* Posts by Studley

226 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2009

Page:

Obama to scrap Moon, Mars expeditions - report

Studley
Unhappy

Obama to scrap moon?

WHAT?!

Oh, you've gone for the 'Americanized' comma in the headline.

Please make it stop.

Windows 7 users to fly without SP parachute

Studley
Troll

What's wrong with <strike>?

Apart from it being deprecated in HTML 4.0?

Mind you, if that's fair game, let's all start using <blink> and <marquee> too.

Studley

No they don't

Windows 2000 - 5.0

Windows XP - 5.1

What's your point exactly?

Avatar renders this earthly life meaningless

Studley
Unhappy

I know how they feel

Ever since The Matrix, I've been ingesting red pills but I'm yet to wake up from this hellish dream-world.

US music royalties' collector sues T-Mobile over ringback tones

Studley
Thumb Up

Infringement? who cares

Copyright infringement? Hard to say, but I'd still be delighted if they were banned.

"Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law if they forget to silence their phones in a restaurant? Under this reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copyright violation for you to play your car radio with the window down!""

Again, I have no problems with the above being declared illegal / punishable by death.

Facebook chief explains bear photo bareness

Studley
FAIL

Default = 'Share with everyone' = fail.gif

The main problem with the 'transition tool' - a.k.a the screen which says "Update your privacy settings" - is that by default, there are NO privacy settings applied! See the screenshot below, which shows that all of the settings are defaulted to 'Share with everyone', as opposed to 'Old settings':

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/375/transition.png

Which means that anyone who just clicks through it (or assumes that the default configuration will leave their privacy unchanged) suddenly finds they're sharing their teddy bears with the world. Zuckerberg, despite his protestations, is clearly a very public victim of this.

For a company who have so fundamentally failed to get a grasp on privacy, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that they missed something as fundamental as defaulting to the user's old settings, rather than defaulting to revealing everything to the world.

Spotify embraces Symbian

Studley
Pint

Cheap...

@Rob Kendrick:

Expensive, compared to what? Downloading albums illegally? Sure.

If, on the other hand, you want to listen to a whole host of new-release albums without having to shell out £7 a time to find out if they're any good, it makes its money back every single week.

Ironically, your TV license example is a good idea of exactly why Spotify works. How much TV would people actually watch if you had to pay per programme that you wanted to watch? Sure, there'd be some (infrequent TV watchers) who might find it beneficial ("£10 a month to watch TV? Bugger off") but an all-encompassing licence to watch everything on terrestrial telly is much preferable, shirley?

But, to bring the post back to its beginning, it's pretty hard to convince people to switch to a subscription model when they're already used to ripping all their music for free.

3UK shapeshifts on traffic shaping

Studley
Joke

"Reprieve for video steaming"?

Sounds like a euphemism for the kind of mobile video I'm most interested in.

Xbox 360 Twitter, Facebook clients rated X

Studley

Xbox 300?

(inevitable duplicate post)

Is the Xbox 300 some kind of 360-lite which I haven't heard about?

This is just Microsoft covering its own back, I suppose (and it's not as if they're the first company to take such a stance - see also: Apple's previous Adults-Only rating of dictionary apps). Although from my experience, people fall into one of two camps on this: (1) indignant Mail readers vomiting their disgust about something they're never going to use, or (2) people who just don't care.

Yesterday in Game I saw a kid who must've been about 10 years old, getting his mum to preorder the (18-rated) COD:MW2 for him (which she did), before demanding that she pick it up at tonight's midnight launch. With this sort of thing being rife, it's a wonder that Microsoft even bothers with this sort of initiative.

Mozilla plots Firefox interface overhaul

Studley
FAIL

New != better

This smacks of revolution for revolution's sake. Hiding the menubar seems an arbitrary decision at best... they've tried to disguise this by bunging all of the main options onto the 'Tools' menu: https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:Fx-3.7-Tools-Menu-Phase-01.png

'NEW WINDOW' IS NOT A TOOL.

'EXIT' IS NOT A TOOL.

I could go on.

Some of the stuff on that wiki is really frightening: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Menu_cleanup

They're justifying removing menu shortcuts such as Reload, Close Window, Close Tab, or Delete(!), based on the fact that they're "already in the UI". Well yeah, sure, assuming we're all a species of super-users, but there's plenty of people out there who use those menus, particularly for accessibility.

So, time to find a new lightweight browser which focuses on usability and a small footprint, rather than bunging in gimimcky new features... hang on, isn't this why I switched to Firefox in the first place?!

Boxer sets lawyers on Facebook

Studley

Facebook should use "fair comment" as defence

because Frank Warren DOES have floppy earlobes and looks like a ****ing rabbit.

Zombie plague analysed by Canadian maths prof

Studley
WTF?

'Smith?'?

"you have no idea what it's like to be entirely invisible on Google"

I have an idea that adding a question mark won't help. Unless you want to perform some kind of wildcard search. He should've changed his name to Robert Xzvygzax instead.

Labour MP exposes password credentials

Studley

Slight typo

"This revealed login details for the database behind the site."

Actually, it revealed login details for the database behind *a* site. Not this one. It was a result of exporting/importing blog entries from a previous CMS, and the details would never have allowed access to this new system.

Nice to see Mr Thinks doing good rather than evil though.

Apple denies censoring App Store swear words

Studley
Thumb Down

17+ rating for dictionaries?

mayb that's wots makin da kids so illitrat.

Sky switches on 3D TV channel in 2010

Studley
FAIL

Am I the only one...

...who remembers how rubbish 3D glasses were first time around?

How long until Sky announces smell-o-vision integration?

Cameron condemns Tweeters as tw*ts

Studley
Thumb Up

For that alone, he's got my vote...

...although he's probably lost an irrationally-high number of votes from Joe Web 2.0.

Landlord sues tenant over moldy Tweet

Studley

Not wanting to engage with Twitter, but....

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=horizon+realty

How did that move work out for you then, guys?

IE icon too familiar for Microsoft EU settlement?

Studley
Coat

Am I the only one...

...who's oddly intrigued by Browser 6?

Spotify: iPhone sideloads for £120 a year, unlimited

Studley
Headmaster

Re: To [sic] expensive

The mental £100 barrier? It's all about how you phrase it. El Reg have shamefully gone for the expensive-sounding tactic (hey, why not point out that it's £600 for five years?)

Phrase it a different way. 30p a day to listen to pretty much anything you want (save for the notable exceptions that Michael posted above). Sounds rather more palatable now, doesn't it?

Studley

Re: last.fm

Spotify's service isn't really comparable to last.fm's. Both have their benefits. In Last.fm's case, their offering is more like Pandora; you can stream genre-specific "radio stations", but there's no on-demand listening. Even if you subscribe (pay) to Last.fm - which gives you access to custom playlists etc - you can still only listen to these playlists on shuffle, and there are some very limiting restrictions (each playlist must contain at least 45 tracks by at least 15 different artists).

Spotify is much more about freeing the music; listen to what you want, when you want (and now - where you want!). Sure, £120pa sounds like a scary figure when you start banding it around in headlines, but for instant (legal) access to exactly what you want to hear, it's a small price to pay.

(full disclosure: I'm a subscriber @ Last.fm, AND a subscriber @ Spotify)

Dell Studio 15

Studley
Thumb Up

Function Keys

Yes, it's annoying that (by default) if you want to press F1, then you have to press Fn-F1. There's a simple switch in the bios to change this though: Advanced -> Function Key Behavior -> Function Key First

I've had the machine for about a month, and it's a solid performer. Games-wise, it might not be bleeding edge, but it's pretty damn competent. (I can easily play Left 4 Dead with the graphics ramped up to the max; the missus can play The Sims 3 without moaning that she can't make out her characters blinking or something like that)

The only small issue for me is keyboard flex - it's noticeable, if not particularly restrictive.

Street View solves Dutch mugging

Studley
Stop

Schtop!

Something doesn't schmell right here. He claims he didn't know the two guys who mugged him? Then why (if you follow the Google car along the entire length of the road) was he cycling merrily alongside them for close to 2 minutes (assuming a 20kph speed limit)?

Still, great to see Big Brother finally scoring a kill (or a wrist-slapping at least). Now we just need the service to become real-time, and we'll all be totally safe.

Tories, LibDems under election day cyberattack?

Studley

Lib Dems: "Oops! Something is wrong"

...would be a pretty good campaign slogan actually.

Presumably their website was overloaded when over six people connected at one time.

Hacker disrupts economy of annoying Twitter-based game

Studley
Gates Horns

Filling Twitter with useless junk?

So this game launched in 2006 then? And Stephen Fry is the Sheriff of Nottingham?

Evil Bill, because he probably makes £75.39trillion in just 15 minutes

Fans decry tennis gal's breast-slash plan

Studley
Heart

online petitions never work

...thank the lord.

Musician dumps instruments for iPhone

Studley
Joke

I hope he's taking requests...

"Jailbreak" by Thin Lizzy, please.

Page: