Posts by Tom 38
1575 posts • joined Tuesday 21st July 2009 13:02 GMT
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Posted in Minotron: 2112 on iOS 4
Yak 4 life
Too many wasted hours playing Revenge of the Mutant Camels.
Posted in Apple-branded unicorn spotted at 3
@Piloti - You should be a climate change scientist
The way you can manipulate numbers like that, its freaky.
iphone 4 off contract is £510.
If you deliberately choose a stupid contract, and include the cost of the contract in the phone cost, then yes, it will cost you more than that. The same is true if you buy any phone, even one of your magical nokias.
If you actually compare like with like, the comparison is different. Eg, on three, their 'one plan' is £25/month SIM only, or £35/month with a subsidised iphone for £69.
The contract length on both of these contracts is 24 months, making the cost of the phone £309 above the cost of the contract. I'm sure even a nokia has a calculator app, perhaps you should use it before trolling so pathetically.
Are you in fact super miffed because you spent the same amount of money on a nokia phone + contract, and have to keep justifying to yourself how daft everyone else is?
Posted in People watch movies on stuff
Re: Re: They do what?
And it's a good job there are stupid people, who pay full whack to watch a film, buy it on blu-ray and buy all the shit merchandise, or there wouldn't be expensive movies for cheapskates like you to rent from your library.
Way to make your argument.
Posted in Police head-cam TV show debuts in US
"Fruit of the poison tree" is not so good
Occasionally evidence is recovered which, whilst undeniably true, cannot be used in a court solely due to police/prosecutor mistakes. This is not good.
Also, even with this rule, there is an exclusion for police officers executing an illegally obtained warrant 'in good faith':
... police officers had a warrant to search an apartment on the third floor of an apartment building. Expecting to find a drug dealer, then actually raided the apartment across the hall from the one they intended to raid.
While they realized their mistake, they also found a bag of marijuana on a dresser in the apartment they accidentally raided. The Supreme Court based its decision in part in the inability to deter such actions.
So long as the officers didn't intend to violate the rights of their victims, their findings cannot be precluded from being used as evidence in a criminal trial.
So, in general the rules apply the same across the pond as they do here, except rich people cannot hire really expensive lawyers to attempt to throw out every piece of evidence.
@zootlewurdle
I think you will enjoy this letter sent to Virgin's predecessor, NTL:
http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=1695&page=1
Bridging doesn't totally avoid the crappy ISP box
I have Be, and use their supplied/rented speedtouch router in bridge mode. It still crashes occasionally, requiring a hard reset, despite it doing nothing more than a glorified packet pusher.
Mind you, it is an age better than when you use it as a router, when it dies within seconds of launching a multiplier network game with high numbers of UDP packets.
Posted in Apple-branded unicorn spotted at 3
Wow, 2 hours after the reg post about it
And the white iphone is gone from three's store. Guess someone enabled something too soon, and their boss just found out.
Posted in Apple-branded unicorn spotted at 3
@Piloti - troll much?
The £900 figure comes from expansys, who do like to rip people off by getting them to buy up front for phones they don't have. The white iphone will almost certainly cost the same as a regular iphone, which is £510/£612 for 16GB/32GB.
This compares to top-end Android smartphones, such as £429 for a 16GB Google Nexus-S, or £485 for a 16GB Samsung Galaxy S.
Whether you want to pay the additional money, or whether that money is well spent, is at the discretion of the purchaser.
If you have bought into the Apple media hierarchy, it may well be that other smart phone choices are idiotic - can the Galaxy S stream to Apple TV? Can it synch with itunes?
You may think these questions are ridiculous, but they are the very questions my old man asked me when I suggested upgrading his iphone to an android phone - he wants what he has got, but faster and better looking, and is not interested in learning a new platform. For him, an extra £100 is insignificant compared to it working how he expects.
Apple prices are from UK apple store, Android prices are from carphone warehouse.
Posted in Apple-branded unicorn spotted at 3
This is news?
It's been there for at least a week, and it's only displayed, it isn't an option to buy. If you click 'select' next to it, you get told "White iPhone 4 is currently unavailable for order online or in-store."
Posted in Firefox needs heavy hitter Linux power
Firefox is useless
Firefox left running over weekend, one tab, simple HTML page, no plugins - RSS 270MB.
Chrome left running over weekend, 15 tabs - RSS 200MB
If I'd actually used Firefox significantly, then it's not uncommon to see that RSS rise constantly, highest I've ever seen was 1.1GB.
Firefox - its okay, but now we have webkit, no thanks Mozilla.
FYI, 'Firefox' and 'Chromium' are not the only fruit. Konqueror (KHTML), Epiphany (Webkit) are available for KDE and GNOME respectively, and there are many other variants. I currently use xxxterm, which is a GTK wrapped webkit with vim bindings.
Posted in What will we do with 600MHz?
@AC
"""
There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that Human DNA is harmed by the radiation emmitted by phone masts - let alone the harm caused by mobile phones.
"""
Well done, come on to a scientific biased website, and use a phrase like 'anecdotal evidence'. Son, if its anecdotal, it's not evidence, it's just a story you heard from some guy. 'anecdotal', from 'anecdote' - 'private story'. Well done.
"""
So very soon coming to a backyard near you will be the next generation of 4G masts at 1.8GHz and 2.4GHz blasting microwave radiation 24x7x365!
"""
It's good they get a day off in leap years though, one less thing to worry about.
"""
I've had to fight [a mast] being put about 60m from my home.
"""
Who won, you or the mast? Watch out, those masts fight dirty, all of a sudden they can FRY YOUR BRAINS, even though when testing we noticed no such thing - they are that devious.
Posted in White iPhone 4 'in production'
You might scoff
I was thinking of getting a new phone to replace my aging iphone 3G, and the idea of a white iphone 4 tickles me some what.
On the other hand, I'll still probably wait until after WWDC, just in case they announce an iphone 5.
Mine's the flame retardant coat.
I'm astonishingly puerile
I quite liked it. With such magic lines like:
"I could tell at once that you were a bender, and that you would realise your destiny."
It's almost, but not quite, bad enough to be good. I'm hoping he gets another $150m to spend on a film, his quality trajectory will soon create the best worst movie ever.
Off to watch Plan 9..
@Neil Weller
<sarcasm>Really? I hadn't thought of that.</sarcasm>
So, although their previous 6 versions were absolute pap*, WinPho 7 will eventually be awesome, and it's not yet because they only just wrote it. Ok, makes perfect sense, we've just got to give them more time.
* 6.5 wasn't all that bad, although I'd count that as distinct from 6.
@Little Poppet
Start from scratch? It's called Windows Phone *7*, which means this is their 7th iteration at trying to make a smart phone interface. They're getting there, I suppose..
Posted in iPad maker goes Brazilian
@Dazed and Confused
We will be able to afford it as long as China continue suppressing the real value of their currency. If we had to pay what things actually cost, we couldn't afford it already.
I was talking about Foxconn with some of our Chinese developers the other day - they were looking to hire another dev, found someone suitable and offered him the job. He didn't seem to like the pay that was being offered, and said that he would earn much more working for Foxconn. Yes, replied the lead dev, but you will be dead in six months. Boom boom.
skyplayer.sky.com
Really nice example of a silverlight website,
I believe most apps in Windows Media Center are built with silverlight as well.
Silverlight is usable on PC and Mac, btw.
"simple pleasures"
http://xkcd.com/330/
fnar fnar
IANAL
But how does one go about starting a private prosecution?
Presumably, anyone caught with a spliff can now claim that they took advice from their dealer, and cannabis has now been ruled legal in the UK - a genuine misunderstanding guv, no criminality meant, probably won't do it again.
The ICO is always complaining he doesn't have powers to go after or punish data losses - well here is a clear case for him to prosecute to clearly lay down a marker - content transmitted or received by an ISP on a customers behalf is both private and sacrosanct. You must not look at the content, other than to maintain the efficient running of your network. Trying to profit from your customers data is wrong and immoral, and when caught you will be seriously punished.
I think a massive fine is in order in this case, with directors going to jail if it happens again. Proper jail too, not Ford Country Club.
The whole thing is incredulous. From BT and their lawyers thinking it was legal in the first place, to CPS thinking there is no merit in prosecuting, or that they won't get a conviction when BT have admitted to doing it. I can imagine how the conversation went at CPS:
Lawyer A: So they admitted to it?
Lawyer B: Yep, no chance of a conviction now.
Lawyer A: Well, they didn't mean to, ignorance of the law is a valid defence, right?
Lawyer B: Well, I'm ignorant of the law, so yeah, guess so.
Posted in What will we do with 600MHz?
HD - lots and lots of HD
If we can get 8 additional HD channels in the UK, then we should do it. Unless you have Sky, we still have the most pitiful HD experience going. BBC 2,3,4 in HD, a BBC stream for red button HD, and HD +1 versions of BBC 1,2,3,4.
Job done.
On the other hand
It's perfectly fine for party members to stand outside the polling station telling people "Remember to vote Labour", as they do in my constituency in east London.
Not holy enough that they don't prostitute themselves for election cash
If they want to take cash for hosting election booths, they can damn well tolerate whatever is legal.
At that point, it is not a place of worship, it is a place of election. If they don't like the parties the electorate form, they can choose to not take the money. Simples.
Tolerance doesn't go both ways - strongly religious people are often the least tolerant people, from my experience*.
This comes from the very basis of religion; "My way is correct, and, even though there is no proof to confirm this either way, you will be damned for eternity because you don't think like me". Doesn't sound very tolerant.
* I've also met very intolerant atheists, and very tolerant religious people, so it's not fair to tar all with the same brush. This priest didn't seem particularly tolerant though.
My exchange upgraded months ago
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/LNSTF - The Olympic exchange!
However, whilst they are happy to upgrade the exchange, seems actually putting cabs on the street is proving too tricky.
On the other hand, I currently get 18 Mbps from Be, and Be aren't doing FTTC yet. Having BT as an ISP is not something that appeals - well, actually, having not Be as an ISP is not something that appeals, if you'll excuse the double negative.
10MB up (and a provider that lets you use it) would be awesome for accessing my home media.
Posted in Assange gets appeal date
I don't think he's guilty
I do think he's skipped out of Sweden to avoid being charged, and should go back and face the music though. His guilt is up to the Swedish to determine.
It's hardly like he's being sent to Iran for trial. If you or I were charged with a similar offence, and considered ourselves innocent, we would simply obey the law. He seems to think he is above the law, and his mission supercedes everything else.
Go. Go now. Stop dragging it through the courts, the decision to extradite is not going to be overruled.
Hmm
Weren't whole sections of the Beeb's IT staff outsourced and transferred to Siemens? Probably explains why they were given the contract, it was probably given to the in house team that is no longer in house.
Outsourcing or no outsourcing, failing to fully specify a project leads to this sort of issue and uncertainty in cost.
Or not
Seeing as Lewes, Delaware is in Sussex County, I would have thought it is probably named after the town of Lewes, in Sussex, England.
Posted in Assange gets appeal date
@AC
"Besides, if the system is being gamed to get Assange to USA, why shouldn't he game it to prevent it?"
Show one jot of evidence the system is being gamed to get Assange to the USA. Really, please do. You speak as if it is self evident, but this smacks of delusion.
If America wanted him, they would only have to ask the UK, and not charge him with a capital offence. Do you think the CIA will whisk him away in mid flight, somewhere over the North Sea?
He's already gamed the system enough, fleeing one country to avoid prosecution.
@JeffUK
I think they are talking Fahrenheit rather than Celsius.
In real measurement units its 18°C <-> 27°C
Or at least I hope so, for the sake of their techies!
Posted in Air Video 2.4.6
Welcome to 2009
http://www.ioncannon.net/programming/452/iphone-http-streaming-with-ffmpeg-and-an-open-source-segmenter/
My version of this is ~100 lines of python, to choose the file, setup the transcoding and segmenting in the background, and hand off to webkit.
Re: Re: Tsk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkin_(disambiguation)
Sometimes words have multiple meanings. The fact that a slang term for an American is also the name of a pubic wig is sometimes, not always, apt.
The main difference is you are unlikely to be shot by a pubic wig.
@heyrick
Slight misread - no problem with VISA debit, used that on 4 continents. Maestro used to get strange looks wherever I used it, which is why I'm glad they no longer issue them.
Posted in Ofcom Radio pokes at potential pirates
Drug dealers on pirate radio?
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
The problem is that often you cannot buy tickets for these games
Lots of tickets are allocated for sale to the various clubs, and local unions around the country. For example, I used to be able to get a couple of tickets for any Twickenham match from my grandad, since he was an ex president of Suffolk RFU.
The RFU want to cut down on people buying these tickets solely for the purpose of touting them, which is what seems to happen a lot. I suspect they want to crack down on these particular touts pour encourager les autres, which is a lot cheaper and easier to do than adding additional technology. The 'facilitated trespass' argument is quite clever and cast on solid, they probably didn't even have to pay their lawyers.
Also, checking credit cards against tickets may work for 15k people going to a concert, trying to do it for 90k is a bit more problematic. It's hard enough getting in and out of Twickenham on match days without an additional 30 second delay on the gates.
Posted in Apple Digital AV Adapter
Saw it coming, don't care.
If you buy an ipad (and I have, mk1), you know precisely what you are getting yourself in to - all the accessories are listed out there, right when you buy. You know a case will cost you £30, and if you want to stick an SD card in there, that's another £30 odd quid (funny, never needed that one).
I'll probably not need this one either, since AirPlay was trivial to setup on Linux using freely available software, I can already beam stuff on to the big screen. Might be handy for traveling though.
In one way, it's good these things aren't built in - you get a svelte tablet, light and thin, but then you need breakout cables with electronics built into them, which is pricey.
Yes, you could 'save' yourself £200 by buying something like an Archos, or an Advent Vega (shudder). They are probably quite functional devices. Personally, I want it to look good as well as operate effectively, and my power as a consumer allows me to choose that.
You also get to choose. Looks like a lot of people are just choosing to sling ad hominem attacks around, which says more about them than it does about Apple.
Any successful company knows that the price of something has no relation to the cost of manufacture or development. The price of a thing is whatever the market will bear, and quite clearly, the market is bearing this.
The poster complaining about ipods not charging from USB anymore, yep that has riled me a bit too. OK, so modern Apple batteries are better charged using a 10W adapter, rather than the 5W that a typical USB port can chuck out, but still, how about a trickle charge algorithm rather than a smug icon telling me its not charging. A cynic may say that's their way of saying 'buy a new mac', probably right.
HSBC is pretty good
Although they screw you over just as much as the next bank. Apart from that, truly global presence, and never even came close to asking for bailout money, from any government. Plus, they give you proper VISA debit cards now, rather than Maestro, which gets puzzled looks whenever you try to use it abroad. They're also rolling out 2-factor authentication systems for internet banking.
Barclays probably also not bad, but I really really would like to punch Bob Diamond*
* Note: this is not a threat. I just would like to do it, not that I ever would. Can't be too careful these days. Also, Bob, if you're reading, any jobs going?
Posted in Judge flips $625.5m Apple patent payout
This is what happens with jury trials for civil matters
Crazy merkins. You need a panel of judges, who are well versed in patent law, rather than 12 Texans who want to sock it to the evil Californians. As if it deprived him of a $200m dollars.
What the cock is wrong with FM?
How many bloody radio stations do we need anyway?
Certain cure for depression
2 hours of Joy Division/Smiths
Admittedly, it's a kill or cure option, but much more of the latter than the former.
@Sarah Bee
The 60's called, they want their catch-phrase back.
Last time I heard something was 'boss' was - well, last Saturday, was watching American Graffiti. Is it making a come back?
Re: Interesting point
Depends on the network. SyFy* produce a number of shows with 13 episode runs, some of which are split over the christmas break, where I think they just show re-runs.
* God I hate that name.
£399 to go 5 metres?
Whats the point? You could rent a masonry drill for around £50, put some nice little holes through the wall, and actually have decent quality video and audio.
Signals sent over HDMI just aren't made to be sent over anything other than HDMI - which supports a bandwidth of between 4-8 Gbps for 1080p video + audio. Re-encoding that to be sent over wifi (probable bandwidth: 50 Mbps), in real time, with no coding hints, will lead to worse artifacts than you get on your average illicit DVD (you wanna buy DVD?)
It *is not* GNOME
GNOME is an entire stack of UI components, libraries and a window manager. To be frank, most distros don't run GNOME, they run some GNOME components, and usually use the really-not-GNOME compiz wm.
It's not GNOME if it's not running metacity.
Oh, and since you seem to delight in pedantry, it is 'GNOME', not 'Gnome' - it is an acronym (the GNU Object Model Environment), not a proper noun.
Posted in Facebook Comments kill web freedom
I'm not on Facebook
And I don't plan on changing that any time soon.
Not to bang on about this
Almost every high profile, targeted hack attempt these days involves a zero day exploit of an Adobe product.
Now, part of this must be its ubiquitous presence on a desktop machine, but some large proportion of the blame must be laid at Adobe's door.
Sure, every graphics card can run compiz
Unless you run 'nv', or an unsupported 'radeon' card.
Or if you have a 'weak' graphics card, like an intel 810.
Or even if you have more modern intel graphics, like a GMA 950, or a discrete, but cheap as fuck nvidia, like a 7200 GS, and have the temerity to run multiple screens.
Even if you do have a nice beefy graphics card, there are significant downsides to 3D desktop rendering, principally that upon doing something that requires your beefy 3D card, like switching workspace, will make its fan scream along, and chuck out way more heat.
I can't be the only one who prefers a 2D desktop precisely for its simplicity. A desktop is just a nice way of having lots of terminals open anyway.
Posted in Australia, give up your fixed broadband!
Wireless isn't some magic pill which solves all woes
It's a pile of shite. Inherently, you are all sharing that bandwidth, due to the shared spectrum - it simply does not scale, coverage is limited to urban areas and it generally is unstable where there are lots of users and suffers from high latency everywhere.
Britain has one of the best 3G networks. Use it in central London, and you'll quickly see how slow and overloaded it is. Try and use it outside of an urban area, and you'll find you have no coverage. For instance, at my parents house out in the 'sticks' (yet within sight of the biggest telecommunications research institute in the UK), and not only can you not get 1G reception inside the house, but you have to wander about half a mile down the road to get anything.
A national fibre network is the only way to get high speed, low latency internet into every house - and that's what people want. Ask the Swedish, they've been doing this for years - live in the middle of nowhere? No problem, they run the fibre right to you.
Of course they pay a lot more in taxes. Perhaps the aussies should fund this by taxing the massive international conglomerates that rape Australia of its natural resources a bit more.
Posted in Apple plays cloud catch-up
@paul 97
I call bullshit; I have an ipad. I don't use iBooks, because the prices are an absolute joke, but I'm a heavy user of the Kindle app, since it's prices are reasonable, plus the range is much more extensive. I think I have about 4 iBooks, and about 50 Kindle books, and haven't bought an iBook since I registered with Kindle.
I know it is stupid to say "I do this, therefore everyone must do this", but it is equally stupid to say that Apple fans will suck up anything, at any price. We're quite a conscientious bunch really, even if we do like the shiny new devices that are easy to use and hard to go wrong with.
I don't get the idea of a music locker though. I don't keep my e-books in book locker, they are kept on device. The only music locker that makes sense to me is Spotify, where I can get most of the music I want. The only music I keep on my phone these days is stuff I can't get on spotify (Zeppelin, etc) and a few saved playlists.
Not exactly precision is it
Can't help but see the similarities between this and cluster bombs, and other non discriminatory weapons of war that we have deemed unsuitable.
Perhaps rather than inventing new ways of killing the worlds population, America could stop invading all the third world countries. You know third world countries, they're the places where only the rich can afford healthcare.. oh snap.
Warhammer 40k Dreadnoughts
Almost certainly prior art in this area, but that's what came to my mind first:
http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Dreadnought
I'll stick with GNOME thanks
At least on my desktop and laptop. I've used GNOME for a long time now, I know where things go, its fast, it doesn't make me use 3D nonsense for 'productivity'.
Basically all I want from a desktop is a way to launch apps, have multiple desktops, and then stay the fuck out of my way.
But then I don't even run a desktop RSS reader, for those kind of users who want to be distracted away from youtube every time some one posts a tweet, maybe this is perfect.
