Posts by thomaskwscott 21 posts • joined 16 Sep 2011
I bought an Advent Tegra Note 7 months ago now. Similar benchmarks from quad core (ARM) tegra 4 chipset, similar 1 Gb memory, similar low end screen and similar price (£130). I love it but i have to say that if this had been around back then the decision would have been a lot tougher.
SMS seems a strange thing to focus on. Especially since in KitKat only the default SMS app is allowed to send SMS and there are actually now two types of Receive SMS with the default app getting one and any other apps getting a far more limited version. It seems Google are taking steps.
That said, the model where permission is granted as required is so much better. App developers almost never tell you why they need those permissions so you have to make a choice to trust them without knowing the details of their usage. An on demand model would be much clearer to the user. Maybe we'll get it in Android 5?
This is huge for European companies with regulators on their back. Last year a project i was working on for a financial institution very nearly went tits up because the regulators were insisting that our cloud provider handle a "Metropolitan event". This basically means an entire city goes lights out (in our case Dublin) and we were required to have failover inside the EU. Amazon's lack of alternate EU datacenter (apparently availability zones don't count) nearly killed us off. Hopefully a German center will avoid these problems in the future.
I've never really got the raspberry Pi. It's a nice device but quite frankly it's expensive for what it is. You're going to run out of computing power pretty quick if you want to use it for anything slightly resource intensive. I have been messing with Chinese android sticks for a while now and find them much better, for around £30 you get a dual core 1Ghz A9 with 1GB of ram (for £45 you can have quad core and 2GB). Some of them have pretty decent communities too and run Ubuntu see http://home.g8.net/ (the site is hosted on a RK3066).
I love the idea of Glass but have never understood why it needs so much hardware. It's never going to replace the phone (at least not in it's current iteration) so it's essentially a remote screen, mic, speakers and camera. It should really be trying to hand the meaty stuff off to the phone it is inevitably connected to.
That way we can have long battery life, simple APIs and possibly a great reduction in cost too.
You don't often hear me saying this but Go On Microsoft! This kind of thing needs to be challenged openly if just to establish what the correct practice "should" be. As has previously been mentioned it makes little difference in practice as there are other less transparent pieces of legislation US government slurpers can hide behind but it can hopefully go someway to avoiding the current headaches we suffer in putting sensitive European data on American company's servers in Europe.
I just finished a project where we used the Amazon cloud in Ireland to store and process financial data that could have been classified as sensitive. Cue hours of negotiations with regulators, compliance and Amazon lawyers...
My brother actually did this about 6 months ago with the orginal galaxy tab. Just blanked the panel on the car off completely and only had a headphone cable coming out of the dash and a bog standard universal tablet mount. The cable then went directly to a 6x9 and sub amp in the boot. Worked like a charm with spotify and was loud!
I cannot believe that after recently declaring cyber attacks as "Acts of War" a nation would interfere by partnering with a country that already has massive tensions with Iran to deliver its own attack. We are lucky Iran is taking a sensible approach to this as it is well within its rights to consider itself at war and launch counter attacks (cyber or real) of its own.
Paris because even she's not dumb enough to pull this one.
I hate apple as much as the next Android/Ubuntu user but price wise this seems like a rather good deal. It's pretty difficult to find an ultrabook below the £1200 mark and you can garuntee it won't come with these features (even if you ignore the retina display) so £1500 ish sounds reasonable.
Oh wait! 1GBP = 1USD in consumer electronics world so this will cost a fortune...
Agreed, i remember reading about VMWare tools capable of all of this more than 6 months ago. They also work for on a non windoze OS....
It's becoming increasingly easy to spot a sponsored el reg article thanks to the obvious bias normally made clear in the first paragraph.
IT because this clearly is more about politics.
It's got 2 seats (like a 125cc bike), does 50 mph at the top end (like a very slow 125cc bike) does 50 miles for a quid (like a 125cc bike) and costs twice as much as a 125cc bike. Ignoring the green super rich (who lets face it will buy anything that says zero emissions on the side and costs 3 times as much as the alternatives) who do they think they're going to sell this to? Buy the bike and spend the extra cash on the right protective clothing and you'll probably be better off in an accident (and better weather protected too).
Depends how far you want to go! I have the Kobo touch which as far as i know is the same hardware underneath. It's basic Linux underneath with a lot of dev tools left on. A quick google will give you instructions for installing a hacked update that contains telnet and ftp servers. Busybox is installed by default and i highly recommend downloading headless Java for ARM. This last weekend i wrote a quick library for writing images to the screen and have made inroads into getting touchscreen input working.
Its rare these days to find a device so open (whether intentionally or unintentionally). I love mine and am just getting started.
I've got a Kobo touch and when i zoom in and drag i see an animated moving block of test/pictures, same when i am on a webpage, i am able to see the scrolling. How is this different except that it does it in the menus? The Kobo is £40 cheaper, less DRM restricted, better supported and (bar the ridiculous accelerometer) has all the same features. Why does it only score 5% more than this?
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