Posts by Buzzword

Really?

"We’ve heard from people that they want to see fewer stories that are hoaxes..."

Are you sure, Zuck? Judging by how many people *like* and *share* these stories, it seems they very much do want to see them.

Linked Out?

It's just a clone of LinkedIn, surely?

Not all Nexuses (Nexii?)

My Nexus 7 (2013) with 4G still hasn't received the upgrade. Only the Wifi-only model is on Lollipop.

Vapourware

That's all very well, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Why do people keep buying CDs?

Because my car only has a CD player; and because I can afford to.

I have enough disposable income that it's just less faff to buy a CD. With any other method, I have to find blank CDs, fire up my dusty old computer that still has a CD burner, work out which illegal source of music hasn't been shut down this month, work out which illegal filesharing client software isn't pumped full of adware. Then I discover the ink in my CD-labelling pen has dried up, or the blank CDs themselves go wrong.

Yes, I could probably buy some MP3-playing gadget that I could wire into the car's CD player, although DIY isn't my forte. I suppose I could pay somebody at a garage to fit one. Or, much simpler, I could just keep buying CDs.

Then again, I'm talking about the kind of CDs you find near the tills in petrol stations. I don't think my purchases of Eddie Stobart's Keep On Truckin' are keeping the charts alive.

Tarred by their own brush

Android is also facing the other Windows fate: being judged by old versions of its own software. Microsoft did itself no favours by continuing to support XP into 2014: likewise, many Android users are stuck with Jelly Bean (or even Gingerbread) with no chance of future upgrades. When these buyers are shopping around for their next phone, they'll remember all the bugs in their current Android version. For all Apple's foibles, they've been incredibly good at supporting the latest OS on older hardware. As phone hardware matures and replacement cycles lengthen, Android's non-upgradeability* will increasingly tarnish its reputation.

(*Yes, tech-savvy Reg readers can install custom/hacked versions of the OS; but try getting your nan to do that.)

Tax advantages

There can be tax advantages to buying up a company which has a (hopefully temporary) large loss on its books.

Free movie rental!

What's stopping me from "buying" a film on iTunes, watching it a few times, then taking it back to the shop for a refund?

Protectionism

There's more than a hint of old-fashioned protectionism. We know that blocking imports of physical goods favours domestic producers. Similarly, blocking "imports" of online services also favours domestic companies. With the added benefit of being able to spy on them more easily.

App Store inception

So on one level we have the Docker Hub, a sort-of App Store (TM) for Docker. In that store you can download Ubuntu Core, in which you'll find Snappy, another App Store. In Snappy, you can download Docker.

It's turtles all the way down.

Mobile

I know there's m.theregister.co.uk for mobile, but it would be nice if the main site would auto-scale for narrow screens.

Still too big

I remember fondly the days when a full OS could be booted from a single floppy disk. Where does the extra 109MB go? Is it all networking and multi-tasking?

The master key to all your accounts

Another password manager app. Protect all your fiendishly hard-to-remember passwords with one single password. What could possibly go wrong?

Just replace "standards" with "passwords" in the comic: http://xkcd.com/927/

FAQ

Could you ask a bit more about people's "stage in life" when they expatriate themselves? Are your interviewees aged 25 and childless, 40 with kids in tow, or 55 with kids all grown up? Expat life can be great, certainly, but I assume there's a golden age where you have globally-marketable skills (not too young) and a sufficient lack of home attachments (not too old / no kids). Or am I over-simplifying things?

Is Monetise in Jeopardy?

Why would you use a natural-language question-answering computer for a mobile payments business?

Coming next week: KPMG audits your accounts using fuzzy logic; and Cisco designs your network by copying a live spider's web patterns.

The first rule of software development...

... is to always have a more powerful computer than your end users. You need more RAM (to hold your IDE, your debugger, and your app itself); you need more power (to compile quickly); and you need more screen real estate (to see the app you're working on and your IDE around it / on a second screen).

Using a tablet as a thin client to a remote desktop or command-line terminal is only acceptable in emergencies, such as if you're on holiday and it's the only computer you have with you.

Incoming calls matter too

One important metric they've missed is the percentage of incoming calls succeeding. My experience with O2 is that an awful lot of incoming calls don't connect. I get voicemail messages without my phone ever ringing, even when I'm sat at my desk and the phone has four bars of signal.

For anyone running a business from their mobile, missing a call from a client can be a deal-breaker. This is particularly the case for small businesses with many clients: mobile hairdressers, painters & decorators, etc.; but it's also very frustrating when you're job-hunting and expecting calls from potential offers.

It's cheap to try

Personally I'd like fewer fatties in my neighbourhood despite the cost: they take up two seats on the bus, they walk too slowly, and they offend my eyes. I'm sure you could put a figure on the pain I suffer, in QALYs, of having to see fat people.

At the same time, quite a few of McKinsey's 77 solutions are no-cost or negligible-cost. Perhaps it's worth trying the half-dozen cheapest solutions? And what can we learn from elsewhere? The Danes banned trans-fat: how is that working out for them?

Pretty cool

Yes it's an advert, but it's pretty damn cool, and I learned a bit of science.

Recycling user names?

Maybe you're the original JSmith@yahoo.com or a J.Doe@gmail.com or your Twitter account is just @1. How long do the companies wait before recycling those names? Do their heirs get the right to sell them, like personalised number plates?

Fight fire with fire

The police need a new squadron, the Flying (Remotely) Squad. They'll have their own attack drones, maybe some trained hawks too, who can force a malevolent drone out of the sky. Just as the police get super-fast cars to chase down us ordinary folk, so too they need killer drones to defeat the menace of unauthorised civilian drone flights.

I, for one, welcome our encroaching police state.

“When I’m in the office I’ll AirPlay it over to an Apple TV connected to a monitor. What’s the difference between that and a desktop?”

The difference is productivity. On a desktop with a mouse and a full numeric keypad I can fill out a spreadsheet with data from three different sources, draw a chart, copy it into a document, format it nicely, and email it to twenty recipients. All within five minutes.

On your iPhone, multi-tasking is barely feasible - every time you jump from your spreadsheet to your presentation app you'd find the latter'a process was killed because it ran out of memory. The Bluetooth ultra-light keyboard will be slower to type on than a more solid keyboard. There's no mouse so simple tasks like Copy+Paste take forever.

For content consumption (displaying your presentation) the iPhone is fine: but creating anything more than linear text, no edits, is a tedious chore.

Word docs

"2. Will you move the ITU toward the use of multi-platform-friendly documents rather than Microsoft Word docs?"

Which platform are you using that struggles to read a Word document? I can open them on Linux (Abiword, LibreOffice), on Mac OS (Pages, which is free in the App Store), on Android (too many apps to list), etc. It's just not an issue any more.

XKCD

Mandatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/1363/

Seriously, what is it with everyone and their dog thinking they can make a better phone than Samsung/Apple, despite having (usually) no prior experience, no team of engineers, and nothing but wishful thinking?

Olé olé olé

"Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) object technology is used to share data between applications so that a chart from an Excel Spreadsheet can be included within a PowerPoint presentation, for example."

We're tech readers, not Daily Mail readers. Give us some credit.

Herding cats with long tails

"The Linux kernel has just over 3,000 committers"

But of those, there are probably 50 to 100 dedicated committees, and a long tail of thousands who only contribute the odd patch. Some other metric is needed.

Malware

This is no protection against a malware-infected computer though.

Banks (in the UK at least) have a better system. They issue a device which generates one-time tokens which you type into the computer. The twist is that when you make a payment to a new recipient, the last four digits of the challenge code must must match the last four digits of the recipient's bank account number. Thus your one-time-code is only valid for a specific transaction, not for any transaction; and crooks can't redirect the underlying website to send the money to their own accounts instead.

Since this doesn't protect against malware, and HTTPS already protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, what exactly is this supposed to defend against?

Same as iOS 8

iOS 8's Spotlight does the same thing, sending search queries to Bing. It also shares your geographical location (not sure if with Apple or with Bing). Both features can be disabled via the Settings, so it's not exactly secret.

John Connor

Your surname is Connor, your son is into tech and killing robots, and yet you didn't name him John?

6 GB free

Anecdotally, it's the requirement for 6 GB of free space that is putting most people off.

Don't tell them that they can connect their iPhone to a computer running iTunes and perform the upgrade without having to delete anything.

"What we think of today as the "flagship" Android niche may shrink to boutique-sized proportions, much like top-end hi-fi or A/V equipment became a low-volume high-margin business."

Yes, this. Mobile phone manufacturers can't differentiate on OS (it's Android or nothing, nobody except MSNokia are making WinPhones), nor can they differentiate on screens (AMOLED, 300ppi since the eye can't see the difference). There's little point adding a super-fast processor or tons of RAM since the OS and apps aren't built for it. Radio support (3G/4G/5G) depends on the network. And so on.

Today's high-end phones compete on fringe features such as speakers (HTC One), battery life (Sony), and camera quality (Nokia). Speakers haven't evolved in years: phones differ only in speaker placement. Cameras will reach a technical plateau soon. All that's left is price. Margins will shrink dramatically: in fact they already have for most manufacturers.

There could be some good in this, if social networks accurately reflect real-world networks*. Researchers could track the progress of e.g. winter flu by observing status updates like "feelin poorly, ugh i h8 being sick, yay day off work/school!!"

In practice the mapping between social and real-world networks is poor (how many of your colleagues are friends on your TwitFace account?), so it's worse than useless.

Docking

I find half-screen docks incredibly useful; in fact when I was forced to use Windows XP for a while (after having become accustomed to 7), the first thing I did was install a tool to enable left/right docking. I'm very much looking forward to corner docking becoming a standard feature too.