Posts by Another Anonymous Coward

Hard to say...

I suspect the best solution would be to get an external HDD enclosure, and put a high end HDD in it.. desktop USB drives tend to come with the cheapest model that will provide X GB.

Generally, though the bottleneck is more to do with the USB 2.0 specification than the HDD itself.

I'd recommend an eSata card or a fibre channel card and external storage/ HD caddy to match if it's at all possible to add it to your kit. Even firewire 800 would be better. Sounds like you need a better port than than usb for the job.

Esata is probably the cheapest option, cable, card and caddy will come to about £50, then put whatever drive you want in there.

Credit-card size earns points from me.

Never mind transfer speeds or encryption.. the biggest problem I have with small external storage is that I'm constantly losing it.

It's never a case of "grab the usb stick and go", it's always "spend 5 minutes finding the usb stick then go".

For someone like me this would be great as an addition to the wallet, always good to cut down on pocket clutter too.

Nice.

Just a light bit of upgrading all around.

Very welcome to see. If companies like Apple don't want to lower their prices for the recession, they should at least be increasing value without raising it.

And there is the reason why it'll never take off.

Despite the fact that I'd quite like it to. Too many different confusing distros and variations.

And nearly all of them have obscure and utterly hideous acronym-based names which are virtually impossible to pronounce or even read in some cases. Compare:

Mac Operating System. Photoshop. Windows Media Player.

Kubuntu. Xandros. GIMP. Totem. GNUmetris (wtf is that? Oh wait, it's tetris)

Only OpenOffice has remotely normal monickers that don't look like they were thought of by a man sitting in the centre of four padded and faeces-smeared walls. The dorky names need to go.

Consider the following:

Wacom Cintiq 12wx: £800.

Macbook: £719

Ading £380 on top of that to put the 2 together isn't too bad.. the whole package is only 500g heavier than the cintiq. Not bad considering there's a whole entire computer and battery in there, and the screen is an inch bigger. Build quality looks decent from what I can see, too.. could really do with a review by someone who isn't also trying to flog it though. :P

I would love one of these things, my cintiq is great, but not exactly portable thanks to the big thick wire coming out of it running to a clunky great box with 3 other big thick wires coming out of it.

"portable digital sketchpad" is something pretty much any designer would love to have, gotta like the company for at least releasing the product that Apple's fanbase has been screaming at them to release for the last decade or so.

Regular graphics tablets don't quite cut it for sketching. Pencil+paper is still superior, due to looking at where you're drawing, and being able to rotate the page while sketching. Unfortunately pencil + paper also requires the tedium of scanning in and cleaning up before it's useable in digital pieces.

For people like animators who have to convert thousands and thousands of pencil drawings into digital files, hardware like this is brilliant... completely useless for the vast majority of the population.

I smell yet another case of "specialist niche product released" news with "I'm not a specialist, therefore it's useless to everyone on the planet" comments. ;)

Soon to be rendered useless by...

.. the release of the MagnaPhallix *104* inch screen.

It's bigger!

£310's a bit much.

When the cost (and additional size/ noise/ wires) of an external hard drive to store all the HD content is also considered. An external dvd drive on top of that would completely kill the compact style.

Considering the alternatives... fiddling around on the mesh site, their media centre with a 4550, 4gb ram, 1 tb hd, E5200 and dvd drive for £450 looks like a much bigger bang for the buck.

Still, thanks for the review.. it's good to know whether or not the manufacturer's claims of smooth HD playback cut the mustard or not. Looking forward to seeing whether or not the ION platform lives up to the hype.

They should have put a 4550 in there instead of a 4350. Have one in my current PC and HD playback is great.. the price difference between the two is tiny.

anti-aliasing, 80's style

Interesting how the CRT image looks better due to the blurriness softening the edge of the pixels.

Kind of amusing how modern games instead have to use a lot of computing power to achieve the same smooth edges as the fuzzy old monitor.

OLEDs are neat, but...

Would be better if they had integrated it into/ behind the key rather than having it next to it.

I'm using a Cintiq 12wx at the moment, don't expect or want to have to replace it for another 5+ years.

For those complaining about price - you get what you pay for. I'm glad wacom's business model relies on high margins and low sales rather than making cheap tat that breaks down, meaning that you have to buy a new one.

These things are highly reliable, I know someone who has a still-working 1995 model that's seen constant daily use since it was bought. The only thing that has finally made it obselete is the fact that modern computers don't have serial ports. :P

Now is a good time to...

... buy up a load of old HDDVDs for cheap and trade them in for blu-ray.

Regarding small files

Yesterday, I had to write 70,000 tiny tiny files over to a flash stick (and no, couldn't zip 'em). Only a few gig, but took hours before I finally gave up and chucked them on to a whacking great external HDD instead in the space of 20 minutes.

For the hordes of tiny tiny files, flash really can't cut it.

I'm happy enough, with downloads.

10mb download is fine, tends to do the job even after the cap kicks in. More often my download speed is limited by the server I'm connected to, a lot of them still can't deliver content at that speed.

Would prefer it if they worked on sorting out the mediocre upload speeds and telling Phorm to suck a fat one instead.

Continuity on this one is a kicker...

.. Time travel reset thingy means that, the events of every single other star trek show and movie never actually happened.

All those many years of memorizing your star trek fact files binders have gone to waste.

"WiiSpray", what a name...

Might as well have called it "PissPaint", and included a game to make your tv look like snow.

It's easy, but they're still stuck in the stoneage.

In-line clickable ads while videos are playing.

Clickable videos to take you to a website.

5-second ads that play before the video does.

There loads of ad features that pretty much every single website in existence, except youtube, has been using for the last couple of years. And they do work, I know because that's where a small portion of my income comes from.

Youtube, however, still has the same old archaic clunky flash player with absolutely no integrated ad support. With AS3 there's no excuse, it integrates XML easily and plays nice with all other languages.

The interface and playback controls are also still below-average, right now I could go on flashden or some other freelance developer sales site and buy the source code for a much better video player for about $40. Wouldn't suprise me if the youtube player was still coded in AS2, it's a real dog.

So much wasted potential, google has basically done absolutely nothing with the site since acquiring it, it's no suprise it's haemorraging cash.

Mmmm.. robo-porn

Check out the resistors on that baby! I bet she can take a 1000 volts without breaking a sweat.

About the screen res...

MS only allows XP on low-powered chipsets, like Intel's Atom. It doesn't want to lose sales of it's pricier Vista.

Intel only allows certain hardware specs on laptops that use it's Atom, with 1024x600 being the max allowed. It doesn't want to lose sales of it's more expensive portable chips in tradtional laptops, when the reality is that an Atom could, for the most part, do the job just as well and use less power.

Note that the old HP 2133 didn't use Atom, the new one does and that's why the screen has been gimped.

So XP = Atom = Crap hardware, and you're stuck with it until either:

1. AMD gets their finger out.

2. Windows 7 gets released and turns out okay.

3. Appletime!

Right now is not a good time to buy a netbook, unless you can get a nice early 2007 model on ebay cheaply. I spent £83 on a used eee701, very happy with it.

Best youtube thumbnail ever.

Way to make a technology keynote clip look like a 3-way between pooh bear, he-man and the little mermaid. :D

Disks really are on their way out.

Can't remember the last time I ever actually needed to use one, I think they'll soon be looked at in the same way as people look at the floppy drive on their new PC i.e. "Why the hell are they bothering to sell it with this clunky great thing in there?".

Give it a couple more years, and we'll start to see a transition to flash drives as the media of choice. Price is currently approaching £1/gig, and seems to be halving every year.

Add in the unlimited capacity (currently 64gb, but will get bigger), the smaller size, the superior read/write speeds, the lack of clunky hardware to read it, the minimal power usage on portable devices, and the lower noise levels and you have a winner of a recordable media format. I can see it overtaking blu-ray in terms of price per gig at some point.

I got a portable DVD player with a usb slot for my mum as an xmas pressie, also included a 16gb flash drive with 20 movies on it. She prefers playing movies from the flash stick as it's quieter and the battery lasts longer. There's the non-techie vote right there.

Of course, I guess we'll have to wait until the industry figures out how to DRM the things to hell before it'll actually take on. Then there's the stuck pig that is blu-ray to consider. :(

It'll get there, one way or the other, possibly through downloads, the music industry has already made the switch to flash storage for all practical purposes, movie industry will follow suit.

The software industry seems to have skipped physical media altogether, a lot of stuff is only available as a download.

Standard designer problem...

Is that absolutely everyone and their dog believes that they are a graphic designer and can be really good at it, especially the CEOs with nothing better to do than twiddle their thumbs at meetings and nitpick.

Always happens, just look at the London 2012 logo, not the fault of designers who probably created hundreds of different designs, only for the complete goits at the top to decide that one of the worst ones was the best choice, and to then offer their own amateur suggestions (translation - you're changing it this way or you're getting fired) to "improve" it.

Design is a rough job, and as the head of the team, I suspect this guy is good enough to easily find a less-stressful position where the dorks from management and the labs will leave him alone. :)

Flash developer here

Still not interested. As a platform it has the potential to be superior, but without the development tools and community to back it up, I'm not going to be making the switch. There's tons of little widgets I use for flash all the time, from open-source physics engines to custom cameras... all sorts, just browse somewhere like flashden to see the huge amount of useful thingies floating around.

If MS somehow manages to release a better version of Flash CS4 (very possible considering all the interface flaws), I'll start paying attention. The code is important, but it isn't everything. I need dev tools!

I bet they're also opposed to the .xxx domain.

Any filtering has to be done at the user level, it's not the ISP's problem or responsibility.

As for as the children go, parents need to keep internet access for their kids in the living room, problem solved... bit hard to rub one out to horse porn while your family is watching the telly.

Ah well, at least competition is always good..

The awesomebar is changeable, but changing it needs to be a tickbox option, not simply "instructions for how to change this are buried away in some obscure piece of documentation that involves editing about:config".

I stick with Firefox for the extensions, I still believe that customisation is key for anyone who wants to use a browser other than IE. Being able to customize the theme is crucial, whitehart all the way for me! Being able to customize interface elements is also good... the browsers with fixed input field boxes and tabs at the top with no way to change this bug me, so firefox's drag and drop interface for changing it is great. 2 thin bars: one with file/edit/view etc., search box and address box, the other with navigation icons and bookmark icons (text removed, naturally).

Now that I'm used to that, I could never go back to the clunky great icons and mulltiple useless toolbars. I do think Chrome has gone a bit too far in the other direction though, people like it if there's the usual file/edit/view menus to click on.

Very good to see a healthy amount of competition though, means that all browsers have to up their game if they want to keep or raise their market share.

Improving javascript speed is not as important as getting the compatibility right.

Somehow I get the impression that MS will release a new browser with superfast javascript that still doesn't bloody conform to the standards. It's a bit frustrating... I'm a flash developer and a lot of stuff could be done with javascript instead, but there is no way I'm trawling through every legacy browser to make sure that the code is compatible when I can code in AS3 and be damned certain that it'll do the job.

Looks like a makeup bag.

The glitzy outer panel detail really does it no favours.

A better place to put online money...

...is Zopa. I've got a couple of grand in there at the moment and the 10% interest is very nice at a time when banks are offering nothing. Highly recommended (no, I don't work for them).

They would say that...

...after making their fortunes well before downloading became as popular as it currently is, and well before the CD market croaked and died.

Not so sure if some of the more starving artists would be as keen about getting nothing for their work.

In any case, gig money is where it's at, you even perks like free hookers in the form of gushing female fans.

At least they kept the 2G model on sale.

Half the price, with controls, not much bigger than the 3G model, and with different colours to choose from.

Only 1GB of course, but 200 songs is plenty if you're just making a playlist of your favourites to bung on there.

There is a market for this.

Creative professionals.

That's pretty much it, and it's a big market, ask any photographer, designer, animator, flimmaker, etc.

A lot of the industry is freelance and people are often paid more for being able to use their own hardware, and prefer using their own rig anyway, so whatever they use needs to be powerful and portable, with firewire for camcorder input.

Pricing in this market depends on how much money the gear will save you... I personally spend £1500 on a cintiq graphics tablet and it's genuinely saved me more than that in wages over the last year or so in terms of time saved = money earnt.

Can't see why anyone would want to buy this for non-professional reasons or even just for showing off... the air fills that niche better.

It's easy enough.

Have done it myself. Pop the base off, undo a few screws and it's sorted, as far as RAM goes.

No way in hell would I attempt that 1TB upgrade though, there are too many things that could go wrong when you start having to solder wires to things, and hand-craft your own custom molex connectors.

I bought the mini last year because it was cheap, small, and pretty much silent compared to my "old dinosaur" PC with the vacuum cleaner fans and cranky hard drive.

This year though... mac mini's gone up by £100, not good when you also factor in the fact that, over the last year, big PC companies have finally started to realise that it might be a good idea to design something that isn't a variation on the "great big heavy noisy black box" theme.

@ Martin - Dell's studio hybrid is cheaper, with a slightly better spec, and then there's this little beauty from ASUS:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/03/02/asus_eee_box_206

Lots of good stuff floating around these days. :)

All this has changed pretty quickly.

I'm 21, at age 16 I had no problem getting served in wetherspoons, the staff just didn't care. Nowadays, they always ask me for ID... which I don't have after losing my passport on a night out. Do have an expired student card which does the trick 90% of the time though.

I don't have any problems with other pubs/ clubs... wetherspoons only bother because they're always so busy, other places won't turn away the custom unless you look like a rowdy bugger... which was probably the real reason those marines got turned away.

Supemarkets are the other one that's big on ID... but that varies wildly between checkout staff. A friend of mine works in Tesco and according to her there's only one tesco-evangelist person working there who will be completely and utterly obtuse when it comes to ID (sorry granny, no brandy for you!)... everyone else just wants to keep the queue moving along and waiting for someone to fumble around with their wallet for an ID card doesn't help with that.

dont loose you're cool...

Aoccdrnig to rsceearch at Cmabrigde Uinervisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.

The reset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lterter by istelf, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig eh? And I awlyas tohghut slpeling was imporantt…! And for thsoe of you wtih mroe tmie tahn ohrets, you wlli ntocie taht not olny are msot of the wrosd a mses but smoe of tehm are cpmlpoetley msiseplt awslel…!

Hmmm...

Battery = good.

That's pretty much it. The screen is incredibly poor resolution for 10", but you can blame Intel/ Microsoft for their hardware restrictions on netbooks below a certain price point that use Atom and XP.. that's the real thing holding back any progress beyond the copycat clone specs we see on every netbook out there.

Almost hoping Apple will pull a fast one and enter the netbook market, without those restrictions stunting their hardware, they could bring out a real blinder of a product.

External hard disk any good?

Works for me, no problems - seagate freeagent drive that comes with a bit of easy backup software that automatically backs up any folders I select at any time.

I have it spend a few minutes every night backing up the stuff I've been working on that day, and have a seperate weekly backup of the entire hard disk.

There is always the risk that both the external and internal drives will fail at the same time, but that's incredibly unlikely. Pretty easy, and most external drives come with some sort of backup widget that does the job.

Wasn't expecting that to appear so soon.

And in a 2.5" form factor too? Impressive.

The rate of capacity increase on SSDs is crazy, only seems like a few years ago that a 1 gb usb drive was considered really impressive, never mind 1 tb.

There is the crippling expense to consider, but I remember looking up the price of a 4 gig drive about 5-6 years ago, and it was in the 4-figure range in dollars, so fingers crossed for a similar price adjustment on the new high-end of SSD tech.