contribute, they are almost by definition 'power users'. They can find it hard at times to design for the 'majority', because they have long ago forgotten what it is to be a novice user. Someone knowledgeable enough to contribute code probably won't be intimidated by a command line; indeed they will often find it the most efficient way to get a computer to do what they want it to. That's fine.
A lot of work goes into UIs. A lot of research, studies, cognitive science, testing... it takes a lot of man hours, which small OSS teams don't always have access to. It's expensive. The results can polarise people. It's not just a pretty wrapper on the serious stuff.
I like OSS, but I don't believe that it is immune from "Ego, politics, and lies".
>his text is so full of "jargon speak" that it's almost as though he is speaking another language
C'mon, give him another try! He uses metaphors and similes to explain his terms. "Hamburger menu" is fairly self-evident, "Radial menu" is linked to a picture (AKA "pie menu"). Generally he does a good job of explaining the thinking behind UI elements. Unlike a buzzword-using marketing twit, he's using words to make the picture clearer, not murkier!
>Why should someone buy the device that's better engineered when they don't understand what's better about it?
Why would anyone use a beautifully engineered corkscrew when what they want is a can opener? A device should be judged on its fitness for purpose.
>So is it an espresso machine (as implied by the name) or a percolator (as implied by the article).
The two terms are not mutually exclusive: "To percolate" means to cause a liquid to pass through a filter.... an espresso machine is merely one way of achieving that.
But yeah, it's a form of espresso machine, 400 bar if Wired's diagram is to be believed.
>When I read about what people have to do to earn money in the field of physics, it makes me glad that so many of them are unemployed.
Yeah okay, physicists never got poor by chasing DoD funding, you're right. Bunker-penetrating warheads - always handy! And yeah, many scientists and engineers could be put to work improving the lot of humanity instead of making better weapons. But hey, there's overlap: Sooner or later our planet will be struck by a meteorite that will cause serious damage to our species.
It will be quite nice to know a couple of days in advance roughly how fucked we will be when it hits.
>Two, possibly, but 40% of the forthcoming series?
It worked for iDSoftware and Doom! : D
If it was a cock-up, then the fact that only four episodes mighyt be a sign that HBO half expected a leak somewhere - otherwise they would have released the whole series to translators/reviewers.
They are low resolution, but the audio is in sync and they are perfectly watchable. The production values are such that a high quality version is worth paying for.
Some other news outlets say they were not review copies, but copies for subtitle translators - which makes a bit more sense, because a) one would want reviewers to see a good quality versions, and b) reviewers were treated to a screening of the (not disappointing) first episode some weeks ago at the Tower of London, with after-party.
Just to make an observation, people who watch leaked episodes before the official air date, and people who wait for the DVDs at a good price, are missing out on the social aspect of the series. Part of the enjoyment of series like Game of Thrones is talking about it with friends - just as going to the pub to chat after a trip to the cinema is a good part of the evening.
>To most, pathos does NOT represent humour, comedy or entertainment.
Really? So M*A*S*H wasn't the longest running sitcom of its time? Blackadder Goes Forth, The Simpsons, Catch 22... pathos in all of them.
>Besides which, he was a commie.
Bullshit. He was a shrewd investor. He actually advised his friends to remove their investments just before the Wall Street crash.
>Take a particular bugbear of mine: unpaid internships. Even in a society where, by and large, the concept of a minimum wage is accepted. it still seems acceptable for wealthy organisations to place a filter on the workforce
I the book 'Freakanomics', that scenario was used to describe why most drug dealers are poor. Even though they could earn more by working in McDonalds, they unrealistically believe they could be the big man who is earning tens of thousands a month... just as thousands of young people work as interns in the fashion industry but only a few become famous and wealthy head designers.
Thank you for bringing that to our attention. Bummer.
Further speculation on that website suggests that because network operators aren't allowed to mess around with iOS, all iPhone 6s should work with EE's VOWIFI- though that might be optimistic, since EE have been known to lock iPhones to their network even though they have been bought elsewhere.
"Dear EE. I have just moved home. I don't get an EE signal except on the widow sill of the upstairs bathroom. If you don't allow VOWIFI on my current hardware-compatible handset, I will have no option but to take my business to Vodaphone"
>Mind you anyone who goes around bending phones or sitting on them is probably a bit dumb anyway.
OTOH we have the Sales of Goods act, a product must be fit for the purpose for which it is sold. It is not unreasonable for a mobile phone to be put in a pocket, or to assume the engineers have done their job.
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