* Posts by Steve Evans

2772 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007

Symantec downplays source-code trophy theft

Steve Evans

I wonder...

Maybe the hackers can fix the code and stop it being a resource hogging pile of bloat!

Microsoft's master stroke: Pay store staff per WinPhone sold

Steve Evans

Maybe we should come up with a name for this new, ground breaking practise.

How about "commission"?

iPad SURVIVES FALL FROM SPACE

Steve Evans

Which is what I said...

Weight does not come into it... Gravity on Earth accelerates the objects at 9.81m/s/s.

Friction acts in the opposite direction, against gravity.

Surface area is relevant (because of the friction from the air), weight isn't...

You can test it on earth, you just do it in a vacuum to remove the friction component.

Steve Evans

Errrr....

I can only assume you're not familiar with the what would fall faster, a cannon ball or a feather saying?

Long and short of it is weight has nothing to do with it. Everything is subject to gravity, which with no external forces, will accelerate an object at 9.81m/s/s towards the earth. The external forces relevant in this situation would be friction, which can be greatly enhanced by the addition of a parachute, or even covering the case in deep pile carpet.

iOS 5's iMessage chops carrier SMS routing traffic

Steve Evans

Whatsapp

Last time I looked at Whatsapp it had a "free for x months" offer (on Android), which is the crack dealers marketing model. I chose not to become reliant on it and uninstalled it within a few minutes. IIRC it also lacked an elegant way of logging off.

Steve Evans

If they opened BBM up to other OS's then maybe it might have been.

Instead they restricted it to their phones, and thought that feature would be enough to pull people to them... It didn't work.

So instead they screwed up their network and managed to leave large chunks of the planet unable to send messages for several days.

Steve Evans

Where are you?

What country are you in? I was in London and tried to SMS via Orange. For about 20 minutes round midnight I could even get my message onto the network. I expect the cells were overloaded from all the people watching the fireworks.

Steve Evans

Not a good idea...

If anyone out there hadn't realised that sending messages via a single point was a bad idea, Blackberry illustrated it very nicely indeed only a few months ago.

The carriers do know a thing or two about running resilient networks, so for all their faults I would trust them with a message far more than Apple/RIM.

Plus there is the security issue, isn't any data which crosses into the USA from outside deemed fair game for snooping?

The Commodore 64 is 30

Steve Evans

Hardly surprising, it really didn't have any hardware! The Z80 did pretty much everything!

The likes of the 64, BBC Micro etc had many dedicated chips, which improved their performance and features, but would have made sourcing components more expensive and maybe impossible. Acorn had enough problems sourcing the Intel 8271 disk controller themselves and they weren't behind a technology embargo.

Steve Evans

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the commodore disk drives also completely ignore the indexing hole in the disk and purely rely on reading the disk to work out where they were?

IIRC the commodore owners never had to cut a new hole (just a write protect notch in the side) if they chose to flip their disks and use the second side, whereas us beeb owners had to extract the floppy bit, cut a matching indexing hole in the case, then put the magnetic floppy bit back in again.

Ah fond memories, squeezing 400K out of a floppy.

Steve Evans

Ah the fond memories...

...of when a US cost to UK pricing translation consisted of a bit more than just changing the $ to a £.

Happy birthday 64... Although I was (am) a Beeb owner, I still had great respect for the 64. The older brother, the PET was the first computer I ever programmed - it now lives in my attic.

Whale versus shark in KIWI DEATH MATCH!

Steve Evans

Blimee...

I don't blame the sharks one bit!

If I was being picked on my a pod of Orcas I'd be throwing myself up the beach and attempting to develop lungs and legs in double quick time too!

Samoa takes day off to skip International Date Line

Steve Evans

Oooooh gawd...

I hope a certain brand of smart phone isn't popular there... Can you begin to imagine how wrong the alarm clock will be?!!

Will TWO next-gen iPads be unveiled at January's iWorld?

Steve Evans

We've already had them, then some idiot invented widescreen and you now need a laptop screen the size of an aircraft carrier's flight deck to get any useful vertical res.

Steve Evans

iYawn

Oh FFS, enough already.

ALIEN ARTIFACTS can best be FOUND ON MOON

Steve Evans

Yeah yeah, likely story... Narcotics more like and a hacked mining laser.

Steve Evans

How on earth did "archaeological" manage to get past them?

Surely it can't be too long before that is "corrected"

Archylogical?

Apple’s Siri gets sweary with British child

Steve Evans

Hehe...

Apple store here I come!

Wi-Fi Protected Setup easily unlocked by security flaw

Steve Evans

Rolls eyes...

Glad I disabled WPS on my router when it arrived.

I very much take the view that if I'm not using a feature it should be turned off.

Make room, internet, there's another 5 million domains to fit in

Steve Evans

Just don't drop it.

Steve Evans

...

You're obviously the not the owner of a BT Home Hub 3 then... The internet is regularly turned off for a few minutes a week for me when I have to reboot the bl**dy thing to get the wifi to work properly again.

Apple land-grabs fuel cells for mobiles

Steve Evans

Exactly...

The idea of a patent was to protect the inventor so he could recoup the costs incurred whilst developing the product.

The US patent system allows the likes of Apple to patent an idea and do sod all about developing it. If an engineer is unlucky enough to spend time and money actually inventing such a device, he will be lucky to see a penny when he comes to patent the working idea and find Apple own it.

The US patent system is killing invention, not assisting it.

At this rate it won't be long before the rest of the planet develops some bigger cojones and just ignores US patents (aka join China).

Steve Jobs gets posthumous Grammy AND a bronze statue

Steve Evans

Budapest?

How random.

When I was there in the summer I noticed a very healthy selection of different handsets, so they're hardly a country of fanboys. Apple products are horrendously expensive there, for example it's cheaper to buy a Mac Pro in the UK and ship it to Hungary than it is to buy it locally.

Not often the UK can be described as a cheap source!

Iran spy drone GPS hijack boasts: Rubbish, say experts

Steve Evans

Maybe...

So spoofing is complex, but what would the drone do if it didn't have any valid GPS signal?

Without it it would have to rely on dead reckoning calculations, with only air speed, bearing and duration to work with to attempt to find its location. It would be off track and lost very quickly indeed.

In such a situation it could have a fail safe procedure, such as throttling the engine back and performing a controlled descent, or does it just keep zooming along in a lost style, hoping for a GPS lock, until it finally runs out of fuel and drops from the sky?

If it is the former, then spoofing the GPS signal with all its accurate timing would not be required, you just need to drown the signal out with garbage which should be a great deal easier given the weak signal sent from the GPS satellites.

Ofcom maps out what 'psychics' are allowed to do on TV

Steve Evans

*knock knock*

"I'm going to fine you for being a fraud. The fine will be delivered in 48 hours time. If you can tell me the exact value of the fine before it arrives we will let you off."

Steve Evans

I remember Tony Blair being interviewed about the Iraq war... He stated that he prayed for guidance...

So our country went to war because of what the voice in his head replied. Or was it just for the oil or for some kind of back hand from G Dubya?

If the voice was claimed to be anything other than a recognised (who compiles the list?) deity you would get locked up, yet there is no more proof for the existence of "insert recognise deity here" than there is for the flying spaghetti monster. Which is exactly the point of FSM.

Steve Evans

I was directly touched by the noodly goodness last night.

Or as some would call it, dinner.

BT, Scotland Yard form copper theft crackdown supersquad

Steve Evans

We'll be using neutrinos. Light is too slow.

Steve Evans

It's a start...

Insisting on payment into a bank, or by cheque...

Add to that a photograph of the person concerned and his pile of scrap, and a photograph of his vehicle registration, driving licence and the VIN tag of transit van too, just for good measure.

Then make the fine for handling stolen metal or failure to keep proper records somewhere in the bankruptcy region.

Steve Evans

Not if I "Cu" first!

(That was terrible!)

Steve Evans

Yes

With FTTC (aka BT Infinity) the copper pair from you house goes to the box down the street. There the data and voice are split. The voice continues its quaint (and ancient) route as an analogue signal to the exchange. The data jumps onto the fibre at the cabinet.

My area recently suffered telecoms cable theft. Phone was out, but broadband was fine (which was nice).

Homeland Sec., RIAA Torrent lists published

Steve Evans

Indeed...

Dynamic IPs would explain some of the odd reports for home users, but the RIAA and Homeland Sec will have fixed.

Mine came up completely clean, which is pretty good. Even more so as I have a dynamic, which means nobody else who was leased the IP from the pool has been a naughty boy either.

Yeah, I know, the site must be broken!

Steve Evans

LMAO!

What kind of dozy muppet runs a torrent client at work?

Then again, what kind of dozy company/corporation/bloated govt dept manages their network so badly that employees *can* run a torrent client inside the network.

I'm sure the RIAA will be covering their arses (or asses as they are American) any time soon with stories of "We have to join torrent streams to check the authenticity of the content before legal action can proceed"... or "It is for statistical analysis of how effective our anti piracy policy is..."

BTW, both those explanations are copyright.

Laptop display pixel counts to quadruple in 2012

Steve Evans

...

The count is going in the right direction, but the pixels are going in the wrong direction.. Sideways!

How about a bit more on the height and a bit less on the width, you know, like ummm, one of those quaint old 4:3 screens.

Then we could have a good size business desktop without having something that looks like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

2011's Best... Smartphones

Steve Evans

This is true, but aren't I right in saying that Microsoft aren't allowing anyone to customise their mobile OS? So the certain manufacturer who takes a while to release Android *cough*HTC*cough* don't have a sense skin to crowbar onto the new release (and eat all the resources!).

Maybe google could get a version out to the manufacturers a bit earlier, but if they are releasing it to the public the instant it is finished, giving the manufacturers a head start would actually mean delaying the vanilla release to everyone else.

The fact Cyanogen manage to get builds out faster than manufacturers speaks volumes in my book.

Sent from my HTC Desire Z running Cyanogen 7.1, gingerbread 2.3.7 kernel. Try getting that from HTC... Oh you won't, the phone is a year old, so they've forgotten about it.

Can't wait to try ICS in the new year.

Android malware victims offered free WinPhones by MS

Steve Evans

Five best....

Only five? They're sounding really confident about this aren't they.

Greenland 'lurched upward' in 2010 as 100bn tons of ice melted

Steve Evans

Quite common...

The UK is still doing this from the last ice age, that's how we manage to get little earth quakes even though we are nowhere near a fault.

2011's Best... Premium Tablets

Steve Evans

@eSeM

Not that aspect ratio has ever stopped laptop manufacturers building so-called business machines with movie viewing 16:9 screens.

*rolls eyes and sticks with his ever ageing 1400x1050 Thinkpad*

Steve Jobs' last design: New Apple HQ pics

Steve Evans

OMG!

Apple have invented the wheel...!

Quick, start digging out your historical examples and prepare for the lawyers!

Man fights felony hacking charge for accessing wife's email

Steve Evans

Sounds about the same level of hacking as the UK journalists are currently embroiled in.... In that case they accessed telephone voicemail which had been left at a default 4 number pin. usually 0000 or 1234, and they're going after everyone involved in that with relish!

BUSTED! Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps

Steve Evans

Indeed. Land of the free and home of the brave... These days it's land of the spied upon and home of the scared shitless by endless terrorism hype.

Steve Evans

Checked my DZ too, running stock HTC Gingerbread, no sign of it.

Maybe it's something HTC only dish out with Sense 3, or just to the US market?

Steve Evans

@Probing...

You can't have it both ways you know... El Reg goes into iphone rumour meltdown for a month before every new phone launch, gets rather tiresome to be honest. Multiple iphone stories a day isn't uncommon.

If you feed the rumour mill for free product promotion, you can't complain if the wheels keep spinning when your product does something daft.

Steve Evans

Best someone checks out ios 5.0 then ;-)

'I'm the first to admit that we've made a bunch of mistakes'

Steve Evans

<aol>

Me too

</aol>

Android glitch allows hackers to bug phone calls

Steve Evans

@Miek

I believe he has RTFM'ed. Did you RTFOP? The issue isn't recording audio from the microphone, that's a piece of piss as your links show.

The problem is recording telephone *conversations*. It's very easy to get the audio feed from the Microphone (as per usual), but getting the other side of the conversation is damn tricky.

In some situations the microphone will pick up the audio coming from the ear piece and echoing through the phone internals, but this is not ideal, and subject to the designs of the handset and background noise. It's also completely useless the moment an ear piece is used.

Without a way to tap directly into both sides of the audio, a call recorder as the OP described is not possible.

Siri gets Android rival as Cluzee goes live

Steve Evans

Well I'm only telling you what it it did to me. I might have said "What is the time?" instead of "What time is it?".

It certainly understood what I had said as it showed the correct transcription on the screen and then started moaning about the address.

Steve Evans

I tried Siri the other day...

I said (in a clear British accent) "What time is it?"

It replied

"I don't know what the time is at 32 minus 45 moody street"

1) It doesn't matter what the time is in Moody Street, just knowing I'm in the UK would be good enough, and you can work that out from the cells with no need to reference wifi or GPS info.

2) We say "32 to 45" not "32 minus 45" for an address which spans multiple numbers

3) I wasn't anywhere near s*dding moody street!

So overall I wasn't particularly impressed.

Although I did manage to successful sneak a "wake me at 4am" into the phone, which belonged to a friend.... Haven't spoken to him since, so I might be in trouble, then again, this is an iphone alarm, so it might not have gone off yet!

Dawdling EU countries smacked over telecoms reforms

Steve Evans

Interesting mix...

You could forgive some of the smaller countries for maybe be a little bit less organised about it, some of them aren't long freed from the grip of mother Russia, and Poland did lose a big chunk of their government in a plane crash, but that list isn't just the old Eastern block is it, the big (and small) western players are in there too. In fact some of the old Eastern block countries have implemented it successfully.

So which ones are too disorganised to implement it, and which ones are just too top heavy with red tape that they're still trying to slow the bureaucratic oil tanker down before they can make a slight manoeuvre?

The French of course will have their own third category as usual - don't like it, will ignore it.

Still slightly amazed the UK isn't on the list. I guess implementing it in law is one thing, enforcing it is something else entirely.

How digital audio ate itself ... and the music biz

Steve Evans

Interesting.

An interesting read. Thanks for that.

Just curious you chose to pick on Kate Bush's 80's samplefest as an example, she wasn't the first name to come to my mind from that era... Try the Art of Noise, 1984, Close to the edit.

Although my favourite wasn't until 1986 - Paranoimia... I can feel a youtube memory trip coming on...

Oh oh okay doors, Swiiiiing....