* Posts by RRoker

5 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Mar 2013

Good grief! Have you seen BlackBerry's square smartphone?

RRoker

Re: "keyboard doubles as a capacitive multitouch trackpad"

It's a normal keyboard (in the fashion of past Blackberry devices) but with a capacitive layer on it meaning that you can use it like an oversized track pad (think the little optical pad in earlier devices but huge). I've seen a few demos of it and it looks really, really good.

BlackBerry claims ugly duckling Passport mobe is a swan in the offing

RRoker

thought I'd counter the inevitable outright negativity

I *really* like the look of this. It looks like a proper phone for messaging + working with documents on the go which I personally find to be a struggle on a device with an on screen key board. (Before you say it, you might not, I'm not disputing it, I do, others do).

It's just a pity that it presumably won't be compatible with Google services like Google Now and Drive which is probably going to be a deal breaker for me.

Acer reveals 'floating' screen to save desktop, self

RRoker

Re: Nice try

You probably know about this already but if you work somewhere with at least 5 windows licenses you can get licenses for Windows 8 Enterprise which allows 'Windows to go' which does exactly what you've just described. (Though as I understand it really needs a very good USB stick and USB3 to work properly and USB3 isn't what you'd call common on business PCs)

Also, I've looked at a few photos of this thing, I feel for anyone who buys it it doesn't look pleasant to use as a productivity device.

Amazon yanks SimCity download from store

RRoker

differs by jurisdiction

The rules that would apply here will differ a lot between different countries.

In the UK I would imagine that any customer who has purchased a license of Sim City would be able to say that EA are in breach of an implied term of the contract that the customer will actually be able to play the game.

If you're affected by this you could do worse than having a look at section 3 of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 which says (amongst other things):

"...cannot by reference to any contract term—

(a)when himself in breach of contract, exclude or restrict any liability of his in respect of the breach; or

(b)claim to be entitled—

(i)to render a contractual performance substantially different from that which was reasonably expected of him"

If I'd just paid over the odds for what looks like it's going to be a disappointing game at the best of times and it didn't even work because of some horrible DRM system I would say that any attempt to avoid giving me a refund/say that everything was fine an dandy was probably an attempt to "render a contractual performance substantially different from that which was reasonably expected"

Here's the $4.99 utility that might just have saved Windows 8

RRoker

Metro Apps = painfully slow

I'm running Windows 8 on my Core2 laptop with an SSD and (before I reset all of the defaults) it would take about as long to open the Metro picture viewer as it would to open Photoshop (and a lot longer than just using the normal Windows preview tool). (So I'm not sure I'd be that bothered about being able to run Metro apps in a window as I don't want to run them at all).

I'd recommend classic shell to anyone else running Windows 8, as apart from the interface it is better than previous versions of windows (and when I brought it was a lot cheaper than upgrading to Windows 7 from Vista on my laptop)