* Posts by Will.

24 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2009

Wikipedia awash in 'frothy by-product' of US sexual politics

Will.
Mushroom

@ "There is no such thing as a basic human right"

Tell that to the United Nations 'Universal Declaration of Human Rights' adopted in 1948. This, backed and enforced by the US (when it serves them; usually in other countries) applies regardless of so-called jurisdiction. No court on the planet can deprive you of them.

HTC Sensation dual core Android smartphone

Will.
Boffin

FYI, Re: Benchmarks

The Quadrat synthetic benchmarks run at the phone's native resolution and are resolution dependent. Therefore, a qHD screen at 540*960 is going to obviously have a lower score than a similarly spec'd phone running the same benchmark but only rendering 480*800.

Cobol cabal will take over THE WORLD Australia

Will.
Thumb Up

Who needs Ruby?

When you've got www.coboloncogs.org

Donkey Kong Country Returns

Will.
Thumb Up

@ Nephew Diddy?

Diddy is the nephew, and he and his girlfriend Dixie were in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, if I recall correctly.

and @ Sample "What about the N64 game?"

There was also Donkey Kong Land 1,2 & 3 on the Gameboy, which were pretty much all more of the same (and complementary to Donkey Kong Country 1, 2 and 3 on the SNES) and all were excellent.

Taxpayers may ship 736 iPads to Brussels

Will.
Thumb Down

@ Made in China by Foxconn

Yeah, just like 90% of everything else electronic. What's your point?

Gizmodo faces visit from cops over 'found' iPhone

Will.
FAIL

How altruistic of them

So they contacted the engineer that they knew owned the phone, after posting 4 stories and 2 videos about it and after sharing a detailed teardown of the hardware for all to see on the internet, all the while raking in the ad dollars. Wow, I guess I was wrong, they really did the right thing and not just the bare minimum they thought they'd need to confirm it as a real device and simultaneously try and cover their backs on legal terms.

Will.
FAIL

"If I find a phone, how do know who owns it?"

Well when it has Home phone numbers, user's facebook status and text message right there within literally one click, it's stupid to assume there needs to be some sort of Central Bureau of anything. And if you weren't just being a facetious idiot then you can surely see he could hand it in with the manager of the business that it was found in, rather than stealing it.

Will.
FAIL

@ "they did contact the guy that lost the phone"

Yeah sure they did... _after_ buying it for $5000 and publishing half a dozen different exclusive news stories on it. And the reason Apple Legal was on to them was because they saw the news of their new iPhone prototype all over the internet. Stop kidding yourself.

Will.
Grenade

They tried to return it? Hahaha, please.

If I left my phone in a bar and it contained all of my facebook information, I'd damn well expect the guy to either leave the phone in with the bar manager or to send me/my friends a message over facebook saying that he has my phone. Expecting him to phone up Nokia in Finland to return it would be entirely idiotic. Stupider yet would be him expecting the support drones to even know who I am.

Bottom line is, the guy could have handed it in or contacted the rightful owner if he wanted to. He knew fine rightly that the support jockeys have no idea who owns any given iPhone and claims that he phoned them only to cover his back.

The fact that he knew the full name and contact details of the owner and then sold it to Jizzmodo for 5 large is just disgusting and is clearly theft. Jizzmodo have screenshots of the facebook page of the owner so they too are culpable for buying stolen goods. I hope they all get sent up the river on this shameful charade.

Visual Studio 2010 - your chunky new friend dissected

Will.
Boffin

Re: Mobile Development

MS already give away Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (or whatever it's called) for free with the Windows Phone 7 SDK and Emulator. What more do you want?

iPhone 4.0 SDK bars un-Jobsian code translation

Will.
Grenade

@Elite?

Well if you're going to complain about the price barrier of entry to development, do be fair:

Apple: $Cost_of_cheapest_Mac + $99

Windows: $Cost_of_cheapest_PC [Visual Web Developer Express for Windows Phone and Visual C# Developer Express are free]

Will.
FAIL

.Net languages only

Too bad they're being so restrictive, only allowing us to use

VB

C#

C++

F#

J#

IronPython

IronRuby

A# (Ada for .Net)

L# (Lisp for .Net)

P# (Prolog for .Net)

Fortran.Net

Haskell.Net

Ja.Net (Java 5)

NetCOBOL

#Smalltalk

Those bastards!

DARPA to build military App Store, battlefield 3G

Will.
Black Helicopters

A title is required

You forgot the top seller:

iCallAirSupport™

Researcher spies new Adobe code execution bug

Will.
Boffin

What happens on 24th March

Probably this year's Pwn2Own thing, if memory serves me.

Microsoft re-tiles mobile platform for Windows 7 era

Will.
Happy

@ Rewriting?

Separation of concerns? What the hell are you talking about? I love to write all my program logic directly in the user interface class :)

RealNetworks boss in sudden exit

Will.
Happy

In detail, my opinions on this situation:

BUFFERING...

Samsung Omnia II

Will.
Boffin

no wasted space

Actually as soon as you touch the website content the menu bars hide themselves automatically.

Firefox 3.5 wins top dog browser crown - sort of

Will.
FAIL

Oh really?

IE8 has InPrivate browsing and Chrome has Incognito Mode, they've had them for months.

Acer A1 Liquid Android smartphone

Will.
FAIL

SenseMe

It's "Sense" UI.

And why does this phone get lauded for lacking it? At the end of the review it seems to get praise for lacking the previously mentioned as useful and nice shell that HTC provide for their phones.

Muggers plundering gig bootleggers' booty

Will.
Boffin

"Piracy"

Actually it's not piracy in all cases, some performers let their fans make personal recordings of gigs. Recently Nine Inch Nails (same band that gave away an album online for free and just sold limited edition records, previously covered by El Reg) decided on a free-camera policy for gigs, allowing people to record and enjoy later stuff they had seen live.

If it weren't for that fact then they wouldn't have overcome the extortionate prices charged by venues for professional filming by 'crowdsourcing' (ugh, I know) their media, and come up with this rather good quality DVD composed of fan-shot footable of their last tour and second only performance of the entirety of The Downward Spiral at www.thisoneisonus.org - officially free for download.

So don't just jump on the bandwagon of theives and assholes at gigs consummated by the ignoble call of "stopping piracy" without realising not every situation is the same.

Germans devise attacks on Windows BitLocker

Will.
Thumb Down

@keylogged wouldn't work

The keyboard-embedded keylogger doesn't need an OS to run. It just listens to keystrokes from the keyboard as they are sent.

Apple voids warranties over cigarette smoke, users say

Will.
Grenade

@What all you wonderful examples of humanity have forgot

What's the exchange rate between slightly lower risk of Altzheimers and massively increased risk of heart disease, lung cancer, mouth cancer, throat cancer, brain aneurysm, stroke, etc etc etc...?

Will.
Thumb Down

@ Law here in the UK

If you had read the article you'd have noticed the macbook was 'less than 2 years old'. Doesn't sound like 'less than 6 months old' to me.

Santa menaced by sex offender postie

Will.
Dead Vulture

Misleading Article

"The US Postal Service has pulled the plug on a Santa Claus letter service which has run since 1954."

not the same as

"So the Operation Santa Program will still work, but those letters with the North Pole mark won't be handled by volunteers in the town."

but of course all the previous commenters read only the first two paragraphs and go straight to bitching and moaning about how our liberties are being infringed and Christmas is ruined forever. The only actual difference is that one town has decided that their postal workers can't keep up with the concept of a reference to an address being replaced with an address. Not newsworthy and certainly not worth reacting like a Faily Express reader about it.