Posts by David Hicks
1064 posts • joined Tuesday 22nd April 2008 12:44 GMT
I usually disagree with pretty much everything you have to say
On any topic whatsoever. However this is a travesty.
It's hard to understand why anyone would think this is a good idea, unless it's the likes of Spotify who have a business interest in being able to pay a flat fee to some or other official body and then stream what they like.
Legislators clearly just have no bloody idea.
$500?
Hell, I can buy most of a proper computer for that, or a 'real' laptop. I guess it's not really 'expensive', but it's hardly a cheap consumer device at that pricepoint either.
Re: Nicely left out the progress being made
@g e
Maybe they don't question that it's taking place *any more*. That is amazing progress, IMHO.
Maybe now we can move on one stage in the discussions about what might be causing this, and what (if anything) is the appropriate action to take. One tiny step away from the morons/paid shills bellowing about how it's all a lie is one positive move in my book.
Of course I don't believe for a second that humanity thinks long-term enough to void making life on this planet very difficult for itself in coming years. I think we'd rather bicker than deal with even clear and present danger, let alone nuanced evidence about our current polluting activities having a downside for future generations.
Still, no sense worrying really, because you can't change people.
Nicely left out the progress being made
That only -
"21% of Americans (+1), 22% of Britons (+1) and 14% of Canadians (=) think global warming is a theory that has not yet been proven"
So reality seems at least to have impinged on the general herd to some extent, in that only around a fifth of people in the US and the UK flat out deny it's happening.
I'm also amused that you think it's meaningful that a large proportion of people don't want to hamper the economy right now. You know, in the midst of the global financial clusterf*** we're currently sitting in. Frankly if 43% of Brits say they would be willing to hamper economic growth for the environment it's something of a miracle.
Also please note that they said they were willing to hamper growth, not get poorer. Your agenda is showing again, might want to pull those trousers back up a touch.
Posted in Sony SmartWatch Android remote
@Dave 126 - Re: So.... pebble watch was not a totally new idea?
@Dave 126
Well, to be fair to pebble, they're still within the time they said they'd be when they launched the kickstarter stuff. It will be interesting to see if they can deliver to schedule and if they can deliver in the quantities they have pre-orders for. I suspect that there might be some growth problems as it got very big very fast.
E-Ink displays have excellent visibility in sunlight. Night time they would need a back (or front) light to illuminate them. Colour... yeah no colour. Pebble, with it's open SDK, could easily be programmed to perform the compass function you mentioned though.
The -1 Sony was not because of this product, its delivery or its execution, it's the other way around. A product immediately gets negative points from me simply because of the Sony label and their (lack of) corporate ethics.
Posted in Sony SmartWatch Android remote
So.... pebble watch was not a totally new idea?
Though the e-paper display might make for better battery life than this thing can manage.
Of course, -1, Sony.
I like the network setup thing
That could be kinda cool.
Am I alone, though, when it comes to an instant distrust of the idea of keeping credit card details, which can be used wirelessly with no pin or signature, inside your mobile phone?
I'm all for device convergence but this leaves me less than thrilled.
Sick, isn't it.
The rules only seem to get more restrictive, whichever area of law we look at, and laws are very, very rarely repealed. All the bad guys have to do is keep trying until resistance crumbles, or they can slip things through on a technicality.
Look at the software patents thing, that rears its ugly head in the EU every so often, despite having been slapped down multiple times in multiple ways. The last time I heard about it someone was trying to slip them through in a bill ostensibly on 'fisheries and agriculture'.
Good.
It would be a travesty to pour public money into a company that seems determined to run itself full-speed into the ground.
If a company is failing it's usually because something is deeply wrong with it. In this case its the leadership. Just let them go. Maybe the clever tech folk can start something else.
Thus ending piracy once and for all!
For all I tell you!
Posted in R18+ games still not over the line in Oz
R18+ looking like MA15+ is fine.
So long as they stop banning things outright and then blaming it on the lack of an R18+ certification.
Never mind that what gets through or not is entirely arbitrary, depending entirely on press coverage.
Posted in New Samsung chief: I want SOFTWARE
Re: They also need
Yeah, the Note does this too. It's a bit weird, when most of the apps seem to be able to handle it fine, but you have to deal with a sideways home screen.
Andoid is very slick now, but the multi-tasking interfaces do seem a little like a step backward from Maemo.
If they're looking for a backup OS, maybe they could get more fully behind Tizen? I know, I know, that's just wishful thinking....
Posted in Nokia after the purge: It's so unfair
Re: The axe swung in the wrong place
Err, the N900 is a few years old now.
Have you tried the N9?
Neither of these handsets were shipped with Meego either, they're both Maemo. I'm not sure what you mean by a linux distro for tween girls either. It looked fine to me, better than the alternatives when the 900 came out.
I did switch away recently, because the 900 is dated and the 9 was on last-year's hardware when it came out, which is a year ago now. Nokia had dropped the ball on competitive hardware even before Elop's folly.
Re: The only time I've previously heard of Habbo Hotel
I'm not sure about a 'real' word, but it comes from FPS gaming IIRC. A griefer was originally someone who joined your team and then proceeded to put all their efforts into killing their own side, obstructing progress, and generally being a pain in the ass.
The only time I've previously heard of Habbo Hotel
is because it's somewhere that /b/tards of 4chan like to go and troll, or stand several of themselves in a public area, in the shape of a swastika. Basically griefing the children.
Re: You'd think
You would think that, given their other new-ish offerings at the moment come with ICS (or are ICS upgradeable). It's very odd that it doesn't.
If this had ICS I would have got one. Instead I'm now awaiting delivery of the Note :)
Re: What new direction?
Your breakdown is nonsense.
There were no problems with symbian and maemo/meego were coming along nicely. The 'new direction' they needed was to get some UI design folks on board, and fire half the management. Cut the number of models down from the hundreds of similar-but-not-equal handsets they were chucking out and get all the engineers pulling in the same direction instead of competing internally on hundred of different teams. Nokia wasn't one company at that point, it was about 8.
By ditching what was at the time the world's leading smartphone OS for one from a company with a history of failing in this arena, they simply torpedo'd existing business and pinned their entire future to a lame donkey.
Never heard of vertu before
Guess I'm not rich enough.
Damn those are some ugly phones though.
Re: They're making the wrong one redundant
What's being a dick about it?
It was obvious that WP was a terrible move from the get go - an extremely late entrant to the market from a company with a history of failed consumer electronics products and shafting business partners. The Xbox does indeed stand out as a counter example, but I'll see your Xbox and raise you a Zoon.
New direction was needed, yes. But even a muppet could see that it was a bad choice, foisted on them by Microsoft's new man at the top.
Re: idiots
I know that most websites I stumble across work fine without cookies, as I reject them all by default.
Perhaps it's you that has a problem with understanding how websites work?
Forward the 'reputation managers'
Who can be found on many (if not most) tech discussion sites and social media these days. They will (for a fee, of course) attempt to make it appear that your product (yes, YOUR product) is the talk and toast of the town, so that these execs notice you and go with your solution!
No, we can't have nice things, ever, because someone will always step in a screw it up for a quick buck.
Posted in US Navy buys Linux to guide drone fleet
@AC 13:48
"If your software uses OSS libraries you need to make their source available, but not the source for the bit you wrote, unless it's modified OSS."
This is false, depending on license. In fact your whole post is false, depending on the license.
The GPL does not allow you to link to libraries without your code also being under GPL.
The LGPL does specifically allow this.
BSD/MIT license lets you do whatever the hell you want.
AGPL requires you to distribute the source even if the program is a hosted service (like a website).
They are all different and all have different rules, and all OSS inclusions and links need to be considered carefully if you wish to use them from closed source code.
I'd also like to say here that the DOD should be *extremely* careful about the circumstances in which they give source or binaries to contractors to work on. They could find that they've given redistribution rights to their entire codebase to the contractor or (if they make them sign away those rights) that they've violated the GPL by imposing a closed/stricter license on top.
Posted in US Navy buys Linux to guide drone fleet
Contractor's rights?
Surely if they give the source of this mixed license application to a contractor, the contractor (as a wholly separate entity) is entitled to modify and redistribute?
And if they make the contractor sign away those rights it's a GPL violation?
I'd be interested to know a real legal opinion here, but it sounds to me like it's not a proper licensed use of GPL code, and that any copyright holder that had a problem with it might have a pretty good chance of a successful lawsuit here.
Fail...
The lumia phones are overpriced and underpowered. The N9 was last-year's tech when it came out, and is now thoroughly outclassed.
The ball was dropped well before Elop came along, but he's done nothing except make it all worse. Ditch all our leading products! Embrace Redmond's latest failure! It's sure to make us all rich!
Poor nokia, they were the phone company everyone else wanted to be 10 years ago. Now they're just a sad example about what goes wrong when you sit on your laurels.
Posted in Firm applies for .sucks domain
Entertaining idea
A shame that bottom-feeding scum (domain squatters) are the ones doing it.
Re: Very, very confused
Pretty sure my Sony CMD-Z7 had that feature back in 2002, on SMS's, well before the iPhone was even thought of!
Posted in Samsung Galaxy S III
Sigh.
This is an ARM device, there are many variants made by many manufacturers, they don't all work the same, which is why benchmarks are *more*& useful than GHz in this arena.
Grand
People already call the UK a nascent police state. Having one of the mascots as basically a big eye in a police uniform... yeah, that's not going to help.
I shall be staying firmly out of the country until this olympic nonsense is over and done with.
They don't have fundamental rights
They have a right that we as a society have deemed useful and beneficial to all - a limited term monopoly with various restrictions and inclusions. With the understanding that they enter the public domain after a certain time. This is to encourage the creation of works, giving society access to more intellectual or creative material.
None of this is any sort of 'natural right'. And for good reason - works are not created in a vacuum, and works become part of culture and (IMHO) common property over time.
i would argue the exact opposite to him - that for the good of all society we must banish this ridiculous idea of 'ownership' rights over intangibles, where in reality we have a cooperative arrangement that is put in place to benefit all parties.
He's probably just angry because (with the internet and next-to-free distribution of anything) his business model is becoming irrelevant.
Posted in Google Apps win ISO 27001 certification
Re: ISO is a scam
Heh, I've not had any faith in anything ISO since MS were able to push their poorly defined and proprietary OOXML format through the system in an attempt to derail ODF. Reading about that whole process was an eye-opener.
Re: @David
Right, so now we get to the bottom of it, you don't need those cookies. It's not going to break the internet to ditch 99% of them, and you consider yourself entitled to track users activities.
Those are (at best) 'nice-to-have' features that allow you to track what goes on with your site, and at worst are precisely the sorts of behvaiours this legislation seeks to make more difficult.
I'm glad we've got to the bottom of this - there is no technical reason that most cookies can't be ditched.
Re: @David
Further to that - one hopes this becomes just another weapon in the arsenal to take down scammers, at least if based in europe.
Re: @Dan
WHY DO YOU NEED STATE?
Why is nobody going to answer this question - why in hell's name does a site like the regneed to bother with state for anyone other than logged in users? Why do 90% of the sites out there set multiple cookies when I'm just passing through to read something?
Sure, session ID's could be a security risk if used for sensitive things, nobody's suggesting you can't use cookies where you actually need to, for user accounts and purchasing operations. How many of the sites that set cookies do you think actually use them for this?
If I leave my browser unprotected it quickly accumulates hundreds to thousands of cookies of cookies. I but from maybe three sites, and have user accounts at another ten at most. The rest of the cookies are for tracking of various forms and these are what the legislation aims to reduce, an operation which I'm 100% behind.
Re: Bloody annoying
@Liam - Why bother with session parameters at all most of the time? Just why are sessions even tracked on most sites? Seriously, unless you are an online shop or an account based service, there's no need, and the negatives of cookies outweigh the positives.
I'll say it again - why the hell does a site like el reg need to use cookies unless people want to log in and comment? For the other (larger) part of the user base, there's just no need.
@Dan - When 'Do Not Track' is actually respected by the shadier side of the advertising business (i.e. Never) then that's a fine solution. Until then, yes a lot can be done with session ids in URL parameters (which I don't believe went out in the 90s), and in a hell of a lot of cases there's just no need for a cookie in the first place.
Re: Bloody annoying
You, someone that understands technology, may well feel that way. The vast majority of people do not, yet many of them would be upset to find out just how much they are tracked and monitored across the internet.
There is no need for 90+ % of the cookies that collect in the browser, just take a look at the list that accumulates sometime. Cookies should be reserved for logins, basically. You can do most of the rest with session ids as parameters in a URL. These irritating popups (I have yet to see one) shouldn't be there either, until someone tries to use a function for which cookies are essential.
I mean, taking el reg as an example, why should anyone need a cookie to read the site? Other than those few of us that log in to make a comment, it seems completely unnecessary and serves to do nothing more than track people, which is unacceptable.
Posted in Review: Raspberry Pi
Re: RE:Memory (and firefox)
It's not just firefox that has the large footprint but.... yeah, it's pretty poor. I'm not sure whether you ought to blame firefox or the legions of web developers who no longer consider footprint or performance to be their problem, but either way it's ridiculous that I can have three tabs open and be using half a GB of RAM for the browser alone.
Who's with me for the native/local code revolution?
Posted in Review: Raspberry Pi
RE:Memory
"I know that software bloat is the in thing these days, but how can 256MB of memory constrain *any* decent programmer?"
This isn't about any decent programmer being constrained, this is about the platform being limited. Big difference. Your implied sniping at the post you reply to is out of place.
If you're trying to run a modern desktop OS, that doesn't really leave you very much at all. Running firefox and multiple tabs on top, and trying to view webpages full of images and scripts, you're going to start swapping like crazy, which isn't going to be fun with an SD card.
I agree that if you set out specifically to tune an OS to the device (and stay away from script-heavy websites) then you could acheive much more, but this is not what is happening, people are running a full desktop stack.
Posted in Review: Raspberry Pi
Re: Waiting to pre-order...
As the other poster said - you have a pc you're posting this from? Then you have a platform you can program already. Install python, or a C compiler, Java SDK, or whatever runtime you want (these are all available free for Linux, Mac and Windows) , find an IDE you like or even just a text editor, then just go for it.
Pi is an interesting device for it's size and cost, but you don't *need* a new machine to code with.
Posted in Alain de Botton wants better online smut
WTF?
"“pornography, like alcohol and drugs, weakens our ability to endure the kinds of suffering that are necessary for us to direct our lives properly."
I think he must be doing it wrong. All of it.
Essential for modern websites?
Strange how, when someone like me puts a cookie blocker on their browsers, most things continue to work just fine without them.
Sorry if it spoils your revenue model, but I'm not keeping cookies around just because you think your site needs them. It most likely doesn't.
Posted in 75,000 Raspberry Pi baked before August
Re: not really the same thing
I guess it saves on silicon, and therefore on price. People who want the more advanced stuff like network boot will just have to put a u-boot image on the sd card instead of a kernel I guess.
Posted in 75,000 Raspberry Pi baked before August
Re: not really the same thing
If you wanted multiple ethernet cards wouldn't you just add them on USB?
Of course you'd need a hub. You'd be able to add more using the GPIO pins too, as they are often used for connecting sata or ethernet controllers on other boards.
I am slightly disappointed at the weird bootloader stuff they do, when the nice, open, u-boot is out there, but I suppose you can't have everything.
Re: Ilgaz - Nobody blames thieves
Nobody blames the theives because they removed linux *before* piracy was even possible.
George Hotz demo'd a proof of concept hack that required interfering with the hardware to make it 'glitch', under PS3 Linux. There was no piracy at that point. Sony removed linux, then the firmware *without* linux was cracked and piracy enabled.
People like you get flamed because you have your facts and your timeline wrong.
'Hacking' was an extremely flimsy excuse for removing the capability, not a good reason at all.
Posted in Best and the Rest: ARM Mini PCs
Re: Overlooking a lot of devices
Re sheevaplug - I'm assuming they leave it out because it has no display capability, unless you add-on a USB graphics adaptor, which people have varying amounts of luck with. The sheevaplug is a great little machine, but it's made for headless operation really.
Posted in Best and the Rest: ARM Mini PCs
Been eyeing up the slice for a while
But there were various graphics or video decoding related issues, IIRC. Despite the power, it can't yet do 1080p video due to the driver for the hardware decoder not being functional at present. Maybe this has been addressed recently.
Also yes, not cheap.
I wonder if it was them?
A couple of years ago I remember a few friends had 'like'd something, some sort of a laptop that was claimed to be a design masterpiece or next gen or something. So I clicked it, and tried to click some or other facebook button to take me away again, but they'd managed to force an overlay onto the page somehow, and next thing I knew I had spammed all my friends with the useless link too.
Quite underhand, and I guess a good way to harvest people's info, as the thing spread like a virus.
So what do I get if I want something smaller?
As a fan of slipping my phone into the front pocket of my jeans, which is the best smartphone for me?
The big screens are all very pretty, but it's almost a different class of device to the trouser-able phones I'm used to.
Difficulty - no SOny, MS or Apple.
Posted in Nokia: 'hybrid' mobiles will save us
Re: Who's in charge?
Regents Street in London had a Nokia store last time I was there, but a quick Google tells me that was du to close down in early 2010.
I must have gone in about that time. It was a mess of hundreds of similar models, none of which had all the features you wanted. Other than the N900, which I still have (didn't buy from them though! ebay... )
Re: @David Hicks
@AC
"The lawyer for their side tried to claim that the film was a documentary, and as such the makers were allowed to use 'small segments for the purposes of criticism / review'"
And if that was genuinely found to be the case, that they had used small excerpts for the purposes of criticism, then I would support them over you. Some uses should be protected, commercial or otherwise, regardless of your objections.
Re: Britain's IP laws...... We are all Criminals
"If the fair use convention applied in the UK, then said company would have been able to shrug their shoulders at me and go 'that's too bad'."
How?
Fair use laws in the US are broadly there so that consumers can make backups of works they have bought, and format shift them, and so that small snippets and segments can be used for purposes of criticism/review. Oh, and so libraries can exist, and the occasional educational exemption on photocopying the odd page.
Please explain how fair-use laws would allow use of your music in a movie without payment. I genuinely don't see it and suspect you misunderstood your own standing. As far as I can tell you're spouting nonsense. Lawsuits go on in the US for this sort of thing ALL the time.
