Focusing

"struggle with the finer points of photography"

Since when has focusing been one of photography's finer points? It's either in focus or its not and then its simply blurred. The Lytro simply lets you make the decision of the focal point after you've taken the photo.

I'd guess the Lytro will appeal to women, means they can change their mind after the event....

How much?

Sorry, at £1200 any laptop I'd buy would say MacBook Pro on it! I don't care if it doesn't have a screen that folds to make a tablet.

Better still 13" MacBook Air and £100 change.

Bode's Law

Assuming this to be accurate, is the end result similar to that of the Babel fish? "and god disappeared in a puff of logic"

Faster?

Will this make iTunes run any faster?

Too long

Judging by the comments, everyone laughed the contents of that box.

We've all been doing this too long.....

...sod it, its Friday

Re: Why the surprise?

Been there, snipped them, so now I can buy what tech I like and the wife can.... Oh, she's already had them.

FW800 is seems fast enough with a few year's worth of RAW files (420Gb) as part of a Lightroom library. This years photos sit on the internal drive of my iMac and I can't tell any real difference in performance when I have to go back and grab a copy from the external WD Studio drive.

Of course, hopefully the price of Thunderbolt kit will drop and when its time to replace the iMac, the external drive will get replaced as well.

I Don't Care

Say what you like, I sit in front of a Windows PC all day and its a pain, partly because of all the rubbish the company insists is installed and partly because of Windows. Things are only going to get worse once we get Windows 7. (Don't laugh, Windows 8 will be on sale before that happens at the rate we're going!)

I come home, sit in front of my iMac or MacBook Air and simply enjoy using them, because they just work. I'd take OS X over any other OS, simply because its nicer to use than the rest. I've got a Win7 box at home as well and it dual boots to Ubuntu 10.04, so its not like I'm not covering all the bases.

The Next War

The next war has already begun and the bad news is we're already losing!

Handling!

I looked at the NEX series whilst looking for a "travel" camera, lighter than my DLSR + lenses but without the restrictions imposed by even the larger compacts like the Canon G series.

The images off the NEX are great, but its horrible to hold, it just doesn't balance nicely with the lens at one end. I opted for M4/3 in the shape of an Olympus EP-1, but it was a close fight between that and the Lumix G series. The added benefit to M4/3 is you can buy an adapter and fit Olympus OM mount lenses, the results are impressive!

Only drawback so far are; there's no viewfinder, I've lost count the number of times I've gone to take a shot expecting one with suitable embarrassment as a result and the auto focus system is easy to fool, leading to shots with the wrong thing in focus if you're not careful. Both Lumix & Olympus now have models out that have expressly addressed the focus issue, so it could be upgrade time.

What if...

I'd really laugh if Apple bought them (guess have a few $ spare down the back of sofa somewhere without touching their cash pile). Can you imagine the lawyer feeding frenzy with all the IP lawsuits that could doubtless generate?

It'd be the only way they'd get into some corporate businesses as well!

SFBags

Have to agree with AC, Waterfield Designs from www.sfbags.com are superb. Bought one for my MacBook Air and they are top quality.

A word of warning though, expect to get stung by UK Customs and Royal Mail! By the time they'd taxed it (a reasonable £7) and charged £23 to deliver it (which compared to $50 to do 5000 miles is a bit steep shall we say) once it arrived, I'd ended up paying as much for the postage as I had for the bag!

What should they do?

They should either release an OS upgrade that makes the thing worth buying or let people jailbreak them in the hope of selling a few so people can put a decent OS on it.

Will they do either? Not a chance

3-4 Days?

Smeg, Kryten knows if you turn pants inside out and they'll last at least 2 months.

Why?

So nice to see all this technology being put to such good use. It'll still sound like a load of strangled cats.

Mind you, if it was to do the same thing to reproduce specific Fender or Les Paul.....

Happy Days

Far far happier days!

Where's your problem?

What's the difference in having a SIM as part of the main board & one in a socket? Generally anyone who wants to use a smartphone has signed an x month contract anyway so they're tied to the SIM.

End of contract, decide to keep phone but move provider: Apply for PAC code, Apple by then have added "New Operator" feature into iTunes, insert PAC code into dialog box, job done.

"Apple will also need to get the network operators to hand over the secrets for embedding into iPhones. Our first thought is that this could never happen,"

Yeah, they said something like that about getting music companies to sell tracks for $.99 each

LADAR?

Why not replace the terrain following radar unit with something similar based on a laser? Surely if if you can have laser guided missiles that home in on a laser source, you must be able to build a similar seeker function into a nav system, with a terrain "designator" laser to accompany it? That sort of tech has been around since the 70's

How much in the way of EM emissions from one of those?

Its not as though a H-60 does 200+ Knots at treetop height either, so the processing requirement must be less than fitting something similar to a fast jet.

No hard drives..

Maybe time to buy something without a HDD?

MacBook Air anyone?

Relegated

So lets see, no BMM or onboard mail in your first release, but you boldly keep at it. iPad2 sells by the bucket load and before Xmas arrives, Amazon launches the Fire (in the US only it seems) and you're 2-0 down by half time at the the of the year.

You make an attempt at pulling a goal back by releasing an update, but still omit BMM and score an own goal instead, then Apple show the iPad3 a month later, possibly introducing a smaller form factor as well or even making the iPad2 the cheaper version as they have with the iPhone.

Come April, you're relegated to either axing the playbook altogether, or cutting the price so any mug buys it. I'd be worried about letters of support from the board in the meantime as well!

Get real

How long before the idiots we elect to govern, regardless of political persuasion, realise that unless they spend billions in research into fusion (cold, warm, tepid or whatever), building new or replacing old fission reactors is about the only reliable way we're going to keep the lights on around these parts in the not too distant future?

Short of surrounding these shores with flocks of whirling windmills or tidal flow turbines and continuing to plant even more in what's left of our green and pleasant land (before the new planning bill covers it in concrete & tarmac) , use what's left of our coal reserves (heresy, fancy thinking of that) there's no RELIABLE, immune to changes in weather, wind, whatever, electrical source to provide enough to keep my Mac running so I can read El Reg.

Build enough and we might be able to sell some of the output back to the Germans?

What firms?

"you have to wonder what exactly US and European firms are going to be doing."

The ones still doing anything will be doing what the rest already were, nothing!

Their owners only see the bottom line and if it costs x pence less to manufacture overseas, then that's what they'll do.

As for patents, that means spending money on R&D and where's the profit margin in that.....

This is what you get when you're lead by beancounters.

Denied!

When I first read the headline, I had visions of Gerry Anderson's UFO moon hoppers. I'm so disappointed.

Sleep Thief.

How to kill time and not realise it?

"Just one more turn...", "I'll just capture that city and I've wiped out the Indians..." Then with a peek out of the window of the room where the PC was it still looked dark, trip across the landing to the bathroom before bedtime and you wonder what that dim light is that's starting to break through the frosted glass, that would be the SUN!

Oops, another grouchy day at work after <4 hours sleep.

It was a slippery slope after Civilisation: Railroad Tycoon, Command and Conquer, Alpha Centauri all conspired to deprive me of sleep.

Excellent game and now I feel really old as my son is playing Civ IV.

WebOS; the Black Night?

"Oh, oh, I see, running away then. You yellow

b*****ds! Come back here and take what's coming to you.

I'll bite your legs off!"

Brits pay more?

And this is news?

Re: Stupid keyboard

What's wrong with the keyboard? I'd rather type on one of them than any other I've used since my last original IBM PS2 keyboard died! And yes, I've had plenty of machines from the dark side, except now I can run Win7 as a VM when I'm desperate.

As for the OS, each to their own I suppose, but if pushed, I'd only swap OS X for Linux.

I'd also lay good odds that in 3 years time, OS X 10.8 (?) will work just fine in 4Gb of RAM and leave at least 120Gb of space on a 128Gb SSD. I even expect it to run on my now last generation MacBook Air. I very much doubt Windows whatever will run as well on a PC of equivalent age.

My boss summed up the Air and the iPad, when I turned up with my 11" Core2 Duo Air. "An iPad is an iPod Touch for people with bad eye sight, and Air is a Netbook done properly" Fitting i5 and restoring the illuminated keyboard just makes it even better.

Thunderbolt will only be OK when there's something useful and affordable to plug in to it. New Cinema Display is useful, but rather fails th either bit!

Lesson Learnt

Fantastic!

Lesson learnt? Read BOFH without food or drink in hand/mouth to avoid ruining another keyboard!

Must be Friday as well. Cheers Simon.

BlueTooth crap?

I don't have problems linking Apple mice, keyboards or phones to my iMac, or MacBook Air, or Apple mouse to Linux box for that matter.

Which is more than can be said for my work Lenovo laptop and MS mouse. Go to a meeting, stay longer than an hour, come back and the only way to get the BT mouse working again is a reboot.

I've tried a few other "wireless" mice over the years, all with Windows PCs and they've all not lasted that long before I reverted to a wired one.

Omit USB 3.0 because you think Thunderbolt is better; now that's dropping the ball when a cable for Thunderbolt is £50 and there are virtually no devices available yet to use it anyway. How much to use USB 3.0 chips instead of 2.0? Come on.

Novel idea, not

"They promise open, glass storefronts with no posters or signs obscuring the view.

Phones and tablets on display will be functioning devices, not dummy devices, "

My my, I wonder where they got that idea from?

Good luck to 'em. Unless 02 match what T-Mob want for next iPhone when it arrives, I'll be wandering in if we get a store nearby.

Remember...

..Happiness is vectored thrust!

So no going back to face F-16's until we get F-35B's then. Or maybe instead of replacing the GR3 on its concrete plinth outside Wittering with a nearly new GR9 they should have sent those them to Turkey instead?

Just let us eat, drink and be merry.

From experience I suspect there are more factors involved in the likelihood of getting prostrate cancer than a few cups of hot lava java. I'd also suggest they look at the impact of tea!

Grandfather - Died age 96, basically of old age. Never smoked, hardly drank alcohol, drank tea by the gallon, but never drank coffee. Kept active until his knees let him down in his 80's

Father - Died of aggressive form of prostrate cancer at 68. Didn't touch coffer or tea. Smoked, drank and sat on his arse for 40+ years.

You can draw your own conclusions.

Why bother?

It looks very nice, but if you want a fixed lens compact camera with a near full size "sensor", go and buy a second hand 35mm Leica. The lens is second to none, it won't be obsolete when the next model arrives and at the end of the day, it will be worth more in a couple of years time because its a Leica.

Re: "Small manned"

You missed a bit. If its small manned and being launched by the Chinese, surely it would be Red Dwarf?

But would they have to change the bulb to step up to red alert?

Volunteers?

Never mind volunteers to go to Mars on a one way trip, I can think of a few I'd like to "volunteer"...

Grenade: that's the cheaper option.

Horse, gate, bolted

So no email client or BB Messenger, few apps and you'd expect, being a RIM device, a price premium?

Meanwhile, there's another slightly larger device thats already sold 30-40 MILLION units, has thousands of apps and is likely to be about the same price you'd think, seeing as you have to pay a premium for those as well (they say).

Or there's the raft of Android wannabes that are a similar size to the PlayBook, but at least have email and plenty of apps as well as probably being a bit cheaper.

Anyone remember the Palm Folio? That sank without trace as well.

Deja vu?

Why does this sound a lot like the HOTOL (?) that appeared on Tomorrow's World (happy days), then disappeared without a trace?

Happiness is Vectored Thrust

Not being able to field a carrier in a fairly limited action like this should be a very stark warning of what's liable to come. I'll give it a couple of years at most, by which time the Harriers will have been scrapped (they won't be sold, too much US kit on them) and by which time someone will have found decent reserves of oil around the Falklands. You can guess the rest.

As for buying Rafale, if we hadn't been so pig headed way back when both Rafale and Eurofighter were still paper planes, we'd have had Rafale in service already, which would have saved us and the French a lot of money.

Must Be Friday!

"IT Directors check numbers for accuracy about as often as they check their faeces for fibre – i.e. only when it’s in their face"

Time to pick a mouthful of crisps out of my keyboard!

So much for hi-tech

Nice to see the US Security people using up to date software. Still looks like they're running XP to me.

There again, if Windows 2000 is good enough for warships, why not.

Would the results be any different?

Having seen what they "teach" here over the last few year as my son passed through the system, I've got my doubts if the results would be any different if you asked the same questions in the UK.

Happy Days

PDP-11/34 seemed so high tech in 1988, yet I suspected I had more power in my Atari ST at home? Had to use one to download data from flight data recorders on GR5 Harriers!

Plug in the "Black Box" which is actually bright orange, (only goes black when it gets burnt, but it is fireproof) select the data sources you wanted, get a print out on some weird multi trace wet plotter, then hang the traces to dry or all you got was a huge multi-coloured smudge.

Only M$45?

Never mind dinky little used toy boats, real rich people have their own boats built. Not quite as big as Chelsea owner Abramovich's soon to be launched 540-foot "Eclipse", but for cutting edge looks, check out Andrey Melnichenko's 394-foot toy boat "A". Now that could be in a Bond film!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303695604575181911796253780.html

Kiss of death

Just like half the managers in the football league come Monday morning if you read the press.

"The board are fully behind me..."

With BOFH cattle prods shoving them out the door!

Adaptor?

Apple may have signed up for this, but does the doubtlessly huge tome sent out by the EU actually say the standard charger must actually connect to the phone directly? If not, Apple will simply include an adaptor, with a dock connector on one side and a micro-USB socket on the other.

That way they adhere to the letter of the EU edict, whilst keeping everyone with a dock of some sort happy at the same time. You really can't see Apple simply adding a separate charging port and hence another hole in the iPhone case, that would be too easy and spoil the aesthetics....

So long as the EU don't finally get round to standardizing mains plugs and foisting some useless 2 pin, un-earthed plug on everyone, when the UK spec 3 pin is better, safer and doesn't fall out of the socket every chance it gets, I don't care.

User Serviceable

The last easily user serviceable PC I worked on was an IBM P70!

Mainly because it was the size of a small weekend suitcase. Things went down hill rapidly after that.

Would it be practical?

Assuming that there's scope in the carrier design to incorporate catapults and arrester gear, steam or otherwise, would they be able launch some nice cheap A/F-18s off the new carriers? Or dare I say, Rafale's if we want to creep up to the French and look like a Euro Navy?

Take your pick, just enough (if you're lucky) hi-tech F35s for one carrier, or a full set of something cheaper?

Better still why not highly capable and probably quite cheap Su-33s. There again the MoD would screw that up by demanding we build them here and fill them with UK spec kit that will take years to talk to the rest of the plane or each other.

Fit for Purpose

I have to side with Mr Page, an aircraft carrier is much more than just another boat, even with his cut down escort units around it and if they build them with a catapult, steam or mag, better still. The Harrier did a sterling job, the STOVL F35 might be better, but for something with decent range and warload plus be able to launch a proper AEW bird and heavy COD, you need catapults. Plus its a good bet the Labour govt signed such a watertight contract, it would cost more to cancel than it would to build, even if we flog them to the Indians.

Those who suggested closing the German bases have to be right. There's little point in housing thousands of troops, expensive to maintain tanks and other AFVs in Central Europe, whilst paying out LOA (or has that already been axed?) just to have them primed to flood the Fulda Gap in one last heroic charge (before they got fried with a couple of TAC nukes). when the enemy they were set to fight headed East 20 years ago. They've already lost permanently based RAF air support and the Harrier squadrons stopped playing in the woods years ago.

Nimrod MR4 hasn't been mentioned? Come on, why are we still trying to extend the life of a hand built 1950s civvie jet? Apart from to prop up BAe. Is it too late to save anything by stopping this particular gravy train?

Axe the Tornado squadrons? I hope BA and the rest need some pilots, because this has been on the cards for a while. Buy ground launched Tomahawks for the long range work and some decent drones for the shorter range precision stuff, no huge bases to man or protect, stop recruitment of techies for a while (another money saver) and re-assign the GR4 ground crews to whatever jobs they've not already outsourced to the civvies. They won't get much for real estate that houses the tonka toys though, Lossie is miles from, err, anything and Marham isn't much better, just not as cold and wet.

As for the last time the RAF shot down any sort of plane air to air, I suspect that would be May 1982 when a 92 Sqn Phantom splashed a 14 Sqn Jaguar. Jag pilot got his MB tie and ended up with a second one some months later when he banged out over Scotland.