Posts by Dave 126

Re: Early days yet

>Are you suggesting some quantum leap in overcoming form-factor limitations is waiting in the wings? Direct display in the cerebral cortex perhaps?

Don't be a pillock.

Stevie, you seem to have stuck in your head that a 'smartwatch' is a battery-guzzling colour-screened lump. The definition isn't set in stone. For a couple of years now both Casio and Citizen have offered smartwatches without said display, and they look like normal watches and each boast year + battery lives.

Basically, there are a few points on the functionality / form-factor / battery life graph. Clear?

Re: Bah!

The display of my analogue watch is, arguably, 'data'. I prefer to think of it as the time and the date, with an ever-so convenient (rotate bezel) reminder of when I bought my parking ticket.

Your comment seems to have been written in ignorance of offerings other than Apple, Android and Pebble efforts. That's fine, but don't condemn a category unless you know what it consists of.

Re: Now this IS interesting

>TAG are very similar to Apple. Both useless as a time keeper.

TAG quartz are on a par with any quartz movement that isn't updated over the airwaves. TAG automatics, likewise, are on a par with their automatic peers.

Apple Watch are updated over the airwaves (via the iPhone) so will be accurate to within the second. Which makes your assertion bollocks.

Re: Web blurb is meaningless

>The web site is all marketing and no substance,

I hadn't bothered to look at their website, but at another technology review website. Of course there are different potentially viable points on the function / form factor / battery life graph, and Fossil are aiming at a couple of them.

EDIT: And yeah, Fossil watches are a bit too gaudy for my tastes.

Re: Now this IS interesting

>TAG should be able to significantly bite into their iWatch market.

TAG have stated that their smartwatch 'will be upgradable', and teaser images suggest it will look similar to a sports chronograph - circular with numbers around the bezel.

TAG watches, like all their rivals at various prices levels, are nicely made. Details, such as the clasp being machined (not stamped) and then deburred, do make a difference. Apple too though, even according to watch nerd sites like Hodinkee, have the quality of finish and tolerances spot on.

That is all good. However, at the moment every smartwatch with a colour screen* incurs a massive penalty in battery life, so it will be for the individual consumer to weigh the pros against the cons. Some people may find the Apple ecosystem offers them more.

* As opposed to watches from Citizen and G-Shock which give phone notifications and not much else - they last a couple of years on one battery, or indefinitely on kinetic energy.

Of course, that should be 're-entered the fray':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_Wrist_PDA

Re: IP Phone Home

>Be great if GCHQ had a neat little app I could look myself up on. Save a lot of bother with KeePass2 and Evernote ...

That was what the Welsh philosopher and drug deal Howard Marks did. When asked how, as an inveterate dope smoker, he was able to be so clear about dates in his autobiography, he replied that just submitted an FOI to the FBI.

[He was busted because someone he trusted was turned against him, something no amount of encryption can save you from. ]

Re: Impeccably dishevelled

You spend time looking at the Instagram accounts of OSX malware authors? Oh well.

Also: How considerate of them to identify themselves publicly!

Facebook could really benefit from an 'Acquaintances' option, since people use it as a contacts directory.

Re: Obviously intelligence is not involved in either betting or boasting.

>Obviously intelligence is not involved in either betting or boasting.

It seems it's easily done: only a couple of years ago a Reg writer included a photo in an article in which his credit card details could be read (except of course for those numbers on the back by the signature strip). I won't speculate on whether the bank account or credit limit of Reg hack is worth ripping off! : )

I guess credit cards could be printed with a pattern such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation which would then cause a camera to blur the surrounding area.... Yes, I know that's an overly complicated and tech-heavy solution to a problem that could just be avoided with some care, but hey, that's why I read the Reg.

EDIT: Even easier solution for things like betting stubs and gig tickets - print half the required information on the reverse side.

Re: We can't afford one but...

Audiophiles can dance? I thought that would introduce unacceptable vibrations to the turntable...

Maybe they wear special audiophile dancing slippers, with inflated bladders and MCU elastomer dampers.

50,000 Euros for the [Headphones+Amplifier]. It is likely that they have to be used together.

Re: Tube Amp

Seems @frank ly's guess is correct, since the product page makes mention of " the Orpheus is the first electrostatic headphone with a Cool Class A MOS-FET high voltage amplifier integrated into the ear cups. ".

Other techie stuff from the page:

"it also accepts high-resolution PCM and DSD data. Music data is converted to analogue signals using the 8 internal DACs of the ESS SABRE ES9018. Four channels in parallel are used for each stereo side to enhance accuracy and decrease distortion and noise level."

I tried to look at the ESS website, but all I got was the message "Waiting for available socket". Many of us feel like that from time to time, but we don't feel the need to broadcast it over the web.

Re: Hand-crafted in Germany

In the early eighties, when Walkmans were a new thing, the front cover of a UK comic book the Beano had a lad walking along with his headphones... then he spots Richie Rich strolling down the street with some hi-fi speakers, suspended from a helicopter, on each side of his head. I can't the picture on-line, but this one amuses me (and if I post it here I can find it again for the next Smart Watch article):

http://flickrhivemind.net/blackmagic.cgi?id=7160108497&url=http%3A%2F%2Fflickrhivemind.net%2FTags%2Frichkid%2FTimeline%3Fsearch_type%3DTags%3Btextinput%3Drichkid%3Bphoto_type%3D250%3Bmethod%3DGET%3Bnoform%3Dt%3Bsort%3DDate%2520Taken%252C%2520new%2520first%23pic7160108497&user=&flickrurl=http://www.flickr.com/photos/59414209@N00/7160108497

Muphrey - haha, not a cousin of Murphey, but a typo of him... still, what is the difference between cousins other than copying errors (in the DNA of their forebears?)

"We checked, no typos" proclaimed the headline to this article. Which of course means that there will be a typo.

There is probably a law which describes this phenomenon, likely named after a cousin of Mr Sod.

Re: For Ed.

>And listening to site like Engadget is the error MS is doing with Win10 - the last user you want to listen to is the gadget-addict needing always a new toy to play with.

Palm had already done the vast bulk of the development work by the time the Engadget letter was published - therefore Engadget didn't actually influence Palm. but did provide a concise over-view of what was wrong with Palm's line-up - bulky handsets, low-res displays, no Wi-Fi.

ANYWAY - it's a moot point because WebOS was only raised in this thread in order knock its UI designer, which isn't directly related to WebOS's backward compatibility. The few people I knew with a Palm Pre though its UI was good.

Re: Can't resist this bandwagon..

Maybe things don't come across well in messages of 150 characters or less.

>- He thinks that a user interface defines how a computer *works*.

If we make that a user interface defines how a computer system *works*., then the statement is largely true, since the user is part of the system.

Re: @Richard 12: Note on Windows 8

>On a similar note, we have a Lenovo 8.1 lappy with a touch screen, which suits our needs very well indeed, if Apple had something similar with a touchscreen we probably would have bought that instead...

@Jay. Hiya!

I could ask you how you use your Lenovo, and why you find it easier to convert it to a tablet instead just picking up a separate device. But I won't, because it is very hard to distil the behaviour of real people into bullet-points. This is why UI/UX design is so expensive.... many hours of testing, videoing the the test users, that sort of thing.

It might be that you travel a lot and don't want the extra weight of a separate device, and that 'touch in tent mode' is great for casual browsing and watching movies on airplanes.

It might be that the OSs and software aren't optimised for working together.

It might be that you want touch input married to x86 software.

It could be a lot of things.

Re: Sherlock

>Touchscreen first interfaces in 8 meant that all future Windows laptops will be loathe not to include that feature (something even Macs lack today).

And for good bloody reason. Touch on a conventional laptop is shit - though 'convertible' devices like the Lenovo Yoga are good for some use-cases (such as watching movies in bed, though that's something a tablet could do). .

Apple are taking the approach of having users buy a Macbook *and* an iPad. If you want touch input on a MacBook, say for Photoshop tool palettes - then you download an Adobe app and use both devices in tandem. Down the line, Apple are betting on developers like Adobe making iOS productivity apps - the iPad hardware and APIs won't be a limiting factor - and making it easy to shunt your workflow back and forth 'tween Tablet and Mac if necessary.

Credit to MS though on their Surface Book.

Re: For Ed.

>WebOS? The one who killed Palm?

That's not what killed Palm. The only problem with WebOS was that it was too late to arrive.

The 2007 Engadget Open Letter to Palm - written before the Palm Pre and webOS were announced - outlines why people were turning away from them:

We know you're working on a Linux-based mobile OS to succeed Palm OS Garnet -- which was already REALLY showing its age two years ago -- but we're sorta worried that you're going to just port the old UI to a new kernel. It's too late for that.

Re: Windows 10 has been designed 'together' with the user

>When you hear a notification sound, you have to dig to find out what app the notification came from.

Go to the app in question, say Email. Go to Options. Go to Notifications. Change it to a noise that doesn't sound like a text message.

True, you might think you would just go to the >main phone options and >notifications and manage it from there, but this way makes just as much sense.

Re: @Davie Dee

I'm with Paul - what you remember is what you remember, and at the time the chief advantage of Win2K was to me was USB support. Previously I had been forced to dual-boot a PC with '98 and NT 4.

Direct X didn't bother me - that was what the PlayStation was for.

Win 2K wasn't without some horrific bugs when it first arrived.... deleting the contents of a ZIP disk and replacing it with a cached copy of the *previous* ZIP disk was one of the stranger ones...

Re: @Alien8n

I heard some social theory the other day that future dystopias are popular because if we have resigned ourselves to the future being shit then we don't need to change our damaging behaviour.

I haven't fully decided about the truth of that yet. It might just be that future dystopias make good settings for violent -and thus fun! - video games!

Re: Trek: The unrebooted series!

>Despite being more than a third of the world's population, India, China and other South-East Asian nations get barely a look-in in Star Trek.

"Black and white lived in perfect harmony, and ganged up on green." (Terry Pratchett)

Re: Splitting water without leccy?

>Splitting water without leccy?

Creating glaciers is possibly not the most efficient means of doing so!

Re: Interesting

Indeed, the possible implications for life on other planets is one of the motivations for studying terrestrial microbial life in environments the we humans would find extreme.

Deep sea vents, arsenic-rich lakes (though it turns out that a bacterium can't substitute arsenic for phosphorus after all, as was originally reported), glaciers etc