Posts by Eponymous Cowherd 1596 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007
It was the back panel he broke.
The problem with an unprotected iPhone (well 4 and 4S) it that its glass all over apart from the metal band around the side. Furthermore the glass stands proud of the edge (front and back), so the fist thing that hits the concrete is, almost certainly, going to be made of glass and is likely to break if dropped onto concrete from hand-height.
Apple patent a lot of arty-farty crap. Samsung get a kicking for doing something that looks a bit like said arty-farty crap.
Samsung patent some real engineering and get another kicking for not wanting Apple to use them for a FRAND pittance.
Seems to me it should be the other way round. Real engineering should have more value than "rounded corners".
The Register is turning into Top Gear for IT!!!!
All we need now is a "Star using a reasonably priced Server" and a Smart Phone "Cool Wall" and we'll be there....
Oh, add in some silly challenges. Create a data centre using Raspberry Pis, Send a Playmobil character into space, that sort of thing..................oh....wait......
Particularly like the "sheet of cloth in a box" for £23.5K
Actually.........
Can we have the "cool wall", please?
First there was Windows Mobile. Quite a lot of developers wrote apps for it, quite a lot of people bought the phones. Then Microsoft pulled the rug from under them when they introduced Windows Phone 7. Windows Mobile apps wouldn't run on Phone 7. Devices running Windows Mobile couldn't be updated to Phone 7.
Along comes Windows Phone 8, and MS do it again. 100% incompatible with Phone 7, no upgrade path and your existing Phone 7 apps won't work on your shiny new Phone 8 device.
And, to cap it all. MS decide to restrict access to the SDK, so that, at launch, there is likely to be a magnificent paucity of available apps. Not that too may developers are likely to bother (i'm not). Twice bitten, and all that. Just wait for Windows Phone 9 and another incompatible update.
"If big movie studios stopped producing drivel such as 'jack and jill' (which they should pay the audience to watch) and charged less for DVD's and cinema tickets then maybe, just maybe there would be less downloading taking place.."
Quite.
And if they removed all of this DRM / content protection bullshit so that we can make fair use of the content we have paid for, then we wouldn't need download dodgy copies to make up for this lack of freedom. In fact, I'm guessing that a lot of people, realising that they are going to have to download a dodgy copy anyway, even though they have bought a DRMed to hell and back legitimate copy decide to skip the step of buying the legit copy altogether.
They used to claim that "home taping is killing music". That wasn't true then, and home copying isn't going to kill music, movies, tv or ebooks. What will kill them is this rabid obsession with content protection and control freakery. It gives end users such a shite experience with legitimate media that people are compelled to "download".
If they really want to beat the "pirates", they need to drop all of this content protection bollocks and accept a bit of "home taping" going on. That will get the public on-side, which will be the biggest and best thing that can be done to combat "piracy".
At the moment, Big Media are seen, most certainly, as bullying, money-grabbing, control freaks while the "pirates" are often perceived (wrongly) as some kid of latter day Robin Hoods / freedom fighters. Unless they turn that perception around then it won't matter how many lawyers they employ, how many web site they shut down, how many students they prosecute or how many laws they buy, they will only ever lose
" I believe it is because we are trying to have the activity included as a sport in the next Olympics. We're just warming up!"
Hmmm, the putting-your-foot-in-your-mouth event? That'd come under the general heading of Gymnastics, would it?
Mind you, introducing a new event of "back-pedalling" (an activity that usually follows foot-in-mouth) might give the US a chance against the UK in Cycling :-P Todd Akin's shown he'd great at that......
"I think it uses Adobe Air on phones, but on my tablet it's just a shortcut to the web"
Android iPlayer is a Flash app and, yes, it does just act as a bookmark to the iPlayer website for tablets.
The use of Flash has made the whole iPlayer experience less than ideal completely shite (just look at the comments on Play).
My hope is this will force the BBC to produce something that actually works on most devices, but I expect the reality is they will move to Air like ITVPlayer (and that, if anything, is even shittier then iPlayer).
The real irony is that the BBC killed off the 3rd party iPlayer clients BeebPlayer and myPlayer and used Flash (because of its DRM facilities) in order to protect their content on Android devices. The reality is that they have produce such a poor user experience that they have probably driven more people to "pirate" sources than if they had just left BeebPlayer and MyPlayer alone and/or produce a decent (but un-DRM'd) native Android app.
Patent law should be amended to include a "must implement" clause on all transferred patents.
In other words it would be illegal (and render the patent invalid) to buy a patent with no intention to implement it. It would be a valid defence against a infringement claim that the plaintiff is not the originator of the patent (i.e. they bought it) and have made no attempt to implement it.
This would protect original patent authors and those who purchase patents in order to implement them, but would block patent trolls from buying up patents to sit on them as a sort of innovation bear-trap.
"The terrestrial networks account for the majority of TV viewing, even in homes that have satellite or cable. So by pitching YouView at pay-TV refuseniks, it has the concept right."
But at a price that exceeds the price of a decent Freesat HD recorder box by some margin.
Too much money for too little functionality on an unreliable platform. Another E-m@iler for Lord Sugar, I think.
"All those lesser players together accounted for 12.3 per cent of the market in Q2 2012, down from almost a quarter of the market in Q2 2011. Moral: punters want brand-name tablets, folks. That brand may be Windows 8 or it may not."
But for the punters who are shallow enough to put brand name at the top of their requirements, that brand name has to be Apple.
And there are plenty of others who are more interested in getting a decent amount of "bang-per-buck" rather than paying for a brand, witnessed by the way the Asus branded Nexus 7s are flying off the shelves.
"Dyson did not invent vacuum cleaners but should they not be able to protect their intellectual property"
Yes they should, and they did. Dyson patented the "cyclone" technology and, because of that had exclusive rights to manufacture devices using that tech until the patent expired (which it has).
The difference between Dyson and Apple are Dyson's inventions are just that. Inventions. Real, technological and scientific inventions that took time, effort and real research to develop, and deserving of the protection a Patent affords.
"The only way to provide enough power is nuclear.."
Imagines the look on the anti wind turbine nimbys' faces change from glee when told the latest plan for a wind farm has been rejected to abject horror when told they would be building a nuke plant instead.
Oh, what's that, Mr Nimby? Suddenly decided that nuclear isn't efficient, now? OK, lets build a nice carbon sequestration based coal fired plant at the bottom your road, then. Oh? Don't like the look of that either? Eh?
Lets face it. Anti wind farm nimbys are, actually, just nimbys, full stop. It wouldn't matter if the thing being built in their neighbourhood was a wind farm, nuke plant or home for the criminally insane, they'd still find an excuse to protest.
Quite happy to use power coming from a nuke, coal, gas, etc fired power station blighting someone else's view, just as long as it isn't theirs.
And it doesn't look like things are going to improve any time soon. Nokia's existing Lumia range won't run Windows Phone 8, so the company reckons "the third quarter 2012 [will] be a challenging quarter in Smart Devices" as punters hold off to see what new hardware is coming
No Shit!
Its almost as if they were set up to fail.
Now, who would do a thing like that?
And its going to completely bugger up the career of Marion Torrent
I imagine these people are going to be a bit pissed off, too:-
Reading the report, Kablekar committed the crimes in India and didn't access any US based assets.
If that is the case (and it may not be), then I can't see how this would have anything to do with US law enforcement.
It's like France seeking to extradite someone 'cos they nicked a sodding Citroen.
"I'm astounded that a tory minister is standing up for what is right!"
This is far more likely than a Labour MP doing so. Though party distinctions have blurred, Conservatism has traditionally been about being given the freedom to stand on your own two feet, while Labour is all about "Big Government" and the welfare state.
Having said that, Cameron's "Conservatives" have shown themselves to be more like New Labour in their control freakery.
"But as Britain's Home Secretary has recently demonstrated, it's seemingly impossible to satisfy the needs of individuals who do not wish to have their privacy invaded – as many have already argued in opposition to the Communications Data Bill – when it comes to responding more urgently to terrorist threat warnings from national security services."
Leaving aside, but in no way diminishing, concerns over privacy, why are they even considering a system that is trivially simple to avoid? Why even consider spending (IIRC) £2bn on a system that will catch nobody except the most incompetent and idiotic crooks, pervs and terrorists?
"The Council has directly avoided any criticism of anyone involved in the ‘never seconds’ blog for obvious reasons despite a strongly held view that the information presented in it misrepresented the options and choices available to pupils"
The only "obvious reasons" I can think of is that, while the Council believes the options and choices have been misrepresented they know that a Court of Law would think otherwise.
The trouble with politicians is they never stop digging when they realise they are in a hole. Say hi to the Earth's core for me......
A rainbow table will still give you the password (or a selection depending if its on a collision. Either way, if people have stupid passwords they are likely to be compromised even if they were just hashes.
While you can equally use a rainbow table (or any other method, for that matter) equally well on hashes as well as encrypted passwords, both cases require access to the cyphertext or hashes. If you work out a single password from a hash, you have compromised a single password. if you work it out from cyphertext then you have got the lot (even the more secure ones). In other words if you store encrypted passwords rather than hash values then it doesn't matter if some passwords are complex, a single weak password will compromise them all.
“Even though we store passwords in encrypted form only, our security investigation determined that more than half of the passwords were simple enough to be at risk of easy cracking,” Riot stated.
Why are they storing passwords at all, instead of using a one-way hash? Is it that the Riot spokes-muppet doesn't know the difference or they really are storing actual passwords?
The only reason you would store the actual passwords of your users is if you want to know what those passwords are, and you have to ask why they would want to know that?
It appears that this device is seriously locked down. Only works with iThings and their proprietary PC / Mac software.
Seems a big miss not giving this this thing, at least, a web interface allowing you to watch using Flash, or a DLNA / UPnP interface?
Power issues or arm-twisting from rights holders seeing pirates in every home?
I have no problem with people protesting and campaigning against things based on genuine evidence that the object of their ire is dangerous / damaging to the environment, etc, etc.
The problem with NIMBYs is that they first decide they don't like something, then hunt around for evidence to support their personal dislike, then make an inordinate amount of noise to get whatever they dislike stopped, irrespective of how it would benefit the (silent) majority.
NIMBYs, self-serving arseholes, the lot of them.
You reckon?
What about all of those Hi-Fis , 3rd party docks, clock radios, etc fitted with iThing docks. Its actually near impossible to buy something capable of playing music without a fruit-orientated connector (or with a connector for anything else).
The iThing add on industry will suffer collective apoplexy if Apple drop their propitiatory connector, not to mention the ire of iThing owners when they discover their new shiny won't fit their £400 BOSE speaker dock.
Of course, there could be an adaptor, but that is just so kludgey and, well, un-Apple-like
Well, there's always this lovely Batman edition Lumia 900
And at only £100 more than the Galaxy S III, its a real bargain to boot. Certainly not run-of-the-mill and you will get many "admiring" glances and comments** as passers-by notice the striking "Batman" logo and cool Batman wallpaper.
** If you consider someone rolling their eyes and muttering "w**ker" to be "admiring".....
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