Posts by dotdavid 1712 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2010
I must admit I'm baffled why so many get caught, unless the advice of so many online forums is ignored by the infringers - i.e. "don't let them come inside your house to inspect it, tell them to return with a warrant (which they might get, but by then your unlicenced TV can be removed)".
Unless perhaps this "conventional wisdom" is wrong?
What a splendid name! It conjures visions in my mind of top-hatted gentlemen exclaiming "I say!" and whatnot.
"Hello, this is the Victorian Taxi Directorate. How may I help you?"
"Good sir, would you be able to inform me as to the present whereabouts of my taxi automobile? I had booked said vehicle for 18 hundred hours promptly!"
"I do apologise, sir, but your taxi automobile is just turning on to your street of residence now."
"Capital, old chap. I shall spur the lady of the house into renewed action then, for she is alas still in the process of preparing herself for the evening's festivities. Good day to you sir."
"Good day to you also, sir."
Just read this;
"Virgin Media can't mention the Olympics, it isn't a sponsor so can't even refer to the fact that the free Wi-Fi will last until the end of the 2012 Games"
Seriously, they can't even mention the Olympics? Everyone else seems to be doing it, including the council near Holborn who have somehow managed to build a "throw your rubbish in the bin" campaign around the Olympics (well, they have a gymnast posing while dropping something in a bin, anyway).
"Virgin will be allowed to make use of "public information channels" to publicise its service"
Oh, great. I can just hear the tannoy announcements now.
"There is a good service operating on all London Underground lines. Why not check whether this is actually true by visiting www.tfl.gov.uk using our free* Virgin Media Wifi service! Termsandconditionsapplyserviceisonlyfreetoexistingcustomersproductmaycontainnuts."
"More worryingly, 31 per cent said they were particularly looking forward to using the 4G networking on the iPad - despite the fact that they will never be able to do so in the UK."
Heh, I can just see it now; "That's weird, my iPad doesn't seem to be connecting at 4G speeds. Maybe I'm not holding it right?"
Only tangiently-related, but I've set myself a short-term goal of replacing my Virgin "triple-play" broadband, phone and TV with just the broadband as I've realised £40 will get me a VOIP box to connect my existing phone to, and Freesat basically gives me all the channels I want to watch on TV.
I guess if it were possible to do this on DSL and not have to pay a line rental for a phone you don't use much more people would do it, considering how easy it all is.
I would say the writing is on the wall for "triple play" long-term, thank god. Perhaps Virgin will stop trying to sell me a Blackberry by then.
An interesting blog post. But it does make me wonder... why did he choose _Microsoft_ as the place to go and work after saying Google was becoming too Corporate?
Personally I think most companies follow that path towards corporatism before they eventually collapse. Call it the natural lifecycle if you will.
What's worse is that Google rarely tell you their thought processes about anything they're doing. Google - If the Nexus S ICS update (which was pushed out OTA for a while before being abruptly stopped months ago) is buggy and you're working on it, fine, just say as much so people don't think you're basically doing nothing.
"This is a good argument for buying a phone with vanilla Android on it, rather than a branded version."
Fair point, although Google's Nexus One is also "aging" and won't be getting ICS officially. Unofficially it's a different story, but then the same thing goes for the Galaxy S.
I used to think it was worth only buying Nexus devices, but now that a lot of manufacturers have officially-unlockable bootloaders I am considering other handsets as long as the community looks big enough to support an official CyanogenMod build.
Worry no more, Anonymous Coward, for the new InsaSecurity3000 is ideal for your pre-emptive holistic threat-prevention needs TODAY!
Seriously though, show me a way of defending effectively against unknown future threats and I'll show you a tower that's for sale in Paris.
Am I the only one that doesn't really understand the point of these apps? Fair play to you if you do and buy them, but don't they just take your (probably poor) phone-camera photos and make them look even poorer by applying a filter?
And why is InstaGram so much better than, say, Paper Camera and whatnot already on Android? Why invest in InstaGram? Do they have a patent on a filter or something?
Perhaps I'm just getting too old ;-)
"The nuclear clock outlined in a paper accepted for publication in Physics Letters Review would neither lose nor gain 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years, the age of the universe."
That's nothing, my wristwatch also neither loses nor gains 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years - it tends to lose or gain considerably more than that.
Now if they'd said their new fancy clock neither lost nor gained *more than* 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years, that would have been impressive ;-)
"Asus was the most happy to punt a low-cost tablet, unworried that the entry level positioning would tarnish its brand."
I think the fact that Asus' competitors seem to think they *have* a premium brand when it comes to tablets says a lot about their current lack of sales.
Personally, I'm quite impressed with Asus, a few dodgy firmware updates aside, and I think they would have been a far better choice than Samsung, Acer and Motorola even if the latter hadn't been so precious.
"I'm pretty sure if I went to my local supermarket, stole 19 bottles of wine and sold them outside, I wouldn't be walking free today."
Well, no you wouldn't. But while it doesn't excuse the bootleggers' behaviour, to do what they did to your books you'd have to go into your local supermarket, make 19 cheap copies of bottles of wine and sell them outside. Not theft but fraud, and a more appropriate analogy should really be used.
"“What will be interesting to see is how e-ink technology evolves as a result of this trend, and whether it can survive the onslaught of cheaper LCD-based tablet devices such as the Kindle Fire, which are usable in a wide variety of ways.”"
My prediction; their insane markups will have to be reduced so e-ink readers will become much cheaper. It's already supposedly much cheaper to make an e-ink screen than an LCD one.
That is, unless they invent a decent colour e-ink which would open up a whole new market of decent requires-no-power digital photo frames, magazine-size readers etc etc...
As the article implies, the Marketing Department are seriously at a loss.
"Look guys, there must be *something* this phone is particularly good at?"
"Well, er, it has a camera..."
"A crap camera"
"OK, fine, well it's got expandable SD memory"
"Like every other Android phone! Well, apart from those new Nexuses"
"Um, it has a small screen"
"A small *low-resolution* screen. But you do have a point with small"
"Small it is then. So who wants small things?"
"I dunno. Children? Backpackers? Pixies?"
"Ah I give up - just say "people on the move will love the pocketability". Now, what can we say about the Galaxy SIII..."
The problem with trains is the problem with all public transport, and the reason for the car's success. Unlike the car, trains rarely go exactly where you want to go exactly when you want to go, especially in rural areas.
Unless they solve this problem the best thing to do is improve cars, methinks.
Indeed, most of the appeal of the Raspberry is the price. In my opinion (and I suspect a lot of others') there's no point being able to scatter sensors round your house to do cool-but-not-essential things if to do those cool-but-not-essential things will cost a couple of thousand quid once the prices of the sensors are added up.
I've been wary of low-end Androids since seeing my wife's Wildfire in day-to-day operation - slow and laggy, even with CyanogenMod 7, even when typing into the default SMS app with the default keyboard.
Since then I've only been recommending friends and family go for 1GHz+ CPUs, but I hear these new Snapdragons are actually quite performant. Is this the case?
I realise that you're not gonna be playing the latest 3D games, but if it can hold its' own with lag-free Angry Birds, Facebook, SMS and Email these handsets (Defy Mini, HTC Explorer, Wildfire S) look more attractive.
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