Posts by Steve Knox 1972 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2011
So a double-click is click to select then click to open.
Wheres two single clicks is click to select then click to edit.
That doesn't explain why -- it just shows that the UI designer decided to give a single user action (click) three different interpretations for the same object depending on context. And the contextual difference between click-click and click-pause-click is fine enough that it trips up even the most seasoned user, especially when the threshold for the pause differs between systems (or even worse, depending on how busy a single system is.)
Making it even worse are systems which have click-click for open, click-pause-click for rename, and click-longer pause-click does something different (or nothing at all.)
Sure you can teach people these things, but you're not supposed to teach stupid.
It does not matter if J.K Rowling had it bad and now is a billionaire with copyright but would have just been sad without it or 'heaven forfend' without the definite potential upside of making *billions* from beleaguered parents everywhere she did not write Harry Potter.
If copyright did not exist, JK Rowling would probably not have written the Harry Potter series at all, and the studios certainly would not have made film adaptations of it. Now you and I may be fine with that, but as you allude to further down, we two are not "*all of us*" so we don't get to destroy the entire system solely for the benefit of our own prejudices.
Copyright is a *grant* intended to make things better for *all of us*, not just a tiny select group of authors and a mountain of rent seekers. It does not make the world a better place and hence it does not serve its function and hence should be withdrawn.
The only people who determine profit from copyright are the creators. The "rent seekers" as you describe them can only do with the material what the creators allow them to do.
[Snipping bit about Thalidomide as it presumes net negative of copyright, which has not been shown.]
I am Canadian..
We'll get to that in a bit...
[Snipping rambling replies which again presume that the system is a net negative which has YET to be shown].
Re: "both copyright an patents arose to make marketing and sales more fair."
If you think that is true and, worse, think that it is what sustains it, I can't help you. If you care, the writers of the U.S. Constitution were fairly clear with their intent and it has nothing to do with marketing, sales and fairness. [quotes US Constitution]
So, you're Canadian, posting on a UK site about an article about an International standard, and your choice of authority is the US Constitution? Why? Copyright was invented in Britain in the 15th/16th century (source), and patents were invented (but not patented, apparently) in Greece in 500BC (source) In both cases, they were created to ensure that those behind development of innovative ideas were protected from others wishing to profit from their work.
Now, I am a US citizen, and I hold our Constitution dear, but I do not believe it to be either infallible or the final authority on concepts which predate it and have international scope. Our founding fathers were wise in many ways, but they were also supremely skilled at attributing idealistic motives to decisions based primarily on base calculation and supporting said justifications with rather flowery language (cf. Declaration of Independence.)
Marketing and Sales are largely to overcome the fact that without marketing and sales people neither need nor want what is being offered.
Actually, the primary purpose of marketing is to determine what people want to begin with, so that production can focus on items that are saleable. Sales exists to those things which are produced for money, regardless of their market value.
For things, like boner pills, that have a genuine demand, marketing and sales demonstrably *increase* the cost and *decrease* the utility of the product.
Without marketing nobody would know that your boner pills would be in such demand, nor how much. This would lead to production under- or over-runs, which would drive up the cost of the product. Utility would not be affected on a per-product basis, but if the wrong products were to be produced, the energy put into them would not be available to improve the utility of desired products.
Without sales to ease the distribution of desirable products and find a way to offset at least partially if not in whole the cost of offloading undesirable products, the inefficiencies of marketing and production would lead to a glut of waste, which would increase the cost of all products.
You claim these basic definitions are demonstrably false. Fine. Demonstrate that fact, with a valid study which properly accounts for all confounding variables.
"One of them looked rather hopeful as a DropBox option, but it turns out that Samsung's HomeSync Lite is more like having a NAS with remote access for Galaxy devices rather than a SkyDrive or similar."
A manufacturer NOT trying to force all of their customers' content onto some unspecified dodgy server "in the cloud"? What is the world coming to?
[ ] Great signal reception
[ ] Excellent data rates
You may want to have a word with your network provider about these.
[ ] Headset that has more than one button
[ ] Headset that survives having the cable rolled over once by an office chair
Since when has any mobile phone come with a headset worth talking about (or with, for that matter)?
Rule 1: If the 'A' is part of a word which contains Japanese characters, use full-width to be compatible with the rest of the word to which it belongs. This covers your example.
However, it does not cover all other possibilities.
Rule 2: If the 'A' is part of a word consisting entirely of English characters, but which is nonetheless part of a sentence which primarily consists of Japanese words, use the full-width.
This rule may be and may need to be generalized to paragraph, section, even document level depending on the particular use case.
Otherwise, proportional should be acceptable, if not preferred.
NB to be fully international and general it would probably be best to replace "Japanese" and "English" with "full/fixed-width alphabet" and "variable/proportional-width alphabet" (or some similar even more appropriate terminology) in the preceding.
"varied selection of hardware"?
A few variations of the same CPU architecture and a few variations of the same general GPU architecture?
Even assuming you're also including the as-yet unnamed and undescribed 3rd party Steam Machines, they're most likely to use an Intel or AMD x64 CPU and an nVidia or AMD GPU.
So the variance with these machines will be much less than that that seen in the PC community. Bear in mind that the SteamOS is a customized Linux distro, meaning Valve can choose to skip Linux kernel/driver releases that aren't compatible with their hardware -- a luxury Loki didn't have. Also AMD and nVidia have both stepped up Linux driver support efforts since Loki's time.
I think you'll find that with the hardware discussed (esp. the i7 and the highest-end nVidia GPU) and with the TB of storage, the SteamMachine could store profiles of Wine/Crossover tweaked for individual Windows games and play them comparably well to an average PC gaming rig.
While that doesn't appear to be included in the initial push, I'd be very surprised if Steam weren't seriously investigating that for future expansion.
Dear Microsoft,
Whilst you have historically been very adamant about minimizing customer confusion by limiting them to one preinstalled OS per device, your current request seems to indicate a welcome change of attitude, to the more widely held belief that choice, when presented clearly, does not increase confusion and improves overall customer satisfaction.
That being the case, surely two manufacturers presenting such choice is better than one. Let us help you engineer Android for your Nokia Lumia phones, so that we can present a united front upholding the value of choice, in both hardware and software.
Cordially yours,
HTC
uses "may", "might", and similar qualifiers all the time -- because real scientists know that they don't know everything.
This particular issue is better described as "theoretical" rather than "hypothetical", because the hypothesis has been found to be consistent with experimental results.
Now read the second paragraph from the article you cited:
A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.
Note the non-definite language there. That's how science works.
More BS - the vast majority of Apple users do not upgrade every year
Nobody said that.
Big_Ted said that Apple want their users to upgrade every year.
I'll go further and say that Apple needs a significant core of users willing to upgrade every year, in order to finance their annual technology refresh (plus that giant mound of cash they're hoarding).
No, that's not the "vast majority", but it is certainly reflective of the "ideal" Apple customer.
So there's a patent (-) involved, but it's owned by an individual (+). It's a Japanese patent (~), being enforced against an American company (+). That company is Apple (+) and they lost (+) but the payout isn't enough to bankrupt them (-).
4+, 2-, 1~: by my reckoning, we like this.
Copyright problems exist outside of the internet, so why is the internet being treated different[ly]?
Because the internet and related technologies allow for a) less expensive copying, b) more efficient distribution, and c) easier avoidance of conseqences.
If you make a movie, and I buy it and make and sell physical copies, I still need (a) to purchase physical media to write the copies to and (b) a physical location (storefront, park, street corner, post office box) to exchange the copies and money. I'm also limited in how many copies I can make and distribute because of the speed limitations of (a) my burning device and (b) the exchange method. Finally, (c) you can work with/without the authorities to track me down and shut/burn down my storefront, cancel my PO box, harass my "customers" or break my kneecaps as a friendly warning. Sure I can limit myself to semi-random street corner/back alley type locations, but that affects distribution significantly.
On the internet, though, there are (a) freeware rippers/encoders, free online storage sites, protocols like (b) Bittorrent to balance the distribution load and (c) Tor to make tracking uploaders/downloaders more difficult. Piracy sites also often have multiple servers/domains and can be backed up so that if they do get taken down or removed from search engines, they can be brought back up or back into search engine listings under a different name in short order.
So the internet does represent a real threat to the current model of intellectual property protection, one orders of magnitude greater than that of physical piracy. But if you've been paying attention, you'll note that none of the policy posturing by politicians even comes close to addressing the root cause. Even if Google were forced to remove every link copyright holders identified as pirate sites, the sites would be back in the database the next day under a different domain name, perhaps with a change in design to avoid fingerprint detection.
The reason they don't address the root cause is because they can't, because it's nothing new. Sure the internet makes copying so much easier, but before that DVD-R,CD-R, and scanners did. And before that VHS, cassettes, and photocopiers. And coming up , 3-D scanners and printers. The only difference is the scale.
A new model is needed to deal with the technological changes, but the 2010 Digital Economy Act simply tries to prop up the old model by battling technology with draconian penalties. The Hargreaves review does propose a new model, but IMHO not a very good one. Any ideas?
We do not believe it to be beyond the wit of the engineers employed by Google and others to demote and, ideally, remove copyright-infringing material from search engine results. Google co-operates with law enforcement agencies to block child pornographic content from search results and it has provided no coherent, responsible answer as to why it cannot do the same for sites which blatantly, and illegally, offer pirated content.
Removal of copyright-infringing sites is not difficult.
Identifying which sites actually infringe copyright is incredibly difficult. Google has taken a very responsible position here in that they don't simply rely on the purported rights-holder's allegation, but instead do some work to verify the situation before acting. This is a necessary check, as copyright holders have shown that they have no qualms about abusing takedown requests.
This is a very different situation than illegal pornography: in that case the takedown requestor is the authority. As much as they would like to be, copyright owners are not the authority on what infringes their IP. They have shown repeatedly that when given such authority, they abuse it.
To put forth this parallel without acknowledging this very obvious distinction belies these politicians' true motivations.
"Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear from Whistleblowers."
Why is this the first time I'm hearing that. We should all use that a lot.
Probably because the spy agencies are happy to admit they have something to hide. In fact, they'd say they did even if they didn't, if only to muddy the waters.
That's what I thought, too -- last year.
Now I've got a laptop with HD4000 graphics which handily beats AMD's equivalently priced integrated graphics.
I can play Diablo3, for example, or Skyrim on high settings.
Sure, you can get better nVidia or AMD GPUs, but you're going to pay half again as much for marginal improvement, twice as much for significant improvement.
I really hate to say this, but Intel's graphics are finally somewhat respectable.
Zuckerberg claimed that when his social network cocked up with people's privacy, "what we found is that that stuff tends to not actually move the needle that much in the grand perceptions around trust," adding, "The NSA stuff did."
So, he's got no problem actually abusing people's trust, only problems with people finding out about it?
JDX, are you seriously attempting to say that
So a creating a new mobile OS is the new bandwagon? Is the actuality that this is a bit like how there are many Linux distros but it's still the same underlying OS?
was not meant to imply derision? If so, you may want to consider rephrasing your questions, especially on this site.
In either case, AC's suggestion that you do a little research yourself rather than asking questions for which the answer is readily available online retains its merit.
It contributes nothing further to the randomisation if it has a predictable sequence
Every pseudorandom number generator in existence has a predictable sequence (hint: that's why they have pseudo- in the name). However, because exploitation of said sequence is dependent upon knowledge of the initial seed value, simply seeding a PRNG with data from a local nondeterministic source practically negates any advantage. Even the compromised Intel PRNG would not be easily exploited unless the application used a deterministically-determined seed value and output a large sequence of unmodified values from the PRNG.
So provided the PRNG is seeded from a non-deterministic local source which is mathematically independent from the other inputs, using its values would contribute to the randomization.
"From 2008 to 2010, Apple made stunning additions to the iPhone with each iteration – quite a feat considering that when it set out, it didn't really know how to make phones..."
This statement is technically correct. Apple's additions to the iPhone from 2008 to 2010 were stunning, for two reasons:
1. Apple fans were stunned by the new shiny as usual, and
2. Non-fanatics were stunned by the fact that Apple hadn't included those basic features in v.1.
>(This comment has been brought to you by the Please Use Google to Avoid Demonstrating Your Ignorance Society).
Unfortunately, in this case, the ignorance was related to Android, which is a Google product. So AC was just being cautious, as he didn't want to break the internet by Googling Google, albeit indirectly.
with ramifications for the stability, security, and privacy of the Tor network.
So if you find yourself being distracted by the name Roger Dingledine, you should probably not comment here.
These comments should be reserved for serious discussion, and not juvenile repetition of the name Roger Dingledine.
Anyone repeating the name Roger Dingledine for comedic effect should be ashamed of himself.
No, because the function would appear to get the direction right for a single character or any group of characters with the same direction.
You'd need an initial set of characters going one direction, and then a wider reversing set of characters going the other direction.
If we're talking proportional fonts and actual pixel width rather than character width, it could be done with one narrow LTR character followed by one wider RTL character.
Otherwise, you'd need one more RTL character than LTR (or vice versa if you started with the RTL character).
If this were the case, the correct answer would be either
a) the absolute value of the result, or
b) the sum of the absolute values of the character widths in each direction
depending on whether the desired result is overlapping characters or each set of characters rendered side-by-side.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
