Posts by James R Grinter 170 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2009
I had one of the MessagePad 2000s and back in 1997/1998, with the keyboard it was a great little Internet-capable device when travelling! TCP/IP (with PPP and a PCMCIA modem or Ethernet), a simple web browser, and email.
(The eMate obviously more than inspired the original iBook designs.)
Another industry but... My dad was a carpenter/joiner. There were certain tools he was always expected to have/use (chisels, planes, saws, etc), and other often bigger stuff that an employer would provide (bandsaws, circular saws, planing machines) in the workshop. Some things he'd use of his own because they were just better or more comfortable- he could get the job done better or easier.
So I don't really find it too surprising that, if a company is employing staff for their skills and talent, rather than just as "warm bodies" on seats, that they might want to let them use their preferred tools where it is reasonable and practical to do so.
If you contribute a technique to a standard, and it gets included, you have to pledge that it will be made available on a non-discriminatory basis to any and all wanting to implement that standard. They can profit, but not single out, over charge some, or prevent some companies from using it.
What doesn't make sense in that?
(Patent trolls of course don't participate in standards making and don't disclose that they hold patents as part of the process of making standards.)
taking the security patches into the "contract only" areas of Sunsolve pre-dates the Oracle takeover.
I think it was pretty short-sighted, too. Oracle merely accelerated the attempt to kill off Solaris, by removing the freely available Solaris update images and Solaris Express.
This report makes it sound like its in particular classes (or libraries, as we old folk call them).
But libraries that ship as part of the "core" platform, akin to a bug in libc or stdlib (but many times more complex as they're often working at a higher level of abstraction)
As to complaint about Java, show me a language and runtime/ ecosystem that haven't had a history of security bugs or, worse, caused lots of code to be written with security bugs. If you have one, explain why everyone isn't already using it...
"They refused to fix my boss' laptop which they admitted had a "bad logic board" causing it to crash dead when an external monitor was plugged in. He had to either splash £750 for a new "logic board" or buy a new laptop."
they replaced a powerbook logic board for me - twice - when it was still under AppleCare, for that very problem: it would put the fans full on and shut down with a temperature error - when plugging in anything 1920x1200 or larger.
(Second one apparently failed because they hadn't put the heat-sink properly back on the GPU, so it failed too. C'est la vie.)
They wouldn't replace an iMac logic board 6 months out of AppleCare though.
Andrew Witty (GSK CEO) put this point about shareholders well,
"Everything we do is dominated by the super long-run view. Once we're all aligned around that, I find very little conflict between doing the right thing and looking after shareholders. Because it is not in the shareholder's interest for us to be criticized by regulators or to find for some reason we're not competitive in a part of the world simply because we haven't challenged our business model and reputation is important to them. They want to own shares in companies with decent reputations, and there is all sorts of good evidence to support that. I don't think I've had a significant challenge from a shareholder on these sorts of issues. Where the tension comes in is when shareholders are looking at the short-term. Yes, we want to succeed is in the short-term, but really where we need to succeed is in the medium- and long-term because that is the cycle time for this industry."
[from an interview at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/phillypharma/202248061.html -- but he's made the same points elsewhere, and often.]
in other words, doing the best for shareholders usually means doing the best for everyone else too (unless you're chasing short-term profit at the expense of the long-term.)
Microsoft IE6 support is slated to finish with the end of XP SP3 "extended" Support in April 2014 - it only offers commercial support for it in XP.
(http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows/products/lifecycle#section_2)
IE7 lives until end of Vista (April 2017.)
(I always figured this is Microsoft's way of preventing the success of web-based tools, by keeping it alive for as long as possible.)
It would be hard, even for the most sluggardly and hard to manoeuvre of large enterprises, to ignore the April 2014 date and keep running XP past then.
Their desktop software, the synchronisation options (everyone seems to use Calibre - it's not really a friendly piece of software though), and the whole 'experience' of working with ePubs is poor on their e-readers though.
It's a shame, because if they made synchronisation and management of plain ePubs possible, and did something to allow local wifi-synchronisation rather than just books bought from Kobo, I think they could do really well.
that's the point of the tiny-antenna approach though. They're not re-broadcasting: they're receiving a signal on a single aerial, and sending it to the single customer over a long (through the internet) "piece of wire".
They're not even sharing the aerial, like a communal one on a block of flats (which is very common here in the UK). They're also not sending the transmission to customers outside of the area it could be received in.
Strangely, it's still easier to unbundle than it is to re-bundle (or to move sideways to another LLU - "side-bundle"?)
I'm really surprised, after all this time, that BT hasn't at least tried to make it easier to get customers back without the customer losing broadband service for a number of days, or needing a home visit. But, they haven't.
quite, the author is comparing apples and oranges whilst desperately looking for an el-reg headline.
This is about dealing with lack of GPS signal when indoors: using WiFi detection approaches in a smarter way.
It's got nothing to do with gazetteer data (which Google has also taken from third-party companies too. The Thompson and Yell data was always woeful and poor. Apple seems to have an on-going problem with how Yelp's data maps to real locations - I'm guessing something is trying to map based upon the postcode, but in some cases it seems to be a consistent offset error.)
Unfortunately the prices the broadcasters pay for shows, even the ones they commission, factor in things like how many times they get to show them, how much it costs to show them again (performing rights can be an issue, too, there) and who has the rights for DVD distribution, foreign distribution, online, etc.
For really old material, each production may have had entirely different contracts involved, and they may already have sold or licensed distribution rights to some other company.
Maybe this is going to be the impetus for BT sorting out their 're-bundling' (moving back from an LLU'd line) process? There's going to be a lot of disgruntled Be and O2 customers wanting to return to BT.
Having just gone through the hassle the other week, to return from an ex-Bulldog (C&WW) line, it would be about time...
A rumour I read recently about the demise of the Dyson washing machines was that a supplier massively increased the cost of one of the key components and they just couldn't source another (bit skeptical about that.)
Anyway.. sadly (because I have one too) Dyson are finally ending maintenance on them as of the end of this year as they say spares are now getting thin on the ground. Mine's been pretty good in the 8 years I've had it (no torn clothing or any of the other stories I've read), though the engineer has been out to repair it a few times (the door lock seems to be a particularly problematic part... it's just starting failing in a different way, fortunately before the deadline) - but each time the service has been excellent.
"Plus, since Solaris itself is BSD-based, there is considerable cross-pollination happening between those two branches of UNIX." -- no, it really isn't (maybe you're thinking of Solaris 1 aka SunOS 4, but that was done and dusted by 1995, going EOSL in 2003. It isn't common BSD heritage that has lead to ZFS and DTrace being picked up by FreeBSD and Mac OS X - the latter not a BSD kernel either.)
Solaris 2 has USL heritage all the way through the kernel, although significant amounts have been replaced and even the 'SysV init' scripts have been deprecated for a while now. It's a stable platform that doesn't crash in the spectacular ways that I've seen some 'Enterprise' offerings give up, repeatedly, under heavy load.
IMHO they got some things wrong (numerous mis-attempts at improving TCP stack performance, failure to fix packaging, poor systems management tools, and what were they thinking when they gave us SMF?) but, that said, at least it's not HP/UX or AIX. Those really are abominations, travesties of the "Unix" brand, that should have been killed off ages ago.
Well, TfL are responsible for 'red routes' in London - these are arterial routes that are (meant to be) free of parked vehicles, and some of which are treated as race tracks by some drivers.
Certainly the ones near me could benefit from this - because standalone speed cameras are so easy to spot (signs before them, bright yellow high visibility boxes, markings on the road, same place year in year out) all the regular users know where they are and can slow up for them: and they do.
Unless ElcomSoft have changed their software significantly, its approach to cracking the actual backup password (the 'iPhone Password Breaker') seemed to be that of a brute force attack (with a few attempts at shortcuts). This new feature just seems to then go on to decrypt the data that represents the on-device keychain (NB. 1Password uses its own data store. Though we have no real way of knowing if it's any more secure.)
My understanding of iPhone/iPod touch backups is this: If you apply a password to the backup of the phone (in iTunes, it's an option when the phone is plugged in) then this is used to encrypt the phone's in-built key (the one that is actually used for the encryption.) Further, the device does the encryption of the data on the way out when being backed up, and it only provides the key encrypted with the user's password from thereon (which is why you can't remove a password once you've set one, without wiping the phone with a full restore.)
I suspect, if you have a copy of the key on disk from before you set a backup password - e.g. in an earlier backup (from a restore point, or via TimeMachine maybe), then it's straightforward for ElcomSoft's 'iPhone Password Breaker' to decrypt your backup. Otherwise it has to crack it the hard way (still not too hard if you used a dictionary password or something a few "st3p5" away.)
None of this prevents just copying the data out of the device directly, per previous reports, if you actually have access to it (perhaps they've fixed that with iOS 4, and/or iPhone 4. There haven't been any attention-grabbing reports about it yet.)
Can any one corroborate, expand, or correct?
On the 3G, as reported by others, turning off the Spotlight search options (Settings > General > Home Button) and switching off/on again definitely makes a difference. How much is hard to quantify, and reports are mixed as to whether it's ok if you turn them back on again afterwards.
is it really half the cost, though? I can see an HTC Desire on sale for £399 (inc VAT, unlocked, P&P extra). But that seems to be a 512MB model
(Do they really come with that little storage as standard? That seems rather penny pinching, even if a good 16GB SD card is only another £20-£30 or so.)
Likewise, I got the new model connector with mine too. Apparently the new connector is designed to better relieve the cable stress (and also with a stronger, more robust, PVC-free cable). But there's some debate on whether it disconnects quite so easily.
The higher-res 1680x1050, "antiglare" display option - or non-shiny, as normal people would call it - is very nice. They've opted for a silver, recessed surround finish - which might even be what is actually underneath the glass of a glossy version - and the lettering picked out in Black. It hurts that they charge an extra 40 quid, though I suppose it's a charge to pay someone to remove what's already been assembled, and perhaps to cover a higher wholesale price if they know they're going to sell less of that panel.
'Basic' says: "Who the hell wants to use quicktime as a format? It's awkward, doesn't play well on anything except a Mac and (let's be frank) pretty annoying"
Well, anyone using the open standard H.264 video format, which uses a container format that looks rather like QuickTime (because it essentially is.)
(QuickTime is a container, not a video codec.)
Adobe Flash needs an API that supports individual hardware decode of frames, rather than pushing the entire H.264 stream through (as already supported by the QuickTime API for a long, long time) because they need to be able to compose other graphics on top: those writing the ActionScript behind many of the Flash-based video players want to be able to add DoGs, adverts, etc. on top of the video "on the fly."
in fact, don't Google already license some of the AP feeds, or is it Yahoo? Regardless, all you'll miss out on is the 'columnists' (which will be no great loss, for the most part), because sadly the newspapers (and the BBC, to be honest) all long since stopped most of their own coverage of news events.
"...nobody uses that website anyway, doesn't everybody use the aggregators like thetrainline and such?"
Actually, the NXEC website was a cheaper (and IMHO easier to use) way to buy tickets than thetrainline. They didn't charge an extra fee for using a credit card, either, and I'm glad that EC has maintained that so far.
"...National Express used old Intercity 125 stock not the 225 and ex Eurotunnel kit used by GNER, so how could National Express have rebranded ex-GNER stock? (that's aimed at earlier posters)."
I'm no train geek - I merely use the line a bit, and even I know that they were using Electric 225s (as others have pointed out to you) as well as the old 125s. Immediately the GNER/ NXEC switchover they started taking off the GNER "shield" logo, and applying "National Express East Coast" onto the white stripe. But they also began repainting their train sets silver, to match their advertising. (I did notice that they continued to have the "GNER training manual" on the shelf in the buffet car, though.)
At least they haven't done as the dreadful First Great Western franchise has done, and had their logo put into the fabric and plastic-work of the seating!
"birtish [sic] company making a nice profit - so bloody what?"
Well, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with them if they were actually paying a fair amount of taxes (other than the other well-known problems of supermarkets, in general). But, thanks to journalistic investigations, we now know that they don't. So, I'm with the O/P.
(What, no tiny violin icon?)
Well, iPlayer almost certainly isn't broadcast (if it were, it would require a TV license, right?), so to do it is presumably in violation of the CDPA 1988 (Illegal? yes, but not a criminal offence unless you're then selling or hiring those copies or doing something that makes them available to the public. AIUI.)
I switched to the SIMplicity 20 for iPhone tariff on the 23rd, and got 600 minutes + 1200 texts, 'unlimited web and wifi' for the same £20/month, on a 1-month notice basis.
(I wonder how long I get to keep that, and whether I too will qualify for the option of tethering at £2/day used -- which is the way they should have been pricing it in the first place.)
I believe that it's also used to avoid cross-site scripting problems, by preventing anything 'user-generated' from being served from the same domains as handle web-site authentication, etc.
(It's a hack to work around the hacks in web browsers that decide whether something is 'same domain' or not.)
where Comcast have begun throttling in such a way that if you seem to be generating or retrieving a lot of data for a sustained period of time (about 15 minutes, if I remember correctly) during a busy period then all your traffic is delayed behind everyone elses.
It's causing trouble for online backup and particularly retrievals (the latter where you *really* want to be able to get your data back ASAP.)
Whilst I would love to write to my MP, and ask him to do something about it, my MP *is* Lammy.
(and, in the past, even when not directly responsible for the issue at hand, he's always ducked doing anything about it because of being a junior minister, minister, or because he was wanting to become one.)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
