Posts by Shonko Kid
359 posts • joined Friday 9th November 2007 08:55 GMT
"...his stated aim has been to turn Sony into an Apple-like business..."
Is he Steve Jobs? No.
Is he anything like as charismatic and dictatorial as Steve? I doubt it
Has anyone outside of Sony know who he is? Unlikely.
I don't see that plan working out as he hopes some how.
Re: For example
"Samsung Apps is just too small"
But Samsung is quite big enough that it could easily go through the Play Store and offer the popular Apps developers a better deal on their own store.
And I think they'd be mad to release a Tizen device that didn't have Android app support.
Put those two together, and their reliance on Google for the Play Store isn't so certain.
"And sex, as you're at it."
Can't you wait till I'm done?
FFS!!
"He also said that new products would be coming along later this year and throughout next year"
He's hardly likely to say 'That's it, Apple's product portfolio is complete. Expect nothing more from us ever again. Thanks. Bye.' now is he?
Will they ever learn?
One of the key failures with Microsoft's Mobile strategy as seen in CE and WinMo was the dogged insistence on a single Look and Feel. What was good about the Win95 L&F on a PC made no sense whatsoever on a mobile device, touch screen or keypad driven. And now they are seeing the failure from the other side, what makes for a usable touch screen UI on a Tablet, is a major annoyance when it flies in the face of over 20 years of using a mouse + keyboard on the PC.
Whilst the ideal of offering developers a single API and environment to code against is laudable, how can their product managers have not realised the simple truth that the 3 primary form factors they are targeting are used in very different ways, and need different user interfaces. Is the yes-man culture at Redmond so strong that nobody questioned the strategy that is so obviously wrong?
Another overpriced Apple product?
I'll wait for the cheap chinese Cook-clones to start showing up on eBay for $10 a pop
downvote?!?
is that you Jacqui?
Probably not enough money in it for them.
Self-serving little sh!t$
Happens quite a lot
I've often seen Win7 boxes enter 'failed to start' loops after an auto update. If this CD actually fixed the problem (registry inconsistencies usually) rather than just uninstall a specific patch, it might be quite useful.
Of course, having the registry as a single point of failure is laughable system design in the first place...
Retro look controller too
There were a few of these multi-key controllers around in the 80s IIRC, which had clip on masks for each game. Kudos for reusing the idea.
Posted in The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME
Re: Wot no SGI?
No it doesn't, at least the 3 I have don't. Doesn't stop them looking damn good though!
Posted in The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME
Why no SGI love?
While I was getting revved up to raise merry hell if you'd not included the ZX Spectrum, I too have to echo the above about a lack of SGI entry - or was it just that pretty much everything they built was sexy as hell?
SGI's look so good people even use them as housings for the mundane, look for the Onyx/Challenge Fridge, the rOctane, or my personal favourite, the Espressigo.
"GrIDsure simply didn’t have the right team ..."
How magnanimous of him. Of course it's was the "team's" failing.
Re: Meh
"I don't really understand the point anyway. Mostly they all look the same, because they're all a vaguely rectangular shape with a big glass front"
Yes, that is my point. They're all pretty much the same. You basically choose the largest screen you can comfortably hold, then which colour matches your wardrobe. Dull.
"Do many people buy smartphones on looks?" Of course they do.
Re: Meh
"and their phones all look the same."
Yes, but you'll notice that they don't have a dozen different models of it all looking the same. Their product strategy is clearly a singular one, and you basically just have to choose the specs/price you want.
Compare to Nokia of old, when they ruled the market, and filled every possible niche with a wide variety of form factors. Not just picking your screen size and price point. Dull.
Khan
Should've gone for 'Khan' as a name, then they could've had Shatner announce it's new name in true style.
Meh
Does Nokia really have no competent industrial designers now? All these WP phones just look the same, and it's quickly becoming Meh. I bet even Elop can't tell them apart.
"sound one and will be done very successfully by somebody else one day"
He's right. It's called Usenet.
"22.45 megabyte download awaits."
Shurely it would be easier[1] to simply download a JavaScript program that generated the required number, rather than transferring the 17 million digits verbatim?
[1] for small values of easier.
...
So, presumably non-rectangular tables would be OK then?
I mean, FFS Apple, I hope Samsung open a shiny store and use tables that have rounded corners. In Cupertino.
Facebook accounting
'unique' users? How is this determined? I can exclusively reveal that during November 2012, I will have visited El Reg from at least 3 different machines/IP Addresses. I've forgotten how many times I've had to agree to the cookie policy. Though, having signed in on two of those machines, is the auditing clever enough to match those up?
Never-the-less, it's good to see El Reg going strong.
"Apple invents the Personal Computer. Again."
I see that their marketing department has never rested on it's laurels, and has continued to provide fresh, up to the minute copy...
"supplied with a book-like cardboard case"
It comes with a box?!? What's everyone going to do with their 3D printers now?
"I have no solution to this"
I do, don't let kids access the internet unsupervised, until you are confident that they are old/mature enough to understand that there's shit on the internet they'll wish they'd never seen, that it's not how normal people treat other people, and no matter what, they need to treat others with care and respect.
It's that simple.
And I guess, 'allowing' your teenage son to find your stash of Razzle would probably divert their interest from the internet anyway.
"the most authentic experience possible"
If it's that good, you won't be needing real guns anymore.
Problem solved.
Re: It was only a matter of time
"Tesco. I see it in there all the time."
Wow, must be a regional thing then, I think I saw it in one of the massive Tesco stores once.
"Ideally you should ask you local newsie to order it for you and buy it there"
That's true :-) Use it or Lose it
Re: It was only a matter of time
"what do they actually sell that you can't get from a supermarket or Amazon or one of those cheap book outlets"
Retro Gamer magazine. Smiths is the only regular stockist of it as far as I can tell, save from the odd Menzies/Maccoll supplied independent.
I should really get a sub, but I enjoy the excitement of wandering into Smiths and seeing the latest issue on the shelf. Having it dumped on the doormat by the postie just isn't the same.
Re: They're doing this backward...
You seem to have missed the bit where Plusnet (or anyone else) doesn't know what effect it will have on various applications that Joe Q Public might be using. Sure, they could opt everyone in, but then have 90% of their customers complaining that X no longer works for them, and switching ISP. Not a great move.
"won’t see the stars stretching by"
That effect was only used for acceleration/deceleration to and from Hyper Space, whilst in Hyper Space George went for a sort of bluey-white cloudy effect that rotated slightly, possibly similar to that described by the students. It didn't get much screen time, as it's not as pretty as the star-stretch effect.
Re: Demonstrates that Windows NT code still lurks under the surface of Windows Phone 8
Exactly, which was the whole point of not being able to use any of the underlying CE APIs in WP7, as they were all going to get thrown out when WP was switched over to the NT based kernel. This isn't news.
EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!
Next year's Company X Product to be incrementally better than this year!
EXTRA EXTRA!
May even look slightly different from last year's!
Posted in Badges for Commentards
Re: Goals?
Thumbs down?!? Don't you people like setting yourself goals? Or was it the suggestion that voting could be swayed by bribery and/or physical violence?
"mobile device market, which is now dominated by Apple and Samsung"
Mobile device market, dominated by Samsung and Nokia you mean.
The smartphone subsector of that is dominated by Apple and Samsung, but Nokia still ship crap loads of S40 devices, some of which would give a low end Android device a run for it's money.
Posted in Badges for Commentards
Goals?
How about some encouragement to earn badges, so It could say 'You've posted 89 times this last year, only 11 left to go for a Bronze badge' or 'You're only a few rounds of beer and a cattle prod away from a Gold badge'
Posted in Ten technology FAILS
OpenDoc and Reasons why Symbian was hard to code for #94
The OS that became Symbian had a similar principle; that editors for the core data types could be embedded within each other. But because at the time, the largest system overhead to running multiple processes were the pages (multiples of 32K) of RAM needed for the call stack, meant that an instance of an editor control had to use as little of it as possible. This contributed to a pathological loathing of allocating anything on the stack, which meant you had to allocate on the heap, but without any form of garbage collection, or try/catch blocks, there had to be a mechanism to keep track of all those heap allocations if something threw an exception... Which was the job of the CleanupStack mechanism.
And beyond ER5 nobody ever really made use of the embedding editors paradigm. Everyone HAD to use the CleanupStack.
Posted in Nintendo shrinks Wii for Crimbo
Interesting...
Is there something particular about the Canadian Games market? The price point is certainly attractive, but I don't see the need for cheap Wii hardware, unless there is still a high demand for certain Wii games, and they've run out of the full size Region 1 consoles.
Maybe Nintendo are using the Canadians as guinea pigs for a Sony-style console lite approach to extending a platform's lifespan?
Dominant market share?
Can the author please point to where iOS dominanted on the helpfully included graph? I can't quite see it.
If you're going to do an analysis piece, best not to open with an obviously bogus claim.
"services and devices" company
That's usually the first step to meltdown, just ask Nokia.
Oh FFS!
Is this really the start of the next-iPhone hypemill? Seems to get earlier every year.
Can we just take it as read that Apple, like every other product lead company, is working on newer models of their existing products, and are maybe looking at new products to expand their portfolio? Is that really such shocking news?
I heard a rumour that somone in Cupertino recently wrote 'iPhone 6' on a slide, so the 5S is obsolete already!!!111!!! SSSSsshhhh. :-/
Of course he should resign...
If he can't even keep an affair secret!
Ericsson phone
The real phone it was modelled on was quite a gem, it was Ericsson's answer to the Nokia Communicator, but was canned shortly before release. Real shame.
Mobility costs
What planet have you been living on? Are the laptops there cheaper than similar spec desktops?
Plus the hardware in the Vita is pretty much bleeding edge, the PS3 is a dinosaur compared to it. if it's any consolation, when the PS4 does show up it will cost more than the Vita.
Posted in Analyst slams Apple innovation FAIL
"Brought touch to phones and tablets"
Err, whuh? Popularised, brought into the mainstream maybe. But both were common place before the iEra
As for Apple's current level of innovation, could it be that they've run out of stuff to copy^H^H^H^Hinvent?
They seem to have peaked, perhaps they're not as cool as they once were?
?
"Who the hell do we vote for?"
If you don't like any of the candidates you're likely to be offered at the next election, then stand yourself. Use it or lose it.
Who knows, you may be surprised at how much support you can get from the disaffected.
That's a lot of pr0n!
Errr
I struggle to see how having really high end CPU specs and having an optimized OS can both be WIN at the same time. If it was that optimized, it wouldn't need a really powerful CPU.
Re: Lead the way then...
"such as the old run your own company and pay yourself minimum wage scam"
That's not a scam, it's just the most meaningful way for certain self-employed people to pay taxes - why should I pay government for the privelege of employing myself? For such people income is largely uncertain, and PAYE doesn't accomodate week-week changes in circumstances. For those that do have that certainty, they usually fall under the watchful eye of IR35.
So don't drag freelancers and PSVs into this, it's a whole different thing - it's not like I've set up a company in The Caimans that owns the Trademark 'Shonko Kid' and they charge me millions per year in licensing. Though now I think of it...
For sure, I'm dead against obvious scams, such as the recent Jimmy Carr revelation, and the Starbuck's one was particularly inventive, but you have to remember one thing. For a publicly traded company, the first priority is maximising shareholder value. That's the Law. And that means employing armies of accounts to minimise tax bills. Which as an added bonus means those guys aren't roaming the streets!
And if you don't like your own tax arrangements, then you know what to do don't you.
I live in my society, and I fund it too. I even employ the services of a local accountants. Frankly I find the comparision between freelancers trying to eke out a living and the tax avoiding shenanigans of MegaCorp insulting. And you even hide behind the Fawkes mask.
I'm also suprised you've been upvoted so many times on this, Have all the IT contractors left the building?
Flame on.
Re: It will be remembered as...
+1 for having to remember ME, I'd completely forgotten all about it!
Re: "converting the waste cooking oil into sustainable aviation fuel."
While I'd agree that we should probably be reusing it in more mundane ways, such as cars and electricity generation, I don't think we shouldn't explore other uses, such as aviation. Once the dino-juice is gone, then it'll be back to biplanes and blimps for air travellers, and that I'm sure you'll agree is a sobering prospect. It seems to be for at least two of the worlds largest aircraft manufacturers.
You argue the jets are delicate things, but ice in the filters could happen no matter what the fuel, it's not like they're just going to dump the used oil right into the tanks, scraps* and all!
*colloq. Batter crumbs left over from frying battered fish.
