Posts by jimbo60

Apple Fanbois (and girls) already lining up for NEW iPHONE

Re: 3 minute orgasm

You're holding it wrong.

Yosemite Siri? Apple might plonk chatty assistant on your desktop - report

Claim 1. A method for invoking a digital assistant service, comprising: at a user device comprising one or more processors and memory: detecting an input gesture from a user according to a predetermined motion pattern on a touch-sensitive surface of the user device; and in response to detecting the input gesture, activating a digital assistant on the user device.

Sure sounds like clippy to me, except for the part about a touch-sensitive surface. Unless a mouse counts as touch-sensitive. Let the lawyers have fun with that.

Or, more recently, the Kindle Fire Mayday assistant (a real human!)

Sorry Apple, 15 years too late...

Apple fanbois SCREAM as update BRICKS their Macbook Airs

Re: top tip

Huh? I don't even get the point about adding memory and an SSD. I've done that to 3 year old windows laptops that didn't cost as much *new* as your second hand price, and it gave them a very nice performance kicker and they still run great and probably will for years more. So, yeah, I can say that about a windows laptop you can buy at the moment, or several years ago.

So long as you have something new enough to support a 64 bit OS and a SATA interface for the drive then upping the memory over 4GB and adding an SSD will always do nice things, especially the SSD. Systems old enough to use IDE aren't good candidates due to lack of IDE SSDs with modern capacity, performance, and price, and 32bit systems can't really even use a full 4GB of RAM. So there is a pretty obvious cut-off if you have something old enough that the technology isn't suitable for upgrades.

Re: top tip

Ok, so what did you pay for it, so we can see how much it depreciated? Then compare that to an equivalently equipped PC of the same age, which probably has a list price half of what you paid, and see what the depreciation is if you just gave it away for free.

We need to talk about SPEAKERS: Sorry, 'audiophiles', only IT will break the sound barrier

not all speaker designers are clueless

My two decade old Vandersteen 2Ci's with time-aligned drivers sounded brilliant when they were new and still do today. Too bad my hearing hasn't held up as well. Oh yeah, I used plain old ordinary wires for the connections.

Concerning Windows Phone and its relevance to the larger business

Re: Windows 8 not compatible with MDM

Sounds like your MDM is inadequate. My company uses Afaria and does not have that problem.

JJ Abrams and Star Wars: I've got a bad feeling about this

Cowboys aren't dead...

...they're just wearing space costumes. At least if you believe the claim that Spielberg was modeling the original Star Wars after the old spaghetti westerns.

Microsoft’s 'FIRST NOKIA' arrives at £89

Re: Wow, why didn't anyone think of that before!

They did. I could issue voice commands to my Windows Mobile 6 phone back in 2006. You know, some five years before Siri came out, and a year before you could buy the first iPhone. :-)

It was pretty simple direct commands to the phone ("call roger on mobile", "play dark side of the moon"), not the modern search engine or personal assistant stuff we have now, but it worked. 8 years ago.

Re: One for Mrs Cornholio please

No, not forgiving of learning a new interface on a phone. The 'new' interface is plainly simple to learn (and not really that new or unusual if you've used any other touchscreen phone). And as others have mentioned, that style of interface (call it Metro or whatever) happens to be really well suited to phones. And probably tablets too (I don't have any Win8 tablets to have firsthand experience), or any other device where touch is a natural interface and the use model is mostly single tasking. Let's face it--touch and swiping is pretty natural and common to all flavors of modern smart phones and tablets, whether they be iThings, Android, or WP. I happen to really like the WP live tiles and the hub model, as it saves the need to open more apps and change contexts just to see information, but still, to actually do something other than glance, you touch and/or swipe to get to what you need.

On my desktops I always have lots of multi-tasking going on, I really don't want to touch my vertical LCD screens, and I absolutely don't want anything taking over entire screens unless I tell it to...especially start menus. The upcoming Windows 8.1++ might actually finally get desktop usability back to where is was in Windows 7, but until then it's a non-starter for me. And I love my Nokia phone.

Nokia Camera guru: I'm finished being Finnish, and off to 'the company you're thinking of'

Nokia cams rock

I've got the 1520 (the 'phablet'...sorry) and it has the same camera tech as the 1020 but at 21 megapixels instead of 41. Even so, it take spectacular pictures. And for a while it had better software than the 1020, though now those updates are available across the whole line. I just recently enabled raw mode and caught some good rainbows with that turned on...still need to load those into Photoshop to see what it can really do.

London cabbies to offer EVEN WORSE service in protest against Uber

Re: Change is not fair!

Umm...not any more. With smartphone satnav with live traffic awareness and the ability to consider traffic when routing, the phone can actually be better than human experience, because the phone knows about the accident 5 miles ahead that has jammed up everything on what would normally be the best route. It still doesn't always figure the best way, but it gets better every year. And it's way better than the dumb disconnected satnav of the past.

Re: Change is not fair!

Were you going through these cities or to some destination within them? I've done both in all three cities you listed, and never had that happen. On routes through I got routed on the best highway through (not always staying on the interstate route, often the big cities have beltways that are a better through route - straighter, more lanes than the old interstate route). On routes into the cities it used the best nearest main highway as close as possible to the destination, then surface streets. I've used TomTom and several smartphone satnav apps. Makes me wonder what awful heap of satnav you were using.

Traffic light vulns leave doors wide open to Italian Job-style hacks

classic Brit films? pah...

Live Free or Die Hard...a good American flick with some serious traffic control hacking.

:)

Sony on the ropes after revising losses UP to $1.3 BEEELLION

how the mighty have fallen

Old Sony:

Trinitron tubes - best in the biz, everybody wanted one, both for TVs and computer monitors

Walkman - pioneering entry into miniaturization and using surface mount in consumer products, when everything else was big and clunky...they really led the consumer miniaturization trend

Video - top notch consumer and semi-pro camcorders

Recent Sony -

Memory sticks - offered nothing over competing technologies except lock in and a higher price

Music CDs - with a complementary rootkit installer included!

Free software add-ons - another rootkit delivery vehicle (in some free to download Spore game tool)

Securom - worlds worst game CD copy protection scheme; main benefit was making sure my kids legally purchased games would no longer work after any hardware or OS upgrades, costing too much of my time to try to make them happy again

Water resistant cameras, tablets - great idea, except when they aren't really water resistant, oops

Is it any wonder why they're doing so poorly?

At least they still know how to make decent ear buds and headphones...

Most Americans doubt Big Bang, not too sure about evolution, climate change – survey

Re: give me a break

First, the core AGW research crowd (since you seem focused on that topic) isn't a few thousand, it's a few dozen, and past revelations (have you read any of the "climagegate" material that came directly from those researchers?) show that there is egregious intellectual dishonesty and, yes, conspiracy going on there. Most of what people see as 'consensus' in AGW is politicians and media parroting this small number. And the politicians have latched onto it in a big way for very simple reasons: control and money. They don't care squat about the actual science. Also, what do you think of your 'consensus' when a prominent scientists (does a Nobel Prize winner count as a real scientist in your book?) resigns a prestigious body because of it taking unfounded positions on AGW, or when hundreds of practicing scientists take issue with your so-called consensus? (http://www.ibtimes.com/nobel-laureate-ivar-giaever-quits-physics-group-over-stand-global-warming-313636)

Second, global warming doesn't even fit your definition of "numerous lines of inquiry, backed by experiments and measurements and fulfilled predictions". I would add "independent verification" to your otherwise excellent list. AGW fails miserably here, especially in fulfilled predictions and verification. Sorry, I don't count "the global weather is going to be different this year because of global warming" as a valid and measurable scientific prediction. That last one happens so often after the fact in the media ('those hurricanes / tornadoes / snowstorms / windstorms / whatever were really bad because of global warming').

Third, as someone with formal post-graduate education in science and engineering, and training and practice in proper scientific method, the alarm bells sound (and should) whenever the justification for anything is "because everyone knows it" or "consensus". A statement backed by those claims may or may not be correct, but those are never justification for why it is correct.

Also, thanks for comparing me to a tax fraud charlatan who can't even find agreement with his fellow creationist crowd. Did I push some buttons that you needed to respond that way?

Re: give me a break

Exactly! Yet we act as if we know everything this time around and are infinitely superior to all those in the past who thought they did.

give me a break

Don't call things scientific fact when they aren't. And don't then call it scientific ignorance when intelligent thinking people disagree with garbage science, faulty and misused statistics, dishonesty, secrecy and refusal to allow independent verification of work, stacking peer review committees, character and job assassination of peers that disagree, and just plain ignorance of long standing unanswered questions. And then there are the extraordinarily complex conclusions based on the thinnest of evidence surrounded by mountains of assumptions and presumed initial conditions.

Claiming that there is overwhelming evidence when there isn't, calling people "openly antagonistic to established facts" for things that are not established facts, and claiming "concerted campaigns to discredit scientific fact" when, again, there are no facts is really just behaving like any other bully who want to establish 'truth' by shouting everyone else down. And the whole idea of consensus is such a vapid concept. There was plenty of consensus that the world was flat until there wasn't. The people who had the more correct model of the solar system were the ones who disagreed with the 'scientific consensus' and the entrenched interests and suffered greatly for it.

Grow up already and open your mind to the fact that we don't know everything and we still get plenty wrong.

Oh no, Joe: WinPhone users already griping over 8.1 mega-update

not exactly

I've been in those forums, and I have the 8.1 preview installed. So I know that about one third of those thousand comments are of the "I'm not seeing that problem" variety, and about two thirds of the rest are "me too" comments. And some of the problem, while likely very real, are inconsistent. Some people are seeing terribly battery drain problems. Others are seeing no problem at all or even improved battery life.

I think the article sums up the main issues pretty well, though: that's not a lot of problems, but a few real stinkers. And the music apps and ecosystem have sucked ever since Microsoft changed Zune to Xbox Music, so while that's not a new problem, somehow it's been getting worse every release since WP8 and W8 came out.

Byzantine Generals co-boffin Lamport bags CompSci's 'Nobel prize'

Re: Brilliant!

For further evidence of the great humor, go to his current pubs list and browse.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html

For a good sampling, look at [101], [176], [122], [60], [91]. The first four go together as two pairs and are best enjoyed that way :-).

Brilliant!

One of the few who has such mastery of his subject that he could break new ground and have fun with it at the same time. The original "Part Time Parliament" (Paxos) paper is full of humor that really helps teach the subject.

I had the opportunity to work with him on the idea and requirements that became Disk Paxos. I couldn't figure it out myself. I think he didn't even break a sweat coming up with that variant.

Apple patent will see Siri remind you to keep taking your meds

prior art?

I think a system of elevators in a high-rise would violate claim 1. Does this constitute prior art?

The land of Milk and Sammy: Free music app touted by Samsung

the name is pretty obvious...

It's what they're trying to do to drive sales...

I guess Samsung is playing catch up with Nokia in the area of apps targeted only for their phones. (Nokia has MixRadio, plus all their mapping apps, free for Lumia.)

Brit-boy Bates is Silicon Valley's pick for Microsoft's CEO

I care less about who than what

Whomever is chosen, will that person please stop Microsoft from making everything they touch worse than it was before? And please don't allow anyone, including yourself, to screw up Nokia's excellent phones.

Sony patents LASER-FIRING Wi-Fi SMARTWIG with sideburn buttons

mixup?

Did someone accidentally get a technology article and a report on some future Doctor Who villainous prop mixed together?

Apple under CEO Angela Ahrendts? Hmm ... (beard stroke)

any of the tech crowd actually bother to look at Burberry?

While everyone swoons over the genius of hiring Ahrendts, has anyone bothered to look at where she came from? US$1500 hand bags...$5000 trench coats...you get the idea. And just how does this transfer over to a high volume vendor of consumer products? Or are we expecting Apple to go even further in the direction of exclusive rich kids' toys?

Play Elite, Pitfall right now: Web TIME PORTAL opens to vintage games, apps

been done before

One of the very first computer games, Spacewar on a PDP-1 from MIT, has been available for years on the web, implemented as the original PDP-1 code running on a full PDP-1 emulator written in Java.

http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/

'With free Mavericks, we are turning the industry ON ITS EAR'

shhh...don't tell anyone

Don't tell anyone at Apple that Microsoft's service packs have always been free. And the Windows 8.1 is a free upgrade.

What, the original version isn't free? Neither is Apple's, it's just built into the overpriced hardware.

Cook: Apple 'so very, very proud to be a FORCE FOR GOOD'

a change?

Under Jobs, Apple pretty much stomped out all corporate philanthropy. Is this a change? Did that $65 million that Apple "raised" come from corporate coffers or did it arm twist it's minions? How about some real journalism to answer that?

Very handy: Nokia’s DC-50 wireless-charging power brick for your mobe

not really so expensive

AT&T was throwing in the plug-in wireless charging plate for free with Lumia 920 orders for a long time (and may still be, I'm not sure). So we already have a couple of those around. I wouldn't be surprised if this DC-50 shows up at reduced prices too.