Posts by phlashbios

Prang finder site reveals accident blackspots

Total Fail. Not a UK crashmap !

Complete and utter failure. It may well be a crashmap of Great Britain, a crashmap of the UK it is not.

There seems to be no accidents in Northern Ireland.

Windows 8 secure boot would 'exclude' Linux

Sales drop?

Businesses buy Windows PC's for end users. Consumers buy Windows PC's (and sometimes Apple's products)

Where exactly do you think the huge drop in sales is going to come from that would alter what manufacturers do? Do you honestly think that the tiny minority that run something other than Windows or Apple's OS, are going to influence manufacturers in any way whatsoever?

There are a variety of reasons why this initiative may fail dismally, and thankfully not make it to market, but a drop in sales isn't one of them.

Windows 8 to ship with built-in malware protection

Tons of security features?

You seem to think that "Joe Sixpack" has to learn how to use tons of features to secure their system. While I wouldn't wish to comment on the effectiveness of Windows Firewall, Windows Defender and Microsoft Security Essentials, the first two come with the OS and MSE is a download from the MS website. None of them require the user to have to learn to use tons of features, in fact they need minimal interaction from the user at all, other than during operation, asking the odd question of you regarding whether you wish to allow an action that the products have detected might have questionable consequences.

MS make great efforts to ensure their OS's and products are as painless as possible to use for end users. While the IT crowd might argue against what they see as the dumbing down of operating systems and the hiding of the nuts and bolts, there is little doubt in my mind that the average end user just wants it all to work, in the same way as they want the TV to just work, and I fully expect Windows 8 to be a positive iteration of Windows 7 in that many things will work very well, without tying up the average user in endless configuration questions that they do not wish to even begin to try and understand.

We live in an age where computer technology is sold in the same way as all other consumer technology is sold - i.e. you can turn it on and it just works. There is a reason why Apple do so well for example, and it is not just down to marketing. It is because they can deliver products to the consumer that the consumer feels just work out of the box and are simple to use. Why would we criticise MS for doing the same thing. I look forward to Windows 8, confident that it will be a refinement of Windows 7, which is already a relatively painless OS to use.

No pain, some gain: Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot examined

@gafisher

I love Indian food. It does not mean I want to eat Indian food for every meal. I like to vary my experiences and try different things.

I know it is an alien concept to some people that you might like to try out different OS experiences to see if they are an improvement (or otherwise), but I am one of those radicals that is an OS agnostic. I will try anything and everything that might be an interesting and useful addition to my user experience. Ubuntu lacking a driver for a popular brand of netbook that uses a widely used LAN chipset, does not make for a helpful user experience, especially when there is no easy way for the layman to get and install the driver.

I quite agree....

It would be nice if it just installed and worked, which is why when I tried it on my Samsung N510 netbook and found the Wireless LAN did not work, I found it dissappointing and frustrating. Reading articles from people who proposed fixes to this problem, that involved extracting logs, deprecating installed drivers, messing about on the command line and writing to Realtek to get an unpublished device driver that they allegedly hold in their software vaults, caused me to just let my netbook just boot back into Windows 7, which worked out of the box, with all hardware functional.

If there is a desire for Ubuntu and Unity to be used by people as a genuine alternative to Windows, then it needs to work on common hardware, out of the box. Joe Public does not want to have to mess about with command line switches and writing to hardware vendors to get unpublished drivers, just in order to get their netbook in a functional state.

Nintendo set to make a loss on every 3DS

@OrsonX You are not understanding the model

Most consumer products that you buy contain a profit margin in the product itself and the manufacturer, distributor and retailer all take their respective cut from that, and everyone (theoretically) makes a profit. Happy days.

The videogame industry is different. Videogame consoles are often sold at a loss on the hardware by the manufacturer and the way they make their money is from software sales from games developed by themselves (1st party titles) and by a licencing fee from anyone else that wishes to make games (3rd party titles) for the manufacturers consoles.

What the manufacturer needs then, when selling a videogame console, is as many people buying the console as possible, as early as possible, so that games manufacturers can have confidence that it is going to be a success that they can make money from, and thus the manufacturer can get their licence fees from the games developer.

If the manufacturer gets it wrong and can't shift enough consoles, then not only have they made a loss on each console, but they then don't have enough software developers paying licence fees or end punters buying games, to make any money at all.

With all that in mind, it then makes perfect sense for Nintendo to give 20 free software titles to early adopters to keep them happy and buying future Nintendo products. It also makes sense for them to drop the price of the console, even if it means making a loss on the hardware, if it drives up the number of sold consoles and therefore software development licence fees that games manufacturers have to pay them (As much as £10 of each console game you buy is the licence fee)

It isn't a reasonable analogy to compare games consoles to the sale of flatscreen TV's for example. Flatscreen TV's pricing is based on everyone in the chain making a profit, whereas games console profits are in the software sold. The likes of Nintendo need to get the early adopters onboard and keep them happy, generation after generation of console and also drive demand through volume sales.

El Reg to unleash rocket-powered spaceplane

LOHAN

Low Orbital High Altitude Norks ? It would obviously need a suitably <cough> "chesty" Playmonaut recruited for it though.

MS advises drastic measures to fight hellish Trojan

@a53

Yet....

You seem to have missed that word off the end of your statement. Oh, I am forgetting, OSX is invulnerable isn't it.

Anonymous claims LulzSec merger

Yeah.....

Brave Sir LulzSec ran away.

Bravely ran away, away!

When danger reared its ugly head,

Said the AC that posted this. Oh the irony.

Apple iMac 27in

Shortened review....

It's pretty, it's expensive, fanbois will love it.

Syria shuts off interwebs

UN intervention?

Well I am sure that the USA and UK will shortly ask the UN for ratification so that they can pop into Syria and sort it all out like they are doing in Libya...

What's that you say? There are trillions of Syrian dollars invested in the US economy and therefore Western democracies will just stay out of it and pretend Syrian authorities are not murdering their own people and hushing it up?

That can't be right. That would be the most disgusting kind of hypocracy if that was to happen, and we all know the US and UK would never be guilty of that..

Echostar HDS-600RS Freesat HD recorder

BSG?

Absolutely right. Clearly a product made by fracking Cylons.

Or possibly it has been made by David Hasselhoff from discarded KIT spares.

Virgin Media frustrates customers with 'intermittent' routing blues

Betcha a tenner....

...that it's Telia again. Virgin lease their backbone(s) from Telia and Telia consistently make routing changes on ther network without telling anyone and then parts of the internet start disappearing. Unfortunately, Telia are so big as a comms supplier that they seem to answer to nobody. Certainly they don't answer to UK customers anyway, from their frozen Scandinavian palaces.

Ask Blizzard about it. They have thousands of disgruntled WoW customers periodically blaming them for routing and network failures that actually turn out to be Virgin Media customers experiencing Telia's unnotified network changes.

Steve Ballmer window-dresses Windows 8

Horses for courses

Here's a novel suggestion. Use whatever suits you for a particular purpose. I have Android on my phone, a laptop with Win 7, a Mac Air, a netbook running Ubuntu 11 and even an Xbox running XBMC. I use each of these items for different purposes and each runs the OS I want/need it to run. I have no partisan views, I just use the right tool for the right job.

My guess is that MS will make a good enough job of Windows 8 across a variety of platforms to make it an attractive and usable OS. And guess what? If it suits my needs for a particular role, then why wouldn't I use it?

Only the fanboi or the immensely stupid would choose or criticise an OS based upon subjective and/or emotive criteria.

Judgment Day prophet resets doomsday clock

And lo the land will be defecated...

Jesus...sitting on the toilet you say?

Holy Shit?