Posts by David Gosnell 952 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2007
Beats me why why do this though. Sure, they're taking the attitude of why sell just one contract when two will rake in double the tied-in profit. But why not play along, show some sustainability credentials by not issuing unnecessary hardware, and officially allow such tethering for a modest fee, perhaps with a throughput cap if really necessary to protect their network bandwidth?
Good to see BT being responsible about this - not. Suspecting their Voyager 2100 to be susceptible to this vulnerability, I emailed them for advice. Several days later, got an automatic reply saying the message had been deleted unread, presumably because the model is no longer supported. Nice.
I love the way this increasingly popular style of keyboard gets these new names. Face it, they are calculator keys, and we've been there before. All those early home computer owners who got laughed at by their spoilt brat friends with BBC Micros are presumably at last vindicated.
Yes, the letters are as identified. However, a traditional bass/treble control on audio equipment does not work in the same way as a graphic equaliser such as on this player.
A non-parametric graphic equaliser such as this has fixed frequency bands, and you can adjust the level of sounds within those bands. It's dead easy to add to an mp3 player because the data is already divided into frequency bands, so on playback the player just accentuates some of them as appropriate before reconstructing the sound.
In contrast, a traditional bass/treble control operates at a fixed boost level, but with the frequency bands affected able to be adjusted. When you "turn up the bass", you extend the frequency band towards the mid-ranges, so a wider range of low frequencies are boosted by that fixed amount. Similarly for the treble, from the high frequencies downwards. Computationally, this is a bit harder work for an mp3 player, and probably no better than a decent graphic equaliser anyway, so is not so common a feature.
Isn't that one of those popular recurring mp3 myths? A good encoder stores the exact length of the track, to extremely high precision, and all the player has to do is honour that. There are some devils in the detail that mean there may theoretically be a slight glitch (mp3 being a non-linear format) but there needn't be an audible gap. There is perhaps a confusion as to what is expected of gapless playback at its simplest level; its main purpose is for "continuous mix" source material, where gaps are plain wrong - and the CD data frames will be 100% full, so no issues there either. Cross-fading etc is over and above that, and does indeed take a bit more grunt.
The reason most players don't support it at that simplest level is 99% laziness.
Well they succeed on 33% of that moniker nowadays, mostly. You acknowledge the field has been shifting towards larger, more expensive models (where pre-installed Windows represents a smaller proportion of the retail price) but I see no evidence this is actually what customers want, at least as a bigger influence than greedy manufacturers fleecing us.
Yes, greedy manufacturers, who can add a couple of inches on to the size, sell it as "bigger and better" whilst removing the smaller options from the shelves, leaving the average gullible punter with no choice. Those couple of inches mean they can share more parts with full size bargain-bucket laptops, so they are probably actually cheaper to manufacture than 7" or 9" models, but can be sold for the significantly higher prices as we're seeing.
Hopefully the arrival of the ARM based netbooks from Pegatron, Qualcomm etc pencilled in for the summer will shake things up again.
Pretty much, yes. Horrid to look at, and will be horrid to use with that ridiculous screen. Yes, we want small netbooks (the move to ever bigger ones is driven by manufacturers looking to standardise components with their full-size laptops and cut costs while charging more) but vertical resolution will always be a bugbear of the smaller models, and this the worst of the lot.
That game's been played for the last five years anyway, with some new tempter being thrown into the mix every couple of months to either fleece the gullible of their money for the same thing done differently or persuade the more prudent to hold off and stick with their 425 lines (OK, exaggerating slightly) thankyouverymuch. Even in this case, Sky have waved the temptation that 3D might be possible without stupid glasses in the not too distant future, so may as well wait a bit longer, and hope there's actually some content to see by then - by which time something else will be just round the corner, etc etc.
What's the chance that a sequence that isn't the "off" code for a particular model of telly, is in fact the code for something else? There's only a finite number of combinations. Would you be hated more for turning the telly off, or having an unfortunate mishap and switching to QVC unexpectedly?
As digital photo frames go, it's actually unusually nice looking - and of course does rather more, though given that it's essentially a keyboardless netbook, a browser wouldn't have been too much to ask, at that price. Shame about the aspect ratio, but c'est la vie these days. I wonder if this is a rebadge job, and if you can get one without its bezel spoilt by O2's logo?
As a small business oriented developer who can't always pick and choose target server technologies, PHP is by far the most ubiquitous, and even if the language has its inconsistencies (and not all servers have exactly the same extensions installed) it's rich and well targeted for my needs. Put bluntly, compared with anything else that's practical to use under the circumstances, for me it's been an utter revelation.
I also like micro-FourThirds, but this I suspect has more mileage in it since they're using the APS-C sensor size which apart from being rather bigger also just seems better supported, being the Nikon/Canon size choice. One thing the press release doesn't seem to make at all clear is what the lens situation is expected to be. I suspect the mock-up is with a "pancake" prime, to emphasise the smallness compared with say the Lumix G1 which is over-bulky for what it is. On the other hand, if they even glued on a decent zoom, this will sell like hot-cakes in far superior replacement of Lumix's best-selling but foolishly-discontinued bridge, the FZ-50. Anyway, bring it on, Samsung - and maybe this will kick Olympus into action now, having mistakenly thought a chavvy leather prototype cut it when the rest of the world has passed them by.
It will be an unsung hero of the DSLR world.
Picky point: according to dpreview, the $700 is estimated body-only street price, going up to $800 including the lens etc - and going on past Olympus experience, those will be the prices you have to pay for quite a few months after launch.
A third of consumer-oriented mobile computer sales, and a fifth of all mobile computer sales altogether (presumably including business sales). Well that's how I read it - and quite an impressive statistic, if somewhat grim reading for those selling premium products into business.
If this thing can be self-powered from its own Li-ion battery (with USB as an option for connection and charging), it could avoid the ugly/fragile protuberances currently generally required for mobile broadband. Stick it in your pocket, and the laptop can talk to it via wi-fi, no extra driver shenanigans or Windows dependence required.
But I sadly fear it might not work that way. Any idea?
Word on the street is that the netbook edition of Windows 7 will be crippleware, basically the same version as the one they flog in piracy-riven countries, that can only run three applications at once. Borderline OK with today's models, but as the processing power increases, so will the demand for maybe running a media player as well as an email client, web browser and instant messaging.
Foot, meet gun.
Of course there's nothing unique about "brain training" video games - other than their ability to engage a youth that cannot relate to anything that doesn't bleep or plug into a television. If one works on the basis* that the average teenager doesn't know which way round to hold a pencil, games such as these do at least provide some hope of mental stimulation and development.
* totally made up, obviously
Most users will never get beyond a web browser and the office applications, so OS choice really makes no difference at all.
It's more likely the case that Microsoft have the manufacturers over a barrel, offering them the carrot of XP at a knock-down price, whilst threatening with the stick of removing their preferential treatment with respect to desktop systems should they not pony up.
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