Android permissions design

Always seemed to me the whole Android permissions system is very under-granularised.

"Read Phone Status and Identity" presents the app with info such as whether somebody is on a call, but also their complete phone number and IMEI number. Combined with Internet Access permission, allows complete silent transmission of your phone number and name to black market phone number lists.

"Make phone calls" An app can legitimately call a number for you. On the other hand it can do it without your permission to a premium rate number, completely automatically, say at 3am.

"Read contact data" allows an app to show you your contacts for something within the app legitimately, or just allows more black market sellable names and phone numbers.

The list goes on and on.

If I was a really suspicious person I might think Google made them this under-granular on purpose. More and more apps are doing the whole "Read phone status & ID" thing by default now.

Yet again

40Mbps, nice, won't stay like that for long though.

Seems to me if everybody moves over to 4G then 3G might actually be quite useable for the few left on it - kind of like how sometimes GPRS can be faster than 3G when there are tons of people on 3G.

The most annoying fact here

All this seems to have come about for the sole reason that the iPad and others are doing pretty well right now.

MS have adopted it full steam ahead, thereby ignoring, nay, shitting on, the many software development investments (billions of dollars worth) from nearly two decades ago, in a single stroke devaluing probably the best and most important reason in the world to buy Windows - backwards compatibility.

Metro is apparently the vomit inducing way forward, it's like sod the past and PAY ME.

What with all the problems with modern society, MS really don't need to add to it by dumbing down and psychedelic re-colouring everything - don't get me wrong, I'm all for ease of use and the tablet form-factor, but most certainly not at the expense of the power that a full Windows app might have had prior to it being Metro-ised.

This just ain't not right I tells ya!

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P.S. Have you ever tried to use Windows 8 RTM in a windowed Hyper-V console? I have, it's an utter joke even trying to get to the top level menus.

£15 - 25

They're taking the smeg, it's over 20 years old and I already paid £30 for it (was it?) back then for my Atari ST!

Guh, it's like the DVD to Blu-Ray tax.

*sigh*

Steve would never let this happen if he were still around.

This, Maps and Youtube (having to revert to an iPhone app to watch YT vids) are all signs that Apple is flagging without it's 'illustrious' deceased leader.

Not that they were ever really good on the software side of things.

So let me get this straight....

If I'm using Blender with this baby installed and enable the cycles renderer (CUDA enabled) in GPU+CPU mode in real time, it's going to render like the proverbial waste material off a shovel?

Anyone know how much this beast will cost? 10k+?

Another trick...

...to earn cash is to have places in games that are formidably difficult to pass without shelling out real money, not so you can afford the gear needed to defeat the 'stage', but just so it becomes doable at all!

Don't do that Crytek, it makes me want to Cry-tek. (bad'm tsh).

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There is a game (Amongst thousands of others) on the iPad that I'm pretty sure does this very thing right at the last level of the game, called Hunters 2.

You can bash away at the 'end of game baddie' with a variety of weapons till he gets down to a point, then every hit you make only causes a miniscule amount of damage no matter what you use. I would bet a weeks wages you have to purchase some credits, then he becomes beatable.

So whilst all this pay-per-play stuff on the surface all seems a great idea, most of the ideas companies have come up with to rake in cash actually sucks donkey balls.

Okay so...

...how many have actually caught fire!? Three? Four!?

Not that I make a habit of defending businesses, but all this recall crap perpetuates more of this nanny society bollocks and the like.

Its the same as when news sites talk about the 'dangers' of exploding Lithium Ion batteries. Gimme a break. Its fair to say that these ultimately quite rare cases could be down to production failures, or equally to undisclosed negligence on the part of the customer

OLED Tech?

Isn't this somewhat misrepresentative of OLED tech as a whole?

Sure TVs to some are most important, but in fact of equal importance, surely, is the awesome rise of OLED tech in a much smaller footprint - that of the smartphone. Sales of OLED panels, be them only around 4 inches, must be through the roof in relation to 30"-50" OLED panels.

I have kept an eye on the rise of OLED tech for years and years, have been looking forward to it for just as long, and since getting my Galaxy S2 phone last year, I will now probably never buy a phone with an LCD screen ever again.

As for the next step in tablet displays, future Samsung and Apple revisions are looking more and more likely to move to OLED tech, therefore 7"-10" panels muscles in on OLED sales percentages too.

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These figures being for TVs only is fair enough, but surely falls well short of the whole story, and in fact may mean OLED tech takes off for TVs much sooner than is anticipated in that graph. If ever there is a reason for OLED tech not hitting TVs sooner than later, it can only be artificially due to manufacturers stretching more life out of LCD tech and keeping OLED TV prices high. But that would never happen, would it!?

Wow

Nice, I loved Carmageddon!

Perhaps this time they can keep the frame rates reasonable. The games always ran terribly on quite powerful systems in the day.

Even if the fps was on average high, there would still be areas which would slow to a crawl.

This is assuming it is designed for, and released on PC.

Surely...

Surely the vast majority of sales didn't come via the channels into shops, Apple preferred or otherwise.

Given the evidence doing the rounds on the day, most sales came via Apple's online shop, as people realised that buying from a shop is a huge waste of time having to stand in line.

TNT and co. went utterly ballistic on that friday, having to fulfill hundreds of parcel deliveries per driver for the iPad, and I'm informed by TNT that they couldn't fulfill them all on the first day and had to spread it over to the Saturday.

My iPad was returned to base in the TNT warehouse whilst the telephone operators told me it was still out for delivery. A subsequent phone call showed it was sat in their very offices awaiting personal collection! So in anticipation I went up to collect it - in some ways similar, if more costly in petrol, than having to stand in in line at a shop for one! :-(

I still don't know if the driver was just being downright lazy, because he returned to base with his remaining stash of iPads earlier than he was meant to return that day.

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So, the channels mean sod all if most initial sales are transferred to customers via TNT!

Prophet?

Didn't prophet essentially die at the start of Crysis 2? The main protagonist got called prophet enough times, but its not him.

Whoops, spoiler! ;-)

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As far as I'm concerned provided it's set mostly in a jungle environment and they remove the dumbed down console feel then I'm sold!

Protestations

I 'preordered' so to speak an RPi on 3rd march, now just this weekend Farnell get back to me and say it'll be in my hands August / September.

So reading this article has been one great laugh!

Fail icon for the RPi foundation AND RS / Farnells wonderful handling of the situation over the last few months.

Incroyable!!!

As for e-ink watches, on my wrist right now is a Phosphor WorldTime watch, which has served me well for well over a year and four months without the battery failing, and is of course continuing to work.

So you can imagine the prospects of having a watch that requires charging every 7 days being a bit of a disadvantage - its questionable whether its worth the (very cool admittedly) extra features...

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I have been following all sorts of KickStarter projects for quite some time now (shame it's US projects only, IndieGoGo is the way to go then) and have never seen a project pull in over a million dollars in the space of 28 hours! Just amazing, and the project shows it too.

Very very well done, very well polished and presented too. The Casio's and Timex'es of the world have an awful lot of catching up to do.

Birdemic!?

Blimey, only four votes so far for that abortion of a film.

Never heard of it until I went looking after seeing this list. It is truly abysmal and plausible to think the director truly thought he created a masterpiece. It is utter trash even for its meagre budget.

Apparently he drove up and down hollywood boulevard promoting his film during the sundance festival or something, played annoying sounds from the film and had crappy bird graphics adorning his car, he spelled the film wrong on the crudely written banner!

The rest of the movies on the list (with a few exceptions) at least had slight redeeming moments such as interesting action sequences or watchable sfx. Birdemic is all out unintentional comedy.

P.S. How come no movies that have shown on Sci-Fi UK Channel are on here? They're bad in a really bad way too.

Suspension of Refunds, Exchanges?

Isn't that against our statutory rights as consumers?

Store credit and the reward card suspensions is also tantamount to outright theft on their part.

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...not that I've bought anything there in years but I'd imagine there must be tens of thousands in outstanding credit at least, due to consumers all over the nation.

Paranoid Android?

Call me paranoid...

Each of those apps require some combination of these Android permissions -

-Read Phone Status and ID.

-Services that cost you money (make calls, send SMSs).

-Read contact info directly.

Fair enough its conceivable why an app might need access to your contacts, even to make phone calls for you, but the question to ask is whether it makes calls without you even knowing, perhaps at 4am, to their premium rate number in thailand!!??

Quite why such an app would need access to your IMEI or phone numbers is beyond me save for some kind of info gathering and selling scam - something to do with them being free?

And I should apparently check the ratings from thousands of people who have interest only in how the app performs to see whether its safe or not? Yeah right.

For all of Apples many *many* failings, at least you don't have this problem.

Hummm

If they'd have stopped production on the franchise after just Robocop 1 then yes, I'd be more on their side...

Still a bit mad though!

Great fun!

English to Spanish test - it got most of my spoken sentence correctly, resulted in this -

"Por favor, ?me podria dirigirse hacia el cercano bar de tetas"

Although I've no idea if its a decent translation or not, I'm sure the sentence can be mostly interpreted provided the recipient has some semblance of a brain. Can't wait to try it out!

Not s/w people

If Sonys hardware dev team have proven anything over the last decade or so is that they're extremely poor at developing software, specifically the OS, and in areas of security and OS lockdown, not to mention consistency.

-A random number gen seeded with a constant 4 every time!?

-The PS3 has multitasking simply patched into the firmware, thereby making it so background tasks are extremely limited.

-Removal of the Other OS feature mostly only because it presented an 'attack vector' to the hackers - a slap in the face to those loyal customers making good use of it.

-Charge people an arm and a leg for old content on the PSN and screw everybody around.

-PS Home was just a laugh, a social networking system that demanded a three hour wait time getting between zones, of which the zones are very small, with very little real substance. What substance it did have was charged for - the PSN equivalent of your crazy frog ringtones and graphics.

-Apple devs typically charge anywhere up to a fiver for a game title on their mobile gaming systems (mostly the touch, but includes all the iOS devices). So how much do Sony charge for their wares? And how much will they add on top for PSP2 titles? Didn't PSP1 titles originally retail for £30-40

-Much like how Windows Phone 7 took nearly a full year to arrive since announcement, by the time PSP2 comes out, the technology won't be anywhere near as impressive as it sounds today.

etc. etc.

Then onto their handling of the situation - take the people to court! Fantastic!

For how it should be done, look at how Microsoft recently treated the team who opened up the WM7 platform, essentially open armed.

Basically Sony failed to spot that having a more open platform means more people buy their hardware. It happened on the PSP, and will happen all over again by the end of this year.

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So how will Sony treat the implementation of the PSP2, they've got less than 12 months to go about improving pretty much everything they do, and how they go about doing it, and charging a lot less to do it! I'm not holding my breath.

*FAIL icon at the top but I'm sure it'll be a runaway success as the drones buy it in their droves.

This whole story stinks of damned lies

Odd fact 1 - Got in a cab with no money, Questionable.

Odd fact 1.5 - Leave a £500 phone as collateral! Questionable.

Odd fact 2 - Got home, went in for money, brought out not enough cash. Questionable.

Odd fact 3 - Returned to find the taxi driver had gone. Questionable.

Odd fact 4 - No mention of any distinguishing features on the vehicle, such as a Taxi ID or anything. Questionable but feasible naivety.

Odd fact 5 - No mention of any particular cabbie company, no checking of license plate or anything.

Odd fact 6 - Contacted the nearest news organisation for self exposure rather than carry out your own investigative legwork, eg. call the various local cabbie companies up and question them about the driver, etc. No just leave it to the cops to do nothing about.

Nobody, just NOBODY should use a cab flagged down in the street - call a cab company (I'm guessing area code + 111 111 or 222 222 or 333 333 etc) on his iPhone and get them to turn up where you are instead of having to stumble to the nearest taxi rank.

I lost count of the amount of things the kid did wrong there! Sure we're all a bit naive at that age, but this is mental.

No, no no, its all just a bit too smelly to me.

All about range!?

Why does it all have to be about range?

Of course they are PR stunts but travelling from London to Edinburgh is one of the least likely scenarios for target customers - it always falls down to the demographics.

I doubt the journey would have been at all practical during the period of the earliest petrol cars either.

Look at my situation, I live four miles to my work place, which is in the same city as where I live. Now I can imagine an electric vehicle allowing me perhaps two weeks up to a month on a single charge at a miniscule fraction of the cost of my current Diesel expenditure.

Surely short commuting, shopping, and light travel duty, perhaps to the nearest large city are utterly perfect for the electric vehicle.

I just don't want to hear about pissant journalists and their London - Edinburgh electric car journeys.

Sod that.

I think I'd much rather have the improved battery life, that sounds like the reason they did it.

Apple had better not satiate the -vast minority- third party hardware crowd, thanks very much.

Yay!

Another technology that we wont see (or will only see on smartphones or iPod Nanos) for a decade or more.

Didn't they say the same thing about being able to print OLED TVs on substrates cheaply and easily without changing the LCD production process significantly five years back now? We're still waiting on cheap OLED tellies.

At least we can now drool over the tech as it emerges, and we have a cool new acronym. yay.

Huh

Easily solved DSG...

...just lower your extortionate prices a bit.

Don't try and convince us that you can't do it!

Summer?

When I moved into my new house it has way better insulation than my mums place, I believe her house was built in the 1890s and hasn't been well modernised.

I now feel very hot in summer time as a result, when the sky is pure blue and the sun is blazing up to 30+ degrees C.

So how does an AeroGel insulated house fare in the hot summer?

If my improved insulation is anything to go by, then I'd imagine with the best insulator in the world it'll be somewhat unbearable, but at the same time if a derivative is used in the re-entry tiles for the shuttle, then it'll be keeping the heat out too, ambient temperatures then dominate, and that'll make it too hot?