Posts by Gavin 8

Consumer group SLAMS NASA for letting Google rent $1bn 'playground'

Sounds like Tesco taking over the Hoover building on the A40 London

As my local convenience I'd say they've done a great job of keeping the listed building in tip top condition (nearly...).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Building

Google's Drive + Gmail: A 10GB Dropbox killer

Booble drive more like

I signed up with glee at half the price of dropbox and started dumping files on to my shiny new 100GB google drive. After a day I noticed a lot was still to sync (I knew it was slow, but something was wrong). Once I checked I found that google drive had errors syncing files, and just gave up at the first sign of trouble. I forced it to keep trying, no dice.

I rebooted, reinstalled and recreated my google drive locally (mac client) and tried again, same thing, different files failed sync each time, and it gives up on all files because it's basically a defeatist & depressed bit of software.

Quite a lot of people with same problems judging by this post:

http://iam.richardbucker.com/2012/04/26/google-drive-just-not-syncing-everything/

The iPHONE 5 UNDERMINES western DEMOCRACY: 5 reasons why

I was hoping to read some good reasons not to buy the iphone 5

but got none :-/

Oh well, I'll just have to mindlessly buy it. Especially as I don't want a memory slot, or a spare battery (4 days battery life from my iphone 4 will do me), and I'd happily be bummed by Stephen Fry.

Also, do I want an android phone with poor battery life, poor ui, piss poor management of push data (no I don't want to configure each app to 'poll' every X minutes chewing up battery life), and even more piss poor touch response (but awesome custom keyboard options - I do miss that).

Thing is, I don't need a pc in my pocket, I need a phone that can do a few extra things reliably (and of course condoms if I meet stephen fry).

So, just what is the ultimate bacon sarnie?

you bastards

Trapped in India for two and half months, and now you've made me homesick. I would kill for a bacon sarnie, literally. Or even a big mac right now, somehow they managed to franchise mcdonalds here with out any pork/beef based products (not they are probably pork/beef based in the UK either).

China could penetrate US with new huge missile

I read it as...

Dongfest-41

Oh hold on, wishful thinking.

Scots council: 9-yr-old lunch blogger was causing 'distress and harm'

Blogger was causing 'distress and harm'?

Not as much distress and harm as those dinners look like they would cause

O2, Be Broadband axe Pirate Bay access

Control Freaks

I regularly buy content: music, movies, and TV shows. I have, against my better judgement been using itunes to purchase their DRMd media even though at times as a paying customer I've not been able to copy it between my own devices, this is not something I am happy with.

Then, last week Game of Thrones season 2 ended, and I wanted to watch it, really badly. Looked in iTunes, nothing. Searched google to purchase the series, nothing. If I really really want to watch Games of Thrones season 2, the only option I have is to download the series illegally.

What really annoys me, is the politicians and courts give in to the whims of these content owners, going as far as censoring non infringing public websites, when the lazy bastard content owners can't even be bothered to sell us their content. How is that balanced?

I'm all up for protecting content owners right to sell stuff, but if they refuse to actually let me buy it and I can freely download it, then I will, path of least resistance and all that. I really have no sympathy for these people who are kept in coke and limos by another bunch of of self serving hypocrite elites who are lecturing the public to not act in a self serving way.

I totally get that there are complex licensing issues, but I don't give a crap, it's not my problem when I can download it for free any time I desire whether the courts block a handfull of websites or not. The real crux of the licensing issues are that various greedy middlemen are trying to suck as much profit out of each other as possible. They managed to go through the hoops of getting it on TV in several countries so I'm sure they can bloody work out how to sell the series on dvd or as an itunes download.

The fact is that the distribution model has changed, times have moved rapidly on, and the contents owners are so slow to change they are losing out. In a proper free market these businesses would go bust, but somehow they have the ear of the ruling elites who think it's better to protect a bunch of lazy, complacent, greedy, incumbents than let consumers and real market leaders move things on to a better place. I wish them all good luck competing against emerging economies in the real free market where they have no control. These people have no chance.

Virgin Media broadband in two-day wobble

Virgin's Support might be worse than BT's

which is saying something...

I called up Virgin Broadband and attempted to explain that I could ping my router fine, no problem, but when I pinged any IP address on the outside world (even my router's default gateway) I would get intermittent packet loss. So the irritatingly over-optimistic but not very helpful india call centre operative assured me he would fix the problem. And that's where the problem started, as he directed me to change my router's wireless channel to 13. I tried to explain politely that the evidence suggested this would make no difference because my internal subnet was working fine. Do you know what he said? "If you know so much sir, why don't you fix it?". Needless to say politeness ended rapidly. 5 Calls later to different departments (the TV department) they admitted there was a problem with the connection between the house and the exchange.

It's nice to know I paid for that service.

You never got this with BE Internet, who could resolve complex technical issues over the phone as they had techies on support, not useless script readers who don't know their arse from their elbow, and instead of escalating problems try to get you off the phone as fast as possible.

Not impressed at all, unfortunately we don't have a BT Landline at this address so we're stuck with a useless company like virgin media who hava staggering history of being terrible even before the re-brand (which has made little difference).

Linus Torvalds dubs GNOME 3 'unholy mess'

maybe haiku will save us?

ars-technica recently reported it's in a semi stable state now.

Assange lawyers fume over leaked rape case docs

Is it Irony?

WIkileaks made public a load of documents allowing us to have some insight in to how public servants (that we pay trillions in tax revenue to) run our country for us, so we can really see how honest they are while they burn OUR hard earned cash. There's value in that.

The Swedish government, wasted the public's tax money prejudicing a trail for one man who no one pays tax money to.

There's not really much of an irony in that, the sooner these blood sucking public servants get it through their thick skulls that they're here to SERVE, the better. That's how the private sector they seduced so much by works. I live in hope that these leaks will help with the realisation.

Julian in contrast is NOT a public servant and no one gives a shit what he does until proven guilty, unless of course they're being petty and revengeful (most probably on tax payers money). Ironically, public servants very rarely manage to go on trail for anything unless they're being made a scapegoat by their peers, so there's no legal recourse for deciding whether they're guilty of wrong doing or not without the leaks.

One day we might have a fair and just system where the servants are forced to follow the same rules they enforce on everyone else. Until then, we'll need these leaks to provoke public support for real justice.

Gmail pushes onto the iPhone

push is pull

push is a load of rubbish, you'd think in this day and age they could genuinely integrate a server side push message, but from what I can work out is uses a slightly clever pull, like you do with AJAX apps in GWT. initially you do a poll to ask the server if it has any new data, and the server just sits there waiting until something comes through or hits a time out. If something comes through the client gets a reply with the notifcation message, if not after a specific time out (say 20 mins) the server returns a 'nothing for you' message. As soon as the client gets a response from the server it sends another request and waits half asleep. - to do this I think/suspect it has to keep a tcp connection open rather than when push is off and it is completely asleep until it gets a carrier packet/message. Which would explain the much worse battery life when push is enabled (it's not 20% worse battery life in my experience).

Not exactly push, and I'm confident that's how it works, but I did read about it a while back and I could be wrong and remain open to enlightenment (I may have just been reading exchange push rather than apple's own 'notification' push).

Steve Jobs unveils iPhone 4

i notice the distinct omission of cpu speed

probably because for marketing reasons they don't want the cpu to be faster than the ipad cpu, so it's probably slower than the neus one which they don't want to admit.

Google blames developers for lousy Android battery life

someone is lying

either the battery use on my nexus one is lying, or google are full of it.

According to battery use on my nexus one, it looks like this and I'm already at 68% battery after less than 2 hours of use:

Display 12% (6m44s)

MediaServer 7% (cpu 8m13s - been running constant for nearly 2hrs)

cell standby 3% (1h 37m)

phone idle 3% (1h 31m)

android sys 1% ( data 59kb sent / 82kb rec)

I have 4 apps which are no more than 2% each (total 6%)

this is not a problem with background apps!

Oz customs search lappies and mobes for smut

Hilarious!

I wonder, would I get extra immigration points for doing any of the above with one of their natives?

Google to flog unlocked phones in January

bugger the USA release date...

When is it released in the UK?

My iphone contract is now up and I want to punish O2 for locking me in to an 18 month contract when the iphone update cycle is every 12 months.

And before anyone craps on about over consumption blah, blah, blah. You're right. However, I would be handing down my current iphone to someone with a black and white nokia with ductape on it, so it would go to a new loving home. And besides, I *need* a faster device as I'm finding the iphone annoyingly slow and I still can't watch movies without re-encoding them for it.

Murdoch puffs Microsoft over Google

Hahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!

So let me get this right, Murdoch thinks internet users will miss his content when it's gone? That is simply delusional.

Orange saves callers pennies with iPhone tariffs

why no 12 month contract again?

WTF is wrong with these companies? 18 months is just too to long be locked in with a device whose battery will be really starting to loose it's charge after 12 months.

Also, I want to upgrade to the new iphone when it comes out. For example, the iphone 3GS would have been a really useful upgrade for me so I wouldn't have to re-encode a lot of my videos to iphone format for watching while I travel as it can support high quality encodes. I would have happily paid a bit more for a 12 month contract, but they don't even give you the option. Total idiots, these companies want to show the world how they've changed, how progressive they are (with stupid crap like O2 Litmus) yet time and time again they treat their customers with contempt. No wonder everyone just wants them to be stupid interweb pipes and they can't generate new sources of revenue. Apple and google will probably render them irrelevant in the next decade with their extra added services. These operators will be nothing more than cell mast maintenance companies and orange wednesdays will just be cinema wednesdays again.