Posts by Badvok 496 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2010
Minor point and I know it is always debatable when the seasons actually change, depending on whether you are a meteorologist or not, but so far as I can see they did have something to release on the last day of summer. Unfortunately they weren't able to, so yes NOW they have missed a summer release.
It is also interesting that they missed some features from even Samsung flavored android and hence marked it down because iOS 7 had them (camera from lock screen, adjustable font sizes). Though it is perhaps an indication that Android is a bit harder to use and get the best out of - I guess that's the price we pay for openness and flexibility.
"My pal on what was then Strathclyde polis reckoned he'd be too bust nabbing murderers and rapists etc to show the enthusiasm his trainspotting colleagues had but thought it was a nice idea nonetheless..."
I really hate that lame excuse. But since there are less than 1000 murders in the UK and around 130,000 full-time police officers, maybe they are a bit busy.
(Rape is a very much higher number but since the majority are actually committed by people known to the victims there doesn't appear to be much the police need to do there either.)
The SIM card remains the property of the network so they can do whatever they like to it. This is not the same as having the network update the handset's software silently.
Or perhaps you'd rather the handset asked you whether you'd prefer to have the SIM updated or have your contract terminated? I guess at least then you'd know they were making changes and you could decide you no longer want to deal with that company.
"and yes I too want to know how they found Beaver botty had such an interesting taste"
If you read the article the clue is in there. Beavers use this as a scent to mark their territory, so it wouldn't take much for someone to wander past a scent marked tree and think "Hmm, that smells a bit like vanilla, I wonder where it came from." and then do a little investigation.
Maybe I've missed or am missing something here but wasn't the "Communications Data bill" all about logging the fact that Alice was talking to Bob rather than what they were talking about? And since normal TLS/SSL only hides the what and not the who (not counting dark nets and stuff) how is it relevant to the latest revelations?
@HMB, you may not realise it, but these days many people connect phones and tablets to their TVs to display video, games, etc. It would be nice if that one connection provided power to keep the device going too. Maybe not a total fail, but given modern usage they should really have included power in the standard.
Seems to me that CTRunGetGlyphCount is returning -1 to indicate an error and the bug is simply that this error condition is not caught and handled. (Probably because these days programmers use Exceptions too much and have forgotten that return values can also be used to indicate problems.)
"The only requirement being to maintain a history of all packets on every node for a few hours, which flash memory could do."
Yep, that will work and the days of low cost room thermostats wil be numbered, they'll all have to come with 1TB of flash memory.
"If I were to find a wireshark equivalant, you are saying that, I could be assured that by turning of "syncing for the Google account." no traffic would any longer be sent to google."
From Android itself? Only the most paranoid would think otherwise.
Of course you'd also have to ensure you don't install/use any Google apps, or any 3rd party apps that utilise Google services, or visit any of their sites to keep them totally ignorant of your existance.
It probably will be on install when it finally becomes an official feature. My guess is that there'll be a set of required permissions that you have to accept to install and then a number of optional permissions that the app would like but that you can optionally deny (both at install time and later).
"When will Gmail incorporate automatic PGP?"
What would be the point? The 'security' services are generally more interested in who you are talking to rather than what you are actually saying. Though obviously if you are sending lots of encrypted emails then they will probably flag you up for further investigation and try to find out what you are talking about.
Faster/Slower RAM, GDDR5 vs DDR3, it all depends on what you are actually doing with the memory that determines which is actually faster, one is faster for pure graphics workloads the other is faster for general computing workloads. So the PS4 has the graphical edge but Xbox One has the edge in all other functions.
You may think it is crazy but the many millions, if not billions, of people who have already locked themselves into such systems obviously don't (Apple, Amazon, Google, Steam, etc. all sell content in a similar manner). The key difference is that none of those existing markets (except Steam) tries to tie in the physical copy.
So it was hardly surprising that Microsoft tried to do this, and still will do for non-physical content. Sony decided to take the physical copy piracy hit to win one over on Microsoft. In doing so they have forced Microsoft to also take the physical copy piracy hit. There is only one winner in this - the pirates.
Not so sure this tech is rooted in the past, although it has been around a long time, the reasonable levels of success enjoyed by the Galaxy Note range suggest that it is still a current and desired tech. Capacitive sensing has the potential for much higher accuracy than resistive sensing.
Moving the sensing into the SoC to improve the sampling rate and thus the accuracy seems like a sensible move.
(But what on earth is a "capacitive material"? Or is that just a contraction typo arising from nVidia's use of passive conductive?)
All the usual anti-DRM comments, but very few that look at what W3C is actually trying to do, and that is define a standard that works for everyone, whether or not they actually want to use DRM.
EFF want there to be no standard for encrypted media delivery, NOTE: Not just no standard for DRM, no standard for encrypted media delivery at all.
To me it seems like they want the businesses that still want to use DRM, are forced to use DRM by the content owners, or even simply want to provide you with secure access to your home CCTV system, to continue to use non-standards compliant front ends. We'll be stuck with Flash/Air/Silverlight/Java forever - great plan EFF!
Am I right in thinking this only affects Open networks and not those that employ any kind of security?
i.e. Hacker sees phone looking for SSID 'TheCloud' and so creates an SSID of 'TheCloud' to which the phone then connects. However, if the phone was expecting the network to use security would it actually still connect if there wasn't any?
Probably no point commenting on this article now that my comment will appear at the bottom of the fourth page of the usual comments, but it will make me feel better to get it out of my system so:
How come this survey only counts 'Launches', rather than time actually spent in a metro app versus time spent in the desktop? Why is there no breakdown of what desktop apps are being used and for how long? I thought the whole point of the new UI was that you never actually closed an app, so doesn't this mean that a user may simply be switching back to an app rather than re-launching it?
Seems like the outcome of the survey shows exactly what they wanted it to show rather than anything meaningful.
"I'm sure at 1'33" in the video when she sucks air through her teeth she's thinking "Don't bluescreen, please to God don't bluescreen now" "
Sorry, but you get a downvote for obviously never having used Windows 3.0. The chances of Windows 3.0 actually surviving a problem well enough to present a blue screen were so slim it hardly ever happened - these were the days of real system crashes, from garbage all over the screen, accompanied by pops and clicks from the system speaker (if fitted), to crazy flickering screens or just the simple system freeze.
Unfortunately IMEI blocking is just not effective. To be effective you'd have to block the IMEI on all networks in all countries in the world. For example, a phone stolen in the UK and blocked will simply be shipped to another European country and flogged. It might work better in Australia because it is more difficult to set up that international exchange, but like in Europe I doubt it would be effective in the US.
Even if you did manage to block the IMEI everywhere the simple fact is that on a lot of phones the IMEI can be changed and on those that it can't it simply requires a mainboard swap so you can still profit from some of the more valuable components of the phone, e.g. the screen.
"and if it includes binary-to-audio on the fly, then that's impressive."
That is exactly what this is, it isn't playing a recording of the raw tape noise, it is an app that takes the actual binary data and generates the appropriate wave forms. It is something that is built into most emulators but this allows you to provide the data to a real ZX Spectrum.
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