Posts by PaulH 16 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2007
For two-way systems like Dropbox, Owncloud etc, what happens when there is a conflict? Do you just lose the oldest one?
If you delete or otherwise destroy a file (e.g. write an empty file over a document with the same name, suffer disk corruption) can you restore the original, or does the bad/deleted file get propagated to the other locations?
Isn't this how Palm Pilots worked? They ran programs straight from the flash memory, instead of loading into RAM. So the memory requirement was much lower, and program startup was almost instant.
I have time to think about this every time I select an app on a modern device and wait for it to load.
> OK, tried it. It doesn't work
Well there's something strange going on then, because (I checked this before I posted and again just now) I CAN log into my amazon account (both .com and .co.uk) using BOTH my 14-letter password and just the first 8 characters of it. Only 7 characters fails.
I've found that if add incorrect characters after the 8th, it fails. But If I put the first 8, 9 or 10 in they all work.
I can add incorrect characters after the full one and it works.
Does this happen for anyone else but me, then?
The only way I can think that this would work is if they stored my password compared the start of it with the entered string, truncating the longer, or if they stored a hash for every length from 8 to 14. Both of which sound mad, but it's honestly working this way for me.
I'm glad someone has pointed this out. Every Roomba review gets those comments about it not being a vacuum. Its an air filter always gets thickly coated with dust. There's no way a beater could do that.
@Ian Ferguson "iRobot have always been terribly careful to refer to their products as 'cleaners' rather than 'vacuum cleaners'" - the iRobot site gets to top few hits for 'roomba vacuum'. Why the Rooba fud?
I've used an iPod Touch as an e-reader for a while. I read in bed, so a backlit LCD is ideal. I'm short-sighted, so I can focus on it close up.
Maybe e-ink display are easy on the eyes in good lighting, I haven't tried them.
But I can say that an LCD works well too - I've read several books that way, including Anathem (1000 pages).
Maybe this all depends on the situation you read in - being far sighted would make a large screen desirable, reading in a chair means you can hold a larger, heavier device comfortably. Reading in daylight makes e-ink much better, reading in bed means that you don't want to hold a large, heavy device, etc.
The other day I had a folder of over 900 photos. I wanted to move my vacation images to another folder, so, click the date column, scroll to the first vacation pic and select, scroll to the last pic, shift-click, cut, paste, done.
I don't see how this desktop would cope with that quantity of files.
I read in bed using the Kindle software on an iPod Touch, and it is set to turn the brightness down automatically (you can set it manually if you want). And the Stanza reader has brightness adjustment via a gesture.
The screen does turn off after a few minutes of inactivity, but on top of all that, I can set the screen to white text on black!
BTW, there probably is a reason to literally sleep with your iPad - I thought that the headline was referring to that alarm clock app that requires you to put your iPhone under your matress (it uses the accelerometer to wake you at a point where you're sleeping ligher
http://www.lexwarelabs.com/sleepcycle/ ).
> Can't Google just provide both labels and folders and leave it to their users to decide what they prefer?
Effectively, they do. There's a handy "Move-to" menu, which actually just applies a label while removing all others. That has the same effect as placing a mail in a folder.
Does this new hierarchy system only apply to the tree-display of labels, or would a "ToDo" label, for example, under "Work" be different from one under "Home"?
I haven't tested it, but I suspect it is just the former (i.e. just a way to display the labels differently).
The 3D view in maps.live.com (Virtual Earth, the equivalent of Google Earth), uses the same method to show the 3D location of "Bird's Eye View" pictures - aerial photos taken at an angle so that you can see the sides of buildings.
(And it's an interesting alternative to Google Street View.)
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