Posts by Vector 649 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Feb 2011
"Why not use a device with 3G/4G in the first place?"
I actually don't understand that scenario. Why would I want to pay for a separate plan for every device I own instead of just using my phones as an access point for all of them. It's bad enough you have to pay a tethering surcharge on most plans (which is just plain usury in the era of capped data plans).
Here's another observation about the pointlessness of this process.
Everything that "security specialist" saw in "verifying" the laptop could have been performed by a board the size of a credit card or smaller, leaving a large amount of space on the laptop's body for whatever nefarious purpose a person would like. In fact, it could be a fully functional computing device, kinda like those...whadda ya call 'em...oh yeah! smartphones
There are a slew of 7 and 8 inch Win Tabs coming with exactly the same specs (and about the same price). HP and Toshiba, off the top of my head, have similar offerings.
The hidden gotcha in this new generation is the memory bus of the processor which is only 32 bit and has a paltry 5.3 GB/s throughput (compare to 25.6 GB/s on an Intel Core processor). I looked at several of these recently and opted instead for a last generation tablet just to get a better memory bus. Still crap, but it gets the basics done 'til I can replace my dead laptop.
" I do see trying to seize a whole national-level domain as analogous to trying to seize the telephone country code, or postal codes."
And about as useful too. They're just letters and numbers. Even if the judge had handed the plaintiffs ".ir", Iran could've just switched to using something else (internationally sanctioned or not) to identify their domains. Might cause a bit of havoc initially, but long term, those folks would probably find themselves holding an empty bag.
"I also wonder, does this ever matter to users ?"
Depends on what your needs/wants are. For standard Android apps, this one will run about as well as a midrange ARM based tablet.. The issues will appear when you start getting into apps that use the NDK (native development kit). These apps, primarily graphics intensive (read: games) are coded "closer to the bare metal." That means they're more dependent on the processor architecture. Since Android has been an ARM game until recently, most NDK stuff is going to run better on those chips than Intel for the foreseeable future.
On a side, but related, note: I find it humorous to see the reviewer's comment that Intel for Android is "every bit as quick as the best ARM devices" right under a graphic showing a half dozen ARM devices with a significant performance advantage.
"I suspect it'll only make a connection when it hears its given name"
This thing is just waiting to be abused. Even if the intent is that it only connect when it hears it's name, how do you guarantee that hackers won't subvert it? Particularly, if it has some sort of "learning" function(s). They can turn on your webcams...
You could start here: arm.slackware.com
Sez it'll run on any arm5te or higher.
Though why you'd want to shoehorn slackware on to a phone is beyond me...
"I do not beleive that it would be sustainable..."
Here's the key to the whole thing: Stop thinking of them as phones. They stopped being that when the first iPhone was released. Treat them like the small computers they are and your life becomes much easier.
As mentioned earlier in this thread, a bluetooth keyboard will make typing much more tolerable and productive. With the right device, you can also hook up (wired or wirelessly) a larger screen instead of peering into the tiny one in your hand. I've used a mouse with many of my mobile devices with no problem (because trying to do even simple photo editing with your finger is a fine route to insanity).
The fact that the phone is the source/portal to your data and applications should by no means limit you to just using it in its native form factor.
While I understand that a permanent (and elegant) fix may take this long, surely a quickfix of some sort could be cobbled together much sooner while that more permanent solution is developed.
Even if the details aren't released by this researcher, I'm quite sure that he's not the only person smart enough to uncover it, particularly now that the flare that something exists has gone up.
All this seems like punishing the customer for the vendor's chicanery, which I find to be bad form. Do you know what USB chip is in that latest bit of kit you've had your eye on? It's easy to say "make'em go back to the shoddy vendor" but the customers probably had no idea and are now put out, probably with little recourse.
Not saying knockoff are ok, but this is a really ham-handed way to deal with the problem.
Much as I'm not (yet) a fan of their mobile offerings, Intel's hard push into the mobile space has to be considered as well. I'm not aware of any design wins in smartphones, but there have been a slew of tablets, both Windows and Android with "Intel Inside" this year. The Android devices, at least, would formerly have contained ARM SOC's of various flavors.
Why? Replace your 7.1 receiver with an (overpriced) Atmos receiver and you're done.
So, let's see if I have this right. Atmos installations in a theater use a matrix of ceiling speakers to achieve their (in my mind questionable) effect. Now, we're being told that 2 speakers can imitate that effect in your home. Oh, and we'll just subtract the side channels from your current setup and replace them with these special ceiling bouncers. So, instead of two side speakers (which are often mounted high anyway) we've got 2 Atmos channels that fill in the center of the sound field by bouncing the sound high.
I actually think this is where we should be going in mobile, though ASUS's execution with the padfone line has been a bit clumsy thus far. The one with the 10 inch tablet accessory had the phone sliding in at a 90 degree angle from the tablet screen which would require a lot more software adjustment to the sensors. Ultimately, that's a nightmare waiting to happen as one of the settings doesn't transition and your device is 90 degrees out of whack. It was also a bit pricey.
Other than that, the only difference between a smartphone and a tablet these days are the size of the screen and the size of the battery. The other components are pretty much the same. I've wondered why there aren't more products like this out there. Samsung could certainly do it with their 11-pin MHL. I guess the biggest obstacle is Android itself. It's too myopic to adapt to different screen metrics in one device.
"Why were they ever called set-top boxes? I don't recall seeing many CRT tellies that had a flat enough top that you'd balance the video on them..."
Apparently, you're not old enough. In the early cable era, when settop boxes made their first appearance, there were tellies that you could (and most did) use as a table!
They're called that because that is, in fact, where they originally sat in virtually every household.
"I don't think Google get sued by Mr Lucas for putting 'An' in front."
That would be because android is a different word from droid and a dictionary defined term making it generic and distinct. IIRC, Lucas "coined" the term Droid for the original Star Wars as an exotic alternative to saying robot.
Enough with the carrier exclusives already! First, the One M8 Windows Phone comes out as an exclusive for Verizon. Now, the Desire Eye is being sold exclusively through AT&T.
I don't know how to tell you this but you're not Apple! Few (if any) will switch carriers to get one of your phones. All you are doing is limiting the market for these devices. I would take a look into the Desire Eye since it looks like a good mid-range phone (nice specs, don't care about the cameras) but I'm not switching to AT&T so I guess I'll wait and probably forget.
"10 years ago laptop screens were 1920x1200..."
Yeah, sorry, I guess I was thinking of next month's phone!
...and I don't quite get that: most of the phablets coming out are already at QHD (on a 5.5 inch screen, no less), yet you have to pay a premium just to get FHD on a laptop.
Yes, it was the benchmark for the original clone market. At my first computer store, since we didn't have an IBM dealership, we spent a good year testing various MS-DOS boxen to see if they could run 1-2-3 out of the box. If it couldn't run Lotus, it wasn't gonna sell. IIRC, there were a couple that had tweaked their BIOS's specificly for it, though they were crap otherwise.
"Give the keys to a variety of authorities and make it so that a significant subset of key holders is required to gain access."
How would you feel about a door to your house that had locks to which those same authorities had keys? There's lots of locks, so just one agency can't get in. Not only do you have the concern about official intrusion, but somewhere out there are a bunch of keys to your house that you have no control over.
These officials still fail to grasp that if there's any sort of backdoor, it will be exploited.
I find this to be a very interesting 5th Amendment issue, though probably in my legal naivete.
It seems to me that the information stored on mobile devices is akin or maybe adjacent to the information stored in people's heads. To compel them to allow access to that information is to compel them to incriminate themselves even if indirectly which would be a violation of their 5th Amendment rights. I'm sure courts have established otherwise, but then, they think corporations are people and money is speech.
"It is much easier to SAY you're going to set up a lunar base than to actually do it."
That may be true, but is it more difficult to do that than to create a large scale space station? It would certainly be easier to scale once established.
The fact is, we need a staging point somewhere around this planet in order to do anything really effective beyond its orbit. The Moon may not be the perfect place, but it's a lot better than lifting everything out of the Earth's well. We may start with having to import everything from Earth anyway, but with time, we could probably figure out how to use the local resources for some purposes.
The plans for going to Mars as they stand at the moment are going to end up just like our little jaunt to the Moon. We go, we bring back some rocks, we say we went, then forget about it for 50 years because it was too expensive.
