Posts by jubtastic1
784 posts • joined Thursday 11th May 2006 09:53 GMT
Posted in Violent videogames reduce crime
Zombie Mary Whitehouse disagrees
She groans that you will burn in hell for your virtual sins.
That can be calculated can't it?
Google recently stated in court that iOS represents 2/3 of their mobile search queries, we know how many iOS devices are out there, by looking at the cash Google sends to say Mozilla for Firefox searches someone could calculate roughly how much they're saving on searches from Android devices.
Not me though, can't be arsed, bet it's dwarfed by their costs at the moment though, especially given the Motorola purchase.
Posted in Amazon's Kindle Fire is sold at a loss
Poor analogy
A single game sale will push a PS3 into profit, and subsequent sales will generate lively income, whereas the stuff Amazon is shifting carries razor thin margins, App Store revenue is a rounding error for Apple, and as far as tablet content sales goes (books, films, music & apps), Amazon will be hard pushed to match that.
Now Amazon may well be happy with those slim profits from content as a long term income stream but Samsung, Motorola and the rest of the Android tablet Manufacturers can't replicate the strategy with no content and are likely to be squeezed out between Apple and Amazon, Google can't be best pleased about degoogled Amazon Tablets derailing their tablet efforts either.
Removing them works as well
And doesn't require constant patching, keep chrome around for the odd time a website doesn't fail back to HTML when flash isn't installed and get a third party app for PDF's.
Not a lot of help if you have to run Java apps but most users only interaction with java is through malware.
Does it also have a 5000000:1 dynamic contrast ratio?
3 days doing what exactly? Is it nothing by any chance?
Posted in Mars trips could blind astronauts
Centrifuge to the rescue?
Or more simply, design the ship as a short stubby can and spin the entire thing on it's axis, it's going to have to be built in space anyway.
Regarding point two
So Apple should restrict address book data from apps? Even contact based apps like Skype?
Skype has to have an address book to work at all, restricting access in iOS isn't going to change that, all it's going to do is annoy iOS users who will be forced to upload their contacts to Skype from their computers instead while Skype says "sorry peeps, nasty old Apple won't let you do it the easy way".
I also don't see how anyone could expect an OS to distinguish between a messaging app uploading data to a remote host in the normal course of usage and uploading data to a remote host because it's been coerced to do so, this is Skype's fail pure and simple.
Pics, details etc
What sort of stuff were they selling? Random gizmos with apple stickers applied or exact knockoffs of kit like headphone cables etc? Anything big, like a MBA? Was the software hacked versions of Apples or skinned something else? How does the counterfeit stuff compare with the real?
What's the Apple angle?
How does iOS differ from windows or android or anything else as far as JavaScript is concerned? And how does creating a new language that probably won't be supported on iOS combat that?
Off topic
But I wonder if anyone can explain why those Ads for payday loans at 4000% interest are legal? Seems like loan sharking to me.
^ this
Swapping businesspeople with expensive phone plans for teenagers on PAYG, who if my kids and their friends are any indication, use BBM nonstop on creditless phones, does not appear to be a viable long term proposition.
Vultures are circling.
Navfree on the AppStore
Spoken turn by turn, doesn't require Internet access, reroutes on the fly, you can't beat the price.
It's the proverbial headlamp of an oncoming train Mr Tom
Posted in TextGrabber
Bear in mind
The iPad camera is worse than the camera on the iPhone 2G, its fine for FaceTime, crap for photos.
Wouldn't it be cheaper
To send up astronauts made of meat?
"Mission control, we just lost Dave, got himself locked in the oven like Frank did last week, also we're running low on BBQ sauce"
Have you seen them?
Their leg-less torsos are bolted to the table, while the hunched upper body and arms imitate the cramped workers they replace, if these robots had faces, they would look like Marvin.
http://hitechanalogy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Foxconn-Robots-500x353.jpg
Posted in HP's UK PC boss: We're going nowhere
HP moots new business plan
1) Sell products at a substantial loss.
2) ...
3) Bankruptcy.
Meh
The only new bit is the conflict panel, and it doesn't look like it's going to work well for anything other than images and it's debatable whether it makes that easier, reminiscent of the PHD sync error dialogs on OS X that my users don't want to deal with.
^ this
And somewhat related, I heard Arthur C Clark is suing everyone that ever put a satellite in orbit
Regarding the prop
The pads in the picture are fixed to the table, they have no backs and line up with holes cut into the table top, the actors legs jostle for space with film projectors mounted under the table which provide the graphics and I'd imagine gently cook their shins.
In scenes where the actors wander about with a pad it's either off or displaying a static image.
Of course even if the pads were real, they'd still be fixed to the table along with the actors, as the whole set was designed to revolve, must have been fun going round and round while Kubrick retook the scene. Best set ever.
Well...
£89 is cheaper than a kindle, it may not be getting any updates but for what it does out of the box it's a steal at that price.
Posted in AutoCAD LT arrives on the Mac
App store licencing
Covers 5 installs if memory serves, so it's just $180 per workstation, that's a massive discount that some clients of mine will be pleased to hear about.
Hacker?
Changing the clock is hacking now? Really?
Heh
"an app that allows me to start reading a story about how Arsenal has failed to sign yet another player, for example, should continue with me once I shut off my smartphone and open my tablet"
That would be iCloud then, of course it will take a while for devs to add the API to their apps but as you point out it will make for a killer feature, so I'd expect takeup to be swift, and as a bonus it's from that IT company you love to stalk about.
You don't need a doughnut
Three balloons will form a hole at the centre as they firm up at altitude, a small hole granted but possibly big enough to shoot LOHAN through.
I heard the word procedural mentioned
Which generally means you don't bother creating a 1:1 "map" of the environment but instead describe sections and let the graphics engine create the ity bity details on the fly.
This probably also explains the macro level similarities and minecraft like appearance. I wouldn't read too much into that, as the guy said, they're programmers not artists and the purpose of the demo was to illustrate the levels of microscopic detail. I'd bet money that every one of the very similar looking macro blocks was in fact unique.
That's Amazing!
If they can do physics on the atoms it's more like a simulation than a game engine, Lloyd Grossman was a nice touch as well.
Posted in iPhone 5 now set for October launch
Cloud implementations
In previous efforts Apple attempted to put the users computers at the top of the tree with the cloud underneath them, this approach turned out to be fragile, iCloud puts itself at the top in a similar manner to competing sync engines so I'd expect a similar level of reliability between services, which is to say, they will all mostly work for most people.
AFAICT Google's cloud is basically an online filesystem, whereas Apple has gone for Application data Syncing, no idea what MS will do, probably both, I'd predict Googles approach being popular with techs, and Apples with users.
Just from my perspective here in the UK I still think it's a bit early for all this, that wireless networking lacks bandwidth and reliability and simply isn't ubiquitous enough for cloud services to replace local storage, I suspect a few early adopters will get properly burned, I suppose we have to start somewhere though.
Sounds reasonable
Until you consider that the "we sell everything" approach of Amazon and eBay are the success stories of online shopping.
I suspect the reasons for this are twofold, firstly punters recognise the shop and know it's legit and secondly, because they sell everything.
Posted in Note to Apple: Be more like Microsoft
Right off the money as usual Matt
Are you suggesting Apple should get out of the hugely profitable hardware business and instead licence their OS to 3rd parties so that others may enjoy those margins or that we should suspend belief for the purposes of your article?
Just a tip, but if you should ever meet Steve Jobs in the flesh, remember not to cross your reality distortion fields.
Call me a grumpy old man...
But no good will come of these newfangled TLD's, .app, .doc, .jpg, .etc
I can see misery looming ahead for the easily fooled masses and excited hand rubbing from the malware industry.
Heh
If you've got automatic login switched on then you're not really going to be worried about a FireWire hack.
Interesting that sleeping lions with FDE can be awoken by this though, that sounds like a hole that needs plugging, <tinfoil hat> or maybe, it's supposed to do that </tinfoil hat>
Posted in Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part Two
Don't do this at home kids
There's a reason hardly anyone knows about it, Apple has purposefully made this hard to do/find out about because sooner or later you will lose data moving files, eg Finder lock up mid move or a disk issue. Moves are not transactional, interruptions will result in data loss.
Seems to me
That if you took 140 trillion oceans worth of water vapour, bombarded it with radiation and assorted space debris while stirring it for billions of years there would likely be a whole ecosystem of tasty lifeforms living in it by now.
Hello space things, pleased to meat you.
Re: Wouldn't it be nice
If Adobe used standard OS windows and controls etc like *every* single other mac app on the platform so these problems, which are so common there's a website dedicated to pointing them out, didn't occur in the first place.
Fixing this is non trivial, seeing as it involves rebuilding the entire UI of the CS Suite, but then rolling their own UI was Adobe's choice, as was sitting on a Carbon codebase for a decade after it was depreciated. Numpties.
To the point, wouldn't it be nice if Adobe hired some engineers that can code worth a damn.
Awesome service
Net result of this being taken offline will be a reduction in the amount of TV watched in our house.
Message to the TV companies:
1) This service increases the exposure of shows, many of which have been added to normal TV viewing as a result of having been seen first on TV Catchup.
2) Negotiate with the service admins for viewing statistics, in show advertising is hitting extra eyeballs as a result of this and similar services, we have way more PC monitors than TV's in our house, dont focus on turning the Monitors off, make them count instead, more viewers means higher advertising rates.
3) Dumb TV's are on the way out, viewers want TV online, and they want it to be as easy as a TV, no one wants to have to load up a dozen websites to see what's playing on different channels.
4) You might wonder how a tiny outfit like this manages to stream at higher quality and greater reliability than your own in house efforts which have sucked up millions of pounds, maybe you could learn something from these guys.
Not the same thing
QNAP does proper old fashioned RAID, striping across drives or mirroring, expansion involves rebuilding a drive from parity, basically an exact copy of the previous drive on a larger disk, repeat for all drives then enable the extra storage space. Performance is notably better if all the drives are of the same model.
Drobo does block level mirroring across whatever drives it decides are best suited for the data, if you drop a drive and replace it with another of different capacity, you'll end up with different blocks written to it than the original, essentially, what drobo does is ensure all data is on the array twice, it doesn't matter what type or size the drives are because they don't need to be in sync to read data off, drobo just reads from the most convenient drive.
That's the theory, and technically it works well, you can mix and match any old drives in there and expanding the array requires *nothing* more than popping a drive out and sliding a bigger one in, in practice however, throughput steadily slows down until it's unbearable to work with and starts causing timing issues with some applications, the only fix I've found is to clone the entire array, wipe it and then copy everything back, this will need repeating every x months, depending on the data and churn rate.
Fine for backup, no good for live storage.
Nice name
And Drobo is a cool concept, shame the IO performance degrades so quickly.
Not sure if it's fragmentation or index bloat but throughput has dropped by a factor of ten over the course of a year.
Posted in Asteroid hunter achieves Vesta orbit
Eh?
What's the point in sending astronauts to a far flung rock, Wouldn't a robot be just as useful? Genuine question, seems a bloody long and dangerous journey just to look at a proto meteorite in it's natural habitat.
Posted in W3C moves to snuff Apple web patents
I'll bite.
It's a stupid patent, there seems to be plenty of prior art, but the USPO will probably grant it anyway because they seem intent on fucking up the US economy. Given this reality, I can't blame Apple or anyone else, for attempting to grab as much stuff as they can since what they don't grab they'll be defending themselves against in the EDC of Texas.
Additionally, it shouldn't be in the HTML spec, which is supposed to be about defining HTML elements, their behaviour and rendering. A mechanism for monitoring and reporting on browser activity is clearly well outside of the box model.
So plenty of stupid to go round, all thanks to the Patent Office.
Unbelievably I did read the article, and the comments
And I totally understand that having your profile deleted doesn't mean your Email etc gets deleted.
Yet it seems clear that google+ requires a profile to work and that said profile has to be public, hence my sarcasm.
In case that's too hard for you to understand, I'm pointing out the blatant hypocrisy.of requiring users google+ profiles be public under the pain of deletion while Google top brass sets theirs to private, YFM.
I'm confused
Wasn't it just days ago they said that private profiles would be deleted?
Posted in Cleaning up the Bitcoin act
Couple* of thoughts
Don't trade with existing currencies, let it grow at it's own pace and you can forget about currency speculators who are IMHO complete bottom feeders.
Short selling is and will always be a crock of shit.
You need a bank, somewhere secure to store coins which can handle reversible transactions to prevent fraud/theft, yet issue coins for anonymous transfers if required. Home computers are a stupid place to store untraceable currency.
* modern interpretation of a 'couple' essentially meaning a random number, although staff in fast food resurants will interpret a request for 'a couple of sugars' as a 'handful'.
Posted in Entering a storage jail
It's easier than that
Just drag the track(s) from iTunes onto your email program to create a blank message with the files attached.
Makes you wonder if the author has actually installed iTunes, or bought any music from Apple or Amazon.
Given that Oracle now employ HP's ex CEO
And Larry & Mark have been buds for some time, I'd say it's a fair bet that Itanium is getting dumped as alleged, that HP have documents to that effect, and that Oracle sees no downside in prematurely killing off a hardware partner now they have their own hardware to shift.
I would guess HP will attempt to tie all this up in court for a few years while they migrate their platform, doubt that will work out well for them though.
POS materials
Is all iPads in web kiosk mode, so I'd imagine it will take a blink of an eye to update.
Shipping, installing and drugging the promotional lion cubs that will be wandering about the store on launch day is likely to be a bigger deal.
That's exacty what they want you to do
As far as they're concerned youre basically deadweight, sucking the bandwidth and cycles away from normal users that don't run adblock, have nice easy to target profiles and click on the money links every now and again.
Posted in Bug-Byte Manic Miner
Loading screen made me grin
The first few arrrgh-peeps, building anticipation for the game code's audio assault. Think I'm going to have to rip that for an alarm sound.
Poker
You don't get to see the cards for free.
Reprehensible? Yeah, but they'd be fools not to.
Posted in Coder cracks iPad 2 jailbreak block
Seems a waste
I get that there's something of a race to be the first to crack it but IOS5 is round the corner, most users are going to want to upgrade to that and it's hard to imagine Apple isn't going to plug an exploit that gives a website root access just by visiting. Should have saved this till after the update.
