Posts by lpcollier

Kickstarter unplugs iFind miracle battery-free locator

Re: I have no opinion on this project, but

That's not actually making use of 'waste' energy. The transformer effect would couple the house wiring to the HT lines and cause current draw from the HT lines which should be measurable.

The cute things they say

Agreed. I liked the abstraction in the original Archimedes RISCOS where the application would give you a little window with an icon representing the file, which you then had to drag to your chosen place in the file manager window (or whatever it was called). The whole idea of an OS having multiple ways to browse the file system ought to disappear really.

Re: True story - because I was there.

Similar story, I was a year 9 student (so age about 14) and our school's design & technology department got their first AutoCAD machines - 386-class, 4MB memory, 20-40MB hard drives, running DOS 3.x or maybe 4.x. After they'd been in use for a few months I was asked by a teacher to take a look at one of the machines that had 'stopped working'. After playing around for 5 minutes and booting from a floppy I realised that COMMAND.COM was missing. I used the SYS command to restore the OS onto the hard drive. It turned out that a 'technology' teacher had decided to delete files that he didn't use from the hard drive, and since he didn't know what COMMAND.COM was for, decided to get rid of it.

MacBook Air 13-inch: If you squint hard enough, you'll see a lesser-spotted Apple Price Cut

Re: Bah!

What are you talking about? The top of the line iPad (Retina WiFi+Cellular 128Gb) is £739, so can't be anywhere near $1000 even if you add in insurance (which is a rip-off for any consumer product).

As for the MacBook Air, you claimed in an earlier post that you could get the same spec computer for half the price - a very common claim in threads discussing the value of Apple machines - and almost never followed-up by posting a link to the claimed half price machine. Usually the poster then goes on to describe a machine that lacks half the features of the Apple machine but they don't need those features so can be scrubbed from the equation.

Sometimes I borrow my wife's ageing MacBook Air when I'm going on a long train commute; I usually copy anything onto the hard drive that I need before going - that's less hassle than carrying around fistfuls of DVDs and my bigger MacBook Pro.

Optical drives are becoming increasingly less useful. If I could drop the drive from my MacBook Pro and also lose a bit of size and weight then I would go for it. Thankfully I have the technical prowess to plug a USB optical drive into my machine so I'm not stuck with "net connected or nothing" as you are. Perhaps a friend or relative could walk you though plugging a USB drive in, if you find yourself in that position again.

Users folder vanished after OS X 10.9.3 update? Here's a fix

Re: Would someone PLEASE explain to me...

Actually, eliminating the file system should be the next big step in operating system development, so long as it's done right. It's like the difference between a spreadsheet and a relational database. Flat file systems give you one way to reference a file (path+filename) that hopefully contains enough information for you to find the file and know what it is. Searching relies mostly on the name. Files ought to be referenced by every piece of information that helps you know what it is - rather than deciding if it's /Users/me/work/customers/bob/invoice1 or /Users/me/work/invoices/paid/bob1, it should be all of those. I think that's the idea of the OSX tags, but it hasn't been developed far enough to date.

Apple, Beats and fools with money who trust celeb endorsements

Re: A fool and his money are easily parted.

I can tell - it's a spoof. But I did have to read a good few paragraphs.

Fury as OS X Mavericks users FORCED to sync contact books with iCloud

Re: Molehill->mountain

So you're unhappy that Apple have dropped support for an obsolete third-party phone that synced using unsupported third-party software. I agree that Apple should have given some kind of warning, but their own phones and several versions previous will work just fine with the updated software. I'm sure there will be third party software coming out that will allow some kind of address book sync that doesn't rely on iTunes. In the meantime it's probably best not to upgrade your OS when you're using obsolete hardware and software.

Re: It's not only iCloud. You can also give your data to Google

What on earth are you talking about? Apple has removed the local syncing capability from iTunes. That's annoying. You can sync your contacts through any third party online service, or indeed use your own server if you wish. no-one is forcing anyone to use iCloud.

Mac OS X Mavericks 'upgrade' ruins iWorks

Re: Ribboned for your pleasure

It's not plagiarism to get help with typos.

BT's mobe interference claim laughed off air by ad watchdog

I removed the silly black BT router and connected my Apple Airport Express directly to the white VDSL adaptor. You need to enable PPPoE on the WiFi router. Works great.

Acorn’s would-be ZX Spectrum killer, the Electron, is 30

Re: My First...

Same here. I remember a maths homework task to create a list of prime numbers. I whipped up a little program on the Electron (probably took longer than just guessing the 10 or so required) and left it running all night, producing a printed list running to several pages to give to the teacher.

Apple Time Capsule 2013: Next-gen wireless networking, anyone?

Re: No ADSL/Cable modem?

I'm not sure that's completely true. Many ADSL/Cable modems have a 'bridge' mode where the LAN ethernet port is bridged to the WAN side, which would mean that the AirPort uses the public IP address and does its own NAT, DHCP etc.

I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working

tell them to spend money...

I get this a lot. I usually look at what they have, and if it's more than a couple of years old (or just cheap junk) I usually tell them they need to buy something new, and that it's irreparable. If they don't know what to buy, I print out the relevant pages from Amazon.

Usually, they do nothing, but don't disturb me again as they haven't followed my advice. A few will actually buy the new kit and ask for help installing it, which I generally don't mind as I'm still geeky enough to enjoy ripping the plastic of new boxes.

Of course, I do help out friends that I know are short of cash and need help. But I've been caught out too many times by people who will happily take up my whole weekend to fix something for free, and then spend £800 on a new iPhone or whatever when it comes out.

DRM-free music dream haunts Apple's app-store lock-in

Logical Disconnect

It seems to me that the whole App Store concept drives otherwise intelligent people into total logical disconnect. About the only thing I can find that differentiates App Store purchases from boxed software is that App Store finally links software "ownership" to a single user or family, making it difficult to resell purchased software.

All of the other issues of "lock-in" are nonsense, and quite ironic that after nearly two decades of Microsoft/Windows dominance, we're finally in a position of true competition on the desktop and mobile front, and the media is awash with the obvious consequence of choice: incompatibility. Has everyone forgotten the golden decade of the 1980s where people bought a new microcomputer every couple of years, and had to throw out most of their software and start again?

We do need to find a solution for some of these issues - for expensive apps like creative and office suites people really will feel locked to a platform, but companies will have to find ways to give users store credit to crossgrade when needed. At the moment the app store model is quite immature, but these things will come.

Apple iMac 27in

Audio and Video Interfaces

And also for multi-channel audio and video interfaces. Audio and video are core markets for Macs.