Posts by h3

Microsoft's ARM blunder: 7 reasons why Windows RT was DOA

The killer feature for Windows RT is any app you like via Remote Desktop with Remote FX.

Dunno why everyone seems to ignore this. (It works like native).

Not sure why people slagging off the surface ignore this.

Tell Facebook who's the greatest: YOU are!

Re: Horses for courses

It is not that hard to buy rabbit.

Google sinks millions into plush new £1bn London HQ

Good if they want hookers. (Dunno if Kings Cross is still a red light district was when I last lived in London at night.).

Amazon-bashed HMV calls in administrators, seeks buyer

Re: It was only a matter of time

WHSmiths are doing quite well. (Stations / Airports) and the fact they have turnover based rents for those shops.

Just what the world needs: Android in the rice cooker

Must be better than the iGrill (It is ~ 6 times the price so by Apple logic must be 6 times as good.)

USB 3.0 speed to DOUBLE in 2013

Stupid. (I did a test with an ssd connected via both esata and usb 3.0). usb is still utter shite.

Samsung confirms Tizen-based mobes to debut this year

With Tizen hopefully you can just build against qt or the enlightenment foundation libraries. Afaik it supports both. If it is readily available (in the way the N9 wasn't) I will likely go for it.

I don't really care what you are supposed to be able to do.

The year GNOMES, Ubuntu sufferers forked off to Mint Linux

2012 was the year Enlightenment DR17 was released (Dec 21, 2012 at 11:59 PM)

To be fair it has been far better than most releases for a very long time now.

It is fast very customisable and looks quite nice.

Most importantly it doesn't kill performance for other things.

Just a quick glance at any of the code should give some hope.

(There are still some people who care about doing things properly)

It is efficient enough that I think even Ubuntu could reskin it to make it look like Unity with it still working as well as anything else. (Excluding stuff like Xmonad but things like that will never have mass appeal as they take some effort to learn).

2012: The year that netbooks DIED

There is a pretty good netbook made by HP with an i3 processor afaik it is still made.

Ultrabooks still look flimsy as hell. (Maybe there is a Toughbook one ?).

No reason that decent netbooks couldn't be made using AMD Fusion (Or the next in the range of Bobcat etc).

Problem with Netbooks is they won't give you enough vertical pixels. (Or even horizontal).

1650x1050 would probably be ok. 2G RAM. SSD.

If you are the only one in a market you should be able to do pretty well.

(I don't want another tablet or an ultrabook).

They all seem to be set in such a way that for what I want I have to pay a fortune for things that until relatively recently were standard features.

I am looking for a replacement for my IBM Thinkpad X31 but I want similar build quality and a Matte screen. Not bothered about weight (As long as it is the same or less) or thinness. I have had this for at least 5 years (Maybe a little longer) years and it is just about starting to need replacing. (I don't put any effort into taking care of it never have). Not many choices for someone like me. (Might just get a second hand semi rugged Toughbook).

Crushing $1.17bn Marvell patent judgment could set record

RE: AC 00:51

Dunno about whether I think it comes by Magic I don't think technology is "special" at least compared to Maths and hard science. I don't mind patents on chip design etc etc don't like patents on look and feel or software patents. (Where would we be today if Microsoft had patented and was enforcing every one of the common controls and the basic web fonts.)

Blu Ray disks are overpriced at RRP (Especially when I have paid for the film 3 times now). Just got Back to the Future trilogy on Blu Ray for £8 at that price it was just about ok but it seems like they didn't put much effort into it. (Far too much junk prior to the movie playing as well). I don't really care about people ripping off films though. (They rip off actors by their accounting practices so it is hard to care about people not paying for their mostly awful product. Most of the changes from books that I quite liked are for the worst or pointless.)

Best policy to take towards a company is do as they do. (If they help people who helped them then maybe they are company worth supporting). If they routinely totally screw over the customer then do all you can to screw them over. (Or just don't buy anything of theirs if you haven't already.)

Feeling poor? WHO took all your money? NOT capitalist bastards?

Re: Howabout..

Easy way - legalise all drugs and tax them. (Keep the quality high and at a price that cannot be matched by the criminals.) Overnight it would turn into a much smaller problem (Like we have with fake and cheap alcohol / cigs being sold in council estates.) People being able to grow hemp to make paper (Faster and Cheaper than using what they use now) might upset the status quo but it needs to be upset and the solution needs to be radical. (Cuts won't work not done in the way they are trying now anyway.)

A solution that works (Because it will involve making a fairly big change) will never be popular with the Daily Mail reading types.

The problem we have is the baby boomers basically who were given everything by their parents generation (Who also took part in a war from them and had a really hard time) have left nothing for their children and took everything for themselves. I was in a pub on Christmas Eve with a fair few people of my dad's generation I was close to punching a few of them. (They retired at 50 on really good pensions that cannot ever be reduced). I think each generation should have it better and easier than the last due to enhancements in Technology / Medical stuff.

What we should be doing is trying to reduce the amount people have to work to 4 days.

(My grandfather's generation used to work 4 1/2). Instead of just creaming off the profits to pay for the people who went to school and university with Cameron. (Clegg is worse though because it outright betrayed everyone who voted for him).

People working for the Public Sector did so on the grounds that they would make less whilst they were working in return for a good pension. (My mother when she left university had 4 friends with the same results as her - 1st Pure Maths - She went into teaching because she wanted to do it but she could have been an acturer / finance director of big PLC's / Professor of Maths - screwing people over at the end of their lives is not a good thing to do.)

I know a retired fireman (Over 70) gets an absolutely insane pension keeps going up. Same as police they retire early if they want to (With a full pension) and then get another job. No reason they couldn't do a desk bound job. (At the moment they just get another job.) That is nothing like teachers.

It is going to get to the point where especially in London the only teachers are immigrants as they are the only people who could and are willing to work for what is on offer.

The only way to improve is to invest in the young. It is only going to get worse if really expensive private schools are the only places with good teachers it won't work.

Maybe we get a meteor hitting the earth or another ice age starting that changes things when people realise how pointless things are these days.

(My parents will get a huge cash injection also when their parents die (They were born during the war and had nothing and lived in council estates and worked very hard and ended life pretty rich) for people starting now with nothing something like that just isn't possible. If your family is very poor now it is far more likely to stay so no matter what they do which is bad.

Motorola pulls out of China, leaves locals behind till of Android shop

I cannot see how they could do worse by just opening up the play store to China.

(If Google treated me as a third class citizen it would be certain I would pirate everything. I would trust free appstore's with paid apps more than totally unknown ones that would have to have access to my financial details. I don't even trust Google but I do trust Amazon(I don't like the Amazon MP3 Store or Appstore and its need for one click don't see why I cannot just do my orders from the website like normal)).

Maybe there is something they have to do that is easy for Apple but impossible for them.

(Be certain no apps criticising the new leader of the communist party for example is easy for Apple but Google couldn't do it other than retrospectively.)

The LINUX TABLET IS THE FUTURE - and it always will be

e17 is released and it is great on a tablet

Kickstarted mobe charger 'kicked to death by Apple'

Micro usb is a god awful connector. Even mini usb seems to get damaged far less frequently.

Firewire was / is great. (It would be even more useful these days as the ease of use for networking stuff has vastly improved.)

USB is good enough when you have no other option.

I used to use firewire instead of usb 2.0

But now I just use esata. (Or usb if I am at someone's machine without it temporarily).

SCSI/SAS/Firewire were designed properly.

SATA/USB/IDE were cheap hacks.

(No reason why everyone couldn't just use SAS (Probably the same drives could be flashed). Other than price fixing).

Apple is probably fine for quite a few people but definitely not for me.

(It is even a quality thing for many things there is one that is blessed by Apple but stupidly expensive and not necessarily all that good. 3rd party things emulating them are better.

(Look at the controllers that emulate the icade for example.)

GPS devices for the wifi ipad is another situation. (There are 2 and they both cost £100 same price exactly as switching to the 3G ipad). Don't think anyone has emulated this though. There is a cydia app for £5 that allows any BT GPS to be used. It is a complete replacement of the bluetooth stack and it works great it would be trivially easy for them to allow it. (Or put a $5 GPS chip in).

etc etc

BT ordered to pay £95m to rivals it overcharged for FIVE years

We should have kept BT & The Post Office publicly owned.

Then a politician could say "we are going to have a world(or europe) etc class broadband network" and actually be able to do something about it properly.

(The reason the national grid is so good is precisely because it wasn't developed by loads of disparate private contractors.)

Even if BT was bleeding money from the taxpayer it was doing quite a good service training apprentices.

(Quite a few of the networking guys I knew in London (Contractors on mega money) started at 16 working for BT).

I just got my Virgin Broadband updated to 100Mb and it is still just as bad as before. No improvement whatsoever. (Latency more important than bandwidth to me at least when I had 50Mb)

Brits are so outraged by Amazon, they voted it TOP for shopping

I don't like the Amazon Appstore or MP3 store (Only used them for free promotional credit or apps - see the trap they are trying to use makes me all the more determined to not fall into it).

'Shake to charge', similar crapps foul up Amazon Android store

I thought Amazon tested each of them properly ? (At least that is what they were charging the fee for).

iPhone tops US market, but trounced by Android in world+dog

More importantly I would rather what I want not be fashionable so it can be bought sim free at a better price.

(Don't care at all about looks or how thin it is either.)

I care about the battery / how fast it is / how good the stock firmware is (If Android).

(If the stock firmware sucks then the code is likely junk and a mess and its quite unlikely to be fixed by the so called community there is the odd exception but not something I would base a purchasing decision on).

All I want is a high end well made phone at a cheap price don't care what it runs really. (As long as it is not Brew or Bada) - Tizen would be ok (Symbian is also fine by me - Windows Mobile dunno if it was modern hardware and a really good implementation of 6.5)

At the moment I use a Lumia 800 (Before that I had an Xperia Play which was absolute crap so no way I will buy Sony again).

(I am not really careful with smartphones or any technology really).

I am careful with my kindle (Never touch the screen) and my vinyl.

Facebook tests feature to let strangers pay to message you

I dunno I never used it properly (Set up a fake account once to test something but never used it).

I think online activities and real life should kept completely separate.

Always have thought that way.

(That guy who ended up being the poster boy for the 25 gallon tub of personal lubricant for just making a joke should be enough to put people off using their real name.)

China 'enhances' Great Firewall, teaches it to choke off VPNs

Re: Not exactly business-friendly, is it?

Probably they would expect anyone important to meet in Hong Kong. (Which is still completely unrestricted.)

Dotcom titan funds 'Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents'

For Video Games Nintendo would be the only ones able to make any. (Almost every other game is a copy of something Nintendo did first).

Patents are useful for industries that are really capital intensive. (Pharmacuticals / Semiconductors.)

The algorithm could take years and millions but so what. It is like writing a recipe.

If anyone should have a patent it should be the Mathematicians who invent the stuff in the first place.

(They are the people who are actually doing the inventing.)

Windows Firefox stiffs Adobe Flash, plays H.264 YouTube vids

Both Silverlight and WinRT HTML5 + JS perform better than Flash.

(I still get a line across both monitors when I start anything flash).

Flash streaming is awful.

(I can stream from Usenet at 1080p extracting on the fly better than I can with flash).

It isn't my connection (Flash was tested using Youtube - Google has the bandwidth).

Wikipedia doesn't need your money - so why does it keep pestering you?

RE:

Jimmy Wales seems pretty reasonable (Not sure how much power he has over it now though).

That junk about Gibraltar was pretty corrupt.

Microsoft 'surprised' by Google Gmail 'winter cleaning'

Re: I agree gmail sucks now.

Outlook 2013 Does support Exchange ActiveSync but not to the ancient version Google uses.

You get an error to do with the protocol version.

It works incredibly well with the Windows 8 Mail app.

(Like 1000 times better than over IMAP).

Outlook 2013 needs a minimum of Exchange 2007. (Whereas Google uses the last Exchange 2003 Service Pack protocol).

I know I have tested it and then researched it from the docs on Technet.

I agree gmail sucks now.

It really is a downgrade. IMAP and gmail work terribly. The web interface new interface is really difficult to navigate. (Everything is pictures not words which is really inefficient for me).

The Android hotmail client (Made by Seven I think is not exactly pretty but it works really well.)

It is annoying Outlook 2013 cannot do Exchange Activesync to the version Google uses.

At the moment my Google accounts are connected via the Windows 8 Metro Mail app and it works really really well.

AFACT wants ushers to confront pirates

The worst problem they have is people recording LiNE audio (That means the projection staff).

LiNE audio + a Russian R5 DVD or Blu Ray is pretty decent quality for a mediocre film.

(Cloud Atlas already has a Blu Ray rip but no none CAM Audio).

Hunger Games is the only thing I have seen this year that I liked. I will probably see the next one at the cinema.

(Rest has been TV e.g Game of Thrones).

(The Hobbit should be one film not three for gods sake).

Rude web trolls should NOT be jailed, warns prosecution chief

I don't trust the police in this country to understand satire.

I think it would be better to be like America and just allow people to say what they like.

(Even if it means we get people like the Westboro Baptist Church).

I don't see why people give a damn what other people say with very limited exceptions.

(The Tory guy wrongly accused of being a paedophile I don't think that type of crap is ok).

I think our country would be better if we followed Liverpool in boycotting anyone who sells the Sun Newspaper.

Penguin gives in to US Feds over ebooks

The publishers screw over the authors.

Amazon screws over the publishers.

Apple screws over the customers.

(That is why I prefer Amazon - I don't care one bit about the middle men. (Be they record labels / Publishers).

Quite like Baen Books and don't mind Oreilly as far as publishers go. (The ones I like least are the ones selling textbooks).

Swedish teens GO BERSERK in Instagram sex pic slut riot

Re : Bill Fresher

Dunno about being a slut but whoring on the sly seems to mess up women's psyche (Over say a decade).

Don't think the same thing happens to men.

Might be the 24/7 lying.

Vatican shrugs off apocalypse, fiddles with accounts dept

The prophecy of the Pope's has been correct up to now.

If the current Pope died now and then the next was called Peter II then the downfall of Rome should start (And Revelation).

"The Prophecy of the Popes, attributed to Saint Malachy, is a list of 112 short phrases in Latin. They purport to describe each of the Roman Catholic popes (along with a few anti-popes), beginning with Pope Celestine II (elected in 1143) and concluding with the successor of current pope Benedict XVI, a pope described in the prophecy as "Peter the Roman", whose pontificate will end in the destruction of the city of Rome. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophecy_of_the_Popes

It would be very interesting if they were both correct (and the time was now).

The Earth will be destroyed when the Sun turns into a red giant unless we can move it.

Search engines we have known ... before Google crushed them

Google did do it properly. But more and more recently it is regressing. (Starting to do the irritating things that were the main reason that it was good.)

The god awful black bar / making it lots of effort to change search parameters (Combared to when they were by the side) / automatically signing you up to youtube (And associated spam message) if you accidentally click on a link when you are logged in.

(Bing doesn't yet seem to actively trick you into doing anything. (Unlike Facebook (the worst) and now Google.)

Microsoft to Moto: We'll give you $1m a year for your patents

Re: Wrong I am

H264 is just Maths it shouldn't be patentable.

Dunno why people think because it is software it deserves any special treatment.

(The real invention is the individual bits of Maths which are not patentable for the good of society).

New Year's resolution: Don't use Instagram, it'll sell YOUR photos

I don't use Instagram. (My mother wants to).

The Autodesk pixlr applications for Android (Free at least for now) seem far better made.

Report says Cisco offloading Linksys

Meraki are about as bad as you can get due to what they did with people who bought opensource friendly routers from them.

GlobalFoundries CEO: Europe must 'wake up' and help industry

Funneling money into manufacturing (And having world class utilities / post / telecoms by nationalisation if necessary) is a better idea than funnelling it into banks.

Having the capability to actual produce something is a useful thing to have. (Far better than convincing people to buy stuff.)

The reason the US is so strong is if it was in their best interests they could stop any imports / exports and be self sufficient.

File-sharing mom begs US Supremes to void bloated RIAA fine

Sharia law at least as mostly practised (Excluding the Taliban) seems to be pretty indifferent as long as it is not against Muslims.

The thing to do is transfer all your assets to someone else and then go bankrupt. (It is exactly what the law firms do when the same thing happens to them).

ACS:Law somehow managed to get the fine (in the UK) reduced from £200,000 to £1000

Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

We should not subsidise any renewable energy projects.

(That is why our costs are going up so much).

Just build lots more fission until we have something better.

The only renewable stuff worth having is stuff like the Aswan Dam.

(I don't really agree with filling the sea with all our junk).

Won't follow Apple Store rules? How 'bout an iTASER TREAT!

You really shouldn't allow police officers to be employed by private companies. (At least retaining the powers of arrest / guns / tazers etc etc).

Grinchy Google to shut down another batch of services

Looks like I am using it.

Google Sync

Google Sync 1 device configured

WindowsPhone

Most recent: sync on Dec 14, 2012

Apple confirms Amazon ebooks bendover, EU watchdog drops bone

ebooks should be cheaper.

Regardless of anything else because you cannot resell them.

(For stuff like textbooks that cost £60 that you need for a short period of time etc etc).

Dutch script kiddie pwns 20,000 Twitter profiles

Dunno why anyone would want an application for Facebook / Twitter. All they seem to do is spam.

UK.gov hires data-handling privatisation point man as CTO

Surely it would be cheaper to just extend something that already exists (Passport / Driving License).

The only other one I trust really is my bank (They already know everything about me and have 2 factor authentication.)

Dragons' Den badboy's biz Expansys is soaked in red

They were ok at one point.

They used to have b grade stuff that was very cheap and quite interesting. (And it was easy to find).

I got a dirt cheap Nokia 770 from them once. (Only issue being it was US so couldn't do wifi channel 12/13).

Windows 8: At least it's better than ‘not very good’

The running 3 video's at once trick I saw on an SGI in either 96 or 97 - Still not seen it work as well on a pc ever since. (Important part being no tearing and smooth).

If there was a free adblock plus thing that worked as well then I would use ie10.

(The Metro version being so locked down is something I would like to use for such as online banking).

Google Maps becomes Apple's most popular app

I think Google Maps Navigation is worse than Navigon (WP7 or Android) / Nokia Maps (on WP7).

If you want Ordinance Survey then you can use Bing Maps. (Web version).

(Using Memory Map / Viewranger (with OS data) for outdoor is extremely expensive but probably the best money being no object.)

Surely Apple should have just licensed the Ordinance Survey data. (They have the money to do it). Dunno if it is so easy for other countries but here in the UK OS data is the best. (I have only ever used it for a small town though). They have all the data that you need to do stuff like 3d mapping properly.

Schmidt 'very proud' of Google's tiny tax bill: 'It's called capitalism'

I thought it was the EU that was set to work like this.