Posts by John_C 19 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2010
Finally someone has done what the whole ultrabook project was about, made a macbook air clone which is good enough and at the right price to get some windows based machines into that marketplace. I've only ever had good experiences with Asus kit and my Transformer is excellent.
Shame that the screen has such a poor viewing angle, a good screen makes such a difference on a machine you use a lot, but other than that doesn't seem to be much to complain about here.
I'd rather spend £60ish more and get the 11" Air with comparable spec and better screen personally, but if the slipcase, accessories and OS make a difference to you then I can completeley understand going for the Asus.
It's nice to see some proper competetion in this sector, can only be good for the consumer.
Yes the author is absolutely right, it's not like the big networks ever leave any customers without service for more than an hour or two. O2 in particular have absolutely no history whatsoever of massive data network outages.
giffgaff have always been great value and overall their service to me has been excellent. I don't do any of the referring people or "working" on their forums stuff. That said, the forums are a bit of a joke, you get tons of people chiming in with the same (sometimes wrong) answer to any query so they can get their "pennies".
I don't care how a government website looks, as long as it's relatively easy to navigate and the information it contains is accurate and up to date.
What the current setup massively falls down on is search functionality and quality/accuracy of the information provided to the user. Directgov doesn't need a facelift, it needs the core functionality to work properly first.
I've used both 'droid and iOS.
I like them both. I find iOS is slicker, 'droid more tweakable. Currently running Gingerbread on a Galaxy S. I'm quite tempted to have a go with WinMo 7.5 next now it's been out for a bit, although ICS might delay that.
It's only a phone and if I don't like it then meh I'll move on to something else after a while.
I also had an iPad but now have an Asus Transformer because I needed more of a netbook-style device without wanting to lose the tablet element. They're both brilliant, but in slightly different ways.
This sort of tribal rubbish has been going on forever (ZX Spectrum vs C64 vs Acorn anyone?) and sadly it will never end. It's usually the people spouting the venom who miss out because many of them are closed off to new experiences.
Yes it's expensive to buy up front, but for whatever reason iPhones hold their value very very well. That means if you can stump up the cash in the first place you can sell it on for much more than the 'droid competetion when the time comes to change.
And before the usual accusations of fanboy-ism fly I sold my iPhone 4, bought a same-age Galaxy S for half the amount I got for the iPhone and pocketed the rest, a decision I'm still happy with.
Dabs? Never again. Check their forums, quite a few horror stories, including mine. The "new system" was a complete disaster, customer services completely melted down, and even once things got "better" they were still incapable of reading a simple email and answering the questions in it.
www.dabs.com/forums
That is all.
They're pretty bad, but I can beat them......
For reasons too boring to explain sometimes we get PC's returned to the office which need extremely sensitve financial data extracting from them as we're the only department in the company with the necessary knowledge to get past all the security and decrypt the data.
Anyway, we got one of these returned to the office a few years back as it wouldn't boot. No-one thought to warn us that the reason it wouldn't boot was that it had been submerged in flood water heavily contaminated with sewage. The rest I shall leave to your imagination.
The smell was....... smelly.
It's not £1000 vs £500, you're comparing a thousand dollars to five hundred pounds.
UK pricing for the 11.6" starts at £849
In any case while it's tempting to do so I don't think giving it a beating over the price really stands up to objective scrutiny. Look at the Dell Adamo or Sony Vaio X which are similar in design philosophy and the MBA is good value by comparison.
I know it looks expensive against the laptops in the recent el-reg 11.6" group test but that's not comparing like with like - once you take into account that the MBA has a good tech spec (dual-core CPU, high rez screen, dedicated graphics, SSD), the battery life and the case design you see where the extra money goes.
It's not going to be for everyone for sure, but given it's a lightweight ultraportable with enough power to cope with a wide range of tasks I don't think it's that overpriced. Oh, and before the predictable cries of fanboi yes I do own an iPhone, and an iPad. I also own a 10" dell netbook running linux and a high end gaming laptop running Windows 7. Each fills a niche in my life very nicely thank you very much, and I couldn't care less who makes them, I like them for what they do.
Oh come on it takes about three seconds to talk to the press, just hit enter three times and you're done. Same deal with the agent, just check every few races.
Problems with Live and IE crashing are hardly the games fault.
I honestly don't understand the beating this game is getting on here, it's not a full sim so comparing it to GP4 or revs is odd, why is the replay feature such a big deal - I'd rather be using that time on the track.
IMO the game is enormous fun and also as challenging as you want it to be as the difficultly level is very configurable.
I'd say play the demo and decide from that if you want it, I haven't relied solely on a review since before the Amiga ;)
Why would apple want to do this? Corporate/Government use. That group of customers actively WANT systems which detect unauthorised use and give their admins the ability to nuke phones remotely, under certain high security situations they may also want this decision to be made automatically and instantly without human intervention.
Get a grip guys, the concept of apple arbitrarily boxing users phones without permission because they jailbreak them is laughable.
Ohhh.. iPad bad for sleep because of the backlit screen.... now what else has those and is likely to be close enough to your face to read? Oh yes a laptop computer.
Would a story about looking at a laptop screen before sleep really have got any coverage? Stick iPad in the story and the media are all over it.
You know, it's *almost* as if this researcher used the iPad as a tag to get some publicity for his studies and help the next round of research grants.
But that would never happen would it.
Come on El Reg, if you're going to regurgitiate dross stories like this at least do a bit of cynical analysis like in the good old days. The Register is getting ever more similar the media outlets it so rightly mocks.
I've been toying with the idea of getting one of these at some point but several reviews I've read say it's too heavy to use as a book reader for extended periods because it weighs 700g.
That didn't seem very heavy to me, plus my wife is hogging the bathroom and I'm bored, so I grabbed the book I'm currently reading and got the kitchen scales out.
Turns out 700g is what a hardback copy of Pratchett's "Night Watch" weighs and that's a relatively small (364 page) hardback book. I certainly don't find it too heavy to hold comfortably for an extended period of reading, so I'm not sure why an iPad would be too heavy?
I too have been reading Guy's work for well over 25 years and he is a sad loss to journalism.
Reading his blog I realise that he was also a brave man who had a great sense of dignity. I had no idea he was suffering from this evil disease but his final piece of great journalism was documenting his cancer. It has helped me understand my own grandmother's death from the exact same disease, something I was too young to cope with at the time and something which has been too painful to go into in the years since then.
RIP Guy, even in death you are still making things I didn't understand clear to me.
Been reading The Register for years but have finally been motivated to register and post a comment.
If crap like this is the way El Reg is going I'll find another source for tech news. It reads like an article written for the Mail or Sun and rejected because they didn't know who the hell Wozniak was.
I can't see what the point is of two pages of highly personal bile about his weight and what he chooses to do with his life. By all means point out that his personal profile/fame doesn't seem to be justified by anything he's done since leaving Apple - but don't do it like some gutter journalist.
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