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User: ProbablyJoe

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  1. Tablets in general were born too soon on Android Tablets Were Born Too Soon · · Score: 2

    Well, I think it was going to happen regardless really, obviously they want to get in on the action now Apple has driven everyone tablet crazy.

    Still, every time I see an announcement saying a company is releasing an Android 2.3 tablet I groan. I for one wouldn't consider buying any tablets that aren't released with 3.0. I don't really need something with identical functionality to my phone, with a bigger screen

    That said, I'm not sure 3.0 even brings enough to the table - and the same goes for the iPad (I don't claim to know much about them, but as far as I'm aware the iOS on there is almost identical to iPhones?). The resolution on these tablets is almost as big as my monitor at work, and yet they still don't have windowed apps? I was amazed when I tried out the Android 3.0 preview SDK, and every single app, even simple things like SMS, took up the entire screen. I know some of these simple things provide widgets for that sort of thing, but really, why do we not have windowed apps yet? It's not like Android has any issues with multitasking, so why can't it do 2 things on the same screen?

    Until I can do more with a tablet than I can with my phone, I'll be more likely to consider a small laptop (or a netbook for you buzzword lovers).

  2. Re:"Bio-engineered 'cultured' meat" on Scientists Work To Grow Meat In a Lab · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's the thing, people go crazy about genetically modified food, think it's wrong and evil, and refuse to eat it. And yet, the same people will gladly eat fast food that has far worse stuff in it. Clearly, McDonalds is far more trustworthy than science. Sigh.

  3. Re:Meh on Sony Reveals the Next Generation Portable Console · · Score: 1

    At the time, basically all I used my (modded) PSP for was playing old games on emulators. Seems to have improved some these days, but the range of games was very limited a few years ago.

    It is interesting to see more games companies embracing this these days, with Steam and all the consoles selling downloads of old Genesis/SNES/etc games. It'd be nice to see more of this for handhelds, which are ideal for this sort of thing. I know a lot of old stuff has been rereleased for handhelds but this is exactly the sort of thing that downloadable games is ideal for, rather than carrying around a cartridge/disk for a 5MB ROM.

  4. Re:Time to look at your own desk... on Last Days For Central IPv4 Address Pool · · Score: 1

    Well, where's all the information? Sure, I'm sure if I went out of my way to search for it, I could easily find out how to set IPv6 up for myself (and I may well do so soon). But if this is so urgent, why aren't the IANA and all of the regional NICs pushing this information at people? And why aren't the ISPs supporting this and forcing people to switch?

  5. Re:Why not wait? on Firefox 4, A Huge Pile of Bugs · · Score: 3, Informative

    I definitely agree that Chrome seems faster than Firefox 3.6, as much as I disbelieved it before. So I -tried- to switch to Chrome, and I -tried- to like it, but it's just missing too much for my liking.

    I'm not a fan of the minimalistic UI, but I could get used to that. But the URL/search bar is vastly inferior to Firefox's, and it was putting regularly visited sites under sites I'd visited once and random google searches. I thought maybe it would just take a while to pick up on things but after a week or 2 of usage it doesn't seem to have changed

    Add in the general lack of plugins, particularly things like NoScript that I pretty much consider a requirement these days, both for getting rid of ads/popups, as well as general security. Yes, Chrome has AdBlock plugins but I was still seeing a lot more ads than in Firefox. There were also a number of other minor issues but that was maybe more down to my Linux setup.

    I've tried Firefox 4 beta for a few days now. It does seem faster than 3.6 but it does indeed seem quite buggy. And for some reason they seem intent on copying Chrome's minimalistic UI. Fortunately between options and plugins you can mostly get around that, but I don't see why they felt a need to change it. Removing the status bar and putting mouseover links in the URL bar is absolutely insane and useless.

    It took me a while to realise what I want from a browser, but I know now: Firefox but a bit faster.

  6. Re:XFCE is amazing on Xfce 4.8 Released · · Score: 1

    Hmm.. I used Xubuntu when I first started using Linux as my main OS and it seemed like a decent balance, though the config options were a bit confusing to me at the time.

    I've been using Fluxbox for the last 6 months or so since installing Gentoo on my new computer, and I like the simplicity to a point but it is a bit bare, and also it's been giving me some issues.

    The main issue I had with XFCE is it seemed to have issues dealing with multiple monitors. The task bar was spread across both screens, which I didn't want, and I couldn't see any way to change that. Just gave LXDE a try and that did seem to get around that issue. Maybe I'll try this new XFCE.

  7. Missing the point on RapidShare Threatens Suit Over Piracy Allegations · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sure, RapidShare is used a lot for copyrighted material, but it's not as if it's their doing. On the contrary, they seem to make a lot of effort to remove copyrighted material - at least a lot of the links I see are deleted. Whether or not this is them specifically searching for it, or it being reported, I have no idea.

    What next? FTP is used for uploading copyrighted material too. What an evil protocol.

    Slashdot loves car analogies right? Clearly cars that can drive over the speed limit are also to blame for speeding.

  8. Re:Cat on The First Photograph of a Human · · Score: 1

    So according to those dates, the first photograph of a human was actually taken a year -before- the technology was invented.

    Clearly photography eclipsed Daguerre's less famous invention, time travel.

  9. Re:Bad idea on Best Education Path To Learn Video Game Programming? · · Score: 1

    Gotta agree with that. Being just out of university with a decent CS degree myself, I had little problem finding a job, and the same goes for most of the people from my course who aren't aiming for anything too specific. In contrast, I know a few people who went for specific games development/design, or animation/media courses, and they're having a lot of trouble finding any jobs, for a few reason. For one, the jobs in the area are pretty limited (depending on your location), but then if you change your mind on what you want to do, you're kinda stuck. Maybe the people I know just took bad courses, but they don't seem to have learned anything that couldn't have been self-taught in a few months of free time. Getting a degree for playing around with the Source/Unreal engines for 3 years is nice in theory, but getting a CS degree and actually having fun with that stuff is probably better. Though, finding the time to actually do some games development stuff once you have a full time job is another problem entirely...

  10. Bittorrent is not the answer for everyone on Bittorrent To Replace Standard Downloads? · · Score: 1

    No thanks. Many ISPs throttle P2P downloads at peak times, or even all the time. At least in the UK, BT and Virgin, the 2 biggest ISPs, do this now. Bittorrent is not a viable option for me at most times from my home computer, and even if it is, as people have said, it takes too long for a torrent to get up to speed for it to be practical for anything but large, popular files. Not to mention the large amount of extra bandwidth it uses with uploads, which again causes issues for many people on more restrictive ISPs. Storage and bandwidth is so cheap these days, that I don't understand why so many companies are shifting to P2P solutions. Especially when they use some form of built in torrent implementation that doesn't allow you to alter anything such as ports. The need to set up port forwarding properly is another thing which can limit the average user from using Bittorrent easily