Posts by airbrush

Why OH WHY is economics so bleedin' awful, then?

Trust

Id only trust the ones that value their reputation over the corporate coin : http://rabble.ca/columnists/2013/02/economists-conflicts-interest-and-plea-journalists.

iOS and Android apps on Windows 10: How is this supposed to work?

Piracy

Sounds like a great platform for running pirate apps.

Vodafone didn't have a £6bn tax bill. Sort yourselves out, Lefties

Petty politics

I can see where Worstead is coming from when the current government wastes billions on schools no one needs, ineffective reorganisation of the nhs, starts on austerity and ends up following the Labour plan, millions wasted on universal credit, policy made up on the back of a fat packet, Libya, Syria etc etc. Were this a left wing government they'd have been utterly ridiculed, I certainly don't trust them with my taxes. Journalism's always been partisan and lazy but is that good for democracy?

Hacker kicks one bit XP to 10 Windows scroll goal

Re: Impossible!

I think it was the kernal that was rewritten from the ground up which is what he might be referring to..

What time do you call this, BT? Late, state-funded broadband rollout plods on

State funded?

At least some small amount of the public service part of BT has survived privatisation, the always privatised businesses in the states delivering universal broadband have swallowed up billions of tax payers money and delivered far less.

Google's latest letdown: Simply not enough billions since October

Boring adverts

At least in print etc. they make an effort with the adverts, perhaps in the future adverts will all just consist of plain text + all in the same font..

The next big thing in medical science: POO TRANSPLANTS

Re: Gut ... er journalism?

You can listen to Jaspers story here, its fascinating : http://www.radiolab.org/story/91691-sculptors-of-monumental-narrative/

European Commission decides it won't have a science advisor after Greenpeace pressure

A bit one sided maybe?

If Greenpeace was the only lobbyist she annoyed then she wasnt doing her job, given the lack of background to the article I'm taking it with a hefty pinch of salt. Anyway here's a great article in the Guardian about the sterling work she was doing and hopes that she would carry on :

http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/jun/23/evidence-based-union-a-new-alliance-for-science-advice-in-europe

and then later an article about why the role is being questioned:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/aug/29/the-eu-needs-science-policy-but-does-that-mean-it-needs-a-chief-scientific-adviser

Seems like someones being cynical about the green lobby when its dwarfed by pretty much any other lobby group, the decisions made by the EU are pretty transparent at least compared to our Government that is. There's always going to be the scientific view about GM crops and the publics view, if a good proportion of the population don't want GM crops then politicians aren't going to alienate the voters without good reason (you'd hope).

AMD claims record with latest overclock-happy FX Series chips, again

Free market

I've never managed to replicate the benchmarks/overclocks so it does make you wonder, also my super fast i7 locks up all the time when the processor is far below 100%. My guess is theyre using unrealistic set ups and production motherboards etc perform far below what the average consumer buys.

Britain's housing crisis: What are we going to do about it?

This is not a solution

I'm afraid the free market only works with honest competition, that's about as likely as communism!

Piketty thinks the 1% should cough up 80%. Discuss

More class war from the register?

Yes because everyone on benefits gets a mansion in Mayfair while honest working people struggle to buy a shoebox. Read the daily mail by any chance?

EU: Let's cost financial traders $400m a day, because EVIL BANKERS. Right?

Re: Cost of markets

Thats not the point I'm making, the banks have been caught screwing the pension funds by buying and selling shares to institutions for a fast buck : http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/apr/06/michael-lewis-flash-boys-high-frequency-traders. That's naughty of them to say the least!

Cost of markets

Wasn't the problem that certain banks were taking advantage of the time differential between stock exchanges shifting the price up for pension funds?

Sorry London, Europe's top tech city is Munich

Re: @ Don Jefe

Well 40% of manufacturing in the early 80's, much of our knowledge based industry has been bought by French, American and German companies. The result of these sales is that the jobs and profits eventually go overseas, incidentally income inequality is now back at Edwardian levels. Great job. No ones being negative about Britain, what she allowed was a kind of unilateral disarmament of our industry. Remember when UK companies could make power stations??

Android engineer: We didn't copy Apple or follow Samsung's orders

Bad advice

I know quite a few people moving away from apple mainly because of battery life and screen size but I suspect that these court cases are seen as unjust. Buying apple might once have made people envious, now its disgust at their tax affairs and throwing their weight around.

SCRAP the TELLY TAX? Ancient BBC Time Lords mull Beeb's future

Seems good value to me

Sorry but I like things the way they are, no systems perfect. Most tinkering over the past 20 years have hardly improved stuff, the more they concentrate on making great programs the happier I'll be.

Googorola's Dennis Woodside shuffles over to Dropbox

Great Guy

Emailed him about my broken matrix screen, it had malfunctioned and within a week he sorted out a replacement razr hd. Pity Motorola couldn't be turned around because they gave it a good shot.

A BBC-by-subscription 'would be richer', MPs told

Oh dear

Hey let's just sell it all to the Germans. Or the French. I guess that's what Margaret Thatcher meant when she made Britain 'Great' again. Lions and donkeys comes to mind. Pretty soon there will be no nation, sorry not sure where that came from.

How Britain could have invented the iPhone: And how the Quangocracy cocked it up

Despite the evidence..

The UK has become a world leader in the arts in the past 20 years and this sector of the economy is pretty successful so can't have been all bad.

British support for fracking largely unmoved by knowledge of downsides

Its not all bad..

If we burn all the gas in the ground the City of London will be underwater within the next 50 years, so there are some positives,,

Google teases hush-hush Android event on July 24

with the death of symbian all the os choices are american and feeding data to prism, so which os exactly is a private person to use??

More than half of Windows 8 users just treat it like Windows 7

I Like the new settings but its a job half done..

Havent found a use for any metro apps. Configuring stuff in the metro interface is much clearerl but they've left many of the settings in the old windows 95/vista dialogs, probably because the ui doesnt work well in metro. Unfortunately this makes windows feel disjointed where you have to jump all over the place to set stuff up. I did look in the windows store once. I think ms started to go off the tracks when they tried to switch to 2 year releases so now we have an os with a muddle of windows 95, vista and now windows 8 design rather than a complete over-hall like with NT4/95.

You know how your energy bills are so much worse than they were?

Yeah ok

Probably lots of over simplifications etc. but some good points. It seems to me that the energy companies are proposing a pfi style nightmare with nuclear plants. Let the government finance and build it while they lease it from us. At least if the energy company turns out to be inept we can replace them in fact wasn't that the point of privatisation in the the first place not creating new monopolies.

Cameron's speech puts UK adoption of EU data directive in doubt

Why so vague?

Why doesn't he tell us what these laws are that make us 'uncompetitive'? Perhaps he could spell out what they are, how we voted at the time, if we voted against what changes we wanted and what evidence he can present to show that law is uncompetitive. Surely its not just hyperbole?

EU-wide mega-Leveson 'needed' to silence Press, bloggers

Re: Hungary votes to support proposal

Isn't that a body that can fine newspapers? Not sure our judiciary is exactly a neutral body, but then what organisation is?

Lolz

I love these stories about stuff that the EU might do, or voted against it brings out the paranoid in people. Go back to bed, luckily one or two countries arent in the pocket of multinational companies or the USA so democracy won. Wish we were one of those countries .. Zzzzz.

Google, Apple, eBay shouldn't pay taxes - people should pay taxes

Economics is corrupt

Imagine if the register received money from tech companies in return for favourable reviews, that's the situation with economics now. From Celtic tigers to a booming Iceland they're utterly corrupt, did you not watch Inside Job?

Graun Aid: Don't They Know It's Christmas 2.0?

Re: The real problem with the Guardian is ...

Pity they didn't hang onto Ben Goldacre although he did write a fantastic article about the drug industry recently, not sure you'd find journalism like thata any where else. Nearly all newspapers lose money, mostare run by oligarchical meglamaniacs that can afford to trade a few million for political influence. Quite scary really.

Google offers tool to bridge Android and iOS app dev

Its funny when ms write a development tool they seem to spend more time making sure it isn't cross platform, they'll know they've arrived when google adds c# as an option.

AMD's Hondo APUs ready for Windows 8 Q4 launch - report

Bottlenecks?

Work laptop cpu copes pretty well but struggles due to disk io, my llano based laptop is indiscernible from my i5 based laptop in general use, has same overall rating but runs so much cooler. Ok the i5 isnt sandy bridge but the list price for my i5 was a lot more than the llano and only a year or so older. The llano is a cheapo laptop (and looks it in comparison) but in my experience its a better proposition at the budget end than intel based chips, make sure you go for the fastest llano with four cores as its only a fraction more. The desktops more complex though as a cheapo intel chip + graphcs card costs a similar amount for better performance.

Who killed ITV Digital? Rupert Murdoch - but not the way you think

Retaliation?

As David Cameron was a PR man at Carlton at the time, isn't it odd that this story pops up the day after the funding scandal published by the Times. Looks like a possible retaliation to me..

Foxconn pay hikes 'driving tech titans into Philippines'

% Labour Costs?

I'd be amazed if the labour costs are more than a few percentage points of the costs of a car in the uk say let alone in China. I imagine the costs of moving a factory would be far higher.

Lets say you move your factory, this takes 6 months to gain that 1% saving in labour costs per item. It will then take 50 years to save the money for the 50% loss in that year. Lets say it takes a few months to get to full productivity etc.

Surely for high tech once the investments been made that factories going nowhere and this is really about garment factories etc where orders are fulfilled by existing sweatshops etc.

Dodgy Economics

This story makes no sense, labour costs are a few percentage points of the cost of an item, even if they manufactured stuff here, labour wouldnt be that much more in percentage terms. Assuming that the Philippines and China have equally bad pollution etc. then the measured against the costs of moving a high tech factory are such that it would take decades to recover the investment. As an example to make a car here, the labour costs are less than 5% of the costs of the car.

Metro breakdown! Windows 8 UI is little gain for lots of pain

Odd

It'll look good on display in pc world though.

Gnome isn't available by default any more, just install it and itis magically appears in the login menu.

Dumb salesmen are hurting us – Nokia CEO

I would have bought an n9 on contract, just shows an utter lack of belief, come on Nokia youre still in the game!

Lovefilm dumps Flash, BLINDS Linux fans with Silverlight

Moonlight?

Presumably this doesn't support DRM yet or has been killed??

Microsoft's uphill battle to push Win8 tabs into punters' paws

how can it fail?

Most windows apps wont work, interface is incredibly disjointed. Why would you choose it to over an ipad or android?

Britain's Harrier jump-jets reprieved to fly and fight again

Its quite funny listening to people try and claim either lot are good at defence spending, from rifles to radios to jets its been woeful. We're years ahead of anyone so why we have to keep 'innovating' is beyond me.

Eurozone crisis: We're all dooomed! Here's why

Consumer debt is huge in the states, the largest in the western world. Their government debt is worse than Greece. It's politicians generally seem at least as corrupt as Greece's, do wonder if this whole euro crisis was a smokescreen for the mess in the US. Now if say the euro replaced the dollar as a world currency, the us + goldman sachs et al would be totally sunk.

Mm, Silverlight, what's that smell? Yes, it's death

Could share 90% of the code with a wpf windows app. Also worked on the mac which was nice. Was great for rich clients on the web, as it was so much quicker to develop for than web app's. Making apps is expensive, complex web apps are often not fit for purpose as they're too slow so this was quite a nice half way house imho.

AMD beats analysts' bets with profitable quarter

Benchmarks not clock speed

Better to go for a dedicated hardware site such as toms hardware as clock speeds etc. aren't really that helpful any more. They have tables of all the popular processors along with benchmarks as well as recommendations by budget.

Real Competition

Their budget Llano laptop chips beat intel hands down at gaming, its only once you get to discrete graphics that they can compete (even with i7's). Looking at pc pro's A list for budget laptops and they're still recommending an i3 rather than an A6 and A8 Llano laptop.

Nokia's Brave New World is (almost) Finn-free

Telegraph Awards 3.5 stars

The telegraph seemed to think its good but not as good as higher end android + apple phones. At least meego kept software development in Europe + engadget thought the n9 was on a par with mango.

Lenovo aims to seize PC crown within 3 years

Waiting to find out when my laptop will ship as they seem to be unable to tell me when placing the order, feeling a bit worried after Alan's comment. Email support could only tell me to query the order later this week to obtain a date, so yes they need to spend a bit of money on their web site and be better at keeping customers informed.

Windows 8 secure boot would 'exclude' Linux

Positives and Overwhelming Negatives?

Well there are some positives such as quicker boot times and the end of root kits, if they make it optional fine. Surely we're at the stage where we need some kind of global body to ensure that companies don't employ anticompetitive measures to dominate a market and os have to be certified or something. Its in our own interest to have competition after all even if your not a fan of linux.

Quarter of NHS data collection to go in red-tape slash plan

Cover Up?

Stats are the lifeblood of managing anything. They obviously don't tell the whole story but at a time when wholesale reorganisation is going on don't we need to be able to compare before with after otherwise how do you measure progress?

Sci/tech MPs want peer review, not pal review

Research abuse

The media's search for a good story does tend to give research a bad name, often papers are published with small data sets which are statistically invalid but may attract more funding to do further research. Tellingly these are the papers that make the news, mmr vaccines and fish oil (snake oil salesmen) for example. This is an example of why we need laws to ensure newspapers tell the truth.

Drug companies are notorious for only publishing studies that show more positive results (for some reason they don't publish the studies showing the drug is worse than an existing cheaper drug). Peer review isn't the problem here they must publish every study for peer review to be possible.

Peer review where its open to political or commercial interference is basically corrupt. Peer review that stops a paper being published that goes against received wisdom may have left us believing the earth is flat. So how does this leave us better off? Knowing this government it will leave research more corruptable and lead to bad decisions affecting everyone.

ICO won't investigate Tory minister

Nit Picker!

Poorly reported maybe, but who can complain about a bit of fun at the expense of this bunch of no hopers!

Rupert Murdoch was never Keyser Soze

its all about the swing

Politicians don't even bother with 90% of seats any more its all about the small number of votes in the Target constituency. If you can convince a few thousand swing voters you'll be paying more tax or not to bother voting because they're all the same then its job done. When debate stops being rational we are a worse nation for it. The inspiration for the tea party is our anti euro UK independence party. Fox news is the mail.