Posts by Philip Clarke
108 posts • joined Thursday 21st February 2008 18:46 GMT
Posted in SPEARS fired up for explosive climax
Surely you should blast off regardless of turbulence ? Better a delayed messy ejaculation of the craft then no release, the latex popping and crashing to the ground ?
an interesting question would be why the monopolies commissions in various countries have not taken a hard stance against compulsory Ebay and Paypal. I think Australia was the only country that did.
all the other solutions mentioned in the article are USA only. No good for the UK let alone other European countries. Only Google checkout and PayPal work outside of the USA which is the fundamental flaw in this article.
Older Apple iMacs
Looks like no-one in the study has one because mine draws 60 watts on "idle"
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3559
GPL from the FAQ
"A company is running a modified version of a GPL'ed program on a web site. Does the GPL say they must release their modified sources?
The GPL permits anyone to make a modified version and use it without ever distributing it to others. What this company is doing is a special case of that. Therefore, the company does not have to release the modified sources.
It is essential for people to have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately, without ever publishing those modifications."
Open only has to be Open if the source code is release.
This article is odd since it only deals with one person's quote, and doesn't really propound anything. Facebook could boot off Zynga if it wanted to, so there's a situation where one company dictates it's API and could harm others, but the flip side of the coin is that if Facebook were to release all of their data, then no one would visit, as a small developer could strip out the bumpf and produce a "pure" Facebook experience thereby destroying the value of the company. (and probably still clean up by selling the contact details). Asking for an open API without restrictions is like asking for the world to throw away intellectual property.
Posted in Samsung Galaxy S III
Eyes's glinting
What happens when one wears shades ?
Also what happens when I light a ciggy putting my phone down in the process, that is encrypted with the compulsory letters and number combination for the password on the lock screen? I put the phone down, light the fag and then have the bloody thing turn off and have to enter the lock screen. I have an S II which has rubbish battery life and a screen so big that entering the lock code with one hand frequently means it presses shift or settings with my palm, it also crashes far more often after the ICS upgrade and does odd things like refuses to find the GPS and overheats in a car window mount. AND the SIII is plastic ? Give me an aluminium honey comb grid on the back as a heat sink, a big battery so I don't need the lock screen on every 15 seconds to save power and for security, and don't give me wallpaper on the apps screen where the app designers have no HID guidelines so the icons clash. I don't want a walled garden, I want a man's phone that is usable.
Posted in Internet's first 'Hall of Fame' REVEALED
It's okay they'll just populate later years with those self publicists from silicon roundabout.
Posted in Lytro light field camera
Re: don't care about the science
no that's not the point, the surgical distance is the point you set as lens to give the perception of the deepest area in focus. on a wide angle the area in focus is "greater" because of what is called s reduced circle of confusion. to recreate lyto all you would need is to to pictures in rapid succession like. at .5 metres 6 metres and 25 metres, then Mark the images as "one" where all items are in focus and the choose the focal point later in software. the hyperfocal distance is lens and aperture dependent as well as how you view the image because in reality there is only one focal point and this circle of confusion gives an parent depth of field. in lower light you would need more separate images because to get the image the hyperfocal distances would be lower and a telephone lens needs many more shots but then the software could be limited to a primary area like the entire head for a portrait. trust me i was a physicist then a photographer. a low light portrait would be great because you'd shoot the head but then select the eyes and nose tip in software and omit the background and ears from the focal zone.
Posted in Lytro light field camera
Re: don't care about the science
you could also do it with mobile phones etc... they have massive depth of field anyway and the multiple exposures could act as compensation fir their major problem, noise.
Posted in Lytro light field camera
don't care about the science
why not have a dslr program that knows the lens, fire burst mode at overlapping hyperfocal distances with possible hdr exposures and then combine the images in one format? it's not rocket science gives virtually the same effect at higher resolution and more options.
waste of time in UK
Just get a court order to reveal the password or the "perp" gets two years inside.
Posted in Colorfly Pocket Hi-Fi C4
I'm surprised they put an equaliser on it. my information may be outdated by 20-30 odd years, but it always used to be that the money was sunk into quality of components, while equalisers were for the shelves of dixons, Amstrad & Matsui.
work rounds cost money, a company invests a billion in manufacture then has to bin the infringing items. Samsung makes a lot of components for apple and when the cost of the law suits impinges on their bottom line they'll be a cost to apple. I'd expect Samsung to be buying other manufacturers then dropping apple's volume discount. long term it could benefit the USA as apple will have to source components from countries where the FTC won't allow cartels currently apple has enough money in the bank to go into memory fabrication the question would be if they could get a return on their investment from their sales alone. the one thing consistent about apple is that it does not return it's cash stockpile to the shareholders, I predict a partnership with foxconn and new component factories in China as apple marginalises it's component suppliers and that could be very good for apple.
dreams
when I was a child 30+ years ago, I had a book about the future, jet packs with head up displays, bountiful energy from nuclear fusion, instead we got the solar powered parking meter.
Posted in Nissan Leaf battery powered electric car
second car
a second could be considered recycling, a diesel could be run on bio diesel and be carbon neutral as opposed to coal powered/ gas powered leccy and all could be recycled at a salvage yard.
or you could just skip the second car entirely and have the first car as above.
it depends on the detection part, the action can be got around by putting a icon to tap next to the number, I can't see much use for an address book without being able to dial the number on any phone.
please tell us that...
you are going to do a new year article featuring all those business decisions in full?
I nominate any decision by any HP executive or for a long term prediction the thousand dollar ultrabook price tag.
Posted in Angry Birds maker now aims at Asian IPO
the kids have it
at my son's eighth birthday party every single one of the 25 children had played it (i asked then around the table), it's popularity appears to be waning with moshi monsters gaining, but an IPO in Hong Kong is great as I believe that they have to be profitable as opposed to groupon.
and nobody noticed a director taking $10 million from the company accounts?
more seriously
If that email was sent by a foreign government, it probably is now an act of war.
Posted in China gets 64 quid Android 4.0 tablet
says it's a capacitive screen, could have an almost iPad killer if it were not for the CPU.
Posted in The BBC Micro turns 30
business use
in 1985 or 86 my father bought one as an upgrade to the zx81. it was educational, we built a business around it, using it to calculate of area of wood needed for hardwood triple glazing that he manufactured. you'd select the frame style type in the size of hole for the window and it would work out the wood required and it had graphics so the client could sign off on it.
it was truly exceptional just rectangles area and a unit cost and all achievable in basic for a 13 year old.
tosh - wikipedia science
The problem with all of this is that it is complete tosh. The theory of special relativity (and clasical mechanics) has 3 possible outcomes
1) something travels slower than light and would require infinite amounts of energy to get it to light speed (ordinary mass)
2) something is stuck travelling at the speed of light (photons)
3) something travels faster that light to start with and can never drop below light speed without destruction.
It happens because in classic mechanics you can have a negative velocity that is the squared (basic kinetic energy) therefore making it a positive so at lower than light speeds the energy of the particle would be negative, e.g. non-existent which happens quite a lot in theories like dropping to absolute zero where a particle has no energy so can have no mass. It's perfectly possible to travel faster than light but only if one starts faster so in "the real world" one would require negative energies and mass. Possibly CERN generated neutrinos of this type but probably not. How is light altered by gravity in the parallel plane if gravitons aren't particles faster than light ? (and so giving use the red shift used to correct astronomical observations to give us an idea of the make up of stars). Just because no theoretical model has predicted that a neutrino could be created starting off faster than light doesn't mean it couldn't have happened. Stating that something is "impossible" based on a theory is a dodgy starting point for any discussion, otherwise we'd still be stuck with Newtonian mechanics. Best to see if the experiment can be replicated by a different lab.
I blame the media and the second paragraph of wikipedia on lightspeed myself.
But can it re-animate the dead?
10Mw ? Didn't the spanish just build a massive solar ranch in Arizona? That was 20Mw I believe. Out of general green interest, how many flops does one get when one does some thing like seti with the public's computers ? Could a SC feed in tariff be more viable than a green electric tariff ?
Same in India, at least in Bangalore.
That's why they killed the ibook, now everything is encased in aluminium shells which can be earthed, it's Steve Jobs' last vision, oh wow oh wow oh wow.
Silver lining?
According to the nice lady on the phone this morning I could have been mis-sold payment protection, and could get a lot of money back. I wonder if greece had it too... Problem solved then.
Never going to stop
The problem is quite clearly highlighted in the article, you get the applications down, get people retrained, have the system reduced to the bare bones, then some one decides to buy another company.... Rarely are the people in IT asked about the costs a new acquisition will incur to migrate the systems, in addition to financial audits there should probably be a requirement for a migration audit prior to purchase only then would a company not be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Wonderful
How do they get it off once it's stuck on? Can it be scaled up? I'd like to see one with a chair for use as a stair lift for the elderly you could deploy them quickly to create temporary elderly care homes though getting the daredevil pensioners back to ground child be tricky, bugger free climbing my father'd be scaling any glass building he could find.
I remember....
When fortune 500 companies used a beige box and an isdn line for their web serving and email needs. Tech support was via tin cans and a bit of string. Those were the days.
Seriously?
Last year 100% of businesses were involved in the gov's security initiative?
The problem is that the knowledgable guy is the entire company's single point of failure. Too often management doesn't duplicate that guy, and instead replaces him with budget versions leading to the hiring of ever more expensive consultants when things go pear shaped.
Better to import the data
Than to hand over the keys to a linked in spreadsheet with two way communication. My greatest concern ever while working as a dba was people claiming they needed "live" data, they always used to get data pulled in from a replicated server which needed frequent rebuilding, but at least it wasn't the live db being ground to a halt by "group by" queries. I really do not "get it", this pivot point sound better than most because it doesn't compromise the integrity off the critical systems, but it still seems that business intelligence is based on an unqualified person looking at simplistic data analysis made easier so that they can "prove" their long held beliefs. What was that quote about lies and statistics?
Compliance, is of no use without accountability. Shirking responsibility seems to be more fashionable in this Oprah winfrey culture.
Like the A-Team but with IT....
Why oh why did the IT Crowd guy stop writing, so much new material. Jen sitting alone at her desk, pictures of the others next to a windows machine and the blue screen of death. Hunting for her little black book to find the phone number of someone qualified to tell the irate user on the phone to tell them to turn it off and on again.
Posted in El Reg in SHOCK email address BLUNDER
My father passed on very little to me, but he had an office policy. Everyone makes mistakes, learn from them and never hide them. He'd always give a mistake maker a second chance but finding an error was hidden made raining hellfire and brimstone quite pleasant by comparison.
Hope anonymous don't mix up the filenames with el reg's data leak :-)
Posted in El Reg in SHOCK email address BLUNDER
Least it doesn't leak....
Or link all the details of your friends, possible connections, browsing habits, address book, pictures you may be interested in our suggest that you may like something or someone. Seems pretty tame compared to face book and linked in.
Was steve ballmer, bill gates, zuckerberg, assange and steve jobs on the list?
Tax incentives
Bet That's the cause, want to set up a new business? You go where it's cheaper and you are going to get a tax break, and the policy makers and lobbyists ensure that their already established businesses where the voters are, are going to get the breaks. I'll pick up my nobel prise with my coat...
Posted in El Reg in SHOCK email address BLUNDER
Easier said than done. Set one flag wrong in a sql query and it doesn't matter how many tests. I'd like to know why the email address was compiled in the first place though.
Posted in Groupon IPO seeks $11.4bn valuation
Hong kong rules and banking
I think that in the time if this tech bubble that they should apply the hong kong rule that the business should be profitable before ipo.
Not sure about the rules of the exchange where they are launching, but I believe that if the shares are unsold then the underwriting bank has to buy the remaining stock. So groupon's still going to get it's money (after the original vc investors take their cut) but it will be substantially less than they need to build a viable business (assuming they needed the original valuation), I think they'll tank inside of six months.
Touch screen?
There's an interesting point here, if the dock is supposed to be touch screen friendly then why when it hides does it need the mouse to go to the left hand side of the screen and stay there when a window/ application is maximised? (and I couldn't find a way to turn off that behaviour). Touch screens don't have mice, so there's no pointer to bring the panel back which seems like a large usability issue.
Left it too
Went to xubuntu version because my productivity dropped right if the scale, the unity top menu bar was the last straw. more than one window open and clicking on it I'd close the wrong application.the alt tab switcher was okay, expanding to show multiple windows from the same application, but that was possibly the only plus point. xfce with the scant dock is too mac like for me but at least I know what is running and can reach the menu without needing to jump through hoops. Oh nautilus appeared to be better too but you can't really compare that to not knowing with the unity bar, whether file > open is going to open an item in the application you want or some app hidden in the background that unity guesses is the proper window.
Posted in Collapsing cranes and cantankerous cars
Last picture?
Is it just me our does that look like the front is lifting? ahem, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to design the car like a big wing.
"attitudes to sharing data in the NHS can be defensive"
Too bloody right and inside the nhs, so they should be.
So...
The grand plan to save tv, is to create a shopping channel based on monitoring my friend's soap opera watching preferences in bangalore ? Or worse, endless reruns of the x-factor, pop idol or strictly come dancing with adverts. Hold on ? This makes the assumption that my viewing habits are public and to be shared by default, otherwise it can't work.
For the uspto that seems like a remarkably short time to grant a patent unless it's scope really is limited to just facebook's platform.
Holmes because something needs more investigation.
Countries are not identical though
So you'd have a variety of responses given in varying pubs, coffee shops, restaurants, tea house, hence the featureless white room. In the uk I postulate that the accelerometer would be needed to discount real ale induced sway affected results.
