Posts by Ian North

Surely this is a little obsolete now that iOS 5 uses the Volume Up button to take pictures with?

"because ultrabooks tend to use faster low-energy chips from AMD and Qualcomm"

I thought that to be branded an Ultrabook, it had to use a specific Intel CPU?

How the hell did that get past Apple's censors?!

So what's the difference between one of these and a normal wine box then?

There is a lot of active circuitary in the present Thunderbolt cables. There's more to them than dumb cabling which accounts for much of the $50 price tag. Chances are that the optical transceivers will be in the cables themselves rather than in the ports.

Facetime...

I'll say this for Facetime, for all of its faults it does seem to produce a clearer and smoother image than Skype does, from the iPhone at least.

I was chatting to my girlfriend over skype the other day, her on her iPhone and me on my computer. We decided to try Facetime for some reason. I could see her a lot more clearly and the framerate was higher. She said that she could see me more clearly too.

Same hardware on both ends, same internet connection.

HDD

Does this support 12.5mm high drives or just 9.5mm?

At least...

it doesn't look like complete arse which is unusual for an electric car. And Nissans in general at that...

I can't help but agree with James May about electric cars. They will undoubtably the future in some form but the current implentations are too limiting.

Opera?

"Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework"

Does that mean that Opera Mini falls foul of the rules now then?

That's all very well and good...

but how does he get at the home button?

Meh

I don't see this as a huge problem personally. I've had my iPhone since January. I use the cellular network quite a bit (not for video or VOIP though) and so far I've used less than 400MB all in all. Those caps could be a lot worse

Extra power?

What are the molex and AC adapter ports for? Will USB3 ports be able to provide more power to devices than USB2?

re: "Say What?"

"It's a gaming device, not a general purpose computer. Does Microsoft allow all and sundry to develop games to run on the xbox360?

No. No they don't."

Actually, I think they do. They have the XNA Game Studio which allows anyone to write and publish games for the XBox 360 via XBox Live.

uPnP

Does iTunes count as a uPnP server that this thing can use?

Uh...

System Mechanic recommends you disable automatic updates and BITS? Are they crazy?

Who uses MMS?

Probably those people who don't have iPhones or other smart phones with unlimited data plans but have access to cheap PAYG or low-end contract phones. Not everyone has access to their email accounts everywhere and all of the time. Not everyone's phone has an email client. But most phones available now have colour screens and can receive MMS messages. Sometimes it's nice to have MMS in those cases.

Example, when my niece was born last year, I was in the middle of the French countryside with no internet connection. My sister still managed to get me a picture of her by MMS. If she'd emailed it to me instead, I wouldn't have picked it up for another week.

RE: RAID 1

Cris Wilson, RAID1 is not a replacement for a backup, merely a complement to it. It won't protect you against file or operating system corruption, it won't protect you if your computer gets destroyed or stolen. Solely relying on RAID 1 for disaster protection is an exercise in foolishness.

Hmmm

"The vulnerability affects Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Vista in both 32 and 64 bit flavours of the operating system"

Possibly a daft question but does this mean that it hasn't been tested on the other editions or does it mean that the other editions don't have this flaw?

Multi OS Support

Silverlight already works in IE and Firefox on Windows and in Safari and Firefox on Mac. There is also a Microsoft sanctioned Linux port called Moonlight which works with Konqueror, Opera and Firefox again. I don't see what else they can do to make it much more cross-platform than that!

Re: Or (radical plan here)...

"...avoid a new Windows license altogether, get a Linux box and run Windows as a virtual machine if you need to."

Running Windows on a VM doesn't avoid needing to buy a Windows license...

20" iMac

I kind of agree with Thomas Reynolds although I don't love Apple quite so much. I have one of the new generation 20" iMacs too. I use it with a Dell 2001FP screen and there is a noticable difference between the two screens, the Dell is much nicer. That said, I'm not too bothered. The iMac's screen is good enough for my purposes and lets face it, 20" 8 bit panels are getting to be like hen's teeth these days anyway.

RE: Logo

"i bet there's some bloatware windows version of logo nowadays, isnt there?"

There are several Windows versions of Logo available. One that is quite widely used in schools is MSWLogo and its successor, FMSLogo.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=149686

MS HD-DVD Drive

"Curiously, the EHPG is nonetheless quite happy to include Microsoft's HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 games console in the debate, so we can only hope the organisation is praying the software giant chooses not to release a second-generation 360 with an HD DVD drive built in."

I suppose that the difference is that whoever decides to buy the HD-DVD addon for the XBox 360 is only going to use it as a HD-DVD player being as no software is going to be released on HD-DVD for the XBox. However, with the PS3 you get a Blu Ray drive whether you want to use it as a Blu Ray movie player or not.

RE: Downgrade Rights

Matt,

As long as you buy the PC with Vista Business or Ultimate or have an SA agreement to get Enterprise, you do have downgrade rights. However you don't with the Home editions.

A3000

According to Wikipedia, the A3000 did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes

Slot loader

"The M1330's optical drive is a slot-loader"

It's about *&@#ing time! I would really love to know why slot loading optical devices have been installed soley in Apple laptops for so long. For a laptop, they are such a superior design.

RE: compatibility

Jeremy,

There is an Office 2007 convertor available for Office 2003. It is available for download here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101686761033.aspx

It works with all versions of Office dating back to Office 2000.