Posts by Dave 126

Re: Topping up the device's battery at the same time

Indeed. Nokia used to ship phones that had a miniUSB socket for data, couldn't be used for charging!

Re: Meh

>Meh - micro USB does the job, charges the phone. I don't need to spend five times as much for a stylish design that does the same job to make me feel smug.

Good for you. Now, spare a thought for anyone with poor eyesight and / or arthritis who finds microUSB a hassle.

I don't use Apple kit, but they've had two connectors in over ten years. This legislation is the result of the likes of Samsung never releasing two phones with the same connector. Apple were pre-emptive in this regard, the others had to be dragged kicking and screaming to accept not only a standard power connector, but even a standard 3.5mm headset jack - and even now they mess it up by using resistors of different values.

It's not only his own wealth

He's also teamed up with the like of Warren Buffet to persuade other multi-billionaires to give away large chunks of their personal fortunes... I think they use an argument along the lines of "What can you possibly spend it on anyway?"

Re: Flash vs Utility

Well, if you asked a Formula One engineer to design an enclosure that has to cool some components as quietly as possible, they might look at the ionic discharge cooling we heard about some years ago: http://www.tessera.com/technologies/intellectualproperty/Pages/thermalmanagement.aspx But, after finding that this technology isn't suitable for their need at this time, they might then think to use convection to aid airflow.

Hot air rises. Putting things in its way reduces its flow. Big slow fans are quieter than than fast ones.

Performance is only a measure of how well something fulfils its role. Since the Mac Pro's role is to allow someone to work on AV production, power and quietness are central to its function.

Yeah, this convection design would be good for living room-based games console, - apart from the optical drive. of course.

Most of us are more familiar with bins, lozenges, cola cans, chimneys, or Bender from Futurama.

Re: I thought I'd seen it all...

>The music industry has been one of the last Stalwarts. This is in part because they are one of the last to have certain packages available ONLY to Apple, but also because well, how can I put this delicately? Musicians aren't in general best known for their IT literacy, and so as a rule of thumb, appreciate an OS that treats them like they don't know what they're doing.

- Firewire audio kit just works with Macs, with generic PCs you have to determine if you have a Via or TI Firewire chipset (one works, one doesn't)

- Macs are usually fairly quiet in use.

- OSX's CoreAudio behaves. Window's sound subsystem is a mess, and keeps trying to wrest control back from ASIO for no good reason.

- Wireless MIDI is baked into OSX and iOS out of the box.

True, you could build some special low-latency Linux box to do the same, but should it go tits-up good luck acquiring another one five minutes before you're due on stage.

Re: Rollaway

I think that is why they made it with a circular cross-section (as opposed to a triangle, rectangle or hexagon): It makes it clear that it is to be used only in the upright position.

Re: AMD FirePro

Apple wanted to get away from CUDA. Many of the 3rd party OSX applications that use acceleration have now implemented OpenCL support. This would appear to benefit the user in the long term, since both nVidia and AMD products work with OpenCL - they are not tied to nVidia. In the short term, Apple have used this as leverage to get these FirePro cards from AMD at a large discount.

The performance per watt depends on the task- in some scenarios AMD are better, in others nVidia has the lead.

Re: Ummm.... oookkaaayy

> but with that price tag there are going to be those that cannot afford the new shiny and the applecare

If you're spending that much on the machine, it will be because you are using it to make money- so you will either get Applecare or another contingency plan, since disappointing your clients will cost you dear.

Re: Ummm.... oookkaaayy

> but practical... I don't think so.

Well, the internal configuration would suggest a Tolberone shape, but then people might lay it on its side which would prevent cooling by convection. What shape would you prefer?

>So for an editor that has a few hard disks, possibly some sort of video input device you are looking at at least half a dozen wires up on the desk.

No you're not. One Thunderbolt cable to your displays, one to your storage and PCIe cards. The advantage is that you can take your $6000 RED card with your Macbook when you're working in the field, or swap it between workstations depending on workflow.

>But all they are doing is making a bespoke form factor that makes upgrading even more impossible then before

Ugh? It was very easy before- the old Mac Pro was renowned for it. Now it is just a case of swapping a cable.

Re: Seems a tad odd

Once you get up the first steep hill, it's (on average) a gentle downhill to London all the way. : D

Re: Who needs presets on a DAB radio?

I use them, albeit in a car where scrolling through a list of stations isn't a good idea - being able to switch between a few favourite stations without taking your eyes from the road is an essential feature.

A good number of televisions allow you to either edit the channel list, or to create a list of favourite channels - why would you want to scroll between all the QVC shopping-type channels just to get from the entertainment channels to the news channels? DAB is much the same - you may find yourself mostly listening to just a handful of the available channels, in accordance with the Pareto '80/20' principle.

Re: Seems a tad odd

I'm normally at the forefront of expressing disdain for DAB... or at rather championing the importance of a reliable, low tech, battery efficient and widely received standard such as FM. I still stand by that.

That said, I've been using a second hand Pure Highway (a neat DAB to FM transmitter, or in my case Aux-out to my car stereo) these last few weeks. It is nice when it works, but in too many places it just does't. A run down to London was fine, but the M4 and M5 near Bristol was a gurgly mess, let alone amongst the hills and valleys near me. Still, for £6 I don't mind, and I can fall back on a loaded SD card or stream from my phone.

I almost took it to France last weekend, but it won't receive DAB+ without a software upgrade, which requires a serial number that is strangely missing, and the use of an Australian proxy server (since otherwise Pure ask you to pay the license fees for the AAC codec)

Re: Yes, make Radio 1 DAB

>Radio 2 you can leave alone please

You could change its jingle to something less nauseating, and axe Jeremy Vine - we don't need three hour listener polls about, for example, whether it's okay to hog the middle lane of the motorway (it isn't, don't do it, it's not up for discussion).

Re: Efficiency?

Even if were only 50 or even 25% efficient, it would still be a piffling amount of energy compared to running a PC or television, let alone lighting and heating.

Re: iWatch ? I cannot believe

>Now if I could have a Thunderbirds video watch (remember them?

Vaguely... though I suspect I saw it on the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Thunderbirds spoof in 'Not Only But Also...' It looked a bit like the Holly Wristwatch from Red Dwarf, IIRC (now that was a smartwatch - it had an IQ of 6000!)

Searching Google for Thunderbirds Watch just returns pictures of Rolexes customised in celebration of a USAF outfit.

Re: Not convinced

The credit card would have to resonate with the coil... a bit like how an opera singer can shatter a wine glass, but not a beer bottle or spectacle lenses.

Re: iWatch ? I cannot believe

>Right, so I cannot believe Apple are going that route, I mean, Samsung have made idiots out of themselves with their sCrapWatch, why would Apple follow [?]

There were mobile phones before the iPhone, and MP3 players before the iPod.

The iPhone is an interesting case, since it is telling what Apple left out - 3G. If they had included 3G, the battery wouldn't have lasted long enough to be practical, and bad press would have followed. This was mitigated by having an app to fetch, for example, train times, which more data-efficient than having the user hunt down the same information on a browser.

Samsung's smartwatch has taken the 'throw everything in it' approach - it can even run normal Android apps -but it doesn't really know what it is for. Apple are likely to focus in on a few core applications - simple alerts and media remote control, perhaps - and then expand the capabilities over time as improved chips and batteries allow it.

Oh, and a geek watch doesn't have to look like a geek watch. Tissot make a model with thermometer, compass and barometer which is indistinguishable from a a normal 3-hand wristwatch; touching the face at 12, 3, 6,or 9 causes the hands to display that information instead of the time.

Re: iWatch ? I cannot believe

>Who in their right mind wears watches^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hchronographs these days ?

People who don't want to fumble in their pockets every time they wish to know the time.

People who wish to turn their phones off, from time to time.

People at work who need to time an operation, but don't want a manager to think they're texting their friends - or reading The Reg.

Re: One meter charging is a bit more useful

>If your keyboard could act as a charger

The Reg reported on an Apple patent about a year ago for magnetic charging, including daisy chaining and a way of switching between which device to charge first (i.e prioritise a phone over a mouse or keyboard).

The Reg has also reported on Apple patents for a micro-deflection control surface that looks like aluminium, but can be used as a display thanks to tiny perforations.

Add to that their investment in sapphire manufacturing, and the ingredients for a smart watch are coming into focus.

Re: When I were a lad ...

You can still buy wristwatches with tritium markers, but the tritium is usually contained in tiny glass vials on the hands and hour markers. The half-life of tritium is such that your grandfather could read the watch in the dark, but you probably can't. In addition, the radiation degrades the phosphorescent material into dust, which isn't good for the watch mechanism, or for anyone who services it without a fume cabinet.

T Swiss Made T

Re: The *other* G4 Cube feature

>Vendor lock-in may be a feature but it still isn't one to encourage.

True, but then I didn't see any standards organisations, or consortia of companies, even trying to create something similar. And hey, I made a point of praising the concept, not the implementation.

I am looking at a wired remote control unit for a Sharp Minidisc player, circa 1999. It has a 3.5 mm tip ring ring sleeve jack, flanked on either side by two more contacts. The unit mirrored the complete player display, and most of its controls, via three toggle switches (the equivalent of nine buttons) plus a lock button. AIWA and Sony had their own way of doing the same at the time. Almost a decade and half later, three is still no standard for a wired remote control headset.

The closest that you can get (other than Bluetooth solutions which come with the faff of charging up yet another device), available from a wide range of manufactures (from B&W to Sennheiser) and from any highstreet or supermarket, is Apple's - be it a headset or a speaker dock. You might have have thought that the Open Handset Alliance, or even Google, might have taken a lead on this, but no. Hell, they quite happily never used twice the same power connector until the EU kicked them. There are even Android handset vendors such as Sony and Samsung making speaker docks for iPhones, but not for their own handsets.

The issue is that there isn't the monetary incentive for consortia to design really nice solutions (there is no competitive advantage if your rivals are using the same), so they tend to settle on 'good enough'.

Re: Rounded corners

>Is that where they first produced something with rounded corners?

No, it wasn't.

1984's Mac desktop featured rounded corners.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png

In fact, anything that is moulded tends not to have sharp 90º corners- it's hard to get the molten material to flow into the corners.

Re: Not just beautiful, quiet too

It is! Actually, it's a bit disconcerting at first, turning on a computer without the usual whirs, clicks and whooshes. There are totally silent passive CPU coolers available these days, good for up to 95W TDP chips. Combined with SSDs and fanless power supplies, a silent machine is achievable.

Re: Time they bought it back

>Apple should have solved the problems they had with it, and refined it,

The question is simple: How do you stop a PHB from placing papers and coffee cups on top of it?

I consider the new Mac Pro to be that refinement of the original Cube concept.

Re: At this point, Snowden could reveal that the NSA is run by alien lizards..

There is precedent: The philosopher and drug dealer Howard Marks was asked, after the publication of his autobiography,how a man who smoked so much dope was able to remember the dates and general chronology of his life. He said that since the US authorities had been watching him for years, he simply made a Freedom of Information request, and received back the skeleton of his life story.

Re: Handspring Visor Deluxe

> but this whole iMac design was one of the worst things to face the face of earth

Before the iMac was the Newton-based Apple eMate, which was a dark green translucent plastic. Around the same time, mid nineties, I had the limited edition Gravis joystick (transparent plastic instead of the usual black).

I don't mind the look of the original iMac myself (especially when generic PCs often had sculpted curvey beige plastic fascias for no good reason), but I couldn't stand the raft of cheap tat that blindly copied its blue translucent styling (but never got the colour correct). Another influence was that in the late nineties, CAD was mature enough to make curvey products much easier to design and engineer. The resulting design fashion was known as 'blobtech' at the time.