Posts by stewski

Plex plucks media cloud service, sends users scurrying to exit

Re: This is Dell or EMC?

Got to agree, on a life time subscription, couldn't give a monkeys.

The satellite local DVR function however, is putting my Virgin Tivo to the sword at my next contract negotiation!

Autonomy ex-CFO Hussain guilty of fraud: He cooked the books amid $11bn HP gobble

Huge fan of moronic accounting getting a kicking in court.

I'm just wondering when blighty will have the 2.8trillion sub prime defrauding banker bastards in the dock, because my kids legacy of a nation repaying that idiocy for a life time and the probable number of deaths (from a utilitarian view) are starting to rankle!

Microsoft patches Windows to cool off Intel's Meltdown – wait, antivirus? Slow your roll

Re: Not just AV

Happen naturally?

"We're planning on having a home patching, we've even bought a patching pool, breathe, breathe"

Re: Intel to provide Chips for Tesla?

Or even cARMageddon if you follow the kick starter campaign...

Rooting and modding a Windows Phone is now child's play

Re: Perhaps????

I'm rooted and so's my wife fnar fnar.

Super SSD tech: Fancy a bonkers 8TB all-flash PC?

makes my 8TB raid nas look out of date

This tech makes my raid 5 nas look a bit old hat.

Bet the price is a bit steep though...

Microsoft to Moto: We'll give you $1m a year for your patents

Re: Wrong I am

Then all language should be patentable (insert sark mark tm)

H264 is not based on equations, it is equations...

Re: Wrong I am

Inventive in what way, the specific application of fairly well known and unpatented maths kind of way?

Adobe's revenge on Steve Jobs: HTML5

Re: Adobe's mixed blessing

Actually I'd lay off macromedia.

Fireworks supported png natively and reverse engineered Adobes proprietary .psd file format whilst providing most of the capability at less cost with a focus on screen content.

Dreamweaver supported relatively browser agnostic HTML and attempted to place Macromedia as the Switzerland of the early web format wars.

Flash was the only viable tool for a large portion of web interaction and video playback and had to work with a bunch of crappy audio and video standards.

Had Macromedia held out and ended up buying Adobe, instead of the otherway around flash would have probably morphed into HTML/Open Standards sooner and world peace would be upon us right now...

P.S. Adobe probably bought Macromedia just because their open standard supporting pixel editor had reverse engineered enough of the cash cow .psd lock in to make them seriously concerned...

Re: Erm, am I missing something?

You are missing something if you think Jobs was fighting against proprietary video by ditching flash.

safari ONLY really supports proprietary video formats like h.264 a video codec that Apple (with others) is part of the licensing pool for.

It has been the case that those proprietary software vendors have promoted this codec (and other non free codecs) hampering the web for media continually.

Apple and MS et al:

Where is the ogg/vorbis free lossy compressed audio support?

Where is the FLAC free lossless audio support?

Where is the WebM/VP8 or ogg/theora free lossy compressed video support?

Yup Jobs was all about improving the web and moving away from proprietary lock ins...

Apple iPad Mini 8in tablet review

Which pocket is the reviewer putting this in when taking it on public transport?

A history of personal computing in 20 objects part 2

Re: No Commodore?

In the UK the Amiga was the shiz.

Frankly for £400 notes, it smoked the apples and IBMs of its day and if you liked parallax scrolling and shallow game play shadow of the beast was your man.

68000 and numerous specialised processing units killed the competition, now it's clear that symmetric multi cores arent the way forward with moores in mind, the Amigas design philosophy may prove more important than even the genius arm of the Archimedes.

Free Android apps often secretly make calls, use the camera

Sensationalist BS

The style and content of this story were Sun level sensation, with virtually nothing of interest.

"Free applications are five times more likely to track user location and a whopping 314 per cent more likely to access user address books than paid counterparts."

whopping? after the first part suggests 5 times more likely to track location and the second part talks about a whopping 314 percent, do you think we are idiots, sun readers, or just so bored that bad maths and english will brighten up our day.

Is requesting the capability to use location services proof that free applications are 5 times more likely to track user locations. I don't know but this whole piece and the study reads as thin on facts and big on BS.

Surface RT: Freedom luvin' app-huggers beware

yet another pointless and inaccurate post.

Surface is the worst thing in the world ever, well since the nazi's final solution and terrorism.

By the way I haven't used it yet, surface that is...

Windows 8? Nah: Win Phone 8 should give Apple the fear

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/08/22/ten_low_end_android_phones/page2.html

or the g300 for under a ton.

Look you may have got nokias last lot of lumias at 170 for all I know

But MS/Nokia aren't even really playing the low price point game at the moment.

P.S. if you bought a rubbish cheap android phone, try reading a review or two first, don't blame choice on your inability to choose.

When comparing tablets, to smartphones on price remember you can also pick up a nexus 7 for about 150

and that isnt even the bottom end on price...

As tech journalism goes, this was rubbish.

"the smartphone market is where Microsoft must win, because it offers the lowest price points"

when comparing tablets, phones and traditional computers.

Cheapest win X phone in the UK = £300

yes smartphones can be cheap, no MS havent got a cheap one.

I'd destroy the other rubbish, but I cant be arsed...

Foxconn trumps Apple to sit pretty on Fortune 500

Re: So

Much as profit is great, when your business is based on shaky IP law, which can be reduced to trying to prevent competition from using the same 1950s braun designs you borrowed you shouldn't be too complacent about your position in the global economy...

Ultrabooks: objects of desire but just too darn expensive

Re: Bang for buck!

Toshiba z830 = £700 - equivalent macbook = £1100

The main differences being

the tosh can plug in to a projector or monitor via VGA,

the tosh has USB3 not thunderbolt

the mac is an i5 the tosh is i3 (no major shakes, agree?)

the battery in the Tosh lasts longer

the tosh has sdxc for upto 2tb of expansion

the tosh takes up to 6gb of ram (which cost me < £40) the mac is maxed at 4

the tosh has a max res of 1366x768 the mac supports 1440x900 (which I seriously would prefer but it is still a compromised resolution for my work so VGA support is a must)

I can run OSX as easily as you can run win7

What is special about the air again?

Where is the £900 coming from.

I bought my toshiba z830 for under £700, its lighter than my works 10" toshiba at100 and the ssd means photoshop loads in about 3-5 seconds and it boots in less than 20.

My friends ipad set her back over £500 by the time Apple had finished selling her add on's she needed to be able to plug it into anything and to my mind it is functionally useless in comparison.

Mine doesn't have a dvd drive but everything else I could ask for is there including a matt screen. What the hell are you people on about?

Ten... Ultrabooks

The toshiba is £700

This article is rubbish.

The winner is an HDD driven device (sso not actually an ultrabook?) and the Toshiba at number 10 is only about £30 more and on their own tests beats a bunch of the i5's.

Frankly I bought the Toshiba (£700 at amazon or John Lewis) a month or two ago and cannot see any attraction of the models that cost £300+ more...

Redmond man unmasked: UK.gov open standards stalled

Re: FSF call to respond

Probably true, though the opening of all ordnance survey data was under the previous gov.

let's hope the new one stays on this....

Samsung shifts Apple A5 chip production to Texas

Wouldn't it be funny if Samsung put $9bil into the US economy during a major IP litigation that revolves around a US companies IP and the sale of product based on these chips.

Of course it'll never effect the outcome, US law is above all that...

Firefox needs heavy hitter Linux power

Matt is a Chrome user?

Slowly turns my back!

One question, what date do you think it will be when Chrome runs a device sync ala Firefox that stores my personal data in an encrypted format and they release the source, so I can set up my own sync server? I'm guessing 12th of never!

Ellison's Oracle washes hands of OpenOffice

We've already got one!

Washing their hands is great, we all moved to libre office anyway!

YouView mandates Linux, HD content encryption

BBC where is my TV

On The BBC iPlayer.

Did we not already pay for the BBC (self produced) content.

Why can I not download any previous program ever, quit it with the DVDs and 7 day limits!

Android, Steve Jobs, and Apple's '90%' tablet share

I've heard this before

You used them both?

As I say I haven't, the prada did win the IF product design awards the same year as the iPhones launch, but many random internet people have said the same as you, that it was awful and the iPhone was "the" innovation.

Obviously, touch screens were not innovative, neither were touch only converged mobile devices, those claiming iPhone innovation (the introduction not just bringing to market of something truly new or novel e.g. the definition of innovation) are always left talking about the synergy of the features available. To me this isn't innovation, innovation was made at xerox parc and Doug Englebart, not MS or Apple, or by Sam Hurst of Elographics/IBM for pioneering touch interfaces and University of Toronto's Input research group and later Bill Buxton for multi touch. But maybe you are right some bold rounded buttons and a very popular product are the epitome of innovation in the modern world!

Either way touch interfaces for mobile devices have got better (they were expensive and awful in early products) my friends iphone pinch/zoom and on screen keyboard seemed a step forward, but still awkward and expensive, the haptic feedback on my Android seems to take it a touch further for text input, and it is on an £80 device, if its all about making a product when I'm paying this is what I'd rather call innovation.

So is Android

My Daughter did much the same on my Android phone, she was around 2 at the time.

Funny thing is, she did all this without partitioning the SDcard as ext4 and SSHing in to use busybox, but I guess that just proves that, just because a device can do something, it doesn't mean all users HAVE to understand or do that.

Also when I last asked she was unconcerned with the Androids platforms fragmentation :-)

And yet it wasnt the first!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada_%28KE850%29

I'm not saying the LG prada was a better phone, I've not used either, but the revision of "innovation" around many Apple products is continually amusing...

What music player market?

Apple still hold the music player market, what use is that when the advent of smartphones/converged devices is cannibalising it until it no longer exists ?

There is some urban legend that subsidies from carriers are helping android prices/competitive position. Lets check that out by looking at approximately equivalent PAYG devices.

ZTE Blade - £99 at argos

iPhone 3Gs £428.00 at Apple

There is a simple reason the Android devices are competitively priced, Android manufacturers actually compete!

As is said in the article, all the detraction around the xoom/tab were made about the G1, Android generally gets better/runs faster with updates, H/W gets cheaper and the range is larger. Some will cry fragmentation, and call things cheap and nasty iDevice knock offs, but people will generally buy a device that is £328 cheaper than an Apple equivalent regardless!

Google 'clamps down' on world of Android partners

Free Open Source Apologists?

Most people are unlikely to understand how you become an apologist for software that has been released source and all to the comunity.

Yes many would prefer earlier releases of source

others want tighter control

some are saying better closed and honest.

Myself I do see any failure to release regular Android code or suggest no further releases of a branch as a huge step backwards.

But no an honestly closed controled draconian future is not the path I want for my computing, information technology future. If you like being told which cartoonists to read, how programs should be written and what they should be allowed to do.

Personally Im too busy tethering my £90 Android 2.2 (cyanogen) phone to pay £430 for a locked down iPhone 3GS...

Are you stating fiction or facts?

Does the Open Handset Alliance not give minimum hardware requirements for Android also?

By the way, did those standards help samsung and MS in their recent updater update efforts?

Thanks mr OED

Thanks for that blcollier, I didnt realise that YOU alone are the authorative source on this matter.

General use of the word linux refers to any operating system based on linus' kernel and it is that general use that will likely come to define the word not your chosen take on it.

Yes there are many distributions of open source software that bundle the kernel and various OS components, these can all be (and generally are) termed linux by the majority of users and distributors!

Southampton Uni shows way to a truly open web

Joe average wants?

Joe average probably wants his work calendar in a an electronic format that can actually be processed by machines. Yeah a print is hand and not much wrong on the pdf front there, want to actually use some of that data however...

This was not a good comment

Idealism yes but I'm not sure TimBL is the poster boy for "youth" these days :-)

Why I say your comment is poor is this, what semantic web switch are you talking about?

Your facebook data is not about to be magically represented in rdf made open and linked.

The Semantic Web is an effort to standardise the publishing of interlinked data in the same vein that the original web standardised the publishing of interlinked documents. You didn't have to publish web pages back then and no one forces people to publish linked data now.

Now the open access ideal for science publication/data is related but different, if your experiment/science isn't repeatable and observable it's not really following the scientific method anyway, so the idea that research data and articles should be locked away and unavailable (or behind some pay wall) is not really taking science forward. Allowing research to be open, linked and widely accessible seems likely to change the quality of research science.

As for other data sets like government and organisational (the OS stuff that was opened) It is simply OUR data in the first place, why lock it up? The one time Labour/Tory/Liberals have agreed in any meaningful way about tech is when they listen to Sir Tim BL about data.

I'm not sure this makes sense.

If I understand what you are saying, why doesn't that apply to the current web?

Web pages are also "non portable" in that they link to other pages or locations which mean if you move them off line they no longer function identically. Whilst this is true, it is possible to spider to any given depth and cache that, the complaint also ignores the added value of those links for discovery, rating, relating and indexing etc.

Linked data attempts to gain value in a way similar to the web for documents by showing relationship between data or concepts via a uri. If you can say that linked data is not as valuable as a traditional off line database then you could also say the web is not as valuable as word documents. Much like the current web, linked datasets may often be based on tradition database data, you gain value by making the format an open royalty free standard that links to other datasets, that does not detriment the original data set you have. Your web pages do not diminish the documents they are based on either.

Android malware attacks show perils of Google openness

iPhone with the giant pdf jailbreak?

Oh yes that'll be apples secure ecosystem that allowed iPhones in physical apple stores to be jailbroken (root code exploit) by visiting a simple website?

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As for other "secure" and "business" phones anecdotally Ive only ever seen one smartphone dead by virus and that was a blackberry, what evidence is there that proportionally Apple and RIM arent offering less secure ecosystems?

replace wikipedia with encyclopaedia Britannica

Erm if you replace wikipedia with encyclopaedia Britannica in your comment what changes?

What firewall?

I'm not sure what firewall you are on about, has ubuntu changed and started running a bundle of crazy network aware services on install and putting up an inadequate software firewall, oh wait no thats the other peoples OS...

Google plugins force-feed open codec to IE and Safari

is HTML5 a standard?

Odd that people skirt around the idea that webM is a standard, despite open specification documents and source for encoders and decoders. Often h.264 gets the defacto standard applied without figures for its adoption on web video encoding and then HTML5 is described as a standard (which I'd agree with) but it is yet to become a candidate recommendation from the w3c and has not been agreed by ITU or ISO (which is where h.264 supports suggest standards come from).

In fact HTML wasnt iso/itu agreed for 9 years and xHTML and a bunch of w3c tech still isn't.

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Either way, w3c recommend only royalty free tech for a good reason, the idea that users will mostly be able to access such tech for video is not bad thing!

Watson beats humans in Jeopardy! dry run

AI degree?

You have a degree in AI great, what is proper AI or even just I?

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For my money Turing's test(s) at least acknowledges the fact that we know very little about cognition so would do better to accept that (at least short term) and judge appearance of intelligence. If current AI thinking has something better, I'd be very interested though..

Will Windows on ARM sink Windows Phone 7?

They could adopt an open source model

As I type this I am laughing at the thought.

That said if MS actually adopted an open source model for smart phones (ala android) and made it interoperable with their non standards, they could at least save some face in the bigger OS/Device areas that are surely just going to follow as Android, Meego and iOS grow up...

If you open source an old market, are you doomed to fail?

Have you played the humble indie bundle?

Actually regarding Gnu/linux as a platform for indie gaming there are some amazing titles on the humble indie bundle. World of goo alone is better than nearly anything big label I've seen recently.

http://www.humblebundle.com/

The pay what you like model used also raised quite a lot of cash for charity and developers, and the Gnu/Linux users donations were roughly twice as much as the windows/osx users.

Standard smartphone charger to dominate in two years

I can't say I agree

My Tmobile pulse charges up just fine via micro USB, some manufacturers are enlightened enough to support standards before a big stick is waved at them...

I can't say I agree

My Tmobile pulse charges up just fine using micro USB. Hard to believe but some manufacturers are capable of supporting an existing standard without having a big stick waved at them...

2011: The year open source (really) goes capitalist

Smelling a rat?

This is the second tech site I've read with this spin on Microsoft's clear effort to push H.264 (which it in part patent encumbers) into open source territory, whilst not offering clear support for WebM in its own browser. Somehow we're expected to read this as altruistic and embracing the web, please.

Lucky this article wasn't authored by someone from the only major Linux vendor to buy into this (non web friendly) encumbered standard for their own distribution... oops...

Berners-Lee: Facebook 'threatens' web future

you fail

One the web and the internet are not the same.

Two I'd say your statement is analogous to saying the people who administer a dictionary should have prevented swearing, or those that design roads have failed because people have accidents or use them to ferry illegal goods.

Google: Oracle doctored that 'copied Java code'

Most posts here are seriously dim

Thanks to VIC on this thread for being informative.

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For the most part, posts on this thread are idiotic.

Google assert that Andoid is developed by the OHA, cue comments like, "way to screw your business partners", and "MS never do this" etc.

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What part of the OHA do you not understand? Hardware manufacturers are increasingly interested in the software their hardware runs, and sometimes the standards they can use. HP bought palm for a reason you know, Nokia/Intel contributed and merged development into meego for a reason. The days of a Microsoft leaving the scraps for "partners" is over. I'm saying the "DOS ain't done till notes don't run" days are Gone!

The OHA are big boys and all make money, they are not Google, the software is not only open to be just built by one and licensed to others, if there is a legal case its the OHA who will likely fight it, how is stating this, shafting partners?

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Amazing to me, is the idea that Oracle could be claiming copyright infringement against the the terms of GPL'd code. Will we see Larry visit the FSF to see how best to prosecute? I'd pay to see that.

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VIC suggests there are exception for the code samples, and his knowledge seems more convincing than idiotic - the code looks the same statements, therefore copyright infringement, those comments remind me of a bit of python: "she's a witch" "how can you tell?" "she looks like one"

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Beyond the frankly weird "copyright" red herring, is a complex argument about Patents for Java, derivation and implementations of VMs, syntax of language and Sun/Oracle licenses of such.

Honestly I don't know what the heck is right here. I heard SUN Java was trying to be good to open source/open standards based development, I guess now Oracle are involved we can all.

1. Fork and use as much free stuff from the SUN years whilst entirely ignoring Oracle as an entity or leader of such projects. Hence libreOffice, openJDK, Harmony, mySQL will no doubt/may have forked and many others.

2. Avoid use of any technology they hold valid patents/license over, though in the case of Oracle that really has been a good idea for the last 20 years.

3. Support any/all free/open mobile software that doesn't get caught up in the coming patent Armageddon, it's almost amusing how the big software companies are looking more likely to destroy each others business, just as Linux on a consumer screen (albeit not the desktop) is actually in danger of becoming reality.

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As for the early Apple troll, I don't think Apple are walking away from the current "patent absurdity" without trouble either, if I was as idiotic as that poster I'd be saying Go Motorola et al. I'm not saying that, just kicking back with a drink and watching the patent bombs drop all over the growing markets, and wondering if this outcome was imagined at "Gottschalk v. Benson". Still I'm in the UK in a patent bunker :-)

Android rebellion: How to tame your stupid smartphone

Rubbish article with one important fact

I second this, the article seems a lot of hot air.

However the fact that android still fails to support proxies properly is astonishing.

I just wish Mozilla could get Fennec or Portable Firefox to work so we could get around this.

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As for the iPhone just works no configs/fiddling - It could be user error but my anecdote is that myself and a friend couldn't move their own user recorded videos to a PC because they had iTunes synced to another machine, DRM like this is simply defective by design!

Hogwash

I remember this issue in the birth of the PC market, OMG your horrible fragmented competitive evolutionary PC standard will wreck user experience and never produces a better product than our one company designs. So what are the guts of a Mac these days?

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As for the start of the erosion, android sales figures are not exactly what you might call eroding.

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Could be related to the £460 price differential on the iPhone for and my tMobile pulse (huawei 8220), yes I know its a bit lower spec, no I'm not giving you £460!

Wikileaks will soon post biggest military leak ever

Terminology "Rabid Dog"

I see where you are coming from, Indeed he may infect others with the virus of Factual Information

an issue for any right thinking civilisation.