Posts by Reg Varney 68 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jan 2008
... if they spent the effort improving the resolution of a 20+" monitor rather than a 5" screen. It's ludicrous that resolution increases have stopped at 1920x1080 all the way up to 27" (except a few like Dell U2711), when the same resolution is available on a 5" phone screen.
This plague of spurious patents will only be solved when the defendants realise that it is a bloody sight cheaper (and more satisfying) to just pay for the assassination of the litigants, their lawyers and every half-wit patent office reviewer who was ever involved in the original patent than it is to spend 5 years in court defending them.
For the last 3 versions, this has been disastrously unstable, crashing a minimum of twice a day, including when I'm not actually doing anything, just have it open in the background.
Used to be great, but unreliable POS recently,
No price mentioned = high price. So, they're late (probably launching after iPad 2 and Androidpads with 3.0), new (so sod all software, at least in comparison to the others) and high-priced.
Shame, I was rather looking forward to this as an alternative to Google, but it looks still-born to me
should have one whole level of mark-up removed, as the digital vendor (eg Amazon) equivalant of the wholesaler, sells to the user with no bookshop mark-up.
So - delete the production cost, delete the bookseller mark-up and then we should see the ebook price.
... they do provide free POP3 access to most of the world (everywhere except US, I think). Bizarrely, this is only on accounts created since the rule change - there is no way to "upgrade" an old account into having free POP3 - you can only go the paid "plus" route,
Now, some (/most/all) people would think that this is a pretty stupid way of annoying their current customers, and that potential new users are more likely to go to hotmail or gmail anyway, but that's the Wonder of Yahoo for you.
which read something along the lines of "you've bought a service that worked, done fuck all with it for years and now killed it. excellent, well done: I am certainly more disposed to use Ask's services now"
Really, really pissed off over this - Ask have the right to run whatever services they want, but why buy the fucking thing in the first place and then do nothing with it. Their reason for shutting it down is total nonsense as well - if they can't tell the difference between the content of an RSS feed and the stream of drivel that constitutes twitter, then god help them
Suggestions for a replacement? So far today I've tried Google Reader, Feedly, activor.us and Feedshow - hated all of them. Feedly is kind of interesting, but I want to read what I want to read, not what happens to be newest; GR and Feedshow don't allow non-alphabetic sorting, and feedshow doesn't seem to have been updated for the last 3 years. GR is also encrusted with loads of Web 2 shite: "like" & "share this" buttons, and the like.
I'm part of an enterprise which is *finally* going to upgrade to IE8 next year (just after it is superseded by IE9, probably). The problem isn't just the internal apps written to IE6 that don't work on anything else, there are really key business apps by 3rd party vendors which don't work on newer versions or other browsers, either because the vendors haven't finished testing on a newer version or they've abandoned development completely, or we're stuck on an old version and can't move for some other dependency.
It's very easy for some smart-arse in a 100-PC company (or 3 PC house) to go on about switching browsers and how IE6 is so old, but try moving a 100,000+ PC enterprise, that is dependent on some apps which can't move - it aint that easy.
Yes, but the whole point is that XFM *doesn't* do that - not because it can't compete with 6Music, but because it was bought by Capital and drastically re-targeted the station. They don't want to compete with 6Music, they just want a student-oriented equivalent of Crapital.
XFM was great when it started, but has been utter shite for years
this is getting somewhere near what I want from an eBook reader.
I want:
- whiter background than the currently murky grey
- magazine subscriptions
- colour (though I can live without that for this generation or 2 of devices)
- Find (by on-screen keyboard)
- highlighting capability (by touch or stylus, not buttons)
- no DRM
- ability to accurately render PDF and CHM docs
- Realistic pricing of eBooks / eMags, not deadtree price + surchange for presumed piracy. In other words, not the rip-off iTunes model
I don't want:
- Wifi that eats battery for no useful purpose - I'm happy to download on my PC and connect the ebook reader to it. How many people *really* find themselves stuck somewhere with nothing to read and *need* to download a book from the WiFi hotspot, *right now*? If these people actually exist, I'm not one of them
- ebooks that cost a large portion of the price of the deadtree version (eg 100+% in the Waterstones/Sony model)
- buttons. Any buttons at all (well, except an on/off, and even that should just be by closing a cover on it)
... to wish the stupid hippie fucktards would just shut the fuck up. If they want to spend the rest of their lives debugging their almost-finished-but-couldn't-quite-be-arsed-with-the=boring-bits applications on Linux then feel free. But stop bugging the rest of us about it.
Because it's a godawful piece of software, with a terrible UI?
To give it its due, its linking with the iTunes shop is, as you would expect, excellent. However, as I have no desire to pay more for a digital download than I can buy a CD for in Tesco, that is of no interest to me.
It's also pretty good at managing podcasts.
For everything else, MediaMonket is infinitely better, in just about every respect.
... for jobs which don't require local contact, or detailed local knowledge. But it burns my arse that the government hands out visas by the thousand to import lower-paid workers which displace UK workers, who are expected to train them up to take their own jobs away.
... when it and Byte was the only "general" computer magazines widely available.
But, it's been irrelevant for years, and the current incarnation, with the crappy paper and the retro articles has largely been embarassing - the columns have been trivial, the reviews superficial.
After my last experience with their totally dysfunctional dispute system, which is absurdly biased in favour of dishonest sellers, I am determined never to use the useless gits again. So it is with some amusement, I watch as they thrash around, repeately shooting themselves in the foot, and alienating everyone that they haven't screwed over (yet).
Well there are 255 characters in 7-bit ASCII, let's have all of those in variable names as well.
Anyone who thinks that, for example, aVariable, AVariable, AVARIABLE, avariable, aVariAble etc are all sensible and adequately differentiated names for *different* variables should not be allowed near a keyboard, IMHO. Or should be forced to only program in fortran-66, where they aren't able to hurt anyone.
Heresy to invoke VB in this discussion, but defining the case of a variable in the declaration, then the IDE converting all instances of this variable to the was it is cased in the declaration = very good.
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