Posts by Jason Bloomberg

Re: Optional

I have original Kodak DC-20 and DC-50 cameras. They were incredibly expensive but absolutely brilliant for the time.

It certainly wasn't the cameras which were a failure. Kodak were more like a textile mill which had invented the knitting machine and put themselves out of business.

I am also a little sympathetic to the Philips DCC and Sony MiniDisc. Apart from the nonsense to prevent CDs being boot-legged both were just too late to market, arrived just as alternative and better technologies were emerging.

Not sure I would be so generous though when it comes to the Sinclair Microdrive.

Re: Still "be able to" attend court?

As long as people are offered the option "pay this or take it to court" I do not see a great deal of problem with the scheme. If one is guilty, or expects to be found guilty, and has to "pay this" anyway, and probably more on top in lost wages etc, it's actually doing them a favour.

For the type of cases being considered most people would know whether they are guilty or not and it's just a waste of everyone's time to go to court, plead guilty, and get the fine an online service can just as easily hand out.

There is an issue of people believing they are guilty when they actually are not and have grounds to escape conviction but they would probably mistakenly admit guilt in court anyway. That rests on what legal advice they get (or don't), not the means of processing the case.

It might lead to innocent people paying-up simply to avoid inconvenience and costs but I don't think that is a great enough risk to reject the scheme.

Is that like; if you don't like the way the police abuse you when you call them out you don't have to call them out?

Yet another subscription i will be expected to have if i want to watch everything?

I suspect getting into the fray in a saturating market may be why Apple aren't really pushing hard. They may, for now, be happy to be just another player, keeping their finger in the pie and an eye on what's happening around them, but with no great commitment.

We tend to expect big corporations wanting to dominate in all markets they step into. This might be an exception to the rule.

Re: Makes sense

The app doesn't need to know jack shit about it's desktop environment.

I guess you have never had to create an app which needs to keep users with HD displays and those stubbornly still using 640x480 monitors happy.

It is hard enough crafting web pages which one or the other doesn't complain about, before adding landscape and portrait modes into the mix.

Having auto-resizing grids and complex rules as to how things should shuffle and re-align in different environments can help but at best it feels like a compromise. A particular target environment often dictates the aesthetics of the whole and it can be very hard to achieve the same satisfactory feel in another.

It's not that auto-layout cannot be done it is more that the results are rarely pleasing and need to be tweaked based on knowing the environment.

Re: So a court battle

If there is a risk of infringing IP rights then Apple would most certainly have bought the company and may still do so.

It is being reported elsewhere that Apple had been in talks about a buyout of Imagination last year but they had turned that opportunity down. Looks like they've just paid the price of that.

Re: Hmm

And another thing - what's this troll malarky? Give me back my beer (icon)

You'll be pleased to know I can see your beer icon when I hit reply.

As well as the troll icon there was some other 'text scrolling' crossing the icon selector when I made a post earlier today. That seemed entirely meaningless. I guessed it related to April 1st but couldn't figure out what. Perhaps it wasn't rendering properly in my browser.

They will change their processes.

Anything which makes their processes less effective could be called an improvement in the situation.

Katie Hopkins' radicalising influence would be greatly reduced if she were not given her platform of being a columnist in the Daily Mail.

If slow speed data extraction is acceptable; one can use malware to cause the PC to turn itself off (or not) at certain times of the day..

One then monitors for power changes, the frequency of "FFS!" utterances, calls to support, or use a drone to watch the power LED.

Or maybe the hacker crew could just set themselves up a support service, get dodgy kit into a site, sit back and wait for the unsuspecting users to report back the seemingly meaningless error codes which annoyingly pop-up every half hour.

Re: I think they genuinely don't see the problem.

I tried to use Rudds envelope steaming analogy ... if you create a mechanism to decrypt messages and wrap a legal process around it, the cat is out of the bag as there is now a mechanism which can be used by those not overly fussed about the legalities.

That's the crux. I don't think most of us really object to terrorists and the like having their secret messages exposed, but we do care about people poking about in our affairs when we cannot see the legitimate need to do so. It's a matter of trust.

What Rudd wants is something which requires a trust which is not actually there, probably never will be.

Re: I'll give

I'll give self driving cars 18 months before its back to the drawing board...

I don't see why. So far there does not seem to be evidence that self-drive cars perform worse than human drivers in the same circumstances, though I am sure there will always be those who cling to the notion that 'if a human had been driving it wouldn't have happened'.

It's reasonable and responsible to take the fleet off the road while that's checked out, but I am not convinced the self-drive was worse than a human here. Sure; drop a gear and accelerate away, steer onto the sidewalk; all imagined escape plans a human could conjure up which a self-drive will be accused of not having the wits to do. But, in reality; success of such escape plans is down mostly to luck and whether one even sees it coming.

Re: Actual case aside

Evidence on an encrypted drive is the same as evidence in a safe - you have no right at all to keep that evidence unknown to the police if they have a search warrant, and no right to keep it secret from the court.

I would say people have every right to try to keep things as unknown and as secret as they can, while the police have every right to try and reveal the same.

The accused should have no obligation to incriminate themselves or prove a case or allegation against them. It is up to the prosecution or accuser to prove the facts of their claimed case.

As soon as we go beyond that we are all in very dangerous and frightening territory.

The problem with holding individuals responsible is they will want more money to reflect that degree of responsibility and it will only end in the fiasco of buck-passing anyway.

If anyone ever is held as responsible as people might like, there will be no one willing to take on those job lest some underling fucks up and they have to carry the can. But it's probably going to be an underling who carries the can while the exec really responsible walks away without punishment courtesy of lawyering-up.

While saying individuals should be held to account, punished for mistakes, it's very hard to achieve that in practice.

Re: Pledges

"The plans were reversed on the basis that they breached his own party's 2015 manifesto pledge"

Fake News!!! Hammond says otherwise. He says the proposal did not breach any manifesto pledge because that pledge only applied to Class 1 NIC. However, he says he recognises "that compliance with the ‘legislative’ test of the Manifesto commitment is not adequate” so has decided to drop his change.

Whether we believe him or not...

There's a danger of legal creep in any ruling or injunctive relief. That's not good enough cause to not make a ruling or we would never have any on that basis alone.

I sympathise with those resorting to streaming services because official providers are too expensive, because they paid huge amounts for rights, because they want to make themselves a monopoly in provision of coverage, while the sports have taken advantage of that willingness to pay ridiculous amounts.

But the fact is, if one tries to get around it by dubious or illegal means, those who own rights will come gunning for the people doing that and the people aiding and abetting them. The greater the effort to avoid paying, the greater their efforts to ensure people do.

Having an addiction to sport does not justify illegality. Resorting to dodging subscriptions isn't going to work long term. If people want to get things changed they have to find a way to achieve that change. Courts aren't there to say whether things are fair or not, they can only apply the law and lay down rulings as deemed appropriate.

Please list any action taken (beyond "discussing it") about any of the Parliamentary petitions whatsoever.

That is hard but they do influence those deciding things and do consequently affect outcomes. They are not entirely pointless or a waste of everyone's time; even if it is difficult to discern where a petition has had impact.

The 'deny Trump a state visit' petition did not succeed, and I doubt anyone actually expected it to, but it does appear to have influenced when that visit will occur and how it will be. It also enabled MPs and others to speak out with the confidence that a huge number supported them in speaking out.

I can recall legislation and proposals which seemed to have been influenced by petition and public outcry but I'll admit I can't list it; I don't track such things. Disbanding the Red Arrows, Gurkhas, refugees and Tax Credits come to mind but I might be wrong.

Re: @Valarian

Whether your code will compile and run correctly is beside the point.

Exactly; even "tree = BalanceBinaryTree(tree)" shows some knowledge of programming concepts. They are looking for the reaction of someone who claims to be something but knows nothing of the subject they claim to be skilled in.

Re: Grab the burning torches and pitchforks

I've come back to this because it's still annoying me. This wasn't scaremongering over the Bluetooth API as such

Except for the sub-headline; "Warnings about leaky Bluetooth Web API all-too-accurate".

That appears to me to suggest the Bluetooth Web API is at fault here.

From the article: "Basically, it is possible for a webpage to connect to CloudPets plushie, via Bluetooth in the computer or handheld viewing the page, without any authentication"

Yes; and that's a failure of authentication, not a failure of the Web Bluetooth API. I would refer you to the post below from pdjstone; "Author of the blog here ... I don't think there's anything particularly bad about Web Bluetooth itself (Chrome pops up a prompt and the user has to explicitly choose a device to connect to)".

There is no automatic means for a web page to automatically connect to any Bluetooth device, including CloudToy. That requires human intervention.

Re: Why not just sell the on Amazon

The root cause of limited availability is the Zero was not manufactured in sufficient quantity, and the reason for that is the RRP is too low to allow them to be economically manufactured in quantity and have too little margin for larger retailers to stock them.

Hopefully the increased price changes that.

If they can manufacture enough, with enough margin for larger retailers, we might see them in superstores alongside DVDs, SD cards and TV streamers and elsewhere.

It hasn't helped that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has repeatedly underestimated the popularity of their products. They expected to only sell 10,000 at the start, did not do much better with the Zero. Let's hope they do better with the Zero W. It has so far proven the case that the best engineers don't necessarily make good business leaders.