Posts by Dave 126

Re: The iPad Pro?

>The iPad Pro, though, has an A9X processor - it runs, therefore, iOS, not OS X, so it can't run real Macintosh software, only tablet and smartphone apps.

It can't run OSX apps, but there is nothing stopping developers from creating 'Pro' applications for it. Indeed, Adobe have been working on some even before the iPad Pro's announcement.

It will find a place in some content creator's workflow.

Re: Ergonomics?

>Here's an idea: perhaps the basic premise is stupid and wrong?

Maybe. But maybe the truth lies in the middle?

Some of your productivity apps have a place on a tablet - especial things like Photoshop (stylus) for roving photographers, or a slider-heavy work space in Ableton (multi-touch). Indeed, maybe your workspace is spread across a PC monitor and a tablet, as Photoshop and DAW applications already support?

Interesting times.

Re: @Peter R.1 - This just in

@JustaKOS

This would appear to be what Peter was referring to:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/10/13/microsoft-windows-10-new-upgrade-rules/

Re: Obvious MS surface ad

The Reg has also reported on Macs, Chromebooks ( and has done so in this very article, FFS!) and today has reported on a possible Linux laptop from Xiaomi.

The nicest thing that this article said about the Surface Book was that "The Surface Book has a decent chance of becoming a successful device in its own right", which is not an unreasonable assessment.

If other laptop vendors follow MS's example - which is the gist of the article - we consumers will have a greater selection to choose from. As it is, most of them only offer 16:9 screens, whereas the Surface Book has 3:2.

You might prefer 16:19, you might prefer 3:2 or 16:10, whatever; choice is good.

Re: Multipurpose

@g00se

could it be that you are thinking of the existing MS Surface (tablet with attachable keyboard)? I'd expect an Intel i5/i7-powered tablet to radiate more heat than any ARM-powered tablet.

This article is about the newly released Surface Book (laptop with detachable screen).

Re: Maybe the flicker is...

The Surface Book hardware actually appears to be very good. The full list of weird symptoms users have reported all seem to be software/driver related.

Re: Discrete GPU

The GPU is offered as an option.

For those of us who do CAD work, it's nice to see a GPU on a laptop of this form factor, especially if one's workflow can benefit from stylus input.

Also, this 3:2 laptop seems to be the only one available, other than Macbooks, that doesn't use a 16:9 screen. If I am wrong about that, please, please supply a link!

Re: I would have thought it was hardware

>What surprises me is that this is apparently software, I would have thought it is a screen ribbon or something.

For sure. However, other reported symptoms suggest that it is indeed software, for example some owners have videoed the colour temperature changes as they scroll down a website - on both the Book's own screen and a connected monitor. I can't think of a hardware cause for that!

I'm sure that this will be a very compelling product, so it just seems daft that these issues were not dealt with before launch.

Re: Denim blockers?

>None of the images seems capable of tracking their legs, and they all seem to be wearing jeans.

Legs are curved. The areas of the body this system 'sees' most clearly are flat and head-on to the sensor.

Did you notice that the people in the video all held their hands open, with fingers together and facing the camera? That clinched it for me.

If this system fired ping-pong balls at the subject and counted the ones that came directly back to it, the resulting heatmap wouldn't look too different to this team's images.

Good work!

Re: Can we ditch the silly political correctness in reg articles

>99.9% of hackers are men. [no source cited]

>>"Most surveys put it at 85% at most." Cite.

Uh, okay. Basic fairness suggests that if you demand a source for a statistic, you do the same for the statistic you use. That's just good manners.

It is moot, though, because any statistic about the male/female make-up of a hidden group is shaky. As it is, how can we know anything about any hacker, sex, shoe-size, real name, whatever? For all we know, 50% of hackers are female, but 85% of the hackers that get caught and prosecuted are male. Unlikely, but, hey, not provable either.

However, we can say with confidence that *some* hackers are female.

Analogy:

Look at xkcd cartoons. Sometimes the focus of his cartoon is a relationship between a man and a woman - the stick-figure with longer hair is the female, or sometimes a stick-figure is given a beard to denote maleness. The sexes of his figures are central to these cartoons.

Most of the time though, his cartoons are just aboput two physicists, or a doctor and a patient, or whoever. Sometimes he might make a doctor (stick-figure with white coat and clipboard) female (plus long hair) even though it doesn't affect the joke.

So, I guess I'm comparing pro-nouns with cartoon pony tails....

To cite the man himself:

"The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics."

- http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/06/sex-and-gender/

Re: Can we ditch the silly political correctness in reg articles

I used the pronoun 'she' in a Reg comment a few days ago, in reference to a hypothetical inventor in her shed. My logic was that some real inventors are women (no comment about percentages) so it would be no issue if some imaginary inventors were women. The vast majority of the time I use 'he' when writing about an imaginary individual in a context where their sex is irrelevant.

Since women are bright enough to recognise the context for 'he' meaning 'he/she', I then also credit men with the wit to read 'she' as 'he/she' if the context s appropriate.

I think visually, and maybe, after imagining a cluttered workbench in a shed, it wasn't really necessary to imagine the appearance of the shed's occupant. Doc Emmett Brown is great, but after all the coverage of Back to Future day last week I didn't need to give him a another mental cameo this week.

Re: Kuerig for home-brew?

Apparently you can change the recipes yourself. Much like coding, you start by trying examples of other people's code, and then experiment by changing little bits to see what happens. Otherwise you'd just have too many variables to make sense of.

Re: Have to wonder

Same rule-of-thumb as pubs - if a busy pub is run by a rude miserable landlord, that is a good sign that the beer is well-kept. If the bar is staffed by an exquisitely pretty barmaid, that is a sign that the beer alone might not be good enough to bring the punters in.

Good beer sells itself. If I want to look at nudey pics, I don't need to look at a beer advert (or even buy ten packets of peanuts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_D_(peanuts)#Promotional_displays )

I had a mate who used a thermostat-controlled 'heat mat' under his fermentation vessel, of the sort sold for keeping pet lizards comfortable in their glass vivaria (empty fish tanks).

Re: If it's fully automatic ....

"Craft beer" is purely a marketing term. It has no meaning.

Real Ale, by contrast, does have a definition.

Temperature control during the process is important too, more so with 'pico' batches (surface area to volume ratios scaling as they do)... you might have an area of your house that maintains a roughly constant temperature, or manage temperature by other means.

You are right to highlight hygiene, though. Metal casks are often cleaned/sterilised with high pressure boiling water.

Re: Spain, Bristol AND Sussex

A.M. [Pamplona .ac] and B.W.D. [Bristol .ac] designed, developed and implemented the algorithms and simulations; A.M. and S.A.S. [Bristol .co] measured the acoustic slices; A.M [Pamplona .ac] and D.R.S. [Sussex .ac] measured the spring constants; A.M. [Pamplona .ac] conducted the rest of the experiments and wrote the paper; all the authors contributed to the discussion and edited the manuscript.

tl;dr Pamplona and Bristol created the algorithms, Sussex helped measure them.

Re: Of course, in my early work in this area...

Isn't that more rapid bouncing than actual levitation? : )

(For some reason this reminded me of the 1997 party political broadcasts in support of the Natural Law Party, featuring Yogic Flying)

Re: Bullit County

>Especially if this earlier footage contained the marksman's daughters.

For sure. Curiously, the article didn't note if any evidence of deliberate spying was presented in court, only that "Merideth *thought* the quadcopter was spying on his daughters in their yard". (my emphasis)

Re: Nothing to see here, move along

Guys, adnim was joking.

admin, make that clearer next time!

Re: Morons.

SteamOS on XBOX360? Hahaha!

Re: hahahahaha

>Then again I gave up on sony when the PS4 became a PC jammed in a console box.... these days its SteamOS all the way :-)

Fair does. Personally, I judge a console by the games that are available for it, and not by its internal architecture. In the words of Oddball "I only ride 'em, I don't know what makes 'em work."

For many genres of game, Steam is very good. However, the Playstations, like other consoles, have always had some exclusive titles. Not that my reflexes are good enough for WipEout any more....

Oddball: Hi, man.

Oddball: Definitely an antisocial type. Woof, woof, woof! That's my other dog imitation.

Re: 360?

In 2001, Sony, Toshiba and IBM committed themselves to spending $400 million over five years to design the Cell, not counting the millions of dollars it would take to build two production facilities for making the chip itself...

...But a funny thing happened along the way: A new "partner" entered the picture. In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip for Microsoft's rival game console, the (as yet unnamed) Xbox 360. In 2003, IBM's Adam Bennett showed Microsoft specs for the still-in-development Cell core. Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123069467545545011

Re: Even happier I chose a PS4

> [lack of JRPGs] is perhaps the biggest reason besides the RRoD, why I hate the XBOX brand as much as I do.

Uh, okay,I think 'hate' is a bit strong for something that merely doesn't offer your taste in games. If the RRoD issue could have been foreseen, it wouldn't have occurred. The XBOX360 disc-scratch issue was annoying, though.

I actually do prefer the game selection for the PS3 over the Xbox360 - there were more interesting games, such as 'Flower'.

>The world such as it is DOES NOT revolve 'round Halo 5, or Gears of War 17 Fragfest. Which I kinda fail to get since those players would rather be in the PC Mustardrace.

People like to play splitscreen with friends in the same room, which Halo and Gears of War allow. It's fun, and reminds us of playing splitscreen GoldenEye on the N64.

Re: 360?

I very much doubt it. The Xbox360 is based around a PowerPC architecture IBM Xenon CPU, a cousin of the Cell chips in the Playstation 3. Porting Windows would be a pain, with little reward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_(processor)

However, both the XboxONE and the PS4 are more or less just x86 PCs, making software porting much, much easier.

Re: Please...

Perhaps a Reg article comparing the personal data polices of Google, Apple, Microsoft et al would be handy?

Certainly their motives are slightly different... Apple make money on marking-up hardware and content such as apps and music, Google make it from advertising.

Re: Even happier I chose a PS4

>And what do actually believe that that will change, instead of MS spying on you it will be Sony...

Ah yes, Sony with their advertising network.... wait, hold on!

Okay, both MS and Sony are in the hardware, software and services games, but I suspect MS have a greater motive to retain your data. Sony haven't been great at securing the data they do have. MS have seen their personal data policies as a way of differentiating themselves from [Google's versions of] Android, though it's not something I've looked into for a while.

Re: FULFILL MISSION OBJECTIVES!

The US generals we have seen in recent years seem a lot more capable of critical thought than their political masters.

Re: Good to see...

Another area that patents affect medications: Antibiotics.

If you developed a new antibiotic that was very effective against bacteria that have developed resistance to previous antibiotics, you probably won't sell much of it initially. Why? Because doctors will want to keep it in reserve, as a last resort in order to preserve its effectiveness. Since patents only last for a finite number of years, you might not see any return on your R&D investment.

Therefore, there is little incentive to research new classes of antibiotics.

Re: Yes, yes, cure cancer and so on, but, what of these 'poppers'...

This is the internet, I'm sure you can find any number of specialist-interest websites to advise you.... when perhaps you are not using a work computer!