Posts by Chippy-Minton

Servers make crap desktops

Right, just how "high end" a workstation is a 3-5 year old server exactly? Given that you can get a six.core chip at nearly 3GHz for under $300?

Then there are the noisy fans, the noisy disk arrays, the fact it's in a rack-mount case?

Waste of time and effort for a technician, unless you do it as a "hobby" project.

Most of ours get sold for spares. Smaller businesses often purchase servers as "one-offs", with no or only a short contract which isn't renewed and the service is then done in house, these spares can be of great use to them.

Real Notebook?

"netbooks are basically bought by people who are too poor to buy a real notebook."

Really? There have been cheap "real notebooks" for years now. It's just that they weight 3-5kg with pathetic battery life. Remember a "real ultraportable" was around $1500-2000 until the last few months. I take my netbook cycle touring; there's no way I'd take the weight and the possible risk of destroying something expensive otherwise.

Basically Jobs is so hacked-off because "the third computer" was exactly the market he's been aiming for for years and the netbook does it cheaper, better and without the evil of his control.

Tuners bah!

I wouldn't bother worrying about built in tuners, there is always going to be a new technology or an upgrade on the horizon. Like a computer monitor a TV does or should have a much longer product life cycle.

Another downside is all TV tuners are NOT created equal, some deinterlace better than others, others decode/render/ sharpen better. There is no garantee the built in one is going to be particularly good.

Of course in the UK the leading supplier is Sky which means an external box under all circumstances.

I really wish there was some broadcasting legislation regarding digital TV receivers. That for example is why every European TV has a standard SCART plug (it started out as a legal requirement in France). Another bugbear is TV box power consumption, often the same in "standby" as leaving it on. As far as I can tell, on my box it just blanks the picture, especially as the sound is still there on the RCAs!

Marketing

It's market segmentation guys. The two drives will have exactly the same platters if it is a 750gb model and not a 666gb model - but the firmware will lock out some of the space (look at the price difference!). If they've done their job properly, it'll lock out the inner, slower tacks and the smaller disc will perform better overall.

It was possible on some older disks to actually unlock extra space with a bit of trick firmware.

Sony formats

"the W995 may be one of the last batch of Sony Ericsson phones to use the M2 type, after the company's announcement earlier this month that it plans to migrate to the more standard microSD format"

Sanity at last. Let's hope for a masacre of memory stick and other Sony proprietry formats.

I might even start buying their products again.

A step backwards...

I think you'll find this misses out on the most attractive feature of the AA1.

You could buy it for £170 in Tesco.

It also loses the second card reader which was actually extremely useful.

thin, schmin

Why the obsession with making it thin? It seems to me to be the least important dimension and certainly not worth sacrificing a removable battery and ports..

Like the Air, it's footprint is still the same as other, cheaper models with the same sized screen, meaning the same space when in use and the same size bag to carry it in.

Wot

As a result, Thomas’ screen only uses a few volts of electricity

- would that be Watts then?

ccleaner

removes index.dat...

Other than that run a ramdrive and redirect your files to here.

Of course the best way is simply to run a "live" linux cd which can't possible write to your HDD in the first place.

Just think...

What you could do with the £20billion from this.

Plus the £50 billion from Northern Rock.

Plus the £2-3 billion per year from not fighting two wars.

Plus the £4billion from not giving our gold away.

Surely free hovver cars on the NHS?

I've never in all my life lived under such a bunch of incompetent wasters as these clowns. It's no mystery why we have around a trillion of public national debt.

Proprietary must die!

ATRAC, memory-stick, UMD, Minidisc.... No thanks.

I no longer buy anything Sony (or indeed Apple for their funny connectors, lock-ins and hideously awful itunes) for this reason.

Amazing New phone

I just got a new phone which does away with all those cumbersome menus and touch interfaces, tapping away at a touchscreen and clunky email clients etc.

You simply speak into it at one end and the person at the other can hear you insuring instanteous, interactive personal communication. In your own voice too, instead of some impersonal, badly spelled electronic rendering. It shuns Google maps for a sense of direction and the ability to read road signs. This works even when the phone is off thus delivering unrivalled battery life!

Frankly, I'm stunned at the technology behind this, how can Apple be so far behind the Zeitgeist?

Amazingly this phone was FREE, thus freeing valuable financial resources each month to clear the credit card bills for all that other electronic tat you bought that you thought might really improve you sorry existance and didn't. It also has the added bonus that it doesn't look like you have an ingot of some metal stuck to your ear, like some fashion faux-pas earring. Best of all it doesn't give you a falsely elevated sense of social standing, but then what item of mass produced Chinese electronics and near-future landfill, available to everyone should?

Could this be the, you know, coolest phone, like evah?

Compact flash.

Your laptop will boot from a CF card as it replaces your HDD via ata directly, nothing to do with usb. All you need to do is change the flash card to "fixed storage" using "atcfwchg.exe", which can be found if you look hard enough. Your notebook will not be able to tell the difference between it, these modules or your old disk.

The extreme IV cards are very fast, the 4Gb can be had for $50.... I can boot XP in 15seconds on a modest celeron-m notebook. A RAID pair would likely come close to the state of the art ssd drives available and only come in at $100-120, a quarter of what's being asked.

I first did this with an earlier, slower Sandisk Extreme II card, this wasn't ideal as it didn't do DMA. Of course back then, flash with enough capacity to store an OS was expensive anyway. People have been doing this with homebrew linux routers etc. with as little as 16MB for years and years. Great way to recycle old, small cards.

Bloat

Why not just add the new screen and charge £250 for it? £329 is way too much for this kind of thing.

I could easily add the 16GB should I need it in the SDHC slot. These cards will cost about 50p in 6 months time.

And it would leave the internal space free for whatever I wanted to do with it.

I think I'll stick to my 4G 701, at least until the atom version comes along.

Disk performance

I'm in two minds about Vista.

I don't think it's unreasonable to up the ante on hardware specs. CPU and memory have never been cheaper.

However the bottle-neck in most systems is hard-disk performance and it was the worst possible thing MS could have done to hit this as badly as they did. On my wife's 2*1.8GHz home Vista machine, disk transfers take around 60% longer (especially from within the same physical disk to otherr folders or partitions) than my similar notebook with XP pro. This isn't acceptable.

I wonder what server versions of Vista are going to do to database performance and the like?