* Posts by John Burton

54 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2007

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Beak explodes at Samsung's evidence leak in Apple patent spat

John Burton

Great

Really, someone needs to stop apple.

People thought microsoft were evil but apple make them look like amatuers.

Seriously, they should just be shut down.

Google Nexus 7 blighted by brightness blunder

John Burton

Mine is ok

I know this is hardly a scientific survey, but mine seems ok. The colours seem fine.

Although I don't really use it for movies, maybe it's more obvious there.

Microsoft posts first-ever quarterly loss

John Burton

Re: Bad data

And all a-few-thousand pcs in this building are running windows 7 ...

Google Nexus 7 shipping cock-up enrages fandroids

John Burton

Re: just have to say...

I got mine last friday, and it's pretty good.

I agree that the biggest flaw is how hard it is to get it out of the box.

iPhone 5 poised to trounce Android, devastate BlackBerry?

John Burton

52% own iphones?

Vs. 26% android?

Well it's flawed from the start.

So basically they asked a bunch of people who already own iphones what they are more likely to buy next time.

Can neighbours grab your sensitive package, asks Post Office

John Burton

Ugh...

It's not that I don't trust my neighbours.

But one of them works shifts. And has been known to take in my parcel and then never be in when I am for a whole week. The other neighbour has taken stuff in on a friday morning then gone away over the weekend.

Why can't they just come to an agreement with tesco or someone that opens 24h that you can collect the parcel from there?

Then the post office doesn't have to have multiple failed deliveries and can pass on a small part of that saving to tesco... Tesco gets people turning up at their store who will decide to do their shopping while they are there... and I can collect my stuff 24h.

Everyone is a winner!

UK is first class for train Wi-Fi in Europe

John Burton

cost

And if it didn't cost £40 a month on virgin trains it might be useful ...

Facebook phone app attempts to seize ALL YOUR MAIL

John Burton

Not happened to me

I see no evidence of this happening to me,

Microsoft sets the price for a Windows 8 upgrade at $40

John Burton
Thumb Down

Or

I'll pay £100 instead for a version without metro.

Jaw-jaw no more-more as calls fall down tally of phone tasks

John Burton

Phone

They should continue to be called phones. The meaning of telephone has simply evolved...

'Inexperienced' RBS tech operative's blunder led to banking meltdown

John Burton

Re: That's it, blame the help

No amount of asking for confirmation helps if you think that the operation *is* actually what you need to do...

Techies beg world to join the 1% on IPv6 launch day

John Burton

Come on theregister,...

Why aren't you reachable in ipv6 yet? Seems I have to use the old internet to connect to you still!

Windows 8 Release Preview open for download

John Burton

I tried hard to like it.

I installed the previous version. I tried so hard to like it, but after a few weeks I just just didn't. I found it made everything harder to do and was ugly and incomprehsible.

Eventually I installed the new Mint Linux instead and it felt like such a relief to go back to a decent user interface. I still use windows 7 on my "main" pc but after using mint linux for a while now I'm increasingly findint I can just do everything in that. And yes, it was this new interface that drove me to try it. and yes I did give it a try, but frankly it's just awful.

Come on microsoft, fix it before release... The rest of the os is good, but metro makes it such a pain to work with.

Sony PlayStation 4 will not be download only

John Burton

I imagine they'll sell it as a feature then remove it later in a software patch. Oh wait, surely Sony wouldn't do such a thing,

'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8

John Burton

Preview version...

I tried in. I want to call it an incomprehensible mess. But that would be unfair to other incomprehensible messes. What that on earth are microsoft thinking. it's just an awful mess, how can they possibly be thinking of releasing this

Pinterest valued at $1.5 BILLION, bags $100m in funding

John Burton

But what's it for?

Can someone tell me what pinterest is for? I've so far been able to work out anything useful it does that you couldn't do just as well before?

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

John Burton

Openoffice?

Does openoffice still need java installed? Because, you know.. who wants that on their machine?

Mozilla and Google blast IE-only Windows on ARM

John Burton

Re: Google Calling the Kettle Black

> it is just not possible on Android to choose any search engine other than Google

I just went to www.bing.com on my android device and it works fine...

RIP Ceefax: Digital switchover kills off last teletext service

John Burton

Digital text

It's interesting how digitial text appears to be slower and less useful than the thing it's replacing.

High Court confirms 'cheap DVD' tax loophole will close

John Burton

Is this just on these dvd or on all imports?

I buy quite a lot of cheap electronics components from ebay from china. Usually costing just a few £. If I had to pay 20% vat on them, that's one thing... but no doubt the post office will add an £8 handling fee each time too that you can't avoid making in entirely uneconomical to buy stuff in this way.

HD JuiceBox HDMI over Powerline kit

John Burton

My reaction

Oh cool just what I need.

...

Oh, HOW MUCH??? Never mind then.

Pay-by-wave: At least it's better than being mugged

John Burton

Erm...no.

"Why don't you install this application on your phone that can be used remotely to remove small amounts of money from your bank account directly without you having to be involved in the transaction or authorize it....Or even know about it"

Erm. No.

Nokia launches Windows Phone range

John Burton

Interesting...

What's most interesting is that despite being entirely happy with my HTC Desire I actually find myself wanting one of these :)

Official: Kindles get heavier as you add e-books

John Burton

Eh?

I thought flash memory was erased by setting it all to '1' bits, and you could store stuff on it by selectively setting bits to zero. So adding books should, if anything, reduce the weight of all those '1's.

Amazon’s shares slashed as profits drop 73%

John Burton
Thumb Up

Shares...

Seems like a very good time to me to buy shares.

Not for a quick profit but to hold onto for 3-5 years.

Everything I see about amazon makes me think they actually have a strategy that's more than just "see how much money we can report for the next quarter" like so many companies.

I may well be wrong, but I intend to invest some but not all of my money in amazon as part of the "slightly risky but I have good feeling about it" part of my investments.

Call routing scam costs telcos $150m a year

John Burton

That doesn't sound like a scam

That doesn't sound like a scam, it seems everyone is being paid the amount they requested for the service they said they would provide?

London public transport tap-cash plans will be 'entirely safe'

John Burton

My fear...

My fear with this isn't someone cloning the card or something like that, it's someone using a legitimate card reader to charge me without me knowing. It's the fact that you don't have to actively "make" the payment or authorize it that scares me.

Amazon's anti-iPad arises 'in October'

John Burton

I'll buy a tablet when...

They are powerful enough to run compilers and development environments. (which is what I do..)

You can develop apps for them in c++.

You can work with the onscreen keyboard, but plug in a usb keyboard for when you want to do some real work.

It's not made by apple.

Probably you can do one or more of those already.

Aussie carbon tax in actually-makes-sense shocker

John Burton

Yeah right

Good grief there are still people out there who believe in this global warming / CO2 thing?

Travelodge still doesn't know who hacked it

John Burton

Hmm

So they have no idea what happened but "We can further confirm no financial data has been stolen, accessed or compromised. Really? If they have no idea where the email addresses came from can they really say this and be certain of it?

World braces for domain name EXPLOSION

John Burton
WTF?

Nobody needs a new name anyway...

Because these days most of the adverts just say "search for [brand] on Facebook" anyway.

Got a website? Pay attention, Cookie Law will come

John Burton

What about non-commercial sites?

I presume this applied equally to non-commercial websites?

Does anyone know for sure?

Intel teaches machines to build own device drivers

John Burton

I confidently predict this is the last we'll hear of this.

... you just know this isn't ever going to actually be used for anything

Facebook fails webmail tests

John Burton

Quite a few don't seem to know...

A few people saying that facebook doesn't do email...

Yes it does. You'll have been asked to choose a page name for your http://facebook.com/whatever pages. Then you can just email whatever@facebook.com and it works,.

PlayStation Network credit cards protected by encryption

John Burton

So, erm....

So.... Lets hope that the "intruder" didn't leave some kind of trojan on their system to capture and send them all the new passwords and new credit card numbers that are now going to be send to Sony....

iPhones secretly track 'scary amount' of your movements

John Burton
FAIL

Amazing stuff

Amazing stuff. Not the article. We've come to expect this kind of stuff from apple.

But the reaction from some people.

I honestly think that if apple were to announce that they'd disabled everyones iphone and you should go buy a new one at full price immediately there would still be dozens of posters on here saying yes this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do

BT Home Hub 3 ADSL Wi-Fi router

John Burton

Does it do ipv6?

Does it do ipv6, or is it limited to accessing only the "old" internet?

What sealed Nokia's fate?

John Burton

ipv6...?

> how many other mobiles do you know that can obtain an IPV6 address?

My android (HTC desire) for one using the standard untouched software.

My network doesn't offer ipv6 so it doesn't get it on that, but on home on wifi it just picks up an ipv6 from my wifi and *just works* with it.

MozyHome stiffs unlimited users

John Burton

Sounds goos

I was thinking of trying them but this makes me more likely to.

The reason is that all the people who wanted to backup huge amount for very little money will have gone and they'll end up with a service that is actually sustainable at a reasonable quality level.

UK a 3D TV nation? Not half

John Burton

Silly

I would get a 3dtv and sky 3d if I'd not recently bought a new reasonably large hdtv.

Next time I want a TV it will support 3d. But I can't justify buying a new one and getting rid of my old one just for that. But yeah, some day...

CSC cost-cutting spreads to Europe

John Burton

Helpful

I guess the days off will be handy for going to job interviews...

Txt tax would wipe out half UK deficit, claims union baron

John Burton

Re: Er...

> Why dont we simply NOT pay interest on the deficit!

Because we're relying on people lending the government very many billions of pounds just to keep paying the biils, and if you stop paying interest who exactly would be willing to lend the goverment their money?

Amazon Kindle 3 e-book reader

John Burton

Yes it can connect to hotel wifi...

>> "d but if you're in a hotel that requires you to connect to the network then open your browser to authenticate then you're out of luck as the Kindle can't do that."

Yes it can! It pops up a box saying that you might need to enter a password on a web page, and automatically launches it's web browser. I was quite impressed first time it did tha

Apathy kills Google's new-age Wave

John Burton

Pity

The idea was good but the implementation didn't really work very well. Plus it needed to integrate with ordinary email a lot better.

Hopefully some ideas will arise from the ashes of this and something great will happen :)

Czechs toast Bud-beating beer win

John Burton

I quite like it

I quite like US Budweiser. /shrug

O2 to step back from unlimited mobile data deals

John Burton

Good

It's far better to be able to buy the data usage you want rather than have to choose "unlimited" but which is no such thing and subject to "fair use" limits and so on. It's a return to honesty and a good thing.

Met lab claims 'biggest breakthrough since Watergate'

John Burton

Hmm

Hmm, well this doesn't sound completely bogus. But I'm very sceptical how much use it is.

First of all most digital recording I've seen has between a 10-14 bit D/A converter. I'm sceptical that with filtering any signal would be large enough to register at all or if it did it would be so quantized by the sampling into 1 or 2 bits that it would be difficult to get much useful information out of it. Secondly it's rare to see a system that doesn't compress to MP3 or similar these days. I would expect that artifacts from that process would so completely swamp the signal as to make it useless .

Finally if this came up in court my first question would be to ask how accurate the match to the recorded value was, and to ask if there were any other periods over the previous few months that were within 20% of being as good a match. I find it very hard to believe that there wouldn't be many. I imagine you could discredit any such evidence very easily

Sony Bravia KDL-EX703 32in Freeview HD TV

John Burton

Sony...

it's a sony. They'll most likely update it after you bought it to remove the feature you wanted anyway

Google tweaks search results with mystery site speedometer

John Burton

Good stuff google :)

This is good stuff.

All else being equal I'd much prefer a link to a speedy site than one which takes ages to load.

Who wouldn't?

Is Google spending $106.5m to open source a codec?

John Burton

Ogg

Well nobody is going to use Ogg while it has such a stupid name, if they call it something less stupid sounding it might have a chance but frankly I'd be embarassed to use it in case someone asked what it used.

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