Posts by badmonkey

Ford recalls 433,000 cars: Software bug breaks engine off-switch

The Focus etc

are not "American" cars.

The Focus etc

are not "American" cars.

And the winner of the most reliable disk drive award is ...

Not quite correct. Your retailer warranty has expired but Seagate do warranties on a per-drive basis. Go to their website and check the warranty status with the drive serial no. You will have to deal with the nearest distributor or Seagate directly.

Judge orders Yelp.com to unmask anonymous critics who tore into biz

Re: Amazon ?

Can you? I use Amazon and never realized that. Why should it even be necessary?

The reason people are down on Amazon reviews is because anyone can place a review on a product without having purchased it. It practically encourages trolling, enables astroturfing (both positive and negative), and colludes with both libelous competitors and con-artist sellers.

It would be like placing eBay feedback on a trader without ever having traded with them. It harms the customer or future buyer, and it harms the seller (for products on the Amazon Marketplace). Guess whom it doesn't harm?

Ask yourself why Amazon would have such a seemingly ridiculous policy and you will answer your own q.

Re: Welp, that's Yelp.

Amazon reviews are not restricted to purchasers of the product in question, so they are really a waste of time, especially with niche products vulnerable to the negative campaigns of competitors. There is much fakery and astroturfing that goes on. Amazon just want the illusion of depth of content and appear to be set on the policy, they won't change it although of course they easily could.

LG: You can stop hiding from your scary SPY TELLY quite soon now

Re: Legal liability

I suppose it depends on the likelihood of the TV equivalent of the EULA holding up to legal pressure.

Re: Aren't they breaking the law?

The 'user' probably 'agrees' to it when first turning the TV on by way of a long hard-to-scroll licence written in Korenglish.

Samsung Galaxy S4 Active: The mobe for CHUCK NORRIS TYPES

Re: About bloody time!

These aren't underwater devices, the 30 min escape clause is how that gets formalized. If you want to see what that would look like, go look at any underwater camera enclosure with proper O-ring seals and mechanical latches. You can't get that level of seal with little push-in rubber plugs and crappy thin film covers - it will hold out the water initially, but over time it will seep in when there is a pressure differential between the phone insides and the deep water. Hence permanent submersion is not likely to be a good situation in which to leave your S4 Active.

I don't see why changing altitude would be an issue, the interior of the phone will equalize in pressure for the same reason it's not really properly waterproof and therefore there is no pressure driving rain water inside. It should be able to remain permanently wet in such a scenario without issue.

Bradley Manning* sentenced to 35 years in prison

Re: Good

"Assange has always maintained he never said this and made a formal complaint to the Leveson Inquiry about the veracity of Davies’ evidence. Assange is alleged to have made this remark while discussing the redaction of the Afghan War Diaries with journalists from Der Spiegel and the Guardian during a dinner in London in July 2010. Nick Davies was not present at that dinner. A journalist at that dinner, John Goetz provided a signed witness statement affirming that the remark was not made."

Jimbo Wales: ISP smut blocking systems simply 'ridiculous'

Re: misguided strategy

You are wrong.

- Nobody "stumbles" upon porn.

- Your use of the term "innocent" implies the opposite of anyone viewing porn. Irrational moralizing.

- It's spelt "porn". I know that we don't have sex in Britain but some of us are grown-ups and can use the words without feeling icky.

- Why are Perry's intentions "admirable"? They form a socially conservative puritanical agenda resulting in undesirable government interference in an area it should have no business.

Patent trolling surges, but righteous cavalry on the way

Re: Get your terminology right!

You won't say that if you invent something worthwhile and invest your life's savings in it only to see it rapidly copied and ripped off by the competition.

It's the trolls who sit on obscure patents and ambush legitimate and innovative start-ups with protection-racket style litigation that are the problem.

If said start-up is ripping off their more inventive competition down the road, then they deserve the book thrown at them by the lawyers...

Re: Best look on patents I have seen.

Open source and rejection of IP protection might work for Siedle - he talks about needing to innovate within 12 weeks to stay ahead of the copycats, and having hundreds if not thousands of products in his company's portfolio. That's great, but it's only to say that his company isn't what the patent system is designed to help.

Traditional products that require big investment and have long-term ROI schedules are not helped by such a laisez-faire attitude. If you are investing 6 or 7 figures into new product R&D and then a quality production set-up that will need to generate revenue for the next decade to be a worthwhile investment, the risk of cheap copycats that you have no effective legal recourse against is huge.

I have been involved in 'traditional' manufacturing, small steel working products, and development and bringing-to-market of products in that area. Very traditional stuff but stuff that there is great need for. The idea of open-sourcing all design IP and embracing the cheap rip-offs is ridiculous. There is no benefit to either us the developers and manufacturers, or the end-user, only downsides. For the end-user there is either the consequence, whether directly felt or not, of a) poor quality rip-offs flooding the market, or b) [more likely] we don't bother in the first place and the innovation/development never happens. To the extent that patents are not practical or enforceable, I assure you that situation (b) is happening constantly the world over.

Crying "open source" and "free" is no solution except in a very limited band of examples like that of SparkFun. What we should be talking about is the modernizing and improving of the patent system and the legal processes of enforcement.

Google turns off Chinese censorship alert service

Yep

It's just a pity that the Nazis were so far ahead of their time, I'm sure Google and its assembled mass of its users data would have been of great help to the lawful government in tracking down them dirty untermensch and packing them off to the gas chambers, per proper law and regulations.

Dipshit.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know how to use HTML5

Re: I'd like to see....

Judging from the bugs and moving targets I encounter developing simple interactions with Facebook's services from web dev point of view, I wouldn't be so sure that they know much of anything - or care, frankly.

Microsoft 'surprised' by Google Gmail 'winter cleaning'

Re: Thank goodness for POP

Who needs server sync'ed and backed up email eh?

Re: I don't really see a problem

LOL not really, I've just used it for years and am pissed with the number of irritating and obvious issues with it that never got resolved. I'm also pissed with Gmail for the same reason, but in both cases I've stuck with them so go figure.

Re: I don't really see a problem

>>> As far as the bandwidth is concerned, yes you're right but for the most part emails are maybe a few 100kb max, so it's hardly the end of the world.

What, you never send attachments?

>>> The webmail client I have on my own server is SquirrelMail (also Horde) which both do have the mark and purge function. However when using the same account from my Android device, if I delete an item it goes directly to Deleted Items.

Great consistency there eh. Really wonderful for users.

>>> in reality neither does ActiveSync for the purposes of most clients. An Android or iDevice connected to Exchange 2010 and configured for push just checks mail every 5ms generating a crap load of unnecessary server load

That's not true in recent EAS versions.

Re: I agree gmail sucks now.

It does, whether it talked properly to the buggy Gmail implementation is another question.

Re: At least google only throw out features, MS threw out my accounts!

So presumably you don't use Gmail either, since their policy is to terminate accounts after 9 months of inactivity?

https://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/program_policies.html

Re: I don't really see a problem

IMAP is slow, usually, and clients don't tend to handle poor connections well.

It has no sensible way to archive sent messages. What should happen is the sent message gets uploaded once, sent, and is archived in both the client's and the server's "sent" folder without further need for synchronization. What actually happens is either a) the client sends via SMTP and then uploads a second copy to the sent folder, or b) [like Gmail] the SMTP server copies the message over to the IMAP sent folder on the server, and the client then faithfully syncs it to the local sent folder. Either way double the bandwidth is used and it is fucking retarded.

The deletion behavior of marking and purging is outdated and confusing for people who expect deleted messages to go to the "trash".

There is no IMAP push.

Whatever. Gmail uses weird folder structuring and what it does with sent e-mails is "non standard".

Re: i have to use outlook.com

I think he means he's using EAS on a mobile client, and the push is killing battery, which sounds more plausible but maybe it's app specific - definitely need more info.

Re: From Exchange To Gmail

Expensive though isn't it?

Will Outlook.com not do for free the same thing? (basically unrestricted [500] users and data)

If you're using the free version of Apps, you have the same issues as before - IMAP support is of poor quality, EAS is generally superior if your clients support it, you cannot do email forwarding, low number of users allowed, etc.

A better question is why do Google not come up with their own offering that is superior to the horrible IMAP interface that they do bother with.

I know that the answer is that they want eyeballs on their web interface, and preferably via Chrome, but I'm happy to see some interest at least in the tech community that apparently indicates some lingering interest in proper e-mail clients... despite the sorry state of affairs in that department, at least in the Windows environment.

Re: Fixed it for ya, Microsoft...

No, MS has taken advantage of an opportunity for some PR, and their key points are on target.

>>> Really, nobody wants to use Microsoft's proprietary crap, when there is perfectly fine open standards

Well I do, because the open standard of IMAP is not perfectly fine, in fact it's outdated crap that was fuct from the outset and has never worked well - particularly with Gmail, which is even more awkward with its totally non-standard IMAP implementation - whereas Exchange ActiveSync is actually brilliant.

For my domains I intend to switch away from Google Apps to Outlook.com, in every sense it seems to now be the superior offering.

If it's anything like the ISP e-mail in collaboration with Yahoo that I've seen here in New Zealand, you're stuffed. No IMAP support.

I enjoy watching Yahoo's decline.

Re: I agree gmail sucks now.

>>> It is annoying Outlook 2013 cannot do Exchange Activesync to the version Google uses.

Could it not? I thought it could - but of course now Google have terminated the service so it's a moot point.

It was always buggy though, I don't know how well it worked with the Outlook client Google Sync plug-in, but using it directly in things like the iPhone mail app, and the likes of Enhanced Email on Android, wasn't really feasible because of a bug where you couldn't properly move messages. Instructions to move or delete (move to trash) resulted in the messages disappearing from the inbox but only because Gmail just stripped the message of all tags, so it would remain forever in "all messages" and nowhere else.

Cloud storage giant Amazon cuts S3 prices, waits for rivals to die

Consumer vs enterprise?

I remain slightly confused about the cost of this hosting vs the "consumer" level stuff available.

For example, Box.net (no affiliation) current pricing -

https://www.box.com/pricing/

- is $15 per month for 1000 GB (per user).

Storing even half that, 500 GB, would cost $62.50 per month with S3 or Google Storage. $125 for the full 1000 GB.

I appreciate that it's per-user with Box, and that the S3 architecture is more sophisticated and feature-full, but for small set-ups or private use just needing somewhere to dump backups, it's not much of a comparison is it?

Even Google Drive plans are $20 for 400 GB or $50 for 1000 GB. Is Drive really so much inferior to Google's "Cloud Storage"?

Android users: More of them than fanbois, but they don't use the web

Re: This is quite obvious

But you missed the point in the article that actual mobile internet usage is comparable on Android. It's only over wifi that Androids aren't being used as much as iOS.

My answer to this is: iPad. In the tablet market, Apple still holds dominance that it lost years ago in the phone arena. Tablets are more likely to use wifi for various obvious reasons. QED.

As iOS loses the tablet market also to Android over the long run, these figures will even out.

Then there are a few other marginal factors such as custom browsers like Opera being used and deliberate spoofing of user agents by the more tech-literate demographic that is more likely to go with Android.

why don't Android users surf the web using Wi-Fi more often?

Because iPads still dominate the tablet market, where many products are wi-fi only or are mostly used only in scenarios with wi-fi access.

In the mobile internet stats, where phones are more likely to be the devices in use, we see what we would expect.

Microsoft Office 2013 heads for the cloud but fails to soar

Re: Install footprint

The preview installer exe is smaller than 2010's, comparing Pro to Pro so I think that's fair.

Re: Have we really made it this far in the comments

I always thought 6.1 for Windows was rather good, and in some respects MS Word is still not its equal.

Meow.

Re: UMMMMMMM......

Very good.

WARNING: IRONY

SkyDrive cock up

>>> If I open a document from SkyDrive in Word 2013, lose my network connection, then try to save my changes, the operation seemingly completes without an error message... [re-opening opens old local copy]

There are other issues - although that on its own seems like a major deal breaker. Who is going to recommend a product that does the above?!

I found that this default SkyDrive integration is badly incompatible with desktop SkyDrive (the sync client). On opening an old doc in the newly installed Word 2013, I get thrown some “error”: “a problem needs your attention” – it essentially just wants you to re-save the document, thereby sync'ing with SkyDrive from within Word, but that was stupid for a collection of hundreds of old docs none of which ever need editing again - and are already sync'ed via SkyDrive desktop!

It then porked the sync with SkyDrive desktop, with the little green tick icons on the file icons in Explorer turning to red errors, and SkyDrive complaining that it couldn't sync them. Great.

Had to turn it off, otherwise you’d have to go through and re-save (and change file mod date) every old doc you ever opened to view.

Utterly stupid and whoever let this through without user testing deserves worse than whoever was responsible for even the dumber ideas in Windows 8.

Apple granted patent for microphone silhouette

Re: FFS, get it right..

It wasn't patented. They registered a design patent.

Try again, dumbarse.

Whatever the Swiss clock case involved, it wasn't patents.

It might have been designs, and probably copyright.

Apple isn't "using the [patent] system" because IT ISN'T A PATENT.

Re: On the positive side....

The equivalent of a US design patent is not called such in the EU. They might have a crack on the grounds of their community design, if any. Didn't bother to check if they had one, did you?

>>> So now, what are the chances of the USPTO granting a patent of an icon illustrating the cross-sectional view of an egg in an egg cup?

None. Because that isn't patentable.

You might get a useful design patent or registered design. Consult your IP attorney.

Next question?

Re: Barmy

It... is... NOT... a... PATENT

It is a design patent.

Clear enough?

Re: Barmy

No. Because it isn't. Pay attention.

Re: Not only is the patent pointless but it's worthless

>>> it is a patent for this very specific icon of a silhouette of a microphone.

It isn't a patent at all, it is a design patent.

>>> it's worthless because it's very easy to make an icon that looks enough like the Apple patented one that it is recognisable as such, but is sufficiently different to not qualify as a violation of the patent itself.

Then presumably Apple believe it it worth protecting their "special" variation. The difference between the prior art is a recognized factor in any court's assessment of the extent of a design patent, so this whole thing takes care of itself. Something that lends a little irony to certain commentards' blather above.

If it's useless, let Apple waste their money. Who cares.

>>> The point at which anybody tries to get the system to actually, physically compel you to do anything will be the point at which the system is forced to take a long hard look at itself and realise it is being abused.

Ah no I believe that would be the point at which the bailiffs earn their living, you hope like hell it is a limited liability company that you have just bankrupted, and you cross your fingers the court doesn't issue an arrest warrant for you personally. Moron.

Humans becoming steadily STUPIDER, says brainiac boffin

The bulk of people have not moved into cities

until recently in our history. So...?

It's probably true though that technological advances across all dimensions of life remove evolutionary pressures and checks against 'stupidity'. Modern culture certainly goes the other direction and encourages it [stupidity] along with the lowest common denominator thinking that a few yet rail against.

Apple granted patent for ebook page-turning

It's not a patent, ya dildos

it's a DESIGN patent.

It covers only the aesthetic / 'ornamental' elements that are pictured.

Additionally, the true extent of its protection is left much more up to courts, in the event of any action, than the patent office.

About 99% of the above commentards, and about 100% of the authors of the article, need to educate themselves before spouting the ignorance witnessed here. It's particularly disappointing for the Reg. Run it past your pals at Out-Law.com first next time okay?

Morons.

Wonder why you live longer than a chimp? Thank your MOTHER IN LAW

Re: Old women are useful

The extension of that theory is that the incentives for women, from the perspective of increasing likelihood of genetic offspring surviving, shifts such that it is of more utility for women past a certain age to concentrate on assisting their daughters and sons with their own children, rather than simply keep trying to breed themselves. Hence menopause kicks in to enforce this role shift, maximizing the survival chances of their descendents across more than one generation.

Windows 8: Is Microsoft's new OS too odd to handle?

Re: Prettier interface? 1366 x 768

>>> What will put most off, is the HARDWARE that WILL cause the RELEASE version of WIndows INSTALL to FAIL

What hardware? And with citations!

>>> MS has hardened the install to 1366 x 768 minimum

Bullshit. The minimum resolution for Windows 8 is 1024 x 768 px. Some features such as "snap" require 1,366 by 768 px to work.

You want to contradict that, again - citations please.

Noisy whales made FAR MORE oceanic racket than humans do

Re: 2 Predictions

Don't be so cynical. Whales use long distance sonic communications. Cocking them up is not fair to them. The theory is that at least some "adverse impact" has been done to whale populations on account of the screw supplanting sailing ships.

As any boater or diver will attest, screws are extremely noisy under water and the sound carries a long distance detectable even with human ears.

And if we screw up too much, we'll have to use a Klingon ship to go back in time to save the humpback in order to appease the pissed off alien Probe that comes to have a chat with our underestimated large-brained underwater cousins.

Android apps get SSL wrong, expose personal data

After all this...

...did we end up with a blacklist of Android apps to avoid using at present?

I skimmed over the PDF but apart from the occasional mention of Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al, I found no particular apps named and shamed.

Kiwi three strikes piracy case collapses

Re: Why they withdrew the case? Easy.

She might have a case for defamation, but not if the allegations were restricted to the court environment and proceedings which are privileged and anything goes.

Anyway it would be hard to demonstrate damages I'd guess. If her profession related to IP then maybe (?). But NZ has pretty weak libel laws compared to the UK and much less precedent, making all cases rather unpredictable and risky things.

Windows 8 'bad' analyst says Store is a weakness

Re: Windows 8 Bad or author bad?

>>> As long as Windows 8 runs my Windows 7 APPLICATIONS Software (the productivity stuff)

Windows RT won't though, you will need the full Intel hardware to run 'proper' software.

There is a problem with these articles in distinguishing between the two. Windows RT properly competes with Android and iOS... While Windows x86/x64 on tablets will bring the obvious advantage of a fully fledged Windows environment that is capable of running all software, it's hard to see Win RT doing the business on either of its two major competitors.

Microsoft Surface: Designed to win, priced to fail

Re: Whoa! 20% Sales Tax? Who pays that?

Everyone in the UK, numpty.

The poster was comparing like-for-like w.r.t. US and UK pricing.

There may be duty too (?).