Re: Micro USB charging

I would like to see induction charging on a watch.

My watch lives on my bedside table at night next to my phone. If I could just drop it on the charge panel with my phone that would mean it always gets charged.

Micro USB would be handy for the odd occasion that i'm not at home though.

Re: Nokia was right

except when Nokia was busy selling itself out the market was a lot different. There is a good chance that if Nokia had of combined Android with its expertise in making phones then they could at the very least be competitive with Samsung rather than a foot note.

Re: Why Doesn't He Google It?

@AC 01:41

If you read the second to last paragraph you can see that's exactly what he is trying to do.

<quote>Vocal paralysis isn't a widespread condition, and there is a lack of case-study evidence for the condition. Page, therefore, is asking members of the public to contribute their experiences of the condition to the Voice Health Project.</quote>

Re: As a contractor...

I was in the same boat when I was contracting, I paid my taxes. I know colleagues that have massive daily tax deductions for lunch, transport, client drinks etc and pay very little tax every year.

I also know someone that was involved in a tax scheme that involved them being payed in rubles every quarter etc. They ended up getting audited and received a very nasty back tax payment request from HMRC that they almost lost their house over.

I used to view it as the more tax you pay the less likely HMRC would ever bother investigating; low hanging fruit and all.

Re: do not understand open source ... prefer not to be honest about it

if Open Source == fix your own bloody problems or hope to hell someone else does

Then Closed Source == hope to hell someone else does

Companies can provide open source software that you can download/install/use.

They still control the code for the project and provide fixes or features etc. If you don't like the pace/quality etc of the product then you can take the existing code base, fork it and run it as a community project if you wish.

OpenSource is not always a community of hippys doing things for the good of the IT world :)

As always disclaimer of use the best tool for the job applies :)

Re: Once again...

For the sake of clarity I should point out that the above post is in reply to Wardy1

Re: Once again...

only if you discount

A) the price

b) the lack of vendor lock in

c) the ability to download/compile/deploy the app ourselves from its source(we usually do that)

d) the ability to move support in house if we want to go to the effort.

e)no forced upgrade cycle (tired of raising a support ticket with IBM only to be told the bug is fixed in the next version and wont be ported back to the version we are using)

f)the ability and general availability of tools to allow you migrate your data to a different platform (related to point b i guess)

f) the ability to add features to the main codebase ourselves (granted, sometimes this does conflict with support agreements)

Its not always the right way to go. Its something you have to evaluate on its merits but drawing parallels from paid support on a freely available opensource product and closed source purchase/support is pretty tenuous

Re: Hmm...

Two things with that statement.

a) it is correct currently but I suspect that it will change eventually. Baby steps to help them swallow the end goal and all that.

b) it is still a barrier to a newbie installing their first non MS distro. Its daunting enough to make that first step sometime without messages that intimate that your machine will be a spam infested, zombie bot by not running the latest Windows OS*

*Disclaimer: I haven't built a machine with UEFI so not sure of the message that pops up when you try and load a different OS.

Re: Once again...

I think a lot of people have a world view of opensource that is a decade old.

I'm my last 2 jobs I have architectured platforms that were open source that were worlds ahead of equivalent proprietary solution and that's not including RHEL that we use for all our servers.

I will add the disclaimer that I had a significant budget and was happy to pay for support contracts to go with the open source software.

Support for open source product X was about 3/4 the support cost of the proprietary software onto of the huge initial purchase price (don't even get me started on licencing confusion for load balancing VM clusters containing cpus with different thread counts and GHz)

If you simply go to sourceforge and download any random project and expect community support equivalent to what you get throwing lots of £££ around then you will probably be disappointed. However if you do your due diligence and select well established projects backed by companies that offer paid support you will generally come out on top.

Re: HTC One Black - no stock

well for me personally it was after buying the Desire Z for a premium price only to be told later that they wouldn't be updating the O/S even though it could physically support it.

There were also a couple of really annoying bugs with their sms and mail apps that I never received replies to etc.

It was a decent phone on day 1 but I will never buy from HTC again due to their post sale support.

Re: A Linux based OS with malware?

gaah, i don't wont to hear a whooosh but as I read it the malware wasn't in the app itself. I simply provides an advertising window within the app. Now this advertising window will then point at a nasty piece of code that the user will have to click on and install (assuming that they have third party package install allowed).

Not really anything to do with Linux.... ;)

Re: Hang On

I know i'm replying to a troll but i am curious. Android may be considered dominant but i don't think it is considered a monopoly (yet?). Do the same rules apply as the original Windows/IE decision?

For me it has boiled down to sports.

I do like the movie channels but i would be perfectly happy to get movies through a VOD/netflix etc channel.

I've already decided that I'm dropping the subscription but i've been dragging my feet because I like sports (although I don't follow football which is 90% of the sport content)

If Sky Now end up with sports then that would be perfect. Sky can either get £0 from me or £something from me for providing what I want without all the crap i don't wont.

Re: FTTH is a waste of time

I think you need to be careful about the above numbers.

Infinity Option 2 (FTTC) 76Mb down 19Mb up £26 per month (plus telephone line rental)

Those speeds are probably only valid if you live within throwing distance of the cabinet and have nice clean copper lines. There will probably be 80% of customer that get +-20MB due to the age/distance of the copper.

At least with FTTH you know you are going to get the speed rather than some vague up to amount

Re: Hmmm

I often wonder if that was why they used to be so popular. They would give a shipping date that was before anyone else and then constantly push it back. I used to be happy paying a premium for their gadgets because I thought I was getting it quickly but in hindsight I think I was just paying extra for hope :)

Re: What?

and i can't think of too many parts of the legal system that retroactivly removes things from the public domain i.e changing of copyright lengths.

I think its perfectly fair to say if we provide you with a never-ending monopoly on something then you can't complain too much if people want an easy and reasonable way to access it.

They just need to settle for obscene profits rather than ludicrous.

Re: Google are going to get royally screwed over this

"MS are licensing their patents out to the android makers - which for stuff they've perhaps spend many millions inventing is fair enough, and where it's gone to court the courts have generally agreed with them."

Except its hard to confirm that because they wont allow anyone to talk about what patents they are licencing etc.

"Also, both apple + MS have said that any patents essential for things like 3G, H264, WiFi and so on have to be licensed under FRAND, can't be used to get anything banned"

Of course its not surprising that they would take this stand as they generally don't own as many of those patents.

"If you look at their statements on FRAND and patents in general, MS's is actually the most reasonable"

I know Microsoft were big on their FAT patent which cost a lot of manufacturers

"Basically they don't want android copying iOS (which is fair enough I guess), but that means android can't have slide-to-unlock, nice scrolling and such."

Ah but IOS was happy to take the drop down notification bar a release or two ago....

Re: Google are going to get royally screwed over this

i'm not sure how you can say microsoft are being the good guys here? Didn't this whole drama start over Microsoft collecting money on each Android device sold etc.

Mind you I do agree that playing around with FRAND is going to get you slapped down.

I am curious as to who decides that FRAND applies to a patent as that could be rather annoying for a company to have to licence its patent out for 1p when a stupid patent on something obvious (slide to unlock etc) can go for several £ per device.