Posts by Matthew Barker

Oh good

that means they'll stop whinging. 3 years is a long time to whinge about something without backing it up with action.

Ooooooooooooooh

Balsille is getting a might tetchy!

I was rather hoping for a larger-than-ten-inch tablet. It would save me from getting reading glasses.

Effigy battles

So, they're saying that it's OK to hire one person with an ethically questionable record, because he's better than the person he replaces? Am I understanding this correctly?

And to demonstrate how the new guy is ethically good-enough, they're still beating the previous one, who they hired and who they paid off when it was time to leave.

And the board, along with the last two CEOs they hired, was involved with fraudulently obtaining phone records belonging to other board members, employees, and the press.

They seem to be becoming worse rather than better.

I don't think I want to give them any more business.

[El Reg - Can you come up with an icon to symbolize HP's board of directors? Perhaps a bottle of sauce?]

Meh

Given that 4 of the last 5 Sony Ericsson handsets my family members have had have failed in less than a year, I think I'll give it a miss.

Formerly good quality. Now down the toilet, as far as I'm concerned.

Hmmm?

Who the hell wants to sit in the sun in 95 degree weather and read. And electronic gadgets always have a limitation. I can dip a book in water and, as long as I fan out the pages, I can still read it when it's dry.

My daughter's iPod shuffle went through the wash twice (at 800 rpm) and still works. Maybe I should sue Apple for a product that violates its environmental limitations.

Probably the reg should start a US-only column modeled on "flame of the week", called "stupid class action lawsuit of the day". Make sure you put pictures and addresses of the folks bringing the lawsuit so we don't accidentally hire them.

The problem is...

that we're, once again, being offered some "free" "service" that costs quite a lot to render. And those offering the service are employed in a "start-up" company, which is the silicon valley equivalent of a Las Vegas casino. They want to get rich. Thus it's quite naive to expect the business that's trying to grow a new crop of billionaires not to try to make money off of its users in any way possible.

The users are largely freetards walking a fine line with giving up personal details - in a time of rampant ID theft - in trying to get as much as they can for free and the businesses are trying to make as much money as they can off the users, walking a fine line with legalities and word play in their "privacy" policies.

So we have greedy bastards on either side of the line.

Ahhh, there it is!

The old Register is back, still smarting from being excluded.

Stiletto Cade meets Stiletto Steve.

Give them a refund, Monty

Monty sold the company. Apparently, he thought he could keep control.

But...but...but...

their motto is "do no evil"! Surely their definition of evil is the same as every other person under the sun...oh, wait.

A character in Ray Bradbury's book, "Something Wicked This Way Comes", pointed out that evil would naturally view something that was good as evil.

Anyway, I think we should have a personal statement from each Google employee for how that person defines "evil", updated daily, and then put a word cloud on the Google front page which shows the things Google will mostly be trying not to do on that day. That should help set our expectations.

Perhaps they could update their definition more frequently over an IRC channel that feeds the word cloud. That way I can determine with each search whether I want to trust Google or not and will have fair warning when I need to start clearing my Google cookies and using an anonymizer.

Standards?

' In her view, it is now Apple, Adobe and Google who are less committed to web standards -

Microsoft, Opera and Mozilla are fully onboard. '

Hmmm. I find this an interesting comment. Of all of the browsers I've used (including Firefox), Safari was the first to pass Acid3 with 100%.

App store vendors

Let's do some math. 140,000 apps on Apple's app store (by their count, not mine), maybe 50 (at most) whining vendor stories (or actual and unreasonable miscarriages of the process) which have made the news. And we then have to endure an endless supply of stupid lines like this:

"...which has a less than transparent process for approving apps. If developers don't fit Apple's

unspoken laws, they can forget tapping into the lucrative iPhone (and iPad?) market, except for

those customers foolhardy enough to jailbreak their handsets."

Calculate the percentages. It's this kind of stuff that makes me think El Reg will soon contract the services of Glen Beck or some other Fox News talking head to do their analysis for them...unless this is another example of El Reg taking the piss. One can only hope.

So, in the vernacular, BFD. Who cares if Apple controls the content. My daughter, friends and co-workers who have iPhones have pretty much trouble-free experiences with them. Some people want that. Some people don't want to jailbreak their phones and they want a vendor who screens all of the apps. More power to them. I think they should be allowed to have it if that's what they want. You could also remind folks in the same breath that the Google uncapped app marketplace model doesn't work either, since we've already heard about malware there.

For the record, I don't own an iPhone, but a Sony Ericsson phone.

It's also pretty stupid to require vendors to do software that can be run on every handset. Normally, it's hard to find software that will run on Linux, Windows, Mac, etc., so why with the handsets.

Let 'em run Java if they're so concerned about run-anywhere (and, no, I don't like java either.).

Sounds like...

we need to have mandatory community service for everyone after high school so they can build roads, parks, spend time outside and see that they can act rather than be the pathetic passive gits they've made themselves into.

Sounds like it's time for a new 12-step group for the internet-affected.

"Putz"

That's the only word that comes to mind when I read the blog and petition. I dunno why.

Intel

Obviously those working for Intel are so cerebral that they only care for completely mental pursuits.

Strange

Strange how this is so noteworthy. All of my non-apple phones (Sony-E, Nokia & Motorola) are the same.

Sounds like an attempt to stir up apple hater/lover war to drive readership to the Reg, no?

Why not?

"Why Palm hasn't gone the RIM route and developed their own iTunes-syncing utility remains a mystery."

No mystery. They were out to save software development costs with the stupidity of a Las Vegas-style gamble. May've been some freetardian impulses running through Palm. Utopia is always just around the corner, but it always involves leaving the other guys behind at the entrance to your gated community.

Let the commentard jousting between Fanbois and the Palm-Wanks begin!

Suggestion for a slight change...

" - an odd addition that will do little more than reduce battery life, in our opinion."

It doesn't seem to make sense to offer such a directed opinion on this without seeing how it's implemented. If there's a slight feedback when the switch to "wiggly icon" mode happens, then I doubt you'd ever be able to tell the difference in battery life. It wouldn't make an awful lot of sense to have it vibrating constantly as it would be an awful distraction and fairly "un-Apple" like.

In other words, this particular piece of text could be removed from your article and would only strengthen your writing.

Some things you can do...

I've installed it on 4 computers, 2 intel, 2 PPC – 1 tiger & 3 leopards.

My standard operating procedure, when I hear about everyone else having trouble, is to clean all my system caches, rotate logs, scan prefs, etc. before doing the installs.

To do this, I use maintenance.app (from titanium.free.fr) and applejack (applejack.sourceforge.net),

which overlap a bit in function.

No trouble.

Pre not just color shift

When fully blown up, the Pre pics appeared to be oversharpened by quite a lot.

All of the phone cams seemed to show sharpening artifacts, but the ones from the Pre bug me the most as they're strongest. They all suffer from crap lenses.

Failure to perceive

Nice troll-work. Also known as a Devil's Advocate, which is just fine. But many reading the column are apparently not sophisticated enough away from technical matters to digest this bit of nuance.

I read over the Opera Unite collateral, watched a video, looked at the developer stuff and closed the browser window. More fluff built on top of the internet utopian credo.

I shuddered at the idea of learning yet another API for yet another developer's fantasy, driven by over-marketing. This is not a new thing; there has been one tiresome wave after another for the last 15 years. The internet and new glitzy technology will save the world, coincidentally employing engineers, marketing folks and CEOs who know how to sell a business plan for unsustainably-high salaries.

The marketing hype was the set-up for disappointment.

I'm sure this will work for someone, but I'm too weary of the glittery wrapping that's been put around the whole Opera Unite thing.

And the anti-american rants are just as tiresome as the pro-american rants. Both sides really should put an effort into "getting over themselves." It's not too far from racism, except we're basing it on imaginary national boundaries, accents and the like. Really, it's the most pathetic statement in this whole discussion.