Posts by dogged
1945 posts • joined Monday 16th November 2009 12:21 GMT
Page:
Re: Good
The legions of google fanboys on the Reg appear to disagree with you.
Their version probably goes "the only good patent infringement claim is one filed against Microsoft, however spurious".
Posted in Is the next-gen console war already One?
Re: Morphing more and more into PC's
Oh, you write for APIs but APIs aren't magical. They depend mainly on drivers and driver functionality.
See, if I'm writing a game using DirectX then I only address DirectX. But DirectX is heavily optimized for the 360 as it stands now. It is, after all, still a DirectXBox.
DX is less optimized for every single graphics card in the entire world because duh. Different cards support the API in different ways and each has their own little niggles. Does it work? Sure. But how well it works depends on AMD, NVidia and Intel and, more specifically, the people who write their drivers which are updated approximately every other week, as opposed to the static optimized drivers in the XBox firmware.
Posted in Is the next-gen console war already One?
Re: Impressive bult ultimately useless.
When did Sony copy Kinect then?
Their version is announced as a PS4 accessory.
Re: @Kristian Walsh
Are you seriously trying to find a defence for Google on this one?
The answer is quite simple - Windows Phone does not report users' browsing and app choices to Google. Google would prefer that you used Android, which does report on you.
Therefore, they have decided not to do anything or allow any access that would make Windows Phone more popular because more WP users = less spyware Androids out there.
Logical enough for you?
Posted in Is the next-gen console war already One?
Re: Impressive bult ultimately useless.
it's an impressive gimmick.
Barry, you used to say it was unusable shit. Repeatedly. I see you've mellowed since your employer Sony decided to copy the idea.
Posted in Is the next-gen console war already One?
Re: Morphing more and more into PC's
Any company that released a game that insisted on a particular motherboard, a specific chip from a specific company, a specific graphics card - nope, a cheaper, more expensive or upgraded version will not do - a specific blu-ray drive with known spin-rates and the equivalent of a VPN to a dedicated gaming network would be laughed out of business in days and you know it.
A console provides absolutely this certainty. This certainty is what breeds performance and longevity.
A PC is great for gaming - I game on mine when I have time, which is admittedly rare - but a console has advantages in the consumer market that no PC will ever come close to.
Only one of many misconceptions
Other misconceptions about old people include
1. "they deserve special treatment because they fought in the war"
even though most people over 60 were born after WW2 and are more likely to have have been spliffing up to the Byrds than saving anyone from anything
2. "they're so poor"
even though the state pension is the only benefit that continually rises above the rate of inflation and there are endless free handouts - winter heating allowance, for example - which are not means-tested. You just have to over 60 (for women) or 65 (for men). Multimillionaires collect their winter fuel allowance because as far as they're concerned, fuck the taxpayer.
3. "we need to take care of them". One of the consequences of the Baby Boom is that pensioners now outnumber taxpayers of below pension age. And pensioners vote in far higher proportion. When you think about it, this makes sense - political parties court them with more and more benefits at everyone else's expense so they actually have something to vote for. The rest of us don't unless we happen to be lobbyists or bankers.
Seriously, "bad at IT" is the very least of the misconceptions about pensioners that we need to start rejecting.
Posted in Is the next-gen console war already One?
Either you didn't think that through OR you need a particle accelerator and a ride-on lawnmower among many other devices in your lounge, which indicates a rather odd lifestyle.
Posted in Is the next-gen console war already One?
Re: Morphing more and more into PC's
while I take your point entirely, the thing about consoles is that, as a developer, you know exactly where the target is. You don't have dick about with whether the user has a decent GPU or is going to bitch that his nice shiny Ultrabook with Intel's excuse for gfx onboard won't run it at over 8fps. You don't have to aim low on memory requirements. You know exactly what the sound output is and how the controllers work. Nobody is going to demand to remap the controls for their Logitech macro-able cheat-like-fuck keyboard. In short, you can optimize the holy hell out of everything because you have a static target.
How old is the 360 now? And how good does, for example, Assassin's Creed 3 look on it? Yet the hardware is basically obsolete by PC standards. You'd need a PC significantly heftier than a 360 to even consider playing it but when the hardware is fixed, you can work miracles.
If this thing or the PS4 goes for £400 or less, it's cheaper than a current best-of-breed GPU. And it will last you approximately five times as long.
All things considered, that's not bad.
Re: Should Thee Trust SNOOPING Software?
Looks like EADON MAKING SHIT UP AS USUAL FAIL to me.
Re: Should Thee Trust SNOOPING Software?
Eadon, you dolt. Anyone can write a blog on Forbes. Quoting it as if it were gospel is like citing Geocities. Then again, your website look s a lot like a geocities monstrosity so I guess you'd do that, too.
Re: Office... @dogged
I thought Approach was revolting but then Access was and still is revolting so that's not really a refutation of your point.
But mainly, Office won because Outlook. Hate it or hate it, you wouldn't swap it for a Notes client in any sane universe.
Re: Office...
Are you having fun with your Lotus Office running on WinME?
Minimize it then, genius.
Re: MSFT breeds Haters Does Windows support 32 cores?
But it's almost impossible to be sure :(
@John Smith 19
The history doesn't really matter, especially with new evils like Google the marketing giant and Apple the religious cult out there, but there are certainly times when trying to decipher their bizarre licensing system can make you hate Microsoft.
@JDX
It supports 256 cores.
@AC13:57GMT - Who feels sorry for Microsoft ?
Come back when you can install Android on your iPad and then complain, AC.
Or at least complain about both rather than this endless UEFI-FUD.
Posted in Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook
Re: Why?
I don't think this is a Microsoft issue. Outlook.com works fine in Chrome and Firefox under linux, as do the free Office web apps.
Must be something in that Googly codebase that hates MS domains.
Re: Companies the world over must be over joyed to find M$ blocking their ads
No, you did not read this correctly.
Microsoft's new app has no access to the Youtube ad API because Google want it that way, and therefore it cannot serve ads.
It doesn't block the ads. It is literally disbarred (by Google) from seeing them.
Posted in Bing uncloaks Klingon translator
Oh, come on.
Think about it before you jerk your knee so hard that it snaps.
What was this about? Nerds working at Redmond? I don't think there's any question of that.
Serious attempt to provide a service on paid time? Unlikely.
Proof-of-concept for transliteration engine in a language where you can't offend any native speakers with dodgy translations and/or nerdly hobbyists working unpaid overtime? Highly likely.
It's interesting, because you could also wonder how much Google pays El Reg for articles like "Microsoft splashes big bucks to blast Google Apps - Latest ad campaign smacks of desperation" and "Windows 8 'sales' barely half as good as Microsoft claims - Don't even mention the XP/Vista sales comparisons - stories which don't claim to be anyone's opinion pieces - but clearly are.
While this claims only the author's own opinion, previously stated several times.
But obviously, Google don't buy articles because they are lovely and fluffy and Android is open(ish)! No, only the DevilMicrosoft does that.
Of course.
And you're not a fanboy in any way, right?
Re: Watching Live TV?
USB tuner support?
Re: Gates vs Politician
(And the less said about the Weaknesses of windows the better)
Shut up about it then.
Posted in Ten Windows 8 Ultrabooks
Re: Eadon's Verdict... (SPOILER - FAIL)
and it's been called dev/null in casual internet discussion since before your balls dropped.
Of course, back when people like you called people noobs for being right, they were instantly referred to as one of these.
Biodiesel in the UK
Here's the thing I can't understand.
If biodiesel is absolutely as green as you like, totally renewable and ecomentally awesome, how come the UK Government applies tax and excise duty at exact the same rate as normal (non-bio) diesel?
And given the slightly lower power output of biodiesel, am I right in thinking that this makes it the single most heavily taxed form of fuel (on a per watt generated basis) in the entire world?
So all these fuel taxes (which, if you recall, they used to tell us were for "green" reasons) are actually a massive shot in the foot because they're taxing the "good" fuels even more heavily than the "bad" fuels?
Or does it just go to pay for bailing out bankers?
Re: That worked out well for Nokia
Yeah, Dell have never partnered with MS, right?
Re: The end of Project Sputnik?
Doubtful.
Sputnik was never going to make money. Tills and petrol pumps will.
It's already huge. I mean seriously, the sheer number of tills and petrol pumps that run Windows Embedded is staggering. Where have you been, man?
MS don't make much money off it - I believe a license currently goes around $3US for a 100+ unit install - but it doesn't crash, it does what people want and it's easy to code for.
House of Fraser actually use purely for the embedded browser so that all their tills connect directly to the central (non public) web servers on a sealed network. This gives them security and direct access to inventory management and billing.
Nothing could possibly go wrong
It certainly hasn't, so far at least. And it's been around since before XP.
Re: Compelling reasons for a smart watch?
A "smart" watch doesn't have to be be all that smart. Really, it's just a remote display/controller, possibly with accelerometer/gyro/pedometer functions for added value.
The phone does all the heavy lifting.
I'm interested, but the beautiful brass Fossil on my wrist is going nowhere until there's something comparable.
Microsoft stop trying to be Apple and come up with something original.
mark12, stop being an idiot and actually read the fucking article.
Apple, original? Maybe when Satan snowboards to work.
Re: We call them Chromebooks now
Those really aren't selling. It's common to snigger at Windows 8 sales figures on the Reg but damn, Google wishes that ChromeOS would fail one tenth as hard.
Re: The welsh lobby
my beef was with the *nationally* orientated programmes that have presenters guffing about what an amazing day it is, then they pan to the weather, and most of the North is covered in snow, and in Wales it's raining :)
No shit? Raining? In Wales? Remarkable.
Re: P.Lee @ 29 March 07:00 z
On the nuclear, where rae you going to store the waste
It's not 1981 anymore, you know. Nuclear "waste" is simply reprocessed into usable fuel, a process that is currently over 97% efficient.
Re: Operator A
It's EE/Orange.
Absolutely no doubt about it.
Re: An industry standard cynical outlook
Don't judge how Apple behaves in the same way as Oracle, HP or Dell do, they just don't operate the same way.
Indeed. That would be like suggesting that the Church of Scientology acts like the Red Cross.
Re: Use MS services
That's just Eadon.
One day you too may be "technical" enough to understand that although Google accede to more requests and give away more data, only MS are any danger.
Posted in Windows Phone 8 support to end in 2014
Re: What does "works" mean anyway?
Okay. Put Jellybean on something with the same spec as a Lumia 620.
See how it performs. I'll wait.
Re: He was scared of the RED RING OF DEATH
Eadon merely has a red ring.
Posted in Windows Phone 8 support to end in 2014
Re: What does "works" mean anyway?
Eadon - looking forward to your citations regarding your continual FUD about WP using more resources than the notoriously CPU-hogging Android.....
Please keep us updated.
Posted in Windows Phone 8 support to end in 2014
Re: All current handsets are supported and will be upgraded to WP9
we're all secretly hoping for the death of Windows Phone anyway.
Because less choice is SO FREAKIN AWESOME right?
Posted in Windows Phone 8 support to end in 2014
Re: So if I had bought a Windows Phone 8 on day of issue [1] ...
we get our wish and Windows Phone 8 self-destructs
Because less choice is FREAKIN AWESOME right?
Re: sad
Maybe, but to judge from the pictures on the Huffington Post (link here) we should all be thanking Microsoft, the game publisher and probably Sony and Nintendo too for discouraging them from breeding.
Exactly. Their windows hardware has been overpriced and boring.
You don't need to look much further for a reason why it's not selling.
Well...
Nokia are making screens you can use through thick mittens. Maybe you can get some of those and use 'em through tasteful curtains.
Re: Maybe if they bought relevant ads?
I have had eBay offer to sell me Wales before now.
Reserve not met.
Posted in AMD releases new 'Elite' laptop chips
Not bad as a bulletin but no real meat to this article.
Still, Anand Lal Shimpi will review it before long, hopefully.
Re: @Eadon Siverlight
Are you angry that EA no longer support Sim City 2000 as well?
Re: @Eadon Siverlight
Even 4 has the writing on the wall, since MS would much prefer that you dump all the crufty old .NET stuff in favour of some shiny WinRT stuff.
Bzzzt - wrong. And you were doing so well up to then.
The shiny RT stuff is written with Visual Studio in your choice of .NET languages + or JavaScript and uses your choice of WPF or HTML for the UI.
Also .NET is 12 years old. I hardly call that dumping it every five years.
Re: Siverlight
.NET itself is being quietly retired also.
More of your usual lies, I see.
Also, stop using the "technical content" icon when you're spreading FUD, please.
