Posts by Bod

O2 could impose out-of-contract iPhone lock-in

The EU

What's the point of being in the EU if they can't do anything about this.

It used to be basically an obligation under EU law to provide unlocking, but the EU got cold feet or got bullied by operators/Church of Apple and now say refusal to unlock is fine as long as the consumer is aware of this position somehow (i.e. fine print in the contract or worse even lack of it!).

Someone needs to take this beyond whimps like offcom, and go to the EU courts.

Or you can just buy any other brand of phone than Apple ;)

Sony pulls plug on cabled power

Re: Nothing new

I was about to say the same. One of the oldest electrical technologies in existence. "Magnetic Resonance" my arse. It's age old magnetic induction. The stuff you learn in school physics! (or used to. Probably don't these days. Probably just have to prove you can switch on a socket to get an A).

And before anyone says it's the first use outside of transformers, there are loads of devices that already power like this. Even my electric toothbrush charges this way.

But Sony will slap a funky name on it, colour it blue, patent it and be able to dominate the market for "wireless power". If Apple don't do it first that is ;) (in which case, funky name, colour it white, etc).

iPhone voted UK's 'coolest brand'

And...

Christianity is the most popular religion.

'Evil' Windows 7 campaign goes global

@northern monkey

*Some* people like shell based text editors. *Some* people like using the command line. etc.

Vast majority of the population wouldn't have a clue where to start and educating them won't help. They are idiots when it comes to computers, and that is not meant to put them down, it's a fact and we should embrace that. Why on earth should they need to grow a beard and step into sandals just to use their computer?

Computers should be easy to use. Windows (like it or lump it) is easy to use for the majority compared to Linux. Yes, yes, I know linux is probably easier to use *for you*, but you aren't the majority audience.

Oliver is right. The instant Mr.Idiot is told to open up some text editor to do this and that, you've lost him and he's off looking for another solution.

Not that linux can't cater for Mr.Idiot. It's just it's still a long way off doing so. The example of how to do it right is OS X. i.e. wrap cotton wool around the UI to protect Mr. Idiot and prevent him from ever needing to fire up a text editor or command prompt. But then Apple have such tight control they can be sure everything will work without the need for fiddling about. Fiddling about is the usual experience with linux desktop unless your distribution is Uber-Idiot proof and 100% targeted for exactly the same hardware you have got (netbook distributions are a positive step forward here), and you never want to install anything other than official distribution releases (else you're into a world of pain, especially if the software is not packaged for your distribution, it's driver related and your kernel doesn't have parts required and you need to, good god... recompile the kernel! Users SHOULD NOT *EVER* need to go near a compiler. End of!).

Oh, and the system file issue has a degree of resolution on Windows, more so in Vista/Win7 but even in XP it's had for a long time a means of protecting (or at least reversing) changes to critical files (and not just talking about System Restore). It just doesn't apply to all the other junk installed!

And finally, most of the open source products available to linux are also available to Windows (and OS X). I use a vast amount of open source of my own free will, on Windows, along with some commercial software that I prefer. Because I *choose* to do so, not because FSF and the like tell me I should.

Socialist claptrap if you ask me

I'm all for open source where it has it's place and/or where the developers are not interested in making a profit, but FSF's aims are to get everyone to use GPL licences which would destroy most companies who make money from software.

GPL is not what I call "Free" anyway in terms of licensing. It's just as restrictive for developers. Personally I believe the real meaning of Free they don't like to admit is as in Freetard. Bunch of people who believe everyone should share the software for free. Sounds great, but how do you run a business on "free"?

If a business wants to use open source software, that's their decision. If they want to use pay software, including Windows 7, then that's their decision.

How to run Mac OS X on a generic PC

@Stuart Duel

"They introduced the GUI to the mainstream (which they PAID Xerox for the rights to use, as opposed to Microsoft which STOLE the code from Apple to write their half-arsed attempt at a Mac rip-off, Windows)."

Where's the law suit for this theft of actual code? The case I'm aware of was where Apple claimed copyright infringement on their GUI style which is not the same as stealing actual code. The defence was that Apple's GUI was taken from Xerox (which was true) and MS & Apple had a licencing agreement that allowed them to do it anyway. MS won the case.

There's nothing innovative though in what Apple "introduced". Like everything they've done it's just someone else's idea with a bit of fluff.

Let's not forget that OS X GUI is a derivative of an open source GUI used on unix and linux platforms, which is derived from all sorts.

"They lead the industry by ditching pointless, outdated hardware such as floppy drives and legacy ports (which you still find on most PCs to this day) which take up valuable space on the motherboard and back-pane, consuming resources and power for no good reason."

Woop-de-do. Though have you seen modern PCs? The only legacy port these days is the PS2 mouse port. Serial maybe still there on a desktop but I can assure you it doesn't consume resources and power for no good reason. The only pointless port on a PC is Firewire and guess who's big on Firewire... ;)

"They make excellent hardware from quality components with such astonishing attention to detail, right down to balancing the weight of Macbook Pros and iPhones."

Get what you pay for. A Ferrari may have quality components and astonishing attention to detail compared to a Ford. So what?

However, don't mix quality with good driver support. Most people judge bad quality on a PC because of flakey drivers. Apple have total control of the hardware and can be certain their drivers work. Sounds great, but remember their drivers don't work well on anything else. Only Apple hardware.

The approach is the same as a games console however. Nothing innovative there.

"They have created technology which everyone takes for granted such as Firewire, and introduced technology that everyone now uses, such as mice, and wireless networking to name a few."

Hmm yeah, Firewire's the big hit that is was supposed to be wasn't it (i.e. replacing SCSI) ;). Yeah, that'll be why 99% of people use USB and hard discs now use SATA. Outside of Macs, Firewire is only used for video cameras.

The mouse was nicked from Xerox again. Wireless networking had nothing to do with Apple, they just introduced a WiFi adapter around the same time the far east companies were knocking out theirs, all based on a long established industry standard.

"With the introduction of the original Bondi blue iMac, they made USB actually useful by inspiring an avalanche of USB products when before the iMac, there were very few."

Lol, dream on. That'll be why the vast majority of USB products, especially in the early days, only ever worked on Windows and there was no interest in Mac drivers. If it was the way you believe it to be, they'd all have been Mac compatible from day one.

"They have created codecs and protocols which are now industry standards and contributed greatly to many others."

Hmm, what Quicktime? ;). Think you'll find the majority of the best known codecs have little to do with Apple (or even Microsoft for that matter). Even the mighty AAC was not an Apple invention.

Office 2010 to come loaded with WGA's bastard child

Meh, who cares

Office provided us with the formats for Word and Excel and everyone uses them so you need Office, *but* now we have OpenOffice which does 99.9% of what most people use Word/Excel for and are compatible with the Word/Excel "standards" so there's no need to keep upgrading to the latest MS offering (especially if MS force their XML "standard" documents on you which no one can read unless they buy the latest Office).

As much as I'm happy with Windows, I see no need for MS Office now. OpenOffice does all I need.

So MS really should be far less worried about the pirates and more worried about genuine sales. The approach towards piracy they are taking is akin to RIAA and MPAA who were/are too blinkered to see how the market has changed and still have this misguided view that piracy is the big threat (if you look at music especially, it's likely that Spotify will fairly much kill off music piracy as there's really no need any more now there's a legal service to play whatever you want instantly with a different form of revenue than just asking people to directly cough up money).

Mass infection turns websites into exploit launch pads

@LewFoo

Businesses these days tend to hire cheap outsourcing or foreigners looking for a visa to work in the UK, all of which have degrees from high turnover tech universities overseas (e.g. India).

In my experience of these situations almost all of them have been rubbish. I'm guessing the degrees are more like business degrees where they try to teach VBA to Excel students and that qualifies them to write software!

Recruitment these days is a nightmare too as not only are the businesses looking for cheap labour, but the agents are pushing cheap labour at inflated prices to take a bigger cut. It's amazing just how few applications for IT jobs these days are actually home grown and I suspect it's more down to agents than the proportion of candidates applying.

Any platform

Before the smug lot turn up, it's important to stress that SQL injection attacks affect any platform, any form of SQL, whether you're on IIS, Apache, using ASP, PHP, or "whatever". It's not SQL either that's at fault, it's simply sloppy coding on the web application side that isn't checking and formatting data correctly before it goes into an SQL query.

Again another reason why today's slew of "I've got a degree in Media/Web/Business" developers should be given managed and protective high level development platforms to develop on. We can't stop the flow of sloppy developers, so we need to protect everyone else from the mess they create by preventing them doing anything dodgy.

Multitaskers: suckers for irrelevancy, easily distracted

"easily distracted"

easily distracted - sounds like one of my school reports.

Nokia launches laptop

@Torben Mogensen

"But why did they have to use an Atom processor, which isn't capable of playing videos at this resolution?"

Sorry, that simply isn't true, and is a claim of many people who haven't tried recent netbooks (and this includes Steve Jobs who believes such cheap netbooks are not possible to be decent).

My Samsung NC10 has an Atom processor and I'm watching 720p HD movies full screen smooth as anything. More than that I have them upscaled to 1080p via the VGA port to my 40" HD TV and still perfectly smooth.

I've been watching movies, both SD and HD full screen on the Sammy whilst on a plane with it in 'silent' mode (i.e. throttle back the CPU, low power mode etc to conserve battery), and still flawlessly smooth.

It does require the CoreAVC codec though as Microsoft's codecs just aren't up to it. The one restriction here is CoreAVC can't deal with DRM video, so BBC's HD iPlayer won't run through it (though their SD iPlayer works fine with the standard codecs).

Interoperability eludes Office and OpenOfffice

Who uses OOXML?

Almost everyone who needs to transfer Word/Excel files about uses their older "standard" that Open Office even supports fine. Why would you write to a format only supported in newer versions of Office when most people are still on older versions and/or use alternate products?

Apple loses students to netbooks and Windows

Re: Netbook schmetbook

Nah, you should have bought a better netbook that's all.

A Samsung NC10 for example has plenty of grunt in that Atom processor to do almost everything the average person wants to do. In fact it does more (e.g. 720p HD video, running smooth if you use CoreAVC, even upscaled via the external VGA to 1080p).

Sure, if you want to run Photoshop for serious editing it will struggle a bit, modern 3D first person shooter games will barely run (though older ones are fine, like original Half Life), but you don't buy a netbook for these reasons.

Anyone who's evaluated netbooks on the basis of those cheap EeePC, Aspires and Dells, especially those running some cut down Linux, should re-evaluate them based on the higher spec Atom powered netbooks running XP. That includes Mr. Jobs.

Orbital skydives to follow inflatable heatshield success?

It's skydiving Jim, but not as we know it

Of course Trekkies know about orbital skydives (both in the "normal" timeline, albeit in a cut scene in Generations and in the "alternate" timeline) ;)

Dell's Android phone unmasked

Lack of 3G

Could be down to China. They're a bit picky about these things and have only recently started allowing 3G I think. Depends how long Dell's had this one under wraps.

I doubt many in China will be bothered as how many can get 3G anyway?

Bug exposes eight years of Linux kernel

@AC 13:20

"Oh dear. Anyone could do a bit of homework and get this right before posting this dreck."

The OS X kernel is derived from the CMU Mach monolithic kernel. The rest of the OS X userland, not counting Apple's proprietary stuff, appears to be a mix of all the BSDs, according to someone who surveyed the version strings."

Good grief, nitpicking or what. I said "based" on BSD. I didn't want to complicate things mentioning Mach. Sure I'm no expert on it, but Mach from what I can tell is partially based on BSD's kernel (or at least was a replacement for it and developed by BSD developers).

Hardly dreck. The point was simply to emphasise that OS X is *not* Linux and does not use a Linux kernel, not to get into the details of this and that kernel. That's all.

Re: Re: At least the fix is easy.

Worse than that, linux kernels exist on a huge amount of embedded devices that never get updated. Though the attacker will still need a way in first.

@James O'Brian - "And seeing as OSX is a variant of *nix does this affect them as well?"

*nix isn't Linux, and OS X is based on BSD I believe, so in theory no. Unless the same bug is in the BSD kernel of course ;)

NASA review: Forget about boots on Mars by 2030

In my lifetime?

I'd be just under 60 by 2030 if I haven't keeled over already with the millions of things I'm supposed to die of because I haven't eaten the right stuff, breathed the right air, etc.

If it's later than that then it's pushing it. Average lifespan for a bloke and all that... !

As said, have to depend on stem cells.

Twitter is mainly pointless babble and other rubbish

So what

Most of what people write in personal emails and before that letters is pointless babble. What about postcards? People write about what a lovely time they're having and what they had for lunch and send it to people who really don't care.

Microsoft at a loss in Word patent case?

End software patents now

Nuff said.

Orange repeals unpopular price changes

Text message

I got some text message about some changes which provided a link to a web site. Later decided to check it on my PC (for free), but the link insisted I had to access it from my handset (how much would they bill me for that I wonder!). Of course I was out of reception, so couldn't do that. I couldn't even browse to it via WiFi on my handset. It only works from an Orange GPRS/3G connection.

Still haven't worked out what these changes are.

Nokia to cull Symbian from smartphones?

Symbian / S60

A lot of people say Symbian is crap, but Symbian (in the current Nokia products) is the underlying OS. The problem in part is the S60 platform which ties the S60 UI to Symbian (the other problem is generally the processing power and memory).

Symbian OS itself is fine. It's a proper microkerneled pre-emptive multitasking OS with an emphasis on utilising low resources.

The S60 UI and infrastructure has always been a clunky bolt on. The touch UI is again similar.

That's why Qt is going to be interesting. It's a complete departure from the existing S60 platform though, but still runs on a newer generation of Symbian OS. The resultant platform will technically be called Symbian though, including the UI.

Best Buy demos Dell netbook running... Mac OS X

Simple

XP with RocketDock + OS X wallpaper

That's all you'd need to knock that up on XP.

Two convicted for refusal to decrypt data

Re: Plausable deniability & TrueCrypt

There are flaws even with the likes of TrueCrypt. If someone has access to the PC over time (constantly or with periodic snapshots) they can snoop on changes and infer there is something there. Not to mention they can grab the unencrypted data before it gets to the encrypted partition. The easiest way to convict people is to intercept the data before it's encrypted rather than go through costly forensics on an already encrypted system.

With TrueCrypt it's also almost a guarantee you have a hidden inner partition even if they can't technically detect it, as that's why people use TrueCrypt. It is possible to detect the outer partition. If it's a file it's fairly easy and if it's an actual partition it's an obvious giveaway as why would you leave a chunk of your disc empty but which has random data in it?

Another giveaway is if you give the password for the outer partition with fake files, they can easily spot it hasn't been updated regularly and suspect there must be more to it.

Forensics can go a step further and detect physically where recent changes have been made on the disc in areas that should be empty.

Official: Toshiba to get in on Blu-ray Disc

720p vs 1080p

"the difference between 720p and 1080p is just as important as that between DVD and 720p"

Only on a big enough TV and/or if you sit close enough.

Also, if you're comparing 720p and 1080p on your 1080p TV, then that's an invalid comparison as 720p is not at the native resolution. You need to compare 720p on a 720p TV and 1080p on a 1080p TV, of the same size.

Myself, having done both kinds of comparison, whilst I can tell the difference, it's no where near gobsmacking enough. Generally even 720p upscalled on my 1080p TV is perfectly fine. That's on a 40" TV.

However it's a void point. Most people who have gone out and got a flat TV to replace their CRTs have gone and bought 720p TVs. They don't need Blu-Ray for that. A smaller bandwidth download would do just as fine, and even with more compression they won't notice on their 32" or smaller TV.

And don't forget the majority of the population still have CRTs. You might find that hard to believe, but the majority of the country are not people like us. I'm still shocked by the number of people I see with just a little 14" portable TV tucked away in a corner, not to mention a lot of people who don't really watch much TV (and a few who actually don't have a TV at all!).

@MarkOne - "You seem to have forgotten about CD and 1.44Mb floppy discs which Sony did come up with."

Sony only came up with half of the CD. Sony came up with an idea for an audio optical disc (based on Phillips laserdisc principles). Phillips had something similar in the works. The actual redbook standard that produced the "Compact Disc" is a combination of Sony and Phillips technology.

1.44Mb floppies are specifically those 3.5inch discs that PCs used and formatted to 1.44Mb. They were a little different to the similar sized disc that Sony much earlier failed to introduce. Essentially their contribution was much like Betamax, but you can't say Sony came up with VHS. Besides, their floppy disc was a derivation of earlier discs of larger sizes, much the same as Betamax was a derivation of other earlier video tape formats. Sony have never really been original. They just take another idea and try to mould it into their own proprietary format.

Download times

"I can order a film and have it delivered on Blu-ray disc in less time than I could download it at the same quality."

Well I could download an HD movie quicker than it takes Royal Mail to deliver a disc. Usually overnight.

Only catch is those movies are somewhat less than legit torrent based shares ;)

Given few people bother with next day delivery from the likes of Amazon, play, etc, then most are prepared to wait the 3 to 5 days, so they could easily download during that time. Dedicated infrastructure through deals with the ISPs would speed things up a lot more too (look at BBC iPlayer as an example).

Give it a little time and fast enough downloads with the right infrastructure will be in place. The problem is some people will always have rubbish connections though.

I was hoping Tosh's idea of movies on flash media would fill this gap. People could just load up movies onto a credit card equiped with flash media when they go shopping if they are not equipped for downloads.

I'm fed up with discs though. I just want a library I can dip into without cluttering my shelves with discs I only ever watch once or go through the hassle of getting scratched to death unplayable rentals.

Spotify has shown the way for music. Now we just need the same for film. HD for most people takes a back seat. Few people even release they don't have HD on their new shiny HDTV. They just think it looks amazing compared to their old CRT, so that's fine for them.

The move here from Tosh just prelongs an old outdated technology. Shiny discs based on a nearly 30 year old concept have had it. Problem is, do I buy them anyway in the interim and end up with more redundant discs and hardware in 5 years time?

Texting makes kids faster and dumber

bring back text adventure games

I learnt a lot about spelling and grammar from the old text adventure games. You were forced to think about verbs and nouns, stringing sentences together. The later more advanced ones got into more complex grammar.

If I'd learnt from texting I'd be as thick as many of today's youth I think.

I'd agree to that many kids probably don't use T9 anyway. T9 isn't corrective, it's just predictive. It won't correct your spelling if you hit the wrong key in many handsets and you need to know how to spell the word in the first place. Correcting the spelling when it doesn't recognise it takes longer, so kids likely resort to the simple ugly text speak.

Tories plan health record giveaway

Google Medic

So will you need a Google account to get access and it then appears as another of their apps? Perhaps you could have your Android phone hooked up to a heart monitor also to feed back information!

And all this information stuck in the cloud in America for unscrupulous US pharmaceutical companies to harvest. Hmm.

Mind you, I'd have more trust in Google / Microsoft than some half baked government IT system.

BT's giant new faster broadband boxes blocked

Re: Virgin Media...

Those old cable cabinets were only designed for analogue TV + phone line though. They still are like that, which is why some people find Virgin (formerly NTL, formerly... etc) connections can be tremendously unstable when digital TV and broadband is applied.

Unlike BT's copper to home, the connections from cabinet to consumer in terms of TV and broadband work by essentially a big coax cable of the old thick-ethernet style, complete with noise, interference, and is affected by neighbouring connections, especially unterminated ones (much like thick-ethernet).

The best solution to connect to houses for digital is fibre, next best is dedicated copper / twisted pair. The worst is noisy coax, which is what cable companies use from cabinet to home. Great for a crappy analogue TV picture. Rubbish for digital.

BT's cabinets likely have a lot of electronics in there that the old green cable cabinets have, and a dedicated connection to every house. Cable cabinets only have dedicated phone lines. The coax is shared in a loop with spurs essentially.

Anyway, how are BT going to stop the kids kicking the crap out of the boxes like they do with the cable cabinets?

Apple blueprints warranty Big Brother

Where's the EU when you need them

So where's the EU case against Apple anyway regarding deliberately blocking the consumer from replacing the battery and force them to spend their money with Apple to replace the battery or more likely replace the whole unit?

But then I guess it's different for a Cult than for a real hardware/software manufacturer. In such a cult there is ultimate control by the cult leader of the consumer.

I'm waiting for the advert saying, "Mass cult suicide? There's an app for that".

Murdoch says Page 3 won't be free from next year

Re: Sky is not part of Newscorp

Erm, Sky is part of BSkyB which is 39% owned and essentially controlled by News International (who own The Times, The Sun, etc), a subsidiary of NewsCorp. Sky was created by Murdoch essentially (although BSkyB was a merger with the former BSB). Murdoch stepped down as chairman but his son is currently chairman (formerly CEO).

It's not "part" of Newscorp in terms of a wholly owned subsidiary, but it is a major holding and essentially controlled by NewsCorp unless the shares are sold.

Finances of the major shareholder does have an impact on Sky. If NewsCorp want to suck money from Sky they can as they'd likely have the controlling vote. If NewsCorp are struggling they can flog BSkyB shares which could devalue the company and that can affect their position and investors.

Meh

There's so much news content out there, I'll just go somewhere free than pay for Sun / Times content online. Big deal.

Most people don't want to sign up for such sites I expect anwyay. They just see a link to an article, click on it and if it says you need to sign up to read it, they'll go somewhere else.

Can't see how he expects to make money out of it this way more than through traditional advertising.

The real question though is how News Corp finances will affect Sky. If the subs start going up, I'll drop to Freeview/Freesat (but what's the betting that Sky News becomes a pay channel?).

KDE 4.3 promises polish, polish, polish

Linux

KDE originated on Unix rather than specifically Linux. KDE, after CDE, see? ;). More than that it is actively being developed and promoted as a cross platform desktop that could run even on Windows and Mac OS X (technically, any platform supporting Qt).

Orange declares mobile broadband price war

"connection speeds of up to 3.6Mb/s"

At least it's qualified as connection speed as otherwise I'd rant on about how it's almost impossible to get anywhere near the quoted speeds on 3G, especially if you're moving more than 0.1mph.

So, when are Orange going to cut their US roaming data rates though? Come on. £8 per MB !!

Qnap TS-219P Turbo Nas

Atom Atom Atom

Atom is the way forward with NAS. Low power, low heat, but powerful enough to make a decent little home server and not need a monster noisy power supply sucking in dust 24/7 that will go bang (as my home build PC servers frequently do!).

Sadly Qnap's Atom versions (e.g. TS-239) are even more expensive! There are cheaper alternatives.

@Bob H - These typically have a proper PC motherboard (in small form factor), processor, memory (typically 1GB these days), often a RAID card/chip, GB network adapter (or two, maybe with failover, load balancing, etc in some cases), a few peripheral ports, support for a UPS, (usually) hot swap drive bays, and a power supply on top. They're enough to make a good home server running streaming servers, web, email, etc. And then the branded ones come with all the software and packages preinstalled with easy to use interface. Even considering the mark up, there's a lot more than £15 of parts in there, and considerably more in value.

Microsoft ditches Windows 7 E plans

Stuff the EU

The whole argument about them being anti-competitive is rubbish. Who really stands to lose commercially by IE being part of the operating system? Most are open source free browsers.

The only other one that's really of commercial advantage to anyone is Safari and yup, that's because it's bundled by force with Mac OS X and the EU doesn't bat an eyelid about that!

Though Google can get commercial gain out of theirs but theirs is heavily tied to their search engine and will of course be central to the Google Chrome OS. Bet the EU doesn't kick up a fuss about that either! They don't even seem to care that Google are advertising Chrome to all IE users who browse to the Google home page (which must be the home page to the vast majority of users). Why should Google only advertise their browser on their home page? Surely in all EU fairness all other browsers should be advertised as well, until the page is 90% links to browsers and 10% is the seach edit box ;)

Pah, who cares. If you don't like what MS put out, go use another operating system, simple as that. Plenty of commentards here bang on about it enough.

It's like objecting to the fact Ford stick Ford engines in their cars. Don't like it, don't buy a bloody Ford!

Apple tablet unveiling brought forward

10" for movies

Perfectly fine if you're on a plane etc.

Problem is, there are hundreds of devices that do this job perfectly, and for a fraction of the price Apple will be charging. Some are netbooks, some are dedicated movie players. Most likely play more formats out of the box than Apple will probably allow and won't be tied to iTunes.

So, if it's a 10" movie player you want, I don't see the point.

If however it's a full OS X running Mac in a 10" tablet, that's another matter.

Will still be way overpriced though, but you guys can't resist lining Steve's pockets for a sexy brand ;)

Now if Apple can pull it off at the £300 price point. That's another matter. Won't happen though.

Bezos begs forgiveness for Amazon's Big Brother moment

More Fahrenheit 451 than 1984 perhaps

In the sense that you have no right to keep your book, you are just licenced. Taking the book away is akin to book burning.

And what if governments decide they want the power to stop people reading books by forcing revocation and/or deletion of DRM'd books they disagree with?

DRM is wrong, wrong, wrong. We've said it enough times. It's being used the wrong way too anyway.

You buy a book. It's yours to keep. Doesn't matter what the author, publisher, authorities or anyone else decides later. DRM, if it is to exist, should only prevent unauthorised copies that harm the author/publisher. Not prevent the purchaser from using it, in any form.

Fujifilm confirms 'world's first' 3D stills and films compact

Re: Since the lenses

"are all of 75mm apart you're not going to be getting any sort of noticeable stereo effect unless the subject is quite close"

75mm is about the average distance between the human eyes, and we manage to get a pretty good stereo effect ;)

Microsoft opened Linux-driver code after 'violating' GPL

GPL. The freetards licence

"I want everything for free", so let's have a licence that ensures anyone who uses it has to give away the whole lot for free with the same restrictions too, or otherwise not use it at all.

BSD, Apache, MIT licences, etc, to me carry the true spirit of open source. Free to use code to do the hell what you like with, just with attribution, and so what if it's used in closed source commercial code. Open source shouldn't be about restrictions, and that is exactly what GPL is about.

As a developer I'd even prefer to pay for code/components rather than go for GPL due to the legal complexity, especially if I'd have to convince company lawyers that it's okay to use it.

Google filters image problem

Verify Licence

"You'll still have to verify that the licensing information is accurate,"

Sadly a lot of companies still fail to do this. They filter for Creative Commons and just assume that gives them full rights to use them commercially. Nor do they realise that just because it's CC does not mean they have been assigned copyright. That still resides with the original creator.

But then a lot also don't give a crap at all and assume if it's on the net, even if it's All Rights Reserved, it's free for use. Trying to chase up copyright infringement is extremely difficult too.

Silverlight 3: closer to what client-side .NET should have been

vs Flash

As a .NET developer I can fully appreciate developing for Silverlight over Flash. Actionscript in Flash is pretty nasty.

I think the next step though is to take on AIR properly though.

Orange UK drops DRM

Operators all alike

They all pretty much do the same with branding, if they're allowed to.

Or they're like O2 and have exclusive deals and the manufacturer ensures the phone is locked down tight (in breach of EU guidelines to allow operator unlocking).

Answer is simple. Buy sim-free and unbranded/locked/tied-down outside of the operator. So long as you're not after the iPhone that is ;)

Many people pay over the value of their phone anyway on overpriced contracts they don't fully use. It's worth checking the full price of the phone and comparing that against a contract.

Anyway, question is, what bitrate and quality are the non-DRM tracks?

Still more expensive than a physical CD these days though. Most CDs I buy are £5 and excellent quality that I can rip lossless and store on my media server.

Google polishes Chrome into netbook OS

@Grease Monkey

"FFS how many times do you people need to have this explained? The EU's beef with MS and bundling IE with Windows is that they are using their dominant position in the OS market to artificially enhance their postion in the browser market.* Apple and Google do not have a dominant position in the OS market to abuse in the first place.

It's very, very simple to understand therefore I can only assume you are deliberately misundersanding the situation in order to support your prejudice."

So if by some miracle Apple or Google became dominant then it's perfectly okay they have a bundled browser because they weren't dominant at the time ;)

p.s. no prejudice. Win, OSX, any flavour of *nix, all have their place in my home if they do the job. It's just the hypocrisy of those who sought to hit MS that I find laughable, especially as it really was just a jealousy thing. And besides, what does a maker of a free open source browser have to lose financially by IE being shipped with Windows? The "Browser Market" is nothing more than an ego trip here.

Reality is, MS had a shit load of cash, and sufficient lawyers in US and EU worked out they could get their hands on it.

Anti-trust, EU and all that

Surely Google won't be allowed to get away with bundling their browser with the OS, and not to mention all the Google Apps? ;)

Oh, but they're not Microsoft, so that's okay (see Apple).

As for Chrome browser vs IE. It is great and I use Chrome all the time now, but problem is people still see a use for IE. Parents complained that their IE was taking for ever to load up. Told them to try Chrome and they were amazed and said this was much better. But then they found it doesn't do a bunch of things IE does on the edges (fluffy things like a sidebar for bookmarks), and of course a bunch of their favourite sites just don't work right because they're rubbish sites badly coded and rely on IE's bugs. Thus they won't switch.

Ofcom coughs 3G coverage maps

Lol at O2

It's no wonder I keep seeing iPhone owners twittering about lack of 3G signal.

P.S. Vodafone and T-Mobile above Orange? Looks to me Orange has far more coverage, even in the south.

One of the reasons I stick with Orange is not the customer service (which like everyone's is sh*t), it's the coverage, especially outside of the home counties.

Sadly though Orange's Mobile Broadband offers are also sh*t and Vodafone/T-Mobile have some of the better PAYG mobile broadband offers.

Too thick to boil an egg? Buy 'em preboiled

Sainsbury Local / Tesco Extra etc

I can see this as a bad thing especially for customers of the small "local" Sainsbury/Tesco places which already chuck out most "ingredient" products in favour of overpriced flavourless lazy-ass ready made products for those too lazy or too thick to even cope with cooking the simplest of foods.

So out will go the boxes of eggs and in come pre-boiled eggs.

How will I make my Yorkshires now? Ah, but these places have overpriced "tastes like cardboard" bloody Aunt Bessies lazy-ass things they claim to be Yorkshires!!

What's the betting they're laid by chickens in Bolivia, shipped to Honduras by air to pre-boil them, and then shipped to the UK for packaging before shipping to the supermarkets?

What next? Pre-boiled tea and breakfast cereals with the milk already in? They can do away with stocking milk then.

Sir Alan Sugar hits eject button at Viglen

Viglen floppy drives

Ah, those were the days :)

Think I had some 'Watford' disc controller though that was non standard but more advanced (double density disc support I think!). Was good except for being incompatible when it came to "backing up" some copy protected discs (yep, they had copy protection even back then).

The expense though for a floppy that would store a few hundred KB !!!!

Hollywood prepares to battle Asteroids

Time to...

Get Sean signed up. He's the real grandad of asteroid films. Oh wait, that was Meteor though (which was daft anyway as the film was about an Asteroid whereas Meteors are much smaller).

But anyway, Asteroids has been done. See the Asteroid Field scene in Empire Strikes Back. No one can top that (especially with the John Williams score).

Ofcom decides on white-space parameters

Huh?

Cognitive Radio? Had to google/wikipedia that one. Sounds vapourwearish to me.

Give me old fashioned LW or SW radio with cross channel interference (literally cross channel from France), any day.