Posts by Ed Cooper

I'm not going to defend Apple's huge price rises and failure to provide what a lot of professionals actually desire at this time, neither its embarassing failure to update its Pro desktop machine.

However credit is due for providing four, full bandwidth Thunderbolt 3 ports (on the 15" machines), for those professionals working with high-definition video this is important, just because you cant perceive why this would be useful to your work flow doesn't mean for some it won't be significant. Being able to hook up two 4K monitors (maybe 5k too!?) with USB 3 pass through and then also have ports available for full bandwidth transfer/management is possibly quite revolutionary for a few true pros.

For those of us who want to ingest some video/photo from SD cards, I guess it's a pain.

It's not like Apple invented a new connector here, it's clearly the future standard, if I was spending that sort of money on a new machine I'd probably accept a little bit of short term pain for long term benefit.

I'd like to see a model with six USB-Cs in the not too distant future.

It remains to be seen

That spending thousands paying a farmer to dig up his fellow farmers land to run a fibre to another farmers property really provides any significant boost to the economy. Those people who need fast broadband to be productive have generally put themselves somewhere where they have access to it.

If we want to subsidise something let's make it core infrastructure that affects everyone.

Self driving

Seems unlikely that you would lease a car, then drill dozens of holes in it to allow you to add the equipment to make it self driving....

A tenner?

There is no way you found an actual* 128GB microSD for a tenner.

* excluding 1GB cards thats have "128GB" printed on them and have been formatted to appear as 128GB.

Seems Apple aren't willing to sacrifice the 12 hour battery life for a higher resolution display. Personally for this machine I feel it may be the right choice.

No double the next model will have it though.

What's so difficult about putting flash memory on a PCIe card?

what's the point

Of all that complexity and weight for 1.4kWh of stored energy, pathetic.

25W Speaker!?

I doubt it's even 2.5W

a tip

Press the power button and the home button briefly at the sametime. Magic.

Surely Apple should do all the virus scanning at app store level, and remotely disable any evil app that gets through. This will save bazillions of CPU cycles on portable devices and hence battery.

If I need to run AV on my phone - I've brought the wrong phone.

Opening the whole phone route structure up to a virus scanning app sounds like a huge step backwards to me!

Ed

Yeah, death rate on our roads sky rocketed from the moment servo-assisted brakes became common place. Goodness knows what these advanced stability programmes and forward looking radar technologies are going to do to death rates in the future!?

Considering

they're still selling the iPhone 3GS after what seems like decades, I doubt they're going to stop flogging the iPad 2 all that soon, it'll just be a bit cheaper.

Poor MacBooks

Why on the comparison chart are you comparing the CPU with a 15 in. MacBook Pro, and then the 3D graphics a 13in. MacBook Pro (which only has integrated graphics) what's the point in that!?

Can we compare 17in. machines with 17in. machines, not with 13in portables (of non-stated vintage).

I was in Australia last year

I was in Australia last year and the ADSL connection at the house we were staying at, had a cap of something like 10GB, which was apparently pretty normal!? As someone who has got used to downloading that amount of stuff in an hour I was a little surprised!

Performance

"The 150PS 1.6 EcoBoost will do 0-62mph in 8.6s and 31-62mph in the same time. "

Well, presumably that means it will do 0-31mph in 0.0s, which is quite an astonishing rate of acceleration for a Ford. No wonder you need those low speed safety features!

An apartment

Can't wait to see how brilliant these things are in a high density environment. In an apartment block, if this ever took off, it would be a nightmare. It's bad enough with WiFi, and that's not transmitting all the time!

Also as previously pointed out it's dumb as hell to be re-encoding content and then transmitting it, just shuffle the encoded content over the air so quality isn't compromised.

I can see these things working if they join the WiFi fabric, and stop trying to be an HDMI replacement, just make them a tranport for encoded content! Could work well for laptop/projector use as well.

are you sure?

Surely the point of this is really for powerpoints and collaborative working in the office, where it sounds like a great idea if it needs no new hardware at the PC end. Not as sexy as the home market and takes time to get manufacturers integrating the right chips.

Your description as to how it works isn't really all that insightful, does it really just gab and encode everything that's on your screen in MPEG4 (not h.264 I guess as the latency wouldn't be fun) and then shuffle that over a wifi-esque network. That implementation sounds pretty dumb, at least Airplay basically just streams the encoded content to the device rather than displaying then re-encoding it (badly) and transmitting it.

20mbps at 1080p with a baseline MPEG4 compressor (i.e. low latency) isn't going to be terribly 'Full HD' IMO.

For wireless

Buy an Airport Express and spend the £300 balance on a nice high end Optical DAC if you must. You get bit perfect 48_44.1/16 which is all this offers over wireless anyway, plus you don't have to buy that USB thing, plus you share printers, plus you can expand your wired network plus you can play to multiple rooms synchronously, plus...

Oh and if you can't stand iTunes Airfoil for £20 is your friend.

Moisture damage

The poor thing died form excessive condensation build up which I'm pretty sure is going to be a problem with any phone, though I guess more so ones made out of alu and glass. The problem is Apple's attitude to water damage, but it's hard to suggest they should toe the opposite line and fix every phone that's water damaged for free.

Desktop market

I've started recommending 2.5" drives for backup purposes (Time Machine, retrospect, etc) to friends. Often they have plenty of capacity for their needs and the benefit of a pocketable enclosure (tidier, might actually hide it away or rotate them) and no need for a power supply (tidier, cheaper to run) outweight the cost/capacity disadvantage.

Sanity?

Is this article suggesting that Apple can patent the concept of putting two dock connectors on a product? Surely there is no innovation here to patent!?

Even..

..if it charged in six hours, the idea that a lump of plastic with a solar cell and a lithium ion battery shipped for the far east is going to be less environmentally damaging or more economic than taking 5Wh from the grid/car/plane is just stupid.

As a reserve battery I guess it works ok, I bet however if someone did the maths the 1KWh or so of energy this thing is going to provide in its lifetime, won't offset the carbon used to manufacture, integrate and ship that solar panel.

Oh for lord sakes

Do you really expect any manufacturer of a consumer goods item to post operating temperatures of, what, -20C to +50C ambient. Absolutely no chance, wide temp spec kit costs serious money, batterys, lcds, digitisers are all majorly affected by temperature.

That's why silicon companies make special lines of their chips for the automative market, and charge a hefty premium for them.

Signal Issue

The signal issue does exist, but I believe it's more down to how phones are rigged to report signal strength.

It seems you'll get four or five bars across a huge spectrum of signal strengths, it's been rigged this way for years as that's what the networks want. As soon as you get down to three or two bars things are getting pretty sketchy anyway.

I'm sure when the Apple engineers were testing it the found;

With no physical contact, or a case, antenna performance was better then iPhone 3.

With typical physical contact antenna performance was on a par with iPhone 3.

With full interference contact antenna performance is marginally* less than iPhone 3.

Their conclusion, on balance, probably was to go with this design - typically it out performs iphone 3 and offers an innovative form-factor. Of course their conclusion did perhaps not allow consideration for mass hysteria relating to Apple products and every dweeb in the world with a twitter/blog deciding that they are an RF engineer.

Anyone know why they didn't laminate the aluminium, would of thought you could make the problem go away - guess not very durable. Anyway I'm sure someone will be selling $3 kits which allow you to apply a laminate to the antenna soon.

*marginally to be defined.

I'm looking forward to the class action lawsuits by lefties.

Snow Leopard with Safari

Under Snow Leopard with Safari, flash crashing doesn't even affecty the browser, it just dies and all your tabs with flash content get replaced with a blue cubed question mark. Refresh the page and it reloads.

It really is a pig though and desperately needs graphics hardware support to be able to play HD video, which is sorely lacking under the existing Mac release and beta versions.

A remote cut off?

That seems incredibly risky, what if there is some sort of software fault, or the system becomes compromised. It would be intresting to see what happens if for some reason half the country was commanded to switch off and then switch back on again, I don't think we'd be left with much functioning infrastructure!

Though I agree that load balancing should be part of future smart meters, but implemented in such a way that only compatibe appliances respond to its requests. So you'd buy a modern fridge with a chip in it and it would adjust its compressor run times depending on the available energy, in return you's get a slight reduction in £/kwh. This sort of technology can make wind power feasible for more than a small percentage of installed capacity without having to build dozens of Dinorwig type stored energy plants.

All of this can be implemented without any sort of snooping of your usage patterns.

I can't help but think

In these days of high energy costs, and growing environmental concerns, that water will win. You can dump heat from a water system by pumping it through a pipe in the ground. You could easily heat exchange it into an existing HW system. With a bit of forethought even the worst plumbing failures could be manageable - with reduced capacity.

DAB has issues

mainly the quality, bring back the bit rate and it would help things. I Think it would be better waiting for DAB++ which should integrate 'podcasting' i'd like to see portable devices with storage capture radio programmes seamlessly, that would be worth investing money into. Could even be useful in the car.

That graph is outrageous. The register should be ashamed.

You can't really tell what its showing but if you decipher it its something like

100 000 units 2003

200 000 units 2004

360 000 units 2005

470 000 units 2006

Thats units sold in that year not the number purchased accumulative. You can't expect to sell an every increasing number every year, there are only so many people.

This guy should get a job with the government, i'm pretty sure you could make the ipod look like a failed product with that graphing technique.

You know

surprisingly the engineers who build notebooks have actually thought of all your brilliant safety 'innovations'

The problem is not to do with simply overheating, its due to the li-ion battery getting into a situation where it dramatically overheats and then burns. These type of incidents are generally chain of event incidents, where multiple things need to occur along with multiple failings of safety measures.

Hence this is very rare, likely something around one in a million, but with maybe 500 million laptops in the world (?), it happens.