Posts by Peter Hartley
7 posts • joined Friday 15th June 2007 13:39 GMT
Spamfestation of search results
Like poster Number6, I'm right behind any Google algorithm, special-cased or otherwise, that keeps price comparison sites out of the search results. I'd always assumed that Kelkoo, for instance, retained its annoying presence due to a bug in Google's algorithms rather than any deliberate "whitelisting". Google should provide a setting (implemented like the Safe Search setting) that lets the end-user turn the whitelisting off, so that Kelkoo, Foundem and the rest remain at 119th place or beyond, where they belong.
Peter
@spendergrsec: no, Mikov is right, you're scaremongering
The simple bug is dereferencing tun in the line "tun->sk". The fact that after that there's a NULL test on "tun" which GCC correctly optimises away, doesn't make it a more serious or unusual bug -- although it would certainly be nice if GCC issued a warning "optimising away NULL test because you've already dereferenced it". In particular, your contention that "from a source review the bug is unexploitable" is wrong, unless the source reviewer in question somehow misses the "tun->sk" line with the bug in.
The bug in PulseAudio, which the Reg article somehow conflates with this one, is of course completely separate.
Peter
Posted in Philips Streamium NP2900
Gapless?
"We think Philips missed a trick by not enabling the NP2900 to access iTunes – or Squeezecentre - as a server in the way Roku's Soundbridge can. Doing so would not only have meant gapless playback for opera fans..."
Um, what's the connection there? Surely gapless playback is a client-side feature, not a server-side feature; if NP2900 can't do it against Twonky or other UPnP servers, what makes you think it could manage it against an Itunes or Squeezebox protocol server?
Peter
Posted in Apple cracks down on rogue app stores
SDK licence, or Developer Agreement?
The original Ars Technica piece says that the new conditions are attached to the Iphone Developer Program, not to the SDK download itself. The Developer Program is the extra thing that you have to do, and pay $99 for, to get your programs on the App Store. If that's the case, and if they aren't changing the SDK licence conditions, then it's more like they're saying "You can choose EITHER to be a registered developer and get stuff on the App Store, OR to distribute your programs for jailbroken phones, not both". Which dichotomy may be uncomfortable for some, but is a lot more reasonable than the blanket ban that the Reg article suggests.
Peter
Posted in Emtec Movie Cube S800 DVR
@Jason
You're right, in fact, that I hadn't previously seen the Rapsody gear -- but AFAICT the ones that have screens (RSH-xxx) can't do streaming (i.e. don't have a network connection), and the ones with a network connection (N3x) don't seem to have a screen.
Peter
Posted in Emtec Movie Cube S800 DVR
What's interesting about this...
...is that it's the first gadget I've seen that lets you stream video to a TV, *and* has its own screen for listening to audio without having to turn the TV on, both in the same box. Shame about the software, then, as having good, intuitive software is an essential part of that experience.
Peter
Posted in Kids get early start in electronics
Electronics
> "From the headline, I'd conjured up a wonderful mental image of a class full of eager seven-year-olds wielding soldering irons and reciting the colour codes for resistors. Now that would be a great news story."
OK, it was age ten, not seven, but the headmaster at the state primary I went to had us doing just that. And learning about transistors, logic gates, 74 series TTL (real 74 series, mind, none of that modern 74LS or 74HSC nonsense), and all the rest. It was indeed a good news story, we all got on local radio and even Granada Reports with it. It was 1982.
Peter
