* Posts by John 172

47 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2009

Ha! Win 10 preview for Raspberry Pi 2 pops out of the Microsoft oven

John 172

Re: Tipping Point

Intel chips have been RISC for years now. The x86 instruction set is decoded into RISC "micro ops" which are executed out-of-order by the RISC core; a retirement unit then sequences completion to maintain coherency. Interesting discussion about if here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5806589/why-does-intel-hide-internal-risc-core-in-their-processors

Is this what Windows XP's death throes look like?

John 172

Re: Oh wow...

Just yesterday I had Linux (Ubuntu 10 LTS distro) completely fail to boot. Did it's mini boot text then just hung, repeatedly on every reboot, in recovery mode too. The cause, a new GPU. The BIOS had mapped the GPU into a 64-address space, the 32-bit OS decided that it would try and use it anyway with disastrous results. A warning that the device was misconfigured would have been nice but this is Linux, a hard lockup of the kernel is much nicer! Until tatty stuff like this doesn't happen anymore regular users don't stand a chance.

HDMI, thy end is near: Qualcomm's Wilocity gobble will let mobes, tabs beam 4K vid to TVs

John 172

Re: On the subject of HDMI...

@Pete 47 - HDMI connectors are crap, Put your face real close to the monitor and see if you can see a very fine white snow moving and sprinkled around the image. If you can you have connector issues; the same issue will also cause lipsync errors if you have a AV amp with HDMI inputs. Try some bluetac or chewing gum to hold them in until the snow goes away. You'll also find it depends on the content, never used to get issues playing blurays back but had real problems playing DVDs; that turned out to be the following: bluray->1080p24, DVD upscaled->1080p50; DVD playback was running with a much higher pixel clock and made the connector issues much more of a problem!

FIGHT! Intel disputes ARM's claims of Android superiority

John 172

Re: I am so sick of Intel's whining about ARM versus Atom or CISC whatever

RISC Vs CISC is almost irrelevant in modern devices. A modern CISC device has an instruction set decoder producing a stream of RISC micro-ops; that's really not that different to running a java/c# byte code interpreter/JIT compiler producing a stream of native instructions.

Torvalds rails at Linux developer: 'I'm f*cking tired of your code'

John 172

Re: coding and Welsh bitch

Linux and designed in the same sentence; that was great, made me laugh for ages...

Wii got it WRONG: How do you solve a problem like Nintendo?

John 172

Re: Wii is a stroke of Genius..

Don't like the gamepad, fine, use the wiimote, they pair and play just as with the wii. Honestly though, get a gamepad in your hands and say you don't like it, they're genius.

John 172

Re: They still have an amazing back catalogue

Looks like Nintendo have heard the call about it being your account and not the consoles. Was setting up ours yesterday and the guide explicitly said if you have a 3DS use the same account details and link them to the WiiU rather than have two different ones. Don't know about cross play but that certain goes for the virtual console purchases.

John 172
Stop

Nintendo got the marketing wrong, not the console.

I really wonder how many of the people posting comments here have actually ever played a game on the WiiU or are judging a book by the cover? I keep hearing that the WiiU is underpowered, compared to what? The WiiU is a more powerful console than either the PS3 or the XBox360 and the numerous graphics comparisons now floating around on the web confirm this. The WiiU premium package is now half the price of the PS4 and XBoxOne and frankly, the WiiU has better games available than either of those machines. The gamepad is marvellous, mostly as an alternate screen for the console, the screen on the gamepad is very large, high resolution and pin sharp and there's no lag between it and the TV at all; plus you can switch the TV off and keep playing if you so desire, very useful if someone else wants to use the TV. Making it a universal remote was also genius.

I think Nintendo are right to be focussing on releasing quality software for their machine, after all, we don't buy these things for the spec sheets, we buy them to run software on! Maybe Sony and Microsoft should be focussing on quality and enjoyable game play rather than their current focus on processing power and rendering ever more detailed murder and killing scenes in games.

4K-ing hell! Will your shiny new Ultra HD TV actually display HD telly?

John 172

Broadcasting Linear TV Should End

Why is it that the old fashioned concept of broadcasting linear channels is being applied to the internet and being kept alive? Netflix have it right, a true on demand service with no adverts. It's a liberation not having adverts being forced down your throat all the time and having an on demand only service forces you to think a little and often the choice is to switch the TV off (or put the fireplace on since Netflix added that). If network bandwidth needs to increase for this to apply widely then so be it, let that happen!

Google Glass driver told she CAN wear techno-specs while on the road

John 172
Childcatcher

We are Borg

You will be Assimilated...

Microsoft buries Sinofsky Era... then jumps on the coffin lid

John 172

Re: What we want to know is...

No wonder you're so uptight and self appointed, that lot would stress anyone out!

Microsoft to RIP THE SHEETS off Windows 9 aka 'Threshold' in April

John 172

Unnecessary Windows 8.1 Hate

My PC boots in about 4 seconds now Windows 8.1 is installed on it and is usable immediately; Windows 7 didn't come anywhere near close to that on exactly the same hardware. After a few bits of customisation, after login it goes to the desktop, files open in desktop applications and links open in desktop browsers. Learning a few of the mouse gestures makes it more usable too (such a mouse top left, pull the mouse down). Instead of a clunky start screen or the often 'desktop full of icons' I have a start screen containing only the shortcuts I use with most other application win+S away. Shutdown/restart is a single right click away. It creates a cleaner, more productive environment and the OS is considerably faster and chunters much less than Windows 7. All the traditional config snapins/dialogs are still there as they were in Win7.

Actually try 8.1 for a few days after customising it then comment...

WAIT! What's that sound? It's Intel stomping into the 'Internet of Things'

John 172

Not more appliances that need boot up time!

Does that mean I'm going to need to wait a few minutes for my toaster to boot before I can make any toast?

Blighty's laziness over IPv6 will cost us on the INTERNETS - study

John 172

Re: I guess the issue is.....

@Joe Montana "You don't sell or rent ip addresses of either the v4 or v6 variety, doing so is explicitly against the ripe rules... You can only charge a one off "admin fee" for provisioning the addresses to the customer."

Tell that to BT, they charge a monthly fee for a static IP address.

Netflix original TV shows gamble pays off... to the tune of 10m new viewers

John 172

Re: What an original idea

Since switching to a combination of Netflix and iTunes we're certainly not missing the many hours of adverts or fast forwarding though adverts or being told a recording failed due to the puny small HDD in the sky box being full. Not having advert breaks in shows in one of the best parts of Netflix.

John 172

Re: What an original idea

Got Netflix, cancelled Sky, got fibre broadband instead earlier this year. Some months we spend the huge savings on DVDs and Blurays of shows that aren't on Netflix, some months we don't and just pocket the difference.

It's the '90s all over again: Apple repeats mistakes as low-cost tablets pile up

John 172

Re: An Interesting Conundrum

"What if little Jonny says its cool to carry a knife, will that also make knives a must have accessory?"

That's exactly what does happen and why gang culture is so corrosive to society.

John 172

Re: Downvoters: show us your links.

Just for kicks I connected my Yamaha keyboards MIDI USB port to my iPad using the USB adapter in the camera connection kit. Would you know it, it just worked and I was able to use the Yamaha keyboard to lay tracks down in Garageband!

RUMBLINGS: Apple pondering 'Touch Cover keyboard' for iPads

John 172

Re: It needs to make sure....

@hardboiledphil

That's actually exactly what it does. I use the Apple wireless keyboard with my iPad and the onscreen keyboard is absent as long as the wireless keyboard is paired and present.

Extreme ultraviolet litho: Extremely late and can't even save Moore's Law

John 172

Re: So wafer sizes moving up from "carpet tile" to "family pizza" size?

@DropBear "Then again, there's the teeny tiny inconvenience that you CAN'T make an octa-core processor from eight discrete ones and expect it to work as the integrated one - nuisances like "signal propagation time" and such sees to that."

Actually you can, look at the latest high end Xilinx FPGAs; they're composed of multiple die mounted on a silicon interconnect layer that permits many thousands of etched interconnects to be formed between the die. They've done it to reduce costs and increase yields of the high end devices. The same technology could be applied to CPUs as they stand now for the same reasons.

AMD details new low-bucks, high-oomph graphics cards

John 172

Re: Linux

@BrentRBrian "Intel insists on using graphics chips that don't support Linux"

Is that the same Intel that open source their Linux GPU drivers? If you want a driver just code one up, that's the Linux way...

Windows 8 fans out-enthuse Apple fanbois

John 172

Re: Win8 is a bloated piece of shit.

@jake - One wonders how many of the fan bois are being payed by microsoft to spout this nonsense.

I got paid by Microsoft to like Windows 7. They've not paid me to like Windows 8 yet so I don't.

Windows 8.1: Microsoft's reluctant upgrade has a split-screen personality

John 172

You can polish a turd

The Mythbusters proved that one (although there were a few hairs still sticking out of them)...

For PITY'S SAKE, DON'T BUY an iPHONE 5S, begs FSF

John 172

Re: Blah blah blah -@AC 14:24

You know, if someone stole you're iphone or any nice glossy phone they could probably lift your finger prints off the case anyway so why bother trying to crack into the security chip in the first place! The cops have been getting finger prints in that way for decades!!! It does also beg one question, how secure is a finger print scanner when the finger prints to unlock the device are probably all over the device in question?

New iPhones: C certainly DOESN'T stand for 'Cheap'

John 172

Re: 64 bit my arse (was Affordability my arse)

So you've never used a 64 bit CPU then? If you had you'd know what's useful about it. It's not just about address space and I've yet to see a 64 bit CPU that can actually address a 64 bit address space, the physical addressability is often only in the 40+ bit ball park. Native 64 bit general purpose registers, often more general purpose registers, wider internal pathways, wider deeper write combining buffers, etc. If you're code is packed full of pointers you want to re-think it with a more implicit data layout so pointers aren't used so heavily, you'll find the end result runs faster too due to less de-referencing and possibly better data->cache line locality.

That earth-shattering NSA crypto-cracking: Have spooks smashed RC4?

John 172
FAIL

Re: Look at NSA-approved crypto

It would be identical, it's a standard! Even a single bit difference would cause a cascade failure in the block chain resulting in a garbage decryption. Just because it's encoded using one type of hardware doesn't necessarily mean an identical implementation is operating at the other end if the link.

Nintendo is FLATLY UNHINGED: New 2DS is a handful of game

John 172
Mushroom

Freemium has ruined the tablet game market

Sure there are a handful of decent games on tablets but their scope is limited and the download size has to be kept to a minimum. Freemium games are not even games, there are carefully designed annoyance designed to get you to pay for skipping over the game play becuase lets face it, how many of us like games that nag continuously to be picked up every half an hour and need that method of play because when you do pick it up there's only about 30 seconds of game play available, unless you pay...

Death to the freemium format!!!

Long live the dedicated gaming machine!!!

Sony and Panasonic plan 300GB Blu-Ray replacement for 2015

John 172

Re: Enough...

True, but did you ever see a VHS duplication plant...

Apple Maps. Remember that? Apple does. It just gobbled Locationary

John 172
FAIL

Re: Still not fixed

Alternatively you're location service is just using the ISP location which no amount of map updating is going to fix...

Judge nixes Microsoft SkyDrive name in BSkyB court ruling

John 172
FAIL

Re: This does beg the question...

No it wasn't, it was written about a girlfriend of Paul's called Lucy...

Oh, those crazy Frenchies: Facebook faces family photo tax in France

John 172
FAIL

Re: I'm sorry...

@Robert Long 1:

"Quite the opposite. The public is demanding that their taxation be reduced by collecting the missing billions from multi-nationals using fraudulent companies. Every penny Vodafone avoids is a penny we have to pay in their place."

So where does vodafone get it's money from? Oh yes, that's right, you! So is taxing companies more a good thing? NO, it'll just result in more inflation.

New Tosh drive can wipe out 4TB 'near instantaneously'

John 172
Facepalm

Re: 5 better then 3 ?

No, each platter density increase, increases the density of the data on the platter... i.e. denser platters being spun at the same speed as less dense platters equal more data being written/read from the denser platters compared the the less dense platters. i.e. fewer but denser platters are faster and more less dense platters. Check the disk data sheets out for confirmation.

Inside the iPad mini: Pray you never have to open one

John 172
Go

Re: You never had a Renault Megane then?

No you don't, you just need to go to a garage where they have a 'specialist'**

** specialist == fellow with strangely long arms.

Headaches, delays plague Windows Store, dev claims

John 172
FAIL

Epic Fail

This fella wrote an application that was slow and actually did crash. Microsoft were right to reject his application so many times. Yes, the feedback could have been much more helpful but ultimately this was down to coding errors on the devs part. Time for him to be a bit more humble and put his hand up and say this wasn't down to Microsoft being difficult or harsh, it was faulty code! Based on this I'll be avoiding his apps, he only improved it because they kept rejecting it, otherwise I suspect he'd have been cramming more unstable slow features into it.

BTW: Upgraded to Windows 8 pro on the release day (at £24.99 for burn your own ISO it was worth a look). My SSD based laptop now boots in less than 4 seconds from a cold boot, after BIOS post (so about 8 seconds from pressing the power button). So amazingly fast I had to keep doing it to make sure it was real! Win7 boot took about 22 seconds (differed quite a bit from boot to boot). You know, that's faster than my iPad boots from a cold boot (not that I ever do that)!

N00bs vs Windows 8: We lock six people in a room with new OS

John 172
Trollface

Re: There. Is. Just. No. Point.

So talking tools, you must still be using a stick with a stone tied onto it for a hammer? Damn those modern metal incarnations and don't get me started on those round wheel things!

EE screams UK iPhone 4G exclusive, rest of pack sobs quietly

John 172

Re: Why several models?

Different frequency == different aerial.

Windows 8 on ARM: Microsoft bets on Office 15 and IE10

John 172
FAIL

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

"(as embodied in modern OS, like Linux)" - That's funny right there... ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Has Microsoft finally killed off Windows 8 Start button?

John 172
WTF?

Grumpy Old Men

Blimey, there are a lot of grumpy old men posting comments today. Did you cause such an uproar when the DOS prompt was replaced with the GUI or when the start button was introduced in the first place? Progress is necessary from time to time...

Drama as Thai frogmen struggle to save world PC market

John 172
Childcatcher

RE: WTF?!?!

@MrCheese - Look around, yes....yes it is....

Apple's new Lion beta bakes in iCloud

John 172
Mushroom

Holding it wrong

Naturally, he was just holding it wrong, no sorry that was the iPhone4, forgive me for getting all confused.

Aussie retailer accuses UK shops of HDMI 'scam'

John 172
Thumb Down

Nice Try

Modern digital cable signalling standards aren't '1's or '0's at all, they're generally some form of differential signalling and some of them are not even binary (ethernet was ternary last time I looked). Furthermore the clock is encoded with the data, so generally, you either receive the signal entact, or you don't.

Dentist cuffed for using lost credit card to pay for pizza

John 172
Grenade

That's US cops for you

In this country the student would be made to pay for the fraud and taken to court if he contested the transaction.

Windows Phone update wallops Omnia 7

John 172
Stop

People

Hmmm, I must not be people, I buy Microsoft products because they work well for me. Not like that crap Linux, I like spending time with my family not debugging code because I something to work. I also don't buy Apple because I don't like paying 4x the reasonable cost of the hardware because it looks pretty and to be honest, shiny isn't really that nice looking once it's got very visible usage marks all over it (form over function as ever).

Punters 'pooh-pooh video on demand'

John 172
Megaphone

Channel Hopping Was Killed By Digital TV

The days of proper channel flicking were killed by digital TV, gone are the days where channels changed instantly; On the old analogue systems the channels changed instantly, on Freeview, Sky digital and Virgin digital the change takes up to a second, on IPTV, buffering...................... It takes the fun out of channel flicking and means you can't scan the channels very quickly at all.

Without Meyer, what will AMD do next?

John 172
FAIL

@AC

You're not Bill Gates are you? Don't forget, PC's will never need more than 640K of memory!

Ads watchdog underclocks reseller's 9.2GHz AMD CPU claim

John 172
Happy

Quad Cores

@Simon Neill - Actually the Nehalem quad core chips do precisely that, if you're only using one core it'll 'boost' it's speed within the thermal envelope of the package.

The best memory config for a Core i7 CPU

John 172
WTF?

Misleading Conclusions

I think your review shows up a limitation in PCMark rather than triple channel memory not providing much benefit over dual; I agree that the average user wouldn't see the benefit but then again the average user isn't going to be building a high spec Nehalem based system and worrying about overclocking are they?