* Posts by Humpty McNumpty

68 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Sep 2011

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Far Cry 4 review: It's a far cry from Far Cry 3

Humpty McNumpty

It is under £30

CDKeys and similar will sell you the "Limited Edition" fir under £30, granted that does not include the season pass for future DLC, but you can often pick that up very cheap at a later date.

What this review doesn't touch on because it was done on PS4 is that the PC release cannot apparently be reviewed until they release a patch today, so those who want the game on release day don;t have much if any warning as to any gameplay issues at launch.

For possibly related reasons, it ,as of this morning at least, still wasn't possible to preload the game ready to play on UPlay.

BEHOLD Apple's BENEVOLENCE! iMessage txt BLACK HOLE finally fixed

Humpty McNumpty

Cludge

This is a lame cludge tho' surely. Most users who this affects, will still be unaware as to why text from their friends fail to arrive so won't know they need to use this tool. To my mind the fix needs to be automated so that iMessage "de-registers" numbers automatically if they have not signed into the service recently.

I do know someone who will be very happy this fix exists however.

Supercapacitors have the power to save you from data loss

Humpty McNumpty

Huh,

Seriously, the hyped up "supercapacitors" tech articles love to refer to in the vaguest terms these days are actually boring old "Tants" as used on just about every board you might care to pick up from the last 20 years? Never seen on explode that wasn't backwards.

A typical lead free solder alloy such as SAC305 has a melting point of 217C, to ensure every joint reaches at least this temperature some parts of a PCB can easily hit 250C, most lead free process compatible components can handle up to 260C for a few seconds. The reflow profile for any given product is tuned such that all components reflow while staying within their defined limits for ramp rate and maximum temperature. In the more common convection reflow process this is achieved by selecting an appropriate speed for the conveyor through the oven and the temperature of the hot air forced through nozzles in zones along the length of the oven. The alternative is condesation/vapor phase, whereby the PCB is immersed in a vapor and so heats evenly and gets no hotter than the boiling point of the Galden used.

You don't hand solder surface mount parts, if you find yourself needing to, your process is shit. More to the point what would be the point in that device being surface mount? Hand soldering a component with a soldering iron infers heating first one lead then the other, this induces stresses (thermal and mechanical) on the component and it could snap in two.

Automated through hole soldering processes do exist in numerous forms:

Flow Wave - the whole pcb runs over a wave of liquid solder, only really works if the underside of the PCB has no components on it (OK only true at the pitches involved here).

Robot - an arm that essentially mimics manual soldering.

Selective Soldering - The PCB is moved in x and y over a very narrow wave of molten solder soldering only the required areas.

Pin in Paste - place the though hole part with your surface mount machine, and reflow it on your surface mount process

Of course as Mike says, none of this matters, or helps you choose a drive.

On the pictures I have seen from reviews of consumer grade drives, the zoomed in detail of banks of capacitors appear to simply be high capacity MLCC capacitors - probably something like X7R or Y5R. (on the basis of them not being black/yellow/orange and having no polarity markings). These are far inferior to Tantalum based caps in many respects, unstable and they degrade over time.

Wii got it WRONG: How do you solve a problem like Nintendo?

Humpty McNumpty

I quite like it

I think the WiiU is a little underrated. Like many others we had a Wii and it did quickly fall out of favour for any kind of actual gaming. However unlike many of the other people who had one we also have a PS3, 360 and a well specified PC. Many of the titles we did pick up for the Wii were really quite quirky while others seem to struggle to make full use what the controls offered. There was little incentive to buy non-exclusives as Wii versions.

If you play with the WiiU, you will find the new controller does in fact offer a wealth of new possibilities, conceivably it may have been cheaper to offer some kind of dock that adds physical controls to your existing phone or tablet, but that would almost certainly introduce problems with crappy underpowered hardware, poor chipsets and crappy sensors.

There is surely a place for Nintendo and its consoles in the market, steering clear of the violent, stressful or intense gaming that typify what is offered by the other platforms is surely a good idea. Why not focus on the fun, playful, family friendly stuff that befits a device located in the family living room (where the Xbox wants to be) rather than being consigned to the bedroom of a spotty teenager.

The online stuff could do with some work, and so could game pricing. Nintendoland is great fun but it feels like a tech demo and so could really be much cheaper.

Boffin dreams up smart battery gizmo for Raspberry Pi fiddlers

Humpty McNumpty

Re: Where's the incentive

Well I will freely admit my scepticism is heavily coloured by my own scrooge like tendencies. I do follow the odd project that interests me but have as yet never backed one. If I were to I wouldn't back at any level that did not either get me the product or a kit to make it, this is in no small part influenced by the fact I don't consider myself to have the spare income to gamble. I am probably happier than some to wait for the market to produce something on its own rather than fund the now now now. A prime example being 3D printing, Kickstarter is full of these, I consider them all too expensive and too primitive, so I will wait. We've seen what happened with conventional printing I am gambling on that happening again, I simply choose not to do so with money.

Starting a business can indeed cost a lot of money, it does depend how you do it, what you are doing and what your plans are. I work in one small business and grew up in another I am well aware of the money and sacrifices that go into making them happen. Neither of them went out with a begging bowl to get started.

Humpty McNumpty

Re: Where's the incentive

Pot kettle black Mr Pott, I am struggling here to understand how your intervention in this is much more than trolling in of itself.

I don't read the OP as demanding anything, merely offering the opinion there might be better and dare I say it fairer ways such fundraising could be done. From a purely altruistic POV, I truly appreciate the (perceived) inspiration for Kickstarter and similar. It's a nice idea to help someone get something off the ground that they may otherwise find difficult to do because they do not have the credit, the history or charm to raise those funds elsewhere in a more conventional manner. This particular project is a good example I think of one that is close to those ideals and so are many others. I think open source/hardware project are more suitable still as others can then take what was created and run with it, moving manufacturing closer to home, making it better, all good stuff that helps innovation.

My issue with the concept comes with established companies and individuals using these platform to raise funding for projects that essentially mean they can embark on risky ventures with no risk to themselves at all. In many cases they would have no problem doing this stuff themselves and in many others the need for capital is frankly illusional. In manufacturing there are all sorts of deals you can strike on pricing that do not require you to spend huge sums of up front cash or quire large stocks. These projects I think raise moral questions, why are we prepared to give other people money for them to turn into profit for themselves? Even if we don't get a return should we not at least make it so when/if the project is a success they give it back.

Should such platforms have greater regulation and indeed clearer and greater responsibilities as to how they operate.

Should people who solicit funds in this way be obliged to be more open about how they are spending our money.

Frankly I don't care if some of these alternative platforms exist already in some form, Kickstarter is the one everyone is using. Kickstarter gets all the press and many of the rewards are token at best, maybe it should have tiers and types of project that fund and deliver differently.

Without serious questions like these, I fail to see how its anything other than exploitative capitalism at its cynical worst.

Humpty McNumpty

Charging

OK so it seems like a perfectly worthwhile project in concept, but the hardware itself is hardly rocket science. Unless I am missing seems to be a glaring omission, why is there no charging circuit built onto the same PCB? With that it really could flex its muscles as a UPS with solar power/wall wart running your Pi and excess power going to your battery. The parts are quite ordinary, it would be very easy to get pretty good pricing on most of it even with quite low volumes, indeed most it is probably part of a manufacturers stock. It should be pretty cheap certainly way less than £18.

I share the Kickstarter critique, I get the impression many backers of projects have not bothered to read what a project is contracted to do with your money. Backing is not an investment, the only thing a project is obliged to provide a backer with is whatever reward they sign up for. Backing a project does not get you a discount, it gets you whatever they choose to offer, which might be "Thanks". A fully funded project need never actually produce the product to take your money, technically if your chosen reward was this product you can ask for your money back, but Kickstarter won't help you. The Kickstarter rules specifically state you can't use it as a pre-order system, which is a rule they quite blatantly ignore because that seems to be precisely how most projects use it.

A version of Kickstarter that did make your backing an investment would be interesting, I think however there are probably significant legal hurdles to such a process as it would imply the trading of shares.

ZyXEL router attack: HUNDREDS of Brit biz bods knocked offline

Humpty McNumpty

Cheapskates?

What makes them a cheapskate? Perfectly standard piece of hardware, that as vmistery says had quite a good feature set and IIRC had a reputation for a being fairly solid. What kind of ISP and equipment do you expect the kind of small business that this might relate to, to have?

Who has an SLA with their ISP for an ADSL service that would prevent this?

Who can confidently say they own a Router that has no such vulnerability?

Small business don't run out and replace things for the latest shiny shiny when what they have is perfectly functional.

Bigger on the inside: WD’s Tardis-like Black² Dual Drive laptop disk

Humpty McNumpty

Yeah I don't get it either.

I run an SSD and HDD combo in my Desktop, but the solution is far from perfect. Remapping or hard linking the user directories onto the HDD and then choosing on an app by app basis which drive you want to install on is a pest, assuming the installer even gives you a choice. In my case the configuration also appears to prevent the Windows 8.1 update from installing.

All this seems to do is replicate this set-up which for many is not something they will relish. Perhaps if it had come with some fancy caching software to make the SSD invisible it would more more tempting, but having been on the receiving end of NVelo Dataplex thats not exactly something to relish either.

While I can agree Linux evangelists are often overly quick to say something will work, SATA controllers and the like often do right out of the box. Its things like obscure revisions of WiFi chip-sets or those form a few notable very closed source chip-set makers that cause the major issues.

Confessions of a porn site boss: How the net porn industry flopped

Humpty McNumpty

Are you really so anonymous?

Back in the days those dark days. I was involved with a small discussion board supporting users of a small ISP that was pioneering un-metered internet access. One of the fellow administrators of this little community left the group to work with his "Adult Websites". Which would beg the question, are you he?

The discussion board in question is only now shutting its doors, if anyone on here remembers or used to visit The-Scream.co.uk, now may be your last chance to say goodbye a lovely community.

Samsung to spend ENTIRE budget of London 2012 OLYMPICS... on ADS

Humpty McNumpty

Branding

Why not take a leaf from fellow industry giants and use its branding power properly. A Lexus may well be a Toyota but it doesn't have Toyota written all over it because that would lower its perceived value. In contrast Samsung will write Galaxy on pretty much any piece of crap to hang on the coat tails of is premium Galaxy S line. This damages the value of the Galaxy moniker, although it can't help that they are are all flimsy feeling bits of plastic with naff gimmicky features.

Such high spending seems more than a little excessive, to some extent such a prominent players products should speak for themselves. Just how high did they set their targets? did they really think that having so rapidly taken the top step, it's still powerful and technically capable rivals would not fight back and take at least some of the pie?

Apple’s iOS 64-bit iUpgrade: Don't expect a 2x performance leap

Humpty McNumpty

Motorola Atrix..........

......had a fingerprint sensor. I turned it off because it was annoying, but it was there....

Shadowrun Returns and Killzone: Mercenary ... old titles, new takes

Humpty McNumpty

Shadowrun

I'm not sure I can forgive the franchise the travesty of a game that was Shadowrun on Xbox360/PC but at least it killed its Studio.

MS Office on iOS is OFF the menu, says Fujitsu as it nixes Personal Cloud

Humpty McNumpty

Re: Dodging Exchange

Yes, split roughly equally between hardware, OS & installation, ongoing support would have been an extra even for year 1.

No wonder I went for a HP microserver rammed with disks ;)

Humpty McNumpty

Dodging Exchange

It would be a mistake to lay all the blame at MS's door when it comes to SME's. As the in-house IT guy for a small CEM I have to tell you a large part of the problem lies with with the re-seller network or "Microsoft Business Partners" if you like. The installation costs alone that I have been quoted on a Windows Server setup have been horrific considering my Zentyal setup took me, a n00b, under a day.

Of course as a non professional I do have some concerns as to just how quickly I could put it all back together if something went horribly wrong and this means the good old "Cloud" is something has has quite a bit of appeal. Now if there is a problem, it's not mine but equally I have less control and as mentioned before licencing models even on something like 365 do not allow the flexibility needed by an SME so you end up paying for things you do not need.

In a small business margins a slim and investment needs a demonstrable return; £12k+ for a server for <15 users would buy a sizable piece of time saving manufacturing hardware.

VMware waves goodbye to Zimbra

Humpty McNumpty

Jargon and buzzwords

I looked at Zimbra a few times while dodging Exchange, it never quite pulled me in because the community version was too restricted and the professional version used to start a little too high up the pricing/users ladder. Zimbras new home does not look likely to improve that as it sells products us mortals don't know or believe we need.

Resistance 3

Humpty McNumpty

CoD games have barely evolved since COD2 I would put it on a par with that series whereas Battlefield is better.

Humpty McNumpty

I like it

I picked this up the other day with a free Blu-ray copy of Battle: Los Angeles, I figured it couldn't be too bad being the third instalment and as it was effectively £25 thought I'd give it a shot.

Our household has all the current consoles and I have a reasonably spec'd gaming PC that usually get all FPS or strategy titles played on it, especially if there is an online element. This would only be the second game I have properly played on the PS3 the other being the incredibly derivative Killzone 2 (which deserves every accusation the author throws at this game). As it was charged and to hand I have been playing it with PS Move and it works really well, in fact this could tempt me to play more FPS on consoles in future and perhaps splurge £600 on a PC rebuild less often than every 3 years. It doesn't sound like I'll be trying the multi-player any time soon as I like big maps with 32+ players, but in single player mode I find it quite enjoyable and a good match for my casual gaming style. My main criticism would probably go to the PS Move controllers which are simply not comfortable to hold, especially true of the joystick and its location of L1.

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