Posts by M Gale

Turns out that she's a Reg reader too.

Apparently this and the "your CV sucks" articles are both very good articles in her opinion. She was going to give the URL to the entire year, but it was decided that the comments about not liking them darn forriners, while a fair comment, was not something the university could condone.

However, if a student were to email other students, that's not the uni's problem.

Dominic, take note. There's a rather large group of students here who would find your opinions useful, if you could make them a bit more PC (I know, yuck).

All I can say is... wasn't me.

Looks like I got hit by a bunch of red-button-tards too.

Ish. Sort of.

If you want to participate in the Android ecosystem - which is very much Google's baby - then you have to toe the line and follow the device compliance specifications. And, yes, pay Google for that. The reason for the compatibility testing, asides getting Google a little extra pocket change to swill around, is so that the Marketplace app knows what apps your device can support. It also helps somewhat with this fragmentation thing that everyone keeps talking about but I've seen precious little of amongst officially supported devices. I'm not sure how well, therefore, throwing the Marketplace open to every two-bit manufacturer and their dog like that would work. Would it have to run a benchmark on your machine when you download it? What happens if a background process slurps up resources, making the Market app think your 1.4ghz Cortex A-something has all the poke of an 800mhz ARM11? Not to mention some of the funkier hardware configs that could play havoc with apps that use the NDK

Most importantly, would it be usable by the mythical Joe Sixpack without having to learn about "megawhatsits" and "gigathingies", "ARM whatevers" and "Snapdragons" (aren't they a type of flowering plant, do they bite and can they breathe fire, etc, etc)? It'd certainly be amusing to get the "full Android experience" on a homebrew Beagleboard with an old laptop screen duct-taped on and a 12v sealed lead acid battery/housebrick in a caddy round back, but perhaps wishful thinking given the target market of.. well.. everyone including people who aren't geeks.

However if you're a company that wants to roll your own, build your own ecosystem and get a shiny product to market in a reasonable timeframe, Android is a rather good base upon which to build. Just ask Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.

Can they not?????

No, they cannot. Or at least, with GPS turned off, the tablet thinks I'm somewhere.. err.. in the street. Maybe. Or in the fields nearby. Or by the local Tesco. Perhaps. When that huge blue circle calms down a bit and finds a fix a little more accurate than "err, somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester".

In cities and other hugely built-up and wirelessly connected areas it's a little more accurate. It actually pinpointed me as being in the correct university building down to about 10m, though the fact there's a honking great phone mast outside and the entire campus is saturated in 2.4 and 5ghz access points probably helped. Anywhere else, wifi and cell-tower-only location is about as accurate as trying to hit the bullseye using a dart made out of jelly, sellotaped to an RPG, from half a mile away.

As I said though, even if the thing does know that a router is in your house, what privacy issue is there? It's not like you can't randomise the MAC address by nagivating to 192.168.x.1 and logging in to change it periodically, if you're concerned. Or maybe just not broadcasting to everyone in range that you have a router. As someone mentioned above, this is a little like keying up your CB and shouting "My Network Name Is FooNet" into channel 19 over and over. If it's government intrusion you're worried about, you'd best cut the cable leading into your house right now because I can guarantee that the various investigative services have far better ways of finding out what porn you're into. Usually by sticking a tap on the ISP end.

Maybe I should change my tablet's portable AP SSID to "AbusingThirtyTwoCharactersLimits"?

And comes before a Bung...

...unfortunately.

The problem...

..is that while BSA won't try to extort you, Microsoft may well have a go. Until someone definitively wins a court case over alleged patent infringements in Linux and stomps that nasty little company into the dirt, they will continue to try it on.

How small are your pockets?

I can fit a 7" Galaxy Tab into a coat pocket. I'm sure a 5" tabphone would fit in something less sizeable, and the more normal-size fondle-toys definitely so.

Try turning ABP off.

Those awful iframes and popup DIVs on this very site are exactly why I installed that lovely little Firefox plugin. Adverts don't bother me, but flying, animated, expando-shit does.

It affected everyone who had the iPhone 4 and tried to use it as a phone. Maybe only a small number bothered to complain about it, but I'd reckon nearly everyone with an iPhone 4 has had to deal with "Network Error [dismiss/cancel]" every single time their fingers or palm wander over that special black band.

Why do you think one of the things that every review site on the web is saying is that the 4S has had its antenna fixed (and that there may be Samsung patents involved, cue drama and lawsuits)?

Probably a combination of...

...trying to get you to want it, and the competition to crap themselves. I'll also guess they're targetting more the businesses who'll be buying and selling the phones rather than end users.

Oh I don't know

Grey looked like quite the witty thing, when it wasn't inflicting ironic torture on genocidal dictators.

If you haven't killed a million people or so, I don't think you'd have much to worry about. It's just a big floating hyperintelligent London Dungeon. Madame Tussauds might even do an exhibit swap!

Phone passwords....

...tend to appear in plaintext, one character at a time.

r

*i

**g

***h

****t

*****?

It's stupid, probably has its legacy in traditional "dumb" phones with their iffy t9 text entry mechanisms, and is a feature that needs to be able to be disabled on any smartphone or tablet. It's a little annoying having to hunch over the screen on the bus like someone trying to roll a sneaky joint without anybody seeing it.

A hand in that.

...what, literally?

As someone who has helped with more than one Adwords campaign...

...please put the + back.

Now tell me I'm "not a customer".

(or +not +a +customer, if you like)

Linux tablet

You'd probably be better trying for Always Innovating's Touchbook. Though, that's more of a developer's toy than a consumer model. Tweak to your heart's content, but just don't expect it to be fully functional out of the box. It's been around longer than the iPad has too, amusingly enough.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

They also seem to have a channel on Freenode. Or did last time I looked.

Slight correction.

Lawful is whatever hasn't been deemed to be illegal. Or to put it in geek terms, "ALLOW ALL EXCEPT", as opposed to "DENY ALL EXCEPT".

pipl.com

You should try it some time. Scary site, that is. A few dollars and you can get just about anybody's address. That and Google gives the guy's full address if you poke it with the right search string and are quick enough before it disappears from the cache.

Finding people is not too hard these days, unless they take extreme precautions to hide.

There is a profound difference...

...between copyright and "intellectual property".

I'd not have a problem if copyright was just there to stop Dodgy Bob from selling your movie on a market stall for a fiver and not giving you your cut. You know, making sure the creator of a work gets some compensation for his or her efforts. However, "intellectual property" has gone way, way beyond that. A 70 year extension? How is that not cultural theft? Between this and the ever-increasing encroachment of a completely fouled-up patent system, it's a wonder anything gets produced, invented or otherwise composed at all without everybody getting sued!

Oh hang on, wait a minute...

Silly, but not fake.

If you get spattered with liquid nitrogen or helium, the end result will generally be that it quickly turns into a gas before it can get a good thermal contact with your skin. Now, if you were to plunge your hand into a dewar of the stuff, that wouldn't be a good idea. Small splashes though, are likely not dangerous.

It seems it is.

At 63p. I'd buy it if Google's retarded payment scheme allowed Maestro users to buy stuff. Ho hum, suppose it's time to go get one of those prepaid Mastercards or something, if they'll even work.

Just search for Phone Story. It's a little way down, listed in the "Arcade and Action" category.