Posts by Mark Rendle

OCZ refunds punter for dud drive shortly after El Reg steps in

My only issue with applying the term "red-top" to The Register is that it precludes comparison to the Express and Daily Mail, and that would be inaccurate.

No; just increasingly infrequent due to the accelerating downward trend in the quality of the "journalism". Speaking of which, whatever happened to the RIP comment icon?

Oh dear

Reporting your own journal's little "triumphs" is just so tabloid. Can we expect tech commentary from shirtless bimbos in the near future? Maybe you could even hack Steve Ballmer's voicemail and see if he uses Google.

Harry Potter director takes on Doctor Who movie

Robert Carlyle...

...would not take any shit from Daleks.

Or do it as an animation and get Seth MacFarlane to do the voice.

Disney's animated back-catalog gets re-released in 3D

Not all 3D is bad for kids

I understood that glasses-less 3D on a small, handheld screen is bad for the eyes of babes and sucklings, but I don't think the same is true of sitting in a cinema with polarised RayBan knock-offs.

Galaxy Tab remains illegal in Germany

Down With This Sort Of Thing

Surely there's something equally idiotic that Samsung could file suit against Apple over? Just find something that Apple started making after Samsung, like TFT screens or whatever.

PlayStation Vita priced up for UK punters

The UK tax again

I'll pick one up when I go to BUILD in September.

Is Microsoft's Javascript chief killing his .NET creation?

No no no

Just because Microsoft have announced that Windows 8 will support native applications crafted using HTML and Javascript, that doesn't mean they're killing off .NET, any more than .NET meant they were killing off C++. It simply means that Windows is an agnostic platform for which you can develop using a wide range of tools and technologies.

Open source .NET mimic rises from Novell ashes

Great news

This is a fantastic development. The Mono project provides a lot of innovation in the .NET space, and the Touch and Droid stacks are easily the best way to develop for iOS and Android.

Crucial M4 256GB Sata 3 SSD

Ordered one yesterday

Went for the 512GB option to stick in my early-2010 MacBook Pro. I had a 128GB Samsung in it until I ran out of space, then had to fall back to a 500GB Momentus XT. That was painful. Back to speed tomorrow though!

Motorola Xoom

Agreed

If it had a full SD slot, then it would work with both. This way, the most common format is unsupported.

The Advent Vega has the same problem.

HTC 7 Pro WinPho 7 smartphone

Reductio ad... no, wait

I was going to rubbish your post by pointing out that the same things could be said about laptops, but then I read the rest of it and saw that you made that point yourself.

So, well done. You highlighted the flaw in your reasoning, clicked post anyway, made yourself look asinine and saved me the time. Except I still couldn't resist drawing attention to it. I suck at internet.

Apple MacBook Pro 17in Core i7 BTO notebook

Alt-3 is the hash key

Weird.

No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

I never read the Education section of CVs

I look for stuff like personal projects, open-source contributions and other signs of passion. And if it's obvious from your CV that you can't spell or construct a coherent sentence, then you'd better have more Passion than Christ to make up for it.

Amazon Kindle 3 e-book reader

Excellent device

I've had mine a few weeks now and I'm really happy with it. Lighter to carry and easier to read than a paper book. There is an issue with the availability and price of titles, but now the thing is selling like hot cakes hopefully the publishers will start to take the platform more seriously.

Trident delay by the Coalition: Cunning plan, or bad idea?

I respectfully disagree

And you are a grotesquely ugly freak.

</ChrisMorris>

Oh no, not you again.

Another reasonably well written and yet completely bereft of sense column from the author of http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/05/dont_vote_lib_dem/

Much like the Audi TT my wife says I can't buy, of all the things we can't afford, an independent nuclear deterrent is the thing we can most afford to not be able to afford.

Microsoft: Silverlight safe against HTML5

Silverlight is not closed

As the Moonlight team will happily attest.

In fact, technologies which are driven/controlled by a small product team tend to progress much faster than designed-by-committee "open-standards" technologies like HTML5. Just look at the farce that has been Javascript development over the last few years, and the complete failure of those involved to produce a 2.0 of the language. When JS 1.5 appeared, the next version was supposed to be 2.0, with a class keyword and proper support for object-oriented programming. Instead, five years later, we got 1.6, where very little of any note happened to that language. In the same time-frame, Microsoft launched C# and .NET, /and/ produced a 2.0 release with generic support.

Even now, all the excitement over HTML 5 has come years ahead of an actual, final, concrete specification for the standard; once again the browser manufacturers are bickering over the details and implementing custom extensions.

There's a lot to like about HTML 5 and CSS 3, and I'm using some of the safer elements of both in projects, but there's a long way to go before I can quickly produce stable, cross-platform, cross-browser software the way I can using Silverlight/Moonlight.

Opera: Firefox tab sets? We've had 'em for years

FYI, Hakum-Lie

Nobody cares.

Microsoft's dynamic languages on forced diet

Time warp

.NET-bashing is so '00s.

Sarcastic reply

Absolutely. And the same goes for JRuby and Jython, and MacRuby...

That anybody would want these popular dynamic languages running natively on their platform and able to interop with their high-performance components and libraries... well, frankly, it beggars belief.

Germany bans BlackBerrys and iPhones on snooping fears

Can I just clarify something?

Is The Reg officially a balls-out, shameless red-top tabloid these days, or are you just having trouble curbing the baser instincts of some of your headline writers?

Ballmer's 'lost generation' note finds resonance

I love my MacBook Pro

It is far and away the nicest computer I have ever owned; the screen is amazing and the trackpad is great. It runs OSX Snow Leopard, and Windows 7 Ultimate on Bootcamp (and the same partition in VMware Fusion).

There's a lot to like about OSX and Win7, and there are issues with both.

Bash is far, far better than CMD or PowerShell. Mac generally is better for running *nix-y software, Ruby stuff and all that.

I prefer the Windows taskbar to the OSX dock.

Having got used to it, I quite like the way the menu is always at the top of the screen is OSX. But I don't like the way OSX claims function keys for itself and stops them working in applications.

Also, Steve Jobs is right: Flash on Mac is a piece of crap.

In my opinion as a developer, Windows wins: Visual Studio is exponentially better than XCode, and Objective-C is a horrible, horrible language. MacRuby is cool, though.

Generally speaking, I boot into OSX and use Windows, where necessary, through VMware, unless I need better performance for development work. All general web browsing, email and stuff I do in OSX.

One thing, though: I can't remember the last time Windows just completely hung on me, without even letting me CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to bring up task manager. OSX throws up that spinny beachball all the fecking time. iTunes is a particular offender.

Solar plasma aurora storm to hit Earth tomorrow today!

Insufficient data

What time might we see stuff in the UK?

Revealed: Government blows thousands on iPhone apps

£40k is nothing

In terms of wasting the taxpayers money, various departments fulfilling this FOI request and the BBC running the story probably cost 10 times that.

Hybrid hard drives: what's not to like?

Wrong-turn

Ill-informed comments from people who haven't actually read anything about the product in question? Help! I'm in the Register comments section again.

FWIW, I've got one, and it's not as fast as my Samsung PBJ22, but it's still bloody quick and four times more space for less than a third of the price.

Sony demos very bendy flexible OLED screen

That is so completely brilliant...

...that it almost makes my PS3 purchase worthwhile, insofar as it may possibly have contributed in a small way to the R&D that has come up with this. (Gods know it hasn't contributed much to anything else.)

TwitPic-nicking Mail nicked

They got previous, innit?

You'd think the Mail might have learned their lesson after their interweb plagiarism escapades of 2001, involving El Reg and the venerable Mr Mil Millington (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/03/02/daily_mail_apologies_for_nicking/).

IT Crowd gets fifth series run

Fifth?

It beggars belief that it got past the pilot.

Queen's speech pledges faster deficit cut, 'freedom bill'

Contributions used to be invested

But then they had to start dipping into them to cover increased payouts as people started living longer. And so it snowballed.

I find your lack of pragmatism disturbing

People are going to live longer and longer. Those of you who are under 40 can reasonably hope to live well beyond 80, given the pace of advances in medical science. Why should retirement age not be relative to life expectancy?

Anonymous coward: And you're posting from a building site, are you? The point is that most 70-year-old men today are far more fit and healthy as the average 1950s 65-year-old.

Mexflyboy, for example: good luck being able to afford a piña colada, let alone a cruise, if we don't find some way of reducing the already-crippling pension bill some time soon.

Thanks for the reductio...

I never suggested raising the age to or beyond life expectancy. I am merely pointing out that the demographic model on which the system was designed is no longer valid.

And that is why...

...the change should have full cross-party support.

Pension age to 66 by 2024?

Here's a better idea: change it to 70 by 2011.

The State Retirement Age has been 65 for men since 1925, and 60 for women since 1940. In 1941, the average life expectancy was 59 for men and 64 for women. So men, on average, never lived long enough to claim their pension, and women got it for four years.

Life expectancy now is 77 for men and 81 for women. So an increasing number of pensioners are claiming for longer and longer, and being supported by a proportionally smaller number of taxpayers. The system is broken, and dicking around for fear of upsetting the Saga Set is just making it worse.

Steam rushes from Valve onto Macs

Epic fail

Downloaded it, installed it, ran it, and got told that I should reformat my hard-disk using a case-insensitive file-system. I've got a better idea: maybe Valve should write software that works properly on Macs?

So, the only Steam I've got is coming out of my ears.

Exam board deletes C and PHP from CompSci A-levels

Recursion

"Most centres offer Pascal/Delphi and Visual Basic as the language of choice for their students. This selection is based on the experience of the teacher in that centre and their own comfort with that language."

So students have to learn a language which won't get them a proper job because it's the only language their teacher knows? Anybody else sensing a vicious cycle?

Also: LISP.

Vote Lib Dem, doom humanity to extinction

Utter crap

Others have very eloquently made the case, so I'll just add this as a +1.

Wide-eyed kiddies in Scarface school play shocker

Awesome

I love the fact that you can get away with pretty much anything as long as you say you're doing it to raise awareness of the fact that, these days, you can get away with pretty much anything.

Would post more, but I've got to go and add rohypnol and LSD to the water coolers at The Daily Mail.

Microsoft to extend Silverlight for Mac?

Microsoft FUD Ate My Hamster!!!

Hey, you know another cross-platform framework or language that supports COM when running on Windows?

ALL OF THEM. Even Java.

No, you're right, it's much more fun spouting malicious bullshit. Hey, here's some: did you know that the Silverlight implementation on this new Windows Phone 7 Series (which is TOTALLY closed-source, BTW; I bet it won't run on iPhones) includes support for interacting with phone features that PCs don't even have!!! So much for cross-platform. FAIL!!! M$ LOLZ.

Seriously, I remember when this used to be a tech site, instead of an unfiltered sewer of idiotic copy elbow-typed by Daily Mail rejects.

Employers call for end to Mickey Mouse degrees

Subtle differences

I think you are confusing reasons to 'do' higher education with reasons why the taxpayer should pay for you to 'do' higher education.

I also think you are forgetting about the pre-existing confusion of "higher education" and "degrees with names which end in 'Studies'".

Microsoft banks Windows Phone 7 on Silverlight

*sigh*

It takes a particular type of dunderheadedness to discover that Silverlight being the development platform for WP7 and infer that the phone is going to come without it and require the user to download and install the runtime from inside the browser. Isn't it far more likely that the WP7 OS will include or be based around a Silverlight implementation? (Yes; yes it is. You see that now.)

Silverlight is considerably more than your writer gives it credit for, too. "Media player", indeed. It is a full-blown Rich Application runtime, with quite a chunk of the WCF stack included for communicating with web services, and is heading for binary compatibility with the main .NET Framework CLR, meaning that assemblies that are careful with their references can be used in both desktop and Silverlight applications. And it's always worth mentioning the multiple language support - C#, VB, C++, Scheme, Python, Ruby, Clojure - all supported in the Silverlight ecosystem.

Now, is there a grown-up there who can confirm whether (given the platform's Zune heritage) XNA will be supported for creating games?

WinMo apps?

Yeah, gutted that the extensive range of visually-stunning applications written in .NETCF are going to have to be rewritten.

Of course, most of the underlying business logic of those apps can be salvaged through the (admittedly complicated) act of copying and pasting it into the new WP7/Silverlight app.

Women face 'glass cliff' after breaking glass ceiling

IANAW, but

I don't see any women complaining about the glass floor, below which men are expected to shut up and get on with it but women can suddenly decide that no, actually, they'd rather not work at all and can become "homemakers". If any female coal miners or sewer maintenance engineers are offended by that, then I apologise unreservedly. Everyone else can suck it.

Too much sitting can kill: Official

Also,

Swedish scientists have discovered that any article starting with the words "Swedish scientists" will be 75% bobbins, with the remaining 25% made up of conjunctions and prepositions.

Apple misses self-imposed Windows 7 boot camp deadline

That's only half the task

I shall also be requiring a MacBook Pro 17 with a decent capacitive multi-touch screen. When that arrives, I promise faithfully that I will drink the Kool-Aid that I have thus far only sampled with my iPhone.

Brum DJ canned for cutting short Her Maj

Legal case

Doesn't he have a case for illegal dismissal?

Oh, and @Will Godfrey, in many countries the Queen would have been summarily executed years ago, so perhaps she should think herself lucky instead of asking for an increase to the annual £8 million we pay to have our country represented by an out-of-touch old lady.

Windows 7 - The Reg reader review redux

Slow startup? Not here.

I've been running 7 x64 RC on my main PC since it was released, and it still boots to usable desktop in well under a minute. In fact, the POST takes longer than the boot to the login screen, and login (local only) takes a few seconds. And I've got dozens of things installed, including the full Microsoft Office, two versions of Visual Studio and all the frameworks, SQL Server 2008, IIS7, Eclipse, and a bunch of ickle background things like MSE, uTorrent and goodness knows what else. Applications load almost instantly, I've had no blue-screens or compatibility problems, and I think this is the best version of Windows ever.

Of course, my main PC is a 3Ghz quad with 8GB of RAM and an OCZ Vertex as the system drive. But I've also been running 7 Ultimate x86 RTM on my Samsung NC10 (with 2GB RAM) since it hit MSDN, and that's still running fine, too, with a similarly diverse bunch of things installed. It is noticeably faster than the originally-installed XP.

Only real problem is, I'm bored now. When can I get my Windows 8 CTP?

Cobain band mates denounce dead rocker's Guitar Hero gig

The point

@davefb: they had control over what they covered. And I doubt they ever did "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting".

@EdwardP: they're not complaining about the use of Nirvana songs; they're complaining that the Cobain model is an unlockable bonus character.

Microsoft names the day for iPhone come-back punch

Still miles away from relevant

Until they provide some form of WPF or Silverlight as the UI layer, and *require* the handsets to have capacitive touchscreens, it just doesn't matter.

Celebs join call for official Turing apology

Dear King Harold

Sorry about your eye.

Regards,

France.