Posts by Buzzword 1030 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2010
To gain any traction, they urgently need to backport the Windows Runtime and App Store to run on Windows 7. If I'm developing software for companies, I can't possibly tell them "Here's your new app, by the way you need to upgrade your entire estate to Windows 8." Most of my clients have only just migrated from XP to 7; they're in no hurry to go through the same hell again.
What exactly is the danger here? A paedophile somehow gets access to a kid's location data, identifies times & places where he/she is likely to be alone, and then pounces?
Kids are most often found walking alone to or from school, around 8am and 4pm. There, no hacking needed.
It's time to give serious consideration to installing city-wide pipes for goods delivery. Just as we have water pipes leading to every house, we could have an Amazon pipe - no more than two feet wide - delivering small packages. Robot vehicles would scuttle through the pipes carrying goods. Once arrived at their destination, they could drop their payload (or wait for the recipient), then drive back to base automatically. No danger of bird strikes, air traffic, or poor weather. The pipes would be fairly cheap to build since they're just dumb pipes: no fancy engineering needed. All the smarts are in the robots, which can be upgraded as technology advances. Since they are ground-based, they would be much more energy-efficient than flying drones.
I have no idea what this would cost, but it certainly seems worth exploring.
@TeaLeaf,
Thank you for addressing my concerns directly. I accept that her actions will indeed make a difference. Though for what it's worth, I suspect the nasty men will just ignore her precisely because she's a woman; the same message coming from a man might have a greater impact on its intended audience.
It was a great speech, full of well-intentioned ideals, but what practical difference will it make? For example she asks men to sign a pledge that they'll be nice to girls. But let's face it, the kind of men who aren't going to be nice to girls simply aren't going to sign it.
It's analogous to the problem of reducing CO₂ emissions: one person acting alone will make virtually no difference to the global impact; and those who are emitting the most are the least likely to change their behaviour.
The first iPhone didn't even have 3G, only wifi. So having a data plan was irrelevant.
Once operators saw the uptake and the potential, they were falling over themselves to launch iPhone-specific plans. Also, Apple charged operators a few bob for use of the trademark "iPhone" in their plan names. For a while you could get the exact same plan at a cheaper price by choosing the variant without the fruity trademark in the name.
"Basically raw capacity is doubling every generation with compressed capacity increasing 2.5 times per generation."
No, that's not mathematically possible. Compressed capacity increases at the same rate as uncompressed, assuming no change in compression efficiency. And indeed compression has pretty much stopped evolving: all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, there are only minimal gains left to be made.
What's worse, a lot of the new data which is filling up these tape drives is made up of images and video, already compressed: so the stated 2.5:1 compression ratio is actually falling.
They have my GMail address, but not a password that I ever used with the service. They have a low-entropy easy-to-type password that I regularly use for one-off sign-ups on sites that I couldn't care less about. Unfortunately that doesn't help narrow down the source of the leak, other than to exclude Google themselves.
Yes it's pretty much the same price. The iPhone 6 base model costs £539, the 5S cost £549 at launch. However, since other phones (like all electronics) are falling in cost, the iPhone should be too. You can pick up a very capable handset for under £150 these days: it's no longer clear that the iPhone is special enough to make up for the extra cost.
The cost of the mobile networks is falling too: when I got my first mobe, I was paying something like £1 a minute for calls; today it's down to pennies or fractions thereof. As a result, the price of the handset becomes more noticeable.
"It processes more than 500 complex messages a second."
There are some 36,000 GPs in the country, seeing an average of one patient every 12 minutes; making a total of 50 patients per second. That's an order of magnitude less than the number of messages per second that the system is processing. What are all these messages?
Let's say I want secure email for all my employees. But then Alice gets run over by a bus and is in hospital for six weeks, and Walter needs access to her mailbox. Can I get a secure email system for my employees which nevertheless still allows the IT department to grant access to Walter's mailbox?
It's amazing how quickly we've shifted from the idea that software is a product you buy once (with a service pack or two to fix bugs later) to the idea that it's a service which is constantly kept up-to-date. It works surprisingly well for consumers (e.g. on smartphones), but businesses are taking a while to adapt to this new reality. Hence companies still using Windows XP today.
Presumably the fingerprint won't differ between the same make & model of computer or tablet? There are millions of identical iPads and MacBooks. Some of the more popular models from Dell / Asus / Lenovo must sell in the hundreds of thousands, at least. I don't see how canvas fingerprinting could uniquely identify them.
68 per cent of apps (that request SMS permissions) ask for the ability to send SMS messages;
28 per cent of apps (with SMS permissions) also request read SMS access;
So out of a hundred apps which request "SMS permissions", 68 can send and 28 can read. What do the remaining 4% of apps do, if they request SMS access but neither read nor send?
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