* Posts by alex dekker 1

44 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Nov 2009

Acer to deliver ARM notebook within nine days

alex dekker 1

Smartbook? Blech

How about a name that suggests it's a tablet with a keyboard?

- Clamshell tablet

- Flip tablet

- Keyblet

- Qwerty tablet

- Multi-button tablet

Microsoft fails to turn punters on to WinPho 7

alex dekker 1

Counting industrial applications as smartphones?

Surely WinMoPho 7 is outselling the old version by now? Are these figures counting industrial applications [eg hand held barcode scanners] as smartphones?

Otellini: ARM servers 'ain't gonna work'

alex dekker 1

Stating the obvious

> "It ain't gonna work," Otellini told his audience at Intel's Investor

> Meeting 2011 in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday.

As if there were anything else he could have said to his shareholders!

> "This is so reminiscent of the RISC-CISC arguments of, gosh,

> twenty-five years ago," he said. "But then the argument was the

> other way around, it was that Intel can never possibly take on RISC

> architecture in the server space."

> He then allowed himself a bit of gloating. "Well, we kind of proved

> that wrong," he said.

Some upstart dislodged the mighty incumbent? That must be the kind of story your shareholders love to hear! I wonder if we're going to see Hot Patent Action against ARM licensees, a la Android licensees?

Sony implicates Anonymous in PlayStation Network hack

alex dekker 1

"carefully planned, very professional"

"Sony has been the victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack" - in other words, the stealing of PII from Sony was nothing to do with Anonymous.

The weasel wording in Sony's PR gives one the impression that they're saying Anonymous were responsible for stealing PII, but if you read it carefully they don't actually say that. I don't know if the headline writer has fallen into the same trap, or if it's just clickbait.

alex dekker 1

Yeah, right

Good luck trying to get anybody to believe this, Sony! Even if it was true, all you're doing is helping to build the Anonymous brand.

Behind Apple's record sales are signs of desperation

alex dekker 1

Imaginary Property

"...the rising tide of lawsuits in smartphones shows the level of competition..."

I think this is more an indication of the parlous state of the patents system in general. They seem to be more of a tax on innovation and favour the status quo, rather than a way of protecting inventions, and they're well past their sell-by date when it comes to software.

Nokia deal to 'rocket Windows Phone 7 past iPhone'

alex dekker 1

IDC = waste of oxygen

Why do IDC continue to get thoroughly undeserved publicity from borderline respectable sites like The Register? Making predictions to 1 decimal place 4 years into the future about the smartphone market is disingenuous at best, retarded at worst.

Creative Ziio 7in Android tablet

alex dekker 1

big smartphones or genuine tablet-computing devices

"big smartphones or genuine tablet-computing devices" - what exactly is the difference?

IBM floats Microsoft Office web challenger

alex dekker 1

Link?

An whole article, but no link to a demo site, download page, press release, nothing.

Google Apps battle spam with auto email signing

alex dekker 1

Postini automatically trusting Gmail

> Remarkably, even the Google-owned Postini filter has trouble determining that email sent over Google Apps is legitimate.

If they did that, then presumably it would incite whining about 'anti-trust' issues.

Car immobilisers easily circumvented by crafty carjackers

alex dekker 1

Translation

"To our knowledge the direct causal link between the failure to adopt AES systems and the rise in car theft cannot be drawn,"

Translation:

"Even if we were to use a contemporary encryption algorithm, our implementation would have been vulnerable anyway"

Google accused of hard-coding own links in search

alex dekker 1

Microsoft shill

"Whereas in the operating system context, if you installed Netscape and you double-clicked on a .html file, it would open in Netscape...It would be fully integrated in the relevant sense. But it's hard to see how Yahoo! Maps could get to be fully integrated with Google in the relevant sense. I don't think there's been any discussion of that.""

Presumably the reason that there hasn't been any 'discussion' is because it's nonsense. Are you asking for Google to create a mechanism whereby you can ask it to offer links to 'foo.com' when searching for 'baz', even if it thinks 'bar.net' is better? An interesting idea, but of limited use methinks: you'd just go straight to foo.com if you thought it was the appropriate site. You can use Greasemonkey to edit Google results on the fly if you're *that* bothered. Of course you could always just use another search engine, run by some big, friendly, not-interested-in-making-money organisation, like, say, Bing.

And would you hold yourself to such high standards? What if your daughter asked for a pony for Christmas, but you couldn't afford it; would you suggest your child seek out some alternate, richer parents because she would get her pony, and probably better life chaces to boot?

Robot wars break out on poker sites

alex dekker 1

Inevitability

Preventing bots playing games for money is like trying prevent someone from cracking a DRM scheme. Gambling sites should acknowledge this and allow bots to play, so long as the other players are informed.

Ofcom clears way for iPhone apps for TV voting

alex dekker 1

Title? I'm commenting on an article, not sending an email

"complexity of the voting process"

Are you being serious?

High Court to probe Digital Economy Act

alex dekker 1

6%

Surely if 6% of MPs is considered to be 'Parliament', then the BPIs members would have no problem with me paying them 6% of the price of one of their CDs?

Garmin Nüvi 3790T satnav

alex dekker 1

Portrait sounds good

I like the idea of portrait orientation - it seems like such a basic thing to want to do, but no sat nav I've ever used has it.

Having said that, why would anybody drop 300 notes on a standalone sat nav nowadays? You could buy nearly *two* Android 10.2" tablets for that with GPS built in, and thus you wouldn't be spending 300 on something that only ever gets use while you're in the car.

And how is 'û' pronounced?

BT network goes titsup up north

alex dekker 1

...or maybe you don't

BT IPstream = all down

BTnet Premium = all up

BT IPclear = all down

Yet IPclear is the most expensive. So maybe you don't.

ToryDems nearly swallow Labour blueprint of equality for all

alex dekker 1

RE: I disagree

You forgot to include the words "hell" and "handcart". Better luck next time.

RIM BlackBerry Curve 3G 9300

alex dekker 1

RIM artillery

Firing Blackberries out of a cannon would make a terrible mess, although I'm glad to hear they have a use after all.

Do the Webminimum

alex dekker 1

Centralised management

I reckon if someone wrote a Microsoft Management Console snapin for Webmin, they'd make a killing.

Spammers latch onto Ping to pump iPhone survey scams

alex dekker 1

Technically illiterate + money to burn

Apple users would appear to be the ideal target market for an internet scam.

SUSE Linux hitches ride on enemy hypervisor

alex dekker 1

Strange bedfellows?

What's strange about these two?

Intel swallows McAfee: Why?

alex dekker 1

Cheaper UTM appliance

As you say in point 4 these devices already exist; in fact so many of them exist that they're already got their own name, the Unified Threat Management appliance. The thing that costs money with these is the subscription to the update services, and Intel's manufacturing and distribution might isn't going to help with this.

Linux police offer deviant Android return from exile

alex dekker 1

OK, what am *I* missing?

"serious player"? What part of shipping on tens [if not hundreds] of models of handsets, to millions of customers, doesn't qualify as making a mobile OS a "serious player"?

ISP condemns new BT backbone

alex dekker 1

AAISP do use LLU

AAISP wholesale Be's service as well. However, Be aren't at every exchange, so they also have to wholesale BT's product as well, in which case the state of BT's 21CN is a matter for AAISP because AAISP are BT's customer.

Flash bursts onto Android

alex dekker 1

iPlayer

You obviously haven't used iPlayer then.

Google morphs Chrome OS into netbook thin client

alex dekker 1

Re : VNC

> Have we missed something in this announcement ?

Yes, it's not an announcement. It's a story about a leaked email that hasn't been confirmed by Google.

Google did some work with NX recently, so that would seem to be a more likely candidate than VNC.

Google turns on SSL encryption for search

alex dekker 1

Referrer:

> Google is feeding our search parameters to other websites to process and

> feedback as they wish.

I think you will find that your browser is passing the Referrer: header on to the web server that hosts the site whose link you click on.

OFT won't block BBC's über set top box

alex dekker 1

get_iplayer

Worked when I downloaded "Welcome to Lagos" a few weeks ago.

Jobsian Vendetta - Flash stabbed by Mac the Knife

alex dekker 1

re: this is why..

I come hear because I like to read posts from sarcastic piss-takers like you :-S

Software makers fall in behind Lucid Lynx

alex dekker 1

Bye bye QA

"...allow developers to quickly create and distribute applications to Ubuntu users without having to go through the same tedious beta and release candidate cycle of the operating system itself."

I hope these untested applications will be clearly marked out to potential users before they install them.

eBayer sued for leaving negative feedback

alex dekker 1

Wrong title

He hasn't really been sued for leaving negative feedback, has he? He's been sued because he compared the seller to a used car salesman and said he was "bad", and he happened to do it in the feedback form on eBay.

CEOP renews attack on Facebook

alex dekker 1

IT'S PAEDOGEDDON!

But seriously, funny you should mention MySpace. The only reason this tit is getting media coverage is because the Murdoch press are so keen to associate Facebook with paedophilia. If you've had the misfortune to read any of his rags, you'll find frequent articles linking the two, even going so far as to use a large Facebook logo in place of the word Facebook in headlines, to really ram the point home.

BlackBerry sees iPhone shrink in rear view mirror

alex dekker 1

Bad analogy

How possible is it to 'see' something shrinking by 0.1%?

Video giant embraces Flash-phobic iPad with HTML 5

alex dekker 1

Video giant

Presumably if Brightwotsit were actually a 'Video giant', you wouldn't need to explain who/what they were.

Sony Ericsson preps compact Android pair

alex dekker 1

RE: credit cards...

I don't think anyone was querying how big credit cards are, it's more a case of knowing how big the phone is relative to one!

Tories will force BT to open up ducts to rivals

alex dekker 1

RE: There's already one division

ProperDave wrote:

> there's still an unhealthy level of incest between the two

What would you consider to be a healthy level of incest?

Brits left cold by mobile internet

alex dekker 1

Too expensive? Shop around!

If you think mobile data costs too much, then you haven't shopped around enough.

alex dekker 1

Sample size

This survey may or may not be bollocks, but to those who whine about the sample size [2000] being too small, it's impossible to say whether or not it's appropriate without accompanying confidence limits. Taking massive samples when trying to analyse a problem is also known as 'counting'.

Boffins birth uber 'net neutrality' dowser

alex dekker 1

re: Not 100% accurate imo

Some firewalls [Cisco ASA for example] replace the banner with *'s as a 'security' feature.

UK government considers open source Ordnance Survey data

alex dekker 1

re: 000000

> What it really just boils down to is pure fucking greed!

Well not quite, I think it's more likely to be incompetence than greed - having 20 different departments of one country's government each paying money to another department of the same government, for the same set of data just doesn't make sense.

How about a Department for Publicly Owned Data, charged with releasing as much taxpayer-funded data sets into the public domain as possible? As others have pointed out, we've already paid for it once with our taxes, and there's no need for us to pay for it again. The OSM [osm.org] project is doing a fantastic job with very little money, just imagine what it could do with a bit of assistance from the public sector; in fact, they could probably teach the public sector a thing or ten about using budgets as efficiently as possible.

Google Chrome OS goes native (code)

alex dekker 1

Lighten up

Seeing a bogeyman around every corner must be a pretty depressing way to live your life. Do you perhaps suggest that Google instead not bother writing any plugins, and wait for browser makers to catch up?

Can anyone explain the chunnel fiasco?

alex dekker 1

Where's the anti-Google angle

Well, come on Google, the trains aren't going to fix themselves, are they?

Google Phone: What's it gonna be?

alex dekker 1

Remember the Motorola Droid

Not sure when this article was originally written, but you seem to have predicted 2009's Motorola Droid, for which Google engineers spent time with Motorola to develop.