Posts by M Gale 3500 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2007
Every colour scanner I've used (though granted my last one was a while ago) used RGB lights. They look white because all the lights are firing. Try doing a greyscale scan. The options will usually allow you to select all, or either the red, green, or blue light as the illumination source.
But if lit by R+G+B LEDs, the paint will reflect nothing, and will appear black.
If that was the case, colour scanners wouldn't work.
because Android isn't anywhere near flexible enough support anything but the one form factor.
Phones, tablets, smart TVs, dongles to turn a TV into a smart TV, media players, SoC/SoB development platforms, games consoles, and convertible laptops?
Sure seems like a single form-factor to me.
I could say the same about anybody suggesting a Core i7 lap-scalder for doing letters and spreadsheets with. The Fujitsu Lifebook T731 is not exactly cheap either, unless you want a decrepit "refurbished" one.
So sure, if you have unlimited funds and the desire to throw unlimited amounts of them at some kind of shiny, then you might just barely, so long as you're not using it too hard, get 8 hours out of an x86 Windows tablet PC. Really, well done.
Now if you don't mind, I have a years-old TF201 here to play with. Cost £500 when it was brand spanking new. Goes all day. Like the Duracell Bunny of convertible tablets, it is.
Actually I think, now Microsoft have made the idiot decision to try and turn the desktop into a phone and get the general public used to "duh hooge squares and pretty pictures" phone interfaces, Android could go through just a few modifications to be mouse and multiple-window-friendly and stand a good chance at taking Microsoft on, on their home turf. Wouldn't that be something?
Duo 13, i7 variant. £1725, before you even go on about the prices Sony will charge for an extra battery, a car charger... well, it doesn't come with it. I also see no battery life figures.
So, we're probably talking somewhere north of two grand, all in. For a jumped up netbook. To write fucking Office documents.
Now what was that I said about extortionately priced? Not to mention that the huge PDAs that we now call "tablets" have a battery life that approaches or exceeds all-day heavy usage already, without any mucking about swapping batteries halfway through.
I figured the whole point, if you're in a position to be hugely bothered by the kernel size, is that you can turn off a shitload of options in the kernel headers and compile your own teeny-tiny version, with support just for the hardware you're running it on?
Or just download Ubuntu or some other preconfigured distro where about everything sensible has been switched on.
Would a microkernel end up any smaller after every single driver (sorry, Service) for every possible bit of hardware out there has been included in with the distribution? Don't forget, Windows is a hybrid kernel that does a ton of stuff the microkernel way. Hardly a size 0, is it?
Xperia Arc S here, from when it was "Sony Ericsson". Still working, though a bit long in the tooth now perhaps.
Not a perfect phone, but still damned fine. Dual GLONASS/GPS before the Applistas ever thought of the idea, and the ancient, replaceable battery still gets me all day if I don't hammer it. Camera's awesome for a 2011-vintage phone, pretty good even for a bleeding-edge new smartphone, and it can actually make calls while being held like a phone, unlike the iPhone 4 that it went up against.
I'll probably be getting a replacement in the next year or two, simply to take advantage of multiple cores and stupidly high-res screens (as if the current phone isn't high enough). However, this ol' Arc S still gets appreciative comments, mostly on the size and clarity of the screen. It really is eye-searingly bright and razor-sharp.
Oh, and it seems to play almost every video file I throw at it. All without being tied into some PC-based bloatware.
I think you're mistaking pre-emptive multitasking with cooperative multitasking. Coop multitasking was what Mac OS had all the way up to OS X, and Windows up to 3.11 (up to 9x for 16 bit apps). It is, to use the crap analogy, the equivalent of leaving a bucket of money out and asking people to only take from it fairly. The program hogs resources until it gives them back to the OS.
Pre-emptive multitasking on the other hand, is where the OS decides how much CPU time each process is having, and rations timeslices accordingly. Unix has always had it, right back to 1969. Linux has had it since its inception in 1991, and since Android is based on Linux, well, Android has had it since day 1, too.
Strangely, pre-emptive multitasking works, regardless of how much an individual process wants to hog things. The only remaining argument is the best type of rationing policy - round robin, least-used-first, priority-based or other?
Ignorance, eh? It's everywhere.
No, but a whole bunch of people replacing their name with "Cockmeister McFuck", and their profile picture with dongcopters and other such loveliness might prompt the site owners to allow deletions. Even if not, it's a funny form of protest that leaves the offending site in an awesome state for future viewers.
Of course if it's a site where the owners are not likely to be offended by such imagery, you do a bit of research and find something that will offend the site owners.
What is it with crap analogies?
It isn't a car. It isn't a house. It's a router. Lots of routers in fact. That were left in public mode. The public used them. This is not difficult to understand.
You want another crap analogy? You just bought a bus, stuck "10A Liverpool" on the front of it, painted it up in Arriva's livery, stopped at the bus stop, opened the door, shouted "don't worry everyone, it's free today", and now you're acting all surprised that you got a boatload of passengers expecting to find themselves in Liverpool City Centre via Rainhill.
Unencrypted routers are public routers. Get that through your skull, and encrypt yours if you don't like that. It's not hard. As for exploits, that's a different kettle o' fish, and quite clearly a case of trespass if you've done anything more than ping the thing and ask for its capabilities (which is, duh, just what Google did). Encrypted routers are private routers.
Why the hell do idiots make things so much harder than they need to be? And why are so many supposedly smart people acting like complete fuckwits over this? Kick Google because it's Google? Yeah, real smart move, that.
Except this isn't a house being burgled. It's a router that has been left in public mode.
Surprise surprise, the public used it. Victim my arse. Encrypt your router. No ifs, no buts, get it done. Why the hell should the courts back you up because you've thrown your network open to the public to use and they've used it?
See that would assume that I regard wardriving as inherently wrong in some way. I really don't see what they did that's so awful. Drove around with a boatload of cars running Airodump? Well fuck me, lock 'em up, throw away the key.
Or alternatively, lern 2 WPA2. It'll stop Google from snarfing your passwords, AND the hackers that are probably already raping your unencrypted connection.
Would have been nice if the court would have said something like "just delete the data and we're happy."
I can see this turning into something similar to PPI and whiplash injury claims, where an increasingly small percentage of claimants were actually mis-sold PPI or really do have whiplash. Really, you just shouted your unencrypted username and password into the street with a megaphone, and it's Google you want to sue for it?
To anybody that does: Get a brain.
For some reason, I'm looking at that poster and thinking of the original Mercenaries game.
Judging by the couple of broken Dysons that a friend has had, it's certainly bollocks of some kind or another.
Also Dyson did not invent bagless vacuum cleaners. The guy did however, take an already-existing technology - that of using cyclones to separate stuff - and stick a hose on the end. There's plenty of bagless designs that are basically a solid dust container with a filter at one end. While some manufacturers might have had a razor blade business model with the bags, nowhere near all did.
I still remember le Mother's old Goblin quite fondly. Of course, now it's a Henry.
So I gotta wonder why you can't just have one damned phone variant with its SDR chippery, and have the thing scan around until it goes "oho, there be mobile signals in these bands"?
Maybe two variants if regional frequency variations are so wide that you need separately tuned antennae, but really, ten?
The only solution I found to work consistently was a good ol' re-image
And the first thing the shop-bought branded box does after you've nuked the hard drive and re-installed the factory image from the oh-so-impossible-to-corrupt-and-infect sooper-seeekrit hidden partition?
"Please register your free trial of McAfee..."
Damn.
There's a difference between wishing someone dead, and dancing on their grave.
Whether ol' Jobbie deserves that or not I guess depends on your opinion of the guy. I guess Stallman doesn't like him too much. I could think of a very few people who I'd happily tap-dance on the coffin of, but they're a little closer to home than Cupertino.
Firefox and Flash. There's your problem.
No, really. Block Flash from running on Firefox unless it's needed. Your computer will love you for it. Myself, I just uninstalled the plugin completely. Chrome gets used for the occasional Flash game or Youtube video that absolutely must show ads, and therefore can't use the html5 player. It also seems to have a better Flash implementation in general. At least, it doesn't turn into a computer-destroying jerkathon.
I have a Transformer TF201 here that very much does support plugging USB thumbsticks and hard drives into the keyboard's USB slot. It also seems pretty good with mice, keyboards and, to a lesser extent, control pads and joysticks. Asus also provide a rooted ROM for you if you wish to use it, however the blurb is very clear in stating how it's not supported, and that if you break it, it's your problem.
You'll find most fondle-toy devices are the same way, whether the manufacturer provides rooted images or not. If your solution requires root, then the chances are it is not supported. This may not matter much to you, but it will matter to anybody who fails to get root, ends up with a brick, then tries to claim on the warranty.
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