Re: Qwerty

Well then, your money may go to the Samsung 5510 or dual SIM version 5512. I have the latter. Not quite a BB buti prefer android.

Re: Lucky the lil sweetie isn't American

I used to have an e71 and e72 now have a samsung 5512 which is dual sim version of 5510, i suggest you check it out on amazon, hard to find elsewhere in uk.

WTF

Well said, far too many ignorant and gullible people spouting useless opinions. Opinions dont equal facts, dont equal right or wrong. Forums and social media and wider media are degenerating into a morass of ignorant poo yet policy by our mindless political morons is being based on this poo opinion.

Re: Oh hell, about high time

lars, are you a fascist or a marxist? You certainly don't understand the concepts of democrracy and sovereignty and the right of countries to run their own affairs, set their own tax rates, etc. How would you feel if the UK had a tax rate imposed by the EU. Think before you write, unless you truly believe in removal of democracy and sovereignty.

Re: "European austerity measures" ... a little perspective.

Don't worry, austerity will be forced upon us sooner or later when the pyramid system collapses upon itself. These so called experts and our political class are ignorant and in denial and Putting off the day of reckoning and will simply make it worse for longer.

Re: fawlty: exactly

These men knowingly caused damage and stole property so they deserve punishment, same as anyone else. Being extradited to the US is an occupational hazard of criminals so tough, they should have thought of it before they committed crimes. If someone breaks into my house i wont be lenient on them, will you? I'd expect the rozzers and CPS to deal with them. Having said that, there should be some leniency for first offence and only punishment where direct damage was done.

Weak Security

It makes no difference if my front door has a simple lock or a more convoluted affair, but regardless anyone getting into my home and stealing my belongings is a thief.

Re: Balmer is safe because...

Much as I dislike Ballmer and all the cock-ups he has presided over, simple fact is that MS revenues and share price are on the up.

Not Fascists...

...it's the commies screaming that 7" screen is the best and everyone else is stupid for disagreeing with them.

Re: "Microsoft honcho pleads with media: 'Stop picking on us!'"

I know people exactly like that too. The main part of the problem which MS need to overcome is that owning a PC is not easy, things go wrong far too easily, constant updates to worry about, varying quality of antivirus and firewalls and the rest of it.

It's just like owning a car and for the most part doing all the maintenance on it yourself rather than the garage mechanic taking care of it. If the business model had been originally that you take in your PC for annual maintenance when you go on your holidays for a week or two, then the love affair with MS would have been different.

Apple, although not entirely problem free, have just made owning an operating a computer or device just easy to use and worry free. Android is also getting near to that point. Users love Apple and Android and have bad memories and bad taste of Microsoft. The only people who still like MS are some specialists and those whose livelihood depends upon it. I am actually sticking with MS because with Win 7 I now have a stable platform and it does everyting I need it to do. In addtion I have an Android tablet and phone which are great sync as well with MS Exchange as MS' own software.

The only way that MS can succeed again, at least in the retail / consumer sector is by a complete change of name / re-branding of the OS and hardware because its strength has now become a massive stubbling block as people recall their bad experiences with the product. They tried with "Windows" but that only rubbed salt in people's wounds. They need to come up with something completely different, base it on BSD / Linux, give it a fruity name (they could buy the rights to the name of former Apricot or Acorn for example) and come up with some sexy phone and tablet and PC hardwares to go with it.

Long way to go Microsoft, a very long way to go.

Re: rMBP

I am generally Apple-averse, but today I had a quick look again at the Mac Mini and the related server, now that looks like a decently priced and spec'd bit of kit for the novice and expert alike.

Peter2.....

.....he understands EXACTLY how businesses and the real world are suffering right now, and the impact upon IT spending, unlike many overpaid and arrogant ponses commenting on this site.

As an founder and Director of several small business I would probably take on someone like Peter2 to be responsible for my IT without a single hesitation, he simply "gets it" and operates in the real economy, not the pumped up fluff which is akin to a pyramid scheme whici is about to crash.

Re: Blindfold firmly secured? Let's go!

The death of the desktop is greatly exaggerated, for lots of reasons I will not go into here, but "horses for courses" is an appropriate phrase, as well as 30 years of inertia. Tablets are complimentary and in most cases not yet a full replacement. MS are actually on the right idea, albeit a pretty poor implementation of Windows 8, but they will get better, but in the meantime they must not drop Windows 7 improvement.

Re: @Arctic fox - @JustaKOS ... "You see what I mean?"

Indeed, best to ignore the tossser. The responses, even downvotes give him a hard on. El Reg would do well to have an ignore button as well as improving their archaic commenting system.

Re: doesn't prevent us from being attacked by Javascript related vulnerabilities

With no script you might as well give up browsing, it's a nightmare to use. Better to use adblock and a flash blocker, or disable javascript completely.

news

Of course it is news. Yet another orchestrated attempt by the Establishment to nip in the bud this major threat to their own money printing. They will try and extinguish bitcoin whatever it takes, similarly gold which they naked shortsold to an unprecedented scale last week, to stem it's popularity. The "currency wars" are alive and kicking.

Re: Good news

They do offer that choice to businesses, and you can even build your own if you are that way inclined.

Re: Working for devices with smaller screens?

Indeed, it's catch up all the time. MS has for the past few years been run by committee, and a fairly clueless one at that, sorry, MS have been run by Ballmer the Baboon who heads a clueless committee. Actually, a bit unfair, Office 365 and Live are very decent, albeit still not flexible enough, but very decent nonetheless. For my desktop needs though, it seems that MS are going to abandon me and throw the baby out with the bathwater as they focus all their efforts on mobile whilst ignoring the fact that most of us want BOTH mobile AND desktop, not some crap hybrid of the two. If there is no Windows 7 continuation and tweaking then MS is going to die, at least for me, swapping for the excellent Mint 14 etc.

Re: Metro

Metro=Fisher-Price=Crap

Re: Worked for Steve Jobs, why not BG?

Indeed, MS need the guy with the halo effect. Since Apple lost St. Steve they are showing of signs of faltering just like MS. Companies and their disciples need their saints and prophets, that's human nature.

Re: Not even signed

Well spotted, I also noticed the same issue last year. I kicked up a big fuss about it with them, but they were arrogant and in my opinion dumb. They may be smart script kiddies, but they are ignoring the fundamentals.

I evenetually replaced their software as both an on-demand or realtime extra layer and got Hitman Pro on-demand, run nightly, takes only 2-3 mins, and which uses about half a dozen other AV vendor databases. It's a great concept although it did quarantine one false-positive on one occasion, thankfully did not delete this digitally signed MS file which one of their vendor databases flagged as malware.

No vendor is perfect, you just need to always ensure you have regular image backups....which reminds me, ahem!

Re: Cure worse than disease

MSE is nice, but it's not effective enough. I tested it myself in a vitual enviroment several times on live malware links and it really could not detect a lot of ransomeware from hijacking my virtual PC. The best combo that I found, after loads of extensive testing was using PrivateFirewall together with Prevx/Webroot. Stopped EVERYTHING in it's tracks, one way or another, nothing else did as an effective job, and no false positives that I can recall.

Apple leaving...

Apple will leave, and so will others, but you are probably wrong, it will not be China hurting but the US will be screwed since it will have nowhere to send it's massive supply of dollars, and so the dollar will tank further in value. Perversely, that will be good for US exports of course, in fact that is probably their grand plan, get manufacturing back and deflate the dollar further.

As for the smut, the Chinese are right. What is acceptable in one country or culture does not mean it is, or should be, acceptable in another one. Just because we have zero morals in the west, with porn and violence being perverse entertainment for the masses, does not mean that it is a good idea.

Apple, Hollywood and Co are just a mechanism for spreading the low western values and debasing the whole world whilst screwing them for as much money as they can in the process, then the users become hooked on porn and violence - great revenue stream for the studios and Apple etc, no?

Updates

Indeed, but even users who do not auto update will be affected by this. I checked this patch out, decided I needed it, then had it not been for an El Reg email today, on a day that I do not normally read El Reg, then I would not have now just installed it as a precaution despite not been affected.

Re: What a surprise! Linux is STILL not ready for the desktop!

The biggest problem in this respect is linux fragmentation into all this myriad of distributions. Great for freedom but not good for suppliers to be motivated to build drivers for the 1% of linux users...sorry, I mean a driver for each linux fragment of 1%.

To be clear, I have Mint Linux installed on one PC and it's really great for many tasks, but over the years I have had myriad of frustration with linux not working.

Having said that, the amount of time wasted on issues and re-installing and security threats on XP and even of W7 are countless, so it's like comparing apples and oranges, you take your pick and use it, not slag someone off because the prefer an apple to an orange, or vice versa, it's crazy.

Suckers

...followed quickly by the Brits by their iPose

Re: Longevity

I've been around for a year or two and my conclusion is different. The real story here is not that Android is losing anything significant since it is already more than half of the market, but that 1) RIM is tanking and it appears that users may be switching from RIM to iPhones, possibly and 2) Windows remains feeble and is not grabbing the corporate market from RIM. In other words it's a two horse race and month on month, year on year these 2 will go up and down against each other and the others will remain in the stable.

Utter crap...

Anyone doing well would not close a store. You need to get out of denial, the once great Nokia have screwed up massively. What nearly killed them was ignoring Android and ignoring their customers who struggled with countless Symbian issues.

Perversely Nokia's future may actually be brighter than most people realise, they are selling well in India with low cost devices and I bought an Asha 205 the other day online, cheap and cheerful but I can see the appeal of such a device, especially dual sim, but the other specs were too low for me so sent it back and got a decent spec Samsung equivalent instead.

The whole market is going to go cheap and cheerful and that's why Apple's share price plumetted and Nokia may well recover over the next 2 or 3 years, possibly.

Re: Tandem

Just found this on Wiki, partly explains my question, Tandem no longer seem to exist, but perhaps proves my point about cheaper options and that use of Tandem-like solutions should cope with these failures and not require a committee to have a conference call about the failure?

"Tandem Computers, Inc. was the dominant manufacturer of fault-tolerant computer systems for ATM networks, banks, stock exchanges, telephone switching centers, and other similar commercial transaction processing applications requiring maximum uptime and zero data loss. The company was founded in 1974 and remained independent until 1997. It is now a server division within Hewlett Packard.

Tandem's NonStop systems use a number of independent identical processors and redundant storage devices and controllers to provide automatic high-speed "failover" in the case of a hardware or software failure.

To contain the scope of failures and of corrupted data, these multi-computer systems have no shared central components, not even main memory. Conventional multi-computer systems all use shared memories and work directly on shared data objects. Instead, NonStop processors cooperate by exchanging messages across a reliable fabric, and software takes periodic snapshots for possible rollback of program memory state."

Why?

Why Ubuntu on a phone? I just cannot see any benefits unless it can be like Android but without the slavishness to the Google God.

Re: Can someone explain to me ....

" the Java on Mac OS X is Apple's responsibility"....no, the iFanboys believe that the Java on their machines is MS' responsibility, they always blame MS.

Botnets

The best, but not guaranteed, way would be to have two computers, one of them being completely standalone and not exposed to your network / internet and comprising of all your data and applications that you actually do work on. Files are then burned to a CD / DVD and transferred to the other PC for emailing, etc. I don't actually do this, but am beginning to consider it. The isolated PC would also be one of my self-built older ones, to help minimise the risk that the hardware / firmware is infiltrated by the Chinks.

Re: It's pretty hard to keep up, it's not like they are exactly loaded with money.

They are far to busy innovating more iRipoffs, you should get your priorities in order!

BBC

Yes indeed those luvies have lost the use of their shiny iToys, how terrible it must be for them...but great for the rest of us.

Re: Subscribing to a Word Processor?

Perhaps, but this is the most useful review / comparison I have read on this topic.

OO is dire

I've had the (mis) fortune to use MS office products since Word and Excel in the early 90's. Yes there have been some better products, but in business it's all about compatibility and familiarity and despite whatever abuse of their position and other tactics MS are the de facto standard.

Since the late 90's I've tried to use Star Office and all it's successors, including Libre Office, OO....and had a major company grabbed SO 5 sooner than Sun did then it could have gained a much stronger foothold. It was actually a great software and I much preferred it to Office 95 / 97.

Now with IBM's Symphony which is for me a better implementation of OO than anything else plus the myriad of cloudy apps, OO is showing to be a quite amateurish product; some nice ideas and great that so many people dedicate their time to it, but it's not slick enough implementation. Inevitably MS Office will continue for a long while yet in business if they make it run on Android and iOS as well as all their cloudy versions.