Posts by Jim 59

Battery Anxiety

Five Cores ? The point of a mobile phone is to be mobile, not to be stuck in orbit around the nearest AC outlet.

"The Reg would like to issue a challenge to our commentards to exceed the current record for faux outrage between liberals, conservatives, misogynists and mean-spirited bastards. If you think you're up to it, you can join the discussion below..."

Careful with that despising-your-readership stuff

Maps

Dated maps are a problem. Considering the mapping companies, builders, OS and many others know where every road is, to the centimetre, and when every new road will be opening, to the minute, it is bizarre that a typical satnav is years out of date, even when brand new, and subsequent updates are also years out of date. It is amazing that paper maps are actually more up to date than electronic ones.

We already pay the OS to make Britain the worlds best mapped country. Why can't we just download updates from them every week ? Either that or there is room for some open source solution. Honestly, distributing up to date map data should be almost a no-op.

Offices

American companies often provide palatial office environments but what people really want is to enjoy their work and feel valued. A great job in a grotty office is much better than being a nobody in Herman Miller heaven.

Too expensive

to be interesting. You can get a whole laptop for that money.

Apologies for the cynicism

The original had a certain atmospheric charm, and the low budget didn't stop it being occasionally terrifying. Any new 1999 is likely to conform the the 2012 rules of UK TV drama. It's difficult to see how a new show can avoid being slow, over-long, soapy, with twitchy camera work, dodgy CGI and an overpowering urge to make men look stupid in every scene.

Tax

Just pay your tax.

Font sizes

Naughty Step 'tards should have their comments rendered in progessively smaller fonts.

AV out ?

I see it has AV out. Can I use that to connect it to my old (non HDMI) telly ?

Never

The proposed system will never happen in any recognisable form. It's basically microsoft asking the industry to give it a second monopoly on desktops and servers. it will fail.

Cheap ?

"In fact, ever thought about why everything you buy is so dirt-cheap and affordable?!"

Well that's true. Or is it ? You may think trainers are cheap because they come from awful sweatshops. But £60 isn't really cheap, not much cheaper that we paid in 1975 when our trainers were made by highly paid workers in Britain or another western economy. Companies who exploit are probably happy for us to think sweatshop == cheap, but really sweatshop == increased profit margin, with the price staying the same.

Web access

Very nice, I like that speed. Regarding data sharing, this will be limited by your internet upload speed, usually much smaller than download speed. Also, will Netgear release security patches ongoing ? A system that is never updated should not really be facing t'internet, even through proxies.

Lyons

"talks around digitising the records had been going on for some time"

Well done NHS on digitising your records just 63 years after Lyons did it. Or at least mentioning it in meetings. Truly our helth service is the envy of the world.

Dumb question

Why does it not have an enclosure ?

Add a phone !

Add a phone and you have a work of genius. In response to smartphones killing the camera market, Polaroid could respond with a camera with a built in phone - biting back into the phone market with a different emphasis and a better camera. When they announce a new iPhone, Apple spend most of their time talking about its photo abilities. Photography is the killer app for spartphones, after calls. Polarid could use their photographic reputation to really stick the boot into the market.

Looks

Rather than a "touch of Aston Martin", I would say the grille is simply an Aston Martin photocopy. It's a piece of plagarism that distacts from the genuinely smart looks of the car.

Just pay your tax

like the rest of us

Fun story

Nevertheless, cue foam-flecked outrage from the department of "durrrr..."

Missed

I had a CPC464 but this game passed me by. Codemasters started a trend for £1.99 games. Would that they were still so cheap. Nice article.

Lemmings

Goot article, even if the game was more tat than "antique". There was at least one Lemmings Christmas edition IIRC.

As a non smartphone user, I find it shocking that buyers must trawl the fleamarket for functionality that should be built in to any reasonable OS, eg. cache cleaning, bandwidth monitor, CPU usage, media scanning.

Drone

Difficult to envisage how it could be hacked. And having hacked it, why would Iran boast of the hacking ? Making that info public will just cause the US to take remedial action. Logically, they would just keep taking aircraft for as long as possible. I guess we will never know what really happened here. Maybe it just crash landed and was captured/repaired. Maybe the whole thing is made of cardboard.

There is stuff going in within Iran, possible a power struggle, and this maybe is all part of that.

Ads

please could this 9 minutes apply to advertising on the beeb - idents, "trails", and "discussions" advertising one program within another. Radio 5 will often stop for a 15 minute "discussion" of that evening's entertainment on BBC1. Question time often grinds to a halt so DD can advertise the next week's show or some dreary coorporation website. If you want that guff, you can't have the license fee too.

On Channel 5, the gadget show is a sad example. It was great once but is now so debauched with competitions, advert breaks and other annoying ephemera that the original point of the show is largely lost. It is clobbered by BBC Click.