Posts by Brangdon
128 posts • joined Monday 15th September 2008 13:36 GMT
Re: Compelling reasons for a smart watch?
For me the compelling feature is likely to be NFC. Having to get your phone out to buy stuff is not much easier than having to get your wallet out, but your watch is already out.
Your list of drawbacks are just pessimistic assumptions. There is no more need for a smart watch to blank its display than for a normal (digital) watch. Blanking it does not save much power.
The Pebble watch has minimal features and only lasts a week. It also adds drain to your phone battery. Mostly from keeping the Bluetooth connection alive at both ends.
Re: makes sense
Plus perhaps a console, for more serious game playing. For many home users, it's the desire to play demanding games that drives the purchase, or upgrade, of a new PC every few years. Next year we'll have a new generation of consoles, and I'd expect those to eat into home PCs even more. (Admittedly some people will always prefer keyboard and mouse over hand-held controller.)
Re: Don't bring Lucy Meadows into this...
Whether or not she took her life because of the press is irrelevant. The press should not have hounded her. Having done so, they should not have got away with it. She made numerous complaints. It's an important example partly because it is so recent, and shows that even now the press aren't able to regulate themselves.
Posted in Samsung: We're doing smart watches too
Re: I have no idea what a smartwatch is meant to do
NFC belongs in a watch, not a phone. Paying for stuff by pushing your wrist against a sensor is easier than getting your wallet/phone out of your pocket. Unlike a card, it can beep/vibrate for every transaction so the money never goes out with out you knowing. The smart phone can do the rich UI (setting maximum transaction value without PIN, etc).
Other key uses include having your phone unlock automatically when it is held in your hand, and having the phone or watch alert if they become separated by more than a few feet.
Re: What Are We Waiting For?
If you think a Mars government would be any better you need to look up "hydraulic despotism" in your history books.
Re: Dr Frankenstein
True. Are you saying that Dr Frankenstein looked good in a dress?
Posted in Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant
Re: Is this really Torvalds' position?
He's not changed his tune. What he's rejected in the thread is adding cruft to the kernel when it's not needed because, "What you mention we can already do, and we already do it *better*" via standard X.509
certificates.
Re: So, the jist of the problem is...
I expect she'd chat with you for a few days first, so she wouldn't be a stranger by the time you got naked.
People have relationships online. Cybersex sometimes include video. Sometimes the fool is the one who is unable to trust.
They'd only show your half of the conversation, and say you thought you were video chatting to a 14-year-old girl at the time. That's all it would take to get you pilloried by the internet as a paedophile.
Re: Skipping ads used to be better
Tivo has a 30-second skip. To skip 2 minutes of ads, press the button 4 times. It's really not that hard to figure out.
Re: How many shirts do you own?
It could be your watch. I wear the same watch whatever clothes I'm wearing.
It's limited because its display is small and it can't talk wirelessly other displays, and because it can't afford much battery power. Those things will change with NFC and wireless charging, and Moores Law.
I'd probably accept a somewhat thicker and heavier wrist band if it had more functionality. If, for example, it replaced my house and car keys with a secure wireless lock, and if it could be used to pay for stuff without me needing to get my wallet or phone out.
Re: I do not want to sound like
Retribution was rubbish - and I like more other films in the franchise. I didn't think Milla was especially bad in it, though. The plot was so poor and the characterisation so thin that the actors had no chance.
Re: not done right
Charging should become less of an issue with decent wireless charging. Most people take their watch off when going to bed anyway, and whatever nightstand they dump it on should charge it, without them having to think about it or mess around with cables.
That said, the longer life the better, of course.
Re: Underwhelmed!
Eventually docks will become wireless too. There's a critical point where both connectivity and charging can be done wirelessly and at a range of 40cm or so. Sit down at a desk, and the keyboard and monitor connect to your phone (or tablet) automagically. You can run CPU-intensive tasks (including the wireless connection itself) and not have to worry about the power that uses because of the wireless charging.
If someone gets all the bits sorted out and working nicely, I think it will be compelling. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple was the first to do it, as that sort of unified vision is what they do well. On the other hand, it is also the vision that led Microsoft to unify their mobile and desktop operating systems, and they potentially have a unique advantage there. (Obviously Windows 8 isn't there yet; this stuff needs up to 5 years more work.)
Re: Heard this one on R4 yesterday...
I think you are missing the difference between identifying the date and time from scratch, and verifying a date and time claimed by the witness. The latter is surely a lot easier as you are just comparing two signals for equality. Even if the witness time is approximate, you'll have a relatively small range of samples to compare against.
Re: there's still water coming out of my tap
Water is relatively easy to store. There's no good way to store electricity in bulk. The best is probably to pump water up a hill and let it flow down again later, but even that needs a supply of hills that you don't mind ruining with the big reservoir.
Re: Come on
Cable let it be known he opposed News Corp. Hunt let it be known he favoured them. Cable was sacked and replaced by Hunt. Both were known to be biased, but in opposite directions.
There's no evidence that Cable let his private views affect his decisions. There is some evidence that Hunt did; he appointed Michel and let him leak "absolutely illegal” material on the bid to News Corp. However, this is circumstantial. Hunt escaped because he had plausible deniability; his underling Michel took most of the blame.
Finally, it's worth noting that Cable was correct. Eventually the scandals meant News Corp had to withdraw. So Cable arguably was not prejudiced but had merely reached a judgement based on merit.
In a situation like this, the man at the top can avoid giving explicit orders. Michel knew the views of his boss Hunt. Hunt knew the views of his boss Cameron.
Re: Someone needs to mention Thief
Have you played the third game? The game is supposed to be a first-person sneaker where darkness is your friend, and someone dropped a survival horror level into the middle of it. ("The Cradle".) Awesome.
Re: Bond's options were limited.
That the 00 prefix represented a licence to kill, is mentioned in the book Goldfinger, in 1956.
Hence Windows RT
That kind of reasoning is why Microsoft have started targeting tablets, and why they won't let Windows RT fail. It may take them a few iterations to get it right, but they won't give up until they do. Otherwise Android will grow until it takes over the desktop as well as tablets - Google will add multi-tasking and multiple windows, and work on notebooks and laptops and desktops. Tablets (and to a lesser extent phones) are where Microsoft have chosen to make their stand.
Since Microsoft have chosen to do that, and shown themselves willing to compromise the desktop experience if it helps win on tablets, the articles predictions become moot. In the medium term, it could even be the death of Android, at least on higher-end devices.
Posted in Microsoft Surface priced up for Blighty
I recently bought a 64Gig Asus Transformer Pad Infinity
No regrets yet. The Asus has a better screen, the keyboard dock is more worthwhile because it adds battery life and ports, and it currently has a better app ecosystem. My phone is Android too, which is convenient for sharing apps and their data. I do find Android 4.1 a bit limited on a device of this calibre, and I'd like the WinRT Snap-2-apps feature. (Hopefully Android will get it, in due course.) I'm not bothered about Office.
I'd rather have had a full desktop Windows 8, without giving up battery life, but the former won't be available for several more months and the latter could be years. With it just being Windows RT, and at that price, it's not very attractive to me. Maybe in a year or two's time, when/if the app store is more mature. I might have changed my phone by then too.
Posted in Valve's Half-Life
Re: Half Life
Half Life 2 has better graphics, physics and modelling, but in the ways that matter Half Life 1 is better. HL2 level design suffers more from feeling linear. One cares about the characters less (to the point where I'd use squad members to set off traps because they were worth less than bullets). In HL1 one generally has sense of one's goal (eg, get to the surface); in HL2 you are just wandering around looking for the single exit.
Seriously. I've played both games many times and as long as you can put up with the poorer graphics, HL1 is better.
Apple get away with it
Apple don't have a monopoly; they've always been a high-prestige, low market share company. So they get a lot less legal scrutiny than Microsoft.
Microsoft do have a monopoly on desktop OS. They don't, and never had, a monopoly on browsing on Windows. They got caught in the past trying to use their desktop OS monopoly to gain an unfair advantage in browsers. Arguably they are doing the same thing now.
Re: Sorry but
Kinect people flapping arms is because the shipped technology isn't good enough to track fingers, only arms. Once the device can recognise finger positions, you no longer will need the big movements. It will be able to read sign languages.
I agree with your sentiment, but in practice I doubt the fine will be large enough to discourage future transgressions. The magazine will have made a lot of money from this.
Re: AVX2 on integers
What is "Bedouin memory management"? A google search turned up nothing that seemed relevant.
Re: Software decently written?
"Most software" surely means how stuff is written by app developers, rather than which compiler they use. I figured he meant that apps that use busy-waits, polling, and the like, won't see much benefit from the new sleep state because they won't often sleep. Where-as apps that do things "properly", waiting on locks, using push etc, and therefore tend to be inactive while they are waiting for other activities to complete: these apps allow their respective cores to go into a low power state more often.
Whether it's true that most software is well-written by this criteria I don't know, but presumably Intel do, because they'll have measured it. This is the sort of thing that apps written for mobile devices emphasis. Part of the motivation for the WinRT API was to promote a more asynchronous style of code than Win32.
Re: if it was contract killing services
Contract killing is illegal. Prostitution isn't. Further, with contract killing there is necessarily a victim. Prostitution (as opposed to trafficking, which is different) need not have a victim.
The goal should not be to stop prostitution.
Re: unlock your phone
Surely most of that hassle is self-inflicted? Allow NFC to make small transactions without a pin, and set a default wallet. Then you shouldn't need to unlock your phone.
Re: They changed the UI more than "a bit"
They threw away almost nothing. The desktop is still there.
Posted in Key evidence in Assange case dissolves
Re: @RICHTO
Well, evidence (or lack of) is something that would be examined in a trial. The point remains: what he's accused of is rape. I'm not saying he's guilty; I don't know.
According to the allegations, by the time she was able to refuse, it was too late. She'd already been exposed to his cooties. It doesn't follow she'd have consented had she been awake when he started.
Posted in Key evidence in Assange case dissolves
@Spoddyhalfwit
One difference is that Assange knew she wouldn't want another go if it was without a condom. He picked a time when she was asleep so that she couldn't stop him until it was too late. Or so the accusation goes.
Posted in Key evidence in Assange case dissolves
Re: Wow
Yep. This perhaps make it more likely he'll be acquitted at trial, but Assange still isn't the one who decides whether (or where) the trial takes place. And he's still guilty of jumping bail.
Posted in Key evidence in Assange case dissolves
@RICHTO
Actually, having sex with a woman while she sleeps, knowing she would not have consented had she been awake, is accepted as rape in the UK. The judge went over all this during the endless extradition appeals.
Sign language?
Does it have the precision and accuracy needed to understand a sign language for the deaf? I gather the Kinect can't manage it because it can't locate fingers. Being able to enter text with a sign language could be a big thing, if people were willing to learn it.
Re: Shame it doesn't support Windows XP
According to browser stats, XP has around 42% of the market (Windows 7 only overtook it recently). The IDE doesn't need to run on XP itself, but if you want to sell your software to nearly half the market, you need a compiler that generates XP code.
The good news is that Microsoft have promised XP-code generation in a patch later this year.
Re: How often do you use it?
I wouldn't have much opportunity to pay by NFC today, but I expect that to change over the next 2 years. (My current phone doesn't support it, and I'm unlikely to buy an iPhone regardless.)
There's a chicken and egg problem here. I think NFC would be a good thing, but the infrastructure needs to be distributed, and small retailers don't have much incentive to get the scanners unless there are lots of people with NFC-capable phones. For that reason, iPhone 5 not having it is a set-back.
(Wireless charging is another technology I would have liked to see, both for myself and for getting the gear widely distributed.)
Re:The article clearly states that the scheme has saved money
It says it saved £72,000. That's the 50p. It doesn't say how much they spent to get that saving. Usually such investment schemes take a few years to pay for themselves; not saying how many years is a bad sign. I very much doubt it paid for itself in one year.
Re: Apple fears Windows 8...
I don't see the article as saying Apple should fear Windows 8. It's saying Android should.
Suggestion: software patents should expire after 3 years
Currently software patents last for 20 years. That's too long. If it were a much shorter term, they would do correspondingly less damage. If Apple had, say, a 3 year monopoly on scroll-bounce, that would be enough for them to sell a lot of phones, and afterwards we could all benefit.
Note that patents are intended to encourage two things: that inventions are made, and that inventions are published. UI patents are special because they are inevitably published. Apple couldn't release the iPhone without letting everyone see scroll-bounce. (They don't need to show us their source code, because any competent programmer could implement it once given the idea.) Apple need to be rewarded for coming up with the idea, and for spending money refining it in UI labs, but they don't need to be rewarded for publishing because they were going to do that anyway.
3 years may be too short. 5 years might be better, as companies sometimes develop ideas long before domestic hardware is capable of running them. However, that in itself is part of the problem. Once you have a touch-screen, a lot of possibilities open up. Whenever someone improves the hardware enough, a sort of gold-rush happens as companies patent the new possibilities. Arguably the new hardware should be patented, but not the stuff that follows, because anyone owning the hardware can see the possibilities. It only seemed novel before the hardware existed. So Moore's Law is part of the reason software patents should differ from hardware ones.
" I would have to receive a dozen messages a day."
Google will remember which machine you used for a while, so even if you log out frequently you should only get one text message a month.
Re: Now if they were 'really mathematical....
Men are getting in because they are more assertive, not because they are more competent. If the woman on the phone has more achievements, but doesn't mention them, she's not going to be picked, is she? The man will be picked even if his achievements are less.
"does not donate"
That has changed. According to Ars: "One of the first things Cook did after being named CEO was launch a charitable matching program for Apple's employees. In mid-September 2011, Apple began matching employee contributions to nonprofit organizations up to $10,000 per employee annually, dollar-for-dollar."
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/one-year-down-many-to-go-5-things-apple-has-done-since-tim-cook-took-over/
But Apple do licence their stuff. Microsoft licensed a lot of the UI stuff that Samsung just got stung for. Apple offered to license it to Samsung too, but Samsung refused to pay. (It would have been expensive, but not as expensive as the damages.)
re: basic GSM and 3G patents
If you mean the patents Samsung just sued over, Apple did pay for them. Specifically, they paid the chip manufacturers, who in turn had deals with Samsung. Samsung was effectively trying to get paid twice for the same tech, apparently out of spite because Apple was suing them and they wanted to sue back. The jury threw it out of court because it had no merit whatsoever.
Re: Now if they were 'really mathematical....
The benefit of having better staff at all levels should be obvious. Currently they are favouring less competent men over more competent women, because the women don't like to boast over the phone or recommend themselves for promotion.
According to the article. Which you seem to have trouble reading.
Re: drop in the bucket for samsung
Although a good point, this isn't over. If Samsung are prevented from selling some of their phones, as Apple is now asking, they will lose out further.
Posted in Assange calls for help from … Quakers?
He's mad
From his speech: "On Wednesday night, after a threat was sent to this embassy and the police descended on the building, you came out in the middle of the night to watch over it and you brought the world's eyes with you. Inside the embassy, after dark, I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through the internal fire escape. But I knew that there would be witnesses. And that is because of you. If the UK did not throw away the Vienna Convention the other night that is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching."
If he truly believes that (a) the UK was about to raid the embassy; and (b) that we only stopped because there were more witnesses than usual: he is out of touch with reality. And if he said that without believing it, then (by definition) he's lying.
I wonder what Ecuador hopes to achieve by supporting him? They are using him to wind up the Americans, and now us. I guess it makes them look good in their local South American politics.
Posted in Assange calls for help from … Quakers?
Re: T'Internet memory
He is accused of having sex with a woman while she was asleep, knowing she would not have consented had she been awake. That is considered rape in the UK. The point was addressed when the validity of the extradition request was challenged, and the British judge confirmed it. To claim otherwise is ignorance of the facts.
Personally I doubt he'll be convicted, but he still needs to return to Sweden to be exonerated.
