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The point is that the Motorola design might be a cheaper solution, bit the phone simply looks shittier

Yes, because this looks MUCH better than this.

Maybe, but this looks better than this. Coincidently, that picture comes from a whole site dedicated to cracked Moto defy screens.

The point is that the Motorola design might be a cheaper solution, bit the phone simply looks shittier

Yes, because this looks MUCH better than this.

But yeah, keep comparing your iPhone to a Mercedes if it makes you feel better.

New phone almost as fast as month old phone.

Xperia Z1 was released same day as iPhone 5s. It is faster, waterproof, and has higher res 1080 screen. It also has a 20.7MP camera with a much larger 1/2.3" sensor.

I thought you could get an app that makes the iPhone waterproof?
Yeah, here's the ad.

Yup Apple's wifi kit would never allow unfiltered IPv6 traffic into your internal network by default, or expose filenames of attached disk drives to unauthenticated users.

You should definitely be feeling pretty smug.

It really is a nice OS, and if you can accept that you won't be using the mouse very much to navigate around it because the "must use touch" has ruined that experience, it's not even irritating. There's even some value to some of the "create native apps for websites" stuff that's moved in from the tablet world. The big issue is that people load it, and try to find the start menu and it's not there and they get grumpy. Then when they eventually find the start menu they can't find their apps and when they work out how to search it uses clumsy non intuitive mouse movements, especially on dual screen. Your first few minutes of the OS show you all of the horrible mistakes that were made. Most people won't learn all the keyboard shortcuts and will either hate the OS or install stuff to bring back the old look and miss out on some of the new things. Microsoft seems to think that people will learn to use it and love it, I have my doubts.

With a keyboard though, it's actually quite nice, press the win key and start typing, you find your apps, win+x opens a neat little system admin menu, win+f opens file search, plus a whole bunch of others. The "touch and mouse work the same" was an idiotic decision, I get why they did it, but I still believe it's a fundamental OS. Underneath all that though, they've improved the OS quite dramatically. It was also the easiest in place upgrade I've ever done for Windows as well as being the cheapest windows upgrade I've ever bought.

I think their timing is perfect. The explosive leaps in mobile phone specifications has started to taper off. People are starting to get bored with Apple and Google ... and having another offering may be attractive to some for a personal phone. For businesses - whether you like it or not - I think its going to be a neck in neck race between Microsoft and BB - Microsoft has an edge with its existing server install base and Office integreation - but I think Blackberry is going to have an edge with its experience in the IT room and its understanding for what IT departments want. I like this link. Its impressive to say the least and shows one of the strong suits of BB10 that really does matter. http://www.cnet.com.au/blackberry-10-browser-beats-every-desktop-browser-339342636.htm

The Canadian mint is releasing a quarter with a dinosaur on it where, when you turn off the light, a glow in the dark image of it's skeleton shows up. I find this more interesting and relevant to my day to day life than digital currency I'm not likely to use in the near future... unless forced. Well that, and the fact they Canadian mint has just been ordered to stop producing the penny... Canada will penny free very soon. Anyway, I like the current system of Interac and cash very much, thank you. With the Harper government busily trying to catch up to the U.S. in terms of snooping on its own citizens (not sure anyone could catch up to the British government... even the Chinese), the less I want to do with any form of Canadian government information network.

Photoshop Touch has already been out for a few months on Android tablets actually, and the iPad version is "as close to identical to the Android version as is possible, given the platform differences". So that's no reason to get an iPad over an Android tablet.

Name one, because I'd set up sandisk and Cowon and Rio and just about every kind of MP3 and PMP known to man and I have NEVER actually seen on that preferred NFS

Here you go it's a fine player that plays anything format you could really want, but smb performance is abysmal, nfs is the only way to go for hd streaming over the network.

And as for NAS? that's what those cheapo HP WHS boxes are for. Its a HELL of a lot cheaper and unlike some jury rigged homebuilt it will actually be efficient and is actually BUILT for that job, its also great for media and file serving since it has a ...drumroll...server OS!

Oh, you mean like the dedicated cheapo home storage boxes that were already installed when i arrived? it handled four disks at the time and achieved a maximum throughput over the network of 4mb/sec. When I made the linux nas (with the only new hardware being an extra plain sata controller, rest he already had) he wanted some more storage so it now uses five drives and pretty much saturates gigabit ethernet (sequential read speeds of between 320-350mb/sec too).

Oh and that dedicated embedded nas box ran an ancient version of linux with softraid, so reading the old drives and updating/using them was not a problem.

For the jobs you have it would frankly be insane to use a desktop because its not designed to support the connections you require

It would be insane to use a typically installed windows, linux works fine and dandy as both server and desktop, the people understand that they have to leave that machine on in order for the media hardware to access it (there are five 40+ inch tv's in that house with some form of network playback device attached). But it also functions to access the internet and end user purposes also.

look up the versions of NT/2K and you'll see they had Enterprise and Data Center for the jobs you listed and NT/2K pro was for workstation.

Yes, because we all love paying more for the os than we do the entirety of the hardware, and only to still have more limitations.... win2k enterprise edition was damn expensive

The only difference between server and client is which one is providing information, the hardware is not typically a limitation, a modern i5 or i7 has no trouble serving up many a webpage or media, on a modern machine the software is the limitation. In fact half the reason it was setup this way was the abysmal performance and lack of flexibility with embedded solutions.

With windows you have this arbitrary line between 'this is used for a server' and 'this is used for a desktop' with linux, it will do whatever you damn well want it to do, which isn't that the point after all? for software to do what the user wants?

As far as power consumption is concerned, having a bunch of disks spinning already consumes a fair bit of power, the extra overhead of the machine is balanced with the immediate availablility of a machine that is always on and ready to do what you wish, with more flexibility and performance superior to any cheap and nasty embedded nas device.

The windows home server 2011 you listed is decent value. It still presents quite a few limitations that are not present in a linux solution but to most these would be moot, although it isn't windows 7 which was what the topic was originally about. With that kind of pricing I fail to see why desktop users aren't simply using windows home server as their primary desktop os. Cheaper than windows 7 and with less restrictions.

Doesn't look like the app I did for this guy was listed.

http://www.cnet.com.au/nothing-says-marry-me-like-an-iphone-app-339307517.htm

I already bought an Acer TV with Wifi in 2006... It's only too bad Acer discontinued this line, it could have become really great... And yes, the built in PC with LAN and Wifi did run linux (but the default menu is pretty useless, and the software hasn't been updated since 2006 too).

These are same guys responsible for the 37" LCD screens dubbed "The Kogan Kevin 37" that cost the same amount that Rudd handed out to citizens as part of the Stimulus package. Kogan Kevin 37

No, it was for PS2 backward compatibility. At the time the format wars between BD and HDDVD were going on. Although I was sure BD would win out I wasn't willing to bank on it. Actually, I've had my PS3 for three years and only own one BD movie. Now I've read they're coming out with one of two new BD formats that will render the player in the PS3 obsolete. http://www.cnet.com.au/new-blu-rays-get-2-5x-storage-won-t-work-in-your-player-339302332.htm

I'm not talking about the bandgap. I'm talking about the fact that the surfaces of most CMOS chips have a series of narrow slots through which the light must pass. Call it gaps, call it slots, call it circuit traces, call it whatever. These parts don't have such structures, and that significantly changes the angles of light that these sorts of parts can detect.

And I reiterate the question: do the benefits of absorbing all light (including light from near-parallel angles) outweigh the problems that this causes?

Not even sure if that's relevant. I don't know if there's any precedent in the US, but in the Australian iiNet decision, each torrent was found to constitute a single instance of 'making available'.

a person makes each film available online
only once through the BitTorrent system and electronically transmits each film only once
through that system

- Section 10 of the Summary

I found references to 95% of the claim in one search
http://www.cnet.com.au/ford-fiesta-econetic-limbos-under-4l-100km-339290910.htm

just the year is wrong.

Looks like I spoke too soon. The 3G actually is free. However, my remaining points are still valid.

Do check out ZFS-Fuse . Development has accelerated over the past couple of months and it is very usable with decent performance.

Atleast one commercial offering is using ZFS-FUSE in its products - however, no idea whether it is using a custom non-community build.

I am using ZFS-Fuse on Ubuntu Hardy with 2 hard disks in a mirrored configuration, serving its files over Samba. We do incremental backups everyday (which the filesystem supports) and are quite happy with it.

The exodus is already here.

Sony have done that. It required a reboot unfortunately.

http://www.cnet.com.au/sony-vaio-vgn-sz483n-339284061.htm

Actually I think a better solution would be to put a PCI Express slot in a docking station and integrated graphics in the laptop. Then you could disable the integrated GFX when you dock and use discrete instead. Even better you could use a relatively cheap desktop card.

Mind you Asus have tried that and it didn't exactly catch on

http://www.techspot.com/news/24044-asus-introduces-xg-modular-laptop-docking-station.html

Probably the reason is only a vanishingly small percentage of people care about gaming performance on a laptops. Oh, and at the moment docking stations use a proprietary connector so the market for things like this is even more limited.

You can get an E-IPS panel, I recently got me a Dell 2209WA screen, was fairly cheap.

"specialize in removing cameras from phones, such as the iPhone."

I was thinking the same thing. Would it be so hard to gently "dig" the camera out of there, then epoxy a small round plastic piece the same size of the hole and the same color of the iPhone? Then when he says "no camera" he can inspect it all he wants and look, no camera. If you wanna get really technical you can use the same techniques used for auto body repairs, with the buffing and sanding, etc. If done right you'd never be able to tell a hole was ever there. Here's a guide on how to take your iphone apart, one section even completely removes the camera.

If you're not comfortable doing it yourself, iResQ does it for $99, or this guy says he'll do it for $40

Again, wrong. Not insightful, wrong.

The 15" MBP claims a battery life of 5 hrs. Dell claims a battery life of 7 hrs for their comparable Latitude E6500 with the extended battery.

Dell: 5.2 pounds, 1-1.3" inches thick (depending on battery)
Mac: 6.6 pounds, 1 inch think (at least according to you)

According to Macworld, the 2.4 Ghz 15" MBPs have a ~2.5 hour battery life. The Dell was recently tested with a 9-cell battery at ~1.5 hours, though you can add a 12-cell battery on top of that to get somewhere in the range 3-4 hours, I'd estimate.

It's not HALF the size, it does NOT have 4x the battery life, is not vastly superior in build quality (I've seen both) and "user experience" is a vague, nebulous, and dubious term used only by Mac fanboys.

So you're going to pay $700 more for a quarter inch?

E-reader, hmm, ever sat on a paperback you where looking, or the TV remote, or even a cell phone. At $359 an e-reader is just way to expensive, it has to achieve disposable prices to survive let alone get past the issue of just way too many devices. The closest in reality that most people will get to an e-reader is a netbook with a rotating touch screen display along the lines of http://www.cnet.com.au/laptops/laptops/0,239035649,339294108,00.htm.

In a depression a mass market product like a newspaper has to be sufficiently cheap that it reaches the majority of it's target audience and make that audience available to advertisers, prices range from free to at most a couple of dollars ie. pocket change. An e-reader for the majority on a very limited income is completely unrealistic and sounds more like a desperate bid by the current executive team to bleed off as much of the shareholders remaining value in the company before the doors are finally shut or the shareholders wake up and remove the current way overpaid executive team and replace them with people who can adapt to internet publishing.

Oddly enough the print industry is likely to do a little better in the depression even in light of falling advertising revenues. As people wind back on their expenditures, cut back on internet access fees, don't buy a new computer, cancel cable TV, avoid expensive software and end up spending on the news the only thing they can afford, pocket change. After all newspaper often has many diverse money saving uses after you have read it, perhaps they are better off promoting those uses than spending money on expensive digital readers.

Really? I would consider it spyware myself. They have spied on their customers too many times for me to ever put Realplayer anywhere near my network. For examples see here which is for 10.5 and their latest 11, and here is PC World's Steve Bass advising folks to grab the BBC version of Realplayer as it is a "spyware free" version. Personally, I just avoid anything in Realplayer formats like the plague. I had to fix enough Realplayer infected machines in the late 90's and early 00's for me to ever touch that crap. But that is my 02c,YMMV

Households, not individuals. And assuming people you happen to know are a representative sample is always a mistake. Assuming people you happen to know are representative of an entire nation of people over seven thousand miles away is flat out idiotic.

The 25% number is actually one of the lower estimates for overall penetration. If you look at the Consumer Electronics Association they pegged penetration at 30% back in June, with a projection of 36% by YE07.

Hell, a cursory look seems to indicate your friends aren't even representative of Australia given that this article seems to imply significant market penetration in Australia as well.

Problem is most people can't make those assertions.
Furthermore, it quite possible that 'respected' sites are serving malware without even knowing it.
So what happens if a respected site, is serving drive-by-download ads from google adsense?

I remember having THX (or something similar) on the cassette tapes.

That was Dolby calibration tones. Dolby worked by boosting the highs in recording to improve the recorded high frequency S/N ratio and then reversing the process on playback. To properly set the attenuation curve a refrence tone was recorded to calibrate the playback levels. They still use it on studio videotape. The specification is here.

www.exn.ca/producersguide/HD_Prod_Specs_04.doc

This was quickly dropped as it caused much confusion with consumers. A few with high end and super ears with unlimited budget for equipment though that was the best thing since sliced bread. It's too bad it couldn't be shoved off into an extras menu somewhere like THX calibration screens included in many DVDs.

http://www.cnet.com.au/dvdpvr/dvdrecorders/0,239035839,240056302,00.htm

Here you go. No batteries needed. Pretty immune to dust as it has no moving parts. Stream music from the house. Get toons all day and blast it all you want on the shop boom box.

http://www.cnet.com.au/wireless/streamingmedia/0,239028928,240059371,00.htm

This is about a potential exploit of Bonjour that Apple has apparently already patched.

There is no information on how it is started or spread. Usually when worms appear, they've already plowed through several million dollars worth of damage. Since a Mac worm would have to rely on a lot of planets aligning (ie, enough Macs running in the same subnet, configured similarly, and the worm being spawned by a user) it would be hard to imagine what kind of problems such a theoretical exploit would cause.

It is easier to understand the intent and propagation of a media worm, which infects all the IDG and CNET publications and spawns out FUD about how Macs have theoretical exploits that are generating more stories than the actual exploits available for Windows.

Given that the creator of the "worm framework" explicitly says in the article that he is getting paid to develop it to show "Apple Computers are just as susceptible to Malware as Windows based ones."

What is malware? Slashdot cites Inqtana and Leap as known Mac OS X malware, but InqTana was a proof on concept worm designed to spread between Macs with Bluetooth file sharing enabled. It only ever existed in a lab and its propagation method has since been patched. InqTana

Leap is a trojan for iChat that is unable to replicate. It is as dangerous as sending someone a chat request and telling them to pour water on their computer.

This new Bonjour exploit is as yet an unproven claim. We know there are over 10,000 live malware products for Windows. So it's not really true that Macs are just as susceptible (ie "likely or liable to be influenced or harmed by a particular thing") or there would be real problems for Mac users.

That doesn't mean there will never be Mac exploits or security problems and that users needn't bother to be concerned about security issues, but it does highlight the absurdity of a media willing to repeat the unproven claims of a nobody.

Of course, if you're worried about Bonjour worms, you shouldn't run unknown software, and you shouldn't join unknown wireless networks with your Mac. It's hard to imagine that this will cause any damage outside of the bloggers who repeat it without any criticism as proof that "Macs can have malware!"

The RAZR is the most popular cell phone in the US, and the newest version (available in the US through Cingular) interfaces directly with iTunes. This is a much nicer phone than the ROKR and comes with a 512MB microsd card (see review). Although it has the restriction of only holding 100 songs, this is about what will fit on the included memory card. I have one and I find it a compelling alternative to carrying around a separate nano. I'm not sure why people are so dismissive of this.

The PS3 is for games.

No it isn't. :-)

Why don't you give that same tip to Apple, whose DRM is by far the most prevelant, and most restrictive to boot? (It *only* works on Apple hardware/software.)

It is the least restrictive ( source: http://www.cnet.com.au/mp3players/0,239028967,2400 54461,00.htm )
    - Fairplay encumbered AAC:
            - usic purchased can be played on up to five PCs
            - Single songs can be burnt to CD an unlimited number of times
            - Playlists can be burned up to seven times
            - Music purchased can be transferred on an unlimited number of iPods
    - Protected WMA:
            - You can burn the song up to three times onto CD.
            - You can transfer it an unlimited number of times to three portable music players that can play licensed WMA files.
            - Up to four re-installs per year allowed

It should also be noted that the Fairplay AAC songs work on both MacOS and Windows (I know none that work on Linux), on the condition that you have iTunes of course. This still doesn't give an excuse to having DRM at all and if the online music sellers are having such a hard time, then they can thank the music industry for imposing DRM.

I have one mobile that does almost exactly what you want. Its the Nokia 6280 and it has a slide form-factor so it takes up very little space when closed and has a decent keyboard when open. It takes mini-sd and I use it all the time to listen to music with a 1GB card and stereo bluetooth headphones which of course can also be used as a headset to initiate calls with the voice recognition feature. The audio quality is excellent, both the mobile and the headphones support the A2DP standard (although I had to update the 6280's flash from vesion 3.4 to version 5.1) The only down side is the battery, it lasts for a whole day of music listening, but if you make more than one call the battery takes a big hit.

I don't think YouTube are going to be too worried about this new startup, they've been doing it for almost 6 months already.

I highly doubt it. That particular comparison shows one year in the overall six year lifespan of the PS2. How much money was Nintendo making between 2001 and 2005, before the DS took attention off crappy sales of the Gamecube?

If you look at the statistics:

Cumulative Nintendo game sales to March 2005
Cumulative PS2 software sales to July 2005

Even accounting for the small difference in intervals, we can see that the PS2 has sold about 5x as many titles as the Gamecube (which makes sense, given that it sold about 5x as many consoles). Even if Sony spent a billion developing the PS2, and took a billion dollar loss on the production, Nintendo would still have to make enormous margins on each Gamecube to make up for the sheer greater volume of PS2 software sold. If we assume about $7 per game (which is a historical figure from the early PS2 days), and a $2bn setup loss, Sony made about $4bn in profit from license sales. If we assume that Nintendo makes about the same license fee per game, they make about $1bn on GC games. If we further assume the GC had no R&D cost, and they never took any losses on the console, Nintendo would have to make a profit of $136 on each of ~22m Gamecubes sold to offset the extra 700m PS2 games sold. That's absurd for a console that introd at $200, and quickly dropped to $150 then $99.

Not only that, but WMP 11 won't play HD DVD or Blu-ray discs out of the box either: http://www.cnet.com.au/software/operatingsystems/0 ,39029541,40092160,00.htm

iTunes uses MPEG 4 Audio http://www.m4a.com/ for its encoding. There seems to be a lot of varying and conflicting opinions on the differences in audio quality (ie. here: http://forums.macnn.com/archive/index.php/t-158250 .html , here: http://www.xciv.org/~meta/audio-shootout/ ) but my university lecturer, who has been a professional sound engineer for a long time, has told me in the past that M4A is much better at preserving the original sound than MP3, with a 96kbs M4A file being equivalent to something like a 260kbs MP3. I'm not sure if he's right as I can't seem to find any supporting evidence but the general consensus from my googling, other than the last link I posted, seems to be that M4A offers a higher quality output than MP3.

If by "weighted rateing" you mean the iPod's signal to noise ratio (SNR), Apple doesn't post it on their website, but I did find this: http://www.cnet.com.au/mp3players/mp3players/0,390 36128,40062302-2,00.htm Note that most people can't tell the difference between a couple of dB, so most of the higher rated ones are fairly evenly matched, and I wouldn't be suprised if the results for those would change if the test was carried out again by somebody else. The lower ones are particularly bad, though; you would probably hear the white noise during the quiet parts of your music :)

Easy to read version (without bells and whistles): http://www.cnet.com.au/pdas/pdas/print.htm?TYPE=st ory&AT=40063806-39035588t-30000042c

Text only version

Seriuosly, would you even want to use a $100 laptop??? Does it have the "Designed for Windows for Workgroups" sticker on the case

A laptop costing only $100 may not sound like much but for someone who doesn't have access to a computer it can make a big difference. Much like the Simputer, it would allow the masses to have a computer. With one and internet access it could enable many to improve their lot in life. That's a big idea behind the Simputer, as an example a farmer in India can use it to check the going price of food commodities to make sure any middleman offers them a descent price for what they've grown. Many farmers in third world countries get the short end of the stick by what are called coyotes in Latin America. Not knowing how much commodities like coffee sale for internationally farmers sale their product cheap to these coyotes who then sale it on the open market. With a "$100 laptop" with wifi or another method of accessing the internet farmers can look up how much produce is selling for and therefore they can get a better price thus improving their lives.

Oh, obviously ther isn't an "Designed for Windows for Workgroups" sticker on them. The OS used is Linux. Much of the computers used in the Third World use Linux. Windows raises the price of computers as compared to Linux, especially with the requirements for Windows. In part for this reason MS released a low cost version of Windows in Asia.

http://cnet.com.au/laptops/laptops/0,39035649,4006 3900,00.htm

No report on whether the bulge makes things snappier. ;-)

CNET.com.au also has an article on this issue (with photos): http://cnet.com.au/laptops/laptops/0,39035649,4006 3900,00.htm

AU$830 / $999. Ouch.

"The article or article summary is written by someone that wants HD-DVD to win, and uses the UMD failure to try to achieve that."

That specific quote is attributed to an anonymous exec at Universal Studios Home Entertainment, a member of the HD-DVD consortium.

http://www.cnet.com.au/hometheatre/dvd/0,39025983, 40057346,00.htm

A lot of non-technical people could be easily tricked by the packaging on this. Have you looked at the happy Viiv logo?

When I see that, I can't help but picture some delicious-looking carton of food, with a bright yellow sticker: "Now with CARCINOGEN!"

http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/pcs/0,39029439,400 61082,00.htm

Because this article states otherwise.

http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/pcs/0,39029439,400 61082,00.htm A local Dell spokesman has effectively denied rumours that it's acquired rival PC vendor Alienware, suggesting that all speculation should be taken "with a grain of salt".

Linksys has had this for quite a while now - they call it "SES" (Secure Easy Setup). Details here or here .