Posts by Dale 3 414 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009
Heh, nice idea but it will end up being a gimmick. They will still have to make you enter a password, otherwise anyone could hold up a photo and get into your account. As long as there is still a password required, facial recognition doesn't add anything that clicking on one's name doesn't already do, and more accurately.
On the other hand, if they could make a short-range identification token replace the password, I would be very excited. (Well ok, not excited, but I would like that.) Even something like a bluetooth connection, so when my mobile phone comes in range of the PC it forgoes the password requirement.
You can already do that, it's called hibernation. The trouble with current implementation is that you still have to wait for the hardware BIOS to do whatever it likes to do before even giving the OS the green light, and it takes a non-trivial amount of time to copy the 2GB of memory image from hard disk to RAM. It's still better than waiting for the system to boot from cold though, but there is massive room for improvement, not least with some help on the hardware side.
Sticking the RAM image onto an SSD however is a great idea. Even better one of these hybrid HDD+SSDs that people are starting to talk about which could make for a more efficient use of the SSD.
It's a contract which you agreed to. Simple at first glance. But I object t being forced to have a contract when it isn't necessary. Fair enough to lock someone into a contract if the length of the contract is necessary for the provider to recover the upfront costs of equipment, lines and so on. But if my new provider is simply taking over an already-installed line from a previous provider and is not providing anything new themselves, there should not have to be a contract at all. Imagine if shopping at Tesco the first time locked you into an exclusive Tesco-only contract for the next 12 months.
I especially object to BT's habit of automatically rolling you over into a new 12 month contract when your old one finishes. That is completely unnecessary and can only be to be anti-competitive toward consumers who aren't paying attention.
Dunno about looking silly, but now there are carbon trading schemes in existence there's real money involved and lots of it. Carbon trading may or may not have been an ingenious way to create value out of something that had no intrinsic value, but if there is real money involved anyone on the receiving end is going to be vigourously defending it.
If we could convince enough people that there was value in used cigarette butts and chewed chewing gum, imagine how clean the streets would be.
I work for a software development company. A large proportion of our employees are not allowed to check code in. Turns out, it doesn't matter because they don't work on the code, they do other things. Looks like it's the same for this guy. Are we scrambling for stories now that the volcano ash cloud is blowing away?
The burglary probably wasn't anything to do with Street View but I guess it could have been.
Suggesting that he "close the damned door" is disingenious since Google isn't going to send a car round to reshoot the picture of the closed door, and how would the man have known in the first place that the Google Car was coming? Obviously his recourse now is to have the image removed from Street View.
There's a difference between someone leaving their garage open 24 hours a day with all his stuff on display, and someone who tries to keep it concealed to avoid tempting thieves but happens to be snapped during the 15 minutes that it happens to be open. (There is a reason police advise keeping packages and valuables hidden from view when left in parked vehicles - to dissuade break-ins.)
Yay! I'm going to be forced to pay £5 to upgrade my original iPod Touch to 4.0 when all the existing apps start insisting that they need the OS, just so they can push advertising at me, while I lose out on multitasking which is about the only enhancement that would actually have benefitted me. (Remember, the addition of advertising is a producer benefit, not a consumer benefit, no matter how "targetted" they might claim it to be.)
Saving consumers £800M is a fallacy. The ultimate ambition of any for-profit company is to pay dividends which increase year-on-year to its owners (investors). There are three ways to do that:
1. Cut costs while the income stays the same, so that a larger proportion of income is clear profit that can be paid out to investors. There is a limit to how much of this you can do before services begin to suffer.
2. Increase income by attracting more customers while costs stay the same, so there is more income that can be paid out to investors. The market is effectively saturated so generally any new customers one network gains are losses to another network and investors are no better off.
3. Increase income by extracting more cash out of the existing customers, so there is more income that can be paid out to investors.
Bottom line is that if they lose £800M in termination fees and still want to keep paying out increasing dividends to investors, they will have to make it up some other way. By method #3 that means consumers in general cannot be saving anything. Some individuals might end up better off, but others will be worse off to compensate.
When exactly are we supposed to start imagining dystopian futures in which the Evil MegaCorp runs the world, requiring the services of a hero character and his unlikely band of misfit Street-speaking sidekicks to discover the Big Evil Plot and bring down The Corporation in an impressively entertaining show of falling buildings and sparks?
Seriously though, isn't the sweetheart Google nearing the point at which we are all supposed to turn on it for being Too Big and Too Pervasive and Too Closed Source, and write its name as $oo$le or something?
Your 64kB sectors are a different thing to what they are talking about. Hard disks have always been physically formatted to 512 byte sectors (sometimes known as a low-level format). The format that you perform via your operating system sets up its own set of allocation units using those physical sectors. Some disk formats confusingly also refer to their allocation units as sectors, but they're not the same thing. Others use different names, such as blocks or units.
Each of your 64kB OS sectors actually comprises 128 physical sectors, and the OS takes care of translating "give me sector #100" into "give me physical sectors #12800-12927" when passing the instruction over to the disk. What is changing here is that newer drives will have 4kB physical sectors. You can still have your 64kB OS sectors (comprising this time just 16 physical sectors each).
(Of course, the reality of this is somewhat more complicated, but this is the basic idea.)
Couldn't they just play a tune over a loudspeaker while the camera car drives around, to warn people it is coming? Maybe they could hand out ice-creams while they're at it.
Now what would be very cool is if they could attach one of those new fangled airport scanners to the camera car. Just think of all the terrorists it would catch. No problem with data protection either, because the viewers of the images are all in remote locations. Everyone wins!
There's also nothing stopping the operator from taking a picture of the screen with his mobile phone camera. Remember he's sitting in a "remote" location, so chances are there aren't too many people keeping an eye on him, or if they operate in pairs it just takes one quick toilet trip.
Do they use a Jedi mind trick to overcome the realisation that they're doing their "lightsaber" training with a stick? Because lightsabers don't actually exist, it turns out.
OTOH, this wouldn't be the first science fiction-based "religion" to have lasted long enough for there to be enough new recruits who weren't around when the first person MADE IT UP, that they actually believe it.
There generally isn't a need for buttons much larger than normal on a touchscreen. My iPod is pretty good at guessing what I meant when I tap a tiny little link on a web page with one of my great big grubby fingers. Apple got it right there and other manufacturers should licence the technology if necessary. Then all that is necessary is for the software to have a suitable way of dealing with the occasions it guesses wrong, such as a robust Cancel/Back/Undo mechanism, and there shouldn't be any problem.
The main problem I have with both the iPad and the Google vapourPad is the exposed screen with no covering. If laptops do go this way in the future, losing the keyboard and therefore losing the need to have a lid then I would be worried about scratching the screen all the time. I really like the Microsoft concept, having two screens which fold shut like a laptop and open out into a dual-monitor arrangement. If you need a keyboard, it can be done on one of the screens in software, otherwise you have a dual screen arrangement with multitouch on both.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
