Posts by DrXym 5327 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2007
The other components probably add up to $50. Therefore a non subsidized ereader shouldn't cost more than $120 and probably less if it subsidizes itself by tying to a store. There really isn't much excuse for devices that cost more than this especially with tablets about to eat their lunch.
Just type "android tablet" and you get a pile of them, in various styles including an iPad ripoff style. I expect performance and quality are not great, but it's $99 ffs. I suppose Disgo is a relatively well known brand which gives some peace of mind, quality control, warranty etc. but I expect it's just selling the same rebadged models.
What it shows is that there is no reason for tablets to cost the absurd amounts Apple charges (or Dell / Samsung for that matter). I believe the sweet spot for tablets is in the £150-250 range. That's when they will sell craploads and have the benefit of driving down the price of ereaders too.
Archos devices are not compatible because they are designed for multimedia playback and don't carry hardware like GPS & compass. I don't see that as a reason to exclude them from using the marketplace app but that's exactly the situation right now. The standard marketplace app is only suitable for compliant devices and as Android walks into PMP / tablet land there are less and less of devices that match the spec. In other regards they might be perfectly compliant.
The market place app already filters apps based on screen size and some other attributes, so why not also filter on things like compass, GPS, hardware support for certain codecs and so on.
The standard Android marketplace app is only shipped on a device that has passed the compatibility test suite (CTS). That's fine and dandy except the CTS is specifically written to define phone devices. What about tablet devices? What about set top boxes? What about esoteric devices like picture frame / alarm clocks? What about...? The CTS really needs to define classes of devices with core and standard profiles of compliance.
At the moment if an android device does not implement the mandatory phone features required by the CTS then it can't ship the marketplace app. That's why some tablets are implementing some peculiar features like GPS when there isn't a reason to. In turn that drives up costs to end users.
That's why AppsLib has sprung up and some other reputable alternatives. There also some disreputable and probably downright dangerous alternatives too.
Google need to fix the CTS NOW. Tablets are shipping right this minute and are falling through the cracks. Even if Android 3.0 is a while away, Google need to address the needs of tablets and adjust the CTS accordingly. Otherwise tablet devices won't bother passing the CTS and they won't bother shipping the marketplace app. If that happens they may not bother with any compatibility testing at all and things will fragment even further.
Oracle has shown itself to be an uncaring and unsympathetic steward of open source projects. If OpenOffice can cut itself loose it may find itself enjoying a new lease of life.
Perhaps this move was even motivated by layoffs or rumours of further layoffs in Oracle. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Oracle were to conduct a serious cull of the former Sun workforce & projects.
Is there are already several ZX Spectrum emulators for android such as Marvin for free and they play any tzx / tap file you throw at them. Imagine that - an app that INTERPRETS machine code. Unthinkable.
A bigger question for me is how the hell do you play games which demand a keyboard on a device which doesn't have a keyboard. I expect emulators will have to overlay the screen with some common layouts for kempston, cursors QA/OP etc. which most games require.
There are a raft of tablet devices in the process of shipping right now or in the next few months, but Android is still stuck with a compatibility test suite which expects feature sets half of these devices will not support, e.g. a camera, GPS etc. Consequently many of these devices won't ship with the standard market place app or Google's apps because they're not compliant. It's notable that ones that are compliant are basically giant phones which adds to the cost of devices. It'll get worse as Android creeps into set top boxes, alarm clocks / picture frame devices, tablets, home control systems and so on.
I wouldn't buy a tablet with the uncertainty of compliance. IMO this is heading for a major cockup and sooner or later it's going to dawn on people what is going on. Google should be saying now what the roadmap is even if they're not ready to release 3.0 this moment. I am sure that Android 3.0 will resolve these issues, perhaps defining device classes / profiles to sort this out but at the moment things are seriously in limbo.
I do believe that Android has the potential to power a range of devices. It's already proved that, but it needs to sort out the core featureset to ensure consistency and consumer trust in devices that use it.
From a developer perspective Android is streets ahead of iOS, not least because the SDK is a free download that runs on Windows, Linux or the Mac through Eclipse. Compare to iOS where you need to fork out for a Mac before you can even write a line of code. Java is going to be familiar to more devs that Objective C too.
For this story they're screeching that somebody can't get data. In this other story they're screeching that the DVLA is in "flagrant breach of data protection laws" - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-369838/DVLA-sells-details-criminals.html.
Basically the rag seems to exist to push the reactionary outrage button on closet facist readers. Any story regarding immigrants, council taxes, speed cameras is prime fodder to get the Daily Mail treatment which usually involves toploading the story with the outrage and then burying the mitigating / actual circumstances at the bottom.
Another example of blatant hypocrisy in the Daily Mail - the UK version of the paper is campaigning that school girls should NOT get the "controversial" cervical cancer vaccine while the Irish Daily Mail is campaigning that school girls SHOULD get the vaccines. http://layscience.net/node/507
Such hypocrisy from a nasty close minded newspaper.
NVidia could easily say that version X is the last major release and then it goes into maintenance / deprecation mode. People can choose to stick with it in its final form or port to OpenCL.
I don't see this as being any different from (for example) Microsoft and Winforms, or Sun & AWT. Yes they'll give it token support but all the good stuff will go into another API which happens to be the industry standard.
Microsoft never liked either format. They may have propped up HD DVD but they hardly committed to it in a meaningful way, for instance by embedding HD DVD drives in the XBox 360. Instead they paid lip service but let Toshiba carry most of the burden. When the format died they walked away relatively unscathed.
I expect they just wanted to prolong a format war for as long as possible in the hope that both formats would ultimately fail or come to an impasse so Microsoft could ride in with some magic delivery platform and win the day.
"We offer full HD 1080p Blu-ray quality streaming instantly, no download, no delay. So, who needs Blu-ray?"
Unless they are delivering 20-40Mbps then claiming instant blu ray quality is an utter lie. Even if they were delivering that, which I doubt, people would have to be subscribed to a FIOS with unlimited bandwidth to benefit. I would be surprised if their content was running higher than 10Mbps and probably its far less.
Perhaps the service is okay for video on demand or streaming but you'd have to be stupid to purchase anything from it to keep. Microsoft have already killed PlaysForSure key servers (thus locking purchased content to one device forever) so who's to say they won't do it again.
I think Microsoft could potentially innovate mobile gaming by introducing XBL to smart phones, but other than that I really don't see much their platform offers right now that would set it apart from its competitors. Maybe a few more iterations will give the platform time to mature and to implement some pretty important functionality it is missing right now.
Tthe problem is by the time they sort this crap out will it be too late? Aside from games, what exactly is the killer feature that sets Windows Phone 7 apart from its competition?
DDOS attacks are very difficult to stop since if done in a sophisticated way there is no way to separate genuine traffic from the attack. You might be able to set up intrusion alarms that monitor for unusual activity, you might even be able to auto bounce / reroute the requests into a hole until the attack subsides. In theory it could be done automatically but in practice I expect it is requires a lot of sysadmin time & resources to monitor and control the situation, conference calls and so on.
A principled ISP might be prepared to take a lot of punishment for a controversial website or an innocent victim, but how many are prepared to take it for a bunch of litigious lawyers. At the end of the day these people have the money and if the attacks continued they should be footing some of the bill. If not, then they should find themselves another ISP.
Evolution is a theory supported by overwhelming evidence and it is also a fact.
Human beings can cause animals to evolve by selective breeding. Wild populations have also been observed to evolve, for example because of predation by introduced animals.
The evidence for evolution is compelling. The only question that remains of creationists is whether they are ignorant or willfully ignorant to disregard it when there is absolutely no evidence of any kind to support creationism. It is a non theory since it predicts nothing or accounts for anything. Claiming "god did it" is the ultimate cop out.
I can understand a movement which wants less government spending and / or taxation if its backed up by some rational arguments. But the Tea Party is anything but rational. A better name would be the Hate party since its members appear to run the spectrum from racists, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, zealots to common-or-garden bigots.
What is particularly alarming is the success they are enjoying at least in the Republican party. Scandals seem to be running about 1 per week at the moment and it's like their supporters don't even care. The latest features no less than Christine O'Donnell who espouses the usual religious phooey even though she was just shown on TV confessing to dabbling with witchcraft. Pure hypocrisy.
It is true that Google worked around Java, but anyone who knows anything about J2ME can fully appreciate why.
J2ME is a shit environment that people are fed up with and it's expensive to licence. Modern phones & set top boxes have outgrown J2ME's limitations. I just came off a project that chose to use Skelmir (a clean room JVM) in a set top box because it cost half as much as J2ME to licence, and supplies virtually all of important features of J2SE 5.0. I expect if the project were started from scratch again we'd even have considered Android. What we would never have done is considered J2ME.
J2ME hasn't changed in the last 5 years - it implements a subset of Java 1.3 (no generics, no autoboxing, no NIO, no XML parser, no concurrency APIs etc.). It's barely adequate to develop a single application let alone an entire OS of apps all talking with each other. Oracle have basically neglected their child and are acting all shocked that people don't want to use it any more.
Of course Android & Dalvik aren't Java, but they're close enough. The fact that it isn't Java and never claimed to be is why Oracle must resort to patent violation litigation. If you look at the handful of patents Google has been accused of violating a good half are in the SDK, not Android. And all of the "violations" are pretty weak. I expect if it comes to anything Google will just file a countersuit with a list of Sun / Oracle's violations and the whole lot will be settled for a paltry sum and some token support for Oracle somewhere.
It's too bad Oracle don't recognize Android for the opportunity it is. JavaFX would be a natural fit for Android, and would allow people to develop rich apps that run on the desktop or on smart phones.
JavaME is getting sidelined because development under Oracle / Sun's stewardship is moribund. J2ME APIs are arcane, a subset of J2SE and stuck in a world where phones are only capable of running 1 java application at a time with limited access to the rest of the phone.
Google just did with Android what devs wish Oracle / Sun had done with J2ME building an entire OS around a Java like runtime with a rich & powerful API. Instead of whining about it, Oracle should produce a viable alternative or at least contributing to the ecosystem in a meaningful way. For example I expect a port of JavaFX to Dalvik would be a popular and welcome addition.
You call her "lazy" for trying to contact the press relations department. I'd call her conducting due diligence. Crazy as it may sound, it is good form to contact the entity and request comment before hammering out a story. I wish more blogs & journos did it.
Anyway, at least now she can make lemonade from lemons. Steve Jobs basically and undeservedly told her to piss off. If you can't write a story about that then you don't deserve a passing grade.
Buy a new PC from Dell or similar and the first thing you'll notice is the Norton 30 day trial crapware nagging you with scary notices about how your machine won't be protected unless you subscribe.
Screw that. Microsoft produce a perfectly serviceable AV product called Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free, it does it's job and most of the time it stays the hell out of the way. When combined with Windows Defender I really see no reason to pay Norton or some other vendor for AV or firewall software unless you are stuck on XP.
Firewall software is even more a waste of time these days. Most people will be behind a cable or ADSL modem firewall anyway and Windows Firewall provides a second line of defence. The chances are the default protection is more than adequate out of the box unless you want anal levels of control.
Reduced copyright & patent controls and greater use of open source software all have compelling arguments to support them. But those arguments fall on deaf ears when they're coming from something called the Pirate Party.
The name conjures up two things in people's minds - either a) something akin to the Monster Raving Loonies, but with pirates or b) a bunch of disgruntled losers who want something for nothing. If they want to be taken seriously, they need to rebrand themselves and convey a more professional & pragmatic attitude to their issues. Otherwise they are just going to fail in one election after another.
The first Apple TV was underpowered, expensive, tied to a download service which few people could access in a timely fashion, and for a while you couldn't even buy content on the device - you had to buy it on a PC and transfer it to Apple TV. It was a complete mess.
Apple have rectified some of the issues and introduced others. The device is still underpowered (no 1080p video), but at least it's cheaper. Problem for Apple is they're no longer king of the dunghill. There are quite a few streaming devices and there are bound to be more coming. I'm sure eventually the device might offer apps and potentially IPTV or other services, but at the moment it's nothing to write home about.
"Bugs are to be expected, but there's no reason to have things like XSS flaws and bad user input validation, even in "pre-alpha" software. "
Yes there is. It's called limited time and resources. I expect the modus of these devs was to get basic functionality up to some level, throw it to the wolves and then work on the security and other issues identified thereafter. Ultimately the software will be stronger for it.
Kinect is trying to infer a wireframe representation of a person(s) from a 2D image and a depth sensor. It's going to be compute expensive to do and even then it is never going to be perfect or precise because it's trying to work off limited inputs. If someone puts their hands behind their backs, the software is going to have to guess. If someone moves too fast for the camera or a mote of dust passes over the camera lens, it's going to have to guess. etc. To counter this, they'll probably have to dampen the inputs, but that introduces lag. In the non-optimal conditions in the average home it's going to be laggy and probably still glitchy.
The live demos shown so far would bear that out - I was watching one on YouTube last night where there was literally a second's worth of lag between a girl jumping and her counterpart avatar in a rafting game. I realise that the software in demos might be preproduction quality but the thing is only 6 weeks from release so it hardly bodes well for the final product.
My original PS3 packed in recently so I've ordered a Move & Slim bundle seeing as I had to buy a replacement anyway. I haven't received them yet but my thoughts are that some games will really benefit from the controls but most won't.
Just like the Wii motion control will work best when there is a 1:1 or obvious mapping between what you do with your controller and what happens in the game. So sword swing will work great if your in-game avatar copies your moves, but it will be balls if it maps onto some generic swipe hi / lo style action (like Red Steel). A game that tracks you in real time will be great, but a game that waits for you to proscribe some action before responding with be awful.
And games that rely on gestures such as drawing a wavy line or a circle or a squiggle to do some action should be cast into the pits of hell. Abstract gestures suck so badly.
I have to wonder how things will fair between Move & Kinect over christmas. I have no doubt which is the more practical and accurate system, but sometimes reality doesn't favour the best solution. Perhaps both will sink into relative obscurity once the initial fanfare passes.
Not really. The way crypto works in DVB-CSA is a little tricky to explain but here goes:
a) The crypto in the STB (Irdeto, Nagravision, Videoguard etc) listens for entitlement control messages in the incoming transport stream. The content of these ECMs is unique & proprietary for each crypto scheme.
b) The proprietary crypto scheme cracks open the payload and extracts a descramble key. The descramble key is just a random 64 bit number.
c) The descramble key is plugged into the CSA algorithm to decrypt the video / audio content. The key is only good for a second or so and then another one is sent.
Steps b & c) are common to every DVB-CSA implementation and a) is unique. A cable company can transition from one form of crypto or run a couple side by side, sending ECMs for both kinds of boxes at the same time. A cracker might be able to compromise a) in one scheme but it would not necessarily help them crack the others unless the schemes were related in some way.
Theoretically two ECMs for different boxes do contain the same descramble key so if you know the key from one ECM it might help you crack the other, but I expect that every scheme ensures to salt (put random stuff in and around the key) to stop this. More modern STBs also do 2-way crypto (i.e. they need a cable modem) so it's not enough to just read what's on the wire.
I don't think it will be long before someone starts selling brute force devices that simply try every possible combination of descramble key until they find the right one. Then it won't matter what crypto is in the box because DVB-CSA will be completely broken. If that happens the shit will hit the fan since you'll be able to plug a CAM of any kind into bog standard satellite / cable receiver and watch ANYTHING.
I expect at that point that Sky et al will have to replace their older boxes. I imagine their more recent boxes may be capable of DVB-CSA2 & 3. I don't know much about either but I expect the keylength and crypto algorithm is a lot stronger to resist brute force attacks.
Is to do what Sky do. Put the decryption onto a card / cam and swap it from time to time based on perceived thread. The beauty of DVB-CSA is you can have multiple encryption schemes running at once, allowing a period of transition between the two scheme, or for boxes by different manufacturers to use different crypto schemes.
Virgin could even start decking out new customers with boxes which use a cable modem to talk with a centralized crypto server. It would make cracking virtually impossible short of someone being able to brute force the CSA payload. Once computers get fast enough to brute force the CSA encryption in realtime, then all bets are off until DVB-CSA2 turns up.
If their customers could get service for free, they'd no longer be customers. So in that sense they're protecting them by stamping on free hacks. They're protecting customer numbers in other words and have lower overheads that they don't have to pass onto to customers. Doesn't mean Virgin won't jack up their prices for other reasons, but supporting freeloaders is not one of them.
I was sitting at work one day when a bunch of emails turned up from PSN thanking me for my purchases. WTF? A phone call later reveals my 4 year old son had decided to buy a bunch of games while he was playing on the PS3. He cost me €30 that day but I learnt my lesson and password protected the thing.
Crypto prevents deep packet inspection by ISPs which is a Good Thing. However it doesn't prevent the fake P2P clients recording every incoming IP address and using that info to compile reports that eventually get sent to the ISP.
In order to have plausible deniability, it would be necessary for P2P clients to act as proxies to other clients with receiver and sender separated by 1 or more hops. The more hops and the more random the path between receiver & sender the better. Preferably the hops would cross several national jurisdictions as well. An IP sniffer would not be able to say with 100% confidence that a node is the recipient of the data (which is encrypted) or merely passing it on somewhere else.
If this were part of the protocol rather than an optional feature, then the entire population base would benefit from it. It's more or less how Tor and Freenet work. The problem is doing it right. Tor and Freenet are painfully slow because of the number of hops and I expect that any P2P implementation would suffer the same issue.
If people are stupid enough to advertise illegal and repugnant services on a medium that allows them to be tracked down and arrested then I don't see what the problem is. Let them do it. They'll certainly be caught, prosecuted and jailed a lot faster than if they offered those services in a more discrete way.
GoDaddy takes the Ryanair approach to domains. It starts off advertising dirt cheap domains but makes it difficult to get those prices. By the time you've navigated a gauntlet of nickel & diming & upselling the cost is nothing like what you started with. They also love spamming customers with a constant barrage of promotions.
Once you fight your way through this crap, the service is reasonable enough. They have online tools for the usual things and service is fast. It's too bad they make customers feel so icky in the process.
Windows Phone 7 is bound to get better but it's widely known that the first release will be hobbled, (or more charitably) focused on certain consumer functionality. Things like cut & paste and multitasking are not implemented, which you'd think are pretty bloody important. Give it a few more iterations and it will probably give Android a run for its money. Whether that's enough to consider it right now is another matter.
It boils down to this. If this person publicly does what he claims he will do, people will die. That is the outcome, and the cause rests firmly with his entirely avoidable and completely offensive act.
Possibly it will be US soldiers who die, possibly some poor bastards who get caught up in the frenzied demonstrations that will inevitably follow, possibly some Muslims in the crosshairs of the police, possibly some time later when some radical uses it to justify blowing themselves up.
This "pastor" is a moron. I think he should be allowed to burn the Koran if he wishes. I believe he flown to the main square in Tehran where he will be promptly stoned to death by the angry mob. Then we can get this shit over with until the next loon decides to exercise his free speech in the most offensive way possible.
Fundamentalist idiots are fundamentalist idiots. It doesn't matter what magic sky pixie demented worldview they've bought into, they're as stupid as each other.
I propose flying every fundamentalist and dumping them all on a small island. There they can brutally kill each other in their insane never ending holy war and leave everyone else alone. Whichever faith comes out victorious shall receive a small Tesco Value plastic trophy for their troubles.
Is that this insane, insignificant, god botherer has managed with little effort to cause a massive international storm of controversy. In a rational world, people would just ignore the loony (and the many Christians / Jews / Muslims just like him). Sadly, it's not a rational world and people will die because of this idiot.
To wit - "Book burning is antithetical to American ideals. People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation – much like building a mosque at Ground Zero."
The "mosque at Ground Zero" is a day centre two blocks away that she and her followers turned into an issue, nobody else. She might not be quite as demented as this pastor but she is definitely of the same persuasion.
I like the Apad at one level because it demonstrates what a ripoff the iPad is. Here is a fully functional Android tablet on sale than $100. Wholesalers can get them for $80 which is frankly an incredible bargain.
On the flip side, there is nothing to write home about the device. What it says to me though is that Samsung, Acer et al could easily produce extremely functional tablets in the $200-350 range and make a lot of money. I think if they jack their prices too high they're going to fail.
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