Posts by Whitter
374 posts • joined Monday 13th August 2007 12:59 GMT
Follow the money
If Apple was just a non-profit making intermediary, I'd think the ruling unfair.
But as it stands Apple takes 30%, so time to do something for the money.
Posted in Review: Nokia Lumia 720
The old ones that were good ones.
I've only just retired my old 6230i this year. It was a splendid little phone.
personal vs business shopping
Am I the only one that uses -alibaba in almost all searches when shopping?
What the task says about the asker.
"...She has been tasked to work out how deploying tablet devices could help the management team better cope with the demands of their day..."
An interesting task in that it pre-supposes tablet devices will be given to the management team, even though there is (as yet) no proven business case to do so. Toys for the excs first; IT case second. Same-o same-o.
And who didn't know this?
Not exactly limited just to neuroscience.
Re: Knew It Was Coming
Wasn't it obvious when they put an "airplane mode" into your phone?
I just never knew what it was really for.
Who needs MS flight sim now!
Troll fight
I'm waiting for the day a patent troll sues another patent troll for trolling a third party using a patent that the primary troll alledges prior art on (and thus should be trolling the tertiary party instead). Or somesuch. Lets hope they all kill themselves anyway. And software patents die with them.
Portability
Given the use of a superconducting super-cooled detector; not really one for black-ops yet.
What do you buy?
It can all get a bit silly if you try even just a little bit.
Say I buy a CD. What I buy is a disk with a series of holes in it. I use a CD player to read those holes into a digital equivalent, decode them, copy them to another buffer, send to a DAC, send the analog output to a speaker, wobble the diaphram a bit and make some sound which I listen to, decode in by ears to nerve impulses and so on and so on.
I didn't buy the sound. I bought the holes. So is any of this process legit? I'd imagine as soon as I read the holes, that's a derivative work. I've stored bits of it endlessly as I've gone along because the design is easier in some cases, because I have to in others. So is that reproduction?
Does fair use allow this? Not all markets have a fair use BTW. If it does, then there's copies in there: fair use copies. In what way are they legally different to other copies? Becuse they are only temporary perhaps - but I've never seen that in the small print of a CD case; and if it isn't on the case (info before you buy), it doesn't count. Again - depending on what juristiction you are in.
Can we not have a grown-up chat about digital ownership - which probably means RIPA-types and the freetards are sent outside and the rest of us can sort out something sensible?
Re: Community?
Indeed: my first response has become "What did Google say?" whenever somebody asks.
Biological problem solvers
Now I like ant colony solutions and I like slime growth solutions, but which is better?
There's only way to find out... FIGHT!
(Seriously, no Harry Hill icon...?!)
Posted in Want faster fibre? Get rid of the glass
Re: Umm, minor point
Indeed, but as a researcher pointed out only last week, (and on El Reg here: www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/25/lightspeed_variable/) there really isn't any significant stretch of vacuum anywhere due to pesky background radiation particles being "in the background" as it were plus the even peskier virtual particles, with an extended field theory slapped on to fill the gaps.
Re: Agree totally on the Take-Aways
I had a vindaloo in Germany where I was served a korma with a little extra chilli added. They didn't undertand why I sent it back (beyond the difficulties expected due to my poor German).
Royal charter eh?
Let's hope the Queen doesn't sign it...
Seriously: you want to make up laws at 2:30am? That's why we have the debates, committees, second house and so on: to stop crap laws getting on the books - or at least, not quite so many of them.
Re: Also, MIT did this last year
2010 is the first I recall seeing a demo. Old news indeed.
Re: Care-o-Meter hovering at zero
If you want to mount a high res camera mounted to mini-remote-zepplin, photograph Bristol, then sell the photos for a tenner, on you go. Just don't steal somebody's else's work who did it properly.
Granted the Somalia reference was poorly chosen, but the point still holds. If nobody will pay, nobody will supply. Economics is about a maintainable market - the "everything for nothing" market is an inevitable dead-end.
They've got previous
GW and Michael Moorcock ended up embittered due to a rediculous IP grab over a generation ago. It seems that's the way GW likes to play it.
Dear USA: You make your laws; we'll make ours.
That is all.
Re: Also
I thought too expensive *was* Apple?
Sarcasm tags required for some it seems!
Fair usage: you can't download constantly for 1 month, so unbiased time division is not realistic.
But as you charge in monthly units, you should refund in monthly units.
Set a triggering threshold loss-per-day (e.g. 2 hours) and/or loss per month (e.g. more than 2 days per month) to get the whole thing rolling. Companies can then compete on the packages they offer to customers: if the ISP doesn't believe its own reliability hype, the package will soon show that.
Stolen != Bought (Well, not necessarily anyway)
That assumes that they were actually stolen: not just a lie to get the next hipster model on insurance.
Lost empire...
Coffee? What about tea!!!
Wishful thinking.
What is the point in any court when the result is inevitably appealed? Can we just not skip to the last court and start there?
Re: So they have negative Kinetic Energy?
First thing I thought on reading the article intro was "aren't population inversions in a laser in a negative temperature state?"
I must get out more.
Posted in Review: Lego Lord of the Rings game
Sold
How often do I read a revie and go from "not much interested" to "want"?
Rare indeed: I haven't played a computer gam ein years and amn't to fussed by JRRT, but none-the-less, its a birthday wishlist item now!
Re: The sad part is ...
ACPO: the union for top police - by all means a valid POV, but they are not a legal body and should not carry themselves as such.
Re: Beware uninformed customers
And beware pointless insurance, e.g. short-hop travel insurance (if stolen from your hold luggage it's not covered. In travel insurance: WTF?). Buildings insurance (structure) yes. Contents? Rarely worth it - the decent policies cost too much, the affordable ones are worse than a bank account you put some savings into to handle it yourself.
And don't forget the true cost of claiming: not just the excess and deprication of items-worth by insurance auditors, but also the future cost resulting from a claim: all the other insurance renewals you'll get in the next 5 years (wether in the same field or not) will go up by a total that is likely far more than what you've just "saved".
A con of an industry.
Personal recommendations
Only use tradesmen somebody you know has recommended: it's a common reaction to try and avoid bad service (though, like amazon, carries the risk of a review from somebody who doesn't know they just got shafted).
What is less well known is that tradesmen also have recs of the good and blacklists of shoddy customers.
You reap what you sow: that laywer would likely struggle to get anyone local to work on any part of their house ever again.
Error during ordering process
I got a garbled error message too: not sure whether I've got one ordered or not as a result. Email says yes; on screen message said no at some point, claiming "errors" would be updated over the next 24hrs. However, if they took any money, that's a contract no matter what their systems do.
I'm in the 5-6 weeks camp, so imagine they can cope with the odd glitch in ordering in this group.
Re: Every single update...
Not just Adobe: it's all of them.
I think they have been court tested in NY and it was essentially "companies are expected to read them - individuals are not". That might have been wishful thinking though!
The article makes a bizare claim for Apple ("I have to say I find Apple’s take on things rather interesting."), but as anyone who has updated any app on an iPhone/iPod etc knows, the T&Cs change with great regularity and even greater verbosity: 35 pages or more to get an update from another company, not even apple!
Re: Prior art?
The new bit you add to prior art to create a new patent must be more than just "neat" or "handy": the new bit must itself be *inventive* and "not obvious to anyone skilled in the art".
The seperate issue of patenting things you haven't (or as yet can't) make is yet another hole in IP law. But let's face it: IP law is starting to push the "collander" comparison further than you'd want a collander to go.
Re: 2008? Prior art much?
Simply changing the connector's shape (to a known standard) isn't inventive. It might be clever - but not inventive. And in this case, had been done already anyway.
Re: The heart of the problem
Part of the US system is a legal undertaking from the inventors to bring all potential prior art they know of to the US patent office's attention duing the application process. Failure to do so is a criminal act. Its always tricky to prove what somebody doesn't know, but sometimes the blitheringly obvious really should try to lock some of these nutters away.
As to why the USPTO didn't spot the blitheringly obvious - it's all been said before. Not fit for purpose.
Re: I am sure
It won't really cost Apple anything to contest the patent: they can show "blitheringly obvious" prior art pre-trial; if they then win in a full trial, they'll then claim and get costs.
Of course they don't really have costs in the same way a small company do: they have specialist IP laywers on staff, so its just what they do in their 9-to-5. Perhaps it might stop them suing somebody else for a week though...
Posted in Why do Smart TV UIs suck?
Re: Just like PC's
It's worse than just the PC-like functionality causing UI overload - the "dumb" TVs without the PC section also have awful UIs. It seems to be an industry with no UI skills at all - I guess they think nobody makes a purchase choice based on the UI menus.
liquid lenses
There was a prototype oil lens a bunch of years ago, simply using an applied voltage to change the surface curvature. Never heard whatever happened to it.
Design Patent != Utility Patent
Is a DESIGN PATENT - that's a claim for a look-and-feel, not for anything useful.
Re: email?
Reply to myself eh? Madness. But interestingly enough, Yahoo DID put Google's email into the spam folder!
email?
At least you got the email. It hasn't turned up for me yet. P'haps yahoo have blocked them all as spam...?
Re: Can't remember the last time VoD worked properly on Virgin Mediocre
Me too: I've stopped using iPlayer and am in the process of weaning my movile etc away from Virgin Media so that when I leave - and I will - it won't be too many changes at once.
The sang that the competitin isn't much better is indeed a snag, but the bean counters at VM have to see the exodus before they will do anything it seeems.
More of this!
There was that funky signals-via light-bulb modulation a while back too.
And some Zombie TV program using embedded near-ultrasonic signals in the TV audio to sync up PC/mobile apps for an integrated while-watching experience.
Well done all those creative types!
Wireless medical life support
There are indeed changes in the industry starting to take "violent hacking" into account. That's an issue that people should push the lawmakers to accelerate - and their doctors to take into account when ordering devices: make a tender redline and it will indeed happen.
But as to her greater point: do you have the right to propriety IP in a device implanted in you? You certainly have the right not to have the device at all, and they have the right not to sell it to you (so long as that isn't in a discriminatory manner), notr withdraw your rights to use it once it's in there. But do you have the right to their IP work? Its complex stuff and doesn't get done for free. "It's going to go in me, so yes" is certainly a fair and understandable POV. But it isn't the only one.
Alas, this probably comes doen to private/public sector issues: if the private sector did the work, its theirs. If the public sector did the work, it's the publics (yours). So if you want it, get your universities to do the leg work building it and you can have it.
Private industry and medicine have a lot of issues and this is only one - a small one given what big phara gets up to.
El Reg units
SI plus El Reg units obviously.
Those crazy examples didn't even have a double decker bus in them!
And the winner is...
Appartently a cousin of Cthulhu if the picture is anything to go by.
I want one.
Posted in Motörheadphönes ears-in review
Ear phones...
Did you mean ear plugs? The chaps pictured at the end but never mentioned.
I wondered that too.
"The best camera is the one you have with you"
Or whatever the quote is. The snag with a decent quality camera (which until now has been "any dedicated camera") is that you rarely have it while you tend to have your phone a lot.
Alternative take
Or maybe it means that business people just aren't up to it?
Perhaps we should stop letting the monkeys turn the handle.
How much does anyone really want?
I was at an all-you-eat type of place in Vancouver once and they had a cunning method of avoiding over-gluttony: you paid to start eating and you paid for anything left over at the end. While it wouldn't stop the rugby team munching your profits, it did make most folks focus on how much they actually wanted as opposed to how much they could have.
