Posts by frank ly

Met issues mug-shot gallery mobe app to finger wanted crooks

Re: Highest density of CCTVs in the world

As I understand it, you are not allowed to place a private camera so that is monitors another person's property or a public place. So the cat in the wheelie bin situation was being illegally monitored?

As for the public helping to identify pictures of witnesses; I can imagine a situation where someone is walking through a park, a good face shot captured on public CCTV while a nasty crime is being comitted in nearby bushes; then their face is presented as 'the police would like to talk to this person in connection with a rape and murder that took place last week'.

The police might state, in writing on the site, that the person is only a witness, but you can bet lots of illiterate mouth-breathing thugs will beat them up as soon as they recognise them.

When you recruit volunteers from the public without screening or training, you get the quality you pay for.

Microsoft retunes Intune for full Android, iOS app integration

It could work out OK

If the company I work for want me to use my personally owned computing and communications device to carry out work for them, I'd be happy to lease it to them and let them have total control over what is installed on it.

Swiss, German physicists split the electron

Re: Where did the charge go?

A good question Gordon. It seems important enough to expect them to go looking for it or at least mention it. I suspect that what has happened is that the X-rays picked out some aspect of the properties of the quantum 'mush' that is smeared around the electron 'sea' of this complex crystalline solid.

I also wonder what temperature the solid was at when they detected this.

HTC One S Android smartphone

micro SIM

Do most mobile network providers hand out a micro SIM if you ask for one, or do you have to chop your existing SIM to fit it into this phone?

I'll wait until Christmas (or just after) to buy a used one on e-bay, as I do with all my phones and other techie stuff. I've never had a bad one yet.

Oakley: 'smart' sunglasses ready to shine

The frames!!

You aim for retro, push for art-deco, then overshoot to fugly.

Why does it have an earpiece if "everything happens through your eyes"?

US judge orders Apple, Samsung CEOs to get a room

Welcome to the Borg

“Apple’s attention to design allows people a feeling of symbiosis with their electronic tools, creating a feeling that one’s device is an extension of oneself”

JCB builds Android blower for brickies

iP67

Subtle; very subtle.

Singapore most 'liveable' Asian city for ex-pat IT pros

Re: Cough...

"... especially those below director level."

When you say 'director level', do you actually mean being a registered director of a company, having legal responsibility for the actions of the company, etc? I would imagine that just about everybody working on any project is below director level, by my understanding of the word 'director'.

Google G-drive app leak sparks 5GB file vault riddle

Re: This is news?

".. product placement on the likes of Hawaii Five-O."

Bing him Danno!

Ten... smartphone survival accessories

Item 3: HDMI output cable

So you can use a HD display to share your day's 'wilderness experience'. I had to laugh at that one.

Apple screws UK disties, punts just 13,000 iPads to channel

Re: "Foxconn-rebrander"?

I don't see anybody defending Context. who are described as 'abacus strokers'. Apple can look after themselves; you should stand up for the little guys.

Google faces WHOPPING FTC fine for Safari privacy gaffe

Yes indeed!

... and that's what Google said to themselves as they completed the design and looked forward to releasing it.

Mystery hologram disc upstart gobbles InPhase blueprints

Re: Archeologists in 500 years

The ancient egyptians worshipped cats as gods. Have we progressed much since then?

Samsung boss vows siblings won't see a penny of inheritance

A tradgedy

I feel really sad for rich people and their families when this sort of thing happens to them. It must be very embarassing for many close relatives as well.

Lesser-spotted Raspberry Pi FINALLY dished up

@Ian Davies Re: A rubber-keyed speccy?

The Nascom keyboard was very nice indeed, but I think it was the Nascom 2 that had a case. The Nascom 1 was a bare mother of a board where you had to do all the assembly and soldering yourself (while crossing your fingers and praying to every deity you could think of).

Re: A rubber-keyed speccy?

Ahhhh, I remember typing in assembler code for the Nascom 1 and designing and building my own I/O port decode and latching hardware. Those were the days ........ better days ........... nurse! ....... the pills!!

BYOD sync 'n share

Belt and Braces

I dragged my Dropbox folder into my Sugarsync folder so now I get my files stored in two clouds. So if Dropbox goes dead then I can still access files from Sugarsync on a different device, and vice versa. There is the consequence that I have twice the data traffic on data synching... meh. (I wonder if they use different cloud storage service providers?)

CAPITALISM without PROFITS - Welcome to the Instagram Era!

Just wondering ...

... if and when the book will be on sale in the Reg shop. I want to get down with the new paradigms.

Re: Oh, god...

If it's any comfort to you; imagine how the people at Seedrs feel about it. Oh..... wait a minute.

Android Trojan distracts Japanese with anime and porn

The really suspicious ones are the 'attractive' and free analgue clock widgets that want full internet access, ability to send and receive SMS, read phone state and some other stuff. Big WTF! on those.

The only 'Contacts' on my phone are the ones that the SIM card forces on me. I use Colornote to mantain lists of contacts and have widgets for family, friends, work, etc; which works great with Android's built in ability to recognise text that is a phone number or e-mail address, highlight it and action it with a single touch. That way, you get to decide upon and layout the contact information in a way that looks good and is useful to you. (This will work with Evernote and just about any text file app).

The only disadvatage is that I can't tell who is phoning me unless I recognise the number, but that doesn't bother me.

I have considered rooting my phone so I can use a fine grained permissions blocking app, but that's technically a bit too much of a step fopr me.

Cloudy QR code bike theft stopper gets Police thumbs up

After a little thought .....

..... Just print the QR code with 'stretching' at the edges so that the data blocks look square when viewed centrally head on with a camera. This would mean that you'd need to stick them to the bike frame with a particular 'curve orientation' but people willing to pay $30 a year to get this protection should be willing to read the instructions carefully.

Facebook defends support for CISPA monitoring bill

Re: Uh, yeah. Right....

Do foreign intelligence services and international organised crime figures have much of a presence on Facebook?

FBI track alleged Anon from unsanitised busty babe pic

Lost in all the obvious humour ...

"A review of log files from the Texas DPS website revealed that it had been compromised on February 8 ... utilising a SQL injection vulnerability ..."

The Texas Department of Public Safety can't even look after their own safety. How long have SQL injection vulnerabilities been widely known about, understood and fix measures been available?

Apple, publishers and ebook pricing – what does it all mean?

@Euchrid Re: And the authors who .....

Thank you for that interesting contribution. I didn't know about Amanda Hocking and I wish her and others like her well.

My second point was confirmed when I searched the torrents for "Amanda Hocking"; her books are all over the place! (I did not download, I just had a look to assess the availability in preparation for my comment.)

Re: And the authors who produce the goods, where are they in all this??

" ... authors themselves have no distribution channels and publishers have that monopoly."

Not true. For ebooks, places like Baen Ebooks (www.baenebooks.com) and others have channels where authors can sell their books. There are also ebook publishing houses (on the internet of course) who will package your manuscript into an e-book (as a paid service) and have various charges depending on the publishing and sales model an author wants.

However, hardly anybody (in the grand scale of global numbers) knows about these outlets, which is no good for blockbuster bestselling authors (think J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, etc). Even for middling authors, unless their ebook has DRM, then a popular book will find its way onto the torrents in a very short time. People who are capable of looking into internet niches for ebooks can easily find the popular ones for free on the torrents; I know I did :)

For paper books, an author can go the 'roll your own route' via the so-called vanity publishers but the question has to be asked - why didn't J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown (etc) do this? Probably because it's too much hassle and they are happy with the deal the existing publishers gave them.

If authors who want more money want a better deal, they will have to spend lots of time not writing books, but chasing publishing and distribution opportunities. It seems they've decided not to bother.

Soup up your home network

Re: Forgot the obvious

Can you give any links for 'proper' antennae please Danny?

re. extension strip

I too have run a Homeplug from an extension strip with laptop and other devices plugged in, with no apparent problems (I had a short network cable and was too lazy to find a longer one). You could do some simple speed comparison tests if you had any worries about performance.

Publishers fork out $52m in Apple ebook pricing settlement

Re: Cartel behaviours

"Did I say allegedly often enough in there?"

Possibly.

New fake anti-virus shakes down frightened file-sharers

" ... the use of Dropbox as a delivery mechanism ..."

This Dropbox reference was thrown in right at the end, with no explanation.

Do you get an e-mail from the bad guys with a link to their malware laden Dropbox public folder? Do Dropbox themselves install the virus the next time Dropbox has an auto-update?

A bit more explanation would be nice.

Vevo comes to Australia

Re: Subeds, please

There is a 'Send Corrections' button for that, on the same line as 'Post A Comment', and I nearly used it for that purpose.

However, in this case I've decided to interpret 'local reigns' as meaning 'power/influence in these regions'. That's just me; you do what you like of course.

German scientists link two labs with ‘universal quantum network’

Re: FTL?

@Unicornpiss: Essentially, yes. This is what the article is about. Actually, I'm not sure that "... effects passed to one entangled quantum particle will instantaneously affect its partner ...". It may not be as simple as 'push one atom to the left and the other atom moves to the left as well'.

@DryBones: It's not science fiction. It's science fact; was predicted by Einstein's theories and has been demonstrated in various laboratories for quite a few years.

I'm a qubit confused.

If you make use of the quantum entanglement of two atoms (which are stored in different places) to instantaneously convey information from one place to another, don't you destroy the entanglement? (Or is that only for entangled photons?)

Have the experimenters demonstrated instantaneous state change transfer from one entangled atom to the other?

The entanglement can (it seems) be created/restored by exchanging a photon, but this is limited by the speed of the photon.

So, the best you could do is to 'prime' a set of entangled repeaters and then use them up for a one time instantaneous message, then have to wait until they were re-primed by 'slow' photon exchange.

I may have misunderstood this; have I?

US sues Apple, publishers over ebook pricing strategy

@LOL123 Re: economics .....

"The problem is I think the typesetting and format conversion work, which is not ebook friendly..."

When an author has finished slaving away on his/her manuscript and dealt with all the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors and sentence structure, etc; it will (hopefully) be in the form of a Word document (or similar). If I was given that, I could knock out an e-book in a few minutes and send copies to thousands of people at zero marginal cost, (I'm on the intertubes).

So, I'm wondering why e-books should be so expensive. Do authors still submit manuscripts to publishers in the form of ink on parchment? Even if they do, how expensive is a copy-typist with document layout skills?

iPad to reign unchallenged as KING of FONDLESLABS

That's 'fandroid' . 'Fanboi/Fanboy' is for iStuff.

DARPA boffins seek Terminator-style disaster-zone rescue robot

Re: Human shaped robots are the least practical idea ever

" .., a tractor unit that can attach to different modules to transport, deliver and perhaps even operate them?"

We're back to International Rescue again. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

" emergency situations don't usually come with good WiFi."

Anybody who could afford to stock and deliver a robot with the capabilities of this thing could easily afford to also deliver a super-duper, encrypted, noise busting radio comms system along with it.

170m people 'upgrade' to Google+, but how many stick around?

Re: And...

That's 'valedictorian'. (Or just 'dick' in some cases.)

Oh My God!

I set up a G+ 'presence' when it first became generally available, just to see what it was about. It looked clean and simple but I didn't take it any further. The thing about Facebook (it seemed to me) was that it was full of pointless crap from pointless people. (I do realise that it's up to me to create my own meaningful crap and share it with meaningful people; but I'm lazy).

Just now, after reading this article, I clicked on my G+ button to see what was happening. I got a page (or about 5 page depths) of pointless crap from pointless people. I then had to find how to reduce this to zero, which I did after a while. What I could not get rid of was the list of 'Trending Items', so I had a look at one, a well known company related one.

The first thing I saw (apart from a big news picture) was a response comment of "You're a c**t" (without asterisks).

At last, Google has managed to emulate Facebook. They must be very proud.

Matt Groening reveals location of Simpsons' Springfield

If you tilt your head 90 degrees to the right ............

.... it looks like Homer eating a doughnut and not realising that he's on fire.

(Maybe it's just me......)

TED

Re:GPodder - And again, why?

I just tried GPodder. It's a little 2.68MB program..... that requires you to install 211MB of Python software environment before it can do anything.

Dark matter hits you once a minute

Re: Human Body Mass

Or a Big Matter Accumulating Commentard.

RIM: BlackBerry sales to US gov still on the rise

Ok, show us how it should be done.

That was a very short article so it shouldn't take you long. Can you enlighten us (and the author) by rewriting it in the way you think it should be presented; as an educational service?

Culture jammers connect Lego clones with 3D printer files

Re: I hope they have good lawyers

In theory, you can get to sarcastic/ironic by running full tilt at screaming batshit vitriolic and passing through it. In practice, few people manage to achieve this.

I was shocked

"... but we’re not going to do the acronym because it is NSFW " - if you think that's bad, you should read their website:

".. the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems"

Forensic snoops: It doesn't take a Genius to break into an iPhone

Re: Counter measures

"...I was stupid enough to feel the need to keep anything incriminating on my phone."

Exactly!!

Foxtel gets foxed by ACCC

Linear Channel?

Can someone explain what a 'linear channel' is please?

China's Internet Society backs online censorship

Re: :/

If you read the article properly, your analogy is not correct. It's like the BBC (etc) reporting that Nominet (or whoever is more appropriate) has called for web companies in the UK to self-censor.

"...every government does it, it's not even news worthy."

So, government decisions and 'guidlines' that affect many companies and lots of people should not be reported?

'Don't break the internet': How an idiot's slogan stole your privacy...

Re: Gladly.

I prefer pottage myself. It has much more minerals and vitamins as well as a more varied taste.

Asda knocks out Kobo e-reader for £49

Re: MAF to ePUB

That is amazing; epub and mobi too. Thank you for the link, it's now on my Firefox toolbar!

HTC One X Android smartphone

Re: @Arctic Fox: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones......

While I agree with the main sentiment of your post; as long as a phone has WiFi then there will be cheap data transfer. (I wonder who'll be the first to get rid of it?)