Posts by Greg J Preece

So if you've ordered Windows 7 E...

...what happens to your order?

If I end up with one of these

It'll be straight in the microwave. Bye bye, Mr RFID. Fuck that thing right in one of its security holes.

Only one cable?

This is the Internet. I thought we were supposed to have a way around this kind of shit. Didn't we call it packet switching or something?

The Sony one is astonishing!

That one made me laugh my ass off.

Isn't this the same man

That did WebCameron?

That painful episode might lead some to use phrases involving a pot, a kettle, and a colour.

But then again, Cameron calling *anyone* a twat makes him a bit of a hypocrite.

Been on Android for ages?

Hasn't there been one of these on Android for donkeys? My boss has it on his G1.

@Rik - Ding ding, round two!

>>* A light, solid case that doesn't bend and cause damage to your components, nor crack after being 'lived with' for some time.

Got that.

>>* Well designed and implemented cooling, so your fan doesn't come on so often, at such a high speed, or sound so annoying.

Got that

>>* A keyboard that's a joy to use. Unless you're on a MacBook, 'business' HP or ThinkPad, you're probably getting a pretty nasty keyboard, with spongy keys, lots of flex, and poor reliability.

Got that.

>>* An incredible touchpad. Touchpads are rubbish in general. I have to use an external mouse to be at all productive - except on ThinkPads (trackpoint) or MacBooks.

Incredible? As a torture device, perhaps. I have RSI and I don't know what it is about the new MacBook touchpads that makes them cripple my hand, but they do.

>>* A very nice LED backlit display. Beats most laptop displays I've seen.

Granted, they have very nice screens. But you really do pay for it.

>>* Very good battery life.

As above.

>>* Magsafe power connector. Yes there are stories of people breaking these, but they seem to be idiots who yank the thing around by its cord. IME it's brilliant.

Phht, 20p worth of components that no-one replicates because it's patented. And the people that break the Magsafe ones are the same morons who break normal ones.

>>* Last but definitely not least: A copy of, and a guarantee of compatibility with, OS X. If you don't like it or need it, fair enough, but lots of people swear by it.

Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu. Don't have to re-mortgage my house for it, does all the same stuff and probably a wee bit more. Observe...

>>>* When you resume Windows by opening the laptop lid, it takes ages for it to be usable again. This is getting better, but it's still not like in OS X where the thing is ready instantly.

Ubuntu.

>>>* When you resume WIndows, it takes ages for the thing to be connected to a wireless network again. In OS X, it's ready to use by the time you try to use it.

Ubuntu.

>>>* You don't need 'malware' protection. This may change in the future, but for now, it's nice to not have to bother with such crap.

Ubuntu baby, yeah.

* Built in search works, is incredibly fast, and you don't notice it slowing your machine down, unlike Windows Search.

Uuuuuuuubuntu!

Bwhahaha. Macs are pretty well built, but Apple's attitude stinks. Especially sealing batteries into the laptops, or selling drives without an ODD and with only one USB port for £1700. Thanks, but no thanks. For work, I have my £400 Lenovo (with a hideously expensive £30 RAM upgrade). Bit less than a Mac, eh? You might think it's totally crap at that price, and you would be entirely wrong. I'm a programmer, not a sales jockey, and this little thing is great. Also works really well under a certain OS. I'll let you guess which one.

As for play, well....gaming on a Mac? Yeah right. That's what I keep Win7 around for.

@AC 10:49

"XBox - turd? How so? Best graphics and processor of any game console"

*SPLUTTER*

Come again? I seem to remember one of the current gen consoles having a Cell in it, and a different one melting repeatedly to the tune of $1bn....

As for Win7, I've been really impressed with it. Well, that is, until tonight, when I tried to transfer 4GB of data from one drive to another and was told it would take AN HOUR. 900KB/s for transferring files is simply ridiculous. And if that wasn't bad enough, the rest of the system became completely unusable, as every program running started lagging for some reason.

And before some MS-tard comes rushing in to tell me my system is under-specced, it's a quad core box, and those hard drives are 15000rpm U320 SCSIs. Under XP x64, which the machine was running before, that transfer would have taken literally *seconds*.

That had better be fixed in RTM. I've already pre-ordered this thing. Tried some steps from Vista to try and solve it. Here's hoping...

My eyes! MY EYES!

Dear sweet mother of God! MY EEEEYYYEESSS....

I can't draw a straight line with a diamond-edged ruler and a laser-guided light pen but even I could do better than that monstrosity.

*Drool*

Nuff said.

It was better as a tat bazaar

Cheaper, more interesting, more fun.

Now it's expensive as hell, only drop-shippers and businesses post, and they post buy-it-now auctions that are more expensive than Amazon Marketplace. The amount I buy from eBay has reduced drastically from "almost everything" to "practically nothing," in the space of only a year or so.

@Psymon

Might I venture that the reason IE doesn't use much in the way of *additional* resources is that half of it comes from the OS you're already running.

But I do agree with the other posters here. I don't like the idea of pointless eye candy, and by Christ, could they not find a more garish background for that first screen? And having a see-through menu bar just makes it harder to use! Urgh.

iThinkYouNeedToKnockThisShitOff

This iNonsense has gone too far. iMedicinalCannabis? Give it a rest. Not every application in the app store has to start with an i, surely?

Chopper Costs

"A police spokeswoman told the BBC the helicopter was deployed for less than 20 minutes, costing about £200."

Horseshit! I am willing to bet good money it costs more than £200 just to get a helicopter off the ground, never mind to the riotous 15-person burger bash that it's supposed to be quelling.

A theory...

"The busiest time for internet usage in the UK is early on Sunday evening, when average speeds can fall as much as 25 per cent."

The Top Gear Effect?

@GettinSadda

FFS, just install the Nightly Tester Tools and turn off version checking.

@AC 14:58

Oh calm down you wanker. You're taking seriously something that really isn't supposed to be.

The killer app...

...is the same as it was in Vista. DirectX. Let's be honest, it's the only reason half of us still use Windows. I want to play games, and most of them require DX. Plus, DX11 looks pretty damned cool.

Hold the phone...

Went to find a copy of Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate and found this comparison chart:

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/Windows-Windows-7/category/102

Where one of the advantages of Win7 Ultimate is apparently:

" Work in the language of your choice or switch between any of thirty-five languages."

Eh? Have they removed alternate languages from the other versions?

The DCFS

If they're bothering to upgrade, why aren't they upgrading to IE8??? Just making another rod for their backs, surely?

It's called the Athena

"Think of the old Psion 3 or 5 pocket computer on steroids, offering a lovely QWERTY keyboard for messaging, a screen that's good enough for browsing and a photo album, and small enough to fit in a jacket pocket. "

HTC Athena. Mine's three years old and I kept it over the smartphones available. Annoying OS at times, but it gets the job done.

Typical Americans...

"Ms Longueira suffered nothing more than scrapes to her arms and back in the incident, although the Longueira family says it intends to sue."

Our daughter wasn't looking where she was going and didn't hurt herself. You bastards!

@Simon Taylor

Joke icon dude. The rest of us didn't need it, but he provided it for the special people amongst us.

In any event, this looks like a very cool website. Wonder if I'll bother staying up to watch the moon landing....again. ;-) Can't count the number of times I've seen that on documentaries.

@Tom Paine

Got there before me. :-)

And oi, Annihilator. Ten quid please.

Car/Moon Pic

Gave me a giggle.

Little bit of a fib

"We had aimed to get fibre to half a million homes by next March"

Doesn't he mean "to *near* half a million homes"?

Or how about...

...having the back of the phone swivel round 90 degrees to form the wings? It would undoubtedly be more solid.

Where I work, IE6 is banned!

We hate it. We hate it so fucking much. If you're running anything less than IE8 or Firefox, you won't be for long.

O2 - Hahahahaha

The perfect network on which to show off the Jesus Phone's legendary speed....

The word you're looking for...

>> "So was I wrong?" wrote Schneier. "Maybe. Okay, probably."

"Yes." The word you're looking for is "yes."

Knock-offs already available

My mate's been wearing a £60 version of this for a few weeks now...

Software patents?

I thought the UK didn't do those?

@Tim Brown

Nope, I'm with you mate. No AV installed on my only Windows machine. Slows things down and annoys me, and I never get infections anyway. Every now and then I run an online scan just to check, and it never finds anything.

I will buy Blu-ray

When it becomes cheaper. I bought 2001 for a tenner, the new Batman films for £15 and the super-uber-deluxe Blade Runner boxset on Blu-ray. Because...well...with films like that, you've got to really. I do love my movies.

But will I be replacing my ooooodles of DVDs with BDs in the near future? Hell no! Not at those prices.

I have nothing against Blu-ray, unlike some of the other foaming-at-the-mouth rantboys on here. "Die Sony Die"...? I quite like it as a format. And will all the download service advocates please (for now) shut the fuck up? If they released a HD download movie service in the UK right now two things would happen:

1) Net neutrality would end overnight because our infrastructure just IS NOT READY. I don't know how many times I have to say this, but it is not good enough for HD movie downloads, certainly not for streaming. (They're already bitching about the iPlayer.) A BD disc is 50GB. How long would that take to download even on my rather meaty line? And if I want 300 of those discs, where am I gonna store all that data? Dumbasses. What you want will happen, but not yet.

2) The 2nd hand market would slowly cease to exist, so you will all end up paying more for what you watch. Don't believe me? Look at games. Steam is one of the biggest online game distribution networks, and bloody hell, it's expensive. If a game is released on there exclusively, can I buy a cheap 2nd hand copy? Errr....no. I'm stuck paying full price for everything, and full price on most media is too damn much.

I like my physical copies. Ones I don't have to wait for. Ones I can trade, sell on, get cheap. Ones that are never going to be affected by a server dying or a parent company going bust. Ones that will be mine forever because they're solid, plastic wrapped, and in my hand.

Did anyone else notice...

...that because their clothes were painted on, they had the air of a 5-year-old CGI TV series about them? Watch 0:45 to 0:47 and tell me that doesn't look like Captain Scarlet-style rendering.

Hahaha

Biggest laugh I've had all day. Nice one Lester.

Worth it just for the speed

Compared to FF3, 3.5 flies for me. For that and the improvements in HTML 5, Acid 3, etc, it's worth the upgrade for me. As a web developer (amongst other things) those are what's most important to me.

64-bit is 30p more?

Why?

And if you're going to have a price difference, why isn't it 32p more? ;-)

And where's the 64-bit edition of Ultimate?

@Ash

OSE can be gotten as a *.deb from the Ubuntu repositories. Job's a good 'un. Now they just need to update the repositories....

@AC 7:09

It's fantastic watching you argue with yourself...