Posts by Geoff Campbell

BUSTED TWO: Carrier IQ monitor-ware on iPhones too?

Bwhahahahahahahahaha!!

Cyanogenmod on a Samsung is looking better and better.

GJC

Duqu attackers: master coders, Linux rookies

You forgot one.

My money's on the Illuminati.

GJC

Insanely great PCIe 4.0 bit rate locked in

Use the force, Luke....

If you follow the link embedded in the article, there's a very useful definition of exactly what it means. Raw bits per second per channel, in essence, with a 25% overhead for encoding.

GJC

References, please?

Gates denies ever saying such a thing, and a quick google turns up no definitive references to when or where he might have said it.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9101699/The_640K_quote_won_t_go_away_but_did_Gates_really_say_it_

GJC

Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android smartphone

Most kind, thank you.

I look forward to receiving it.

GJC

Are they not?

My Galaxy S is running ICS 4.0, as of this afternoon. It's very nice.

GJC

iPhone 4S is for failures who work in coffee shops - Samsung

Makes sense.

I've now got ICS running on my spare Galaxy S, by the way. It looks rather nice.

http://code.google.com/p/ice-cream-sandwich-sgs/w/list

GJC

That's not what the Nexus is about

As with previous Google phones, the Nexus exists to be a reference build for the latest release of Android, not to be the latest greatest smartphone. A lot of the specs are deliberately quite mundane because of this.

GJC

Office 15 beta ready for fondling by early 2012

You what?

Not only can current versions of Office read files created in pretty much all previous versions, but Microsoft have released a compatibility pack for Office 2003 to allow it to read files created in more recent versions.

Or, to put it another way - what are you blathering on about, man?

GJC

Ten... Monster tellies

Blinding deal on the 60" Aquos

Currys currently have the 60" Aquos on offer at £999. As our old 47" LG just died messily, this seems like a bit of a hint. Seems like an awful lot of television for the money.

Quite amazing that something that size can run on 101w of power. I do so love the 21st century.

GJC

That offer in full....

It can be found here, by the way:

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/sharp-lc60le636e-60-full-hd-led-tv-11909226-pdt.html

Apparently available for another four days.

GJC

Got a few minutes to help LOHAN suck?

Well....

I don't know if they go as low as you require, but pretty much every diesel car out there has a vacuum pump to generate the vacuum for the brake servo. Normally mounted on the end of the camshaft, on the cars I've played with. Might be worth a look.

GJC

When geeks turn Green: Performance tune your energy bills

@GrumpyJoe

Absolutely -- the 80/20 rule applies in spades. 80% of the improvement comes with the first 20% of the expenditure and/or effort. When we first moved into our current place, it was appalling, huge gaps around the doors and windows, no insulation anywhere, 25 year old boiler consuming 1100 litres of oil every two months. A few thousands pounds and a bit of DIY later and the oil consumption was down to 1100 litres a year, and the house felt hugely more comfortable to live in.

We've carried on making improvements, but as time goes on, each bit of improvement costs more time and money.

GJC

Afghan elders refuse to be labelled pimps by number 39

You stupid, stupid fuckers.

Get over yourselves, grow up, and start acting like adults.

GJC

Shock result: UK's largest city best place to get IT job

Well, I guess that explains....

....why I spend so much bloody time on the M4. Ho hum.

GJC

Reg reader seeks living room Myth advice - can you help?

Depends on your budget, as ever.

I solved the "no PC in the living room" edict by buying an Antec Fusion case, building the PC into it, and using a Gyration remote control. To all outward appearances, you end up with a piece of AV kit that does all your TV and media playing tasks, without looking or sounding like a TV. That's about £200 of kit, plus whatever you spend on the PC itself.

GJC

Politicians call for Modern Warfare 3 censure

"engage in gratuitous acts of violence against members of the public"

"There's no room for men like you in my force, Savage. I'm transferring you to the SPG".

Ah, truly the old ones are the best....

GJC

iOS upgrade swells iPhone battery-suckage grief

Yes, of course.

After all, it's not likely that Apple would get something wrong, is it?

GJC

Apple expels serial hacker for publishing iPhone exploit

That's the trouble with Apple....

....no sense of humour. Boring buggers.

GJC

Colossal dead black neo-sphere approaching Earth

Nah

That's not a mass extinction size. From memory, the collision that did for the dinosaurs was of a rock something around 10 miles across, massively larger than the rock we're talking about here. And even that didn't immediately wipe out the dinosaurs, the final extinction was a slower process around the change in the ecosystem that the impact caused.

Still, you probably wouldn't want to try and catch it....

GJC

Quote of the Week: 'Phone bills shouldn't cost more than the rent'

Ferrari

Am I the only one noticing the implicit assumption that normal warfare is something you use every day for normal day to day activities? Odd world that we live in.

GJC

Google explains 'why' ads target user's Gmail

These ads are on Google's own services.

They don't need to touch any network traffic at all, they have all the data that is relevant on their servers.

GJC

Steve Jobs' last words: 'OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.'

Ah, yes

Some years ago, my Dad was suffering an aggressive form of prostate cancer and quite advanced Alzheimers (he always was an unlucky bugger). In his more lucid moments, he would often comment that he was glad he had Alzheimers, it made him forget he had cancer.

I can only hope I can face my end with such humour and equinamity as and when it comes.

GJC

Pete Townshend condemns Apple as 'digital vampire'

@John

Distributing one copy is so cheap as to be essentially free.

Distributing billions of copies, from a service with good response times and good up-time, and collecting money for them, costs a lot.

GJC

It's a whole new world out there.

I download copies of music. Normally MP3s from ThePirateBay.

I then listen to it, once or occasionally twice, and if I like it, I buy the CD. If I don't like it I delete it.

This has lead to me buying a good number of CDs I wouldn't ordinarily have considered, by bands I wouldn't ordinarily have tracked down.

I may or may not be representative. I suspect this happens more than is generally given credit for. It's a complex ol' world.

GJC

China to take women to heaven and back

Interesting.

I've long wondered, given that every gram of mass sent into orbit costs megabucks, and that the fairer sex are on average rather a lot less massive than us grunts, why there aren't many more female astronauts. Most odd.

GJC

World heading for massive jobs slump

There we go then.

The job security offered by free-lance consultancy work is looking ever more useful, I have to say.

Apple 'prepping smaller iPad'

Standard pockets

The original 7" Galaxy Tab fits comfortably into an inside jacket pocket or most back pockets in jeans. This is what makes it such a great form factor when travelling.

GJC

5 SECONDS to bypass an iPad 2 password

<Snigger>

"It Just Works" just took on a whole new meaning. Again.

GJC

Ofcom to finally yank sat broadband biz off the air

@Alan

Just the fact of taking on contractors for two year stints is a good demonstration of what you say, I suspect. Why do companies do that?

(I write as a contractor and consultant of twenty years, I should say. But I rarely stay in one organisation for more than a couple of months at a time.)

GJC

Apple wins for now: no Galaxy 10.1 in Oz

Hell yeah.

We need a kick-arse rock n' roll backing track, and plenty of drugs.

GJC

Yup

That's what a big cash reserve buys you.

GJC

This Dianamania is a slur on Jobs

My prediction is that speech will indeed flop badly.

Thing is, good speech recognition has been available on PCs for many years, and smartphones for a year or two, and it is almost exclusively a niche product - the only large-ish groups of people I know who use it regularly are those who are disabled such that a keyboard is not a viable option, and lawyers, for whom keyboards are still an anti-status symbol, dinosaurs that they are.

Still, we shall see. Perhaps the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field will continue to pervade the industry after his death, and Apple will succeed with speech recognition where all others have failed. I won't be betting the farm on that, however.

GJC

Sorry for the downvote

I'm not very good with orders :-)

GJC

@Metavisor

No, that's bollocks.

Had Jobs and NeXT not existed, the WWW would still have been invented. Perhaps not in the same form, or at the same point in history, but it would still have developed. The same is true of pretty much all the generic developments that are credited to Jobs - he got there first, in some cases a little way ahead of the competition, in a few rare cases a long way ahead of them, but without him they would have happened anyway, one way or another.

GJC

No, that's not going to be a problem

The only way to achieve a truly unlimited supply of oil will be by a closed-cycle process in the short term, taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere to gather the carbon for the generation of the oil. Hence, such processes will be carbon neutral, and hence, there is no impact on climate change. This is the same reason I heat my house using wood.

GJC

iPhone 5: Apple 4S, pundits 0

Plenty of 3G available on the Piccadilly line, west of about Barons Court

Even some HSDPA, in my experience.

Why so much fuss over a voice recognition system, though? Android has had exactly that system of back-end processing of sound samples for ages. Is this the best innovation Apple can manage these days?

GJC

What's not in the iPhone 4S ... and why

Well, that's fine.

But a *real* global phone such as the Samsung Galaxy S2 that I have beside me in my hotel in the colonies currently requires none of that mucking around. Bought in the UK, with a UK SIM, I just had to walk off the plane in America and, well, it worked. Why do Apple have to make everything so damn *complicated*?

GJC

iPhone 5 a no-show at Apple's 'Let's talk iPhone' event

Innovation?

Android has had language-driven, location-based search with the heavy lifting of the voice recognition done by a cloudy back-end for a long, long time. Apple are not innovating with this, just copying existing best practice.

GJC

Don't bother with that degree, say IT pros

Ahem. Not Monty Python.

The four Yorkshiremen sketch was from At Last The 1948 Show, not Monty Python. 50% of the original four Yorkshiremen went on to form Monty Python, and the sketch was performed by the MP team, but accuracy is important, I feel.

A wonderfully innovative and prolific time for UK comedy.

GJC

It's a useful first line filter.

If a company specifies that I must have a degree to work there, I can be pretty sure I won't want to work there.

GJC

Verizon: Samsung 4G ban not in our, er, public interest

How?

Can you come up with a realistic, sensible approach that might have worked? It seems to me that Samsung have taken the only path that was open to them, and in using a selection of proper, defensible patents based on technological innovation rather than the stupid look n' feel ones that Apple chose, Samsung have usefully highlighted just how desperate and vicious Apple are being.

GJC

Online government services would exclude many Welsh

Yes, and so it did.

Unfortunately, as in so many things, "Wales" in this instance was taken to mean "Cardiff". As accurate as claiming that what happens in London holds true for the whole of England.

(No major complaints here, I should say - despite living halfway up a mountain 10 miles from the nearest town, we get ~5.5mbps on ADSL, albeit at rather higher price than more urban locations due to a lack of competition. I do know people locally who are not so lucky, however.)

GJC

Laptops en route to Europe by rail for first time

I wonder how long it will be before the first train-load is hi-jacked, or stripped bare in a shunting yard?

GJC

Self-planting plant discovered in Brazil

Low maintenance grass is available

See http://nomowgrass.com/

I've not tried it, but it looks like fun.

GJC

Windows 8 secure boot would 'exclude' Linux

Good grief....

They never learn, do they? Ho hum.

GJC

MPs: 999 HQ revamp FAIL cost £469m

We should start a survivors' group, really.

Not my favourite project, by quite a large margin.

GJC

Skype for iPhone makes stealing address books a snap

Oh, splendid!

Cue mass outrage from assembled fanbois in 3..2..1..

GJC

TouchPad sales doubled after it was discontinued

Well, yes, but given that most of the major retailers' web sites collapsed under the strain, and most potential purchasers failed to get one, they could have sold lots more.

GJC

Lost memory stick had 87 NHS patients' info unencrypted

Anonymised data

Anonymised does not mean randomised. There are plenty of tools and techniques out there to allow live patient/customer databases to be anonymised without ruining the continuity of things like patient records. These should routinely be used whenever data is extracted for research use - this is why the hospital is at fault. They should not put students in a position whereby they can make such cock-ups.

Sad, really. This isn't difficult, yet NHS IT cannot even get these basic things right. Remind me who it is all outsourced to, again?

GJC