Re: Would you trust him though?

I think that, roughly translated, this post means "sort your own shit out and don't even think about dumping your problems on my doorstep. :("

Re: Beggared themselves buying iPhones, now can't find 69p

Droid phones are about £50-£60 for a cheap one. It's no supermodel, but it's a smartphone.

Re: Great - a Bore's Charter

You did see that thing about upvotes being required for a silver badge, right?

And about gold badges being selected manually by the Reg team?

Re: Where can I check my upvotes?

In total, your posts have been upvoted 3599 times and voted on by Microsoft fanbois 884 times.

We can all be snarky, dear.

Re: Further to previous post

Not sure about other countries, but in the UK it's very easy to visit the gift card section of Tesco or similar and buy either a Visa or Mastercard. You're then prompted to activate the card via a site like this, or via an 0870 number, and they don't seem to be too particular about what details you give them.

Oh bloody hell.

I can't wait for post edit privileges. Must proof-read before hitting "submit".

Re: Didn't I make 100 posts in a year?

JUdging by your post history you qualify for at least a bronze badge. The article does atate the change is "rolling out" though.. which by that I assume means that somewhere, some old 486 is running a BASIC script that's repeatedly doing SELECT and UPDATE statements, and we'll all get our badges eventually.

Re: Good News for end users then

Because my name is really "M Gale", your name is really "Barry Shitpeas", and if I have to create a Plus account at some point, my name really will be "John Smith".

Re: And what if you don't have a G+ account?

Yes, Google now require you need a Plus account, to leave an app review.

You will be taken through the sign-up procedure when you try to review an app. There is no option to bypass.

Re: Paying for apps...

No I didn't downvote you, but I can see why somebody did.

If it requires me to root my phone, then it is a useless solution.

Re: Further to previous post

That, and who says the card you use to pay is your card?

Trying to infer your real name from that will be mighty tricky and a bit stupid.

So yes. Concerted trolling effort required.

Re: Further to previous post

That would be the prepaid Mastercards and Visas that I routinely register under such names as "Kara Buckwheat" or "Mickey Mouse", right?

"it's probably 1% of Android users buy any apps and 90% of iOS users buy apps"

Just where does this myth come from?

Out of all the iWotsit-owning people I know, most of them either don't pay for apps, or have an app which tells them when popular paid apps are on a free offer.

Re: Paying for apps...

but I just don't like my credit card out there

£25 and £50 Visa/Mastercard prepaid debit cards. Works for the vast majority of apps out there.

I have about £100-worth now.

Re: Paying for apps...

"Why pay for something you can get for free?"

THIS FREE APP REQUIRES:

Your location (course)

Your location (fine)

Your phone state and identity

Network access

Services That Cost You Money (write SMS)

Read contact data

THIS PAID APP REQUIRES:

Network access

Enjoy your popups, billboards and targetted spyware. Really, people used to get programs to remove this stuff. They were like anti-virus programs. Ad Alert, Spybot S&D.. oh but hey, it's different on a phone, right?

"There are zero startups in the console space."

There haven't been any new console companies since the 1980s. Even Xbox and Playstation came from two very well established behemoths deciding to get into a new sector.

That said, it could be interesting to see where Ouya goes.

Methinks once it's been unplugged and tossed onto a balcony, the "electrical" part of the fire has been mitigated.

Re: aside from the obvious hard drugs

"What worries me is that pharmaceutical companies have been trying to produce THC pills"

Just to clarify, there's a UK trial of the Sativex product by GW Healthcare. The bottle states that each 100 microlitre spray contains 2.7mg delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol and 2.5mg cannabidiol from Cannabis Sativa. The company say that you get the medical benefits without the high.

A friend of mine with some serious and painful illnesses who's managed to wrangle themself onto the programme says that you damned well can get high from it, but only if you take a heavy dose. Apparently it works medicinally quite well though. Better than slow-release morphine, but "not as well as a bud", so says the afflicted one. It also costs the NHS something like £240 per month to provide it, which might explain many doctors' reticence in prescribing it. Basically it costs the NHS more than it would cost someone to buy raw bud from a dealer in ounces, given the medicinal dose for bud is a lot lower than you'd have to get high.

Of course at 300W for a grow, with photoperiod plants, 18h veg cycle and 12h bud cycle, you'd spend maybe £100-£150 or so at the usual per-KW/h electricity prices to make several ounces of your own at home. In metric, you're looking at maybe 0.5g per watt of lighting if you do it right, or at least so say the books on the subject. Doing so would put you into serious-legal-penalty territory and it gets worse if you try and make it neat and tidy, because that means it's a "sophisticated" grow. You probably will be doing time if caught, might well lose your job, could lose your children if the courts decide you're unfit to look after them, could very well lose your home if it's a rented property (as increasing numbers of homes in the UK are). And all over a grow tent.

People say that marijuana induces insanity. Maybe, perhaps, but only in the minds of the lawmakers.

Re: A *BIG* difference

Sour grapes at an OS with a Linux kernel under there somewhere getting to be phenomenally, unbelievably successful?

Let me look at your posting history...

Yep. Sour grapes. Sorry boy, but Microsoft aren't going to borg this industry. Neither are Apple, now.

Re: Instant On

That's easy when it never really turns off.

I have an Asus Transformer Prime that does the same thing. Oh, and an old Windows XP laptop that's pretty similar. Even Linux machines are at it.

Now try Windows 8 from a cold boot, and enjoy watching Mint v12 beat it to a usable desktop.

Re: Affordability

That does show that Microsoft could have skipped spending all that money to develop a phone interface for the desktop, released the kernel improvements as a Win7 service pack AND dropped the price, and still made a shitload of money out of it. After all, it's not like most people are going to buy or otherwise use any OS except Windows when they buy a computer. Microsoft could release a great steaming turd and people will buy it because buying anything else means saying goodbye to the vast majority of all software written for PCs.

In fact, I do believe that's what Microsoft has just done with TIFKAM.

Re: One-trick pony

IIRC, my last update was a notification. "There is new firmware available, you want?"

I said "yes please". Did the same thing for a minor update a few days ago.

Asus do make nice tablet-tops.

Re: Does rather beg the question...

I used to have a Bluetooth KB/Mouse combo that did that.

30 seconds of non-use turned them off. You then had 5-10 seconds of waiting for the Bluetooth handshaking to complete before either switched back on again. Upon which, the keyboard buffer would dump itself and you'd end up with all the keys you mashed in frustration being input.

Annoying would be one word for it.

Re: S, E and X keys?

yes :(

Re: All very well...

I'm too tired.

I saw the self-censorship above and thought it was a malformed regular expression.

Just thought I'd share that with everyone.

Re: Wndering why there isn’t a simple FB alternative that utilizes existing email accounts?

There is a perfect alternative.

It's called "email".

Re: Wait...

Better to check whether you can sell it after you bought it.

Re: alongside the wizards and dragons

I don't know what you're smoking son, but I'll buy an ounce.

Re: Dear Matt,

"The graphics and space scenes in it were all rendered on banks of Amigas for example."

Ah, that myth.

No, Babylon 5 was not rendered using Amigas and video toasters. The Babylon 5 pilot movie was, and then they went to Pentium PCs, DEC Alpha workstations, a handful of Macs and some SGI equipment.

"There were all those home PCs like Spectrums and Commodores."

Which were okay as toys, but the only computer with any oomph even back then was the old IBM/PC compatible.

Thing is, Sean there was on about choice. Exactly what in, I'm not sure, as the modern wave of things such as the Beagle Board, Raspberry Pi, the forthcoming Via APC, the venerable Arduino, the Ouya games console and various other platforms seems to mean far more choice than back in the 80s, where a home computer had to be made by either Sinclair or Commodore, and business machines had to be either made by IBM or compatible with IBM plus Microsoft. Certainly more than the 90s, where the IBM/PC compatible got proper sound and graphics cards, came down (ish) in price and proceeded to wipe the floor with just about every other home computer format that wasn't a games console.

Re: Dear Matt,

"I had more choice and freedom in operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s."

No you didn't. Even by the 80s, Microsoft DOS was the one single OS that mattered.. though you could use the mostly-perhaps-maybe-compatible DR DOS if you liked. Amigas, when they becamne available, were for playing games and occasionally making techno music in Modtracker or something. Your choice for big computer OSes was Unix, Unix or Unix, with that Linux thing not even written until 1991.

Sure, you had various odd manufacturers with odd operating systems and odd hardware. You still get that now. In fact I'd say you have radically more freedom now than at any time since Microsoft first got the contract to buy someone else's OS for a computer system that would become the defacto standard microcomputer.

Just got to keep the momentum up and make sure the bastards at Redmond don't do to mobile what they did to home and business machines.

Re: Kinect

Speak for yourself. I found myself more confused than impressed by two-finger scrolling, especially when it goes off when you don't want it to.

That said I like to turn most of the "clever" off in software anyway. Mouse taps are what mouse buttons are for, FFS. The whole pad does not need to be a button!

Re: Turning a profit in colorado

For the same reason that beer brewers make money in the presence of legal hops, barley and yeast. Some people would rather pay someone else to grow a warehouse full of plants so stinky you can chew the atmosphere around them.

Re: adequate but unexciting software

Adequate but unexciting is what I want. I do not want to turn my computer on and go "woah, holy shit! What have they done THIS time?"

It doesn't matter if WIndows 8 is faster, leaner or meaner under the hood. My desktop is not a phone. They've given birth to a supermodel, then taken it out back and smashed its face in with a brick. If I want TIFKAM, I'll buy an Xbox. You know, a toy.

Until then, that abomination sits in a VM jail where it belongs and gets used so that I can say I've used it. Everything else uses a halfway-sane desktop interface.

Re: Need to Wize up

*YEAH

O rly?

No, I've nothing to contribute to the conversation either.

Re: Custom

Brings back memories of the moderatrix and her gleefully-administered emasculations.

Come back Ms Bee, it's just not the same without you!

Re: Digital babelfish, how I miss you

Your problem is that a language is more than just words, and words is all a computer sees. Sometimes there is no direct translation and one word becomes twisted into a partial sentence in an attempt to convey the same meaning. See the German "schadenfruede", which translated to English is.. errr.. "schadenfruede".

Then you add homonyms, synonyms and odd dialects of the same language, and what you have is a recipe for a programmer's nightmare. Multiply that by the number of languages in the world, and you can see the scale of the problem.

Or just pump the phrase of your choice into here and have fun with the problem instead. Yes, yes I was looking for an excuse to post that link.

Re: limiting choice

"Android and tweaking your car with underbody lights and flared wheel arches - some would argue they want the 'choice' to do it but 99.5% of people don't..."

I find that ironic considering some of the rather garish iThing covers that are routinely spotted on the buses.

As for why you'd reconfigure the home screen.. well a grid of icons might be good for you. For me though, I rather like something a bit more useful for a phone.

Or even a tablet.

The lock screen clock looks pretty sweet too, with the 3D rotating live wallpaper of an EVE ship in the background, but frankly I can't be arsed screencapping it and blurring my owner details out at gone 3am. You'll just have to take my word on that one.

Maybe a difference between tablet and phone? I've noticed ICS/JB on phones doesn't have that annoying permabar, for one.

A moot point anyway, but still worth a giggle for a company that praises itself so highly on its design skills.