Posts by A Known Coward

Are we there yet?

Yes, to be fair there are two or three options which come very close. They mostly seem to fall at the price issue though. Take the Satmap Action 10, the hardware is almost perfect with a nice large clear screen and yet not too large to be carried in a pocket. It's fully waterproof and can achieve reasonable battery life especially with the optional Li-ion pack. I'd still love to see a device achieving 2-3x the runtime (12-18 hours at least), solar charging isn't a pancea. They provide 1:50000 and 1:25000 OS maps plus full UK/Europe road and street mapping. Their customer service is also excellent I've been told. The device cost is within reason although more competition would help drive down the costs like it has done for the car-based sat-nav devices.

Three things have so far stopped me rushing out to buy one.

1) The first is the price of the 1:25000 OS maps, the 1:50000 are reasonable but the 1:25000 are insane. Take the Peak District set, I have that area covered on paper maps, it's just three 1:25000 maps at an RRP of £8 (or £5.50 if you buy online) each. That's at most £24 which includes the costs of printing, paper and distribution which don't apply to digital maps. The Satmap 'Peak District' card costs £104.99. Yes it includes the 1:50000 maps as well, so let's be fair and include an extra two paper maps for a total of £40 ... there is still a vast difference £65 difference. It's certainly not cheaper and yet it should be given there is no printing involved.

2) The Action 10 is now 3 years old, in hardware terms it's at best described as middle-aged. I've been a first adopter before and paid the price, I'd rather wait for the second generation of hardware.

3) The Action 10 PC software is terrible and Windows only. You don't _need_ PC connectivity but it's still desirable. I'm a linux user so out in the cold. What's more, Satmap based the Action 10 on Windows CE and run a locked down platform, you can't use third party maps at all. As a regular contributor to OpenStreetMap that's irritating.

And yet, does destroying a robot grant authorities a license to murder?

Even in the case of a submarine used for smuggling, does the destruction of a robotic craft involving no loss or threat to life justify killing all those on board the sub? I can't see that it does. So all ways around, there wouldn't seem to be any sense to the scenario described by Lewis where the sub-hunting robot remains permanently in place above the submarine and destruction of the robot would carry a death penalty.

More to the point, authorities normally wish to intercept smuggling operations to board and make arrests ASAP. When they do intercept them they usually aren't concerned about their frigates being torpedoed. I might imagine these craft being used to find smugglers subs, saving on manpower, but not following them around for months ... or even days.

@ Bill

You don't slow down when you arrive, you start slowing down at the halfway point using those same engines pointed in the other direction.

@ Anon Re; Software Testing

As a matter of fact, even small scale open source projects are running continuous integration suites. If a volunteer run group with zero income can manage it, then Microsoft can and should.

Do NOT joke about that!

Without exaggeration, the mere thought of George Lucas being involved suddenly made me very nauseous.

If they do make another film, and I hope that never happens, I will refuse to watch it no matter who was in the producer/director/writer chairs. My memories of the original star wars films was forever tarnished by seeing the 'prequels' but those original films never came close to true sci-fi classics like Blade Runner in my opinion. Whatever the disappointment I felt about Lucas' butchery, it would be so much worse to have Blade Runner ruined for me.

Before anyone says it

Yes, I've just noticed that I typed "You're" when I meant to type "Your", having a wireless keyboard does not improve my typing ability any. In this case it's a case of muscle memory vs brain.

@ Annihilator

If it makes you feel better to believe what you just wrote, then so be it. Some of us have what is called conscience and empathy.

If the OP felt that they had themselves been sold a product which was not suitable for purpose then he has the legal right to obtain a refund. Instead deciding to sell that product on to another individual who bought it in good faith, believing it to be fit for purpose is just morally indefensible.

In the 'free market' you describe selling someone a product you know to be broken, deficient or just snake oil is all perfectly fine. Next you'll argue that conning old ladies out of thousands for roof repairs with a value of hundreds is just the free market at work!

P.S. No, I never bought this game, I don't even own a console any more.

You're wrong ...

With only minor exceptions DVB using countries have all opted for H.264 as the codec of choice for HD, in an mpeg-ts container. It's true that SD uses mpeg2 in many cases, and it will likely remain that way in the UK for some time as changing it now would mean all those existing SD-only Set-Top boxes becoming paperweights. Expect it to change in the longer term, switching codec will allow for more channels to be crammed into the available bandwidth*.

In ATSC land, USA mostly, they opted for mpeg2 for HD and unfortunately for residents there, a lower overall picture quality as a result. For example, BBC HD started broadcasting at ~21Mbps using H.264 but in the USA the maximum possible bitrate for HD is ~19Mbps and they are stuck with the less compressible mpeg2.

All that said, what is broadcast via Terrestrial, Satellite or Cable is not really suitable for the mobile at this time. Firstly the resolution, bitrate and encoding parameters are too high, even if the decoders in those devices could handle these profiles it would drain battery life too quickly. Secondly an hour of broadcast quality H.264 is 6-8GB, few phones have the storage to keep anything more than 1 episode of your favourite show at most, so again, re-encoding to a smaller resolution, higher compression and lower overall quality is necessary. So the argument of convergence is moot, you need to re-encode for the mobile anyway. Broadcast quality H.264 is definitely too much for the internet, on the average connection you could not dream of reliably broadcasting video of that bitrate. So if you still need to re-encode to a lower quality, then what practical advantage does H.264 offer over VP8 (WebM)?

Well there is one area where H.264 has the edge for web-broadcast video, hardware decoding support. It's hard to argue against this, H.264 is ahead of VP8 in this respect, but it's not surprising since it's been around longer. In a very short space of time we will start seeing hardware decoding for VP8 and yes those older devices will be redundant, and yes that will cause some people heartache just as HD-DVD vs Blu-ray, Betamax vs VHS et al have done in the past. The important thing here is that MPEG-LA won't have complete control over video creation and distribution on the internet (and all other platforms) for the next 15-20 years. If MPEG-LA revoked their patents then H.264 could and would be the natural choice for all video, but that isn't going to happen, such patent pools represent not just an income for Apple, MS and others but the power to manipulate an entire market.

*Sadly we're unlikely to see them use that bandwidth to instead improve SD quality/resolution on the 'minor' channels. The viewers have failed to revolt against terrible picture quality on certain Freeview channels, so broadcasters feel that they can get away with serving up such crap.

Destroyed harddrives are useless?

Err, no. It all depends how they were destroyed.

Properly wiped (not just re-formatted) then it shouldn't matter. Merely shattering the platters on a an unwiped disk is not enough to stop a well resourced and determined individual/group/government from retrieving data from the fragments. If you're not going to wipe the disk first then the physical destruction needs to be more complete e.g. grinding the platters to dust.

A little less conversation, a little more action please

Trust me when I say as an open source developer that if you want to get anything done you don't talk about it but beg forgiveness afterwards. The product will either stand on it's own because it meets the requirements or it will fail, but at least it will get done. In the wider world when 'standards' are being put together and every party's input much be considered it can take years for them to become official, we need a solution NOW.

Everyone and their dog has an opinion about the direction of development in open source. Most simply have no understanding, they are not programmers and have never contributed anything but their opinions. If you stop to discuss a proposed feature in the open then it quickly spirals out of all control and what was once a simple project with clear goals quickly becomes a quagmire where no-one is happy because their idea was dismissed. I've seen far too many projects die on their arse because they decided to 'talk' about their plans and not a single line of code ever gets written.

I'm no Ubuntu fan but even if you suspect Shuttleworth's motives, you can't really object to what he is doing. Whatever they create will be open source so in that sense it cannot be wholly proprietary, more than likely Ubuntu will release the project to a cross-distro committee for future development/maintenance once they have something to show. It will either find favour with the community and therefore survive or it will not. There is no dark sinister conspiracy here, it's difficult if not impossible to pull off Gates or Jobs style Machiavellian plots in the open source world.

Linux - Clip+ has all of that

The Sansa Clip+ has Ogg + Flac support and operates as a USB Storage device. It's also by far the best mp3 player in this class.

Black is better

Back when I was an RAF cadet they were in the process of re-painting all their training aircraft from white and orange to black. It seems pretty obvious in hindsight but after years of experimentation they'd discovered that nothing stands out against blue sky, white clouds or even the varied palette of the ground quite as well as gloss black.

At night the colour is irrelevant obviously and the aircraft are lit up like Christmas trees.

Don't malign MythTV

MythTV does not condone piracy. In fact it's actively discouraged, the project has no wish to be associated with thieving bastards.

MythTV is for legal recording of television and viewing/listening of media you have legally purchased.

The project cannot control what third party plugins are created unfortunately, that's the nature of open source but go use XBMC if you want sympathetic treatment.

It doesn't have to

As they've stated more than once, the GPS is NOT intended to track the flight but to allow recovery once it's back on the ground, therefore altitude and speed limits are irrelevant.

Nut? More like a mountain.

No, sorry, but I disagree. The problem of spamming and botnets has been out of control for a while now, the time for diplomacy has passed. The ISP(s) in question ignored requests to keep their house in order, they have failed to do anything about it. In some cases these small ISPs are even run by crooks for crooks.

If a nightclub has a reputation for fights, drugs and generally causing a problem for local residences then their liquor license is pulled and the place is closed down. No-one finds that to be unreasonable, so why is this any different?

They should have been doing this years ago, before spam, phishing and DDOS attacks became a fact of life on the internet.

Not naive, optimistic maybe

I wish I were naive, it seems the naive live untroubled lives. We've been discussing this for weeks since we first heard about it, we've been at from all the angles and though we can't predict the future, we're still happy that this is a good thing.

The backdoor to full DRM/encryption angle is a popular one and yes, it's very likely, although not certain, that content providers will ultimately demand more from the BBC. When that happens I don't see the BBC pursuing it, they would need to return to Ofcom and the public for a change in their charter which would be much harder to achieve. At that time they will stop carrying imported content and that will be a great shame (hint, not all imports come from the US). Just because it's inevitable doesn't mean we should accept it now, even if we only get a year of films in HD, that's better than a kick in the teeth. As the tide changed against DRM in music, it will eventually change for video, nothing lasts forever.

Something that I don't think is stated enough in this debate; The BBC are only asking for parity for Freeview with Freesat. This is nothing that isn't already done for BBC HD, no-one complains that the Freesat EPG is huffman compressed because it doesn't stop anyone recording BBC HD or watching it back on their laptops while on the train to work.

Peer review

Shonko Kid isn't entirely wrong, a null pointer dereference is a unforgivable error in kernel patch which should have undergone significant review. Now reviewing someone else's code isn't fun, it's not something I enjoy, but it is a requirement of all patches to the kernel so someone was asleep on the job. I'm not levelling blame at anyone in particular, but it does seem that with the pace of current kernel development this sort of thing is going to happen more frequently. Most static analysis tools will have no trouble finding simple null pointer de-reference mistakes, some even manage to find the more obscure ones with a low number of false positives, so maybe it's about time that all kernel patches are automatically put through a battery of tools before they even go to peer review.

To answer the obvious question, yes I have code in the kernel and other open source projects.