* Posts by Dave 126

10643 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

New Tosh drive can wipe out 4TB 'near instantaneously'

Dave 126 Silver badge

Not as much fun as having your NAS mounted in a large, pre-strung catapult.

Ten technology FAILS

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Zip Drives?

Yep, essential as a student, ZIP drives... £70 for the drive. Solid State still too expensive, but its arrival was known to be inevitable. MiniDisc player in bag. A year into the design course and Apple release some £600 portable audio device, that wouldn't work with PCs.

I never had the click of death, but the Win2000 (pre SP1) campus machines had an entertaining feature- they would wipe your Zip disk and copy on to the entire contents of the disk the last user had used in the machine. Bizarre.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: UMPC's

I'm fairly sure Sony dipped their toes in the UMPC waters... seem to remember one came with a stylus that looked like a guitar plectrum, on a lanyard.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: The Cloud

That depends on what you mean by 'The Cloud'. For some definitions, just having emailed a copy of, for example, your CV to yourself- so that you can print a hard-copy at any internet cafe- qualifies. Likewise, renting some CPU time from Amazon to render some images can make more sense than buying the hardware yourself, if you only need to do it occasionally.

I can't knock you for having a right-minded objection to fluffy buzzwords, though! : D

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Bob

Followed by "The coffee cup holder doesn't come out anymore?"

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: CDI != VCD

CDI - I remembered a demo unit in Makro, playing Dragon's Lair. This was around the time that 'FMV' and 'Pre Rendered Sequences' were buzzwords, and Boots could make you Kodak PhotoCDs.

---

Re: Rock-solid freeze frames... I remember renting 'Desperado' on VHS, and finding one sequence was very worn and 'snowy' with noise. It was the bit where the leading actress was displaying her nekkid Blugarian Airbags.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Beta

>Yep, but Sony kit cost a bomb and - all the pr0n was on VHS. That was the real reason why VHS 'won'.

Sony explicitly barred pr0n from being ontheir Beta platform. Having learnt from history, they deliberately inferred that the would raise no such objection to 'adult content' studios releasing their content on Blu-Ray, during that Blu-Ray / HDDVD skirmish.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Secondlife Is still Alive.

as Playstation Home?

Similarish concept, though it looks like the latest Tony Hawks skateboard game, minus the wheels. This line from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Home could do with being rephrased:

"Home allows users to create a custom avatar, which can be groomed realistically."

Half of us have old phones STUFFED in our drawers

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Precious metals...

Tom's Hardware did an experiment to recover gold from circa 1990 PCs, where the metals were used in larger quantities, using some nasty, expensive chemicals. After all their efforts, they recovered a pea-sized amount. IIRC their conclusion was that on a large scale, it might economical to recover gold from older PCs at 2012 gold prices.

I would imagine that the tiny component size of modern phones would make it uneconomical to recover metals from, but I'm not certain- any ideas?

Iran's Photoshop FAIL: 'New drone' actually Japanese university bird

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Yup and the Onion says

I not sure what you are trying to say.

But this creased me up:

" BEIJING (AP) — The online version of China's Communist Party newspaper has hailed a report by The Onion naming North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as the "Sexiest Man Alive" — apparently unaware it is satire."

- http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g94TAgX61U0KSmll8j0J432fAv0Q?docId=82dfc9b60cad45f89bc82e5983d0dd61

Ten weird Chinese mobile phones

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: ...that would be awesome!

Broke after 2 days?

Well, their brochure did say 'USB that make phone call' [singular].

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Michael Schumacher

That, and they have copied Vertu's old styling. Not that Vertu are any more tasteful than these.

Real sci-fi space ships coming at last? NASA tests nuclear engine

Dave 126 Silver badge

>Just waiting for the next flood of paranoid hippies decrying putting nuclear fuel in space.

Well, that put paid to Project Orion - the idea of launching a vehicle into space by releasing a chain of nuclear bombs behind it- the lid on the coffin was that each launch was estimated to lead to the premature deaths of around ten people due to fallout. Shame really, because one design constraint of Orion is that it had to be big. Really big.

Still hoping someone can crack the Space Elevator, but it seems pesky physical materials don't allow it.

MIDI: 30 years old... almost

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: It's still limping on

>It only takes an excruciating amount of time if you're not very good at using them. A poor workman, etc.

Double bollocks. Even using some Logitech USB speakers on my Win7 laptop to make iPlayer less tinny is unreliable, often killing the laptop's integrated sound card, usually requiring some faffing about in 'playback devices'- enabling, disabling, setting as default, swearing at it before turning off and on again whilst crossing fingers? Once connected and on, it's fine, but but makes switching to headphones a PITA. I'm blaming Microsoft, not Logitech.

And do you really think its right to blame 'the workman' that FireWire audio on a PC isn't a standard, but a lucky dip as to whether you have a VIA or a Texas Instruments chipset?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: It's still limping on

Worry not. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI#Alternative_hardware_transports- I get the impression that past efforts to supplant MIDI have mostly failed, and the current work in progress, 'MIDI HD Protocol'. is fully backwards-compatible. There are too many musicians and enthusiasts with esoteric MIDI hardware out there for it to be rendered obsolete.

MIDI seems to bring out the bodger and tinkerer in us... I saw my mate the other day, soldering MIDI ports into a circa-1990 toy Yamaha keyboard... Instructables.com has a lot to answer for.

I blame MIDI for getting me into IT... my friend's dad had an Atari ST, Roland GM module and a Casio MIDI guitar, and and I took my piano lessons with their next-door neighbour on a Yamaha DX-7 keyboard.

I did have a play with MIDI again about a year ago, trying to get a cheap Wacom Bamboo tablet to act as Kaoscilator, by using some virtual patch cables and a softsynth... one way to waste an afternoon. Low and bloody behold Windows 7 doesn't like you changing the default MIDI playback device away from the integrated audio hardware, some poking of the registry is required. Add to that Windows Sound Mapper trying to prise control back from ASIO, and I now know why musicians use Macs. At least Android is moving in the right direction:

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/07/android-high-performance-audio-in-4-1-and-what-it-means-plus-libpd-goodness-today/

Dave 126 Silver badge

TouchOSC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bJsxIeg5iQ&feature=relmfu

I've chatted with this man after a Bristol pub gig... though about electric vehicle drivetrains (he is from San Francisco) rather than his MIDI clarinet and MIDI iPhone (for it's accelerometers) combo. He's a smarter lad than comes across in this video! He seems to have evolved since then, since in this video he had made his own MIDI controllers- one for for each hand, plus mouth piece, and wrist-strapped iPhone.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "unfriendly" European hi-fi gear?

That's all good if you have the connectors, otherwise cable clamps are more universally bodgable! I think the article author was referring to the hifi that used DIN for speakers.

Android seven-inchers swipe rug from under Apple

Dave 126 Silver badge

I've just recommended a Nexus 7 4G to an old boy in the pub who had been asking about smartphones, yet he expressed doubt about his eyesight and digital ('of fingers') dexterity- so sticking with his clamshell phone and getting pocket/glovebox-friendly tablet seemed a better approach. It will be a device for his his car, and as a backup to his laptop/router* for the purposes of email, cricket scores etc.

I would have suggested he look at an iPad Mini 3G (as his grown-up children have iPads) but its price was double what Google were asking- very hard to justify.

*when it is 'playing silly buggers' he can still keep in touch with family by coming down the pub.

Google plans touchscreen Chromebook for 2013 - report

Dave 126 Silver badge

That would appear to be the sensible, easy sell- "it's like your Android tablet, but with keyboard".

I dunno, is there anything that a Chromebook can do that Android can't?

Only Kinect: Microsoft boffins build Minority Report-style tools

Dave 126 Silver badge
Happy

Re: “looking at pixels in the air without a screen” - will be the “next big thing”

>Next big thing are time machines

Don't you mean 'The last big thing was time machines?'

Dave 126 Silver badge

Which is why place-names on British road signs are written in Title Case... it seems Birmingham is quicker to read than BIRMINGHAM.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Can they refine the Kinect a bit more first?

It is my understanding that the PC version of the Kinect is tweaked to work at smaller distances (and is pricier because it won't be subsidised by future game sales)

Harley allows Apple to use 'Lightning' brand on 'playthings'

Dave 126 Silver badge

I did read once that H-D's CAD system is geared toward's maintaining the 'classic look' of their engines, not just their mechanical function.

Dave 126 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: "is Apple thinking of making iPod docks for hogs?"

Interesting that motorcycle electrical parts are included in this - is Apple thinking of making iPod docks for hogs?

No, they're not- it's there so that both parties are clear on area of potential overlap.

Elon Musk envisions small town of vegetarians on Mars

Dave 126 Silver badge

Just need hops, barley, freeze-dried yeast and molten permafrost. The vehicle thrusters can be cannibalised to boil the wort, the rest is just plumbing and temperature control.

Get it right, and the population might start to grow.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "it took a significant expense to get things started"

Well, the diseases that us Old-Worlders (as in Europe, not Earth) had become resistant to did that much of that for us.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Is that a reference to Martin Amis's sci-fi short "The Janitor on Mar's"? n the story a Mars-based alien robot contacts the NY Times, gives humanity some tips on escaping our gravity well and requests that scientists, artists and "examples of male and female pulchritude" are sent to the Red Planet. He asks that no politicians or religious leaders are sent, and says "Print the obscenity is full, else I go the Post. I repeat: No Fucking Monkeys."

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Won't happen for that price

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/

I think he was looking at around $500,000, which does cover the fuel. His current aim is to get the cost of manufacturing the rockets down, for which there is plenty of room.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why?

Eggs. Basket.

Between asteroids, zombie apocalypses, ROTM, triffids, toxic overload, ocean acidification etc, its a hedging of our species' bets.

And there are people who live in Arctic regions, since more hospitable regions are already populated by other people.

Granted, it wouldn't be for most people, but in this world of 7 billion people, I'd hope there would be some volunteers.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Dreamers

Not just dreaming- he's throwing time, money and other people's brains at launch vehicles, initially to reduce the cost of satellite launches. The Mars thing is down the line a little.

The full interview is over on Wired, and what he said about the cost of rockets was interesting. Fuel is only 0.3% of the cost of his rocket, cost of materials to make a rocket is traditionally 2% of the cost - compared to around 25% for a car - so there is room for greater efficiency in the manufacture; it suggests that the old system of contracting to contractors who in turn subcontract hasn't given NASA the most whoosh their buck. He's also used friction stir welding to add ribs to the frame, rather than machine them out of solid billets of alloy.

I have no doubt that Musk is skilled at PR, and he isn't yet addressing issues of radiation on astronaut's bodies on the journey, but its good to see a billionaire doing something interesting with his money rather than just get a yacht

Pong creator turns nose up at Nintendo Wii U

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: This from the founder of the company that created the Atari Lynx?

I seem to remember TV adverts for the Lynx, aimed at my age group at the time, set in a boys toilet in a school- with Lynx Link cables slung from cubicle to cubicle for multiplayer gaming. Can anyone confirm?

Dave 126 Silver badge

The iPhone hasn't really tried, it sells enough already.

Android probably can, now that Jelly Bean has drastically reduced the its latency.

Agreed, it depends on the control scheme. And console gaming is a different activity to personal 5-minutes-to-kill gaming. The past sales of Gameboy and PSPs would suggest their is a big enough market to make a good games controller for phones, though it might benefit from being backed by a big name or consortium in order to gain game developer's confidence.

Cambridge boffins fear 'Pandora's Unboxing' and RISE of the MACHINES

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Seriously

Well, we evolved into the environment we created. Genetic dating of the mutation that allows some peoples to digest lactose as adults suggests it occurred around the same time as we domesticated cattle, for example.

The problem we have had with an agricultural lifestyle is that we tend to outgrow our environment- become a victim of our own success. It has been observed that species that find themselves without predators or competition for food eventually breed more slowly to avoid population booms (which can lead to busts, due to depletion of resources). All fine, until you meet something that has sharp teeth, breeds quickly, and eats your eggs.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: The solution is ...

Prior Art: "Fuel cut off switch for this bus is under this flap"

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: In other news...

>In other news... ... still no cure for cancer.

Yeah, I was wondering what percentage of the world's computing power is currently used for medicine, science and engineering, and how much is used in stock exchanges, video games and serving cat videos. At what point do us puny humans come to be no more than worker-ants, servicing the power requirements of the WorldWideNetwork? It wouldn't have to subjugate us Terminator-style, but just give us duff information to game our decisions for its benefit (as HAL did with by reporting a 'faulty' communications module, but on a species-wide scale)

Arthur C Clarke, Alfred Bester, William Gibson, and some writer from the 1950s a fellow commentard recently recommended but whose name I've forgotten, have all played with this theme. Frank Herbert sets his stories in a universe in which all AIs have been destroyed in the past. Isaac Asimov and Iain M Banks have imagined more benign AIs who look out for us meatbags. We can only hope AIs have a sense of humour- why else would they keep us around?

(need a tongue-in-cheek icon)

Driverless trucks roam Australian mines

Dave 126 Silver badge

I've seen a catalogue of radio-controlled demolition machines- basically full-size 360º diggers fitted with concrete-smashing equipment (though smaller models more resemble a bomb disposal robot). A little boy inside me whooped for joy!

Had I seen it twenty years ago, I would have grabbed a pen and started to write:

"Dear Jim, Can you fix it for me to smash a derelict building to the ground with a massive radio controlled digger?"

Google, Apple, eBay shouldn't pay taxes - people should pay taxes

Dave 126 Silver badge

> Or, to put it more simply: There's always someone smarter than you.

Especially if the mice are better motivated than the builder of the mousetrap... or rather, a company might spend a fair bit of money on hiring an accountant who can save them millions.

Dave 126 Silver badge
Unhappy

" Or you could just shut up generally and let non-extremists talk about tax in a grown-up way."

He seemed fairly grown up. We may not agree with his argument, but the grown up way to discuss it is to counter his argument point for point, whereas telling someone to shut up is playground talk.

Nokia's imaging chief makes surprise exit

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Did he really leave

http://asia.cnet.com/shootout-nokia-808-pureview-vs-panasonic-lumix-dmc-lx5-62216561.htm

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Did he really leave

And there have been advertisements for Sony cameras filmed on Nikon kit. Embarrassing, yes. There are plenty of real comparisons on the internet of the 808 phone against 'premium compacts' such as the Lumix LX-5 (1/1.6" sensor, f2 lens) in which the phone more than holds it own in low light.

Dogs would say: size is important, shape - not so much

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: My dog's very clever

Your canine might be picking cues from the Staffie... they tend to be keener on humans than they are other dogs.

***

I was impressed when my nine-month old cocker spaniel took his lead from my mate... his chickens had got loose, so he ran towards them, arms flapping. My spaniel immediately picked up on this, and joined in the game. Fearing he would he would hurt a chicken, I called him back and returned to me - surprising, because usually he is 'selectively deaf'. He's got within a jaw-length of an ascending pheasant's tail, and made an ambitious attempt to catch a buzzard, but so has yet to dispatch anything avian.

Man strives to shatter Call of Duty world record

Dave 126 Silver badge

Sleep...

I remember listening to a British round-the-world solo yachtsman on the radio, talking about never sleeping for too long because of the need to avoid other vessels or deal with weather situations. Twenty minutes here, maybe an hour if he was lucky.

He said that he had sponsorship from the USAF, I think collected data on himself too, since they wanted data about sleep deprivation and alertness, so that combat flight rosters could be most effectively drawn-up.

Assault on battery

Dave 126 Silver badge

By coincidence, all my rechargeable AA batteries have resurfaced in the last few days, so I'm sorted. I'm surprised, as matched pairs of rechargeable batteries generally behave like socks- one twin loves to elude the other. My mouse takes one AA battery, but my torch, game controller and beard trimmer take two each, and that's fine.

What does my nut in that gadgets that take AAA cells usually require THREE of them (so as to be close to USB voltage). Three! I can't buy alkaline batteries in threes, and my chargers will only charge two at a time, no more, no less... Grrr! Am I supposed to buy four, and sling one? Am I supposed to charge four, and then drain one, so that it can be charged with its brethren when they expire?

According to Which?'s tests, Lidl's 'Aerocell' brand are the most cost effective- they don't last quite as long as the big brands, but are far, far cheaper. A few years back they noted that Sainsbury's homebrand AAs lasted longer thn the big brands, but that no longer appears to be the case. For the dark winter nights, Tescos sell a homebrand 2xAA aluminium torch with a CREE LED for a tenner; bloody bright, pocket friendly.

IBM insider: How I caught my wife while bug-hunting on OS/2

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Really?

>perhaps Windows could tell me in english what the problem was

I would have thought so to, but for some strange reason I have to turn on minidumps, download some piece of MS software, then download some 'symbols' whatever the hell they are, and interrogate the minidump file... Why Windows couldn't do that by itself and just tell me it was simply a dodgy driver for a card-reader in the first place, I don't know. The only mitigation for MS is that the laptop shouldn't have been shipped with a Bsodding driver.

My only experiences with OS/2 Warp are: installing it on a 286 and as a nipper, and then as an adult an OS/2-driven ATM decided to reboot itself with my cash card inside, necessitating an extra night's stay on the shores of Lake Titicaca in order to reclaim in from the bank.

Asus VivoBook S200 11.6in touchscreen notebook review

Dave 126 Silver badge

Lost Comment

I've been getting that of late on El Reg forums... the page changes and I see my draft comment in grey... as soon I click in the text box in an effort to copy it, it disappears. Sometimes it gets posted as a comment, sometimes it just disappears. I haven't been arsed to report it yet, but if it helps: Chrome version 23.0.1271.64 m, Win7 HP x64

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: USB ports?

>Can anyone explain why USB ports aren't all USB 3.0 nowadays?

Yes. You can't install Windows 7 from an external DVD-drive if its connected by USB 3. It will boot into the installer, since it reverts to a slow legacy standard, but when it wants to start copying files it will start asking for drivers.

The same is probably true of some other OSs as well. Note that this laptop does not have an in internal optical drive.

Also, most of what is connected to my computer doesn't require USB 3 - my mouse dongle, a cable for charging my phone, some USB speakers, keyboards, joysticks... and a good number of my USB memory sticks are too slow to benefit from USB 3 anyway.

Hope that helps!

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: 5 tiles

I'd be interested in a "Win 8 Revisted" review in six months time, to see if by then any 3rd-party software developers have made anything to 'fix' Win8's UI for those who don't find it to their taste.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: One thing

@uhuznaa

+1 for the term "Tent Mode".

That Lenovo model looks good, since it allows casual sofa-bound fondling with hardly any compromise over a traditional laptop (bar a little extra cost for a few sensors and a few extra grams on the hinge, I would imagine).

Microsoft said to be building Apple TV adversary

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Yeah, but...

MS Media Centre... I still have the fairly civilised Media Centre IR remote controller that came with an old WinXP Media Centre edition desktop, and it worked with my Vista laptop that had an integrated IR receiever. I've just checked, and its in MC is in Win7 Home Premium, too.

I seem to remember having some limited success in using a plugin to get it work with WinAmp... or maybe I'm thinking of the media controls on a keyboard.

My memory is fuzzy, but didn't MS try and get hardware partners to make Media Centre branded kit? I know Toshiba made some MC personal media players, but there is no mention of them on the MC Wikipedia page.

McAfee takes time off blogging to concentrate on being chased by police

Dave 126 Silver badge

'k Yeah!

IMDB Belize (2012) Directed by Terry Gilliam.

The long awaited sequel to Brazil (1985) in which the urban dystopia of the original is replaced by a subtropical Brave New World of psychoactive substances, sexual practices and extreme wealth divides. Like much of Gilliams work, it explores the themes of paranoia, subjective storytelling, unreliable narrators and has a strong streak of fantasy...

Seriously though, Gilliam's latest film doesn't seem too different- The Zero Theorem, starring Christolf Waltz as a reclusive computer programmer living in a burnt-out chapel, answering to the head of a totalitarian state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zero_Theorem