* Posts by JDX

6847 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2010

Samsung Galaxy S5 in El Reg's claws: This time the 'S' is for 'sensible'

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Fitness Fad

This whole thing for fitness functionality seems to ignore the fact most of the Western world is fat and lazy (myself included)

Or are such features akin to gyms offering cheap deals in January for 12-month memberships, knowing it makes them money but will never be used?

BT snatches crown: Soars to top of complaints list

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How does such a flawed analogy get so many upvotes? You don't pay for "gallons" of data, you pay for access to a pipe which can dispense X gallons/minutes. In a petrol station this would be like paying per minute for as much fuel as you could get out of the pump.

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Re: Yodel

And you do realise that your local Yodel delivery boy isn't Yodel, or that one parcel is meaningless statistically?

I hope you make sure to send Amazon proper complaints every time something like this happens because that's the only way they would realise if one delivery company really is consistently below par. It costs them money after all.

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Re: Crap Service is the Norm

Yodel is not part of Amazon customer service. Customer service are the people who fix the problems Yodel introduce.

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Re: Crap Service is the Norm

Amazon, FirstDirect are notable exceptions

FINALLY Microsoft releases Office for iPad – but wait there's a CATCH

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Re: Owwwww My Eyes !

Who said you would be using your iPad for that purpose - this allows you to create and edit files but doesn't mean they think it's a substitute for a proper W8 computer ;)

Also, if they have a great touch interface (a big if) I wouldn't bet on it being unusable although that's personal preference a lot - I don't find reading a page on my iPad to be a problem as long as it is sensibly zoomed and laid out.

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Re: Typical Microsoft

SaaS isn't a MS obsession. It's a general IT obsession MS are jumping on to

Nvidia, VMware join to pipe high-quality 3D graphics from the cloud

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Cost

This is my big concern. When I looked into various DaaS providers they all seemed very expensive compared to using something like EC2. It didn't seem like it would take long to have paid more than a physical PC would cost - presumably my needs don't align well with their business cases though.

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Re: More cloud frauds going on...

This isn't true. I've been looking into such technologies and been disappointed that while you can get DaaS, with a few niche exceptions 3D rendering was simply not provided.

It's not for everyone but definitely a powerful tool - for instance I create powerful 3D-simulators for business users who typically run basic business laptops, maybe even 5-year old business laptops with terrible onboard graphics chipsets.

This kind of approach means that rather than tell them they have to get brand new PCs for every user, I can provide an alternative.

Boffins power wearable tech with body static

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They're missing a trick

What about those caps with the little propellors on top. FREE WIND ENERGY. And if you lower your head and run around, you can generate additional power FOR FREE.

You TWITS! Facebook exec erects billboards shaming texting drivers

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Re: He is just annoyed that they are texting ...

"As for the rest of us we could try reading a map before we begin our drive."

Or put your destination in the sat-nav BEFORE setting off, by the same token.

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Re: RTFA

The people that dumb are almost certainly the people already texting while driving anyway.

Ancient telly, check. Sonos sound system, check. OMG WOAH

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Re: Snobby

But if you don't want a massive system, you can buy a smaller one. For £300 - not £1500.

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Soundbar

For the same reasons as the reviewer, we went for a soundbar by Philips - a full home theatre isn't of interest but TV speakers are sucky. We got the same kind of improvement in experience for £200.

The speech clarity is the biggest boon, although it's not perfect. It totally failed to help in the latest Riddick film because his voice is so deep, but luckily not being able to tell what he was saying in no way detracted from the film.

As WinXP death looms, Microsoft releases its operating system SOURCE CODE for free

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Re: – a trend it finally broke with the sixth version of the operating system.

6.22 was amazing!

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Re: Are you insane?

>>Just imagine an operating system 100% compatible with Windows, but without all the useless crap added in the newer versions?

Like performance and security features - yeah what a waste of time.

Gr8, it's the new M8! Ideal for that celebrity funeral selfie

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DoF

Another article I read claimed this phone DID let you take pictures and then alter the focus in the built-in apps. El Reg seems to be claiming it doesn't (yet)?

What price justice? 73 CENTS in book price-gouging case

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Re: *There is, as always, a better way.

If you* want to be a dirty little thief, why bother going to that trouble when you could just find a ripped copy online?

*the hypothetical you, obviously.

Nvidia unveils Titan Z: An 8TFLOPS off-the-shelf supercomputer disguised as a gfx card

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Yowser

12Gb on a graphics card.

Can someone convert this thing's likely real-world performance to units I can understand, like approximate number of i7 CPUs for general computation or something?

Boycott Firefox, gay devs urge as Mozilla appoints JavaScript daddy as CEO

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Re: I'm boycotting FF too

FF is a slow behemoth these days which is a shame as it used to be my favourite. I'd rather use IE10/11 than FF but Chrome is the best (if you don't have privacy hangups) although it too is succumbing to some early middle-aged spread :)

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Re: I just want to browse the internet

But he hasn't done those things.

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I'm boycotting FF too

But only on the basis it's crap these days. And I never realised I was supposed to tell people I was boycotting it.

The Reg's desert XP-ocalypse aversion plan revealed

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Re: MSE ! @rm -rf /

Because obviously two people couldn't think you're an idiot.

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Re: Java (JRE) standalone?

Office, Chrome and I assume Libre & FF all support print-to-PDF natively.

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Re: MSE !

I'd still recommend Acrobat because my motivation isn't to show how tech-savvy I am, but to provide standard tools people will have heard of.

As for "if you were up to date you'd know firefox has a PDF renderer already built in" yeah great so does Chrome. Often, links to PDFs open directly in the browser and this is pretty great. But then sometimes they demand you download the file and I don't want to be opening local files with my browser.

Also - I am up to date. That's why I don't use FF anymore.

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I can't see why The Gimp is a standard tool to install, it's a bit specialist and not very easy to use. Paint.NET is better if you actually need something, but I doubt you do.

NotePad++ would definitely get my vote.

I'd say use MSE rather than Avast.

Surely Acrobat Reader is a requirement?

Not sure on why bother with FF and Chrome, I'd say pick one as an IE alternative personally.

AdBlock possibly makes sense but not script-blockers because it sounds like your target users will not know what's going on when pages don't work properly.

Ray-Ban to produce Google Glass data-goggs: Cool - or Tool?

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Re: I hope Glass becomes popular!

Ah yes, the smack in the face that you would never dare deliver yourself but hope to live vicariously through.

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Re: Ooooohhhh Shiny-shiny

>>No, but I do. Hope I can still get them without Glasshole circuitry.

Is this your entry for "stupid comment of 2014"?

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Re: Ooooohhhh Shiny-shiny

Pretty sure hipsters don't wear Oakley, do they?

The plot to kill Google cloud: We'll rename Windows Azure to MICROSOFT Azure

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Ah the wisdom of nerds

Little engineer wage slaves in their protected environment. Safely isolated from the rest of the world and able to pontificate about how "marketing is a waste of time" and "engineering is all that matters", totally unaware that without the marketing department they would be out of a job. Occasionally, a talented nerd will come up with an idea for a new product and bravely let go of mummy employer's hand to set up on their own, only to realise that actually building the code is only about 10% of the work needed to create and sell their software - messing about with SEO, adwords, etc.

Marketing may not be to our taste but it makes a difference. Get your heads out of your cubicles.

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Re: Money well spent

Is Bob STILL banging on about that? He's a one trick pony.

Oculus Rift? Tchah, try 'Oculus Thrift' ... You bet your vrAse we tested these bargain VR specs

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Re: Modern Victorian diablerie

I guess I "invented" this then because when I saw BBC showing Wimbledon in 3D as horizontal split-screen on regular TV, I wondered if I could get 3D by making one eye look at each half of the screen. It didn't work at all, are you saying it would've if I'd persevered?

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Re: Modern Victorian diablerie

So how does this work; does your device need to show content in a special way (e.g. left/right split-screen) or do you literally stick two lenses pointing at the same screen?

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Interesting stuff

Even if most of these are commercial flops, it's nice to see people pushing in different directions. Who knows what will suddenly take off.

Reality check: Java 8 finally catches a multi-core break

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Re: Good performance? Scalable?

It is illogical to attack a product which competes against your own with arguments which can equally well be levelled at your product by the type of uneducated person who just hears something on the web and parrots it. It increases 'awareness' of criticisms generally. It's not in MS' interest to have people talking about "how interpreted languages are slow".

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Re: Good performance? Scalable?

It's daft to call someone a MS shill for talking down Java, when the exact same ignorant arguments can be levelled at .NET (slow, interpreted, etc).

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Re: Good performance? Scalable?

>>Come back when you understand how modern JVMs work. Wikipedia hint: JIT

To be fair, it's still not as fast as C++. The JIT evangelists claim JIT should mean Java/C# runs as fast as C++ or even faster (since it can compile for the exact CPU you're using) but I have never seen this in real life. What I have seen is that the difference in speed is not a big deal. Maybe a factor of 2 rather than a factor of 10, for doing heavy computation in a tight loop.

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Nobody said it didn't support threads. But you had to create and run the threads yourself, make sure they don't fight over the same data dangerously, etc... this is the traditional model of multi-threading very similar to using threading in MFC/Win32. More modern approaches mean parallel logic can be automatically split off to threads without you having to do it, in a similar idea to how Java doesn't make you have to manage memory, but does it for you.

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Are Java lambdas similar to C#/C++ - nameless functions - or something else? How exactly does this allow automatic multi-threading where doing for(Object o : collection) doesn't? And, do C# lambdas also do automatic multithreading?

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Re: Good performance? Scalable?

So says someone who either hasn't used Java since 2000, or hasn't updated their learning since then. Java's performance is not matter for subjective opinion, it can be measured directly.

Java is not as fast as C++ for bare algorithm implementation comparison. But it is NOT "miles slower" and the difference in speed between Java and Ruby is far greater than the difference between C++ and Java.

I speak not just as a programmer, but one with experience in the world of competitive coding contests where you are given a limited time for your code to process input data and return a result, where language performance is a big deal. Rather than quoting middle-management "I read Java was slow because it's interpreted" levels of misinformation.

Microsoft DirectX 12 pushes gaming code closer to GPU bare metal

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Re: Taking on the Mantle

Well argued. People on W7 aren't going to find [m]any games require DX12 for a long long time, unless MS sponsor a few showcase titles. W8-only features WILL drive some extra uptake of the OS and there's not really a great deal of point adding new stuff to an older OS. It sends mixed messages.

As for Mantle - a vendor-specific technology is not a good plan. Even nVidia's PhysX has struggled,

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Re: Windows 7 or it will not be used

Since it supports XBox too, they will.

Also, game-tech has historically pushed the industry. And it will take time to be adopted widely so it may well be W9 before a big shift is seen - loads of people still work with DX9.

Google wearables: A solution looking for a rich nerd

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Re: What's the big deal with charging every day?

Hand-winding a watch every day may be a slight inconvenience but it takes moments and you can keep the watch on, and do it anywhere. Having to take your watch off for an hour or 3 every day is a whole other issue. You'd get use to it but it is certainly inconvenient.

New WebCL toolkit hooks browser apps into GPUs – and that's not good news for Apple

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Re: "This a big deal because now you'll be able to access everything on the web"

Yeah, but it's not. And nobody is changing that - we're still working with horrible CSS/DOM nonsense and this isn't set to change

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"This a big deal because now you'll be able to access everything on the web"

Except there is no actual reason everything needs to be done through the web in the first place. This whole idea of moving every application to a web-site is just dumb. You shoe-horn your 3D game into a browser-plugin or rework your well-designed UI to use HTML and end up with something which is less good but "hey it's in the browser".

If you need the kind of processing power that only a GPU can give, write a proper application.

Crap flap-app flap chap yaps: Yes, FLAPPY BIRD is comin' back

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If it were, he wouldn't have taken it down.

I think he maybe wants the money but hates the fame.

Virtual-reality Dev Kit 2 game goggles by Oculus – now with less vomit!

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Maybe a silly question

But why don't these have a front-mounted camera (or one per eye) or even the option to open the front, so you can a)walk around with them on b)explore the whole augmented reality thing? It would seem to add another string to the thing's bow - opening up research and non-gaming applications as well.

Google, Microsoft tackle climate change as IBM seeks cancer cure

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CC VS Cancer

It's a bit hard to prove anything you do in regard to CC has any effect since people can't even agree what CC is definitely happening, let alone what is causing it.

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"basic wireless communications to provide news"

Yeah, when I am dying of Malaria I'll be glad of WiFi.

Maybe you could tell us what YOU'RE doing to change the world before complaining other people aren't doing it right?

Star Wars movie to start shooting in UK this summer

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Re: I can't see ...

Um, it's an entire fictional universe of which we've seen a single strand of history unfurl over 30 years and you can't imagine there are untold stories? It's a pretty shabby universe if the entire potential of the Force and the Sith is exhausted in 6 films.