Posts by pear

Fifa fans kick up fuss over Euro 2012 team substitutions

FIFA RTWC

Think they should just re-release fifa 98 really. Football games have been on a downhill slope since then. Back in the day you were allowed to dive and deliberately foul the goalkeeper. All this with real players!

Microsoft unveils paid SkyDrive options

Re: Existing subscribers all get 25GB

ditto!

Qualcomm's S4 chip set to shrink laptops further

Fine, if you want a laptop that can't run a proper version of Windows....

CD: The indestructible music format that REFUSES TO DIE

I <3 cds

thing is it's worth buying a cd even if you don't plan on using it. It's usually cheaper, it's uncompressed and if your hard drive blows you just rip it again.

The only annoying thing about cds is that they scratch, easily. Yesterday I accidentally dropped a cd :( i've proably messed up a track... fortunately I have it ripped to a lossless format so no data lost!

Nokia readying Win8 tablet for 2012 release?

All hinges on how good WOA is, the power users will lean towards the x86 tablets, whilst the ARM ones will be more plug and play, I have a feeling it'll be pretty good but it'll next dev support to do well.

Crucial pledges PC performance boost with Adrenaline

Re: Nothing New

Well it's similar in principle but it's more of a retrofit (corsair are also doing an almost identical product with the same software too).

Is more designed to add in rather than in a fresh build and is probably a bit easier to set up.

There is a very big advantage to caching over a boot ssd in that an algorithm is probably better than people at working out what should be on the ssd and what shouldn't. You won't need to move programs and files over, managing multiple disks is a nuisance. Most likely with there'l be a performance hit and probably a sort of lag, play a game for the first time in a year and the first couple times it won't speed up but then it will. Whether or not it's noticeable in real world terms or not is another matter. Also half the windows files that would be installed on to a boot drive don't need to be there.

Lastly as it's a cache if it dies like ssds do then your mechanical drive still has everything (well almost depending on it's writing policy).

SRT is probably more appealing and the SLC drive which is purpose made is extra reliable to handle being thrashed around, although it is only 20gb which is not really big enough.

Intel smartphones coming to the UK, France, China, India

STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE INSTRUCTION SET

just worry about the phone!

Sony PlayStation Vita

Re: Re: 1.3 MP ?

why would it need a better camera though? It's ample for AR. Most people carrying these around would have a better one on their phone anyway

Will Windows 8 sticker shock leave Microsoft unstuck?

WOA

I think WOA will probably be something well implemented but the marketing of this all is going to confuse the hell out of many.

Official: Sony and Ericsson are divorced

rockin' out on a k800i i got on ebay for £20, it seems to work quite well! I had a c903, it went bust whcih was probably a sign of things to come, it seemed noticeably less well implemented despite having a great spec.

Sony could potentially succeed with media oriented android devices if it wanted a niche, walkman android kinda thing.

Motorola 'Intel inside' Android 4.0 phone spied on web

Who cares?

Ultimately when I am using my phone I couldn't care less about instruction sets, at the end of the day it's all about how well it's executed, if Intel can make good mobile x86 chips then it's good competition, if not then they will fail. I think intel (and AMD) will do better in the tablet market though where x86/full windows could actually be beneficial.

Later revisions will incorporate more stuff, intel will buy some more companies and it will ultimately end up as a full SOC.

MySpace no longer crying a river with 1 MILLION new punters

Well it's much cleaner now and a bit more purpose built, although personally even though I've been on there to listen to music/check out a band etc every so often I haven't logged in for about 5 years.

Facebook didn't pull of it's musician's pages very well at all so it's still a decent place for unsigned/small bands.

Secondhand MP3 shop can keep trading during EMI trial

Usually nothing to stop someone copying a CD anyway. Although you are often selling the booklet etc with it.

Will leave it for the courts to decide the legality of it all though.

Sinofsky shows off Windows 8 on ARM and Office15

hmmm

not all so sure about this, whilst I'm confident that Microsoft will produce a very nice and polished product I can see things getting messy when you can buy x86 and ARM tablets. The x86 versions will be useful as they will just be mini computers, and will be a real hit for transformer type/dockable devices.

With this more closed platform the ARM versions will be able to guarantee a very high level of stability , on the other hand little existing software will work. Having said that it shoudln't be too difficult to port a lot of stuff. Windows will largely be in competition with itself and will need to clarify who the target market really is, and selling it as Windows for ARM doesn't sound like a good idea.

Also Medfield has proved to some extent that the whole ARM vs x86 thing isn't necessarily true, and the x86 tablets may be able to have just as good battery life. The one thing that I think is likely is that the ARM tablets will probably be cheaper than x86 and this may be the key here. Intel and AMD will need to throw their weight behind a few tablet makers to ensure that regular windows 8 is a justifiable tablet OS. One problem that may arise for MS here is that on the x86 tablet side of things there will be a mix of products, some very good, some probably terrible.

Microsoft sets date for Windows 8 preview - at mobile shindig

yerp

I reckon we are going to have something called "Windows 8 Tablet" which is windows 8 for arm, will be sold as a stripped down tablet oly version, whilst "premium"(pos?) x86 tablets with intel/amb cpus will just be windows on a tablet/ laptop hybrid kinda device. At a guess you might have thinner/lighter ARM tablets but not necessarily. I think they will be cheaper though.

FWIW Windows tablet (if it is called that) will effectively sit somewhere between "windows 8" and "windows phone 8".

Ten... Freesat TV receivers

inbuilt

Fortunate to have an inbuilt dual freesat/view tuners on a panasonic plasma, I find the freesat signal more stable. More channels too but mostly junk, although cbs acion has TNG at 8pm every night :p...

More tvs should have it built in really.

Colorfly Pocket Hi-Fi C4

portable?

Would you really want to carry around £500+ gear on a bus?

I do actually understand this product though, it does have the potential to be the basis of a mini audiophile setup.

Some minor issues...

It 1) Could do with more capactiy, although a standard lossless album will take 500mb or so, so around 100 albums ain't too bad.

2) Double up as a usb dac, for things like spotify etc without needing a converter.

3) Better format support.

4) a squeezebox touch costs less than half that

Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 DNA splice is on - report

confuggled

So there's going to be 3 different Windows 8s...

Kinda sounds like wp8 will similar to winodws 8 for ARM, which i think will be tablet targeted. Wonder how on earth they're going to be marketing all this.

Also sounds like wp7.5 devices will probably not get upgraded to wp8.

Page won't show his ring to prove Google+ 'engagement'

ditto.

I now even avoid using gmail as it looks so bad and now just read it via a folder in my hotmail.

Intel chieftain outlines broad tablet, smartphone blitz

That sort of processing will most likely be happening on a GPU...

Medfield already uses licensed graphics, as does everyone else except qualcomm and nvidia

Asus Eee Pad Slider SL101

I still don't get

why I need one.

Whilst this looks like a nice piece of kit I still struggle to understand what I would do with it :/

Chief Rabbi: I admire Jobs and Apple and use my iPad daily

agree entirely

some of the comments were just ridiculous, the fact that it spiralled in to a apple = good vs bad war proves his point to some extent. It was fairly obvious that it was just metaphorical and that Sacks is not actually blaming Steve Jobs for consumerism. It's a bit of an insult to his intelligence to think that he genuinely thinks that consumerism was created in 2002.

Apple shifts Lossless Audio Codec to open source

meh

Pretty much it makes not much difference which lossless you use at the end of the day, any decent processor can convert tracks from one to the other in not very much time.

I would suddenly become an Apple customer if they decided to actually sell ALAC albums though.

Sid Meier's Civilization

Fun with civ

I used to play this when i was 7 :D

I loved changing the text files so that my demands were more brutal!

Apple pictures iOS on your wall

Fahrenheit 451

sounds like ^

Pure Sirocco 550 music combo

Hmmm

"What's wrong with putting it on the back? " If you want to plug in at the back just use the RCA? I imagine a lot of people might have this sort of thing up against the wall and will want to quickly plug in an mp3 player.

Better codec support would be handy

Boffins brew up formula for consummate cuppa

nonsense

The fact that this is sponsored by cravendale makes a mockery of it really.

For starters good tea does not come in a bag, and personally i prefer it without milk.

Israeli couple dub sprog 'Like'

it would sound terrible!

Forget the absurdity of it! In hebrew there isn't even the appropriate vowels to say like, it would sound more like "leck" or "lake"

Freeman Dyson: Shale gas is 'cheap and effective'

not free

Energy coming from humans is not free.

People have to eat, to burn energy. Essentially this is solar energy, (plants get energy from sunlight).

Energy going in to plants going in to humans are not as efficient per sqm as solar panels. Though it may be good for public health!

it takes time

Unless you drill right in to the core of the earth (well in to the actual heat source) it is rather limited.

Reason being is that it takes time for the rock to heat up. It's not an unlimited supply in the sense that you either end up extracting energy at a slow rate, or extracting too much too fast.

It's a bit like a water filter, you can have as much water to put in it but you can only drink as much as the rate that it comes through. Certain places like iceland it comes through rather quickly so it's not without it's merits but in most places in the world it can't contribute a very significant amount to the grid.

coal is not clean

Gas is not clean, whilst cleaner than oil and coal and bountiful but it is still a fossil fuel and you cannot decarbonise by by using it.

What will we do with 600MHz?

Radio

A decent digital radio platform...