Posts by Dave 126 10841 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
Aren't Oxbridge colleges famous for posing questions like "Why don't plants have brains at the entrance interviews"? Perhaps the custom of asking such questions at Google started because interviewers asked questions they themselves had once been asked, or they are aping something they have heard about.
I second the motion for an iHater filter. They can be allowed back in when they back up their claims with evidence.
They are especially irritating because the rest of us would like to talk rationality about the future of the kit that we use, and new ideas and standards often pop up on Apple kit. I'm a PC user. Take the ThunderBolt interface for instance - that has the potential to blur the distinction between desktop and laptop, offering as it does the ability to offload a discrete graphics card into a docking station, as Sony have used it for on the equally pricey Vaio Z (along with fast external storage and a monitor to boot). Exciting stuff, in so far as tech goes.
That's high end kit at the moment, but give it a year or two. This stuff will affect us more than one manufacturer deciding now that many of its users don't use Ethernet enough to warrant a dedicated socket. Shit, one relative of mine bought a new laptop purely because her old Toshiba didn't have a caps-lock light or a SD Card slot...
Viva la difference.
I didn't flame you, but want to point out that whilst it would be nice for Apple to use MicroUSB, there are a lot of iDevice chargers and cables out there, and docks and car systems. Sensibly, their charger is a generic USB charger supplied with a cable.
Nokia, on the other hand USED to be a de facto standard- every house in the land had a Nokia charger - buy a Nokia phone and you'll never run out of juice. Then they went small, and now they sport Mini and Micro USB sockets but won't bloody charge from them!
As regards Greenpeace, I have seen a lot of Macs outlive their PC brothers - if only because someone has got fed up with Windows slowing down and just bought a new PC.
> Renaming it to "Overpriced metal sheened wireless deelie for mugs" would be better, and far more accurate without calling iTards what they actually are.
Strange how tossers like you can't support their overpriced claim with links to where one can find a comparable PC for half the price of a Mac. Put up or shut up, please.
Musicians do. Using the ASIO protocol (instead of Windows Sound Mapper) for external sound cards is a pain in the whatsit on Windows, it keeps reverting to WSM and other weirdness. Not only that, but your soundcard won't even work if your FireWire card is made by the wrong company. Win7 won't allow you to change your default MIDI device to a softsynth without some buggering about in the registry... its all a mess, really.
Macs just work, and are quieter than most PCs out there. And multitouch iDevices have some obvious uses in a Digital Audio Workstation setting.
(happy PC CAD user)
There were pie-in-the-sky plans for an open source peer-to-peer alternative, but it was still working on security bugs, last I heard. Unfortunately, Facebook's USP is its ubiquity; imagine being at a party and a girl asks if you are on Facebook, and you reply "Nah, I'm a geek so I use Diaspora. Let me tell you about it..." Even Orkut is only good for keeping in touch with Brazilian acquaintances.
Facebook has critical mass, and most of the people I know on it aren't likely to adopt a peer-to-peer system- indeed, many now access it from a phone.
It would be a lovely thing indeed for just the core useful functionality of FB (group messaging for event invitations, photo-sharing, sending your telephone number to a friend of a friend you were chatting to the night before) to be available without the creepy stuff. The work involved in creating its infrastructure is tiny compared to the billions FB has been valued at, and the only reason people visit it is to see words, pictures and music their own friends have created.
A law forcing FB to allow data to be exported from it would be very welcome, but I don't see it happening.
I don't know, but was it maybe the rubber that was causing your cutting discs to heat up, and thus wear more quickly? It has been, after all, specifically chosen for giving high friction. I would have expected the wire beading to have been chosen for its strength rather than its hardness.
[just my assumptions, I'm happy to learn]
People who use 'gay' as a negative are just self-identifying themselves as insecure 15 yo boys who aren't worth listening to, and it is better for the rest of us that we can quickly and easily recognise them as such as and when they post on forums.
That said, 'gay' didn't always refer to someone's sexuality, but of course meant 'happy', in a way that always reminds me (probably because of the song 'I feel pretty, and witty, and gay') of the cheerfully skipping Fotherington-Thomas' saying 'Hullo Clouds, Hullo Sky". Obviously such cheerfulness is only going to annoy the pessimistic schoolboy Nigel Molesworth - whose outlook better reflects the school experience of many of us (especially in the realms of sport and games) - and provokes him to call FT a 'gurl' and a sissy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotherington-Thomas
Another example of happiness being equated with ineffectualness (without any homophobia) would the "Isn't [the countryside] amazing?!" lad from The Fast Show.
None of which is in any way applicable to a pricey bit of military hardware.
[Smiley, because]
Lots of brambles, nails and hard kerbs in space. But yeah, you raise an interesting question. I've found a PDF that seems to be at my level:
http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/pdf/space_shuttle_tires_5_12.pdf
Filled with Nitrogen at 315 PSI. Bigger molecules than the mixture that is air. Air pressure at sea level: 1 Atmosphere. In Space: 0 Atmospheres.
1 Atmosphere = roughly 15 PSI. So exposing tyre to vacuum is the equivalent to over-inflating by 15 PSI, or in the case of the space shuttle, 5%.
It used to be exclusive titles that in part dictated your choice of console. Sonic and Mario have been together for some time now! There are still a few exclusive PS3 titles (WipEout, Tekken) that tempt me, but most of the AAA titles are cross-platform.
Still, the PS3 has always been a more civilised machine for an adults lounge (quiet, plays blu-ray and iPlayer, rechargeable controllers as standard, doesn't look like a toy) but far too pricey at launch.
Average car costs, say, £15k
Average Bentley, say £150k
According to Tom's Hardware, the markup of a base-level Macbook over a PC laptop with like-for-like components is almost negligible, not an order of magnitude.
And you have the nerve to use the phrase 'get real'. You buy your machine, let other's buy their's. Mine's a refurb Dell, suits me fine. My boss's Mac suit him very well (storms into office to check emails, machine wakes instantly...). It really shouldn't be making you sick- perhaps you should focus your attention on flowers, fossils, arts or literature?
Oh, and you have concerns over the exploitation of assembly workers and miners of rare resources, buying non-Apple gear isn't going to make much difference. Anyone who can afford a computer and the leisure to to read El Reg is, compared to many of our fellow planet dwellers, very privileged indeed. Remember that, and don't get sick because of other people's IT choices. In fact, the most ethical (or least amoral) policy is to buy a longer lasting (if marginally pricier) product and to use it for longer.
>crap products
I've seen Macs remain fit for purpose over many years.
>Shiny Boxes
As shiny as anybody else's boxes.
>Stupid Prices
See Toms Hardware report. They struggled to built a comparable PC using like-for-like components. If you can, please post.
>Thick
Lack of technical IT ability [does not equal] lack of intelligence, just as not being able to cook a beautiful steak does not make you an idiot.
There is a difference in what I want from a search when at home or in the office, and when using a mobile device. Google doesn't always serve me well when I'm on the hoof.
Examples of mobile searches: Addresses, telephone numbers for businesses. Product reviews for a cut price product I've spotted in a shop and are tempted to buy. Wikipedia to settle pub arguments (the same reason the Guinnesss Brewing Co introduced its Book of Records).
Just posing the question: is there enough of a discrepancy between mobile and desktop searches to allow Apple to compete with Google? (I have no idea)
On Google Maps on Android, there is a (not obvious to the non-technical user) option to cache data, but it is
clunky and I don't trust it (it's my dad's wifi only tablet , and he travels to France a lot). I believe that there are other map apps that explicitly allow caching of, at least, road atlas data.
Also, you could try http://www.reghardware.com/2010/08/19/group_test_satnav_apps/ for some ideas.
C'mon Bob, all know people who may have rebuilt motorcycles or have built a successful business, but boast of not knowing how to send a text message or set up their email client. Apple 'cynically' target a market segment with money- i.e baby boomers. But then so do manufactures of whiskies and wristwatches.
Indeed, to us the car analogy, some might want a Ferrari whereas some would get more fun out of building their own Caterham-7 style machine.
As far as I know, El Reg's anti-spam isn't there to prevent links to companies pertinent to the article, but rather stuff like:
" I earn £600 a day from home!! See how at oneborneveryminute.com"
>miserly 5 hours max
That was 5 hours streaming HD video on loop, not 5 hours maximum.
>cannot be upgraded
Please define 'upgraded'. I can't easily upgrade my CPU or GPU in my DELL laptop. This Macbook effectively has PCIe-onna-cable.
>Business and First Class
have power sockets and or beds.
Poor products? I've seen Macs and Macbooks remain swift and usable after many years. Anecdotal, I know, but still...
>I love high res as much as the next man, but wtf you gona use it for?
Er, desktop publishing and photo-editing. Like Macs have traditionally been used for since the 1980s. Print has always been at a higher dpi than your screen - the closer the screen comes to the printed output, the better. Shirley you can grok that?
... was 'tweeted' by William Gibson a few days back. (This was my first look into the world of Twitter- I was curious to see Gibson's take on Prometheus, since it re-used an idea from his Alien 3 script)
Neuromancer was written on a typewriter, and subsequent books-in-progress would be printed everyday, just in case all the computers failed : D
Contracts.
In the UK, I have (as a relative youngster) only used a fax machine for sending my time sheets back to my employment agency. I have been told my signature on a fax carries more legal weight than on an email- I don't know if this is true, but at least a sender can be reasonably sure that the fax has gone to a specific geographical location.
Now, does any one here remember Arthur C Clarke describing his plan for hacking his fax machine so as to bankrupt people who sent him spam faxes? (it was included in 'Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds')
Unpopular, and has, when been implemented in the past, subject to the laws of unintended consequences. India sees its current economic strength as being in part due to 'one child per parent' policies failing, and in China cultural factors (your sons live with you and help you in your old age, your daughter live with somebody else's son) led to more boys being born - many of whom have little chance of finding a wife (but I guess that more adult men than women results in fewer children than vice versa, and probably motivates the men to achieve more to stand out from fellow suitors).
Ideally, we would achieve fairly constant population by education and better living standards and medical care, as has happened in many 'Western' countries. Unfortunately, the resources required for everyone on this planet to enjoy Western 'standards' would currently require several planets.
People would not vote for Benjimin 4's proposal, so I can't see how it would be bought about in a democracy. I am curious as to how he sees it being enacted.
Hi Chris, have you considered this:
The things that piss you off (well-off educated women delaying conception for work and needing IVF) are symptoms of the very factors that have caused our population to plateau (female education, empowerment, lower fecundity etc ).
(If it wasn't for net immigration, our population in the UK would be stable or falling.)
I'll give you this: our current culture re women and work in the UK isn't ideal. In France it is more common for educated women to have children in their early twenties and then pursue their career afterwards.
You are also right about having an economy based on constant growth. Bertrand Russell had some ideas about this some time ago.
I'm sure that the authors of the report don't expect the population to be 27 billion by 2100, but are rather stressing the point that our current rate of growth is unsustainable.
Though it would be nice to think that population growth will plateau for the same reasons as in some Western countries (female education, good health care) there aren't the resources for these factors to be applicable across the world. The reason why we won't come near 27 million is a lack of food, a lack of water, and no doubt some old fashioned genocide as well. Malnutrition, death, and horror.
>Hence the use of the pejorative "Deniers".
The article was at least acknowledging their viewpoint, and even gave a brief rationalisation of what might have informed it (i.e a suspicion that climate change researches are driven by grants or 'Green' ideologies). Though the author could have used the term 'Sceptic', that would suggest that they would be cautiously accepting of the thesis given evidence, and so couldn't be applied to views such as Jake's.
But I do agree with you, respect for both sides is what is needed.
>Apple is terribly overpriced and underpowered
Don, show us the body of evidence.
I just remember the Toms Hardware investigation into your tired claim... they attempted to build a PC using like-for-like components (ECC RAM etc) to the standards of a Mac Pro, and found that the base-line Mac was actually very fair value - though Apple would take the piss if you chose to upgrade storage and RAM from them. Remember that Toms are all about testing hardware empirically, mostly with a view to PC gaming but also general productivity, CAD and server workloads - hardly Apple Fanbois.
If you can support your assertion, please post link.
... it would be bonkers for Apple, but it seems to be what Microsoft expect desktop PCs to have for WIndows 8 - a touchscreen that sits next to the keyboard and allows users to poke at Metro.
It would be bonkers to have the Mac Pro fitted with one because it is an under-the-desk machine.
>I don't know whether a live cat would be less or more aerodynamic than a dead one
Probably a dead one would be more aerodynamic; whilst a live one would keep its coat clean and slick, a dead one wouldn't be wriggling into positions that presented a high cross section.
>"do you have to descecrate the poor animal by tying it to a flyingmachine under the pretext that it can now >continue to hunt birds?"
Nine out of ten cats feel that desecrating, eviscerating and generally playing with dead animals is perfectly acceptable, nay laudable, behaviour. The chances are that Orville would have have thought the same. Had he been able to hold such abstract opinions. Which he didn't, because he was a cat.
[Hopefully Redundant Disclaimer: I'm not for hurting live cats, btw, just doubtful that they worry or care about what happens to them when they die. And I wouldn't skin somebody else's cat, as that could obviously upset a still-living human. ]
...but please make some laptops with taller screens as well!
It might not even be the wider screen ratio per se that doesn't agree with me, but that it results in the the top of the screen being further away from my eye line.
It's like Tosh read the Reg forums and then went and did the opposite.
Nev: A major UK supermarket's online division was offering the Lumix G2 with kit zoom lens for £200 a few weeks back... and it was similarly discounted elsewhere too. It has a built in EVF, hot-shoe, manual controls and an articulated touch screen (like this one, you find yourself forgetting to use it).
The G2 doesn't do full HD (720 only) and looks more like a bridge camera than a rangefinder (so is less pocketable if fitted with a pancake) - the big discount on its price was probably to clear stock before the arrival of new Lumix offerings. It has so far shown itself to be a handy camera.
Otherwise, I hear good things of Sony's EVFs on their 'SLT' cameras (like DSLRs, same sensor, but omitting the moving mirror).
> As has been mentioned, the radiation issue.
That was my first thought. However, the article says it is for docking the satellite, presumably something that happens after hours in orbit, rather than days or months.
>Protecting the optics in sun facing positions will be challenging.
To keep with the off-the-shelf ethos: A self-darkening welding mask.
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