Posts by mm0zct 27 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jul 2011
As a very happy owner of a Surface 3 (128GB/4GB model) this looked like it could be a good replacement in their lineup, but it seems a shame to drop the screen size and resolution to the point that it's less then 1920 wide. The original S3 has a 1920x1280 display, which is perfect for 1920x1080 video content!
The USB-C connector is welcome, but the S3 charged with micro USB anyway, which matches all my other portable devices and batter packs at the moment.
If you want a cheaper pen then old S3 and SP4 pens should work fine on the newer surface devices. You lose the tilt sensitivity but IMHO the S3/SP3 and SP4 pens are both perfectly fine for most users, especially if you are using it for writing / rough diagrams rather than professional art production. (When the new Surface pen came out I picked up a second hand SP4 pen for £30 to compare with my S3 pen. In some ways I prefer the original S3 pen, but it's a matter of personal taste)
What I want is Amazon's "AutoRip" for books, I don't want to buy a book twice just because I like reading dead trees at home, but prefer to take my kindle on holiday. Let me fill my bookshelf, but give me a ebook copy too, just the same as you do for CDs and mp3s (the only difference in the argument is that it's easier for me to rip the CD myself anyway, in theory I could build/buy a book scanner).
IIRC you just grab a little "handle" next to the scroll bar and drag it onto the page, it automatically splits the page like you're peeling back some sort of partition. I think you can even keep doing this for more splits.
It's embarrassing that the MVP didn't know this, and I also hate the ribbon interface, but the feature wasn't dropped.
The banks only accept bills printed by the company and posted to you, not self printed ones. I learned this after much palava trying to open a new joint account with my partner. The only thing in the end they would take is the council tax bill for this year (or an HMRC tax letter dated within a few months), because we have everything else paperless. House insurance on the property doesn't count even, nor did the fact I bought said flat through the same bank! (Mortgage and current accounts are completely separate, how ridiculous that the bank won't believe you live at the house you bought with them?)
The only time I get this problem with UK Freeview is when the built in DVB-T tuner in the TV is so bad that it can't actually keep up with decoding the incoming video at line-rate, and eventually slips a little out of sync until it eventually fails completely for a few seconds while throws away all it's buffers and gets a lock on the signal again. No problems whatsoever with DVB-T tuners from brand names however, or my £15 usb DVB-T tuner with Windows Media Centre (by far the best TV interface I've ever used, and the reason that my media centre PC can never migrate to windows 10)
I replaced my N900 with an N9 after the USB port went and I got fed up swapping the battery every morning with the one in the external battery charger. It works brilliantly as a phone/messaging/email reader/web browser, and I especially love the "feeds" screen, which with a few free/open apps contains not only my twitter, facebook and RSS feeds, but also my upcoming calendar events. With Billboard I can also put a lof of information on the idle screen, such as time, current song, and IP address, which the N9 keeps displayed at all times with the low power OLED display. The 1GB of RAM over the 256MB of the N900 means it's much better at multi tasking and web browsing (the N900 couldn't use the web at all when I gave up on it).
Unfortunately I sorely miss the keyboard, that was one of the main reasons I hung onto the N900 for so long. The N9 can still ssh with X forwarding, but it's not nearly as useable without a physical keyboard. Swype helps with SMS messaging, but it's still a long way from a physical keyboard.
In summary the N9 is a fantastic phone, but the keyboard is what made the N900 great. I'd be more interested in Jolla if it wasn't so much bigger than the N9.
It's not "new" but you might want to give the n900 a look, it's a fantastic phone for messaging and ssh (especially since it's runs X11, so if you have to do X-forwarding you can).
Sadly the 256mb of RAM makes the "modern" web basically unusable, which led me to switch to the n9, but I sorely miss the physical keyboard (you might want to take a look at the neo900 project too).
I hope the rotary encoder is better made than the one on our office coffee machine (which controls the volume of coffee produced), you try and turn it back up to a full mug after someone made an espresso and the thing just skips up and down with about 5/8 clicks changing the value in the direction desired. That's after just a few years wear of a fairly industrial looking machine.
Agreed, the article claims to be measuring efficiency, but simply reports power consumption without the performance part.
Give us total energy, performance/power (for games for example, where workload changes with performance, it makes more sense to report fps/W), or EDP, then we'll have some metric of "efficiency" to talk about.
If it's anything like meego on the n9 the UI is actually really intuitive after a couple of hours. After a day or two you'll be wondering why your friend's phone doesn't close the app when you swipe down from the top, or go to the switch app screen when you swipe from the right. I know I have this problem any time I pick up my girlfriend's or mum's phone. It's a shame Jolla can't get a Swype keyboard by the sounds of it though, because Swype on the n9 is really good, and I would miss it moving to Jolla.
displayport -> hdmi/dvi/vga adapters are cheap enough, in the order of £10-15. If you're spending £1000 on a laptop you can afford £10 for a display adapter, and yes displayport -> hdmi will support the audio component also, so no need to get your panties in a twist over the laptop being no good for media.
Similarly a usb->ethernet adapter is ~£5-15 if you need it. Personally I'm a big fan of wired ethernet too, but ti's not the end of the world to have to use a usb one, at least both the ports are usb 3.0.
Almost 3 years on and my N900 still has it's stylus. When the stylus clicks neatly into the body of the device it's quite easy to not lose it. I do prefer my physical keyboard over touchscreen typing or handwriting though, which is one reason why I'm hanging onto my N900 as long as possible.
If the Note2 had Maemo5 quality multitasking and Android wasn't quite so restrictive I'd be a lot more interested.
You are missing the point a bit there. The core still executes x86 code, so runs the legacy ISA and can be targeted by the current compilers. The 2% refers to how much die area is used to specifically decode the x86 ISA into a processor internal representation of the opcodes. The remaining 98% of the core would look very similar if the core was executing ARM or any other ISA, that was the point of the comment. That still doesn't mean that x86 can shrink as small as a RISC ISA specifically designed for small cores, but at least the x86 ISA is not really a limiting factor in the size of _this_ core design (which is admittedly fairly small).
Late to the party, but I've seen the tech first hand. The flicker is a non issue - I am quite sensitive to flickering lights and don't notice anything when looking at them working, and the light is not modulated on-off, it's a much more complicated modulation scheme than that.
Also the light can still transmit data while it is not perceptibly on, the data rate might be lower but it can cope with quite high noise to signal ratios.
The people worried about moving from room to room: I think the lights will operate somewhat like mobile phone towers, on a more localised scale, where your connection should automatically switch to the most visible light source. This is just speculation on my part however.
Disclaimer, I'm loosely related to the Edinburgh project.
Have a look at VLC - Visible Light Communication http://visiblelightcomm.com , there's a research group at Edinburgh doing clever modulation of while LED lights to perform the same function as WiFi (the term LiFi seems to have been adopted at some point).
One of the professors responsible did a TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/harald_haas_wireless_data_from_every_light_bulb.html
It's not 1.5GB/s but it can stream video already, one of the current projects is a tiny ultra low power modem to accompany the light in it's fitting (with an ethernet connection probably), rather than the bulky prototype they have just now.
"How hard is it for companies in the phone manufacturing business to release well designed, solidly built and well spec'd phones?!? Is Apple the only one that can do it?"
Like my n900, I can't fault it except for the gps, which only ever seems to work with the help of the "agps" cell tower triangulation as a starting point, and this requires internet (not a problem if your contract has 3g, I decided to do the internet as pay on the days I need it).
The phone itself is solid, has a good keyboard, screen and ui, and is well spec'd for it's time (and I will probably be using it indefinitely, since they aren't releasing a maego successor with a keyboard)
But a distro not supporting a desktop environment you really like _is_ a reason to leave a distro.
I am another that was saddened by the loss of gnome2, and am still running Fedora14 on my work desktop and my laptop. When it comes to upgrade I'll give gnome3 and XFCE a spin anyway, and will probably stick with Fedora, but I'm only resigning myself to losing gnome2 because other distros eventually will too.
Never heard of Synergy? (or synergy+ as it is now called iirc).
It lets you share a mouse, keyboard and copy buffer between multiple computers, you just define a "server" with the mouse and keyboard attached, and where the various screen borders link to (for me it might be "laptop is left of desktop 1" "desktop 1 is right of laptop" "desktop 2 is right of desktop 1" "desktop 1 is left of desktop 2".
The only limitation is that you can't drag applications across.
I have a goflex drive too and I love it because my laptop has esata-p but not usb3, and my desktop has usb3 but not esata-p (it has esata but the goflex only provides an esata-p adapter); and as you said I can use all 3 adapters (usb2, esata-p and usb3) for my goflex on any other 2.5" hard disk :)
Interface flexibility is underrated.
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