Posts by Mark Rendle

Not all 3D is bad for kids

I understood that glasses-less 3D on a small, handheld screen is bad for the eyes of babes and sucklings, but I don't think the same is true of sitting in a cinema with polarised RayBan knock-offs.

Down With This Sort Of Thing

Surely there's something equally idiotic that Samsung could file suit against Apple over? Just find something that Apple started making after Samsung, like TFT screens or whatever.

The UK tax again

I'll pick one up when I go to BUILD in September.

No no no

Just because Microsoft have announced that Windows 8 will support native applications crafted using HTML and Javascript, that doesn't mean they're killing off .NET, any more than .NET meant they were killing off C++. It simply means that Windows is an agnostic platform for which you can develop using a wide range of tools and technologies.

Great news

This is a fantastic development. The Mono project provides a lot of innovation in the .NET space, and the Touch and Droid stacks are easily the best way to develop for iOS and Android.

Ordered one yesterday

Went for the 512GB option to stick in my early-2010 MacBook Pro. I had a 128GB Samsung in it until I ran out of space, then had to fall back to a 500GB Momentus XT. That was painful. Back to speed tomorrow though!

I never read the Education section of CVs

I look for stuff like personal projects, open-source contributions and other signs of passion. And if it's obvious from your CV that you can't spell or construct a coherent sentence, then you'd better have more Passion than Christ to make up for it.

FYI, Hakum-Lie

Nobody cares.

Can I just clarify something?

Is The Reg officially a balls-out, shameless red-top tabloid these days, or are you just having trouble curbing the baser instincts of some of your headline writers?

£40k is nothing

In terms of wasting the taxpayers money, various departments fulfilling this FOI request and the BBC running the story probably cost 10 times that.

Wrong-turn

Ill-informed comments from people who haven't actually read anything about the product in question? Help! I'm in the Register comments section again.

FWIW, I've got one, and it's not as fast as my Samsung PBJ22, but it's still bloody quick and four times more space for less than a third of the price.

That is so completely brilliant...

...that it almost makes my PS3 purchase worthwhile, insofar as it may possibly have contributed in a small way to the R&D that has come up with this. (Gods know it hasn't contributed much to anything else.)

They got previous, innit?

You'd think the Mail might have learned their lesson after their interweb plagiarism escapades of 2001, involving El Reg and the venerable Mr Mil Millington (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/03/02/daily_mail_apologies_for_nicking/).

Fifth?

It beggars belief that it got past the pilot.

Epic fail

Downloaded it, installed it, ran it, and got told that I should reformat my hard-disk using a case-insensitive file-system. I've got a better idea: maybe Valve should write software that works properly on Macs?

So, the only Steam I've got is coming out of my ears.

Recursion

"Most centres offer Pascal/Delphi and Visual Basic as the language of choice for their students. This selection is based on the experience of the teacher in that centre and their own comfort with that language."

So students have to learn a language which won't get them a proper job because it's the only language their teacher knows? Anybody else sensing a vicious cycle?

Also: LISP.

Utter crap

Others have very eloquently made the case, so I'll just add this as a +1.

Awesome

I love the fact that you can get away with pretty much anything as long as you say you're doing it to raise awareness of the fact that, these days, you can get away with pretty much anything.

Would post more, but I've got to go and add rohypnol and LSD to the water coolers at The Daily Mail.

Microsoft FUD Ate My Hamster!!!

Hey, you know another cross-platform framework or language that supports COM when running on Windows?

ALL OF THEM. Even Java.

No, you're right, it's much more fun spouting malicious bullshit. Hey, here's some: did you know that the Silverlight implementation on this new Windows Phone 7 Series (which is TOTALLY closed-source, BTW; I bet it won't run on iPhones) includes support for interacting with phone features that PCs don't even have!!! So much for cross-platform. FAIL!!! M$ LOLZ.

Seriously, I remember when this used to be a tech site, instead of an unfiltered sewer of idiotic copy elbow-typed by Daily Mail rejects.

*sigh*

It takes a particular type of dunderheadedness to discover that Silverlight being the development platform for WP7 and infer that the phone is going to come without it and require the user to download and install the runtime from inside the browser. Isn't it far more likely that the WP7 OS will include or be based around a Silverlight implementation? (Yes; yes it is. You see that now.)

Silverlight is considerably more than your writer gives it credit for, too. "Media player", indeed. It is a full-blown Rich Application runtime, with quite a chunk of the WCF stack included for communicating with web services, and is heading for binary compatibility with the main .NET Framework CLR, meaning that assemblies that are careful with their references can be used in both desktop and Silverlight applications. And it's always worth mentioning the multiple language support - C#, VB, C++, Scheme, Python, Ruby, Clojure - all supported in the Silverlight ecosystem.

Now, is there a grown-up there who can confirm whether (given the platform's Zune heritage) XNA will be supported for creating games?

IANAW, but

I don't see any women complaining about the glass floor, below which men are expected to shut up and get on with it but women can suddenly decide that no, actually, they'd rather not work at all and can become "homemakers". If any female coal miners or sewer maintenance engineers are offended by that, then I apologise unreservedly. Everyone else can suck it.

Legal case

Doesn't he have a case for illegal dismissal?

Oh, and @Will Godfrey, in many countries the Queen would have been summarily executed years ago, so perhaps she should think herself lucky instead of asking for an increase to the annual £8 million we pay to have our country represented by an out-of-touch old lady.

Slow startup? Not here.

I've been running 7 x64 RC on my main PC since it was released, and it still boots to usable desktop in well under a minute. In fact, the POST takes longer than the boot to the login screen, and login (local only) takes a few seconds. And I've got dozens of things installed, including the full Microsoft Office, two versions of Visual Studio and all the frameworks, SQL Server 2008, IIS7, Eclipse, and a bunch of ickle background things like MSE, uTorrent and goodness knows what else. Applications load almost instantly, I've had no blue-screens or compatibility problems, and I think this is the best version of Windows ever.

Of course, my main PC is a 3Ghz quad with 8GB of RAM and an OCZ Vertex as the system drive. But I've also been running 7 Ultimate x86 RTM on my Samsung NC10 (with 2GB RAM) since it hit MSDN, and that's still running fine, too, with a similarly diverse bunch of things installed. It is noticeably faster than the originally-installed XP.

Only real problem is, I'm bored now. When can I get my Windows 8 CTP?

The point

@davefb: they had control over what they covered. And I doubt they ever did "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting".

@EdwardP: they're not complaining about the use of Nirvana songs; they're complaining that the Cobain model is an unlockable bonus character.

Still miles away from relevant

Until they provide some form of WPF or Silverlight as the UI layer, and *require* the handsets to have capacitive touchscreens, it just doesn't matter.

Dear King Harold

Sorry about your eye.

Regards,

France.