Posts by Quxy
352 posts • joined Thursday 22nd October 2009 13:26 GMT
Posted in Washington cop tases naked lawn sex man
ID NOT required in either PA or WA
The police officer may have demanded an ID in this situation, but likely the two lovebirds were not legally obligated to provide ID. Washington isn't one of the 24 states that has a “stop and identify” statute (nor is PA, FYI); so unless Yelm has such a statute, the Supreme Court holds that persons are not obligated to identify themselves when detained by police. Additionally, there is no law in the USA requiring citizens to carry identification of any kind ("stop and identify" statutes require a person detained to identify himself to a police officer, and in some cases, provide additional information, not to carry or provide ID documents).
Of course, none of that has much bearing on whether or not sticking up for your rights in an encounter with the cops is worth the aggravation...
Posted in Washington cop tases naked lawn sex man
ID?
Since when do residents of Washington have a legal requirement to carry or produce ID (except when engaged in activities like driving)? If the cop saw open containers of alcohol, perhaps he was looking for proof-of-age; but something smells fishy...
..or just report truthful numbers
Yawn. Every time Microsoft has trundled out their "counterfeit software" complaint in the past, it's turned out that their "counterfeit" figure includes ALL PCs not running licensed copies of Windows. You actually see a fair bit of Linux desktop use in China, so my guess is that this 79% figure is again padded to include non-Microsoft operating systems.
And what is non-innovative about using OSS?
Eh? You write as if the proprietary closed-source nature of Windows is good for anyone. Apple's insight was that they could make a better commercial product by building on high-quality peer-reviewed OSS, and use their internal development resources for things like the UI where differentiation was important. And, no surprise, that's worked very well for them.
OSX incorporates well over 200 OSS projects. Unfortunately, Apple's token contributions back to these projects and the OSS community at large - let's not even get into KHTML, Safari, and WebKit - has always been a source of contention. At the point that Apple contributes something substantial back to the community that has been critical to the success of OSX, Stevie-boy can finally brag about Apple's "openness".
Yes, it IS the interface...
Since Android was intended to support vendor interfaces like SenseUI, it's not exactly a failure when it competently does just that. In any case, both user satisfaction surveys and the fact that in the first quarter of 2010 Android's US market share increased by 29 percent, while the iPhone's market share increased by 8 percent, indicate that actual users are quite happy with both Android and iPhone.
Posted in ARM chippies cooperate on Linux
Umm, Linaro is not a distro
The article is more than a little misleading.
Linaro is NOT another distro, but rather a common software foundation and set of tools for other distributions to use. It is driven by silicon suppliers (the folks who make ARM-core chips), and provides a way for them to test their board support packages and make them available to device manufacturers, distributions and software developers.
All of the application software will be developed in the appropriate upstream open source project, and written for the target distro (Debian, Ubuntu, MeeGo, LiMo) that lands on top of Linaro.
Posted in ARM chippies cooperate on Linux
This will be good for Debian too
As a heavy user of Linux on ARM embedded processors, I welcome a distro project focused on that (huge) family of processors. At the moment, Linux on ARM is fragmented among several different development communities, depending upon architectural details (e.g. MMU vs MPU, internal vs external RAM, execute from Flash vs RAM, etc.) and the target market (e.g. multimedia, network device, smartphone, automotive, deeply embedded, etc.) for the specific variant. Hopefully this will bring some coherence to what has become the second most popular Linux target.
Just as anticipated by the FSF
No surprise here. As FSF pointed out at the beginning,
"In most ways, this is a typical enforcement action for the FSF: we want to resolve this situation as amicably as possible. We have not sued Apple, nor have we sent them any legal demand that they remove the programs from the App Store... The only thing we're doing differently is making this announcement. Apple has a proven track record of blocking or disappearing programs from the App Store without explanation. So we want to provide everyone with these details about the case before that happens, and prevent any wild speculation."
Of course they oppose it...
Because of the enormous public outcry against Wall Street, Congresscritters are being forced to (in public, anyway) endorse "financial reform". That leaves only the MPAA and telcos as money sources for the Democrats, so you can bet they're going to suck up to those industries for dear life.
This is really too bad
Azoogle (aka Epic Advertising) is a well-known pain in the collective arse of the ISP community It's sad that Alex "Teflon" Zhardanovsky managed to weasel out of this one at the expense of a small ISP.
Zhardanovsky is no stranger to SPAM litigation: I recall that in pre-trial discovery in the infamous "Get a "Free" Plasma TV" spam case a few years ago, Azoogle admitted to hiring the Ralsky spam gang to sent out the spam.
Posted in Google programming Frankenstein is a Go
There's a lot to like about Go...
...particularly in the way they've implemented inheritance and interfaces, its clean syntax, and the way the language is (still?) pretty uncluttered (yes, I like the idea of a garbage-collected, concurrent C). I sure hope that they come up with some sensible solution to exceptions and generics, though.
I agree
I get better battery life with a Motorola Droid than I ever did with an iPhone 3G, for my normal mixture of all-day streaming audio, web browsing, and email usage. Perhaps this is simply due to better 3G coverage from Verizon than AT&T (i.e. lower radio power), but I have no trouble using 3G all day long on a single battery charge.
"Innocent until proven guilty"?
How quaint. Yes, that's how it's supposed to work. However, child abuse/porn is such an emotionally charged issue that it's a rare DA who can approach such a case without bias or a politically-motivated agenda, and a rare investigator who will go to much effort to unearth evidence that might cast doubt on the obvious guilt of the perp.
No, if this guy is actually innocent, he'd better get a good lawyer to start an investigation of his own before the entire trail of evidence is destroyed.
'Fluff' is the key word here
The website referenced in the article contained no substantive information, just a few fluffy stories ('eradicate malaria!, simplify rocket science! more efficiently screw policyholders!'), and an unsuccessful attempt to install Silverlight. The 'please visit www.modelingtheworld.com for your ideas and feedback' yielded a black page which again tried unsuccessfully to install Silverlight.
The technical computing boffins *I* work with use Linux -- coz that's where the affordable supercomputing power is right now. To a person, they're also turned off by marketing hype, so Microsoft is unlikely to impress any of them with glossy websites that require unsupported plugins.
Perth Pink
"This is a browser with a message in, and the message is 'beware'. This is not a browser for drinking, this is a browser for laying down and avoiding.'"
Posted in Viewsonic VMP74 1080p media player
HiSense is still ahead
Nice box. But its capabilities are eclipsed by the new HiSense MP801H (the successor to the MP800H previously reviewed by el Reg http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/1105/review_media_player_hisense_1080p/). For that matter, I think that once you install the latest firmware update, the MP800H itself edges out the VMP74.
Posted in Adobe declares 'LOVE' for Apple
Kicking and screaming, perhaps
As has already been pointed out, the UI in the Windows versions of Adobe products is pretty nasty compared to what the "Mac faithful" are accustomed to. Mac and Linux users have already been forced into that situation with Framemaker, and it's an unpleasant, frustrating experience.
Figures often beguile me...
...particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
Posted in Nokia takes Apple to court, again
No surprise about Wisconsin
The Western District of Wisconsin has for years been a "magnet" jurisdiction, just like the Eastern District of Texas, because of the traditionally plaintiff-friendly juries in that district. Unfortunately for Nokia, recent Federal appeals court decisions make it easier for the defendant to transfer the case to a court more favourable to them (perhaps effectively signalling an end to "magnet" jurisdictions). If Apple can show "good cause" (e.g. key witnesses are in a different geographical area), and that its proposed forum is "clearly more convenient," then the case will likely be transferred (to the less-plaintiff-friendly Northern District of California, for instance).
Worthwhile upgrade
The speech-to-text facility works remarkably well (so long as I take care to speak in a California accent!), and Google appears to be continually improving its accuracy. I've been using 2.1 since the upgrade was leaked about six weeks ago, and now routinely use speech-to-text for both SMS and email transcription whilst driving.
IT hoisted by its own petard
Now, I'm normally going to usually side with IT. But in this case it's pretty clear that senior IT dude Michael Perbix was the person instrumental for introducing LANrev into LMSD's laptop program. School management undoubtedly failed in their responsibility to mandate appropriate privacy and usage policies; but Perbix has been very public in his enthusiasm for LANrev and his belief that students shouldn't expect any privacy. Sorry, this IT guy doesn't need your sympathy.
Cue the fanbois...
...and pass the popcorn.
I've long since lost most of the respect I once had for both Adobe and Apple -- which makes it all the more amusing to sit back and watch the handbag fight!
Apple a for-profit corporation, not a friend of the FSF: news at 11
"Should Apple be a contributor to the patent pool Steve Jobs mentioned, that would be very bad news because then the objective may very well be to prevent any commercial use and distribution of Ogg Theora and other open-source video codecs"
Why the surprised rhetoric? Apple and Microsoft have always happily appropriated open-source software when it benefits their bottom line, but when have they every given back anything significant to the FOSS community? They both have huge patent pools, and routinely use them to fight commercial competitors. Why doubt that they'll similarly attack any FOSS development that they see as competition to their long term business strategies? You can bet that everyone in MPEG-LA hopes to profit from their investment in H.264.
But Theora developers have been saying that for over a decade...
When Monty Montgomery (founder of Xiph.org, the body overseeing Theora development) was recently asked about MPEG-LA's Theora-is-not-patent-free assertions, Montgomery was fierce in his reply:
"For 15 years, Xiph.Org has carefully 'played by the rules', fully within the bounds, intent, and letter of intellectual property and patent law. For the past ten years we've informed the entire world, including MPEG LA, of our specifications and algorithms in detail. We've requested in open letters that any group believing we are infringing to inform us so that we make take immediate corrective action."
"I predict that MPEG LA may counter that they know groups have been pressured into licensing patents in order to use Theora. This has been a recent back-room assertion. You might want to ask point blank if MPEG LA itself or any of its constituent members has engaged in this practice, thus manufacturing the evidence that 'vindicates' their patent allegations. I beg you - tell me immediately if you get a straight answer (or good video of any squirming)!"
"I'm sure you can tell I'm a bit peeved; this has been going on for over a decade. It's amazing they've never been called out on it."
Flash blocking
"Web content just use one of the many ad blockers for your Android browser of choice."
Fortunately, it's likely that Flash blockers will arrive in the Android Market shortly after 2.2 is released. God knows that NoScript is the only thing that keeps web browsing from becoming terminally frustrating -- and that's on my high-end workstation.
No, I'm not about to switch back to the iPhone after having used Android 2.1!
Flash on a 550 MHz Cortex??
My god, even if they use the DSP as a co-processor, Flash is going to bring Android to its knees on any existing smartphone. Unless they add Flash blocking to the browser (or Fennec turns out to be a lot less bloated than the alpha version), that's enough reason not to upgrade from 2.1 to 2.2. I shudder at the thought of destroying what is - on the whole - a pretty good browsing experience for the sake of lame games and in-your-face adverts.
His Steveness wants H.264: end of discussion
Well, Apple has made this assertion before about the uncertain patent situation surrounding Ogg Theora. And while Theora supporters claim that it doesn’t violate any patents in the H.264 pool, MPEG-LA has stated that they believe otherwise.
But probably the most worrying issue is that of "submarine" patents. H.264 would naturally also violate those patents; but if the holder of a submarine patent were to sue over H.264, MPEG-LA could countersue using the patents in the H.264 pool. In comparison, Theora users are unarmed against such an attack.
It seems likely that Apple (perhaps through companies they've acquired) holds unpublicised patents which any modern video codec would infringe. And it's in their strategic business interests to force competitors to their preferred HTML5 codec out of the pool, either through lawsuits or simply FUD. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the "mystery patent pool" includes both Apple and Microsoft.
Posted in Steve Jobs issues open letter on Flash
"IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only"
Microsoft has also firmly joined the HTML5 camp. I suspect that Microsoft and Apple are going to put a LOT of effort into pushing a consistent HTML5 experience.
Even Adobe's BFF admits that "Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance." http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/29/html5-video.aspx
Advocating the use of Flash by claiming that "the key is ... delivering consistent experiences or content" is more than a little disingenuous, as Windows is the ONLY platform on which Flash performs acceptably.
Posted in Steve Jobs issues open letter on Flash
No, Flash doesn't crash OSX
No, Flash doesn't crash OSX, or even WindowServer. As on Linux and Windows, it sometimes kills the browser, and often sucks up 100% of the CPU, necessitating a Force Close of the browser.
Posted in Steve Jobs issues open letter on Flash
Open standards are a plan to lock in Safari?
"open standards" in web browsers means "subtle hacking around weird edge case problems for different browsers"
Hey -- it's better than the alternative: proprietary browser plugins. When your Flash plugin has security bugs (as it does) or crap performance (as it does), all you can do is to hope that Adobe someday releases an update for your specific platform that fixes the problems. When you have problems with HTML5, you can fix the problem yourself (if you're using an open source implementation) or switch to a competing product that doesn't have the problem.
The situation with Flash is an awful lot like those websites that only work with a specific version of Internet Explorer.
Posted in Steve Jobs issues open letter on Flash
"Namaste"?
It's hard to imagine His Steveness (thanks, AO) using such a respectful term to anyone, let alone Adobe. But his point is entirely reasonable; and is, I suspect, painfully obvious to any developer of Flash applications who isn't a shill for Adobe.
Nope, Adobe had its chance, and blew it. The world moves on. And the web will be a much better place without such undue reliance on one company's proprietary product.
That would be a 'nope'
"One thing we'll never know - if the finder had persevered in contacting Apple, would they have rewarded him more highly than Gizmodo did?"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
"Italian eco-anarchist group Il Silvestre"?
Oh, dear... This sounds like the setup for a joke with the punchline, "they tried to blow up a bus, but burned their lips on the exhaust pipe"...
Huh? Good publicity for the cops too!
Are you kidding? REACT was established at the request of Silicon Valley high tech industry, and its stated remit is to "provide a more effective level of service to the high tech business community". Those same high tech companies "provide specialized training, liaison personnel and internal support for task force investigations." There's no way that they were going to pass up _this_ PR opportunity, even without the nod from Apple!
"Shockingly Bowness"?
I take it that would be the nom de scène she used during her nude modelling stint?
Yep, the Corporate States of America...
...is healthier than ever. I'm sure that REACT was falling over itself in its eagerness to knock down Jason Chen's door, although the wink from Steve probably didn't hurt.
Unfortunately, Mr Chen has been more than a little injudicious, and will be very lucky indeed if he stays out of jail: California is really not a good place to go offending big high-tech businesses...
Sauce for the gander
Of course this is the same guy who (in last autumn's ICSA report on security products) berated the developers of security products for failing to "think like attackers".
Overpriced and lousy security
Since ICANN, there's been no reason to use NSI as a registrar; and they've always been a poor choice for web hosting. Security breaches seem to be routine over there; and they confess that they still don't know how 600,000 names/addresses/CC# were stolen from their "secure" servers last summer.
Another language doomed to be stuck in Windows?
So, with apologies to Gosling, F# is "sort of OCaml with reliability, productivity and security deleted"?
But seriously, it's undoubtedly the case that some of the stuff coming out of Microsoft research is pretty good. That's a pity, as the rest of the computing community isn't going to pay a lot of attention to it until Microsoft stops slapping patent protection all over everything.
Red Guests are better than Black?
Well, not quite... Honker (红客 = "red guest") is is a particular Chinese group known for hacktivism. The Chinese media uses the usual transliteration of hacker (黑客 = "black guest") unless they're talking specifically about the Honker Union. These control servers are probably not controlled by the Honker, whose activities usually have a more overt political component.
Posted in Lenovo ThinkPad X100e
Is this the best Lenovo can do, 4 years on?
So... It's heavier and a lot thicker than my X41 -- and has terrible battery life, to boot. Even the CPU benchmarks don't seem to be any better than the X41's 1.6GHz Pentium M. The additional 342 pixels of horizontal resolution hardly seem worth the cost of the other compromises.
Posted in US gov cries foul on MPAA piracy claims
GAO: Sensible, but irrelevant?
Unfortunately, while the GAO is usually independent and sensible, and is supposed to serve as a sort of financial conscience for the Congress; members of Congress have developed excellent mechanisms for ignoring their personal consciences, and are nearly always successful at doing the same with the GAO. Given the vast amounts of money that the BSA, MPAA, and other "intellectual property" organisations have pumped into Congress, it's unlikely that this GAO report will have the slightest effect on proposed copyright legislation.
Posted in Atom runs Android, Google plans tablet
Incomplete title?
No, surely that's "The Distressingly Named WePad"...
Posted in Opera for iPhone: The review
Andrew has a Cupcake?
Yes, as someone who finds my Android 2.1 WebKit browser to be generally on a par with my iPhone Safari browser, I'm puzzled by Andrew's comments. Perhaps his experience is limited to older Android releases.
I also use Opera 5 on the Android, where it has almost the same pros and cons as Andrew described for the iPhone. It certainly has some nice additional features, like speed, Saved Pages, History, and Shortcuts.
Moreover, I find scrolling to be smoother on Android than on the iPhone (perhaps just a faster processor?). Certainly the Android version doesn't exhibit the zoomed-out font and image rendering problems I notice on the iPhone.
However, I really do miss the lack of pinch-to-zoom and continuously variable zoom of the Android and iPhone browsers. Navigating around a web page just isn't as smooth or pleasant an experience as on those two flagship browsers.
Posted in Apple updates MacBook Pro notebooks
You're no fool...
...so fortunately there's still Dell and Windows 7 for smart folks like you!
Posted in HP's Memristor tech - better than flash?
Yeah, Chua's an EE
Yeah, I know that Chua's an EE (I'm personally most familiar with his work on nonlinear circuit theory). But Stan Williams and most of the rest of the team at HP's Quantum Science Research lab have backgrounds in physics (or physical chemistry or chemical physics), not EE. Even my colleagues working on nanoelectronics in my local university's EE department are as likely as not to be theoretical physicists.
Why?
Why treat a modern smartphone as a PC peripheral? Neither CPU speeds nor memory capacity (my phone has 28GB free -- more than my PC) are an issue any longer. And you can bet that folks aren't going to use the iPhone-OS-based iPad that way.
