Posts by Connor Garvey

Shenanigans

I second Neeblor's shenanigans.

If that's him in the picture, he still has lips.

Advertising

Nokia can make money by giving their map app away the same way Google makes money.

They certainly can't compete with Google with their previous $100 per year price tag.

Too lame?

Vulture Ship 1 riding up on the Dark Knight

Immigration

Japan doesn't forbid immigration. They encourage it.

http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2221.html

Subscription

I've been using Rhapsody for about 6 months. I regularly delete music I don't like, but I've still managed to build a library of 1820 tracks. It would take me over 10 years to make up the price difference using Amazon's service. That's only if I don't want any new music during that time. As much as I would love ditching DRM, the subscription model has saved me over a thousand dollars.

Rhapsody @ $15 / month: $90

Amazon @ .89c / song: $1,619.80

MS

I don't think you rose above VMware's marketing attempt. You just fell for Microsoft's. Really ... what's with the MS love fest. I'm no great VMware fan, but I don't understand the point here. It seems MS's strategy is the same as it's always been. Make a product that's not great, but good-enough, then bundle it. In the process, explain why it's a good thing that you aren't offering as many features as your competition.

ESRB Notice

Game play may change during online play.

Comparison

I agree with Anonymous vulture. I have a Wii and a PS3. Both were given to me as gifts. I find myself turning on the PS3 far more often than the Wii, even though I only have 2 games for it. The only time the Wii gets used is when someone's checking the weather or when family / friends want to play a game together. As far as I can tell, the lack of blood, guts and intensity gets more non-gamers interested in playing with the Wii. Also, people who are intimidated by the PS3's 16 button, 2 stick controls are much more interested in the Wii's remote. They generally don't have any easier time getting used to it, though.

No. I'm not overweight and I exercise 5 times a week. The Wii is fun. I just like the PS3 more.

monica lewenski....

is on his left ear

I'll do one better

Let me grab my club. I have this great idea for a new Yang-tze river dolphin-skin phone.

White?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that this man was white. I'm sure that if he'd been middle eastern, it would have been a biological terrorist incident. He'd be in Guantanamo, all of New York would be scanned for anthrax, smallpox, etc. and the US media would call it a great success for law enforcement!

Patents

I think if they weren't related to patents, tactics like this would be called extortion. Wait until the company can't survive without the technology and then demand huge sums of money or else!

@Pascal

That's why it's called a comment and that's why I prefaced it and used the words "seems" and "guess". I really don't care about these two guys, but the quotes in the article were pretty mean spirited.

Visit Crackle

I can't believe that the reviewer spent much time reviewing Crackle before writing this ... review. The videos are mostly high quality and it lends itself to more Web 2.0 style sharing than YouTube. Also, Sony does advertise their movies, music and hardware, including cameras, on the site.

Please. No more of these sensationalist articles. Reviews based on reasoned evidence are much more useful.

Open source?

Does this mean that a discovery that I make that I publish online for free can be patented by someone else because I never filed for a patent? I don't think I like this idea.

US is big

"Why cant the US do the same, it cant be that difficult?"

I definitely don't want to defend Sprint, but the US is more than 14 times the size of the UK, so it really is difficult.

I think no

Should I also pay a tax to the oil companies when I buy a car?

Oh! How about a hand out to Microsoft whenever I buy a PC.

I'll have to give money to the soft drink companies whenever I buy a cup because i *might* put soda in it one day.

Do the Register's editors read these stories before they're published?

Not clear?

Just to make sure Google hadn't changed in the last hour, I went to their site and searched for "new car". Three sponsored links came up. I know they were sponsored because they were indented and presented in a yellow box with the heading "Sponsored Links". It may not be the most obvious way to set those links apart, but so far, I've never been fooled.

Compare this to various companies' penchant for commissioning studies designed to further their own goals. Software companies publish documents claiming that TCO is lower if you buy their stuff. Antivirus firms publish studies that clearly indicate increasing risks in ... just about everything. Petrol companies publish studies claiming that renewable energy is too expensive and global warming is not happening.

And Google colors the sponsored link box light yellow instead of fuschsia. I think we all have bigger problems.

Helpful ... ?

It doesn't look easy to hold or handle. You can't rest it on your shoulder because that's where the second controller is. It looks like you have to hold the whole contraption up with one hand reached out to be able to pull the trigger. Then, if you're playing a game like Red Steel that requires you to move the controller and nunchuck to perform actions like throwing grenades, you'll have to detach the controller, do the deed, then re-attach it. How did I ever live without this?

Speakers

It looks like the speakers have moved up too. If the PSP's resting on something, it often sounds muffled. I also accidentally cover the speakers with my thumbs when I'm playing. I hope the sound's been improved.

Define neutrality properly

I think many of the Reg writers don't understand what is meant by net neutrality. ISPs already do charge and always have charged different amounts for different levels of service. Consumers are used to the tiered model. If you want high data rates, you pay more. You pay a premium for a static IP. You pay extra to remove the cap on the amount of data you can transfer in a month. What the comms companies want to do is to be able to charge whatever they want to whomever they want. They want the government to give them the OK to price gauge companies like Google and Yahoo! Services companies pay extra to get fast connections. They pay just as much as anyone else who wants a fast connection. AT&T wants to be able to give Google a "special" price because they know Google can pay it and will pay it or it will go out of business.

Supporters of net neutrality say that ISPs should not be allowed to filter traffic in this way. Their pricing models must be "neutral" to the source of the traffic. I hope this helps.

Sue The Reg

Is it any different when you, The Register, re-publish these pictures? How about the countless hours of street footage shown on news programs, reality TV shows and YouTube? What about sites like Blogger, Flickr and Yahoo! Photos? Seriously. Get a sense of perspective. It seems you just love to hate Google. Could it be envy?

Airplanes

It's only a matter of time before people use airplanes to do harm to this country. They must be grounded immediately.

Let's not forget trains, cars, cameras (surveillance), and guns. They also might steal weapons from the military, too, so let's blow those up as well.

Privacy

When do we reach the point at which the tinfoil hat brigade starts crying about Microsoft's invasion of privacy? If Google's one-time shot taken during a random drive-by of a location is too revealing, what about providing hundreds of photos of the same location? I'm sure you'll find plenty of shots of Notre Dame in which people in the foreground or background are in compromising positions.

Get real

Of all the evil things corporations do with our personal data and our money, why do people (and the Reg) pick on Google?

Nobody cares about your cat. If you don't want people looking in your windows, close the blinds. If I happened to be standing in front of my window in my knickers when the Google mobile drove by, I'd say, "I shouldn't have been standing in front of my window in my undies with the blinds open." Or, "If I didn't want people to see me going into the porn shop, I shouldn't have gone into the porn shop." What a crazy bitch.

Buzz bombs

This is as bad as the Aqua Teen Hunger Force scare. What kind of bomb takes the form of a blinking illuminated picture of an alien giving the finger? What bomb maker would alert potential victims by making a vibrating package? My only conclusion can be that many people are very dumb.

Total waste

This is just another excuse to give billions to a contractor. If, as el prez claims, terrorists are the real threat, why worry about missiles? Countries powerful enough to have long range smart ICBMs understand the concept of mutual destruction/annihilation.

Lost

I'm in the US and I lost everything as well. I was actually signed on at the time. I clicked on a link and everything vanished. I spent about 15 minutes updating the page and making it better than it was before. Today, my old configuration is back, overwriting the new one I wanted to keep.

Picture

There's a picture here. Is this a joke?

http://www.k9magazine.com/viewarticle.php?sid=15&aid=1981&vid=0&npage=

Matt

I agree with Matt. Who cares if Katrina kills and displaces thousands. It didn't affect me. What do I care if a tornado destroys my neighbor's house. I'm happy as long as I got mine.

I'm an American, but I'd still call this typical self-centered self-serving right wing Americanism. Blame it on the left-wingers. It was the right wingers that ran around screaming about Iraq until we started a war there. It'll be the liberals that clean it up. Now, the neo-cons are asking why we should help people in Darfur when their country isn't on our border. It'll likely be the left that pushes to solve that problem too.

Why Adobe?

If everyone's so upset about the UK pricing, buy something else. I dropped Photoshop in favor of the GIMP long ago. Adobe sets the price based on market research. They charge the price that will maximize their profit. If you want to protest, don't buy it from the UK or the US. Don't buy it at all. Then mail the UK office and tell them off.

Japanese

I'm studying Japanese and am amazed at the number of borrowed words and phrases. They'll use long English phrases to describe things that could easily be said using Japanese words.

ruuzu sokkusu - loose socks

orenji juusu - orange juice

furuutsu sarada - fruit salad

sarariiman - salaried man

seerusuman - salesman

Diagram versus document

When a system is first conceptualized, architects should stay far away from listing any details of a system. The specifics of the type and structure of the data storage and UI should not be defined in the initial use cases. Has everyone forgotten about user testing? It shouldn't be an architect, but users who decides where each button should be placed and what data should be stored. By the time the developers get their hands on the use cases, they should have developed far beyond a simple diagram and should be a part of a detailed requirements document.

GTA

Will it now be illegal to play any video game that allows you to role play illegal activities? Can we not watch movies that depict theft, murder or rape? Although I think it's sick, I think it's better that these people are living their fantasies virtually than committing real criminal acts. These types of activities existed before Second Life and if they're banned in the virtual world, they'll continue in "first life".

Aliens!

Aliens are attacking with high tech sperm! They are creating alien pirate hybrid babies who ran this way.

Really??

It's strange to hear that this is a surprise to anyone, especially someone who's knowledgeable enough to write an IDE. It's for exactly these reasons that Java and Coctothorpe were designed to be type safe. Inheritance and variable types are determined at compile time, not run time. If you're writing auto-complete for Ruby, you'd really have to run every iteration of every combination of methods in the program to figure out what the the type of a variable might be at any given time. For example, how would you determine the type of the variable in this code (sorry about the indentation and extra spaces)?

class TestClass

def initialize(testValue)

@testValue = testValue

end

end

You'd have to find every method that might ever call it, which may not even be possible if this is a library. It's much easier to design and write an IDE around type safe languages. It's also much easier to have the compiler check the correctness of your code than to have to run hundreds of extra test cases to make sure that your string is always treated as a string or that, when a user enters a value, you remember to convert it to its proper type (date?) and don't accidentally leave it in string form.