Posts by Paul Shirley

Only takes one observation to establish an alibi, 100% surveillance isn't always needed.

Re: Perhaps ...

..or cut&pasted from the same API documentation, then search&replaced renamed to make sense.

Re: I'd have assumed that their test code suite would catch something like that...

"Test coverage should be a long string of '9's."

You're assuming it isn't. And as long as any 9's are in the test, bugs can get through.

The alternative is never shipping complex products.

Re: Hang on...

One goal of UWP is to run the same apps everywhere. Run them at all. It's not to run them equally well everywhere and it can't do the impossible. Well it could slow down every platform to match the least capable one - that's the Metro solution BTW.

Unfortunately Microsofts real goal is maintaining and increasing Windows lock in, they'll grab as much control as we let them. It's not a time to be quiet while it happens.

Re: "Ad blockers are as much a "protection racket" as "cops" are."

Advertisers are paying for the service provider to vouch for the 'acceptability' of their adverts, buying use of the adblockers good reputation. They are perfectly free to rely on their own reputation and appeal directly to the users. After a few decades good behaviour they might earn enough trust for that to work (so really it's never going to happen).

That's not blackmail, it's a reputation repair service that costs money to deliver and no one else would ever pay for the work involved. If there's blackmail, it's entirely self inflicted.

Re: Message to advertisers

Oh yes, I remember the first banners. And the first adblockers turned up within weeks...

Re: Whaaatt?

Can only work with the available data. If there an equivalent covering more of the world I'm sure the vulture want to know. I'd like to see a few more tends yanked out of it, like the Windows (all versions) share trend, currently only 52%.

Re: I'll believe it when ...

That's a lesser error than the initial deal, where they intended to take part payment in SCO shares. The fixed fee arrangement was what it took to cancel that and SCO were the winner despite contingency fee clauses on winnings and sale of SCO.

It was an incredibly stupid arrangement to make that makes it clear the lawyers believed SCO have a good case at the start. Problem was, SCO lied to everyone including their lawyers. It also became obvious the whole suit was as much a stock scam as about the IP.

Taking a shareholding in such an obvious scam would have exposed them to serious legal risk. Just losing vast amounts of money is the lesser evil.

Re: Fanless GFX

Been there, done that, burnt my fingers. I had a highish end passive 7950GT that worked perfectly until I upgraded the CPU heatsink to a giant so effective the fan rarely ever started. Unfortunately the passive GPU needed the tiny backwash from the CPU cooler to be effective :(

Re: Good luck with Bitcoin stuff

Serving adds on the content site would arguably be better in the long term, it ties legal liability directly to the site serving it. Won't take many lawsuits for them to magically do what's been impossible so far and sanitise the shit.

Only then can we have a debate with the shit slingers about what's acceptable and fair. Perhaps remind them workable add filters existed before ads were farmed out to external sites.

Re: Smooth

The bit I hate is when they slide off your hand unless grabbed by the edges, making shiny back large screen devices firmly 2 handed use only. Putting a grippy case or back cover on usually bloats them too much as well, with the notable exception of my G4's leather back (which isn't really gripping enough).

Why this obsession with shininess over ergonomics in phones?

Re: Satellites

Also be a little worried about where the backscatter from the sail goes. To survive that much beam energy it has to be reflective and I'm not sure they make sunglasses dark enough ;)

Strangely the Tories seen happy to ignore eu rules when it concerns the rights of their uk serfs, all the while whining about other eu countries ignoring other less important rules, especially the idiotic ones originating in the uk!

Europe: the last non violent line of defence against our own state. Courts they cant easily override and ignore at great risk.

Re: Standard, standard, standard

I would guess the physical design here rules out a useful open standard simply because it would require every compatible phone to have the same dimensions and remove a major differentiator between brands and individual phones in their ranges. The grip looks ugly enough on a phone it's designed to fit, imagine one it doesn't physical match.

Re: Hard to take seriously

"Remember the Spitting Image scene"

I remember the frightened, blanched with fear face of the shop assistant forced to test his new delivery vehicle in Reading traffic ;)

Re: Best of Breed

I think Streetmap brought the wrong case in the wrong courts. Instead of seeking some sort of protection or equal treatment, they asked for damages. Damages for an inferior product, that wouldn't generate significant income from the purportedly lost views anyway.

As a niche player in a global market, where the internet age expects global availability they weren't even offering a similar product. We protect competition, we don't stop innovation because one side can't or won't compete.

Re: Since 2007?

As far as I remember Google captured maps before it started showing up in search results and you had to go to their maps site explicitly. The competitors had a couple of years to improve their products, don't remember any of them doing anything at all, while increasing numbers of us sought out Googles primitive but silky smooth version.

Re: perhaps

Andrew is right about one thing, large chunks of the Indian state aren't working for the ordinary and poor people. They aren't necessarily a better gatekeeper than Facebook. That doesn't make Facebook any less creepy or untrustworthy.

Pure (ish) net neutrality potentially offers a way around that lack of trust, creating a much reduced attack surface to abuse. That's why Facebook's scheme has to die in its current form.

Re: Winning back trust

It's not theirs if i completely replace it with my handcrafted version. Microsoft didn't invent the host file.

Re: Tortious interference claims ..

It's quite amazing how often SCO lied during the case, how inconsistent the lies were and how no court did anything about it. In fairness most of the case was fought with PR lies outside the courts but at heart the entire affair was high level blackmail and the legal system failed everyone but the blackmailers.

Re: All I want from VR

Facebook is extremely likely to do something like that with Occulus, it's a better option for exposing you to their core product than gaming.

Re: If their US Pantry

I stick to bulk ordering long life stuff through Amazon, sacks of flour, pulses, rice etc. That's almost everything we used to need supermarkets for and massively cheaper. Almost everything else is cheaper at our local farm shop or the market and ready to eat today, not in a couple of weeks or likely to rot before ever ripening supermarket style.

The surprisingly large proportion of people that think the big supermarkets are actually cheap are a tempting target for Amazon because loss leaders aside, it will be trivially easy to crush them on both pricing and choice. For the few of us that live happily with minimal exposure to anything beyond Aldi, don't see any change coming we didn't already buy into, we're reverting to buying from the best supplier for each product, not the hell of the supermarket shopping expedition.

Re: How many conclusions

" I guess he can't backtrack on the rest of the litigation's chances."

You forget SCO and their lawyers were caught telling different courts contradictory things. Sadly not caught by the courts though :(

Re: I Wonder....

We don't live in a deep enough gravity well to confine the atmosphere enough to sustain fusion. The rest of the planet is waste material from stellar explosions and massively harder to ignite. The iron won't fuse at any temperature. Pretty safe from a runaway reactor...

Re: Teams that "can be fed with two pizzas"

And what happened to the draw full of takeaway menus and picking one at random? If you're stuck in the office at least go curry, with a side order of Chinese. Although my local does do a firey curry pizza...

According to the MS shilling scripts there are too few Linux users to notice if they complain!

When MS screw over their 'lots of users' they can't complain about the scale of the response... yet the weasels do, while ignoring the content of the complaints. When Canonical screw over that negligible (it's in the MS shilling pack so it must be true) Ubuntu user base, they get lots of complaints and eventually back down.

off topic: straight fruit&veg

The fun thing about straight <insert fruit or veg here> standards is most originated in the UK, the home of unnatural and stupid restrictions and were imposed on the rest of Europe as 'class A' when food classes were harmonised. The rest of Europe promptly ignored them unless they were sending defective crops (AKA straight ones) to the UK!

As usual the UK is wrong on this one.

Re: No problem here

Yes, there's less ongoing need to have root BUT you still need to yank out all the crapware shipped with devices. Luckily unrooting is easy, so root, do the 1 off fixes, unroot, carry on as normal.

Personally I value having regular scheduled backups more than payment apps I never intend to use, too many app updates break them and reverting isn't an unrooted option.