Posts by sisk 2455 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Mar 2010
Actually I have on occasion. About the only times I've ever scanned a QR code is on movie posters when I wanted to see a trailer.
Two reasons I don't worry about this 'exploit' though. First, I make sure the QR code I'm scanning isn't on a sticker stuck over the real one. Second, my app gives me a chance to confirm that I really want to go to X URL before it does, so if the URL looks suspicious I just hit cancel.
100TB isn't so much. There's an article floating around the web (I've read it, but I'm too lazy to go find it right now) about how to build a RAID5 petabyte SAN on a relatively modest budget (around $3000 if I recall correctly). It'd still be a rather large, but not inconceivable, chunk of change for an individual. I've tried to talk my wife into letting me do it with our tax return for the last couple years, but apparently having an insane amount of storage that I could never dream of actually using up is not a good enough use of several thousand dollars for her.
It sends your information to another party without bothering to get your consent or even inform you of what it's doing. That fits the textbook definition of spyware pretty well I think.
Storm in a teacup? If it were proprietary software maybe, but Stallman is right about one thing. OSS users tend to not put up with this sort of nonsense. Personally I've never liked Ubuntu (it pales in comparison to Debian in my opinion), but if I did this would be my cue to find a different distro.
Or maybe they've just shown us that they have a sense of humour and you don't?
That's more likely, but then this is the nation where a government agency had to issue a statement saying that mermaids don't actually exist we're talking about.
Seriously though, we DO have a sense of humour here in America. Unfortunately we've also got people who take everything literally. This probably IS a serious petition that grew out of someone's joke about building a Death Star.
Ebooks are sometimes more expensive than the paperbacks, but for those of us who are regularly waiting for the next book of such and such series for a year or more they're less expensive than the hard back.
A recent example from my life is a book that carries a cover price of $27.50. The ebook, grabbed from Google Play Books, was $14.99. Sure, I could have waited a few more months and grabbed the paperback, but I've been waiting a year for this book already. The last book of this series saw me waiting even longer as its release date kept getting pushed back.
@Schultz
Our politicians can't read. They've spent so much mental energy pushing the extreme ends of the political spectrum further apart that they've forgotten how.
No, really. They vote on the bills based on who drafted them (first) and a brief summary that some underpaid aid gives them (sometimes). It's not at all funny. It's depressing.
I went through my house and replaced all the incandescents with CFLs. It cost me about $40, which I made back through a lower electric bill in a matter of months. The one in my garage takes about a half second to come on when it's really cold out, but the rest of them come on instantly. I don't know what everyone's complaining about with them.
I (almost with the vast majority of people) don't feel the need to service my own car - but some people do.
As much as labor costs you're damn right I feel the need to service my own car. No way am I paying someone an extra $150 to do what I can do myself. Same thing with computers. Why should the consumer who's willing and able to upgrade their own RAM have to pay Apple an arm and a leg (or a kidney) to do it for them?
If someone can't afford internet and a $50 wireless router why in the world would you think that they would spend a couple hundred dollars on a smart phone of any type and the monthly fee for the data plan (which is always expensive by the standards of someone on that tight a budget) to go with it? I would suggest that the answer lies in other factors. I don't know what they are, but the idea of someone who can't afford a wireless router having a smart phone is just silly.
I do note the absence of Dolphin Browser on the chart. I've gotten the impression that it's at least as popular as Opera Mini on Android. I may be mistaken about that, but if I'm not then that would account for a huge chunk of Android web traffic not being represented.
Win8 is the last Windows operating system.
I certainly hope you're wrong about that. In a lot of environments, like schools and most businesses, nothing other than Windows ever gets considered. I'd hate to think that those of us who work in those environments are going to be saddled with that crapfest eventually.
@JDX - Did you seriously just call Adobe's toolset 'nice'? And if so, are you sharing whatever it is you're smoking? It's anything but nice. It literally gives me a headache every time I have to deal with it.
I will say this though: the continued lack of a HTML5 standard is getting very annoying. Haven't we been waiting long enough?
As for Nibiru - the legendary planet which the Mayans believed had a "3,600-year-long orbit of the Sun"...
The Mayans believed no such thing. Nibiru is a fantasy concocted in the mid 20th century. If you could go back and ask the Mayans about it you'd get nothing but puzzled expressions. Likewise they did not believe the world would end on December 21 2012, or 14.0.0.0.0, or whatever name they assigned to that day. It's simply when their long count calendar starts over.
That's right. Starts over. Just like ours does every year. All this rubbish about the Mayans thinking the world is going to end is nothing more than modern fiction. Ask any competent archeologist and they'll tell you that the Mayans, were they still around, would be busy planning the biggest quasi-new years party in history.
Once upon a time I had a desktop gadget in Linux (this was before Microsoft had thought of desktop gadgets) that was a Faerunian calendar. That was slightly nerdier than this I think, if only because I was actually USING a fictional calendar from D&D as opposed to mapping one from LOTR into the real world.
On a related note, can I have back some of that time I had way too much of in my early 20s?
Kinect was quicker, of course.
Of course it was. Microsoft needed an answer to the Wii and the PS Move and they needed it quick. Granted the Kinect does more than simply answer the competition. It's one of the few good innovations (and one of the few truly innovative goods) to come out of Redmond in a long time.
I majored in acting the first time through college (no, I don't know what the 18 year old version of me was thinking, but I wish I could slap some sense into him). I get a lot of funny looks from people trying to figure out how I went from the Stanislavski method to object oriented methodology.
Back before I gave up alcohol I could drink insane amounts of liquor and not be affected overly. I once proved that I could down a fifth of whiskey and then pass a sobriety test (though it wasn't administered by cops). On more than one occasion I managed to remain on my feet and able to walk even after imbibing quantities of alcohol that left men triple my size sprawled on the floor (such as, in one case, a full bottle of tequila), and no matter how drunk I got (which was a pretty expensive proposition, so it didn't happen often) I was stone sober an hour after I quit drinking. This despite the fact that at the time I was skinny by any definition. Unlike with most heavy drinkers, I did not build up a resistance over time: my first drink was when a group of friends thought it might be fun to get me to pass out and failed when I drank them all under the table.
Does that qualify as a mutant power?
You're quite likely to have more linux devices in your life than windows ones (even if you're a sysadmin!)
There, fixed that for you.
Seriously though, the year of the Linux desktop may actually come now that Microsoft has foisted the horror of Windows 8 on us. I doubt it though. Despite the fact that it runs on half of everything that plugs into a wall (yes I exaggerate slightly) the average consumer has still never heard of it. Even if they have, they're likely to have the impression that its one of those things that only computer geeks mess with (an impression which is neither entirely right nor entirely wrong).
Sadly I think Microsoft will succeed in killing the desktop off entirely before we see the year of the Linux desktop, and that's something that I thought would never happen before I encountered Windows 8. Still, our chances of seeing it now are probably better than they've ever been before.
Second Life doesn't belong on this list. It may not have become the new interface to the internet that Linden Labs intended, but it is still hugely successful. Both Linden and many of its users make a great deal of money off of it. I know several people who make enough money off of SL that it is their soul income.
Sadly my own store doesn't do that well (probably because I actually do have a first life, complete with a wife, kids, friends, and frequent exposure to natural light, so I don't spend hours every day creating virtual merchandise), but I still make enough that I never have a need to spend real money to buy Lindens to get stuff in world. In fact I occasionally sell Lindens for some pocket change, so it's become one of those rare hobbies that not only pays for itself but actually makes me money.
If the number of noobs I regularly run into there is any indication they are still getting a ton of new users. This is despite the fact that I've long since abandoned the areas they usually frequent, like the freebie markets. There's another reason that I wouldn't call it a failure.
3% is horrendous when you couple it with the fact that the average income hasn't kept pace with inflation. A 3% increase in the cost of living is a hell of a lot when your paycheck doesn't swell to match it, which in this area they haven't. That may just be the area I'm living in. I haven't looked at national statistics but I know that in my area most people have only gotten one minimal cost of living raise since the bottom fell out of the economy in 2008.
@Steve I - First off, I don't care if you think I'm a 'pretentious twat'. 'Pray tell' is a part of my regular vocabulary. If you have to attack my phrasing to make your point then perhaps you need to rethink your position.
My media center PC, back when I had one, had only three cables coming out of it: power, audio (to the surround sound system), and VGA (to the TV). Everything else was handled by wireless USB dongles. There was my gamepad, which was a modded wireless XBox control, the RF keyboard and mouse, and my wifi. The fact that I had a modded XBox control should give you the timeframe for when I had this box. Today, with graphis cards that have HDMI, I'd have only two cables, a 802.11N dongle (which could handle HD video, unlike the old G one), and Bluetooth for everthing else. As for noise, my PS3 (which has sense been sold because it was just collecting dust) was much louder.
As an added bonus, the media center PC also played video off of my file server (something which my no console at the time could do, though the PS3 can with DLNA, the Wii can if it's modded for homebrew apps, and I assume the 360 can somehow) and, briefly (because I only briefly had a use for one), served as a DVR (something which, so far as I know, consoles still can't do without being modded).
It's basically 5 year old tech dressed up with a gimmick controller and a high price premium.
I'll grant you that it's old tech plus a gimmick, but isn't that what Nintendo's been doing in the console market for a while? It seems to work remarkably well for them. As for the 'high price premimum', $500 isn't all that much for a launch price on a console anymore. Hell, the PS3 was $700 at launch, and that was 5 years worth of horrindous inflation ago.
Sure, you can connect a PC up to these bits of kit, but them you have to factor in keeping a PC in the living room.
And how, pray tell, is that any different from keeping any other piece of equipment in the living room? Seriously, one of my PCs is smaller than my PS3 was and still packs more power.
I, to, have had experience in dousing faulty components. In my case, though, it was a no-name motherboard with a short that was feeding 12v into a component that was designed for 3.3v. Exactly how that led to a fire instead of just a burned out component I'm not sure, but I have never bought any component from a brand I don't recognize since.
Unfortunately in my case nothing survived because the fire started in the bottom of the case and ate everything above it. Thankfully I had all me important data backed up.
I would say nano over vim for the things most users do (config file editing mostly). Don't get me wrong, vim's great and all, but the learning curve is a bit steep for people who aren't going to do anything with it beyond editting a couple lines and saving the file.
And yes, all of those are available on Linux, though I've never had the pleasure of moc or mpd (I prefer Amarok for music, even if I do have to pull in half of KDE just to get it to run....oh how I miss Songbird).
I haven't tried to use Ubuntu in a long time, but last time I did I found their package manager to be far inferior to Synaptic. It just made finding the packages I was looking for harder. Even searching for a package using its exact name was unreliable in there.
Granted, that's been several years. I would hope that Ubuntu has improved since then, but I'll be sticking to Debian and Synaptic anyway thanks.
Even Linux needs AV. Believe it or not there are a few Linux viri in the wild, even if they are exceedingly uncommon and pretty much harmless unless you're running root when you pick them up. Besides, the point of avoiding passing on viruses to your more vulnerable friends is a good one. My Linux based file server runs daily Clam AV scans for that very reason.
Erm....having owned all three consoles from the last generation let me assure you that the Wii was the most durable of the lot. Both my 360 and my PS3 had problems inside of 2 years, but the Wii is still happily chugging along after 5 years. It gets more use than the other two ever did to because my kids love it.
When Nintendo says 'cheap' what they really mean is 'off the shelf and affordable.' They don't build to high end specs I'll grant you, but they do build for quality.
Jobs may have had ulterior motives for killing off Flash in iOS devices, but that doesn't mean he was wrong. Flash is, and has long been, a bloated, bug ridden mess. It's well past time for it to die and be gracefully replaced by a better alternative. HTML5 (or rather the collection of technologies that keep getting thrown under that umberlla) fits the bill nicely.
Two things ridiculous here:
#1) If you know enough about technology to actually make use of a tablet then you know damn well that a chunk of storage is gone before you buy it.
#2) 16gb??? For an OS on a mobile device?? WTF Microsoft? If I'd been considering buying a Surface that little tidbit would have shot the idea dead.
You've never actually used Google's Play Store, have you? After using it dealing with Apples pitiful excuse for an app store makes me want to pull my hair out. There's that much of a difference in the experience.
As for wishing I'd bought an iPad....well if I could give away the one I was given at the office I would. I can't do half of what I was hoping to do on it when I got it. Up until they cracked down on unauthorized devices on the wireless I had ended up bringing my Nook to work to do what I should have been able to do with the iPad.
Personally I love my Nook Tablet. Granted it's a couple years old now and had to be rooted to get anything like acceptable usability, but still I love it. It may not have GPS and GSM, and maybe I lose access to the Play store every time I let it grab an update from B&N but I love it. It might have a few little glitches but......
Oh who the hell am I kidding. I want a Nexus damnit.
"Ok, so if Silverlight is on the way out and HTML5 requires a browser that can read it, what do people program in that customers with older OS/Browsers can still use?"
AJAX when I can, Flash when I have to. I work for an organization that's not moving off IE8 for at least another 3 years. That's when we finally get to cycle out the last of our XP machines (I didn't set the policy so don't blame me).
"...insultingly poor opinion of its customers' tech savvy."
Um....have you ever tried to talk tech with an average Apple customer? Judging from the ones I know the phrase 'tech savvy' doesn't really apply.
(Yes, I know there are tech savvy Apple users, especially here on El Reg, but you're all well above the curve and you darn well know it.)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
