WTF?

How does real time reporting help if the unfortunate householder reports their bin was missed when they get home from work? Round these parts the bin men wake me up ludicrously early but never, ever put in an appearance after mid afternoon.

All this will do is make them make *more* return visits. Idiot politicians strike again.

yawn

3 months since they last got some free publicity, now they're feeding on scraps. What's a company to do when no-one wants their product...

WTF did they measure? Cant have been throughput

I looked at my local map and it doesn't match what I see. What they're measuring doesn't seem to be much use in guessing what coverage is really like.

According to this I have full O2 3G coverage everywhere in the city. What they've not managed to notice, in my city the O2 3G is so poor it doesn't work at all inside 90% of city buildings, in many cases I can't get any signal indoors, not even voice. I've sat in pubs next to a street window and seen zero bars, its that bad.

So poor even standing in the streets I have a 50:50 chance of seeing 3G. So overloaded and lacking in backhaul that actual throughput rarely climbs about GPRS rates, whatever the connection type.

Have to conclude they measured the wrong thing.

The only believable result is confirmation that there are few "3" users near me ;)

how does that make GPL3 better than 2?

I'm at a loss to understand why a licence that let's users violate it knowing they can unilaterally restore their own rights after delay waiting on enforcement, is better than one that takes time to kick off enforcement then leaves offenders up shit creek if they persist. Usually with a lot of grovelling, paying costs and signing binding undertakings to not offend again.

So why is GPL3 supposed to be better from the licensors viewpoint? Seems superficially like a licence to take the piss with few enforcement teeth. A licence easy to duck against one with bite.

The FSF really have lost what little grasp of the plot they still retained, pushing a poison pill licence with no obvious advantages beyond that patent poison pill. Which doesn't look like an advantage to many corporations.

Even if their story was more than FUD, the GPL3 is widely seen as too toxic for corporate use. As pointed out days ago when this was first reported on, if Linux was GPL3 Android would not be using Linux. That's one self destructive way to prevent license violation.

there is another option

It's depressing that no-one even considers the possibility of Google simply imposing more openness on Motorola than Motorola historically demonstrated.

Things like banning the ultra-locked bootloaders Motorola have become infamous for or maybe even forcing them to offer crapware free versions. Google can force a hell of a lot of change on the overall Android market without favouring Motorola, just by forcing them to be better than the competition.

It's a sad commentary on the behaviour of the existing giants that so many can only see abuse of power as an option here.

It's not as if the 'special relationship' Google and Motorola had developing Android 3 has caused any comment about abuse, even amongst the G hating regulars on the Reg!

Abuse is not inevitable unless you have Bulmer or Ellison on your board ;)

irrational

Bidding with (approximations of) irrational numbers seems a very pertinent comment on an irrational system.

While the rest of the world pays at least lip service to the concept of patents serving *the public interest*, America has resurrected their original use as gifts from royalty to cronies. With all levels of government infested by lawyers there's little chance the pigs will give up the patent trough without being pushed. A company too big to fail, failing is about all that's left to try.

Norwegian law allows that evidence to be used

Norwegian law allows use of illegally obtained evidence at the judges discretion, it's one of the differences between adversarial and inquisitorial systems and apparently Norwegian criminal law is partially inquisitorial.

Further, EU law (specifically the human rights) also allows use of illegally obtained evidence.

Whilst it's likely the court won't admit this data that's unlikely to stop the police using it.

1st rule of Internet club: lie

This reg reader suggests everyone uses 1/1/1970 as their birthdate on every site with no need to know and lie about everything that doesn't compromise your use of sites. As a habit.

I also love responding to phishing. With completely false details. What we really need is a set of trigger CC accounts that automagically trigger fraud detection, might catch a few more scumbags.

...and the rest of us drink

I try to not carry much cash because of it's astonishingly short half life if brought near a pub...

tuner availability

"owners of Digital Video Recorders still consume 86 per cent of their television live, which surprised us"

Unless you have enough multi capture tuners available for the multiplexes you want to watch in peak slots, you're going to have to watch live. With 4 Freeview tuners in my MediaPortal box I watch nothing but sport live by choice. When I recently dropped to 2.5 tuners I had to watch a lot live. Most domestic 2 tuner setups are much less capable.

Lets also not forget that very few people would record live news or the crap shown outside peak slots. That's a large chunk of typical viewing.

stress testing

Be nice to see some stress testing pulling multiple channels from a multiplex, which I don't believe WMC allows. Seen enough tuners crap out in various ways with 2 or 3 channels in use to always test this.

Some idea of how hot it runs would be a good start, both my failed USB tuners ran too hot to touch before failing.

stating the bleedin' obvious

It's not that 'consumers' aren't creating content, it's that most of the content they're creating is either best done on their phone (Twitter) or being done on the go where carrying a tablet is a poor option. Unless social media dies no-one needs more than a T9 keypad and a phone camera for all the content they're ever likely to 'create'.

What that means isn't so much that the desktop is dead but that laptops are endangered. Laptops of course have seriously impacted desktop PC's already, so I question just how much scope there's left for tablets to replace them.

Other than that he's been paid to state the bleeding obvious.

Vonage?

Tying yourself into Vonage seems a little surprising, I went with Siemens Gigaset phones partly because they'll handle multiple SIP accounts instead of being locked into just 1.

Of course if you don't need new phones like I did Vonage is cheap and reliable, still think I'd have got an unlocked adaptor though and hedged my bets.

And yet another case where 'unlimited' actually means 2000min ;)

the paper makes weak claims

One thing sticks out a mile here: with his known beliefs, affiliations and record, the best he could manage is claiming an effect that in essence smooths out extreme short term temperature excursions (on the timescale of 3months or so), explains a well known difference between *short term* model predictions and measurement and at best just delays global effects. Despite the best efforts of 'friends' in the press to misrepresent the actual paper it's hardly a bombshell.

I think he was faced with a self inflicted dilemma, write exaggerated BS or stay close enough to the truth to actual get printed in an untainted publication. In this case a marginally relevant publication. He chose the latter. Going to be interesting seeing how much of the mild claim survives peer review (which it's not had yet).

It's really hard to work out what he hopes to achieve, the message seems to be 'it's not possible to understand the situation', presumably because that will throw doubt on all modelling efforts. I hope he's actually found something real, it could help ameliorate the worst effects on extreme weather effects and buy a few more years before the tipping point to undo the damage his cronies have inflicted with delay.

More likely he's failed to resist exaggeration and will be refuted pretty quickly now the 'usual suspects' are stirring up PR.

have they learned nothing from the past?

Remind me why this isn't the same colossal mistake Microsoft made embedding Internet Explorer so deeply in the OS?

I want my net facing apps as strongly isolated from my local system as possible and that's a hell of a lot quicker and easier to get right if they're just apps, not parts of the OS. Mozzila will just end up reinventing the OS+Browser, so I suggest they just work on the browser part, let someone else deal with the OS layer.

A4Tech had a simpler approach

A4Tech cracked this one last century: put a charger in the wireless receiver dongle.

Not quite as elegant but with major advantages:

: you have a spare pair of cells on constant trickle charge without having to remember to dock the mouse overnight. Its pretty hard forget to put the spares in the charger when swapping out.

: forget to dock and let it run down and you'll end up waiting for the Apple mouse to recharge. I get to just swap batteries as normal whenever they die, or pre-emptively if I could be bothered.

: its dirt cheap. About £45 cheaper.

: without the charger circuit it uses AA cells for 2-3x longer life between charges

Nokia picked an idiotic time to get out of the smartphone biz

With Eric Schmidt predicting Android phone prices of US$50-70 soon, at Google's Mobile Revolution conference this Tuesday, by the time they shift old inventory Nokia will be priced out of even the low end of the feature phone sector.

They don't have a future, apart from being bought by Microsoft and consumed. As it is Microsoft will be making more on each WM7 phone by the time they ship, if priced to actually sell.

not failsafe

Heatsinks do 2 jobs:

1 provide a conduction path to lose heat to the environment.

2 provide thermal mass to buffer rapid temperature changes

There's a little problem with this design, if the impeller stops spinning, the air gap becomes an insulator and suddenly the thermal mass is no longer connected to the thing it's buffering and cooling....

The bulky heatsink on modern processors doesn't need fan driven airflow a lot of the time, coupled with the thermal inertia that makes them relatively failsafe. 10s of seconds with a failed fan before dangerous heat levels are reached is not unusual, more than enough time for the CPU, OS or user to take action.

However effective this design is, he'll have to cripple it with old style passive blocks of metal to make it safe to use. That might restrict its market a little, if you've got to put the hefty metal in there either way there's not much point replacing the cheap fan on most systems.

...and I don't believe the dust claims. My desk fan seems to have no trouble covering it's spinning blades in dust... neither do the fast spinning ones in my PC.