Posts by Dave 126 10840 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
>How about some bendable spoons?
My baby nephew has one... silicone I think, so that whilst being spoon-fed there is no danger of bashing his milk-teeth should he decide to shift his head.
Larger flexible spoons, again silicone, are used for cooking, in particular for scraping the last of the sauce from the bottom of the pan.
>I guess its time you upgraded your OS to something that can.
AC, "test, don't guess".
I'm not knocking Linux, but suggesting that it is a universal panacea for all IT woes is just unrealistic, and could disappoint people who follow your 'advice', potentially putting them off Linux.
If the websites he visits use Flash, he might run into problems with hardware acceleration, too.
You don't know what other applications he was running, nor did you suggest he try another browser (an easier line of enquiry than installing another OS, don't ya think?) - on older XP machines with 512 MB RAM, I find Opera more usable than Chrome, for example.
I would suggest he get more RAM, but even that can have some pitfalls, depending on his hardware setup (Intel's advice for some issues is to remove the second stick, for example) so I won't.
Hey Jai,
No reason these things can't use tabs. Some tasks require concentration on a single screen, some tasks benefit from being able to compare two documents side by side.
Kudos to this company for considering different uses for flexible displays, and not just retrofitting them to existing devices. They could well be wide of the mark, but at least they have put the idea out there.
>Until someone invents bendy chips/boards/batteries, what is the point?
It would allow devices to have a a screen twice the size of their footprint. Mobile phones have been getting bigger, in an attempt to find a compromise between being pocket-friendly yet big enough to use- but these solutions are compromises.
There have been devices such as Nintedo's newsish Gameboys, the Sony Xperia P Tablet and the aborted MS Courier that have a clamshell form-factor but with a bezel between the two screens... having a flexible display would allow a clamshell factor with no bezel.
As a rough guide, it would allow you a 6" 4:3 screen in a device the size of a 4" 16:9 smartphone (very roughly).
Besides, people are working on flexible batteries and circuit boards too!
As if on cue...
I posted the above comment at 12:31. At 13.01 El Reg posts a story about bendy screens!
I would enter smug mode, but have just noticed that I substituted the word 'would' for 'what' in my last sentence above... I must be losing what little of my brain I still have left!
(icon: nearest I could find for 'smug mode')
>"and I still don't understand why we need 3g tablets when wifi will link up to your mobile hapilly.."
Maybe because if you have a 3G tablet for internetty/map stuff, you can just use a clamshell phone with nice big buttons and long, long battery life, and not faff around with a fiddly, expensive smartphone.
For actually talking, the clamshell design is the superior form-factor- the mic is next to your mouth, the speaker is next to your ear, there's no chance of disconnecting the call by touching a soft 'button' with your cheek... Plus, should you lose it whilst drinking, cost of replacement is £35, not £350.
3G is usually an optional extra on tablets, not a standard spec... so why object to it?
Okay, okay... It seems to me that until someone develops fold-up displays (in commercial quantities), there isn't going to be anything too interesting in the world of phone. Fold-up (or roll-up) displays would get around the current compromise twixt pocket-size and sausage-fingered usability, like the calmshell-like MS Courier or VAIO P but without the awkward central bezel.
Fellow readers- would sort of innovation do think this sector needs to give mobile devices the 'wow' factor?
Being a cheapskate is nothing to with it... anything other than 16:9 is hard to find at any price. If El Reg wants to collect a list of high res / 16:10 / 4:3 laptops, that'd be nice.
It's not just the low pixel density on modern laptops that annoying, it's the aspect ratio. On Windows machines, vertical pixels are eaten up by the task bar, status and title bars, and sometimes a Ribbon like menu bar... not to mention websites with large banners and adverts that require some scrolling before even beginning to read the article. One of the many little irritations of Windows is that the taskbar will unhide at the slightest provocation and obscure the status or tool bar of whatever application you are using. (Another irritation was introducing a ribbon interface at about the same time letter-box displays became the norm... FFS!)
In addition, the centre of a 16:9 screen is is a lower position than that of a 16:10 screen, hardly conducive to a good working position. 16:10 is better but not perfect; ideally, you would have separate the screen from keyboard so that both may be placed in their optimum position... hopefully, time will come that a mobile workstation solution will consist of a tablet, mouse and keyboard- acting as a thin client for CPUs/GPUs sitting in a bag at your feet.
(hoping my old 1920x1200 fantastic plastic Dell keeps on trooping on til that day)
A shame maybe, but Sony never appeared to have the critical mass / virtuous spiral of users and developers. Were Sony to aim for the far more modest goal of making an Android gamepad, and certified 3rd party phones and tablets, they would be on to something. They would have a smaller slice of a bigger pie.
As it is, the Xperia S is compatible with some Sony games on the Android Play store, but my Xperia P isn't.
It was mentioned in passing (in the Lego LOTR game review) but gaming-mouse maker SteelSeries has made a game controller aimed at mobile devices. Unlike this nVidia unit, they seem to have considered the way it would be slipped into bags thus and removed awkward protruding parts.
Rule 1: No poofters.
Rule 2: No member of the faculty is to maltreat the Abos in any way whatsoever—if there's anyone watching.
Rule 3: No poofters.
Rule 4: I don't want to catch anyone not drinking in their room after lights out.
Rule 5: No poofters.
Rule 6: There is no... rule six.
Rule 7: No poofters.
Oh wait, I think I have the wrong meeting...
My first dip my toes in the Linux waters was installing Mint on an ancient ThinkPad with a mate, for shits and giggles... til that day, I had never even heard of SUDO before. We installed Mint fairly quickly, but getting audio to work took the rest of the afternoon, though to be fair we were complete novices and the internet suggested that model of ThinkPad had slightly esoteric audio hardware.
I'm normally a Windows user, and I take a fairly dim view of its audio system as well. Trying to use ASIO is a PITA cos WSM keeps jumping in, trying to change the default MIDI device requires faffing around in the registry... I only mess around with audio applications for fun; if I had to do it seriously, I would get a Mac without question.
And many accounts suggest Steve Jobs was more likely to rage at very well-paid VPs, but took a different approach with junior employees. Didn't the engineer who left the prototype phone in a bar keep his job?
It reminds me in a scene of The Thick Of It, where Malcolm's bulldog Jamie concludes a rant at a minister (using violent sexual imagery) then nearly bumps into a cleaning lady- to whom he courteously apologises to.
>Strings vibrate initially in a plane, but then the plane rotates.
I was under the impression that silicon gyroscopes (tiny vibrating rods) work on the principle that the plane of vibration doesn't change just because its mounting point does... as shown by Foucault (of pendulum fame) by placing a metal bar in the jaws of a lathe, twatting the rod with a hammer, and then rotating that lathe by hand- he observed that the plane of the rod's vibration stays the same relative to the floor, not the jaw of the lathe... at least for short durations over which effects of the Earth's rotation were too small to observe.
This might help, though it more concerned with oscillations and harmonic systems than it is about instrument-specific causes of damping:
The Physics of Musical Instruments (1991) By Neville Horner Fletcher, Thomas Dean Rossing
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9CRSRYQlRLkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Try some searches around "CAN bus wheel speed"....
http://www.eng.auburn.edu/users/brodedj/7970/WheelSpeed.pdf
to get you started. Also, it is discussed on a few sites.
Hard n softwares may be here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus_monitor
>What a cretin.
If the inertial (or whatever you call wheel speed differential etc) system is used in conjunction with built-in maps, cumulative errors can be drastically reduced.
And he didn't say 'just a speedo'; the car's CAN bus will happily tell any module information about each wheel.
His point that a GPS navigation system integrated with the cars drivetrain control can be superior to a plain GPS unit still stands... at the very simplest, the car will already know where it is when started up, allowing a quicker fix on satellites (as long as you haven't been towed, washed down the river etc)
Even without this smartness, Honda (or was it Toyota?) made a intertial navigation system in the eighties, using a microfiche-like system for map storage.
>incar entertainment system for the kids on long journeys.
@Simon Round
Hmm, wonder if the tablet's accelerometers can be used to augment the video, so as to reduce the car sickness that can result if the brain receives different clues from the eyes and inner-ears! Kinda like the Optical Image Stabilisation used in cameras, but applied to output image instead of a sensor.
>Considering how cheap android tablets are these days then it should not add more than couple of hundred quid to >the car price.
That might be optomistic! Ford (UK) currently charge £250 for a sodding DAB radio to be fitted as an extra, for example. A tablet-based "entertainment package" is likely to much more. Still, there is little in what you have outlined that can't be achieved by the car-owner themselves, or by an independent car stereo installer if you really want a neat job of it.
Still, on the plus side, hopefully enough cars will come to have 3G/4G / Wi-Fi to make DAB redundant.
>I belive a Garfield solution to how to operate a full-size food-stuffed fridge when on the outing with Jon was simple - take the cord, 300 miles of.
Added advantage: enemies need physical access to the cable if they want to jam/overide communications with the device.
> why didn't they have a strong robot to do the lifting?
"Humans are cheaper" is a possible answer in sympathy with the distopian tone of the film. Aliens might have a few plot holes (Why does Burke want Ripley to come along, when she is opposed to his aim of bringing back 'samples'?) but they are very easy to over look compared to those in Prometheus (that movie is little BUT plot holes. A shame, because the bits with David studying Peter O'Toole's Lawrence of Arabia ("a man serving two masters") are superb... the DVD release needs an 'anti-directors cut')
Guilty pleasure: Starship Troopers 3, with battle-suits. It revives the tongue-in-cheek attitude of the first film, and the ropey special effects are a hoot. Exploding heads, nudity, far-right Christianity replacing fascism... a kiss set against the backdrop of a planet exploding... what's not to like?!
If the object is to allow a soldier to cover large distances quickly, then those designs that take their inspiration from kangaroos is the way to go, much like the 'Blade-runner' amputee athletes. The kinetic energy is stored in the spring (as it is in the tendons of kangaroos), and released again, so is a very energy efficient way of travelling, though not suitable for all terrains and hardly stealthy.
I believe the Soviets experimented with a power-assisted version (with combustion-powered cylinders) that allowed soldiers to take strides ten yards long.
If you want to your soldier to carry heavy equipment/supplies into hostile territory, then why burden the soldier with it and a HULC system? It's better to have a robotic mule carry the gear independently. Or, as was done in Burma in WW2, a real mule can be parachuted in.
(A local farmer did this, and the next day Japan surrendered... nothing to do with an A-bomb at all, just the threat of Jasper on a donkey. Later on, when posted as a guard in the gardens of the Imperial Palace, the Emperor, under house arrest, politely approached him for a light... "You can fuck off" he responded)
>child of some mystic land of Merlinian magic
What amuses me is that in some of the Marvel mythos, wormholes that connect to different universes are situated in... Gloucestershire. And in Buffy the Vampire slayer series, one of the women goes on a witch training course in... Gloucestershire.
Which is of course nonsense. Anyone who has stood on the edge of the escarpment looking West over the horseshoe bend of the Severn knows that Gloucestershire is the Shires, the Forest of Dean is Mirkwood, and Wales is Mordor.
Yeah, Star Trek never fully uses their tech for hedonism like the citizens of the Culture... using the transporter to exchange gasses in your lungs whilst you bath in a zero-G sphere of oil, for example. Although both Star Trek and Bank's feature tech-enhanced extreme sports (orbital sky-diving and lava-flow rafting, for example).
A habitat's AI's appeal to a party guest "Please tell the ambassador that he is talking into a broach" (Look to Windward) seems a gentle dig at TNG's communicator.
>Don't forget the "The graphics for Babylon 5 were done on an Amiga!!!!!!" frothing-mouthed tedium
I never realised that TNG's Wes Crusher (Wil Wheaton) worked for the makers of Video Toaster.
I had cause to remember another Video Toaster project, SeaQuest DSV the other day- I went to the cinema and ASUS have an advertisment in which Megan Fox talks to a dolphin (IT angle?!). Maybe it was on heroin like its fellow cetacean in Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic"
Probably a consequence of my teenage years, but whilst I kept up with the few few series of TNG, I was losing interest by the time DS9 and Voyager turned up. Thank you to the article for making the case for DS9.
I liked the visuals of Babylon 5 more, and approved of the way they had life-forms that were neither humanoid or gas clouds, but still I didn't really keep up with it for some reason. Maybe it because of of the cast fell into the 'uncanny valley' of looking like Bruce Willis (similarly, I don't do FireFly because that bloke is just trying too hard to be Han Solo. He isn't. He can't be). I do remember an episode that featured the magicians Penn and Teller, though!
I wouldn't engage with a Sci-Fi TV show again until Battlestar Gallactica, whose submarine movie-like visual style answered my unease with the clean, well-lit look of TNG. Even on some alien ship, TNG actors were too well lit.
I wouldn't mind watching a series that looked like The Fifth Element, a colourful sprawling mass of humanity, mutants and aliens, akin to Megacity One in 2000AD. Dredd might not make it back for a second movie, but there is a possibility he will return for a TV series, though I can't see them having the budget to do MegaCity One with proper anarchic abandon.
It would appear it means "Free [to take with you and use with a tablet/phone, or Mac/PC]", judging from SteelSeries' website... it quite a compact looking thing.
There have been a fair few comments on other threads about the need for a product like this if smartphones are to continue denting dedicated portable gaming machines, but the price seems a bit steep. People who like bodging their own solutions are already using a Sony PS3 controller with 3rd party software for Android / PC gaming.
I've only heard of SteelSeries before in relation to their gaming mice... they seem fairly well thought of by reviewers, but gaming mice aren't things I know much about.
>I guess you've not seen the article elsewhere on the site today about how the MSMC UK EPG stopped working a few days ago (and resulting comments on how there are lots of alternatives to MSMC, many of which don't involve any MS content at all)
I had read it. The point still stands.
>What happens if you don't want to buy a Windows Phone?
MS released an app for Android, iOS and WinPho to integrate with the XBOX. Sony's PS3 equivalent requires a PSP or PS Vita. I see you have looked deeply into this before commenting.
>What happens if MS give up on the project after 5 years or the next best thing comes along?
Look at how long MS Media Centre has been kept going, despite it not achieving mass popularity. It's getting on for tens years now.
>What happens if your Xbox gets an RRoD?
Oh, get over. Look at the causes of that seven year-old fault and tell someone that they still apply. The mere fact that XBOXs don't any longer sound like Harrier Jump Jets should give you a clue that Moore's Law is in effect.
Yeah, after deleting my Ubuntu partition in order to expand my Windows partition, Window wouldn't boot. No great stress, since there was another Win7 machine in the building, and I just got it to burn a repair disk. No worries.
It wasn't Ubuntu's fault, it was my mistake. But hey, that's how I learn.
Yeah, I re-read the article looking foe mention of that, but couldn't see it. If an Ubuntu phone could pretend to be an Android phone, then some people would buy it- or at least not reject it if their company hands it out to them. Technically, how difficult would it be to have this running smoothly?
Out of interest, which large-tablet apps are these that aren't available on Android? (Not disagreeing, genuinely curious what apps still need to be written.)
@Mark .
Music creation apps. Though the devs of such software are getting started Android versions now that Jelly Bean has reduced the latency considerably over previous versions. I don't know if this is what HandleOfGod had in mind.
>"the Android operating system that is popular but not nearly as good as Apple's iOS" Everyone is entitled to an >opinion
Yeah, it depends on how you use and what you use it for. I'm happy with my Android phone, but I upgraded from a featurephone fairly late in the game. Apple did make a smart move with iOS from the get-go, by implementing MIDI and with a low enough latency to allow it to be useful (Android has only caught up on this front with Jelly Bean, and developers of music creation software are expressing an interest). It is a niche feature, but one that sits well with another niche market that has traditionally liked Apple: musicians. Being cynical, it is smart move to cater to musicians, when the other side of your business is selling their work.
Here is an example of someone who gets full use out of his iPhone for his purposes, using its accelerometers as MIDI controllers in conjunction some hardware (distantly based, I think, on a dissected MIDI Clarinet) he has open-sourced on Thingiverse: http://onyx-ashanti.com/
There were a few MSX machines made by different companies - it was a standard. The first Metal Gear game by Konami was for the MSX2 platform
In the image below, from the 1983 Hamley's catalogue, the bottom right machine is a Sord M5 Computer, fairly similar to MSX spec:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=286058214747254&set=a.286052674747808.73189.273368722682870&type=3&theater
The Commodore Vic 20 is probably the more famous machine to work with both tapes and cartridges.
I have a 1983 Hamley's toyshop catalogue floating around... [performs quick search to see if someone else has gone to the effort of scanning it in... and Bingo! Thanks to be to that person]
Here it is:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.286052674747808.73189.273368722682870&type=1
The games consoles are near the bottom of the page, click a thumbnail for a larger picture. What I got from it was the how much the dedicated chess-playing boards were compared to the more general gaming machines.
>Thanks, I'll read that as meaning we'll need Thunderbolt 2.0 or HTML 2.0 to handle high definition displays in >practical situations.
I think we might be at crossed purposes here. Thunderbolt is an extension of of your PCIe bus that happens, in its most common incarnation, to use the same physical connector as Displayport- a standard for connecting displays. Thunderbolt isn't a standard for connecting displays in itself, but it allows the Displayport signal to passed along to the display device. It can have an external GPU behave as if it were in your computer.
You didn't mention why your wanted to drive your 4K Cinema Ultra at twice its native refresh rate, either. You have a bootleg copy of The Hobbit (3D, 48fps), perhaps? To achieve the standard, either one Displayport cable or two HDMI cables will do the job, according to the manufacturers of such displays.
I was impressed when I saw my mate's blackberry do that on its dock. A few years later and my Xperia seems to have picked up the idea, but using a combination of [accessory]+[optional time period] to trigger that dim clock behaviour- or some other action. i haven't tried Tasker, though, but i get the idea it does all sorts of things like that.
Marvin Minsky (made the first head-mounted display, neural net and confocal microscope, is name-checked in 2001: Space Odyssey, lauded by Asimov as well) co-wrote a novel with Harry Harrison (The Stainless Steel Rat, nuff said) about integrating a neural net with someone's brain, called The Turing Option. It is framed as a thriller, but the AI integrates itself with the protagonist's brain because he has suffered a traumatic bullet-related head injury.
It's alright. Might seem a tad dated now. There again, who am I to judge?
>...and leaves us in the rather odd position of having to be quiet because a colleague is deaf...
I've heard that this is not uncommon. A retired doctor with hearing aids drinks in our beer garden, and he is more put off by background noise than us who are lucky enough to still have reasonable hearing. He is probably one of those who complain to Radio 4 about placing background music behind spoken-word content (screw DAB: Roll on 'radio' over IP, and the BBC can easily output the raw spoken-word output without music for those who want it)
I did read in New Scientist that Charles Babbage started to loose his hearing, and became overly sensitive to street musicians and buskers.... he campaigned against them, so in return they made a point of parading up and down outside his house.
I'm dyspraxic, and with it comes sensitivity to noise... I do appear to have a lower tolerance to sodcasting than my more mellow peers. FFS kiddies, either buy some headphones or get a ghettoblaster so we can all hear it. The landlord who made our local legendary sadly passed away a few years back... he was the sort to dunk phones in peoples pints, and "tell all the lager drinkers to f^&k-off and we'll all have ourselves a lovely little lock-in".
