Posts by bk109

European Union takes China to WTO over smartphone patents

Re: Turn and Turn about / The (US) patient system is broken

Or Japanese (including some that experimented on Allied soldiers). Or all those people that had their wartime acts whitewashed on both sides of the barricade, because both sides needed a nucleus around which a new German army would grow. Hell, the more historians start to dig through WW2 records, the more it'd appear that quite a few acts of stupidity (ie Stalingrad) that've been blamed solely on the Charlie Chaplin cosplayer were actually done by subsequently "rehabilitated" generals in Soviet and Allied employ.The sad truth is that when it comes to national interests (or money, or both), principles get cast aside faster than you can say "Hipocrisy".

It's not even limited to the big guys - for example driven by their own national interests (to weaken Iraq), the Israeli were helping maintain Iranian gear after the revolution (and allegedly helped train their internal security apparatus after SAVAK got gutted).

Throw away your Ethernet cables* because MediaTek says Wi-Fi 7 will replace them

... I see we're recycling the claims from the .11ad days

Seriously, wasn't this almost verbatim the promise vendors were making when trying to fling their 802.11ad-capable devices (ie 'wireless' laptop docks)? At least WiGig had the 'excuse' that it was aimed at enterprise clients still using the bulkier docks of yesteryear (as if that's a bad thing) and was kinda positioned to make a lot of the cables redundant, by allowing the user to plop his or her device out of the way in a more "efficient" * way ... in the days before USB-PD made docks little bigger than USB hubs of old... and for a fraction of the price of the bloody WiGig docks :D Too bad that after enough procurement types bought into the hype and the overpriced stock people realized that the tech was glitchier than a 20$ Ninvento in its initial form to make .11ad NIC "upgrades" unsellable on business machines :D

*Nothing has wasted more time, effort and nerves than some moronic efficiency drive nuking "good enough"... sometimes I wonder how popular a "strangers on a train" scenario would be for dealing with the higher ups that make IT work "interesting" :D

Russia blows up old satellite, NASA boss 'outraged' as ISS crew shelters from debris

Re: People In Glass Houses.....

Salyut 7 was crewed at the time, with a Soyuz on the way up a couple of days after the test with a changeover crew.

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

Re: Yay landfill!

Definitely possible on the Garmin at least - I still keep an old Garmin 200-something as a backup in the car running OSM-based maps of most of Europe that I could grab pre-packaged from several sites online... Also, I guess this Nuvi's going to the landfill, because I have the sneaking suspicion Garmin won't be releasing any updates for a '08 device

Re: RE: If ya can't do it yourself you is someone's bitch.

Bad example - if it's a Vauxhall or any French car, you'd have made more of it yourself than the factory that churned it out :D

Yeah, Google seems to cope best with dynamic routing (apparently all that data slurping is good for something besides their balance sheets), but you can also use it in offline mode as well, you just have to remember to pre-load the map slices you'll need and yer golden in fact I'm midway through updating the maps from Dublin to the in-laws' in Sweden and the map sizes seem manageable so far - 5 gigs or so for most of the UK, Northern France ...