Posts by Dave 126 10841 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
>Anyway, the last thing I want is a Ubuntu phone (or a Unity desktop), so I'm not giving them a penny
I'm no Linux expert, but would have assumed that a phone that can run Linux could be tweaked to run other distros fairly easily.
Besides Unity (and arguably Android) there any other small-screen touch-orientated Linux desktop environments being developed at the moment (such as might have fallen out of Nokia)?
>Tactile feedback, and the way the inertia of physical peripherals helps keep your hand steady, count for more than you realise when you’re trying to be precise.
Other online reviews of the Leap make much the same point as Mr Smith. Maybe Leap have missed a trick - rather than just software developers, perhaps they need hardware partners, in the same way that a Wii controller can be fitted into a dumb 'steering wheel' or 'fishing rod' accessory. Existing 'digital clay' systems use an expensive articulated arm to provide XYZ + vector user input, and haptic feedback.
Inexpensive hardware accessories could make the Leap pretty handy... just add a glass sheet and pen to make it an ersatz digitiser, for example.
Actually, the Daily Mail printed pictures of an 11 year old girl in her bikini:
[Of Chris Morris' Brass Eye special "Paedogeddon!":] Around 3,000 complaints were received and politicians spoke out against Morris.[4] Beverley Hughes described the show as "unspeakably sick" but later admitted she had not seen it, and David Blunkett said he was "dismayed" by it. He also had not seen the episode, because he is blind.[5] Tessa Jowell, after watching,[6] asked the Independent Television Commission to reinstate censorship to ban similar programmes.[7] There was also a tabloid campaign against Morris, who refused to discuss the issue.
The Daily Star decried Morris and the show, placing the story next to a separate article about the 15-year-old singer Charlotte Church's breasts under the headline "She's a big girl now" and using the words "looking chest swell".[8][9] The Daily Mail pictured Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, who were 13 and 11, in their bikinis next to a headline describing Brass Eye as "Unspeakably Sick".[9][10]
- from Wikipedia, but I remember Private Eye at the time drawing attention to the Daily Mail's hypocrisy.
There are more Windows Phone devices to be seen amongst the general public (okay, my local's beer garden) than the comments sections of The Reg would suggest. Of the other drinkers, some have still have trusty dumbphones, some have have Androids, some have had iPhones but now use Android devices, some are Apple loyalists... they all seem happy enough, and it seems a lot of people aren't too fussed about the OS.
Other than the immature ecosystem and a distrust of MS (I know that one), why does WinPho get so much abuse?
>This statement would only be true if you define "some" as "gamers" because the only reason to dual boot, which for anybody who does it regularly is extremely annoying, is to get the full 3D treatment
3D CAD, modelling and simulation software is better represented on Windows than OSX.
>I like those rugged devices - shame the spec is always lacking.
Yeah, but at least you now get most of the way there with high-end hardware- both the Galaxy S4 Active and Xperia Z are waterproof. Then all you need is a very sturdy case, if any are sold.
(http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/09/galaxy-s4-active-hits-uk-shops-starting-at-495-contract-free/)
Hopefully, toughness and waterproofing will become standard features for phones.
>I was intrigued up until the point where there may be other people in the car when it pulls up.
Then simply pay a premium to use the vehicle by yourself. Your preference in this matter will probably be part of the profile you create when you sign up for the service- or chosen on a trip-by-trip basis, if some days you are feeling more tolerant.
The whole gist of the article was based on economic factors. If you want to save money by sharing the lift with others, you can. If you want to spend a little more for the privilege of travelling by yourself, you can.
AC wasn't using the word 'shaft' to mean defraud (which of course does put up premiums). He was looking forward to a transport system with far fewer accidents, thus greatly reducing the level of insurance required and perhaps the need for many individuals to have to deal with insurance dealers at all.
>The idea that a large portion of people might give up car ownership because a car can drive itself doesn't hang together for me.
It might not cause existing drivers to give up their cars, but it might delay the age at which a young person chooses to buy their own car... perhaps indefinitely.
It's not just the cost of ownership of a car, but in the second-hand market mechanical faults can unexpectedly occur, landing them with a repair bill of a few hundred pounds that they haven't budgeted for (plus the inconvenience of being without a vehicle, and missing whatever engagement they had that day).
>There are many hard-to-predict market effects.
The survival of the rural pub, one hopes. Though excessive beer duty might still destroy the hubs of our communities...
There was a recent story about a county in Ireland that proposed to give some people living in remote locations permission to drive slightly drunk - it was calculated that the health risks of isolation and loneliness outweighed the risks of driving after a few pints on mostly empty roads.
Actually, a variant would word well in the countryside. City dwellers have the option of buses, light rail and taxis- or facilities are close enough to just walk or cycle to. Here in a smaller town, public transport is very poor.
The proposed system would allow young people (even those with driving licenses currently face crippling insurance premiums) to travel to the cinema in the next town, for example. (Only this morning, the local paper tells of a coroner's finding that two young men died in a car crash due to the driver speeding so as beat an 11 PM curfew imposed by his insurance company and enforced by a TomTom-manufactured GPS logger. )
In the UK, there have been trial schemes of a service akin to a bus/taxi hybrid... one rings up to with a request to travel from A to B, and you are contacted later with the time at which you can expect a minibus to turn up. The idea is to lump together people to make efficiencies in a time when local bus routes are being cut back. It was aimed at an older demographic, and before adoption of the smartphone (a GPS-equipped device can only aid services like this, if its users have the inclination and ability to use one).
In France, people who never gained a driving licence in the first place (usually the old) may drive a specific model of low powered car, limited to around 30 Mph. Sometimes they are bought by people who have lost their licence due to drink-driving. Also in France, I see that young people are allowed to take passengers on their mopeds.
I'm glad to hear the Syndicate team are making a game for tablets... I've never understood why people have been so keen to port First Person Shooters to tablets, when tablets seem to naturally lend themselves to games like Syndicate, Cannon Fodder, Monkey Island, Sim City, Worms etc.
I don't know what the hell this 'Latitude' of which you speak is. Offline maps disappearing? Grr. I use it in places like Devon (poor signal) or France (too expensive to use data)- on home territory I don't need any maps. Apparently, the Google engineers weren't happy about it it either, and so it maps can still be cached by typing 'okay maps' into the search box. (I haven't upgraded or tested this myself).
I tried to set my old man up on Open Maps on his tablet, but he was mistrustful after a vector error placed a lake over a road and town in Italy.
Actually, having a camera on a tablet is useful for things like Google Translate, which can use OCR to translate, say, a French newspaper into English. (data connection required)
"No tablet is a tablet for photographers." is a little ambiguous - as a companion to a real camera, a tablet is a useful device for reviewing photographs in the field... especially since many of them have better screens than those found on most laptops.
>IR is used in rescue scenarios that don't involve fire because the buildings in the other cases are cool, making human body heat stand out on the person and whatever they touch.
There was a recent example of a IR-equipped quadropter being used by a fire brigade in England this year, to find (and successfully rescue) a person from a fast-moving flooded river.
That's not prior art with respect to this patent.
Mr Hollinger's patent is for HOW the thing works: "the processing unit instructing the camera to capture an image in response to an electrical signal generated by the at least one position sensor and the at least one orientation sensor. " - http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8477184.PN.&OS=PN/8477184&RS=PN/8477184
i.e, the frame rate of the camera isn't fixed, but is triggered by by position and orientation sensors.
If you read through the patent, you will see a summary of prior related art and how his device differs.
I don't, sorry - though the guys on this site seem keen on discussing such things:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/661448/us-samsung-galaxy-s4
Apparently the octa-core S4s hve Wolsfsons, the US and UK dual core variants have Qualcom DACs.
http://www.head-fi.org/t/601535/dac-of-sony-xperia-s
If this is for home listening, many Android handsets support USB-Audio, so you might want to look into using an external DAC of your choice. When looking into portable 192Khz 24bit portable players (there aren't many), I saw that some people use iPads with external DACs through the 'camera connection kit', too. Otherwise, I'd go for a Sansa Clip player, or read up on a Colorfly C3 (24bit).
Some Nokias are said to have very good ADCs, so it's possible they have good DACs too.
Just search the interwebs for comparisons of the previous Belle Pureview against things like the Lumix LX-5 before commenting... or, as the article suggests, the Reg write-up. The Pureview fits in jeans pocket; the Lumix does not.
There are more WinPho 8 phones in my local pub than the comments section of the Register would suggest. I haven't used one, but the users (be them converts from Nokia candybar dumb phones, older Android phones or 'feature phones') really don't seem bothered.
Sounds like Nokia could release a product to compete with the likes of GoPro, video cameras for 'extreme' sports (or duck-taping to quadropters). Obviously the market for dedicated camcorders is smaller than that for phones, but still!
http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/8/4503382/nokia-lumia-1020-sample-photo-joe-belfiore-flickr
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