Posts by B-D

Your chance to win the world's only handheld ZX Spectrum

To me it is a Zee Ex.

Take a look a look at the teardown again and see how Ben clicks on to the design philosophy.

From that moment on he hand builds a brilliant US nod to an EU classic.

Great stuff.

Chips are down at Broadcom: Thousands of workers laid off

I would imagine that cellular baseband would cover marine and military applications whereas mobile phones now use SoCs where the Cell transciever, WiFi, Bluetooth and NFC systems all live in the same package.

Pixar frees its production-grade RenderMan software

Is it me or did

Rule 34 suddenly just get a lot more real?

iVEC seeks testers for petascale powerhouse

Depending on which side of the ocean you are on

You can either ask it why you like dried leaves in boiling water or you can ask it to figure out the good old question of why does the porridge bird leave it eggs in the air?

Mine's the one with the dolphin shape bozo nose in the pocket.

Multiplayer Elite to debut on May 30th

Re: sheep or employee?

I'm not even going to grace your first insult with a reply, and I am not an employee of a software house.

Whomever it was that pissed in your wheat-O-s it certainly wasn't me so maybe you should try and direct your anger to the people who scammed you.

Elite: Dangerous and other such projects (Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure is another that springs to mind) are very real (Tesla Effect has made it to retail and you can play the premium Beta of E:F right now.) and are not scams, and if you had actually spent any time learning how crowdfunding works you would have found out that if the funding goal is not reached then no money is taken and the project is abandoned.

I mean... really, insults and name calling are the first port of call of those unable to accept they are wrong or who cannot construct a solid argument.

*resists the urge to ask whether you are capable of dealing with solids yet.* ;-)

"Until a few years ago software houses were paying people to do alpha and beta-testing of their games ... Now people are so dumb and on drugs to pay even a lot of money for flawed and unfinished products with no real guarantee."

Until a few years ago a game house would have to court its investors to get a greenlight on it, now they can go to the gamers and offer early bird incentives for dropping cash on it, the return for doing so depends on the product so a knick knack would have a limited edition run of colours whereas a game would have early access.

Alpha testing usually costs a lot of money in the hopes of finding that rich fan who can offer a damned good idea.

So, early access isn't exclusive to games and it isn't going anywhere.

Beam me up Scotty: Boffins to turn pure light into matter

A posit of theoretical physicists, shirley?

Where are your rich friends? Facebook's Zuck sued for not being social enough

"But Joey... we shook hands!

"Show me a piece of paper that says we shook hands.

Cast a Deadly Spell (1991), Valhalla Entertainment.

IBM PCjr STRIPPED BARE: We tear down the machine Big Blue would rather you forgot

VGA?, CGA surely

I note that you refer to a VGA quite often in your write up of the PCjr, surely it used CGA at that time?

Re: I am insipred

Please have fun for us both, I long for my old Sanyo MBC-550 and Philips green screen, alas we parted ways many years ago.

I bought a 4.77Mhz crystal oscillator from my local Tandys store and overclocked my machine, and having read this PCjr teardown I can understand why the Sanyo was clocked at 3.5Mhz now.

Amazing, and here I am with an Intel Core i7 930 2.4Ghz @ 4Ghz.

Staggering

Bitcoin bank Flexcoin pulls plug after cyber-robbers nick $610,000

895 BTC?

That's a lot of ISK/PLEX right there.

Samsung's bid to halt grinding wheels of justice in Apple case denied

10 seconds on a search engine would reveal that Samsung have R&D labs in the US & EU.

Panasonic throws in towel on plasma tellies, preps for BILLION-dollar kick in pants

CE or C E?

One is Certified for Europe, the other is a Chinese Export.

Universal's High Fidelity Pure Audio trickles onto Blighty’s Blu-Ray hi-fis

It's all just a little bit of history repeating... again.

XRCD

HDCD

DTSCD

Audio only DVDV

DAD

HDAD

DVDA

SACD

And now Audio only Bluray.

Myst: 20 years of point-and-click adventuring

Tell me a lie that isn't a lie, or into the burning pit fall I.

I prefer the parody of Myst whereby you visit the island after all the day players have passed through and left their mark on the world, it was called Pyst.

Regarding The Neverhood, the creators of that game have just run a kickstarter campaign to bring a new klaymation game to fruition called ARMIKROG, the Brotherhood of Neverhood can rejoice, you will be back in klayspace soon enough. :)

Bloke in shed starts own DAB radio station - with Ofcom's blessing

Just as NTSC was backronymed to Never Twice the Same Colour, I'd love to see the moment when DAB means Dead And Buried.

USA reverses iPhone, iPad sales ban

Re: both companies

Which part of the samsung vs apple and apple vs samsung courtroom tennis match did you miss?

Ban both companies products until they've learned to act as civilised adults would, until then it should be the naughty step for the pair of them.

USB accelerates to 10 Gbps

Cheap As Chips

Absolutely, the fiasco surrounding the 1st gen Marvell SATA3 controllers that were tacked on to X58 family motherboards because Intel hadn't gotten SATA3 integrated in time proves that point.

Sure, they had SATA3, but it performed only marginally better than the integrated Intel SATA2 it was meant to usurp.

There is also the mobile computing market where less is more and separate controller chips are very much undesirable, for that market it is SoC or GTFO.

Hackers crack femtocells to pwn then clone phones

HDMI?

I'm flip flopping between asking WTF is an HDMI port doing on a femtocell and wondering whether it is mistyped.

Boffins use lasers to detect radio waves

A brilliant mix of existing tech and ideas for what is essentially a digital radiowave microphone with the diaphragm acting as a platter upon which a laser tone arm reads the peaks and troughs.

Superb.

Snowden's XKeyscore revelations challenged

Re: Utah DC

Does it have a sign in the front proclaiming it to be the offices of a certain "SETEC Astronomy"?

Murdoch machinations mean Microsoft must rename SkyDrive

I'd utterly hate to give the lawyers some ammo but surely MS can now turn their own loss into a gain by using the Sky ruling to pressure LiveDrive into handing over their name?

Nissan to enter 300 kmh electric car in Le Mans endurance race

Re: HMMPH!!

It didn't do anything notable because it isn't racing until next year.

MIchael Duke beat me to the punch on this one, a Delta wing running on Uniross Hybrio batteries.

Best of luck to them.

Facebook bug leaks contact info of 6 million users

Re: Already covered - I would like to think

It doesn't matter one iota what you put in, it is what everyone else around you puts in that matters, that is what Big Data is about.

It would be very easy to extrapolate your tastes and pleasures based upon your social circle and their preferences.

Presto: Facebook reveals exabyte-scale query engine

Maybe they can offer up some of this superscale search to it's users?

I know an FB friend posted something about a poet named Robert a while back, can I find the post in question?, can I buggery.

Microsoft brings back Windows watch after Apple seeks 'flexible' bod

Re: My watch is in the bedroom drawer

Person A: What do you think of my new toy?

Person B: Nice watch, you look like Dick Tracey

Person A: I look like Dick Tracey?

Person B: No, I said you look like a dick, Tracey.

Gates and Allen reshoot historic 1981 Microsoft photo

Indeed

It isn't the same on used in the original, the new photo contains a Sanyo MBC-55x, my very first PC!.

That really brought a smile to my face... awesome.

Universe gains an extra hundred million years

But does it screw up the Standard Model?

AKA The Galaxy Song.

Canadian cyborg says Google Glass design is cracked

Re: Each eye to focus on a different plane?

Nope, bifocals have the bottom quarter of the normal distance lens cut for reading in both lenses.

You look through the top 3/4s of the lens for normal viewing and then look down a bit for your magnified reading part.

It isn't a case of the lens lens being set for distance and the right for viewing, that would really mess things up, you'd end up looking like Major Asshole from Mel Brooks' SPACEBALLS.

As for whomever decided to downvote my previous post, I was of course referring to the issue of a good idea causing problems, a la Opti-Grab...

D'oh! icon 'cos he looks like he's suffering from eye strain.

Google Glass (Sergey Brin) - 2012

EyeTap (Steve Mann) - 1999

The Jerk (Steve Martin) - 1979

Tech bazaar Aria puts £10K bounty on heads of DDoS varmints

My bet is on a forum member who has been permabanned.

Any armchair slueth will tell you

That all a bounty achieves is bringing all the kooks, cranks and phoneys out for a quick buck, thus hampering the real investigation.

Keyboard, you're not my type

One of the weirdest keyboards I've ever used came with the Sanyo MBC-550, like the IBM of its time it had a solid metal backplate, a distinct amount of travel and a clack that could madden even the most even tempered.

That was where the similarity ended though, the bloody thing was non standard, so when the cable broke I travelled to my local computer junk shop (remember them?, now the are called WEEE disposal centres) and picked up a replacement DIN cable, hacked the keyboard side connector onto the new cable and it was good to go for many more years.

That was the only keyboard I've ever used that had a PC reset button on the side.

Wicked times.

I use a Krups Dominator myself... Company policy.

There is a youtube video of a chap modifying his keyboard to provide analogue W A S and D keys for gaming, I won't link to it as there is slight vulgarity in it, but a search for "XBOX Controller Mods: Analog WASD Gaming Keyboard " will bring up the goods.

Enterprising 'early adapter' tries to hawk Google Glass on eBay

See, there is a use

for Big Data after all...

I wonder how much time it took between the auction going up and the Google BD system flagging it up as a keyword hit?

Microwaves thrash fibre on speed... if you like two-nines uptime

The only problem with microwaves

Is having to wait a minute for the container to regain rigidity.

Boffin shows pics of germs grown on SPOTTY STUDENTS' MOBES

Well done Simon

Print this article out on cut price toilet paper and you'll have your very own sun article.

You did forget to make bold and capitalise the emotive words though, the HORROR!

Montana TV warns of ZOMBIE ATTACK in epic prank hack

That does it, He's a freakin nerd!

Gotta catch the wave.

Felix Baumgartner sadly turns out to be blinkered FOOL

Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.

First he fell to earth, now he's falling from grace, poor chap.

I wonder how all the agencies both governmental and corporate along with the people actually up in space who watched his cunning stunt feel about such a turncoat speech?

13-inch 'Retina Display' MacBook Pro to uncloak next Tuesday?

I don't understand.

Why are they making their small things bigger and their big things smaller?

reeks of running out of other peoples ideas to me.

Epoch making?

1 part resin to 2 parts plasticiser if I remember correctly.

WoW cities wiped out by 'exploit'

typos optional

after beer o'clock.

Also known as "Ok, who farted?"

Isn't this the second time a virulent death has rained upon the realms?, I remember the first time there we two mains camps, the carebears and the griefers, the carebears tried their hardest to save their friends from certain death whilst the griefers ran around infecting anyone the could just for the sheer hell of it.

Hackers leak 120,000 student records in raid on world's top unis

First one to post the Bobby Tables XKCD gets to clean the sharpie marks off the digital whiteboard.