* Posts by eugene

43 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Apr 2007

Proof Apple is GOING BACKWARDS: It's trying to patent a Newton-ish touchscreen stylus

eugene

Stylus? Who wants a stylus?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YY3MSaUqMg

Samsung admits Android tablet cash haul is disappointing

eugene

Re: ...and moaning about it helps how?

Nooo please tablet makers, don't restrict choice. I've tried 7", 8.9", 10.1" and briefly played it a 7.7"and find the 8.9 at 465 grams the most ideal for my use.

Choice is good. No one else makes an 8.9 so Samsung won my business. Otherwise I'd probably get a transformer. "One size fits all" never fits all.

US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux

eugene

Versions

XP or Linux?

Shouldn't that be ...

XP or RedHat 7.2 (or whatever linux distro was released in 2001)?

Why are people still talking about an 11-year old OS today? Isn't it high time for organizations - especially ones that are very concerned about security - to switch to something more modern?

Samsung's lovely illegal tablet: Why no one wants to know

eugene
Mushroom

Remember...

...it wasn't too long ago when people said Android wouldn't succeed and iOS would become king.

Today, Android has the largest market share in the world.

You can argue against it all you want, the fact that Android succeeded despite the ios-toting naysayers' predictions will remain unchanged.

It's still early days for honeycomb. I can see the benefits and disadvantages of both the ios and honeycomb platforms, so it's game on!

cue explosive responses now...

IE9: Downloads beat Angry Birds, lag Firefox and Opera

eugene
Stop

what platforms?

Shouldn't this article also mention that IE9 only runs on Vista and Windows 7, whereas FF and Opera runs on XP and everything else?

Microsoft releases Windows Live apps suite

eugene

heh

funny, when macs come with iLife, it's a great feature. When Windows comes with Live apps, it's bloatware. tsk tsk tsk.

The iPad is killing laptop sales

eugene
Stop

Moot.

As JaitcH mentioned, Best Buy says they were wrongly quoted, making everybody's "i knew it" comments as well as this entire incorrect article, moot.

The ipad affected netbook sales, not laptop sales, which makes sense as they both target similar markets - people who only do light computing.

iPhone users get more sex than Android fans

eugene
Heart

tsk tsk

sooo... iphone users are more faithful to their phones than their partners?

Want to use WD diagnostics? Buy Windows

eugene

It's a liveCD.

BartPE is a livecd.

eugene

BartPE? W7 trial?

Can't they just use Vista/W7's 30-day "trial"? No licence key needed.

Does BartPE need a windows key?

Apple preps iOS fix as Germany warns of iPhone peril

eugene
WTF?

Apple and security?

@AC 4.26am

Apple hasn't had a track record for failures? Can you name one iPhone/iOS that hasn't been rootable and carrier-unlockable very very easily?

Dell does factory fresh virus infections?

eugene
Stop

It's *replacement* motherboards

it's dumb, but in the interest of fairness and accurate unbiased reporting, i think this article should state that it was only replacement motherboards that had the infection. i.e. if you had that particular server and it died, requiring a motherboard swap, that replacement motherboard would have had the bug.

The way the article is written can easily make people think the problem is worse - that Dell are shipping factory-fresh servers with malware-ridden motherboards.

Apple bins iPhone covers

eugene
Stop

etc etc yawn

To all those people who say their screen has a scratch after they dropped their phone and it landed on whatever ... do you realize, if you had a good screen protector on like an InvisibleShield.......

YOUR SCREEN MIGHT STILL BE PERFECT.

So that's why many people get screen protectors - in case they drop it on concrete and step on it, or drop it onto an unprotected dishwasher tine. i.e. in case ACCIDENTS happen. Now all you naked phone users have scratches on your screen from your unplanned accidents. Those who applied proper screen protectors are likely to have scratchless screens even after those accidents.

www.theinvisibleshield.com

Lifetime warranty.

eugene

oleophobic screens

Glass may be tough, but is the oleophobic coating as tough?

Apple themselves say that rubbing the screen with something abrasive (pants pockets are abrasive - look at the corners of plastic gadgets you put into your pocket) will "diminish" the coating.

Screen protectors let you resell the phone later on with a "pristine screen".

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10280454-233.html

Freebie BlackBerry bonanza kicks off

eugene
Thumb Up

just register each device

It doesn't actually only support one user, rather, each BES download comes with one CAL, based on the BB's PIN.

So all you do is download BES once per phone - you'll be given a CAL for each phone. You can then put your multiple CALs into your original BES installation and it'll work happily. And just like Dibbley, I did this in 2006 and as recently as three months ago with BIS.

iPad pitch to the Wall Street Journal laid bare

eugene
FAIL

@AC

@AC regarding flash not being available for 64-bit windows. That is completely incorrect. Flash works perfectly fine on 64-bit windows, just not 64-bit browsers. Good thing pretty much all the popular browsers now are 32-bit.

Apple earnings leap 50 per cent

eugene
Thumb Down

wow

Wow. This is what you call typical fanboi behaviour. You give Mac users a bad name.

eugene

overpriced = more profit

"expensive" and "overpriced" means more profit per item. Apple can sell fewer things but make more money from them.

And judging from the comments of people I know, they buy ipods simply because they're not familiar with other brands, and 'ipod' is 'cool'. It's all about marketing. There are other players that have a better UI than the ipod, but because of marketing/brainwashing, people only recognize ipod. Why does Colgate sell more than generic supermarket-brand toothpaste?

ipod shuffle anyone? Haha.

Bloated Office 2010 kicks dirt in face of old computers

eugene

old computers die

You can only upgrade so much. The older a computer gets, the less reliable it becomes. Hard disks can die suddenly, power supplies can blow, motherboard capacitors can bloat up, etc. All that leads to downtime. If that happens in the middle of a crucial project, the business will lose money.

There's a good reason why some things are done pre-emptively. Why don't most people drive the same car for 20 years? Because once it gets over a certain age, things start breaking down. It eventually reaches a point of diminishing returns - the cost of downtime and the hassle of fixing old PCs negates the cost of a new PC. Having worked in an IT company that provides support for business customers, I have seen many occasions when the cost of our services to get an old PC working again, or working fast, approaches or exceeds the cost of a new PC.

5 years old in computer terms is ancient. Office 2007 was released in November 2006. A computer that's unable to run Office 2007 would be WAY overdue for a replacement anyway.

Shame on the reg for the biased, sensationalist title.

I've deployed OO to clients before and none of them liked it. Literally none of them. Why? Mainly because the interface was unfamiliar - the same reason why so many people bitch about Office 2007. Humans don't like change. If you started using word processors for the first time in your life, I bet the Office 2007 interface would be easier to use compared to 2003, as it's more intuitive for the most common tasks.

2016 bug hits Windows phones

eugene

no problem here

No such problem on my N97.

eugene

why?

Why would a wired EFTPOS terminal have mobile phone code in it?

Japan falls for the iPhone

eugene

App usage, not smartphone market share

Don't forget that many free apps have Admob ads on them. The huge number of half-useless apps would drive the admob numbers up, yet have little relevance to real life.

Sensationalism anyone?

iPhone conquers half the (smartphone) world

eugene
Thumb Down

Smartphone = internet ads?

The whole article is based on the premise that "smartphone" equates to "visiting a mobile website with an admob ad".

Sure looks like a sensationalist headline - the article states "...does not represent the traditional view of market share blabla", but the headline reads "...conquers half the smartphone world".

Skinny Acer notebook delivers six-day battery life

eugene

batteries forget

@Anonymous Coward

Batteries will not tell the computer how much runtime is left. They can tell the computer the current power consumption, how much power has been put back into the battery during the last charge, the battery's capacity, and stuff like that. The computer then calculates the runtime from that data. I've seen large numbers like that after coming out of standby, like the other AC mentioned. Fixes itself quickly.

The full-charge-discharge calibration sequence is real - it might take a few months for a battery to reach you - the cells would have self-discharged a little. The battery's chip doesn't account for that, so a full discharge-recharge cycle will recalibrate it.

Gmail users howl over Halloween outage

eugene
Joke

Redundancy?

Strange, don't they have automated failover systems in place? Did someone ... chuck a Spanner in the works?

*cough*

Win 7 users shout: Where's my bloody ballot screen?

eugene

i want...

... a browser ballot screen for the iphone/ipod touch!

Microsoft Q1 sales pays price for Win 7 launch

eugene

GFC?

I'd imagine the global financial crisis might have a hand in that somewhere?

Hands on the Sony Vaio X

eugene
Megaphone

@Shades

You could say Rolls Royce are 'singularly out of touch when it comes to pricing products'. But they seem to be just jusssttt fine. Just like Sony. Obviously their products are not aimed at value-minded people like you. Or me, for that matter.

Some people would gladly pay for looks or trends. Many people buy Macbooks and run Windows on them.

MMS (finally) comes to AppleT&T

eugene

welcome....

Welcome to 2002, AT&T iPhone users!

I recall with a smile, when the iphone was younger, some apple fanatics claiming that apple left out the mms feature because they thought it should die... that everyone should email pics to each other instead. Awwww.

Nokia's £500 netbook: What were they thinking?

eugene
WTF?

@Stuart Rogers

"Of the five featured apps, two are trialware, another two aren't even included in the box let alone installed, and the remaining one is what everyone (EU antitrust cases notwithstanding) would expect to come with a modern OS."

Can you name me a netbook that comes with a full non-trial version of MS Office SBE and a full internet security suite?

Heck, can you name me a computer that comes with a full non-trial version of MS Office SBE?

Intel playing virtual silly buggers

eugene
Stop

whine whine whine

Wow, what a bunch of whiners. How many of you who are complaining about XP Mode and VT ... actually have a use for XP Mode? 3? 5? 10? Face it, the rest of you are just whining just because you need a reason to bash Microsoft. I bet a number of you don't even know what you'd seriously do with it.

Italian iPhone makes like Roman candle

eugene

recovering waterlogged phones is common

Recovering a waterlogged phone is a very common thing. Just google "recover wet phone" or something similar. There must be a lot of jesuses out there. :)

Apple explores auto iPhone audio

eugene

My old phone had it

My old Nokia 5140i from years ago had it, plus more. From the manual:

Automatic volume control — Select On to automatically set the volume of the earpiece at a certain level that you have set with the volume keys. For example, if the environment is noisy, the earpiece volume is increased, or if the person you are talking to on the phone is speaking very loudly, the volume is decreased.

http://nds2.nokia.com/phones/files/guides/Nokia_5140_UG_en.pdf

Ambulance Service not patient enough for Vista

eugene

tsk tsk

I'm another one of those happy Vista users. I run it on three computers and it works just fine under heavy load. People seem to like bashing it because it's 'the cool thing to do', regardless of whether or not they've even tried it themselves! I have friends who say vista is bad even though they haven't used it - quite amusing.

The LAS not seeing a need to upgrade can be seen as praising XP. Perhaps XP works perfectly fine for their needs, so they see no reason to upgrade. If it ain't broken, don't fix it! Of course, Vista-bashers will immediately see it as "they must have thought vista was crap, which is why they didn't upgrade". Ahh, what simplistic minds. :)

Where's my coat?

Google's IP anonymization fails to anonymize

eugene

Don't use google then

If all you google haters are so against Google serving you ads based on your surfing habits, don't use google. Google is free, and it works really well. Don't complain about free things! They make money from advertising to provide you a service. If you don't like how they make their money, don't use their free services.

Read my email? Yes, i'm very sure Google is interested in reading the emails of a few hundred million people.

There's a difference between reading an email and parsing an email. I definitely mind a human reading my email, but if a computer was parsing it looking for keywords to decide what ads would appear on the page, I really, really don't care. How does it affect you? Apart from paranoia.

What's to prevent any internet company from doing the same? They all have access to your email.

Steal my passwords? What, you're all using the same password for all your accounts? tsk tsk.

Bottom line: You google-haters aren't as important as you think. Nobody really cares enough about you to bother to sit down and read your email. You're not that interesting. Really. Paranoia paranoia paranoia.

Did you know that word processors ... read ALL your documents? How else would they know when to put a squiggly red line under mistyped words? Not to mention, online spellchecks on other webmail providers! GASP!! Oh... oh wait... there's a difference between a human reading what you write, and a dumb computer parsing information. Saying "google reads all your emails" is deliberately misleading to instill paranoia in those who like to sensationalize things. Google doesn't "read" your email like a human does. Computers don't "read" things. They recognize things. OCR isn't called Optical Character Reading for a good reason.

Still paranoid? Don't use any google products, and stop trying to "convert" people by sensationalizing things. Don't even use google products through an anonymizer if you're against the way the company makes money to provide you with that free service.

Nokia E66 smartphone

eugene

Re: James Anderson

Just one or two smartphones? I prefer the many-different-models approach. There is no one (or two) phones that will suit everyone - different people have different wants and needs in a phone. An iphone is an iphone is an iphone. Don't like the lack of a keyboard? A heavy user who needs to replace the battery in the middle of the day? Need corporate features, and a phone that actually cares about data security? Sorry, Apple doesn't have a phone for you.

On the other hand, if you need business features, you can get an E66, if you want a keyboard, you can get an E71 or E90. Want just multimedia? You have a selection of N-Series phones to choose from. Don't like the look of one? Get a different one. In the end, nokia will end up selling more phones ... oh .. they already do! :)

Apple seem to have done pretty well with just 4 models? What's their market share now? They're selling an image. It's like saying Prada is doing pretty well with bags. They are, but it doesn't mean Prada bags are superior to <another brand> bags. With the iPhone, people buy them for the name and image, or get fully taken in by the hype and great apple marketing, while the remaining others actually buy it for what it is.

"Makes more sense than the current scattergun strategy" -- it sure seems to be working very well for them! A phone for everyone - not "everyone, you will like this phone!"

I used an iphone for a while but really didn't like typing on a touchscreen. It's a great web surfing (as long as you don't need to type too much) and multimedia device, but a very, very ordinary phone.

DARPA calls for 'DUDE' combo infra-nightscope

eugene

Really?

Really, Annoymous Coward?

Do you really want to be lugging around a mobile ITX PC with cables running to your gun and your HMD, while you're trying to be stealthy and run around while maintaining your agility?

What happens if your power-hungry PC runs out of batteries? If a cable gets damaged in the field? If your cable gets caught in something and pulls you down?

Do you even want to be wearing a HMD when you're actively running around? What if in the heat of battle, your HMD moves off to the side just a fraction, throwing off your aim, and you end up shooting someone innocent?

Will you be able to come up with a mil-spec TOUGH device that does everything, and fits on a gun, won't get damaged easily, won't be rendered useless by a damaged cable, etc etc .. for 2 million pounds?

Maybe that's why you're not designing things for the military. :)

Should I buy a USB HSDPA modem?

eugene

watch that battery!

Watch that battery usage! If your laptop's battery life is of a concern to you, a mobile phone that supports HSDPA will have its own battery, which will allow you to work longer on the move.

Get one that can be charged over USB and it'll still work if you forget to charge the phone - plus you have a spare phone to use. :)

Nokia 8800 Arte and Sapphire Arte handsets

eugene

look at it in context

Some people would pay for build quality and the fact that it's a premium phone.

After all, people pay premium prices for Mercs, Jags, and BMWs that have less features than e.g. a Lexus.

Some people really just have too much money. If they want a phone, and have plenty of money and aren't tech nuts, it's a drop in the ocean. So, why not? They could shred the cash and dump it in the trash and not blink an eye.

I wouldn't mind being one of them. :)

Microsoft cuts Vista price

eugene

Yawwwn...

Yawwnn... all these rants against Vista will soon be forgotten, and Vista will become the next standard.

Who remembers moving from Win98 to Win2k? Now XP is the new standard. Inevitably, Vista will be the next one.

Samsung readies 'fastest' graphics memory

eugene

forever...

You do realize that you'll be waiting forever if you do that!

One plug to rule them all

eugene

wires suck

I'm all for a single plug - it'll be a lot more convenient for people who swap phones during the week. I just hope bluetooth headset manufacturers do the same!

Plantronics is moving in the right direction with their Discovery 6xx series. You can get them with charging adaptors to suit most major brands.

In the end though, wires suck! I'm personally waiting for inductive charging to get small enough to be practical. That, plus UWB or whatever becomes the next short-range wireless standard, would be awesome. Assuming it doesn't break itself randomly, like bluetooth.

Of course, if battery manufacturers can come up with a next-gen batt technology that allows you to recharge your phone once or twice a month with regular use, the type of charging plug becomes less of a hassle!

And the centre of your desktop is...

eugene

Chris, you're "an idiot."

While you may have had valid points Chris, insulting Jason and following-up in a derogatory manner gives the impression that you're a "fanboy" and Jason's post hurt you personally, hence the need to retaliate in that tone.

I think both sides have valid points, but for larger businesses who work with others, I personally think MS Office is the only way to go at this present moment simply because everyone else uses it. It is true that OpenOffice follows open standards, but if lets say 95% of the world uses MS Office, realistically, that is the 'real' standard that matters. Keep in mind that Jason was talking about sending and receiving files from his clients.

A big feature of MS Office is Outlook - my clients extensively use its scheduling features with Exchange to check and sync appointments with everyone else in the office. Sync'ing all their appointments with their phone, whether remotely or when at their desk, also works well. Cached exchange mode is also a blessing for those with laptops. I haven't been looking around, but is there an opensource equivalent for the Outlook/Exchange combo that works well and has all the major features?

It'd be interesting to see what happens with Office 2007 now that it uses an open standard.