Posts by dogged
1931 posts • joined Monday 16th November 2009 12:21 GMT
Page:
Re: Is El Reg the new Slashdot?
It seems that almost NO-ONE love microsoft - some find them useful, some are forced to use their software, some game, some know no better. But hardly anyone likes them.
I agree and yet, this does not make their products universally bad. Which, if these boards and this site were all you went by, you would be forgiven for thinking. In fact, you'd be unlikely to think otherwise.
This view is very popular but it is wrong. Not every Microsoft product is bad and many of those who criticize do so without experience of the products in question. The articles tend to be mean-spirited but this is the Reg so you pretty much expect that. The comments, however, go way beyond and into the realms of outright falsehood in what could be perceived as a deliberate attempt to discredit.
That it's (claimed to be) voluntary rather than paid negative astroturfing makes it worse because it indicates that these commenters put blind hatred and/or favouritism toward a different product/manufacturer above rationality. It is irrational. It is not sane behaviour.
The idea that any one of these people gets to make business decision which affect jobs, families and livelihoods when they are irrational is deeply worrying.
Fortunately, they're mostly first-support who read from a fucking script and pretend to abilities which they plainly do not have; the root of skilful manipulation of technology being sound analysis and their analytic skills being negated by their evident irrationality.
Re: Is El Reg the new Slashdot?
I know, 45 is a huge exaggeration.
Re: Is El Reg the new Slashdot?
The DIFFERENCE would be that no-one is paying them
Oddly, that makes it worse.
Compare against AnandTec or TechRadar or even Engadget or the Verge and the Reg comments suddenly looks like a collection of fake user accounts created by all 45 users of linux on the desktop and probably funded by Google.
Observe reactions to stories about -
Apple :- About 60/40 anti-Apple vs pro-Apple. This is normal, fanbois are obsessed.
IBM - Little but love except when somebody mentions a Lotus product or any of the Rational suite.
Facebook - universal derision
Google+ - disinterest except for the few regulars who insist on how much better it is than Facebook
Google advertising/Wifi slurping etc - Overall negative to count by individual accounts but massively unbalanced by pro-Google types. Barry is a fine example.
Android - By individual account, about 80% overwhelming love. You do get a few tenacious Apple fanbois insisting it's a crap copy though. And one or two programmers (I include myself) who think it has glaring faults but generally wish it well.
Microsoft (any product) - about 90% hate, regardless of any possible qualities (positive or negative) of the product. The only exception is XBox and even there, Barry Shitpeas and Bob Vistakin (usually posting anonymously) will jump up and say it's crap because it's Microsoft. At any hour of the day or night.
Now, you say those people aren't being paid. That would indicate that the Reg comment boards have become a self-selecting group where a qualification for entry is hating on Microsoft. Which given the law that competition is good for consumers is financial self-harming. Even leaving aside reviews by people like Trevor Pott which are generally favourable but are ALWAYS torn to pieces in the comments, and always by people who haven't even used the damn software, it's just weird.
You can play the "I'm an embittered old sysadmin and I hate everything" card if you like (except you're not, you're first line support and you read from a fucking script) but even then, to attack without knowledge is the sign of an idiot.
Not surprisingly, the Reg itself now almost never posts a story which MS in any favourable light because they tend to reflect the views of their readership, like any other publication. Which means you are making the Register less accurate as a source of decent news.
If the Reg was all I read, then MS would be heading for bankruptcy at the end of the year because everyone and his cat hates Windows 8 without ever using it and Asus don't like Surface and Nokia are already in receivership and Google rule the entire world except for the US legal system which Apple has locked down.
No doubt that's how some of you wish the world actually was. But then, Daily Mail readers wish the Nazis had won.
Re: I'd like to see
Putin is an extremely high-ranked Judoka.
Zuckerberg would be toast.
Re: Is El Reg the new Slashdot?
I see a lot more anti-Microsoft shills hitting their voting buttons than the converse.
Including you, Barry.
Re: 2000AD
No.
In 1999ad, they had a reader vote about what to call the title in the following years.
The overwhelming majority voted to keep it as 2000ad. So they did.
Vive la France!
Yes, but this is the French we're talking about.
Tell them they MUST do something and it's illegal for them to refuse and watch them sit back and smoke Gitanes while cheerfully ignoring you forever.
The only exception has ever been their politicians, who agree to all sorts of bullshit that the population totally ignores. If only we in the UK did likewise this country would be a much happier place.
Re: $90
I think rather a lot more want NO OS devices so they can chose !
Maybe they're selling on Earth and not Planet Nerd.
Re: @RICHTO - You REALLY dont know what you're talking about
Maybe if the two major linux distros had secure boot and antivirus baked in they wouldn't have had such a poor record over the last two years.
iPhone5
Short of contract restrictions, Samsung would be crazy to go giving Apple competitive advantages.
Next thing you know, they'd be sued for using the memory they invented in their own phones.
Re: Ok, so a stylus for your tablet/content creation device.
Interesting how, having had the advantages of the stylus pointed out to you, you still try to mock the idea.
And this is Lenovo, not Microsoft.
Posted in The Dragon 32 is 30
Re: Happy days
Wasnt that keen on the machine since my parents had stupid amounts of money to waste on me
Fixed that one for you.
Nobody
Nobody will be Mitt Romney's VP because that would imply that he had a snowball's chance in hell of actually getting elected.
Posted in OCZ Vertex 4 256GB SSD review
Re: price
Since Samsung no longer make HDDs, I doubt if they'll be concerned.
Sold out to Seagate, as I recall.
Re: What OS did he use?
Dirty Mac OSX, to judge from the article.
Posted in Win a monster laptop
Are you planning to disallow entries from people who always complain about 900 vertical pixels being crap?
Re: I'd still like to see somebody explain
No, the biggest power drain is actually the cell radio. There's a reason why talktime differs from standby time. The screen rates pretty highly on power draw though, with the chip being way down the list UNLESS your OS performs badly.
And to Richard Plinston, I agree that Skype is not useful on WP7. However, I consider VOIP to be an edge case, given that voice calls can be made and received without it. It would be nice if it ran properly and I hope that it will with 7.8 or 8 but it's not a dealbreaker at the consumer level.
Windows version dropped
Good thing you mentioned that or it'd be YEARS before anyone noticed.
Re: I'd still like to see somebody explain
I said "shit-slow". And having gone over Dalvik's garbage collector twice when trying to get decent performance out of a mobile app, I stand by that. It's terrible. As for genuine multitasking over tombstoning?
To be frank, except for operations like playing music or receive data as a stream, I don't see the point on a mobile device. Say you fire up your El Reg app, follow a link, switch to the browser, play a sound file in the browser. Is there really any point in the El Reg app being anything other than tombstoned?
I'll agree with your theory about energy saving when you get three days without a recharge from a Galaxy S3. Given that we got that time from a Lumia 800 on battery life tests, it seems only fair.
Re: I bought. It's nice. I prefer it to iOS, which I also have.
I'd still like to see somebody explain the need for a multicore processor on a phone. Assuming that you don't need one to compensate for a shit-slow OS, of course.
Cupertino Head Cook lashes out at rumour mill
talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
Re: I bought. It's nice. I prefer it to iOS, which I also have.
No, there's no iPlayer. That used to really annoy me until I remembered I can just watch it on the TV with the XBox anyway and have no real interest in squinting at a phone for entertainment.
Re: Here's a concrete example of Microsoft's problem
Hey JIm, somebody here doesn't like it when you try to help.
Hatters gonna hat.
Re: Who would buy ?
All I know, is that I can't get any apps for it
Why can't you get any of the excess of 100,000 apps available for it?
I suppose some people might be missing Instagram but the corporate business requirement for shit sepia-toned photos is not exactly proven.
That's the default for Youtube comments and the BBC's Have Your Say.
Re: The real story is
so, no answers except "less apps". But three downvotes anyway.
Interesting. I'm actually quite surprised it was only three downvotes - the hatesquad must be on holiday.
Re: The real story is
How are Android phones "better"? Exactly?
Bullet points please and note that "quad-core chips" is not better, it's just throwing hardware at a problem. Performance criteria only, please.
Re: ... underpants "were considered a symbol of male dominance and power"
I have read elsewhere that underpants were almost unknown until the 18th century.
Untrue. As any re-enactor will tell you, underpants (braies) were de rigeur ever since the Norman invasion, and possibly earlier.
Hmm.
Report rumour as fact? Check. Sideswipe Nokia for no apparent reason? Check.
Must be a Gavin Clarke article.
Re: I can't really comment.....
I loved it. Steven Mackintosh's portrait of a man falling apart at the seams in Season 1 is absolutely extraordinary and totally convincing.
Still, de gustibus non est disputandum so we can't really argue about that. I will say that the BBC's decision to only fund 3 episodes of Season 2 hurt it badly and I hope they don't do anything that foolish again.
Re: People are Nutz
Bootnotes.
Re: I can't really comment.....
You've been missing out.
LUTHER for example, trumps everything on AO's list of water-cooler TV shows.
Watch it. You won't be sorry.
Jelly Bean
Damn you Google. The name keeps earworming me with "Billy Jean".
Oooh!
/moonwalk
Re: good
Still wish they'd switch all their comps to linux though.
And then retrain everyone, install alternative software (much of which will NOT be free, especially on support contracts, even the OS isn't free if you go RHEL for example) probably spending hundreds of millions in the process....
If they'd gone linux right at the start (when, to be fair, it was pretty much unusable to the average Joe) linux would be cheaper. Right now? Now, you'd have to be some kind of religious whacko to ignore all the costs involved.
@Oliver
Avoid your rabbi, priest and imam for a while. And think yourself luckyt it wasn't a dead ox or you'd have upset the Hindus as well.
Re: Why ?
But by the time you've added all that, you lose the mobility and the price exceeds that of a desktop.
Re: If you don't like looking at porn, then DON'T LOOK AT PORN.
There is such as a thing as consensus. Grannies being beaten up has a pretty clear consensus view of "bad". Coveting your neighbour's ox or looking at ankles, not so much.
Re: I think this may be PR speak..
Mine was fine until this morning. I thought the SIM might be bad, reseated it, rebooted and it's fine now. Now I don't know whether I was right about the SIM or whether the network was bolloxed.
Re: Vapourware
@eadon2 - I don't understand your issue. Either, as you claim, this product is vaporware and does not exist or some journalists used and had their hands on it for long enough to tell us what it's like, a service which they abbreviate to "hands on review".
Because it's very hard to review the touch-typing on a powerpoint slide.
Re: Vapourware
You think Techradar were typing on a fantasy, then?
TechRadar's hands-on review would tend to indicate probably not.
I mean, you can be sceptical as much as you like but it's not as if somebody just announced a tablet with some slides and a mockup.
Re: Apple even used to admit they don't invent anything
Which ironically, was stolen from Igor Stravinsky. "A bad composer copies. A good composer steals."
@h4rm0ny
Nobody uses the WP7 facebook app anyway. There's simply no need to since the OS handles all that nonsense.
Re: Audience reach
While I agree with you, that doesn't help with frictionless paywalls.
Re: ^^^^ says the Windows phone user
With an Android tablet and a linux server, and a house he shares with his girlfriend (who has an iPhone, an iMac and a Macbook Air).
I can do impartial, not that impartiality is necessary to get fed up with squabbling dickheads.
Re: Apple BS
How about everyone shutting the fuck up about who's got the shinier e-penis?
You're not convincing anyone with this jihadi bullshit. Toward either side.
Re: doesn’t support a lot of popular gaming titles
Screenrez and different native code.
Re: Oh dear
Agreed 100%. I'm not certain Gavin knows how HTML works (or indeed, how anything works).
Frankly, the best option for Uncle Rupe right now is probably Amazon. The best option in six months time may have changed but Amazon are fully cross-platform because, er, that's their business model. As for Android tablets - how are they any more mass-market than Apple?
We're continually being told (trolled?) by this very organ that Android tablets are a bit of a commercial flop and that people who want a tablet buy an iPad (note - Reg readers don't count as "people" for this, rightly. Reg readers are expected to have some technical ability and interest in discovering alternatives). So where next? Windows 8? It might work or it might not, but one company that you can absolutely guarantee will support it and everything else is Amazon.
Rupert needs to go talk nice to Jeff Bezos.
