* Posts by Mike Hanna

123 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Mar 2009

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iCloud Communications sues Apple for 'irreparable injury' to trademark

Mike Hanna
FAIL

Money is not enough!

"Monetary relief alone is inadequate to fully address the irreparable injury that Apple’s illegal actions have caused and will continue to cause to iCloud Communications if this court does not enjoin Apple. iCloud Communications is, therefore, entitled to preliminary and permanent injunctive relief to stop Apple’s unfair competition."

Sounds like they want to be bought out and become part of Apple just so they shut up. Hands up who thinks Apple will stop calling their product iCloud?

World Health Organization: Mobile phone cancer risk 'possible'

Mike Hanna

@FatsBrannigan

Hey! Who said you could come in here using proper facts!

The Daily Mail says we're all going to die of cancer due to phones, so we should point out that eating pickled onions is going to kill them too.

Mike Hanna

Lawsuits

Ok, so when companies run risk comparisons to show whether they should follow one course of action or not, they take the number of possible occurances should they make the wrong choice, and the potential cost per case in court. 4 billion people have mobile phones? This is a guestimate. 4 billion * cost per death-law-suit-after-incorrect-info = bankrupt WHO / UN.

So are they going to even chance the fact that they've got it the slightest bit wrong? No, they're going to err on the side of litigation and say that it COULD possibly be the tiniest bit cancerous.

CaseBuddy case-friendly iPhone dock

Mike Hanna
FAIL

55%

It falls apart every time you use it and it still gets a score of 55%? How crap / infuriating / money-stealing does a gadget have to be to get below 50%?!

CEOP announces 'record results' in child protection battle

Mike Hanna
Childcatcher

Clarification required

Hmm. I send a question to CEOP on their website asking how many of those arrested were charged and found guilty of those crimes, and what the comparison was with past figures. I got the automated reply below, that says my details, not my query, have been sent to CEOP - should I expect a visit / inclusion in the next number of arrests?

Contact us

Thank you. Your details have been sent to CEOP Centre.

UK.gov would pay to have benefit claimants' tattoos erased

Mike Hanna

I have a tattoo

Some Jeremy Kyle starring muppet gets a tattoo saying "I luve Shazza and she luvs me" across his forehead just before she divorces him can now get that tattoo removed whilst treating himself to free internet access at the local job centre. Great.

Star Wars: From dream sci-fi bride to perfect Blu-ray wife

Mike Hanna

@NightFox

Haha

Sworking again

Robotic waiter service uses Kinect to see

Mike Hanna

FULLY programmable?

I, for one, welcome our new Kinect-enabled overlords, shirley destined for greater things than mere nutrition conveyance and panoramic depictions...

Multimillionaire's private space ship 'can land on Mars'

Mike Hanna
Thumb Up

I love...

...that it looks like a Star Wars escape pod

TalkTalk claims wooden spoon for highest level of broadband gripes

Mike Hanna

@TeeCee

Call it an iMedal and everyone will want one

Nintendo notches up record sales for 3DS

Mike Hanna

No headaches...

...but when the best 3D effect on display is when you press the home button and the game fades back behind the menu screen, it kinda makes you think "What's the point?" My 9 year old son loves it though.

Nintendo 3DS launch games

Mike Hanna
Thumb Up

@ Simon King

I don't know if the thumbs is for my post, or the 3DS, or the iOS version with no buttons... Perhaps you're a fanboi who can't see fault with iOS devices and think that any version on an iPhone is better than any version created ever cos it's magical and revolutionary

But actually, in part, yes - do additional buttons, real or not, provide something better than the iOS version delivers?

Does the new stick thing or D-pad on the 3DS work better than the iPhone screen? They'd provide more feedback because you would know it was being pushed and the character would be doing something, rather than mashing at the screen with sausage thumbs like I do and get annoyed when Ryu's not chucking out a fireball across my iPhone screen cos my thumb's momentarily in the wrong place.

Perhaps the graphics are better, but I doubt it looking at the 3DS screen shots.

There's loads of extra characters in the 3DS version, so does that add to replayability over the iOS version?

Loads of different fighting backgrounds. How is the bottom screen used? What different, and I assume more, game modes are there... Bear in mind that the comparison is between a version of a game designed to be played on a gaming system, not a version of a game to be played on a phone that also plays games.

All of these things add up to value-for-money. All these things considered, is it 10 times better than the iOS version? If it isn't 10 times better then parents like me should perhaps think of getting an iPod for a Christmas present for our fledglings instead of the latest mobile gaming hardware

Mike Hanna

Not exactly a fair comparison

Angry Birds will probably turn up on the Nintendo 3DS Markeyplace 1-click App store, or whatever has been created / re-vamped. Perhaps a better comparison would be iPhone Street Fighter @ £3 and 3DS Street Fighter @ £30 (on Amazon). Is it 10 times better in 3D with the added functionality the Nintendo hardware brings?

Mike Hanna

Just three games

What about Lego Star Wars?

120 Underground Wi-Fi hotspots will erupt in 2012

Mike Hanna

Phone Use in the Tube

There's a contract been agreed for this now, as Huawei are going to be installing antennas that provide seperate coverage for each of the four main mobile companies. And not just for the platforms, but on the trains as well, as far as I understand.

Channel Islands VAT loophole shut, petrol prices cut

Mike Hanna

Really?

Really? It's not market driven? Howcome then, all petrol stations don't charge the same amount? Petrolprices.com shows a differences of 20p in the price of a litre! It's not a regulated price, it is just affected by the price of oil.

Which the Governement is happy with cos they get all that additional tax, which is a percentage, not a set rate, as far as I can work out from the website.

Mike Hanna

(untitled)

A fucking penny?! And that's IF the franchise managers who run the petrol pumps actually take the penny off at all. Perhaps the useless cnut should think about regulating fuel charging so we all get a fair deal

@DrXym - Great point. So the fuel companies can pay the £2Bn to the government, and then put a penny back on everything, not just the fuel they sell on forecourts. And each of those pennies will be doubled by all the different taxes that the governement put on fuel. So Osbourne looks like he's doing something good, only to rake back even more into the HMRC. Perhaps he does have an idea of economics afterall, at least when it concerns double dealing. Doesn't make him any less of a cnut.

Mike Hanna

He's a cnut

"He said he would introduce a "fair fuel stabiliser" by taxing oil companies to the tune of £2bn in tax."

And how the fuck does he expect oil companies will get that money back? He's a useless cnut with no idea of economics...

Online world maps rub jubs against todgers

Mike Hanna

Phew...

Glad I come from Northern Ireland, not the Republic...

Tribunal rules Digifone paid bung for Irish GSM licence

Mike Hanna

No-one wants the money?

I'll have it! I can think of loads of things to spend £147k on that could be telecoms related...

4G: What does the auction mean for the incumbents?

Mike Hanna

Hmmm

Perhaps four of us on these boards should all bid £2...

Ubisoft reveals rock game with REAL guitars

Mike Hanna

This game teaches you

Think it will teach you how to properly tune a guitar before you play? Or will loads of people holdin their fingers in the right places be getting low scores and doing a Clash and smashing their axe off the TV

PS3, Xbox 360 pass water on Wii

Mike Hanna

"PS3, Xbox 360 pass water on Wii"

Really? They pissed on the Wii whichsold more? Perhaps my English or Maths skills are failing me by 17m units by the Wii is more than 14m units for the PS3 and more than the 12m unit for the 360, and the Wii continues to piss on the other two.

Hasn't the Wii hit saturation level yet?

How languages can live together without killing each other

Mike Hanna

Welsh Vs English

I'm sure all the Sheep Botherers in North Wales would argue the point over Welsh being a dead language

Apple, RIM profit from Euro smartphone shift

Mike Hanna

Hmmm

Does a touchscreen make a phone smart? I have a BlackBerry, which some people would call a smartphone. But it's 2G and the only thing it's good for is emails. And GPS, although the maps look they've ben drawn by a monkey with a nervous disposition. What makes a phone smart?

BT fibre-to-the-premises trial takes 7 hours per install

Mike Hanna
Grenade

What a surprise...

"BT has committed huge man hours to the project, while its main rival Virgin Media says it sees "no compelling reason why" it should heavily invest in FTTP at this time."

Especially not when it can wait 18 months then complain to OfCom (or whatever replaces it) that BT has a Monopoly on FTTP, using skill-sets and everything else it earned from the Post Office sell-out, and how they should be able to use that infrastructure for free.

But yes please, like most people I'll sign off the wayleave so that BT can put one of the gren cabinets in my front garden, and I'll not only provide tea and biscuits, but coffee too for the more cosmopolitan engineers, and enough bacon butties to see them through their seven hour shift installing to my house.

ECJ gender ruling 'could throw insurance into turmoil'

Mike Hanna

Men might claim money back?

Really? Call me cynical, but it's likely that women's preumium will rise to match men's rather than the other way around.

Woman sentenced for breaching former employer's PCs

Mike Hanna

Not the value of 1's and 0's

It's the financial impact of what she has done with those 1's and 0's

Man found guilty of battery after ejaculating in co-worker's drink

Mike Hanna

Perhaps they turned up a year too late!

"Tiffany apparently burst into tears after a verdict, prompting a sherriff's deputy to bring her tissues"

Hahahahaha!

iTunes privacy hole shares library content with world+dog

Mike Hanna

Relax! Relax!

So the fact that I've got the Justin Beiber back catalogue downladed from iTunes isn't actually available to everyone to see? Thank Christ for that...

Who needs 600 friends when you're a bride of Christ?

Mike Hanna

Hypocrisy

Did the iPenance App get a papal thumbs up a few weeks ago? So iPhones are good, but FB is bad...

Rugged-phone maker claims world's longest talk time

Mike Hanna

@AC

"The only problem is that if you are stuck that far from the beaten path, there may not be any GPS signal anyway."

So far off the beaten track that you can't see the sky? That's called pot-holing...

Steve Jobs unveils 30% subs model for ... everything

Mike Hanna

Shopkeepers

How much mark-up do newsagents and Tesco and everyone else who sell magazines make? 30% is aqbout the going rate, isn't it?

iPhone owners get walked through confessional

Mike Hanna

Really?

No Jesus Phone comments yet?

More privacy for the Queen, less for everyone else

Mike Hanna

So the NHS Confidential...

...isn't going to be?

Sony Ericsson sues over Clearwire swirl

Mike Hanna

Really?

Shirley Ocado should be more pissed off than Sony Ericsson?

Nine per cent of gamer kids are 'addicted'

Mike Hanna
FAIL

My son is a gamer

He's about to turn nine and we have a PS3, a Wii, he's got a DSi, and for Christmas he got an iPod touch, which he uses constantly for gaming. He wakes up at 6.30 and either switches on his iPod or DS. When he gets home from school and finishes his homework he amuses himself until dinner time on one or the other again, and perhaps after dinner might play on the Wii or PS3. So almost constantly gaming then. Addicted? He gets a 3-second strop when I tell him to put his iPod down when dinner is ready.

It's all sh1t at the end of the day, but it's temporary sh1t. My brother is still a hardcore gamer even though he's engaged, has a kid, and a proper job and rent to pay. His partner is also a gamer and they have a great relationship and speak to each other face-to-face, not over XBox headsets. They don't game as much as they used to, cos other priorities in life take over.

Do I worry about how long my son plays games? No. Why not? Cos it's too cold and dark for him to go out playing with his mates. And cos as well as mind-numbing games like Jailbreaker, he came and sat with me to have the intracacies of chess explained to him as he played a new game he'd asked to have downloaded onto his iPod. And surely there's an arguement that Angry Birds subconsciously teachs the laws of physics, Newton's Laws of Motion and all that stuff. :)

Should the study be "1 in 9 students get addicted to Stuff"? Gaming is just the element that is easy for them to latch on to. If they didn't have games it would most likely be something else where they could seclude themselves in a darkened room going through their stamp collection or Panini sticker book, or Bakugan / Pokemon / Yu-Gi-Oh sh1t. Or perhaps "1 in 9 students' parents don't care enough about what they are doing to help control it" would do it better.

4G networks can screw up cable TV

Mike Hanna
WTF?

Cable viewers, please note

Don't sit less than a metre from the big screen TV you've got when on the blower. Simples.

Apple 4 Verizon. True

Mike Hanna
Go

3G mobile hotspot

I love that idea? When can I get that from O2 in the UK?

Apple refuses frozen iPhone repair

Mike Hanna

Really?

"I'm not going to sell to you cos it's too cold in your native country." Isn't that racist?

"You damned Eskimoes aren't allowed iPhones? Want an iPad and live in Africa? Stuff you!"

I'm kinda thinking that would be more of a PR-disaster than pointing out the working conditions when one goes wrong on a rare occasion. Temperatures in Manchester and Belfast both dropped to record lows, and my missus and I have had no problems.

Grand jury meets to decide fate of WikiLeaks founder

Mike Hanna

Death Penalty

Do they have the death penalty in Sweden?

Apple iPhone 4 vs... the rest

Mike Hanna

iPhone is the benchmark?

How come in the scores at the bottom it gets 75%, joint bottom of the pile of those reviewed...

Call of Duty DDoS attack police arrest teen

Mike Hanna
Coffee/keyboard

Beswick

Knowing how much of a shit hole Beswick is, if I lived there I'd be doing all I could to get into prison as well...

EU telecoms to Apple, Google: 'Pay up!"

Mike Hanna

Really?

I don't know if your whole post is a joke, but seeing as you haven't used a joke logo I'll take it at face value.

tangerine sedge said: "The freetard users are also to blame, demanding full access to unlimited content!"

That's the (not actually) unlimited content that these supposed freetards actually pay for the benefit of using in monthly fees. If I pay for it I am not a freetard, and if I'm limited to how much I can download it's not unlimited. I pay a subscription that was advertised as unlimited and now it's my fault that I use as much as I want? You, sir, are a tit. If I buy a tin of baked beans from Tesco, and actually only half of the beans are in the tin when I open it, should I be grateful that Tesco have shafted me?

tangerine also said: "The freetard corporations are the real greedy bastards though - using the internet as massive free shop window (hey why invest in bricks and mortar, when we can piggy back on somebody elses infrastructure). Why should a TV company invest in transmitters or content or licenses, when it can use the internet and get people to provide free content (copyrighted or not) - see youtube for more details."

O2, Voda, T-Mobile et al advertise their products as opening us up to the internet, having constant communication at our finger tips. That content is a tool that they use to show how good their services are, so they cannot complain when we actually use it. Using the analogy above it's like Tesco complaining that I actually ate the half-tin of bins that they gave me, after I had paid for a full tin.

A TV production company may not pay for the transmitters or broadcast time over them, etc, however TV-transmitting companies need decent content or people will not watch them - though that does not explain the existence of Easterneders, Corrie, Emmerdale FARM etc) - and thus they will not earn advertising revenue. As good as the YouTube infrastructure may be, I think you overestimate its' value where a TV company (other than a start-up who ultimately wants to get on TV or into films) would put their top-grade programmes on YouTube on their first airing. For now, I can't imagine Band of Brothers, 24 or something of that stature appearing on first on YouTube.

Mike Hanna

Not exactly...

I think that's the money left over from the Digital SwitchOver works, and I wouldn't have through that too much came from the BBC / License Fee as the technology put in place was to the benefit of ITV, C4 and Five as well as any local stations.

I think that £300m is pretty much direct from the Governement through the efficiencies of other non-Gov companies doing things under budget.

Mass mind control artist condemns El Reg to obscurity

Mike Hanna

The Simpsons - A worldwide window on Yank knobheads

Is this the fella that the Simpsons right-wing disc-jockey character is based on? I think he gets Sideshow Bob to run for Governor or something, whilst stuffing his stupid fat face with donuts

BT tests 1Gbit/s broadband

Mike Hanna

4km away

I know you're not specifically complianing but it pains me to see when people write this. Should we perhaps build a new motoway off-ramp direct to your mothers' house at the taxpayers expense as well? If the craptastic broadband is such a sticking point, move house. People who complain about such things would probably complain just as much when they move closer to the exchange and then get radiation sickness from the mobile phone antennas all over the BT Exchange rooftop.

And yes, I see what you mean about BT having been effectively given the whole infrastructure back in 81 when it was privatised, but I'd suggest they may have put a few quid into major or wholescale upgrades to large portions since then, whilst still having to give (greatly) subsidised access to those systems to comanies like Cable & Wireless. If C&W / NTL / Virgin have only pushed the capability for their services to a portion of the country, and been able to sell to an even smaller percentage of that portion over the last three decades, whose fault is that?

Mike Hanna

That's what I thought!

...so I asked Sky when they thought they would be reselling BT's superfast stuff, and they said there are no plans yet. Maybe it's time barred, or maybe BT only need to open it up for other companies' use when they hit a revenue target over the whole network

Blu-ray barely better than DVD

Mike Hanna

Really?

How did you work that out? Did he have two identical set-ups for direct comparison between screens? Or did you (perhaps more likely) put the DVD in, with upscaling turned on, watch that for a bit to get an idea of what the picture was like and then press stop. An eject. And put the disc away. And then put the Blu Ray disc in. And then wait for it to load. And wait a bit more. And then press play, and get to the bit that you'd watched on the DVD. What you had there was you comparing what you see on the screen with the *memory* of what you saw on the screen a few minutes ago, but still decided it was better. Relevant to a point, but not exactly scientific.

Blu-Ray Disc video specification also allows video streams in 720p and SD. So actually, the Blu-Ray definition, the thing you buy, is the storage media, not the actual content. Legally they're progbably alright, cos that's what the agreed spec says, but morally they're a bunch of twats.

Someone mentioned above that *something* had to do upscaling to display an SD picture across the full screen of a 1080 TV set. It doesn't upscale to do that. Basically, it just fills in the gaps that would be left after it's stretched across and down to fit the screen. Assume each of the characters below is actually a scan-line. Not upscaling stretched it across the larger screen the blanks get filled in by replicating the previous pixel. Upscaling makes a guess as to what pixel would have been there had it been 1080.

SD picture on SD screen

1234567

ACEGIK

Gaps's plugged SD picture across HD screen (not upscaled)

11223344556677

11223344556677

AABBCCDDEEFF

AABBCCDDEEFF

Google to scrub slurped UK Wi-Fi data

Mike Hanna

If...

It was a bloke on the street who went round doing this, anyone know what the crime and punishment would be?

Anyone wanna start taking bets on how long it will take for all the slurped date to end up on a few BitTorrent files?

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