Posts by Dave 126 10668 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
> Or make it possible for two people in the same room to travel at the same time to opposite parts of the world?
You just put each person in their own holodeck- each holodeck then presents a simulation of the other users to its own occupant. Easy.
It would seem that you options are setting up a multiple user profiles (not great for working between accounts) or launching incognito windows to access the web services of your other accounts (no saving passwords or history).
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/chromebook-central/nhITKi0YI38
>Samsung must have been working really hard to build a ARM based unit that has less duration then their Atom-powered ATIV500
The power consumption advantages of ARM over x86 are most evident when the system is sat doing nothing - so is suitable for smartphones. When the CPU actually has a job to, Intel's new Atoms have some tricks up their sleeve- not least a more advanced fab process and a more efficient memory controller. Note that the test in this article was looping a 720p video. The battery benchmarks for using it as a word processor (i.e write something, stare into space for ten minutes, write a few more lines, get bored, check emails, wander off for a coffee) might give different results.
Actually having the same system on both ARM and x86 allows power consumption per task comparisons, something that has been done before between Win RT machines on ARM and x86
>If the chrome books are only good for web browsing and light media consumption then I don't see the point of them compared to a tablet. The Nexus 7 and 10 being very good tablets.
In a word- a keyboard. I didn't read anything that said they weren't good for just entering some text, be it an email or a novel. You don't always need fancy formatting and DTP tools.
No, you don't even bother. I was involved in developing a patented product, and the services of a professional patent lawyer were engaged: We applied for patents in Europe, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, but didn't bother with Brazil, China, India, Africa or Russia, IIRC. The Chinese can choose to make it, but they can't sell it here.
>It's easy to forget that through history, not all inventions make millions for the inventor
Like Charles Goodyear who invented the process of rubber vulcanisation, esssential for pneumatic tyres, before the motror car was developed.
http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/goodyear.html
Goodyear once wrote: "I am not disposed to complain that I have planted and others have gathered the fruits. A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps."
It won't replace the Dualshock- is a venerable design indeed. I had a book, 'Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Studio' that showed dozens of foam mock-ups of conceptual PS controllers, of which the Dualshock is a variation. The design that they eventually used was very similar to one of the first they created.
Since the Bluetooth Dualshock can be persuaded to work with Android or Windows with software (ironically, the XBOX wireless controller requires a proprietry dongle for PCs) Sony should aim it (or a more compact design, as SteelSeries have) at the mobile gaming crowd rather than promote its Playstation-branded phones.
Remember, a patent application is no sure indication of future products. Developing products requires some experimentation, implying you create some concepts that probably won't work out- but still, there is no harm in applying for a patent on these 'also ran' concepts. The cost of making the application is small enough that it is worth hedging your bets,
For sure, I haven't been persuaded to get a Move, and am far from convinced how well integrating it into this tablet will work. I was just observing that whilst a tablet might not be great as a games controller (Tekken: No. Real Time Strategy games: Maybe), it makes a reasonable companion to a TV-connected media player.
Yeah, because removing Win8 annoyances takes suuuch a long time. Actually, it takes less than ten minutes to install a few bits of software and tweak some settings. 'Classic Shell' is even available through Ninite, so only takes one click if you are already in the process of installing your favourite browsers, utilities and codecs.
http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/software-and-web-apps/how-to-make-windows-8-look-like-windows-7-50009546/
The first thing many of us do after installing any version of Windows is to change settings to our liking and install our favourite bits of software. Linux is no different, except of course you can have your own customised distro ISO ready to go.
Ever since the most recent Royal Institute Christmas Lectures ( a TV show aimed at children, but hey, I still learn things) I've desired an acid-etched slice of an iron nickel meteorite called an octahedrite. They showed a large specimen. The etching brings out Widmanstätten patterns, which are beautiful and can't be faked- for them to occur, the rate of cooling through a certain temperature range is no more than 10ºC per million years.
Small samples are around £30 per gram.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octahedrite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widmanst%C3%A4tten_pattern
When I was watched Blue Peter, every rocket I drew had the Stars and Stripes and a NASA logo on it, not a Union Jack... just as every car I drew had all manner of unlikely gadgets poking of it, like James Bond's. Vans looked like the one from the A-Team, and most cars had the Confederate flag on top of it like the Dukes of Hazard. The coolest electronic goods were ghetto blasters, especially if they had a massive graphic equaliser on the front- and were all designed in Asia, the best ones Japanese. Monster trucks were ace, as were Ferraris.
Just because we grew up with cool things from other countries doesn't stop us being supportive of British companies when we grow up.
The important thing is that Blue Peter is telling pre-teen children that there is such a thing a product designer, and they might choose to be one when they grow up. I don't know why you would want to sully their innocence with talk of corporate shenanigins, or choice of gadget OS.
>Apple did NOT invent...
And Henry Ford didn't invent the internal combustion engine- so what?
>Perhaps rather than giving a badge to a guy who ran off from his own country and setup abroad
British companies could have employed Ive, but their management didn't see the benefits of doing so. Maybe Ive's example will serve as further encouragement to do so.
>But oh no, the BBC has joined in with successions of British politicians and other 'stars' to rubbish absolutely everything that British people ever do while praising and worshiping anything foreign.
Really? I though they were celebrating a son of England, and saying to Britain PLC "C'mon, we have the talent, lets use it'. You seem to have forgotten that Blue Peter is a children's show, famous for encouraging children to make functional objects with modern materials- why shouldn't some kids be able say "I want to be a product designer when I grow up"? Interviewing coders and engineers from the nineties is not going to hold the interest of the Blue Peter audience.
Psion were great, a proper integration of superb hardware and and useful software, the Psion Netbook well ahead of its time, and Psion might have made the first decent HDD MP3 player... but it didn't work out that way. The reasons why would make a fascinating Reg article, but isn't something for six-to-twelve year olds.
Steam might set a precedent for commercial software on Linux. It will be interesting to see what happens, and if productivity applications follow in the wake of games. The attitude that 'we don't need commercial software, you must be a snob if you do' is not helpful to the adoption of Linux. Professionals and business will happily spend a few hundred pounds per user if it saves them time over a free alternative.
The other possibility is that more commercial software gets used 'as a service' or 'in the cloud' (useful for software that benefits from team collaboration and rented compute resources, such as engineering design and simulation) and the user's OS becomes irrelevant.
About five years ago the main argument the Linux fold were putting out was that it was a good way revitalising older laptops... alas, some of them could be quite esoteric machines.
Rather than just asserting that it works out of the box with most hardware (it might nine times out of ten, but Sod's Law is what it is) , a more useful approach would be to promote a list of distros for specific machines. Just a website that's asks you what machine you are using and then gives you a choice of suitable distros that have been tested by other people in the community.
CAD vendors do it the other way round, and publish a list of specific machines that have been tested with their products.
I wouldn't say that Unity is useless, but just that it isn't the best for mouse and keyboard machines. In the future there may well prove to be a place for a GUI that works for both mouse+keyboard and touch, if it can be made to work. Arguably, it hasn't yet:
MS have tried using a mouse+keyboard GUI for touch devices (albeit older single-point touch devices where to stylus is akin to a mouse cursor) and more recently for multi-touch PCs tried the approach of bolting two GUIs together. Others have tried the other direction- using tablet versions of Android with mouse and keyboard. Apple haven't really tried combining the two- maybe because they would rather you own a Macbook and an iPad. XP Tablet Edition wasn't a complete flop- it was adopted by people with specific needs- car mechanics for example use 'ruggedised' laptops, and 3rd party engine diagnostic software is designed to be used with people poking at the screen or a mouse.
The trouble is, the mouse gives you a single, accurate point with modifiers (either different buttons or a keyboard key), multi-touch gives you less accuracy but different modifiers (number of contact points and 'gestures'). These differences extend beyond the GUI of the OS and into the applications used with it. Reconciling these differences in a coherent, efficient and easy to learn way is no small task.
Using a direction pad ('D-pad', game controller, IR remote control) is a another input method, one that is given in its own GUI in most OSs (Windows Media Centre, OSX Front Row, XBMC), so the 'multiple GUI' approach seems sensible to people in some situations.
Plus, if you try a VM you can have it on one side of of your screen, and use a web browser with a guide (or forum thread if you encounter issues) to hold your hand through the process.
To the novice, the concept of a Virtual Machine (a computer inside a computer) might seem strange, but the practice is very straightforward and unintimidating.
Yeah, those were the little barriers when i first tried Linux- I didn't know what I didn't know. Lots of little things that were new to me and made sense individually- SUDO, shell, mounting disks, package managers, strange names- were a bit much to swallow all at once. Fortunately, my friend and I were just installing it (Mint) for fun, to see what all the fuss was about- this was about five years ago when people recommended Linux as being a good way to get more life out of older machines- in this case an old donated Thinkpad with audio hardware that the Linux forums had warned us was tricky. We got it all working in the end, and got a sense of satisfaction out of it- though in the end he hacked a boot loader onto a PS2 and used that as media player instead.
>For the last griefing time - You do NOT need to use a command line to install or use most modern Linux distros.
Yes, but you might, just as you might in Windows or OSX. Just the other day, I thought I would try the approach that is often recommended to novices- installing Ubuntu on a VM Ware virtual machine. I clicked 'Easy Install', and the virtual machine got stuck in a loop (VM Ware's fault- it was trying to install helper tools, but Ubuntu 12.04 was too new for it.) It took three lines of command line text to fix the Linux installation
-What makes a virtual machine suitable for novices is that they still have access to help on the internet during the installation process if they don't have a second real machine to hand. What took the time is that first few pages I consulted said "It's buggered, reinstall it" before I found one that told me how to fix it).
I usually have a Linux installation on a second partition and GRUB, 'just in case'. There are tools available for it that aren't easily found for Windows, and I thought it would make a better platform for on-line banking (if only because its exposure to nasties would be lower because I wouldn't use it as much). It is also reassuring to have an OS outside of your primary OS, for images and recovery, diagnostics and virus scans etc- though modern hardware can boot off a USB stick so partitioning the HDD isn't essential. Ironically enough, my practice of dual-booting stems from when one MS OS wasn't enough (at uni I needed both NT.40 and Win 98)
Turbodog, Abita Springs, Louisiana. From some one who has known the head brewer of Budvar, back in the day when his pride in a Ford Capri was dented by the up and down antics of my dad's Citroen BX (the great thing about the autobahns is that you don't have to stop in Germany for lunch).
Anyone else notice the similarity of the artwork on the side of these cabinets to the magnificent poster for National Lampoon's Vacation?
http://www.impawards.com/1983/posters/national_lampoons_vacation.jpg
I'd like to add to the wish-list of desirable features in this dream plug and socket combo: some method of inherent waterproofing so that little rubber thingies over the ports aren't required. More devices are being designed to be waterproof.
In addition, it should go in either way, and have rounded corners to make it suitable for docking station and the clumsy user.
>And don't get me started on micro USB where the difference in shape is so minute you can spend EVEN >LONGER trying to find which way fails to snap off the little thing in the centre of the connector...
Micro USB.... and the little buggers have sharp corners, so if I've cack-handed I scratch whatever I'm plugging it into. As it happens, this has scratched the black coating off from around the socket on my phone, making it marginally easier to spot in the dark.
Why can't an industry standards body develop a plug that it happily goes in both ways, has rounded corners and is mechanically strong enough to support a device in a dock? It isn't difficult to see that these are desirable qualities, yet it is only some company known for proprietary kit manages to grok this.
And yeah, whoever made the exterior of USB A plug symmetrical, but not the insides was daft. At least the old PS/2 plugs could be located by touch, and then rotated until the plug went in.
The only downside to dumb screen + external box(es) is that my father can't grasp the procedure to turn on the tv from the PVR remote control. I guess a universal remote with macros would resolve this issue.
Most people I know don't have rooms so minimal that they get upset by an extra box or two- indeed some boxes hide behind the screen on the Vesa mount- so integrating features to the screen itself makes more sense for second TVs in kitchens and bedrooms.
@Andy
Gaming laptops don't tend to have very high res screens because of the constraints of the graphics card and battery. That said, there was a Reg column last month advocating gaming laptops (specifically Alienware) as mobile workstations.
>I suspect Oracle is hoping that the appeal judge they get is a computer illustrate fool that will buy their arguments
Illiterate? I'm not judging- I've found myself, in the last couple of years, typing similar-sounding words in place of the ones I actually mean.
I must admit, the article left me feeling computer-illiterate. All I know is that in my head, Java = annoying for its insistence on being updated every fortnight and attempting to install some shoddy browser 'toolbar'. If there is more to it than that, Oracle have not encouraged me to find out more.
> I don't understand how 'intense market competition' could weaken sales.
If you're competing against rivals, you've also competing against your future models. You won't want to release a phone that is going to wear out too quickly, because people won't buy from you again. Sony are making more of their range waterproof, making durability mainstream rather than reserving it for niche models. My last few phones have had compromises, but this one is alright- think I'll stick with it til it dies.
It's not for us, it's for Russian politicians. Move on.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2009/10/russian-officials-sporting-watches-worth-up-to-1-million/
http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/2012/6/7/vladimir-putins-watch-collection-worth-six-years-of-his-decl.html [Putin's watch collection worth six years of his declared income]
I get the impression that it is not a good idea to mock Mr Putin, for any reason.
Oh, not sure sure about the phrase about sapphire being "said to be very scratch resistant". Is is. The only way you're likely to scratch it is if you let you trophy girlfriend handle it when she's wearing daimond rings, or if you've just done some DIY with a diamond cutting disk and the dust has got in your pocket. Sapphire is routinely grown for watch crystals.
>fitting hybrid drives into "Joe Public's" laptop or desktop is like feeding caviar to pigs.
Rubbish. If anything, Joe Public has less patience for his computer. Joe Public is more likely to double click an application shortcut half a dozen times before the application has loaded from the spinning rust, ending up with six instances.
>Of course the market for this type of technology is for those who understand it and the benefits it brings as well as the premium paid for it
Apple have given in a catchy name (Fusion) and made it more or less invisible to the user, if they buy a machine with the correct drives. More expert users can roll their own, since it is an LVM in the OS.
>Presumably there are other independent camera shops following the same model.
'Clifton Cameras' is no longer in Clifton, but now in a scruffy (ex industrial, now commuter) town 20 miles North of Bristol, on the picturesque edge of the Cotswold hills. Unlike Clifton, the parking is free, and I'm sure that the rent is far, far cheaper. People don't spend thousands on a body and lenses everyday, so on they occasions they do they probably don't mind making the trip - especially as the scenery is a suitable subject for their new toys. They have an on-line presence, too.
A few miles up the road in another scruffy town is a discrete shop selling some very expensive guitars. It has been visited by a fair section of rock royalty- it's equally accessible from Birmingham as it is much of the South West, areas that many rock gods have made their home.
Both these shop sell the sort of high-cost items that people will travel for. Both are in towns that don't really offer any other major reason to visit them.
>He needs to shut up and get some decent products released.
Can you expand on that? The specs of their kit look decent enough, even if the price is a little high. Some of their stuff boasts some quite desirable features that are hard to find elsewhere, such as the aspect ratio and resolution of the pricier Macbook screens. Several market intelligence sites suggest they are among the more reliable brands.
>Apple can't sue away Samsung's lead no matter how hard they try.
Apple might not threaten Samsung, but today's news headlines suggest that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (if Sara Palin -yeah, right- those are the 'bad guys' in the North, and yes, I agree their self-given name is misleading) is warming up to give it a go! See icon and a news site near you.
Thank you for joining in, Dazed and Bemused.
Physical buttons, tricky one- my Sony Android phone has three buttons that respond to the merest touch, and so annoyingly get activated by accident. Gr. Still, maybe this capacitive solution is more durable - I had a few phones 'back in the day' that had a real button stop working. Conversely, I would like my camera to have the option of using a shutter release that doesn't require pressure, since it would lessen the chance of bringing motion blur to photos.
If I could make an improvement to my phone, it would be for it to have a millimetre ruler etched down the side - it's such a square lump of aluminium that it's ideal for it.
And the iPod didn't change for several years - so what? It it is better and more profitable to release a new product when the technology allows, not before. Heck, it's good for products to pause in their advancement at times - it allows them to be refined and for any bugs to be ironed out. If flexible displays, super batteries, or a change in people's usage develop, Apple will aim to bring out suitable new products. And so will others, including Samsung if the recent news about them starting a Silicon Valley division for buying suitable start-ups is anything to go by.
All these comments about Apple kit not changing - and none of them actually saying what they would actually like to see in a new product.
C'mon- this is as good a venue as any to exercise your imagination.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
