Posts by KnucklesTheDog

They probably want to avoid the exFAT licensing costs - keeps the handset cost down and means you aren't helping out your competitors.

Re: I get regular calls

I've had Sky for over a decade and in that time I've had one box break. Sky charged a fixed £65 for a call out which would have covered replacing everything if required (cable, dish, box). My Dad once managed to get a free one out of them when his broke by telling them he'd rather cancel than pay the £65.

If you had to call them out every single year you wouldn't recoup the cost of these warranties (equipment replaced by a £65 call out is covered by a new 12 month guarantee). They tell you the repair costs are many times this, which is just an outright lie.

Re: @guyr

It's 48ml per person per day, which actually seems about right.

(Your population figure is out by a factor of 10)

I used to have a HP Pavilion laptop, I though it looked really good (nothing like a Mac either). Unfortunately it suffered the notorious GPU burnout problem just after the guarantee ran out with just 2-3 hours of light use a week for a year.

Tried to complain (HP had already refused to recall that Pavilion model, although they did recall some others - Apple and Dell recalled all their laptops with the same problem) and was told the only avenue for formally doing so was to log a support call at a cost of around £55.

Replaced it with a Mac book which is still going strong 3 years later.

Copying some cases isn't going to help HP, they already had a great looking product range.

Re: Yet another fart app.

"What's more, most of the "Apps" will disappear as HTML5 standardises, browsers improve, and an "app" is therefore no longer needed to look at a website that doesn't render properly"

The best apps integrate with features of the phone and are not just UIs, although admittedly there are plenty of bad apps which are, and do it badly too (Facebook springs to mind).

A website for example won't let you listen to music with the screen off, or sync offline in case of signal loss.

Re: Let's hope the software is better

I'm guessing from what you've written you have the non-touch model (i.e. up/down buttons), I've got the touch and I couldn't be happier with it.

To be fair I expect the Kindle touch is as good (I've only used a non-touch Kindle so can't really compare fairly) - but the Kobo is cheaper so I simply don't see any reason to spend the extra. I think price is a massively important feature with ebook readers as you tend to carry them about more and less carefully than say tablets.

Reading the original article...

it would appear they are stating that the A-GPS messages are sent over your general internet connection (i.e. over an IP based protocol), not the mobile network specifically (although of course if your internet connection was via the mobile network they would go that way) - so reading between the lines, if you happen to be connected to the internet over wi-fi it will send the A-GPS data over that wi-fi connection.

Again reading between the lines, if the A-GPS over IP protocol had the facility to send a new A-GPS server IP address back to the phone, the wi-fi network could spoof that message and re-route all future data from that phone wherever it likes, this would continue to happen even once disconnected from that wi-fi network (although presumably only until the real network re-configures this at a later point in time).

It's all speculation on my part though, this article and the original are both lacking in too many details.

Oh yes, and of course it has nothing to do with Android.

Pretty sure Rovio don't own eMusic.

Re: Moral of the story... @ JDX

"I don't recall my bank, utility companies, local council taking my family holiday snaps and sharing them around anybody who cared to wander in and look"

No, but as Instagram is a tool for sharing photos around anybody who cares to wander in and look this probably isn't really a fair comparison.

I didn't actually know you could make photos private, it's really just a Twitter for photos. Using it to archive private photos strikes me as a bit like using Twitter to archive bits of text, it's just not really what it's geared up for. Still, no excuse if people are given the option of using it like that I suppose.

Re: You've been where?

"not an Apple walled garden or a Google ad trojan"

I suspect this is trolling, but anyway... Either the Meego stores are walled gardens (i.e. software only accepted after thorough review), or they have the potential to contain advert ridden software or malware. Care to explain why it's technically special in either of those regards (i.e. not its current relative obscurity making it undesirable to write software for)?

Some of you use old Windows PC software which requires a parallel port, and this is relevant to an article about the new Mac Book not having IR or a CD drive?

Maybe as it's not a completely suitable device for one or two of you Apple should shut up shop?

Re: @Fitz

"I trust you have the same attitude with regard to Motorola Mobility"

If you're suggesting that I'm taking a specifically anti-Apple stance then there's no reason to assume that, after all I was even complimentary about their products.

As for the noise cancellation patent specifically, I don't know if that's an obvious concept (along the lines of a balanced cable for example) or a piece of genuine technology (e.g. a circuit they've researched and developed at cost to themselves). There's always grey areas too of course, but I don't think anyone would suggest that software to identify a number in a piece of text could ever fall into that.

Re: ..said to have prevented legitimate callers..

Yes, I was wondering exactly how long did he tie up the line for legitimate callers with 100 automated calls? Are people really calling this that often? Couldn't they have just rung back a bit later in the day? Maybe if the unspecified acts of terror were an immediate concern they should have been dialling 999 instead?

Re: "The company shifted 7.8 million handsets over the last three months"

Well they could always start making Android handsets then.

Re: RBS: "No evidence" this is connected to outsourcing

"I wonder if the senior executives and accountants at RBS Group do their banking through Barclays?"

I worked for Natwest in the 90s for a brief period and they would only pay your salary to a Natwest account (you may have realised that this effectively means they're not paying you at all until you remove the money as it never leaves the bank!). No matter what the rules now, I expect a lot of their own staff were screwed over by this too. Probably not at board level, I guess they'd have access to their ample offshore accounts...

(The HR woman at the time said there was a time when not only would they only pay into Natwest accounts but they wouldn't allow you to have any other account aside from a building society savings account - your line manager actually had access to your statements to check you weren't moving out money to a rival bank!)

Re: Dixons have their place.

There is a place for them, but they are running the company into the ground with poor service - do a google search for "currys reviews" - their inability to deal with customers seems a universal problem.

Re: The problem China has

> Surely the best solution for all would be for US to unplug from the internet

Didn't Verizon already attempt this once?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/21/verizon_class_action/

Re: They're making the wrong one redundant

"Replacing/improving the UI on Symbian did not require throwing away Symbian."

True, but if you were to port a UIQ application to S60, you'd throw away a good chunk and what you'd be left with is a bunch of crappy framework classes with crappy APIs. I.e., you'd still be sitting your new UI on something that's far from any modern set of libraries in terms of ease of use and stability.

Nokia might have been selling more Symbian devices (I'll take your word for it) but Symbian was losing market share. Smartphone sales increases likely as not propelled it along with Nokia die-hards, but Symbian handsets were experiencing less growth that they should have been compared to their competition.

You're right about Windows Mobile though. Symbian beat it in terms of stability hands down (at least WM 6.5 which was my last experience of it). Windows Mobile had a .net mobile API which meant anyone could knock up apps quickly, but they rarely worked well because the underlying stuff was so flakey.

"The Symbian eco-system is large, especially in foreign languages"

Well Symbian supports a lot of languages (something it has over the competition undoubtedly), not sure I'm aware of a large eco-system so to speak though...

Send them all into space, lets just make sure we keep the telephone sanitisers.

I always thought schools should move over to open source alternatives.

Not only would money be saved in licencing (I don't believe the argument that the increased cost of support would negate this - as support skills increase in open source alternatives this would drop anyway), but kids would leave with skills in Linux and cheaper office tools, opening the doors to employers to use them, and they too would save money. The cost of getting your kids a home computer for school work would drop as well.

Worse case, employers still use Windows, tax payers have still saved and our kids have broader computer knowledge.

Re: From whom?

I'm sure all the indie labels and distributors have agreed too, because of course it would be massively unfair just to ensure a few big companies benefited financially from giving away licences to music they don't necessarily own...

Re: Discriminatory?

They're outside the EU so they probably don't see it that way.

I expect they think that simply being close to another EU country doesn't mean you should have a different set of rules that only apply to you.

Ironically Windows tablets have been on sale for as long as I can remember and no one cared! It will be interesting to see if stuffing it inside a remote virtual machine will make a difference!

Still, I think OnLive is a superb service for games. My only criticism is that some of the multiplayer games are under subscribed at the moment. I suspect this is because some of them seem to require a player to host rather than OnLive running dedicated servers for them.

The real issue

Because Windows doesn't enforce separation of data and application installs many novice users I've seen quite happily save files from various application in the default directory it brings up - this is usually in "Program Files".

This is made worse by the fact that even those slightly more advanced users that understand what they've done and where they've saved files can then bring up Explorer and attempt to look for those files, only to have it tell them not to navigate to the "Program Files" directory.

"One More Thing" backdrop? Did he steal his power point template from Peter Falk?