Posts by mark l 2

Microsoft v Google judge could shape the world in new patent punchup

Aren't the microsoft patents on the FAT file system? which you could argue is a standard essential patent in itself since you need to be able to read/write FAT partitions to get anything on/off a Windows PC which MS have a monopoly on.

Even a CHILD can make a Trojan to pillage Windows Phone 8

Don't panic, Don't panic (sorry couldn't resist a little homage to the late Clive Dunn)

But since there are very few Windows phone 8 users its hardly a problem at the moment

Man, 19, cuffed after burning Remembrance poppy pic is Facebooked

Its obvious why the police go after these offenses, its easy to do so, the person usually has posted under their own name with photos of themselves tagged along side it so they can simply lookup the persons details and send a van round to their home, so they can make the crime stats look good.

When they have to do some actual police work they are not so keen, had been scammed out of several hunderd pounds of computer equipment when someone bought it from me then claimed they hadn't authorised the transaction. Gave the police the address, phone number and IP of the person involved as was told. 'nothing they could do'

Microsoft and Skype to axe world's most popular IM client early 2013

Isn't skype on around its 3rd owners now with none of the previous ones able to make money from it? its good because its easy to set up and free, i use it to video chat to relatives who live overseas but never used it for IM or to chat to my friends in this country as i get virtually unlimited SMS a month so if i want to message rather than talk i just text.

Not really sure how microsoft are intending on making money from the Skype purchase, if they make it Windows only they will loose vast amounts of user from iOS and Android that will just go elsewhere. And very few people would realistically start paying for it, so i guess that just leaves annoying adverts like they put on MSN/Windows live messenger clients

Adobe spurts spackle* into Flash's gaping holes

Interesting to see that for both the Windows and Linux versions of flash Adobe recommends a 2.33ghz cpu or better but for MacOS it say a 1.83ghz or faster. They are also saying that flash 11.2 is the last official version for Linux.

Rather than adding new features how about they optimize the code and make it less of a resource hog

Apple tries to add Galaxy Note, Jelly Bean to patent slapfest

if they are trying to go after Jelly bean because it arranges icons in a grid then so did Windows 3.1, Amiga OS, Risc OS and probably lots of others well before iOS was around so plenty of prior art on that one

Firm-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's tax dodge profit shift? Totally legit

A lot of what people are suggesting to stop multinationals moving profits abroad will also hit 'home grown' UK business and could quite probably put a lot of smaller companies go out of business. Some of the suggesting have been to:

*abolishing the ability to claim back VAT on purchases for the business - this will probably close down a lot of business that rely on low profit per transaction but high number of sales

*taxing companies on income not profit - So your saying if i run a company that had a turnover of £1000000 but due to purchasing, R&D, marketing, wages, business rates, etc only made £10000 profit i should still pay say 25% corp tax on the entire turnover so have a tax bill of £2500000 to pay.

*Make the corps have a major audit - HMRC are already stretched without having to audit this big corps that will have large accounting teams a high paid lawyers to make sure everything they do is all within the law.

Unfortunately there are no easy answers, you can't force Ireland or other countries to increase their corp tax and as it stands these corps are within the law of what they are doing, and any sledge hammer aproach to it may result in UK business going under or increased prices on goods and services for everyone.

Windows Phone 8 has a secret feature which may activate at any time

of course this is all assuming that you have battery zapping WIFI turned on all the time, i know i don't and i suspect others don't either and just turn on WIFI when i want to connect to a WIFI hotspot.

Also is the claimed 11 million hotspots worldwide or in the UK?

Microsoft's 32GB Surface RT has 16GB of free storage

16GB just for the OS, sounds like to make Windows RT Microsoft just recompiled the Windows 8 binaries for ARM and then locked it down so you could only install software from the Windows store and left all the other crud for full fat windows in there that won't be needed. Of course the surface comes with Office installed so that bound to take up a chunk of the space whether you want office or not.

To compare the OS restore software for my Ainol Android 4 tablet fits on a 1GB SD card with just a few hundred meg of free space left

French gov 'plans to hand Google €1bn tax bill' - report

Its all well and good to say that starbucks, Google etc should pay more tax here but where as this will increase the tax revenue the government gets it will result in those companies increasing prices to their customers to make up for the loss in revenue. So ultimately your next cup of coffee or a shiny nexus 7 will be more expensive and then everyone will be complaining that prices are too high.

Ballmer has plans for more Microsoft own-brand hardware

Microsoft are doing their best to piss off their OEMs by making their own hardware, who may just start looking elsewhere for an OS. I see at least one major PC maker going tits up within the next 18 months as sales start to dry up even more and they fail to win people away from Apple with Windows 8

Windows RT OEMs unveil pricing for Surface wannabes

Ill just pick up a Windows RT device from the £99 bargain clearance bin in 12 months time when they stop making it as its already on the slippery slopes with these prices even before its realised

Microsoft: Welcome back to PCs, ARM. Sorry about the 1990s

Its Windows RT for ARM, NOT Windows 8

If a IT news website can't even get it right what hope does your average customer have.

Skype for Windows 8 is coming: Always on, always in your contacts

Another reason to avoid Windows 8 then. they used to do the same with MSN messenger constantly running in the background all the time and you manually having to keep log out to stop being pestered all day when trying to work

Kaspersky Lab to create new OS 'to save the world'

Wasn't QNX designed for these niche markets and has been around for 30 years so assume is pretty secure, kind of seems like re-inventing the wheel to start from scratch. No matter how well they write the code there is bound to be some bugs in it. And besides as RIM now owns QNX they could do with some alternative markets since the Blackberry hasn't exactly sold well

Windows 8 pricing details announced as preorders begin

Only have the option to upgrade from previous editions is a bad move. From experience of previous upgrades of older Windows versions its not exactly a reliable process and can often result in a unstable system

HTC profits lobbed off a cliff by rivals Samsung and Apple

My ZTE blade/orange sanfran with CM7 is still going strong despite several drops and once being kicked down the road but with it costing less than £100 new if it breaks completely then ill get whatever is the latest budget smartphone, from my friends having either iphones or S2 not really seen anything they can do that makes me want to shell out 3 x more than it cost for my Sanfran.

Maybe HTC should start to concentrate on the low end rather than compete with Samsung and Apple at the high end

AMD unveils 'sweet spot' processor for 'sexy' tablets

If your not wanting to run legacy x86 code i don't see the point in having a x86 netbook running linux, Windows yes as Windows at the moment is so heavily invested in the x86 platform with lots of legacy code that won't run on ARM. But for linux you may as well get a ARM netbook as there are plenty of Linux distros for ARM available now and most common Linux programs have been recompiled for ARM and with ARM SOC available for <$15 it should result in lower costs.

Lancashire man JAILED over April Jones Facebook posts

While i am against trolling and posting offensive comments on the internet surely a community sentence is more appropriate in these cases keeping prison for people who have caused physical harm or loss rather than emotional harm. I know from personal experience of people who have been attacked, beaten and had to spend days in hospital recovering and the perpetrators only got community sentences.

Sounds like knee jerk sentencing again, just like we had after the riots last year.

Only buy Huawei or ZTE if you like being SPIED ON - US politicos

So Google, CISCO, Microsoft, IBM etc won't implement a backdoor if the NSA or some other US gov dept tells them to.

Unless they have found some ZTE or Huawei kit that under lab conditions has tried to contact back to some anon Chinese server where does this proof come from that they are less secure than US made kit?

Motorola whacks laptop-like phone dock

If they had sold the dock for about £100 and made it compatible with all their range of phones it may have sold better as the concept is good, Hope some chinese cheap phone maker such as ZTE will copy the idea for their phones.

Google launches credit card in UK

Why would small businesses go for a google credit card at 11% APR rather than one of the many that offer 0% APR, or they could even get a credit card that offers Airmiles or other voucher points such as tesco clubcard which means they can get free stuff for buying the adwords. Unless of course you get more ads for your money paying with the google card than with a normal credit card which may make it worth while.

Google-Moto slips out of Microsoft's grapple in German court wrestle

Allowing apps to work on different phone, surely JavaME which has been around on feature phones for years already allows an app to run on different phones. So unless the patent was granted a while ago there is plenty of prior art on this one anyway

Mozilla floats fondleslab-ready Firefox for Win 8

I wouldn't worry too much Mozilla for not having access to the API's for making a Windows RT version of Firefox as i doubt it will still be around in a couple of years time so don't bother wasting time trying

Microsoft plans midnight launch for Surface

Wonder how MS are going to spin the story to avoid embarrassment when there are no queues for buying the surface?

I predict they will say that with their advanced online ordering system there was unprecedented demand ONLINE for purchasing the surface which meant customers didn't need to queue at the Microsoft stores at midnight.

STILL TRUE: Facebook and co to handle taxpayers' ID

Another waste of money duplicating the functions of directgov on gov.uk, whats the benefit to the tax payers?

And if its anything like previous changed and update to government websites links will get broken and not redirected to the correct pages. The amount of times i have typed a link thats been provided from a government document to find 'that page cannot be found' error and have to go to google and do a search to find where the info had been moved too. HMRC is particularly bad for this and so is the Environment agency.

Skype touts FREE* Wi-Fi across the UK

I think MS/Skype have missed the boat by about 5 years on this one, bet you can count on one hand the cafes and pubs in a town that don't already offer free wifi to their customers. And for other businesses i doubt it would be worth it, Free wifi is only of a benefit to places where customers are going to stay around for at least 15 minutes and may continue to spend money by buying another coffee or pint, so offering it in a newsagents or DIY store isn't going to get you any more customers.

Windows 8 early-bird users still love Windows 7 more - poll

it still baffles me why MS chose to not include the ability to turn off the 'Not Metro' start screen and go back to the normal Windows desktop. The previous versions of Windows, 7, Vista and XP have had the option to turn on classic start menu so that the users who only know how to do the very basics on Windows can be moved to the newest version with no retraining needed on how to use the OS. This is especially true for the pro version of Win 8 which is aimed more at business than end users this should be an option you can choose during the install. Guess we will have to wait for MS to release the first service pack and see if they fix the issue

Motorola's Germany Xbox sales ban castrated by US judges

I'm sure the register gets paid everytime they mention Windows 8, the author of this article managed to shoe horn it in even though it had absolutely no relevance to the subject other than it being produced by Microsoft, why not mention Office and Hotmail as well just for good measure.

Salt marshes will suck CO2 from air faster and faster as seas rise

Sounds like a good opportunity to cultivate some salt marshes or mangrove swamps in some coastal dessert regions around the world maybe cheaper and environmentally better than the carbon offsetting of planting trees that they do now

Steve Jobs backs Amazon from beyond grave in Apple trademark row

What difference does it make to Apple if Amazon do call it an Appstore, even if some idevice owner did think that Amazon's appstore was some way affiliated with Apple, they would soon realise when they visit Amazons store that they can't purchase apps for iOS there anyway.

There two stores are not competing for the same customers, Android users will not buy from the Apple appstore and vise-versa.

Ultrabooks to finally out-ship notebooks after 20% price slash

So basically 15 - 17 inch notebooks will still be outselling 13 inch ultrabooks, so not exactly outselling notebooks is it?

Tesla drops veil on top secret solar Superchargers

I seem to remember a figure of 10000 being said for a replacement battery pack for a Telsa but not sure if that was Dollars or Pounds as it was a while ago i heard it. Still a lot of money either way.

Vandals break into congressman's office, install Linux on PCs

Sounds like some well meaning but none technical person at the campaign office thinks he will stay behind late one night update the computers to Linux and chooses to format the drive rather than do a frugal install. Craps himself when he realised whats happened so breaks a window and blames it on vandals.

Intel CEO thinks Windows 8 isn't ready, insider claims

personally i would say Windows ME was by far the worst version of Windows, although i never used anything pre 3.11. But actually 3.11 was pretty bad compared to the WIMP environments of the competitors products (no per-emptivive multitasking) but just comparing Windows versions to each other ME sucked donkey balls and was quickly dropped by MS but Vista managed to stick around for 3 years.

Microsoft Research man: It all starts with touch

I don't think the mouse and keyboard are going to go away anytime soon. I can move the cursor from one side of the screen to the other with just a few MM of mouse movement, and have keyboard shortcuts for doing other tasks, scrolling on a touch screen device it still a pain and you often end up clicking on something when you meant to scroll.

LONDON iPHONE 5 MADNESS: 'You must be CRAZY to buy Apple'

I just don't get why you would queue up for hours to buy any product unless it was extremely limited one time only offer and even then i would have to weigh up whether my time would be better spent working (so making more money) or doing something more pleasurable such as spending time with family and friends.

Its not like you get a 'better' phone by getting it first, in effect your really a beta tester if your the first to buy as issues that weren't noticed during testing won't be ironed out until a few weeks or even months after you got your phone with software updates.

International Trade Commission heeds Moto, targets Apple

I had always said well before Google bought Motorola that Apple and Microsoft would be best leaving them well alone as they might come out on the wrong side of a patent battle with them.

They practically invented the mobile phone so hold a lot of patents in this area.

Windows 8: Never mind Office, it's for GAMING

There is a whole lot of difference between making a mouse and keyboard and a full computer. And where as the mouse and keyboards Microsoft have made maybe reliable the early Xbox's certainly were not as anyone who has experienced the red ring of death will tell you

Twitter to UK.gov: Web super-snoop law will trample twits' rights

Looks like it will probably be easier and cheaper for all these companies to simple close any UK offices and move their servers out of the UK where they will then not have to comply with the 1984 style spying laws.

What will the government do then, probably add these none compliant websites to the block lists that were originally there to block access to kiddy pron site that have now grown to incorporate bit torrent sites and soon sites about suicide.

Ballmer: Win8 'certainly surpasses' Win95 in importance

The fact that the surface has been confirmed as trying to compete with the ipad on price rather than the Amazon Kindle fire and Nexus 7 have now doomed it to failure along with all the other tablets that tried to price themselves the same as the ipad (HP touchpad, Blackberry playbook, countless Android tablets im talking here) If MS want the surface to sell when launched especially as there won't be many apps available they need to price it as low as they can or face poor sales. The days of it simply selling because it has windows are now fading as people begin to release a personal computer can be just as useful without Windows installed

Office to propel Windows tablets past Android in 2015

Yes because the only reason stopping all those people buying iPads is the lack of MS office software?

Tablets are good for entertainment and education but not much cop for office use, and with Windows RT having a crippled office version without outlook and the inability to connect to a domain they are not going to be any use for business anyway.

Windows Phone 8 stands a chance as Apple, Android dither

Even if Windows phone 8 is the greatest OS the world has ever seen, doesn't mean it will be successful if there are no good apps for it. BeOS was technically much superior to Windows when it was released but because no one wrote any programs for BeOS it eventually died a death. Its a vicious circle, a new OS with hardly any users so developers you don't want to write apps until they know they will sell so wait until the install base increases. But end user buying a new phone don't want to buy a phone with no apps available so go with Android/Apple or Blackberry.

Final Office 2013 for ARM may not ship until January

the ONLY good thing about MS office over the free alternative office suites is Outlook, so without outlook they are basically getting the same (if not less functionality) as you could get from Libreoffice/openoffice which you can get for free anyway.

German court turkey-slaps Motorola in patent case

Re: Just silly.

A underground OS already exists that does exactly that, its called Linux.

Microsoft preparing for diskless Windows 8 PCs

So they have basically announced what BartPE has been able to do for years with existing Windows XP/Vista and 7 files. Well done MS

There is life after the death of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Start button

I am sure microsoft will re-enable with start menu with Windows 8 SP1 when they realise that Stardock is the top selling program on the windows 8 app store

iPad no flight risk says Federal Aviation Authority

Yes they will be fussy about the models. American Airlines say iPads are ok, but definitely won't be allowed Samsung tablets

Apache man disables Internet Explorer 10 privacy setting

How will this effect EU customers who get to choose which browser to install when they first boot the PC or have MS now managed to get around having to offer up other browsers under Windows 8 in Europe?

Virus lab blogger collared by blundering copyright cop bot

Can we not just build a big firewall around the USA and let them have their own private internet with as many laws as they like while the rest of the world can carry on as normal?