Posts by Stan Smith

Here's a great idea: Let's make a gun that looks like a mobile phone

Sigh. I'm embarrassed to be a US citizen sometimes...

As bankruptcy looms for RadioShack, we ask its chief financial officer... oh. He's quit

As they tried to become relevant to today's youth, they eliminated everything that made them actually useful. I've been there a few times in recent years to try and pick up things like LEDs, connectors, fuses, etc. Most of the time I couldn't find anything close and had to order from Digikey or the like. Sad.

Philips lobs patent sueball at Nintendo in US: Seeks to BAN Wii U

Crazytown...

Not sure about the first patent, since it wouldn't load. But the second patent specifically mentions a camera taking an image. That seems more like Kinect than the sensor-based Nintendo version. Correlating a camera to a couple of IR LEDs is more than a stretch...

Supermassive BLACK HOLE to stuff MYSTERY gas BLOB into open maw

Won't this crash...

...have actually happened some 26,000 years ago?

Adobe exec puffs cloud shop: Online features are so 'compelling'... What are they again?

"There are "super traditionalists" he added, but people's buying habits were shifting when it comes to consumer software, as evidenced by iTunes, Facebook and Salesforce.com."

Bullshit. I might buy apps through iTunes, but I don't have to keep paying every month for the honor of using said app. What aholes.

'THINNEST EVER' spinning terabyte beauty slips out of WD fabs

We need to stop letting HD manufacturers use weasel-words to short-change their customers. I'll go with base-ten drive measurements when they also start giving bytes ten bits...

Greenland ice did not melt in baking +8°C era 120k years ago

Re: Odd, I'm beginning to think Lewis has an agenda...

...Says the Anonymous Coward.

My point was more that Lewis seems to be a single-minded chode. He could actually be a well educated, highly respected scientist. But I doubt it. And his opinions on climate change are the worst part this site.

Odd, I'm beginning to think Lewis has an agenda...

Maybe you should start writing for Faux News, instead of a tech news web site?

Apple 'slashes iPhone 5 screen orders', tight-fisted fanbois blamed

Not a value no matter how you look at it.

I actually wanted to get one this last weekend, but it's not worth a $100 premium over the 4s, even WITH a 2-year contract. So I settled for a 4s.

Biz users, hard-up punters: Nobody loves Windows 8

I really like Windows 8...

...granted, I use Classic shell and largely bypass the Start Screen entirely. Windows 8 runs better for me than 7 did on the same hardware, and the new file maintenance functionality makes the whole thing worthwhile!

Apple loses UK 'Samsung copied us' appeal: Must publicly GROVEL

Is the actual verbiage of the required notice spelled out? They could just turn it around and say, "Samsung didn't copy our designs for their devices; They're similar, but not as cool as ours."

The judge himself made that argument, so I'm not sure how that would be out of bounds...

Ballmer's lightened pay packet is the least of his problems

The only reason I tend to think articles like this are incredibly overblown is the fact that my company is still running XP, and is just now starting to look into Windows 7. It's possible they'll just skip 7 and go to 8, depending on what the next year brings. Or maybe they'll keep XP for a few more years, just to keep costs low and save some executives bonus.

NASA: WE'VE FOUND Four-toed NON-HUMAN FOOTPRINTS

Re: Batman

This also proves evolution, as we can deduce from this image that The Batman once had 4 horns instead of two...

Greenland ice sheet not going anywhere in a hurry, say boffins

Re: I didn't bother reading it

You're obviously forgetting the "Global" part of Global Warming - the USA is busy baking away this summer, with no relief in sight.

Microsoft so sorry for limp wedding tackle gag gaffe

This is considered controversial?

What a stupid non-issue.

Common brain parasite 'can affect host's actions'

Oh. My. God. This also explains the vegan epidemic! Cat-loving vegetarians threaten our very way of life!!!

Truck nuts swing onto US freedom of speech agenda

They're trying to stick it to us!

Anyone wanting to ban truck nuts is just a dick. The desire to ban "offensive" things like this is a growing problem, and just seems to keep coming up again and again. Even when it's proven that one can't just slip into a crack in the constitution and put whatever one wants in there, they still keep trying to jam it in. Really people need to just calm down and think about something distracting, like baseball. That will hold it off for a while and make the whole experience just that more pleasant.

Good day.

Oracle's Sword of Damocles forces open source fork rename

Unintentionally funny?

... or an intentional meme reference? Leeeeeeeeeeeeeroy Jenkins!

Beastly Android will batter Apple's iOS beauty

Not sure what you're smoking...

Realize that this is a USA perspective.

From a consumer standpoint, Android phones are just as locked down as iPhones - depending on the carrier. People keep touting open and free, and give examples such as tethering available on Android. But Sprint has locked down tethering on my phone; I can't use it without paying more. I can't PAY for Angry Birds on my Android phone - no, I have to use the stupid free but Ad supported version.

Unfortunately, none of these phones are any better than their carrier. And while I like my Android phone, I can't wait for the day I can use an iPhone. It's just a much better user experience.

US cable giant Comcast accused of internet video 'toll booth'

Am I missing something?

Doesn't Level 3 have it's own ISP? Doesn't Level 3 pay that ISP, just like we do, to get content both to and from the web?

Comcast can suck it.

Google accused of hard-coding own links in search

WTF?

IMHO, the first search result is actually much more useful.

The system knows that the user was highly likely looking for information related to a stock; that being the case, I like that it inserts a direct stock result. It has links to other stock information providers, so it's not like they're hiding anything.

When the search query contains the comma (or other characters), it's less sure that they are looking for the stock result alone, so it omits the direct inclusion.

Just as the top result is often an automatic map when you Google an address or business, it might not be a "pure" search result, but it *is* useful. And that's why I use Google.

Twitter joke martyr loses appeal

Threatening?

Would a smiley emoticon on the end have made it enough less-threatening? :)

Sony PS3 Slim

Huh?

The 360 is better at cross-platform gaming because lazy devs can practically recompile and get a working game for it. That's not really a selling point, that you get a bunch of me-too PC games for more money than they cost on the PC.

Apple misses self-imposed Windows 7 boot camp deadline

Bootcamp s. VM

The difference for me is that you can actually game when running Bootcamp, unlike trying to run a modern game in a VM...

Vampires not good role models for Catholics, declares Vatican

Twilight isn't real? WHAT?!?!?

Don't they realize it's a fantasy? Just like religion, I mean...

Microsoft's Windows 7 price gamble - and why it's flawed

What Microsoft has to do to beat OS X?

Uh, how about remove the copy protection, artificially hobbled versions, and upgrade-only copies? A single OS X license might be more expensive, but you get a full copy of everything OS X has to offer.

Still not sure why they feel they're competing with Apple anyway - with Apple's small market share, they're just acting like the anti-competitive bastards they've always been.

But I do love Windows 7 for my gaming machine....

Microsoft having to compete with Apple's OS?

Uh, how about remove the copy protection, artificially hobbled versions, and upgrade-only copies? A single OS X license might be more expensive, but you get a full copy of everything OS X has to offer.

Still not sure why they feel they're competing with Apple anyway - with Apple's small market share, Microsoft is just proving to be the anti-competitive bastards they've always been.

But I do love Windows 7 for my gaming machine....

Battlestar Galactica prequel shuns space, spaceships

Is this a joke?

They're going to take an outstanding work of science fiction and turn it into fucking DYNASTY?!?!? PLEASE tell me this is a joke.

Parallels 4 users want their money back

I haven't had any trouble with Parallels...

Maybe I don't have a lot of room to speak, since I'm relatively new to the whole virtualization thing. But I tried Parallels first, then Fusion. Both were with my existing Bootcamp partition. For some reason Fusion was just INCREDIBLY slow, while Parallels has been a really nice experience. I don't use Coherence mode, but Windowed and Fullscreen have been excellent. But all I ever do is play with Visual Studio 2008 and use a VPN connection.

This is the perfect combination for the road - I can use my crappy browser-based VPN for work and do VS development, and still have MacOS for everything else.

Microsoft slams 'sensationalist' Vista analysis

No, Vista really does suck.

I keep trying it (I have Vista 64 installed on a second partition), and I just keep having to go back to XP. Here is my list of issues, in no particular order.

Network compatibility sucks. It constantly disconnects mapped drives. And copying files (even on different drives on the same machine!) is dog slow and occasionally errors out. And this is WITH SP1 installed.

MS, in their infinite wisdom, decided that there couldn't POSSIBLY be a reason for people to want a generic Postscript printer driver. Even though that's often the best/easiest way to share a printer between machines and platforms. Since they had perfectly valid drivers in both XP 32 and 64, I don't buy the incompatible line.

Slow. Not a huge amount, but enough that it's irritating. This is on a quad-core machine with 8GB of RAM.

OpenGL support is barely there, and in emulated form only. This matters more for 3D professionals than gamers. Just like the lack of hardware accelerated audio, though that's more of a gamer issue.

UAC is a nearly completely useless feature (more irritating than anything else, and the way it's implemented will just encourage people to click through the warnings, whether they be benign or malignant). And you can't turn it off if you use some VPN's, since the OS is then deemed to be completely insecure.

Windows Explorer widgets were made smaller for no good reason, making them occasionally hard to click. And many of the once unique icons were made so similar it can be hard to distinguish them at first glance.

I want to like it; I really do. I do keep trying. I just have to go back to XP 64 to get things done.

Movie pirate forced to ditch Linux

Crap

"while I a currently unemployed and relatively unemployable with the two felonies that they gave me"

Uh, dude, you COMMITTED those two felonies; they weren't a gift from on-high.

At least running Windows will let him buy a few decent games to play during his "time off"...