Posts by TonyHoyle 366 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2010
It looks like their entire ordering system is indexed. Which, given that google only follows links, means that there's a link on their page to list all orders.
Also, the order numbers are sequential numbers, with no other validation like a login required... newbie web store error, meaning their entire system has been wide open for ages.
I really hope they didn't *pay* anyone to design that system, and the 12 year old they asked to do it gets a sharp talking to.
It's a crippled laptop.. for £400. It does nothing to justify that price.
Had they priced it at the £150 the early netbooks went for (before the manufacturers started getting greedy and killed the concept stone dead) it might have had legs. For £400 you can get a reasonable HP Laptop (G62-451SA came up on google).
An organisation run by the press is innefectual at regulating the press... surprise!!
Something independent, but not actually run by the press, is needed. With teeth. Big sharp ones.
Of course the moment you suggest that they'll start bleating about 'freedom' - well look where unfettered freedom of the press has got us.. just walk into WHSmiths and checkout the headlines. Journalism is in the gutter and more discredited as an industry than banking!
Rather than messing around with my old collection of mp3s (copying 40gb of files to every device isn't fun, and keeping them in sync even less fun) I just use spotify these days.
If I hear a nice tune on the TV/Radio shazam gets me the name and spotify gets me the album.. nearly instantly, at no (extra) cost. If the album turns out to be crap it gets removed.. no loss. I've discovered lots of new music that way. In the old days I'd have probably gone 'nice tune' and forgot about it because the £15 for a new album (=3 months spotify subs!) is too much to risk on someone I'm not sure about.
There's no central database that logs every time you go to 'ipadporn.com'.. the only thing I can imagine them doing is reading the logs of a bunch of websites.
Of course by picking the websites carefully they can say any damned thing they like, depending on who payed for the 'survey'. It's not that long ago we were seeing articles on this very site saying how the corporate world was enamoured with blackberries they'd take over the world...
Next week someone else will release a similar report saying Android has most of the market. The week after Windows Mobile...
People will buy virtual cabbages - by the truckload apparently.
As long as there still enough gullible people out there, Zynga will make profit. This is unlike a lot of IPOs recently where the whole company seems to be built on hype ('we've got 100 million users of our free product.. if we could get them all to pay $10 a month we'd be rich!' (later) 'Hey, were'd everyone go?').
They've pulled the £1 = $1 stunt, and (according to a couple of sites) the US store has far more titles as well.
Excitebike is worth about what they've charged for it, and led to me trying to work out how to delete it after about 10 minutes. Nothing else even looks remotely worth what they're charging.. £3.49 for an ancient gameboy game? WTF?
It's like the whole rise in cheap mobile gaming never happened in Nintendo-land. Can't see myself buying anything from that store.
If C/C++ is uber now.. my assembler skills must be godlike! (smug mode on).
To the poster above.. pascal is a complete nonstarter. It's like programming java with one hand tied behind your back.
Object pascal? Maybe the poster only used it in a school environment? I help maintain a 1.5 million line project. Suffice to say, its single pass nature cripples it fatally. (I had a whole rant here but deleted it..).
Most of the 'good' ideas from delphi ended up in c# - you'd be surprised how similar they are (right down to identical function names).
90% of the time the language you used is determined by the task. I write Android in Java, iOS in ObjC, my main job in Delphi, maintain others code in C or C++.. One isn't 'better' than another.. Every language has its 'WTF?' moments. What matters is you get the job done, and you don't write an unmaintainable behemoth that will drive the guy you comes after you quetly insane.
"Can you actually get GIMP on an Apple product???"
Yes but GIMP OSX is absolute shite.. you have to click twice to make anything happen, there's no screen capture functionality and copy/paste doesn't work.
Most of this is because it was just recompiled using the X11 layer rather than being integrated in the UI in any way.
...And downloaded the android SDK, which already has a perfectly servicable emulator that runs android apps. Bit of tweaking to the UI of that to integrate it better with the desktop and you're done.
So.. Windows only, US only (tied to the amazon marketplace, which hates us foreigners). And they'll probably want money for it too..
Drives fail.. that and the CD drive are the only bits left with moving parts and those wear out. Having no ability to replace the drive instead of a quick repair job the cost of ownership just went through the roof.
It's simply not true to say that most people don't replace them. Maybe they don't do it themselves but when it 'breaks' they do take it to a shop that does it for them, or ask a techie friend. Now the response will be 'Oh it's one of those.. only apple can do that. What, your apple store is 200 miles away? Tough break...'
You can bet the replacement will be *expensive*. This is the company that expects you to pay £200 for a battery (and considers battery failure in 6 months to be normal wear and tear.. yes I have had that conversation.. all it did was make damned sure I'd never buy a macbook again).
Which is a relief.
They did the right thing. Properly functioning auditing detected the anomaly, they investigated and even though they can't prove it's a compromise took the decision to err on the side of caution before it became a full blown breach.
Much better than certain large consumer electronics companies I could mention.
Far from 'only 900' Sony have thus far admitted 12,700 credit card details have been stolen. They haven't ruled out the others (http://blog.eu.playstation.com/).
Have those 12,700 been personally notified? Not that I've heard.
Given that it took them 2 weeks of forensic analysis to even realize SoE had been hacked too, they clearly have little or no auditing so it's far from scaremongering to assume the rest could be compromised.
Just got a third 'warning' email from Sony.. sent directly to an email I *only* used for the ps3.
1. It's not from sony, or a domain registered to sony. Indeed it appears to be from a spammer.
2. It states rather boldly at the top 'Add PlayStation_Network@playstation-email.com to your address book' - first part of a 2 stage phish? (Since in some mailservers email addresses in the address book are more trusted which supresses the phishing warnings)
3. It was sent from a *third* mailserver, of similar dubious origin.
As a phish it was so borderline (containing no dodgy links to russian websites etc.) that it took some discussion to work out what was going on.
If somehow it's not a phish then Sonly just failed epically *again* by training their users to accept emails from random untrusted domains.
considering all the emulators are basically already x86 android versions, the linux kernel runs fine on x86 and already has device drivers, and the important bits of android are in java then 'this year' is a rather pessimistic estimate. 'this month' maybe, unless their programmers are contractors paid by the hour, in which case they'll spin it as long as they can.
You wouldn't buy a 3D TV unless you wanted 3D - the price difference is significant.. Panasonic do a 2D LED TV under £600. This is their cheapest 3D model.
IMO the reviews should quote the price with 4x glasses.
btw. a year ago when people complained about the price of the glasses the common line was 'they're just new, they'll get cheaper' - then they were £50. Now they're three times the price, and the TV no longer comes with 2 free pairs as was common a year ago - commonly they come with no pairs at all (I was actually looking at 3D TVs only a couple of weeks ago, and none of the TVs I looked at came with glasses). Manufacturers are using them to reduce the 'headline price' of 3D, but the real price is always much, much higher.
As 3G is shared bandwidth the more people using it the slower it gets.. so in cities you'll get a lower average (with some outliers - I've had 6Mbps in some parts of Manchester).
Most of those speeds look to be so similar as to be effectively the same (given the natural variation with people hopping on and off the network between tests). It would be interesting to see the fastest - are they rural?
Since broadcast 3D (both Sky and VM) is side by side and half horizontal resolution anyway... I bet it'd knacker gaming though.
That said, I have zero interest in active systems.. £100 for a pair of glasses that might potentially break/be sat on/etc. is a complete nonstarter. The LG passive can be had for as little as £800 now, but it apparently isn't much cop on the 2D front so still waiting.
The future really is much higher horizontal resolutions.. Displays will eventually need need to do that anyway to increase the resolution in the Z direction (which is a tiny fraction of the X resolution, due to the way 3d works).
Internet radio is perfectly viable (esp. in the home) right now, and has a much better long term future. It's FM's natural successor. I can even stream spotify in the car for most journeys these days*.. give it a few years and that kind of stuff will be the norm.
I'm reminded of the LS120 100mb floppies that came out *just* as USB keys and writable CDs made floppies obsolete. It's not that the technology doesn't work, it's just that it's too late... the world has moved on.
* I've travelled halfway down the country without a break - it's not quite viable as consumer tech yet but it's not far off.
"A major thing that has held devs back on IE has been a lack of HTML support in the browser from Microsoft"
I'm pretty sure that a browser that didn't support HTML wouldn't gain much market share.. What did these people think it supported. Gopher?
I got an email today from amazon UK to my UK email address.
Clicked the link, downloaded the app store... click angry birds. It wants a credit card, for a free app. (Google marketplace already scores here).
Add credit card, click buy. 'App Store not available in your region'.
FFS Amazon. You could have said that beforehand. Like not email a .uk address registered to an Amazon UK account saying it's 'available now' in the first damned place. Or say *somewhere* that it was US only *before* going through all the download/register crap.
Going US only is annoying. Going US only *and* going out of your way to our noses in it just bloody stupid.
It's not a free speech argument. Apple aren't the government and aren't bound by any free speech laws that may be in your country.
It's a totally controlled environment. Apple approve *everything* that goes on there and they say what opinions you can and can't express. They have proved in the past that they're not afraid to remove things that they take a dislike to for any reason they like.
In that environment by putting an app like that on Apple are explicitly saying they approve of it. If they *didn't* want to say that then they shouldn't have approved it in the first place.
The domain name isn't the webserver. It's only a pointer to it. And as someone else has already pointed out WHOIS information only covers the second level domain name, not subsequent levels.
To use a bad car analogy, what the plod want to do is have the power to remove all the signs to the M1 just because a 'bad person' drove on it last week.
"OFT will continue to prioritise cases that protect the integrity of online consumer reviews and comments"
Sock puppets are common.. hard to prove (but isn't that the OFT's job?) but anyone who hangs around forums long enough soon gets to see a few. That horse bolted years ago - it's considered a legitimate way of doing business now.
Some graphics drivers are too poor to have ever been releaased. I've seen drivers claiming support for features, then when you try to use said feature, hard lock the OS. Annoyling visual bugs are extremely common also. Having a blacklist of drivers that simply don't work is the only way to work around it.
I wouldn't say it was 'old drivers' - only yesterday we had a case where the latest driver for a card didn't work on windows 7 (it turned the 3d into impressionist art), forcing the customer to have a choice of rolling back to vista or buying a new laptop.
It looks like a kitchen appliance. What's with the huge border? Ipad 1 is much nicer looking. Of course since you've never seen one it could just be a poor mockup.
Nothing compelling in the specs for me.. not worth it for dual core (the kindle app, which is 90% of my current use of the ipad, is plenty fast thanks, as is Safari which is most of the other 10% - if I want games I'll fire up the wii), and I'd look pretty silly taking pictures with something that big!
The insurers failed to demonstrate a statistical difference between male and female drivers, that couldn't be accounted for by other factors. Hence they lost. It's all spelled out in the ruling.
The press have swallowed this 'men are worse drivers' line and repeated it ad infinitum but if this ruling proves anything it's that this is simply an urban legend trotted out by insurers to charge more.
Nokia is a north american company now :p
I've never noticed any particular facebook functionality on the nexus S - and there hasn't been a firmware update so how exactly have google 'removed' it anyway? - poor reporting.
Deciphering the story I guess they've updated the facebook app so it doesn't upload your contact details to facebook any more (rather than anything to do with the nexus S). There are about a dozen 3rd party apps that do exactly the same thing, so it's no big deal.
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