Re: Stalkiness factor

I'm a bit torn on this.

It's very easy to record someone secretly. How do you think private investigators do it? The technology has been available for many years and is incredibly cheap now. If you want to secretly record someone, without them knowing, you can.

Now, have you seen someone wearing Glass? It's not exactly invisible, and is not really a hidden camera.

I believe that the issue is going to come more from accidental situations. e.g. Say you're sitting on a park bench reading a book with Glass on and hear a surprising noise. You look up and see that a child has made it. I'd imagine that if the parent sees you looking at their child with Glass on, they will get very defensive, as they don't know if you're recording their child in a creepy way or not.

Re: Looking good.

@AceRimmer and you've lost MHL (which is the main reason I haven't switched to cyanogenmod on the i9300 S3) and the ability to touch focus with the flashlight on, among other issues.

You can turn off most of the Samsung specific additions on their phones by tweaking the settings, installing a new launcher, etc. but it won't turn it in to a Nexus. Certain parts of the system (notification drawer, appearance of dialogue boxes, etc.) are hardcoded and only changing ROM will change them.

Unfortunately, the Exynos drivers are closed-source and so certain features are less than optimal on open source ROMs. The US versions on Qualcomm chipsets tend to have better support.

Samsung have been good (read: better than a lot of the rest) at supporting their older phones though, with the S2 getting Jellybean updates and the S3 is meant to be getting a lot of the S4 software ported to it, where the specific S4 hardware isn't required.

Re: I get feeds on my MeeGo N950 phone

Just put an ad in to the RSS article. Some of the feeds I follow already do that.

Re: Boo!

Google Listen worked fine for me, but I also use BeyondPod mainly for the smart playlists.

However, as with many RSS based applications, BeyondPod can also synchronise with Google Reader, allowing it to keep track of listened podcasts across multiple devices (luckily they've currently got a beta of their own synchronisation method in testing).

I'll miss Reader though, the ability to use desktop or mobile to efficiently read feeds (and easily mark certain entries as unread to come back to them later on the other device, if necessary) is/was very useful to me.

Flipboard and Feedly just don't work as well for me.

Re: D'oh, for cripes' sake...

> Does Amazon honestly think that I'm so goddamn' impatient that I can't wait a business day or two for my CD to arrive?

Does it matter? You still get the CD, and they give you the download for free.

> (never mind that most of the stuff I'm after wouldn't be carried on Amazon, or probably hasn't even been reissued on CD)

Then this doesn't affect you at all, so no need to worry.

> Will they blow me off and just keep piling up auto-ripped tracks in their cloud until it hits the limit and they start charging me?

When you buy music from Amazon, it doesn't take up any of your paid-for space, you get it added free.

> P'wah, "auto-ripoff", more like.

auto-freebies, more like.

> Besides, I'm not so friggin' incompetent that I can't slip a CD into my computer, fire up iTunes, and rip the tracks to 320k mp3, or wav, or use my FLAC converter myself, thankyuhvurymuch.

And you still can. They haven't taken anything away, just added things.

> you can't fix stupid.

Indeed.

It runs stock Android. You can get an OnLive client for Android, although obviously you'll need to pay for the service.

Re: Well when you've been dumped by everyone else...

The Snapdragon chipset may well be better, but there aren't any/many games that take advantage of the GPU on Android, unlike the Tegra 3 enhanced exclusives.

I realise that general software will be able to use the better CPU, but there is very little on phones/tablets besides benchmarking tools that shows an appreciable difference in the number crunching.

Re: Pity...

I'm pretty sure that Tegra 4 will come to quite a wide range of tablets and phones, as Tegra 3 did.

Re: Search engines all failing

I think it was always a bit ORish. In the past, you could put "+" in front of a term to make sure that it was required in the page. They changed that to double quotes now, so if you put double quotes around each search term individually it should make sure that the page contains them all.

Re: Quelle surprise...

This is very standard. It prevents claims of "wilful infringement" as well as saving a lot of time.

I'm pretty sure that I remember reading that Linux developers are also urged to not check to see if anything is patented either, a long time ago.

Banking apps

Some banking apps and other "secure" apps (such as streaming paid-for video) try to stop you running them if you're on a rooted device, but that's about it.

Re: Offline mappage

I was travelling abroad the past few weeks and found offline Google maps almost useless. You can't plot a route, which I knew, but I was also unable to even search for anything (e.g. road name, town, hotel name), even if it had been downloaded and was visible on the map, which was particularly poor.

I ended up using Osmand for free navigation. It wasn't perfect (based on OSM, so just as bad as Apple Maps!), but got me from A to B, and let me set waypoints to work around situations where it routed me down a private gated road.

Re: App-store

Yes, I think that Chrome blocks installations (certainly of extensions) from outside the Chrome store, unless you put some effort in to working around it by going to chrome://extensions and drag&dropping the downloaded extension in to it.

That worked for me installing a greasemonkey script, anyway.

I'm not sure how thoroughly curated the Chrome store is though. If it's like Play store, anyone can upload an extension.

Re: S3 not exempt

> It likely doesn't violate the trade dress patents, but it would still violate the UI patents like the bounceback.

Where does the S3 use bounceback? It doesn't appear to use it in the gallery application or other applications that I've noticed. Instead, a highlight extends from the edge over the main display, but the main display stays still -- as in stock ICS.

Re: Photo editing?

It comes with free copy of Photoshop Touch which supports dodge and burn.

In fairness, Microsoft did already dump Windows Live Mesh (2008 edition) after a few years of use. They gave plenty of warning for users to rescue their files before they got deleted, but it would have been nice to have been able to have them transferred to another service instead (such as SkyDrive) before cancelling it.

Re: I'm guessing Nokia saw the HTC One

@Voland's right hand.

What rubbish. The N95 came out before the original iPhone, it had 3G, GPS, and a great camera (for the time), TV output, multi-tasking, and it allowed applications to be installed. I don't believe that the original iPhone had any of these. Oh yeah, it also had basic features available on almost every phone such as MMS.

The N95 was so far ahead of its time with respect to the hardware, even in its slightly chunky package.

To phrase your sentence as if Nokia were competing with a phone that wasn't yet released is silly.

I also had no big problems with the N95. While the later firmware updates did improve the memory usage (particular demand paging) to allow more multi-tasking, it was still very functional before that.

Obviously the iPhone had a much bigger screen, a touch screen, looked better and was a lot less technical to use, but if you knew what you were doing, the N95 blew it out of the water with features. Satnav would be an obvious example.

(not any kind of fanboi, btw, I happily switch to whatever platform is most useful for me at the time, and I'm certainly not using Symbian any more!)

Re: mesh

I haven't tried Mesh since Microsoft ditched their last online synchronised storage system, called... Mesh.

Admittedly, they did give a nice long warning, giving plenty of time to back it up, but I would have been happier if they could have just moved my data across rather than cancel the service then re-open it again with the same name.

Re: Lots of idiots

They've got to be technically competent enough to allow installation of applications from outside the Play market (Android disables this by default, but it can be changed in the settings after agreeing to a popup that notifies you of the dangers associated with changing it).

Obviously if there's another way to install applications that works around this safety precaution, it's an Android issue that needs fixing.

> Why does the current release of Google Maps need to be able to make phone calls - what do I gain from this ?

Surely Google Maps needs to be able to call numbers because when you've found what you're looking for (hotel, etc.), you can call it?

I've certainly used this functionality before and it seems quite an obvious requirement.

Re: ATV2 can't handle 1080p content

Where does it say that they won't detect that? It's strongly implied that as you will be able to sign up to Netflix on ATV2, you are also able to stream content.

Netflix already has different quality streams for their content, as well as dynamically switching between them on the fly depending on available bandwidth.

Double fail?

> 4G must be great, if it can hold the call and if the user can find a 4G provider, for both himself and the one he is calling.

While I'm not familiar with 4G in the US, I would expect that the person being called doesn't have to be on the same 4G network for it to work. That would be silly.

From the click-through to the Google Blog post, I think that Google Bookmarks (which I use, providing HTML access or extension-based access for pretty much any browser) is staying, just the "lists" feature is being cancelled.

define: still works for me.

Cup-cake = 2 syllables

Dough-nut = 2 syllables

E-clair = 2 syllables

We'd be great at charades!

Some people may be on CDMA in the USA but travel to other countries where there are predominantly GSM based networks.

I thought that Chrome's bookmarks were synchronised to Google Docs anyway, so a user could just visit there to find them.

I remember the days, actually fairly recently, when I ordered a PS3 and PS3 remote, and they cancelled my PS3 due to being out of stock with no plans to restock, but still sent the PS3 remote. Very useful.

I called them, returned it, and... they sent me another PS3 remote. This happened 3 times before they finally accepted it back.

I've been happy with CDs bought from them though, except for a few crushed boxes.

I just updated Chrome again (I was on a previous 14.x version before, now on 14.0.835.186) and can now confirm that I also get the "YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS AT ALL" message, so it looks like they're going backwards.

Tested on IE9 vanilla, 64-bit Vista and got 100/100 with IE9, although missing the shadow from the reference image, so not perfect. Still not as bad as Chrome with Google Analytics opt-out extension.

Looks fine in Chrome for me, 100% and looks just like the reference image.

Interestingly though, if I install the Google Analytics opt-out extension (written by Google) it fails so horribly, looking a complete mess.

Nice way for Google to make you want to keep Analytics enabled :)

Strangely, there are 2 voice searches from Google.

The other one is https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.voicesearch.x and the changelog says it's now international, but the reviews say that it force closes for quite a few people (including myself).

Weight

I wonder how heavy the weight would need to be and if there would be a problem dropping it from a great height where there might be people walking.

Re: Tom Pellereau's idea

I'm not sure that this is a traffic light, so they might be safe from lawsuits.

Google talk on Android

Unless you're using Android 2.3.4+ (still quite rare), you won't even have audio on Google Talk, let alone video.

In fact, the HTC Flyer tablet is just about to get a 2.3.4 release and it still doesn't have video.

I've been quite happy with Skype audio on Android, despite the haters. I don't have a device capable of running the video in this release though, unfortunately.

I don't think Microsoft will have had anything to do with this update, but wouldn't care if they had, unless it was obvious that they were holding back specific features for their own devices.

I think you may be missing something

As I understood it, they're saying that people are targeting the LAMP systems in order to launch phishing attacks against 3rd parties.

Bertie Bassett

Surely the killer Bertie Bassett (in The Happiness Patrol) was the scariest.

In terms of confectionary-based foes, he was far more frightening than Mr. Staypuft from Ghostbusters.

Rearranging

For one, I hate that you can't rearrange icons in Android folders. I get a new app that I use a lot, and it's stuck at the bottom of my folder list when i'd like it in the mid-right side, right next to my thumb for the most efficient start. I haven't tried this app, but it sounds like it should handle it.

The only work around to this with default Android folders is to remove all the other items and re-add them in the order you want. Clunky.

Some people (not me) also care about how consistent their phone looks, or want to make it unique. They'll redo all the icons for their apps in a consistent style that they're happy with.

Experts exchange

And I have to repeat that I can still see answers to questions that I find on Google (I checked again just now) by scrolling to the bottom of an Experts Exchange page -- but you _have_ to go through Google. A direct link not referred from Google will hide the answers.

I don't understand the bile towards experts-exchange

They're original content, as far as I know, and if you click the link in google, they do actually provide the answers for free (at the bottom of the page, as mentioned in previous comments).

I strongly hope Google do not do a global ban based on a few people who don't know how to scroll a browser window, or use "find" on a page.

Microsoft?

Microsoft don't ship patents for many different video encodings, but allow users to install the codecs themselves.

They're allowing this with WebM/IE9 as well. It's not really surprising that they're not shipping a new codec with the browser.

It's Apple that implied they were going after WebM, not Microsoft, who publicly said they would support it if users installed the codec. Obviously they might be saying / doing different things behind closed doors, but I'm not aware of any evidence of this so far.