Posts by Arctic fox
1891 posts • joined Friday 6th November 2009 05:17 GMT
Page:
"Officially sanctioned leaks?"
Pope still keen on Catholicism, bears still evacuating their bowls in sylvan groves.
Posted in HTC bags UK win in patent war with Apple
@Keep Refrigerated Re "....don't give praise to the UKPO....."
I think that when he posted "yay for the UK patent office" he may not have been being entirely serious, hmm? You know, the concept known as "satire".
Posted in Apple's UK smartphone lead shrinks
You are simply getting the same treatment....
....that anyone posting a factual statement concerning MS that the howlers do not like will be subjected to - learn to live with it.
Re: "Don't overclock? Don't build it yourself?"
No, that is not the take home message for those of us who like to build ourselves and "fettle" a bit. The (rather obvious) take home message is that if you do, use decent components. If you do not, or you buy a box from GenericKrapTek PLC you are likely to end up in bother - thought we all knew that didn't we, hmm?
Re: Someone explain to me how the Nexus looks anything like the iphone?
The situation may possibly become rather more richly ironic and costly for Apple than they are expecting. It is frankly impossible to judge what kind of impact in the tablet-pc market that Win8 and/or Win RT may or may not have. However, if either MS with it's Surface offerings and/or MS' OEMs actually produce something the public want then the net result of Apple's behaviour may be to create space for Redmond in the tablet market which might otherwise not have been there without Apple's legal assault on the Android os in general and that operating system's leading OEM, Samsung, in particular. Apple may in fact end up being badly damaged in the war with their "auld enemy" by virtue of their patent trolling attacks on Mountain View. History is after all littered with examples of the workings of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Then they can go screw before......................
.................we get rid of our wall-mounted 55-inch LCD Sammy and buy an OLED TV - simple as that. I do not expect to pay bottom feeder prices but they can forget us paying what they are hoping for. Engineer down the costs or kiss my arse - their choice.
Re: Beware of the weasel
The one thing that this proves (whatever else it may highlight) is that the "Directorati" are so fucking ignorant that they do not understand that (in modern industry, whichever type of industry it is) you cannot cut IT support in the same way that you can (if you are very bloody careful) in other areas of your business. The domino effect of the wrong decision in that area of your activities can have utterly disastrous effects - as we are now seeing.
I think this issue with the ultrabooks is an example of why MS have chosen to produce.......
...........the "Surface" themselves. Too much of what the OEMs produce is boring, unimaginative and often way overpriced. There are of course some exceptions but they are usually in the high-end price wise and are not going to exactly contribute very much to building the mass market Intel are hoping for (Intel's own greed when it comes to their chip prices doesn't help very much either). When the customer's reaction very often is "boring" followed by "WTF! How much?!" then "mass market" does not appear to be exactly looming on the horizon.
Most peculiar. I may have misunderstood of course but when a judge granting a.......
.....preliminary injunction (granted usually where the judge feels that there may be a case that the defendant (in this case Sammy) has to answer) uses words like............
""Although Samsung has a right to compete, it does not have a right to compete unfairly, by flooding the market with infringing products," she said."
....................she is giving the rather unfortunate impression that she has already made her mind up about the final merits of the case before the full trial. Or have I misunderstood what is going on here? Any suggestions?
Re:"Was there a story in there somewhere?"
A CEO saying something sensible in public?
@h4rm0ny Re: "We're called old people."
Indeed, furthermore if we are to judge by the degree to which nefarious activities utilising modern tech provide substantial earners for the ethically challenged amongst, we "oldies" are not always simply suffering from not having read the right memo. Our wariness is actually sometimes not without some justification. -:)
Re: "What ads?"
I think that you have just summed up what is terrifying the entire industry. They are beginning to believe that almost nobody is watching those ads. If that is indeed the case then a more classic example of the emperor's lack of any connection to sartorial reality would be hard to find.
@Tom Maddox
I think he just does not get El Reg's style of satirical hyperbole. Sad really. Given the number of enthusiastic Apple customers who post here you would have thought that the line "Reg readers - iTunes refuseniks to a man jack of 'em" would arouse the suspicion that it was not to be taken seriously. However, it is very clear that some people simply are "satire blind" - they would only recognise if it jumped up and bit them in the arse and perhaps not even then.
Re: Oh Nokia where art thou... Yes I know but look on the bright side.
Whichever one you get it will cost you £500 - £600 pounds and be shiny shiny. -:P
".........selling Apple IDs for as little as AUD$33"
The price suggests that obtaining such IDs on a fairly large scale is relatively easy. Rather more worrying than CAV's less than impressive command of tech terminology I would have thought.
Re: "It wasn't even the inane ramblings of a self-obsessed teenager!"
You never know, they may have managed the inane rambling bit. -:P
"Only in America"
Sorry, that was impossible to resist. -:)
"...the seniority to override rules and use them at work if they want to."
"These people are a double threat to security. They are senior enough that saying “No” to them is a difficult option, but they are also likely to have access to just the kind of data you most want to protect: confidential sales projections, business strategy or sensitive IP, perhaps."
Arrogant, ignorant shits. That's all.
Posted in Linus Torvalds drops F-bomb on NVIDIA
"ATI (AMD) haven't been all that good supporting Windows lately"
That has been my experience as well. I've been running four Win 7 installs since the os was launched and the only time I have had any trouble has been with screen card drivers from you-know-who - which is indeed a pity because the cards themselves are very nice.
Posted in Retina Display detachment
"I gave you a mod up because I assumed the above is a funny joke."
I sincerely hope that you are right.
"......he may want to ensure that the companies have less grounds for appeal.............
................... by exhausting their legal options now."
I sincerely hope that he succeeds if that is indeed the aim.
Re: It's called a laptop!
I think that you will have noticed that a fair number here would not recognise irony if it bit them in the arse.
Re:"Not forgetting the role of First Officer in the original pilot."
No indeed. -:)
AF.
Having evaluated this "sketch" myself I am forced to the conclusion that...............
....................both those who made it and those who are complaining about it should get a life.
@IglooDude The only reason I did not post a correction myself is because reading............
.............reading that part of the article induced a catatonic state from which I have only just recovered. This is however, not the first time they have sinned so grievously. In the following article they were apparently unaware that Majel Barrett-Roddenberry played Nurse Chapel* in TOS. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/16/google_siri_will_be_called_majel/). According to them the good lady was, in practice, only well known for the voice of the ST computer. How did they let that through, are they unaware of the geek ratio here? There are certainly people posting here who can manage whole episodes by heart and some of them can probably speak Cardassian never mind Klingon - what were they thinking about?
*Or for that matter Deanna Troi's mother Lwaxana in STNG.
Re: "Why is this on el reg?" El Reg very helpfully provide a clue for the hard of thinking.......
.........in the form of a category (you have heard of that concept no? It keeps things separate.) known as "Boot notes" which is El Reg-speak for amusing and entertaining off the wall news items that rarely if ever have anything to do with tech.
You couldn't make it up.
The US patents office has just granted Apple a broad patent on the wedge shape to "protect" the MBA. How it is even possible to patent a geometric shape known to the Babylonians is the most insane thing I have ever heard of.
@h4rm0ny RE " Loads of people would love an ultrathin laptop"
I think that you are likely right, the only caveat being that the large majority of punters definitely do not like the £800 - £1000 price point. If AMD and the OEMs can bring decently specced ultrathins in at around the £600 mark then they will really have something cooking here. It will also give Intel a monumental headache because I do not think that Intel is yet willing to contribute to making the ultrabook mainstream by taking a hit on their normal pricing.
"Few Americans are taken in by that kind of nonsense....................
.....................but suggestions that a World Order cyber coup is in the offing seem to be swallowed more easily."
I am sure that the author is right in saying that only a minority of Americans are taken in by that particular brand of hard line right-wing tin foil hat nonsense. However, it is also an observable fact that they are heavily over-represented on that wing in Congress. Some sixty or so years after that lunatic Joel McCarthy wanted to investigate the then President of the United States Harry S. Truman for alleged communist sympathies nothing much has changed amongst his political inheritors.
"China often takes advantage of the diplomatic privileges afforded to embassy staff"
Delete "China" and insert any nation you care to name. To all practical intents and purposes a percentage of any embassy's staff, regardless of nationality, are spooks. See icon+title.
"He worked on jailbreaking SAS soldiers' iPhones."
..................whilst under heavy shelling from Cupertino.
RE:"Who on earth downvotes someone for posting information on the subject being discussed?"
A certain type of commentard when they fear that the information concerned might contradict something they prefer to believe. Try doing the equivalent on virtually any thread about, for example, "A Certain Major Software Company" or maybe "A Famous Mobile Phone Producer" - just don't be surprised if you get hosed with down-votes.
Got to agree with your old chap in regard to "Can Facebook users be bothered to vote?
According to one of my favourite Trek novels "Spock's World" the old Vulcan word for "idiot" meant "one who fails to participate in civic affairs".
@Magnus_Pym, RE: "to buy into Nokia "
Sorry old chap. When did MS buy a shareholding in Nokia? As far as I am aware they have a commercial agreement between them, not the one "buying into" the other company. If you have some new information in this regard to share with us, please do post the link concerned.
@dogged. Re: "You failed to read the article Barry."
He manages to get the wrong end of the stick (accidental on purpose like) so often that it is IMHO a waste of time trying to point it out to him. Though kudos/respect for trying.
".....But if they stay priced above £800....."
In a certain sense this is no surprise at all. In general punters are not willing to pony up to that extent. A quick look at the online catalogue of Scandinavia's largest computer retailer (I live in Norway) tells the tale. Of the 116 pcs from various producers they have available 70% are in the price range between £225 - £750 (and if you take a look at how many units they have in stock at each price point the disparity becomes even more striking). Over £800 is too much for a large majority of punters. It has been the case for a long time that the vast majority of ordinary retail customers will simply not drop most of a grand for a computer regardless of which form factor we are talking about. The Ultrabook/MBA market is, relatively speaking, a smallish minority segment and it is not clear to me how Intel are going to make the £800 - £1000 segment any kind of mass market price point. I am entirely willing to be proved wrong but I just can't see how they are going to do it.
Posted in Orange unveils Intel Atom smartphone
Re: Interesting, but would I buy one?
"copy of an x86 Linux flavour, or even (Hells Bells!) a copy of XP"
Why not? It would give all of us a great deal of harmless entertainment!
Posted in Orange unveils Intel Atom smartphone
Well, the battery life *may* not be as pony as past experience with Intel would suggest.
Anandtech did a review of the Lava Xolo X900 (running Android and using an emulator for the apps) and althought the battery in that phone was rather small the "normalised" battery life figures suggested that Medfield based phones would likely be reasonably competitive. We'll just have to see what this offering from Orange actually delivers when RegH takes a hands on look at it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the-first-intel-medfield-phone/1
Posted in China wants to be techno SUPERPOWER
Re: Racist my arse!
No, probably not racist but certainly very ignorant cultural stereotyping. China is a huge nation of almost one and a half billion people and is in cultural terms very much a federation of peoples/ethnic groups. Attempting to "sum up" such a huge and diverse nation in the form of a lowest common denominator cliche is irredeemably stupid. The analyst's remarks say a great deal about the intellect of the person concerned and absolutely nothing of value about the Chinese peoples.
@diodesign I think that you can afford to take a very relaxed attitude to their..............
...........reaction to the "re-brander" meme, after all just think what the iPhans are doing for the site's click-rate every time El Reg winds them up like that. Oh, you have already, ok.
RE "Microsoft have a reasonable free security package."
I agree, Defender/Essentials has a very low resource footprint in comparison to the shite that McAfee and the rest of the AV scareware industry punt out and it appears to be at least as effective as most of the paid for packages. I have to admit though that if it really is the case that one in six effectively take no interest in the security of their pc (how that security should be organised and whether an AV package contributes much is of course the subject of some debate) I am almost inclined to feel some sympathy for Microsoft on the issue. They at least appear to have learnt something since Gate's memo on the subject of computer security whereas something like 17% of customers (apparently) continue to rejoice in their own ignorance.
@Chris W. Point taken.
See title.
AF.
I am wondering if there may not be an element of deliberating deciding not to rebuild...........
.............to the same level of production capacity that they had before? In order to shore up prices and therefore profitability? Has anyone seen anything on the levels of planned rebuilding? It would be interesting to compare that with pre-flood production capacity. I also have to say that the difference between what happened with the prices of external and internal hard drives (mentioned by several here) is indeed very peculiar.
RE: "So you've never heard of the Kindle Fire then?"
The Fire is only relevant in this context if you can explain how Asus, Samsung, Acer etc can make any money selling Android or Windows tablets at cost.
".......a tell-tale sign of a 'co-jacking' that was spotted............."
Very positive to see that only one supplier fell for it. However I have to say that that the following........
"Suppliers that are shipping blind without any form of credit checks or contact with the customer need to redefine their business processes with special attention to where the goods are being delivered,"
..........made the choice of icon obligatory.
@dogged. RE "The Acer Iconia W500 runs it "
Yep, it does. Ours lives on the kitchen table currently. I will not say that it is an amazing experience given that the hardware is poor but it runs significantly better with 8 on board than it did with 7.
Posted in Foxconn to create workers' paradise?
@Tim Worstal. That actually makes a lot of sense and did not at first.........
.........occur to me in relation to Foxconn's own motivations, some very good points in fact. However, I do feel that the general political background I referred to in my posting is also part of the bigger picture.
Posted in Foxconn to create workers' paradise?
Re: 100 Years Behind
That certainly may be part of it. However, it is almost certainly the case that the Chinese authorities are acutely aware that their only chance of retaining control over events in China in the medium term is if their agrarian and industrial working class (by definition the overwhelming majority of the population) begin to see some of the benefits of the modernisation of their nation. Foxconn's "seeing the light" is probably at least partly a result of being heavily prodded by central government.
Posted in And the worst film NEVER made is...
@GitMeMyShootinirons. For me the killer aspect to this film was the..........
........the casting of Eddie Murphy as Jar-Jar Binks. Given the nightmare that the original Jar-Jar was (it was the first and only time that I felt an overpowering urge to bite the back of the cinema seat in front of me and howl noooooo at the top of my voice) I feel that only Mr Murphy can truly do justice to this role.
@Perlcat RE "independent conservative democrat"
I see that a couple of Repubs hooked onto the the "democrat" bit whilst ignoring the fact that the guy appears to by trying to cover the entire US political spectrum. How about "independent liberal teabagger"? It makes about us much political sense!
