
sideloading to the rescue
...all Samsung have to do is remove the photo app. Users can easily sideload it back onto their devices.
Or do what many users already do and load a gallery app worth using instead of the stock version!
2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
I looked at my local map and it doesn't match what I see. What they're measuring doesn't seem to be much use in guessing what coverage is really like.
According to this I have full O2 3G coverage everywhere in the city. What they've not managed to notice, in my city the O2 3G is so poor it doesn't work at all inside 90% of city buildings, in many cases I can't get any signal indoors, not even voice. I've sat in pubs next to a street window and seen zero bars, its that bad.
So poor even standing in the streets I have a 50:50 chance of seeing 3G. So overloaded and lacking in backhaul that actual throughput rarely climbs about GPRS rates, whatever the connection type.
Have to conclude they measured the wrong thing.
The only believable result is confirmation that there are few "3" users near me ;)
I remember something closer to an iPhone (and advanced one with a borderless full glass face and yes telephony was mentioned) but it's been a long time. Been trying to track down some ref to it for a while now, when the pile got too high I dumped most of my copies.
Seems it's just the 2 of us that remember it :(
What Apple did was prove people wanted to own an implementation of *an existing idea*, not create the idea. If Apple had patented *selling pads* then Samsung would be in real trouble, luckily that's a hard one to get past even the US PTO (where US stands for Useless).
What this does is destroy their design patent protections because clearly, someone designed beat them to the detail as well as the broad idea ;)
I'm at a loss to understand why a licence that let's users violate it knowing they can unilaterally restore their own rights after delay waiting on enforcement, is better than one that takes time to kick off enforcement then leaves offenders up shit creek if they persist. Usually with a lot of grovelling, paying costs and signing binding undertakings to not offend again.
So why is GPL3 supposed to be better from the licensors viewpoint? Seems superficially like a licence to take the piss with few enforcement teeth. A licence easy to duck against one with bite.
The FSF really have lost what little grasp of the plot they still retained, pushing a poison pill licence with no obvious advantages beyond that patent poison pill. Which doesn't look like an advantage to many corporations.
Even if their story was more than FUD, the GPL3 is widely seen as too toxic for corporate use. As pointed out days ago when this was first reported on, if Linux was GPL3 Android would not be using Linux. That's one self destructive way to prevent license violation.
It's depressing that no-one even considers the possibility of Google simply imposing more openness on Motorola than Motorola historically demonstrated.
Things like banning the ultra-locked bootloaders Motorola have become infamous for or maybe even forcing them to offer crapware free versions. Google can force a hell of a lot of change on the overall Android market without favouring Motorola, just by forcing them to be better than the competition.
It's a sad commentary on the behaviour of the existing giants that so many can only see abuse of power as an option here.
It's not as if the 'special relationship' Google and Motorola had developing Android 3 has caused any comment about abuse, even amongst the G hating regulars on the Reg!
Abuse is not inevitable unless you have Bulmer or Ellison on your board ;)
Have you ever tried contacting Google? They just don't reply until the PR shit hits the front pages. And then they might consider a 'no comment'.
Hell, even app devs struggle to get any response at all from them and usually it's just 'you're wrong' rephrased if they bother with a response.
They really have a shitty attitude to the outside world.
Yes, with Android you can pick almost any price and find a phone, as low as £40 for PAYG today.
With Apple you can choose between expensive, more expensive or 2nd hand (but still expensive).
Much cheaper to buy into Android, once in its such a PIA switching platforms you'll stay. Plenty of high end Android devices when or if you feel the need to move upmarket. This is the real threat to Apple, inertia will drive high end sales in the long term.
Paying 3x more for 6x more patents and getting a business thrown in on the side doesn't seem much of a mistake. Particularly with Microsoft trying to buy the same business, for altogether less pleasant reasons.
Doesn't hurt hat Microsoft will now be paying patent license fees to Google ;)
1: a casual glance at the list confirms what I expected, a long list of piss poor, low end devices thrown together in Chinese sweatshops are non-compliant. Good luck convincing the Chinese to do anything about that and try not to be surprised if none of us are surprised. After all these shady companies tried building fake Android devices before realising they could just grab the real thing!
2: the GPL doesn't specify a time limit on supplying source and it's (unfortunately) fairly common for it to take a few weeks. There's slop in the system because of that and swift enforcement isn't really an option.
3: to date many companies have had to be nudged into releasing the source *faster* by eager modders. There's been no panic from copyright holders and very little feeling any of the companies within reach of the law aren't going to comply eventually.
4: Naughton misrepresents how enforcement is usually handled. Delay too long and yes, the licence is declared void but getting compliant and saying 'sorry' almost always get's it reinstated - albeit often with a legally binding agreement not to do it again. Less of a time-bomb, more of a rubber mallet to compel compliance!
There will be companies that flout the licensing and inevitably some will be within reach of our courts and end up on the wrong end of a court.
That's not a specifically Android problem, that's the same corporate theft a long succession of scumbags have tried ever since the GPL was created. It's sad that the Reg's ongoing war against Android has sunk to this level. Couldn't you find a real story to beat on Google and/or Android with?
Bidding with (approximations of) irrational numbers seems a very pertinent comment on an irrational system.
While the rest of the world pays at least lip service to the concept of patents serving *the public interest*, America has resurrected their original use as gifts from royalty to cronies. With all levels of government infested by lawyers there's little chance the pigs will give up the patent trough without being pushed. A company too big to fail, failing is about all that's left to try.
Norwegian law allows use of illegally obtained evidence at the judges discretion, it's one of the differences between adversarial and inquisitorial systems and apparently Norwegian criminal law is partially inquisitorial.
Further, EU law (specifically the human rights) also allows use of illegally obtained evidence.
Whilst it's likely the court won't admit this data that's unlikely to stop the police using it.
Gumby, do you do any honest research or just spout the what you're paided to spout?
8 consecutive autosaves of an email *with no destination* followed by the final saved copy *with the lawyer CC'd in*. Can you guess which copies Oracle surprised Google and the court with and which one they didn't mention?
Can you guess if the court really ruled against Google yet or Oracle and their friend Florian just made that up?
Right now Boies,Schiller&Flexner is pulling the same stunts they tried with SCO vs the world. Which I'm assuming includes paying shills.
"Oracle needs this letter to show mens rea. That Google acted with a 'dirty mind' or rather they knew what they were doing was in fact illegal (civil not criminal)."
In fact Oracle needs this unsent email to fall through a timewarp and have been written *before* Oracle accused Google of patent infringement. Right now it proves Google engineers knew Oracle had made that claim, not any belief they were infringing before then.
Odds are, despite the judges current stated opinion, a jury will never see this. Engineers aren't qualified to interpret patent law, the opinion that matters will be what Googles lawyers said.
Google have certainly finessed the law to bypass various licence issues and you and others have bitched relentlessly about it. Determining whether there's wilful infringement will come down to whether a jury believes Google believed they'd lawyered and re-engineered their way round the problem identified in that 1st email.
Looking at today's court filing Oracle are well on the way to a spoilation charge over 'vanishing' the Sun website in any case. Taking it down the moment Google started finding interesting posts really wasn't the smartest idea, given spoilation can get cases dismissed.
Right now I stand by my earlier comment: Google can reach court in 5 years time, lose but still end up paying less than if they'd licenced Java up front. Don't forget, the case isn't about billions any longer, the court has already suggested $100mil as a more realistic starting point.
This reg reader suggests everyone uses 1/1/1970 as their birthdate on every site with no need to know and lie about everything that doesn't compromise your use of sites. As a habit.
I also love responding to phishing. With completely false details. What we really need is a set of trigger CC accounts that automagically trigger fraud detection, might catch a few more scumbags.
KDE4 hilights the major difference between KDE and Gnome: both do batshit insane stuff in new major releases, then:
KDE devs listen to the feedback and start fixing some of the broken software
Gnome devs listen to their own self serving feedback and try to fix the broken users
"owners of Digital Video Recorders still consume 86 per cent of their television live, which surprised us"
Unless you have enough multi capture tuners available for the multiplexes you want to watch in peak slots, you're going to have to watch live. With 4 Freeview tuners in my MediaPortal box I watch nothing but sport live by choice. When I recently dropped to 2.5 tuners I had to watch a lot live. Most domestic 2 tuner setups are much less capable.
Lets also not forget that very few people would record live news or the crap shown outside peak slots. That's a large chunk of typical viewing.
The USB driver thing is a bit of a red herring. In principle you don't need them just to mount the sdcard on a PC. But you may need to fiddle with some settings on the Tab and it won't mount automagically, you have to explicitly tell it to. Whether Samsung cocked that up is hard to say but I'd suggest user error is as likely!
In practice if you want to debug or use Samsungs sync tools the standard USB storage device doesn't do enough and you need drivers. Its not spectacularly hard hacking the standard SDK installer for new devices on Windoze - which is good with how often some clown changed the USB identifiers in 3rd party roms for my phone - I believe it's even easier on Linux.
Tim Almond:"I keep being told it's a great media consumption device, but I don't understand how a tablet is the best of those options. What am I not understanding?"
I spend an hour or so catching up on news and assorted browsing each morning *before leaving bed*. I've tried it with my laptop and it was a PIA finding space for it and my breakfast and not much fun getting my lap toasted! It's been a lot more pleasant using my phone, when I find the excuse I expect a tablet to do better.
What you're missing is how much the desktop/laptop form factor affects how and where you 'want' to use them. For pure consumption tablets are just that bit easier to use on a sofa, armchair, in bed, or flipped on their side while you lie there. The idea of sitting in front of a laptop to watch media would never occur to me, slobbing on a settee would.
It's not that 'consumers' aren't creating content, it's that most of the content they're creating is either best done on their phone (Twitter) or being done on the go where carrying a tablet is a poor option. Unless social media dies no-one needs more than a T9 keypad and a phone camera for all the content they're ever likely to 'create'.
What that means isn't so much that the desktop is dead but that laptops are endangered. Laptops of course have seriously impacted desktop PC's already, so I question just how much scope there's left for tablets to replace them.
Other than that he's been paid to state the bleeding obvious.
Gad said:"Seems like a bad argument to say that some people being able to expose that information justifies exposing it to a far greater pool of people, especially when no risk assessment regarding the impact of that action is."
The starting 'risk assessment' here was the state deciding it was perfectly safe to stamp on groups practising responsible disclosure. The idiots making that decision are far too dumb to consider who might step in when the white hats are gone and their corporate friends far too cowardly to defy them. Stupidity is almost a qualification for the job and there's no career downside for them.
Remember: this escalation had a start and could have been avoided. Or more accurately could have been avoided if our governments and state machinery weren't so irredeemably anti democratic.
...looks like law enforcement wasn't taking the informants security seriously anyway if amateurs could extract plaintext lists.
Some would argue simply having the records on a computer shows reckless disregard for their safety, though it's probably cheaper and easier to just bribe a bent policeman than hire a black hat hacker...
Be nice to see some stress testing pulling multiple channels from a multiplex, which I don't believe WMC allows. Seen enough tuners crap out in various ways with 2 or 3 channels in use to always test this.
Some idea of how hot it runs would be a good start, both my failed USB tuners ran too hot to touch before failing.
Tying yourself into Vonage seems a little surprising, I went with Siemens Gigaset phones partly because they'll handle multiple SIP accounts instead of being locked into just 1.
Of course if you don't need new phones like I did Vonage is cheap and reliable, still think I'd have got an unlocked adaptor though and hedged my bets.
And yet another case where 'unlimited' actually means 2000min ;)
One thing sticks out a mile here: with his known beliefs, affiliations and record, the best he could manage is claiming an effect that in essence smooths out extreme short term temperature excursions (on the timescale of 3months or so), explains a well known difference between *short term* model predictions and measurement and at best just delays global effects. Despite the best efforts of 'friends' in the press to misrepresent the actual paper it's hardly a bombshell.
I think he was faced with a self inflicted dilemma, write exaggerated BS or stay close enough to the truth to actual get printed in an untainted publication. In this case a marginally relevant publication. He chose the latter. Going to be interesting seeing how much of the mild claim survives peer review (which it's not had yet).
It's really hard to work out what he hopes to achieve, the message seems to be 'it's not possible to understand the situation', presumably because that will throw doubt on all modelling efforts. I hope he's actually found something real, it could help ameliorate the worst effects on extreme weather effects and buy a few more years before the tipping point to undo the damage his cronies have inflicted with delay.
More likely he's failed to resist exaggeration and will be refuted pretty quickly now the 'usual suspects' are stirring up PR.
Wonder if that's related to the 'surprising' filtering going on in the app review lists in the new Market app. Instead of displaying reviews in date order with minimal filtering (just spam), they're now in some unfathomable order that appears semi random with a heavy dose of burying low ratings.
It's bizarre finding 4&5 star reviews from Jan or even last year topping the lists, regardless of what current review ratings actually are. Their woefully broken Maps 5.7.x series used to feature around 40% 1 star ratings and has done for 2+months. Now you'll struggle to see more than 1 in 20 low ratings.
It's tempting to say it's deliberate but the damage is too random and too widespread. My own app fell from 1st to 5th in its small (7 result) search, despite having higher reviews and more downloads than all the rest combined. My guess is someone made a catastrophic error in the ratings algorithm and the single 1* review last week matters more than anything else.
I don't buy the 'let the engineers get on with fixing it'. There's a long standing problem with G both not responding and eventually it becoming clear they aren't actually working on a fix. Trying to get bad map locations on Maps fixed is a complete waste of time in my experience, Android bugs go unfixed for years and feedback never, ever happens till someone with a big enough PR stick intervenes.
Remind me why this isn't the same colossal mistake Microsoft made embedding Internet Explorer so deeply in the OS?
I want my net facing apps as strongly isolated from my local system as possible and that's a hell of a lot quicker and easier to get right if they're just apps, not parts of the OS. Mozzila will just end up reinventing the OS+Browser, so I suggest they just work on the browser part, let someone else deal with the OS layer.
A4Tech cracked this one last century: put a charger in the wireless receiver dongle.
Not quite as elegant but with major advantages:
: you have a spare pair of cells on constant trickle charge without having to remember to dock the mouse overnight. Its pretty hard forget to put the spares in the charger when swapping out.
: forget to dock and let it run down and you'll end up waiting for the Apple mouse to recharge. I get to just swap batteries as normal whenever they die, or pre-emptively if I could be bothered.
: its dirt cheap. About £45 cheaper.
: without the charger circuit it uses AA cells for 2-3x longer life between charges
"easy to make a smartphone that drains it's battery in 3 hours" - "old friends from Nokia who have done tear downs on the iPhone 4 still think the HW and OS is rubbish."
This is actually a sign of how out of touch with the market Nokia had become. While we all want longer battery life, all bleat about daily charging on our iPhone and Android phones, we still keep buying them. Seems the buying public prefer a device that burns bright and dies young over one that plods boringly along for a week.
Nokia engineers may know how to make a power efficient OS but if it ends up so deadly dull we don't want to use it, it's wasted effort. Bluntly, if it can survive a whole day and be recharged by morning no-one cares. Even the limited recharging cycles create a lifetime roughly in sync with the normal contract upgrade grind.
And however good Nokia engineers may be they also dismally failed to make an exciting OS with a decent battery life!
With Eric Schmidt predicting Android phone prices of US$50-70 soon, at Google's Mobile Revolution conference this Tuesday, by the time they shift old inventory Nokia will be priced out of even the low end of the feature phone sector.
They don't have a future, apart from being bought by Microsoft and consumed. As it is Microsoft will be making more on each WM7 phone by the time they ship, if priced to actually sell.
Heatsinks do 2 jobs:
1 provide a conduction path to lose heat to the environment.
2 provide thermal mass to buffer rapid temperature changes
There's a little problem with this design, if the impeller stops spinning, the air gap becomes an insulator and suddenly the thermal mass is no longer connected to the thing it's buffering and cooling....
The bulky heatsink on modern processors doesn't need fan driven airflow a lot of the time, coupled with the thermal inertia that makes them relatively failsafe. 10s of seconds with a failed fan before dangerous heat levels are reached is not unusual, more than enough time for the CPU, OS or user to take action.
However effective this design is, he'll have to cripple it with old style passive blocks of metal to make it safe to use. That might restrict its market a little, if you've got to put the hefty metal in there either way there's not much point replacing the cheap fan on most systems.
...and I don't believe the dust claims. My desk fan seems to have no trouble covering it's spinning blades in dust... neither do the fast spinning ones in my PC.
If you're relying on the OS vendor for your security you've already lost. One of the most important tasks is protecting your system *from the OS vendor's mistakes*. Not waiting for them to try repairing the damage later.
Paradoxically Microsoft make it easy, they're so predictably consistent in fucking up. Simply sandboxing or otherwise jailing all new stuff from them goes a long way to securing your system. Sadly it's usually impossible to delete their mistakes from systems.
This is the company that thought embedding IExplorer - a 3rd party, buggy POS - deep in the OS was a good idea. Neuter that back when it launched and you neutered 90% of attacks on Windoze.
The same company that thought running native code in the browser was a smart idea (ActiveX), still struggling to patch security over that colosal error. Disable that and you knocked out most of the rest of the risks.
Proper security starts with the user and includes as many different sources of protection and fixes as possible. Do it right and Microsoft are the least part of securing your system, which is mostly securing it from Microsoft's clumsy grasp in any case.
The lying scum have been preparing this for a while. The rats will just disperse to other parts of the empire and carry on as usual, as planned.
Need serious escalation of action against the whole company to actually make anyone pay for this.
And who believes it was just News International? More likely they just did is so much they couldn't help getting caught.
FFS, they finally get the file and fork support C had in the 1970's? What's the point? What have they been doing? Why is a new library more important than fixing the bloody language?
The core language is still horribly crippled, riddled with short sighted decisions made long ago. Often simply to make the compiler easier to write, now frozen under layer after layer of bad kludges.
Just shoot the beast and start again. Get it right this time.
(And yes, I did waste most of yesterday realising that Java generics really are crippled and hardly better than cut&paste. All the pain, very little work from the compiler or even type safety and half the stuff I do in C++ won't work because they cant have statics in an interface)
Without any hint to what proportion of the entire market are switching this tells us *why* *some* people are switching. It doesn't tell us whether tariff changes make significant numbers switch provider.
So interesting though the trends shown may be, it's impossible to say whether this confirms or refutes the "consumers are generally a lazy lot who don't shop around" meme. I'd guess that meme is perfectly safe though ;)
You should probably go look at the code and see just how little they did to get that 15x. By my standards they're still picking off obvious low hanging fruit - how does any programmer not notice they could use a Vector and choose a Map? The code is now at about the state serious optimisation should be starting, good enough to use but still improvable *if needed*.
I think all this demonstrates is how dangerous adopting the idioms of a language+support infrastructure can be, it seems to stop programmers thinking about whether the component they choose is the most appropriate one for the job. ...and that GC is evil ;)
Now optimise the C++ and try to back port it to Go.... which still wont be any fairer a comparison! FFS optimise the damn things natively or don't bother comparing them. One or the other. And if you aren't going to start with an optimised algorithm (ie no low hanging fruit) go get a job cleaning toilets, you aren't a crack programmer.
While I find the best way to optimise the Java I'm writing is to strip the native Javaisms and use the same strategies I would in C/C++, when it hits the 'extreme' level Java just can't express the evil hackery I resort to in C++ or assembler.
It's going to be the same in any pair of languages, a certain level of code tweaking simply won't be translatable.
...but the judge didn't agree and the Daubert motion is going ahead. After reading how Cockburn came up with his figures it was obvious that would happen. If Oracle come out of that with 10% of that 2.6bil left it will be in the right ball park. Ready to be whittled down in parallel with Oracles claims being pruned or lost...
What's most intriguing is how low that 2.6bil figure is, considering their 'expert' tried so hard to inflate the figures. It's a figure so low, if Google lost completely and paid it all, it would still likely end not much more than paying licence fees to Oracle up front! Except of course this isn't about paying for Java, because Oracle are continuing Sun's policy of only licensing Java ME for phones, which is no use at all to Google.
There's a very good chance this whole mess will actually cost Oracle more than they can ever recover, *even if they win*. The numbers just don't make any sense. It really is just about killing Android.
I find all those advertising supporting flashy sites do a bloody good job of stopping me finding what I'm really looking for. Usually so busy trying to look pretty they either forget to put any meat on or hide it under so much flashing crap it's not findable.
That 'circa 2000' bare web has a lot going for it. Perhaps if folk stopping pissing pounds away on graphics they could afford pennies on real information. And just maybe the more useless ones will just bugger off and stop polluting the web if the cookie ban fscks up their business plan enough ;)
Ummm, who to trust:
a bunch of psychiatrists (a trade barely 1 step above homeopathists on the delusional bullshit scale), who probably wouldn't recognise evidence if anyone could explain to them what evidence is
or
a bunch of psychologists (a trade at least 1 step above psychiatrists because they make some effort to be scientists), who read to evidence from real scientists and commented on it.
Think I'll carry on meeting my retired father in the pub as usual from now on. 11 units a day seems about right for my him ;)
The only reason it seems less buggy on Windoze is Firefox sandboxing the crashy pile of shit! My PC essentially stopped crashing as soon as Mozilla locked Flash in it's own little jail. And it still manages to leak system memory that cant be recovered without rebooting.
Epic fail. No-one will miss it.