Posts by Buzzword

Bluetooth

Why is Apple forever reinventing the wheel? We already have a perfectly good standard for streaming audio wirelessly to speakers; it's called Bluetooth. It can even support MP3 and AAC natively (though few implementations do), so no need to decompress and re-compress the audio and hence no loss of fidelity. Certainly it should be easier to add MP3 support than to invent a whole new proprietary wireless standard.

Huawei Ascend G300

Worth mentioning that you did a review of this one a few months ago, where it was only worthy of an 80% rating. Somehow it's 90% now, despite nothing having changed?

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/06/25/review_huawei_ascend_g300_android_smartphone/

Lions don't drink coffee

Java isn't included by default in OS X Lion or Mountain Lion. This considerably reduces the number of potential victims: from all users to just those who have gone to the trouble of downloading Java. I can't remember the last time I needed to use Java on my home computer.

Fragmentation

When will companies learn?

- Nokia has hundreds of phones

- RIM (Blackberry) has a dozen different phones

- Apple has one iPhone, one iPad

Guess which company is doing best?

The success of the early Kindles was partly down to the fact that there was just one model. Developing apps for the iPhone and iPad is vastly simplified by having only a handful of devices to worry about. Android developers complain about hardware fragmentation: there are thousands of possible combinations of screen resolution, processor speed, memory, GPS, Bluetooth, etc. Customers look at all the confusion, shrug their shoulders, and go to the Apple store instead.

"You may think an entrepreneur may have enough on their plate already...."

Yes, but I can think of plenty of specific examples where a start-up requires clarity and certainty from government before embarking on expensive product development costs. For example if you're inventing a self-driving car, you might want to lobby government to amend the rules of the road. Your investors will want clarity on who bears the financial burden in the event of a self-driving car malfunctioning and killing the driver; that might require a change in the law too. Another example is LightSquared, who thought they had covered their backs by seeking prior approval from the FCC, only to have their business plan vetoed by the Army.

You can't compare Web 2.0 companies to Microsoft and Apple. When Bill Gates was tinkering about in his garage, he wasn't treading on established industry toes; he wasn't entering into a heavily regulated field. By contrast these Web 2.0 shops are upsetting the music industry's apple-cart; they need clarity in the law and where technology is evolving quickly the law is often left behind.

I'm not saying that what Google is doing is right; I'm simply pointing out that there is a case for start-ups lobbying government in some situations.

Door stickers are bad

Rather than putting the sticker on your door, the label should go on the parcel instead.

So your address could read:

John Smith OR next door at number 47,

48 Sinclair Way

Bogcaster BOG1

As others have pointed out, being able to pick up parcels at local late-opening shops would be much more useful. For drivers the nearest 24-hour petrol station; for non-drivers a corner shop or similar. For those who are truly house-bound.... well they'll be at home to answer the door, so non-delivery is not an issue.

Nice idea, but....

It's all very well having a simplified interface, but when the underlying laws and regulations are fiendishly complex then it's not a great deal of help. The Revenue's pages on IR35 alone would take up a ream of printer paper. Benefit and tax credit recipients often have to resort to Citizens Advice or similar agencies to help calculate what they are owed. Putting a pretty skin on it doesn't change the underlying complexity.

For simple things like renewing your car tax I can see it being useful though.

Positioning?

Since there's no GPS indoors, the usefulness might be limited. Can Google's apps triangulate nearby wifi signals accurately enough to tell you where in the building you are?

A body which supplies doctors with training and advisory services recommends that doctors need more training and advice. Now there's a surprise.

Up to 30mph only

The system is only engaged at speeds below 30mph. So it's strictly limited to jam conditions; it's not a super cruise control system. No doubt future versions will support higher speeds, after a few years of real-world testing.

"a hybrid SSD using 256GB of Flash and 1GB of RRam ... yielded an 11x increase in write performance"

Why not just use 1GB of regular RAM, with battery backup for short-term non-volatility? That would provide the same speed boost to the SSD.

Electricity only, not gas or oil

This wonderful figure of 80% only covers us for electricity consumption, not gas or oil for heating. In the UK, only 30% of gas consumption goes towards generating electricity; the rest is used in homes and businesses. Using renewables to provide electricity is the easy part; it's much harder to use them to provide heat.

The long arm of the law doesn't reach that far

The UK's cyber-cops can't raid crims in the Ukraine, Nigeria, or China; so defence remains a better option than attack.

Animated vs changing gate numbers

If a gate number can be changed dynamically, it may not be a far stretch to change the colours too, in order to match Masabi's requirements. I'm trying to access the Apple dev site to confirm this, but the site seems rather slow today.

Typical use?

What are people using these mini-PCs for? Are they enterprise thin-clients, home theatre devices, or simply just for hobbyists (i.e. messing around)? Or do they occupy a niche e.g. embedded systems?

Genuinely curious - this is not a flame!

Tampons

"There's a growing consumer backlash against highly targeted advertising that uses personal data..."

Any technology which reduces the number of tampon ads that I (as a man) must endure can only be a good thing!

Dilbert covered this

We've seen the "social search" idea before:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2006-05-13/

Staggering?

£1349 sounds reasonable, considering that the 27" iMac starts at £1,399 (admittedly with a Core i5 rather than an i3).

Most-started programmes != most-watched programmes

I started watching an episode of Come Fly With Me on iPlayer once. I never made it to the end because it was so awful. Do their stats include people like me who thought "oh this looks promising" and started watching a show, but then never made it to the end? I'd quite like to see a list of top-ten shows that people actually managed to sit through.

Reinventing the wheel

Why is JavaScript being hacked and cajoled into all these contortions, when there are perfectly good languages out there such as Java or C# which support "sandboxes and module loaders, array comprehensions, binary data objects, built-in hash maps and sets, and super-method calls, block scoping, array comprehension, maps and proxy"? Wouldn't it be easier to just take an existing language and plug in the DOM-related functions?

Turkeys

"Three quarters of forensic scientists were opposed to the closure of the Forensic Science Service".

In other news, three quarters of turkeys are opposed to Christmas. Farmers have been accused of failing to listen to the advice of CTAs (Chief Turkey Advisors).

No support for wideband speech (HD Voice)

This headset only supports Bluetooth Hands-Free Profile version 1.5, not the new version 1.6 which was ratified last year. That means it doesn't support HD Voice. Perhaps not a big deal today, with relatively few phones or networks supporting the standard; and not so important for a headset which will be mainly used for listening to music; but nonetheless a shame to omit.

HD Voice?

I can understand losing Orange SignalBoost when you change the ROM, but surely HD Voice is just a standard built-in phone feature?

Maybe the reason Mint is so popular is simply because the taskbar & start menu look and feel very much like Windows. (Whereas Unity doesn't.)

Gary

No reference to Gary McKinnon? Come on Reg, his story used to feature regularly on these pages.

Ambilight is patented

That's why other manufacturers haven't copied it.