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James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Popfly Game Creator Beta, or "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges..."

August 29 at 10:32 am - Link

Robert will be demoing one of his games on stage at PAX - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Nikon GP-1 GPS Unit- D90 Only? No! D3, D700, D2x/s, D2hs, D200!

August 27 at 1:48 pm - Link

I want one! - James Clarke

Leo Laporte posted an entry on leo

leo: MySQL is struggling. Anyone know anything about optimizing #mysql configurations?

August 26 at 8:57 am - Link

John LeMasney, Caroline and ·[•_•]· liked this

It can depend a lot on the application's use of the database as well as the schema design. Easily as important as proper database configuration. - ·[•_•]·

If you are trying to get it to work on a VPS then I've collected a few links that might help: http://www.possibility.com/wik... - todd

Yeah . . . ditch it. - Nev Stokes

get SQL server express :) - James Clarke

sqlite FTW: "Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic." - ·[•_•]·

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

HTC announces S740: because two keypads are better than one

August 26 at 8:17 am - Link

Hasn't been an I Want windows mobile phone for a while. - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

iPhone Ads vs reality

August 14 at 10:34 pm - Link

Trade descriptions act? - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Could Vista fail?

August 8 at 10:42 am - Link

What a load of bullshit, Dave - James Clarke

Robert Scoble shared an item on Google Reader

New 177.79 GeForce drivers to implement physics calculations on GPU

August 6 at 11:07 pm - Link

Dukeswharf, Glenn Batuyong, Craig Eddy, sirish and 4 other people liked this

For a moment I thought this was about being able to speed up F@H, S@H, etc... but it isn't, is it? - Egon Willighagen

computation shaders are the way to go - James Clarke

http://www.nvidia.com/object/c... - @Egon That sounds more like CUDA, looks like they did that recently: http://www.hpcwire.com/offthew... - Tim Hoeck

This will only speed up existing games/applications that are using the PhysX Engine that Ageia developed for their dedicated physics cards. Most people didn't buy the cards, but many developers used the engine because it was free to do so. So if you're playing a game (or using an app) that uses the physics engine and you didn't have an Aegia card, then yes you should see performance improvements. - Paul Reynolds

Now, if dell would only get around to putting the latest versions out for their 8600M GT - xero

Robert Scoble shared an item on Google Reader

The Top Five Reasons Not to Upgrade to the New iPhone 3G

August 6 at 11:07 pm - Link

Dani Radu, Cait, Nicholas James, Charlie Anzman and 40 other people liked this

I agree with Thomas' recommendations here. The one exception is the GPS. I really like that, but it, too, needs to be taken the next level with turn-by-turn directions. Battery life? Turn off the GPS and the 3G and you get better life. I'm also seeing that sometimes the battery just drains itself. I think it's due to some applications. Still trying to repeat that enough to be able to authoritatively write about it. - Robert Scoble

Yeah it really is kind of sleazy the way they tout in TV commercials that the phone is cheaper, when in reality over the life of the contract, it's actually more expensive, particularly since there's no free text messaging. Speaking of which, what's up with companies doing unlimited data service but not throwing in the text messaging. That's pure profiteering right there as the text messages use almost no bandwidth and really are almost 100% profit in the pockets of the cell service providers. - AlexScoble(Robert'sBro)

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At the end of the day though, it's just a freakin' phone. Most people (90%) would be better off getting whatever free phone is available for AT&T through Verizon. Blackberry Curve anyone? - AlexScoble(Robert'sBro)

Who is Alex Scoble and what has he done with Robert? - Eric Schlissel via twhirl

There's definitely something weird going on with battery drain. Sometimes my phone will be dead if left to sit overnight, other times it's practically fully charged. - invariant

Why isn't there a voice guided turn-by-turn application already available? I read somewhere that in the iPhone SDK terms-of-acceptance, it says that you are not allowed to develop voice guided turn-by-turn. Is that true? - oregon_tony

Interestingly none of those reasons apply in the UK. The monthly cost is the same (both data and voice/sms), but many more minutes & sms are thrown in now. The handset one-off price is much cheaper. O2 are doing deals to enable 2g iPhone owners to upgrade before the end of their 18 month contract. The O2 3G network is OK (not good, but OK), and the O2 Edge network is crap. Because network coverage is better, the phone does not need to work so hard, and so the battery issue is much less of a problem. - Ian Fogg

I upgraded my iTouch and immediately noticed the poorer battery life on that device too. If I use wifi the device is lucky to last 2 days. If I turn that off and stick to my music/podcasts, I can get several days without needing a full charge. I also wonder how much extra power the different apps use. Games like Super Monkey Ball and Labyrinth and the NYTimes app, or Facebook or any of the others that rely on wifi/data connections? Think I'll stick to my Nokia E90. Cheaper with more benefits and software. - Stephen Cropp

Ian - having upgraded last week I have found the battery performance disastrous. The 3g network in London is patchy to say the least. Power managment within the OS seems inefficient. Some form of activity monitor is required - there are times when you know that an app is running in the background and draining the battery yet you cannot confirm or control the process. The GPS without turn by turn instructions is an extremely minor upgrade in my eyes. I am a huge Apple fan however I am seriously considering the new Blackberry until such time as the issues mentioned above and by others are resolved. Dissapointing! - Mark

Same with my Touch (2.0). Then again, I use the wi-fi quite alot at home. the games drain the hell out of my battery. Although Apple made fun of Task Manager in WM6, I'd much prefer it if there was one to use on my Touch. - Roberto Bonini

I think i like my Nokia phone and will stick with it and not go crazy about iphone - Vidya

I used my Blackberry (and now iPhone) as an alarm clock. My usual routine is to charge it every night if the battery is low enough. I'm pretty diligent with conditioning my batteries. Occasionally, I'll have to do an afternoon charge because I'll let it discharge well below 20%. I wonder if people are complaining about battery life because they have to charge it once per day? I keep bluetooth off, everything else is on. It seems to auto-switch WiFi off in standby and flips it back on when wakes up. - Paul Reynolds

i gave four good reasons nearly two months ago: http://bit.ly/3hFVm3 - Rob Shields via twhirl

I have to agree with Thomas. I'd like to note that A-GPS is rather unreliable as it often doesn't work (at least in my case.) I've made the decision replace my iPhone 3G with the N95-3. - Brandon McCall

If you turn of the push feature, then you get much better battery life. I did it and now it much better. And here in Sweden the 3G / HSDPA network is quite good. - Svartling

I had a ATT Samsung 3G phone for about a year prior to buying a 1st gen iPhone. The Samsung would also occasionally just drain the battery even in sleep mode. I suspected it was something to do with the 3G radio and its behavior in poor reception areas, but couldn't reliably reproduce the problem. - Steve Wilhelm

Another theory on the 3G battery life is the radio power is cranked up right now to compensate for the weak coverage and it can be adjusted remotely by the carrier. I forgot to mention I turned "push" down to every 30 minutes. - Paul Reynolds

Just switched over last week after about 7 yrs of BB devices. Certainly has "cool factor", form factor and UI, but BB still better for power user of basic email and phone services without the bells and whistles of iPhone. That said, I think iPhone is a worthwhile investment and good device to have to monitor what is happening with mobile devices and device convergence. Mobile commerce and communication will be important elements to many business strategies. - Fred Neil

I'm very tempted by an unlocked 2nd hand gen 1 iPhone. Being tied to a carrier doesn't work for me no matter how compelling the device - James Clarke

Well James, unlocking for a different carrier is great, but don't expect any good apps in the jailbroken installer. Nothing but stupid themes. - Dennis Jackson

BOOOOO. But thanks. I'm waiting until my contract runs out and it's literally been killing me. At least this helps cool me down a bit. - Sarah Perez

Sometimes it might help to 'get Bold' instead of following the wisdom of the crowds :) - Mrinal Desai

Agreed. As I posted elsewhere, there is nothing compelling enough for me to spend an extra $30 per month. My beat up edge version works beautifully and mine was free! - Brad Nickel

i thought this post was an engaging read. - Carmen via Alert Thingy

What bugs me is that everyone is saying to turn this feature off or that feature off to preserve battery. What's the point of having an iPhone 3G if you have to turn all the features that make it different from the original iPhone off? Hopefully Apple will work on better battery life. For now I'm sticking with the 1st gen. - Dennis Jackson

Seriously, if you're worried about 3G battery life in your car, you might want to invest in a $20 car charge adapter for your $199 (or $299) phone. - Ernie Oporto

I never turn3G off and no battery complaints here. I do uncheck the ask to join wifi option. Battery usually lasts all day. Sometimes I give it a little charge after getting home from work. - Bob Blunk

MajorNelsonJR posted a message on Twitter

“Loving the new iPod touch update”

August 5 at 5:58 pm - Link

What's new? - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

The Broken Ecosystem for Windows Mobile Updates

August 5 at 2:47 pm - Link

Couldn't agree more. Lack of decent updates is one of the many reasons i'm on the brink of buying a (used, unlocked) iPhone. - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Figuring out which NVIDIA GPUs are defective -- it's a lot

July 31 at 5:17 pm - Link

Dang my M1530 is on the list - James Clarke

l0ckergn0me posted a message

“Okay, am... am I the *ONLY* person on the planet who can't *STAND* Twhirl? It's unresponsive, ugly, and... blah.”

July 28 at 7:41 pm - via Ping.fm - Link

Evangeline, Richard Crocker, Andrew Feinberg, Radek Pilich and 7 other people liked this

just like windows - fijidaddy

Nope. I love the sporadic jumping around the desktop too. - Kevin Cearns

Show 32 more comments

I don't really care for it either if that is any consolation -- I really don't see the point - Brian Sullivan

Nope,can't stand it either - Mo Kargas

True that it's slow, while watching the FriendFeed page I see around 2 min. delay between actually receiving posts. Thwirl I really like for design and concept. But for the network-capabilities, it could maybe do better. - [ zu ]-eBailey via twhirl

i never understood why there needs to be separate instances for every account. and yeah, butt ugly. - Craig Childs

I wouldn't use it myself -- Twitterrific and twitter.com work way better for me. - Jake Jarvis

ugly yes, but the feature set is first class - Duncan Riley

I just use the website. SMS for people I really am following, - Andrew Feinberg

I like twhirltles. Twhirl is my favorite. - Bwana McCall

It's currently the only way to get desktop notifications of @replies in identica on the mac. I'd love for an active Mac OS X native application that implemented these microblogging/status update services at the same speed that Friendfeed implements them. Maybe then I'd stop using just Twitter. - Mark Trapp

I deleted it some time ago. The view was not worth the climb. - Phil Yanov

I'm not the world's biggest Twhirl fan by any means. I think they've been completely unresponsive to new development since Seesmic bought it. Before that happened, you could actually get a reply from the developer and updates were frequent. Since then, updates have become far less frequent and I don't know the last time I've had a response to a tweet about issues. But, in Twhirl's defense, it isn't any uglier than any other app available. And you can skin it, so if it's ugly, it's your own fault. - Gregory Pittman via twhirl

I don't like it either, can't match Twitterific. - Oli Kenobi

Yes. You are. Now what?:-) - Francine Hardaway

I've used Twhirl more than most AIR apps, but that's not saying much. - Chris Baskind

Works good for me on Vista, just use the the web based version of Twitter on Mac OS X - Scott

After making an effort to like Twhirl for the longest while, I am now back to the browser for both twitter and friendfeed. The search continues... - Kamath

I think it needs some UI improvements as they add services but I think it's very cool, actualoly. - Hal Rottenberg via twhirl

I like Spaz for Twitter...is there an alternative for FF? - Marc Vermut via twhirl

no, you're not. I don't like it either. - edythe

I don't like it either. - Mack D. Male

I can't stand it, it is buggy, and for some reason, they display comments in reverse chronological order. It is sub-par, but it the best FF client I have found so far, but that isn't saying much. - James Mowery via twhirl

My biggest complaint is that it's a RAM hog. It also occasionally beachballs on me, but I'm guessing that's related to my first point. - Kevin Johnson via twhirl

Me too. - James Clarke

I use Twhirl on my linux box. It's been rock solid and have been running for several months now. - imabonehead

while I agree twhirl is a Memory hog and the interface is getting messier by the day it still seems to be the best app out there - Fuad Arshad

I hated it. Using TwitterFox - Alex C. Williams

Twitterrific and TwitterFox do the job for me. Twhirl's interface just irritates me. - Andrew Trinh

The scrolling behavior annoyed the heck out of me, but maybe I missed a magic key combo. I want it to work like Google Reader, where it always scrolls the next item to the top of the window. Twhirl scrolls to the next item that's not completely visible in the window when using the scroll wheel or down arrow. This always threw me off, so I stopped using it. A combined window is also sorely needed. Tabs would be ok but an option for a single view of all services intermixed would be best. - invariant

nope. me too. i would assume everybody using windows effectivly (not that that are many people) do not like the interface as it is very counterintuitive to what makes windows fast and efficient to work with. - Nicole Simon

I agree Thirl needs some extra work, especially when it comes to scrolling in FriendFeed - but I stick to it to give them time to improve it. Hopefully they will until I start to believe all the haters here. - Svetlana Gladkova via twhirl

Man, Twhirl is terrible. It won't stay open more than about 5 minutes for me. It never notifies me. Every interface I've seen using Air requires too much relearning. The standard web page interface for FriendFeed works much better. - Richard Crocker

Yeah, I installed it thinking "Hey, what a great way to keep up with FF" Hell no! It's awful and the scrolling is so jerky! But I do like the notifications... - zoblue (Zulema)

I'm a fan of Twhirl, but then, I'm biased. I work with Marco (the developer of twhirl) at Seesmic. A number of the issues mentioned here are very frustrating shortfalls of the AIR platform (that we're eager to discover workarounds for.) FWIW, I can tell you that we are very interested in the option for a single window view. I would love to hear any feedback at thomas@seesmic dot com - Thomas Knoll

Thomas, glad to see you here. It's always good to hear from the developer. That used to be a huge plus for Twhirl. But that stopped suddenly when Seesmic bought Twhirl. That's a shame. You're correct in saying that some of the bugs listed here are AIR bugs, over which you have no control. But some of them--the spastic jumping around, for example--are not AIR bugs. They're all Twhirl's. And we haven't heard any explanation and there have been seemingly no attempts to fix it. - Gregory Pittman via twhirl

Hey Gregory, sorry, the past months have been full of coding work, and I have to admin, my responsiveness to user questions wasn't as good as it should be. Apologies, I'll try to catch up on that. As you mention the jumping windows bug, it is indeed a problem of the AIR platform, not twhirl's. We are trying to find ways to avoid it, and as our tests show, it has become better, but we are not fully able to work around it yet. - Marco Kaiser

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Silverlight Layout Fundamentals Part 2 - Layout Containers

July 26 at 9:26 pm - Link

brandon r... You should check this out - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Gary Krakow is off his rocker, blames MSFT for iPhone battery woes

July 15 at 11:05 pm - Link

Another tech journalist that should be writing about cookery - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

A Live Mesh Moment

July 15 at 11:05 pm - Link

Mesh runs my whole life - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Sony cutting 80GB PS3 price to $400 in September, ditching backwards compatibility

July 15 at 11:05 pm - Link

I'll probably pick one of these up to play BDs over the holiday season - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

An(other) Xbox blog to watch

July 15 at 11:05 pm - Link

Why am i seeing these year old posts in the middle of e3 '08? Come on Lith, get your act together - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Gtk+ 3.0, take 2

July 15 at 11:05 pm - Link

Linux needs 1 GUI and 1 programing model. Without, it will never be a desktop contender - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Some of the features in the new Xbox experience (8 person chat, VGA support and more)

July 15 at 11:05 pm - Link

Awesome. Just give me a choice other than cartoon character for my avatar - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Channel9

July 15 at 11:05 pm - Link

These totally rock - James Clarke

Paul Thurrott posted an entry on SuperSite Blog

Live Mesh update adds new features

July 14 at 12:03 pm - Link

Ian Rathbone and Eric liked this

Sounds great, now when do we regular Joes get to migrate from FolderShare? - Michael Saul

I've got a few invites left if anyone wants one. - Bruce Williams

For some reason, mine says it's up-to-date but I still cannot exclude the Mesh Live Desktop from syncing a folder's content - Craig Eddy

thanks paul :D - Ian Rathbone

To exclude the live desktop, edit sharing from the live desktop (not the client) - James Clarke via Alert Thingy

Major Nelson (Larry) posted a message on Twitter

“(sorry if I am missing anything in this coverage...it's only me and I am going as fast as I can can!)”

July 14 at 10:54 am - Link

Don't worry.. Engadget just went down :-) - James Clarke via Alert Thingy

its back up tho - James Clarke via Alert Thingy

This is better anyway. - Jordan Hofker

Paul Thurrott posted a message on Twitter

“iDisk just brought Vista to its knees. Thanks for that, Apple.”

July 13 at 2:03 pm - Link

Any info on what the update for Mesh was this weekend Paul? Cheers :D - Ian Rathbone

The most notable feature of the Mesh update is that you can choose what gets sync'd up to the cloud (and thus comes off the 5GB limit) and what is merly sync'd peer-2-peer. This is one I've personally been waiting for. - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Windows Mobile - 6 months on

July 13 at 9:15 pm - Link

Brian liked this

Earth to Windows Mobile. The iPhone is kicking your ass. You used to be in the lead. What went wrong? Hello? - James Clarke

No comment. - l0ckergn0me

@James Clarke: I believe Windows Mobile is still well in the lead. Regardless, Windows Mobile is a terrible mobile OS with a UI that is (at best) very dated. I had a HTC Tilt for a while and hated almost everything about WM6. It was slow, locked up all the time, looked terrible, was difficult to navigate, was never updated, etc. I finally flashed my phone with a custom, minimal ROM from xda-developers.com to get it fairly stable. - Jason Huebel

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Microsoft Equipt Fact Sheet

July 2 at 8:52 am - Link

Great bundle; terrible name and product packaging. Don't we ever learn? - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

New York Times gets it wrong

June 30 at 10:28 pm - Link

Whoever wrote the original article in the NY Times is a moron who clearly knows very little about operating systems - James Clarke

James Clarke shared an item on Google Reader

Dell's new Studio laptops in the wild

June 26 at 3:47 pm - Link

Robert really wants one of these - James Clarke