As marketing headman Phil Schiller ate up more and more minutes of Apple‘s “Let’s talk iPhone” event, waxing rhapsodically about the new iPhone 4S, it became increasingly clear to those in attendance that the iPhone 5 wasn’t going to make an appearance.
Not that The Reg was there to take the pulse of the crowd. For reasons best known to Jobs Cook & Co., your humble Reggies are personae au gratin at One Infinite Loop.
Locked out of the event hall, we struggled instead to find a working live-blog feed, settling on a sputtering Ars Technica and a stumbling Engadget as the best of the self-immolating lot that we tried.
But despite the glaring limitations of this newfangled “internet” thing, we were able to learn from those live-bloggers’ reports that Schiller was valiantly attempting to paint the iPhone 4S as a Real Big Deal™ – and that he pulled it off better than might have been expected, considering all the pre-event hype about the iPhone 5. Read the rest of this entry »
Generally, users have two beefs with Android. One, handsets often don’t get updated when a new version of the OS rolls out from the Chocolate Factory, and, two, many of the bespoke overlays and ROMs cooked up by handset makers and telecos are more akin to painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa than adding anything of value to the user experience.
Luckily, you can fix both these problem, and fix them quite easily by installing a new ROM to replace the entire operating system with a better version. There are several out there, some generic, others coded for specific handsets. Probably the best one is CyanogenMod.
CyanogenMod: revamp your Android
The latest version – at the time of writing; updates are frequent – is CM7. It’s available for a wide range of devices, including HTC’s Desire and Desire HD; Samsung’s Galaxy S; and even Dixons/Advent’s Vega tablet. There’s a visual list of supported handsets on the CM website. I installed it on an Orange San Francisco – aka ZTE Blade – kindly lent to me by Orange. Read the rest of this entry »
MS-DOS is 30 years old today. Well, kind of. On 27 July 1981, Microsoft gave the name MS-DOS to the disk operating system it acquired on that day from Seattle Computer Products (SCP), a hardware company owned and run by a fellow called Rod Brock.
SCP developed what it at various times called QDOS and 86-DOS to run on a CPU card it had built based on Intel’s 8086 processor.
Command line: MS-DOS 1.19 still running after all these years
The company had planned to use Digital Research’s CP/M-86 operating system, then still in development. But, having released the card in November 1979 – it shipped with an 8086-compatible version Microsoft’s Basic language interpreter-cum-operating system – and reached April 1980 without CP/M-86 becoming available to bundle, SCP decided it had to create its own OS for the card. Read the rest of this entry »
Review 26 Hours of extras, 15 discs, 3 movies, one ring. Finally, the extended Blu-ray version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy has been released. Time to finally Orc-up and buy.
Long player: The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy – Extended Edition
Like many, I steered clear of The Rings first hi-def appearance; it was clear that New Line would be double-dipping and I simply didn’t want to waste my Elven shillings. Read the rest of this entry »
I was invited to the Campus Party in Spain last week. After being told it’s the biggest tech show on the planet, I could hardly turn the offer down. And, following some manic days at the show, I have to agree: there’s nothing quite like it.
Held each year in the beautiful city of Valencia, Campus Party is described as the world’s largest tech event for creativity, entertainment and digital culture. Since 1997, it has brought together Spain’s geek community from overclocker enthusiasts and hackers, to robotic engineers and video gamers. There were 6500 of them this year.
You name it, some übernerd was there flaunting it.
The first room to grab my attention was the computer modding section, where hundreds of enthusiasts gather Lan party-style, each with their own extensive PC tweaks and custom designs. Here, the modders stay up all night and sleep through the day, playing games, networking, sharing ideas and doing what geeks do best: secretly finding ways to watch mature content, ahem. Read the rest of this entry »
