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* Posts by David 146

14 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009

Sony readies official PS Move support for PCs

David 146
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No it's worse than kinect

The PS3 Move's controller does not contain anything 'special' unlike the Kinect which features a depth-sensing camera. The Move performs tracking and depth sensing with a glorified blob-tracking algorithm with a standard webcam (the PS Eye is 640x480@30fps). Such a technique is not computationally expensive at all, and can be performed in real-time on a machine from 10 years ago without any problems.

The Move controller does feature a set of sensors for unit orientation detection, much like the Wii does, but it's hardly anything special as I said. It does the same thing as the Wii remote but with the ability to determine distance from the camera. Considering it needs a PS3 to power the thing I just don't think it makes sense from an economic PoV.

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Microsoft reins in Windows server prices

David 146

Bad for VPS/VDS providers

There's a quirk in the Windows Server Datacenter Edition SPLA license that allows unlimited virtualisation, so Windows VPS/VDS providers just get a single WS Datacenter license per physical box, and then install Standard or Enterprise in each virtualised partition. It costs about £40/month (incl VAT) per physical server right now, so if you're selling 10 VDS partitions per physical server you'd be making a tidy profit, but if Microsoft is raising this to nearly £60 it might push up VDS prices considerably.

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Forumware giant vBulletin sues ex-devs (again)

David 146
IT Angle

Trade Secrets?

Almost every teenage web developer will have spent a few months at some point in their lives implementing their own blogging engine or web forum software; it really is trivial and there's no real secret-sauce (or real 'computer science') involved. All the fancy-shmancy stuff that requires more than half a brain, such as spam detection, is not specific to internet forum software and is hardly unique to vBulletin.

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Lego and RM plot robot future

David 146

RM Subsiderary Dacta?

Eh what? "Lego Dacta" was Lego's educational arm. Now I'm confused. Did RM get the rights to the Dacta name as part of the deal or what?

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Best Buy tech finds 'child abuse' wallpaper on broken PC

David 146
FAIL

Yes and No

I'm undecided. Would someone be stupid enough to hand in a laptop that had an illegal image as his wallpaper?

Going by the small number of images, is it possible that they're images made by the man? In which case it's a simple test: "is the guy in the photos the same guy who handed the laptop in?"

/fail tag because the article doesn't have enough details

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Office 2010 Release Candidate taps small pool of testers

David 146
Jobs Halo

Basic Edition?

What about Office 2010 Basic we've been hearing about, which is due to replace Microsoft Works with a free/adware version of Office?

/St.Steve 'cos new Macs come with iWork which has no ads

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Combat games disrespect war laws, report claims

David 146

Ah yes...

but does teabagging count as a war-crime?

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Hackers free Snow Leopard from Jobsian cage

David 146

What about the long-term future?

I wonder if Apple's purchase of those chip design firms earlier is a premonition of Apple transitioning away from Intel's x64 platform in a few years onto hardware they have more control over, and so not have to worry about the likes of Psystar and these Hackintoshes.

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Judge Dredd 'Black Box' recorder/spy kit for guns unveiled

David 146
Jobs Halo

Needs barrel camera

There was talk of introducing barrel-mounted cameras to police guns a few years ago, which whilst being less useful for the armed forces as this thing would be great for the police, especially in cases of suspected police brutality or "on-duty murder".

Maybe they could make a version that does that too?

/St.Steve because the iGun would have an app for this

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Transparent OLEDs demoed

David 146

True 32-bit displays?

My computer tells me it's in 32-bit colour mode, that's all well and good, but only three of those four bytes are used for colour information, the fourth byte should be used for alpha, but it isn't because my monitor isn't transparent like these wonderous things.

I'm curious if production-model transparent OLED displays will be the first true 32-bit display with variable alpha on each pixel? It means we could get rid of the notion of desktop wallpapers and just have our icons and windows displayed on a sheet of fine quality glass.

A man can dream, no?

//SteveJobs^H^H^H^Hesus because Apple will be the first company to implement this technology in a consumer-swooning product.

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Man blames cat for child porn downloads

David 146
Gates Halo

How did they find him in the first place?

Unless it was a sting operation website (unlikely) the cops don't investigate you unless there's some other lead. I understand most child porn downloaders get caught because they were foolish enough to use their own credit-card information to purchase it, or that someone else reported them after seeing their computer. The AP source doesn't mention this (rather crucial) detail.

/SaintBill because IE doesn't report what sites you visit to the feds

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iTablet suppliers named

David 146
Jobs Horns

So very un-Apple like

I call shenanigans; the iPhone/iTouch is already a competent web browsing platform, sure the screen could do with being bigger but that would break compatibility with all the current applications which assume a 320x480 display size.

September is only a few months after the release of the 3GS too, usually there's a longer wait between releases. I'm of the opinion Apple is developing a touch display for the Apple TV.

/Evil Steve because his company is so unpredictable at times

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January's Windows 7 hole still open

David 146

It isn't the same issue

The issue described in January was a SendKeys vulnerability: that UAC wasn't prompting the user when UAC was disabled.

The current issue is different and relates to priviledge escalation due to "pre-trusted" apps like explorer.exe allowing their memory to be altered by other unprivileged processes.

Also, Long didn't write the code, he just reposted it.

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MySpace cuts 30% of staff

David 146

Health of MySpace?

Gah, if they're after wht's truely in the best interests of MySpace they should take it round back and euthanise it.

...and nothing of value was lost :)

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