Posts by SteveK
174 posts • joined Tuesday 23rd June 2009 14:06 GMT
Re: Argos catalogue is a great example of something that should be archived
Started to write a confused reply but just re-parsed original comment and noticed that BFI != FBI.
Re: I have one of these and they're good bits of kit
"I *like* the fact it can't run games, means I can give them to my kids and know they'll be used for reading not Angry Birds."
Actually, it apparently can play Angry Birds (and other Android games) if you root it and tweak the screen refresh settings. Although I suspect still not very well in mono with slightly iffy touch, if the infra-red touch interface has the same performance as the Kobo.
Ordered one - at that price good as a backup, good for tinkering with and should be able to run the Overdrive Android app natively for borrowing library books rather than have to go through the convoluted mess that is Adobe digital editions on my PC to download and transfer to my existing Kobo.
Dangerous
So, this was just Hamburg? By accepting the fine surely that's setting a dangerous precedent now for every other town and city in Europe to fine them a similar amount? It may be small, but scaled up to those numbers could still be quite costly.
Re: Why ever not?
Malice perhaps, but greed may have some involvement. I can imagine management asking why the developers are being paid to test and develop their shiny bloatware on last year's phone which might prevent consumers from upgrading to the new model (despite the now-standard 24 month lock-in). And heaven forbid they just provide the firmware as-is without all of their 'value'-added commercial services.
Yes, could use custom firmware and getting increasingly tempted. However I use at least two apps that I know don't work on rooted/custom ROMs (one for banking, the other being the only useful bit that Orange do install and which no one has as-yet got working on custom JB ROMs (last I checked anyway) - Signal Boost, used for routing voice calls over wifi, and very useful if you frequently work in thick walled buildings and/or basements).
Re: Lack of business sense?
"Leaving aside for a moment that consideration, AVG is not showing much business sense, why then release products for Windows Phone and iOS only? Where is the Android version?"
Over there in the Play store, where it's always been...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.antivirus
It all ends up wetter
OK, I'm not going to touch the whole climate change thing. However, climatechangologists frequently point to the chain of events as climate change -> ice melts -> sea levels rise -> flooding.
So why is it that when people come up with wondrous new methods of producing power, everyone cheers that the only byproduct will be lovely clean water?
If everyone is driving around in hydrogen powered cars, dribbling water out of their exhaust pipes, and power stations pumping water into the rivers, has noone considered that this might also lead to a rise in water levels and flooding? Obviously it'll be a *cleaner* flood but still...
Re: so...
Last gig I went to charged a couple of quid "postage" to email me the tickets..
Re: Someone else who's missed the point about privacy and GG
" I bet he thinks that being in a bar is also a public place."
Given that the very next paragraph goes on to say: "He added that owners of private property, such as homes and businesses, would be perfectly within their rights to ban the use of the devices", I'd happily take your bet...
Re: Late Arrival
"Found the "Museum of the History of Science" in Oxford thanks to the Geek Atlas. Well worth a short visit, small but perfectly formed :)"
Agreed, but after a little while you do start to overdose on brass instruments of every technical persuasion...
What might be more useful is if only the active tab could make noise.
Or for that matter, only the active tab can run plugins (unless you specify that this site can run plugins in the background)?
Would cut down on CPU usage by pages filled with animated adverts and so on.
"You'll be using it and suddenly, without warning, what you're working on will disappear and the 'social network' screen, or some other nonsense, will appear. You're constantly on pins, just waiting for it to go tits up."
I had similar issues with a new W8 laptop. Found it worked much better (well, more predictably and reliably at any rate) with a mouse attached. Doesn't solve the whole split personality problem with W8, but at least it stopped randomly opening other applications or refusing to two-finger scroll for no discernible reason.
Re: Sigh
"And, to be honest, if my Freeview signal was affected, I'd be more likely to just switch it off and/or buy something more regulated from someone else."
My cynical view is that they've worked out if they mess us around enough, so many people will do just that and move to Sky/cable/Freesat that they can just switch off Freeview altogether and flog off even more bandwidth to the mobile networks.
Re: Headcount?
Not sure if this is the one you're thinking of?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/microsoft_drm_spy_patent/
MS have a patent on facial recognition stuff with set top [x]boxes identifying who is watching a film so as to charge based on number of viewers etc. Seems a very similar patent to the one that Intel apparently have?
Vodafone kept trying to tell me I needed to buy one when I called to complain about nonexistent data connectivity both at home (where I had wifi anyway) and out and about in town. They didn't quite see how a Sure Signal would be of no use or that it might constitute a trip hazard if I had to trail Ethernet cable behind me whenever I was out.
Now with Orange (Or the rather bland EE) where I actually do get a 3G signal most of the time, as well as the ability to use SignalBoost to basically do what a femtocell does in-phone over wifi for free.
One way deal?
"Apple's licensing agreement with HTC excludes any of the fruity firm's design patents and any HTC products that are "clones" of iDevices."
Yes, but doesn't Apple consider pretty much any modern smartphone as being a clone of an iDevice?
Re: Oh dear, Microsoft.
"But this is not the way to win friends and influence people, Microsoft. Your credibility is already hanging by a thread - stop insisting on trying to cut it! Surely you can do better than this."
Ooh, that sounds like a new phone app - 'Cut the Credibility'
Posted in Help-desk hell
"A user was having trouble printing documents. He told me that the computer said it can't find printer, adding: "I've tried turning the computer screen to face the printer, but the computer can't see the printer.""
Wasn't that Eddie Izzard a few years back?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6C_HjWr3Nk - about 3:20 in. Fairly close anyway...
Re: not the end
No, I think this date is just the end of that counter and just rolls onto the next one, in the same way we did at the first millenium (i.e., going from 999 to 1000), not counting down to 'day 0'.
Also, (according to wikipedia at any rate), other Mayan inscriptions do refer to dates further in the future, one in the year 4772 for example, so they clearly don't expect the world to end next month. Then again as their dates seem to resemble IP addresses (albeit with more sets of digits), perhaps they were predicting when we'd be ready to move to IPv6?
Posted in Intel insists Mac Mini HDMI fix inbound
Re: nope
"If your Nvidia drivers are acting up do you blame Microsoft? nope."
Yes, if I'm using the Microsoft-certified drivers as installed by default and never-updated-again...
Although personally I don't ever knowingly or willingly do so.
"Unexpected demon in the bagging area"
Re: Really a surprise?
"When you run a store with staff who know nothing selling overpriced goods?"
Indeed. On the occasions I have been in there to consider buying things, I've tried asking the person-from-that-department the differences between two similar products, and their help has consisted of reading out to me what it says on the specification sheet taped to the products. Well, thanks, I can read for myself.
When I was looking for a new fridge/freezer earlier this year, this even confused the salesdroid as the make and model was the same, except for two additional letters on the product code, and an extra £100. Everything else was identical. Since I clearly wasn't just going to buy it, he went off to the back room to "find out", and after half an hour still hadn't come back. So I went home and bought one online.
The two problems I've experienced with trying to get sockets into offices (Personally, I'm an advocate of get as many sockets of any sort, power, data etc in as possible as you don't know what will come - however, as IT-person, I have very little input into this process, only trying to pick up the pieces later):
* Architects who don't seem to want to cater for anyone actually using their creation. We used one who flatly refused to have ugly power sockets ruining the smooth flow of his walls, and eventually compromised on grudglingly permitting the building to have one accessible power point in the lecture theatre, plus some buried in floorboxes where they were all in the wrong place or inaccessible while the seating was deployed. Sadly I was told that it was prestigious to use this architect and simply telling him that if he couldn't design something that met the requirements, he should sod off and we'd find one who could wasn't an option. (On a previous building, same architect sealed motorised projection screens and lighting into the ceiling with no access panels, and thus no way to repair the motors when they burned out, or even to change the tiny sparkly light bulbs when they blew).
* Office staff who insist when having their office space refurbished, that they will have the desks 'here' and 'here', and a printer 'here', (usually as islands in the middle of the floor) and that they must have power/data to those points with no health-and-safety infringing trailing cables. Then after said points are installed, discover that the new desks they've ordered without measuring don't fit, or they have a rearrangement a week after moving back in, meaning that the furniture is now sitting on top of floor boxes that were the only option, with no way to then access them, while the people whose offices they are moan and gripe about not being able to plug anything in.
Re: 'Telephone support'
I had the same thing. It wasn't "injecting assembly code" into drive firmware at all. (at least mine wasn't), from analysing it, it was simply getting the hard disk to write zeroes over the first chunk of the disk, overwriting boot sector and partition table. Getting users to write assembly to hotfix a drive firmware really isn't viable.
In my case, it didn't fix the problem (which was a knackered disk) and led to a lot of annoyance as at no point had they warned me that this would effectively erase the contents unless I could remember the start/end blocks of the partitions. Yes, I had backups, but you'd expect a bit of warning rather than 'run debug and type this lot in, before we'll talk to you'. Ahh, the good old days of Dell "gold" support.
Posted in Judge denies move to ban ad-skipping DVR
The trouble is, this will likely just lead to cases where the channels overlay adverts above the TV programme, obscuring whatever you were trying to watch. I've seen quite a lot of US shows do that already with adverts for other shows, including really distracting video overlays rather than just a subtle text caption, so how long before you just get no actual advert breaks, but almost constant interruptions that you can't skip, floating in from all sides of the screen?
Re: 14 days?
"So Apple can't edit a simple website page in under 14 days?"
Well, every time they want to change or add a new product to their store it is replaced with a "we're updating" message for several hours, so I'm guessing no, they probably can't.
Steve.
Re: Old hat
Indeed, my thoughts too - Active Desktop (in Windows 98 IIRC) offered rectangular boxes of IE-rendered content obtained by subscribing to content 'channels' and updated live from the Internet.
It was atrocious, and the first thing I disabled on installing any W98 machine, but it clearly predates the patent, although as I really can't stand to read the patent it probably specified some miniscule difference, such as a shade of blue, or the fact it updates while the user is sitting down.
Re: Great Lesson
I'm guessing FB isn't being held liable for that part, but appears to be accused of withholding other information, specifically lack of advert growth.
And I guess if the lawsuits target enough people and companies, it increases the odds that one of them did or said or didn't say something that could be regarded as critical.
Re: Yeah, there's pretty much no way to spin the admen's position
"Ahh yes, but the Add Men want the DNT setting to come with a pre checked setting of “I do not want to use DNT” as the default."
More likely they'd want the description to be more like:
'do not disable the Don't use DNT function (note: choosing this may lead to receiving increased irrelevant advertising).'
[And I may not have had the right number of negations in there, please add one if not, my brain hurts too much to parse it again...]
I'd have gladly done it for beer and free tickets.
Then again, I have no musical talent and at school was never allowed anything more challenging than a triangle and would probably only give myself a 50/50 chance of holding an instrument the right way round. But hey, you get what you pay for, right?
Re: EU
"An adapter that you need to carry around is even less compliant than a bunch of different incompatible chargers."
Not just carry around, but actually pay an extra £15 for in the first place (unless that price is only to buy additional adapters?). I had assumed that, in line with the EU arrangement on phones being required to use a standard charging port, it would actually come with the adapter in the box when sold in the EU?
Steve.
Re: 800k loss eh?
He walked away with £1m out of it, sounds like his business skills are OK. (from his perspective at any rate!)
Re: Question?
"Starboard - towards the system's star, Port - away from it. One of the most practical Sci-Fi ideas I have read about recently."
Until you end up in a star system with two (or more) stars..
Sat next to someone who used her phone for the entire 2.5 hour flight yesterday to play some game or other that just seemed to make annoying tinkly noises every few seconds. She did at least put it away during landing, but I bet hadn't switched it into flight mode. Not too bothered though as pretty sure that numerous devices are left on during each and every flight (including on the flight deck) without an incident ever being provably linked to one and would expect that aircraft systems and cabling should be fairly well shielded from interference.
Was more annoyed though that she wouldn't/couldn't put her 'hand luggage' under the seat as it was too large, and had it jammed between her seat and the one in front, hidden under her coat, and wouldn't even move it to allow us to get out to go to the toilet or get something from the overhead locker, expecting us to climb over it - that would have been far more of a potential hazard than using her phone if there actually had been some sort of incident. Sadly, being RyanAir, I hadn't paid some sort of extra charge to have the flight attendants do anything except try to sell food, drinks, hire cars, lottery tickets or duty free. So, apart from asking her towards the end of the flight how long she'd had it there (and then doing nothing about it) they just ignored it.
On the subject of RyanAir (and probably the other cheap pile-on-the-extras airlines too), anyone know what the 'Oxygen reservation charge' is that the website was trying to offer me? I didn't take it and they didn't tape a bag over my head or disable the oxygen mask above my seat (to my knowledge).
Re: Apple having it both ways
Funnily enough, I read a post on a heavily-Mac biased website a few weeks back where the author claimed that he put his shiny new iPhone down on a desk next to a friend's Samsung phone and was entirely unable to tell them apart when he came to pick it up again. Yet same author still apparently managed to every single time update to a new iPhone each time without once accidentally buying a Samsung. I'd have thought it would have been a lesson to him that if, in his mind, the phones really looked and behaved identically, he'd have been better off buying the cheaper one.
Of course he did still argue that despite 'being identical', the Apple still looked and worked better.
"Secure64 markets DNS servers based on NSD (Name Server Daemon) and not BIND. Beckett denied suggestions that its warning about genetic diversity was either a disguised sales pitch or an example of mud-slinging against BIND."
Absolutely not, it was merely a happy coincidence.
Re: The sheep don't voluntarily send the message
Give them their own Internet access and they'll all be following each other on Twitter before you know it.
Re: I'll be damned...
No, they're suggesting Peer-to-Peer - i.e., that members of the House of Lords can swap content between themselves and the rest of us get what we're given...
Innocent unless proven guilty
Surely in the interests of fairness, if a judge is going to ban one product from sale before the case has even been heard, products from both companies should be banned until the outcome has been reached?
Re: US Patent N° 32134165898461316
No, this is an evolution of that patent. Apple doesn't bother with the apology part.
Posted in How do you measure up at the Olympics?
"The latest phaser-esque starting gun simultaneously makes a sound in a speaker behind each athlete."
Excellent - can it make different sounds for each athlete, kind of like the QI buzzers?
Posted in Google suspends 16GB Nexus 7 orders
Hmm. I'll give mine a very close inspection later, but certainly haven't noticed any of those reported issues with it, so they are certainly not common across all devices. Seemed very good build quality - not all as flimsy or rattly as I'd been half-expecting!
Re: O2 & 3 give away femtocells for free.
"Vodafone just keep telling customers to buy them, no matter how much they complain about the poor signal."
Yes, when I emailed them to complain that myself and everyone I know on Vodafone could never get a 3G signal anywhere in Oxford - inside or outside - and for them to please not bother suggesting buying a Suresignal box as I can use wifi when at home/office and it really doesn't help me when I'm in town and wanting to check the price of something.
Sure enough, on the 2nd or 3rd email, that was their suggestion. I don't think the support guy even understood when I asked if the cable I'd be trailing everywhere I went would pose a trip hazard.
Other than that, their only other advice was that I should reboot my phone or try another SIM as the computer said I was in an area of excellent coverage.
Now with Orange, which has pretty good signal here and at least (unless you have an iPhone) provides an app for free that basically does the Suresignal thing in software over wifi, so I get a good signal when indoors at home/work too.
Re: A bit underwhelmed
"No Flash in the browser means some of the streaming media websites I use regularly don't work."
Yes, Adobe have scrapped Flash on new versions, and in a week or so's time (I think) will remove it so it cannot be installed, although devices that already have it will apparently still get updates? Bit weird, but they clearly want to scrap it. Annoyingly BBC iPlayer also won't install or run, as that appears to require Flash. Hopefully they'll fix that very soon as the Nexus will be a great device to watch videos on.
"And every time the screen turns off, and I turn it back on, it starts at the Google app, rather than the web page I was looking at when the screen turned off. Oh, and I accidentally pressed the Google+ icon - you can't back out of it, you either agree to sign up for Google+ or you turn the device off."
If on the unlock screen you drag the unlock icon onto the obvious Google button, it fires up Google Now, which seems to be what you're seeing. If you drag the unlock icon anywhere else it just unlocks and returns to where you are. Took me a couple of goes on that.
And when I accidentally went into Google+ and was asked to sign up, I just clicked the 'no thanks' button and carried on.
Re: just have to say...
yep, agree with that. My 16gb model (ordered on the 28th) arrived at 10.30 and didn't get it out of the box until 11.15...
Re: Dichotomy, eh?
Hmm. My 2006 Macbook is on its 3rd set of batteries now I believe, with the first set no longer holding any charge after 18 months. Then again, as Apple only support current and one previous version of the OS (now released annually), and since the Core Duo CPU is not supported on anything later than 10.6, means that when 10.8 comes out this month, it likely will not receive any security fixes and so I will be expected to buy a new one. Or just install Windows or Linux on it, as a 2Ghz dual core CPU is still perfectly adequate.
That's the thing with Apple - forced obsolescence. 10.8 is now dropping support for other models so they probably only have a year before they become unsupported. My < 2 year old first gen iPad won't take IOS6 (and to be honest, before the 5.1 update, IOS5 crippled it as it was intended for the newer devices with more RAM, meaning that even a little amount of web browsing would run the risk of experiencing random 'out of memory' browser crashes - funny, I thought Apple said that Flash was responsible for most browser and OS crashes yet Safari on IOS5.0 would crash repeatedly without it). Yes, it still works, but won't get any new features or updates.
OK, my Macbook is 6 years old, it probably is due for replacing. But if it still works and still has enough resources to function, why should I be expected to throw it away and get a new one if I want to keep up to date with security fixes? That's hardly a green approach. Microsoft were required to support and provide updates to XP for about 13 years and I believe I read have a policy now of releasing security fixes for 2 years beyond the release of the second subsequent version, or a minimum of 10 years (or something like that) on business products.
Sadly I think there is a lot of prior art on that one...
Appeals
In other news, Apple have banned all competitors from use of the appeals system on the grounds that the word 'appeal' is very close to 'apple' and therefore likely to cause confusion.
"The Nexus fondleslab was spotted lurking in pre-order form on the Play store at £159 for its 8GB version, but no sign of the 16GB one yet."
Sorry? Did you actually look? The Nexus 7 page on the UK Play store has a big button to toggle between 8Gb and 16Gb versions. £199 for the 16Gb, inc VAT but + delivery (was a tenner for the 8Gb so assume the same for 16).
Re: This is an important one
I haven't looked at the details on what is allegedly being infringed on this one, but based on your summary, is it really an h264 patent that is being claimed? If so, why on earth is that considered an essential patent for making a phone?
I agree with your points completely, just mystified why it is considered essential that a phone be able to view or record video in a particular format!
Re: Voice-powered Blu-Ray?
Hopefully it can cope with hearing someone in the film saying 'stop' or 'eject'...
