Posts by JDX

It's going to be a White (Space) winter after all

@Richard 12

Surely it's 5min from the accident being reported... meaning the band is already cleared by the time emergency services reach the scene?

Lumia sales fail to set world alight

Found one!

My Phones 4U had a couple, but they were simply placed in the lineup alongside the various Android phones... no splashy "look at Windows Phone" posters for brand awareness.

I got the impression MS would practically be paying people to stand outside the shops pushing the Lumia in peoples' faces to get awreness up!

I though MS were going to be pushing these phones super-hard in the shops... but walking down the highstreet past Orange, Phones4You and another big chain, none were prominently displaying "come try the new Lumia" posters - if they were I'd have gone in to take a look.

I also haven't seen a single TV ad for Windows Phone 7[.5] - where is the massive marketing campaign MS need to get the ball rolling?

Facebook shoves your face into creepy 'sponsored stories' in 2012

re:do no evil

Please explain precisely why this is 'evil'?

Don't see the problem

If I was a regular FB user, this seems a much more sensible way of making money from my membership (I see no problem with that) than regular boring ads.

AMD claims 'world's fastest GPU' title

re: what do we use it for

Games like Crysis, with brand new cutting-edge graphics engines, are the area where PCs still lead the way.

O2 denies Nokia WinPho handset cull

re:technohead95

Sounds like someone has neither used one of the phones, nor ever done any development work. But they did manage to get some pretty green thumbs-up by regurgitating what they read on the internet.

Idiot AC.

They probably had a small stock to start with.

Channel 5 snubs Freeview HD again

@Richard Lloyd

+1 channels are great. We can record two things at once and watch a third and yet we STILL often watch +1 for two reasons:

1)We turn on and find something has already started which we would like to watch

2)Recording conflicts mean recording the +1 version can be really useful

C5 in HD would be nice for CSI I suppose - and football.

Film4 in HD would certainly be nice however I reckon the BBC could make great use of it for the Olympics... they could even use it as a dedicated 3D channel.

Ofcom maps out what 'psychics' are allowed to do on TV

Regardless of any of our personal opinions on the supernatural... this seems a bit harsh on anyone who is serious about such things, and is forced to say "this is just for fun".

Although I suppose giving up on your principles is par for the course if you want to be on TV.

Tempt tech talent without Googlesque mega perks

Maybe they could just use proper databases

Plenty of people know how those work.

Nissan Leaf battery powered electric car

re: 2nd car for £30k

Indeed - this is not about saving the environment, but an expensive PR toy for those whose carbon footprint is probably 5X the average due to their giant house :)

Got to laugh at the solar panel, I would be interested if they made the entire roof (or even more) a solar panel though.

Quick question - do electric cars all use F1-style KERS, to recahrge the battery on braking?

The Best of El Reg 2011 now on Kindle

I've no issue Reg advertising their stuff on their site, but I agree billing it as a regular news story is perhaps a bit too much. Perhaps restrict such things to the side panels?

Mandatory "open format bitch"

Just to get it out of the way...

iPad scammers pwn Lady Gaga's Facebook page

Maroon 5?

Isn't that like making malware for Windows Phone 7?

Google+ gets group vid, Nokia still has a Pulse

re:G+ still requiring "real" name? If so, still as useless as ever...

Damn right. Look at FaceBook, they only have a ONE HUNDRED MILLION+ real names.

I've never _heard_ of Pulse. Should I?

I have heard Google's hangouts are pretty decent for video though, especially since you can add moustaches.

NASA detects 'heartbeat' of pint-sized star-sucker

close to the theoretical "mass boundary" at which the formation of a black hole becomes possible.

Well maybe it was larger before and evaporated.

Pop teen beats Steve Jobs in Google's 2011 popularity contest

Homie

Nice of you to decide musical taste is now an exact science. You should write to all those deluded people who think otherwise.

Doctor Who girl Amy Pond axed in 'heartbreaking' exit

50:50

I like Amy but will be glad to see the back of Rory, who makes the whole thing more clownish.

Facebook rolls out Timeline to world+dog

for the 90% of the world that doesn't use Facebook

Most of them probably don't use the internet so posting here might not be helpful. If Facebook is at 1Bn users, that could easily be half of those in the West who use the internet.

If you don't use FB, why do you care what the feature is - you wouldn't understand it anyway if you don't know what FB does/is to begin with.

ostensibly all about "sharing", really about harvesting data for advertisers

I'm not a fan of FB but I don't know that's entirely fair. I don't believe FB was created with this in mind, Zuzky is a proper nerd and made it because it was cool... only later did the money-grubbing activities come in, as evidenced by how long it took for them to figure ads out properly.

Jedi light-sabre beats Taser in Oregon parking-lot fracas

used his lightsabre to snap one of the wires

Must be pretty tough if he was still abel to control his limbs once hit.

Google promises 0.001 of revenue to free the slaves

Google are under no obligation to give to charity...

I tithe (literally) but I see no reason Google have a responsibility to do the same, or any company for that matter. I think it's more a personal decision.

It's very British that when a big company or rich person gives something away, journalists find a way to portray it in a negative way.

However I thought the Reg was a bit above such negativism as we see in the tabloids.

OnLive Game System cloud gaming console

Back-end

Is the back-end infrastructure PCs, or consoles like 360/PS3... they could in theory do either I suppose. Or do they run multiple VMS on a single PC - I imagine that would be quite tricky for resource hogging games so I imagine they need one box for each current player?

I'd love to be able to hire their setup for my own games/software - being able to do rendering & complex logic on a proper PC then pipe the results to an iPad would be great for the scientific/medical training software I work on.

re: Bandwidth

Isn't it simply going to be comparable with watching online video (iPalyer/4OD/NetFlix) and therefore you know what it's going to do to your usage?

Laptop display pixel counts to quadruple in 2012

Also

All the people whinging about how 1080 is a step down from 1200 lines... fine, and 900 or even 768 line resolutions are sucky. But the solution isn't to DOUBLE it... is it? Rather a kind of overkill?

What?

People have been managing at 1280x1024 on their 4:3 22" monitors for years. Why do you need double that on a small laptop screen for editing documents?

Why?

Is this simply to match mobile resolutions or for a real reason? It puts quite a large extra load on CPU/GPU?

I suppose at least you'll be able to run it at 1440x900 (half-res) if you prefer, without pixel jaggies?

Jimbo Wales ponders Wikipedia blackout

re:Anyone can edit, but only Jimbo can grant access... wtf?

Sorry but did you think you own the part of wikipedia you wrote? Just like the Reg forums, wikipedia is owned by someone and thy can do what they like with it.

The same Jimbo who is begging for my money?

Every wiki page has big fat begging ads right now... so their plan is to take donations and then take the site down fora bit? I hope all those who donated will be allowed special access.

CERN: 'New physics starts now'

New Physics?

If Higgs exists, validating the Standard Model, then that cuts out lots of more exotic models doesn't it? So maybe "old physics" is more appropriate ;)

iPad 3 out in March/April say part maker moles

re:iPad 2 is obsolete !!

No it isn't, no it won't be. Apple still support even the iPhone 3GS in iOS5 so while iPad1/2 will lose support one day, it won't be when the iPad3 comes out.

I'd still so much rather they kept the screen as-is and updated the other hardware... we'd be able to do so much better 3D graphics, or have a really good battery life.

Oh well a project I'm on wants iPad support so hopefully iPad3 comes out soon so I can get one for work :)

O2 rents out latest iPhones to tease panting fanbois

The idea is sound for businesses - they don't want to sell old handsets - but it seems hugely expensive for the package offered. If I ran a business which gave employees phones, I would like to rent but only if it saved me money... otherwise I'd give the employees the old phones as a perk.

Chrome is the most secured browser - new study

@Ed Vim

You do make a good point about WinXP... maybe I should have said "3 most popular _current_ browsers".

I definitely would like to see the study extended to Mac/Linux versions of Chrome/FF, and Safari on Win/Mac... but I still think Google are fine not to pay for testing every combination, since they let us do this.

sigh

They tested the world's 3 most popular browsers - Windows versions of Chrome, FF and IE. They released the data meaning anyone can extend the report for other browsers on other OSes... as the article mentions.

Also - a truly secure browser would impose security on plugin-modules.

Versions

I didn't spot any mention of browser versions in the article and I don't want to read 20Mb of data. Can anyone more motivated help out?

Windows Defender Offline: For PCs too hosed to go online

re: clean install

1. Some nasties can survive this

2. Some of your documents or needed files can get infected

Netflix set to make your video history public

"Now they have decided to make it public."

NO THEY BLOODY HAVEN'T. They've been given permission by the government to allow users to choose to make it public.

Do torrent users think it's impossible that their downloads can be tracked?

Good article to gauge the moron quotient on Reg Forums

"consumers will be able to give a one-time consent"... but still we get a half-dozen rambling on about privacy invasion.

Is Bill Gates mulling a return to Microsoft throne?

I think it'd be fascinating, a chance to really see how good Bill is when coming from behind rather than dominating the market.

Win8 beta to surface in Feb 2012 - Microsoft exec

August 2012

By then we'll presumably have iPad3 and the next-gen Android tablets not around yet. They're going to have to be VERY polished tablets for W8 to take off.

Microsoft welcomes OSI open source to Win8 store

GPL

Presumably their hands are tied with GPL... hence why it's not so popular.

Steve Jobs' last design: New Apple HQ pics

@Richard Hodgson

He does have a point though, things would be a lot easier without users.

That last quote is wonderful.

Personally I like the design, it's nice _someone_ is still building interesting stuff.

Microsoft seeks to woo developers with Windows 8 store

@Paul Shirley

I think MS are targeting Win8 predominantly at the mobile world... not necessarily even that bothered about desktop take-up while W7 is doing nicely.

As far as desktop use, I think a lot depends how easy they make it to toggle regular/metro.

Turn your WinPhone into an Xbox remote

@Taylor 1

1)It's NOT a universal remote, it's a 360 control device.

2)When did you get your 360 to blue-screen? When has WP7 been reported as blue-screening