Posts by Vector
61 posts • joined Monday 21st February 2011 17:10 GMT
It's not the current design that counts.
I'm amazed at the absolute shortsightedness in most of these comments. Yes, the Liberator is a piece of crap. Yes, using one is probably as likely to maim or kill the user as the target. The point is not the general utility of this particular design but, rather, that it has any utility at all. It seems most everyone looks at this thing, focuses on the fact that it barely works and comes to the conclusion that there is no danger.
The danger is not in this design, it's in the proof of concept.
Let's look for a moment at the parallel in 2D printing. When I first got into the "microcomputer" revolution, we had two choices for printing: dot matrix or daisy wheel. One could type out a letter that looked like a typist had done it but couldn't do any graphics, the other could do primative graphics, but the overall quality was so poor that it was really only good for utilitarian reports. Thirty years on, all our currency has to have multiple security features, because you can print a passable facsimile on a printer that you can buy for less than $100.
You can look at this and say "what a piece of crap," but you're ignoring the potential in doing so. The fact that it can be done means that it will be done and done better as time goes by.
"If it wasn't for the lack of SD slot..."
That and no removable battery. I traded to an S4 from a Sensation, which served me very well. I wanted to like the HTC One, I really did, but in the end, expandable storage and a replaceable battery (along with the slightly faster processor) made the S4 more future-proof in my mind.
Re: Mr C
"it would be the equivalent of one person in a crowd wearing a shirt saying "Look at me, I'm doing evil!" All the FBI/NSA have to do is record the encrypted stream (they can claim reasonable grounds), arrest you and then get a court order for you to decrypt it or go to jail for contempt."
I'm no legal expert, but I don't think that would pass constitutional muster any better than arresting the guy just for wearing your "I'm doing evil" shirt would.
@Alan Esworthy Re: Betting against the MAN
"I like where I am: I like the people and the location."
How much of what you like about the location is due to govt services? How you likin' those roads and parks and emergency services? Sure, you could get many of them from private industry. I'm sure they'd love to see the govt sector wither away so they wouldn't have to worry about the competition when they set their prices. Oh, and they'll decide what services are profitable to maintain whether it's in your interest or not...
What he really meant...
Mark Zuckerberg said at its launch last month was aimed at attracting the next billion users by putting "Facebook first" on mobile.
Fixed it for him...
Re: All very true, but..
First off, it is a gun. It may not be particularly effective but, per the dictionary definition ("a device that throws a projectile" - Merriam-Webster), it's a gun. I'm no expert (far, far from it), but I'd guess it's almost as effective as the early blunderbuss pistols.
The author seems to miss the point. Sure, it's crap, but then, so were the printouts from early dot-matrix printers. This just proves that it can be done and it's up- or downhill from here depending on your point of view. Some really smart (and possibly twisted) people will figure out how to improve on this start and people will be able to "print" guns. It may take 5 or ten years, but the genie is out of the bottle.
At the same time, the government seizure of the plans is laughable. Those plans are not physical, they're information and that information has been set loose into the world. You can try to legislate this out of existence but to paraphrase an old saying: if 3D gun plans are outlawed, only outlaws will have 3D gun plans. And you probably won't know they have them until they've printed their gun and used it.
Personally, I'm not real thrilled about this eventuality, but sticking your head in the sand by saying "it's not a real gun" does nothing to address the issue.
Re: Pretty much as expected.
"15Gb for £15 (or thereabouts) a month is hard to beat. There are countries where it is beaten but compared to the US, it is an absolute bargain."
Holy Carp! I had no idea the shaft was that big. 12Gb costs us poor 'merikans $120 or, effectively, 6.5 times as much.
oy...
Re: I wonder...
@jonathanb 1800GMT
"Everyone with an android has a g+ account"
Not true. I've been using Android handsets since the Moto Droid came out and do not have a G+ account. I've stopped reviewing apps because I refuse to join G+ just to voice my opinion. I find that a rather annoying attempt at cross-pollination on Google's part.
Re: The reality is...
"ka-boom, cos thats all we can manage at the moment - firework on a stick"
Yeah, but, then again, our cars all basicly run on fireworks in a can (ok, cans), so it's a valid power source if not the most efficient.
That said, I sure would like to get off this rock. Would someone fix that please?!
@El Andy
Yes, I do dismiss it lightly as much of it follows rather directly from the base idea of using your finger or, as a matter of fact, multiple fingers. Most consumer grade touchscreens prior to the iPhone were resistive, single-touch affairs where the "innovations" of the IOS UI would have been difficult or impossible to implement.
'"We think this is the best version of Facebook there is," he said, before stressing that in five to ten years a billion internet users will have no idea what a traditional computer is, as they will have grown up using tablets and smartphones.'
...and, IMHO, they'll hardly remember what Facebook is either.
"Sure, the Prada and the F700 were being developed concurrently with the iPhone. But check out some YouTube videos of their software. It's frankly garbage compared to iOS. No pinch to zoom, no tap to zoom, no QWERTY onscreen keyboard, I'm pretty sure they don't let you swipe to scroll anything, there's no generalized idea of apps, obviously no bounce effect..."
Most of what you describe comes from the PDA world (if you can remember when that didn't stand for "public display of affection"). Apple basicly took a PDA, stuck a cell radio in it, optimized the UI for fingers and called it revolutionary. Handspring did most of that years before. Once capacitive screens came down in price, eliminating the stylus was bound to happen.
...and, yes, I, too, used my fingernail on many a PDA instead of dragging out the stylus.
None the less, Apple did not invent either the modern mobile phone nor the modern tablet (ok, maybe if you count the Newton, which was developed while Jobs was off running NEXT and Pixar and which he unceremoniously axed upon his return). All that could really be said for them is that they came up with the idea that someone might want to use a finger instead of a stylus on a touchscreen, which, frankly, was coming down the pike anyway.
Re: Still not interested
I am also not interested in vomiting my entire life out into the world. It's in part why my dwelling has walls.
Social platforms just don't seem to grasp that parts of our lives are private and that just because I'd like to share something, does not mean I want to share everything.
Re: Online advertising's greatest flaw
Afraid that's not true at all, at least not for all non-online advertising.
Marketing departments have many tricks up their sleeves to monitor the efficacy of their ad spend. Things like the phone number you call or "mention this word" spiffs are markers for analysis. I once worked for a company that went so hogwild with the phone number thing that we ran out of space on our PBX for the new numbers.
Our sales are up 10%...
...so we are perfectly justified having hundreds of thousands of users locked out of their legitimate archives to preserve our profits.
Nuke because the takedown was a WEE bit heavy handed.
Re: Optional
Yes, but in the rush to make sure the FIRST shuttle was named Enterprise, the trek faithful missed the fact that NASA wanted to give the name to a spacefaring vessel. The noise became so great that they caved and moved the name up.
Re: Someone doesn't know their history of astronomy
Asimov also had a wonderful essay about Vulcan called "The Planet that Wasn't." It became the title for one of his essay collections.
Learning has not taken place
...and so, the movie industry ignores the lessons learned in the music industry and goes running off to attack their customers.
My impression is that music piracy is well down now that easily accessible, reasonably priced legal alternatives are available. Not gone, surely, but greatly reduced. There certainly hasn't been much rhetoric from music camp of late.
The online video world, on the other hand, has become this byzantine mishmash of rights and exclusions which lead to some of the weirdest inabilities to consume their content. For example, Hulu Plus won't let me stream their content from my Android tablet over an HDMI connection because they aren't licensed for that type of connection from a "mobile" device. My tablet's not particularly mobile, being wifi only. In contrast, a Windows laptop, regardless of it's network radios, can run that content out over pretty much any video port it wants.
Then there's the content that's just not available online at any price from anywhere or which has been given exclusively to one source or another.
I suspect that quite a bit of the piracy that's currently going on right now is because consumers can't get the content they want where they want it for reasons they just consider absurd. Fix that and much of your problem disappears.
@Elmer Phud Re: Fuck 'em
Wadda ya mean "anyone else?" What he really effectively said was "oh sure, we gots privacy...our own special brand of privacy."
We Yanks ain't got it any better than anyone else.
How "right to privacy" fails to imply "right to data protection" is beyond me. Must be a lawyer thing...
@Mark. 15:25
You're missing the bit where iPhones have a much larger share of the US market. Don't remember the numbers offhand, but Apple's market depletion is coming primarily at the hands of the emerging markets.
That said, I do feel wounded each month when the cell bill arrives. I keep trying to find a way off the merry-go-round, but if you want decent coverage, you gets to pay the tariff even after your "subsidy" is paid off. And that's true no matter what platform you decide is best.
Oh!...and now you can't even take your "paid for" phone off to another company without permission from your current carrier.
Re: Facebook is the new AOL
"To be fair to Facebook, at least I don't have a metric crap-tonne of Facebook CDs kicking around, plus dropping out of every magazine I ever touch. "
Somehow, I 'spect that if CDs were still a viable transport, you'd have enough new FB christmas ornaments to decorate a forest...
Re: After the contract has expired,
Even before the contract has expired, this is ludicrous! Every cellphone contract of which I'm aware has an early termination fee clause. You wanna unlock your subsidized phone? Pay the ETF.
I've also noticed that even with all the crying the operator do about having to subsidize devices, my bill never seems to drop once that "subsidy" is paid off.
Upvote for you for beating me to that point...
Re: greetings from Austria
That must be like StormWatch!™ which is what we get here in Southern California at the slightest hint of a drizzle.
Re: Several problems that I can see
Oh, I agree whole-heartedly. Personally, I'm usually much more interested in the story than the resolution or the framerate but then, I do know people who will spend $200 on an audio cable to get that extra half dB or dynamic range or what ever it is a fancy cable gets you.
Besides, all these technologies will plummet to cheap as chips eventually if history is any indicator.
Re: Several problems that I can see
"what would you do with a PB of storage, unless of course you run something like Pixar"
Well, Let's see...
DVD's are about 5GB per platter for basicly SD video.
Bluray bumped that up to around 30GB for HD video.
Extrapolating, 4K video would be about 120GB and 8K would be pushing 500GB. Anyone know what MegaImmersiveHolySh*tIsThatRealHD requires? ('cause ya know we ain't done yet). And that's just resolutions. Framerates appear to be on the rise too, if "the Hobbit" is any indication.
Photo resolutions keep bumping up, audio bitrates keep increasing along many axes.
Yeah, much of that can be stored in the cloud. Once we all trust the cloud...
...and have reliable access to the cloud from whereever...
...and have enough bandwidth for the larger streams...
Once, Mega was the stuff of storage, now it's barely memory. Giga was the stuff of dreams, now you need at least 2 of them just to start your PC. Peta, Exa, Yotta and even Zeta will all eventually fall into the personal orbit, even if we can't imagine how at the moment.
How about...
...compulsory licensing of all patents. Not just software, but anything.
The justification for a patent is to protect the investment the inventor has made in developing the invention. The current system provides that protection by giving the inventor exclusive rights to their invention. To me, this seems to be the point where innovation is strangled: if I have a good idea based on your good idea, I can't do anything with my good idea without your permission. Companies are using this concept to entrench themselves and hold their competitors at bay.
In the copyright world, at least in the US, there is a compulsory license which, as I understand it, gives anyone the right to perform a work that has been previously publicly released regardless of the copyright owner's wishes so long as the performer pays a royalty to the rights holder.
Imagine if this concept were extended to patents. The inventor would still be protected (if you invent something that everyone else wants to copy, you get a cut of all those copies). Innovation would also be enhanced and markets could thrive just as the tech industry (computer industry back then) did before software became patentable.. I'm sure there are a thousand niggly little details that would have to be worked out, but it would be a good place from which to start, wouldn't it?
Re: Don't want you pictures / Info used and abused?
It would be simple if I could guarantee that nobody else would upload pictures of me...
Not so simples, then...
Re: Lets give it to them right up the a*se
"Set up a few fake accounts, upload copyrighted photos from as many famous photographers, swamp Instagram with thousands of these pictures.... Sit back and wait....."
Sorry, that dog won't hunt. Instagram will claim safe harbor under the DMCA, as long as they take appropriate action on being notified of IP issues with the images involved.
How they're going to dodge the model release is more interesting and, frankly, quite frightening.
Isn't it about time to start the conversation about secondary privacy? You know, everything someone else knows about you is not necessarily available to the highest bidder. It's not just photos; how many people have handed out your email address(es) in the guise of "contact management?"
Posted in Help-desk hell
Re: Could you send a copy of your data
A friend related the story of a woman who came into his shop with a bad 5 1/4 floppy. He checked it, found it was corrupted, reformatted it and sent her on her way. This process repeated several times until he decided he'd best visit her at home to see what was causing the problem. After watching her go through her routine and finding nothing wrong, he told her he would have to do some research into her problem and get back to her.
As he prepared to leave, she took the disk out of her computer, walked over and stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet...
Posted in Help-desk hell
Re: Space: The Final Front Ear
"I have also had calls where I have spent upwards of 15 minutes trying to help someone find the Enter key."
...better than the "Any" key!
Re: it looks very similar to....
It also looks amazingly like...turning a page in a real book, hence obviousness:
"Hey, Mr. Joe Average, who is not even skilled in the art of computer software design or programming and has never seen any fruity product, if you wanted to do an animation to move from one page in your ebook to the next, how would you do it?"
...and the bar for the USPTO is supposedly "skilled in the art."
Re: So it'an Acer.....
Sorry...downvote for U. I've got an A500 which I bought on release day here in the US and I've never had a lick of trouble with it (oh...do I tempt Murphy with that statement).
The A110, however, does seem like a misfire. Haven't heard of a rebate in the states, so the lesser screen and memory offset by SD card and HDMI port don't really warrant a $30 premium on the 16Gb Nexus 7, particularly with news of Miracast support in JB 4.2.
Re: Curious
I believe the piracy threat referred to is that of international piracy. The US Coast Guard's mission concerns only US coastal waters not such places as the Strait of Malacca where Somalian piracy has been rampant.
Still, it's sad to see such a piece of history fall to the scrapheap rather than being preserved as one of the early milestones (for good or ill) of the nuclear age.
@the_LocoCoyote Re: Wasted £10 on maps of Spain
"It gets tiring hearing about how tech company A (B, C, G, M...whatever) is screwed up because you can't use your device to do something it isn't designed for."
...and that is the Locus of the problem I have with Apple's Philosophy: 'We didn't design it for that, so you shouldn't use it for that.'
It just seems a bit shortsighted to me that Apple can't seem to imagine why anyone would take a device without a cellular connection out of the house. Even after introducing the Personal Hotspot functionality.
Not that they're completely alone in this blindspot. Personally, I can't imagine needing a cellular radio on my tablet since I carry my phone with me everywhere but all the manufacturers and carriers keep trying to convince me I need it.
I know, I know. "There's more money in it!"
Cake and eating it too!
What I love is the spin Apple puts on things. First, it was "OK, our screen is smaller, but just LOOK at the resolution!" Now, with a lower resolution, it's "Look how much BIGGER our screen is!"
Security through obscurity...
...is a fool's errand, particularly for a product as generic as this since the code eventually has to be deployed. It's utter hubris to believe that a small team, no matter how good, can create a truly defect-free kernel.
This sounds much more like KL trying to market their security reputation to the uninitiated.
I believe that the only way to get to a low defect OS is to keep it tight and put in front of as many eyes as possible.
Posted in Google gets hands on 'glove-cam' patent
Re: RTFP
Okay, I read the patent summary (don't have time to wade through the entire thing at the moment) and I still say that between obviousness (camera on finger? why, whodathunkit?!) and prior art (optical mouse, for one), this is just a prime example of the modern patent system gone awry.
Is ANYTHING obvious anymore?
Posted in AT&T defends FaceTime price gouge
Re: False premise
Tell that to all the download sites that throttle per connection bandwidth...
Posted in AT&T defends FaceTime price gouge
@Steve Knox Re: "network neutrality only applies to competitors"
Yes, the AT&T VP's blog post was discussing the FCC's net neutrality rules, not the general principal itself.
...and the guy is technically correct. AT&T is perfectly free to use these policies to drive their users to other carriers!
Re: Apple fail
Sorry, but you're missing the point of remote wipe completely!. The idea (and it's useful in many circumstances) is that if your device is stolen, the thief can be prevented from accessing any sensitive data. Kinda hard to do, if the thief has to give permission for the wipe to happen.
"Mr. thief, would you mind terribly if we eliminated all the data you've tried to obtain (Y/N)?"
Re: @DougS - null and void
I fail to see how the assertion of higher resale value could lead to a conclusion that iPhones tend to be used longer than Android phones or how that would justify a sample set so heavily skewed against what are, admittedly, current but nonetheless indicative sales figures.
Piper Jaffray may not be a scientific research company, but they have certainly trumpeted these figures to the press and have reached suspect conclusions in the process for the press to tout to world+dog.
Re: null and void
I'm not an expert either, but when the sample set has the shares for iPhone and Android flipped almost exactly to IDC and Gartner numbers for current market share (52% iPhone, 26% Android in the survey versus 23% iPhone, ~57% Android in the market numbers), I'd say any findings are suspect.
Re: "Rory poses the question of whether Facebook's $100bn valuation can be justified."
You know, what really, TRULY astounds me is this ever growing assumption that Facebook is a foundational pillar of the internet rather than the latest webtrend writ large.
Anyone remember the days of Yahoo or AOL? Myspace?
Re: Greater democracy?
Silly me. I thought politicians were supposed to be answerable to their constituents.
I know...SO 19th century...
Re: Kansas!?
OK, that's not quite it either. Having grown up in Overland Park, I can tell you that it and Lenexa along with the rest of Northeastern Johnson County (in Kansas) grew as the "bedroom communities" of Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas City, Kansas which is in neighboring Wyandotte County (as a matter of fact, Overland Park is actually larger than KCK). They are all in the "Kansas City Metropolitan Area" but KCMO (the Missouri one) is the anchor of the region.
None-the-less, they are still both Kansas City not Kansas which is a state. From what I can find on the Google blog about the project, both KCK and KCMO are included in the project, but it is unclear whether the cities in Johnson County (which are the true locations of Garmin and Sprint) are included.
@a53
That's it, just ignore the bombers flying over your tidy little walled garden...
Posted in Study fingers humans for ocean heat rise
Re: As an outdoorsy kind of nerd...... jury still out
Yeah, this is the issue I always have with this kind of report. We measured the system for .0000001101 percent of its total estimated lifespan, so we know exactly what's going on!
Just last week, there was a report indicating that sea tempuratures in the miocene era (IIRC) were significantly warmer than previously presumed.
I'm not saying that it's not human related. I AM saying that we really do not have a significant benchmark to test against.
Re: Poisoned AP + auto sync
Yeah! Pwned while your ultrabook sleeps! Woohoo!
BOFH's the world over be afraid...be VERY afraid!
