Posts by Dave 126 10675 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
The PC platform games always seemed lacking compared to Mario and Sonic - and Wonderboy et al - on the consoles. Keen was EGA ugliness, Jilll of the Jungle was merely alright, Gods was a sort of 'run and gun' game.... Flashback wasn't as good as the Amiga version.
Still, a few years later my console and Amiga-owning friends would come round to mine for X-Wing, and later Doom
I've just made my phone 50% thicker to add to its functionality. It is now also a ruler, knife, toothpick, pen, file, tweezers and pen: I glued a Victorinox 'Swiss Card' to it.
It works for me, but i wouldn't expect it work for most people.. Similarly, I see a lot of builders with iPhones in cases ranging from slim to 'two cigarette packets' in size - it seems that the individual users can choose the level of protction that suits them. More battery? Maybe these builders are able to charge their phones off their 18v site stereos, or in their vans. I'm not sure how all these IT Commentards here are always so far away from a USB socket to charge from.
There are, if these threads are to be belived, people who are on the phone so much that they require a second battery, yet at the same time they will tolerate the faff of restarting their phone off every time they need more juice. Don't insult our intelligence by pretending that is an optimum solution.
>Anyone still making buying decisions based on brand loyalty, or in the more current nomenclature, fanboyism, these days is doing themselves a disservice.
That's largely true, but if it takes an individual several days to weigh up one option against another then relying on 'track record' actually makes more sense (depending upon how much one's time is worth). Ultimately, physical products can't be completely expressed 'on paper', and trying things for themselves can take too long. If what you are used to works for you, then buying MKII or MKVII can make sense.
I don't use Apple. I use Android and Windows, Sony and Dell*. However, I don't like unnecessary snark, since it muddies any sensible discussion of useful features and good design choices.
* the aged Dell keeps trooping on, so I will overlook some of its offensive design decisions.... blue LEDs for starters.
>Yeah so sorry we're not kissing the ass* of a huge multibillion dollar corporation. Funny how everyone likes our snark until we pick on their favorite* business.
'Kissing ass' is a bias, just as is 'pissing on'. Many of us here don't like any form of bias; give us straight info and let us make our own minds up. The headline suggested less battery life, whereas the article remembered that the chances are that the SoC is built on a smaller process and that the new OS version might save power. As a reader, I think it reasonale that the headline and the article agree; c'mon guys, this isn't New Scientist or Wired.com FFS!
I use a couple of Android phones, and I want them and their replacements to be as useful to me as possible... I don't see how spreading FUD about the completion helps that end. Give credit where it is due.
>it is reasonable to assume that a smaller battery means less battery life.
That's only a reasonable assumption if you haven't been paying attention to the trend in CPU power consumption for that last umpteen years. Hell, even Lewis Carroll** knew that in Alice Through the Looking Glass ( what we call the 'Red Queen Effect'). Moore's 'Law' isn't a law, but as a prevailing trend one should consider any observed exceptions to it as noteworthy. By your own admission we don't know the process size of the new iPhone SoC, and you are quite correct, but I'm curious as to why your assumption is that it doesn't fit the trend.
In Android land, the first mainstream phone to use the Snapdragon 800 SoC was the LG G2, and being first its battery life was widely applauded. SoC process size does make a difference to battery life.
* spellings that suggest the article was written by the USA branch of the .co.uk Reg site.
** Snark hunting? Frumious Bandersnatch.
>but a stylus? Painful to watch and a betrayal of everything Jobs stood for.
It isn't a betrayal at all. A stylus on a phone is a useless hassle, if one is only making phone calls or entering text - the functions of the first iPhone.
A tablet is different beast, and a tablet used as a graphics tablet even more so.
>People said that the surface pro was expensive well at least with a surface you get a full desktop OS not a smartphone OS.
That's a fairly arbitrary differentiation... If the UI works for the HI hardware and it runs suitable applications, who gives a damn what the origin of an OS is?
>Small point of inquiry. According to the apple presentation the GPU in the new iPad pro and iPhone 6s offer console level graphics. Exactly which console are they comparing it to, the PS One?
Between the PS2 and PS3, roughly.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/190105-does-the-iphone-6-actually-have-console-quality-graphics
http://static1.gamespot.com/uploads/original/110/1100542/2644037-3674092395-Tegra.jpg
The behaviour of streaming audio buffers does my nut in too - and I'm an Android user. Let us both hope that whoever finds the solution first, Apple or Android, is swiftly copied by the other! : D
In fairness, Google has a nasty habit of suggesting that an app be updated (i.e maps), when the newer version exceeds the hardware of my device (yeah, my newish phone broke, so I'm on a aged cheapo phone). Apple are aware that many iOS users are still on older hardware, and then *don't always* trip those people up with OS updates.
>How is it a good experience for users OR developers to augment the internal memory with memory that is relatively slow, unreliable, and potentially missing completely?
A good point, but as developers of the OS there is nothing to stop Apple from somehow defining data types that are more tolerant of slow speeds and unreliable presence; i.e music and video. However, even then one gets into the situation where SD cards need to be indexed before use, app developers need to define data as such (i.e game engine lives internally, big level maps live on SD) or whatever the the situation is in Android these days ( I only have an Android phone, but I haven't tested the way internal Vs SD storage works... some apps are happier than others to be on SD maybe?)
YMMV
And of course 6'3" Corporal Carrot was a Dwarf, and it wouldn't occur to any Dwarf (of closer to mean height for their demographic group) that he wasn't. (The Fifth Elephant).
[Oh jeeebus, I have read the book twice and only just now whilst writing the above have I twigged that it is an pun on the Fifth Element. Is there a term for when two bits of info exist within the same brain but only collide some time later?]
>Follow the money.
ARM sell chip licences to ODMs. ARM think that if they put together an OS and whatnot to facilitate IoT projects, more people will buy these devices with ARM-licenced chips from ODMs. Seems pretty straightforward.
The clue is in the cloud service that they provide - free to play around with, but to use it seriously ARM will require your money in exchange for this service- someone has to pay for the servers. Again, that seems fair and straightforward. If you want to sort out your own hosting and pay for it yourself, fine, ARM will supply you with the software tools gratis.
>This way the device will know it's in your back pocket and won't magically unlock itself and dial Zimbabwe when you sit on it. No more butt-dialling!
>The future is now.
Damn right - just sew an NFC-tag into each pocket of each of your trousers, and instruct the phone to remain locked when in range of them, and job's a goodun'!
>Sturmey Archer hubs cost a lot more than they used to.
Haha! You should see the price of Rholoff 14 speed hubs.... about £800! However, people who are setting on a 10,000 mile expedition by bike find the reliability and minimal maintenance worth the high asking price and extra weight.
Apple owners include some drivers of 10 year-old VW Passat estates, some pedestrians who wear Tricker's brogues, some skateboarders riding Independent decks, some users of the Swindon to Paddington rail line etc etc
Riders of fixie bikes though don't really want an iPhone. They want a WASP T12 SpeechTool: http://trashbat.co.ck/
According to Richard's Bicycle Book ( late nineties edition), the only purpose of fixed-wheel bikes was for training - forcing the rider to spin quickly when going down hill and pedal powerfully when going up can help tone their legs.
If I lived in a mostly flat area, I might not bother with gears (one less mechanism to maintain, and a single-speed bike can have thicker, more durable chains and sprockets), but free-wheel hubs are so reliable that there is no practical reason not to fit one.
Each to their own. My personal preference for a flat city would be a BMX (if chained to a fence those small tough wheels present a challenge to any pisshead who wishes to kick them in), but I would respect the choice of anyone riding a cyclocross bike, hybrid, folding Brompton, mountain bike, whatever if it works for them.
Pocket Lint reckon the Honor 7 call quality is "perfectly fine", supporting the assumption that a review will often only touch on this aspect if it is drastically better or worse than average.
>shame about non-removable battery but 99.9% of users won't bother.
Thank you for reminding me to charge my 5200 mAh USB 'power brick' - I'm just packing for a three-day long festival, so It'll be handy. (not that I'm planning on using my phone much, but it's nice to have).
>Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the roads
Just because you are hopelessly lost doesn't mean that you have to drive dangerously!
Bizarrely, some roads that cross from England to Scotland have signs saying "Drive on the Left". I wonder if there was ever an incident that prompted these signs for the bleedingly obvious?
Apple want to make money, and they have a track record that shows that they know how to do that. Part of Apple's strategy is to investigate potential opportunities, and then to pick the avenues that they predict will work well for them. So, one can assume that Apple pay a lot of very bright people to investigate opportunities. These bright people are then provided with the best information that money can buy, and have the resources to conduct expensive original research themselves.
Will Apple make a conventional car? Probably not. Is this an area that shows signs of being disrupted? Yes (see: Uber, Tesla, car clubs, fuels prices, car automation research). Does Apple have a record of working with outside parties? Yes (iTunes and record labels, iPhones and network operators)
The analyst doesn't know. I don't know. Apple don't know, but they will do due process.
To answer your question:
Popcorn-Time presents torrents with a streaming-style UI. Whilst you are watching content on PopcornTime, you become a Torrent peer, uploading. Indeed, you can even drang n drop a torrent file from a website into PopcornTiime and it will play, after buffering.
PopornTime.io says they send you through a Proxy; Popcorntime.se does not, and in addition it sends your CPU cycles skywards. Wired.com being what it is advertised the latter. Go figure.
>ChrisInAStrangeLand
Nice Heinlein-inspired tag!
You saw QI last night then? (Context for other readers: 'Third World' was first used top refer to countries that were aligned with neither the USA or USSR, before later being used to refer to poor countries. We now use 'Developing Nations' for the latter, a loaded phrase itself since it suggests an 'inevitable' direction.)
Whoah. Fox News broadcast a terrible obituary of Kurt Vonnegut, so this report of the FBI's attitude towards Bradbury seems entirely plausible.
What's worrying is that Fox were looking to trash Vonnegut and his humanist values in 2007 - that is far less remote than the paranoia of decades ago.
Google: 'youtube fox news kurt vonnegut obituary'
>Are their lives so shallow/meaningless that they can't come up with their own pointless drivel?
They have had the gumption to share things that amuse them and enjoy the activity of bringing people together, thus ticking the following boxes: humour, activity, community, celebration.
For all we know this is just what they do for kicks when thy aren't busy curing cancer or whatever.
To do that would require more testing, and cause confusion amongst some customers. Even for the type of user who likes reading the XDA forums from time to time would find a dual-booting phone a sub-optimal experience. I mean, if you were on a desktop PC and you just needed to use an application on a different OS for five minutes, you'd find it more convenient to use a virtual machine or a WINE-type facility... you wouldn't want to have to restart your machine.
On a Blackberry-class phone, this is even more important - you wouldn't want to risk missing a phone call from a potential client, would you?
Also, how would you synchronise your call logs between your two OSs?
So then BB would have to test the integration between the OSs, as well as testing them separately.
Five days ago The Reg reported that Google is postponing its limited launch of Project Ara - a modular component system for mobile phones. In response to that story, I osted a comment about expanding the Ara concept to laptop/tablet sized components:
As a modular systems for just phones, it may prove to be a bit niche- many users might find that their needs are more simply met by owning a selection of traditional handsets and selecting one for twon and another for the woods.
However, if this modular system is extended to tablet screens, keyboards and more, the possibilities become more interesting. A user could create any of the following:
- 5" clamshell with a Psion 5 - style keyboard...
- ...or candy-bar with Blackberry-style keyboard if that's your thing.
- 12" tablet with pen digister and full size SD-Card slot for working with discreet cameras
- 7" e-ink configuration, with light-weight battery for comfortable reading
- physical controllers for games
- good quality camera modules, akin to Sony's QX-100
- laptop
- desk-bound workstation
- High-end audio interfaces / microphones, for musicians and journalists
>Decent screen and keyboard should be pretty long lasting.
Then our experiences must differ! In less than ideal environments, keyboards get gummed up or blocked by crumbs, and screens are prone to accidental damage. And that's in the developed world amongst adults, let alone in possibly dustier environments amongst children!
True, you you go the ToughBook route and make them more durable, but it is by no means certain that this would be a more efficient approach than easily swapping out defunct units.
@The Axe
You are painting a rosy yet cynical picture in which children get conned over biscuits in order to 'inoculate' them against dodgy pension investments 40 years later.
Yes, I take your point that we learn better from our mistakes. I for one have never gambled money as an adult because I once fed a fruit machine with Franc coins as a child, trying to win back the first Franc I lost.
However, we as adults cannot be expert in all things. I am not a chemist or biologist, so I trust the 'nanny state' to protect me from any water company that would seek to cut corners in their purification processes. Even if I had that expertrise, i probably couldn't be arsed to test every glass I drink. Likewise, in a democracy it stands that if a majority of parents don't want chocolate to be advertised during children's television segments, then the wish of these parents should be expressed through the elected government.
The NBC series '30 Rock' has a message in the credits to the effect of "Commercial consideration provided by Apple", and indeed the show is full of Macbooks, iPhones and iMacs.
NBC used to produce a show called Community. After they cancelled it and Yahoo! picked up it up, all the Macbooks in the show have circular stickers over the Apple logos on the lids.
Of course both shows are a bit 'meta', meaning that refer to their own product placement in a 'knowing' way - much like the product placement skit in Wayne's World 2. The premise of 30 Rock is that Alec Baldwin's character is head of "NBC and General Electrics Microwave Programming" to the detriment of the broadcaster. One episode of Community revolved around a charismatic man who is paid to talk about the positive aspects of his Honda SUV to people in his peer group - and of course Honda paid Yahoo for this.
>I find myself asking who the [REDACTED] is so inversely inpactected by vBlog advertising
Ultimately, it is the vBloggers themselves who stand to benefit from this intervention. If their viewers become jaded and lose trust in them, nobody benefits - not the vLoggers, the viewers or the advertisers.
Take your Windows 8 example - I don't recognise the situation you sketch, but then I only regularly visit tech sites that I trust - or least have a feel for their style.
Were I be the type to watch vBlogs, I imagine that I would get a feel for the individuals, much as I do for film reviewers. Sun Online say the film is AMAZING! = ignore. That contrarian git from the Guardian says the film is RUBBISH! = it's probably pretty good fun.
Why do you draw the line? Various territories have attempted to limit advertising for decades.
Without state intervention, the situation you would have is basically this: A whole team of marketeers skilled in the dark arts of psychology Vs a naive individual. And if that individual is too young to have educated themselves about how advertising works, the situation is even more one sided.
"In The Hidden Persuaders, first published in 1957, [Vance] Packard explores the use of consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, including depth psychology and subliminal tactics, by advertisers to manipulate expectations and induce desire for products, particularly in the American postwar era. He identified eight "compelling needs" that advertisers promise products will fulfill. According to Packard these needs are so strong that people are compelled to buy products to satisfy them. The book also explores the manipulative techniques of promoting politicians to the electorate. The book questions the morality of using these techniques."
>some bloggers were paid to post videos featuring Oreo cookies
Most US crosswords feature 'OREO' as an answer fairly often.... I wonder if the clue setters get a free packet?
Joking aside, due to the format of US crosswords the clue setter will often need a word like OREO for its vowels. And yep, the Shortyz crossword app is my chief phone-based time killer at the moment.
My favourite biscuits are Sainsbury's Quadruple Belgian Chocolate All Butter Cookies. I have received no money from Sainsury's for this post.
>Could a 'fork' of Linux be developed that went back to the basics of IoT system requirements and thus produced an IoT OS kernel that was small, well understood and had the advantages of years of bug clearouts?
You might, but in many cases you might choose to use an OS that already satisfies your requirements.... QNX, for example, is roughly a tenth of the size of the Linux kernal and has been used in industrial control for decades. VxWorks has been used in aerospace, industrial control and medical applications for a similar period.
So, having been used for decades and being small makes these OSs more likely to be 'better understood'. And, unlike most flavours of Linux, they are also 'Real Time OSs' which is essential for some embedded applications.
Linus was being sensible and honest when he suggested that trying to squash Linux to resemble these existing OSs is largely a waste of time.
[ I have used proprietary OSs as my examples]
Just to be clear, this dispute is over a Design Patent - what we in the UK would instead call 'Trade Dress', like the shape of branded cola bottle or car radiator grill. What we think of as real, proper patents are referred to in the US as 'Utility Patents'.
This confusion isn't helped that in the US it is the same organisation that registers Patents and Trademarks.... indeed the clue in in the name: United States Patent and Trademark Office.
I don't know why, but I up-voted 'jake'. Not because i think all plod are clueless, but because of the circumstances in which they work can make them appear that way. Also, I'm fairly bored of down-voting him.
A removed example: A bent accountant who commits millions of £$ of fraud will be far better incentivised than any official set to prosecute them. They will have spent years of experience and months of planning to commit a crime that the investigating officer might ojnly have weeks to look at - that is, if they even know there has been a crime to begin with.
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