Posts by Giles Jones
2493 posts • joined Wednesday 13th December 2006 15:36 GMT
Page:
Just use the website?
http://www.teletext.co.uk/
Re: Truth in Advertising
Have you seen the film Crazy People with Dudley Moore? he plays an advertising executive who does just that, creates adverts with the honest truth in them, they ended up working really well too.
I'm guessing BT's honestly approach would lose them business though.
We're the 51st state, so we buy from the US and in return they give us nothing.
Re: When will parents learn
Kids make mistakes, so it's pretty foolish to link your credit card to their iTunes account. Just like you probably wouldn't give your child a mobile phone on a contract.
Anyone responsible would use iTunes vouchers. They would get through it so fast that alarm bells would ring.
Java is different from C, C++ and other languages. It is a combination of syntax, an API and a virtual machine.
C and C++ do not typically provide set API (they often have standard libraries and these are sometimes copyrighted), the OS provides the runtime and the API.
So in this case it is quite right for patents and copyrights on this to be defended. Sun only tolerated Google's use of Java derived technology due to Google's overall contribution to the Java community. Oracle are obviously less tolerant.
Re: Recycled Technology?
Please quantify, you can connect a Bluetooth keyboard to iOS and run stuffy office apps if you really want to (yawn).
There's tons of tools for musicians. That is "productive" surely?
Re: "Apple is a liberator, not an oppressor"
Nobody is going to publish their works to a store where it can be easily copied. DRM is mandated by the media creators.
Unless schools do things using the GPIO on the PI board then I don't see the whole idea of the board since the video I've seen of the unit in use just shows it running Debian Linux and some educational software.
Re: Very sick of it
But have you noticed Apple tends to sue based on design and UI patents but Samsung and others sue Apple relating to low level hardware patents?
Doesn't that say a lot? when has Samsung claimed that the iOS UI has infringed their work? never as far as I know.
Patents on the chips under the hood is pretty irrelevant for the most part. The most important part is the CPU core and that's a licenced design from ARM. The software is what make all that otherwise useless chippery do something interesting.
Re: The data fetishists are still *very* much in place.
Not to mention the fun they will have gathering information on celebrities and other high profile people. Such personal information will be very useful for blackmailing opposition politicians or union bosses into backing down.
Posted in Angry Birds want to be Donald Duck
Re: Oh God help me! I was going to ask if anyone can get me off this planet.........
Perhaps they wanted to do a more relaxed bird game? Except that the name mellow birds is already used.
Re: Why the iPad?
Why not the iPad? Have you not noticed the fact that Apple kit tends to attract a lot of interesting accessories?
The iPad for the same reason a serious guitarist buys a nice instrument and doesn't use some cheap plank from Argos.
They want something that looks nice, built well, good support and that many others will have.
If they use some Archos or other Android thing it will require a redesign every 6 months for different ports and layouts. Zillions of Android fan boys will complain that that model isn't supported or won't fit. Someone will hack it to work and then the company gets bombarded with problems.
In the end it's just simpler to support one hugely popular brand (there's more iPads in musicians hands than Archos tablets?), especially on a device that already has loads of music tools already available for it.
Quite negative postings on here. Who says IT workers in India are less proficient? my experience is quite the opposite. Microsoft has lots of developers from India.
Also, bear in mind the time zone differences in having outsourcing which can be advantageous for testing. When the working day in the UK is ending people based in another country can still be working for a few hours. So the next day developers can come in and have test results.
It is surely advantageous to make use of the whole 24 hours in a day?
...and there's me thinking a that transformer is a device for raising or lowering AC voltage. A use of the name that has been around for quite some time.
But maybe the games will be fun? enjoyment is supposedly part of the fun. For instance, no amount of graphic realism will make driving a racing car on a console like the real thing, there's no wind, dust, g-force or sense of imminent death if you get things wrong.
Posted in Apple New iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G
Re: Lovely screen
How do you know that it wasn't damaged in transit?
As for the yellow-ness, there were streaks on the iPhone 4 at first, it was the glue setting. They had shipped so fast from the factory that it hadn't had time to cure fully.
Posted in Game CEO steps down
Nice of him to leave it so late. I thought the captain was supposed to go down with his ship?
So in reality he's jumped off-ship in the life-raft while everyone else drowns in the sinking ship.
Re: Not writting it off....
Placebo is the only way. It is why that test is done, in many cases people get symptoms when you suggest the idea.
Just like telling people they are looking at an original oil painting makes them say they like it even though its not. The human mind is pretty suggestible, probably why blind taste tests are required too.
Re: Not writting it off....
Satellite TV and GPS are beamed to earth along with other communications. The frequency is very high to get through the ionosphere of the planet. You don't hear many people complaining about that?
WIFI, mobile data and smartmeters must use much lower transmit power than GPS or Satellite TV.
If they hadn't been told it was using radio signals they wouldn't have even noticed.
Re: Free stuff
It's quite a different use case to use Linux as a development workstation deploying to Linux servers than a office desktop for purely running software.
There are still quite a lot of Windows only tools in the office arena.
Re: So do people actually scan these things?
They seem like the sort of thing that augmented reality would be handy for. A QR placed somewhere on a static poster could then trigger a 3D advert when viewed through an AR app. The video would replace the poster.
It would also make a "They Live" augmented application possible, just need to replace the faces of random people with alien faces :)
Re: Colour QR
Microsoft proposed their own colour QR using triangles. But it's not took off, colour costs more.
As Amiga users used to say years ago when PC gamers mentioned there were no Amiga games: "If you want to play games, get a playstation".
Of course, things have moved on since then but I would imagine WP7 gamers would be better getting a Vita :)
Even read only USB sticks would be better than optical media. You probably wouldn't need to install to the hard disc either.
Re: LibreOffice for Android
Except that Android is effectively owned and controlled by Google who are a giant just like Microsoft and Apple.
So there's not total freedom.
Posted in 440m2 screen has fewer pixels than iPad
It's all about viewing distances and the like. Such a big screen isn't much good if you are a foot away from it.
Re: Gave up reading at
Well, it was actually the 4000T that was probably the last design.
68060 was pretty good, but they did have to remove some features from the silicon that had to be done in software. It wasn't a mass market chip either, no other desktops were using it that I know of. Everyone else was moving on to PPC.
Re: Gave up reading at
Indeed. Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking and a micro kernel in 1985. It took Mac OS until 2001 to get something similar.
Oh and it was colour, how many years was the Mac only available in mono?
Just get rid of SIMs and SIM locks full stop.
Re: Unity and Gnome Shell should have been a warning to them
I wouldn't call it a desktop UI, but a tile that provides a compatibility view for all the old Windows applications.
Re: Risky business?
It's almost like they knew it would tank, so why bother?
Re: Stoopid
Microsoft doesn't make tablets, phones or laptops. So no Apple kit is in direct competition in terms of hardware.
Re: hmmm
They paid one person more than that in their "payback" one year, payment for recruiting members or helping on the forums.
As for charities there's too many who gobble up 40 or so percent of the money in wage bills and advertising (those free pens aren't cheap) and often do things that should be state provided (which wouldn't require advertising then).
Second hand cars kill the new car market. So what?
Is it unreasonable that in these risk aversive times that we pay full price for something we may not like?
Re: Go get a grip, Mr Braben
You don't own software, you have a licence to use it.
You buy a jumper and you have a jumper to wear, but you don't have the right to produce and sell an identical product yourself.
They could surely use facebook or twitter for the time being? it's what the rioters used, so it can't be that bad.
Re: Samsung supplies parts?
Samsung is a huge company with many divisions. If it doesn't sell to Apple then it loses quite a huge chunk of business.
Sharp tried to make the screen but couldn't do it well enough. So they licenced the required patents to Samsung so they could.
It's funny how applications can do the same on your computer with no warning and there's no controls to stop it either. Yet nobody complains or even know about it?
Why are phones different? possibly because people trust app stores to weed out the bad applications. Plus people keep more personal data on their phones (not everyone has phone numbers on their PC).
But ultimately it has been proven that mobile app developers can't be trusted and so further controls are going to be needed. This is a shame as it means huge annoyances in having to authorise access to so many APIs when running an application.
Did you not see that Orange (Everything Everywhere?) are being given the chance to launch it this year?
Is it called Metro because it will be underground soon? (ie. buried).
Make no mistake, Metro is Microsoft Bob 2.
Posted in Comet and Walmart battle for Game
Re: Comet?
Well, they were taken over for a token payment and I imagine they would either shut the Game stores and bring the brand into Comet or they would keep them open and maybe sell a few TVs in there?
But to be honest, downloading games just like downloading movies and music is the way it is going. If second hand goes too it's a loss of quite a bit of sales.
In my town the independent game shop closed, Woolies is no longer with us, Game and Gamestation look like going which leaves pretty much HMV and Argos.
Posted in Lawyers of Mordor menace Hobbit boozer
Just an example of the whole IP and rights thing gone mad. All that is left to do is for the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to be sold to Disney for it to become Disney's The Hobbit.
Re: Hear No
It's funny how they can take the money instantly, yet can't do the same when paying it out.
Sorry but you have to split consumer from office to make sense of the numbers. Tablets are largely bought by consumers.
Lets face it, downloads are always going to be the future. Optical media is an 80s invention largely.
If you move beyond discs then you will have the risk of making it hard to get things onto the machine. Not vastly hard but a damn site harder than browsing a menu on the device and pressing "Buy".
The question is do you want to download on a PC, copy to a USB stick then install the game on the console. Or just press one button?
It was tried with the PSP Go and it failed miserably. The other problem is no competition, a single source means no price competition.
There's so many cores out there doing bugger all, I don't know why people can't be paid to process data via some background service. So long as it's not classified of course.
Some of us could solder a replacement on. It's irony that computer designed to teach people about the low level aspects of computing is delayed due to a manufacturing error. Perhaps they're learning too?
I really don't know why schools don't use Arduino or something.
