Posts by Paul Shirley

Which means an essential part of any legislation may be compelling them to allow better monitoring, though not something we necessarily want to happen given the risks more surveillance brings.

Ultimately though 'today's tools cant do the job' means nothing more than it says, 'today's tools'. Arguably a signal of abuse must be detectable, otherwise no one is actually being abused. Once detected the tool of legal compulsion can be employed to dig out the truth. If the carriers are smart they'll not risk that anal probing level of investigation.

Re: No OTG?

Could be a deliberate differentiator, in the past Sony have shipped OTG capable chips with a connection omitted to disable it.

Re: Sadly

You've made the mistake of assuming bull refers to the truth of the tales, not the nature of the truth.

Re: Spite

Really? Did the start of a long recession just before the smoking ban started have nothing to do with falling pub attendance, except for discount outlets like Wetherspoons. You also have to pretend JDW didn't start making *more* money months before the official ban when they banned smoking early, my favourite sight of the time was a builder being physically thrown out of a pub by his workmates as he tried lighting up at the bar.

We'll never be able to pin down what, if any, damage the smoking ban did. It did break the decades long fight by pubs&bars to do avoid doing anything meaningful about the problem. Offered a deal - provide a moderate number of smoke free rooms spread across geographical areas - and there would be no need for a ban. They got nowhere near and it became very clear from trade publications the belief was the gov would back down. That's how we got today's ban.

Apart from losing pub gardens to smokers it's been good. Just wish I had less other ways to spend my disposable income, the real reason pubs struggle to get us into them.

Re: A blogger did this ?

The overall design is a brazen Samsung knockoff, hard to conclude otherwise. The question is if it's so brazen it's infringing. There are no separate features so distinctive they deserve protection on an iPhone, only the combination. Yet the case Apple brought focussed overly on detail, instead of how the list of details adds up to 'passing off'. And they convinced a judge&jury to go along with them.

You can protect a collection of unprotectable parts if as a collection it's distinctive. Apple tried to scare off all competition by focussing almost exclusively on detail, both in court and LOUDLY in PR. They can't complain if the case then falls apart as the individual claims fall.

Re: What's' this pointy stick for?

Spell correction and predictive text are responsible for most of the gibberish posts I make here, they're not always a good thing. I can't spell or get grammar right without help most of the time yet it frequently does more damage than good!

Re: Trying hard, could do better

At least Ballmer&co are incompetent with just a small dose of evil. It's not a small dose with Murdoch.

The US police have repeatedly demonstrated they have no problem with killing suspects with little or no reason... don't tempt them.

Re: data treated as code

It's called the Harvard Architecture and it was designed to increase throughput to/from memory but does separate data from code. However we quite like to load programs into memory so they can be run, we like to JIT compile scripts and so on - so it could never offer any more security than write protecting pages in our Von Neumann machines.

The reason they died out is probably the slight problem of where you put the extra pins on a microprocessor to access 2 separate memory systems. Nowadays we could just multiplex them but it makes more sense to treat it just gobble the extra bandwidth directly.

Re: why not save the £60 by going sim free?

...because for most people it will cost much more than £60 to actually use it for the contract duration.

Also why it's such a PIA working out whether a bargain really is a bargain for you. As a £5/year man I'll stick with last years remaindered flagships for the foreseeable future.

BTW O2's cunning stunt of splitting the bill into device+airtime payments so they could carry on hiking prices mid-contract has backfired, so many people worked out they can buy on contract then immediately pay off the device part and cancel the contract, their operators sometimes just ask up front if that's what you plan to do!

Hacking is what you do with tools, not knowing how to use tools and most definitely not knowing how to use some obsolete tool someone else decides defines hacking.

Re: Hm..

One huge change possible with very cheap ink is using enough of it to keep the heads very regularly flushed even if the printer is not being used, without annoying the users over cost. I print rarely and both my inkjets died prematurely with unrepairably blocked jets and replacements that cost more than a new printer. I switched to a colour laser printer when the last one died.

If they get the lifetime right or at least make replacement heads cheap this could kill laser printers for many workloads.

Re: has to be said

People continue to forget that the *HIERARCHICAL* start menu is there for the times pinning to the taskbar, desktop or using search doesn't do the job, not the primary way to launch things. And because it's hierarchical and easy to organise by drag'n'drop it's a hell of a lot better at those edge cases than the Start Screen or it's dumbed down menu replacement.

The new version makes those edge cases harder and more tedious without making anything any easier. Design driven by Microsofts desperate need to go mobile and touch over what works.

Re: Most AC can't hack it anyway

In one of my brief stints working on-site one of the senior devs knocked a hole in the outside wall of his private office to vent a portable evaporative cooler. Then ran it 24hrs/day but couldn't work out why his room was the hottest place in the building.

I can't remember how many days we waited before asking him if he'd ever filled the water tank ;)

Re: wouldn't turn up to your sister's funeral in cowboy boots

If people turn up at my funeral in suit's they'll get turned away at the wake while I turn in my urn. Why make a bad day worse.

An important part of the scarcity and invitation system is the way it creates artificial loyalty. Imagine the storm of complaint over the problems the 1 had if people could make casual purchases. Instead we have muted, almost apologistic, posts mostly out of sight on their forums.

Just like the 1p1 by the time anyone can just buy one the hardware and price will struggle to compete with year old flagships at year old flagship prices. The service will still be bad.

Re: You know what

The reg and orlowski in particular are disappointed that 2+ years solid cheerleading for WinPhone and some other ms stuff harmed their reputation when ms started listening to the market (a very tiny amount) and backtracked on some of the mistakes.

Jilted lover syndrome ;)

Last time they did it to me it reached the point of 'you're going to prison' before I handed them money I didn't owe. A year later they finally realised they'd cocked up mightily, handed the money back with interest, the fines back with interest but not the slightest sign they cared.

At least it was several % more interest than I could get anywhere else.

Re: the ads served are invariably total bollocks.

Invariably they're for something I've just bought and no longer need to buy.

Last time I looked Win10 was still offering me the 64bit Pinnacle 7010ix driver that won't work on 4Gb+ machines and the WiFi stick driver that causes instant kernel panics. Windows should NEVER automatically update drivers, the quality control on Windows Update is pathetic and drivers can render machines unusable.

Nvidia are even more of a fustercluck. I abandoned their products long ago due to the regular removal of features or hardware acceleration in new driver updates. Last Nvidia GPU had 2+ year old drivers before I binned it, they were the most recent that worked properly with my hardware. But at least I could control which version was installed, which bugs I'd be living with.

Giving back control needs to be built in to Win10, not a badly publicised patch many/most users will never hear about.

Re: Who intentionally sends MMS messages these days?

On some networks you can't received MMS without first sending one, a large number of users might quite accidentally be protected because only hackers are likely to voluntarily use MMS today. That's aiming their SMS use didn't trigger conversion of long texts to MMS though.

Re: your forgot a bit

EDF claim lifetime (construction,operation,fuel & decomission) CO2 emissions of 11gCO2e/kWh for wind power, 16gCO2e/kWh for nuclear, against a whopping 870 for coal. PV doesn't do so well at 72 but there's a lot more available roofs near the grid ;)

Focussing exclusively on construction cost is misguided if not actively mischievous.

Re: Screens

I spend much of my day with side by side documents, wide is good. 3 monitors wide is better...

Re: lets start a new craze

I went through my entire secondary education wearing the school uniform tie as a belt. They never did get round to specifying how the uniform was meant to be used ;)