* Posts by JC_

426 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2011

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Scottish gov follows cutting-edge Italian Post Office with Win 8 trial

JC_

Re: complete with the Start button

on a KDE Start menu ... no hierarchy more than 3 layers deep

In Windows, Linux, or whatever, a menu that goes vertically and horizontally is a UI mistake - it's just too hard to navigate with a mouse. MS realised that some time ago and to their credit removed the nesting - is it really being used in KDE?

T-Mobile FREES AMERICANS to roam world sans terrifying charges

JC_

Re: Premature smugness

T-Mobile are only doing this for US customers and only because they're desperately trying to build market share.

Last month I was in South America and T-Mobile (UK) wanted £1.50 / minute to send & receive calls. If that isn't gouging, I don't know what is, and it'll only stop when either the market or regulators force them to stop.

30 years on: The day a computer glitch nearly caused World War III

JC_

Re: I was in the right place at the right moment

No offense to Obama but his was a low in Nobel awards.

Lower than Kissinger's?

Asus NV550JV 15.6in full HD notebook - the one we didn't have to send back

JC_

Dell sell the M4800 with a 3200x1800 15.6" screen.

It doesn't make much sense to shop in the consumer section and complain that the laptops don't have the features you need...

UK.gov's e-Borders zombie still lurks under the English Channel

JC_

Interesting article, it explains something I've always wondered about. On my last UK visa application I had to list the entry & exit dates for trips abroad; you'd think that the "Border Agency" would already have this information, which is a pain in the arse to reconstruct from dozens of passport stamps, but clearly not!

No matter how badly run a government department is, you can count on Theresa May to make it worse.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it ... Win Phone 8? No, it's APPLE'S iOS 7

JC_

Re: Thumbs up. Apple Vs Microsoft

There's no woosh, here. MAPS is a business to business partnership agreement - MS sells licenses for a lot of software at a massive discount, intending to get a benefit in return. The hoops they make partners jump through (basically, a 10 minute questionnaire about IT) are cursory at best. The site is ugly, but it's business, try and get the same software for £300 elsewhere.

If "btrower" wants an example of getting software without any hassle, Windows Phone updates are the same as iOS updates. An update alert shows, it downloads & installs, no problems at all. He's just looking for a reason to bitch.

JC_

Re: Thumbs up. Apple Vs Microsoft

You are comparing the following:

MAPS:

10 Office licenses

10 Windows licenses

Server 2008, 2012 licenses

SQL Server license

3 (possible) VS2010 licenses

A bunch of others stuff on annual renewal.

iOS:

An update for your phone.

At least compare Apples with apples and look at the iOS update vs. Windows updates (guess what, Windows 8.1 is free and will be a piece of piss to get via Windows Update).

Your comparison is inane. The MAPS program is an annual subscription for businesses, and noone at your business track invoices so you blame MS. Even if you forgot, they send out endless reminders, and it's not like the software stops working...

Steelie Neelie calls for TOTAL BAN on EU mobe roaming charges

JC_

Re: Great (<sarcasm>)

People tend to avoid calls when abroad because it's expensive, not because they don't go to the rest of the EU. Removing this kind of friction is a good thing and is what the EU is about.

Keeping roaming charges within the EU would be the equivalent of having roaming charges between states in the US - obviously a way to gouge users, and the sooner they go, the better.

Does Gmail's tarted-up tab makeover bust anti-spam laws?

JC_

@AC

MCG Brings you a reply sponsored by Microsoft.

But Thunderbird is a dog - slow, ugly and full of annoyances. Save an attachment and there's no option to open the location. Switch folders and your "Quick Filter" has disappeared when you return. Reply to an email and the original email window stays around. The user experience is dreadfully unpolished.

Despite that, I still use Thunderbird in preference to Outlook (2007), which shows you don't have to be a shill to criticise it.

Win XP alive and kicking despite 2014 kill switch (Don't ask about Win 8)

JC_

Re: 12 years not enough?

You should be counting from when they stopped selling licences, not from the launch date. It's not so long ago that new PCs were being offered with Win7/WinXP 64/32bit licences and media from the likes of HP.

The end of support date was no secret when the buyers chose XP; if companies want to give MS money for a soon-to-be-unsupported OS, superseded twice, then they can hardly whine about it later.

My partner just got a brand new laptop from her employer (a large airline) and it came with... XP! You'd think that their IT department would have got on with certifying/porting applications for Windows 7 by now, but apparently not.

Burger-rage horse dumps on McDonald's: Rider saddled with fat fine

JC_

@AC

It's not safe to hand over a collection of burgers in bags and drinks to a cyclist or motorcyclist. ... How do you know that it is not safe? Have you done a safety assessment?

As a motorcyclist & cyclist I can assure you that it's not safe to ride while holding onto anything but the handlebars. One-handed riding simply isn't stable. Toll booth tickets, boarding passes etc. are a pain to deal with, let alone a bag of chips and greaseburgers.

Yeah, a tankbag can mitigate this but I think it's a fair policy; the rider has to get off to eat/drink what they bought, after all, so they might as well do it before buying their food.

Horses - large and panicky animals - in an enclosed drive through? Absolutely stupid.

Fines 4 U: Mobe insurer cops £3m penalty for grumble dumping

JC_

Re: How, exactly

The company has been walloped with a big fine; from it's point of view, it'd be better to pay the extra to keep customers happy, rather than have unhappy customers, the fine and bad publicity.

Hopefully the fine is big enough to do this and not just be treated as a 'cost of business'.

Ferocious fungus imperils future of British gin and tonic

JC_

Re: British?

If I'd be mean-spirited I'd count Bailey's and Sheridan's as another uniquely British crime, but then I'm not a Loyalist so I can chalk it up to the Paddies many culinary atrocities

Baileys was concocted by a couple of advertising types in London in the 70s and named for the pub across the road from where they were working.

You can chalk it up as another British culinary atrocity and insult to Ireland :)

India's outsourcers fume over new US immigration bill

JC_

Re: Wot, no acronym?

Rearrange the title to "Border Immigration and Opportunity Modernisation Economic Security" Act and you get the BIOMES Act, there to protect the local ecosystem.

Desperate Venezuelans wiped clean of bog roll

JC_

Re: Alternative theory

I have fond memories of filling up the 23 litre tank of my motorbike in Venezuela and getting change from $1. It wasn't so fun close to the Brasilian border where there were massive queues of Brasileros at the petrol stations.

You weren't allowed to fill containers, which made sense, so exporters would simply build external petrol tanks into their car boots. It took a lot of arguing in Spanish to get my 500ml stove bottle filled up, which was a bit ridiculous when the Brasilian next to me was filling his car up with 200 litres...

Personally, I'd rather have loo paper than cheap petrol.

Interwebs taunt Sir Jony over Apple eye candy makeover

JC_

Re: People forget: Icons should be iconic!

Everyone has to learn what an icon means; a 3.5" floppy disk means little to anyone under 20, yet people have learned that that's the button to click on to save, so even the most common ones require memorising.

Ask anyone who's done the UI for business software or anything complex. It's quite hard, if not impossible, to represent all concepts and tasks in a tiny square image.

Tech giants' offshore cash-stashing is only ever a delaying tactic

JC_

Re: And this is where the complexity comes in..

* VAT is regressive. It isn't so much of a problem as is usually presented.

And yet it is. It's very simple: whenever a poor person and a rich person buy the same item, the poor person pays a greater proportion of his or her income in VAT. That's the definition of regressive.

People who buy more expensive items, even of the same type, pay more tax. Are you saying that's a bad thing?

They pay proportionately less even though they can afford more; that is what I'm saying is a bad thing.

Maybe, despite what you might want to be true, greater inequality is a by-product of generally increasing wealth overall.

Try this thought experiment to test your real attitude to income inequality: where would you choose to live if you were born into a random family, Denmark or Brazil?

If you answered Brazil, then you'll have lovely beaches upon which to sell snacks, but opportunities for fulfilling your potential have historically been few. Thankfully though, the situation is getting better, thanks in part to the redistributive policies of Lula and Rousseff.

If taxes are too redistributive, they may reduce or remove the incentive to invest and create jobs. Which in turn lift people out of poverty.

The point at which higher income tax rates become counter-productive (i.e. the down side of the 'Laffer Curve') is approximately 70%. A rate that high would sting, but people would indeed still work, so it's not fanciful to suggest it.

Estate taxes, on the other hand, what's the argument against them? That it would remove the incentive to be born into a rich family?

JC_

@Mike Street

And that the richest woman in the UK (leaving aside the queen, for the moment) has written some books, and inherited nothing whatsoever?

It's interesting that you illustrated your point with the UK's richest woman (leaving aside the queen...) and not man. The richest man is Lakshmi Mittal, a steel magnate; Mittal's father ran a ... steel business.

The next two on the list are Alisher Usmanov and Roman Abramovich, both Russian oligarchs. As some might say, behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Next is Duke of Westminster, who with a name like that mustn't have inherited anything.

Next is Ernesto Bertarelli, who became CEO of his father's pharmaceutical company upon his old man's death. What a nice comfort in his time of grief.

And so it goes on. Even an 'idiot' should be able to spot the pattern here.

JC_

Re: And this is where the complexity comes in..

To my downvoter, which of the following statements do you disagree with and why?

* VAT is regressive.

* The consequences of massively unequal distribution of wealth are undesireable.

* The more wealth one has in surplus, the more there is available for investment, resulting in ever greater concentration of wealth in the absence of redistributive taxes.

JC_

Re: And this is where the complexity comes in..

However although like the idea of a Land Value Tax, I haven't seen a good anwser to the issue of asset rich but cash poor people.

Sell something :)

Estate taxes and land taxes should both be high. Money attracts money and these taxes are good ways of off-setting this undesirable fact.

VAT is grossly regressive and anyone who argues that replacing income tax with VAT is either deluded or cruel. Rupert Murdoch won't give a toss if he pays high VAT on his Bentley - he already has more money than he can spend - but someone living on the minimum wage spends every penny and every penny counts.

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

JC_

Re: Comparing like with like

the One sells as many as the 360 in the UK, that's 8m units x £37 = £296m extra profit.

Only if all other things are equal, which they aren't.

For example, you like those consumer protection laws in the UK that ensure a product has to be fit for purpose? I certainly do, but there's a price to pay in preventing manufacturers from saying "tough shit" when something expensive breaks down after 366 days and that will be included in the inflated number.

Google's Schmidt calls climate-change deniers 'liars'

JC_

Re: @hplasm

This overwhelming evidence bollox has to stop. Like the man said - present it.

Okay, here you go:

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus.

Now, for you deniers: put up or shut up.

JC_

@hplasm

Present it.

Look for it. The evidence for anthropogenic climate change is in every single relevant scientific journal; the overwhelming consensus of the scientists who study climate is that it's happening.

If you disagree, then the obligation is on you to show some evidence that makes your case credible, because it certainly isn't now.

Former Microsoft Windows chief: I was right to kill the Start button

JC_

"Likewise he was insanely misguided and showed incredible levels of incompetence in his field to release an interface where simple things like closing apps also have no visual indicators"

There's obviously a lot wrong with Windows 8, but this is one of the things that they got right. Metro-style applications aren't really meant to be shut down. As they're light-weight, you just leave them in their idle state. Closing them is unnecessary and it's a better experience overall to let the OS worry about managing resources. Geeks, of course, hate giving up control!

As for the gesture (swipe down), well, they had to come up with something and that works very nicely on touch-screens. Not so great on non-touch-screens, but point A about it being unecessary makes that moot.

'Leccy car biz baron Elon Musk: Thanks for the $500m, taxpayers...

JC_

Re: Wow-3

And it happened despite Republican attempts to sabotage Tesla (they're not handing Obama a win without a fight!) by tying Tesla up in legal disputes in some of the states with Republican legislatures.

JC_

@Thomas 4

2) *All* technology is unproven at one point, from the wheel to the atomic bomb.

Curiously enough, the uranium-based atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima had never been tested. The scientists were absolutely certain that they'd got the design & calculations right and that it'd go off, which of course it did, but it still seems astonishing that they were so confident.

Ed Miliband brands Google's UK tax avoidance 'WRONG'

JC_

@AC 12:53

The problem is not the law in the UK, but the laws globally. If you fix the problem in the UK then the businesses don't set up a division here.

All countries have to make co-ordinated changes.

You can take 0.5% of £32 billion plus a few thousand jobs or 100% of 0% and no jobs, which is a vote winner?

I agree the coordinated change is desirable, but the temptation to beggar ones neighbour (hello Ireland!) is going to be intense. Ireland has, after all, stated that it will veto EU policy proposals to coordinate tax rates.

That said, Google is not going to leave the UK market if it's forced to pay tax. For Google, 70% of what they currently have in profit is better than leaving 100% to a competitor that will play by the (new) rules.

*IMHO, Ireland and the other leeches can fuck off out of the EU; selling out all of the other members in return for a few coins from Google, Intel, Starbucks et al. - they're as bad as the Judas they despise.

Our new 1.5TB lappie drive isn't thick, it's just the densest - HGST

JC_

Re: @James O'Shea

Son, my backup system includes a handy checkbox labeled: "Shut down when done".

Gramps, you still have to leave it on to start the backup. With the backup running in the background you just close the lid and walk away.

If you have 750GB of data you are in a very, very small percentage of users and nothing like the average user. Everyone in your company might be the same as you, but you're not the same as other users.

As it is I've added an external 1 TB drive to my laptop kit.

So get a SSD for the main drive and enjoy all the benefits of it, since you're already stuck with using external drives.

JC_

@JEDIDIAH

"You're just out of touch with the vast bulk of PC users out there."

The vast bulk of PC users run Windows on a laptop with a fairly fast CPU, a slow HDD with not much on it, and quite a few crapware installations that thrash the disk and make it even slower.

"A lot of the hyped benefits of SSDs come down to certain operating systems doing poorly at what is basically 70s style multi-user concurrency."

The cause of HDD-as-a-bottleneck doesn't matter. It's a lot easier to fix it by installing a SSD than by switching OS or redesigning Windows.

JC_

@James O'Shea

I, for one, set my machine to back up overnight,so I don't _care_ if backing up slows it down.

Leaving the laptop on overnight is inefficient and forces you to remember to leave it. With a SSD a full system image backup can run at any time without affecting the user - no heat, no noise, no slow down, no risk.

As for the 'very few laptop users need anything like 1TB'... what planet re you on, mate?

Most users don't have 1TB drives and what they do have is nowhere near full. 95% of users could fit their entire music, photo and video collections in a few hundred GB. Whenever I fix the laptops of family and friends the hard drives are mostly empty.

JC_

Re: Cost per Gigabyte? Yes.

For the average user, the performance difference between SSD and HDD is close to nil: slightly faster startup, almost unnoticeable program load improvement.

The average user would get much more benefit at a lower cost by increasing the RAM to have more caching.

No way is this right. Wait until the average user's anti-virus or backup kicks in and see how responsive their laptop is. Try searching for a file at the same time and tabbing between windows. This is hardly "power-user proposition" and the difference is huge: with a HDD, the experience is awful; with a SSD there's no noticeable slowdown at all.

Even cost isn't much of an issue now: HDDs have high fixed costs, whatever the capacity. Very few laptop users need anything like 1TB, and as fewer of them are purchased, the economies of scale will fall away, giving SSDs the advantage.

Word 2 to Office 365 and beyond: The good, the bad and the Ribbon

JC_

Re: Office... @dogged

Office won because Outlook. Hate it or hate it, you wouldn't swap it for a Notes client in any sane universe.

Office won because it was a massively cheaper bundle than the competing products and actually pretty good all round.

WordPerfect experts may disagree, but the WYSIWYG interface of Word was a bit of a mind-blower at the time; you didn't need a keyboard cheatsheet to remember how to do things. Lots of bugs, but clearly the way of the future.

Excel has been the best spreadsheet for a long time, not much debate there.

Access is pretty good if you're using it correctly - it's a single-user DB and it does the job pretty well. There's no way of backing up that's easier than copying & pasting a single file. SQL Server Express has been free for a very long time, so even MS offers an alternative.

Powerpoint is required for business presentations.

Outlook is, well, it's there for testing purposes :) Personally I prefer Thunderbird, and that's a bit of a dog.

MS is the company that sells Office - Windows is there just to run it.

MYSTERY Nokia Lumia with gazillion-pixel camera 'spotted'

JC_

Re: @Aoyagi Aichou

Aoyagi, I don't think you understand: if the phone provides "nice animations" while doing something, then it is being responsive, not "lying" to you.

Lag and stuttering are signs of a defective OS, not a feature.

JC_

@Aoyagi Aichou

WP8 has not only failed to innovate, it took massive steps backwards from WM6. It seems fast because of long pretty-looking animations. What has the "power" is the hardware, not the OS. WP8 deserves what it gets.

If it seems fast to the user then it is fast. What other criteria is more important than having a happy user?

Counting cores and claiming a phone is better is pointless willy waving.

Murdoch hate sparks mass bitchin', rapid evacuation from O2, BE

JC_

Best of luck to those running off to BT, but I fear most will regret it.

After 16 months of using BT FTTC at work, absolutely no regrets here. Not a single outage and no traffic-shaping that we've ever seen. Fast, cheap and (touch-wood) 100% reliable - what's to regret?

JC_

@JDX

True enough, but if you've been irritated by O2/Be's lack of FTTC and crappy iPlayer service then the move to Sky may be the final straw.

We switched (to Plusnet), and when we said Murdoch was the reason for requesting the MAC, the O2 elf didn't sound even slightly surprised.

Off-topic: it's nice that the loathing of Murdoch can unite us all, Windows, Linux and Mac users ;)

37,000-machine study finds most reliable Windows PC is a Mac

JC_

@JEDIDIAH

The end user is generally not responsible for building a PC.

Indeed, and a vanilla Windows PC is most unlikely to crash. It's been decades (literally) since I had a Windows box crash because of the OS. That long ago, the Linux and Mac OS PCs I used shat themselves on a regular basis, too.

If your wintel boxes crash, they're built or used wrong.

i.e. faulty hardware or someone's been playing where they shouldn't, like the registry.

HTC profits PLUNGE 98%: Pins hopes on HTC One, 'Facebook mobe'

JC_

Re: They need to reduce their product portfolio.

Then they should bring out a high-spec version of the Wildfire/Buzz... Within a week it'll be shitting money.

They should bring out a high-spec version of their low-end phone?

because I know what I'm talking about

Yeah, right.

Apple: You thought Google dodged taxes? Get a load of THIS

JC_

@reno79

The market is going to be all over it. There's simply no question of Apple paying off the bonds - they have 145 billion in the bank and earned another 9.5 billion in the last quarter. Anyone who questions their future ability to pay 16 billion - even if they literally just burn the bond money - is simply fantasizing. Bonds aren't equivalent to shares, let alone shares in an IPO.

As for my vitriol, Shagbag has earned it. Have a look at his posts - he's not only an Eadon-like fantasist, but also rather rude. If he can dish it out, he should be able to take it.

Not send from an iPhone 'cause I prefer Android & WP.

JC_

Re: "The market is going to be all over it,"

"We at El Reg know that Apple's new product pipeline is looking quite poor "

Who's this "we", fandroid?

There's no risk in a bond issue for $16 billion when Apple already has nearly 10 times that in the bank and another 10 billion coming in every quarter.

Hate Apple (and MS...) all you want - it's your right to be pathetic - but try to stay vaguely attached to reality.

JC_

Re: Given that the US dollar is actually worthless

"Given that the US dollar is actually worthless"

If that's the case, then I'll happily give you £1 for every 10 of those worthless dollars you can find. If you prefer, I'll give you the equivalent of £1 in gold or bitcoin instead for those 10 dollars.

If you're not happy to take that offer then you might be full of shit...

Not cool, Adobe: Give the Ninite guys a job, not the middle finger

JC_

Re: I prefer to use a slightly old version...

Why not install Flashblock or NoScript? They'll do the same thing and won't mean keeping an old and risky version of Flash.

Review: Nokia Lumia 520

JC_

@Shagbag

I was burned by the WinPho7 Lumia 800 not being upgradable to WinPho8. So I sold it (£250)

Really? You sold your second hand Lumia for £250? That's more than they cost new six months ago when WP8 was released, so you must be quite the salesman.

Even before WP8 non-compatibility was confirmed the 800 was going for less than that in any colour you like on eBay (I know 'cause I was looking).

Reg hack to starve on £1 a day for science

JC_

Re: 'and also we presume in penance for his part in cinematic outrage Pearl Harbor'

Affleck went to the New Zealand and UK embassies asking for food, but they turned him away...

Review: Nokia Lumia 720

JC_

@bailey86

"All apps are on the front screen"

Um, no, they're not. Apps are only on the start screen if you pin them there and there's nothing stopping you from removing and rearranging them. It's better to think of it as the area to keep apps that you want to get alerts from (weather, messages, facebook etc.) or need instant access to (maps, dialer etc.) All apps are on another screen (swipe right to left from the main screen).

The Android way definitely has it's pros & cons and I can understand why someone might prefer it. Personally I dislike the iOS grid of icons as it's unstructured and communicates little information, the worst of the three, in my experience.

JC_

Re: @Dave 15

Ah, my mistake. I thought when you said that you "just can't tap the right part of the screen consistently enough" you were referring to something more difficult than picking up a call, which requires a crude swipe across the screen on my phone. Dialling requires hitting a clearly marked area of about 10 square cm, so not too difficult, either.

And NO it does NOT work in the car, bus, train - the shaking and wobbling ensure you don't get the right places.

Maybe if the bus is the back of a ute heading down an Andean dirt track, otherwise you're making the tasks hundreds of millions of people do without thinking everyday seem extraordinary.

If all you need to do is place and answer calls and you can't do it on a touch-screen, then the problem lies with you. You're clearly unhappy with a tool that works for most people.

JC_

@Dave 15

The problem with ALL modern phones is that they've all gone for touch screens - these just do NOT work in mobile situations - walking, on a train, in a bus, in a car... you just can't tap the right part of the screen consistently enough.

If you want to fiddle with your phone and you're walking, then stand still. If you're in a car, be the passenger. If you're on a bus or a train, no problem, it works fine.

Your brain can't deal with navigating and operating a phone simultaneously and do both well, so it's not the fault of the touch screen. Pedestrians have wandered into busy roads while looking at there mobile since well before the iPhone came along.

Smart phones are awesome, but there're plenty of dumb phones around if that's what you really want.

Nvidia Tesla bigwig: Why you REALLY won't need x86 chips soon

JC_
Thumb Up

Re: honesty

Yep, this quote is for posterity and belongs at the top of the comments section for every ARM & x86/x64 article with "Steve Scott, the CTO at supercomputer maker Cray" in bold.

White House backs US web sales tax - eBay hits panic alarm

JC_

@Kevin 6..

Wow, that comment was simply insane.

What D.C. (finally) does get is that the competition is unfair - purchases from a bricks & mortar store have to include sales tax while internet purchases don't. How on earth is it "dumbass" to level the field?

Regarding your beliefs on employment: economics doesn't work the way you think it does! Read a 101 textbook, for god's sake, before commenting about it again.

Always told people putting a dumb fuck politician from Illinois (land of corruption, just look at how many politicians end up in jail, and they are mostly democrats...) in the white house was the worst decision imaginable.

Yeah, we need fewer disasters like Abe Lincoln and more Texas successes like George W. Bush, right?

NZ plans interception law refresh

JC_

Re: It is really fixing something that was in the grey area

Of course the opposition will make a bun-fight over this. That is all the opposition ever does

You say that like it's a bad thing.

It is telling that the broken law was introduced when the opposition was in power.

The PM & govt were in power at the time the Dotcom affair happened; it's their mess and their responsibility.

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