Posts by Daniel Barnes

Makes me think this trilogy will be based on the 'Jedi Academy' trilogy of books by Kevin J Anderson.

In the first book an ancient Sith lord (Exar Kun) terrorises Lukes Jedi academy in spirit form.

I don't understand why Apples fine is 5x what the other companies are paying, surely it's a 50/50 blame situation? Or am I missing something?

I don't understand, if it wasn't proven conclusively wouldn't that have resulted in a not guilty verdict?

The design of the cube still impresses me, the convection cooling was a great idea which has sort-of been reused in the new Mac Pro.

It still puts a little smile on my face when I open one up. Flip it upside down, press the handle in, it pops out and you can lift all the guts out of the enclosure.

Although it started life as a 400mhz machine, mine's been modded with a 3rd party 1.5ghz cpu and a geforce 6200 which greatly improved performance over the stock config.

I would imagine each game would run a mini-benchmark on first run and automatically select the graphic level settings optimal for that machine. Very similar to how a lot of PC games work today. Hopefully they will still allow users to tweak the settings if they so wish.

I picked up the Nook HD+ for my brother in law for the bargain price of £60, second hand but boxed and like new. I was pleasantly surprised by the build quality and the screen is really nice. I got it running cyanogen 10 and he was happy as larry!

With it now being able to access the play store and other googly apps I would probably recommend it to anyone after a mid-range android tab.

I'm a huge Apple fan, have been for many years (before they were 'cool' even). I love my macbook pro, iPhone, mini, iMac. I also love my windows gaming rig.

But I think removing the optical drive on a desktop machine is just daft when it doesn't change the footprint of the machine. It takes up the same amount of space whether it is 2 inches or 2 centimeters thick! It would have been nice for them to have included a blu-ray drive.

Being the rabid Apple fanboi that I am, you would have thought I would like this review, but I don't!

It's far too gushy and seemingly one-sided. There are no negative points, the new map app should be highlighted as a serious negative, I'm sure in the coming months it will be fixed and be great, but in the here-and-now it's crap!

There are a lot of good things about the iPhone 5, the cpu looks very tasty indeed and even though on paper it looks like it is sub-par compared to the likes of the S3, in reality it smokes it, but that is to be expected, it's a newer device. In a few months time an Android phone will be released that beats this one, that's just how technology works!

I like Apple products, have done since I was young, but I've also owned and enjoyed Android devices and before the iPhone came along I owned various Windows mobile devices too that I also enjoyed (apart from the spv e200, which had a horrendous joystick that kept breaking).

I've got an iPhone 5 on order, should be with me in a few days, it'll be a nice upgrade to my iPhone 4, but that's all it is, a phone upgrade. Nothing to get too excited or foaming-at-the-mouth about (for or against!).

I don't see what's so damning of Apple, it's not like they got hold of a Sony prototype sketch and copied it, one of Apple's designers was simply sketching ideas and asked himself "what would I design if I was working for sony?".

Personally I think these companies should stop wasting energy suing each other and just make great products, there are hardly any 100% original ideas anymore, just improvements.

Has the side-on view picture even got a silver bezel around the screen? You can get the same spec macbook air for $1300, which has a higher res screen and a slightly faster cpu. Even if they didn't look the same why would you not get the Apple?

I love these topics, people take their selected choice of phone way too seriously. Most people on here are fairly intelligent (at least as far as tech goes), yet it always deteriorates into childish, schoolyard-type name-calling.

I have an iPhone 4 and have never had any problems with it, neither do I know anyone who has.

However I know that that doesn't mean other people aren't experiencing problems with theirs, it's the same as any mass-produced product, there will always be some bad ones slip through the net.

We all know it's the same for Android phones as well, and with the added fragmentation the platform has also, it's not surprising that lots of phones go without updates from operators, luckily the sterling work that Android communities do supporting these 'forgotten phones' negates a lot of this, but only for people like us who are tech savvy, you try talking your Nan through a custom rom install, you might as well teach her how to to program her VCR while you're at it.

On the flip side Apple's 'walled garden', while preventing non Apple-sanctioned apps, rogue apps and virus's to spread is a closed system, which has it's positive and negative issues that can also be negated by tech savvy people like ourselves in the form of jailbreaking.

I've been an Apple fan since the mid 90's, but I've also been a Windows user for many years and have supported a few Windows networks in my time. I've tried to like Linux (I really have!) But I think it's fragmentation issues have hindered it being adopted more widely and I don't think it will start gaining ground until there is just one linux or at least a reduced amount of distro's with the same underpinnings (package manager formats especially).

So in summary: Stop bitching at each other about the choices each other makes. Every platform has it's positive and negative points, just be happy with the choices you make for yourself.

I can't see this working unless the kids actually care about programming and do it as a separate course rather than rolled into a generic IT class.

When I was doing GNVQ IT at school (admittedly a few years ago now) we had 5 lessons a week, 1 lesson was taken by a maths teacher who had a free period and might have had a computer at home, which qualified him to take the class, 2 lessons by a mid-late 20's lady who had a nice pair-sonality and seemed fixated on everything being done in powerpoint presentation format.

The other 2 lessons were taken by someone who actually knew what he was talking about, ran the school network and smelled like tobacco and coffee (he also had a more than passing resemblance to Penfold from dangermouse) he was a great guy.

Unfortunately he had to dumb down the programming section of the course for the normal, non-geeky, students who had a hard time finding the @ key. You know the kind, the one's that type by floating their index finger randomly around above the keyboard until they find the letter they want. We ended up doing DOS batch files as a form of programming!

o2 joggler

The o2 joggler is a great toy for techies to play with, you can pick them up for around £50 too!

If you're not familiar with it, it's like one of those 7" digital picture frames, but it has a 1.2ghz atom with 512mb ram, gma500 graphics card, network port, wifi and usb and it has a capacitive touchscreen. It's just a shame it uses efi rather than bios otherwise it would run windows fairly well, but it can run linux with both mint and ubuntu 10.10/11.04 both ported to it!

The stock os that o2 bundle with it is ubuntu based with their own gui on top that has various webby things installed (internet radio, bbc iplayer, youtube, etc) plus you can send text messages to/from it.

Give it some time..

When the iphone came out it was revolutionary, that's why so many people camped out to buy one and why it was sold out everywhere for ages. These days there are lots of good touchscreen devices around so the release of windows phone devices was always going to be a bit 'meh'.

This doesn't mean that it is rubbish, it just means that you cannot expect it to fly off the shelves like the iphone did/does. I'm sure uptake will be slow but steady and lots of people will get one when their contract runs out.

I won't be buying one myself, i'll stick with my HTC hero till it dies (or i get bored of it and fancy a new gadget) in which case I'll probably get another iphone. Not because I'm an apple fanboy (I am an apple fan however), but because I think it is a good device and does what i want it to do.

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Fair review

I've been using the S10e for about two weeks now, it's about the same as all the other netbooks on the market. I find the build quality and keyboard feel slightly better than most models. OSX runs a treat on it as well, bar the wired ethernet.

I love reading these windows/linux bash threads

they're funny. Both Windows and Linux have legitimate uses but Linux will not become mainstream until it is unified, having 100 different distros all claiming to be the best does not help anything. Different package managers, different package types, different repositories (and not just one repository, lots of different ones, in different places holding different bits of the puzzle needed to install something).

Users simply won't be able to get their heads 'round it.

For example I want to install a piece of software, in windows or mac I go to the website, download it and install, that is it, job done. In linux I have to google for a bit to find what repositories I need access to, create/modify the repository list on my computer, run a package manager which will download the source, compile the source and finally install. why!?!

I can't be arsed with it, and I like to tinker. How are my grandparents going to do that, or my mum or most of my friends! It simply wont happen until there is one linux, or at the very least one way of doing everything, one type of package, one package manager and one big repository( or just an install file you can download from the programs website). I like linux, but I'm not devoted to it, like some people, I can just take a step back from it and see it for what it is, flawed.

The cube rocked!

" Hmm, where have we seen that before?"

The difference being the G4 cube is absolutely gorgeous, a work of modern art and at the time of release it was actually quite powerful. This on the other hand is ugly and seriously underpowered in comparison.

Computer Vendors?

"The group also hit out at computer vendors (though it didn’t name names), saying that some have “shirked responsibility” for their equipment dumped in developing countries."

I don't think you can blame Dell or any other computer manufacturer for what happens after the customer has had enough of their machine, it's like blaming Cadbury's If I threw my dairy milk wrapper on the floor.

That's almost £20 per person!

I cannot believe how much this government is spending on the olympics, it's just a bunch of games that I couldn't give a rats ass about! £20 is just on security (that's bound to increase), how much more money are they going to waste in bringing the olympic games to london? If the government started using the money we give them on things we need, like schools/hospitals/police/etc rather than things THEY want then this country would be a much better place to be.