Posts by Dave 126

The best smartphones for Christmas

Re: Xperia, Sony Xperia...

For those that want it, there is a variant of the T called the TX - it has a removable battery. The official Jelly Bean for the T and TX is said to arrive around February 2013.

Agreed- I forgot to mention that as a valid criticism of the Xperia P phone I mentioned above. That said, maybe soft-touch buttons are more reliable than some designs of physical buttons, but I don't know... back in the day when they had keypads, I had a couple of phones that developed a dodgy button or two.

I'm not sure why someone down-voted you, you were merely expressing your personal preference, whilst accepting that not everyone feels that same.

Re: Well...

>Too big, far too big, too big, too pricey, Too big and no apps, too big...

Help us help you- what size are you after, 3", 3.5", 4"? I have a 4" model, the Xperia P, and doesn't worry my tailor or give me cramp in my hand, but it may be considered 'pricey' compared to some handsets and cheap compared to others. (I have no Hammer pants)

You want small size AND a keyboard? Hope you've been a good boy this year!

Re: No need for Stickmount...

Hi guys, thanks for your responses.

After reading bits of a very long XDA thread, it would appear that whilst the Nexus 7 can be bodged to work with USB OTG, the (LG-made) Nexus 4 can never be - it seems that its hardware can't supply power to the microUSB port. Apparently there are other LG phones that suffer from the same hardware issue.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1966864&page=23

Oh, and I guess that a universally supported, non-propriety file system capable of bigger-than-4GB files is too much to ask for 2012 : D

Re: I don't want a big smart-phone!

@AC desiring lots of resolution in a 3.5" phone... who's your optician? : D

The Xperia Go is around 3.5", and yeah, the resolution is a bit poor if photos and web browsing are your thing. I find the resolution on my P (4") good enough, small text in browsers is readable for my eyes but I wouldn't want it to be any smaller! I guess that if you often tether a tablet for browsing, the need for a large phone screen is somewhat negated.

Re: I don't want a big smart-phone!

I get on well with my Xperia P (much the same 'footprint' as the iPhone 5, but not as thin) and it doesn't have any annoying idiosyncrasies as my past feature phones have done, but since it is my my first smartphone I may not be the best judge. I would note that the update to ICS has a feature to make the battery last much longer than when it reviewed- it achieves this by turning off some of the data when in standby, so isn't suitable if you need receive an email or Facebook etc notification ASAP. Texts and calls, of course, come straight through.

MiniHDMI cable, 1600 mA charger, and screen protector in the box. Headphones (ear canal type) sounded very reasonable, until the cable broke (pulled out of the microphone junction).

I'm not desperate for Jelly Bean, but a quick search suggests that after Sony roll it our for the flagship models (T, TX, V) around February 2013, it will be coming for the P, S and Go. The same search reveals the Sony Xperia TX, a big screened model that has a removable battery and microSD- I mention it here because it is a feature i know some fellow commentards appreciate, and this model seems to have come in under the radar.

Ug?

> Of course, without any sort of storage expansion, the £280 16GB [Nexus] device is probably the preferred option.

Does that mean that it doesn't support USB OTG?

Punters rate Apple, Samsung more highly than ever

Re: HTC?

>I'm honestly surprised HP is so high on the list though.

Yeah... though we don't know the questions that were asked of the people being polled. Maybe when many people are asked about 'technology', they think 'printers', though the HP Touchpad gained a lot of attention last year (for the wrong reasons), the HP Microserver has been on sale forever it seems, and they are a brand that have been around for a while. They might also have entered the popular conciousness through news stories- once was a time that HP Labs Bristol were in the press every other week with something odd such as robotic DJs.

I met a young 'un the other week who was doing work towards her PhD at HP, using lasers to measure the angular momentum of gas molecules... she'd used her phone's camera to align a target to a laser (better than her eyeball, I guess) which now only produces images in shades of magenta.

Worldwide Gmail crash was due to Google Sync bug

Re: "Was this limited to a specific region?"

I had Chrome crash on Monday (UK) twice, within 5 minutes, glad to have stumbled on this article and that it wasn't an issue at my end.

Review: Mio Cyclo 300 cycling satnav

Re: Pretty much useless for long-distance riders, then ...

Maybe you don't need it turned on all the time... there will be stretches where you will either stay on the same road, or use landmarks like hills or church spires to navigate. A compass on the handlebars is a reasonable backup, too.

Revealed: The Brit-built GRAVITY-powered light that costs $5

And:

Batteries aren't very nice things to dispose off... not the sort of things you want leeching into your soil.

Re: I think that my idea is better

Hehe, we had some fun in the pub beer garden the other month... a couple of the regulars came in with half a bike fitted to a stand, with dynamo, switch and car headlamp unit. You coulc switch between no resistance across the dynamo, the dimmed light and the full headlight- at which point cycling became very hard.

The comedy arose from the effects this concentrated physical exertion had on us, our hearts and lungs being sub-optimal due to being.. well, pub regulars.

Can anyone do a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the efficiency of charging a lead acid battery by this method, compared to the weighted rope method outlined in the article?

(My intuition suggests the rope is more efficient, since it is quieter and doesn't get as warm, but I may have overlooked something)

Re: Wind-up Radios

Batteries are expensive.

Batteries are not nice things to have decomposing into your soil when you've slung them away.

Batteries can't be recharged indefinitely.

Batteries may not be as efficient as this method of energy storage (that recharging batteries get warm is a clue)

Batteries are harder to repair than a piece of rope and sack of stones.

Re: More western technologies to corrupt their ways of living....

Conrad's Heart of Darkness

- there is mention of different lights being used as markers of status... the officer-classes were allowed (clean) paraffin wax candles, the lower-class Europeans in the camp had to use tallow candles that were unpleasant to work by.

Review: Apple iMac 21.5in late 2012

Re: Gaming! All I wanna know is if you can game on this thing!

>i have also never tweaked or had the need to tweak a driver.

I've never tweaked a driver for better performance, but have updated them in efforts to improve system stability. My laptop came from a well-known vendor, but it wasn't a mainstream model and the drivers weren't great. YMMV.

Re: @Mark 65 mechanical harddrive???

Apple's combination of SSD plus mechanical HDD uses a Logical Volume Manager in OSX, so most of the speed benefits of a large SSD are seen in small SSD + HDD combo- the OS decides which files are present on the SSD, and which on the HDD, all invisible to the user.

Still, having a mechanical HDD drive that is difficult to access isn't ideal.

Re: Not impressed with your review.

>perhaps you could explain how the Retina Display can be recycled when it's a display fused to a gorilla glass panel?

Probably mechanically- there are a fair few companies and universities boasting of having developed tools to separate the screen layers from each other, and there is no reason to think that separating parts from the glass is any harder than they from each other.

This isn't actually the chief problem for companies that recycle flat screen monitors- many monitors and TV that use cold cathode fluorescent lamps have yet to reach the end of their life, and the mercury present in the CCFLs is costly to make safe- it requires costly labour (wearing bulky protective suits) to remove the CCFLs.

If you want to separate components from batches of old products, it is actually preferable to have them glued rather than screwed- you can heat the whole batch, rather than pay someone to wield a screwdriver. Since the EU had been putting the onus on end-of-life disposal on manufactuers for over a decade, it isn't in their interests to make it difficult. Like any industrial process, it becomes more efficient if you are dealing with large quanitites of the same product- since Apple sell something in the region of 2 million iMacs a year, a sufficient quantity that dissembly lines and tools can be optimised for them, or at least an operative will have familiarity with them.

Re: Gaming! All I wanna know is if you can game on this thing!

>I find support in terms of drivers, etc for laptop versions of graphics cards to be extremely lacking.

That's because nVidia usually tell you to contact your laptop vendor... ho hum. You should be alright, but it might be worth checking what the latest BootCamp drivers are like.

If I indulged my paranoid side, I might install a CPU-temperature utility but it isn't necessary- if it does overheat, it will throttle itself (the game will go slow and jerky for a few seconds, before running smoothly for ten seconds, repeat).

Re: THE POWER CABLE WILL COME OUT REGULARLY

>loses all their files when the power cable comes out

What have you got, a RAM disk? I believe OSX has an integrated back-up utility. If you're talking about loosing your open files, then it's good practice to save them regularly, or place a bead of Blu-tack around your plug, or whatever. Last time I kicked the kettle plug out the back of a computer, I was pleased to discover this then-new Office feature called AutoSave...

Re: What is it with number pads?

The wired model is about £40, the wireless one is about £55. I have a mate with sausage fingers, and he swears by Apple keyboards on his Win PC, though I think I may have been successful in weaning him onto a wireless 'Chiclet-style' Logitech model that cost £12.

Re: Not very "Green"

Green? Using glue instead of screws actually makes products easier to reduce to their components parts come the end of their life- rather than have a man spend 30 seconds unscrewing each machine, you can put a batch in an oven, and then toss aluminium in one bin, glass in another etc.

I don't know about the i5 chip in this machine, but my Core2 Duo CPU is rated to 109ºC, and starts throttling itself at around 100ºC. I'm pretty sure that it can be subjected to higher temperatures when turned off without damage. You should be able to use a heat gun (its a heat gun, designed to bring areas to vaguely uniform temperature, not a blow-torch!) to loosen the glue without overheating any components inside the iMac, especially as the aluminium case will do a good job of distributing the heat to the desired areas.

Apple TV demand may drive Samsung-sapping sales

Lets say that you expect your TV to last five years... a £200 premium over an equivalent model works out as being £40 a year, sod it, lets call it £1 a week. What can you bring to your TV set that would justify the cost of a weekly Radio Times? (Hmm... would be interested in seeing whether the rise of EPGs has impacted the sales of dedicated television listings magazines... some people still like to hold the week's listings on paper, wielding a highlighter)

Review: Samsung Series 9 super slim notebook

Re: @AC 17:55GMT - @AC 14:10GMT - @Dave 126

Thanks for the clarification guys... I didn't phrase things well. The point I was grasping at was that Win 7 machines will happily run Linux, since Win 7 doesn't have signed boot loader as Win 8 does, so a Win 7 machine will surely have a UEFI that allows the SecureBoot to be turned off. As I understood it, the concern about other OSs was that it wasn't guaranteed that all future machines would allow this, or, if one wished to keep the SecureBoot enabled, if one would be able to get a signed bootloader for the desired OS.

Re: 1600x900

Cheers JamieV,

I've heard of a few competing software solutions, for all iOSXAndroidWindows combos- there were plenty of blogs that announced it works, but none that I could find that actually said how well it works. Thanks for your recomendation, I don't know why I was of so little faith...

Re: 1600x900

@AC

> The human eye can distinguish 170 PPI.

Alas, if only things were that simple, but things involving biology rarely are. The human eye can distinguish more detail in different situations, and uses some tricks in 'post-processing' to achieve even more, especially when illumination or movement is involved. It is the centre of our vision (rare animals we are, with two front-facing eyes- most trade front-on depth perception for greater situational awareness) that is very sharp, and it is estimated that to fool our eye into thinking a picture is real would require 500 megapixels filling the full vision of one eye (not including trying to simulate the dynamic range that our eyes can perceive).

Whilst we might only be able to distinguish 20 million colours, this number is not evenly distributed amongst the hues (we can distinguish more shades of green, for example) so it is better that the hardware can handle more, so that it can display at least the number of greens that we can see.

Yeah, in essence I agree with you- more pixels can only benefit the user so far.

SecureBoot is a Windows 8 feature/annoyance... so that would be "Yes". I'm assuming it has Intel HD 4000 graphics, and there have been reports of issues on Win and OSX machines, so you'd best check with your fellow penguins if you want it to do more than boot into VGA mode.

Re: 1600x900

@K

It would be nice to be able to use a high-res tablet as just a dumb monitor, to add a screen to one's laptop. It doesn't strike me as being too difficult/costly a thing to achieve technically (or am I wrong?) and would give said tablet a unique selling point.

One could imagine buying x86 laptops without screens, and plugging them into a ARM tablets in dumb-monitor mode... this could lead to improvements in ergonomics over traditional laptops, since the screen and keyboard could then be placed further apart from each other.

If it is backed up by appropriate circuitry, can a microHDMI port act as an input? (i.e, is it purely a scaled-down HDMI socket?)

Re: 1600x900

@Anonymous IV

I'm typing this on a Dell laptop with a 17" 1920 x 1200 screen... I am at a normal distance from the screen and can just about make out the pixels - well, I can just about make out a very slight jaggedness around text. I'm not desperate for a greater pixel density (as it would be on a 15" display) - and I do appreciate that many people I know have difficulty in reading small text on monitors- but I'm glad for the extra pixels, especially in the single-pixel-thick lines and wire-frames in CAD.

It might be this issue of reading text that has caused most modern laptops to have a poor resolution screen; I'm not sure how Windows 8 handles it, but setting up Windows 7 for someone with less than 20/20 vision on a high res monitor feels like a work in progress- upping the text size to 125% or 150% can can render text in some legacy programs unreadable, as it spills out of its allotted space. Some users resort to running their computers at below the monitors native resolution, just to make text and icons larger.

Look out, world! Are you ready for John McAfee: THE MOVIE?

Often short stories make better films than full novels... certainly most of Philip K Dicks stories that have become films were short stories.

The latest Total Recall is a curious beast, trying deliberately at times to break with the Paul Verhoven version in some interesting ways, and at others to pay homage to it. The editing wasn't quite to my taste, and left me feeling it was less than the sum of its parts, but YMMV. As for the ending, you'd best watch it yourself. Still, Kate Beckinsale...

Re: eerr David Fincher?

>on that criteria alone it's got to be Johnny Depp

For sure , but Mr Depp does seem a bit too comfortable playing nutters. His Hunter S Thompson seems almost nonchalant. Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant appears to be just on the verge of falling apart at the seams throughout most of the film.

But yeah, Herzog or Gilliam.

Re: It surely has to be

>Christian Bale had that down pat in "The Machinist".

And Mr Bale has had experience of portraying a man escaping through a jungle, in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn (2006)... he doesn't stuff tampons up his nose, but he does eat insects.

Re: eerr David Fincher?

The problems with Alien 3 were nothing to do with Fincher, he got the gig because the studios thought they could boss him around due to his then inexperience. There is no 'director's cut' of the film, but the 'Assembly Cut' of the film is different, plot wise, and is actually a reasonable watch with some strong British actors.

Fincher later made Se7en, and The Game with Michael Douglas as a Gordon Gecko-style businessman discovering the perils of giving away too much personal information. The unreliable narrator structure of Fight Club is probably why he was added this list by Reg staff.

Benjamin Button- well, Fincher isn't alone in occasionally making films aimed at the mass-market box office. In fact it's hard to think of any director who is 'all killer no filler'.

Bruce Robinson's 'How to Get Ahead in Advertising' is probably a better argument for his inclusion in this McAfee. list than 'Withnail and I'.

Terry Gilliam is currently filming a movie about a reclusive computer programmer with an unsettled relationship with the state in which he lives, starring the excellent Christoph Waltz. However, having a director make a second film with a South American country as its title would be neat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zero_Theorem

I've already expressed support for Gilliam to get the job in a couple of posts on these forums, but on reflection, I think Werner Herzog is a strong candidate. Why? He's delivered altered states of conciousness in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009), and has also directed an escape through the jungle film, Rescue Dawn (2006).

Microsoft notices Xbox gamers actually slack-jawed TV fans, adds 43 new apps

Re: So does that mean there's a lot of dim people

You do realise that the RROD defective machines were replaced, so hasn't changed the numbers that you are playing with?

I won't defend the platform- the first generation of machines were as noisy as hell (unsuitable for any kind of media playback) - and the paying to use the online features (which as far as I know, is a peer-to-peer system that doesn't place too much workload on MS's servers - though I may be wrong) isn't great, but you are exhibiting that unfortunate tendency to class whole swathes of your fellow humans as 'idiots'. Pillock.

A year's subscription to XBOX Live Gold is less than quid a week... far cheaper than that extra half pint on a Thursday, a take-away snack once in a while, a coffee on the way to work, or a monthly trip to the cinema. Why single out this one expenditure for your poorly thought-out judgement?

The PS3 is the more versatile, civilised machine, though. No charge to play games online- but that's just as well given Sony's history of keeping user's account details secure.

Dr Alex Moulton: 'An inspiration for generations of engineers'

Its a shame to hear this news. Bicycles have been a passion of mine, that brought balance to my teenage years that else would have been spent indoors trying to get PCs to play games (whilst my peers had Amigas and Megadrives).

Small wheels make a suspension system essential almost essential, unless you have the toughened skeleton of a twenty year-old. Larger wheels offer inherently lower rolling resistance, but efficiency is far from the only consideration- you only have to see the hallway of a city flat blocked by 26"-wheeled bicycles to realise that the traditional design is not convenient for city living. For small trips, a BMX is the better urban machine than bigger bikes- there are no gears to got wrong, it takes up less space in the hallway, and the wheels are damned near indestructible and won't end up pringled like those on the poor machines one sees chained to railings after pissheads have decided to kick them in.

It's a shame that Moulton have never managed to get the price down to become more mainstream. My heart sinks when I see the hideous 'full suspension' bikes that are sold for children these days, the suspension on them is worse than useless and just makes the whole machine so heavy that it is likely to kill any enthusiasm for cycling the child might have possessed. If you can't afford the better materials and parts required to make suspension worthwhile, it is best to Keep It Simple.

Earthworm Jim

The best part of video games to my mind, like the best part of drinking booze, is laughing with friends. Swearing at your mate cos he's just uppercut your last worm off the map, or overtaking his kart after hitting him with a Kooper shell... lots of fun! It isn't critical which activities you do with your mates, and computer games are as good as many on a cold winter's evening. Other folk might prefer to get their friends around regularly for a game of poker, or just to watch the football game... and fair play to them.

Re: An enjoyable game

>escort missions are the distilled essence of ball busting frustration.

Correct, as this video shows:

http://gizmodo.com/5886210/the-most-realistic-goldeneye-mod-ive-ever-seen

Witness the player's frustration at Nataliya's tendancy to get shot or walk in front of his gun, whist endlessly chirping "We need to go to the control room!" before she gets stuck walking into a door frame.

Re: I miss the humour

Sam and Max had a series of new games released a few years ago, in an episodic format. Check 'em out. You don't get lines of dialogue like "By the sacred sideburns of Isaac Asimov!" everyday!

Sensible Software also had a sense of humour- at one point in Cannon Fodder you lead your platoon across a Sensible Soccer pitch and can shoot all the players. Worms (Team 17) did too, but were nothing compared to some of the Spectrum era games such as Jet Set Willy and How To Be A Complete Bastard.

I guess that when modern AA titles require millions to produce, the odd-ball humour suffers.

Patrick Moore: Lived with cats, accompanied Einstein on the piano

I've been lucky to catch most of the recent episodes of the Sky at Night... how could I not, with recent events such as the landing of Curiosity on Mars, and the deaths of Neil Armstrong and Sir Bernard Lovell of radio telescope fame (covered on the same episode?). Not to mention the ongoing journeys of the Voyager probes as they begin to enter interstellar space...

I was of an age to be the target audience for Gamesmaster, but was already aware of who he was... and remembered at the time (a re-run, obviously) Monty Python parodying his verbal delivery. My favourite was the Radio 4 version of Dead Ringers, ringing him up in the voice of Tom Baker's Doctor Who. "Davros is planning an invasion of Earth from Mars, but we don't know from where on the Red Planet he is basing his invasion"... Sir Patrick didn't miss a beat, and immediately gave three likely spots, as well as concisely giving his reasoning behind the choices, before picking the most likely. A prank call done with affection (John Culshaw has appeared in recent episodes of The Sky At Night, including an anniversary edition) which allowed the 'victim' the best lines. (Though John Culshaw as 'The Doctor' ringing up Tom Baker himself was priceless... "I am the Doctor" / "No, I am the Doctor... y'know, I always fancied Davros" )

That Patrick Moore met Orville Wright I find amazing, just as I do the short period of time between the first heavier-than-air manned flight and the first man on the moon.

This is out of hand now: Apple attempts to trademark the LEAF

Re: Some Simple facts

> it should be sued for it's total market value just for trying to patent a PLANT PART

Have you any idea how many billions of shapes the flora of this planet generate?

Toronto Maple Leafs, an ice hockey team. Their logo? You guessed it!

Yet you call a fair chunk of of our fellow humans 'idiots'. That is not a healthy perspective. And 'pure evil'? Read some history, there is far worse stuff there- rape, pillage, murder, oppression, slavery, torture, mutilation, genocide... just for starters. And sadly, it's not confined to history. If you have a serious point (giving you credit) about worker's conditions in China, I would suggest you look at the supply chain of the raw materials that go into all our decadent electronic gadgets- from any manufacturer. Nothing new here: diamonds, gold, tea, tobacco, cotton, oil, rum, sugar...

Kodak Yellow, BP spent millions about 15 years ago changing their colour of green from 'vivid' to 'natural'. Colours- there are millions to choose from.

Much like geometric shapes. This leaf shape is created by two arcs, whose respective foci are a distance from each other that can be expressed with respect to the radius of the two arcs, and the angle of the axis on which these two arcs lie. Change one of those numbers and you have a different shape.

Re: What's the big deal?

>The leaf is just a simple geometric shape.

What isn't?

Bass

National Geographic

Blaupunkt

Nike

HSBC

Re: footwear

Close, but not the same. Adidas' 'leaves' are slightly longer, even if they weren't divided by three parallel lines. Apple's application isn't for any 'filled space defined by two arcs with different foci', just this specific one.

I haven't heard of any complaints of Adidas using 'three parallel lines' as a trademark, which is even easier to define using words.

Re: ...and if they did....

Audio tape... Sony were going to package their first audio cassettes in yellow, but changed their mind out of respect for Kodak, who had been packaging their consumables in yellow for some time- Sony saw Kodak as being pioneering in their consistent use of one colour to distinguish their brand. Sony went with red.

National Geographic use a Yellow Frame, Bass a Red Equilateral triangle.

>Stephen Fry and his minions would all rush out and buy it, saying how wonderful and innovative it was, and how it changed their lives.

And if Douglas Adams were still alive, he's be with them. Hell, once was a time people would lie in bed and worry about the Mongol Hordes, Communists, The Scottish,The French, Catholics or Spanish Armadas... but Stephen Fry's Minions? Seek counselling.

Re: Next step: sue God?

>Damn, we so need a Douglas Adams icon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams#Technology_and_innovation

-from Wikipedia, though I got the same impressions from reading The Salmon of Doubt. Just saying.

Apple: 27-inch iMac won't ship until next year

Re: Much as I love...

XP had Shadow Copy, but your Aunt Mary would still have to seek out a 3rd party utility for actually making image backups. Win 7 has a TimeMachine- like image back up utility built in, but it fails halfway through if you don't turn off MS's own AV software first! FFS, how difficult would it be to add a notification window telling the user: "Before making this backup, first run a virus scan and take any recommended actions" - if not have the backup system do this itself?

There are a lot of Aunt Marys out there, and many of us who might be called upon to provide tech support for a cup of tea and a slice of cake... and we might not want to have to receive a phone call every time the OS throws an esoteric message at them. Having the user's computer make backups of itself without their input makes life easier for everyone involved.

Behold ATLAS, the fastest computer of 50 years ago

Re: Wonder if I actually used it??

In an effort to learn about these Banda duplicators of which you speak, I tripped over this gem:

"In grade five at Tyler Street primary school, Preston, my first newspaper, The Weekly Trumpet, was hand lettered on quarto paper and pinned to the class notice board. About this time my mother bought her first washing machine, a Hoover with a fold-away hand-wringer. "What a perfect way to run off a few copies of the Trumpet and sell them to the kids" I thought! But something went terribly wrong. Instead of the violet hectograph-inked paper-master soaked in methylated spirits transferring onto white paper, it ended up on the wringers of mother's new pride and joy! The Weekly Trumpet appeared on whites and coloureds for weeks until the image disappeared."

-http://www.metaltype.co.uk/stories/story38.shtml

The author continues to describe his career in printing, from 1949 to present... a parallel story of business and information technology.

Take it or break it: the return of the drop test

Re: Am I the only one..

I've noticed that toddlers are more attracted to cameras, spectacles, mobile phones (even when the phone is turned off) and wristwatches [in short, expensive stuff designed to appeal to adults] than they are to toys. They seem to instinctively know what you don't want broken, and make a beeline to it.

You would have though that toy designers would have noticed this too, but no.

Fortunately, the whole post-a-jam-sandwich-in-the-VCR-door experiment is a thing of the past in most households.

Re: Going for the FHM demographic?

>A bloke in a similarly-irrelevant-to-the-claimed-context outfit, posed and dressed in such a way as to suggest that the undercarriage may be flapping in the breeze (but just about hidden from plain view) and with no real relevance to the article?

Here you go:

http://blackbooks.wikia.com/wiki/Dave's_syndrome

(IT angle?- image taken from Black Books, a Graham Linehan series that pre-dated The IT Crowd)

The best tablets for Christmas

Re: iPads feeling expensive now

>There are some Android tablets which have a different aspect ratio screens, e.g. the Archos 80 has a 4:3 screen.

And that weird 5" Android LG phone is 4:3. I dislike 16:9 on laptops, but on tablets its not quite as irritating because I can rotate it by 90º.