Re: I'm pretty certain I fiddled about with all of them ...
No, nobody saw an eMate 'in the wild'. I did see one in my school though, a teacher was assessing whether it would be of any use to him... he decided that it wasn't.
10660 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
>people have uplinks 20x slower than their uplink & I don't see any sign that ISPs want to reverse the trend
They might be under more pressure to change if more consumers start using cloud services and off-site back up. I have a bog standard domestic connection, and it is a little boring sending modestly-sized files of my own creation (images, a few animations) to clients and collaborators.
>The DAC in your iRiver should be a NXP UDA1380TT; one of my friends has one still going strong at what must be coming up to 10 years old - how long did the HDDs on iPods last?
Er, the same amount of time?
The iRiver H1xx and 3xxx series used the same Toshiba HDD as the iPods at the time... and indeed the same Li-ion batteries. (I had a H320 that I dropped a few times onto concrete, the HDD died so I replaced it with one from a broken iPod - happy again until someone stole it)
Before having a HDD-based music player, I had a MD recorder- strange that not many MP3 players could record audio like the iRivers or MD-recorders could.
>Joe Meek used to master on speakers nicked from cheap record players and transistor radios, because that was
what he knew people probably would be listening to the finished result on.
I believe that was common practice in American studios in the 1950s, according to a radio documentary I heard.
Well, perhaps in future the local investigating authorities will consider openly embedding one of their own as a 'moderator'. After events such as the Boston bombing, police forces always appeal to the public for any leads or sightings, and sites like Reddit have structures that can aid in that- it seems that they just needed a little guidance.
Similarly, file hosting sites have an infrastructure that can aid investigations, as people can upload any video footage they took of/around an incident for the benefit of official investigators.
Just an idea. Thoughts?
>I wish there was something like tvtropes.org for real-world social tropes which repeat but people just don't recognize them.
Many episodes of the Simpsons attempt to condense 'social tropes' (the townsfolk of Springfield forming a mob / the stupidity of the crowd, being recurring examples)... but the message is hidden in the mix with many pop-culture allusions and homages.
Especially as Ubuntu's plan is to run across devices like phones and tablets... most of my photos live locally on my PC (other than those snapped on my phone), but cloud services are one way of making them accessible to mobile devices. If Ubuntu is to be used on mobile devices, it makes sense for it to have a feature like this. Concept / implementation...
Logitech do make mice that are good value- well featured for around the £20-£25 mark- but they don't seem to be available in any retail stores. The cheapest Logitech mice, as you say, offer nothing over cheaper generic mice. Logitech's expensive mice are good but overkill- not many will spend a £50 premium for a mouse that works on glass when they can just use a mouse-mat.
I've been trying to buy a Logitech mouse from a retail store for a mate, and can't find one worth getting.... PC World has a selection of two dozen mice, most of them generic 'notebook' mice from Dell or whoever with a scroll wheel. The only Logitech mice with 'hyper-scroll' wheels they stock are the expensive 'Darkfield' MX models which are very nice but a bit overkill if you don't use them on glass (plus the battery life isn't convenient). The rest are overpriced mice with capacitive touch-pads, urgh. There are no mid-priced, well-featured Logitech mice (to tempt people to upgrade from whatever came with their computer) available from any local retail store.
>Of course it might tear the east wing of your castle down due to the weight.
Well, if you collect classic motorcycles, you invest in a secure garage*. If you collect old manuscripts, you might consider a climate-control system. The amount you would have to spend on making your gaff suitable for this TV set is unlikely to cost more than a few percent of the price of the unit itself... well, round here it wouldn't; I'm blissfully ignorant of the rate builders in London might charge!
*(I actually know of one man in London who has been collecting classic motorcycles such as Broughs since the 1970s... though the value of the bikes has increased over the years, the market value of the dozen or so garages he bought to store them in has increased much, much more!)
String? If you've got the cash for this TV, you'll have the cash to a, reinforce your wall, and b, attach the TV to the wall securely. Even paying a local steel fabricator to build you a custom frame that can be hidden behind plasterboard isn't going to cost much more than a grand... a chunk of money for me, but pocket change to those this TV set is aimed at, surely?
Supporting systems are usually rated to a load, including a safety margin of at least three times. For extra peace of mind you use a back-up system (such as used on stage-lighting fixtures to avoid a can falling on someone's head), and beyond that you have insurance.
The frame contains the speakers (on the vertical as well as the top 'crossbar'), and is in any case removable if you prefer to mount the television on your wall.
It strikes me that complaining about the frame is a little moot, since anyone in a position to spend £35,000 on a television can spare a few thousand to have some builders come in and reinforce their living room wall, and then buy a separate surround-sound system.
I'm just trying to reconcile the sentiments "Your mileage may vary." with "The mind absolutely boggles at the daftness of TheGreatUnwashed."
If I want a device that acts like a typewriter, I use a laptop. If I want a device that acts like a picture frame or MIDI control surface, I use a tablet... just as if I want to bash something I use a mallet, and if I want to carve something I use a knife, router, chisel or lathe.
>What I find stranger and more commonplace nowadays is seeing golden oldies trying and failing to read their undersized iPhone screens in public
Yeah, I've made the point a few times that those with poorer eyesight don't always get on well with 'smartphones', and would be better off with a 'dumbphone' for making calls plus a tablet for mobile email and web-browsing etc. One old boy in the pub has recently got a 4.3" touchscreen phone instead of his old 'clamshell' phone, and he doesn't get on too well with it... he did want a device that he could use to email his grandchildren when his conventional laptop 'was playing silly buggers', but I can't help but feel a bigger-screened tablet would have been a better back-up device for him. Since he comes in the pub on a daily basis, myself or one of the bar-staff would always be available to get a tablet connected to the Wi-Fi...
The more mobile a device, the easier it is to get free-tech support. : D
>No, it WILL be "because of Windows 8 and its emphasis on touchscreen technology".
Or it might be that people already have notebooks. Mine is still working, and won't be replaced until it dies since it handles all I throw at it happily enough.
(I was about to whinge and say I won't know where to find another 17" 1920x1200 screened laptop... but sod it, it rarely moves off my desk so a separate 16:10 monitor will do fine)
Stephen Fry put it well.. it occurred to him in school that a Careers Advisor was a retired military chap who would ask boys "What are you interested in?" and if they replied that they were interested in cars, he would suggest they become a mechanic- this advising lark seemed a fairly easy lark, it appeared. So, when asked what he wanted be, a young Stephen said he wanted to be a Careers Advisor. "Oh, a comedian, hey?" responded the unamused master. Mr Fry noted that as far as he knows, he was the only boy who grew up to do what this careers advisor suggested.
>giving this developers this guarnetee will creative new possibilities for gameplay,
Wha?
If I want to shoot some American teenagers in the head, then yeah, I take it for granted my console needs to be connected to the internet. But there is zero need for it if I just want a quick race or fight against a mate in the same room.
>It's the audio latency that needs improving, they are far from laggy.
That's something Google stated they were concentrating on in Jelly Bean- I'll give it ago when the update drops for my handset this month. Previously, people who have wanted to use their phone or tablet as DAW control surfaces have gone iOS. A real Korg Kaoscilator is a fun toy, but too pricey to justify to myself!
>Does it have rSAP?
http://www.android-rsap.com/compatibility.html would suggest that it does. Curiously, my uber-geek mate (the sort who always sticks his previous gen Samsung Galaxy on eBay a day before the official announcement of the next model) drives a recent Audi, and he likes the integration. A nice car, but he only discovered that he has to put anti-feeeze in his windscreen in winter when he crashed into a parked car a few months back... a selectively-smart chap.
Though much of James Dyson's autobiography is a fairly tedious account of his patent struggles, he did relate his experience of Japan. He sought the services of consultants who advised to learn the customs, and to work out someone's status so as to choose the appropriate greeting, and so much other stuff that he just thought:
"Sod it... I'm never going to convince them that I'm Japanese, and anyway they want me here because I'm not one of them... I may as well act like an Englishman, and concentrate on delivering what I'm here to do."
That's not to say that you shouldn't keep some basic human wits about you when abroad... even as a child, I remember a funeral passing through the square of small French town... and all bystanders took off their hats and looked respectful, except for one loudly dressed American family.
>if your going to have a 64 core server running cuda processes, you would still want quad sli
Only if communication between the cores is the bottleneck, and if SLI is a suitable interconnect for it. More likely, you would design interconnects specifically for the task in hand, just as SLI was developed for sharing the load of graphics.
>That, or the converse claim that ARM is more efficient have to be qualified: what geometries? what OPS? single or multithreaded?
As a rough idea, Tom's Hardware compared task-for-task x86 vs Arm as best they could using Win8 RT - which is available for both architectures. They didn't declare an outright winner, but announced their intention to watch developments with interest. They found enough to dispel the 'ARM is always moar power efficient' assumption, though.
If one is loose with the definition, then land-mines could be considered 'killer robots' - i.e they react to predefined stimuli in such a way as to cause incapacitation. The same is true of mines as would be of 'armed UAVs with no person-in-the-loop' as it is of a workshop bench grinder wrapped around some careless wretch's sleeve: "They don't know when to stop".
If a human pilot is relying on an automated system to identify targets (or rather, relying on an automated system to identify friendly armoured vehicles and not kill their occupants) then it seems a little irrelevant to argue about whether the actual trigger should be pulled by a human finger.
Google are trying to make autonomous cars... some would say they have to be really, really safe before being considered suitable for mass adoption.... others would say they just have to be demonstrably safer than a human driver.
>I will admit the average American drinks crap beer, but they have a large microbrewery contingent.
i just wish that the many small British breweries who are using American Cascade hops did so with a bit more moderation... most of this new breed of IPA-style brews just taste of elderflower at the moment.
There is a UK brewery who does it well, but if I named it I would out of fairness have to disclose an interest, and that would be blurring the line between my real and Reg identity: You'll have to keep drinking and work it out for yourselves!
>Don't have the mi-fi with me? Just tether the phone, one widget press, thanks to Widgetsoid
That's alright for many of us, but where I see affordable 7"+ 3G tablets being useful is for people like my old man who much prefer their old Nokia candy-bar or a cheap flip-phone to a touch-screen smart-phone. Small cheap phone with big buttons and a long battery life, plus a cheap tablet to live in the glovebox- a good combo for some!
I guess the bottom line to this review is: is it worth stretching to the extra £35 for a Nexus 7 3G?
I've always had a 1983 Hamley's toy shop catalogue kicking around my house, and this machine is listed simply as the 'M5 Computer' with no mention of Sord- someone has kindly scanned and uploaded the whole catalogue - sorry for the Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=286058214747254&set=a.286052674747808.73189.273368722682870&type=3&theater
If you click to get the next pages, you'll see such delights as the Vectrex, Coleco and Sinclair Spectrum.
Yeah, diesels don't give you the oomph when they get revvy like petrols do, and I would imagine that a lot of people have come to diesels in the last few years and could benefit from that pointer. I've had one for ten years in a Peugeot 306 guise, but now have the same engine model in a Citreon Berlingo that has an ECU modded for economy (wretched thing). Unlike the Pug, the Berlingo has a rev counter which I can only assume is to aid economical driving (though annoyingly, it is situated where the speedo was on the Pug).
>3) Being automotive technology, upgrades will be expensive, mainly due to the lock-in - think of the difference in price between going into Halfords and buying a TomTom unit, and approaching your dealer to get an equivalent-spec satnav system installed.
To give another example, the head of Ford UK was on the radio last year, talking about the uptake of DAB digital radio... he said that to factory fit it to a medium-priced car like a Ford Focus would cost around £220. The cost of a consumer buying a pocket DAB receiver, and attaching it to their head unit with an aux cable, plus fag-lighter adaptor and duck tape would be less that £50- I don't think the UI would be ideal, though.
>I hope the positive wins out and I really hope that they make it impossible to watch a movie / TV while driving (like they do in Japan)
I was under the impression that this was the case here in the UK, or maybe manufacturers just implement it that way to avoid lawsuits.
I remember someone turning up at the pub in a brand new 2012 Range Rover with a lenticular display in the middle of the dashboard - it would display GPS to the driver but TV and video to the passenger. (Though the dashboard that almost had me applauding was in one those greenwash Lexus hybrid SUV things- moulded into the dash was not only a DVD/CD player and surround-sound system, but a slot for cassette tapes too. Cassette tapes- wow! - but c'mon, Lexus, you had space to fit an 8-Track, Minidisc, DAT and DCC whilst you were about it! : D)
>Who wants a phone that doesn't offer or run your preferred software?
Preferred software, maybe. But if Facebook's website is anything to judge by (changes without informing users or obtaining consent, constant push against the boundaries of what people consider acceptable re their privacy etc), there is no guarantee that a Facebook app will remain as it was when you installed it; I wouldn't trust it not to 'creep'.
Besides, if you don't know what you are doing, you are probably better off in the walled garden. If you do know what you are doing, you can jailbreak the phone and visit Cydia.
>The Pebble watch has minimal features and only lasts a week. It also adds drain to your phone battery. Mostly from keeping the Bluetooth connection alive at both ends.
There is a more suitable Bluetooth protocol, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy, but it isn't currently support by Android- so it doesn't make sense for the Pebble watch to use it either.
>Is that "anecdotal evidence"? If some guy turned up to photograph a wedding with a Casio Exilim I'd guess he was either a rank amateur, a chancer or otherwise undeserving of the huge fee most wedding photographers charge.
By 'mirrorless', I mean just that: an APS-C or medium-format mirrorless camera, such as made by Sony, Leica or Canon, not a holiday-snaps point-and-shoot as you had assumed. The purpose of the second camera is usually to avoid having to frequently change lenses on the primary (DSLR) camera, and it doesn't necessarily require the functionality provided by a bulky mirror box.
Agreed... 'telemedicine' is on the rise, as are lower cost medical monitoring devices (Lidl had a wearable heart-rate / blood pressure logger for about £20 the other day, my diabetic mate's device for analysing his blood looks like a funky little MP3 player...)
Bluetooth Low Energy is an open standard, but isn't supported by Android yet.
Hehe... reminds me of a cover of a Beezer annual from the 1980s... one lad is walking along, chuffed to bits with his new personal stereo, until he sees a Richie-Rich-like boy, being followed by a helicopter that is suspending a hi-fi speaker on each side of his head!