Posts by GrumpyOldBloke
48 posts • joined Saturday 5th March 2011 02:14 GMT
Re: A shame really
Plus you have to throw it away in three or four years when the battery expires - no more passing gadgets down to the in-laws. A terrible waste given the obvious effort they have put into manufacturing the phones.
Re: I have no issue with this
It's horses for all courses...
Re: greatness
@MyBackDoor: I am not sure that Google's behaviour in this scenario is necessarily motivated by avarice. The scenario you describe would be the typical approach of someone coming in from the outside; I have a dream but first X, Y and Z must happen. A few months down the track and the realisation hits that X and Y are already present and Z just needs a few changes. Hat's off to Google for backing up and working with the community on Z rather than going off and inventing the wheel as other large corporate patent trolling companies might.
Re: ..corporate chief tried to force the Unity interface
>Unlike WindblowZE, there is a cure for Unity: sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback
Not any more, not after the gnome teams recent efforts simplifing nautilus. Now it is sudo apt-get install xfce4 with the added advantage that it works across multiple x screens. Thank goodness there is choice in the linux world and we don't all have to follow Microsoft over the cliff.
Re: Brilliant!
Human rights? How are those searches for WMD's going in Iraq after the free west inadvertently killed a million of their people in a bid to halt oppression (or was that the decline of the petrodollar). Afghanistan? Mali? Somalia? Palestine? to name a few. I think you will find that here in the West our approach to human rights tends to end or ruin a lot more lives than all of the 'totalitarian' regimes put together.
Let's hope this is another step towards Sony exploring the concept of the customer and perhaps discovering that the only vested interests that count are the ones bearing coin.
Re: Microsoft partners are hurting
Acer are also fighting their corporate reputation. Old Chinese shopkeeper saying - you can only cut a person once. I will shed no tears for them when they are gone.
>How is this going to work?
The same way the anti-bullying campaign works in Australian schools. There will be policy documents. Public servants will be required to agree with the policy documents. There will be lots of public servants. The policies will apply to everyone except unruly bullies whose parents have few material assets, those who come from a disadvantaged minority or those who have a history of antisocial problems. The policy will be held up as evidence of a solution. Like mandatory bicycle helmets and obesity or child porn laws and teen sexting there will be many unintended consequences. The consequences will not be allowed to overshadow the fact that there is a policy and therefore a solution.
Re: Did he forget the magic word?
Memory!
Re: Prior art...
Slightly bigger but offering much the same end user experience as the last time and the time before that and the time before that. Not good with directions. The little antenna thing might not work right and if you hold it wrong it might not work at all. Dissatisfaction with the docking accessories and compatibility. The back is easily scratched. Wireless communication is always tricky. Then there is the iPhone with its improved efficiency, longer battery life and better survivability when dropped - see the two things are completely different.
Re: Job creation
Thank you for your concern Shagbag but I can assure you that Australia has well and truly left its convict days behind it. Casually depriving someone of their property without just equity or consent is no longer a crime punishable by deportation to the other side of the world. Taking more than you are rightfully entitled to or have consent for is now a job requirement in the public, finance and trade sectors of the economy. Far from denigrating those poor souls who seek to profit by feeding vending machines with washers and other worthless bits of tin we applaud those who create money out of thin air and hold in high esteem those who then gamble it away. Australia is no longer a land of hard working gaolers managing untrustworthy convicts - in fact it is quite the reverse.
Re: detail work at sub-millimeter accuracy
>Sounds to me like Apple have made a difficult to assemble product
That was my first thought on reading the article - engineering failure.
Re: If Only..
The only thing that stood between Nokia and another decade or two of success was a business school and an undeserved executive qualification. They held the future in their hands and then went to lunch.
The UN identified a decade or so ago the move to portable personal computing devices, either because of a lack of demand or infrastructure for PC's (Africa) or a lack of space or privacy in the house (Asia). HP claim to be a computing company, there is a market niche not being met by the consumer smart phone solutions currently on offer - a niche last served by WinMob6. Give us a computer that is also a phone. No need to root, sensible fully featured operating system (I vote for Debian/Qt) none of that MS rubbish, no hidden hardware api's, no spyware, no closed crap markets, decent high res screen, decent HID support, maybe a keyboard, something that when I buy it it is mine. Get it right and I may suspend judgement on the shoddy build quality of value engineered American products and buy one.
Re: New Headline...
Locate a man in his 20s with this tattoo driving a red car...ensure man accounts for all his time, currency exchanges and carbon footprint in next tax return else its off to the slave labour camps (prison) where at $2 per day he can repay his debt to government while enriching the private prison operators. Remember the bad people hate us for our freedoms, ha ha ha ha....sigh.
Independence?
>in particular, “that regulation will be free from any government and political interference”.
Public servant calls for independence from oversight by publics representatives - the irresponsible government model. Look how well that worked for the central banks of US and Europe.
Yes I know the elected representatives are mostly morons but they are our morons and they are all we have against the arrogant, belligerent, self serving fiefdom which is the public sector.
>the Australian Tax Office is reportedly looking for more interception powers as well
No time like the present to ask for it then. We have two major political parties that are committed to throwing any remaining Australian civil liberties under a bus just as quickly as they can - either to bring us into line with someone or the ever ready child porn defense. One of the supporters of these new powers, the opposition party, is even going to go to the election on a free speech platform - monitored free speech of course, but that has got to be better than nothing. Strangely enough, with all these demands for subjects to surrender information to the state including mandatory strip searches at international airports, the state itself is quite opaque and becoming more so.
Re: has a complete misapprehension of...
Thank you David 12. Calling for stricter regulation of net content - a position broadly in line with the ambitions of much of Australia's public sector, the established content industry and many religious groups - is a call that does not fall on deaf ears. While the NBN is a layer 2 device, there is nothing stopping the government imposing special conditions of access - such conditions are probably planned as part of the end game anyway. With no other competing high speed fixed networks allowed, play the game or loose access to your customers. Stranger things have happened - http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/einstein/
Re: Security
>what approach to security will they take
Ours or theirs?
Re: Flawed sample set
>nothing but security theater at worst.
At worst it is much worse than just security theatre. The effects of the xray and millimetre wave scanners on human health should be factored in as well as the spread of disease from TSA workers not changing gloves between intimate pat downs. Consider also the economic cost of having your tourism industry destroyed by these procedures or the strong disincentives to frequent business travel (ignoring malware that just goes in and steals products anyway). It may also be that the surrender of freedom that the NSA / CIA / FBI / FEMA / Homeland Security / TSA police state embodies will mean a less confident, less creative America - that is for products people actually want to buy rather than products dropped upon them from 40,000 feet - and that does not augur well for their future - exhibit A: the UK. On the bright side, most of the Western world seems to be heading down this path of oppression and we may all soon find common purpose in the dream of moving to China, Russia or North Korea for the principles of freedom and democracy that they represent.
Lost me at 720P
Hight powered device (i7/4GB/SSD etc) but which developers were pleading for the same rubbish display available on any low end laptop. Stretch a little, buy a mac and get lots of dots.
Posted in AMD smacked by channel slump in Q2
Re: the "business conditions" are mainly that AMD's APU's are kinda crappy?
Plus the low yield on their 'high end' fx cpu's
Re: And so it begins..
Probably not. If Dell really has been talking to customers then they will be well aware that the leading edge of the tech community is moving away from windows and there is resistance in the user community to microsofts latest offerings. It must be a bit frightening for Dell, not wanting to be the next Nokia but not yet ready to clench the hand that supports it. Dell need to be seen to be playing with the cool kids and somehow relevant.
Re: Errm...
May not be that simple. Remember the tilt bits and other DRM junk built into vista and above. What microsoft may be saying is that there are now so many checks, balances encryptions, decryptions and obfuscations built into their OS to keep everyone but the purchaser happy that it is now barely stable in the real world. One flipped bit somewhere and the whole thing comes crashing down.
Great Idea
Apple backed themselves into a corner with: iPhone4. This changes everything. Again.
But now: iPhone5. You change everything.
Genius!
Where are software patents when you need them?
Re: a small plastic nub on top of the machines!
I think you are missing the genius of this. They have gone from a flat surface that you can drag a bag or oversize article across to a flat surface obstructed by a blob. Absolutely brilliant! If this isn't an example of public sector led progress then I don't know what is.
No need, once they are fitted with GPS we can expect to find them lost in the outback or driving into the sea.
Posted in How iiNet beat Big Content
Re: Blank media tax
The problem with a blank media tax or its internet equivalent is that it tends to reward the major producers by volume of work rather than the smaller innovators by quality, thus entrenching the dinosaurs. There is enough dross coming out of big content now without encouraging them to produce more just to up their share of a honey pot.
Optional then Mandatory
For our foreign guests, a little background. Victoria is Australia's police state, followed closely by South Australia. Any nut job legislation (like 3km/h tolerances on speed limits or mandatory bicycle helmets) is first trialled in Victoria and then rolled out to the rest of the country - to bring us in line. What we have is a voluntary $30 bicycle registration scheme that will for all sorts of nefarious social benefits be made mandatory and will probably then be linked to 3rd party insurance requirements. We will arrive at a place whereby the police can fine cyclists and check their papers as easily as they currently do other road users - assuming they don't shoot them first.
Posted in HTC wants a hug after glum Q1 estimates
Loose the spyware
I have been quite happy with my HTC Android phone but the next one will not be HTC. Companies that cant resist the corporate urge to include spyware and unneeded data logging software in their devices do not deserve to survive – I appreciate how hypocritical this comment is given that I am using a Google OS.
Torch Relay
If I wanted flames out of the top of my mobile device I would buy from sony
Posted in Certification for Malaysian IT pros?
any professional registering with the board ... possess professional experience ... unregistered IT professionals will not be allowed to “practice, carry on business or take up employment which requires him to carry out or perform the services of a Registered Computing Professional.
This is why logic should be left to professionals, public servants have no place in this space.
Posted in Netflix rules out Kiwi launch
A small mostly empty country with a stuffed economy, a nanny state, crap services and where the political discourse reaches the level of who should take offence when someone hauls a couch to the top of one of the mountains for a barbeque (noting they did take it down again) or how much to pay to appease the latest mythical Maori creature that has just been discovered in the path of critical infrastructure. Pedestrian speed limits, high taxes and a bunch of white people pretending to be brown people. Get out of NZ and see the world, you will come to realise that apart from the fresh air blowing past you at 60 knots there is not a lot on offer.
>an opportunity to be engine room of content creation...
There is nothing stopping Australian plumbers and poets becoming an engine room of content creation today, just as there was nothing stopping them yesterday - but it didn't happen and it wont happen tomorrow. While the former politician can wax lyrical about our communications infrastructure he completely ignores the tax structure in place in Australia that acts as a massive disincentive to all risky startup ventures, especially those featuring ephemeral products like software or media content. Starting 2012 tax collectors will be working even harder to collect the carbon tax as well as anything else they can get their hands on to pay for the governments share of the national fibre network.
The proposed TPP free trade agreement will probably introduce draconian penalties for IP theft which will deter ISP's from hosting new media streams that have not come from authorised sources - much as a previous generation of the agreement did in South Korea. The Nanny state, the cost of media classification and threats of internet censorship will also inhibit Australia achieving this glorious content based future.
So while the former politician can swan around blowing sunshine up darkened places, infrastructure alone will not allow Australia to reach this glorious pinnacle of which he speaks. Such a future could only start once the public sector got its hands off our wallets and its noses out of our lives - ie no time soon.
Best of NZ and AUS TV
From New Zealand: Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby and Leigh Harts Mysterious Planet
From Australia: Newstopia (SBS), Sideshow (ABC) and some of The Gruen Transfer (ABC).
Yep, about 30 seconds.
You just have to see this with the eyes of a public servant. Obviously no one in IT wants to invest in an overtaxed nanny state on the butt side of the world. However, by having representatives right next to the tech companies that will overbid for your next unneeded data whore house you can skip all the hard work of dreaming up compliance and collection scenarios and go straight to the spending money phase - an obvious improvement in efficiency allowing the streamlining of expenditure a at reduced overall cost, against employing and housing consultants etc, with more achievable and predictable outcomes. Its brilliant!
re: Security
Agreed, this fire(wall) is about end user security which is obviously a lesser priority than Sony Corporate security. On the plus side, once the TV catches fire it can no longer leak unauthorised content, perhaps this is just an upgraded application of the DRM/DHCP model. I look forward to reading about the next generation of TVs with active content protection lasers in addition to Sonys world leading self destruct technology.
Crap Support Service
Yup, still waiting for Acer to honour a cash back deal on an 8.9" Aspire One. Never buy the brand again.
Posted in Neurogaming set to be launched by Disney
Queue the standards war...
Direct Grope or Open GropeL
Additionally...
The problems of a banker in the West being able to generate truly random number sequences and communicate these by stage coach net or next generation steam train net to a banker in the East without anyone having a quick peak would suggest that this was not a perfect solution. Human nature would also suggest that shift sequences would be reused over time. Rather than being perfect, the shiftybank algorithm and key sharing mechanism was probably adequate for the time.
re: Consensus science
Lets hope you have nothing caused by miasma, witchcraft, demonic possession or something that requires you be pumped full of mercury to cure. While consensus can often be readily arrived at, being right can take a little more work and is often not nearly as popular. 1000 fools do not a wise man make.
Other opportunities to profit?
Not here in Oz, we follow a strict - guns are bad - policy, unless of course they are in the hands of the state.
Who needs more public servants
Why dont the emergency service personnel just use the telco networks. If they could be prioritised and had access to several carriers then they would have a far more robust system than their dinky little operations at a fraction of the cost.
Posted in Ubisoft whispers the wonder of Wii 2
Gota Love Progress
Wii.1=dodgy PS2 ports with naff controls. Wii.2=dodgy PS3 ports with naff controls.
I wonder
Dont believe everything you read in the press and single out one nation. Leaders and public servants the world over, including many in the West, are becoming terrified of their populations or are moving to totalitarian control to cover the crimes of their cronies in arms or finance.
Good!
If politicians are caught up in this sort of nonsense too then maybe they will think twice before standing with all the stupid OMG-Think-of-the-Children nutters that are attempting to usurp ownership of children.
