Posts by Chris Boyne

LG Touch Me FM37 MP3 player

@Steve

Nah mate, you like A-ha too much. And I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that, but this time it has led you astray.

It's a one-hit wonder called Touch Me (touch me now!) by Sam Fox, one of the old-skool page 3 girls.

Apple emasculates the iPhone

You always pay more for Apples

I remember back in the day, a 20 gig Ipod was 500USD and a 20 gig Archos was 200USD. Guess which one I went for?

Turns out the Archos was pretty ugly (looked exactly like a laptop HD with two AAs on each side and a screen bolted on the front). But it had much better features. Drag n drop your music collection, make your own playlists on the PC, replace the batteries yourself. I knocked up a 10 minute java program that created playlists for all my albums to save me time navigating the directory structure of my music.

Point is, the Apple always has a nicer shell and a nicer UI - but you have to take what you're given and you have to pay the price. I've never found Apple products to be a compelling value proposition and the lock-ins are enough of a downside on their own.

Saying all of that, I bought a Creative Zen Sleek Photo and it's a bloody nightmare to sync on Windows XP, and no Linux program wants anything to do with it.

Next time I buy a mp3 phone or player the top of my list of features is that I get to decide how I manage my music and ideally without using any kind of bullshit 'music manager' except the one of my choice.

iPhone hack bypasses AT&T

@Rolf

You'd be allowed to reverse engineer a book (that is the construction / layout) by dismantling or copying a few pages, and wouldn't need to copy the whole thing.

Likewise with DeCSS - you wouldn't need to copy a single DVD to write DeCSS, you only need read access to the disk.

The point of DeCSS isn't to copy DVDs, you can make a bitwise copy of a DVD with blissful ignorance of the actual contents.

The point of DeCSS is to enjoy the contents of the DVD which you paid a license to access. Your DVD player uses the exact same algorithm everytime you play a disk.

Making your own DVD playing software is an entirely legitimate task.

I'm sitting here in Australia and can't watch my own DVDs, bought and paid for, because of Region Coding. What the fuck? Thank goodness for all those illegal DVD players that let me enjoy my own DVDs by ignoring region coding.

Acer outlook not so sunny after all

Vista Ultimate + 1GB RAM = Unhappy Chappy

I bought an Acer laptop with 1GB of memory and Vista Ultimate. Just turning it on and opening up IE, the memory usage was 763 MB. Given a 256 MB commitment to the shared graphics card, that's me thrashing the virtual memory before I even do anything. Turns out there are a few things you can tweak to get Vista to wind its neck in a bit but your average joe is never going to know that nor care to find out.

The cost of 2GB SODIMMs for laptops is exorbitant (about three times the cost of a 1GB module) so getting the thing to the recommended 4GB RAM for Vista is going to scorch your wallet somewhat.

Selling Vista with 1GB of RAM results in your customers thinking either your laptop is rubbish or (more rarely I wager) coming to the correct conclusion that Vista is a bloated RAM-hoover and regretting whatever part of their purchase price paid for the OEM Vista copy that they want rid of but can't sell.

I ended up installing Ubuntu which does the same thing (run a browser) in 172 MB, which is in the same ballpark as XP which is about the 240MB mark.

Looks like there isn't a way for me to trade in my Vista license for an XP one so I'm stuck with an OS I didn't even want in the first place.

Bad call Acer, number 1 for selling Vista and number 2 for not putting at least 2GB of RAM in every laptop.

Trying to run Vista on 1GB of RAM is like driving a car with square wheels.