Posts by Timmay 258 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Dec 2011
Couldn't agree more. As much as I love my tricked out Phantom and its capabilities, my Hubsan gets many hours more use day to day.
The Phantom only comes out on special occasions, when I can really be bothered - it feels more like work, more of a chore.
> Why is it some people are so insanely angry about the idea of a telephone just being a telephone?
Insanely angry is a bit melodramatic, but anyway; because people keep coming into stories about pocket sized but virtually fully fledged computers - commonly known as "smartphones" - and writing sneery comments about how an old fashioned brick of a telephone which could do nothing but make calls and send texts lasts twenty times longer on a charge.
Well, duh, no shit.
What the fuck is a GTE1170???
After a quick internet search, I think you should consider the following:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/444874673/icups-the-ultimate-ironic-accessory
Infinite battery life - much better than your Samsung GTE1170 and Nokia 515 - and about as much functionality.
It makes it more snarky, for sure, and as much as I zzzzz at Apple stuff, I zzzzz tenfold at snark. Maybe I'm getting old, but there's a bit too much snark round here for my liking, and the snark is increasing. Maybe it should be renamed The Snark Register.
Just wanted to see how many times I could mention snark in one comment.
Snark.
I don't think anyone's ever thought it sensible to entrust hotel provided safes with their priceless family jewels, but unless the cleaner also dabbles in locksmithing and/or hacking electronics, they're probably still fine for keeping housekeeping's opportunist mitts off my passport and a paltry bit of foreign shrapnel.
You're still missing the point.
1. Firstly, people spend lots of money (more than £200) on things of dubious value all the time (toys). I, for instance, dropped £500 on a quadcopter just last year, and I can count on one hand the number of times it's been used. I'm not going to apologise for being a somewhat frivolous wealthy geek.
2. You're still thinking that people want this to use just as a watch.
3. There's nothing wrong with manufacturers trying new things - this may not be a perfected concept yet, but it could be a stepping stone to something which is. If human-kind sat back and didn't bother with that first (likely to fail) concept, we'd still be sitting in the dirt and bashing each other with animal bones. Every piece of technology you use has likely had many generations/iterations before it, some which may have failed, not sold well, and were criticised by idiots saying "I don't see the point in this, this is of dubious value", but without them, we wouldn't be where we are.
Oh, as a manufacturer of smartwatches, I didn't realise you alone represented all of humanity.
My apologies, I'll go away and create something else, and also let Pebble know - though given they only sold 400,000 smartwatches last year, they're probably already aware.
When the glasses are pretty much a fully-fledged computer on your face, 300MB isn't so depressing.
Jesus, how much of an old fart do I feel when someone describing themselves as an "old fart" thinks 300MB was a large hard drive.
Your 300MB hard drive computer with an OS taking up just 3MB; did it have a 5MP camera capable of 720P recording, 1.2GHz processor, Wifi, Bluetooth, gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, ambient light sensor, proximity sensor, and all the drivers, stacks and APIs to support the above and more?
As P Lee said, that's A Good Thing. If you have a load of contactless cards in your wallet, surely you want control over which one the till takes payment from?
Regarding the guy's failed attempt to pay by bonk, quite possibly either he'd spent up to his contactless transaction limit for that day, or maybe it had randomly decided to make him use a PIN. Y'know, like it's designed to do. For security.
Interestingly, and the opposite side of the coin, when Barclaycard foisted a contactless card onto me a couple of years ago, because I hardly used the credit card (rather use my bank's debit card), I phoned up my bank to see if they could give me a contactless debit card. When told they didn't do them yet, I found my usage of the contactless credit card going up - when faced with paying for something small, I'd look at my wallet and see two cards; one which you just tap on the till and you're on your way, and the other which you slide it in, wait a second, try to remember the PIN on that card, enter it, find one of the keys doesn't work properly, re-enter it, wait a second, then you're through.
Given I often have to mash the card against the reader to make it recognise it, I think the fears about thieves being able to "nick £10 from my by just walking past" are typical tin-foil luddite views with no basis in fact.
Sure, if someone nicks your wallet, you're more exposed to small (sub-£20) losses, but I've found I can't make more than one or two contactless purchases in a short space of time before it refuses and prompts to do it the old way (PIN), and anyway, your bank is still liable for the loss if you've taken "reasonable precautions" (ie. don't leave your wallet on your dashboard) and let them know as soon as you know it's gone.
Why does the Student Loans company even have or keep medical records??
Okay, so you might say they need them to weigh up risk when lending for such long periods, but a) I thought everyone qualified for a loan so long as you meet certain (non-medical related) requirements, and b) why do they need to keep them once you're approved?
Doubt it - don't think the basic GSM specification has really changed a great deal (other than addendums for 3G, LTE, etc) for years, pre-dating cheap and convenient GPS chips.
Phones with built-in GPS only started coming out 7/8 years ago, after the 3G specification we still use today.
I suspect the GPS chip was on there because it's the same circuitboard used in higher specification models, which do include that functionality. It's probably cheaper to just use the same design and disable (either in software or hardware) what you want to fit the cheaper model, than design, test, certify, and manufacture a whole separate board, for the sake of saving a few pence for the GPS IC.
You guessed correctly, sir, lovely leafy suburb here, nice swinging neighbourhood.
Anyway, sure, as I said, there are nefarious things you can do with today's drone technology. But, putting myself into the mind of a roaming teenage gang member looking to create trouble, I did consider a camera equipped drone.
However, at a purchase cost of several hundreds of pounds, plus the same again for FPV (first person video) equipment so I can create mayhem beyond line of sight, I decided it wasn't worth the risk of crashing it/losing it/someone downing it, so I picked up a £free brick from the roadside and lobbed it at a window instead.
Ah yes, similar to the "don't put cameras on phones, the world will be full of people sneaking shots in changing rooms or communal showers" argument, from a whole decade ago.
Really, if I wanted to sneak shots of your oh-so-gorgeous body from outside your bedroom window, there are far better ways to achieve it than have an 85dB screeching whirling drone hovering outside.
Yes, there are nefarious things you can do with a camera equipped drone (as with virtually any technology nowadays), but until they are utterly tiny and completely silent, who would bother.
@ theodore - buy from a reputable brand, from a reputable dealer, at least you can replace it under warranty if the worst happens. Only time I've heard of MicroSD cards dying is when buying dirt cheap (knock offs) from eBay, from China (for example)
Besides, who's to say this USB device won't be as unreliable.
> But that front running is something entirely different from the basic concept of HFT itself. Bit like a shotgun perhaps: which can be used to get yummy peasants* for tea or to take out the troublesome ex. One isn't a problem, the other is a crime – although both use the same tool.
Perhaps pheasants for peasants?
Call me a snob, but whenever I see the word "Sonos" followed by it "blowing" someone away, I smack my head in despair. Doubly so when it's a super expensive device attempting to recreate a home cinema listening experience out of one single box under your telly.
I feel the same way about those single-box Bose systems you always see marketed the hell out of at airports - they've just put a largish speaker in a box, turned the loudness and base equalisers up to 11, and gone "wurrrgh, that goes LOUD, better put a big price on it".
Weird, I used to have both a work Vodafone iPhone, and my personal Three Xperia Z - I would frequently look at the iPhone and it rather desperately reported "Searching..." while the Xperia was on a few bars of signal with H+ data. Never did I see it the other way around.
You said: "my Android Phone. In the it bricked itself when trying to load an updated cyanogen release"
You meant: "my Android phone. I bricked it when I unlocked the bootlocker and rooted it, thus voiding the warranty, and installed a third-party/unsupported operating system"
I had an iPhone once. Loved it, but it broke when I smashed it to pieces with a hammer. Piece of shit.
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