Posts by jeffrey

wow

That is some impressive circuit board part density going on there.

Scripting phone fuctionality

Part of me thinks wow, that is actually an amazing feature to be able write scripts to define how the ringer/other functionality works. And the other part thinks, hmm that means surely that it might give another attack vector for doing malicious things.

Missed a trick

o2 should have 3 options in my opinion:

12 month contract - expensive line rental or low minutes included.

18 month contract - as is, no early upgrade but less minutes /more line rental than 2 year option

24 month contract - but that anyone who has this can upgrade to a new iphone after 12 months at whatever the cost for a new customer is, at this point the old two year contract is removed, and you get a new two year one. This way anyone who wanted to could update annually to a new phone without disadvantage, but if they wanted to leave then they would have to wait the full 2 years (one of which would be staring at an iphone which was newer than the one they possessed), but they get full advantage of cheap calls loads of miniutes free phones etc

Prices

For those wondering about costs

18month contract pm/purchase

16gb £29.38/£184.98 £34.26/£184.98 £44.05/87.11 £73.41/Free

32gb £29.38/£274.23 £34.26/£274.23 £44.05/175.19 £73.41/96.89

24month contract pm/purchase

16gb £34.26/£87.11 £44.05/Free £73.41/Free

32gb £34.26/175.19 £44.05/96.89 £73.41/Free

So basically it is more expensive than last time round, and o2 want you fro 24 months, and they won't let you upgrade.

@Jonathan Cohen an lg (or any other phone for that matter) could have 3mp or 300mp, it will still take s*** photos compared to a proper camera with proper glass elements or s*** video compared to a decent camcorder, if you want hd video for non youtube purposes, buy a decent camcorder. Infact there is an argument for syaing that mobiles with silly pixel counts like 8mp or higher just take noisier crapper photos.

@michael branagan

Just take it back to apple an swap it for the new one and price drop, as you bought it less than 14 days ago,

@ Anonymous Coward Posted Wednesday 27th May 2009 12:01 GMT

Alternatively as stated they are using the lossless form of DCT. There were a couple of articles on lossless DCT in the IEEE archives if you are interested.

Mind you such schemes are only marginally better than lossless jpeg, so there scheme sounds like a lot of effort for not much gain.

It's also worth mentioning

Shame that it;s the last time that will be happening as well. For all the people saying shuttles are rubbish, they don't go very high, can't do very much, cost too much, I personally like them, they are actually quite graceful. If I win the euromillions tonight (unlikely) then I would be tempted to buy one of the old ones and bung it in the national space museum.

@By Chris W

I agree stupidity increases in densely populated areas, but then so do a lot of things, like levels of malnutrition, child neglect, levels of people with less education. All are related, but none are related to the amount of wifi that has popped up in the last 5 years.

I give only a couple of years

I give only a couple of years until walkera have hacked apart the software and put it on their helicopter range

Lose the camera and GPS, but use the software these guys have developed to make an easy to fly 6 channel rc heli. It would make the proper rc helis much easier to learn to fly on as you could continually dial down the stabilisation software until you were a great flyer. I.E start with the heli doing almost everything, until you do it all and the heli software is turned off,

Having said that for 400 sized helis (around 40cm) there are several diy arduino/sparkfun autopilots available that can help fly a helicopter hands off

hmm

so hypotheticaly if a robot lander wanted to return from the surface, all they would need to take would be a pump, a tank full of oxygen, and an empty tank to store the lpg in?

Off with the buggy linux, on with a stable XP

It goes the other way as well. I bought a linux Aspire one, got it home and put XP straight on. It's all a matter of personal preference really. Mind you the sales person said if I wanted to run linux on it with the wireless I needed to hack around with the wireless drivers a bit or buy myself a usb wireless stick as the built in wireless has a knack for turning itself off after an hour and refusing to come back. People can b*tch about how linux is better all they like, but if the netbook companies can't supply a decent working distro installed out of the box with a stable driver base for the hardware and common external hardware then quite frankly the linux is more useless than vista. At least XP just works as it has had so long to mature, personally I would like to see them drop the win 7 extra basic version, drop vista , and have win 7 for laptops, desktops etc and a £30 version of XP Pro available for people who want that instead.

New Features

I think a massive price increase vs the £99 retail of the 3G woudl be too much to swallow. Therefore I think when they bring out a new model, they will either keep to price the same +- 50% or they will have and expensive high end one and another one that will proably be a version of the current iPhone 3G still at the £99 price point.

Opt out

If the list of companies mentioned opt out, won't that make phorms data largely useless?

OSH

Open source hardware is already here, and popular in some circles (look at arduino), and it is now getting much cheaper for indivduals to get high quality low volume pcbs to design their own things. Seeedstudio in china will print pcb's for you at very little cost for very small runs (e.g 3 - 5 boards) as long as you make your designs open source, They print off your boards, as well as some for them to sell in their shop, and will host the designs and documentaion on their website, everyone wins

Subsidies

Everyone I know who has bough Acer Aspire ones or EEEEEEEEEEEpc's has gone for the cheapest linux version that satisfies their needs, and then formated and installed XP. Subsidising linux is unlikely to stop this, so someone somewhere would be losing money. I'm not saying linux is a bad product, I use some heavily customised distros for certain things and for that job they are perfect, but a large % of the general public (and even quite a lot of IT knowledgable people) will want XP because they are used to it, it works well and the programs/toolchains they want to run are well developed on XP

Connecting at Heathrow

Last time I was going though Heathrow, a South African man was trying to debate with security why it was not acceptable to take a 2' long adjustable spanner in hand luggage? He said that security in Durban said it was fine and let hime bring it over here.

shame

Shame, Wimax has more potential than LTE and ultimtely more throughput/ can see why it will fail though, existing 3G operators will prefer the upgrade path to LTE as it will soften the blow for them, Ah well , VHS wins again.

3.4 - 3.6 GHZ

3.5 GHz is prime wimax terratory, vendors already supply basestations around this frequency.

@Mark Dowling - Counterproductice

Sadly no matter how many times/ how many people try and teach my parents to learn what every little thing or their computer means and does, they still fail, some people just have an inability to learn above basic tasks.

I am always getting "support calls" from my parents, what does this popup mean, how do i change this setting, where have I put that etc. If I could remote login from anywhere to fix the problems it would be great (just have to wait till my current phone contract runs out and I can get an iPhone)

hmm

Or they could have bought a third of northern rock. Makes you think if the gov didn't bother to prop up banks with crap management, then they could have quadrupled the budget and we could do something worthwhile. like build a spaceship.

Hmm,

Shame they haven't got two of these units, then they could replace both at the same time, rather than relying on a spare from earth, and one that has been dormant in space for the last 16 years (though still works).

Alternatively they could get a bit fruity and upgrade to a pentium!!!!!!

hmm

Didn't someone come up with an idea where you could convert sellafield for about £4Billion to recycle both existing and projected uk nuclear waste, an option which would supply the same amount of electrcity from nuclear power as the uk currently produces, but without having to by in fresh fuel for a period of about 100 years? I seem to recall we would offer to be the worlds recycling bin and other countries would pay us to take their nuclear waste of their hands, whereupon we would recycle it by putting it into our special reactors several times over to generate our own electricity?