What happened? Twelve years! You hit me with a cricket bat! Ha! Twelve years!
Friday, June 07
Irritatants
The next time someone asserts that the United States is a Christian nation, or was founded on Christian principles, I'm going to drop Mount Rushmore on their head.
(Prompted by the twaddle spouted by Andrew Klavan over at PJTV, but it's a video and their video player sucks, so unless they post a transcript I can't be bothered tearing his nonsense to tiny shreds as it deserves.)
irritatant, n: Something that gives one the irrits.
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Their soi-disant video player is actually a wrapper for Youtube, unless they've changed it in the last few weeks. It's probably not worth the effort of doing a view source and tracking down the right URL, though.
Posted by: RickC at Saturday, June 08 2013 09:25 AM (WQ6Vb)
The first pictures I saw of the Asus PadNote Fone made it look like an ugly piece of do-not-want, whatever the specs.
Found a better picture.
Want now.
6" 1080p IPS screen, stylus, Android 4.2, 3G, but with an Atom processor rather than Arm. Which does not seem like a sensible choice, at least not until the next-gen Baytrail / Merrifield Atoms come out. But it's the only device even announced so far that has a 1080p+ screen in the gap between 5 and 9 inches. Possibly only 16GB of built-in storage, which is barely adequate, but supports up to 64GB of microSD.
I think the problem here is that it's just too big to be convenient as a phone. My Droid DNA has a 5" screen and I think it's about as big a phone as I could manage. Anything larger would be a problem.
About the stylus: my iPaq has a stylus, and there's a place in the iPaq to store it. That doesn't appear to be the case for this one. If the stylus is loose, it's going to get lost or broken.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, June 07 2013 01:20 AM (+rSRq)
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I rarely use my phone or either of my big tablets (Nexus 10, iPad 3), but use my Nexus 7 constantly. So I'm looking for something that will be a tablet 98% of the time and isn't much smaller than the Nexus 7, but can make phone calls when needed. I'm sure most people will have other priorities, but Samsung has sold millions of Galaxy Notes, so it's not that small a market segment.
It does have a little bay for the stylus, it's just in the corner that you can't see in that photo.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 07 2013 01:50 AM (PiXy!)
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I was going to say, the Galaxy Notes have a stylus bay exactly where you can't see in that pic.
It's pretty nice. The phone knows when you've removed or inserted it, and will give you haptic feedback.
Posted by: RickC at Friday, June 07 2013 12:10 PM (WQ6Vb)
Where's the 11.6" Haswell Windows 8 notebook with the detachable 2560x1600 screen which turns into an Android tablet with a Wacom digitiser and a stylus and WiDi for using it as a detached touchscreen and a Thunderbolt dock for desktop use?
Given what has been shown at Computex this year, it's possible that there's a device with those exact specs and I just missed it.
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Given Bluestacks, you could almost have such a thing already.
Posted by: RickC at Thursday, June 06 2013 08:45 AM (WQ6Vb)
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Last time I tried it the Bluestacks experience wasn't exactly stellar. Which is a shame, because it's something that should work, and would be incredibly useful.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 06 2013 02:35 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, June 06 2013 03:51 PM (lpH3d)
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It not only makes coffee, it even drinks it for you!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 06 2013 04:37 PM (PiXy!)
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I tried Bluestacks recently on a Trinity A8-5600K with a discrete Radeon 5670. It worked decently. I think the problems were more that it's a little twitchy than any slowness per se. Since my new i5-3570K doesn't (yet) have a discrete card I haven't tried it there (with an AMD card you can download BS from the AMD website.)
Posted by: RickC at Friday, June 07 2013 12:11 PM (WQ6Vb)
While everyone's waiting for someone to fix the limitations of the Nexus 7 (slow CPU, limited memory and storage, low-res screen - by this year's standards, anyway), Toshiba stepped in and launched their Excite Pure, which is basically the Nexus 7 internals with a 10" screen and costing $50 more; the Excite Pro, which is just the Excite Write without the cool stuff; and the Excite Write, which fixes the limitations of the Nexus 10, upgrading from a dual-core A15 CPU to quad, adding a microSD slot, and building in a Wacom digitiser and stylus while keeping the superb 2560x1600 display.
So the question is just which you need more: A keyboard (Asus Transformer Pad Infinity), or a stylus (Toshiba Excite Write); the specs are otherwise equivalent (or identical).
Fujitsu announced the UH90, a 14" notebook with a 3200x1800 display. MSI announced their GT60 3K gaming laptop, with a 15.5" 2880x1620 screen - and a GeForce 780M with 4GB of RAM to move those pixels around. Dell's XPS 11 convertible has a more mundane 2560x1440 11" screen.
Ultra-high-resolution displays are definitely in vogue this year; we can only hope that this continues - and that prices keep going down as production ramps up.
Intel announced Thunderbolt 2 (again), which provides one 20Gbps channel instead of Thunderbolt 1's two 10Gbps channels. So yes, throughput is exactly the same as before. No, that's not much of a highlight.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:26 PM
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Tuesday, June 04
Glurk
That 4K Asus monitor?
That's not just the resolution; it's also the price tag: $3799.
For which price I can get four 27" 2560x1440 monitors, a couple of Aten DisplayPort switchboxes to hook them up to all my computers, and some of PowerColor's quad-DisplayPort 7850 video cards to hook all my computers to all the switchboxes.
Or to put it another way, it costs as much as 20 perfectly serviceable 21.5" 1080p IPS monitors from Acer.
So... Maybe next year.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:10 PM
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Monday, June 03
Asusising
Asus presented their new product lineup at Computex today. This includes:
The FonePad Note (as opposed to the NotePad Fone), a 6" 1080p stylusised Atom Android phablet.
The Transformer Pad Infinity, the new model in the Transformer range, with the resolution bumped up from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600 and the CPU from a Tegra 3 to a much faster Tegra 4. So it's similar to the HP SlateBook10x2, but even higher resolution. Seems to only come with 32GB of storage, which is just adequate rather than good.
The Transformer Book Trio, which is - get this - a Haswell-based (Intel's brand-new CPU) Windows 8 notebook with a detachable 1080p touchscreen which contains an Atom processor running Android. 1TB of disk on the Windows side and 64GB of flash on the Android side.
The Zenbook Infinity, a nice if fairly conventional 13.3" ultrabook except for the 2560x1440 display, matching the Toshiba Kirabook. Acer announced one of these as well.
I'll take one of each. Unless I have to pay for them, in which case I'll take a box of cornflakes.
Meanwhile, Samsung announced some tablets which are indistinguishable from the rather meh tablets they already sell. Except the Nexus 10, which is really good, but they only make that; they don't sell it; and anyway I already have one.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:04 PM
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This is one of the best shows this season, and one of the reasons I never seem to actually do anything on sundays.
(Available from Crunchyroll in the following countries: USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. This post is not affiliated with Crunchyroll in any way, I just think it is awesome)
Posted by: Riktol at Monday, June 03 2013 03:42 AM (zDlKl)
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I'm quite enjoying it, though it does tread ground already covered by Natsuiro Kiseki (a.k.a. Magical Rock Trolls Four Girls) and Kokoro Connect.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 03 2013 01:42 PM (PiXy!)
Some day I'll have time to return to Mun and rescue my stranded kerbonaut (product of an almost successful Munar landing). In the meantime, let the updates roll!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:48 PM
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