Waste of effort
99% of users *never* update their phone firmware.
The other 1% are geeks and they are always wanting the latest and greatest.
Posts by Goat Jam
2482 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Mar 2008
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Community Linux support for Penguin phones floated
iPad sales shove Apple to top of mobile computing tree
HP to 'spinoff PC biz'
HP murders webOS tablets, phones
Thursday 18th August 2011 23:19 GMT
Nokia to buy WebOS?
There is not a chance in hades that Nokia would buy WebOS while they have that Microsoft stooge Elop at the helm.
They already have Meego which they refuse to sell, why do you think they would go out and spend more money buying another Linux based OS when they are hellbent on drinking Redmond's Koolaid?
Thursday 18th August 2011 23:19 GMT 
Good Greif
Just yesterday I pointed out that HP's executards are failboys of the highest order, only for them to go and compound their fail with an extreme over-reaction to their initial fail.
10 Billion for Autonomy? A British Search company that is virtually unheard of outside of the UK and/or the banking sector?
I'm sure their enterprise search is good, they have some decent customers according to their site but 10 billion dollars?
It makes Googles $12B for Motorola look like an astute purchase really.
id Software Wolfenstein 3D
Piles of unshiftable HP fondle-slabs choke Best Buy
Thursday 18th August 2011 08:49 GMT
Executards
It's hard to believe that with the enormous pay packets HP's exec's undoubtedly enjoy that they could get the basics of supply and demand so monumentally wrong.
When they announced the touchpad at the same price as the ipad it should have been obvious to even the most dimmest ivy league business graduate that there would be little demand for the product.
But no, they go and build millions of the things (to get cheaper unit costs obviously) only to be left with a mountain of unsold touchpads that are no doubt bound for the discount bins real soon now.
Epic FAIL
Dog fight game bitten with pro-PETA virus
Giant iPhone 4 brings Mac OS X to the table
HTC hurls more patent spew on Apple
Injunction suspended: EU can buy Galaxy Tabs again
Son of Solaris raids Linux for KVM hypervisor
Wednesday 17th August 2011 08:26 GMT 
Errrm
Maybe I'm a bit thick but consider this sentence;
"On Monday, Joyent announced that it is open sourcing a version of the KVM hypervisor"
Given that KVM is already licensed under the GPL then any "version" of it by definition *has* to also be released under said license.
So they can hardly "open source" something that was already open source to begin with.
Apple changed shape of Galaxy Tab in court filing
Wednesday 17th August 2011 08:26 GMT
Re: Not really very innovative
I would also add 4) the App store.
before the app store Symbian/Java phones were infested with crappy apps of dubious value that were often harbouring borderline malware.
Remember those dodgy ringtone adverts that used to run on TV which lured kids into signing up to "premium SMS services" that cost $$$ per day?
They are a thing of the past now, thankfully.
Popular Android modder takes job with Samsung Mobile
Apple sells world's most expensive flash drive
Has Google wasted $12bn on a dud patent poker-chip?
Tuesday 16th August 2011 08:34 GMT
Imdemnify their partners
I reckon their best bet would be to offer Android to OEMs in 2 forms;
1) Free to use and fight your own battles
2) Commercially licensed pay per handset with legal indemnification
Let the OEMs decide whether they want to go it alone and hope for the best or pay a license and get protection from G
People don't want tablets, they want iPads
Google SHOCK! Snaps up Motorola phone biz for $12.5bn
AFL boss: NBN could let us bypass broadcasters
Tuesday 16th August 2011 07:15 GMT
I'm sure that,
if I actually watched teevee at all I would wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment.
As things stand however I have to say that the overwhelming crapness of TV network programming over the last decade has turned me away for good.
Not that it was all that good before then mind you.
On the subject at hand, and on a purely intellectual level, I can't help but think that if the TV stations stopped being such dicks with their scheduling they could still weather this storm.
That would mean giving punters what they want of course, namely *actual* live broadcasts instead of all this delayed crap they currently foist on fans just so they can fit games around the mindless reality TV crapfest that they relentlessly shovel in their hapless viewers faces these days.
Given a choice of 5 dollars a game versus "free" most punters will take the free option if the "free" is not too encumbered with crapness.
Besides, if FTA TV viewer numbers are down because the AFL are now netcasting games then I'm sure the going price for the TV rights would drop accordingly.
If not, then find something else to show.
Maybe another fucking home renovation challenge could be squeezed in somewhere.
Google Chrome beta turns on native code machine
Curved light drives boffin one-upmanship
Google lands patent for, um, estimating shipment time
University rats on Sydney suburb
Saturday 13th August 2011 09:41 GMT
Indeed
This sort of muddled thinking is all too common in the soft sciences of today. Too many kids want to go to uni and get jobs working with cute furry animals and the Universities are nothing more than degree factories for whatever happens to be popular at the time.
The theory these people are working on is clearly flawed.
They know that black rats live in houses and these cute rats don't, yet they expect the cute rat to drive the nasty rats out of houses anyway?
Why any rational person would expect that to happen eludes me.
Nokia snubs UK with N9
US Air Force in a seriously stealthless state
Friday 12th August 2011 08:28 GMT
Oblig Bob Calvert reference
Ground Control: Ready for last minute cockpit check?
Pilot: OK.
Ground Control: Largacti1...five milligrammes.
Pilot: Check.
Ground Control: Valium...ten milligrammes.
Pilot: Check.
Ground Control: Haloperidol...five milligrammes.
Pilot: Which?
Ground Control: The little white ones. W-W-W for white.
Pilot: OK. Check.
Ground Control: Pheno Barbitone. Five milligrammes.
Pilot: Check
Ground Control: Disipel...five milligrammes.
Pilot: Check
Ground Control: Glass of water.
Pilot: Check
Ground Control and Pilot: Our father...which art in heaven, hallowed be...mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Jet take off noise into...
http://www.starfarer.net/captlock.html
Deakin Uni promises safe three-wheeler
Linus Torvalds dubs GNOME 3 'unholy mess'
Thursday 11th August 2011 10:04 GMT
Yum vs apt-get
I'm coming from Centos / RHEL here but it seems to me that their repositories are seriously lacking.
Example: CentOS 6. Try installing netperf *
yum install netperf
Dadummmm!
"Nothing to do"
On Debian/Ubuntu it is right there in the repo and installs.
On CentOS, you are forced to ;
a) Goolge, find and and add a "non standard" repo to yum
or
b) trawl rpmbone.net for a "should be" compatible RPM and risk descending into "dependency hell" as a result.
I keep seeing Redhat guys claiming that yum is "just the same as apt-get" and that may be true on a technological level, but it is all for nought if the repositories are relative wastelands which don't have half the packages you are looking for for a given release *.
* Try installing php-mcrypt or php-excel on Centos6/RHEL6, you will come up with nada on those as well.
Friday 5th August 2011 10:40 GMT
Agreed
Except I vaguely recall reading somewhere that come 11.10 there will be no "classic mode", it is Unity or bust from the Ubuntu crowd it seems.
However, I must say that I have had trouble confirming this statement so it might be erroneous.
If it is tru however, I will be sticking it out on 10.04 for the remainder of its support window and hoping to god the Gnome and/or Ubuntu folk come to their collective senses and pull their heads out of their arses.
Friday 5th August 2011 10:18 GMT
Natty "Classic" and Compiz
"revert to 'classic' desktop" option, and I'm going to use it soon if Compiz doesn't get fixed first.
I would do some research first because my Natty machine (nvidia drivers) is totally unable to run Compiz. It is a known bug that seems to be right down on the bottom of the priority list for the Unity obsessed Ubuntu devs right now,
Friday 5th August 2011 10:14 GMT
Linux Mint
"carrying on where ubuntu left off"
Are they? How exactly do you know that? I have trawled their website in an effort to determine where their future direction points regarding Gnome 3 and unity and came up with nothing.
Considering that until recently they were pretty much just a reskin of Ubuntu I was interested to see if they were intending to diverge from that path. They have Mint Debian now (which incidentally lacks a tonne of polish at this point) but I am still in the dark as to whether Debian (or Mint) plan to drink the Gnome 3 koolaid or not.
The fact is I'm getting old. There was a time where compiling kernels and farting about was fun for me, but that time is fading into a distant memory recently. These days I just want to install something and expect it to work without a lot of farting about.. I find myself having less patience when it comes to fscking around getting shit working all the time.
Up until now, Ubuntu has done that for me, sans a few annoying bugs every now and then.
Unfortunately I'm yet to settle on a new distro that "just works" like Ubuntu (mostly) does without all the pandering to morons that Shuttleworth seems hell bent on doing these days.
Rational suggestions for a replacement distro with minimal admin requirements gratefully accepted. *
* P.S. I don't like yum/rpm much but I'm willing to give it a go but apt-get/deb is much preferred.
Friday 5th August 2011 03:02 GMT
Jumped the Shark
First KDE4, now Gnome 3, not to mention Ubuntu going with that toy Unity interface, it's starting to concern me that Linux has jumped the shark, so to speak.
And this from an OSS fanboy who has weaned himself off Windows for everything sans a couple of games and the dreaded itunes for nearly 10 years.
I don't really like XFCE either. I sure hope someone does fork Gnome 2.
Music biz now runs on Viagra®, not cocaine
Friday 5th August 2011 00:16 GMT
The music industry
At the risk of sounding like my father, I have to say that music today is complete and utter crap.
I had my car in for service a couple of days back, and the loan car I had was tuned to some godawful FM station (http://www.novafm.com.au/)
I don't know what was worse, the inane banter masquerading as humour or the mind numbingly terrible beat based cacophony masquerading as music.
All in all it was an excellent example of the dumbed down to the lowest denominator state of the music industry these days.
Microsoft to pay $250,000 for hot new security defenses
It's official: Journos are dumb as a bag of IE users
World needs needs Tequila power: report
HP's fondle-slab dilemma: What to do when you're No 2
Friday 29th July 2011 08:51 GMT
Don't hold your breath pn that one.
I wrote much the same thing over a year ago;
"If these PC and old school phone manufacturers want to play in this market they simply have to get together and create an "open", apple style dock connector (plain USB is simply not enough) that they all use. They need to pay proper attention to interoperability. They will also initially need to start producing some accessories themselves to seed the market until they get enough traction for all the accessories manufacturers to take note and start making stuff too. Then they need to stick with it, and not force people to repurchase things like speaker docks every time they change phones. Until this happens then apple will continue to dominate them."
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/1024429
Since then I have seen zero evidence that any of the Android OEMs have even a semblance of a clue.
Fail for HTC, Samsung et al
Dead bloke reanimates in mortuary
Lost 1967 spacecraft found crashed on the Moon
'Evil' truckie charged with NBN provider attack
OCZ samples twin-core ARM SSD controller
Tuesday 26th July 2011 00:00 GMT
Drives that fail are never a good thing of course
but I have a few SSD's and none of them are used for data storage.
The price is prohibitive and most data hardly ever gets a read/write so there is not much lost performance wise.
Rather, I use SSD's for OS and application files to give a huge performance boost and keep the actual precious data bits on (more than one) old fashioned hard disks.
But maybe that's just me. As always YMMV
Biting the hand that feeds IT
