Re: Over complex

As I understand it the rotation is there so you can't stick a card reader over the top of the slot like you can right now - it would prevent the mechanism from turning and therefore the machine from working.

By inserting your card stripe first you can only scan half the strip if you put a reader over the left half of the slot.

Except where the apparently not so simple task of playing a whole album is involved. The music player in Windows Phone 8 can't even do that properly - assuming you think inserting gaps between each track is unacceptable. Just fixing that would mean I could finally ditch my aging iPod and just carry one device around with me.

On the whole I like WP8, but it does have its problems. Some of them simply shouldn't exist in this day and age - doubly so from a company that isn't exactly new to the OS arena.

Re: I went the other way.

More likely they're stuck on Windows XP SP1 because of an in-house application that has some retarded, ancient dependency on IE4 or similar.

Either that or they're managed by a sysadmin who doesn't understand how to administrate systems. "I wont let those damn Windows machines access the internets - they just slow down the network and introduce security holes!". Isn't that right, Eadon?

Re: Surprise!!!! - Windows is the LEAST reliable...

I can't believe I'm even bothering to reply to this, but well, it's Friday, and I'm going on vacation tomorrow... :)

Yes, well done. Windows is the least stable OS compared to Windows. But on a brighter note, Windows is also the most stable OS when compared to Windows.

You should try using a version of Windows from this century. The current kernel in Windows is as rock solid as any alternative out there. As an earlier commentator mentioned, I haven't seen Windows blue screen in many many years - and yes, my PCs are usually on 24/7.

Just about the only thing that will cause the Windows kernel to crash these days is hardware failure, and there aren't many OSes out there that can survive that. Beyond that, I suspect 99.99% of those reported blue screens are from dodgy drivers and McAfee/Norton/et al. Steer clear of non-certified drivers, and the chances of your system crashing are virtually (practically in many cases) zero.

Re: IP profits lawyers and extortion style law suits

I was half expecting some Windows-Hate at the end of that post.

I'm not sure if I should be disappointed, surprised, or (if I hadn't actually read your post, Eadon) mildly impressed.

Re: Not joining you. Sorry.

Five quid in Sunny Norway is about 45 kroner. In all honesty, you'd have trouble buying a quarter of what you did for the same money in Spain. A litre of milk here costs about 23kr alone.

I bought a small (and not very nice if I'm being honest) chicken wrap in the office canteen at lunch today. With a piddly glass of orange juice I spent 43kr. :(

I reckon we (my girlfriend and I) spend on average about 800kr a week on food.

Re: Escape Velocity

Actually, your escape velocity (or more accurately your escape speed - because direction is unimportant) is the speed required to escape without further propulsion.

If you have enough thrust <frankie>ooh err</frankie> you can escape at any speed you wish.

Re: My hypothesis

No. :)

Without exception, I never use my iPad in portrait mode. I also could never find myself doing any serious work on it. It's a toy for me - nothing more, nothing less. In fact, if I see myself having to type more than I am right now, I usually put the iPad down and head to my desk, where things get done five times faster.

Re: £718pw?

"Actually, picking up a second language and exiting the UK seems to be the only real option."

The nice thing about working in IT is you rarely need any language other than English for work. Add to that the fact most people in Scandinavia speak better English than the average Brit these days, you'd be crazy not to look outside the UK.

Re: £718pw?

I was earning £33k pa when I left the UK at the end of 2001. I was writing games back then, and wasn't even close to some of my peers salary wise.

Now I'm living in Norway, working in the oil business and earning much much more. (The average wage in the Norwegian oil industry is a smidgen under £100k pa.) Of course, the cost of living here is higher than London (by a factor of two or more for some things), but the quality of life is also far higher.

It would seem everyone in the universe you're looking for speaks Norwegian. ;)

Re: Lousy Jobs

"(2). Figurative use as a generic adjective of abuse dates from late 14c."

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=lousy

So a few years before America was founded.

@frank ly

"With a touch sensitive surface, there would be no need for buttons. You'd just use swiping or whatever gestures in place of physical controls."

You misread what I said; That was my exact point. If it weren't for the physical buttons on the side you could already just put a screen on the back and detect which screen is up, which is down, and where the top is.

Re: Is it just me?

I guess the ultimate goal might be to have a device that has no conceptual front and back, or top and bottom. However you pick it up, it orientates itself to always be the right way up. Something you can almost achieve without a wrap around screen - if it weren't for those pesky buttons on the side.

Presumably, too, the curviness of the display was greatly exaggerated in the patent application.

Re: Neat, but.....

While I'm not going to go and read the paper myself, I too have to wonder how accurate this new system really is, and how the boffins can say for certain it's working correctly.

Could it be used to measure the spectral signatures from planets in our own solar system when they are 99% (say) behind the sun, for example?

Re: multiple cursor feature

Visual Studio has had column copy/cut/paste since the dawn of time, and full column editing since the abomination Microsoft released in 2010.

Re: routing of sound to the controller and being able to plug in a pair of headphones

3DO did this 20 years ago. It's a great idea, but not exactly a new one. :)

Re: "before returning safely to Earth"

Except it's not their first attempt. Nor the first successful one either. They've previously sent smaller creatures into space successfully. Their first attempt at sending a primate was a few years ago, which wasn't successful.

Re: "the writing is on the wall for desktop computing."

"As for needing more CPU power, other than video transcoding software, anything in the basic business software remit that would make a CPU spin up to 100% for more than 5 seconds would be viewed with suspicion."

Presumably you're ignoring anything game development related as well, such as compiling, or 3D modelling or ray-tracing/rendering, or (in the case of my first software release) loading and merging/comparing XML files tens or hundreds of megabytes in size. (Although I'll admit in the latest, not yet out, version performance is many many times better than the current version that's out there, and fully multi-threaded to boot.)

As for wanting to move off the desktop, I find laptop keyboards annoying beyond belief to use for anything but the most mundane of tasks. Ditto for touch screen devices - whenever I have to type more than a few words on my iPad I'll more often than not pop into the office and type at my desk on a real keyboard that has cursor keys (really Apple, what were you thinking) and the like.

Re: Interesting....

I wouldn't say the iPhone specifically, but mobile phones in general. Everyone in this survey was born into a world where the radiation from mobile phones and other forms of wireless networks has been constantly increasing.

I'm not saying there is a connection, but you'd have to be pretty naive to immediately rule one out.

Re: Petitions

"What's the solution to actually getting change?"

Revolution. Always has been. Always will be.

Re: "It certainly doesn’t sound as ridiculous as sending Bruce Willis up there."

Can't you just accelerate him once out of the orbital plane and slingshot him around the sun a few times to hit the asteroid from the upper or lower side?

Re: Buffering?

Also being located in Spain, a country with its fair share of sunshine, wouldn't hooking up some solar cells to those batteries also be in order?

Some friends down under have recently added similar to their house (sans batteries) and their electricity meter regularly runs backwards as often as it does forwards.

Re: Maybe ElReg could hire these guys to make the videos work on The Register's site

The Vimeo videos work fine in Opera too. (Sadly, one of the few things which does still work fine in Opera these days.)

Re: Will we hear them?

Yes and no. While transmissions from other planets can and possibly are reaching us, our ability to recognise them as such is virtually non-existent.

There was a study done a little while ago (and possibly reported by El Reg) that concluded that the brief passage of time between inventing/discovering radio and going digital (whose seemingly random signals are much harder to distinguish from general background noise) is such a short period of time in the grand scheme of things, it's going to be virtually impossible to detect genuine broadcasts from other civilisations. Which makes the whole SETI project seem like a rather large waste of time and money.

Re: how do I restrict an application

"Create a user to run the application as, and restrict that user's rights - simples."

Yes, hence my comment about taking a million years. Creating a new user account for every application you run can be done, but in reality you're not going to waste the time it takes to set up. Additionally, with almost every application you run, ultimately you do want them to access *some* of your files, or at least one or two specific files - ie the ones you currently want to view/print/edit/etc. Having to change access rights for specific files on the fly for specific users/applications just isn't practical.

Re: OK now this isn't fair (again)

Windows isn't a secure OS. Neither is Linux, nor Mac OS. Not by a long way.

Without spending a million years configuring any of the above, how do I prevent an application that I run from reading/writing/deleting any of the files or directories I have access to? Or to put it another way, how do I restrict an application from accessing anything on my file system outside it its own directories, except for explicitly when I allow it by asking it to open a file?

Re: Preprocessor hate?

"...they're all processed at compile time."

Except when they're not. Like when mathematical expressions involving floats are concerned.

Re: Talk about stating the obvious...

"As an IT contractor... I don't think I'd like to have to pay tax on my revenue as opposed to my profit."

Which nicely outlines the real problem. People don't like paying taxes.

Normal salaried employees (I.e., most people) pay tax on their revenue and not their profit. People don't pay tax on what's left at the end of the month, they pay tax on what they're given at the start of the month.

Being a contractor who is "forced" to be a limited company, you are already way ahead of most other people in the world.

Re: Seems like an easy fix.

"It doesn't however solve the problem of troll companies patenting ideas that they will never make so they can sue people who do make it."

No, but that's an easy fix too. If you don't have proof that you've started development within two years, and proof you are close to finishing development within five years of the filing date, the patent is released to the public domain.