Posts by Tony Paulazzo

“it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle.”

― Franz Kafka, The Trial

So what non American options are there El Reg? Is Ubuntu One UK based in place of Dropbox? Is there a Pirate Bay version of Evernote? A Mega email solution. Time to sack American Data Thieves...

the need for a reasoned review

Held in secret by a secret court who must keep the findings, details and reasonings secret for National Security

I read this paranoid fantasy scifi trilogy in the 80's who posited a shadowy organisation attempting to destroy the constitution of America and basically enslave the human race: The Illuminati. It doesn't feel so scifi anymore.

Can't believe Obama ('Time for change') supports this, still, guess his chances of assassination are much lower now.

Unified message

Are MS aware that the instant they lower the price of something in America the entire world is aware of it thru' something called 'The Internet'. They might want to get onboard, there's load of good info on it like-

Tidal wave of hatred on Windows 8 months before it went on sale, demanding a start menu but just adding the button for the .1 upgrade

Getting into bed with NSA then releasing Cloudy office and always on kinect.

Who, in the UK, Australia etc are going to buy a full priced RT when it's For Sale in USA?

Steam Vs Xbone (as was)

Steam allows you to burn all your bought games to disk, Steam allows offline play, Steam has sales of up to 95%, Steam has promised [citation needed] that if their servers go dark to rid the DRM off all purchased games.

Microsoft: No backups, no offline play, paltry sales, when their servers go dark so does your console - oh, but 10 'family' [I'm assuming 'live'] members can play demoes of any game in your library.

Doh! Please sir, may I have another. In other news - Fire sale of the Surface RT.

Wouldn't it be funny if the iwatch was a smokescreen and they bring out something truly revolutionary, like a wearable iMac powered by movement. That would be awesome! So it'll probably be an iwatch - boring...

I predicted the tablet would be a success, this will fail (unless its a complete ipad type unit that will transmit wirelessly to a bigger screen / tv output where available).

iOS7

a raft of improvements to such elements as multitasking, the Safari mobile browser, and Siri. Still no ability to change the default browser, no resizable widgets and still flat textureless boring icons.

"We just completely ran out of green felt," and idea's.

Siri gets an upgrade I actually like Siri, seems to understand me better that GNow.

Still no intelligent password control (if connected to known wifi turn off password). One positive - the makeover looks like a nice implementation of MS' TIFKAM.

Take the text away from the icons then say what each app does, only about 50% are obvious, and the itunes / music player are almost the same.

Apple ensured that many of its contracts also had a “most favoured nation” clause

OK, IANAL but doesn't that clause preclude anyone selling at a lower price than you, ie, pricefixing, or could Amazon continue selling ebooks on the kindle at a reduced price? because if they couldn't, then the price was fixed at a price Apple were happy with, but not Amazon (and I assume supermarkets - or could they continue to sell cheaper hard copy books - and if so, how?).

Processor porn!

S'why I love The Reg :-) Still got an AMD in my gaming desktop at home (helped along by an Nvidia graphics card), natch!

If they get the battery / performance dance right it could make for an interesting future.

... frame the argument over corporate taxes as a political sop for the masses suffering under austerity, rather than a legitimate desire for overarching change.

And we have a winner.

Disney: The mouse who started the draconian copyright wars - jumped into bed with EA: Profit before playability, DRM before customers needs, and people act surprised. Marriage made in heav... hell far as I can see.

That there is no storage expansion

Seems an overly consumer hostile move that all tech companies seem happy to follow but I guess the masses don't seem to care - and yea, seems a shame they dropped the keyboard part of the build (offering more battery life, storage expansion etc).

Also, reading between the lines, you seem to rate the phone much higher than the tablet (plastic shell with noticeable join, not great battery, low res quickly smudged screen), and so you start to wonder at the price, especially If the phones only advantage over the Nexus4 is not overheating.

...the year’s best game so far. BioShock Infinite...

I kind'a like it, story is superlative, and the girl is kooky fun - but corridor shooter, in the 21st century? come on, I wanted to go off and explore, ala Skyrim... and as for EA's Simcity - well, I guess I have them to thank for letting me discover Tropico 4, a place where sims return to the same home, have relations and go to the same job every day - plus, you get to be a dictator with secret services who'll take out libertarians if they're pissing you off with strikes or 'peacefull demonstrations. Much fun.

But, IMHO, everyone who paid EA for Simcity put a another nail in the coffin of gaming consumer rights worldwide I'm afraid.

I don't understand

If china is so evil and opposed to western democracy why don't they have their own pc architecture with Chinese software and a local only Internet, also, why do western business's do business with a state that imprisons anyone asking for a little freedom?

I also thought Chinese society was 99% farmers/workers (fixed living income), and 1% ruling elite - turns out they've got layers of society too, middle class, affluent, poor etc. any Chinese resident readers (via vpn), wanna write an honest breakdown of modern Chinese society.

Also, is it true you don't have a Chinese equivalent for child abuse/paedophilia and can marry 14 year olds?

Honest curiosity.

Google is not a search engine it is, in fact, an advertising service, that is how it makes its money.

If that's true then for advertisers they offer a great search engine, probably the best on the net - and I hate advertisers, to the extent that I will flick TV over to bbc during ad breaks. And I've tried using other search engines (I used to love Alta Vista), Bing etc, and they're all pooh compared to Google (I'm not scared of clicking past the first few pages either).

To stop the paranoid fantasies of being stalked thru cyberspace I use Firefox with Adblock and noscript, but I realise the futility of not wanting governments to watch everything I do online - at least Google only do it to make money.

The FBI and CIA and MI6 suck donkey balls! Just a joke guys, you're doing a bang up job of keeping us citizens safe :-) (you know, from the paedo's, terrorists and pirates).

UBS analyst Brent Thill initially predicted that Microsoft would move 2 million Surface slabs in the fourth quarter. In fact it sold little more than a third as many, despite launching Surface RT in time for the holiday shopping season.

He guessed wrong. I guessed right, I knew they wouldn't move any significant numbers at the prices they were quoting. I'm pretty sure Amazon and Google aren't selling their 7 inch tabs @ £150 because they want poor people to have one, but because they did market research that told them at what price a device would sell in an iPad saturated market.

I'm beginning to wonder if MS did any market research about anything they've done recently: Office 2013 looks like shit, Not Metro & Win8 doesn't work well with just keyboard & mouse (just put back the fucking start menu already), and the Surface RT doesn't even have a reason for its existence.

They didn't need to make the Surface Pro tough enough to use as a skateboard, should'a thrown in the cheap keyboard and Office inc. a years license with the pro and sold the whole thing for £500 ($800 ish). I'm pretty sure Sinofsky would still be there if they'd done that - maybe.

I hate Safari on the ipad, did get momentarily excited when they announced fullscreen surfing in iOS6 but turned out to be solely for the iphone - no choices bruv. The back button on Safari is the only badly-designed-for-touch feature in the entire operating system - and the only way to go back a page...

I installed iCabMobile as a great replacement (downloads, full screen option, two finger tap to go back a page), but you're 'not allowed' (what am I, fucking 6?) to use it as your default browsing software, natch.

If I jailbreak (I did it once, I felt so naughty), I can setup my personal browser preference, or even install a trick that gives you Safari full screen and finger based back-a-page goodness, but losing the JB on every update got old. Fast.