Posts by Tom 38

Re: Bobak Ferdowsi

Nah, you're missing it entirely. In America, as soon as you emigrate, you become '****-American'. Instantly. You are now just as American as the WASP down the street. As as soon as you know the patriotic chants (hint: "USA! USA! USA!" goes down pretty well), that's it, you've made it.

Contrast that to the UK, where even 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants will cling forcibly to their old nationality, and not consider themselves "British" in the slightest (qv the Tebbit test). I think the US does a better job of integrating (legal) immigrants into mainstream society than any other country.

Having said that, it is funny in cities with strong Irish links (Chicago, Boston etc), on St Patricks Day, everyone is Irish. Even the Mexicans!

Entitlement is part of being a fandroid

FTFY

So you get all the choice, and the developer of the app gets none? If your choice is between an app that costs £5 and is protected by the developer against copying by using DRM, and a pirated version from a russian app store that costs nothing, you would choose the pirated version and feel morally justified in your decision?

And they say Apple has the reality distortion field.

Re: hmm

Apple used to be a niche product, and you would have to travel to get to one of these very swish, very expensive retailers, often paying a lot more than the list price.

Nowadays, Apple has stores in most major cities, and even where they don't, you can go into a PC World and buy an ipad or a macbook. Everyone - well, anyone buying apple kit - also has access to the internet to order these things directly from Apple if they want.

Put simply, these resellers are an anachronism representing such a tiny proportion of Apple's sales that other channels should have priority for new products. Why should Apple have to hold back stock from a major distributor to give to a minor reseller?

Re: It's the carriers, not Google or the handset manufacturers

So no operator branded phones or manufacturer branded phones? Doesn't leave much choice does it?

Re: and nobody's truly on the hook for the first mile

Look, whilst sometimes the quality of BT's cabling leaves something to be desired, most commonly it is the wiring inside your own house that is the biggest issue. If you don't have a replacement NTE5 faceplate on your master socket and plug your router into that socket, then you will be getting a sub-optimal line performance.

This will translate into low line synch speed, intermittent errors and increased susceptibility to atmospheric conditions.

My old boy lives 8km from the exchange and had difficulty maintaining any connection until I fitted one of these. A few calls to BT to get them to reset the line training, and he now gets 3.5 MB.

Incidentally, this is what BT used to install when all installations were an engineer install. These DIY broadband installations work fine when there aren't any problems, but they should really insist on a faceplate installation as soon as there are any complaints.

"Lets you buy a copy of a film or show and watch it anywhere"

Anywhere they choose, on a device they have approved, assuming I have pre-downloaded the media and my device is still authorized to play the media. If I accidentally lose the downloaded file, and I bought it more than two years ago, then I can't download another copy of it, and it is still "illegal" to rip a copy of the film from a bluray.

I'll start buying movies again when they start selling them in HD in a format I can use. Until then, they can go spin.

Re: I'm puzzled

His partner screwed the pooch on the 4th dive, ensuring they finished 4th (instead of gold, which is the position they were in before the 4th dive). It's well documented on any sports site, less so on IT sites...

Re: Of course you need to use both

If you are suggesting using xbindkeys or .xinitrc as ways to launch xterm without involving the X11 GUI, then I think your cunning plan may have some flaws.

Re: I sneer at your LHF,...

The problem with SuperUltraViolet is that due to everyone and their dog taking unrelated terms and using them for new products is that it might be confused with an effective version of a digital download plus DRM scheme.

By your logic, if everyone complained we might get a useful downtick in unemployment. So, please, everyone complain!

Re: Baffled now.

Indeed, if Aggers, Blowers and Sir Viv have rubbished it, it must be useless. Yea flash, talk nah.

Re: Prior Art

Surely they get paid per application, rather than per patent that they issue. I can't imagine that if you apply for a patent and it is denied, that you do not pay anything.

In which case, if the USPTO simply wanted to maximise revenue they would reject each patent application outright, forcing each patent to be re-submitted at least once before approval.

(In reality, you pay a filing fee in order for the patent to be examined, and pay a maintenance fee every X years, so maybe they just think the more on the books, the more they will make)

Re: What a ridiculous situation

Are you trolling?

MS have/had an OS monopoly that they unfairly abused to gain a browser monopoly. The EU fined them because they refused to do anything about it, the fine gets ratcheted every time they "accidentally" stop obeying the ruling.

Google have a monopoly on search, which they use to promote their own services above others and subsidize other, non profitable services so that they under cut similar services provided by other companies. Once they have achieved a dominant market position, they ramp up prices. The EU are considering whether this is anti-competitive.

Apple, as many gleefully tell us, have neither a monopoly on phones, nor on their OS, app store or music store, so what they force/require their users to do is irrelevant; they can simply use a different phone.

Re: Oh Joy @ Boris

Hello! It looks like you're trying to troll on the internet...

"Cedega" or "Play on Linux" are just Wine.

@SpaMaster

Who do you think buys the kids their lego sets?

Re: Simplifying?

When a program tries to access an address in swapped out memory, it generates a page fault. The OS then has to locate an unused page, or a page that has not recently been used, move that out to disk, load the requested page from disk and insert it into the page map.

Under this system, the page fault is eliminated. When the program tries to access a page, it is not paged out, it is on the FusionMemory device, on DRAM or on disk. When most of the data you need to access is on DRAM, or can be intelligently put on DRAM by the FusionMemory device, you get massive speed ups.