Posts by EddieD

Kindlevision? Amazon reportedly developing set-top tellybox

"Amazon had not returned a request for comment at the time of publication"

This seems to be becoming a habit

Turn off the mic: Nokia gets injunction on 'key' HTC One component

Re: Hold on!

It wasn't designed to bootleg concerts anymore than the compact cassette was designed to pirate albums.

Bootlegging concerts is an unintended consequence, the microphone was designed to give good response in any environment with high ambient noise - e.g. city streets, factories

German watchdog whacks Google with PIDDLING FINE over Street View slurp

Salami.

Slice by slice the companies pare away our protections, safe in the knowledge that when they breach the law, the fines that are imposed are not, by the size of the revenues of the company profits, in any way punitive.

Nokia: OK, Q1 has been weak, but there's 'underlying' profit

Re: @Spoddy

I'll believe that when I see it - remember the promises about the 7.8 update which turned out to be false.

Also, it's been shown on the internet that the WiFi can be left going on lock - lumias in the Chinese market appear to have this, so it appears a marketing decision.

Nah - actions, or in this case, inactions, speak far louder than words

Re: @Spoddy

If Microsoft - or Nokia, I'm not sure - didn't keep lumbering developers with ridiculous limitations - the 920 has a perfectly functional FM subsystem, but it's disabled, which removes it from my potential upgrades - if the WiFi didn't switch off on lock (the expensive cellular data keeps going, I notice), if blocking could be enable, if the old Nokia idea of timed profiles could be implemented, and so on.

I look at Androids - hell, even iPhones, which are regarded as lacking innovation these days - and see so much more.

Ah well, I tried...

Samsung: Posting of fake HTC hate was 'unfortunate'

Re: Ouch!

Really?

Makes this http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/27/htc_bootloader_unlock/

look kind of suss...

Samsung vs Apple: which smartphone do Reg readers prefer?

When it comes time to change, I'll see what there is..

Apps are cheap enough to be disposable, so flipping ecosystems isn't hard - it's not like the massive investments we used to make in a software for a platform - a new copy of Angry Birds (or whatever is the current flavour of the month) is a few pennies, and there are enough free apps for most folk on any platform (including my WinPhone, and my office mate's blackberry).

Whatver looks nice will get the sale.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Re: Sonic

And one of the best races I ever saw.

Wealthy London NIMBYs grit teeth, welcome 'ugly' fibre cabinets

Re: Which is a real problem if some pillock has parked their car on the kerb as well.

https://www.gov.uk/waiting-and-parking/parking-239-to-247

Rule 244 - it's only illegal in London - the rest of the country has "should not park..." i.e. there is no law to prevent it.

Give Google a COLD HARD SLAP - web rivals' plea to Euro watchdog

Google isn't a search engine, it's an advert vector.

I suppose that shows their results are accurate

Whatever happened to telepresence? From $2.5m deals to free iPad apps

Another vote for Skype

We use it all the time - I connect the host machine to a 72 plasma screen, maximise the video window, I use a boundary mic connected to an Edirol sound interface, and everyone says that they rapidly forget that one user is not there.

The remote users can normally just use their own kit from home.

Being on a University LAN with gigabit ethernet to all ports helps enormously - though we can get issues when the person on the other end has a limited connection.

Total cost, minimal - just using standard equipment, but it has saved our department many, many thousands.

First Samsung Galaxy S4 review leak: Stop FONDLING, start FINGERING

Looking good...

My contract is up in 4 months, and I'm not going back to Winphone, so phones like this are definitely tempting - and by July they'll be affordable...just...

Report: Amazon dominates global cloud spend

Oh gee whiz

For the colouration on the graph, you get a fail. If you're comparing the companies, keep them the same colour so we can easily see their relative performances on all scales.

Dear oh dear...

The DIY spy-in-the-sky: From kites to octocopters

Re: Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator launch, a GoPro HD HERO???

And they supply a set of reusable dessicating inserts for the Hero3.

Bought a gopro for this very reason

Just got a Hero3, mainly for cycling and diving, but I will try and clip it on to my big kite at some point. I would go the weather balloon route, but I know that if I got a cylinder of helium, I'd just waste it all on Donald Duck impressions.

Carrie Fisher dusts off THAT bikini for Star Wars VII

Re: With a bit of CGI...copious amounts of coke

Not as hot as when she was in the Blues Brothers.

There's something about a cute girl with heavy weaponry I find frighteningly irresistable.

BRITAIN MUST DECLARE WAR on Cervinaean menace

Re: @g e - And can I pop in a vote

The kids in schools near inverness already have a high venison diet due to culling. My hippy friends will be appalled, but pass me a rifle, I'm peckish

Honk if the car in front is connected

Can't wait

For the first crashes because folk overtake on blind corners because they haven't been told not to.

I can see the value of this, but I think it will need a little tweaking to be really useful

Twenty classic arcade games

Ah - the passage of time

I knew - and loved - all the earlier games, but the later ones were a mystery. I think I discovered girls or something.

For me, Space Invaders - the first really huge game, Donkey Kong - the first platformer, Star Wars - incredible 3D, but I think BattleZone was first on the Vector 3D..., and Gauntlet - just damn good fun in the Union bar - I got the adaptor for my Atari ST so that we could play G2 4 up on the machine - but since you couldn't buy more healther, it wasn't as good.

All classics - and cheers for the memories (btw, no Lunar Lander? That was the first I played, in the mini Virgin Megastore in Nottingham...)

Virgin Mobile coughs to choking its customers

Ah, business as usual at Virgin

Trying to make not giving us what we pay for seem a positive thing rather than saying that we just can't provide what we sold...

German boffins turn ALCOHOL into hydrogen at low temp

Re: 24 litres per second?

Remembering 30 years ago to school chemistry, the avogadro constant for gases is 22.4 dm^^3 at STP, 24 liters is a fraction over this, so ~2.1g of Hydrogen every second - seems reasonable.

Colombian boffins reconstruct flight path of Russian meteor

Weight

I thought that they revised the weight up a tad...between 7 and 10 /thousand/ tonnes (at 17m diameter, that wouldn't be tricky)

Brit biz stops coked-up moist pocketstrokers ruining your pub lunch

Can that gunk be applied to laptops...

" Indeed most phone insurance policies specifically exclude water damage and phones are fitted with tell-tale sensors"

I think Macbook Pros have similar - we had one that had been issued returned to us with the oh so helpful comment "it just stopped working" - only 2 weeks old, so we returned it to Apple. About 20 minutes later we got a terse "it's been immersed in water - tough", and it was returned.

Hey-ho, I had one that had been drizzled with baby oil (I didn't ask) and one that had had what seemed like fish soup through out it's innards. Week old fish soup at that. Not a pleasant job, but I learned how to fix macbooks

Australian Parliament issues summons to Apple, Microsoft, Adobe

Re: Focus on Apple ?

They have to shift the same goods to the USofA - the hardware is made in china, remember, so the delivery charge idea is specious.

Software - all done over the internet via iTunes isn't it? Paid for by the customer.

Try again...

Huge rock-hard marble erection shocks Japanese kiddies

Calm down, it's just a willy...

I think that it's not the first time Big Dave has caused a controversy - often required to don a loincloth of fig leaves - or copper.

Psst, wanna block nuisance calls? BT'll do it... for a price

Riddle me this...

I get a lot of junk calls on my home phone. Which is very odd, because I'm TPS registered, and I only give this to friends - I always use my work number when asked by any organisation, and I never, ever, ever get any junk calls at work.

How does my work block all junk - or are some numbers just excluded from the junkers?

Windows Phone 8 hasn't slowed Microsoft's mobile freefall

Re: Can't recommend Windows Phone even though I liked mine.

You've more or less voiced my feelings - I've got 5 months left on my contract, and I've got me a nice new Gmail account. Android certainly doesn't avoid the lack of updates though, unless you have a reference phone - I know a lot of people stuck on very old versions - older than Win7.5 - on their devices because their device maker/operator hasn't made the update available, and they're not technically literate or confident enough to mod it themselves.

Google, Mozilla, show off in-browser video chat

Re: re: Interesting development, however..

Gaffer tape works wonders. And when you take it off, you're left with a lovely soft-focus effect.

Schoolgirl's Hello Kitty catonaut soars to 93,000ft

Re: Balloon burst

Abso-bloody- lutely - I was trying to work out what it was...adn then I read the blurb.

Cracking shot!

Reg Hardware Awards 2012: The Winners...

Re: Lemmings

http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

Scottish Power blows a fuse after Twitter hijacking

Hic..

Lester's haggis pakora recipe worked wonders up here, for an alternative Burns' supper

Post-pub nosh deathmatch

Burns' Night tomorrow

So I'm grabbing your recipe for Haggis Pakora, adding Sag Aloo (tatties), and turnip dahl (neeps).

I'll let you know how well it goes down. And hopefully it stays there.

All the best,

Oh, those crazy Frenchies: Facebook faces family photo tax in France

I'm impressed

As has been pointed out that with Google, Facebook etc, we're the product, so the idea of taxing these companies for the work we do (i.e. increasing their data store and therefore the value of the companies) is very attractive.

No doubt the companies concerned though will pay for expensive lawyers to tie it up in the courts for ever and a day, and then weasel accountants to point out that the data is actually added in Ulan Bator therefore it doesn't count as work in France, and the companies will continue to export their profits and import losses.

Zut alors, or more likely, merde alors.

Red supergiant Betelgeuse heads for SMACKDOWN with 'dust bar'

Re: Are they sure...

I think that that comment dates you - few people these days know the pain of finding a cinch mark in that roll of film you wound into the developing spiral :)

UK malls use Google in desperate stab at luring shoppers off the web

Bye bye...

Shopping malls and the like are probably not going to last much longer in my opinion - I've been wandering round Princes Street and the environs today looking for shirts - grandad shirts to be precise, out of fashion, but I like them. Not one to be found in Frasers, Debenhams, Marks+Spencer, Jenners, John Lewis (and the rest of the St James Center), Harvey Nicks - and a bunch of smaller boutiques. On the internet, a quick search and a positive plethora. The bricks and mortar shops cannot offer the range that the internet offers - okay, conversely, I can't try things on on the Internet, but DSR makes returning things far easier, and less embarassing, than physical retail outlets.

They'll need to come up with a new models, new services and new ideas to really tempt folk back, this is Canute and the tide.

Greedy Sky admits: We crippled broadband with TOO MANY users

Small Kudos

They're admitting overselling their capacity, unlike others who claim "unlimited" but put caps on your usage so the internet slows down to a crawl, just when you (and everyone else) wants to use it most :)

ISPs should stop playing the numbers game, set a "speed limit" which they can provide, and then work in background to improve infrastructure, and then, when it's ready for us greedy buggers (ISPspeak for folk who want what they pay for), upgrade the speed.

Foxit outfoxes fiendish flaw to fix foxed-up Firefox PDF plugin

FFFFF.....

Ah bollocks, to hard to alliterate.

Slightly quicker than Adobe - and they patch bugs faster too :)

Oz library finds Lance Armstrong books a new home: The fiction section

He was honest once

One of his books was entitled "It's not about the bike", which was a fair assessment of his cycling.

China turns to no-name handsets: Android - without the Google-iness

"Google receives no signalling information from these devices"

Where do I get one?

Amazon-bashed HMV calls in administrators, seeks buyer

It was only a matter of time

A slimmed down HMV may work, but I'm not sure. The assaults of the supermarkets and online are getting pretty powerful.

Has anyone set up a "dead pool" of companies - or even types of companies - yet?

IBM brains ponder universe, say kids will go nuts for STEAMPUNK

And after the mass market has made a quick buck

...the fad will vanish underground again...

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

Oracle, Dell, CSC, Xerox, Symantec accused of paying ZERO UK tax

Yebbut...

How many of us writing here use tax minimising strategies?

I pay my pension by salary sacrifice to avoid the tax and NI payments on that (not insignificant) portion of my gross income - I also plough any spare money I have into an ISA, for the same reasons.

OK, I'm not on the scale of these organisations, and so the savings I make are trivial in comparison - but I bet savings of the 10+million common folk like me amount to a significant dent in the tax take. I have to temper my outrage based on this.

When the companies were lined up in front of the MPs last year, I experienced the same irritations that most folk had when the folk from Starbucks and Amazon stared at the caps on their shiny brogues and made mealy mouthed prevarications - then the chap from Google got up and bluntly said it was his duty to find as many legal ways of paying less tax - if the government want it to stop, they have to tidy up the legislation.

He does have a point.

Up your wormhole: Star Trek Deep Space 9 turns 20

Definitely my favourite

Okay, it may have lifted shedloads from Bab5, but, compared to the preceding two Treks, the scriptwriters had far greater freedoms to explore the darker aspects of characters, and to allow conflicts amongst the core characters, which made it far more watchable for me.

Brooks made Sisko a far more believable /military/ commander than either Kirk or Picard - which suited the scenario nicely - his oft-repeated comment "I do not believe that I invited discussion on this issue" always reminds me of the officers in my cadet corps.

20 years - my word. It's the only US series I've managed to watch from start to finish - I normally get bored around season 5.

Facebook: 'No merit' to claim we broke German privacy law

How would they know?

If you call yourself "The Immortal Khan" - okay, it's a giveaway. If you call yourself John Smith, however? Or, as I did for one account, my middle name and the translation of my surname? Or, given that under Scots law it's legal to take any name that you regularly use as your legal name, with no form filling, a new one every six months?

In the end though, Zuckerberg and his lawyers can, and probably will, say that Facebook is voluntary, and if you don't like the rules, get out of hte social medium. And he does have a point.

GRAIL orbiters make DEATH DIVE into lunar mountain

Re: Rev Bear Ride?

I'm more surprised that no-one has said that the probes had a ticket to ride

MPs: 'Chilling' new libel law will CENSOR THE TRUTH online

Re: Giggs and Imogen anyone?

No media in -England and Wales-, please.

Up here, north of Hadrian's Wall, it was published, very prominently.

Re: One tiny little country

Abso-bloomin'-lutely.

The English laws on libel are so easy to exploit it's ridiculous.

Some tightening up is definitely required - although possibly journals published with regard to English laws on libel (up here we just have defamation, and somewhat tighter controls over who can sue for what and where) may feel that it is already too stringent, those who have to go to court certainly don't.

Review: Mio Cyclo 300 cycling satnav

Yep

This is my solution - a combination of my Lumia 800, Nokia Maps/Drive and RunSat or RunTheMap works wonders.

Not quite got the battery life, but I can get a couple of days out of it, and I've got a recharge pack (and a shaver socket adaptor which works at 98%+ of campsites, and I'm old and wimpy enough to insist on a showerblock these days, nights under the stars with just me, a bike and bivvy bag are long gone...)

I do have to start the unpause the tracking app after a phone call though, which is a tad annoying, but I've got a couple of ton* left over for rare alloy spokes and cf water bottles. (Have I bollocks, it all goes on beer :)

*Yeah, yeah, I pay for the phone...but I was getting that anyways

Dr Alex Moulton: 'An inspiration for generations of engineers'

Ah damn...

First Patrick, now Alex...not a good week.

Moulton bikes are deceptively awesome - the old ones look like the small wheeled Raleighs, but had incredible geometries and suspension which made them lovely to ride.

The later ones looked odd, but you wouldn't really give them a second glance, appearing to be made out of space frame, but again, stunning geometries and balance mean these small wheeled bikes dismantle for travelling, and when you got there they could carry you and your luggage in comfort. You soon got over the shock of a 1200 pound starting price (and the AM7 - if you gotta ask, you can't afford...).

It's almost impossible to build a better bike, but Alex certainly came the closest. I do wish I could afford one :(

Windows Phone 8 must be Microsoft's priority one, two AND three

Wrong tense.

The Windows phone platform should have been Microsoft's priority 2-3 years ago. They should have had engineers working on apps, and tools. Windows 7 was certainly sufficient on the desktop for another year or so, and they should have put the resources from Windows 8 into the phone platform. As it is, early adopters aren't happy because WP7.5 is de-prioritised, and they lack apps, and they pass on their grumbles to the folk thinking of getting a WP8 phone.

I find it hard to see how Microsoft can gain ground from here, unless something major happens. It is a shame, because it has the potential to be a good platform - but the same could be said about a lot of potential platforms that have fallen by the wayside.