Cue/Queue

Give it a day or two for the commentards, the guy might be right after all.

Re: Format?

..Also a subject of this semester's Computing in Society module, where the prof pretty much reached the same conclusion. In 20 years, will there be Word v6 file readers still around? What happens to all the documents still written in it?

Open standards. Good for more than just feeling superior about.

Naw.

It'll be after they cause irrepairable damage to SpaceX's reputation by trying to fling a Robin into GEO with the thing. Or seeing if Stig v3.0 can beat one in a drag race.

I have one of these.

Sold as the "ZTE Racer". It's an okay cheapy droidphone, but some people don't like single-touch resistive screens. I especially don't like pulling the thing out of my pocket to find it's called the emergency services in my pocket.

FIVE TIMES.

There should be a feature in these phones so that the emergency service guys can determine whether a phone has been triggered in a pocket and set an alarm off or something. Better yet, make it so that the screen can't be brought up with the "unlock or press emergency call button RIGHT FUCKING HERE" just by pressing a button on the front of the bloody device.

I'll probably get one.

If only to replace this DS lite with the knackered hinge/shoulder button. Not at this price though, might give it a little while.

Say what you like about Ninty's later-gen consoles not having a bajillion shader pipelines or being able to render things down to subatomic accuracy. Nintendo are first and foremost a game company, unlike any of the competition. They are undeniably good at what they do. The games tend to be cheaper as well, which in my eye is a double plus.

This coming from someone who always bought Sega consoles...

And therein lies the problem.

By acting as the self-appointed Arbiter of Morality, as opposed to just deleting malware, Apple and its app store will always have this trouble. You can't cater to one special interest group without catering to them all, and by agreeing to censor you become a lot more liable for any objectionable content.

Same problem with national firewalls and other such hysterically child-contemplating ideas.

Duck video!

I'm pretty damned sure I remember that. Used to compress a lot of early PSOne/Saturn/Mega CD-era FMV, back when it was called "FMV" and not just "Video".

Nice to see where it ended up. Shame to see the MPEG LA doing an SCO.

Also reminds me..

Of when Blue Yonder (now Virgin Media) had a rule barring you from hosting anything other than "personal use" servers over broadband, and no servers at all on dialup. That somewhat insane rule (almost as insane as running a server on dialup) didn't last too long!

Anyway, in some parts of the country, VM are still the only feasible choice for broadband so are a de facto monopoly. I understand AT&T are in a similar position. "You pays your money, you makes your choice" doesn't sound quite so justifying of onerous business practice in this case, surely?

More like..

The boiler has a crapton of capacity and you hired a plumber to have radiators in all your rooms, not just the kitchen.

And all analogies are bullshit.

But you're not.

You're tethering a device through a phone that I presume has been approved for connection to a public telephone network. There's no more a circuit from your laptop to AT&T than there is from me to Vulture Towers right now. Ain't packet switching great?

Photos at 720p...

...generally look better than cardboard mock-ups at 1920x1200, surely? I can see this being awesome for mmo games. No chance I'd want this to be the future of all games, but that's less resolution and more down to ownership issues.

Not only the hardware and applications.

Also all of "your" data. I know there's some real use for a rentable, scalable computing resource attached to a whacking great Internet connection, I'm just not sure my day to day computing or a company's trade secrets is it.

$31337 would be nicer.

Not that I'd complain at the grand-and-a-bit.

As evidenced by the flashlight-cum-tethering app...

Apple don't do a complete code audit of every app in their store. What's to stop a similarly spiked app with a rootkit on board making it in? Only one hardware platform to figure out how to root, too.

Well, unless it gets banned for not having a convincingly wet sound to the farts available, or something.

Oh hell yes.

"Just hold this a minute", he said. I tell you, a 100w rig being keyed up is as effective as a cattleprod for various assorted bastardry.

I'm a sucker for a sweet little toy

"Currently Android tablets are sharply divided into two categories -- sub-$200 junk and wayyyyy too expensive."

I keep pimping this 7" toy I've got here (selective quoting opportunity right there), a Commtiva N700. Also sold as a Linx 7, amongst probably a couple of other names. It has a capacitive screen, Froyo and 512MB RAM. Not the biggest on-board flash ROM at the same 512MB, but you get a micro SD card slot so that's less important.

It's not as snappily responsive as a higher-end tablet like the Tab or Pad, but it's what I would regard as good enough. No Flash because of the 600mhz clock speed, but that hasn't been a big problem. While something like Captain Forever could be nice to try on a toy like that (and if you haven't ever played it, get yourself to www.captainforever.com and have fun), there's still plenty of games in the Android Marketplace that don't depend on Adobe's plugin.

Price-wise, it's £300, as opposed to the Tab's £450 and the iPad's £_shitloads_via_a_contract. Has features like tethering and portable AP functionality without having to root the thing, and £300 is the wifi+3g, SIM-free, no-network-lock, you-actually-own-the-device price.

Plus, at seven inches, it'll fit in a large pocket. The protective wallet you get with it isn't bad either. Find a shop selling this thing and ask to have a play with it, see what you think and whether you like the price in $.

So that was YOUR form was it?

Ex 2001 keyer here. You bastard, I had to use gloves to handle that rancid mess!

Mind you, couldn't be any worse than rotten dogshit and the various other substances I had to deal with daily. You'd almost think there were a shitload of people unhappy with being forced to hand over personal information!!!!

(As an aside, my favourite forms were the ones where the person had written a 1000 word essay on Why The Census Is Bullshit, all around the margins. Or the people who work in data entry writing things like 'I bet you're halfway through a really boring shift right now - don't worry, it'll be over soon and then you can get a beer.' Useless as a form of protest, but it gave me a smile.)

That last bit reminds me of 2001.

Some guy was prosecuted for putting down "British" as his race. The judge ruled that there is no such thing.

For this census, I will put my race down as "human". I would like the judge to try and argue THAT one.

You do know...

...that LM and Fujitsu/Seimens were involved in 2001 as well? They provided the system and equipment, respectively. The system was one that the government basically bought from LM after it proved successful in the US.

Harmless? Surely you jest?

"Census data is harmless and ultimately is good for the country. Millions of our ancestors were happy to participate and that has also helped us to keep an accurate picture of our country's past."

Well, when it was originally brought in by a conquering monarch who wanted a head count so he knew how much tax to extract, I imagine people didn't have much of a choice.

Now it's evolved far past a head count and into creepy territory, and people still don't have much of a choice.

So while you're right that millions were probably happy to comply, how many weren't and aren't? And how many would just do what the government wants them to do regardless of how silly? See this is the thing about statistical analysis - it helps to know all the variables!

Indeed.

My old advanced statistics tutor would probably love this article. The entire year we were with him was spent learning examples of the sort of maths involved that make 100% sample sizes completely unnecessary. And yes, this included the National Census, an institution that he had no trouble tearing into and making various references to throughout the year.

There's plenty of voluntary sampling methods that will provide you with oodles of market research data (sorry, 'information about the populace') without forcing everyone to provide an ever more detailed analysis of their personal life to the government every 10 years, under penalty of fines and imprisonment. At least, it'll be to the 95th or 99th percentile certain, which is probably just as accurate as the census after you filter out the comedians and refuseniks playing silly buggers with the forms.

Oooh crikey.

You really should be Anne Robinson's stand-in for when she has to take a day off.

"You are the weakest link.. and a complete fucking muppet. Goodbye."

Implications for Linux?

Microsoft try and sue people over the "intellectual property" contained in Qt, the FSF sue the shit out of them for daring to try that with GPL (well, LGPL) software, Microsoft back down and paint the whole exercise as a public gesture of friendship towards the open source community, meanwhile everyone else can smell the crock of shit a mile off and moves to GTK?

City?

I'll give you a clue: I pay sixteen quid a week on a ticket that'll get me on an Arriva bus anywhere in the North West of England and North Wales. Okay, so the Metro might not reach the darkest corners of god-knows-where (or you're not enough of a early bird in the morning), but I'd hardly call my current location a sprawling metropolis. You wouldn't have this many farms and old miners' houses, and BT could probably deliver broadband worthy of the name, and this tablet wouldn't have such a bother picking a signal of any kind up.

As opposed to my location earlier when I posted that.

Er, no.

See this isn't like the desktop, where outside a few select niches you're taking a great risk in spending money to develop for anything that isn't Windows. You should check the Android Marketplace out some time. Plenty of developers and plenty of download counts for the popular apps.

Anyway, "best value" is highly debatable. I'm sure that as long as the screen is capacitive, the chips are at least half decent and the price is less than half a wifi+3g iPad, plenty of people are going to look at a market of 100,000 or so apps and climbing and think that's a pretty sweet deal. Like it or not the droid is here to stay and it's not just biting a chunk out of Apple's market share, but the cheaper devices out there are serving a long tail that Apple aren't interested in: People not willing to pay iPad prices for a pretty toy computer/terminal.

Now wouldn't you, as a developer, want a slice of that growing userbase's app expenditure?