Posts by Glyn 2

MS to WinXP diehards: Just under 3 more years' support

Indeed

For a start XP doesn't start searching the network when I ask it to search for a file on my computer

hmm

Had office and games crash, don't ever remember XP itself crashing on me. Security? If they're still releasing updates for XP does it matter? If they stopped doing security updates for W7 you'd be as knackered. Is the kernel of the design more secure or is Windows 7, XP with a hideous iggle piggle interface and all the security patches installed?

In 3 years time the next version of windows will be out with another massive paradigm shift in the interface...okay, they'll have switched back to the title bar being opaque again and called it a massive paradigm shift...so W7 will be service packed up, cheaper and have another 10 odd years of updates coming.

Don't see the need to shift yet. As in W7 the Office paperclip has taken over the operating system and while there's stuff like ClassicShell and takeownership which replicate some of the nice XP UI stuff in W7 I can wait till other retrostyle apps get written. Give me back my folders button

P.S. I love how people go on about how good Stardock's fences is when it just makes W7 more like Windows 3.11 :)

London Olympics shop in Union Jack outrage

Indeed

In light of how IOC/FIFA/insert other governing bodies here go about their business, I stand by "bought"

hmm

"what else have we "fucked up" then? fucking idiot."

What about the destruction of a plethora of community centres, churches and the like with no replacements being built, planned to be built or being given the planning permission to be built?

Or that the building sites split the areas?

Or that where say in Barcelona, the olympic site was built on the outskirts of the city on a largely derelict site just outside the city centre and part of the money was spent on improving the travel links all around the city, whereas the London site is slap bang in the middle with the travel improvements being put in between the site and the nearest tube stations. How people are supposed to get to those tube stations when the rest of the infrastructure hasn't been improved has been answered with a resounding silence.

Or that the IOC were only bought over and toured round when the kids were off school as this reduces traffic by a significant amount. As the schools will be in for olympic fortnight, no-one will be able to move.

hmm

There isn't a big enough building to put the cock-up-ometer on..."winning" the bid in the first place is numbers 1 through 86 gazilliion

Not to mention there aren't enough numbers in the universe

Office 365: Can Microsoft replace Microsoft?

Ribbon also sucks

I too did not downvote the post because you praised Microsoft, I did so as the ribbon is as counter intuitive as a thing can be.

You have to have screen maximised to make sure you can see everything that's there

Some icons have text below the icon, some to the side

Why does the Links box disappear before the Illustrations box?

In the clipboard box, why does paste button stay big while cut, copy and format painter stay small.

Compare with the Document Views where when the screen is maxmized the buttons are all big then shrink as the screen shrinks.

Why is there no consistency in the contraction of boxes or the shrinkage of buttons?

Why can't you customise the toolbars? Yes you can add them to the toolbar at the top but why am I looking at the paste button? Why is a button I never use taking up a square inch of prime screen realestate?

In previous office versions I could get rid of the buttons I never used and use more of my screen for the actual document and less to show the program itself.

How can "saves a heap of time" be true when it's showing me lots of stuff I never, ever use?

"If your still stuck on 97 you're really making your life a hell of a lot more difficult then it needs to be!" Yeah it's a hell of a lot more difficult to be able to do what I want, when I want to do it and all in a consistent manner

World+dog yawn over NFC smartphone shopping

as stable as an italian waiter

"I launch the payment app on my phone" which is all well and good if the app works and the phone 'isn't having a tizzy and there's not interference from some other source and and and...if anything like that happens...well you've seen what happens if there's a problem with a chip+pin card/reader.

Coins and notes don't crash and are accepted everywhere with no special technology required. And I can lend my mate a fiver without the need for me to buy any kit :P

The tech has got to be stable and resilient to all the little quibbles that can be chucked at it.

hmm

Wouldn't the people who get their wallet/purse out after they've been asked for money just wait to be asked for money before getting their phone out?

I still don't understand how NFC is better/more secure than chip+PIN

sardines

You're that packed in on the train in rushhour that a few cms is all you need. Not to mention on the platform/escalator/ticket queue

One of these in your pocket/backpack and even £20 a trip would make an NFC ripper a sound financial investment. It's pay for a 1/4 of the ticket price for a start :P

Nintendo: no DVD, BD playback for Wii U

still

But once it arrives you can watch it as many times as you like until you mistake the shiny disc for a beermat. The capacity, speed, reliability and reach of streaming needs to be improved a wee bit to huge pipes, ludicrous speed, won't break and everywhere before streaming will replace hard media.

iplayer st-u-ttttt-rrrrrs at the moment where I am, I tried streaming a film off xbox live and that was unwatchable and took an age to start. If I want to watch Mary Poppins it should take no longer to start when downloading than the time it takes me to get the DVD off the rack and skip to the player

Win8: A beginner's guide to FondleWindows

Old wives

The fallacy about even numbered windows releases being bad is totally without basis. It's about as true as all odd number Star Trek films being bad...ah, sorry, yeah you're right

Let's merge the 2 together, call it WindowsTrek Zero (neither even, nor odd). Lcars interface anyone?

How to choose the right screen size

hmm

If the worst that can happen has a vastly higher probablility of happening sooner with the new (with such a high probability that you have to take out extra security) then the old is better. Maybe not technically, but stability wise, certainly. Insurance for an 18 year old driver is £3000, for a 30 year old £300 as the 30 year old is less likely to crash.

It's like saying that rock climbing is safer than climbing stairs because you've had to rope up to go climbing. The need for a safety net doesn't make the new better.

Forgive me for wanting to buy something that doesn't have a high chance of breaking before the year's out.

As for "pule and whine about your terrible experiences"

1 - they aren't my experiences because I haven't bought a new telly

2 - I refer you to your original post whining that I'm a luddite

3 - my original post was bemoaning that there are so many bits of technical information and varied opinions on how to interpret them and updated versions of it all, it's hard to know what to buy so you're not left with an HD-DVD collection when you should have bought bluray

glasses, 3d or otherwise

As you've not seen the tvs in quesetion, you can't really comment on our visual acuity. If you have a small screen, you don't need HD. The HD is there to fill the blanks in on your big screen.

Exciting ascii art diagram - this is how a pixel looks on a CRT tv

#

this is the corresponding area on a big HD tv viewing SD

@@@

@#@

@@@

the HD fills in the @s and smooths the edges so you see

/ -- \

| # |

\ -- /

with nice curved edges that you had on the smaller CRT.

My mum's was an example of technology failure, about a third of the people I know who've had new tvs have had problems of one kind or another, some as minor as a few dead pixels, others DOA when they took it out of the box. Others had various breakdowns and failures over the next year.

Old tvs, no out of the box failures, very few problems until tv the tv died totally many years later.

The new TV tech is too delicate, which suits the manufacturers just fine because they can sell more of them. 1 CRT tv lasts as long as 3 new tvs so you can go and spend more money with them.

No jerking of knees or elbows required.

"like everyone who doesn't feel the urge to condemn rapid technological development as a bad thing."

This is the kind of thing only people who've spent or are going to spend a lot of money on a gadget say...and you have.

So you had a CRT before? Bought a bluray player? Bought sky HD/3D?

And you bought the extended warranty, more money spent but which is now essential as they break. Extended warranties have been a cash cow for retailers for years as the percentage of people needing to make use of them was very low and consumer bodies recommended not buying them for anything. With new tvs it's a must have and the same comsumer bodies say you *should* get an extended warranty for your shiny new one. Surely that proves their fragility and unreliability.

subtitles

"If you're waiting for a time when TVs won't be superseded by the next generation in six months, you will never buy a TV again. Just buy one you think is really good and use it for three years or more, like everyone who doesn't feel the urge to condemn rapid technological development as a bad thing."

Then I'll never buy a TV again and I'm not the only one. The sales figues for tvs are worrying electrical retailers as people who don't want to spend £££ on the never ending merry-go-round of the next big thing are not buying. We've gone from CRT through LCD, plasma, HD, Freeview, more HDHD, bigger and bigger and now it's 3D all in only a few years.

People bought a tv when their old CRT died and while some have swapped once, only gadget show fans have updated to the latest tech every 6 months.

"just buy one you think is really good "

How? What criteria am I using? In the shop each screen looks different most of which is apparently due to the transmission cable the shops use to transmit to all the screens. So I can't compare screens. Also there's no sound, so I can't compare the audio quality. So that leaves me with a stream of numbers and technical specifications which mean nothing and when you look on the net or in magazines for advice you get diametrically opposing views on everything.

For example I've been told that for games I *must* have a plasma as <insert technobabble here> and I *mustn't* have a plasma as the HUD from my favourite game will get burnt into the screen. So, who do I listen to?

Repeat for every other technical aspect of the television.

"use it for three years or more, like everyone who doesn't feel the urge to condemn rapid technological development as a bad thing."

This is not a luddite thing, the rapid technological development you love isn't development. Stuck my old CRT next to my mates HD tv with Halo Reach on both. No discernable difference in the picture quality.

Mum went to currys (other shops are available) and bought a telly when their CRT one died. This was 3 years ago and they're on their 3rd tv now. They keep dying, blocks of red pixels, power not working, etc. They're under guarantee so they keep getting given new ones. It's hardly inspiring me to spend upwards of £500 on something that seems destined to break.

So why should I buy a telly that isn't that much better and that'll only last 3+ years when my old one lasted 13+ ? Please explain to me how that is "technological development". An identical product that doesn't last as long as the previous iteration is regression, not improvement.

As another example take DAB which has been set as standard here, but there are other better DAB versions now so we're told we should use an upgraded system and the government is wasting money on DAB. When does it stop? Do we role out a new transmission network every year and people have to buy new kit every year to access it? The old analogue system has been around for how long again?

I could just as soon call you a gadgetfreak with too much money/credit for buying into the merry-go-round, pointless blanket insults aren't helpful are they!

Oh, now we know

All this argument , claim and counterclaim is why when my telly died last week, I went and bought a second hand CRT from the charity shop for £30.

Call me when they've sorted it out and there's one thing to buy at a reasonable cost which isn't going to be superceded by something else in 6 months time...kinda like my old telly.

And if dvd producers would stop putting the subtitles in the black border on the bottom of the picture, that'd be nice, then when I'm watching something I can tell what the frenchman/american/alien said.

Lloyds TSB signs up to Olympic Phone pay-by-wave plan

bills

Yup I do, well, everything except the credit card and water bill is DDed but when they come I pay them then and there. There's no point in the envelope sitting on the mantlepiece for another 3 weeks when I can pay it now and not have it hanging over my head. Or as happened last year, there was a problem with the money transfer to my credit card so it took 8 days to arrive instead of the usual 2. Good job I paid it 10 days "early".

When the money is sitting in my current account I don't see the point in going into debt, even if I can just pay off the amount in full when the bill comes in

hmm

So, you still have to pay for it? Why not pay now and not 56 days later? If you can't afford it till payday, do without.

This is why there's record amounts of debt in this country, people buying tat in the hope/expectation of being able to pay for it in the future. Sadly, they then go and get some other bit of tat and rinse and repeat till the credit card bill is more than they can cope with.

</daily mail mode>

Mozilla to shift 12m surfers off 2-year-old Firefox 3.5

pah

After much time and downloading of add-ons, I've got FF4 looking and acting like FF3, except for the damnable "close last tab, closes the browser" function. I know it's what happens in chrome which is why IE and FF have decided to appropriate the method, but I can't see why anyone would want it.

FF 3.x, close last tab, new blank tab opens with speed dial, homepage, whatever in, perfectly reasonable (after fighting to get a close button on the last tab in later 3.x iterations). Instead of that one button click I now have to open a tab, switch to the original and close it. Surely replacing a single, simple action with a sequence of longer ones to achieve the same effect is a backwards step!

It also means the last tab's close button has a different effect than the others in the program, close the browser, not an element within the browser. It's the only close button on tab in any program that closes that program. You don't close the last tab in visual studio, for example and studio shuts down.

Consistency of the UI has to exist between programs running on the same system as well as within the system.

P.S. I have the setting browser.tabs.closewindowwithlasttab set to false and it still takes no notice.

David Cameron wants to push all of Blighty online

DWP

If it's that important to have net access then I look forward to the extra tenner a month to pay for it the next time I'm on t'dole. Pensions, IB and all the other benefits will need to go up too. The money can come from all those savings they're making.

Yeah, right!!!

@AC 11:32

"If (for example) my energy supplier can save money on my account, by not printing bills, and allowing me to enter my meter readings, when compared to a "traditional" account, then wtf should *I* subsidise *them* ?"

My paperless discount for phone bills and my gas/electric bill has magically disappearred, so the companies are now sending money by not sending me bills and keeping the savings fro themselves. This is morally wrong to everyone but the utility companies

Steven Moffat fumes over Doctor Who plot leak

Soon

I've seen Star Wars a few times (ahem) but each time can't help but thinking that one day Biggs will make it out of the trench

back to the future

Fan's don't need to travel back in time, most of the plots and design (ships and creatures) have been nicked from other sources and mashed together very crudely. That's where the gaping plot holes come in.

"Stories depend on shocking people. Stories are the moments that you didn't see coming, that are what live in you and burn in you forever. If you are denied those, it's vandalism."

Nope, stories don't depend on shocking people, they depend on a cohesive narrative and actors who can...well..act.

Microsoft Skype: How the VCs won and Ballmer overpaid

Numbers

170 million may not be a lot compared to the total number of Microsoft clients but if most Skype users aren't Microsoft users, it's an "in" to a new, untapped market place. Isn't it? That and there aren't many companies/organisations with huge user bases. After microsoft, apple, facebook, twitter, amazon, ebay and the like there's a long drop to the next level of userbases like the reg for example :P

Tainted ads punt scareware to surfers on LSE and Myvue sites

Me too

I had this try to get onto my PC via ebay, it got caught by Kaspersky :)

Tried to send ebay a message to tell them. It's official that they have the worst contact site in existence, the contact us page when not pointing back to itself sent me to the tech support page which sent me to itself or the contact page. Round and round in circles. All I wanted was an email address or a contact form that let me sent a message.

Any bad press they get over this they deserve I reckon as they refuse to let anyone talk to them.

Google threatens Chrome address bar with death

options

I use this

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

It puts the up button back in and replaces the hateful start menu

Microsoft finally says adios to Autorun

sounds familiar

"it's done for those people not smart enough (or perhaps too lazy) to be to open the CD manually and then the appropriate application or document file themselves"

Sounds like the entire of Windows 7

"of course it seemed like a good idea at the time it was developed to have this functionality but we all know the problems that it has led to years later.."

We'll see (or rather in W7 we won't see as it keeps everything as hidden as possible)

Battlestar Galactica vets needed for online roleplay

drinks

Will this be like the TV series where all major decisions can only be made after imbibing at least 2 bottles of ambrosia?

Mexican woman gets litigious on Top Gear's ass

No

Everyone knows it's New Zealanders and sheep

Murdoch, The Daily, and life without the web

pot, kettle, shade

Got the times today and it contains a fair number of none main news articles that I've seen in other papers or on websites over the past week, the main example being a large piece about made up languages which was on the bbc site earlier in the week.

"almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories… it's theft"

true

In defence of Comic Sans

Hang on

When did you see my living room????

I think the pink doors really set the purple and green off nicely too

Santander mixes up 35,000 bank statements

Me too

Was with alliance and leicester for 15 years and never had a problem. Since the switch over they've screwed up my direct debits, sending me a new debit card, the online banking keeps breaking and they've changed how payments are validated and now my statements been sent to someone else.

In the new year I'm off to the Co-op too

Gifts for the Geeks

shiny

Being an fan of sharp shiny objects I don't know why anyone buys victorianox/swiss army/leatherman offerings

They're not very good and the alternative and cheaper options I've had a far superior.

Got a leatherman type tool from Lidl that was strong, the blades were actually sharp and hold an edge nicely and the plier...prongs....whatever they're called, the grippy bits :) don't twist.

Bought several knives from poundland (other pound a purchase shops are available) that surpasses any of the expensive ones I've ever used and as they cost a pound it matters little that i lose them :)

Queen set to outlaw ID cards today

potatoe prints

The kids fingerprints bit is to do with things like the school libraries and things like that I believe. I used to work for a company that used biometrics to identify kids in school libraries and when the parents found out that their kids fingerprints had been taken, they went ballistic and demanded the biometric details be removed.

The company had never thought of this and the only way to do this was by overwriting it with someone elses fingerprint :-)

Next

They need to get rid of all the fingerprint, pics and DNA they take of people that they arrest and release without charge and those found innocent straight away, not 6 months, 2 years or whatever random number they've picked for it today.

Assange: Text messages show rape allegations were 'set up'

water, in a glass

Sweden have already said that if America asks for him, they're going to let them have him, just chuck him on a states bound plane when he lands in sweden.

Verizon courts Star Wars set with Droid R2-D2

Wars leads, Trek follows

Wars makes a film

Trek makes a film

Wars makes a better film

Trek makes a better film

Wars makes prequels to restart the franchise and they are diabolical

Trek makes a prequel to restart the franchise and it is diabolical, with more to follow

Crash grounds RAF Eurofighters - for Battle of Britain Day!

Nah

You just winch the bomb bay door open and roll the bombs out on trolleys nicked from Tesco.

They only cost a pound a piece, that's a bargain.

Grenade for obvious reasons

George Lucas rattles lightsabre at Jedi laser firm

hmm

Ignoring that Gross Lunatic is being...grossly lunaticy as always, what are these things actually for? What is their intended purpose (apart from aggravating GL which is always fun)?

Microsoft's Windows 8 goals revealed

Help is at hand

I've been using

www.classicstartmenu.com

for a while. It puts the up button back in and the old style start menu without the obnoxious search box and it fixes a few other niggles as well. It only takes up 1k of memory too, so it's not like some other add ons which fill memory with useless rubbish you'll never need.

P.S If someone can explain the reasoning that you can disable the start menu search box from searching but it stays there but does nothing, I'd appreciate it. You can kill it altogether but you have to disable all searching on the PC. They're microsoft's toys and you'll play with them the way they want you to !!!

also

If you're in a folder that's on your desktop, how do you go up to see the desktop, you have to mouse snipe a 5 pixel dropdown and then slide down to desktop.

That's neater than aiming at a big button and clicking once?

bwa ha ha

"And the office address bar is so much neater now"

What's neater than just the information you need

where you used to have

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12

which showed you exactly where you are

now you have

> Computer > Local Disk (C:) > Program Files > Microsoft Office > Office12 >

except when you don't have the explorer window maximised when you get

<< Microsoft Office > Office12 >

where if you can see the old path you can see all of it

Extra padding around everything isn't neat, it's wasteful

"Everything is nicely organised and always in the same place no matter who's machine your using."

The up button was in the same place on every machine. The size of the drop down button is different for each directory as it's the size of the directories name, so they're not always the same size.

Why do the expand directory arrows disappear when you're not hovering over the folder list? You have to wait while they fade in so you can see them. What is the thinking (was there any thinking) behind this? All it does is give you some more of your vaunted whitespace but at the cost of being able to see at a glance without moving the mouse whether a directory has any subdirectories.

My personal male oriented brain wonders what the logic is for this.

What???

"It also suggests Microsoft feels it cannot stop the performance of Windows on PCs degrading over time"

You can, stop making your code hugely overblown and slow. Maybe go back to giving users control over their own computer, if they've got the power to do stuff, Windows doesn't have to.

Also

"The Windows 8 customer will reinstall applications by visiting Microsoft's Windows Store"

Great, if everything's online, the average user is going to go over their ISP's 2Gb a month download limit if they install/reinstall or gawd 'elp them, hit the reset button.

Would anyone trust the reset button wouldn't kill all your personal stuff on your computer?

Pakistani lawyer petitions for death of Mark Zuckerberg

true

and also, why is zuckerberg being threatened with prosecution, just because he's the boss? He doesn't have day-to-day control of the groups/discussions that take place on facebook. If they're going after him, they're going to have to go for all facebook staff aren't they?

And why are all these posts being deleted be the moderators :S

Megan Fox exits Transformers 3

Baweep granaweep ninnybong

Coming from dubious source material is not an excuse for overlooking basic tenents of film making and story structure. You can make a good movie out of anything, ever read the book the Godfather is based on? It's not that good, give it to Francis Ford Copella and he makes it into one of the greatest films of all time.

Bonfire of the vanities is regarded as one of the most important books of the modern age, they made it into a movie with Tom Hanks and it sucked.

"Dude it's just a toy commercial" Fine, so were the series and the comics and they at least rose to the level of decent pulp sci-fi, it's not unreasonable to ask a 200 million dollar feature film to be at least as good as that.

@hfoster

I refer the right honourable gentleman to this which sets out what's wrong with it perfectly

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/escape-to-the-movies/797-Transformers-Revenge

AGAIN

Boffins aim to warm watersports enthusiasts

Titles are for other people

Not to mention, a dry suit costs more and is liable to ripping and puncturing which renders it somewhat useless.

I do like those wetsuits they make with the battery powered heated sections, but I don't think I'd fancy using one because I'm bound to get electrocuted : -P

Vote Lib Dem, doom humanity to extinction

true

This is true, but they've not annoyed as many nasty people as we have by asking "how high?" when the yanks say "jump"

Me, I think it's a little bit hypocritical to have a go at Iran and whatnot for wanting weapons that we have, we're hardly couched in the Chair of Righteousness are we ;)

Bond 23 suspended 'indefinitely'

Qos

The last pierce brosnan one was better than QoS and that had Ace Rimmer as the bad guy and an invisible car

The QoS badguys scream of anger at the end was the best thing in it, only because everyone in the cinema burst out laughing at the squeakyness

yay

That's the quality of cinematic output increased for next year. After how excellent Casino Royale was, how did they regress to the tosh that was Quantum of Garbage?