Re: Assembled in...

There are lots of factories in the UK making lots of stuff. We might not have (m)any of the traditional heavy industry/thousands of workers/spanning acres of land type factories any more, but there are a hell of a lot of smaller concerns dotted all around the place making stuff that is quite often regarded very highly by the rest of the world. Shame the UK media seems overly keen to make people think that UK manufacturing is dead and buried, or at least something we really shouldn't be very proud of any more...

Not sure that GB sticker indicates this particular board was made over here though - it looks more like the stickers my current and previous employers have used to identify which production facility/line was used, or who in the manufacturing team was responsible for final assembly/testing.

Re: Oh come on!

For those of us who grew up on a diet of wartime tales of frontline heroism and derring-do from our armed forces, supported by the home front activities of the boffins and back-room boys, the use of such a term in this context seems entirely appropriate.

Re: Who needs a tablet and a laptop when you can have both?!

Hmm, not sure I follow your reasoning that the software available for the device determines whether or not it's a laptop. What about the majority of people who really couldn't give an entire jungle-full of primates about Diablo3, and just want a laptop to surf the net, maybe edit a few photos, write the occasional letter etc - in what ways would the Transformer (or any similar tablet+keyboard combo) *not* be suitable as a laptop replacement for them?

"Nothing wrong with the games on the Beeb"

Yup, I had a Speccy, my best mate had a BBC B, and our regular weekend gaming sessions at one or anothers houses suggested that, whilst there weren't as many games available for the big beige box, the average quality of the ones that were was higher than the average quality of the stuff being shovelled out onto Sir Clive's baby.

For every fond memory I have of playing stuff at home like Laser Squad, Tomahawk, or pretty much anything produced by Ultimate, I've probably got as many equally fond memories of playing stuff at my mates house like Frak, Citadel, Firetrack, Revs... And yes, Elite. Although given its fairly rapid spread onto practically every other platform out there, I ended up logging far more time on the Spectrum version than the BBC version (and eventually at least as much time again on the Amiga version too), so my memories of Elite don't fire all that many BBC-specific thoughts in my mind.

Re: Product placement is the new advertisement

"Apple are one of the best at this. No one, but no one, uses a PC on TV it seems."

Not at all true - there are plenty of non-Apple PCs used on TV, but you very very rarely get to see them without strategically placed stickers obscuring any manufacturer logos/branding.

Re: Does wireless put people off with lower throughput?

"When the line between your provider and your modem is the slowest link, it matters not how fast your wireless connection is."

That rather depends on what else you might be using the WLAN for. Once you start adding multiple devices to the LAN, the ability to share data between those devices without ever crossing over to the WAN side of your router raises the question of how much bandwidth you'd like to have between those devices. Being able to stream HD video around the house, without needing to string cat 5 everywhere or rely on your electrical wiring being up to the job of powerline networking, is just one example where the speed requirements of your WLAN are potentially being set by something other than the speed of your internet connection.

"Once your pipe is fatter than your wireless signal, it makes less sense to be on wifi, yes?"

Yes/No/Maybe (*delete as appropriate)

Remember that most pipes into the home are asymmetric, so if you're a heavy uploader then you might be willing to spend more on a fatter pipe so that the upload speed is more closely matched to your WLAN throughput, even if it means most of your download capacity goes unused.

Remember also that a growing number of homes have multiple devices connecting to their LAN, some wirelessely, some wired - if you're able to move some/most/all of your heavy-lifting network apps onto the wired devices, then having a bottlenecked WLAN for your other devices might not be such a big deal when set against the convenience of having WLAN access.

So it would make less sense for some people, but by no means would it make less sense in general.

Re: Out of interest

Considering how much effort was put into tracking the Saturn V throughout its ascent into orbit, I'm thinking its unlikely the S1C stages weren't similarly tracked during their descent back to the ocean surface. The S1C page at Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-IC) gives locations for each of the stages, and there seems to be sufficient distance between the Apollo 11 stage and its nearest neighbour to suggest that any debris found at that location probably was part of 11.

Re: If you really have too much money ...

"I'm sure the real Saturn V, with real engines, looks more impressive, but they also exist on dry land, so I can't see why it's worth recovering this one."

It's worth doing because, unlike the ones already on show, this one was an integral part of an Apollo mission, giving it a historical attachment which raises it above merely being "yet another Saturn V first stage rocket engine". Even if the impact with the ocean and the subsequent passage of time submerged in the briny has left it little more than a twisted lump of rusted metal, it's still a historically significant artifact worthy of at least as much attention as any of the existing Saturn V exhibits. Even if it turns out not to have the particular significance of having formed part of the Apollo 11 mission, it's still something we'll be able to look at and say "that helped send so and so to the moon".

Re: I hope T-Mobile doesn't f*** with this update as well

"...and they didn't even bother with Android 2.3.5 or 2.3.6..."

Perhaps not for whichever un-named handset you got from them, but they have supplied at least one of those updates (2.3.5) for at least one of the HTC devices (Desire S) they've supplied...

And when you refer to an internet censor, do you just mean the content blocking feature of all TMobile contracts? I'm fairly certain this has nothing to do with the firmware on your phone, given that, when I was using a completely unencumbered by TMobile crapware phone up until about a year ago, content blocking would still work if enabled in my account settings...

Re: Mondeo in drag

Pretty much all of the laziness in the 2.7D used in the S-Type is down to turbo lag, and pretty much all of that is apparent only when moving away from a standing start when the engine has been idling - asking for more power when you're already moving results in a significantly quicker response. The autobox can also be a bit reluctant to change down if you don't floor the accelerator hard enough with the box in normal mode, but if you've put it into sport mode or are manually persuading it to downshift via the left-hand side of the J-gate, then it's quite willing to shuffle the cogs around in a manner that promotes rapid acceleration...

From what I've heard about the 3.0D used in the XF, a significant reduction in this turbo lag is one of the ticks in the "ways this engine is shedloads better than the old lump" column, so it probably does deserve to be described as "excellent".

Re: "the problem was found in testing"

Except that generally isn't how you do EMC testing... You build a few prototypes, get them working using whatever means necessary and then perform some preliminary testing to see how far off being compliant you are, adding/removing/changing components, beefing up tracks etc as required until your Mk.1 frankenboard hits the mark. Then you build a few more prototypes, translating the spaghetti of patch wires, cut tracks, upside down components etc into netlist and layout mods so that these protos work as expected right out the oven. Then you test again.

At this point all of the testing is preliminary. You might even do some/all of it in-house if you've got some test gear handy and don't have the time/money to spend on repeated trips to a test house. Hell, if your company is really on the ball they might even have a fully accredited in-house test facility that allows them to self-certify their own products (as well as bringing in some extra revenue by hiring the facility out to other companies... I had the luxury of starting my career at one such company, and you don't realise how damned useful having the full spectrum of onsite facilities - plus the dedicated EMC test engineers - is until you move to a company without any of it), in which case you can just test, test and test some more until things are spot on. Once you're happy with the performance of the fixed prototypes, you then do a small batch of production-grade boards and run the formal tests that, all being well, will get you the certification you need.

Only then do you pull the trigger on the full scale production run...

What you'll then want to do, especially if you're using a different board stuffing facility for the production run than you used for the small quantities of proto boards, is to take the first few boards off the line and go over them with a fine-tooth comb to make sure they've been built to spec. It's at this point that you're likely to spot errors like incorrect parts being fitted, but this has nothing to do with EMC testing - any halfway-professional company would do a first-off inspection like this regardless of what official standards the product was required (or not) to meet.

@Peter Jones 2

I don't think everyone would be able to cope as easily as that, especially not if (as you seem to be implying) the shift from 9-5 to 8-4 working wasn't imposed across the board by every single company, school, organisation and other entity whos working hours interact in subtle and not so subtle ways throughout the day.

"If we assume some foreign power has managed to invade and hold Europe, between Russia and the Atlantic coast we must assume they have some neat toys of their own."

We don't really need to assume that, the Germans had been working on "neat toys" of their own for quite some time prior to D-Day - the V1 had been under development for almost 2 years by that point (and was pushed into service very soon after D-Day), and von Braun had been working on the ideas that eventually led to the V2 since before the outbreak of war. And although they weren't railguns, the cannons that formed the heart of the V3 projects had the same basic principle in mind - long range bombardment using relatively cheap and practically impossible to detect/intercept projectiles.

It's a question for debate that, had German industry been left to make up its own mind about what weaponry to develop, rather than being pushed and pulled in a variety of incompatible/incomprehensible directions on the whims of certain members of the German High Command, the Germans would have been able to deploy some seriously effective weaponry against the allied forces far sooner and in greater number than they eventually did.

Agree == Yes

Quite, I really don't understand the constant desire to minimise the size of things that are intended for use by the human hand. I mean, yeah, sure, a thinner phone is going to appeal to all those hip and trendy types who wear clothing so tight they can barely slip a credit card into their pocket without great difficulty, and for whom the current crop of not exactly heffalump-sized phones are simply far too chunky dahlink.

But once you've prised that oh so slender sliver of telecommunications wonderment out of your pocket, you realise that, being so thin, it's really not all that comfortable to hold, and by reducing the internal volume of the casing by 30-50% compared with the current breed of slim and trim phones, you've just thrown away a nice big chunk of space that could be filled with extra battery capacity.

My Desire S is about twice as thick as the Ascend, and for my average-sized man-hands, I'd say that's about as thin as I'd want to go in a phone - thin enough to fit easily into a trouser or shirt pocket, but chunky enough to give a reasonable amount of surface area on the sides for my fingertips to grasp it securely.

Looking at the resolution of the screengrabs in this article and comparing them with screengrabs in other reviews - including iPhone apps where the resolution of the original screengrabs definitely shouldn't be anything other than a couple of combinations - and then considering the way the Register articles are laid out with their rather narrow central column for all the article content, leads me to conclude that the screengrabs in this and other app reviews have been rescaled so that two can fit side by side in the central column, and aren't therefore entirely representative of the actual information displayed in the app itself...

Shame really, I'd prefer to see the articles illustrated with 1:1 scale screengrabs even if it means having to scroll a bit more down each page - or if the Reg design gurus absolutely insist on having side by side screengrabs like this and won't consider widening the central column just enough to fit two 1:1 grabs side by side, then at least make them clickable to open up the 1:1 scale originals.

"the Woz tells it like it is"

As you'd expect from someone with an engineering background.

"I'm really looking forward to being bumped to 100mb. Although with a mostly wireless network I'm not sure how much use it will be to me."

As a fellow 50Mb user, I say bring on the bump! And don't forget that with the bump in download speeds we'll presumably be getting the corresponding bump in upload speeds, so unless your wifi setup is a bit pants you should see some benefit there.

No, 200 quid for a "professionally" (I use the term loosely if Halfords are involved, having seen the quality of their work fitting a similar Dension setup) fitted DAB receiver, iPod adapter, USB adapter and line-in adapter. Ignoring the DAB receiver, the rest of that list would set you back at least 100 quid, so whilst 200 quid *would* be expensive if you only want to add DAB capabilities to your existing head unit, if you're also interested in adding the other stuff too then the price starts to look quite a bit more reasonable.

If I wasn't considering changing cars at some point in the next few months, I'd be seriously considering getting one of these fitted right now, because a) I'd love to have DAB reception on the move and b) I'd quite like to ditch the FM transmitter I'm currently using with my iPod (my car doesn't have anything fancy like a line-in input, and annoyingly the previous owner specced it to have both a CD changer AND a CD headunit, so I can't use the cassette adapter that worked so well on my last two cars).

"I don't think a £40k price tag is too much of a problem either, if the fit and finish are up to snuff"

And looking at the photos in this article, that's a fairly big if IMO. Aside from the in-yer-face visual impact of that touchscreen, the overall look of the interior doesn't sit quite right in my eyes - reminds me a bit of some other American cars that try to ape the European luxury manufacturers but despite using the same sort of materials and the same basic styling cues still end up just looking a bit cheap and a bit nasty. You mention Jaguar having no difficulty shifting XFs at that price tag, but I think if the XF cabin looked like this then things might well be different.

Oh yes, and if that bright yellow/red industrial emergency stop button between the front seats isn't just there for prototyping/debugging purposes, then say goodbye to even more looks-driven sales.

There's a growing number of TVs that are hooked up to PCs for one reason or another (mediacentre, gaming etc), where resolutions greater than 1920x1080 could be of use. And let's not forget that many monitors are nothing more than HDTV panels wrapped in a slightly different casing, so manufacturing higher resolution panels for TV use would also have a positive knock-on effect in the availability of higher resolution monitors.

Then it's their responsibility to learn what they mean, especially given how widely used imperial measurements are on UK road signage - this isn't some obscure difference between the UK and rest-of-EU rules of the road, this is almost as fundamental as the difference between driving on the left or the right...

The point is, the signage itself doesn't require any language skills to interpret and it's pretty much universally recognisable as a height/width restriction warning, so once you know the scaling factor to apply you're good to go. UK drivers who head across the channel are expected to know that speed limits are posted in kph rather than mph, and that blatting down the motorway at nearly 200kph just because the signs say you can do "120" is likely to draw your attention to the local plod. So why expect anything less from mainland drivers - particularly ones who do it for a living - who cross the channel in the opposite direction?

"Many truck drivers cannot speak or read english, therefore putting signs up saying "LOW BRIDGE, DO NOT USE SAT NAV" have no effect whatsoever on these drivers."

If they paid more attention to the almost universally recognisable height/width restriction signs that require only the ability to read numbers and figure out which way the arrow heads are pointing, the locals wouldn't need to erect additional signs...

"no bridges have been lowered or lanes narrowed since sat-navs were invented"

Are you sure about that, especially the "lanes narrowed" bit? There are an awful lot of artificial width restrictions out there, some of which are the *only* reason why HGVs end up getting stuck trying to use that route, and I don't believe for a moment that they were all installed prior to sat navs becoming commercially available.

You really believe that providing immediate but occasionally inaccurate feedback to the user is preferable to providing them accurate but occasionally laggy feedback?

If the key colour is changing, this should only ever mean that the keypress has been accepted as valid and passed onto the underlying app, never that the system thinks you might have pressed the key but a split-second later decides that, oh no, actually you didn't.

"Stop using f**king Sat Nav - If you don't know where your going use a map"

As much as I dislike people who blindly follow the advice of the hallowed device (and doubly dislike those who seem to think it's a HUD given the way they position it in the middle of their windscreen), I have almost as much disdain reserved for people who think that satnavs and maps are two completely seperate and incompatible means of navigation.

I grew up in a house full of maps, I spent almost as much time reading maps as I did reading books, and 30-odd years after picking up my first map I still get a tingle down my spine when I look at a finely drawn example of the cartographers art. And yes, every time I embark on a new journey, I plan the whole thing on the map first. But I also then take the satnav with me... As good as my memory is for maps and directions, it isn't photographic, so if anything should occur en-route that requires me to divert from the planned route then instead of having to pull over to refresh my memory of the roads in that area I can let the satnav handle the task of getting me back on track.

So yes, whilst I do believe people (especially those people responsible for getting motor vehicles from A to B) should have at least a basic grounding in the art of map reading, I absolutely don't subscribe to the notion that being able to read a map means that satnavs are redundant.

The concern I'd have is not whether anyone other than Sony is building support for this format into their devices, but rather whether or not anyone other than Sony will be allowed to make the cards.

It's not unavoidable if you require a distinctly different user input - e.g. a swipe - before the original target area is re-enabled for a single-tap action, or if your UI design leaves that area of the screen unused in the next UI state.

"Solution, hit once and actually wait for it to complete the call teardown rather than repeatedly poking the screen."

That's more of a workaround. The correct solution would be to redesign the UI so that undesirable actions can't occur as the result of double-tapping the screen during a UI state change.

"And on the bus, at least here in London, you only check in, you don't have to check out again."

That's because there's no price difference between a one stop hop and a terminus to terminus excursion. Elsewhere the bus companies expect to be paid according to distance travelled, so for smart ticketing to work you'd either need to tell the driver when boarding how much to debit from your card, or require people to touch-out when alighting.

"That's right, pockets. They have no cash float anymore it seems."

As the partner of a driver working out of a West London garage, I can confirm this much is true for our area of TfL-land at least. It wasn't so much of a problem when cash fares were still fairly popular, but with the push to get people onto Oyster it now means that the odd times when someone does want/need to pay cash can result in a fairly significant depletion of whatever float the driver has available.

I wouldn't be against this idea if

a) the catalogue of titles available wasn't simply a duplication of the existing stuff they're trying to flog, but a full catalogue of anything and everything that has ever been released

b) the service allowed for "pick and mix" compilations as well as reproductions of the original albums

c) the price of each track/disc was reduced in recognition that the disc you're buying isn't a factory-pressed original with an expected lifespan of several decades, but rather a CD-R with a generally somewhat reduced life expectancy

"Does it think becoming another technology reseller like PCWorld/Currys is going to save it"

To be honest, I think they're in with a reasonable chance. I had a browse in their revamped Westfield Shepherds Bush store recently and was pleasantly surprised. All the tablets and laptops I looked at were powered up and unlocked, giving customers the chance to have a proper play with them, as opposed to the policy in certain other stores where everything is stuck on the password entry screen so all you can do is wiggle the mouse pointer around and get a vague idea of the screen quality based on whatever static image it happens to be displaying. And given the sorts of locations they've got, they could appeal to the impulse buyer doing a bit of window shopping in their lunchbreak where the sudden urge to buy something right there and then could override any thoughts of "ooh, let's just check it out here and then order it online when I get back to the office/home", whereas the out of town warehouses operated by DSG/Comet don't have as much scope for grabbing that sort of customer.

I can sort of see your point, although as someone who learned about computers back in the days when storage space was relatively expensive, and access times were relatively slow, I still find it hard to let go of the idea that every byte matters.

There's also the question of who this is aimed at - if you've got a handful of PDFs on your home PC with a few hundred GB of free space, then what's a few extra MB here or there? But what if you're a business with hundreds of thousands of PDFs on a server, with your users generating millions of accesses every day to those files? I'm guessing that being able to shave even just a few % off each file might then start to make good sense...

Not all compression schemes are created equal... e.g. the run-length encoding (RLE) scheme used in some BMP files is a simple but sometimes quite effective means of losslessly compressing image data, but you can pretty much guarantee that an RLE-compressed BMP will still be able to be losslessly compressed even further using a half-decent general purpose compression tool (e.g. 7Zip).

Even using a decent compression scheme, the creator of the file may have decided not to use the highest levels of compression available as a trade-off to reduce the amount of time/memory required to generate the compressed output, leaving some scope to further reduce the file size if another party is willing to expend the additional effort required to run the compressor at its highest level.

The pixel count of each panel might be identical, but unless the image processing capabilities of the LCDs in the review are at least as good as those of the plasma, then the additional artifacting may reduce image clarity. The improved colour rendering and contrast of plasmas also helps give the impression of a clearer image when compared to all but the best LCDs.

So if you take the comment as referring literally to the pixel count alone then, yes,it is an odd thing to say. But in the context it was made - between the comments "blacks are deep" and "images vibrant" - it comes across to me more like a comment on the perceived resolution. Which is exactly the sort of thing a TV review ought to be mentioning.

Saw a plumbers van driving through north London with the reg PO07 RAP - although oddly enough the space was shifted one character to the left, can't think why they'd have wanted to do that...

"...and got rapidly sick of students constantly saying ..."

Perhaps they all just thought you needed help playing Starglider 2...

Vacuum reservoir as backup for hydraulic or electrical systems? On my current car (also a Jag, though a S rather than an X) a faulty sensor was causing the engine to randomly cut out, and as I recall there was no perceptible reserve of assistance for either braking or steering. Which was nice...

Why would people want to drag everything onboard when...

...hold baggage is guaranteed to be handled with kid gloves from the point it leaves your hands at the checkin desk to the point you pick it up again on the carousel, arriving in exactly the same condition as when you last saw it

...hold baggage is guaranteed not to be opened except in your presence, and absolutely guaranteed not to be opened, have items removed, and then closed up again, except in your presence

...hold baggage is guaranteed to be always ready and waiting for you the moment you step into the terminal building at your destination

...hold baggage is carried for free on every single airline, and every single airline/airport has adopted a globally consistent set of rules regarding how many items each passenger is allowed to check in, how much each of them can weigh individually and how much their combined weight is allowed to be, and what sizes/shapes/styles of casing are able to be handled without the item being classed as oversized/oddly-shaped/special handling etc.

Why indeed... I know some people really do take the regal wee when it comes to cabin baggage, but given the increased amount of stuff carried onboard by average passengers, I feel fairly confident in suggesting there are some genuinely good reasons why people are choosing not to check stuff into the hold whenever possible.

The app may be reading the IMEI for authorisation/activation purposes, or it may be checking the phone state to avoid interfering with calls. It's unfortunate that the permission system isn't finer-grained so that apps could just ask for the exact permissions they need without getting others they don't thrown in for free, but as it currently stands having that particular permission doesn't mean the app *will* read your phone number, it only means that it *could*.

As is Reckless Racing...