Posts by James Thomas

STL algorithms

I never used these either - until Lambdas. Now that you can use and algorithm on a single line they have become very handy.

Lets at least be fair

All of the articles I've seen comparing the S3 to the Nexus 4 seem to use over-inflated prices for the S3.

Amazon are selling the blue 16gb S3 for 389.99 (not the £430 quoted in the article)

While the equivalent 16gb Nexus 4 is 279.99. (not the 8gb £230 price quoted).

It's still a bargain, and I would have bought one had I not bought an S3 last month (Doh!), but £110 is a far cry from £200.

Stupid subscription

The idea of yet another subscription would certainly put me off. Someday soon you won't be able to buy anything that doesn't require some sort of wallet draining tax to keep it fully operational, but until that day comes I'm steering well clear.

Besides, it's not even necessary. The console should be driven off the smartphone in your pocket via bluetooth.

You missed one out

What's the f-ing point?

The BBC showed a good documentary about this not too long ago. 'The Box That Changed The Worlkd' or something similar.

Ballmer badly needs to go

MS has had nothing but failures under his watch. If I was a shareholder I would have been kicking up a stink years ago.

Bloody immigrants!

Immigrants going over there and refusing to integrate! They should go back where they came from!

Upscaling is important too

Compression is important, but if you're watching SD material on an HD set the upscaling and filtering also makes a massive difference.

I use an HTPC using DXVA for rendering with carefully chosen codecs, and 0 TV scaling (since the PC always outputs 1080p) and watch Freeview. All sources look great, with artifacts greatly reduced. OTOH my friend's Sky+ on an equally sized TV looks, frankly, like shit with tons of artifacts and blockyness.

Properly upscaled SD material on an HD set can look a lot better than native SD, even with the crap bitrates some channels use.

Btw. I sit about 1.5m from my 42" and I'm pretty sure I could tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. I never understood why people by massive sets and then sit miles away from them.

The tougher question

'What man's house could you raid and NOT find a porn stash?'

8.5bn?

Doesn't seem like a very good deal if EBay sold it for $1.9. I'd be interested to know who ran the private equity firm that owns it, because it looks to me like they are making a suspiciously large profit at MS's expense.

Admirable

As much as I dislike Apple for various reasons it's hard not to applaud that sort of behaviour. VPs get paid a lot of money, when they cock up they should pay the price. Far too often the guys at the top get away with passing the buck.

If investment banks all had Jobsian 'tyrant' at the top perhaps we wouldn't all have got so screwed by their incompetence.

Please

Guy sounds like an idiot. Nothing quoted in the aritcle is anything other than Marketing 101, and is certainly not the magic behind Apple's current success.

What about Android?

I can't test this myself, but surely you can get all of the VoD services on android already, since it's not crippled by the Apples refusal to allow flash content?

If so then it's just another reason to steer clear of the Apple lock-in.

I bloody is generic.

The problem here is that while it's possible that App Store might technically be non-generic enough to qualify for protection (though given Apples market share using a measurment like '88% of references are to the Apple store' is idiotic), it is certainly generic enough that protection will stiffle competition.

What are people supposed to call non-Apple app stores? Application Marketplace? Program Shop?

If apple wanted trademark protection they should have called it the iShop or some other branded nonsense.

Could be DisplayPort

Charlie over at SemiAccurate claims to have info that the iPhone 5 will have a mini-display port output, so it makes sense for it to be on the iPad 2 also, though as you say on the iPad I would expect there to be an HDMI out.

OTOH DP -> HDMI adapters aren't too pricey these days, especially if you only need 1080p.

Precision?

I'm highly sceptical. While it sounds ok in theory the critical part seems to be determining exactly where the observers eyes are. I'm assuming a reasonably high level of precision is required here for a believable 3D image to work and any imprecision could break the whole effect or, even worse, make the user quite sick.

Frankly I don't think it's possible, expecially if you allow the observers to move about.

Well, duh

Why else would somebody get an unlimited call package if they weren't going to use a lot of minutes?

No this again

The BBC and other video producers have already faught this battle once, and they aren't going to lose this time ether.

If you sold something you know can't afford to provide, tough titty. Fire your marketard department, they're the idiots who got you into the mess to begin with.

Agrreed!

This sort of socially responsible voluntary euthenasia should be encouraged!

Wait!

I thought it was a really bad idea until Palin opposed it.

Now I'm confused.

OUTRAGE!

I wouldn't be suprised if the BBC had an all-you-can-eat deal with Getty. It was probably cheaper to buy the image than to organise a photographer and equipment.

Wow

I didn't know Lego make 'Perv Scanner' sets!

Adaptation or not...

The result is the same - not action. Whether or not that is the best course of action is debatable (though it's clear which position the writer favours) but calling it 'Adaptation' is no better than calling it 'denying'. It's essentially a PR rebranding of exactly the same policy that's been pushed from one side of the debate the whole time - do nothing, ignore the problem and hope somebody else fixes it in the future. The human default option of passing the buck.

OTOH, while the Eco-Activists may have won the PR battle some time ago they were always going to lose the war. Fighting against the hubris, greed and inertia of the entire human race was always futile.

Wow.

I wonder if an ID card will become a valuable collectors item in a couple of decades?

It's amazing how New Labour can be even more hateful out of power than they were in power. Alan Johnson must either be utterly stupid to still be defending ID cards.

What are the editors thinking...

The editors should be ashamed of themselves for allowing such a blatantly partisan piece to be posted.

The fact that it's idiotic drivel is almost irrelevant.

But....

I would expect that a higher death rate among junkies would actually be the result of their deteriorated physical condition caused by long term drug abuse rather than just 'being high'.

So it's essentially a marketting/coverup excercise for Taser/The Police force that means absolutely nothing.

Londoners do love it...

At least those that can remember what it was like before. The introduction of the Oyster has had a massive improvement on bus speeds (due to quicker boarding times) particularly, and makes getting on the Tube much quicker too.

I don't entirely see the point of using it for other things (maybe vending machines?), but it's definitely been a major improvement for the transport netwrok.

Thanks New Labour!

Take your ID cards and shove them up your arses!

And then fuck off.

Pedictable

Tbh it was pretty silly of the app developers to not expect Apple to have a change of heart, it was only a matter of time really. This is what happens when you live at the behest of a single company.

What is utterly reprehensible is Apple only doing this to people too small to fight back. They know full-well that what they are doing could land them in court if they targetted someone with enough money to see it through.

Wow.

I actually don't understand how they've taken all those parts and managed to make them perform so poorly. Your test system (practically identical to a system I own, just a different make of SSD) is much cheaper to build and outperforms it in every area.

Maybe they used cheapest mobo. and RAM that money can buy?