Posts by MacroRodent 1979 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
"Whereas dangling a 7cm long microphone 2cm away from the printer would be far less conspicuous."
Bah. Just "forget" a bag with the microphone and recorder near the printer. Depending on the circumstances, it might stay in place for some time before anyone wonders. With suitable camoflaging, the presence of the equipment could also survive the bag being opened by the doctor's assistant.
And if most of the Windows computers at the school used OpenOffice for office work, instead or MS Office, Mac users, Linux users, Solaris users, FreeBSD users etc. would not notice much difference, since it works pretty much the same on all those platforms.
In that part of the ad, Microsoft is pretty much admitting it has the office suite monopoly, and you had better go along with it, or else...
"The application comes, unsurprisingly, from Nokia‘s Betalabs, and has little obvious revenue potential"
This misses the fact that GPRS and SMS data usage brings revenue to the network operators, and Nokia, like all other telecom equipment makers, is marketing to those parties as well. So a feature like this might increase the odds of the operator bundling Nokia handsets, and more mobile data usage helps NSN sell gear.
Some time ago, Scientific American had an article about the feasibility of getting all America's energy needs from solar, wind and the like. Seemed quite doable without assuming any fancy new tech, just a great deal of plain old engineering and construction (you have to put those desert areas to good use). The numbers did add up.
Given this, there really is no reason to predict any dystopias.
Well, if I were a Chase customer, I would drop support for that bank right now... The bank I use (Nordea) has supported nearly every browser on every OS, since the beginning of Web, without breaking sweat... They also have fairly fool-proof security, with two codes (one of which is single-use only, one reused but randomly selected from a large table) needed to make transactions. Having said that, some fools, amazingly, have been known to fall for a phishing attack against this scheme, and entered a large number of these codes by hand when requested by a phony mail message... The point being, the user is probably the weakest link in security, not the browser.
"As for height, that will affect the missiles as well as the aircraft as thinner air reduces their thrust."
True only for a jet-propelled cruise missile. A true rocket, like found in all anti-aircraft missiles, just flies better if the air is thinner! It does not need air either to burn, or to push against. Their ceiling depends only on the amount of propellant.
Yes, the article really was unjust to Mandriva. It does a lot of things right, and is easy to use without inconveniencing power users. And the unofficial community-run PLF repository is treasure, making it easy to add and keep up-to-date the codecs and related stuff that the official distro does not dare to add because of software patent considerations in some countries.
Too bad that Mandriva the company is not that well-run, to put it mildly. At times their management seem busy turning gold into lead (eg dabbling in some hare-brained elearning scheme, firing the project founder, and later one of the best community liaisons any distro has had).
I'm afraid I still did not quite understand from you explanation what happens with the hardware camera key. Does it force fixed-focus (or "hyper-focal") mode?
The point about focusing a video is a good one. With dedicated video cameras, I have often got bad results with moving objects, or in low light because the autofocus vobbles indecisively. The hyper-focal approach may well be superior for casual videos. The pros will use manual focus anyway.
Too bad you could not make the N8 available now... Hard to decide whether to suffer my current aging cameraphone for the summer and get N8 later, or buy some of the existing offerings and skip N8 for wallet-depletion reasons.
"... protecting intellectual property is acting like 5 yo, ..."
It's one thing to act to protect intellectual property, another to try to protect it like a 5-year old...
This is part of a trend. At this point, sane software companies should consider whether it is in their interests to develop for a platform whose terms change at the whims of its CEO. Man-years of work can go down the toilet just because Jobs does not like it.... It's the only platform with this kind of risk.
"Not true. You COULD buy a Mac (all those fanboise did afterall) or even Linux. "
While some PC:s or laptops with preinstalled Linux exist (if you look for them hard enough), the selection is VERY limited. Even getting a PC or Laptop without any OS so you can genuinely choose is difficult. Doable for PC:s, but almost impossible for laptops. (Google, which tries to ban Windows among its own staff, can probably make special deals with OEMs, something not possible for the average Microsoft-hater).
Comparing this to the simplicity of changing your browser to use a non-Google search engine and avoiding Google services in general is absurd.
When reading reports by Consumer Watchdog, please consider also this allegation: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/
"Summary: A look beneath the surface reveals that ConsumerWatchdog.org is “the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights”, which is affiliated with/derived from Grassroots Enterprise, a Washington/SF-based AstroTurfer for hire"
"Is 30fps really an issue nowadays? Surely any TV which can cope with 1080p can also cope with a variety of frame rates?"
Possibly, but displaying on TV direct from the camera is not the only usecase. I may also want to mix it with footage from other sources (other cameras, older recordings, all at 25fps). I want to burn DVD:s about kids (the only modern video media "grannies" can handle, as long as the disk has only one track...). Then there is the issue of lighting fixtures (increasingly fluorescent only, with the phasing-out of incandescents) flickering at 50hz.
"getting any footage onto a UK DVD, is going to be challenging. Video is recorded as H264 MPEG4 at 29.97fps. I understand it is a global product, but a PAL version would have been nice."
Yes, this is a great annoyance in a huge lot of otherwise promising cameras. Frame rates can be converted, but it always introduces motion judder, which totally spoils smooth movements. My favourite horrid example was filming my kid in a playground carousel while testing one otherwise very nice camera (Sanyo Xacti) an acquaintance tried to sell me. Did not buy it after seeing the result on my PAL TV.
It is a mystery. There are probably more people in 25fps / 50 frames/s countries than in NTSC land (after all, India and China are in this camp!), so any global camera should use these rates instead! (Are you listening, camera makers?)
"I find it so ridiculous that companies always go about reinventing the wheel over and over."
Larger companies always feel - rightly or wrongly - that they need their own version of some technology in order to stay in control. I guess Google is now also in the platform-building business, and perhaps they think they cannot be dependent on Java controlled by Sun and now Oracle. Besides Java probably stinks bad in the noses of many hackers at Google. It has a poor reputation among the open-source folks, thanks to the bloat (hah, most software is nowadays as bloated, or worse) and the dependency hell the different JVM versions create (most people just give up and bundle a JVM known to work with any Java application they distribute).
Remember that Theora was based on On2 VP3 codec, and uses behind the state-of-the-art technology, but it now performs much better than the original (some claim almost as well as H.264). Similarly, one can expect that (barring devastating software patent attacks), the VP8 implementation will be improved by some very clever coders so that it will eventually be on par with H.264 for practical purposes.
""First of all, software patents are a rarity in the world and I think it's pointless to have everyone suffer because two or maybe three countries have software patents,""
Sadly, this is a naive position. Although European countries in theory do not have software patents, patent offices, companies and courts act as if they do anyway. The interdiction against software patents can be interpreted so narrowly it is useless: You cannot patent a program as such, but a combination of it and a machine (like a plain old PC) is another thing...
"... Same goes for OO, FF, Nvidia support. ..."
Newer versions and additions are easy to install yourself. Eg. I use CentOS 5.x (~RHEL 5) but not the original OOo. Installing the latest is easypeasy. Same for FF. As someone using Linux desktop at work, I appreciate the conservative approach to the base system. The should rename it "Borix", as in " so stable it is boring".
My parents' garden used to have a variety of strawberry that makes berries like mad, even eerily late in the dark, cold Finnish autumns (basically until severe frosts kill it). Small berries (it is really an ornamental plant), but very tasty. I could imagine that growing on Mars...
"They have Meego as well,"
The problem is that Meego is currenly in the "integrate code from two different organizations" purgatory, and it is anyone's guess whether what finally comes out is better or worse than Maemo or Moblin was, and In any case the integration takes up valuable time.
"But seriously, the chance of other life forms existing at this specific point in time is slim."
Depends on what you take as the sample. You are possibly right for the local portion of our galaxy, which SETi efforts and telescopes can examine, but there are billions of more stars in our galaxy, and if that is not enough, billions of other galaxies. This is Hawkins' reasoning. The probability that the universe contains other intelligent beings besides us is 1.0, but they may be situated on another galaxy, and communication with them is impossible.
"Fitting a sensor of that size into a Nokia cameraphone wouldn't only be difficult space-wise, but achieving the necessary lens-to-focal plane distance in a pocketable device would result in one frightfully lumpy pocket."
While I agree with others that Vanjoki apparently has no clue about the physics of photography, I cannot resist noting that years ago I used to take lots of good shots with an old foldable 6x6cm-format camera, and it did fit nicely into the coat pocket. (For classic camera aficianados, it was an Agfa Isolette, one of the better models with a Compur shutter and built-in range finder).
A cameraphone with a bellows system in the side? Maybe not bad idea.
>I've successfully resurrected drowned phones by rinsing the pcbs in distilled water then IPA, followed by a gentle drying in an oven (with cooking thermometer) at just above 100C.
Above 100C? Wouldn't it be safer to limit the heating to something like 75C? But if it has worked for you, interesting to hear.
> Powered phones generally die very quickly which is why I wont buy an Iphone until they add a "hard power" switch that isolates the battery when asked.
I don't think ANY modern phone has an actual hard power switch. There is some electronics always on. One annoying manifestation of this that I have seen in several Nokias I have had is that if a battery is totally depleted (which easily happens if you leave the phone untouched for a few months), it is impossible to use the phone itself to recharge it. It seems their charging circuits don't work, unless they get at least some voltage from the battery. Just how silly is that?
That kind of placement for moisture sensors can only be thought up by someone working in the near-desert Silicon Valley environment... If a device intended for daily handheld use cannot take a few drops of water on the outside, or some condensation when taken indoors, it is useless in much of the world.
Neither U.S. nor anybody else will make a manned Mars visit, until the silly taboo against using nuclear power in space (real reactors, not weak RTG:s as on many probes) is broken.
For this reason, I'm betting on China or Russia getting there first, as their space agencies aren't as hindered by public opinion...
Indeed, without Opera Mini, my aging Nokia 6680 would be totally unusable for web browsing: the bundled browser is a slow joke and many modern pages just kill it.
it would be very bad it Opera were forced to discontinue this excellent service. For my part, I would be prepared to pay for it, if the prices is not too steep, something like 1€ / month would probably be ok with most users.
I suppose the technology would now allow making an exact C64 work-alike about the size a USB dongle, with nothing on it but three connectors: USB connector for a standard keyboard, and at the other end RCA composite video and audio for connecting to a TV set... Power would come from a battery, or maybe a second USB connector should be added just for this purpose. An internal flash memory would be used to simulate a huge library of C cassette tapes and/or floppies for storage...
The official Ruby interpreter is no speed demon either. Depending on how cleverly they do it, JRuby could theoretically be quite competitive. Eg. it could generate Java bytecodes on the fly that directly implement frequently used methods, which the JIT in the JVM could then turn into machine code. Result : Native speed execution for some stretches of Ruby code. I have no idea if it really does this, but it could...
If small reactors are so much known tech, why aren't they used to power space craft? Like harnessing a reactor to run an ion drive and flying to Mars for the weekend?
Expecting prompt answers from the nuclear boffins so clearly swarming in this forum :-)
(IT? Well that was the only icon with a question mark on it)
Similar situation here: I set up a totally computer-illiterate aunt with a stable Linux desktop, which she uses mainly for e-banking and mail. I shudder to think what would have happened with Windows, as she has no concept of the various software layers (OS versys apps versus the hardware) and if a piece of malware popped up a dialog box sayin "click me to remove viruses", she would certainly click it... The root password is known only to me (she doesn't even know there is such a thing), and updates are done when I visit her. After some initial problems, she has been using the system daily, with many months passing between "service calls" to me.
Too bad this solution requires a "nerd" in the family, but maybe this could form the basis for a service business? Hmm, maybe I should start thinking about it.
"'Instamatic' type cameras are very useful in out of the way places."
Actually "Instamatic" refers to "non-instant" film cameras that used the idiot-proof "126" film cartridges, introduced in the 60's for people who could not figure out how to load regular 35mm film, or always forgot to rewind it before opening the camera... Kodak's trademark, I believe. The "126" went out of fashion, when 35mm cameras became capable of threading and rewinding the film automatically with a motor.
"Also, having no negatives compounds the failure."
There used to be a Polaroid film of the peel-apart kind that also provided the negative.
In fact the peel-apart films would have been more useful to reproduce: You could use them to imprint the color image from the negative side onto ordinary paper (preferably of the kind used for water colour painting), a trick known as "dye transfer". With skill and luck you get an stylish painting-like photograph.
It is also a unique object d'art, as the trick works only for one printing.
Almost exact what I was going to post! This is just Microsoft being Microsoft. Implement enough of the standard so you can claim adherence to it, but somehow ensure the implementation is useless. They probably have experts specializing in such crippling... The classic example of this is probably Windows NT POSIX support: I guess everything that the first version of the POSIX standard considered mandatory can be said to be there, but _absolutely_ nothing else that unix-type systems provided even already in early 1990's. So it was basically limited to command-line programs that interacted with only the file system... Not to mention that documentation on using it was hard to find.
Clearly MS is planning to repeat the execise yet again, this time with HTML5.
"The word Gay is some peoples surname."
I recall back in the days I was first learning English (almost 40 years ago), "gay" was just another synonym for "merry" with no other connotations. I wonder when exactly did its meaning change and why?
(Happy face icon, in memory of the old meaning of the word).
I really don't understand why Google have to photograph at 2.5 meters. If they took the shots at about average adult eye level (1.7 meters or so), there would be much less peeping over the fences (which have usually been dimensioned with humans in mind), and people would object less. It would also make the pictures look more like what a visitor walking or driving the same route would actually see.
"Google made all their own software and didn't use a single piece of existing open source software to help create their empire."
Not so! Google servers famously run Linux, which they could customize to better serve their empire, and using it also saves them from paying OS license fees based on their humongous CPU count...
"Safe languages take up resources and time with garbage collection and sanity checking. "
Not necessarily. Garbage collection is not required, just the checking (Pascal and its relatives do not have garbage collection). And it was demonstrated already in the 1970's by some researchers that the cost of runtime checks can be reduced to just a few % when an optimizing compiler is made to take them into account. This requires the checks are integral to the language and compiler, not a bolted-on feature.
In respect to safety, the field took a nosedive when C and its descendants took over from Pascal and its descendants (like Modula and Ada).
"- compression/quality isn't anywhere near as good as H264"
Old information. The encoder has been improved a lot and now it is close. See http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html or http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/update-on-open-video-quality/
"- no hardware decoding support, whereas there's lots of hardware for H.264 which means you can easily decode it on a smart phone etc."
True but well-coded implementations can decode it fast enough in software on modern processors. Also, if Theora becomes common, hardware companies will start supporting it.
"- there's no guarantee that Ogg Theora doesn't inadvertently infringe some patents and could be subject to a claim in future"
THIS IS FUD, plain and simple, propagated by some corporations with a vested interest in seeing Theora and other genuinely open codec alternatives fail. Any other codec could also be ambushed by a submarine patent holder, nobody can say for sure that MPEG-LA is the only tollbooth you have to pay at... . Besides, Theora is based on old well-established techniques, much the same as MPEG-1 video (which is already off-patent) + patents _donated_ to Theora by On2.
"I had wordstar 3.3 running faster on a 386 than it ever did on my Z80-based Mimi"
That was the MS-DOS port of WordStar, wasn't it? Of course it ran faster, at the native speed of the 386. To run WordStar (either the CP/M or MS-DOS version), a N900 or iPhone would have to emulate both the CPU and the OS.
Has anyone yet created an 8-bit CP/M emulator for either device? I'm sure there are people who would like to run the original WordStar on smartphones...
Actually, given the low speed of the original CP/M machines (Z80 at 4Mhz was typical), in this case the smartphone emulator could well be much faster than the original.
"of poor little Spirit I get an overwhelming sense of empathy and visions of this lopsided Wall-E take off,"
Doesn't Spirit pre-date Wall-E by several years? I wonder if the Wall-E character was actually inspired in part by these hardy real-life explorer robots, that have kept going well past their "best-before" dates.
I have tremendeous respect for the people who designed and operated them. In this era of throw-away technology and cutting corners in the name of profits, I find it actually inspirational that some people have had the skill and care to create technology that operates better than required under very harsh conditions.
"Opera rarely needs OOB security updates, and it's inherently secure,"
Any justification for this statement? I use both Opera and Firefox on Linux, and Opera does not feel any more stable. In fact, it crashes a bit more on this particular setup, but the comparison is not entirely fair, since the Firefox is what the conservative CentOS 5 distribution supplies, and is thus an older patched version (3.0.14), whereas Opera is the very newest (10.10). So I would just say that they appear to be about on par wrt quality. The lack of security updates could be because Opera receives less critical scrutiny (It is both closed-source, and less common than FF).
I would love to see someone create a full-featured browser in some safer language than C or C++, like Java. While that would not solve all security problems, it could eliminate some common classes of them, like injection of malicious code via buffer overflows.
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