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* Posts by Birdulon

16 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2013

USA reverses iPhone, iPad sales ban

Birdulon
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>Apple has sued over trade dress (aka. thin rectangular devices with rounded corners and a screen of an unimportant aspect ratio), and specialised software patents that they own (virtualized slider locks, adjust distance between two fingers to adjust scale accordingly, **regardless of underlying implementations**)

FTFY.

>At best it can be about licensing terms

Then what will stop companies from infringing on FRAND patents and only licensing them once caught and summoned to court? Surely there has to be a precedent of doing the wrong thing being more costly when caught. Should fines for fare evasion be capped at the cost of a ticket?

That aside, at the very least, interest for all the retroactive licensing and the plaintiff's court fees be added onto the licensing cost or the violator will come out on top even when ruled against.

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Birdulon
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Meh

Re: both companies

I know the first one is obviously Apple, but who's the other one? The US Patent Office? The USITC? The Obama Administration?

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US Republican enviro-vets: 'Climate change is real. Deal with it'

Birdulon
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Joke

Re: our children and grand-children die.

So ¾ of the outcomes are our descendants being immortal then?

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Windows 8.1: So it's, er, half-speed ahead for Microsoft's Plan A

Birdulon
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Joke

Re: If car manufacturers were to do the same...

I don't think the fullscreen music player app would pass safety regulations.

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Windows 8.1 start button appears as Microsoft's Blue wave breaks

Birdulon
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Well I only really boot into W8 when I want to play certain games, and whenever I try to do anything outside of that narrow use-case I inexplicably end up cursing things. I managed to remove quite a few of the annoyances by using ClassicShell to circumvent most of TIFKAM, but it still manages to surprise me with things like borderless windows being the wrong size, setting my 1440p monitors to 1080p and my portrait monitor back to landscape when I unplug the fourth screen for whatever reason, and all sorts of other nuisances that make me question its worth and refuse to recommend it to anyone.

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Birdulon
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Facepalm

Re: I wanna shutdown ? .. hit Start...no, I said shutdown

>Not difficult.

Who said it was? The argument here is that it's unintuitive because most people don't associate the action of shutting a computer down with "settings" or a gear icon. Also that the vast majority of windows users are used to shutdown being located in the bottom left corner, and 2/3 of the non-standard screen edges for the taskbar have it in the top left corner, and all of a sudden it's on the right edge of the screen for no real reason.

I noticed that there's some instructionals over at the MS website, but they want me to install Silverlight to view them so I'll just have to give it a miss and ask why they don't come with the OS, to be presented in the help center to anyone who thinks to look there before giving hits to rival search engines. And really, isn't having to read a manual or hit up google to learn how to do basic tasks the sort of FUD that gets pinned on Linux?

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Birdulon
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Meh

Re: I wanna shutdown ? .. hit Start...no, I said shutdown

You mean the "Move your mouse into any corner" short animation? Yes, I distinctly remember it telling me to go to "settings" to turn off my computer. Or are you referring to a newer, more informative introduction video?

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Birdulon
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Windows

Re: I wanna shutdown ? .. hit Start...no, I said shutdown

Yes, much more confusing than the new "move your mouse to the invisible zone on the right edge of a screen, then click Settings..."

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Birdulon
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Meh

Re: wjhat makes me laugh...

>1. Boot up in under 12 secs. (With ssd)

I've found that both 7 and 8 are quite fast to get to the desktop when installed on an SSD. Shame it takes a minute or so for anything else to work.

>5. 2 click access to device manager, uninstall programs, control panel, System, and so much more.

Hey just like on my (ClassicShell) Start Menu!

>8. Far superior unified search.

It's *still* embarrassingly bad compared to the OS X and Linux offerings. Admittedly it was particularly awful in Vista and 7.

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REVEALED: The gizmo leaker Snowden used to smuggle out NSA files

Birdulon
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Re: El Reg's commentard communities reaction is 'How To Secure Your System'.

There's enough articles on the ethics of PRISM, even on this site alone. If you had read this article you'd note that it's on the method the whistleblower used to smuggle out sensitive data, so of course the bloody comments are going to be about that. If you want to find commentard backlash against PRISM you don't need to look far at all, but it all gets samey after a while.

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What do you mean WHY is Sony PS4 so pricey in Oz?

Birdulon
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WTF?

Re: Greed

The crossbone is 25% more expensive than the PS4 in the states, but in Australia it's less than 10% more expensive than the PS4. That dealbreaking $100USD difference is instead a mere $50AUD difference. It's all a bit silly really. Hope the rumours about the PS4 being region-free are true.

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AMD announces 'world's first commercially available 5GHz CPU'

Birdulon
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Re: "the world's first commercially available 5GHz CPU,"

>I look forward to seeing Intel's response, finally we might see the CPU finally hotting up again.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/report-intel-haswell-processors-prone-to-overheating/ Wish granted :)

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Sony sucker-punches Xbox on price, specs, DRM-free gaming

Birdulon
Angel

Blast from the Past

It's like E3 1995 all over again. SEGA kick off with pricing for the Saturn, a new Genesis edition is quietly released, and Sony steals the show undercutting them by $100 with a much more appealing lineup to boot. I wonder if next year's E3 will be a repeat of '96 with Sony dropping the price of the PS4 even further?

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Birdulon
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Re: Pricing FAIL

I hear it's not region-locked. If this is true I may end up importing one later on as the local pricing is just ridiculous.

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Chrome and Firefox are planet-wreckers, IE cuddles dolphins

Birdulon
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Linux

Re: So what's the reason for this

From what I've seen, Firefox does this (excess wakeups) a lot on Android and Linux. Not so much on Windows though. I wish that discrepancy would get sorted out (hopefully by fixing the Linux builds and not breaking the Windows ones)

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Birdulon

Methodology

> Baseline: No browsers or other windows open

It is my understanding that Internet Explorer is so tightly integrated into Windows that parts of it are always running, which is often brought up in cold start comparisons between browsers. If this is the case then it would imply part of Internet Explorer's resource usage is included in the baseline. Perhaps further tests should be conducted with all three browsers open at the same time, and only one visiting a site at any given time?

>In addition, at the request of Microsoft we set the JavaScript timer frequency to “conserve power” in

the Windows power options. We found, however, that the default Javascript time frequency for all

computers tested was set to “maximum performance.” We did not investigate the impact of this setting

upon browser power draw.

I have to wonder if Firefox and Chrome use this system setting. It seems odd that they wouldn't run another set of tests at the default setting if nothing else.

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