Posts by HMB 638 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2010
You know what, I think you make a good argument. I don't use my phone much for HDMI hookup though since I found Android not mirroring anymore very disappointing.
That said, when I slap Ubuntu on my Galaxy Nexus, I would appreciate the phone being charged as a matter of course when it's docked and connected via HDMI.
I initially considered the notion of charging a phone over HDMI rather silly, but you've changed my mind.
So because a standard designed for video interconnect wont charge your phone/tablet you say fail? You realise it's not for that right? It's for video interconnect?
If your phone charger couldn't connect your TV to your XBox in HD would you say that was a fail?
Seriously.
>> But Android is absolute dross
> YOU are the perfect illustration of why Microsoft is in the toilet right now.
Children, children!!
Both of you are right. I've always bought Nexus phones and I've watched Android get better and better and then, after around 4.1.2, worse and worse. It's like Google don't understand what "testing" is.
Android is a great OS that is nice to use, up until Google changes something in a way you didn't like or "updates" your phone to introduce bugs into it while also adding a good feature. Google are going off the rails slowly and they're making Microsoft's job of competing an easier one.
Microsoft on the other hand have great ideas in theory but just don't understand how to temper them with exactly what people want. My friend's WinPho voice recognition does a lot better than my Nexus' quite frankly laughable performance. However, I really want a phone that has more than freaking brightly coloured squares of solid colour for a user interface.
I guess we should all be grateful there is competition in the market place. For me, Google is pushing me (a long term customer) away and both Apple and Microsoft are intriguing me. Come on Apple, release a phone with a screen with 4.5 inches or a smidge more.
While I've no doubt that senior execs calling their platform a burning one does have influence, don't let the tail wag the dog on this one. The market was being torn away from it's long standing affair with Nokia in a powerful way and Nokia had no products that could compete on the level of innovation and slickness that the new arrival of the iPhone had. Nokia had become slow and complacent.
Even my old Nexus One was some way off the polish that Apple had achieved. It was Jobs that tore Nokia a new one, I don't think the average guy on the street cared very much about Elop talking about burning platforms.
"I don't know why they are bothering with getting high speed internet out when they haven't got basic landline coverage sorted yet! They can get that right before they think of moving on to this high speed internet thing."
Is the sort of thing I can imagine some people saying on here. :P
OLED has historically had a shorter life span, that's why it's taken so long to get to TV. I guess you're assuming the manufacturers are idiots and just released it when it wasn't ready for TV yet.
Screen burn is often lumped together when it exists in both a transitory and permanent state. OLED has no transitory 'burn'. Burn in only occurs after a very long time of the same image, which is unlikely in most usage scenarios, unlike plasma. OLED long term burn is the same issue as short life.
Terrible colour reproduction. Hmmmm... You know I feel more understanding of your point here. However it's the opposite way round. OLED has a wider colour gamut than any other consumer display technology. It's capable of showing richer colours. Sadly, this richer colour capability is often used without sufficient engineering thought or restraint, making images look "over colourful". To truly take advantage of a wider colour gamut, you need a colour gamut system (camera, format, post production and display) that is specced for it. I believe HDMI has some sort of support built into it for higher dynamic ranges.
OLEDs are thinner and could be cheaper than LCD, they are more capable in terms of colour gamut and they have outstanding contrast that beats plasma and LCD. Longevity is the issue that must be demonstrated to have been solved, but I'd be very surprised if the Industry have ignored it and just rolled it out with longevity problems like you suggest.
...so in the mean time you won't be nice? :P
Well... you're basically looking at a 20 fold increase in battery performance with a 20 fold reduction in car price.
I'm going to guess you're a manager who's stumbled onto the computer of an engineer and found this site by accident.
If it makes you feel better maybe I can ask Elon Musk for a 20 fold increase in my wage and a 20 fold decrease in price for any houses I want to buy.
Google does seem to operate a "Tough Sh*t" update policy.
Whether it's the removal of the Navigation app (built in to maps now), or the nasty pastel colours on gmail contacts, who know's what my phone is going to change to tomorrow. Yay!
It's good to know that having a Nexus device though that I'll be able to get barely tested OS updates when they come out.
(I've been a big fan of Android, I've got respect for iOS and Windows Phone, but Android offered me the free satellite navigation I wanted at the time. I'm now more open to being wooed by another phone OS than ever before and I'm looking at Ubuntu in particular.)
It would be foolish to think that things are as serious as that, but there is that underlying feeling of creeping malevolence.
And yet the data is safer in the US than it is in the UK. That speaks volumes to me. Americans are wise to treasure their bill of rights.
Maybe if we cared enough about our rights, our politicians would give us some.
Maybe if we weren't so distracted about people campaigning against energy, berating our teenagers exam results or kidding ourselves that we have the money or competency to involve ourselves in other peoples conflicts effectively we'd be looking at what we can achieve....
...if we weren't so cynical.
Owing to paradoxes I'm now obliged to say the following.
We can make things better. The only people who make a difference are the people who believe they can.
Did you read the prominent bits of the article that explained that the NSA outlined a lot of this?
Lots of things help terrorists, like privacy and freedom. Maybe we should ban them, but then what would we have left to protect?
I imagine Miranda felt pretty terrorised by the police.
I have no 2G coverage and I'm very happy with that. I get good reliable voice coverage and data with 3 who have no 2G service at all. 2G isn't as cost efficient so I guess that's one of the reasons that 3 are able to offer me unlimited data for an £18 a month rolling contract.
My connection to 3 is so good I use it to upload large files as it's faster than using my ADSL. (Usually at least 2Mbps, peaking to 5Mbps at night), That's how I hit 12.3 Gb.
I've always had a stunning service out of cable in the UK. At peak time my speeds were always 50Mbps at my last place and I did use the connection quite heavily too.
All this report really conveys about cable is how US companies have chosen to manage their cable networks. That's not necessarily a criticism against them either. For fast well managed networks you need punters prepared to pay for them.
I love the Spirit of your Comment, but while 4G may become a viable alternative for those in the worst served places for BT, 4G simply doesn't offer the bandwidth to support mass take up on a fast broadband service in areas with a moderate population density. Even if it looked good at times, peak demand just wouldn't fit.
Instead of 100Mbps max for one cell, try more like 1 or 10 Gbps. Certainly more so in that direction.
I don't mean to piss on your cornflakes though, I do see this putting the wind up BT's rural ADSL offerings.
Don't forget the effect of a dynamic equilibrium, the services attractiveness causes demand, making the service progressively less attractive as it slows under load.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4nnLP--uTI
Starlite was very interesting, but it really baffles me that it hasn't been replicated or repeated since. Legend has it that Maurice's family still know the secret.
Best theory I can come up with is that it is in use as a classified material. I just find it very difficult to accept that a wonder plastic was created and then didn't escape into the world to be used.
Maybe Maurice stole the secret from the future and the time police have been busy mopping up :P
"I suppose the fact that people who have sufficient IT skills to install Windows on a Mac wasn't taken into account when assessing how well owners could maintain a healthy computer.
I suppose that because there's no control to try to reach even a baseline for that variable.
Still.... I'm sure that it will get loads of mileage in developer office warfare regardless of it's intellectual merit."
...at least that's what I imagine Einstein Von Brainstorm would say.
"Real drivers don't need a rev counter, they can hear/feel the engine." - Exactly the thing that people without a rev counter say.
I'm not going to outright disagree either. With my old car I could accelerate hard from a stand still and instinctively stop bang on 30 mph without looking at the instrument cluster, I just felt and heard the engine note for the gear.
What you're missing is that without a rev counter, you never get to calibrate your ears to a car. You never get to learn what 6500 RPM sounds like for sure, you just take guesses. I don't like taking guesses myself, but horses for courses (especially at Tesco).
Dodgy Geezer...
I like a lot of what you said, but despite myself being a huge fan of nuclear power and believing it to be something that could still change our world enormously for the better, bringing people out of poverty, it could by no means be free.
Nuclear fuel isn't a significant cost in nuclear power. Complex highly regulated buildings and designs, millions of man hours of professional work and planning followed by millions more man hours running reactor designs that are small evolutionary changes over reactor technology that has been around for decades, that makes current gen nuclear expensive, not as expensive as wind perhaps (unless they really do crack mass energy storage), but certainly more so than a normal coal plant.
Nuclear is the one energy source that can solve our problems for thousands of years and it's also the one we're least excited about benefiting from.
VP8 never stood up against H.264 in quality tests at the same bitrate. We'll just have to wait and see how VP9 does.
Patent free video codecs are a false economy if you have to pay more in bandwidth and storage than the amount you saved on the codecs.
Why, does it want a slower less compliant rendering engine?
Don't just tell me that IE10 sucks, show me something that Firefox does better in terms of page rendering. If you find that job difficult, what do you think that means?
IE6 used to be the bane of my web development. I used to hate it so much, but I'm not in an entrenched fanboy-fact-denial position. I use Chrome because of the way it looks and the UI, but IE 10 has one of the best rendering engines out there right now, shame the element inspector is a bit poor.
I also love Chrome syncing to mobile.
If it's preventing scatter from the object then it wouldn't be invisible, but sheer black (or your wavelength equivalent of no energy). The idea being that you can't see energy reflected from it, but then neither can energy pass through it from whatever may be behind it. Only diverting technologies can achieve that from what I understand to be possible at the moment (which of course is limited).
I think the word invisible may be being thrown around too liberally here.
Anyone else's thoughts here?
"Maybe they [Greenpeace] can patent a power system that run's on their userbase smugness"
Well... that should be able to power the world for millennia with no carbon emissions! What an amazing thing that could be, if only we could really power the world on that.
Such a shame there isn't actually a low carbon form of power generation that's reliable, affordable and could last us for millennia. If only.... Greenpeace would love it! ;)
Anyone sufficiently intelligent to do something this amazing would have no problems remaining anonymous if they really wanted to and it occurred to them (it's amazing how smart some people can be and still lack common sense). I'm aware of the different ways remaining anonymous can be achieved as an IT professional as will many other reg readers. *coughs* PRINGLES *coughs*
* I would like to add for the record as an IT Professional that I don't endorse anything unethical or illegal in this statement.
I'm not opposed to these deals exactly, I do understand that sometimes subsidies are necesary and can be a huge boon to commerce and industry, but....
Are we in danger of training BT management to expect taxpayer money before they expand FTTC into new areas now? If they don't get that taxpayer money, are they going to sulk and see if they get it by being stubborn? Could subsidies in Place A mean that Place B has to wait that much longer because it didn't get taxpayer money?
Who cares? It's not like 4.2.2 actually fixed anything. I have a Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Google are falling in my opinion. It's no better for 4.2.2.
The 4.2 upgrade (the first one) made my bluetooth unreliable and made the lockscreen corrupt when playing music. I'm just saddened by Google's quality issues. No, subsequent 4.2. issues didn't fix the problems.
Hey ho, maybe I'll get reliable bluetooth back in Keylime Pie, who knows?
Apple was such a much nicer company when it was eating humble pie:
When Bill Gates bailed out Apple:
I was thinking that before you said it....
Apple's cunning plan to crush the USPTO. Send in a mind numbing amount of patents and watch as the poor staff are slowly overwhelmed and are turned into mindless, broken shells of people, just wanting the endless torture to stop.
When they're broken, they'll approve anything, even something as obvious as a magnetic holder.
Unwanted crap?
I have Ubuntu running on Android running on my Nexus One and it runs like a dog, a dog that's been shot in the leg, no, two of it's legs.
I'm hoping that the native version of Ubuntu on the Nexus One may just offer a low power raspberry pi like computer for my old phone. If it does, I will find a way to use it! I think it's exciting. I want this, but possibly not for the reasons that Canonical decided to go down this route. I'll use it as a graphic-less task master that I can SSH into and get to do my bidding.
This is a case of companies desperately trying to cling on to what they're most familiar with!
Rather than concede now that Voice over IP is the future (Voice over LTE requires it I think). Companies battle on trying to make a legacy product work.
By day I chat with work colleagues over Skype and hear them so clearly that if you were outside the office you might think they were inside there with me.
By night I call my friend up in the car and the conversation goes something like: "What?", "What?", "You said what?", "What?". I joke a little bit, but after going through two cellular networks and two bluetooth conversions with an audio bandwidth not exceeding 4Khz and compression that makes us both sound like we're in a pond.... I just really wonder how much life is left in old phone calls.
I think the mobile industry is probably the biggest pedaller of horse products of them all. They'll keep trying to flog them no matter the cost too.
There's a very strong link between Mozilla Crash Reporter and Mozilla software crashing. As such I've decided I need to uninstall the Crash Reporter to see if it makes Mozilla software more stable :P
Oh I'm sorry was I confusing correlation and causation?
Newcomers to hard-line telecoms? You're optimistic!
With the government's tax system on optical fibre links the small guy gets the most squeezing. With no finalised system for sharing ducts and poles, how would a new operator even begin to invest in new Infrastructure?
BT want more money than Dr Evil just to hook up people with fibre, so are we being realistic with this idea that we can have effective competition with telecoms in the UK? The best you'll get is Virgin Vs BT. Virgin are in monstrous debt from their existing deployment and leave a significant proportion of people unplugged.
The UK is a hostile environment to telecom start-ups. One would almost think it had been engineered so too.
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