Against the tide
While I’m no fanboy, experience of Alphabet brethren YouTube involved me speaking to a Mountain View based humanoid within 5 mins of hitting support site (via free callback to UK) - I was very impressed to say the least.
26 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2008
What did you expect - a magic, learning voice recognition assistant?
Of course they are going to keep samples to run algorithms against and of course they are going to tee answers up for questions which are being asked a lot. What do you think the Siri guys are doing with thier time?
If you are so concerned about your private details then you should get off the internet, and certainly not use a mobile phone. The privacy cat is out of the bag, either get on with it or stop using the kit. No-one is forcing you to use Siri, or GV, or any other flavour of voice recognition app, service, photo storage, mail provider etc etc etc. Before you register for any serice, or use any service, you should be of the mindset that your data will be collected, analysed, possibly sold on and stored. Once you have this in mind, you can make a decision based on which services you want to use based on this trade-off.
You pays your money you takes your choice, or in the modern world - you use a service you hands over your data.
There is no point complaining though, else things will not work very well, or you will need to pay for them.
Rant Over.
I thought exactly the same thing, but a bit of research indicates that there is indeed a 3G network in North Korea covering 75% of the country, called Koryolink. It has apparenlty growing massively, being the oly network and has 300,000 users.
See http://www.intomobile.com/2010/11/11/orascoms-north-korea-growth/ for more info.
Got to admit I didnt expect that, but cheaper than building a copper/fibre netwrok from scratch, and easier to maintain, suppose it makes sense these days.
So Paul Allen has been sitting on these patents for a decade or so, all of the mentioned companies have been reasonably stable in thier core operations for at least the last few years. Any chance that Mr Allen is helping out his former brainchild and attempting to hamper the competition and allow Microsoft to get its hulking beaurocratic innovation engine going at last before it gets permenantly left behind????
Also, how anyone can glean anything from the description of the browser patent I dont know, what a bunch of garbled wishy washy.
Shocker!
"We understand a conventional build could cost €13,000m2 and the Colt modules will be less than this."
I hope it is a damn sight cheaper than that, who knew a new data centre would cost £169 000 000 000 000 to build. Google must be dripping in more dosh that I thought to have all those around the world ;)
Paris, because she knows how to make a number bigger!
If you don't want to get into the bones of the system, you don't even have to bloody look at the bin, etc, mnt folders of this world. You will have a nice simple home directory, with plain English names off all your users in it, and in each one of those will be Music, Documents, Videos etc etc.
You don't need to know where things are installed particularly because unlike windows most of the time, Linux knows how to add and remove programs without leaving behind a trail of detritus and bloat.
I am using and I am liking Lucid, this is the first distro where I do not need to boot into windows, full stop. Now that IT is generally migrating net and cloudwards in general, as long as the interface is nice and supports standards, it matters little what OS you use, take your pick on what you like.
With Lucid being this good out of the box, the little niggles which meant I had to boot up into Windows to do little jobs are no more, I can access read and write fully to my NTFS partition, Ubuntu even shares my windows media folders over uPnP for my mobile devices without too much of a fuss, would like to see Windows to the same with my ext3 / xfs folders, not likely.
Its fast to boot, looks pretty and does what I want it to, I can see my personal windows upgrade cycle coming to a stop here. And all for free, thank you Canonical for the inspiration and the countless numbers of developers throwing thier weight behind it.
Top Job.
Steve,
I think you might be getting a bit confused here, Spotify is a pretty good legal alternative to torrenting, and is available right now for the premium membership (which is what they are talking about after all, legal, paid for large choice services as an alternative to freeloading.) Now the streaming service, which is equally cool was open for ages with no need for an invite, so if you didnt get in there while the whole world was banging on about it, then maybe you should have let your torrents go for a bit and given it a try!.
Thanks
As a welsh dwelling Englishman, I should point out that this looks to be referring to the digi option of s4c, which is welsh language only. The terrestrial option serves up a mash of time-shifted C4 stuff with a smattering of welsh language in mornings and early evenings. As C4 is carried on digi terrestrial in Wales, only welsh officionadies search out this stuff, and there aren't many of those about.
I would be willing to bet most of the viewers will either be of the older generation or more likely middle class English emigre parents trying to get timothy into the local lingo, in case local government, s4c or a pocket of bizarrely welsh speaking Patagonia call in later life and welsh somehow becomes useful.
Err, I think it should be free at point of access, as my monthly direct debit proves the fact that I am already paying for beeb content thank you very much. And this isn't a liscense fee bash, I like the beeb (most of it) and happily pay for the hours of entertainment / education / distraction it offers me for large chunks of my day.
Free it is not though.
Surely if M$ are serious about catching up with apple et al they should be ditching 6.5 ang going straight to full touch 7.0 or am I missing something here. The only thing that will happpen here is that google android and it's manufacturers will come out of it's public beta and will be in a virtual head to head with apple for the consumer Market, if M$ miss that boat, it's screwed.
Isn't this just going to be moving the BT Vision box on demand standards across to other STB's (hopefully with some tweaking). Vision now offers BBC (not true Ipalyer content, but close), ITV, 4 and Five catch-up services across on demand via the ADSL QOS link. Don't see why this would be an issue for the vast majority of DSL enabled freeview premises (those with an 'up to 8Mb' service which reliably runs over 2Meg anyhow). Not sure where fail, fail, fail, fail comes into it, tech proven.
I was recently looking for a phone, a touchscreen phone which had WiFi, 3G, GPS, a camera of some sort and was easy to use and was excellent at multimedia, to get rid of some of the electronic crap lining my pockets these days and combine into 1. I was personally dead against the iphone, I'm not a fan of apple in general and find the hype off-putting, so I looked and I looked and settled finally on the XDA Ignito (the O2 branded touch diamond) which is basically this phone written small.
I was initially impressed with the features on the phone, but it wasn't a package, and never felt like it, it felt like a mish-mash of winmo apps covered under (admittedly quite nice) HTC's touch flo interface. The fact that I had to reg hack the bloody thing to get something anywhere near a decent sensitivity out of the screen should have got the alarm bells ringing.
In the end I went back to the shop and tried an iphone, and then it hit me, this phone just works, the screen is a joy to use, the ipod app is first rate, the controls are intuitive and fast, the visuals are top-notch, and above all, it all feels like it comes from the same place. This is what a phone needs to do to be an iphone beater, be a gloriously user freindly, un-complicated tied together unit, which, just works.
I am prepared for abuse now!!!