Posts by Shonko Kid

Samsung v iPhone 4S French entrenchment: 'TOTAL WAR'

"accused Samsung of waging all-out patent war"

Isn't that exactly what they said they'd do, back in the summer?

Can't help but think Apple have brought this on themselves.

Ballmer shoots down Microsoft breakup advice

Red letter day!

Mark this day, but I actually agree with the old ginger buffoon.

10 years ago, M$ were being threatened with being broken up due to their monopolistic actions, they had too much power and were using it to further their business. Now the stock holders want to do just that?!? I don't think the various regulatory authorities were saying split M$ up as they're not good enough value for their stockholders!

The PC is the 20th Century, M$ need to find a new cash-cow, and the only way to do that is to throw product at different markets. They best way for them to do that is if they can afford to gamble and use their (de facto) monopoly..

Plus, y'know, the bigger they are... ;-)

Mm, Silverlight, what's that smell? Yes, it's death

>I'd recommend you start re-training if you're THE Silverlight developer.

Fixed it for ya!

Feds warn 'pox party' zealots not to send viruses in post

Dear America

You are all just too weird. Please stop.

Microsoft flags Firefox and Chrome for security failings

Aahhh, just like the bad old days

Nice to see M$ back on form with the FUD machine. What's that Steve? every time I use OSS a penguin dies?

Dubstep ringtone wins Nokia compo

...the tone which will grace "a selection of the company 2012 product portfolio"...

Phew, I was worried for a moment that there'd be a chance in hell I'll ever hear it. I'll be sure to steer clear of that lone poor sucka who buys a Nokia phone next year.

HTC Android handsets spew private data to ANY app

perhaps because you should have said "Right, that's it. I'm going to buy an iPhone, they would never snoop on me..."

Taxmen extend biz record check pilot

Tax piracy?

Is this 'Tax Gap' the same sort of thing as the income gap that RIAssA and their ilk claim to be losing due to piracy? Perhaps HMRC should be looking for people downloading income from bitTorrent?

Second-hand E-m@iler spews old emails, passwords

Sralans C5

local Indian takeaway was using a fairly beat up em@iler until about a year ago. Always gave me a chuckle seeing it.

and as for @Nuke

"He bet the farm on it. A number of of his senior staff resigned from the company in disgust."

They did, but in defence of the barrow boy, how many of them now wear fancy cloaks, and have their own hit TV show?

Lancs shale to yield '15 years' of gas for UK

Enviro-mentals

OK, so we've discovered a natural resource, that is there for the taken (bar some up front investment) that not only reduces our reliance on imports, but would also give the govt a bit of extra cash. Sure, we don't want to continue to burn gas, or dig up Preston to get at it, we know it's bad. But it's there, and it's better than free, and we have no choice. Surely it's not beyond the realms of man (or even whitehall mandarin) to say, ok, so this'll get us a few extra £bn over the next decade, let's use that so when it does run out, we have a viable green alternative, and we've kicked our gas-habit for good. Is it really too hard to imagine?

Star Wars: The Complete Saga Blu-ray disc set

Han shot first

Is this the version where there's an extra scene at the beginning of ANH, where we see Greedo planting bombs, murdering school kids, abusing every known narcotic, and pimping out a whole bunch of those green dancing girls. All shortly before his ill-fated meeting with all-round-good-guy Han. Who was therefore totally justified in practically shooting him on sight, and as Han sits back with a wry smile on his face, we see that it was in fact Bin Laden in disguise!!!11!!

Nigerians panic over killer calls

"Technically, it is not possible for such a thing to happen"

At least, that's what the NSA want you to think!

I look forward to this being used as a plot device in the popular Sci-Fi detective series, CSI: Miami

Ballmer: Windows Phone can win third place in mobile!

"Nokia, who'll ship nothing but Windows Phone 7 on its phones"

'Nokia, who'll ship nothing.' is probably closer to the truth.

Ballmer reprises 'developers, developers, developers' chant

Loathe him or Hate him, you have to admit, he's the only senior exec in Redmond with any colour at all, the rest are just mindless, grey, automata. Look at Elop!

M$ need Barmy Ballmer at the helm purely for the Lulz

Microsoft demos creepy car stalking system

" it's what most parents here want"

I disagree, I think that it's enough that technology can provide kids with a 'panic button' and let them get on with the messy business of growing up without constant surveillance/intervention/nannying.

Kids need to be taught that freedom is the greatest gift and learn the responsibility to use it wisely, not 'micromanaged' *shudder*

"Micromanagement"

I hate that term, and the concept behind it.

it's a technique used by a certain type of person, that has no direct control or influence over a situation, and feels deeply uncomfortable about that (can I say 'impotent'?). They force those involved, those who do influence the outcome of a situation, to constantly report back any change or action, or more often, lack of change as it was only a minute ago you asked, just let me get on with it DAMMIT!! </tangent> These people need to learn to just relax and go with the flow.

“I love it when we can use technology to micromanage our families,”

that is one of the scariest statements I've ever heard.

And that's why they deserve, nay NEED, to FAIL.

Yahoo! fires! CEO! Carol! Bartz!

Ya..who?

See what I did there?

But seriously, never heard of her. Some career advice for her, if she wants to be a successful IT CEO, she needs to get with the program and piss off as many of her customers as possible. And maybe wear a nice pastel sweater too.

Of course, Yahoo! doesn't have any customers left TO piss off...

New Apple move against Galaxy Tab on Euro front

Almost worth buying one

Just so you can email Jobs and have 'Sent from my Galaxy 10.1' in the signature.

Giant iPhone 4 brings Mac OS X to the table

Pong

This thing is crying out to be used as a pong table.

Is this guy going to be sued to hell and back, as it looks like an iPhone?

London rioters should 'loose all benefits'

Give them all a holiday

An all expenses paid 2 week vacation into one of the world's many trouble spots, where life is undoubtedly harsher than living on benefits in a London council estate. If they survive, then they might think themselves lucky and come back even slightly reformed, otherwise.. well no need to pay for the return flight.

Blackberry QNX phone details leaked

"is underpowered, incompatible and doomed from the start"

Copying Nokia's strategy then?

".. needs something remarkable to regain trust in its brand, and an incompatible and underpowered handset isn't going to deliver that"

LOL

" my first priority would be greater energy efficiency and better battery life."

As it happens multi core does that.

Thanks to the magic of physics, running 1 core at 1GHz uses more power than running 2 at 500MHz. Of course that doesn't stop developers from thinking 'multi-core == free lunch' and making the software even more bloated and cycle hungry, so you end up having to run both cores at 1GHz.

MPs slam 'unworkable' one-size-fits-all NHS care records' system

What have they spent it on?

I'd really like to know what it is that the uk taxpayer has bought with all this money, as from what I can tell it's just gone straight onto the balance sheets of the companies involved, with nothing of any worth having been delivered.

I'd also like to be able to say that the findings of the report are a complete surprise, but it's been inevitable since the outset.

Who should we be asking about a refund?

Evil Android Trojan records your calls

Social Engineering

"Secondly I agree you'd have to be terminally dim to allow permissions without realising exactly what you've agreed to."

Perhaps you've missed all those studies where people happily hand over login details for a bar of chocolate, etc. - Even if the installed asked permission for things like 'take all your money', you'd still find people who would click 'accept' just to get their fix of Angry Farmers or whatever.

What is needed is a system that breaks the current 'no permission - no play' access granting system.

"where the latter action of course should fool the app into thinking that it worked."

Just adding that to the permissions system would be enough, so at install time you could select which of the permissions to actually grant, and which you'd like to have the OS provide 'fake' access to - for instance, allow it to get a location fix, but it's always the north pole. Or allow send sms, but the sent sms's just appear in a folder that would allow the user to vet them before possible allowing them to be sent.

Truck nuts swing onto US freedom of speech agenda

"Genitalia is offensive"

Poor grammar is more offensive.

Anonymous, LulzSec go legit with PayPal boycott

"Mercedes is a girls name"

Mercedes' are a girl's car.

Fixed it for ya!

Cellular network hijacking for fun and profit

set to auto-tweet everything it sees?

for maximum lulz

Sorry, time travelers, you’re still just fiction

No time travellers here

"if time travel will ever exist - ever - then time travelers are here, now, in their subjective past."

This is a common rationale against time travel, but it makes a wide range of assumptions on the nature of the universe. If it is possible - and the odds are stacked against - then you might not see them here, in their past, as it hasn't been discovered *yet* - their past, may not be our present, if we invoke a many-worlds theory.

For your statement to be true not only requires that time travel be permitted, but also that the future is fixed, which raises many deep philosophical questions.

Moonpig gobbled by PhotoBox

2000?!?

I'm pretty sure it's only been about 3-4 years since they started bombarding our telly boxes with those annoying ads, what were they doing before that?

Still, impressive sales. Though 38 million cards from 3 million punters, means either most of their business is repeat custom, or there are some seriously addicted moonpiggers out there!

Nokia reaps the Dilbert years

"had Nokia adopted Android...and products would have already been on the market."

I doubt it. Their HW platform was no more suited to Android than it is to WinPhone, sure they might have had more enthusiasm from the engineering, but they've all been sacked anyway.

Also, M$ would still be winning, as Nokia would have to pay the license fees that have been reported on recently. At least this way, M$ is paying them to take it. For now.

"Things can only get better, can't they?"

Not really, I just don't see masses of people all holding off buying a WinPhone because it lacks a Nokia badge.

What we're seeing here is Nokia's smartphone customer base trading out to something else, and in the meantime buying their partners/parents/whatever a Samsung Android handset instead of the mid range S60 they would have so readily recommended in recent years.

Nokia's traditional customer base have now left the building, and no amount of chair-throwing antics from the sweaty orang-utang is going to change that.

Nokia posts massive loss, blames 'ambiguity'

"Introduced Ambiguity"

Is that suit-speak for "I haven't got a fscking clue what I'm doing"?

Go ahead and spy on customers, says judge

I hope the Dirty Digger's law team are watching this case

" the judge decided that since the evidence was given by someone no longer in Aaron’s employ, what had happened in the past didn’t count as evidence of likely future harm."

That could be a nice get-out-of-jail-free card right there for them!

Google turns off sidelined Labs section altogether

".. that move didn't work on Wave"

It did, there was plenty of interest in it when it first hit the ground. Where it fell down was the simple fact that it was shit, and solved a problem no-one had, or could even understand.

Let's see if + hits the same rocky shores. Early signs aren't so good, with "so what do I do with it" being the reactions of most early adopters.

MS bashes BlackBerry in tablet fight

Hmm, funny that

"Apple's declining marketshare - down from 94.3 per cent in Q2 2010 - but since Apple had so little competition a year ago, such a shift was always on the cards."

So, business as usually, yet when this happened to Nokia/Symbian, it was seen as a burning platform of catastrophe?

Domain name claim teases Sony-MS partnership

If it was a domain squat..

Who would get to take ownership of it after the court case - M$ or Sony? There's only one way to find out!

Apple patent: 'Pour' your data from iPhone to iPad

This is why US patents are bad

Is there any hint of how these would actually be implemented? That may well involve some non obvious novelty, in the way devices would detect each others locations to such accuracy. But patenting the fact that a user can interact with some pixels, and what the pixels might look like?!? Puh-lease!

TED?

I'm pretty sure I saw it on CSI Miami!

Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its results

I smell a war brewing..

between Google and ICANN; When is a registered domain not a registered domain? when it doesn't show up in an explicit google search for it.

So, if I owned a .co.cc domain, how much would I have to pay Google to have them return it in their results? If there was a free for all in TLDs, then you can bet Google will be looking at how best to 'monetize' it, purely for the good of their users mind, nothing evil, never anything evil...

Microsoft publishes Wi-Fi data collection code

What crap

"None of data collected is associated with personally identifiable consumer information,"

So, if they have a record of an AP with an SSID like "Jones' Household" with a location, that's not personally identifiable?

Insider says doom looms at RIM

anonymous?

You think your anon? You say your still at Nokia, and you sound like a software enginner. That narrows the field down quite a bit surely :-/

Iranian pimp plates arse up Afghan car sales

Can I exploit this...

And socially engineer a situation where Lamborghini sales drop, and I can pick one up cheap?

Google's Eric Schmidt 'screwed up' over social network FAIL

"shouldered the blame"

Riiight, 'cause they're really in the shitter without a TwitBook clone.

Apple nemesis sues iOS, Mac, and Android devs

my litigation sense is tingling...

This could be a new frontier in these frivolous patent spats, as by offering $1000 'compensation' up front, they could be protecting themselves from any counter suits...

iOS dev nemesis Lodsys pressures Android coders too?

Inventive step not required

From what I can tell, to get a patent in the US only seems to require that you submit a claim that has either different words, or different ordering of words from any previous patents, and that you obfuscate the obviousness of the 'patent' with enough words to bore even to most 'librarian' of patent clerks into submission. And once you get that stamp (it's 9pm on a Friday and the clerk wants to get home for an illicit Horlick's), it's just a game of Poker with anyone you fancy taking aim at, except you now have the unfair advantage that to see your hand, the other side has to shell out thousands/millions of $$ to lawyers.

Rapture postponed as world inexplicably fails to end

I find your lack of faith disturbing..

Perhaps the scale of the rapture is entirely dependent on the number of believers involved, as it will only be They Who Truly Believe that will experience it, as I understand it, the rest of us are left behind to look after the cats. If that is the case, then perhaps it did actually happen, but on such a overwhelming minor scale that no one noticed.

We have all been found wanting and God has left us. At least the two Steves are still here to keep us entertained.

Simply viewing Apple kit provokes religious euphoria

FSM will now smite Jobs

May His Noodly Appendage now come crashing down on Apple for being a false idol.

Mumsnet founder: Our members are 'very keen' on PORN ...

It is (or rather was) a solved problem...

Three letters: A O L

All ISPs should have a contract that basically asks:

I understand that the internet is full of questionable and/or objectionable content, and I am a responsible adult.

[ ] Yes [ ] No

Those that tick no, get signed up to AOL, the rest of us can get on with our day in peace.