* Posts by Peter Mylward

26 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2008

When Google's robots give your business the death sentence – who you gonna call?

Peter Mylward

Against the tide

While I’m no fanboy, experience of Alphabet brethren YouTube involved me speaking to a Mountain View based humanoid within 5 mins of hitting support site (via free callback to UK) - I was very impressed to say the least.

Who's a Siri boy, then? Apple hoards your voices for TWO years

Peter Mylward
Flame

What did you Expect

What did you expect - a magic, learning voice recognition assistant?

Of course they are going to keep samples to run algorithms against and of course they are going to tee answers up for questions which are being asked a lot. What do you think the Siri guys are doing with thier time?

If you are so concerned about your private details then you should get off the internet, and certainly not use a mobile phone. The privacy cat is out of the bag, either get on with it or stop using the kit. No-one is forcing you to use Siri, or GV, or any other flavour of voice recognition app, service, photo storage, mail provider etc etc etc. Before you register for any serice, or use any service, you should be of the mindset that your data will be collected, analysed, possibly sold on and stored. Once you have this in mind, you can make a decision based on which services you want to use based on this trade-off.

You pays your money you takes your choice, or in the modern world - you use a service you hands over your data.

There is no point complaining though, else things will not work very well, or you will need to pay for them.

Rant Over.

SUN to GO OUT COMPLETELY: Here's how to watch online

Peter Mylward
Unhappy

19:38

Are you sure it 19:38 GMT - Ive just checked the live feed and it shows just over an hour on the countdown?

Experts troll 'biggest security mag in the world' with DICKish submission

Peter Mylward

This is Brilliant!

Unlike other authors, we have decided not to enable time since 1967;

Emulation of Semaphores

Brilliant

After Jobs: Apple and the Cult of Disruption

Peter Mylward

RE: @ Phil

Captain > We are sinking under a sea of superfluous adverbs - - aaarrrggghhh. Artificially, effectively and particularly in one sentence - impressive!

PARIS concocts commemorative cocktail

Peter Mylward
Joke

What about -

What about the "Bangkok Hilton". Nuff Said.

Bolivians still grimly browsing on Sony Ericsson phones

Peter Mylward

SNAP

I thought exactly the same thing, but a bit of research indicates that there is indeed a 3G network in North Korea covering 75% of the country, called Koryolink. It has apparenlty growing massively, being the oly network and has 300,000 users.

See http://www.intomobile.com/2010/11/11/orascoms-north-korea-growth/ for more info.

Got to admit I didnt expect that, but cheaper than building a copper/fibre netwrok from scratch, and easier to maintain, suppose it makes sense these days.

Florida cops tase naked jogger

Peter Mylward

Bias reporting?

Well of course the reg only report on these sorts of cases, as if it was dealt with normally I assume it wouldn't have ended up on the news wires.

Ofcom gives 3G upgrade thumbs-up

Peter Mylward
Paris Hilton

Think of the Beees!

Why Won't anyone think of the Bees. I for one welcome our 0.5 S Point tower overlords. Mine's the one with the Tin Hat. Paris, because she knows how to double power........

I've run out of Reg cliches now, sorry!

Paul Allen launches patent broadside on world+dog

Peter Mylward
FAIL

Sour Grapes

So Paul Allen has been sitting on these patents for a decade or so, all of the mentioned companies have been reasonably stable in thier core operations for at least the last few years. Any chance that Mr Allen is helping out his former brainchild and attempting to hamper the competition and allow Microsoft to get its hulking beaurocratic innovation engine going at last before it gets permenantly left behind????

Also, how anyone can glean anything from the description of the browser patent I dont know, what a bunch of garbled wishy washy.

Shocker!

Black helicopters circle 'Welsh Roswell'

Peter Mylward
Happy

Tourist?

Doesnt driving through on weekends only make you a tourist? ;)

Colt loads up factory-built data centres

Peter Mylward

A bit expensive!

"We understand a conventional build could cost €13,000m2 and the Colt modules will be less than this."

I hope it is a damn sight cheaper than that, who knew a new data centre would cost £169 000 000 000 000 to build. Google must be dripping in more dosh that I thought to have all those around the world ;)

Paris, because she knows how to make a number bigger!

Fedora 13 – Linux for Applephobes

Peter Mylward

New Drivers?

Just had to point out the new 'new' drivers bit, made me chuckle but has been a pretty boring day so most anything would make me chuckle right about now.

Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx: A (free) Mactastic experience

Peter Mylward

Odd folder names - out of sight out of mind

If you don't want to get into the bones of the system, you don't even have to bloody look at the bin, etc, mnt folders of this world. You will have a nice simple home directory, with plain English names off all your users in it, and in each one of those will be Music, Documents, Videos etc etc.

You don't need to know where things are installed particularly because unlike windows most of the time, Linux knows how to add and remove programs without leaving behind a trail of detritus and bloat.

Peter Mylward
Thumb Up

Liking Muchly

I am using and I am liking Lucid, this is the first distro where I do not need to boot into windows, full stop. Now that IT is generally migrating net and cloudwards in general, as long as the interface is nice and supports standards, it matters little what OS you use, take your pick on what you like.

With Lucid being this good out of the box, the little niggles which meant I had to boot up into Windows to do little jobs are no more, I can access read and write fully to my NTFS partition, Ubuntu even shares my windows media folders over uPnP for my mobile devices without too much of a fuss, would like to see Windows to the same with my ext3 / xfs folders, not likely.

Its fast to boot, looks pretty and does what I want it to, I can see my personal windows upgrade cycle coming to a stop here. And all for free, thank you Canonical for the inspiration and the countless numbers of developers throwing thier weight behind it.

Top Job.

A user's timetable to the Digital Economy Act

Peter Mylward
FAIL

RE: OMG shut up about Spotify

Steve,

I think you might be getting a bit confused here, Spotify is a pretty good legal alternative to torrenting, and is available right now for the premium membership (which is what they are talking about after all, legal, paid for large choice services as an alternative to freeloading.) Now the streaming service, which is equally cool was open for ages with no need for an invite, so if you didnt get in there while the whole world was banging on about it, then maybe you should have let your torrents go for a bit and given it a try!.

Thanks

Irish civil rights group takes aim at iPad launch

Peter Mylward
Thumb Up

Almost had me

I was close to falling for this until the "Mac means brother" bit, lol!

Zero* welcome for 200 Welsh TV shows - in Wales

Peter Mylward
FAIL

Digital I think

As a welsh dwelling Englishman, I should point out that this looks to be referring to the digi option of s4c, which is welsh language only. The terrestrial option serves up a mash of time-shifted C4 stuff with a smattering of welsh language in mornings and early evenings. As C4 is carried on digi terrestrial in Wales, only welsh officionadies search out this stuff, and there aren't many of those about.

I would be willing to bet most of the viewers will either be of the older generation or more likely middle class English emigre parents trying to get timothy into the local lingo, in case local government, s4c or a pocket of bizarrely welsh speaking Patagonia call in later life and welsh somehow becomes useful.

Beeb deletes iPlayer app from iPhone

Peter Mylward
WTF?

@ Tim J 13:40

Err, I think it should be free at point of access, as my monthly direct debit proves the fact that I am already paying for beeb content thank you very much. And this isn't a liscense fee bash, I like the beeb (most of it) and happily pay for the hours of entertainment / education / distraction it offers me for large chunks of my day.

Free it is not though.

Microsoft craves iPhone developers for Windows Mobile

Peter Mylward
FAIL

Are they serious?

Surely if M$ are serious about catching up with apple et al they should be ditching 6.5 ang going straight to full touch 7.0 or am I missing something here. The only thing that will happpen here is that google android and it's manufacturers will come out of it's public beta and will be in a virtual head to head with apple for the consumer Market, if M$ miss that boat, it's screwed.

Apple tablet spooks world of PCs

Peter Mylward
Stop

One Word

There is one word I have to say to Mr Jobs - FLASH. I can forgive it, grudgingly, on the phone but try and shaft me out of user experience on the web in a tablet format and you can shove it. Politely of course.

Nokia N97

Peter Mylward

Generous storage??

"Apple demands over £500 for a new, 32GB iPhone 3G S."

Yet the price in the review box for this phone is £499, whats the difference?

KCOM hands network management to BT

Peter Mylward

@ ian cleary

Sorry to be a nit picker, but I believe he was referring to the founder of the consultancy firm, not of Kingston communications, who is indeed dead!

Broadcasters and ISPs cosy up for iPlayer on Freeview

Peter Mylward
Thumb Up

Vision?

Isn't this just going to be moving the BT Vision box on demand standards across to other STB's (hopefully with some tweaking). Vision now offers BBC (not true Ipalyer content, but close), ITV, 4 and Five catch-up services across on demand via the ADSL QOS link. Don't see why this would be an issue for the vast majority of DSL enabled freeview premises (those with an 'up to 8Mb' service which reliably runs over 2Meg anyhow). Not sure where fail, fail, fail, fail comes into it, tech proven.

HTC Touch HD Windows Mobile smartphone

Peter Mylward
Gates Horns

IPhone Killer?

I was recently looking for a phone, a touchscreen phone which had WiFi, 3G, GPS, a camera of some sort and was easy to use and was excellent at multimedia, to get rid of some of the electronic crap lining my pockets these days and combine into 1. I was personally dead against the iphone, I'm not a fan of apple in general and find the hype off-putting, so I looked and I looked and settled finally on the XDA Ignito (the O2 branded touch diamond) which is basically this phone written small.

I was initially impressed with the features on the phone, but it wasn't a package, and never felt like it, it felt like a mish-mash of winmo apps covered under (admittedly quite nice) HTC's touch flo interface. The fact that I had to reg hack the bloody thing to get something anywhere near a decent sensitivity out of the screen should have got the alarm bells ringing.

In the end I went back to the shop and tried an iphone, and then it hit me, this phone just works, the screen is a joy to use, the ipod app is first rate, the controls are intuitive and fast, the visuals are top-notch, and above all, it all feels like it comes from the same place. This is what a phone needs to do to be an iphone beater, be a gloriously user freindly, un-complicated tied together unit, which, just works.

I am prepared for abuse now!!!