* Posts by Rob McDougall

66 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Sep 2007

Page:

BBC confirms death of 6Music, slashes online budget by a quarter

Rob McDougall
FAIL

Tighter Focus

The BBC needs to keep a good range of distinct radio stations, not a one-size-fits-all mentality with just 5 main stations.

I've never felt the need to listen to Radio 1, but 6Music has often had a great range of programming - the "gateway drug" for me being Adam + Joe...

If anything, they should make the programming more niche - often I would tune out as more popular music was piped out, stuff I could listen to on Radio 1 (but obviously wasn't...)

Cyber attacks will 'catastrophically' spook public, warns GCHQ

Rob McDougall

Wish they'd...

tell this to Mandelson, before he cuts off half the population for downloads:

"any interruption of broadband access becomes intolerable and will have serious impacts on the the economy and public well being"

Microsoft erases Windows 8 optimism

Rob McDougall

so...

...it was intentional...!

Nvidia launches dual-GPU tech for notebooks

Rob McDougall

MBP Fail

This will teach me to be an early adopter... but it would seem that NVidia are now delivering on the promise of the original Unibody MacBook Pro's... I always assumed an update would come along that would allow software-based GPU switching, but no... I shall be forever doomed to logging out/in to switch cores...

Does Apple patent claim show iPad with built-in camera?

Rob McDougall
Boffin

erm...

there's a giant LED flash attached to the front. It's capable of displaying many different colours - but turn them all up to full and you got yourself a front-facing flash...

Ballmer preempts Jobs with tablet slate trio

Rob McDougall
Jobs Horns

Hey, isn't that....

I think I just saw Steve Jobs going round the corner with a bunch of circuit breakers in his hand...

Welcome to the out-of-control decade

Rob McDougall

Oyster

I still don't fully understand the Oyster paranoia - you don't have to register it. You can buy it from a machine with 3x£1 coins and use cash to top it up...

If you can be arsed.

I guess that's where they get us.

The same reason I use Google Calendar and GMail and will probably soon have a Google phone...

Convenience.

The trouble starts when the basket I've put all my eggs into starts to sell my eggs. Or throw my eggs at buildings, if you'll allow me to push the metaphor that far...

Rob McDougall

Fakers

Neocons aren't religious at all. They worship themselves. They may pretend to go to Church but that's only to get votes from the massive (at least in the US) religious right.

Googlephone debuts Jan. 5, says everyone but Google

Rob McDougall

erm...

It does ! It's a groundbreaking, iconic design but the OS is now about 3 years old...

I've not had an android phone, but every time I've played with one I've been very impressed with what they can squeeze out of the phone's CPU... I dare say the UI is a little more functional than Apple's. I was sold immediately when I saw on/off switches for WiFi, Bluetooth etc could be added to the home screen...

O2 grovels for London network failure

Rob McDougall

got much....

...lead paint on that bungalow?

Apple to acquire music streamer Lala?

Rob McDougall
Thumb Down

why...

...won't they just acquire Spotify already?! I prefer that model. £9.99 a month, virtually unlimited downloads....

Fanbois Apple buyers howl over crocked iMacs

Rob McDougall
Jobs Halo

FUSS

Perhaps the customer in question simply wanted to kick up as much a fuss as possible, then sit by his phone waiting for Steve to ring...?

Microsoft admits Mac was Windows 7 muse

Rob McDougall
FAIL

Fail

"very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance"

huh? what was that?

they steal a whole bunch of graphical elements (i.e. THE DOCK) then try and clear themselves by pretending they're BETTER?!

I think it's time to go home, MS...

Gmail users howl over Halloween outage

Rob McDougall

Unacceptable?!

It's free! I'm always amazed by how good the service is considering I'm paying NOTHING....!

O2 just can't keep it up

Rob McDougall
FAIL

Calls

Not only did the data go out on Satuday but I couldn't get through to anyone at the Notting Hill Carnival yesterday - verrrry frustrating...!

O2 data network falls over again

Rob McDougall

"We're better, connected"

better plug something in then, O2...!

Man queues overnight to buy iPhone 3GS... and take it to bits

Rob McDougall
Jobs Halo

Charger!

That charger looks much better!

Rumor rubberizes iPhone 3.0

Rob McDougall
Stop

yeeesh

Apple logo as Flash? puh-leeeeez.... that would look so crass!

Star Trek halted by pig plague

Rob McDougall

Easy answer

Release all of the films together as soon as the crisis is over. The survivors can enjoy the films for months as the rest of the world will be done with all of their prints.......

Bye bye BlackBerry mail

Rob McDougall
Joke

Stop

RIMming.

Canon PowerShot SX200 IS compact camera

Rob McDougall

Hm.

Looks like a re-hash of the 400D with a slightly crippled sensor.... Similar ISO issues, etc etc...

Microsoft conjures imaginary 'Apple Tax'

Rob McDougall
Coat

errr

Did you mean: recalcitrant

mines the one with the pocket dictionary....

Microsoft smooths Windows 7 snafu

Rob McDougall
Coat

Window Steam?

hahaha. Window Steam Blog.

Mac OS 10.5.6 problems? Apple suggests shampoo

Rob McDougall

No worries on 4x macs...

New MBP + MB, Old MB and the oldest intel iMac... all went swimmingly...

Adobe sales are flat in tough market

Rob McDougall
Happy

Hmm!

It seems everybody agrees!

Anyone know a good alternative that works on Mac (or multiplatform) for Adobe After Effects??

Rob McDougall

Too expensive

If Adobe want me to purchase their products they should let me subscribe for... £15 a month or something... some kind of freelancer rate. There's no way the Master Collection is affordable at £2500... except for companies...

Grove: Intel should make electric car batteries

Rob McDougall

Bah

All of this is completely pointless unless all of the major governments start investing LARGE amounts of money into renewable power generation.

Also - did anybody stop and think that maybe having a car all to ones self is a luxury too far?

Open source fanciers finger Beeb's Win 7 'sales presentation'

Rob McDougall

Blind?

Is Rory Cellan-Jones blind now? He's holding a white stick....

Apple MacBook

Rob McDougall

@ Bad Beaver

an excellent post there.

I am a young video professional/graduate with not very much money. I do a lot of live 3D rendering for musical shows and stuff. I used to have a 12" MBP back in the old old days, but in recent years have been doing my thang on my iMac (Nightmare to carry to gigs...)

So I bought a BlackBook. Turns out the X3100 IS a piece of crap, and I soon sold it on.

I waited for this release for aaaaaages... Now I'm sitting here with a MacBook pro and a decidedly shoddy looking bank balance.

Why? Because there is no 13" MBP. Seriously - I would've killed for a higher higher end MacBook w/ FW800... but noooo.... now I have to lug this 15" beast with me!

Not that I'm complaining (too much) - it's an excellent machine. It's just way more machine than I ever wanted!

(also, I can check out my hair in the mirror/screen)

US teen cuffed for sending nude phone pics

Rob McDougall
Joke

umm...

"Licking" county? Are you kidding me?

Spice up your Apple applications

Rob McDougall
Coat

Resolution Independence

That was a very interesting article. I've not dug about in XCode before, it's been sitting on my system a long time 'cos I use Quartz Composer for some nice 3D stuff I do with live music...

To Daniel Harris, I think you won't have to wait too long to get what you want. Apple have been developing "resolution independence" for a while now, I think it's due in Snow Leopard, so your tiny fonts should look the same (hopefully not too tiny) on any monitor! Other things like the menu bar should take up precisely the same amount of space (e.g 1cm or whatever) rather than a proportion of the screen (1% of whatever resolution)... I think?

(correct me if I'm wrong!)

Mines the one with the ruler in the pocket, and no I'm not that excited to see you...!

iPhone 3G not compatible with existing accessories

Rob McDougall

hate to buck the trend...

...but I had the third-gen iPod which came with a dock and lots of bits and pieces. When it finally died, I got the new iPod "Classic", and it fits just fine in the old dock... just thought I'd say :)

Orange UK: the iPhone's latest colour carrier?

Rob McDougall

eep

good grief. I currently get a £35 deal with £15 off each month, 'cos I told them I wanted an iPhone last time round. I wonder if I could keep that deal if iPhone went on Orange...

I do hate Orange though. Despite the nice deal I have at the moment. O2 just seems like a better company all round...

Apple iPhone 3G

Rob McDougall
Thumb Down

what a twat

feckin "Wil" and his "I've got an unusual way of spelling my name like Thom Yorke" mentality...

The production values of this piece were so shoddy. Who the feck uses keynote for their graphics and then leaves the bloody mouse pointer on the screen?! let alone the fact that the gradient looks awful on such a low bit-rate flash codec.

gash. next time buy me an iPhone and a video camera and I'll sick out a better video review...

3G iPhone not ready for the enterprise?

Rob McDougall
Coat

who needs encryption...

...when you've got remote wipe?

actaully, that sounds like a labour saving device for new parents...

...mines the one with the pockets full of wet wipes...

Grand Theft Auto IV Xbox extras delayed

Rob McDougall

Extra content for PS3?

Does noone else think they'd be mad to not put the extra content on the PlayStation network and charge a tenner? I'd pay for it! There's so much of Liberty City that's under utilised in the main game...

Google silences Android critics

Rob McDougall
Black Helicopters

call me paranoid but...

just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you!

google can just "silence" this "dissident"? so if you say anything they don't like, you suddenly lose your freedom of speech on their message boards?

great. sounds a bit chinese to me...

oh, and this message has just been moderated as well (successfully, I might add - if you're reading it)

Heathrow T5 security tackles Transformers t-shirt threat

Rob McDougall

unbelievable

I guess they'll be arresting kids who crash toy planes into the ground next....

Gordon Brown claims a Brit invented the iPod

Rob McDougall

eep

now there's two people you wouldn't want to be stuck in a lift with: GB and Fern Britton.

Fern Cotton, on the other hand....

Apple gets into mine-sweeping, missiles and storage

Rob McDougall
Jobs Horns

Amen to that...

I've upgraded both my desktop and laptop Macs to intels over the last few years, and whilst the iMac's been great, the Macbook has features lacking that the 12" Powerbook used to have (like instant sleeping - battery which would last for a week, whilst asleep instead of a few hours....)

Anyway.

I guess Apple really is turning into the Evil Genius that WIRED proclaimed it to be...

This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours

Rob McDougall
Stop

Holy crap.

What a massive waste.

OK, great so someone thought about recycling them...?

What they forget is, recycling takes up a shitload of energy too (it has a carbon footprint)

So, what's better than recycling your DVD's?

Downloading them? Could be... I'm not sure if servers take up more power than recycling plants...

Either way, I hope this crashes faster than George dubya in his DUI days...

Motorola cuts off gangrenous right arm

Rob McDougall

Gash

Their phone UI has been awful for years. The handsets always look nice, and have some good ideas - but the overall look and feel makes me never ever want another Moto handset ever again.

British youths think Churchill went to moon

Rob McDougall

mm...

so the average reader of this site is what, 30? 40? I bet you knew equally as much about Lloyd George when you were that age...

Mac OS X Tiger out, Leopard back in

Rob McDougall
Jobs Halo

leopard, vista...

Microsoft and Apple bring it on themselves to some degree. Everyone expects OS X to be perfect, and forget that all versions 10.0+ have been buggy till at least .2, if not .3.

Vista isn't as bad as everyone says, once you turn off all the new "features". At which point it's like Win2k, and seriously not worth the cash.

Rob McDougall

Why...

is this article here? Anyone that wants to upgrade will have already, and anyone else will already know that their apps don't work with it yet...! Are you being paid by Apple to round up the last few Tiger users?!

UK postal vote system 'not fit for purpose'

Rob McDougall
Black Helicopters

No to eVoting

Whatever happens, postal vote corruption cannot justify eVoting. Look at the U.S. - their entire elections are now rigged soooooo easily, it's not even funny...

EC jacks up Microsoft fine by €899m

Rob McDougall

Play fair...

I think this fine is justified until Microsoft opens up things like Active Directory. It's not like anyone wants to rip off windows - they just want to be able to have unix and windows-based clients able to talk better with each other.

The way things stand at the moment, it takes a hell of a lot of cajoling to get a mac to log in to a Windows server-based network... *grumbles*

Essex youth's cop headbutt heads for YouTube

Rob McDougall

video

Incidentally, it's mirrored here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDut5HI3Zz4

Rob McDougall

Discussing

There's always been little grotbags who would show contempt for the law. It's just, perhaps in the old days they would be robbing banks etc.

Nowadays, they've not got the balls for that sort of thing so they just end up headbutting policemen.

Microsoft releases latest XP SP3 build

Rob McDougall
Coat

PC's vs. Cars

Sorry, I don't think the PC can really be compared to a car.

Yes, you can go to a showroom and buy one pre-built (Apple are a good example of this), but that's pretty much where the analogy ends. I guess you could say they both take you on a journey, if you wanted to be particularly philosophical...

But the world of PC's is much different to a car. A car, for one, doesn't have an operating system. You can put in new parts without installing drivers. This is one of the downfalls of the modern PC. Each component needs software to drive it.

(Wouldn't it be better to have some sort of standardised driver set, that each device adhered to? This wouldn't limit the devices, just give them all standard ways to communicate with the OS.)

Updates to a car mean buying a new car (if you want the updated version). Upgrades to software don't mean you need to go and buy a new PC, although you may need parts.

Whatever way you look at it, a car and a PC will never compare - because a car doesn't have software. There's that whole other aspect to consider with a PC.

Page: