Posts by Dave 126

Re: In context:

Cheers!

For what its worth, I was puzzled by the absence of an Apple reference design before the 2013 WWDC introduction of 'Made For i[device]' game controller support.

(One of my posts from 2012: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/1610886 )

This was a earnings call, which most public companies make to their investors, not a product announcement. Therefore one would expect there to be words like "Sales, net profit, fiscal, revenue, dollars" etc.

Re: Isn't this the equivalent of marching against malaria?

>Just not sure what benefit a march in masks promoting Warner Bros IP is going to do to improve that? It's like the lamest possible version of vigilantism.

I largely agree, Cliff. However, unlike past campaigns by national papers, it probably won't do any harm. After all, however lame the protest, they are only asking that a proper inquiry be conducted - so I'm inclined to give them benefit of the doubt this time.

You're right though - given the reasonableness of Anon's demands on this occasion, I don't see the need for the masks.

Re: Isn't this the equivalent of marching against malaria?

> Are you saying the police should 'do something'? They are doing something.

Really? What do the names Rotherham and Rochdale mean to you in the context of recent news coverage?

>Isn't this the equivalent of marching against malaria?

No, it isn't. It would be more the equivalent of marching against people being paid to research malaria but who are just sitting about.

>oh gawd, they're gonna start naming and shaming. and if they name the wrong people.... /o\

They don't seem to be doing a 'News of the World' and naming and shaming - or indeed indulging in any direct action. By their own words they are merely demanding that the Inquiry into Historic Child Abuse actually gets going, and isn't artificially limited in its scope as previous inquiries have been.

Whatever one thinks of their past actions, in this case they are behaving more responsibly than any Red Top newspaper.

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

Chris Morris and Brass Eye did a much needed and superb job of lampooning the media hysteria surrounding paedophilia. However, whilst the red tops like the News of the World were inciting vigilantism by people who didn't know what a 'paediatrician' was, Anonymous are merely calling for inquiries into the abuse of power:

"We demand independent inquiries untainted by the corrupt, with full power to investigate. We demand an end to secrecy,"

Well, they can dream. The record of British public inquiries is a bit poor. The current one into historic child abuse has failed to get off the ground. Chilcot's inquiry into the Iraq War has taken six years so far. Anonymous's view of this is no different to the writers of Yes Minister:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FRVvjGL2C0

Re: Isn't this the equivalent of marching against malaria?

>The whole justice system is deeply geared up to punish paedophiles already. I doubt it could be made more critical of paedophilia TBH - statutory rape of a minor has terms akin to murder, so what iis the march for, exactly?

The protesters take the view that the justice system has failed the victims of child abuse, especially historically. As we have seen with the Catholic Church, the structure of some organisations can offer individuals the opportunity to abuse children, and to have their colleagues ignore complaints or cover up their crimes. People working for churches, schools, children's homes and in entertainment have been convicted of child abuse, organisations that structurally aren't too different from police forces, the judiciary and politics.

Many of the survivors of abuse become troubled teenagers and young adults, and have issues with substances abuse, mental health and petite crime... this places them at a great disadvantage when making complaints or testifying against well-connected 'pillars of the community', should they even overcome their distrust of authority figures enough to even make a complaint in the first place.

Re: Court ruling

>Just implement a feature where using a certain digit (or password) invokes a hard data erase.

A buzzing alerts you to an incoming call. You fumble in your pocket to retrieve your phone, and run the wrong finger over the sensor...

Interesting concept, needs refining! :)

Re: If they felt AuthenTec was clearly superior

AC, for criticising someone who has answered a question with a fairly clear explanation of the system as it is, you are coming across as wilfully ignorant. Well done.

Re: Court ruling

>I find to hard to believe they could say that police can't force you to provide a password to unlock your phone but can force you to provide a finger.

It is a moot point, since it is only an engineering process to unlock an iPhone once you have a photograph of a fingerprint, and if you are arrested the police already take good images of your fingerprints:

Once he has the digital image, Krissler can use the same method he previously described for unlocking Touch ID with physically obtained fingerprints: he inverts the colors of the obtained print, so the ridges of the fingerprint are rendered in white and the grooves in black, then prints the image in black ink. The black ink on the paper provides just enough texture to recreate a fingerprint's three-dimensional shape, but inverted.

Krissler then pours glue or plaster over the print of the fingerprint. The ink print serves as a stamp, imprinting the fingerprint's whorls and ridges into the glue and creating a mold that can successfully unlock a Touch ID-locked iPhone 6.

- http://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-touch-id-hack,news-20066.html

Your fingerprints are found upon your person, just like a piece of paper with username and password details could be.

Re: Is this an issue for any PC using EFI

The proof-of-concept attack only attacks Macs, but it has never been seen in the wild - it needs the attacker to have physical access to the machine or else use social engineering to trick the user into attacking themselves.

The attack uses Thunderbolt, which is seen comparatively few non-Apple machines - there probably isn't a big enough pool or PC targets for it to worth an attacker's effort. Even on these PCs, "Intel has never allowed [PC] motherboard vendors to hang the Thunderbolt silicon / add-in card off the CPU's PCIe lanes. These have to hang off the platform controller hub (PCH). On the other hand, Apple was allowed to hook up the Thunderbolt silicon directly to the CPU."* so this might prevent a similar attack on generic PCs.

* http://www.anandtech.com/show/8529/idf-2014-where-is-thunderbolt-headed

As a PC user, I wish Thunderbolt was more common. The idea of a thin-n-light laptop plugging into an external GPU+monitor is an attractive one for CAD users- but I appreciate it might be a bit niche when USB 3 and ethernet takes care of most users' data transfer needs.

Re: Oh, dear...

Thanks AC, thanks OllyL...

They both appear to be apps that map mobile phone coverage... now what we need is an app to compare the apps that compare the networks! :-)

Re: The flipside of competition

Until Worstall writes a piece, the man who gave us the PHB has written:

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102544401421/confusopolies

Re: Oh, dear...

>I'd be willing to pay around a 15% mark-up over their competitors if I knew it was better.

Okay, let's roughly divide that 'reliability' into two categories:

- Day-to-day coverage of a wide geographical area. Okay, you can get some data for this, and make your decision accordingly.

- Protection from occasional blips in service. This is harder to judge, so is harder for companies to compete on. Every company has been known to mess up from time to time, so without knowing the future I'm not sure how you can make your choice based on this criterion. Okay, that extra 15% you pay might allow for some extra redundancy in some areas of the network, or possibly allow a system where you get priority over other customers during areas/periods of congestion... but it might only take one engineer to screw up once to deprive you of service for a few hours.

If you wanted the greatest possible reliability, you'd carry several phones on different networks and pack a satellite phone too. And a pager. Sod it: radios SW and CB, a scanner, Aldis lamp and flares.

Re: Nothing Nowhere

Nothing Nowhere = Something Somewhere <= Something Everywhere <= Everything Everywhere

Re: Oh, dear...

>What we really need is a reliable set of metrics, publically and independent, so that we can more easily see who is best on service. If the government wanted to do something useful with the networks, gathering and publishing official statistics would be the single best thing they could do

An app on people's phones might be the best way of gathering that information. After all, the phone knows where it is, and the phone can test its up/download speeds. Having tens of thousands of phones gathering this data would make such a coverage map fairly quick to compile.

Just an idea. I'm not sure who would be best to implement it. Maybe we'll end up with soft-SIMs, and just use whichever operator has the best signal in an area.

Re: I'm sure that any of these companies could do far better if they just doubled their prices

>Why is this a surprise? People shop by price, putting quantity over quality, as always.

Only they don't; in this market, people can't shop by price because it is near impossible to compare tariffs. It's what Dilbert-creator Scott Adams dubbed a 'confusopoly'.

https://fitforrandomness.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/confusopoly.png

Instead, people often go by which network offers best reception in their area, or ditch an operator if they get messed around by them.

The best way to get a good tariff is to buy your phone out-right, and then negotiate a SIM-only tariff, since they know that you can switch operator at any time. It also has the bonus that your phone is covered by the Sales of Goods Act, so if it malfunctions you can insist on a full refund or a straight swap for a new unit from the retailer, without having to wait a fortnight for a repair.

"£16, you say? Umm, seems a little high... £15... lower, lower, nah, lower or I'm switching to Vodaphone... £12? Okay, that'll do. Thank you."

Re: What accounts for fast radio bursts?

Depends upon the information density of the signal, and whether it is compressible - which would suggest a repeating component...

"We buy any UFO dot com! We buy any UFO dot com! We buy any UFO dot com! We buy any UFO dot com!"

Re: Whipped out the Newton the other day

>So unless Apple changes the whole iPad interface the whole thing just smells of fail.

Uh? Why?

My laptop has several interfaces (main OS plus UIs in applications), some supporting more than one form of Human Input. I might use a mouse to launch a game, and then use a joystck. I might use the keyboard to launch an application in which then use the mouse.

I don't see why iOS would have to be completely reworked for a stylus to work well in some apps.

If you look at OSX, they have integrated 'iOS-like' gestures such as pinch to zoom whilst retaining menus and keyboard short-cuts.

>• you can write on the resistive touchscreen without worries about where to put your hand

This can be faked in software. iPads already selectively ignore some finger input near the edge of the screen, when it suspects that it merely the hand that is supporting it. My laptop can be made to ignore its touchpad whilst I'm typing.

Re: re:some of us were not born with dainty little pinkies but chipolata digits

A stylus allows accuracy.

Finger input allows nuance, by interpreting multiple points of contact.

Some phones that relied on styli did so because their software wasn't well thought through - rough translations of mouse-driven desktop UIs.

A lot of interaction on a modern phone consists of selecting items from a list, or pushing a nice big button... the accuracy of a stylus isn't required, so why faff around finding a stylus?

Accuracy. As someone who draws, I have never found a phone to be a perfect replacement for a notepad. (I haven't yet used a Galaxy Note for long enough to judge it. )

There is a market for pen-driven tablets, especially markets that have been traditionally served by OSX Macs. See the Modbook (a pricey cut n' shut Macbook with a Wacom digitiser), or the Wacom Hybrid tablet.

Adobe, whose software works well with styli on OSX, have started to play in this space on iOS - their 'Project Mighty' is now called Adobe Ink, a hardware stylus and associated software.

Re: @AC "11 mins" whatever that means, ElReg (was:Whatever.)

>And that's "jake", not "Jake". Computers are quite literal. Are you?

As users of written English, we have conventions to make communication clearer. One convention is the capitalisation of proper nouns. It makes text easier for us to parse. One assumes that one would only break from this convention if there was good reason to do so. Can't think what it could be, though.

Re: @AC "11 mins" whatever that means, ElReg (was:Whatever.)

I think jake's point might have been that he doesn't see the point of encrypted communications because he never knows if the message recipient or their computer is trustworthy. Maybe he just works on the basis that there may be security holes in the encryption that he is not aware of.

Disc encryption is different in that you don't have to trust a second party. It is good practice, for the sake of client relations, should your laptop be stolen or lost.

I said might.... it is also possible he was just being a bit jake... he doesn't see why anyone would wear a wristwatch because our computers have clocks, yet his good lady wife is a keen horse rider.

Re: Basically he's declaring war on private conversation

>... What's next, a government mandated microphone in every pub bog and living room around the country?

Following the deaths in the last couple of decades of some older gentlemen with a cavalier attitude to the law and regulations, we keep meaning to sit the retired pub landlord down with a microphone for a week to record the oral history and anecdotes, before he too shuffles of the mortal coil. It lead me to thinking, if only there was a way to wire a pub for sound but with a mathematically-enforced 100-year embargo on the recordings.

I'm not a mathematician, but I'm not aware of any way of accomplishing that.

Re: Tizen's dead...

>So Tizen runs HTML5 apps, but no compatibility with the Android apps found on the vast majority of >Samsung smartphones.

>Given today's news, for the first time ever I believe Project Ara has a better chance of success than Tizen.

That was my first thought, but I'd never considered how developers are attracted to HTML 5... the yet-unrealised dream is that they write an app once and it runs on any platform.

Re: Tizen's dead...

>Ok Sammy might get some useful tech and possibly a few patents but what would they want with BB's os? Add a load of extra crud and make it like their Andriod offerings?

There is a very good reason why Samsung put that Touchwiz crud on their phones, and it is the same reason that they give you their own apps that duplicate the functionality of Google's, such as an app store, mail client, calendar and translator...

The reason is that Samsung want the option of leaving Google. The idea of Samsung having that option would give them more influence with Google. Samsung could potentially merely swap to the non-Googley AOSP Android - like Amazon have done - or go with Tizen or (possibly) QNX. The point is, whatever the OS, the user experience could be much the same as the existing TouchWiz UI that Samsung users are familiar with.

Thing is, Blackberry's QNX is a better fit for devices like smartwatches and wirelessly-controlled light bulbs. Android or Tizen could run a car's 'Infotainment Centre', but is reliable enough to run the car itself. Samsung, with their diverse product portfolio, could get more use out of QNX than BB have.

Re: Tizen's dead...

As I understand it, the main two issues with Tizen are the fuzziness surrounding its licencing, and the perception of it as being way too late to market to compete with other mobile phone OSs.

However, Samsung see it as an OS for TVs, watches, cameras and household appliances, from light bulbs to fridges, not just phones.

That said, Blackberry's QNX OS is more suitable for home automation (an area that Samsung, with its wide range of consumer goods and appliances, is competing in) as it is much smaller than Linux-based OSs, and because of its proven and certified reliability.

Samsung Buying Blackberry rumour... Interesting.

Re: I'm perturbed

>They have 'pertubate' as a verb in that list.

I've very rarely heard that word used as-is, but it is quite common to hear someone say "I was perturbed because [unsettling experience]".

Curious how sometimes only one use of a word is continues in common use.

Re: There... completed the assignment and used them all.

>melange is a French loan word than offers nothing more than mix or mixture.

Melange is also an English jargon term in Geology for certain bodies of mixed rock, and in gem stone trading for an assortment of diamonds of different sizes. Some also say it gives Guild Navigators the ability to fold space....