* Posts by JeffyPooh

1244 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2007

Apple iOS 6 review

JeffyPooh
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Re: COME HERE BOY...

Well done sir. Its * a damn shame people get it wrong. (*sic)

Lightning strikes fresh iPad Mini shots

JeffyPooh
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Why are the homeless poor surfing RegHardware?

Why are the homeless starving poor surfing an El Reg Hardware story about the next Apple iPad? And how are they surfing the web? Using two twigs and some damp moss to post comments on El Reg?

JeffyPooh
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Financial advice...

Start smoking a pack a day. After a few months, quit cold turkey. Now you'll suddenly have about $150 to $200 free cash available each month to blow on gadgets. Point being, everyone makes their own decisions on where to spend their money. If the poorest of the lower class can afford to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, then anyone else can easily afford to buy a cheap tablet a couple times a year. Or a new MacBook Pro once a year.

I take issue with *cheap* gadgets (such as contract-free [wifi] $200 price class tablets) being treated as expensive luxuries or status symbols. It's fricken ridiculous.

The good news is that the price trajectory will shortly intersect with anyone's constrained definition of "petty cash".

JeffyPooh
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Gawd almighty...

Some people spend hundreds of dollars a month on bottled water, and/or on coffee latte el grande-blah-blah. One shouldn't have to publically agonizing over a simple $200-$300 tablet purchase.

The RIM Playbook is down to as low as Cdn$99 for the 16GB version (if you can find one), or $118 for the 32GB. At that price one might buy it just for laughs. If I could find them in stock, I'd buy them as 'stocking stuffers' for everyone in the family. Already bought several at the $200 price point. They're getting well used.

Since they didn't have any PlayBooks left, I asked if they had the Google Nexus 7. Yes? Gimme one. It's quite nice and well worth the Cdn$260. Highly recommended. It's nice to finally join the Church of Android - LOL. The Google Play store is an 'amateur hour' production; they're incapable of accepting Amex cards for cross border currencies, even for free books (like the fricken e-manual). Daft. Completely daft.

I'd like a 7-inch iPad for $250 too, please and thank you. Posted from my obsolete iPhone 4S.

Am I missing any major ecosystems?

Forty Canadian birds BONKING against windows EVERY MINUTE

JeffyPooh
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Bad assumption embedded

Re: 40 per minute windows bonks

Bird strike against window ≠ dead bird.

We have *many* square meters of windows and birds bang into them on a regular basis. But deaths are quite rare. In almost all cases the birds pick themselves up and carry on with their day. (Disclaimer: there remains a possibility that they fly away, just out of sight, and immediately drop dead. Could happen. Not likely to occur in many cases. Impossible to prove either way.)

We had a one crazy exotic bird that needed about 24 hours of TLC before he finally shock it off and busted out of our improvised bird care facility.

One pigeon was being chased by a hawk or similar and he hit with such force that he split open and left skid marks on the glass. Dead before he hit the ground. Poor thing.

Vastly more thumps than deaths. ~97% non-fatal. One death every couple of years is about right.

So it'd be roughly 40 bird+window deaths a minute, but about 1200 bird-window bonks a minute (20 Hz).

By the way, we've had birds fly straight into the wooden siding far from any window. Drunk from fermented berries?

'How I CRASHED my bank, stole PINs with a touch-tone phone'

JeffyPooh
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I call "BS"

If the guy claimed that certain phone systems have back-doors (intentional, or left open by error) or bugs that respond to the 4th column DTMF signals (keys marked A B C D on the extended keypads), then I'd believe it.

Any other claims are "extraordinary" (code word for garbage).

HP's Whitman promises 'more beautiful' PCs

JeffyPooh
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How about this?

HP should try a less annoying and quieter CEO for a change.

It's The Products Stupid, not the cult of the CEO. CEOs are a dime a dozen, even cheaper by the ten-pack.

Key evidence in Assange case dissolves

JeffyPooh
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::confused::

They can pull 100% complete DNA out of a 50,000+ year old Denisovan girl's single knuckle bone (!!!), but they can't get a conclusive result from a more recent deposit?

Intel builds 'can't be built' working digital RF transceiver chip

JeffyPooh
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Re: Flexibility vs Consumption

Sampling speed is one thing, bit depth is the other.

For maximum SDR flexibility, you need to have a wide open front end (no pesky hardware filtering). This is required to meet the promises made by the SDR folks. So how many bits depth do you need to pull Radio Wingwong out of the noise while parked three blocks away from Radio Luxembourg? Without bothering to do the math, probably about 32 bits. Maybe more. I know that 16 or 24 isn't going to cut the mustard.

Humans will get there. Just not until about 2030.

JeffyPooh
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Re: Some work left to be done...

@Brian Morrison

You're getting "integration" conflated with "software defined". Of course virtually anything can be integrated. My point was that these technologies (the ones I've listed) are not yet ready to be replaced with software. In contrast, the transceiver's IF strip can now be pure computer software to great benefit.

Listening to some of the idiot promises made by the 'Software Defined Radio' folks over the past decade is enough to make me reach for the nearest barf bag. I could tell you some horror stories of certain SDR projects, but I'm not going to.

Free advice to decision makers: SDR technology is applicable to the IF strip (not the entire communications system). This imposes practical limitations on the flexibility that can actually be offered by SDR. The NSA policies may impose additional limitations. End result is that the promises made are not realistic.

JeffyPooh
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Some work left to be done...

Low Noise [RF] Amplifiers (LNAs), done right, need special low noise transistors. These specialized transistors are the opposite of inexpensive (in comparison to integrated transistors that are bought by the billion).

Power Amplifiers (PAs), at the higher frequencies, are inherently analog. Digital PWM-type (Class "D") amplifiers can be done at much lower frequencies (low-VHF), but it'll be a few years before they get pushed up to GHz range.

RF filters are typically physical devices at the higher frequencies.

Power supplies may contain SW, but are not built from SW.

Antennas can be wide-band or adjustable. But they're not software.

The all-software software defined radio (SDR) is a long way off.

But applying SDR principles to the IF-strip is almost entirely good. As long as you can keep the power consumption down, and your SW change process isn't 4000 times more expensive than letting "Bob" or "Frank" get on with designing a new all-analog radio.

Cheers.

Error found in climate modelling: Too many droughts predicted

JeffyPooh
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Physics Chemistry Biology

There's a hierarchy of simplicity versus impact. Physics is simple, biology is extremely complicated. Physical processes can have a moderate impact, biological processes can (for example) change the entire composition of the Earth's atmosphere (oxygen, perhaps you've heard of it). Biology can be stronger than Physics - imagine if the oceans were poisoned and all life there died.

This error was in the basic physics. Imagine if (*) the models fail to include all possible biological feedback loops. The models would always be crude and incomplete (**).

Hints: * they do. ** they are.

Climate modeling is a weak science. This needs to be kept in mind. All science papers based on computer models shall be forced to end with one last word: "...Maybe."

Note: I'm still generally in favour of efficiency and reducing dependence on fossil fuels, especially coal. But I hate weak science dressed up as hard science. And then defending it by dragging the debate into the dark religious vocabulary world of "belief" and "skepticism". It's become a religious screaming match, especially from the moral majority. News flash - you need to continuously defend your science if it is to improve. Screaming "skeptic" is a Science Fail.

Apple Lightning adaptors reveal limitations

JeffyPooh
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::confused::

My Sony clock radio can accept an old 30-pin iPhone and can display (on its 7-inch LCD screen) the analog video that comes out the bottom of the iPhone.

The new Lightning connector is reported to be "all digital". The new adapter is too cheap and too small to contain a digital to analog video converter.

So, does all this imply that the analog video connection from the bottom of iPhones is gone and forgotten?

PS: I don't really care. I've never used that feature except to try it out. Just curious if any else has notice this apparent change. Or if anyone in the world besides Sony and I ever noticed the analog video output...

Nikon launches D600 lightweight full-frame DSLR

JeffyPooh
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"$2000 in the US, £2000 in the UK."

Prices are higher in the UK because everything is more expensive in the UK.

Take for example, the Nikon D600. It's more expensive in the UK. See?

And that's why things are more expensive in the UK.

New monkey species with massive blue arse found in Africa

JeffyPooh
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"New" Primate species "discovered" by Western Science

Fail.

Humans, as a species themselves, continuously underestimate their ignorance. The boundaries of human (in this case Western Science) knowledge need to be explicitly considered at all times. A "new" primate species in 2012 is a classic example that proves the point. Sometimes...

They. Just. Don't. Know. (TM)

More 'iPad Mini' tat pics leak ahead of Apple's big unzip

JeffyPooh
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Re: iPad Mini - price prediction...

Just a silly iPhone today - no iPad Mini.

Boring.

JeffyPooh
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iPad Mini - price prediction...

It's not going to be US$200 for the base model. It'll be between $250 and $300.

3, 2, 1...

iPhone 5: skinny li'l fella with better display, camera, software

JeffyPooh
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Evolutionary

No 'very exciting' changes over the 4S.

Google sneaks in back door, slips YouTube onto iPhone 5

JeffyPooh
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"Apple has released Google's own YouTube app..."

There, I fixed it for you. See above.

The tone of this article makes it sound like Google somehow slipped this out without Apple's approval. Also, obviously there's a lot more cooperation (advanced notice) going on behind the scenes; it's not as if Google wrote this app over the past couple of weeks.

Google's Nexus 7 tabs 'can't perform' if flash RAM crammed

JeffyPooh
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The issue du jour is the final drop from about 13 GB to about 9-10 GB

The initial drop from 16 to about 13 is a well-known given. I think that it was mentioned to set the stage for the issue du jour, that is the inexplicable Android storage bug that somehow causes performance issues when the mass store gets even close 80% full.

So... What's the point of the 8GB Nexus 7? 8 becomes 5 after the OS is loaded (fine), but one needs to leave about 4 free to avoid performance issues, that leave ONE ???

FAIL.

Fanboi beats 'e-trespassing' rap after using GPS to find stolen iPad

JeffyPooh
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Apple design fail for wifi-only iGadgets

Most iGadgets that are wifi-only (e.g. iPods) are programmed with a lock-screen. Combine this with the baddie's wifi almost certainly requiring a password, and 'Find my...' just doesn't work. It's just going to sit there, under the baddie's bed, until the battery goes flat. To be fair, Apple was clever enough to call it 'Find my *iPhone*'.

The only work-around is to rig up your home wifi hotspot as a portable system (takes great effort) and take it just outside the suspect's house. But you need to have a suspect.

Why is the iPhone so successful? 'Cause people love 'em

JeffyPooh
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Re: @Jeffy Some people

@Ben Tasker

I agree with you. If one wishes to be careful with their money, then a perfectly function 2nd hand iPhone can be arranged for about the same price as a newspaper subscription. Anyone holding, or lusting after, an iPhone that believes it's a status symbol needs to consider the wise words of Jeremy Clarkson, " Your aspirations are pathetic man!"

Even Bentleys can be more of a brave lark than a status symbol. I was recently half-seriously considering buying a nice used one, but I decided instead to shingle the roof and take a trip for about the same total dollar amount. It could have gone either way. I've seen Kia brand cars (new) in the exact same price range as a low mileage Bentley Arnage.

Cheers.

JeffyPooh
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Historians didn't see this coming...

World War III will be the usual sort of thing, probably over some damp rock that carries a deed to energy resources under the local seabed. But if things keep going the way they're going, then WW4 is going to be all-out world wide civil war between juvenile, moronic, hater fanbois that happened to purchase into one mobile OS/ecosystem over another option that is essentially 98% functionally identical.

I've got tree stumps on my extensive grounds that have more IQ points than the most-rabid fanbois of any camp.

I can't wait until the 7-inch iPad comes out. I'll buy one along with an equal sized Anroid tablet and glue them back-to-back. Then I'll wander around the malls and coffee shows, happily flipping back and forth between the two, showing off ...just to enjoy watching the idiot fanbois' mouths froth as their tiny reptilian brainstems short-circuit.

Down vote if you wish, but you should then hire a life coach.

Cheers. :-)

JeffyPooh
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Re: Some people

"...The thing about status symbols..."

Viewing an iPhone as a 'status symbol' is utterly pathetic. Seriously.

[I'll truncate the post here. It would only get worse, and it's not my intent to be nasty. But seriously...]

NASA's spy sat snaps Curiosity rover burning tracks on Mars

JeffyPooh
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Re: "Jeremy Clarkson's tastes and world views."

Jeremy Clarkson is a living god. He's always right. About everything. Always.

Disclaimer: the above may not be entirely accurate.

Hackers claim to have Mitt Romney's tax records

JeffyPooh
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Electoral-Vote.com

Latest polls indicate Obama 332 EVs to Romney 206 EVs. It's not even close.

Voyager's 35th birthday gift: One-way INTERSTELLAR ticket

JeffyPooh
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The probes will be traveling "forever..."

It's been noted that humans tend to over-estimate future progress the the short and mid term ("Flying Cars by the year 2000", that sort of nonsense), and tend to under-estimate future progress in the long term ("In 200 years we'll have really nice 120-inch LED TVs", etc.).

The implications of this on the Voyager space probes is as follows: In about 500 years, some kids (Earthlings) will discover a historical mention of these space probes on the Interweb Archive. They'll immediately hop into their personal space buggy, race out into interstellar space to find them and bring them back. The ultimate destination of these probes is not some distant star system, but to be disassembled and the parts stuffed under some idiot teenager's bed.

JeffyPooh
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35 years old

I have some radios that I bought brand new 38 years ago that still work.

Of course, they're not in a hard vacuum exposed to Cosmic Rays.

Bruce Willis didn't Buy Hard: His girls can't inherit his iTunes

JeffyPooh
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Apple iTunes "Sync" - I still don't get it...

If one has a 32 GB iPhone and one has about 147 GB of media files, then the iTunes "Sync" function becomes a royal PITA; it's basically unusable and somewhat unpredictable (because one forgot to uncheck a box on the 5th menu from the left). A plain and simple Drag-and-Drop GUI concept would be about a trillion times easier to use.

Not to mention about 500 times faster. iTunes Sync is the slowest possible way to load a file.

Anyone that defends the iTunes UI concept should cut back on the Apple flavoured Kool-Aid.

Mars rover harangues empty landscape with loudhailer

JeffyPooh
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Re: Useful Kit

Speed of sound can be calculated from first principles, if the atmospheric gases, pressure and such are known. There's zero scientific payback for measuring it... ...unless "PV = nRT and a half" on Mars.

JeffyPooh
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Re: i thought it would say...

Forget BMW.

If I found a few billion dollars under my bed, then I'd hatch a secret program to place a VW Beetle on the surface of Mars, somewhere within distant camera shot along the planned Rover path. It'd be worth every penny.

JeffyPooh
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Amateurs...

"...not sure how easy it is to pick the signal up..."

Damn near impossible.

"...or if amateurs have the needed equipment?"

Not a chance. Not even close.

Neil Armstrong dies aged 82

JeffyPooh
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12 on the Moon, 24 to the Moon

Personally I also have a great deal of respect for The Other Dozen; the twelve that went all the way to the Moon but didn't land. People like Mike Collins for example.

Background for those interested:

9 manned flights to the Moon: Apollo 8, 10 to 17

Apollo 8 was Xmas orbit of Moon

Apollo 9 was Earth orbit test of LM

Apollo 10 was dress rehearsal down to 50,000 feet

3 seats per flight, 27 seats to the Moon (incl CM)

3 repeats: Lovel (8,13), Young (10,16), Cernan (10,17)

Lovel went to Moon twice never landed

Lovel probably furthest human from Earth ever (other two pressed against near window)

24 humans visited the Moon (in orbit or walking)

12 humans walked on the Moon

Young and Cernan had the best deal - 2 trips, long duration, rovers

Both Young and Cernan are very cool cats.

Moon project in ten years now impossible, due to modern "Project Management" techniques.

Some of those PM techniques came from Apollo, but now stupified.

We'll not be on Mars for about 25 years from now. Hopeless.

JeffyPooh
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Re: The heroes of our youth...

It's happening because we're in our 50s. Simple math.

JeffyPooh
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Really. Really. Good. Pilot.

Reading about his several hair-raising adventures when his cool nerve and skills saved the mission and/or his life makes it clear that he was a really really good pilot. It was luck of the draw that he happened to be First Man, but his skill made the Apollo 11 landing happen.

Regarding the hoaxers, about 30% of the population are crazy. Nothing we can solve here.

JeffyPooh
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Re: He deserves a burial on the Moon. NASA, think it.

'Ashes scattered in an undisclosed location' would be more in his style; but I hope not. I hope his remains are placed somewhere where I can eventually (years later, when my visit won't bother the family) drop by to pay my respects.

Google names names in amended 'shills' list

JeffyPooh
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LMGTFY

"As ordered by the court, Google has submitted a new and longer list of bloggers and other commentators who have written about its ongoing patent litigation with Oracle..."

The above quote is actually subtly hilarious. If Google has no relationship with those writing about the patent spat, then they (Google) must have simply Googled the list. That's funny by itself. I hope that they highlighted this claim. They should have spent hours crafting the perfect search term string, and then simply provided the court with a LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You) link. It would be utterly hilarious, and well worth the 30-day Contempt of Court sentence.

Ten... all-in-one inkjet photo printers

JeffyPooh
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Re: When is £300>£499?

If you're price conscious (as you should be), then you'd be crazy to compare prices of the printers themselves and not spend at least twice the time comparing the cost of the ink. If you actually use a printer, the cost of the ink will swamp out the price of the printer itself several times over.

Hard-up Kodak selling consumer film biz

JeffyPooh
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Re: So they think that the market

"...if you make budget printers rather than the market leader, it's more likely that your customers will buy cheap off-brand ink."

No need with Kodak inkjet printers. Their ink is priced quite reasonably, as are the printers. About $10 for a black cartridge and about $25 for the colour cartridge. Quite inexpensive compared to the $120+ to replace all the cartridges in my old money-burning Canon. There's no comparison, Kodak has the least money-grubbing on-brand ink in the industry.

Facebook updates iOS app, still poking around for mobile dollars

JeffyPooh
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Facebook on iOS, "Oops, we forgot copy-and-paste..."

No copy-and-paste in the latest and greatest FB app.

If someone posts a photo, and then includes a related URL in the photo caption, it appears as an unclickable URL that is also impossible to copy. No known solution. Maybe start Googling for related terms?

Major FAIL.

New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

JeffyPooh
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Re: 5000 years... Hmmm... ...numbers.

Damn. It's 5000AD, so 3000 years.

Multiply all volumes by 5/3.

JeffyPooh
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5000 years... Hmmm... ...numbers.

5000 years.

Ocean volume (total, as required) is 1.3 BILLION cubic km [Wiki]. So each year we humans would have to filter 260,000 cubic km of sea water through these new-fangled filters. That's 712 cubic KM (!) of ocean PER DAY (!). 30 cubic km (!) per hour. Crazy.

That volume of ocean pumping in itself would require vast amounts of energy. So the whole defective concept enters a recursive death spiral.

Sony PlayStation Vita sales crawl

JeffyPooh
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Re: Have smartphone; DS gathering dust

$200 gaming console gathering dust. Whippity doo dah.

Qty 50+ ~$40 games for said console gathering dust. +10dB. Hmmm...

This sort of cognitive bias is endemic. Just sayin'.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IPv6

JeffyPooh
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Re: and........

Meow... Meow... Meow...

Processor pioneer Victor Poor dies of cancer at 79

JeffyPooh
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Re: 73 OM

Re: invented vs designed

The 1/3 to 2/3 voltage linearization technique almost certainly rose to the level of an invention.

GPS trigger will light LOHAN's fire

JeffyPooh
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Re: Thank you

@Steve Knox

Well done. Have a beer.

JeffyPooh
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Thank you

Your preemptive clarification about the "AND" is exactly correct. I read the headline and excitedly half-expected to find an incorrect comment that would need correction. But you've successfully preempted the whole thing. Congrats.

Watch out, PC disk drive floggers: Cloud will rust up those spinners

JeffyPooh
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Daft.

Can someone recommend a good Cloud provider that will provide me 3TB of storage for a one-time cost of $145?

Oh, and make sure that (in the spirit of "It's turtles all the way down.") 10: the Cloud provider itself must adhere to the 'Cloud as a religion' and not itself use physical media to support their service. They should recursively use another Cloud service. GOTO 10.

Daft nonsense.

Must. Buy. WD shares. Now.

Lone config file in Mac OS X SIGNALS DEATH OF THE DVD

JeffyPooh
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Good idea

As opposed to making a BluRay player app that upscales the movies to Retina display psuedo resolution in order to shift more Apple PCs. Yep, good idea.

(My PS3 is the best DVD player I've seen. Assumption: Clever Apple coders should be able to do something similar for BluRay.)

JeffyPooh
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Re: Big Deal

"...the DVD drive is the first thing to fail in my PCs..."

<< My optical drives have NEVER failed. What are *you* doing wrong? >>

^ Absolutely joking. The << above >> is a typical mindless reply and I thought I'd toss it out there just to mock the nitwits that make such posts. Cheers.