Posts by M Gale
2431 posts • joined Sunday 22nd April 2007 18:21 GMT
Page:
Re: Oh but remote desktop has been done yeeeears ago!
Yes, if you're a complete geek.
Now how about remote administration for normal people?
If El Goog get it done right it could be useful. For normal people. And about any data mining, if indeed it's built into the OS (as opposed to in whatever web app stack Google give you)? It's open source. So rip that functionality out if it exists, no?
If Apple had made this announcement, it'd be full of fawning praise and you know it. Don't you dare think that Apple and Microsoft aren't profiling their customers too, and you pay heftily per OS license for that privilege with them!
It has potential.
I've speculated before that a good use for Chrome OS, given the existance of Android already in toyphones and tablets, could be as a smart terminal for business users. You've no worries about data loss if a fondlable device goes missing, and if Google are smart they'll include options for remote wiping anything that is cached locally.
Plus having your home computer on a netbook on the train sounds like fun.
Posted in Robotic High Noon in Colorado
A big noise.
Otherwise known as a shockwave. It tends to burst ear drums and cause all kinds of interesting stresses in hard or brittle objects. I just wouldn't want to be anywhere near something that size if it did go boom.
A shaped cutting charge if you want to use the minimal amount of explosive and contain the blast a little. Otherwise, with enough high explosive you can blow up just about anything.
Science? Pah. Blind faith and obedience? That's more like it.
"Smith also ignored scientific advice when she upgraded cannabis from C to B even though downgrading it had led to less people taking it. Maybe we could save some money by just sacking these scientists rather than paying them to offer advice which the government will then ignore."
I blame John Oates. He gave the bastards ideas.
Eh, who actually believes the government on its drugs policy any more anyway? Frank? They've been losing the War On Drugs That Aren't Alcohol since the mid 1920s, and they look set to lose it for another century at this rate. Why did nobody learn from US prohibition and nearly 100 years of propaganda and imprisonments?
Posted in Robotic High Noon in Colorado
That robot might have been tiny...
...but packed with high explosive, I'm pretty confident that something that size could blow an appreciable chunk out of that support pillar.
Or perhaps spray passing motorists with ball bearings, nails, broken glass and other shrapnel.
Even a cup full of black powder when suitably compressed can make a hell of a boom, and these days we have things like semtex and TNT, Torpex, and $_DEITY only knows what else. Choose your poison?
'most Rabies are Jew's
I know it's a typo, I know it's bad form to correct other people, but... damn!
Ponemon?
Gotta catch 'em all?
Posted in Gear4 UnityRemote
But what about buttons with screens on them?
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/
A few minor niggles, like no Toy Unix support as such, but I'd definitely keep one of those if it were given to me.
I just wouldn't buy it at the ~£1000 asking price.
Posted in 'Smear agricultural land with human poo'
Hence the phrase "Treat them like mushrooms."
IE, keep them in the dark and feed them shit.
I suggest...
..."Mississippi".
Forks every once in a while, dunnit?
Posted in Windows Phone 7 gets unlocked
Same on an el cheapo ZTE Racer.
As the title says.
Also while I'm here: "Apple's iPhone, the most famously-locked-down of the platforms, has no viruses or Trojans to worry about..."
No viruses or trojans that we know about, you mean? How long did it take Apple to find and remove that sneaky flashlight app from their store that was allowing people to press a secret button combo and get tethering on their phones? Did Apple's infamous close scrutiny spot that, or is Apple's infamous close scrutiny a whole crock of shit that's more focussed on whether you mention a competitor's platform in your app?
You really think Apple would be able to find a competently-made trojan before the developer pressed the detonate button? And so what if they hit the kill switch? The amount of money gleaned from getting a hundred thousand (let alone a few million) phones to dial a premium rate number would probably pay for development of the next sneaky trojan.
Thanks, but I'd rather be able to look at a list of permissions. "This fart app requires: Location (Coarse, network based. Fine, GPS). Services that cost you money (make and receive calls, send and receive SMS messages). Full Internet access. Change contents of SD card. Adjust system settings. Prevent phone from going into standby."
It's not 100%, but then what is? Apple's curated iStore? You're having a giraffe, surely?
Posted in 'Smear agricultural land with human poo'
This is not limited to night soil.
Any large amounts of any kind of fertilizer (or pesticide for that matter) in the water supply is a very bad thing. Phosphates? Nitrates? Good for plants, not so for animals.
Posted in 'Smear agricultural land with human poo'
This used to be quite normal.
Go and Google "Night Soil".
I wonder how many shills post here?
I don't normally accuse people of such, but it's amazing how many "anti pirates" crawl out of the woodwork when something even remotely related to BitTorrent pops up.
Yes, I'm a freetard. No, I pay for my music, in CD form so I can turn it into an mp3 or ogg without any hassle.
And yes, I use BitTorrent. I can't wait for the day I get one of the meeja industry's legal love letters through the door. Seriously, I'll frame the fucker.
Posted in An iPad for under 200 quid*
Apple == Bang & Olufsen
Overpriced tat that looks nice on the coffee table. But hey, you can get it on a 24-month hire purchase agreement with only £200 paid up front!
The rest of us get Kenwood or Sony or Technics or just about any other gear and it sounds just as good for half the price.
Flame on.
Kids, eh?
"Keep the PC in the living room - he'll use his phone.
Take his phone - he'll buy a cheap iPod Touch off eBay.
Use OpenDNS filtering - he'll use IP addresses and proxies.
Turn off the router - he'll use the neighbour's instead.
I don't think ISP filtering is the answer - but I'm not sure what is."
By the time your darling is old enough to do all that, he's probably old enough to know a few things that'll turn your hair grey a few decades too early. Censorship by that time is a little like trying to shut the stable door after the entire race meeting has just departed in haste.
If on the other hand a young child even has the requisite debit card to buy something from ebay (and if you keep giving a nowty little sod money to buy an iToy), then you have something wrong there that a national Internet censorwall will never fix.
Won't be easy to apply.
I could see professional signmakers and vinyl wrappers having difficulty getting this thing aligned to pixel-perfect precision, let alone Joe and Jane Public. That's without considering things like bubbles and creases. Still, as something fitted by the manufacturer I could see lenticular and similar no-glasses 3D working quite well. We'll see how well next year when Ninty goes all 3DS on us.
Viruses in the hands of bad guys.
No, really?
And there's me thinking that Stuxnet was developed by totally above-board professional programmers.
There's already cable that runs for at least as long as the tracks....
"So how do you connect your femto cell to the rest of the network? you're in a train in a cast iron tunnel, you still need 100's km of radiating cable."
...it's called, errr, the tracks. They're electric, you know?
And afaik most of the tunnels are lined with concrete and brick, not cast iron. Not that this matters when you're under several metres of terra firma.
Very nice.
But did you hire aManFromMars to write that title?
Britain is indeed the past master of bastardry.
It's been taken over in the last century or so, though.
Well, all except for one.
So what's the difference...
...between this and the hilariously-NSFW http://headostate.com at all?
I don't see Obama rushing to sue.
Historic quotes?
"Today large hard drives of over 1TB are reasonably priced, and freely available. We are also seeing further expansion of hard drive sizes at a fast rate, where 2Tb drives and more are becoming easy accessible to small businesses."
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
fm radio
Been on every toyphone and dumbphone for years, and now finally the iToys get it!
Hardly antitrust. More like Jobs' magical device finally catching up to the rest of the uncultured plebians.
Posted in BOFH: Look out!
Wouldn't work.
Patient alarms are wired like house alarms: if you cut the wire or pull the lead out it goes off.
Yeah, I'll go fetch it.
Posted in Angry Birds struggle to take on Androids
To be fair...
...you probably weren't running the game inside a virtual machine. What state were SNES and Megadrive emulators in, back in 2000?
Posted in Angry Birds struggle to take on Androids
Perversely enough..
..Angry Birds works on this cheap little ZTE Racer. It gets laggy when the advertising mechanism tries to do something, and it's smoother if you turn the sound off but it's playable.
And yes, it's funny watching people compare a GPUriffic handheld games & playthings platform costing either hundreds of pounds or an 18 month ball and chain, versus a budget pocketable device of anything down to 10% of the iWotsit's price on a 3 network PAYG SIM. Apples and, err, oranges?
Posted in iAds to flood UK iPhones, iPads
Considering how much flak I usually like to throw at Apple...
...I find myself going "meh" at the plans to run their own advertising through the phone. It's not like everyone else doesn't do it, and free apps are pretty much expected to throw up banners here and there. So they probably won't let Random Advertising Network Ltd into their walled garden? BFD. At least this way the customers' personal data and history is only being mined by one company that is too big to fold up and disappear to evade the law if data protection violations rear their head.
I'm just slightly boggled that they are sticking with that name. Congratulations, your iPhone now has iAds? That's a screw-up of Microsoftian "If you have a life without walls, why do you need Windows" comedy potential.
I've said this before...
..Chrome-like? So it'll run on Mac OS X and Linux?
Windows XP?
So much for interoperability, then.
Posted in Samsung Galaxy Tab Android tablet
Not all pixels are square.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_aspect_ratio
In other words, measure the height and width of the screen, not the number of pixels.
Or I'm sure you could be funky and measure the length and angle of a line drawn between opposite corners and do the derivations, but most aren't so masochistic.
Posted in Facebook bug sin-bins female users
And how do you know it was a "he"?
Because There Are No Girls On The Internet. You should know this.
I think the Facebook banning was spot on. Those "girls" are obviously fake. Why, I'm sure even Ms Bee is really a killer robot sent from the future to subjugate humanity to her (!) indomitable will. Rise Of The Machines? You don't know the half of it...
Android is Linux...
...like OS X is BSD.
Related in the same way that I'm related to my father's, brother's, nephew's, cousin's former room mate.
People are paying for their service already.
Customers pay to get access to the Internet, providers pay to stick their servers in data centres. You get 10mbps, 100mbps or whatever rate the pipe to the next router is, to send and receive lots of 1s and 0s with, to any other Internet-connected machine. As far as I'm concerned, that should be the end of it.
But hey, that's not quite enough money is it?
Posted in Samsung Galaxy Tab Android tablet
Gingerbread?
"With an eye on the forthcoming Gingerbread and Honeycomb upgrades..."
But have Samsung said that they WILL allow upgrades to these versions when available? Some people still remember the i7500 and its permanent relegation to v1.6.
Posted in Ten... budget Android smartphones
ZTE Racer owner
And you're almost spot-on. It's quite a nice little budget toyphone, though god knows if ZTE will ever upgrade the OS. I would have a small issue with your view on the battery though: Pretty much any toyphone is going to get the crap drained out of the battery in a mere few hours if you're using it as a PSP. As something that sits in my pocket, takes the occasional phone call or sometimes shows me where something is on Google Maps though, it comfortably lasts until I can get home at night. In fact, right now it's on 59% charge after a day of usage and a good few hours of Meebo IM client.
Still, it could definitely last longer. Missing my Nokia 6288's battery life already.. and the damned thing has the same battery capacity!
And the Manchester Ship Canal goes through Liverpool.
But this doesn't explain a fuck-up of a proportion that only Fox could manage.
Beatles, from Manchester? Well, that's given me my daily dose of laughs in one sitting.
Well you did ask.
#!/bin/bash
# svndiff 1.0
# usage: svndiff file
if [[ ! -d .svn ]]
then
echo ERROR: You are not working in an SVN directory.
exit 1
fi
rev="--revision HEAD"
if [[ ! -n $1 ]]
then
echo "Usage: svndiff [option] file"
echo "Options:"
echo " -h Diff with latest in repository (HEAD) - Default"
echo " -b Diff with what you had checked out (BASE)"
echo " -c Diff with COMMITTED, the version before BASE"
echo " -p Diff with PREV, the version before COMMITTED"
echo " -r revnum Diff with specified revision (specify integer)"
exit 1
fi
while getopts ":r:hbcp" Option
do
case $Option in
h) rev="--revision HEAD";;
b) rev="--revision BASE";;
c) rev="--revision COMMITTED";;
p) rev="--revision PREV";;
r) rev="--revision $OPTARG";;
*) echo "Incorrect option specified. Use -h or -b or -r #";;
esac
done
shift $(($OPTIND -1))
# Define graphical diff tool
#
# The geometry option used by Motif, Tcl and X based programs
geometry="-geometry 1280x800+0+0"
# The following is for Motif diff
# -w: ignore white space
dif="mgdiff -args -w"
file=$1
prev=${file}_PREV
# Trap bash command signals
# SIGINT 2
# SIGQUIT 3
# SIGTERM 15
trap "rm -f $prev" 2 3 15
svn cat $rev $file > $prev 2>/dev/null
$dif $geometry $prev $file
sleep 1
rm -f $prev
...Would that be enough?
Posted in Tumblr and 4chan knock each other out
4chan? DDoS'd?
They had it coming, chaps.
Now. Seconds out, round two. DING DING!
Posted in Missing piece completes Stuxnet jigsaw
"spreading using either unpatched Windows vulnerabilities or from infected USB sticks"
Windows? In a nuclear power plant? Anywhere near anything important?
Are these people insane?
Yes but...
...can a backscatter scanner tell the difference between a real D cup and a Semtex-enhanced D cup?
What, no?
Oh well.
But what happens when a new Android comes out...
...and Samsung want you to replace the rather expensive toyslate you just bought in order to patch a vulnerability in the old Android? You know, rather than just.. letting people use the more modern version?
Until they can get that right, they're no better than any other two-bit Chinese manufacturer. A damned sight more pricey, too.
Getting illegal gains from an app store.
I don't think the developer would really be bothered if Apple hit the kill-switch on their viral app, if they can get maybe 250,000 handsets to all dial a premium rate number at the same time for a couple of minutes. Once that's done, the development of the next stealth virus has just been paid for.
But can you still find out your collection has been "unpublished?"
See title. That's a showstopper right there, that is.
The Sega 16 bit consoles and the Amiga...
...both ran at about 7.67mhz. The 68k itself could be clocked up to about 16mhz though, IIRC.
And yes, wouldn't surprise me if you found one in a washing machine. The m68k family did get everywhere, and still does.
If you're prepared to ride along a busy road on a bicycle...
..you're either braver than I am, or just insane.
But then, you work here don't you?
(I'm glad the Moderatrix doesn't know where I live...)
So if this is US based...
...why doesn't said boss respond to every single question with "I plead the 5th"?
Silicone Valley
Also known as Paris Hilton's cleavage?
"Auto-driven cars will have their own lane, as will cyclists..."
More likely: Auto driven cars get to use bus lanes. Cyclists have to make do with a foot-wide strip near the kerb like they always have.
And you wonder why some people would rather just pootle along the pavement at 5mph...
