Posts by Dave 126

Re: Look at the profit...

Good point Destroy All Monsters, I took MrE's figures and didn't consider the non-recurrent engineering (R&D and tooling) costs.

Re: Why?

>not enough to store half a days worth of music in flac.

If your FLACs come from losslessly compressed CDs, you're looking at around 350 MB per 74 minutes... if you're FLACs are from vinyl rips, Blu-Ray HD audio tracks or High Quality downlaods, you really should be looking at the LG G2 to get the most out of them, since it can decode 24bit 192Khz FLAC files natively.

Personally, most environments aren't conducive to listening to all the details in the music. If CD quality is enough for you, then I find a Sansa Clip (which takes microSD cards) adds little to the bulk of good headphones, and is a convenient size to wind earbuds around.

Re: Lolz

The article didn't mention the size of the market, thus limiting the inferences that can be drawn from market share. It is plausible that more smartphones have been sold than ever before, and it is plausible that people who have not bought a smartphone before are more likely to buy a less expensive model... but without the numbers that is just conjecture.

Re: usually finished off with a full on facial!

>young men and women have been conditioned to think pubic hair is strange or even repulsive,

That's not just a modern thing... apparently the Victorian art critic John Ruskin fled from the bedroom on his wedding night, because the study of ancient Greek statues had not prepared him for female pubic hair. It is arguable that maybe a little bit of porn (with real women and pubic hair depicted) might have been a good thing for his matrimonial relations, in the spirit of 'all things in moderation'.

Re: Depends

It might be worth a quick Google search of your choice of Host, Hypervisor and Guest combination before you start, just in case it lets you side-step any known issues that can waste half an hour.

Re VMWare Player - if you choose to try a Windows host and VMWare Player for a virtual Ubuntu installation, don't use the 'Easy' option when VMWare Player presents it to you ('Normal' works fine). It may have been fixed by now, but the VMWare Player Tools caused issues at the time so that I couldn't reach the guest desktop.

The 'Tools' were just to allow things like 'copy and paste' and 'drag and drop' to work between Host OS application windows and Guest OS application windows.

Have fun!

Re: BTW am I right in thinking UK DAB <> Europe DAB?

Some UK DAB sets can be upgraded to DAB+, but here is little point unless your taking the radio abroad. That upgrade isn't free, though, because royalties have to be paid on the AAC codec DAB+ uses.

Apparently there is a way of using an Australian proxy server to upgrade Pure DAB sets without paying a fee, but I haven't done it myself.

I stand corrected:

"The Principal of Firepower International made claims in relation to a “fuel pill” that could improve the fuel economy of motor vehicles by a large percentage. In a similar way to Rossi, no proper scientific tests were done – just lots of claims of tests and anecdotal evidence of how good the pills were. The Firepower claim was given great credibility by the Head of Defence in Australia investing in the company, with many other people – including politicians – being involved. The Principal of Firepower always promised that a definitive scientific test would be done, but this was delayed and delayed until the company eventually collapsed with something like $100 million being lost by mum-and-dad investors in Australia."

- Dick Smith

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2012/02/24/dick-smith-rossi-e-cat-too-fantastic-to-be-true/

Re: No nVidia = no CUDA = No deal

Cheers for the heads-up, Silent_count!

I haven't used RAW much in the past, but my new camera is speedier at saving files than my last one, so I really should get into the habit.

The quick n dirty mini-review of LightZone is very positive:

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/5637768529/a-quick-review-of-the-lightzone-photo-editor

All the focus seems to be on making laptops slimmer and more power efficient - no bad thing. Gaming laptops often have quite modest display resolutions, since it lowers the demand on their GPUs. I've been impressed with the more recent Intel graphics, but fooling my CAD software into thinking my GeForce is a Quadro results in more useful display graphics for quick animation output.

Personally, I'm not after 'Retina'-level resolution, but just a laptop with a 1920 x 1200 16:10 screen.

CYA

It's better to 'under promise'. No one is going to get bent out of shape if their console does arrive before Christmas if they expected it in the first week of January. The converse is not true.

Re: No NSA please

>They've 'Here' mapping from Nokia on them.

That should have been in the article! Without it, I just looked at the specs and looked at the price (not far off the well-thought of LG G2, and more than a Nexus 5) and thought - "what have I missed here?"

Re: Blame Intel & MS

There have been a few 'Retina'-like Windows laptops released in the last year (Toshiba Kirabook, Lenovo Yogo Pro 2, for two) and reviews suggest that the issue is legacy desktop applications often don't don't scale well. Photoshop, for example, presents you with tiny icons that are hard to see. However, the TIFKAM applications do scale properly.

So, for very high res laptop screens to work requires some effort from 3rd party software developers.

"Whereas navigating the Modern Live Tile interface was easy on the Kirabook, it was nearly impossible to touch anything, much less use the cursor, in desktop mode. The menu options in Photoshop Elements were microscopic. We don't consider our eyesight to be poor, but even we had to hold the notebook close to our face. Fortunately, a Toshiba Display Utility lets you set the size of on-screen icons and text in Windows, but it doesn't apply to the apps themselves."

"World of Warcraft" supports the Kirabook's high-res display, but, like on Photoshop, menu text is tiny.

- http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/toshiba-kirabook.aspx

Re: Fair play...

Yeah, because that's an attitude that will really make people who feel such urges seek professional help before they act on them.

Look: None of us want any children to come to harm, so maybe we'll look calmly at the best ways of preventing it. Should that mean repressing our desire for revenge, then so be it.

Re: They should be forced to use

>But realistically, there is only 1 suitable solution - Viva la Tux :D

So Google must be currently using an unsuitable solution. Ah, that would explain why they are struggling to scrape a living, the poor dears.

Re: What did you expect?

>Windows users get all they deserve

WTF? So, users of software that is only available on Windows get all they deserve? Someone who makes components and has to use the CAD package their customer requires deserve all they deserve? People with a small business who use the accountancy software favoured by the revenue service get all they deserve?

Grow up.

If you fork Android, you can't then use the Google Play Store, Google apps such as the Gmail client or Maps, or any of the libraries in the closed-source Google Play Services. Amazon had the means to make their own Android App store when they released their colour Kindle, and Samsung have been shipping devices with their own apps duplicating the functionality of Google's for a while now.

Re: Isn't nature amazing?

Nature. And lasers.

Re: ah come on...

>"Brings to mind a story..."

>>Never happened.

Or, it might mean 'I can't be arsed to find an on-line reference to said story'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/901723.stm

Re: Even most of the style is copied from Braun & Dieter Rams.

>Even most of the style is copied from Braun & Dieter Rams.

Dieter Rams doesn't call himself a designer but (when roughly translated into English) a 'form engineer'. Jony Ive openly acknowledges the influence, but he's not copying Rams' style but his methodology, an approach to design. Ram's 'Ten Principles of Good Design' are here:

http://www.sfmoma.org/about/press/press_exhibitions/releases/880

People can easily copy style (remember the plague of cheap translucent blue products - staplers, USB hubs etc- that followed in the wake of the orginal iMac?), but following principles is harder, it requires an understanding of your particular problem and the materials available to you to solve it.

Of course you'd be a fool to be blind to when a problem has been solved before... you want to make a music playback device that fits in a pocket? The act of of sliding the device in and out of your pocket is a large part of its 'use'. Okay, let's look at cigarette cases and Sony Walkmans- what aspects can you usefully implement in your design?

Re: @Dave

@AC

I agree.

That is why, unlike ShelLuser, I don't use Adblock on The Reg because their adverts aren't usually intrusive, and I consider that fair play. The Reg deserves its revenue.

Therefore a noisy ad on The Reg seemed out of place... it's a balancing act; if too many of their ads are a nuisance then more readers might activate Adblock.

Re: For this to work...

I would imagine that the plug-in is listening continuously, and is able to recognise 'OK Google' itself locally. After that it sends your voice sample to Google's servers.

Sending everything your microphone picks up to Google's servers (when 99.9% of the time it is useless) isn't a very good use of their resources.

Android phones can do speech-to-text locally if required, it's just that the results aren't accurate as when it's done server side.

Re: HD + SSD management

>The idea of merging my hard drive and SSD into one logical volume appeals to me but I'm not going to do it until it's officially supported by Apple.

It's part of OSX's CoreStorage inherited from when they were flirting with ZFS, and it's used in many a new Mac. If it goes tits-up, you have your Time Machine hourly back ups- right?

I just don't think it's Apples' style to officially sanction this on machines they have already sold you.

That said, the law of diminishing returns suggests that it won't speed up your system appreciably over your current set-up, since your OS and applications are already on the faster drive; a large part of Fusion Drive's intended appeal (when implemented on brand new machines) is to not even bother the user with the fact that there are two disks in the first place.

Re: WTF?

So, to answer the question: WTF is Panty Waist?