Posts by Buzzword

Bluetooth

"The Mini has Bluetooth 4.0 too, but who cares much about that these days?"

If you wanted to use an Apple wireless keyboard and mouse, you'd care.....

On the one hand we have Matt Asay telling us that Web 2.0 is the way forward, that it's all fluffy clouds and open-source open-architecture from here on. On the other hand we have Steve Bong of ¡Bong! Ventures telling us the exact same thing. Hmm....

Colour temperature

"The research team claims the resultant light is close to natural sunlight but can be filtered for specific colors."

Good. Hopefully this means we can move away from having harsh blue-white lights in places where a warmer, yellow-ish light would be more suitable.

Tears

I'm almost in tears at all the mistakes Microsoft are making. Far more expensive than an iPad - that's just unacceptable. As a developer with both feet planted firmly in the Microsoft camp, I can't afford to see them lose the platform wars! I'll be praying hard for them to turn it around soon; but I might just go learn some Objective-C as a backup option.

Work-around

What if you tweet something incorrect, but you clarify that you're merely reporting what somebody else told you? e.g. "According to @bob, Lord McSnooty is a paedo." Can it be libel if you're merely reporting what somebody has said? If so then this very Reg article would be libelous surely?

Planning restrictions

In the UK, planning restrictions might well get in the way of some of those specifications (large front windows, ceiling height).

Missing the Christmas season?!

"Most PC makers are expected to unveil their machines at January's CES."

Are they deliberately being stupid?

Norton Commander

Basically what we want for managing files is something like the old Norton Commander. Two panes (three on a widescreen monitor), quick tabbing between them, quick file preview, quick editing. And we want it all built in to the OS, not a $17.99 App Store purchase. Ballmer, make it so!

Has Mr Musk seen the Barclays rollercoaster advert? They show how to attach the rollercoaster tracks - sorry, "railgun" - to existing buildings, and it can accommodate sharp turns, thus avoiding right-of-way issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCEQoCXJ_so

Your article has zero relevance to the world of real companies, i.e. outside the Web 2.0 bubble. Viewing an Outlook contact's recent Facebook posts? Analysing Twitter posts in Excel? Get real. Nobody wants this stuff. They just want to get on with their work as efficiently and effectively as possible, and get home.

Would make a good thin client too.

Christmas season

Sadly the new BBs will miss the lucrative Christmas season. Millions of kids will find shiny new Android phones under their Christmas trees. The network effect of BBM isn't strong enough; all the broke kids are using What'sApp these days.

Huh. And I thought it was just my new flatmate spending too much time on BitTorrent.

Starbucks (UK)'s "losses" appear to stem from Transfer Pricing in two areas:

1) buying overpriced coffee beans from a Starbucks (Switzerland); and

2) paying a 6% royalty for use of the brand name to Starbucks (Netherlands).

The first one sounds a bit dodgy: paying over the odds for goods is basically illegal under transfer pricing rules. HMRC could fall on that like a ton of bricks. The latter however is perfectly fair. Try opening a coffee shop without the Starbucks brand and see how much money you can make: you'll quickly wish you had a swishy green logo to attract customers.

Amazon and Google appear to be operating perfectly within the law.

I'm not falling for that

Nice try, Reg, but I'm not falling for that.

Although maybe it's a double-bluff, and the link actually goes to a Rick Astley video....

Rats fleeing the sinking ship.

On another matter, "21 million claimants" - really? No wonder we're broke!

Surely it can't do payments if you're in a noisy bar?

Give your kids unique names

This is why it's important to give your kids unique names. Once again the Beckhams were ahead of the game: Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz, and Harper. No chance of them having their accounts merged!

I don't get it. They're all basically the same, aren't they? KDE, Gnome, Xfce, Windows 95 to 7, Mac OS (every version), heck even the old Amiga's window system.

1. You have a background "desktop" across which you can choose to spew icons.

2. You have an application bar along the bottom.

3. You have a launcher in a corner (Start in Windows, the Applications folder on Mac, the Applications menu in Gnome, the K button in KDE, or right-click on the desktop background in XFCE).

4. Your application's menu either lives inside the window (Windows, KDE) or at the top of the screen (Mac, Gnome, Amiga OS).

That's basically it, right? You can add a few extra options such as snapping, multiple desktops, or background widgets, but that's just tinkering around the edges. So why do Linux users have religious wars about these things? (Genuine question, not trolling. And I can see that Win 8 and mobile OSes don't stick to the pattern, but we're talking about desktop windowing systems here.)

So the Reg's headline landed Apple in hot water. No wonder they hate you :)

Who needs a portable games console these days, when your cheap Android smartphone provides a similar experience at zero marginal cost? App store games are much cheaper than PSP games too.

It's a shame they don't go the whole hog and use LiDAR / laser scanning to generate a full 3D interior map. That could be particularly useful for large public buildings such as hospitals, railway stations, or shopping centres. But we can't have that, turrurists might use it to plan their attacks.

It's about bleeding time. Why on earth does London's taxi fleet run entirely on noisy, smoky, diesel engines? Any pedestrian can vouch for how unpleasant it is. The sooner we get those smelly old things off the streets, the better!

Apple?

Don't Apple and Google do the same thing? If you want Safari 6 on your iOS device, you need to upgrade to iOS 6. Similarly if you want Google's latest built-in browser on Android, you have to upgrade to Deep Fried Mars Bar. (You can download a separate browser, but then that's an option on Windows too.) So Microsoft haven't invented the idea of tying the browser version to the OS version; in fact they're merely jumping on a bandwagon.

Billing

In other words, they haven't managed to set up their billing systems yet.

"Facebook launched the AV Marketplace back in April..."

I'm a regular Facebook user, but this is the first I've heard of it. They certainly haven't promoted it, at least not in the UK.

Missing keys

No PgUp/PgDn or Home/End keys, and therefore not useful for people doing real work. At least it has a Del key, unlike the MacBooks.

Google's best option is to provide country-specific variants of its sites, so they could have Youtube.br, Youtube.co.uk, etc. The offending video could be removed from the Brazilian site to comply with local law, but not from the other sites. It would then be up to Brazil to decide whether they want to block the 200 other national variants of Youtube or just accept that they can't control everything.

Playing catch-up?

Microsoft have been offering the .NET Micro Framework for a few years now. Are Oracle just catching up now?

iOS limitations

On iOS there's a constraint on using HTML in apps. Specifically, if your app uses the UIWebView control (an embedded web browser), then the Javascript engine is about six times slower than if your app just runs in iOS Safari. This alone could account for much of Facebook's horrendous performance on iOS. (Caveat: I haven't tried it on Android.)

Mac OS X

I've had a Mac for a few years and initially I struggled with the lack of a Start menu. Then I repositioned my Applications folder to the bottom-left corner and lo and behold it looked much more like my familiar old Start menu!