* Posts by cs94njw

455 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jan 2010

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Sony pains pre-owned game punters with PSN Pass

cs94njw
FAIL

Pre-owned is a big market...

Now I actually own a modern console (Xbox 360), I can actually buy modern games. £40 for a game? I can't justify in this tight times. £10-20 - much easier to justify.

Traded in some 360 games for the first time recently, was going to get another pre-owned as a result. If you look in HMV, the pre-owned section is bigger than the new game section. And I actually had the sales assistant tell me that if Game offered me more money for my game, they would try to match it. WTF?!

I'm getting better service than if I was buying the game new!

You can apply a blunt market vegetable to me in strange places if I'm wrong, but I'm betting those special games that require a pass will happen to be the really popular can't live without games, e.g. CoD, etc.

Looks like Sony's going for a popularity award at the moment. Or they employed any Apple marketting peeps recently?

WTO: China being naughty over rare-earth exports

cs94njw
Thumb Up

Hang on, what about those Gambling companies?

Didn't WTO rule that those gambling companies had been unfairly restricted and could therefore not pay for things from America until their costs had been met? Or something like that?

So they do have teeth, so surprised something similar hasn't been ruled here.

Orange puts budget smartphones on the map

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Thumb Up

Cool!

Brings the phones into a might-buy-for-a-birthday-present area. Although a bit nervous about this mention of Orange Maps?

ALK CoPilot Live Premium HD

cs94njw
WTF?

Google Maps supported Offline in December 2010

Google Maps supported Offline in December

http://androinica.com/2010/12/google-maps-5-0-launches-with-3d-maps-offline-support/

How come TomTom and other brands offer Traffic updates for free, yet others charge by the year? Surely this traffic data is coming from the highways agency?

UK will obey Euro unisex-insurance rules from 2013

cs94njw
FAIL

Are you guys nuts!?

If I said, "All English people eat babies". I would be called racist (well, I'm English, but ...), and rightly so.

But if, actually, all/most English people did eat babies - I'd be stating a fact.

My wife is an underwriter. It is in the insurance companies interests to get these statistics nailed down perfectly. It is the fine balance of having a product that someone wants to buy, and the loss if someone claims on their insurance. They are interested in paying out less than they receive.

Women, on average, have more accidents than men, but are of small value.

Men, on average, have less accidents than women, but when they do - they're a biggie.

I think they should take ethnicity into account - IF and ONLY IF it is statistically important. If Teletubbies aren't any worse/better drivers than Flumps, then there's no point deciding price based on that statistic. If they don't at the moment, perhaps there's a law against it or it's not statistically important.

Do you think you should pay the same premium as a 17 year old? What? No? AGEIST!

Strike hits police, ICO and the Rev

cs94njw
Devil

"Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is managing without 85 per cent of its staff, the PCS said."

The penny drops for Revenue and Customs, and 85% of its workforce becomes redundant.

I think they protest too much ;)

Vodafone hikes PAYG call costs

cs94njw
Devil

Well at least the savings the customer makes in roaming will pay this back...

... oh no, it won't.,

I wonder if they'll start charging a fee to charge-up with your debit card...

Boffins triple battery life with metal foam

cs94njw
Thumb Up

Someone please forward to Google phone manufacturers!

Nothing to see here, move along please.

HTC to follow LG with 3D smartphone

cs94njw
Alert

Battery?

And how does this affect the battery?

When I look to replace my Android next year, I'll be looking for two things: NFC support, battery life.

Oh, and an alternative to the 32MB of Adobe crap that's required on my device.

Twin-screen LG smartphone spied

cs94njw
FAIL

Double the screen...

...double the battery drain :(

States consider saner 'sexting' penalties for teens

cs94njw
WTF?

Thank <insert deity here> for that! Er... hang on...

Yay - it's stupid - so it's much better we're not going to convict the children any more...

Er... hang on... you want to expel them? Harm their education, move them to another school, just because of something they did outside of school?

Er... $60 fine... er... they earn that kind of money do they?

Counselling!? WTF?

"Why did you do it Johnny?"

"Well, there's these round things that are growing...."

"And you Missy-Lou?"

"Well, there's these round things that are growing..."

Just leave it as it is. Take them to court, jury decides this is rediculous, case thrown out.

EA blocks user from game after alleged forum outburst

cs94njw
Go

If you start reporting to ConsumerDirect...

... then the issue becomes bigger. EA would have to face the law, and then perhaps you'd get proper compensation, and a law brought in to stop them being gits to everyone else.

Pr0n stars to demo against .xxx

cs94njw

Re: What about .cum as an alternative?

No, because the Welsh want that ;)

Patent attack on Google open codec faces 'antitrust probe'

cs94njw
FAIL

Patent free? Nothing is patent free

Nothing is patent free. With all the good work that the US PTO is doing, everything has been patented, probably multiple times, and covering things like going to the loo, filling your car with petrol, and scratching your head.

These days - it's a game of Top Trumps to see whose patents are bigger than the next man's.

Government flies kite for VAT changes

cs94njw
FAIL

Company Tax

Government, let us keep the VAT-free low prices, and you concentrate your time getting corporation tax from the banks and other companies. A higher return on investment of your time I feel.

Library e-books to become too tatty to lend

cs94njw
FAIL

Tis simples

Librarian: "Hmm... do I buy a tree book and have it last anywhere from a year to maybe 5 years, or do I buy both a tree book and an eBook, where the eBook costs almost twice as much, and I must replace it every year...."

Surely this artificial-cost practice is highly dubious. I appreciate that a Versache shirt costs more than a shirt from M&S, usually due to the brand name than the materials used.

Please tell me the justification for the higher cost for the eBook.

Apple iPad 2 snapped in all its skinny glory

cs94njw
Grenade

Flimsy?

I hope the iPad 2 is lighter than the iPad 1 - coz it's starting to look a little brittle.

Fifa, Uefa lose free-to-view footie challenge

cs94njw
WTF?

Sky Sports

Which must be the only place where you pay a premium to watch sports, which has advertising all over it, and then they still make you watch Sky adverts.

You pay for something, you get no adverts. You don't pay for something, you get adverts.

That's the way it should be.

Amazon randomly censoring incest books

cs94njw
FAIL

Why this is now more scary...

... is because the EBook market is starting to mature. EBook readers are becoming more popular, and people are starting to consider this as a serious medium (not sure I subscribe to that, but hey...).

Actual book shops are now shutting down, due to pressure of online sales.

Unless your book is Disney-sweet, it's likely to get removed by all the vendors who are the first port of call for EBook customers.

It's commercial censorship.

Better hope Waterstones and Barnes & Noble stay afloat...

Google Maps for Droid phones becomes a LOT better

cs94njw
Happy

Actually... contractually...

Actually, it will cache a route as you require ;)

ITV, C4 catch-up players coming to PS3

cs94njw
Thumb Up

Nope...

These are dedicated clients - well... at least it is on the BluRay players.

Blu-ray barely better than DVD

cs94njw
Thumb Up

HD - it's out there

Two things proved to me there exists a better picture with HD:

1. Watching the BBC HD version of Top Gear stramed via my Blu Ray player, gave an excellent picture, and noticely clearer and bolder than the standard definition one.

2. Watching Batman Begins, when there's close-ups of Commissioner/Captain/Seargent Gordon, you can see the individual hairs on his chin (you'd think they'd make him shave properly first!?).

Hitachi quietly slips in new, big hardness

cs94njw
Grenade

Backup?

Each year we move further and further away from ways to actually backup all this data.

A colleague was saying, what we actually need is effectively a record to backup our data to.

Something solid and won't be affected by the Sunday doing a funky dance, or someone dropping a nuke a mile or two away.

Something you can backup lots to, but also keep for a large amount of time.

It's just a wating game before we start losing considerable amounts of data.

Broadband advertising speed gap widens

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Thumb Down

I think the real issue is Max and the Price

They say £blah for a max 24MB/s. So 24MB/s costs £blah.

But actually, you're getting 6MB/s. So shouldn't you be paying £blah / 4 ?

You're paying the same price as someone else who may be getting 24 MB/s. So you're not getting value for money / the service you're paying for.

I think that's the crux of the matter.

Nokia latest to feel wrath of Jobs

cs94njw
Megaphone

Look at it another way..

Perhaps other phones are also at fault. Perhaps not.

But when you pay £400 quid for a phone from Apple, you would hope you'd purchase something better than the rest.

iRobot Roomba 581 robot cleaner

cs94njw
Coat

Holy moly!

You live in that!? I thought *my* living standards were below par. I need to show to the wife to get myself off the hook more.

I'll get my coat, coz I'm too scared to hang it anywhere in your house.

Brace yourself for 4TB drives next year

cs94njw
FAIL

Backup and RAM

OK, so you have 1TB of disk space. You are now free to create files which are GBs in size. Er... you want to read them afterwards? Computer says No. RAM is so far behind it's sad.

Recently on our Sun servers, Tomcat crashed and created a dump file - 4GB. Trouble is, I can't read this on my Windows XP box. What's the point?!

Backup. The more you can store, the more you're risking. 500GB of family photos. Even if you backup to another hard disk, you've got to keep that hard disk safe, and perhaps even replace every few years.

What backup medium is there that will guarentee that what's on it will stay on it? Holes punched into steel?

FSA: Of course customers don't read contracts

cs94njw
FAIL

It was looking so good...

until:

"The FSA said that, like The On-Line Partnership's new term, agreements should warn customers that they should consult with a company about anything in an agreement that they do not understand."

Muppets. It's 11:30pm at night, you need car insurance for the following day. A tricky T&C comes up... oh I'll just give them a ring... oh... er... I'll send them an email, surely they'll reply within 30mins....

So no change here. In the first place, people didn't want to read pages of T&Cs and couldn't understand them anyway. Now the user's are expected to contact companies (which have tended to degrade customer services) for any T&C they don't understand.

Ah well.. FSA's getting disolved anyway.

DoJ hits LCD vendor with price fixing charge

cs94njw
Thumb Up

A decent law

All the time you see companies fined for X, Y, and Z, and they just apologise and flip the quarters out of their huge spare cash pile. "The company's to blame - fine the company".

Now, the promise of jail time - that's what we're talking about. If a company kills someone - that's manslaughter. Someone should be going to jail.

If they commit fraud/steal something - that's theft, and a jail term.

As Eddie Izzard says, "If 1 person is killed, they go to jail. If they kill 10 people, they're locked in a padded room with people looking in from outside. If they kill 1million people, it's almost like ... er.. 'Well done!... Er... you must get up very early in the morning!'".

Just because the action was "big", doesn't mean it shouldn't face jail.

Murdoch's paywall: The end of the suicide era?

cs94njw
FAIL

Sky Sports

Hang on. Isn't this the same Murdoch that makes you pay a fat fee to watch Sky Sports, and then STILL bombards you with adverts?

When I saw that, I choked and laughed at the same time.

US boffins synthesize self-replicating bacteria

cs94njw
Thumb Up

Basically, this is the first debugger

They've written the code, and syntacticly it's valid, but we've never had the means to run that code and see where it falls over.

Now we do!

Question is - how do we step through the code, or attach to an existing process? And what form does a core dump take?

cs94njw
Thumb Up

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

I guess this is the true issue with making life - what is the difference between the raw materials and that shell of the yeast bacteria? Is it scarily - not much?

Steam rushes from Valve onto Macs

cs94njw

PC and MAC? What about the savegames?

So you can play either the MAC or PC version. Does that mean the save games are compatible too?

HTC sets timeframe for Hero Android update

cs94njw

Hero? What about the Desire?

The InterWeb is seeing some strange 3G problems with HTC Desires.

Wii Fit fall woman turns into nympho

cs94njw
Thumb Up

Well, in the interests of help in the community...

OK - I'm willing to take the first shift, who's next?

British Gas signs Voda so meters can snitch direct

cs94njw
Alert

And if you have a femto cell installed?

I guess you get to intercept what gets sent.

Dodgy BitDefender update bricks systems

cs94njw
Thumb Down

Maybe petty, but...

It actually bricked the system? Turned it into a paperweight? I think not.

Vodafone confirms HTC Android 2.1 duo

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Thumb Up

damn skippy!

Took the words right out my mouth (apart from the bit about K750i, N95 8GB here)

US school comes out fighting over webcam spy claim

cs94njw
FAIL

A small point that might be worth mentioning...

... the laptop wasn't registered as stolen. Do they monitor all the logs just in case they don't recognize the user?

Aussies cane cane toads with cat food

cs94njw
FAIL

Reminds me of something...

She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,

She swallowed the cat to catch the mouse,

She swallowed the mouse to catch the spider...

3 gets Desire

cs94njw
Thumb Up

At last!

At last! A bleeding edge Android phone on 3!!

Humax ships Freeview HD box

cs94njw
WTF?

WTF!?

Like Nathan13 - Add a harddisk and we'll call the price fair. Just because a Blueray box costs megabucks, doesn't mean every other company has the right to screw the customers.

Women face 'glass cliff' after breaking glass ceiling

cs94njw
WTF?

Perhaps women don't want to do the job

Call me stupid (ok, don't) but perhaps women don't want to do the high powered jobs as much as men do?

I bet most men don't want to work in childrens nurseries, I bet most women don't want to work as mechanics.

Perhaps, just perhaps, women/men don't want to do everything that men/women do.

Play.com touts Nexus One with added price

cs94njw
Troll

Apparently...

you only get stung on the tax if you get the charger. Or something like that. The phone isn't taxable or something, but the charger is.

Nokia slashes prices to up market share ante

cs94njw
FAIL

Too little too late...

I have a N95 8GB. I've just finished my 18 month contract and am looking for a new phone.

Nokia is trying to bait me with free navigation software. But I can't test it because my 18 month old phone isn't *allowed* to run it.

The Loch Ness Stig gets pixellated

cs94njw
Thumb Up

Some say...

... he IS the Loch Ness monster.

Some say that if he fought the Loch Ness monster, the Loch Ness monster would lose and even buy him a pint afterwards.

Some say, his use of the force makes camera cars drive on the other side of the road.

All we know is... he's call The Stig.

cs94njw
Grenade

Perhaps more importantly...

...if The Stig and Chuck Norris were in a fight, who'd win?

German court finds parent liable for child's file-sharing

cs94njw
WTF?

WTF!?

"The ruling said that living with the woman was her husband and five children, aged from one to 13 years old."

Bloody hell! I hope the husband was the 13 year old.

But even then...

BT to throttle P2P for faster broadband

cs94njw
FAIL

Umm... the quickest way to upset the people you want

Um... so P2Pers, the people who perhaps might want the fastest and most unlimited bandwidth, are now being told they can't have it.

Which means that only people watching Strictly Come Dancing on iPlayer, or World of Warcrafters can make effective use of it.. er... and use about 1% of the capacity they're paying for.

Er... who the hell is BT's target customer?!

New avast freebie security scanner aims to keel-haul MS

cs94njw
Thumb Up

No problem whatsoever

Installs fine on every PC I've used. Even installed it on my In-law's PC, and not once have I had to solve any issues because of it - which I think is worth its weight in gold.

On slightly older PCs it does make them run a little bit slower, but I've never had a virus. In fact, I quite happily visit virus laden websites, quite assured Avast will detect and stop any infections.

It updates its virus definitions by itself without any interraction, and updates its program by itself without any interraction.

What more can I say!?

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