Posts by Dave 126 10675 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
>Right, because only Apple's iThings could possibly run RC apps, right?
Homer, I didn't say that Android can't do RC, merely that it is plausible for a company to target one platform before another for sound business reasons. Please don't give us the impression that your English comprehension is in need of a pit-stop, because you're probably better than that.
>Just give them the box and tell them to use their imagination.
I was brought up in public houses* before Gameboys or iPhones were used to distract nippers**, and my imagination told me that the piece of card inside fag*** packets resembled the shuttle from Star trek.
*bars
**children
***cigarettes
There are some fair reasons why lots of hardware and software vendors go with iOS. If you take take a step back from your 'politics' conclusion, you'll have a better chance of understanding the business reasons behind this decision.
Device consistency, Bluetooth LE support, low system latency, limited supply capabilities and market research all play a part.
The cars drive themselves around the track, but the player controls the speed of the cars and where on the track they go (e.g take opponent on the inside, or just race down the middle) in addition to when to use weapons to slow rivals down. Do bear in mind that this is only one of many possible game-types, and that modes such as 'capture the flag' can be implemented in future via software updates, or possibly developed by the players themselves.
More details here: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/16/4841798/are-anki-cars-the-start-of-a-robot-revolution
There are lots of software developers and hardware vendors who only target iOS devices, so Anki are hardly unusual in this respect. There is zero point generating more interest than you can currently supply, so you might as well develop for one platform first and then move on to a second or third. The choice of going with iOS might be influenced by the low latency of the platform, and Apple's inclusion of Bluetooth Low Energy - the latter of which only some newer Android devices support.
Only some of the more recent Android handsets support Bluetooth LE, so give it time. It's much the same reason that smart-watches from Casio and Citizen only support iOS at the moment.
If the intention is to leave children alone with this, it is better they use a cheap 'n cheerful Android tablet rather than a pricey iPad.
@D@v3
"Upon the fleas were other fleas and so on ad infinitum" - we get it. I was just making the point that whilst a wristwatch is easy to check visually for notifications, it isn't suitable for headphones.
The precedent for this is the Sony Wireless Walkman... this was a 'proper' Walkman in that it played cassette tapes, but it was paired to a matchbox sized receiver into which the headphones were plugged. The receiver had transport controls that were relayed to the main Walkman unit.
This was in the mid-nineties, and it was available in Japan. My assumption is that the UK's transmission regulations prohibited its sale here.
Er, how does it make you look like dick when it resembles a small MP3 player clipped to your shirt, or when held to your ear a small phone?
I'm sure it can tell you the time, but then if you have it in your breast pocket for smart-phone-companion duties, your wrist is free for a normal watch. Get a mechanical model ('automatic') and you'll be able to tell the time even after an EMP strike.
http://www.slashgear.com/sony-sbh52-mini-handset-reduces-xperia-z-ultra-phablet-size-shame-25287821/
Basically, it's a small Bluetooth headset that includes an FM radio. It also has a speaker and mike, so can be used to take/make calls as if it were just a small phone.
Unlike a watch it is suitable for listening to music streamed rom your phone, as well as displaying notifications on its screen.
I've never been a flip phone fan either - though psychophysically the placement of the phone next to the mouth and ear is reassuring (though sidestepped by multi-microphone trickery these days), and the possibility for large buttons and a screen protected from scratches makes good sense .
Personally, I have a soft spot for the slider-phones Samsung used to make- a very tactile way of taking a call, and then ending it. When I first used Android, I would tap a hard-button thinking it would end the call, but it didn't work that way...
Yeah, but the whole point of good design is to make life easier for us humans (a little more good thought at the design stage gets multiplied by the production run... i.e magnified by millions)... so I'd like every connector to be as easy to use as a 3.5mm headphone jack. (Though even that gets messed up... an example being the original iPhone when the socket was so recessed that not all 3.5mm plugs would fit it, especially fancy thick hifi 'Y' cables)
A major frustration with being an Android user - the lack of standardisation of headsets and headphones, even within the same phone manufacturer, and few offer headsets with three buttons. Even headsets with the same jacks might use resistors with different values. Most of the 'quality' 3rd party headset makers (Sennheiser etc) only support iPhones/pods/pads.
Mr Alexander was after a smaller Android phone that didn't compromise on its internal components compared to 'flagship' models.
Reg readers that want a 3.3" Android phone might want to have a look at this Samsung Android quad-core flip-phone with dual-SIM slots:
http://androidcommunity.com/samsung-sch-w789-hennessy-unveiled-includes-dual-sim-feature-20130813/
> (the "anything mini" line of phones are crippled, all of them)
If you wait until the new year, you might consider an Zperia Z1 f. This 'f' variant has a 4.3" screen, but the same processor and 2GB RAM as its bigger Xperia Z siblings.
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/124257-sony-announces-xperia-z1f-its-flagship-z1-shrunken-down
I have a 4.3"-screened Xperia P, and whilst being far from state-of-the-art it ticks along quite nicely on a dual-core chip and its copes with HD video and 3D games happily enough- though I seldom ask it to. Good call quality. Battery life could be better. Small text is readable on websites, but I imagine a bigger screen would make browsing easier. I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone with poorer close-up vision or 'sausage-fingers' though.
Alas, they won't be able to accompany their "It was THIS big" with the traditional arm gesture... if they could, a human with an 18' arm-span would be even more of a scientific marvel than a bloody-great fish.
On the subject of men with long arms and sea-dwelling animals, I seem to remember a story from a few years back about China's tallest man being drafted in by an aquarium to help them. They had a dolphin that had eaten something it shouldn't, and they required someone with a very long arm to remove the foreign body. On the back of this publicity, the gentleman, in his forties IIRC, found himself a wife (which I'm led to believe is no mean feat in China).
>Only one Apple product needs a "cover"... the iPad.
I like your lateral thinking... maybe an iPad cover that offers functionality in some way (Thinking of MS's new Surface cover that has audio mixer controls instead of qwerty keys [reminds me of concept keyboards]... pity Window's audio subsystem is a mess, though; for plinky-plonky things best off with OSX/iOS, it will save some headaches)
>And Chrome is about the worst choice for a low powered PC as it eats every last available megabyte of RAM on your machine.
Agreed, one company I help has lots of low powered XP machines (just for data entry, really), usually with 512 MB RAM. Chrome is hopeless, but opera isn't too bad.
Most of the staff don't use anything beyond a spreadsheet and a web browser, so migrating them to a Linux distro should be fairly straightforward.
Whoo, that's some expansion. Fair play to Btrower for expanding on his views, we seem to have moved from the Ancient Greeks (who first raised taxes to pay for courts, so that trading disputes didn't result in knife fights) through Bertrand Russell's 'Case for a Leisure Society', and made a detour around Thalidomide.
So, possible alternative means of funding artists and inventors include, but are not limited to:
-Private patronage by a powerful individual, eg Leonardo da Vinci by the Medici family, JS Bach by a bishop.
-Leisure Society - i.e with a 20 hour working week, people have enough leisure time to write, play musical instruments, write the software that they want to use, and potter in the shed.
-Bounty - e.g John Harrison's invention of the bimetallic strip and thus accurate clocks, to claim an award being offered by the British Admiralty
-Employment by an organisation that can bring the individuals work to market quickly enough for it to be a competitive advantage.
- Academic research, grant, i.e society as a whole funds research / artistic endeavour.
None of the above seem perfect systems either, though the Leisure Society should be discussed more... which is tricky when Gross National Product and Economic Growth are all politicians brag about.
>"Patents and Copyrights do not create wealth. They destroy it. The only ones saying otherwise are the parasites who leach off the productivity of others."
Okay Btrower, that's a very sweeping statement. However, you neglected to summarise your system for rewarding inventors and authors in their place. Patents and Copyright aren't perfect systems, but then what are? Have you alternatives in mind?
Is your position informed by certain types of patents which perhaps shouldn't be granted, or perhaps by their application (for example, a small inventor not having the financial resources to defend their work from a large established organisation)?
Please expand upon your point of view.
@Sheluser
If you fire up an engineering simulation application, the disclaimer "This software is intended to reduce testing, and is not intendd to be a replacement for it" is displayed. You still need to test real models in a wind tunnel, but just not as many of them.
The same idea is applicable to software simulation of chemical compounds.
Of course, the real advances in science come when there is a discrepancy between the expected result and the real result of an experiment, a discrepancy that then needs explaining.
>Everyone already knew it was pretty much a re-hash of the LG G2.
The G2 has some nice features... none that would cause people to go 'Wow!, but nice nonetheless, such as the screen that saves the GPU power (although others use this too), the bi-wiring that saves on bezel space, and the high definition audio playback. The LG G2 seems to have suffered (in terms of media exposure) from being the 4th entry to a race that already included the S4, HTC One, and Sony Z variants.
There have been some sites selling legit 24 bit 96 - 192kHz Flags for a while. In addition, LG's New flagship phone can play them natively- and LG have released APIs in the hope that 3rd party audio app developers make use of them. With luck, Google will incorporate it into Android properly.
With storage, bandwidth and silicon ever cheaper, why not?
I've been wary of Sony in the past (proprietary formats, silliness with CDs, sometimes pricey), but always liked them for trying crazy stuff from time to time (Remind yourself here of why Samsung aren't the new Sony: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/29/4783132/the-amazing-products-of-weird-sony )
Also, my current phone, a Sony 2012 model) has been upgraded from Gingerbread to ICS and then to Jellybean, so I feel fairly well looked after.
Companies can change over time, though if you feel bitten then I can't blame you for feeling shy.
> Heh, maybe someone will combine a bluetooth headset & stylus
Agreed.
I won't dig through my past posts, but I've written down that idea before (I think when Samsung first announced the Galaxy Note)... I'm no visionary, it's just a sensible idea, especially if the pen/headset also has media playback controls. Infact, Sony could draw upon the style of their early 'Network Walkmans' (they didn't do MP3, FFS!) players which were cylindrical with jog controls.
It could live in a breast pocket, and a little RGB LED pixel would alert the user to notifications etc.
>TV is bad enough already - we need someone like Apple to revolutionise it.
I thought that devices like Tivo, and services like Netflix, had already made good progress in shaking up the industry... the latter even commissioning original shows (okay, a remake of a British show, but it's good fun to watch a Machiavellian Kevin Spacey).
The following is an interesting look at the commissioning of 'quality' television shows, and the difference between the UK and USA. Armando Iannucci: BAFTA Television Lecture 2012:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmViA8zRhLI
>Tabs don't need all that power with intelligently written code. They are not laptops, nor should they be designed to run as such.
...and 640 k ought to be enough for anybody etc.
Why the hell shouldn't a tablet act as a portable Photoshop device (with the RAM requirements that can entail), especially since the damned things usually have more pixels than laptops?
Look at what Wacom have just done:
http://cintiqcompanion.wacom.com/CintiqCompanionHybrid/en/
It's a high quality Wacom digitiser (as opposed to the cheaper Wacom units featured of other vendor's tablets) on top of a 13" Android powered tablet that becomes a dumb monitor/digitiser when plugged into a Mac or PC.
>Hmm, I'd put a few other games ahead in that category,
As described like that, then yes. However, 'Destiny's blend of a massively multi-player FPS in a persistent shared world with no game lobbies set against a ten year story arc is not one I have seen before... if I had, I would be playing it now!
Unlike the people who have pre-ordered, I'll have the option of reading reviews and listening to friends after its release to see if it is as good as it sounds. Meanwhile, I might just have to re-watch 'Cowboy Bebop' to get a fix of hijinks set across the solar system!
Bungie haven't yet ruled out a PC release. If you want to play the game so badly (and give up hundreds of hours in which money could be earnt) then why not just buy a console... a current generation model if necessary, since I'd imagine they will drop in price when their successors are released. Or, put your money into supporting David Braben's remake of 'Elite', or one of the other "decent FPS and MMOGs" of which you speak.
Besides, this game will be going on for ten years, so who knows what a 'PC' or a 'Console' will mean over that time.
Regarding the revenue stream for running a MMOG, clues can be found in the Bungie-Activision contract:
>Destiny will consist of a series of four MMO-style "sci-fantasy action shooter" titles, released every other year beginning in Fall 2013
>Expansion pack-style downloadable content (DLC), codenamed "Comet," will be released every other year beginning in 2014
>Destiny will feature a number of DLCs, microtransactions, and value-added paid services
http://destiny.wikia.com/wiki/Bungie-Activision_Contract
>Selling Beta access like this is NOT a good idea, yet another Marpets brain fit.
>A beta is for TESTING if you do this you aren't testing you are just selling early access. Having worked in the industry I know that this can ruin a game before it is ready.
Betas are for testing, but part of that testing will require thousands of people, though probably not as many as will want to join in. So, how to select which members of the public to invite to the Beta? Simple, you give access to those who show the most enthusiasm, faith, and yes, financial commitment to your upcoming product. It seems as fair a way as any other I can think of.
The last few Halo games have had elements of their on-line game-play tweaked and tuned (or buggered about with, depending on your view) weeks and months after their release.
>Amazing resolution, but it is just a waste, no one can discern the difference anyway.
Whilst I can't discern any jaggedness to onscreen text when my eyes are further than 12" away from my screen (17", 1920 x1200 = 133 PPI), this test image demonstrates why some people will find a high PPI screen useful:
http://www.bealecorner.org/red/test-patterns/star-chart-bars144-600dpi.png
From a distance of around 30" from the same monitor I can make out jaggedness in lines in a CAD draughting application - which unlike much onscreen text doesn't employ anti-aliasing.
There have been a few high resolution laptops released in the last year (including a very high res Lenovo Yoga), but all the reviews suggest that many Windows desktop applications fail to scale properly (including Adobe Photoshop).
>" since the USPTO feels that Apple is entitled to a patent on the techniques used to fabricate it."
For crying out loud. Look: it's not a difficult concept. You can not patent the cardboard box, but should you develop a new way of manufacturing a cardboard box then it is fair that you are able to patent the process.
I'm not sure why the above commentards think they are experts on architectural construction techniques all of a sudden.
I had a few of the later Samsung slider phones (better than their Nokia equivalents at the time) from around 2006, then a couple of their touchscreen efforts (well featured, but some annoying design decisions)... I don't think they ever twice used the same connector for power, data transfer and audio headsets (!). The first one, a very thin slider phone, wasn't bad at all though.
Theoretically a pan with a solid diamond base would the best way to fry an egg. Apparently it is the best known conductor of heat... though of course impractical for most (all?) conducting applications.
[Edit: John Sager beat me to it, and deserves double points for giving figures]
It is hard to comment without more details about the patent - which appear to be behind a paywall. For all we know, the patent might be relatively minor, and it would have been fairly easy to build a non-moving 'click-wheel' without infringing upon it. There again, it might cover a mechanism that is core to the workings of a click wheel.
"Bluetooth or USB. Suddenly a keyboard and mouse appear. That wasn't hard. Now, software, support it. Oh, it won't? Chicken and egg."
Exactly the same can be said for the adoption of 'traditional' gamepads for Android tablets when playing appropriate games (or even for controlling media playback if the tablet is connected to a big TV).
I heard a BBC producer (of children's content) on the radio the other day... her information was that 60% percent of households with children in the UK own a tablet.
Thank you for responding Mr Pott! If ten keyboards (to fit in with the usual Reg format) is too costly, then perhaps just a couple of choice ones and a cheap and cheerful (?) unbranded model for comparison.
Was there ones a cunning fold-up yet full-size keyboard available for Palm devices, or did I just imagine it?
>Remember how long they clung to the admittedly reasonable FireWire standard even though it was clear the whole world was walking the other way towards USB?
And do you remember how long FireWire was around before before the mass adoption of USB 2.0? And FireWire stuck around for a long time afterwards, because people had invested money in scanners, digital camcorders and high quality sound cards.
Anyway, USB 3.1 isn't a rival to ThunderBolt - it isn't much use for expanding the capabilities of a laptop, tablet, or indeed a small desktop (new Mac Pro) - OCuLink is.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/13/pci_sig_discusses_m_pcie_oculink_and_fourth_gen_pcie/
>For someone my height, holding up a phone at arm's length is the only way I will ever get to see the band.
There are also the following...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periscope
http://www.screwfix.com/c/storage-ladders/step-ladders/cat831476
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_stick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_shoe
http://www.ultimateshoulderrides.com/
... but since this is a tech site, it can only really be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadcopter
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