Posts by atippey

Boris Brexit bluff binds .eu domains to time-bending itinerary

Re: Out of curiosity ...

My first though was em.eu

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Isn't Glimpse ableist against people without working eyes, as is image editing generally...

Boffins computerize giant cyborg cockroaches

Eeek!

If I'm pinned in a building after an earthquake, I don't think the idea having an army of cyber-stimulated hissing cockroaches crawling the wreckage would be terribly comforting. I — along with a sizable portion of the human population — share the admittedly less-than rational fear of having creepy-crawlies crawling creepily over me.

Brits upscaling their TV buys

Re: Smaller the income, larger the TV

I don't know about the UK, but I volunteered in a program which does taxes for free for low income households during my last year of undergrad. Guess where the US Earned Income Tax Credit often ends up going. Seriously, more than a few of them brag about what they're going to do with the money, and this is one of the top choices. Meanwhile, I just pirate everything I want to see online and have a tuner card in my PC for the occasional over-the-air sports coverage. If you're poor, you probably can't afford a nice house or an awesome car, but dammit, you can usually scrounge up enough for a top-of-the-line flat panel to distract you from the depressing realities of your (often multiple) dead-end job(s).

Apple's Retina Macs: A little too elite?

Re: Ugh

It seems like Macbook Pro would be one of the few products with a savvy enough user base to care about SSD/HDD and RAM upgrades. If anything, an extra 8 GB of RAM could add a good year or so to an aging laptop's useful life, and it will be dirt cheap by the time it is a year or two old (actually, it's dirty cheap already). Given that the machine cost north of 2K, you probably want to amortize that over as much time as possible. Admittedly, I dislike it because it completely defeats my MO of buying the lowest RAM option available and upgrading it for half the price of the next Apple option up. When my sister bought her Mac Mini, Apple wanted $100 to up the RAM from 2 to 4 GB and $300 to up it from 2 to 8 GB. You could probably get 8 GB of DDR3 1333 online for less than $50.

Yes, it does and has for quite a while. I put together a computer for my 82 year-old grandma earlier this year and turned the DPI way up on everything — text, icons, and all. Font scaling it straightforward enough. As for the icons, Windows Vista and up support icons sizes ranging from 16x16 to 256x256. Even with a DPI of 220, a 256x256 icons would be over an inch wide.

An early iPad adopter? You smut-ogling filth-gobbling perv!

At least in my experience

Early adopters tend to be nerds. Nerds tend to watch porn. Duh.

Apple to dominate tablet biz, PC market for years

I'm surprised they assume RIM will even be around by 2016.

Moore's Law has ten years to run, predicts physicist

Re: Moore's Law - so what

Goddammit, I want sub-pixel polygons, molecular level physics simulation, and a direct-to-brain interface. Otherwise, Crysis IX will not be worth my money.

Ten... Bedroom Gadget Treats

What?

No dildo or fleshlight or life-sized fuck doll? What is El Reg coming to?

Laptop computers are crap

Two words

Thermal envelope.

Laptops (especially Ultrabooks) are damn near just about the worst shape for dissipating heat. The laptop versions of the same part always have reduced frequency, cache, core count, etc. Partially because they would murder battery life and partially because they'd cook your notebook and/or anything it sat on. This is not such a problem now that even mediocre processors are more than powerful enough for needs of 95% of users, but it's one of the primary reasons a tower of some sort will remain on my desk for the foreseeable future.

Teens break up with Facebook

Re: You've nailed it!

Like everywhere else: your kids are cute, everybody else's are just f#@king irritating.

US teens confess to 60-a-day texting FRENZY

Re: Wife.

I wish my mom could've done that...rather than occasionally catch me beating off.

All-optical RAM to clear comms bottleneck

Re: Re: Re: Oh dear, oh dear - you don't remember your history do you

also, its definitely write only

SanDisk daddy: Flash to 'checkmate' hard drives by 2020

Re: NAND replace DRAM?

What he seems to be arguing is that DRAM will essentially serve as a cache for NAND. It essentially already serves this purpose with conventional storage -- either through the abstraction of swapping virtual memory pages or explicitly loading and releasing resources on demand, but flash's superior performance could allow this "cache" to become smaller. Flash could never replace DRAM per se (for speed and endurance reasons), but I wouldn't be surprised if DRAM provisioning in PCs leveled off a bit a SSDs become more popular. Swapping is less expensive, and there is less pressure to leave commonly used resources in memory if reloading it on demand is relatively cheap anyway.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has a massive package

to be entirely fair

many people could have probably have done his job just as well or better, but he did have to be a highly competent, diligent, and put up with at least one fairly unpleasant boss to do it (compared to certain members of the financial industry who have received similar compensation, this is quite favorable). that said, executive compensation has long since become more than a bit farcical.

Apple annihilates Wall Street performance estimates

As I understand it

Apple has a responsibility to its shareholders to fleece its customers out of as much as it possibly can. Other companies would be thrilled to have a 42% margin. Unfortunately, their customers are decidedly less zealous. Arguably, Apple could increase volume with lower prices, but the company has historically charged a healthy margin on a relatively low volume premium brand. The iPhone/Pad business just allowed them achieve high sales volumes on a premium brand. Even a top-of-the-line fondle-slab costs as much as a run-of-the-mill bargain to mid-grade laptop, and apparently it's more than capable enough for many consumers. Finally, iProducts are ultimately status symbols. The more portable they are, the easier you can flaunt them to friends and acquaintances. Like any Veblen good, its price has to be high as to show the owner has the excess dough to throw at it.

iPhone plunges 13,500 ft from skydiver's pocket - and lives

Potential Energy

I agree that its density would probably mean an iPhone's terminal velocity would be relatively fast. However, the potential energy of a falling Jesus Phone is still 1/2(m)(v^2), so mass does factor into the energy release into said phone upon impact with factory roof -- though quite a bit less than velocity does.

Spielberg flung Fox from Transformers 3

To be completely fair

He did start -- or at least catalyzed -- a major world conflict which killed roughly 60 million people on all sides. Sure, Japan's eastern escapades and tensions between the Soviet Union and the West may have eventually flashed something similar in his absence, but ultimately we'll never know. Also, don't forget the Slavs, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, the mentally disabled...and of course those abysmal watercolors.