Posts by ExampleOne 231 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2017
> It’s a phone for gods sake, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
Except it isn't, and never has been, just a phone. From its very start, it has been a computer in your pocket first and a phone second.
People don't buy smart phones to make phone calls, they buy them for the apps and flexibility provided by being a computer. Purely as a phone, I find all the smart phones have a far worse user experience than classics like the Nokia 3310.
From the article:
The Commission noted that Apple users tend to be loyal to the platform, and seldom switch to competing operating systems, resulting in developers having limited (if any) leverage in disputes.
This would suggest the Commission are leaning towards defining the market as iPhone users, and not smartphone users. If the courts agree, Apple are dead in the water as far as defence is concerned.
HP appear to be taking "HP were misled" (undeniably true) and "Autonomy tried to mislead us" (possibly true) and combining the two and hoping that no one notices that there is a serious problem in the chain of which can be summarised as "Autonomy couldn't mislead HP as HP had already misled themselves".
Do I think Lynch is innocent of all wrongdoing? Not really. Do I think Lynch is guilty of trying to mislead HP? Probably. Do I think Lynch succeeded in misleading HP? Not at all. HP did that perfectly fine without needing a fradylent due diligence report they never received!
My understanding is you need all of causation, mens rea, and mens actus.
While HP may or may not have proved the mens rea andens actus, due to HPs own incompetence causation looks dubious.
Even if Autonomy did mislead the KPMG auditors, with the intention of misleading HP, HP have, as I understand it, failed to explain how that mislead them, given they didn't wait for the final due diligence report. Further, it is hard to claim the HP board was deceived when one member of that board was strongly opposed to the deal.
Ironically, it is possible that Lynch could indeed be guilty of criminal fraud (i.e. doctoring the books) while still being innocent in this civil case (I.e. that doctoring didn't mislead HP because they didn't read or rely on the doctored books).
A pox on both their houses, I say.
I am still failing o to see how Autonomy misled HPs auditors and as a result HP given it is on record that HP didn't read or even wait for their own auditors report, which it turns out was never finished and likely would have raised issues if they had waited.
HPs case, as far as I can tell, is that Autonomy were committing fraud, so had to be guilty of lying and misleading HP. The defence, as far as I can tell, is that HP misled themselves, regardless of whatever Autonomy were doing.
A pox on both their houses, as far as I can tell.
A cynical person might suggest this allows the commission to kick the toxic problem of UK "adequacy" down the road few years until the case gets to CJEU, allowing them to ignore this problem for a couple of years while they try to figure out rather more important details like how physical trade is going to work.
Of course, a bunch of EU politicians would never be that cynical, would they?
If data in RAM is in storage and not in transit, does this mean that all DVD players are now, under this interpretation of the law, making copies of the DVD in storage? The figleaf that the "copies" were in transit clearly can't legally match to this ruling can it?
There are definitely significant implications of this ruling outside the "snoopers" angle, I fear.
A single 220V, 20A connection sounds quite small and reasonable. How about 100 of them for a SMALL office car park?
This quickly turns into anything from a grid substation for every office block to a full on power station in the basement for a large office block with a multistorey car park.
There are large parts of the EV power supply picture wither being glossed over or outright ignored. Yes, getting power into the battery is a probably solvable problem, but that is ignoring the question of getting the power to the car to put it into the battery which is a much larger infrastructure problem.
Ironically this might actually be an easier problem to solve for rural residents, who are far more likely to have space for local wind turbines and other local power generation options meaning they wouldn't be relying on the grid to provide the bulk of the power.
Seriously, advertisers should pay for success (clicks) only. That way all the spam would earn Google et all nothing and targeting would improve.
There are advertising networks that operate on this basis: guess what, they need tracking as it is required for attribution.
There are also advertising campaigns that fundamentally don't function on a "pay per purchase" model - any advertising campaign that is build around brand building rather than hawking a specific product is an obvious candidate.
> Apple should spend more time modernizing critical legacy code in iOS like vm_map.c, written in 1985 and still in use today.
I am not sure why the fact it was written in 1985 is a problem. I am also going to observe that this file was not the one with the bug if the claim the bug was in C++ code is correct.
So yes, there is some justification for saying Google are playing marketing games with this.
"Furthermore, the national organisations have not yet put in place the planned levers and incentives to encourage trusts and other parts of the NHS to take the appropriate action on the ground.
Surely if your digitisation plans are actually beneficial and improving things, you don't need "levers" and "incentives" to "encourage" trusts to adopt them?
If the plans are obviously an improvement, surely the trusts will adopt them without major push-back. If they aren't obvious improvements, perhaps the trusts are correct to push back given the risk involved when things go wrong?
One problem I can see with the just-eats business model is it basically relies on a captive market of people who aren't locals or regular customers of their preferred eateries, and a lack of local word of mouth. I'm not sure that is sufficient to allow them to "rent collect" from the hordes of take-aways who also take orders directly, as in practice they can't monopolise the space.
On the one hand I can see that these zero cost tariff options (e.g. Netflix, Facebook, Youtube traffic doesn't count) are good for the consumer
Actually the court, according to this article, is quite clear that these are NOT in fact good for the consumer in the medium and long term because they reduce competition. From the article:
It went on: “Furthermore, the greater the number of customers concluding such agreements, the more likely it is that, given its scale, the cumulative effect of those agreements will result in a significant limitation of the exercise of end users’ rights, or even undermine the very essence of those rights.”
Nothing against the device, everything against the company.
LeapFrog are owned by vTech, the company who when they had a data leak involving childrens personal information, simply updated their T&Cs to exclude liability [1, IIRC there was an article on this site that is escaping my google foo] and insist parents signed over any right to sue or complain, under an explicit agreement. This behaviour is beyond reprehensible, and is completely unacceptable generally, for a product targetting children.
[1] - https://www.troyhunt.com/no-vtech-cannot-simply-absolve-itself/
Presumably, once you have 14.1 on it, making 17 work should simply be a matter of bumping version numbers in the build system? The technical challenge here is getting anything on to it in the first place?
That said, it is still a LeapFrog device, so I would refuse to buy it or allow it into the house...
The deal is the first negotiated by the UK alone after Brexit and is being hailed as a template for the many such deals to come once the nation completely and utterly departs the EU and is no longer bound by the bloc's existing deals.
So the template for UK trade deals is "roll over an EU one with a few tweaks"?
Obnoxious as it is, and infuriating for all parties as it is, it is highly questionable the extradition request would survive contact with a court room while both governments agree she is entitled to diplomatic immunity. Unless and until either she or the US government waive that immunity, legally speaking there is no case to answer in UK law.
Yes, it is horrible. No, it is not justice, but sometimes the law ends up working that way, and the principles involved in diplomatic immunity are kind of important.
The bigger question that should be being asked is why she had immunity in the first place, and why the government continues to hand it out easily to associates of credentialed diplomats from the USA given their track record on immunity over rather more minor issues (parking tickets and speeding fines).
I still don't get the foreign interference argument. I mean, are people really suggesting that foreign states are spending anything more than a small fraction of what the political parties are spending? Of not, are we really saying that the political parties are so incompetent that foreign interference is that much more proceed effective?
My point is that amazon A) knows what I have purchased on amazon, and B) don’t appear to be able to make the leap to related products. Even a basic recommender system should be able to make the related product leap when fed amazons dataset. I mean, surely the dataset makes it clear someone who bought a drill is more likely to buy screws than a new drill?
I find it amusing that the ad targeting produced by the internet advertising is so appallingly bad. It's worse than the supermarkets did 15 or more years ago based on their "loyalty" cards. What is really sad is how basic many of the mistakes are: I am pretty certain the "recommender systems 101" course I did about 12 years ago would avoid them once even slightly trained.
Having young children, a major drawback of the online only approach recently became very obvious: how do you get content while blocking online access?
Retaining the optical drive isn’t just a pragmatic decision for compatibility. This is a games device, it really needs an option for completely offline single player usage.
And I don't see the value in integrating the WiFi. There is a well-defined abstraction to the network with moderate bandwidth required. It's the archetype for a functionality that should be on a separate chip with a vendor-neutral interface.
I think, in battery powered mobile devices, there is a power benefit to integrating it.
Away from the battery powered mobile device use-case, I completely agree it is better off chip.
I was thinking something similar. Given the terrestrial environments life has been found in, it seems presumptuous to dismiss the possibility out of hand. This may be an environment outside the known parameters, but unless we have multiple examples of such environments here on Earth we can’t say terrestrial life couldn’t survive it, just that it hasn’t had a chance to.
Is this environment that much harsher than the brine lakes under the ice cap in the Antarctic?
If IR35 gave the "contractor" the rights of an employee, along with the tax implications, it wouldn't be so bitterly unpopular.
There is also a difference in intent: In the UK the intention is to effectively force all the contractors into employee relationships (this doesn't prevent short term contracts). In Cali it is to effectively force the employers to offer employee relationships.
Given all you have heard, you are still prepared to consider the app design anything other than “incredibly stupid”? The current design appears to fail completely in the single most important aspect for such an app: encouraging trust sufficient to get people to install it.
That said, it is kind of amusing to listen to all the politicians who threw years ago were assuring us that people were tired of experts and didn’t trust them now appealing to us to trust the experts.
And, while not mainstream or even x86 derived, Raptor had some fun findings on the power draw of the nominally 95W TDP 4-core Power9 CPU from IBM: under load, apparently, they consistently drew around 65W and it was a struggle to get them to draw more.
The only conclusion that could be drawn was the 95W TDP was a “designed to” figure that had been specified before the chips were finalised.
I have no problem with the contention that google are considered a publisher for all material published (I.e. served to an end user) by their servers. This isn’t particularly outrageous. Further, it appears in this case it isn’t the initial publishing of the information that is the subject of the complaint, it was continuing to present the results post notification. This isn’t that far removed from the Spanish case!
The interesting point in this case, and the Spanish case, is that the original website probably has a legitimate interest defence on the original article which sounds like it is an archive site. However old newspapers may no longer be relevant, and google really shouldn’t be allowed to present archive material as recent results, especially once warned presenting without full context could be defamatory.
Any other ruling on “Are google the publisher?” raises the question of who is the publisher for information served by aggregators and other social media sites: I am pretty certain The Age would legitimately be able to defend having their archive available online (not a major problem as most people wont find the article there anyway, and without google etc would almost certainly appreciate the context if they did) and how can they be held liable for the actions of Google? This principle is clearly covered in the EU at least where it is clear that public domain data (I.e. The Age archives) can still be protected data (I.e. not fair game for google to scrape and publish all over the internet).
More amusingly, if you do take this approach, assuming my memories of how the law works in these cases is correct, you are actually suing the retailer, not Belkin.
Want to stop these dead in the channel? Make the consequences of selling them too annoying for PC World.
Except that for plenty of companies, Ink is a lot more reasonable priced once the printer is paid for up front.
I can specifically reference Epson EcoTank where the Epson inks are comparable in price with third party inks on Amazon. I have never checked the Canon MegaTank or Brother equivalents as I don't have them, but assume they are similar.
Interestingly, as alluded in the post you are disagreeing with, the price for cartridge ink per sheet drops dramatically once you move out of the cheap consumer inkjet market. Highend canon photo printers ink cartridge prices aren't ridiculously high, but you are looking at a £500+ printer. This is not a system designed for bulk printing, and is a market that is far more aware of TCO calculations than the regular consumer.
Perhaps there should be two price tiers - the fully costed purchase that accepts third party inks and the gillette model one where the printer is sold at loss but only takes the manufacturer cartridges.
Epson already have this (their CIS EcoTank models), Canon and Brother (AIUI) also have CIS models. Interestingly the CIS models were something like £100-£150 more expensive than the equivalent cartridge models when I was last buying a printer a couple of years ago.
The only problem is HP appear to have moved the other way towards "subscription" ink.
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