Re: That bloody bookshelf
Or, you know, let ME kill it.
I wouldn't even mind if it it reappeared after each OS update, as long as I could delete it. Same with the 'default' apps iOS ships with these days which you can't get rid of.
Posts by Ben Holmes
257 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jul 2007
Apple designer Sir Jony Ive holding up iOS 7 development: Report
UK.gov's love affair with ID cards: Curse or farce?
Quid-a-day nosh challenge hack forms foraging party
PEAK iPHONE? Apple mobe growth slumps to ‘lowest in its history’
Friday 26th April 2013 13:15 GMT 
Neil Mawston is clearly a pillock
What Apple actually need to do, IMHO, as actually release a product that's actually an innovative repackaging of an existing concept again. The iPhone? Not the first smartphone. But well designed, well marketed, and ultimately desirable. Same for the iPad.
Or, you know, they could release something that is genuinely innovative. I fear they're going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory if this trend of incremental upgrade bullshit that they peddled out between iPhones 4, 4S and 5 continues. And that won't be good for anyone. Not even the 'droids. Because as the Android dominance continues, manufacturers will get lazy. It happened with Microsoft and Windows. it will happen again with the Android peddlers. We need competition to keep the market fresh.
And would it kill Apple to give iOS a facelift? Seriously?
But then, what do I know? I'm not a Strategy Analytics analyst. I'm just a consumer who knows what he wants.
Master Beats: Why doesn't audio quality matter these days?
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO: NASA rovers scrawl giant willy on Mars
The Reg puts Vulture inside the Large Hadron Collider
Manual override: Raspberry Pi beginners' books
Is UK web speech regulated? No.10: Er. We’ll get back to you
Tuesday 19th March 2013 13:39 GMT
Re: Oh dear. Here we go again.
Yes, we all saw how well those anti-terror laws worked out for Paul Chambers, didn't we? Common sense prevailed in the end but my god he had to work for it.
FWIW, I don't condone what he said - it was a stupid, crass, knee-jerk comment. But he didn't deserve the stupidity shitstorm which landed on him as a result.
Tuesday 19th March 2013 13:23 GMT
Re: Pile of c**p being disseminated by the media
I am baffled why you have been downvoted for this, Chris. It is exactly the case that a few individuals have ruined the existing status quo for the vast majority of sensible, law-abiding publications whether big or small.
The real question is why these select few publications got away with it for so long. The answer to that question has never been 'lack of legislation' - moreover the existing legislation has not been applied. And that is the biggest WTF about the whole sordid affair.
Apple tears itself away from iThings to squash Mac OS X bugs
Friday 15th March 2013 23:07 GMT
Re: the imac audio stutter fix is long overdue
Ooh very nice. I started out with the Edirol UA-5, which was a brilliantly solid bit of kit, although a bit on the small scale. Work with a M-Audio Fast Track Uktra these days - although it certainly lacks the joyful robustness of the Edirol kit!
P.s. silly Core Audio...
Ten serious sci-fi films for the sentient fan
Amazon yanks SimCity download from store
Friday 8th March 2013 12:08 GMT
@OliverJ
I think this is the point. Client-Server works exceptionally well as a business model when:
A) The application is a distributed business app, possibly bespoke, serving a specific set of needs.
B) Is not architected, developed, and deployed by a bunch of numpties.
C) Is not a 'single player game'.
I think C is the most important point here. There is absolutely zero need for something that is ostensibly a single player game with a multi-player element (which you're not even forced to look at) to be using such an architecture. EA / Maxis say that this thing is about the epic number crunching the servers do in the background. Bullshit. If the average home PC these days is capable of searching the night sky for habitable planets in it's spare time, then it can cope with some complex number crunching. That's why we have multi-core architectures. that's why we have bucketloads of RAM.
If this was about DRM, then what the hell is the point in Origin? This is about control, and built in obsolescence.
For the record, I was absolutely 100% going to go out and buy this, because I love SimCity. Happily, I didn't pre-order, so will be voting with my wallet.
Red Hat tempts devs with OpenShift Origin upgrades
Friday 8th March 2013 10:57 GMT 
Good stuff
I've been using it for a little while, and I really like OpenShift. It's really simplified a lot of the bread and butter work that goes into deploying applications in stable, scalable, and above all, maintainable manner. I'm only using it for personal projects at the moment, but I can see how it would be really useful for all types of projects, ranging from the personal like mine, right up to the enterprise level.
Big thumbs up.
SpaceX Dragon eventually snared by ISS
It's the Peer 2.0: Martha Lane Fox now a crossbench baroness
Ubuntu? Fedora? Mint? Debian? We'll find you the right Linux to swallow
Monday 18th February 2013 13:58 GMT
@Chemist
And THAT'S the problem. It might not be the case any more, and as a Mint user, I wholeheartedly agree that using the terminal can improve your experience. But the perception amongst the wider user community (i.e. Not Linux Users) is that Linux is still defined by the terminal, and that's an obstacle that the Linux community isn't really helping to overcome.
Honestly I think at this stage Canonical need to start running TV ads or something, and make this point in big shiny capital letters. Because Ubuntu is the closest thing we have to a household name at this point.
Tracy brothers are back: Thunderbirds Are Go! again in 5... 4... 3...
Tuesday 5th February 2013 16:13 GMT
I can't be the only person who would love to see a 'proper' adult version of Thunderbirds made. In the sense that it would be Christopher Nolan's 'Batman Begins' to the camp antics of the original Batman TV series. I'd watch that.
None of this 'appealing to children' rubbish. Give me a decent film, and please, try not to fsck it up.
Chinese Apple pirate Kuaiyong sets sail for rest of WORLD
Apple releases iOS 6.1, adds LTE carriers, tweaks security
Star Trek saviour JJ Abrams joins the dark side: Star Wars VII
Monday 28th January 2013 13:24 GMT
It can't just be me...
...who is happy that someone is making a mainstream sci-fi film? There are so precious few of them made these days.
I thoroughly enjoyed ST when I was younger, and thought that JJA did the right thing by opening up the franchise to a wider audience. Did it appeal to everyone? No. But it brushed the cobwebs off an otherwise dead franchise, revered only in the minds of an ever-dwindling fanbase. It was fun, it was entertaining, it had the requisite amount of explosions, and it had a half decent plot. Which as far as I'm concerned is all I really need from any film, let alone a ST film.
Let's just hope that JJ can do the same with the piss-poor wreckage of Star Wars that George 'I haven't had a good idea in years' Lucas has left him.
Shiny, shiny! The window's behind me...
Asteroid-mining 'FireFlys' will be ready for action by 2015, vows space firm
Raytheon to build low-orbit, disposable satellites for DARPA
India gets paranoid about foreign tech
Sheffield ISP: You don't need a whole IPv4 address to yourself, right?
Potty-mouthed Watson supercomputer needed filth filter
Google turns off Chinese censorship alert service
Microsoft 'surprised' by Google Gmail 'winter cleaning'
2012: A generation-spanning year for gaming
Schmidt 'very proud' of Google's tiny tax bill: 'It's called capitalism'
China plans astro-farms on Mars
Oprah Winfrey too late to save Microsoft's Windows 8
Apple said to have let the name of the next OS X cat out of the bag
Revealed! Prime Minister's iPad 'dashboard' for controlling Britain
Classic game 'Elite' returns … on Kickstarter
Mmm, what's that smell: Coffee or sweat? How to avoid a crap IT job
Fans' loyalty questioned as iPhone popularity plummets
Wednesday 31st October 2012 14:00 GMT
As the owner of a relatively new iPhone 4S, I like my phone. Granted, I don't really want to anything more complicated than send a few text messages, make a few phone calls, and occasionally read a few emails, but what it does, it does well. The hardware is pretty good. Extortionately expensive for what it is, but pretty good.
But what really pains me about the whole Apple / iOS 'experience', is iOS itself. The bloody thing looks basically the same as it did 6 iterations ago. OK, the corners of the icons are probably slightly more round, but fundamentally nothing much has changed. In my eyes, it's like firing up a brand-spranking new laptop with the most powerful internals around, and finding its running Windows 3.1. Compare it with 6 iterations of Mac OS X and it's obvious where the development efforts have been.
Please Apple, go away and have a play with iOS. Make it look and feel a little less 2007, and then come back to us.
Vote NOW for the vilest Bond villain
Red Hat stalks VMware in field sport ambush
Red Hat launches community contest to rename JBoss
Thursday 4th October 2012 11:59 GMT
I'll just leave this here...
These are the Cubans, baby. This is the Cohibas, the Montecristos. This is a kinetic-kill, side-winder vehicle with a secondary cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine RDX burst. It's capable of busting a bunker under the bunker you just busted. If it were any smarter, it'd write a book, a book that would make Ulysses look like it was written in crayon. It would read it to you. This is my Eiffel Tower. This is my Rachmaninoff's Third. My Pieta. It's completely elegant, it's bafflingly beautiful, and it's capable of reducing the population of any standing structure to zero. I call it "The Ex-Wife."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
