* Posts by Dave 126

10643 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

Get another loan, fanbois, the new MacBook Pro and iMac are here

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Video card question

Its very possible that AMD have made some GPUs to Apple's specifications for grunt, power consumption, heat and price. Beyond that, I can't help, except to point towards the discussion here, where some commenters might know what they are talking about (I can't tell):

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9268/apple-announces-2015-15-retina-macbook-pro-cheaper-27-retina-imac

I'm sure that Anandtech will explain more about the GPU, and provide benchmarks, when they do a full review in future.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: oh and re the android comment...

>will it play crysis???

Yes, but not at its native resolution.

Dave 126 Silver badge

You would compare Android to OSX? Oh well.

Closer equivalents to OSX include Windows and some Linux distros - which these Macs will run happily. For Windows, Apple will supply you with the drivers.

Linus Torvalds, who had something to do the OS that Android is based around, uses a Macbook Air. He says he dislikes noisy computers at home, and values light laptops on the move. He's hardly a 'fanboi', as his January rant about Apple's HFS+ illustrates.

And that's it: We should judge products on their features and fitness for purpose, and not just which camp they come from. It is also right to base decisions on wider issues, such as environmental, data-retention and market practices of a company, but if so we should be careful about how we interpret the information available to us.

KFC's new secret ingredient is a bluetooth keyboard on your tray

Dave 126 Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Hmm..

Keyboard that doubles as a snack tray... not too bad an idea for a Home Theatre PC setup.

ICON: should be obvious.

Apple patches FREAK-ed out Watch

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: As Always ....

I'm trying to think of a platform that doesn't have security updates issued as flaws are found after release. I can only assume eSem uses some perfect OS known only to himself.

Last flying Avro Vulcan, XH558, prepares for her swan song

Dave 126 Silver badge

I saw it fly over the Shambala festival in Northamptonshire last August bank holiday. I can only assume it was on its way to a bank holiday airshow somewhere. Any idea which show that might have been?

Apple threw its TV out the window after years of research: report

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Disproof

There isn't that much that Apple or anyone else can add to a good TV panel to add value to it, especially if users are just going to plug in a Roku, games console, Apple TV, HTPC or satellite receiver etc anyway.

Apple would never be able to duplicate the functionality of all those boxes into one TV set, and there isn't any compelling reason why any UI-input device (microphone, camera or a Kinect-like sensor etc) should be built into the TV set either.

There is a reason why a Samsung TV looks much the same as a Sony or LG. A couple ofbrandcs have tried to differentiate their TVs - Phillips with AmbiLight, Bang and Olufsen with a massive speaker and fancy material finishes - but that hasn't earned them large market share.

Apple do have a 2010 patent on a laser-powered display that is transparent when turned off, but it consumed too much power and the picture quality was low.

A TV set that could be rolled up like a projector screen might be a fine thing, but one would expect that sort of tech to come from LG or Samsung - the people who actually make the panels.

Use your Apple gizmos only for good, says Tim Cook

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Wow...

>Sorry Timmy...completely happy with my Android phone, thank you very much....This is really pissing me off Timmy.

Relax. We would expect the CEO of any company to *say* that his products are the best, and we would also expect him to know that we expect him to say that. He merely was acknowledging his position whilst reminding people to turn their phones off in a light hearted way.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Funny

>overpriced

What were you comparing the first iPhone to - the LG Prada? :)

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: LOL - how?

The 'hold Vol-Down to make phone silent' facility seems to have disappeared in Lollipop. I'm in no hurry to upgrade from KitKat, so have been keeping an eye how other owners of my handset are getting on with Lollipop first.

>So it didn't occur to you to flick the switch on the side? Fuckwits, the pair of you.

That switch can also be configured to lock the screen orientation, IIRC.

Microsoft's Surface 3 is sweet – but I wouldn't tickle my nads with it

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: What I find amusing...

The only time I've used the camera on a (10.1") tablet is in the Google Translate app- you point the tablet at a French newspaper and read a rough English translation on the screen. It's actually very good, though niche.

Trying the same on a newer, faster 4.3" phone was just a bit of a faff because of the smaller screen.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: RT was essential.

>Can we please see a pic of all tech reviewers who state that a mobile device is too heavy? Feeble!

Twat. I'm sure jason 7 will never age and become infirm.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Connecting to wifi

>I come to El Reg for the comedy and I fully expect the author to rip the piss out of whatever the subject of the article is.

The Reg doesn't do that in *reviews*. Yeah, in all other articles the Reg will take the piss out of [Company], but its reviews of actual products are honest enough.

Stolen an Apple watch? Want to pawn it off? Good news!

Dave 126 Silver badge

What? If you're going to steal a watch, you don't give a damn what it'll be worth in ten years - you only care what you can get for it that week.

We're talking common thievery here, not investment.

4K refresh sees Blu-ray climb to 100GB, again

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Total waste of time

>Try and convince average joe to spend £600+ on a new 4k TV

Many of the 'average Joes' spent quite a bit more on their TVs some time ago, and many will be looking at something bigger and better. Generally, the time Reg readers spend messing around on PCs is time the average Joe and his/her family will spend watching TV and films.

Big TVs used to be the preserve of 'home cinema' enthusiasts - these days they are found in a good number of households.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: How long until 100GB M-DISC is available?

You're going to be around in a 100 years?

Don't be stingy, share your secret with us!

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: DRM again........

Strange... £50 would buy him a good enough stand-alone Blu-Ray player deck. Still, if his eyesight doesn't allow him to see the benefit of the format, why bother?

However, see what the situation is a couple of years. It might be that High Dynamic range images prove to be clearer for people with impaired eyesight.

Still, it depends on whether he enjoys the cinematography of Lawrence of Arabia, or the gags of Tommy Cooper.

Dave 126 Silver badge

People do still buy disks. Not everybody has, is likely to get very soon, fast enough broadband to play HD content, let alone 4K content. Some people will take care when choosing a television set, since they enjoy watching movies.

4K TV sets are becoming an option worth considering, and new display technologies (OLED, Quantum Dot) are at the point where they can begin taking advantage of the extra data per pixel (colour space, dynamic range) of new content formats.

Mobe network Three is the magic number for FreedomPop

Dave 126 Silver badge

My thoughts too - this might be handy for a second phone/tablet, one that you only occasionally take away from a WiFi area.

For example, my mother is beginning to use her iPad Mini in her house as a quicker way of looking at weather forecasts and emails than her laptop. Every month or two she goes on a city break with friends, and would only really need enough data allowance on her iPad to consult Trip Advisor and the like. Her phone is an old Nokia 'candybar', so it isn't really suitable for that kind of use.

Infosec bods demo GPU keylogger. Don't tell the NS... oh, wait

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Remember

I believe Oninoshiko was being ironic

Mondeo Man turns into mutant electrical beauty: Ford Mondeo Hybrid

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: White Elephant

Short answer: Smaller wheels have greater rolling resistance, but they require less energy to accelerate.

Long answer: Imagine a polished metal wheel on a glass surface - no deformation. The actual area of contact is nearly zero, a point. The direction of movement of the wheel at this point of contact is tangential to the wheel and parallel to the ground, so the movement is in the direction that we want the vehicle to travel. This scenario is cleanly impossible, an ideal from a text book.

Now add deformation. A rubber pneumatic tyre. We need it for traction. Our perfect circle now has a flattened area on the bottom. The direction of the wheel's movement at the point the wheel meets the ground is no longer parallel to the ground. This results in road noise and heating of the tyre. Now, for the same area of tyre-road contact, a larger wheel will result in the motion of the wheel being closer to parallel to the road.

Acceleration: bigger wheels have more angular momentum, weight for weight, than smaller wheels. A child on a roundabout knows that if they starting spinning whilst hanging out, they spin much faster when they pull their mass in towards the centre of the roundabout. Effectivily they start as a big wheel, and become a small wheel of the same weight - in order to preserve the angular momentum the speed up. In reality, big wheels will also be heavier than small wheels because otherwise they would break more easily.

So, big wheels reduce the energy you waste in friction. If we had 100% efficient (you can never have 100% efficiency!) regenerative breaking in electric vehicles, the energy used to accelerate bigger heavier wheels wouldn't be wasted since it would be reclaimed when the vehicle decelerated - just as energy can be stored in flywheels.

So tablets, if you want to get anything done travelling get a ... yes, a laptop

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Oh come on

What if your 'real work' is inspecting bridge structures against last known survey results? Are you seriously suggesting someone pushes a multi-monitored desktop around in a wheelbarrow?

Or are you suggesting that the people who stop our infrastructure from falling down aren't doing 'real work'?

Whether you like it not, software for professionals is developed for ARM tablets and rolled out into industry. It might not be your industry, but that doesn't mean it isn't 'real work'.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: The art of travel....

>Panasonic FZ1000

I wasn't aware of that one, and just read up on it.

Not to be confused with FZ-45 and their ilk, the FZ1000 is Panny's answer to the Sony RX10. Think of them both as being the long zoom versions of their respective LX-100 (again, a leap beyond the LX-3, 5 and 7) and RX-100 cameras.

When the RX10 was released, it was in a category of its own. One big tech site journo proclaimed it to be an 'Everything Camera', and his go-to tool when he didn't know what he would be shooting.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: The art of travel....

Photojournalists who think they have a lot of kit: spare a thought for travelling musicians!

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Laptop

Why would he need to remove the keyboard? There are only a few use-cases in which that benefits the user.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Paranormal activity? Just another natural resource ripe for exploitation!

>Did you try replacing the user?

Yes, yes I did. He's a walking illustration of why walled gardens are a good idea for some people!

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Uploading 'everything' to iCloud?

>Now if you think I'm going to even attempt to take half decent pictures of a Female Grizzly and her Cubs (in Yellostone) with an iPhone 6+ camera, you are more than welsome to try.

The discussion is about tech blogging, and a photographer is unlikely to meet anything at a tech conference as dangerous as an enraged grizzly bear.... not now that Steve Balmer has retired, that is. New gadgets don't bite!

The right tool for the right job... too many of the trendy, shiny tech sites take photographs with too shallow a depth of field, so half the gadget in question is out of focus. They are evidently using premium-compact, mirrorless or full-blown DSLRs, but they seem fixated on presentation and not illustration.

Hmmm, you might get some interesting bear shots if you hung an iPhone from a tree, covered it in dog food, and then got an app to fire its camera when its gyros detect an ursine mauling... of course you'd need the photos to be sent off-phone in real time, but it seems doable!

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: TL;DR version

>As long as you can manage with 1 (one) USB port and no hardwired Ethernet.

For the scenario in this article - mobile blogging- those aren't big problems. The Surface Pro 3 does have a microSD card slot, but it appears designed to be left in, as swapping it in and out to transfer photos is a bit fiddly. Still, if you do a lot of photoblogging, an Eye-Fi card might work for you (seek out the experiences of existing users first,to see if the reality matches the promise). If you use a USB cable to connect a camera already, it can live with all the camera accessories - cleaning cloths, lens caps, spare cards etc.

However, the Surface Pro is just a laptop, so has plenty of competition if its removable keyboard doesn't bring you any great benefits.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Wrong Tablet

A discreet nVidia card is a bit overkill for blogging photos! Heck, even for basic 3D CAD the Intel graphics solutions are fast enough these days, certainly faster than the nVidia card in my ageing but still adequate laptop.

You can buy a sub 1Kg x86 laptop with tablet level (8 hours ish) battery life... but you'll be charged lots of money for it!

From another vendor, you can buy a ruggedised mobile workstation with enough grunt to perform geophysical simulations.... but again, it won't be cheap.

Dave 126 Silver badge

: Wrong Memory Card

There is the Eye-Fi SD card with WiFi:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/04/review_eyefi_mobi_pro_wireless_memory_card/?page=2

People know their own workflows, and choose their kit accordingly. Obviously we seek out reviews before making an investment, and we seek out the experiences of existing users on forums too.

If the situation that prompted this article was "I want something as light as a tablet but with a proper OS file manager and a keyboard!" then it would seem that Apple has heard you and produced the new Macbook. And all they want in return is loads of money!

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Wrong Tablet

No downvotes from me, but it your post does ask us to define terms - what s a laptop, what is a tablet?

The variables - external ports, OS, keyboard, CPU architecture - have been lumped together through historical accidents. There is no inherent reason why an ARM device couldn't be given more ports and a OS that is happy to do work. There just isn't much of a reason to do so, though.

The people who want to write and deal with photos on an SD card already have an x86 laptop, so it means that there is little incentive for software devs to make ARM tablets do the same.

The Surface Pro 3 is an interesting device. However, when travelling one still has to pack its keyboard, so there is no weight/bulk saving there. I've looked at CAD forums to see how the Surface Pro behaves as a Solidworks machine... "not too badly but bring your proper mouse" was the view!

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Paranormal activity? Just another natural resource ripe for exploitation!

Paranormal activity....

A friend had a misbehaving PC, and I tried al the usual things but the symptoms persisted. I then changed the HDD, memory, CPU... no dice. Eventually I swapped the PSU and the motherboard over... still, the same odd behaviour. By this point I think the only original component left was the case.

Spooks: Big-screen upgrade for MI5 agents fails to be a hit job

Dave 126 Silver badge

I'd read the book of Tinker Tailer before seeing the recent film version. The film has some merits, but I couldn't work out who it was for... there was too much plot squeezed into too short a running time. People who didn't already know the story told me they found the plot of the film confusing. For people who had read the book or watched the Alex Guinness version, the film had a couple of changes that were confusing. The production design and acting were very good though.

All of that holds for a recent Le Carre adaptation, starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, A Most Wanted Man. The plot, motives and twists seemed clearer in the book. Perhaps 'mini-series' are a more natural format for Le Carre.

Le Carre's book A Most Delicate Truth is ripe for an adaptation, an angry portrayal of Blair-era worldwide private security contractors milking politicians. The market for mercenaries is a big business these days ( http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/the-market-for-mercenaries/6368296 )

Dave 126 Silver badge

Tech Angle

At the insistence of my housemate, I once read a thriller by a Spooks writer. It was no John le Carre. A bit that was annoying was the hero was given a two-part GPS co-ordinate, 54321, 12345 or whatever on a scrap of paper that takes him to an office block. The narrator then tells us that because he is a spy, he has a special GPS receiver that can give him altitude information, so he know which floor his target is on. WTF? He didn't have a Z-axis co-ordinate to work with!

Rubbish In, Rubbish Out. There is a reason I've watched the Wire, and Alec Guinness in Tinker Tailor, but not Spooks.

No, really, that 12.9-inch MaxiPad is totally on the way now

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Yes but evil Steve has declared...

Absolutely a small market - that is why they currently pay a lot of money to anyone catering to them, and why Apple haven't bothered selling 'artist's tablets' to them. It is a smaller subset of the small market that kept Apple alive during the '90s.

Adobe are actively working in this area, though, promoting a stylus and ruler combination for vanilla iPads.

Still, SoC and screen prices fall year on year - even if digitiser tech doesn't - so it might get to the point where a digitiser becomes a good way of differentiating a product for not too much extra cost.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Much like fusion power

>That's a bit rich considering what OS (iOS) was running on what machines (iPads) in the recent grounding of lotsa aircraft.

Seriously? Logically: we know that it was either the OS or the app. Devices running the same OS but without the app did not exhibit this issue. Devices with the app did exhibit the issue. From this we conclude that it was probably the app that was responsible.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Yes but evil Steve has declared...

Jobs also once said that the next iPod will also make toast, when asked if it would play video. Jobs would say what he needed to say at the time. Don't think of it as any more than that.

A stylus on a phone is unnecessary for phone and text functions. Tablets and phablets - which people often use with two hands - change things. Apparently the Galaxy Note stylus is good for entering mathematical notation. Cintiq and Modbook make big digitiser tablets for artists. The decline in tablet sales suggests the low hanging fruit of the mass market has already been plucked.

A lot of time will have been spent by Apple, and by Microsoft and others, filming and analysing focus groups using prototype devices in different ways. The potential returns are too high to be amateurish and and unscientific about it.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Yes but evil Steve has declared...

Indeed, Cintiq already make big tablets with digitisers, and charge even more than Apple do. From this we can assume there is a market for such devices.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Much like fusion power

Practical, commercial nuclear fusion power is 50 years and always will be.

This will be the year of the Linux desktop.

The paperless office is nearly here.

It's 2015 and where's my hoverboard, Mattel? At least Nike are promising Marty McFly's Hyperdunk trainers with Power Laces before the year's end.

Traumatised Reg SPB team barely survives movie unwatchablathon

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: American priorities?

As Neil Armstrong said of himself: "I am and always will be a pocket-protector wearing engineer". He was prouder of being a boffin than being a bad-ass Navy test pilot and whatever else he did.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: How about a Nicolas Cage marathon shitfest?

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is good, but it might not be to everyone's taste.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Needs more Cloverfield

The Hobbit movies I didn't enjoy. I got the impression that everybody involved in making them was bored of doing so. A shame, but LOTR was so well done, especially in making the landscapes so central.

Cloverfield I enjoyed. I'd held off watching it for some time due to some prejudice on my part, but its found-footage conceit was well executed and it zips along at a good pace. I hadn't watched a found-footage film since Man Bites Dog, so maybe it was that I wasn't bored of the style.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Jay would say:

“Affleck, you da bomb in Phantoms, yo!”

And to be fair, the films he has directed, Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Argo are pretty good. As an actor, he works well David Fincher's Gone Girl.

Phablet for the biz fleet with easy typing: Microsoft Lumia 640 XL

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: NOT suitable for enterprise.

On Android I had to use a 3rd party app to backup my SMSs from my old phone and restore them to my new phone.

It did strike me as a strange commission from the basic OS.

Facebook echo chamber: Or, the British media and the election

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: TW is right, but for the wrong reasons...

>our fundamentally broken electoral system,

The purpose of the system is not to arrive at the best solutions, or even to choose the right decision makers. The purpose of the system is to be considered a bit unfair by everybody equally, on the reasonable grounds that grumbling is preferable to civil war, gulags, cultural revolutions and the like.

In this respect, it is fairly successful. Other countries have PR or AV or other versions of democracy... but are any of them utopias? Nah, they might be better on some respect or other for some people, but none are many miles ahead of us.

There is plenty of room for improvement, but don't think that bringing in a new voting system is any form of panacea.

Dave 126 Silver badge

>What in buggery do we do with a country that naturally produces Daily Mail readers? Nuke it from orbit?

Well, if you are going to take that option, then you have nothing to lose by trying some slightly less drastic ideas first. Um.... widespread dispersion of LSD and MDMA? If this experiemht fails, then drop the bomb and sterilise the Petri dish.

But serioulsy, compare the attitude of the Red Tops in the 1980s to today.... they no longer pick on homosexuals, trade unionists, commies, blacks or whoever in the way they did then. Its true that anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise - in pubs, just as it is mirrored in the papers - but that appears linked to people not feeling well off.

Basically, if people feel happy and hopeful they are nicer to each other. If people feel naffed off and oppressed, they want someone to blame.

Uber and car makers jockey for Nokia's 'HERE' maps – report

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Article Error: Missing Context

Self driving cars would be a threat to auto manufacturers because not as many cars would be built- after a car has dropped you off, it would then go pick somebody else up. More people would travel in one car, because lift-sharing would be easier - unless of course you pay extra to avoid the fellow plebs. Fewer cars would be damaged in accidents. Cars would require less maintenance because they would have fewer cold starts, their engines would spend longer at their optimum rpm, and traffic control systems would eliminate start-stopping at traffic lights.

Apple taxpayers swarm to stone-age iPhone 6+ purely for the bigness

Dave 126 Silver badge

I'm an Android user, as I said. However, experience has taught me that the users of a platform are the best critics of it.

I don't use a Windows phone, but the little of it I've seen I've liked. I don't know how I'd find if I used it or longer.

I have iOS-using friends who have 'jailbreaked' their devices because they havewanted more than the stock UI/OS offered.

I've never had enough incentive to 'root' my Android phone.

Dave 126 Silver badge

My bad. Phablets *popularised* by Samsung. The Dell Streak was being sold at discount for years after its release.

Dave 126 Silver badge

>How galling it must be to be an Android ODM and cram in interesting new features

Interesting, yes. Useful? Not always.

- Waterproofing (Samsung, Sony). Useful

-Stylus input (Samsung Note). Useful

- Eyeball Tracking (Samsung). Interesting. Potentially useful accessibility applications for users with impaired motor function.

-Heart Rate Sensor (Samsung Galaxy). Umm...

The trouble for the Android OEMs is that if they do introduce an interesting new feature and it becomes popular with consumers, there is little to stop other Android OEMs from doing exactly the same. Product differentiation is short lived. Example: Samsung first making 'phablet' phones. Everyone else soon does the same.