Posts by Sil

Swedish teen's sex video fine slashed: Unwilling co-star girlfriend furious

Monstruous decision

What will we have to do to get privacy respected? Have a binding contract signed by the girl/boyfriend before each and every sexual encounter? If that's how it will be there will be a backlash against technology at some point.

Dear MP, you were condemned to 10 years in prison & £50,000 fine for bribery and abuse of public office power. However we must see that it has become socially acceptable & every politician is corrupt nowadays. That is why your sentence is lowered to a £1 fine and a mandatory 1-week coaching in the 5-star resort of your choice. Regarding your son that cheated on his MBA exam, everyone is stuffing his iPad with cheating material so it's perfectly ok. I will have the troublesome examiner fired. Please send your financial contribution to my Ngo "Judges for a better tomorrow"

Lumia 2520: Our Vulture gets his claws on Nokia's first Windows RT slab

Seriously interesting

This looks like a seriously interesting tablet for office workers & for personal users that use office.

I must say as an anti RT guy I'm about to give it a chance even if I do regret it's not a 3770 Baytrail full windows tablet.

I might consider it in addition to a standard notebook instead of a super expensive ultrabook.

MacBook Air fanbois! Your flash drive may be a data-nuking TIME BOMB

Re: Not possible.

I don't know, experiences vary and I guess it is quite hard to generalize.

I have bought & used Dell products for 15 years in an SMB with great satisfaction (although I am absolutely disgusted by the lack of configuration options on their site nowadays, I hope they are clear that it costs them lots of missed sales opportunities).

We had basically 1 real problem in all those years with defective power supplies in Optiplex desktops. Someone came onsite and replaced them all, no problem.

As an aside our record computer was an IBM desktop which has been working 24/7 with Windows 95 since 1997 for a very specialized application. To my knowledge - I left the company 2 years ago - it is still working. It was very expensive at the time, about CHF 4500 if memory serves but it sure was a good investment.

Internet Explorer 11 BREAKS Google, Outlook Web Access

Would not be the first time google uses its monopoly power to make life miserable to consumers of competing platforms.

Witness the YouTube app on windows phones which they sabotaged many times.

Apple's top bean counter: New spaceship HQ won't emit 'one atom of carbon'

Créative accounting

Will all employees be required to wear butt plugs?

Plus as we all know getting green energy from outside sources is as easy as buying it, it's not a political lie.

Lastly onsite fuel cells?

But let's not forget Steve Jobs was the best man the earth has ever created and probably will ever create. Oppenheimer being a close second.

Microsoft: Everyone stop running so the fat kid Win RT can catch up

RT is pointless, WP is the way to go

RT is completely pointless because:

A. It isn't Windows compatible.

B. The Windows Store API, while already greatly improved, offer too little possibilities to create interesting apps, that still have to be coded as desktop apps. As long as this is the case, a Windows Store App only Windows is irrelevant for the consumer.

C. Intel already has a perfectly competitive offering, and it makes much more sense to get a baytrail tablet with full Windows than a limited ARM tablet with next to no battery advantage.

Windows Phone converserly truly is an outstanding OS. For people who understand and like the logic, which btw renders moot the use of many many apps, it is really a joy to use. It really should be the focus point for Microsoft. GDR3 is a great step forward. The next step if you ask me is to make it even more Windows-like Inside, i.e. the horrible tombstoning mechanism that made sense when phones were RAM constrained should be excised from the system with phones with 2GB+ of RAM. So there would be true multitasking and apps would not restart from 0 but truly from a saved state. This would make the back button truly a back button an not give people the impression that the system is bugged (e.g. pressing back on a reopened IE would go back in browser history instead of switching apps). This alone would make me upgrade to a new phone.

The second point would be to extend APIs in a big way, even if this means a small security tradeoff, so that we can see apps that can truly extend the system (true automation based on external parameters such as on Android).

Oracle brass past and present tapped for Microsoft CEO - report

Microsoft doesn't need no stinking Mark Turd

MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross

Open formats

WTF is he talking about. It has been possible for years for Word to read & write open formats. Open source alternatives work very well with Word documents with not too deep layouts, e.g. 90% of docs & probably 99.9% of creative authors files.

Apple ban win: Now you can't buy Samsung gear no one was buying

100% b.s.

This is very simple.

The ITC gave 2 rulings.

President Yes we can't Obama, iPhone fanboi and super Cupertino sales rep giving away fanboi stuff to the Royal Family, decided to overrule in favor of Fanboidome bit of course this isn't politically motivated.

Also coming from the man that promised many times to close Gitmo or change the financial word - and what better way to do this than to take people from Goldman Sachs for key positions and not reenact the Glass Steagall act?

Obama is as credible as Donald Trump's Haircut.

Snowden's email provider gave crypto keys to FBI – on paper printouts

Outrageous

To ask for the main key that gives access to all 40000 customers' communications is downright outrageous and I'm sure illegal when there were indeed sufficient possibilities to only intercept Snowden's comms. But you would have to be seriously rich to battle the government in court.

Levinson really deserves a medal to remind the NSA and the so called court, even for a few days, that there is a limit to total impunity.

Apple iOS 7 makes some users literally SICK. As in puking, not upset

A must-have upgrade for beer lovers

Honey I don't feel too well I think I used my iPhone for a little too long.

Fancy facing an Amazon backup beatdown on cold storage spinners?

Wouldn't it be much easier and efficient to write files on standard hard drives and have the metadata on separate ssds?

iOS 7 SPANKS Samsung's Android in user-experience rating

Can you spell horseshit?

One really has to wonder if the authors ever use the phones as intended or stay in the lab applying preconceived ideas.

Let's see if fanbois like the forced cutie animations, parallax & transparencies and resulting loss of time & battery as much in a few weeks of use.

Also surely less than 80% of phone users are technically savvy? And they still survive with Android & do just fine.

Finally as a 3rd example WP8 is probably the OS that would put the most applications on the start screen with small tiles.

Not that this would be recommended. In fact very seldom hear users complain about this or supposedly limited customizations, they complain about lack of whatever fav app still isn't ported to the platform.

A real study with massive polls of what users actually like/dislike about their platforms would be of much higher value.

Nokia Lumia 1020: It's an imaging BEAST... and it makes calls too

I'm almost sure you can deactivate the auto uploading to SkyDrive & choose between a few resolutions.At least with stock camera app.

THE TRUTH about beaver arse milk in your cakes: There's nothing vanilla about vanilla

Beavers for vanilla sex?

You thought slinging Photoshop into the cloud would fail? Look who's laughing NOW

Nothing to blast about

1 million is a nice looking number but the truth is many many customers are dissatisfied and won't join the forced subscription - please stop talking about cloud there are so little services included.

The real number here is -8% revenues. Financial analysts would be well advised to study the utter lack of innovation, the 0 must-have feature of the 3 or 4 last versions of creative suite, and an acrobat business that was so milked that it will produce ever decreasing revenues, and the very near end of the flash franchise.

New iPhones: C certainly DOESN'T stand for 'Cheap'

As cheap as a Porsche

$849 for a very good phone from any brand? No way.

So for the very average 5s no way in hell.

The 5s is an average phone with a small screen, an outdated OS, no nfc

$150 Nokia lumia 520 + $399 ps4 + $299 34" led tv seems like a better value.

OK, forget the 3D telly fiasco: 4K is gonna blow you away - say tech giants

Tiny screens

These 110" screen are way too small and too cheap.

I won't buy a luxury tv until I need to destroy a wall to be able to bring it in the house.

Microsoft, Nokia and the sound of colliding garbage trucks

The deal makes a lot more sense than aquantive which was basically worth nothing and Skype which it should have paid a tenth of what it did.

- there are potent signs that Windows phone may have found its audience: new smartphone users with limited budget. This is probably the fastest growing segment of the Industry. Huge growth is a few markets are a realistic possibility. Now is not the time to have your biggest partner exploring other alleys.

- MSFT stands to learn a thing or two in many areas: industrial design, consumer marketing come to mind.

- For once many synergies seem realistic in the backoffice / admin / finance stuff.

- assuming the merger is a complete failure MSFT would still have recouped lots of IP value and brain power.

. The one real thing is to risk alienating other partners, but they only represent 20% of the ecosystem and were probably much more offended by the Surface and ridiculous Windows RT (absolutely no reason to exist seeing how energy efficient you can get with Intel, ridiculous name, confusing for consumers, a horrendous launch that managed to sabotage Windows 8 launch)

Second-gen Surface and Surface Pro rumored to be minor upgrades

Deception?

I hope the RT dropping isn't true because it would willfully mislead consumers & could only result in a class-action lawsuit.

Thought the PC market couldn't get any worse? HAH! Think again

Crap makers

PC makers are 99% responsible.

- They haven't mend their ways at all and still try put as much crap as possible in their machines such as very bad 1x1 WiFi n when 2x2 WiFi ac should become the entry. Or ultra crappy super low yes 1368x768 40% srgb space 1:400 contrast monitors, touchpads that won't work, 4gb soldered non upgradeable ram & one could go on and on.

- non availability. Computexx is far away & most haswell high-margin ultrabooks still aren't available and the way it looks won't be available in a month.

- one would expect a higher sense of urgency from such an underperforming group. Problem is some of them unrealistically think their salvation lies in tablets -it won't, margins are already laughable - while the rest of them seek salvation in enterprise services, as if the market could absorb an infinite amount of new entrants.

Microsoft: YES Windows 8.1 is finished, but NO you can't have it

Msdn devalued

What's the point of paying lots of greens for MSDN Universal if devs & enterprise customers can't test new products anymore, adapt code, scripts or whatever. It is strange to take such a limiting decision for Windows 8, a product that needs every bit of love it can.

In addition one of the biggest weakness of Windows 8 was the absolute lack of tutorials on how it was supposed to be used. How will we get decent tutorials / training materials on time - eg at availability date .- if their producers cannot get their hand on the RTM?

Sometimes it's as if Microsoft wants to antagonize its biggest supporters.

In the same way, while I personally don't regret the start menu at all, many customers do. Why give them hope with a fake start menu? I can already see a huge backlash coming.

Holiday HELL: Pourquoi, monsieur, why is there no merdique Wi-Fi here?

McDo

You could have gotten your WiFi fix for free in any McDonald's and most shopping centers. List not exhaustive.

Top 10 Steve Ballmer quotes: '%#&@!!' and so much more

Homework

Is this a joke? Do you really think a kid can't make his homework without google? Please do your homework and really test / use other search services such as Bing for a week and see whether there is life outside of Google. You may be surprised.

Yahoo! web! traffic! BIGGER! THAN! GOOGLE! in! July!

Pron company

tumblr is still the youporn of still pictures, Marisa just made it more difficult to find the pics.

I defy Yahoo to publish the non-porn %usage of tumblr.

Snowden journalist's partner gave Brit spooks passwords to seized files

Doggy-style

Why the UK Government, which already debased itself and lost all credibility lying like Bush & co on Irak's WMD, still continue to proudly act like USA's senile doggy, is beyond me.

Despite Microsoft Surface RT debacle, second-gen model in the works

Underwhelming tegra

If the Tegra was any good we would have heard of it and it would have many designs wins.

Fact is NVIDIA can't. N+1 architecture doesn't seem to be of advantage. The new Tegra is so good that NVIDIA has to produce a CE device itself to use the production. It doesn't seem that hot.

Chromecast: We get our SWEATY PAWS on Google's tiny telly pipe

Not sure who it is for. My 2 years old decent but by no means special smart tv does everything this dongle does and much more. People with super old tvs may want to invest these $35 bucks directly in a new tv.

Then again I never ever understood what the point of AppleTV was so I guess I do not belong to the targeted customers.

Jackboot dangled over NSA's throat for US spy dragnet outrage

A few good men

Thank God for a few good men, long live the 4th

Spotify: If musicians don't give us their stuff they get pirated more

Why give money to Spotify?

If musicians do not earn more money with Spotify than with pirated music, why should they fatten Spotify shareholders?

Surface RT: A plan worthy of the South Park Underpants Gnomes

Ego boosting journalism

Not sure what the purpose of this article is. Ego boosting journalism? Yet Another Microsoft Bashing?

The flop of the Surface RT - btw in many ways a very good product - has been very well documented already. Now we even publicly know how much the Misjudgment cost Microsoft. Do you really think the program manager will have free reins to do whatever s/he wants? Do you think s/he'll have a big bonus? We already see signs that things are changing in depth such as availability of key software & services on other dominant platforms from the competition. Microsoft needs to try to tackle the tablet market. Did it do a crappy job, notably with launch, distribution & marketing? Absolutely. Will it improve? Almost certainly.

Dear Linus, STOP SHOUTING and play nice - says Linux kernel dev

Thank God for FreeBSD

It must be nice sipping tea and shouting and swearing at people all day long and being handsomely paid for it, one probably feels like an outstanding manager.

But perhaps Linus should think about who for years really contributed to Linux - in many case with 0 bucks earned for hundreds or thousands of hours offered. If he demotivates open source devs just for the pleasure of being his sorry self, he may someday well have nobody to scream at but himself . Anger management courses, a punching ball and a fps or two could help for him.

If there are recurring quality problems then perhaps processes or organization, even if unformal, may need a little fine tuning. It may in fact be all that is needed.

Analyst: Tests showing Intel smartphones beating ARM were rigged

A fishy rebutal

The rebutal itself is fishy and only shows that these types of benchmarks only go so far.

Unless Intel explicitly rigged its compiler for artificial higher antutu scores there is no problem.

One does expect programs to be compiled with the best compilers and the most aggressive optimizations. Same for drivers.

Icahn suggests pumping Mikey Dell for dollars hard over a court bench

Dear Shareholders

Dear Shareholders,

When Michael announced his intention to get Dell Corp. private I saw a great opportunity to do a quick buck doing nothing, as always.

My plan was to buy lots of shares on the cheap then have Michael up his bid a lot. But he won't so my investment is worthless and I have potentially lost a tidy sum of money, as well as the partners I brought in this mess.

Then I tried to get the board to choose a solution that would essentially siphon all Dell Corp's money (and shorten its future as well) so that I can get a big one time dividend and go on the beach already. After that we could have sold Dell piece by piece, fired most employees and earned lots of money to finance our pina-coladas.

It is very unfortunate that not all shareholders agree with me.

Therefore I will sue Dell Corp. to death until I get some sort of compensation for having placed a bad bet. I hope you are ready because I have nothing else to do. My 4G works very well on the beach and my lawyers know what they have to do anyway.

Cheers,

Carl ICahn & Will F..k You

Acer Iconia W3: The first 8-inch Windows 8 Pro tablet

Memory?

My guess would be that memory more than processor is the performance bottleneck for tasks such as web browsing, it would be interesting to check.

One can see things the other way too as a $380 device won't be your main productivity device. e.g. it is an adequate tablet with the added bonus of enabling you to sometimes read / edit office documents on the go but are not designed to be your main computer where you'll do the heavy lifting. I think it is reasonable assumption. Annotate, comment, correct minor mistakes on the train/airplane, do more heavy work with main laptop. Clearly this was never designed as a replacement for a surface pro or an Ultrabook.

The bad quality screen, an unfortunate hallmark of many PC makers, is a big turnoff though.

Texas teen jailed for four months over sarcastic Facebook comment

Poor guy

Poor guy, absolutely ridiculous. I guess he should be happy not beeing waterboarded in Guantanamo Bay for posing such a high terrorist threat.

I hope that in the future he'll learn his lesson and become a shady banker. He'll be able to steal billions of dollars and never set foot in jail.

PC decline whacks 2013 IT spending projections

Haswell the ghost

Do PC makers really want to stop the bloodbath? Perhaps they should market Haswell ultrabooks or how long do we have to wait? Apple had a Haswell model a few days after computex. PC makers are not even willing to give a date of availability.

France Telecom dials up support for its capitaine in Sarkozy gov cash probe

The messenger

He is probably a Messenger, one has to go up to Boloo,Lagarde or Sarkozy to find the true decision maker.

- There was no need for arbitration. Crédit Lyonnais had a major legal victory from the Cours de Cassation just before choosing arbitration, and therefore it was not in its interest at all, it should have continued with the traditional legal way;

- Borloo had been Tapie's lawyer for years;

- Pierre Estoup, one of the 3 arbitrator was well known to deliver "really strange" arbitration (c.f. Elf)

- Jean-Denis Bredin, the 2nd arbitrator, has been active in the same political party as Tapie for years. He also did a very questionable arbitration in another case (les frégates de taiwan)

In short the arbitration was a joke and the French Government should A never have accepted the arbitration and B even if it had it should never have accepted these 3 arbitators.

So clearly it is hard to pin responsability solely on Richard. One should look higher.

Google mounts legal challenge to surveillance gag orders

It's quite funny that one of the few company worse than NSA, violating privacy on a minute by minute basis via scripts that send information to ad servers & other counter servers with 99.99% of internet users not realizing what is happening, not even counting the (soon to be illegal?) consolidated 'privacy' policy, the strong-arming into google+ accounts (eg YouTube) for faking user of self proclaimed social network is now improvising itself a would be defender of internet user rights.

Surprise! Intel smartphone trounces ARM in power trials

No surprise there

Sure these facts need to be confirmed by other testers but it's not like it's a real surprise.

Anandtech came to basically the same conclusions a few monthes ago.

Also, while not the same product, most tests of haswell laptops have surprised independent testers with outstanding battery life ( such as mac air).

And the ways to improve processing power such as increasing MHz or say implementing out of order execution are known to take a big toll energywise.

So while it's not difficult to make a super slow low power processor the faster you want it to become the harder it is to be energy efficient.

MacBook Air now uses PCIe flash... but who'd Apple buy it from?

Arch-enemy

If Apple chose Arch-enemy Samsung then surely not many companies master the technology or can produce it at Apple's desired scale.

Magpie Apple plunders the competition for cosmetics, as egos run wild

Underwhelming

I don't know what iPhone users do wants - except for good maps - but the iOS7 'novelties' certainly look underwhelming. Perhaps Apple wants to reserve some surprises for the new iPhone's future launch.

The Mac Pro looks ugly to me, will probably please users that purchase once and never extend but for many it will just mean cables, cables, cables and power strips.

Finally the new MacBooks Air are super low on innovation but then again I hear they were already superb. The only announcement titillating me is pcie ssds, I hope Apple will set a trend for ultrabooks.

Apple at WWDC: Sleek new iOS, death of the big cats, pint-sized Mac Pro

Re: Innovation?

The new emphasis on typography and less cluttered screens sure do remind of Windows Phone.

What's interesting is the use of opacity, something that has been almost phased out from Windows.

I Wonder if it will have any impact on battery life.

Re: Really, Apple?

Adobe flash is as dead as youtube is small.

Ugly as hell

Sure it's not the primary purchase criteria but I find the new Mac Pro look ugly as hell.

What do you think?

http://poll.pollcode.com/gq33c

Re: Firewire

FireWire had so many compatibility problems.

It is next to completely phased out in the photo industry and in the music industry its days are counted.

Good riddance.

Microsoft announces $499 price tag, new games for Xbox One

Too pricey in Europe

The xbox should be priced at EUR 299 in Europe, which is USD 399 at today's conversion rate.

No way the Europeans will accept the 33% price hike on their us counterparts especially as the crisis will in all probability still be there for Christmas 2013.

US spyboss: Yes, we ARE snooping on you, but think of the TERRORISTS

The magic word

The magic word in the US: terrorism. Pronounce it and you can drone kill citizens, keep detainees and torture them without being bothered by laws and constitutional rights or snoop everybody and their grand mother.

Sure enough US intelligence is the best in the world. After all didn't they find massive cache of WMDs in Irak & did they not rightly refuse to hear the many foreign intelligence agencies warning them of actual terrorism danger before 9/11?