* Posts by pj3090

40 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Nov 2009

Google makes Gmail EVEN NOISIER, or should that be nosier?

pj3090

Re: Ha

a) My Google Offers go to the Promotions tab, along with other promotions. b) Anybody can structure their emails to provide the same convenience that YouTube and Google Offers enjoy by adding a little schema.org markup, see https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/overview

Creative Suite cloud lurch crushes beret-wearers' cost-slash bid

pj3090

Re: Skipping a version

Hmm. Way back, I paid $625 for Photoshop, and subsequent upgrades have been $199. Since I usually skip versions, that's $824 for about four to five years (one original + one upgrade), or $1023 for about six years (one original + two upgrades). At $20/month, the subscription gets me less than 3.5 years for $824 and just over four years for $1023. So no, it's definitely not a better deal.

And to make it worse, I have to keep renting the software indefinitely into the future just to open my own files, even if I stop using Photoshop in the future. With the perpetual license model I can just keep my lady version of the software around of I need to go back and open an old file.

N7Player

pj3090

Re: Usual over zealous permission

Well, it says right there in the application description, "Reading sensitive log data permission is required only to provide more information in case of application crash when user decides to send log to developers." Of course, you have to trust that that is the real reason, but at least it is a reasonable explanation (especially for a beta). That probably accounts also for the internet permission.

pj3090

+1 for PowerAmp. Love it.

Google beams disaster tourists into tsunami aftermath

pj3090

Speaking from experience...

As a resident of New Orleans for the last twenty years, I have actually lived through a large-scale disaster and its aftermath (thankfully nowhere near as profound as the tsunami in Japan, but still quite bad). In the aftermath, most people here had an almost obsessive compulsion to make "outsiders" understand what we were going through. This has both emotional and practical aspects.

I remember taking multiple friends and relatives on aerial "disaster tours" via Google Maps. In fact, at one point Google upgraded the New Orleans satellite photos to higher resolution images that were taken before the storm. This had the unfortunate side-effect of making it look like everything was all better overnight. Local press excoriated Google for the move, and very quickly Google returned to the lower-resolution but more accurate post-Katrina images.

I suppose it's possible to look at accurate photos of a post-disaster community and see nothing but "disaster porn," but that might say more about the viewer than the image.

Here lies /^v.+b$/i

pj3090

Not recommended usage

It's generally better to combine IDisposable with the using statement, but

using(stob) { ... }

sounds a bit cynical for an epitaph. Maybe a C++ style ~stob() would be more whimsical.

SQL survives murder attempt by mutant stepchild

pj3090

The wise analyst

I thought that I didn't use NoSQL solutions because none of my customers had requirements where the advantages of a NoSQL approach outweighed the disadvantages. Thanks to Steven O'Grady, I now realize that it's just because I'm dumb as a box full of rocks.

Spielberg flung Fox from Transformers 3

pj3090
WTF?

An experiment

If anyone actually bothered to read the entire original post, please downvote me here. I'm just curious.

Citigroup hack exploited easy-to-detect web flaw

pj3090

Taking candy from a baby

Maybe they wouldn't have had such a glaring vulnerability if they submitted themselves to the same PCI compliance extortion they inflict on my small vendor clients

How I learned to stop worrying and love SSDs

pj3090
Thumb Up

Seems crazy until you do it

I put a $350 SSD into my $450 Toshiba laptop. It sounds a bit crazy to put a hot-rod disk into a Yugo of a laptop, but the results are fantastic. It takes only 20 seconds to get to the windows login screen -- I no longer leave the machine on just because I dread the long startup. Visual studio opens and loads my last project in about 4 seconds. Photoshop, pig that it is, loads up in about 6 seconds. Everything is snappier, not to mention quieter and cooler.

Hack attack spills web security firm's confidential data

pj3090

Not asp.net

The attacked pages are PHP (customer_verticals.php, a database called PHP_LIVE_CHAT). Not that there aren't plenty of asp.net sites vulnerable to the same treatment....

App Store not invited to web's date with destiny

pj3090

Some of both...

I think there will always be a role for native mobile apps, just as I still have plenty of native apps on my laptop. However, there are a lot of mobile apps that are completely worthless. Two examples: the Discover Card app, and the app for my local newspaper. Neither offer anything that can't be accomplished with a decent mobile web site. In fact, the newspaper's mobile web site is actually a good bit better than their app. In both cases, I suspect that the app was driven mostly by a perceived need to "have something in the app store".

Another point: all of the talk about how HTML is crap and you can make better native apps, etc, is exactly what Microsoft used to say in 1998...

Android goes virtual

pj3090

Curious minds want to know

A dalvik VM is not enough, by itself, to run Android apps on a "foreign" phone. Rough analogy: Mac OS and Windows both run on Intel chips, but you can't just drop a Windows EXE on a mac and run it. I assume Myriad's dalvik supplies a WINE-like Android API layer of some sort? It seems like the API layer would be the hard part -- harder than a bytecode emulator.

Archos 101 8GB Android tablet

pj3090

Had one for about two months

For my wife, actually. My goal was to allow her to browse the web, mess around on Facebook, etc on something besides my laptop. So far, so good. My review in a nutshell is that this device won't knock your socks off, but it is a good deal for the price. I did install the Google Apps support (which was simple -- just the same as installing any other APK), and that improves the device's usefulness significantly.

FWIW, I also had the archos 70 for myself until I cracked the screen (my fault).

The media player functionality is quite good. We no longer drag out the portable DVD player for long car trips because the kids can watch videos on the archos.

One quibble might be that none of the apps are designed to take advantage of the larger screen, but in practice this is not that big of a deal. It would be nice to have, but isn't a fatal flaw. Dolphin browser actually works quite nicely on the device -- you can take advantage of the tabs and sidebars. In both devices, you can comfortably browse web sites in landscape mode and view the "real" web site rather than the mobile version.

Performance is generally pretty good. I suspect that the archos *could* run Honeycomb, but will archos provide the update? (I'm guessing no)

Between the 101 and the 70, I actually liked the 70 a little better. It was more comfortable to operate for longer period, at least for me, and I didn't mind giving up the extra pixels.

Chinese 'repurpose' Top Gun footage

pj3090

I can code perfectly well when I am tanked

I just can't remember my password

The Last Airbender up for nine Razzies

pj3090

The real shame is that his later stuff ruins the good work he did before

When I first saw 6th Sense, I thought it was a very good movie. Not perfect (the scene in the car with his mother lays it on a little thick for my taste), but clever, imaginative, and pretty moving. Now when I see it I think, "well, there's the old 'whispering for no reason' trick," or, "there's the old 'the characters are so shocked that they can't move or speak for an oddly long period of time' crutch."

Lush website hack 'exposes credit card details'

pj3090

@kirovs

That was my point, really, although my post ended up sounding like I was participating in a fanboy war. I would be willing to bet in both cases that the hack was not due to a flaw in the underlying stack, but some foolishness at the application level.

pj3090

That totally explains the trapster hack too!

Linux Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) 21-Jan-2011 173.203.24.249 Trapster.com

NY bomb scare bank worker 'evacuates self'

pj3090

The most puzzling kind of language barrier

It's called "English" in both places, and it has the same words, but the vocabulary is completely different. I was doing some research on some unpleasant surgery that, um, er, a friend of mine was about to have and I found a UK-based web site that discussed possible side effects. Before that, I would have guessed that the phrase "there may be wind and unexpected movement in the back passage" referred to a treacherous mountain-climbing expedition...

Online sync'n'store services

pj3090
Thumb Up

SugarSync and shared folders

+1 for SugarSync, and one nice feature vs dropbox: in dropbox, a shared folder counts against the storage quotas of both the sharer and the sharee. In SugarSync, it only counts against the sharer's quota. This was a big factor for me, as I use the service to sync 10 years worth of digital photos between my wife's computer and mine.

Google Books spanked by Amazon Kindle

pj3090

Short answer: yes

I have the app on my Android tablet and it downloads and caches the books. Once it downloads (there's a progress bar under the book) you can disconnect the network and read happily.

How to make boots on Mars affordable - One way trips

pj3090

It's been done before (sort of)

Polynesia offers a much more appropriate model of permanent, one-way settlement. Over a span of a few hundred years, the original Polynesians radiated from southeast Asia to some of the most remote islands on earth (most notably Easter Island) in double-hulled, ocean-going canoes. It was once thought that these were accidental, "Gilligan's Island"-style migrations. However, the fact that the canoes carried populations capable of reproduction, along with all of the major plant and animal domesticates, suggests otherwise. On the whole, probably the most remarkable migration in all of human history (so far). A nice summary here: http://www.pbs.org/wayfinders/polynesian.html

Microsoft cuts loose Iron languages

pj3090

I can't believe it...

But I think I'm about to say that the article was a little unfair to Microsoft. Specifically, "They came from that part of Microsoft's brain that cannot accept technologies invented elsewhere. Microsoft is compelled to build its own versions of things that already exist, optimizing them for, and integrating them with, the Windows platform."

It was really just the opposite -- an attempt to make languages that originated elsewhere (and, for the most part, on other systems) first-class development citizens on windows. Not so different from the way that Jython allows python developers to use and run on the JVM.

Microsoft are often jerks about such things (Canvas support? Why don't we try to cram Silverlight down everyone's throat's instead...) but I don't think this was one of those times.

Microsoft caps Ballmer bonus over mobile phone, tablet failures

pj3090

Astounded

Sad to say, but I find it both mind-boggling and refreshing that his performance actually influenced his compensation. Nice change from the standard "here's $20 million even though you ran the company into the ground" that CEOs seem to enjoy.

Moms stand firm against antenna madness

pj3090

One down, one to go

Now that they have defeated cell phone masts, they need to take out the sun. That thing emits an *obscene* amount of radiation.

Google Instant a potential bonanza for search scams

pj3090

Responsive sites are evil

That's why I try to make all of my sites as slow and bloated as possible. Sometimes users ask me to speed things up, but I just tell them it's for their own good.

Zuckerberg admits working for man claiming Facebook ownership

pj3090

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today

I wouldn't be surprised at all if the claim is true. The gigs section on craigslist is overflowing with "we need a web site fast" ads, but the developer has to have the right "entrepreneurial" spirit. Translation: we don't intend to pay you with anything other than vague promises about sharing in the wealth when the site hits the big time.

Microsoft 'gets serious' with Windows Phone 7 tools

pj3090

This time we're *serious*

You thought wasting $2 billion on the KIN was a big deal? Just wait until you see how much money we blow on this!

Obama Twitter hacker avoids jail

pj3090
Black Helicopters

Just saw on Fox news

Turns out Obama's password was "JokesOnThemImAnIndonesianMuslim!"

Google seeks interwebs speed boost with TCP tweak

pj3090

@Mike Flugennock

"You mean, you will not be able to shove more goddamn' advertising in our faces" I'm amused -- the Reg article you are commenting on not only has more ads than a google search results page 25 vs. about 12), but they are more intrusive (how about that big Microsoft cloud services ad right in the middle of the copy?). Furthermore, El Reg has a lot of "white papers" that are just thinly disguised ads. At least Google's ads are clearly marked as such. So, where is your disdain for El Reg?

US weighs up probes for Apple ad biz checkup - report

pj3090

*I'm* not a billionaire

I'm a small-time developer, who might need to rely on one of these ad networks to generate income from an app I write. As such, I would personally prefer to have the widest possible pool of ad partners to choose from.

Ten Essential... Android Games

pj3090

http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.deckeleven.windsofsteel

El Reg is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Winds of Steel

Nice WW II 3D fighter/bomber game. Intuitive accelerometer-based controls. There's a free demo version with limited levels.

Google screws Scroogle

pj3090

Headline is backwards

So if you think Google is evil, is it more appropriate to a) use a different search engine altogether, or b) keep using Google's services, but in a way that deprives them of any compensation or benefit? If your answer is b, then you are not really being an honest person.

Young people are lazy, think world owes them a living - prof

pj3090

Kids these days

You goddam kids with your hair and your music! Get offa my lawn!

pj3090

You are wrong in one respect

A sample size of one isn't just useful, it's decisive. As long as it's my sample. That's how things work on the internet.

Yanks floored by nail guns, computers and baseballs

pj3090

What a relief!

Thankfully I didn't have my orifice-cramming, nail gun-related ER visit until 2009. It would be terribly embarrassing to have that out on the internet.

Peppa Pig told to belt up

pj3090

Dora the Explorer

Whenever Dora gets in a car, they all pull on seat belts and say "seat belts -- so we can be safe!" Same thing with life jackets when they get into boats. Consequently, my small children enthusiastically do the same thing, and they remember to be careful around water. Yes, parents should raise kids instead of cartoons, but it *really* makes things easier when Dora is on your side.

Google gets all Minority Report with Street View

pj3090

Official: El Reg Evil

From this web site's "Advertise with Us" link:

The Register offers a range of advertising and marketing solutions for clients large and small enabling them to communicate with its vast IT Professional community. Its sales and fulfillment teams work to ensure the best possible message reaches the most valuable audience.

The Register undertakes regular independent audits to ensure that its advertisers know who they are reaching. You can read all of them here.

It also applies geotargeting to all of its campaigns to ensure that the right people are seeing the right messages — and to ensure there's no geographic budget wastage.

Thomas the Tank Engine drives 'conservative political ideology'

pj3090

Don't see it for the most part

But I have to admit that the episode where Sir Toppham Hat has the union organizers put to death threw me a little.

Fanbois Apple buyers howl over crocked iMacs

pj3090

I'm sure the cracks are elegant

And the computer fails to start in a sublime fashion