* Posts by censored

244 publicly visible posts • joined 2 May 2007

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Google promises autonomous cars for all within five years

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Re: Da

It doesn't work by following navigation - GPS is nothing like accurate enough.

It compiles Street View, GPS, previous tracks, a video archive, radar and live video feeds to do several things.

1. It knows roughly where you are thanks to GPS

2. It compares where you look like you are from the video to make the GPS more accurate

3. It compares previously driven tracks with yours

4. It has a 3D 'memory' of the area, so can identify things that aren't usually there: be they cars in front or pedestrians waiting to cross

5. It senses distance to other objects and adjusts speed accordingly.

6. Ideally it would be talking to nearby vehicles and they'd all coordinate responses, but that's not going to happen for a long while.

The 'experts' who never see BBM will never understand RIM

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Re: BBM is just an application

Google Talk is on every Android. Imagine if it had the functionality of BBM: read notifications, file sending, photo sharing, maybe even screen sharing. It already does voice and video calls better than Skype, especially as it's now essentially G+ Hangouts so does video conferencing.

And yet, Google don't seem to care about it. It really, really could be an iPhone killer.

T-Mobile outs low-cost mobile data roaming bundles

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Non-EU prices still eye watering...

£7.50 per MB outside the EU

It's £1.50 per MB even in non-EEA countries like Iceland.

Surely the costs to shunt data around the world are minimal these days?

Asus-made Google pad set for June debut

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Re: 7" tablets are brilliant

But given the trend for phones is 4" or bigger (mines 4.7") if I'm going to invest in a tablet it needs to be a different form factor for a different job.

10" is perfect for portability but a use that's different enough from my phone to be worthwhile

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FAIL

Google Mis-Step

By launching a 7", they're not competing with the iPad. They're competing with these: http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/5073692.htm

Apple have shown there is a huge market for 10" devices, and even if they came in at £250 rather than £200 Google would be massively undercutting.

Steve Jobs was top of the flops, says Apple's Tim Cook

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FAIL

"We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia"

Flipping to the polar opposite, and no-one having a clue that you've flipped, is NOT admitting you were wrong!

Admitting you were wrong and that things have changed is a noble and much-underrated quality, especially in a leader. It's clearly one Jobs didn't have.

Spy under your car bonnet 'worth billions by 2016'

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Re: Before anyone says "here comes big brother"...

Nailed it... it won't mean cheaper insurance for safer drivers. It'll mean ludicrous insurance for regular speeders.

I'd accept this, provided my car speedo was absolutely accurate (it isn't, so I don't actually know how fast I'm going), and I got an audible warning when nudging over the limit.

Plus, there's no reason why cars can't safely tail off the gas themselves when the driver pushes beyond the limit to stop them speeding.

National Rail Enquiries

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Re: Shameless rip off

Croworc refunded me the price of the earlier app when I contacted them...

Google Currents

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Big flaw...

It doesn't seem to remember which stories you've read and which you haven't, and there's no indication on an icon that there are unread stories

Stray SMS leads to aborted landing

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Re: Interference

A few hundred milliwatts in a directed beam. Your phone puts out a signal in all directions, meaning the inverse sqare law applies and power drops off very quickly with distance.

Who killed ITV Digital? Rupert Murdoch - but not the way you think

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I never understood...

so perhaps someone could explain? If OnDigital had succeeded, wouldn't it have meant the end of free-to-receive TV?

I mean, they always wanted to switch off analogue. Sky Digital needed a subscription, digital cable needed a subscription and so did OnDigital. Where was the plug in and go option that Freeview now provides?

I had OnDigital and thought it was great. The text and interactive services were better than my Virgin cable box can now deliver... it's a silly example, but I was playing along to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire back when people actually watched it, which cable still can't do...

Paedophiles ‘disguise’ child abuse pages as legit websites

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Joke

They can also...

make penis-shaped soundwave come out of your speaker. Plus, a peadophile in a microlight committed an overhead atrocity.

iPad bludgeons to death two UK Apple reseller shops

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FAIL

They should've tried a bit of customer service...

On one occasion, my wife went into Cancom Brighton and was roundly ignored for 30 minutes before she left.

A second time she went in, but they talked only to her tits.

I went in looking to buy a MacBook Pro but they didn't want my £900 enough to bother speaking to the bloke fondling laptops and looking eager, so I left.

A second time I went in asking if they'd sell me the RAM and perform an installation to upgrade a Mac Mini. They said they'd sell me the RAM, but that the installation was fiddly and not worth their time (I KNOW it's fiddly, that's why I'm willing to pay someone to do it).

iPlayer repeat fees threaten BBC earthquake

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It's not £20 a month...

My licence fee is £12.12 per month on Direct Debit. So, slightly more than Spotify for original content which often can't come from anywhere else and is considerably more expensive to produce. In other words, if you only watched Sherlock, you still paid less than the DVD box set for it.

I agree with the central thrust of the article: that charging for iPlayer is problematic. I can record a show to my TiVo and keep it as long as I like. But I can't download from iPlayer and keep it more than 30 days, and downloading that same show via BitTorrent and keeping it as long as I like is illegal.

These are things that need to be sorted out. But the answer should be a £20 all the BBC you can eat, from any source you like, not paying a quid a show.

Virgin TiVo iPad app out in September

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FAIL

They'd be better off fixing the existing Android app

Which doesn't work on either Android 3 or 4

Ten... Valentine's Day gifts for him

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Hmmmm

Out of the entire world of toys, gadgets and tech you manage to choose 10 things that I would divorce over if they were given to me as a gift...

Motorola Xoom 2 10in Android tablet

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MTP

Google has a download for OSX that talks to Android devices via MTP. Apparently it's a bit flakey (haven't tried it with my Galaxy Nexus yet) but it does work.

Or use ftp

The End of Free: Web 2.0 will squeeze punters rotten

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I, for one, would pay...

To get a service as great as Twitter or Gmail with no ads, no spam and full commercial service levels. I'd pay. Not a lot, but they don't need to charge me a lot as it's relatively cheap to run.

Ice Cream Sandwich

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Menu Buttons

They'll disappear if your phone has hardware buttons...

Windows 8: First contact with Microsoft Touch

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Please god

Just ditch the ****ing ribbons

Ultra-cheap HP TouchPads to hit UK at 6pm

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FAIL

What does it do?!?

Well it's got an excellent web browser with flash. It handles video playback, you can Skype, it has a great email client and calendar suite, you can view and edit Office documents, view photos, there are already Twitter and Facebook apps... all of this handled much better than a £200 netbook would manage

what more do you want a sub £100 computer to do?

iPhone 5 less than a month away

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October release still likely

It's normal to announce a few weeks ahead of actual launch day, so October release is most likely

What will we do with 600MHz?

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Local TV Won't Work

Most community stations are run on a shoe-string, cobbled together to be just about listenable and struggling through with no cash.

This is no slight on them, as they do some great work. Just pointing out that TV is more expensive to produce, more difficult to put together, takes much longer to make and harder to make look watchable.

Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo 2TB Nas

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Will it really play nicely with mac?

I have a Buffalo Linkstation Pro, which was great when accessed by two windows machines. But since I switched one machine to mac, the NAS backups fail every time on the hidden mac files/folders. It backs everything up, but won't do the next backup until I manually reset it.

Buffalo themselves were stumped and so I'm stuck without having a reliable backup system in place.

Firefox 4 Android beta gets stomach stapled

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Try Dolphin HD

It's got tabbed browsing and an Adblocking add-on

Microsoft delivers Google Chrome IE9 beta

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WTF?

"Fewer than one third have opened favourites"

Seriously, how do these people operate?

My wife has all her bookmarks, from regular to vaguely interesting to must-read-sometime on the Firefox Bookmark's Toolbar. In no particular order and running off into a massive scroll-down list. It drives me insane.

And no, I don't think she knows they're all accessible through the Awesome Bar.

Porn and pirates hide Android's money maker

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Stop

why isnt the headline figure

That 51% are making the same or more than they expected?

I stopped reading when I realised that you'd chosen the figure for a negative story but which doesn't reflect the truth.

Acer Liquid E Android smartphone

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The latest version of Android?

Are you sure...?

Microsoft digs Macs in back-to-school ads

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WTF?

when I'm in charge of the world

Companies will be banned from mentioning or inferring their competitors products. Advertise the positives of your own product or don't advertise at all. This style of ad just makes me believe that even the advertiser can't say anything good about the thing they're trying to sell.

And this isn't a mac v pc comment, I have and like both.

UK.gov smiles and nods at commentards

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Frankly, I'm pleased

If we let the public decide policy, we'd end up with no BBC, a privatised health service, no immigration, no council housing, our waste would be all be buried not incinerated, breast cancer drugs would be funded regardless of efficacy, homeopathy would be handed out, and the MMR vaccine would be banned, the welfare state would be dismantled, our aid budget would be slashed, science funding would dry up and Cheryl Tweedy-Cole would be Prime Minister.

Czechs toast Bud-beating beer win

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Thumb Up

I've never understood the Yanks' claim...

"We had the name first so it's ours"

"OK. So where did you get the name from,, as it sounds awfully similar to the town our beer is made?"

"....."

Motorola making Android 3.0 tablet

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"The spec has not been established"

You bet it hasn't given Google haven't yet decided if Gingerbread will be version 2.5 or version 3.0...

Acer beTouch E400 Android smartphone

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Vanilla Android?

Do Acer's phones run vanilla Android or do they add their own nonsense?

In otherwords, could the successor to the Liquid be a future option for Nexus One owners?

Steve Jobs denies Judas Phone antenna problems

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FAIL

Let's get this straight...

All phones suffer from this problem, it's inherent in mobiles and no-one has solved it yet. There isn't a design flaw in the device, the external antenna performs brilliantly and doesn't have any worse problem than any other phone.

Yet at the same time, fitting a bumper case corrects the problem.

Therefore, doesn't that make it a problem with the design? If the phone's chassis had the antenna inside an integral bumper then there'd be no problem.

I'll bet you £5 that iPhone 5 is a minor upgrade, while iPhone 6 is a new design that doesn't have an external antenna.

Google's Android market needs Jobsian strongman

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Has the author actually used Android?!

There's one market and its just as prominnt on the device as the App Store is on an iPhone.

Indeed, for me the biggest plus is NOT having to connect to a computer, particularly when the experience is as horrible as iTunes. Why the hell does your phone need to be connected to a computer before you can even use it?

Middle-aged sex is crap: Official

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Unhappy

Once a week?

I'll be lucky

Murdoch's paywall: The end of the suicide era?

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You're right about having to define 'success'

Disclosure:

Yes, I hate Murdoch. No, I wouldn't pay for his papers. Yes, I think the price is too high. On the other hand, would I pay 5p per Guardian article or a few quid a month? Maybe. So I'm no hardcore freetard.

The point is, as you mention, that The Times (or the Independent or Guardian) have never made money, online or off. Journalism costs more money than you can sell it for. The greatest journalistic organisation in the world is the BBC, who don't have to worry about profit.

I don't really get why you'd define success as 'making money' in the internet age, because that's not how it was defined before. To many people, success of a newspaper would be better defined as readership, influence, quality and integrity.

If a newspaper is breaking interesting and important stories, is widely read and highly regarded, it's more successful than one that makes a profit but no-one reads. Else Nuts and Zoo would be the high mark of British publishing.

I think the key for the future of news is to use other things to pay for the quality. For the Guardian that means its AutoTrader mothership, which makes a pretty penny. For The Times, that would mean using Sky or the tabloid market to fund something worthwhile further up the chain.

I agree with the Guardian approach - because they're widely read and well-regarded journalistically, and believe that it's wrong to sacrifice readership for profit. Whether it can carry on forever is another matter, but so long as AutoTrader keeps the group afloat I don't see why not.

If newspapers have to turn a profit by themselves, we'll end up with Metro. Bland churnalism with at least 50% of the space given to advertising.

Windows 3.0 turns 20

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Gates Horns

I still run a Win 3.1 machine....

Which is crucial to my work. We have to supply digital audio files, encoded to an archaic and proprietary derivative of MPEG1, supplied on PCMCIA cards formatted in DOS.

You can't even format under Win3.1 - it HAS to be DOS (and no, it doesn't work if you so it under Windows). Nor can you just format as FAT under anything later than DOS, despite Microsoft insisting that the format is the same. The cards simply don't work in the end units if you do that.

Fun, eh?

Miracle mono-molecule material could quench hot chips

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I want some!

I bet it's mind-blowing to hold a material with only 2 dimensions...

Volcanic ash grounds dozens of UK flights

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Flame

Easyjet are a shower of shite

I was supposed to fly out of Gatwick before 6am this morning. About half a dozen Easyjet flights were cancelled, including mine. Two Easyjet flights (Amsterdam and Innsbruck) went out after mine should have. Several more followed, according to the flight checker, but the majority didn't.

The Ash Cloud Of Doom (TM) was, at the time, hovering somewhere over northern Scotland and in no way a threat to Gatwick flights heading south. So why cancel flights? Clearly there's no safety issue if others are going.

I suspect, it might've left aircraft stranded elsewhere this afternoon and that would've caused them more trouble than flying their paying passengers where they wanted to go....

Lords: Analogue radio must die

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Crap FM?

Have you heard the sound quality on the majority of DAB stations?

128kbps (if you're lucky) MP2 does NOT make for hifi sound....

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I've just cancelled the order for an all-singing new DAB radio

If 6music is going, there's not much to listen to.

What kind of push is the BBC going to give it in the future if it's pulling out half it's digital-only services now?

Brown's website as mad as he is

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Will Google Take Kindly?

I thought Google de-listed sites who used metadata inappropriately to gain search hits for content that isn't actually there?

Yes, Internet Explorer is on the wane in Europe

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how many chose the first in the list?

Without knowing the reason why people are choosing other browsers, we cant call this a success. If people are blindly installing the first one on the list, this is no better than them blindly using IE. It simply swaps monopoly for dumb clicking without educating anyone as to what the choice means.

And lets face it, if you understand what Opera is then you either use it or have chosen not to.

Tory 'Cash Gordon' campaign suffers Web2.0rhea bum rush

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FAIL

If I were Unite, I'd ask for my money back...

what with Labour MPs and the PM himself queuing up to call their strike "despicable" and "damaging", they don't appear to have bought much influence at all

Mandy quango says Apple, Amazon are too obscure

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I wonder...?

How many people could name where to buy music in their town centre? Out of the whole population, I mean.

Facebook faces Home Sec over lack of 'panic button'

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Flame

Facebook murder??

1. The girl wasn't murdered on Facebook. She was murdered in real life. If she'd met her killer in a pub, would people be bleating about a pub panic button for when you're chatted up by a weirdo?

2. If you're clever enough to click a panic button, you're clever enough not to meet them and let them murder you.

'Death knell' for Eye-o-Sauron™ US border stare-towers

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Same could be said of the defence budget...

To paraphrase Bill Hicks, use it to feed, clothe and educate every child on the planet, provide healthcare and clean water and allow people to develop as they choose - which the defence budget would do many times over - and no-one would ever want to attack you anyway...

BBC confirms death of 6Music, slashes online budget by a quarter

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Not quite my point...

I was merely trying to show that in the last round of Sony Awards (the Oscars of UK radio), there were multiple nominations for 6Music and Asian Network and only a couple for Radio 1 (namely Scott Mills and Zane Lowe).

So, if it's quality the BBC are going for, they already have industry-recognised quality on 6Music.

I then threw in other shows, particularly Fearne Cotton to show that the average daytime show on Radio 1 lags far behind the Sony-nominated Lauren Laverne in the same time slot.

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FAIL

Quality Programming

Let's play "spot the quality programming" shall we...

The Fearne Cotton Show

The Lauren Laverne Show

The Vernon Kay Show

Friction - Asian Network

The Huey Show

The Reggie Yates Chart Show

Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone

The Adam and Joe Show

The Steve Lamacq Show

The Scott Mills Show

(Clue - some of those were nominated for Sony Awards, often in multiple categories (e.g. music and music personality. Other, ummm, weren't).

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