Posts by NinjasFTW 214 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2009
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
"but it has failed to upset any media incumbents" Considering all the bitching the incumbents do about You Tube I would say they are rather upset. Yes I understand it wasn't in the manner that Andrew meant.
It is hard to provide content legally when no one wants to sell it to you though. I'm not sure You Tube will ever be the home of big names such as Game of Thrones, breaking bad etc but i suspect it will be the formation ground for many successful shows that will go on to be bought up by the big distribution labels.
My god,
Can all of the registers please stop fucking around with the naming please.
Every bloody week there is a new money making scheme and it is just going to end up confusing everyone and of course end up with every company having to maintain vast libraries of registrations (yes I know thats the point).
is it time for the registers to be become non-profit companies? I think they've started to lose sight of their purpose!
I find your statement "To be fair, Müller has been more than forthcoming on the subject of his associations with both Oracle and Microsoft as well as various financial institutions" to be genrous to Florian at the least.
From his own admission he was talking with Oracle well before the trial started and then when in a sheer coincidence starts working for them right when the trial starts and for the 'long term'. Now maybe that is just the way it went (Roulette odds for 00 maybe!) but considering the sheer vitrioul that came out of his blog in the lead up to and during the trial I find that highly suspicious.
Especially when it came out that he was flat out wrong about most of what he was spouting. If I was Oracle and he truly was independent of it all, I would be seriously considering rethinking hiring a consultant who was so wrong about things.....
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 :)
As much as I dislike Conroy for numerous reasons. I really hope he sticks with this.
Yes it is costing a bucketload of cash and I suspect it will increase again several times before its completed (if it ever is) but its rare to see governments investing in this kind of capital infrastructure any more.
Can you imagine how bad it would get if they tried a wireless solution!?!?!
I do think they need to look at the consumer prices though, the listings i saw that were proudly showing how it was competitive with other broadband providers was a joke. Ok so you can compete with Telstra, but thats not saying much. The only people i knew with Telstra broad band were the kind of people that didn't know anything about it and just went with Telstra because they were big name brand. Anyone that had any knowledge went with someone else (Internode where I was) and saved 50% with greater caps.
As someone who switches between solutions architect and various administrator roles I think the problem is on both sides. I've seen plenty of corporate architects thrown down some grand plan which completely ignores things like legacy system interfaces, existing tactical fixes, diferent hardware requirement etc. IT then get lumped with implementing this plan that you can't question because its been delivered by God himself. Once you get bitten by that a few times you natually become wary of it.
On the other hand you do get IT departments that are so set in their ways that any change is exrtemely difficult to get implemented.
I suspect that a lot of push back from IT departments is due to the lack of communications between the architect and IT. IT don't feel like they have any say in what they are being asked to do, I usually find that if you get them involved in the process early then they are much more receptive and often provide useful feeback.
Take the entire IT department out for drinks before you hit them with the plan is also useful :)
What a lot of comments miss is that patents also serve as a deterrent against other patent holders/trolls.
The problem is, if all of your patents are FRAND then you effectively can't use them as a defensive patent any more.
For example. Widget maker A holds a lot of FRAND patents which they spent a lot of money to create and are making moderate returns on licensing. Widget Maker B which is paying 1p/unit to Maker A for its FRAND patents then hits Maker A with a £3/unit demand for some design patent that it pushed through the patent office on Friday afternoon just before pub time.
Maker A is effectively unable to use its FRAND patents defensively and so has to remove funcationality from its device. Maker B now has a superior device which it pays very little in royalties for.
"There seems to be a disconnect between what young people perceive a career in IT to be and an acknowledgement of how this translates into the gadgets, smartphones and consoles they use on a daily basis."
hmmm do we really want people who can't join the dots together in something so simple :)
I'm not sure I want IT to be considered a cool industry, I preferred it when it was considered an elite industry and only the dedicated/actually interested wanted to do it. You know, back when it paid better before every man and their dog was an 'IT professional' :)
On an unrelated (and pre coffee) note when the hell did they drop the qualification that to be an IT architect you had to have a big beard and actually know something about the bare metal systems :/
Ah another AO article bashing google. Good to see the sun still rises in the east!
I'm not sure I heard all the handset makers wailing and ganshing teeth over the nexus phone and as for content, sure there may be more on the iphone however i can still get the kindle client and the play store does movies etc now as well as watching mkv (yes I know Mr O thinks its the worse sin in the world to watch what i own in a way that Big Content doesn't approve of)
I don't remember too many people moaning that the Kindle was being sold at a loss
A modern tablet well under half the price of a Ipad will be nice for those that don't have the luxury of spending a bucket load.
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.
"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....
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.
agreed.
One thing that pisses me off though is when you get something that is supposedly free to play and then get 10 minutes in and find you need to pay to continue.
Either be a> Free to play and make money off vanity items or b> just charge a reasonable price for the game.
Any company that releases a game, charges for it and then charges for major components in game gets that company banned for life.
"It's hardly an iron grip, though. Bid more money than Sky, and you get the movies. Perhaps someone in Silicon Valley might eventually consider that's money well spent"
Great so let start bidding wars on services leading to (more?) outrageous fees and draconian DRM for everything. Then there will be even more of those nasty freetard pirates that Andrew is always banging on about. But then again big media can do no wrong in your eyes hey?
You only have look at the rediculous money in football/Sky sports to see where this would end up.
i think the difference there was that you could only use Windows to run 90% of the worlds software and large scale migrations were extremely difficult for a number of reasons.
Its not that hard to move away from Google services and their search business does not provide anything that actually runs the business.
@steve evens.
I think I had the same issue by the sounds of it as you with my desire Z. Once you filled up over 1/2 of the sd card anything over that woud intermittantly disappear and have I would have to run SD rescan to get access to it for a few minutes until it would disapear again.
I logged a problem ticket and never actually heard back from them.
Cyanogenmod fixed my issues as well and my phone runs much better now. I'm actually happy with it for the first time :)
I'm in the same boat as you.
Spending £100+ (not including movies on demand purchases and as a seperate whine its pissing me off that old movies I can buy on DVD for £2.99 are still £5 per view on demand or £6 in HD) a month for the biggest virgin package and yet I still fire up torrents several times a week to get TV episodes that wont be available locally for months or to watch them when I want to watch them. No I will not be paying extra on top of that for virgins TiVo service.
If it wasn't for occasional international sports I would probably drop almost everything and switch to torrent heavy viewing.
I want to do the right thing but there is only so much I am willing to pay and recently i've been feeling like i'm past the reasonable limit.
<quote>For English/History/Geography it's different as they teach you general things about the world you live in</quote>
I guess that really depends on your perspective. For me maths/physic/chem teach me about the world I live in. I personally don't care what King beheaded what wife or the population density of Blackpool/
I understand that it important to some people and that is fine.
I would rather see an early broad education and then allow the student to pick what they want to do later on. Similar to Montessori themed education.
I would think that a consequence of this would be that a lot of people on poor connections now would simply find themselves dropped by the ISP as there wouldn't be enough revenue in it for them.
The ISP doesn't control the conditions of the line heading to the house. Yes its annoying when to pay full price for a connection that isn't as good as others but the only solution is to improve the infrastructe and we all know there is generally a snow balls chance of that :(
Maybe Boing are going for an O/S that they know the code for because they wrote/analysed large chunks of it rather than assuming RIM have written it well.
Besides, who things RIM will be around in 10 years time?
And the fact is that if i was sufficiently motivated and knowledgable (im not) I build the original Android souce and install it.
i'm curious as to when you signed up for your VM plan? The reason that I ask is that I am getting a 'free' upgrade from 50mb to 100mb around the same time these caps come in place. So even when i do get throttled it will still be the same speed as before but it will be faster outside of throttling which is where the majority of my downloading will occur.
"Your *new* Sherlock Holmes disc wouldn't play, forcing you to do a firmware update if you wanted to watch it. Had you not done the firmware update, your old content would have continued to work fine and there would have been nothing the studios could have done about it. That's my point; that they can't remotely kill that which works unless you do it for them, e.g. by updating the firmware."
So your argument is that all I have to do to keep watching all my old stuff is to commit to never watch anything new ever again? They may not be able to remotely kill what works (and that is assuming that future players wont do automatic updates) but they can make it so annoying that you just A> give up and go with it B>rebuy what you really want to watch C> go back to pirating.
I've bought a number of HTC phones going back to the old wm touch pro phone which was excellent in its time.
My last phone was the Desire Z which will be the last phone that I ever buy from HTC. The phone itself is pretty good but the sense overlay (while nice looking) is slow and has several bugs that HTC never respond to support tickets about.
The last straw was when HTC announced no ICS upgrade for a phone that is under two years old and was a premium phone when new.
I have now loaded cyanagen 7 on it and it runs so much better. I have no idea what i'm going to do next as the number of phones with keyboards is steadly decreasing :(
In reality they are selling an ever faster service when a lot of their network cant handle it. Most people would rather a 20 unmanaged unthrottled service than a promise of 100 that's constantly throttled. Took me 42 mins last night to download a 351mb file that's more than a 50% cut.
provided that VM hold up to the posted limits (and that is a big IF) then I would still prefer 100Mb throttled as it will be 50mb vs 20mb
i) Currently rolling out a charge-free doubling of bandwidth to all their customers
I don't mind this change too much as im on the 50mb (soon to be upgraded to 100mb) package so will still be at 50mb while throttled. I'm not so sure it is charge-free though as I think I got the doubling email in the same week I got a we are raising our prices email!
hmmm yes and no.
They do get more up front (although I have never seen 2x and i've been on both sides of the fence)
but they don't get holidays, sick leave, maternity/paternity leave, insurance, pension etc.
I contracted for 8 years and I always avoided holidays because I would mentally be calculating how much it was costing me for the holiday and lost wages etc.
I did enjoy contracting but once junior came along it was hard to risk not having guaranteed work :(
I have to question the article with Mika Mobile.
I have Battleheart and think its a great game. It was basically the first game I bought when I got my Transformer.
My problem with it is that it hasn't been updated since I bought it almost a year ago. Last update was July 14, 2011
So when he is talking about constantly having to push out new patches etc where are they?
The last 30 days graph in the market is showing between 50-100k installs at £1.85.
That seems pretty good to me considering how old the app is.
Not saying that there isnt fragmentation issues etc but this particular case seems strange.
Well annoyed that the Z is not getting updated.
Paid a premium for the device and support has been abysmal. Several long standing bugs such as sense constantly crashing and sms app playing up when you change to landscape mode. Several emails to them have gone unanswered.
Performance is not that great either, although I suspect that it is mainly due the Sense overlay rather than the hardware.
Will have to find some time to CM7 it i guess.
I was thinking about the numerous reports about the cost of production going up in China and started to wonder what China would do if big manufacturers started pulling out.
China is already restricting the supply of numerous resources such as rare earth metals etc to only Chinese bases companies.
I would be willing to bet that if Apple (or anyone) tried to move production to some where else they would find it very hard to find the materials needed to build the latest shiney gadget.....
<quote>Carrier IQ's initial response to the discovery of its software by security researcher Trevor Eckhart in the middle of last month was to issue a cease and desist letter, though in fairness the firm has since tried to explain what it's about and how its technology operates in a way that has defused many (but not all) of the original concerns.</quote>
Why is it in fairness? Its not like it was their intention. Carrier IQ tried the scumbag lawyer approach and then when that blew up in their face they tried to go the PR route.
A very poor statement from el Reg I think.
While I agree with the sentiment that DRM is evil, I think it is the only way to get the content out there in the first place with DRM initially. Once everyone is used to the idea that digital distribution is commonplace a big player (non content producer) needs to step in and set up a distribution system that get the DRM stripped out.
Similar to what happened with iTunes.
Of course the risk is that it all remains in the hands of the production companies in which case everyone fires up torrents like they do currently.
Clare,
That last paragraph of yours sends chills down my spine. The article talks about restricting access to objectionable content for the kids from their own device while your solution is to remove it for everyone!
The content that you probably don't your kids looking at (and with reasonable cause) is legally (generally) enjoyed by millions of people.
Perhaps if you are so concerned about smartphones etc then your child doesn't actually need one? Either that or accept that there are risks for everything, you can minimise them as much as possible but they are still there.
Why I agree with your post, remember that someone paid this company to develop this app. It is the phone companies that need to be targeted in any class action and frankly they're too big to be properly punished.
It will be oops, our bad, some low level exec has been punished and everyone affected gets a free sms in compensation
I think the logic is that the Samsung tablet is the most likely challenger so if someone is going to buy a tablet it will be that or the iPad.
If apple manage to take out the Galaxy Tab then people will buy the iPad rather than some other tablet seeing as they are both around the same price point.
Seems like a fairly reasonable approach.
I would hope that the infrigement notices specify what it was that was supposedly being copied.
There has been some well publised cases of rights holders sending out blanket notices based on some very loose pattern matching searchs which inlucdes things they don't actually have the rights to.
The article also doesn't mention any right of appeal. I would hope there would be some way in which errors can be addressed.
Its early and before my first coffee so my brain is a little fuzzy, but i recently read a story about a pig farmer in Scotland who installed a pig poo generator.
One of the benefits of it was that the bacteria added that fed on the poo to produce methane(?) actually neutralised a lot of the smell.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13941458
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