Re: BBQ Sauce

I'm definitely HP over BBQ, but I'll let it pass as I agree on the rest.

All this talk of no butter is just madness; the butter goes on cold bread and is melted by the bacon.

Or, you know, don't say anything you wouldn't say to someone's face in public (i.e., with witnesses).

And it's also worth remembering that sarcasm/irony/etc. are difficult to express through text - especially when u dnt spl prply

They're aiming for understanding more of our solar system and what was/is in it with the goal of expanding our tiny biological accident of a species on to other planet(s) before it's too late.

Re: *If* I can download to multiple devices, what's the problem?

The new DRM is just to encrypt the local app download to the current device. You'll still be able to download to extra devices and future ones.

Re: "Hmm... Another indication of which OS is preferred by The Best and the Brightest™"

The screenshots I've seen (possibly not from those laptops, however) are not OSX, so possibly they're just using the hardware.

Re: Gmail will eventually lock-in its users to Google+

"spamming G+ users with weekly emails"

Hmm... I'm not getting those. Am I missing out?

Re: I wonder..

I doubt they will. Right now you can have a G+ account associated to any email address (in fact, if you've registered with any G service you probably have a G+ account waiting). But, and this is quite important to a lot of people, you do have the option to disable G+ from within your account settings.

Unless Google became the dominant social network and decided they could abuse such trust, I can't see them changing this.

Incidentally, you can also download all of your Google data (not just G+) from the same settings.

(need a tinfoil-hat icon)

Re: I wonder why...

Don't get too enthused: he's clearly incorporating an entirely new set of substories alongside the main Hobbit one, so how much of each he uses is unclear.

I think six hours would be enough to do The Hobbit a lot of justice, but nine hours means he's planning a lot of new material.

Re: Hmmm....

And that's not even going in to their online services.

I'm a G+ fan, but the number of different interfaces for uploading photos is bordering on insanity. The worst part is that you can tag a person using some ways but not others, so you have to remember how to share the photo.

That said, the chocolate factory is pretty good at reacting to users' opinions (especially if you get a "celebrity" to say it publicly.

Re: Hmm

You've summed up my thoughts on why OSX (and IOS, and Android, etc.) bundle so much non-OS stuff as an OS upgrade.

I'm sure there are upgraded OS features in here, but what's the technical limitation on not having all the Notes, etc., things available as individual software upgrades?

Being such a minor incremental update, my point might not sound so relevant here.

Re: Not quite

Understood, but Dragon got a lot closer without any issues than Progress did ;)

I don't think it will be long before Musk & Co. have a fully automated docking vehicle, given their progress to date.

Re: Was interested in this..

I made this mistake with StarCraft ][ and find it almost unplayable with the current level of DRM. The Blizzard servers just seem so slow to authenticate me, and I lost connection mid-game (and thus progress) enough times for me to just give up.

I should have just pirated it.

Re: android syncs across devices?

What exactly happens for you? Assuming you have your Google account registered on your phone (Settings > Accounts) and marked to background sync, anything you add to the calendar for that account should be "instantly" available in your online Google Calendar and any other Google-powered devices.

I've had this across three Android devices for years and have aways found it to be completely hassle free.

I'm not saying it works 100% of the time, but I've not head before of it not working at all...

I'm looking forward to Google Music coming to the UK, to complete the multimedia cloud experience on Android.

Re: Great idea!

USB-powered printers and monitors (good ones, that is). Boom! Only one PSU under my desk.

Re: I smell BS

I think that's where his "replacing my laptop and iPad" comment came in: Win8 desktop for enterprise (laptop) usage and Metro for lighter iPad-esque usage.

I've only played with Win8 on a desktop, but I could see how Metro would work well for a touch-based interface.

I'll stick with my Transformer and ThinkPad, though. I don't want to mix personal and business usages and accounts.

Re: Fixed with a fracking start icon

Massively agree.

I tried Win8 preview and really didn't care about Metro except that it replaces the quick-to-use orb. While I might eventually get used to the Metro way of doing everything, why do I want to see a bunch of widgets every time I want to run an application?

@AC: "full" Win8 is just Win7 with Metro; I think you're talking about Win8 RT (or Windows on ARM), which only runs Metro applications.

Re: 'Most issues solved years ago'

It'll sound cliche, but Opera Mail also uses tabs.

I use Thunderbird at home and can't say that there's anything major that I think is missing and it's been stable for me for years. This sounds like a sensible solution, as long as they are committed to fixing any discovered security issues.

Re: Hello? Anyone there?

What's that? Oh, sorry. Yep, I use Opera Mobile on my Sensation, but I've found the vanilla Browser is better on my Transformer.

I'll just go and do some flagellation to cleanse myself.

I'll give you another high horse: I'm in SE5 (zone 2) and don't even have Infinity, with no plans to get it.

I had a discussion with BTCare on Twitter yesterday about the fact that they've been telling me that it's three months away for two years now. On Monday it was 30th June, yesterday 30th September.

Go figure.

My friend in Scarborough is expecting his connection in the next week. I'm not saying that Londoners should get everything first, but the infrastructure cost must be lower in a city.

I'm with skelband. I don't know whether Assange is delusional or actual being persecuted by mysterious forces, but I thought he got a reasonably fair hearing (though, I did get his lawyer's point about the Vienna Convention).

As my post history will show, I think he should go back to Sweden to face those charges, but if that was used to then get him to the USA it would be an international incident.

Can we replace the black helicopter icon with Assange?

Re: Microsoft has worked hard to up the hype this launch.

"the devices brought its software to the surface for users"

I threw up a little

Re: We can negotiate for a lower tax bill!?

I think the rule is that you have to owe A LOT of tax. So consider refusing to pay for a few years and then writing to HMRC.

Equality for all.

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

We can trust that the system will be infallible and produce no false-positives.

You say that

but using word processing software (like MS Word) and knowing how to word process are two different things.

As a very simple rule of thumb, turning on special characters and seeing a ton of spaces used to indent or align is a good example of someone who has "picked this up" and either ignored or been ignored in how to do it properly.

/bugbear

I can't tell whether you're espousing this as a good idea or not.

Personally, I can't see how that solution could be tenable. Ignoring the fact there's nothing wrong with being held accountable for your own words/decisions (assuming people give up with the idea that changing your mind is somehow wrong), this would be the death-knell for FOSS, as it would require all email clients to implement and circumventing DRM when you have access to the result is trivial.

Re: I can understand no argument against doing more research

@Tom 13

Ad hominems aside, let's assume that the paper discussed in the article is correct and we're decades away from an irreversible climate problem, which we were unaware of because you spent half your research budget on AV software: how long do you get to enjoy editing your anti-asteroid footage before you run out of food?

In case my stance wasn't clear: I'm pro-understanding what we as a species are doing to our planet and how it will affect us in the future (and if we can do something to improve our time here).

If the option was to spend the money terraforming Mars or building a space ark, I'd be all for it: eggs and baskets, etc. But we only have one planet and one ecosystem.

Re: "If you are driving too fast in the rain towards a brick wall and you MIGHT hit the brick wall"

Nice strawman argument, but why swerve when you can just slow the car down and turn on your headlights?

And population control doesn't require death camps, just education. I doubt it'll happen in my lifetime (at least, not a world scale), but that doesn't mean it isn't a good idea in principle.

Re: I like the sound of the homebrew...

@Sirius Lee

I completely agree with you, we don't *know* what will happen, but we can come up with hypotheses on what *might* happen. Of all the ones I've seen, "nothing" is the most optimistic and "global warming/destruction of a large part of the ecosystem" is the most pessimistic.

I completely agree that the agenda (any of them) has been stolen by the political, economic, and "green" lobbies in order to further their goal, but that doesn't disprove the science (but obviously should cast doubt over some of the findings).

Whatever the "truth" is, I can understand no argument against doing more research (hopefully unbiased) and suggesting ways to reduce our impact on our environment - we rely on the whole ecosystem and we are clearly "straining" (possibly a poor word choice) it in a way it probably has never been before.

We live in a fine balance between ice age and global warming, either of which will have a devastating effect on our species. And we're definitely not in control of what happens in a geological time-scale sense, but maybe we have some ability to control it in the short term?

Re: A question . . .

I was going to say something similar; why would you allow a SELECT against the password column (hashed and salted or otherwise) that isn't limited to returning 1 record?

That aside, my Last.fm password isn't complex because I really couldn't care less if someone got in and liked some random songs.

+1 to them for preempting; let's hope they fix the hole now.

Re: Really AMD?

No excuse, apart from one: have you ever tried to use Windows (even Win7), which these laptops almost certainly are bundled with, on high DPI displays?

Maybe it's just me, but when I have my large display with the "make text larger or smaller" setting (DPI scaling) anything other than 100%, there are so randomly clipped regions going on it's almost unusable. I've had scrollbars in Explorer span out of the window and Chrome, Opera, and Firefox all seem to screw up their default stylings.

You can disable scaling on a per application basis, but then you're left squinting at the ones that don't supply in-app scaling.

The reason it works for iOS and Android is that interfaces are built to reference the areas of the screen they want to use in a relative way, whereas Windows applications tend to have been built historically on a pixel basis.