Posts by jubtastic1

Samsung says Apple lifted iPad from Kubrick's 2001

^ this

And somewhat related, I heard Arthur C Clark is suing everyone that ever put a satellite in orbit

Regarding the prop

The pads in the picture are fixed to the table, they have no backs and line up with holes cut into the table top, the actors legs jostle for space with film projectors mounted under the table which provide the graphics and I'd imagine gently cook their shins.

In scenes where the actors wander about with a pad it's either off or displaying a static image.

Of course even if the pads were real, they'd still be fixed to the table along with the actors, as the whole set was designed to revolve, must have been fun going round and round while Kubrick retook the scene. Best set ever.

Ultra-cheap HP TouchPads to hit UK at 6pm

Well...

£89 is cheaper than a kindle, it may not be getting any updates but for what it does out of the box it's a steal at that price.

AutoCAD LT arrives on the Mac

App store licencing

Covers 5 installs if memory serves, so it's just $180 per workstation, that's a massive discount that some clients of mine will be pleased to hear about.

10-year old hacker finds flaw in mobile games

Hacker?

Changing the clock is hacking now? Really?

Apple, Walmart, and you: Making money in mobile

Heh

"an app that allows me to start reading a story about how Arsenal has failed to sign yet another player, for example, should continue with me once I shut off my smartphone and open my tablet"

That would be iCloud then, of course it will take a while for devs to add the API to their apps but as you point out it will make for a killer feature, so I'd expect takeup to be swift, and as a bonus it's from that IT company you love to stalk about.

LOHAN spaceplane project starting to shape up nicely

You don't need a doughnut

Three balloons will form a hole at the centre as they firm up at altitude, a small hole granted but possibly big enough to shoot LOHAN through.

Game graphics could be 100,000 times better

I heard the word procedural mentioned

Which generally means you don't bother creating a 1:1 "map" of the environment but instead describe sections and let the graphics engine create the ity bity details on the fly.

This probably also explains the macro level similarities and minecraft like appearance. I wouldn't read too much into that, as the guy said, they're programmers not artists and the purpose of the demo was to illustrate the levels of microscopic detail. I'd bet money that every one of the very similar looking macro blocks was in fact unique.

That's Amazing!

If they can do physics on the atoms it's more like a simulation than a game engine, Lloyd Grossman was a nice touch as well.

Apple iCloud pricing revealed

Has anyone mentioned VAT yet?

Anyone... Bueller?

iPhone 5 now set for October launch

Cloud implementations

In previous efforts Apple attempted to put the users computers at the top of the tree with the cloud underneath them, this approach turned out to be fragile, iCloud puts itself at the top in a similar manner to competing sync engines so I'd expect a similar level of reliability between services, which is to say, they will all mostly work for most people.

AFAICT Google's cloud is basically an online filesystem, whereas Apple has gone for Application data Syncing, no idea what MS will do, probably both, I'd predict Googles approach being popular with techs, and Apples with users.

Just from my perspective here in the UK I still think it's a bit early for all this, that wireless networking lacks bandwidth and reliability and simply isn't ubiquitous enough for cloud services to replace local storage, I suspect a few early adopters will get properly burned, I suppose we have to start somewhere though.

Intel: Apple has online app sales exactly backwards

Sounds reasonable

Until you consider that the "we sell everything" approach of Amazon and eBay are the success stories of online shopping.

I suspect the reasons for this are twofold, firstly punters recognise the shop and know it's legit and secondly, because they sell everything.

Note to Apple: Be more like Microsoft

Right off the money as usual Matt

Are you suggesting Apple should get out of the hugely profitable hardware business and instead licence their OS to 3rd parties so that others may enjoy those margins or that we should suspend belief for the purposes of your article?

Just a tip, but if you should ever meet Steve Jobs in the flesh, remember not to cross your reality distortion fields.

Grassroots Brit project plans .app top-level domain bid

Call me a grumpy old man...

But no good will come of these newfangled TLD's, .app, .doc, .jpg, .etc

I can see misery looming ahead for the easily fooled masses and excited hand rubbing from the malware industry.

Kit steals Mac login passwords through FireWire port

Heh

If you've got automatic login switched on then you're not really going to be worried about a FireWire hack.

Interesting that sleeping lions with FDE can be awoken by this though, that sounds like a hole that needs plugging, <tinfoil hat> or maybe, it's supposed to do that </tinfoil hat>

Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part Two

Don't do this at home kids

There's a reason hardly anyone knows about it, Apple has purposefully made this hard to do/find out about because sooner or later you will lose data moving files, eg Finder lock up mid move or a disk issue. Moves are not transactional, interruptions will result in data loss.

Mega-colossal space raincloud found at moist black hole

Seems to me

That if you took 140 trillion oceans worth of water vapour, bombarded it with radiation and assorted space debris while stirring it for billions of years there would likely be a whole ecosystem of tasty lifeforms living in it by now.

Hello space things, pleased to meat you.

Adobe releases lengthy list of Apple Lion woes

Re: Wouldn't it be nice

If Adobe used standard OS windows and controls etc like *every* single other mac app on the platform so these problems, which are so common there's a website dedicated to pointing them out, didn't occur in the first place.

Fixing this is non trivial, seeing as it involves rebuilding the entire UI of the CS Suite, but then rolling their own UI was Adobe's choice, as was sitting on a Carbon codebase for a decade after it was depreciated. Numpties.

To the point, wouldn't it be nice if Adobe hired some engineers that can code worth a damn.

Euro beaks to rule if TVCatchup.com is legal

Awesome service

Net result of this being taken offline will be a reduction in the amount of TV watched in our house.

Message to the TV companies:

1) This service increases the exposure of shows, many of which have been added to normal TV viewing as a result of having been seen first on TV Catchup.

2) Negotiate with the service admins for viewing statistics, in show advertising is hitting extra eyeballs as a result of this and similar services, we have way more PC monitors than TV's in our house, dont focus on turning the Monitors off, make them count instead, more viewers means higher advertising rates.

3) Dumb TV's are on the way out, viewers want TV online, and they want it to be as easy as a TV, no one wants to have to load up a dozen websites to see what's playing on different channels.

4) You might wonder how a tiny outfit like this manages to stream at higher quality and greater reliability than your own in house efforts which have sucked up millions of pounds, maybe you could learn something from these guys.

Data Robotics gives up and changes name to Drobo

Not the same thing

QNAP does proper old fashioned RAID, striping across drives or mirroring, expansion involves rebuilding a drive from parity, basically an exact copy of the previous drive on a larger disk, repeat for all drives then enable the extra storage space. Performance is notably better if all the drives are of the same model.

Drobo does block level mirroring across whatever drives it decides are best suited for the data, if you drop a drive and replace it with another of different capacity, you'll end up with different blocks written to it than the original, essentially, what drobo does is ensure all data is on the array twice, it doesn't matter what type or size the drives are because they don't need to be in sync to read data off, drobo just reads from the most convenient drive.

That's the theory, and technically it works well, you can mix and match any old drives in there and expanding the array requires *nothing* more than popping a drive out and sliding a bigger one in, in practice however, throughput steadily slows down until it's unbearable to work with and starts causing timing issues with some applications, the only fix I've found is to clone the entire array, wipe it and then copy everything back, this will need repeating every x months, depending on the data and churn rate.

Fine for backup, no good for live storage.

Nice name

And Drobo is a cool concept, shame the IO performance degrades so quickly.

Not sure if it's fragmentation or index bloat but throughput has dropped by a factor of ten over the course of a year.

Asteroid hunter achieves Vesta orbit

Eh?

What's the point in sending astronauts to a far flung rock, Wouldn't a robot be just as useful? Genuine question, seems a bloody long and dangerous journey just to look at a proto meteorite in it's natural habitat.

W3C moves to snuff Apple web patents

I'll bite.

It's a stupid patent, there seems to be plenty of prior art, but the USPO will probably grant it anyway because they seem intent on fucking up the US economy. Given this reality, I can't blame Apple or anyone else, for attempting to grab as much stuff as they can since what they don't grab they'll be defending themselves against in the EDC of Texas.

Additionally, it shouldn't be in the HTML spec, which is supposed to be about defining HTML elements, their behaviour and rendering. A mechanism for monitoring and reporting on browser activity is clearly well outside of the box model.

So plenty of stupid to go round, all thanks to the Patent Office.

Google top brass (and Zuck) hit Google+ privacy button

Unbelievably I did read the article, and the comments

And I totally understand that having your profile deleted doesn't mean your Email etc gets deleted.

Yet it seems clear that google+ requires a profile to work and that said profile has to be public, hence my sarcasm.

In case that's too hard for you to understand, I'm pointing out the blatant hypocrisy.of requiring users google+ profiles be public under the pain of deletion while Google top brass sets theirs to private, YFM.

I'm confused

Wasn't it just days ago they said that private profiles would be deleted?

Cleaning up the Bitcoin act

Couple* of thoughts

Don't trade with existing currencies, let it grow at it's own pace and you can forget about currency speculators who are IMHO complete bottom feeders.

Short selling is and will always be a crock of shit.

You need a bank, somewhere secure to store coins which can handle reversible transactions to prevent fraud/theft, yet issue coins for anonymous transfers if required. Home computers are a stupid place to store untraceable currency.

* modern interpretation of a 'couple' essentially meaning a random number, although staff in fast food resurants will interpret a request for 'a couple of sugars' as a 'handful'.

Entering a storage jail

It's easier than that

Just drag the track(s) from iTunes onto your email program to create a blank message with the files attached.

Makes you wonder if the author has actually installed iTunes, or bought any music from Apple or Amazon.

Oracle wants seal busted on HP's Itanium suit

Given that Oracle now employ HP's ex CEO

And Larry & Mark have been buds for some time, I'd say it's a fair bet that Itanium is getting dumped as alleged, that HP have documents to that effect, and that Oracle sees no downside in prematurely killing off a hardware partner now they have their own hardware to shift.

I would guess HP will attempt to tie all this up in court for a few years while they migrate their platform, doubt that will work out well for them though.

Moles say Mac OS X Lion to bound in next week

POS materials

Is all iPads in web kiosk mode, so I'd imagine it will take a blink of an eye to update.

Shipping, installing and drugging the promotional lion cubs that will be wandering about the store on launch day is likely to be a bigger deal.

Google: Go public on Profiles or we'll delete you

That's exacty what they want you to do

As far as they're concerned youre basically deadweight, sucking the bandwidth and cycles away from normal users that don't run adblock, have nice easy to target profiles and click on the money links every now and again.

Bug-Byte Manic Miner

Loading screen made me grin

The first few arrrgh-peeps, building anticipation for the game code's audio assault. Think I'm going to have to rip that for an alarm sound.

Behind Microsoft's $15 Samsung Android royalty claim

Poker

You don't get to see the cards for free.

Reprehensible? Yeah, but they'd be fools not to.

Coder cracks iPad 2 jailbreak block

Seems a waste

I get that there's something of a race to be the first to crack it but IOS5 is round the corner, most users are going to want to upgrade to that and it's hard to imagine Apple isn't going to plug an exploit that gives a website root access just by visiting. Should have saved this till after the update.

Ofcom maps state of UK broadband

Re: This amuses/depresses me

"My provider (Talk Talk) fails"

QFT

Popular FTP package download tarball poisoned

Hypothetically speaking

If say you had (by fair means or foul), root access to a popular FTP server, and you noticed from the logs that a lot of interesting users were using outdated versions of vsftpd, and you had a way of notifying those users to update, in the welcome message for example, then a headless hack like this takes on a whole new aspect.

Simply assuming that someone would go to all the trouble of poisoning a source depository just for the lols is a bit unimaginative.

I would be looking for the FTP servers that respond with :) in their handshakes personally, that might give us a clue as to what's going on.

Boffins fix dead satellite using 'dirty hack' in space

SAMBA cluster fucked

Power cycle hack makes it all better.

#alt heading

'Lion' Apple Mac OS X 10.7: Sneak Preview

@a bit confused about resume

They already do hibernate, including support for power outage, resume is more akin to the firefox feature which reopens all your tabs when you relaunch it but it's system wide and works across reboots.

Apple’s long divorce from Samsung near final

There's more than just a CPU in a iPhone

I suspect Samsung makes quite a bit more selling NAND flash to Apple than they do knocking out ARM chips.

Travelodge still doesn't know who hacked it

OMG we've been haxxord!!1!

Funny how after years of denials, all of a sudden it's ok to admit you've been hacked, it's the new dog ate my homework excuse for corporate incompetence.

Apple Snow Leopard update sets stage for Lion

Yes, keep doing that

When it no longer boots because the filesystem is corrupt someone like me can charge you for fixing it :)

The time out is a safeguard, it's designed to allow you to intervene if an app can't quit, maybe because there are unsaved changes but in my experience it's usually because 10+ apps are all trying to quit at the same time and the disk can't respond quickly enough.

Quit apps manually (cmd+tab+q, q, q etc), or get a faster disk (like an SSD), or be prepared for when it inevitably fails from the forced power outages.

DRM-free music dream haunts Apple's app-store lock-in

Notice the author

It's basically the same as all his other articles which amount to "why isn't everything open source and free already?"

AAC

Is mp4, it's exactly as proprietary as mp3 and not surprisingly, owned by the same company.

There are very few devices that can't play mp4, it's baked into most hardware decoding chips.

Just a heads up in case you weren't aware.

Apple's next iPhone planned for September, says report

You don't need a crystal ball

To predict the next iPhone will have better cameras and the CPU from the iPad, that's exactly what they did last year.

A new case design, perhaps with a different antenna layout? That would be unexpected Easy NFC payments would be cool, Bigger edge to edge screen?

Got a website? Pay attention, Cookie Law will come

This is of course, utterly daft

We already had that, back in the early days of the web it was common to see sites pop up alerts asking for permission, it was terrible UX and broke functionality when users clicked no.

Perhaps the EU should mandate marquue's and flashing text be mandatory on every page to complete this trip down memory lane?

Video vigilantes in trouble again

Jebus

That looks an awfully lot like me, I'll have to show that to the missis later.

Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

Frozen Thames

If the price of pointing and laughing at GW advocates is that my twilight years are so cold the bloody Thames freezes over then it's not worth it.

Breaking wave 'big as the USA' spied on Sun's surface

28G

Means our surfer will weigh in at about 4.5 Mini coopers, quite the handicap for even the most adept of plasma surfers.

Russian computer programmer buries himself alive

Awkward phone call

Hello, is that the police? I've just discovered that the friend I buried alive last night is dead.

Mac trojan evades Apple's brand new security fix

Easier said than done

Despite the noise this is a very basic trojan, it doesn't do anything really clever, just relies upon the Safari default "Open safe files after downloading" (this was always asking for trouble), to install an app into the apps folder and add it to the users login items, It throws dodgy porn urls at safari and asks for credit card details but basically it runs in userspace.

Shocking how well they've done for what it is though.

Apple nemesis sues iOS, Mac, and Android devs

Patent bundle

I'm pretty sure this particular patent was just filler in a bundle containing patents that Apple, Google etc actually did need to licence.

I'd imagine no one bothered looking at it too hard, easy to imagine it's not specifically mentioned in rights to app developers and that A&G viewed it as holed by prior art anyway, I doubt anyone except the holder saw this play for small devs.

I suspect Apple will buy one of these companies and throw their legal team at the issue before the patent trolls smell blood.