Posts by Lee Chong Yew

HTC HD7

Mostly minor?

How can you call Cut & Paste and Multitasking "minor"?

Agreed

Even Symbian has cut and paste, multitasking, memory cards, and user ringtones.

Even WinMo 6 has cut and paste, multitasking, memory cards and user ringtones.

They might as well make it support only QVGA 256-color or 16bit-color res screens.

WinMo 7: A Throw back to the PalmOS 5.2 days.

Microsoft steers OEMs away from putting Phone 7 on Tablets

This adds up...

First Intel announces that Atom is better suited for tablets, now MS wants to make sure you run Win7 on tablets instead of any of their WinCE products.

MS and Intel in a secret deal?

Tux. Because the more savvy are most likely going to get the tablet /without/ the OS and installing Linux on it. And as I understand it, if it runs Win7, it runs UNR. And if it's an Atom processor, it runs Moblin.

Trojan poses as skeleton key jailbreak utility

Well...

They should hold it off jailbreaking for 4.2 that is coming out next month. Since that will be the next version for iPad.

As for jailbreaking, I've said this many times before, but the only reason to jailbreak for me is Frash. Do you have any idea how many badly designed websites are there out on the web that I need to get to? Over half of the pages I visit have a Flash navigation bar and don't or no longer offer HTML-only sites. I'll stop whining once the Biostar website's country selector screen (flash-only bugger) can be loaded up using Safari instead of having me go the convoluted way of searching for the motherboard model on Google and then clicking on the link from there. Oh, and file uploading doesn't work either. If I could at least use it to upload images to imageshack or flickr.

Tux, because you can do those on Linux.

700,000 Saudi BlackBerrys go silent noisy

Re: American?

Um, since M$ bought them over?

Ten Essential... Symbian Apps

My recommendations

I'd recommend the following for the geek within:

1. Opera Mobile (particularly, the 10.1 beta). Opera Mini is great, but if you want to impress your geeky friends with a full blown browser that could actually pass the ACID3 test with flying colors, this one's for you. Now all they need to do is add flash support (can't be that hard or far away, the WinMo version already has it)

2. Palringo. An alternative to eBuddy. It's all down to preferences I guess. The basic version is good enough for me. Connects to all 6 IM networks I'm on, and even allows sending of short recording clips.

3. mIRGGI. The only native-code IRC client for Symbian. Installation is a pain tho, because the certificate on the last version released has expired and requires one to mess with the phone's calendar to get it to work, but once you get it in, it works beautifully and even handles text codes like color, underline, boldface, etc. (not that there's a choice anyway)

4. Youtube. The app's interface is much slicker than using a web browser to access the page. And oh, iPlayer is not available in Malaysia. At least Youtube is available almost everywhere.

5. Quickmark. Know those QR codes that seems to be everywhere nowadays? Well, this program decodes it, using the phone's camera as a scanner. Pretty cool if you're really geeky (and hence browse ThinkGeek a lot).

Emmerdale shoves jam rags in innocent kiddies' faces

Urban dictrionary defines it as

A piece of towel stained with jam after you consume a jam-filled doughnut and wiped your face with said towel.

Close enough I guess.

Agreed

And the answer is, a Dance Dance Revolution controller mat. Since that was the first thing that came to my mind when I heard the term.

1984's MacPaint source code hits web

To quote "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal"

It's called "Job security".

Beer. Real Programmers use them to go into "thinking mode".

NFC will be in all Nokia smartphones from 2011

I agree.

NFC is big in Japan. Have you seen their phones? They've had NFC for years. Tap, paid for train ticket, ticket fare will be charged to phone bill. Tap, bought cola/coffee/beer/cigarettes/used panties from a vending machine, charged to phone bill. Tap, car unlocked. Tap, house unlocked. The house even talks and welcomes you home by name!

And they very frequently use video calls on 3G handsets compared to the rest of the world.

Nokia probably thought that this will make them more acceptable in the Japanese market (or in markets where people want to be as hi-tech as the Japanese), and rightly so.

Dell preps Windows Phone 7 portrait slider

seriously

4GB DDR2 SDRAM? As storage? Why? Why not just use 1GB of RAM as memory and up the storage NAND to 8GB?

And are we back in the late 90s, where PDAs lose their storage content when their battery goes flat?

(Yes, I had one that does that. An HP iPaq H1940).

Opera alerts EU to hidden Windows browser-ballot

Opera has a point

If a user clicks through the IE8 setup screen, uses IE a bit, closes IE, then notices the choice screen, will they even bother with it? MS would do better for the IE8 setup screen to only appear when and if the user selects IE from the choice screen. The best time to tell a person that he has a choice of browsers is when the person fires up his PC for the first time, and both Opera and MS are aware of the fact.

Tux, because Linux never forces a browser onto the user.

OKI C3450N

Linux support

Well, the predecessor to the C3450N, the C3400N, works mostly under linux albeit with a few missing features. Maybe you could try setting up a linux box, installing foo2hiperc and selecting C3400N and see if it ticks.

Nokia puts hive mind to work on Best Phone Ever

You kidding me?

I actually enjoy the N97... as long as it doesn't crash on me. And oh, if only it has better 3G support. I have the ROW N97 and am dismayed that the phone will not work with AT&T's 850MHz 3G signal. Which stinks. Who uses the 900MHz range for 3G anyway? None that I know of.

Geek. Because geeks like me prefer radio connectivity, touch screen and qwerty keyboard phones to triPhones.

Carrier apathy depresses Google Phone outlook

Can't buy it

I tried visiting the page for the phone, fat chance buying it. It just told me that the phone isn't available in my area. The pathetic thing is, it's available for rich neighbour Singapore to buy, but not us poorer Malaysians.

Doesn't really matter tho. I went for a Nokia N97 instead, and have never been happier. I was looking to add a secondary phone to my primary HTC TyTN WinMo phone and settled for the Symbian set after Google turned me down on the Nexus One, and I wasn't disappointed. The fact that my favourite WinMo software also exists for Symbian is also a major plus.

Coat? The one with two smartphones in the pocket, thanks.

Once impenetrable PS3 cracked wide open

@@Sweet

No, not really. The new slim models does not have the ability to boot linux at all.

Sony claims that they're doing to to cut costs. The exact same reason they removed PS2 compatibility from the PS3 years ago...

I guess Sony opened a can of worms by removing the ability to run linux at all...

Bob the Builder slapped with CGI rendering

RE: Paddington

Yeah. Last I saw they turned it into 2D animation. Why?

Wii Balance Board good aid for doctors, study finds

RE: Inexpensive £70

> How much are those sclaes again??????????

Some US$10 or so last I checked.

I agree. Maybe Nintendo gave that guy the stuff for free, that's why it's inexpensive...

French woman marries dead fiancé

@replies

> If I remember from my high school RE lessons, many religions don't recognise a marriage

> until it has been consummated.

Erm, they consummated twice. Qouting the article:

| Goerge and Jaskiewicz had been together for five years, and had two young daughters

> Why is Caput not a good name for a mayor? It means 'head' in Latin and fits just perfectly.

The Germans prefer to differ...

Skull and crossbones. Necro at it's strangest.

Homework late? Blame Russian hackers

@My PC WAS hacked by the Russians.

Forget russian hackers, rival students can also be blamed. This true story happened on my final year of college. I was working to finish my assignment. A "friend" then sent me a message and an EXE which purportedly lets Warcraft use private servers. Having worked from 8PM, it was 4AM, and I was just done with it and figured "what the hell, I could take an hour off before sleep". I copied the assignment into a floppy (college for some stupid reason bans the use of USB thumb drives) and ran the EXE. It hang my PC.

I rebooted the PC, and found my copy on the desktop gone. I didn't think twice, shut down, and went to bed. The next day, I went to college, printed it out, and handed the papers over.

A few days later, the result came out. I noticed that I have been failed for "plagiarism". So I went to the lecturer. He said my paper was an exact facsimile of the one of the "friend" who contacted me that night. I tried to reason with the lecturer, but to no avail. For some reason she believed that it was I who hacked into the "friend" 's PC and copied his paper, and kept refusing to hear my side of the story no matter what.

Higher powers won't have any of it either. I had to stay back for another year semester because of that. But then, I think I've seen that "friend" buy the lecturer lunch at a fancy restaurant the day before the paper was due...

I immediately ignored that "friend" and the lecturer after that. I also built a proxy firewall and denied my computers direct internet access after that.

So yeah. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

OpenOffice.org overwhelmed by demand for version 3.0

Packages

So, is the Debian packages out on the repository yet? Or do I have to wait a year or five for them?

SQL Server 2008 moves on, wants to stay friends

@Any thing is better than MySQL

Oh, yeah. I agree. PostgreSQL ftw!

Wii-like motion-control games to come to the PS2

@PS2 Wii Controller

I hear that the Wii controller is bluetooth based, and so is the PS3 controller. Too bad I've never heard of people using one controller on another. It would be pretty amusing to hear of someone using a PS3 controller on the Wii.

While we're at it, why not just slap a USB Bluetooth dongle on a PS2 (they do have USB ports, after all) and then write games that could take advantage of that? The other upshot of doing so is that people would also be able to use bluetooth keyboards and mice that're meant for cellphones and desktops.

Chinese Trojan on Maxtor HDDs spooks Taiwan

blind man leading a blind man...

Well, I always thought both Maxtor and Seagate drives were s#@t. And this isn't the first time Seagate-Maxtor shipped a drive with a virus in it either.

When Seagate gobbled up Maxtor, the following quote came into my mind: "Isn't that like a blind man leading a blind man? Won't both of them fall into a hole"?

Dell trips over printer cable

14 quid?!?!?

Over here you could get one for RM8, or in British currency, a quid and a few pence. And that's AFTER taxes.

Vodafone explains N95 crippling

why I avoid operator-provided handsets

Sad to see that this kind of crippling is still going on. That's one particular reason I tend to prefer paying a slight premium for a phone that is operator-branding free and not locked in any way.

DXG dishes out 5Mp camcorder with games

Are those PSX action buttons I see?

So, it has the square-circle-cross-triangle action buttons. One wonders if it those 20 built in games are PSOne or PS2 games.

Playing games on cameras isn't a new concept tho. People have hacked Casio cameras in the past to run stripped down versions of MAME iirc.