Penta-core?

Both your blurb here and the review on the compo site say "penta-core" but the competition options for CPU are only single, dual and quad. Is this a trick question? And more to the point, do I win one for pointing it out?

"... including children"

Oh dear god, heaven forbid that children learn that people are all fundamentally IDENTICAL underneath the clothes we wear. All men have penises, all women have vaginas, most computer programmers have as much tits as women, and many of us are flabby and wrinkled. I'd hate to break the stereotype of the idealised mid-20s Aryan body figure but seriously, is it so bad if kids learn that a human body is just, basically, a human body?

Viewing angles on mobile screen

...privacy?

Not everybody likes to be in public (which, frankly, is the principal advantage that laptops have over desktops - portability) where any stranger sitting anywhere vaguely near you could easily read or watch whatever is on your screen.

The fix, say I...

I can't believe nobody's thought of this, but... why not just *not* have all your sensitive and private information on Facebook in the first place?

Additionally, don't add random strangers to your friends list. This doesn't bypass the issue of malicious friends, but in that case, you'd best start re-evaluating your life. With friends like that, etc.

Knee-jerks

I was going to write a long post about how I'm a good driver, and how I use a sat-nav when needed but don't follow it slavishly, how I know how to drive yet don't mind something just keeping me on the right track (we're only human, after all), and about how this is helpful for even when you're driving perfectly and then some idiot cuts in or whatever.

But frankly, AUGMENTED REALITY. I want a HUD in my car like a fighter jet. I want a Terminator-style optical recognition and enhancement overlay. I want to be a cyborg. And THAT is why this tech is cool :-)

Did you notice that today's level (day 5) of the Angry Birds Advent Calendar is all themed around the Galaxy Note?

http://chrome.angrybirds.com/

It's all just a bit of fun, innit.

Key differentiator?

"This mirrors the key differentiator that Google has claimed for its own social network over Facebook – the ability to categorize friends in 'circles' and share different items with each group."

You can already do that on Facebook (you can order your friends into groups, and post items specifically to - or specifically blocked from - any group, combination of groups, or combination of groups and individuals.

I've tried to use G+ (my employer uses Google Apps, Gmail, Google Code, etc, and they're replacing their intranet with G+) but it's nonintuitive and silly. I see where they're coming from and all, but I couldn't even transfer my contacts from Gmail - which is where the Official Company Address Book resides - and had to do the old export to CSV, import to G+ dance. I work in a high-tech firm, but everyone else seems just as stumped.

If I wasn't forced into it by my employer, I'd just give the whole thing a miss, to be honest. A good old-fashioned BBS or even a forum like PHPBB would do me just grand for an internal messageboard. G+ is just too sloppy and unintuitive.

@ Cordwainer 1, 2-Part Return, et al

In Firefox at least, and presumably you can fiddle similarly with the config of other browsers:

In the URL bar, type about:config. Locate keyword.URL and change its value to http://www.google.com/search?nfpr=1&q= (or whatever other default domain you prefer).

It's the nfpr=1 part of the URL which prevents Google from showing search results for keywords it *thinks* you intended to enter, and instead forces it to return your actual query as stated.

Sorted.

@ AC, 24th October 2011 23:33

"When I, and I suspect most people, put a single word in quotes it means that we don't actually mean what is written"

English fail indeed - but unfortunately *your* fail, not theirs. Partial quotations are used in English to help paraphrase; check out the BBC's RSS feeds, they do it all the time (looking at it right now, I see things like: Syrians 'tortured' in hospitals; Writer hails 'genius' Steve Jobs). This means that a word or phrase was lifted directly from the original source and is a quotation from, rather than something the author has included by himself. While it "can" be used for varying types of emphasis, this is only where options such as italics are unavailable (such as in these comments) and really isn't the correct way to use it. Just because it's "common" on the internet doesn't make it in any way grammatically "correct". Go back to school.

Alternatives to Google/moronic 'intelligent' autocorrections

One alternative is to write a script to reformat the search or its results. I find the Greasemonkey scripting community to be handy for this. In terms of moronic autocorrections, I find this one works wonderfully: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/103507 - it parses your original query, and only supplies the "Did you mean...?" as alternatives, not as the main results. Also instructions for modifying the Firefox search bar to do the same thing. It's worth searching for other scripts to handle any other new Google/Facebook/whatever functions that you don't like, the GM scripters are quite prolific.

Well done, Microsoft

*cough* http://i.imgur.com/vd2WA.jpg *cough*

What? No XKCD?

I'm surprised at you lot:

http://xkcd.com/327/

@ Adrian Esdaile / Geiger counters

Funny you should say that, because I have several old British military ones (there's something unbearably cute about the phrase "Ratemeter Scintillation Portable", ahh the military and their own peculiar jargon). You find them in old house clearances where people have kept them since the '60s and suchlike. Looking for one in an antiques shop is just asking for daylight robbery, however.

One note, however: I brought my dosemeters from the UK to another EU country just earlier this year, in main luggage. There's certainly nothing dangerous or illegal about them - they *measure* radiation, but they don't *contain* any, as a surprising number of people seem to think.

Hmm, my nice old RSP 1413A is a very pretty wooden one stamped with the markings of "Isotope Developments Ltd, Aldershot, England" - the home of the UK's wartime nuclear research facilities. I wonder it it'll be worth a bob or two to a collector...

@ Jesus Puncher

"It's a shame the ingredients bill ran so high, otherwise he could have purchased some Mr Muscle® Oven Cleaner..."

You did realise that they already use household detergent to clean out disused nuclear reactors? True story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_islands/8217772.stm

@CraigRoberts/"giving away all my personal information"

What? I use Facebook, and I didn't give away anything personal - at least, nothing that wasnn't already in the public domain and that I don't mind being there (and you can find a hell of a lot more information about me through a simple WHOIS of one of my domains than you can on Facebook).

It's not *compulsory* to give them your phone number, date of birth, email address, or anything else - this latter is used to sign in, but it needn't be a real one, some disposable freemail thing is good enough. The only reason they might have this is that you gave it to them *voluntarily*, you moron - and complaining about it just makes you look like an the knee-jerk reactionary ignoramus that you apparently are.

Sheesh, some people are so desperate to blame the Big Evil Corporation that they'll sink to any depths of hypocracy in order to do so. Fail.

The obligatory XKCD...

...is this one: http://xkcd.com/908/

Gotta love XKCD. He's got everything covered.

A whole variety of good sagas and standalones

Trilogies:

- David Brin's "Uplift" saga

- Gregory Benford's "Galactic Center" saga

- Charles Sheffield's "Heritage Universe" series

- Greg Bear's "Forge of God" series, or the "Darwin" series

- Peter F. Hamilton's "Void" trilogy or his "Commonwealth Saga"

Individual films:

- Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man", or any of his other works too

- Peter F. Hamilton's "Escape Route" would make an excellent couple of hours' viewing, and "Fallen Dragon" would be a really good Starship Troopers type entertainment, although a bit more serious

- Greg Bear's "Moving Mars"

Off the top of my head, that's all - but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

@ naked on furniture, etc

Sheesh. Didn't any of you actually view the website? It says quite clearly on one of their six pages (a couple more images of nekkid girls to be found, too) that they provide things to put on the chairs before sitting, which are disposed of each daily and changed as often as necessary. Good grief, you're an incredibly lazy bunch of commentards.

@ various and sundry

"I often wonder why there is this need for security anyhow. [...] Most mobile surfers just want to do a spot of email checking or check the footy result and wotnot."

Really? Obviously you don't have any shared devices or folders on your network. If you use it *purely* for internet access, and your machines are all locked down, then maybe. I know I share folders between machines and have NAS boxen.

But even if it's internet-only, what's to stop them downloading kiddie pr0n and then running away, leaving you to be faced with the criminal investigation...? I know that if I wanted to do something illegal, I'd find some other sod's internet connection to do it on, rather than at home.

@ LaserJet 4L

I can confirm that mine works under both Vista and 7. You obviously suck at configuring your system.

@ Security with a single button?

It really works 100%. That is, if the button in question is the one built in to the side of the mains socket. Let's see you hack my wireless /now/.

Chernobyl

"There's one bit of history, however, that TEPCO won't repeat: due to the radically different designs of the Chernobyl and Fukushima power plants, it is vanishingly unlikely that such an explosive catastrophe as occurred on April 26, 1986 in Ukraine will befall the residents of Japan."

You only got one our of two things correct. It isn't really the design so much (although that's part of it; the overpressure mechanisms are different) - it's the training. Fukushima is the result of a series of high-order natural disasters and bad luck, while Chernobyl was a man-made disaster through the incomptence of the engineers involved.

So no, this can easily get a lot worse, but there will have to be some more extreme and unlikely events before there's even a chance that this could be "another Chernobyl".

@ My 2p

"RAW image files are a few 10s of MB"

You're clearly not understanding. Take your 30MB RAW or even your 5MB JPEG. Open it in Photoshop. Apply some layers, some complex filters, etc. The original filesize is irrelevant - the final (unmerged) project can be some gigabytes, and takes many more of RAM while it's open. You benefit from more CPU cores, more RAM - and a 64-bit OS, with a 64-bit version of the program.

As to the whole 64-bit question, the driver and hardware support is long since here! I run an Asus P5Q with a Q9450 and 8GB DDR2. This is 2007's level of technology, and yet it's all perfect for (and uses) a 64-bit OS. Anyone who's bought a new machine or core components in at least the last 4-5 years should not even remember what a 32-bit OS is.

On the desktop, I don't know why they still sell them with 32-bit OS when there's absolutely no reason for it. On laptops, it's more understandable. I have a some years old dual-core Dell D620, and although it runs Windows 7, a 64-bit OS would actually be a detriment to it: addressing the extra memory registers would actually make a performance hit, while it's not physically capable of using > 4GB of RAM which would be the only real benefit at this stage. So there's an argument in there.

But seriously, on any desktop since 2006? There's just simply no reason for a 32-bit OS to even exist.

Taking it up the ASA

All I can say is that the ASA seem to be a bunch of feckless* morons, if they get all in a tizzy about a word like "feck".

*yes it's a real word, go and look it up.

Add me to the list

Another non-iPhone Finland resident here. Yep, I've seen temperatures of anything up to -35'C in my time here, and between -10 and -20'C is normal (at the moment it's -2 but has hit -18'C just a couple of night ago, and I'm in the very south. My Nokia N70 has worked in these temperatures for about five years now with nary a problem, except once in about -25'C where response became sluggish due to the coldness of the silicon. No failures though. It's not that I think Nokia phones are particularly tough, just that the iPhone seems to be particularly weak in comparison. But hey, it was designed for pretentious artsy types who hang around all day in offices and "studios" and coffee shops, so what's the problem?

Sweet!

This will be ace for the good folks out there doing the magazine presertation projects (at least in the RISC OS world - Acorn User, Archimedes World, BBC Micro User, and so on). Home enthusiasts can't afford industrial scanning machinery but this looks like it might be reasonably affordable to the home user.

@ volvic

"'ve never understood why the way in which skype displays conversations in their entirety, in real-time, on both (or however many) PCs that are logged into a particular account hasn't caused more uproar"

Then you're lacking in common sense. Skype sends a message to a client with the UID 'volvic'. You have signed on multiple clients all identifying with the same UID - therefore, Skype will forward the message to any and all that match. Sheesh. Please outline the system by which you would code Skype to magically keep track of which particular copy of the logged-in client the user is currently sitting in front of.

If you really want to run multiple clients on multiple systems and have them all be separate, then by all means create separate user accounts for each: volvic_a, volvic_b, volvic_c, volvic_desktop, volvic_pda_in_toilet, volvic_laptop, etc.

'Uproar' indeed.

Malicious intent?

If I recall correctly, Skype is owned by eBay who own PayPal, which is being attacked the self-styled botnet 'hackers' over Wikileaks. A possible connection there? The timing is too coincidental otherwise.

This has kind of spoiled things a bit because I was looking to video call so that my parents could see their 8-month-old grandson at Christmastime - what with being an ex-pat, we can't all be together, and this is where Skype excels. Something of an inconvenience, but I suppose they'll have to settle for a quick phone call and some photos forwarded on to them later.

Yes, I know there are alternatives, but TeamSpeak doesn't support video calls yet and I can't keep it in synch with a standard webcam stream...

The glaring omission...

...can only be a game we've been waiting for, like, Forever.

Gotta get me some of that hardcore pen-on-whiteboard action.

I'm all for this

Leave it to commercial enterprise to get it done; they see the riches in the asteroids, so they have the motivation. As much childhood nostalgia as I feel for NASA, they're an overburdened monolith these days and a relic of the 1970s, and the sheer size of the organisation as well as its political ties mean that it will only ever be able to move slowly, if at all. Corporations may be in it for the profit, but at this stage, I say as long as we get out there, who really cares? We can argue about the delicate science of it once we actually start reaching other planets and stars. Perhaps some sort of public-private partnership (that term used in the correct context!) to allow for scientific exploration while the corporations rape the asteroids for minerals.

@ Sarah Bee / Re: Refers to the film

And the film in turn refers to the bloke, so it's all fairly redundant really.

Oh dear

> Do you know any more ingenious ways to destroy a computer?

Cue the legions of Apple fanbois and Linux freetards chirping out that tired old "install a Microsoft OS into it!" line. I hope something a little more original comes out of this.

Let me get this straight...

It's been renamed to "EPOXI", which stands for:

Extrasolar

Planet

Observation and Characterization plus Deep Impact

eXtended

Investigation

I daresay the art of forming logical and intuitive acronyms is officially dead.

@ All the idiots whining about duty free being after security

Sheesh, guys. I'm glad ONE OTHER person actually has a modicum of common sense here - as EvilGav 1 pointed out somewhere above, this doesn't always apply if you have a connecting flight somewhere else, which therefore involves a second set of security checks... with your previous duty-free liquids in hand before going through. You could have just sealed them in a bag at home with a fake receipt for all you know. And before anybody argues that the article is about flights within the UK, I know people have bought something in Edinburgh, and flown via Amsterdam on to another destination and had their duty-free purchases questioned (and almost confiscated) at the second set of security checks in Amsterdam. If you only have a single flight and if you're within both the EU and the Schengen area, then perhaps it's a non-issue, but please all stop being so arrogant and short-sighted.

An old chestnut...

"Religious wars are conflicts between adults about who has the coolest imaginary friend."

@ There are actually some towns and cities in the States...

"... that have 'ordinances'"

Yes, but unfortunately there are rather more towns and cities that have ordnance.