Posts by Dave 126 10675 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
>[this is how] Osama's computer was set up
With that wording, "set up" can either be taken as meaning 'installed normally' (i.e "I bought a new computer and I set it up on my desk"), or as meaning 'manipulated / interfered with' (i.e "It wasn't me officer, honest, someone has set me up!")
> But what's interesting to consider - is there a way that a computer program could induce EM noise into either the mains or the environment,
That thought occurred to the researcher in the article... he says he unplugged the power cables from the laptops, leaving them to run on their own batteries during testing.
>I know 10x more Sony Android phone owners than I do people that own the Windows phone disaster...
>> I've never seen a single Sony Android, though I don't look closely at every phone I see.
Well, that's anecdotal evidence for you... the good people in my local beer garden have between them three Sony Android phones (an Xperia Z, T, and P) and three WinPho 8 phones... and that's not including the bloke who has a HTC HD2 running WinMobile 6.x that his sister gave him. But hey, that's just a sample pool of several dozen regular drinkers.
Amongst the younger pub users, it does seem to be mainly Samsung Galaxies and iPhones.
>google even allow you to do it and sell it via the play store.
If a manufacturer forks Android, Google will prevent them from using the Play Store, Gmail Client, Google Maps and any other app that requires the (closed source) Google Play Services library (which they promote to app developers as offering advanced functionality and better hooks into the hardware)... This is maybe why Samsung phones ship with Samsung apps that appear to duplicate the functionality of Google's offerings (i.e there is a Samsung App store, Samsung Translate, Samsung Mail, Calender, S Voice dictation etc.); Samsung have been hedging their bets.
@Mr Roberts
You can easily experience what a desktop UI feels like on a mobile phone by using a remote desktop app and controlling your desktop machine from your phone. It's doable, but you wouldn't want to make a habit of it. Early versions of Windows Mobile, aka WinCE (for good reason) also tried to bring something that look like desktop Windows to small screens.
Microsoft with Win8 and Canonical with Ubuntu are trying to develop UIs that can be used across screen sizes... Apple aren't bothering, save for bringing some iOS-style multitouch gestures to OSX (note to MS; OSX incorporated gestures in addition to existing menus, 'corners' and keyboard shortcuts. Not genius, just common sense.)
Yep, when there doesn't appear to much to choose between Sony's, Samsung's and HTC's flagship offerings, go with the waterproof phone. Let's hope that it becomes a standard feature on phones in future.
There is a waterproof version of the Galaxy S4, (S4 Active) but it isn't available as part of a UK contract AFAIK, at least on EE.
Mandatory downvote for using the word 'sheeple', regardless of the topic.
It's a word that betrays a shitty attitude that says "I know better than than the great unwashed, my opinions are are a result of my superior powers of perception. It is obvious that the poor proles are merely following the herd and are incapable of weighing their own requirements against what is being offered to them by company X, because otherwise they would have the very same opinion as I do. Aren't I a smart and independent-thinking kinda guy?"
The purpose of ink jet printers is to be sold at £25 to encourage users to buy ink at a greater cost per gram than cocaine. They might try 3rd party cartridges, but sometimes don't work very well, depending on the model of printer and the make of cartridge. Even the kosher cartidges drey up, as you say, and by the time you've got the IPA and lint free cloth out of the drawer things have got messy.
B&W laser printers are pretty cheap these days, and if a photograph is worth printing, then it is usually worth getting it printed at any large supermarket / high street.
I don't do much printing at home - normally I email documents - so hadn't used the household's Brother WiFi printer until last week. Okay, I thought, it should just show up in my Printers and Devices, right? No. Okay, I'm unlikely to find its original CD, so I'll just download the drivers... what a mess the Brother website is.
The option Brother wanted me to download is 145 MB... "But I just want to print and leave the house!". Though less than clear, I did find a smaller driver download, but the process could have been so much easier.
When I was in my early teens I tried to install OS/2 Warp, and gave up.
When I was in my late twenties, an ATM in South America decided to reset itself whilst my credit card was insde it... upon rebooting, I took a picture of its OS/2 splash screen. I had to stay in town an extra day to retrieve my card from the bank who operated the machine. My thanks to the Peruvian Transport Police.
>And ZevenOS, really? 'Get weird' with just another Ubuntu remix (as if there weren't enough already)?
Read the article again; the reference to ZevenOS was contained within brackets, i.e it was only mentioned as a passing remark, a footnote to the article.
> because someone seems to have started making machines that cannot be user serviced, or upgraded at all, so they go obselete very quickly
Obsolete? Really? Through the nineties and into the early 2000s it was sensible to buy a new desktop for around £1000, because the software and new uses would mean that more CPU, RAM and HDD was always desirable, not to mention having to add stuff like soundcards, CD-ROMs and scanner cards (IRQs, joy). In the mid 2000s, there just wasn't that much that more power would do for the general user, since by then a £500 (or cheaper) machine could happily do all the email, DTP, image editing, web-browsing and DVD playback that a general user would need.
My laptop was bought several years ago, and still performs excellently for CAD and the like. It could always be faster on a render or whatever (and an SSD wouldn't hurt it), but it is very far from being obsolete.
AC was probably using the brand as shorthand for the OS's perception amongst both consumers and developers. You can tell he didn't mean for it to be taken literally because he placed quotation marks around it.
The Android logo has been used prominently on some hardware packaging in the past (if only to indicate that it was a 'smartphone' and not a feature phone, or that the device was more than just a portable media player), when it wasn't as well known amongst consumers as it is today. Using a logo in that way is what people usually take to be 'branding', being as it is akin to marking symbols on the rear end of cattle with a hot branding iron.
That said, wasn't there a recent Reg article about a survey that found they general public had a greater awareness of Samsung than they did Android?
@Dave K
>Show me an Apple product with a design like that.
Here you go!
http://images.apple.com/keyboard/images/hero_1.jpg
They do look very similar, albeit from just one specific angle. The placement of a power button at the end of a cylinder probably didn't originate with Apple though... some older Sony VAIO laptops had a similar design (though the power button was green). Like this Lenovo Yoga, the VAIOs used a cylinder since it was a part of a hinge mechanism (whereas the cylinder shape on the Apple wireless keyboard comes from the shape of the AA batteries it contains):
http://www.pocketables.com/images/2008/09/22/sony_vaiotz.jpg
However, Mr Bough is incorrect to say that Lenovo have nothing beyond copying Apple... The original Lenovo Yoga looks to be a good design, simpler and more sensible than some other laptop/tablet hybrid designs. That is not their only interesting laptop... the beastly Lenovo W700ds mmobile workstation with two screens is unlike anything Apple have ever made:
http://www.pclaunches.com/entry_images/1208/23/lenovo_thinkpad-W700ds-thumb-450x353.jpg
C'mon Mr Campbell
There are people with restricted use of their hands through arthritis, just as there are people have less motor control of their hands for a variety of reasons, some with less strength in their fingers.
Even if your phone never slips from your fingers, you might trip and fall down... in which case you would want to be able to call for help even if you've fallen on your phone in your pocket. (I do hope you don't fall over!)
Other people have young children who might drop a phone onto the ground.
Personal experience does have a place in product design, but taking the experience of others into account can often result in the better product.
There's no shortage of pirate stations in London... in fact it's hard to find a slot in the spectrum to use an FM transmitter in your car to relay your own choice of audio to a stereo that lacks an aux input.
That's another area where perceived progress was actually regression: Many tape-based car stereos had aux-inputs marked 'CD'... when CD playing head-units became the norm, the aux-input became rarer.
>surely is just to make all future radio sets (particularly those in cars) have to support dab as well as fm. Then when you want to switch in a few years it won't matter because everyone will have dab capacity.
Why would I buy a new radio in the next few years? There are lots of FM radio sets that have worked for a very long time, and will continue to do so for many years. It be a shame to throw out a Roberts or a Sony after decades of faithful service!
@Capt J
I love Radio 6 Music, and I won't deny that FM stations are limited. That was taken into account in my argument, and I did state that DAB has more stations that FM.
Basically, the cons outweigh the pros.
Today you can walk into any supermarket and walk out with a £3.99 device that will let you hear the news, some comedy and some music, and continue to do so for many many hours on a single battery... making it £25 for a device that only lasts a few hours is just silly. Really, it's like the difference between a CREE LED and a Xenon flash-light in terms of battery life. One of the genuinely useful technological advances in the last decade is that when you pull a torch out of your glovebox today, there is a very good chance the damned thing is ready for use.
FM Radio:
- inexpensive sets,
-very good battery life (weeks of occasional listing on two AA batteries)
-audio is in sync between sets in different rooms (not true of DAB sets)
-speech remains largely comprehensible when reception is poor.
-sets turn on instantly
DAB:
-Expensive sets (of which I would need two at home plus one in the car and one for the jacket pocket)
-terrible battery life,
- only a slightly wider selection of content than FM
-Audio quality rapidly becomes intolerable when reception is poor.
-audio quality not fantastic, even in ideal reception (poor codec)
Internet:
-Thousands of stations and podcasts, plus streaming services from Spotify et al.
-Many people already own the required hardware
-Sound quality can be very good.
If I wanted the things DAB offers, I'd be better off using the internet. I already possess the hardware, and there is literally a whole world of content available. Leave FM alone - there is a place for easy, cheap, low power listening. DAB shares the disadvantages of internet-enabled devices (expense and poor battery life) but offers only a shadow of their advantages.
I'm not sure what is difficult to grasp here.
>Finally, as far as I can tell, it's unbrickable, perhaps a legacy of supporting non-technical corporates for so long?
Being based on QNX - a Real Time OS with a long history of being used where reliability is paramount, such as industrial machine control - probably has something to do with it.
>13 inch maxi-pad... Surely that's a very limited market.
It is, and so you'll £1200 for the privilege:
http://uk.shop.wacom.eu/products/cintiq
...but you do get a market-leading digitiser for your money.
I think Apple could be serving their traditional core of users (graphic designers and digital artists) by teaming up with Wacom, but then there is always a Modbook Pro, starting at $2900 - again with a Wacom digitiser.
@Petrea Mitchell
Thanks for joining in! I just wanted to express my ignorance because whilst toys (educational or otherwise) are marketed between girls and boys differently, I didn't want to start a nature / nurture / cultural influences type debate.
How the cultural pressure can be challenged (and in this thread, with respect to programming and technology more widely) is an important question... but that's getting into sociology, which is a bit too fuzzy for my particular brain to deal with!
Re. Gears and things, I find solid-state audio players very boring compared to some of the beautifully engineered disc/tape ejection mechanisms found in Walkmans, camcorders and Minidisc players. Many people have a preference for mechanical watches over quartz models, for much the same reason.
Steve Crooks' point about smartphones is interesting because smartphones already have motion / light / sound sensors built in. Okay, the lack of standardisation between models would cause some issues, but I could imagine a class project to make a 'burglar alarm' from a smartphone ( IF no light detected AND foot steps detected THEN make a alarm sound and flash light )
Okay, there is a case to be made for not giving young children smartphones (they don't need to text each other and play games in school) but a phone is a mobile package of CPU and sensors...
On another note, does anyone else remember those RadioShack / Maplins kits that were a board of electronic components (transistors, diodes, relays, a transformer, a CCD etc) that allowed circuits to be created by just clipping pieces of wire into spring-terminals? I made smoke come out of mine...
@Steve Crook
Sorry mate, I wasn't being clear.To be honest, I was rambling a bit because my head was buzzing with how great it would be to 8 years old again with some of this kit! (For years I resented my primary school for possessing a BigTrak but not letting me play with it!)
I didn't mean to advocate the Pi (nor dismiss it), I was just trying to step back from the issue and think about how programming might be used in education by writing down some unordered thoughts : D
Upon reflection, I think that teaching some programming and then having it integrated into other subjects where appropriate (much like mathematics is) might be a good idea... but it is only my opinion and I have no expertise or credentials in education (other than I have been subjected to it!).
Disclosure: I should be considered a complete beginner in programming. I read about BASIC when I was in primary school, but hardly wrote more than a few lines. I did a bit of Hypercard a few years later, and at university I used a little bit of VB with Powerpoint, in order to create a mock-up of a MP3 player interface (in the 'information ergonomics' module of my Product Design course.
>been brought up on a diet of XBox and Playstation, near-photo-quality 3D graphics, realistic physics and immersive audio,
So, use those attributes to teach things. Something like Gary's Mod, for example, allows for Python Scripting. Class project? Design a Rube-Goldberg style mousetrap. Physics. Cause and Effect. If X happens then do Y.
Whilst you're at it, teach them to record and edit audio. Take it into the music class. Let them mess it up by setting the recording levels too high - they'll learn from that. Have them re-create their school in a virtual space. Use a Kinect (low cost low res 3D scanner) and integrate into Design and Technology. Some of them might become engineers.
A crazy amount of biological research (a science subject that attracts more females than some other science and technology subjects) involves programming and computation these days. Let's have some 3D proteins and enzymes floating around and interacting. What happens when we turn up the temperature? Do they interact faster, or do they become denatured?
Zoology, have a virtual ecosystem. What happens to the population of herbivores when I remove all the apex predators? (hint: it doesn't grow steadily)
I had a graphical calculator when I studied calculus. It was an aid,
However, hand skills are very important. Mental arithmetic, laying out engineering drawings by hand, laboratory skills. I had a graphical calculator when I studied calculus; it was a great aid to visualising, but it didn't replace doing things by hand on graph paper.
I agree with the last section of the article. How to engage children with programming? Some unordered observations follow. I'm concious that I was once a young boy, and that these points would benefit from someone who was once a young girl:
The LEGO 'Mindstorms' look excellent (i.e my 8 year-old self would have given his Tonka truck for it!) but are expensive. LEGO Technic taught me about gears, screw threads, differential gearboxes and pneumatics, for example. Destroying some LEGO lights by using them with a 12V model train controller taught me something too...
These days, a IR controlled mini-helicopter can be bought for 15 quid, containing a silicon gyro and a chip to keep it level... a programmable autopilot function wouldn't be much pricier. The "ten minutes play, 50 minutes recharge" nature of its battery seems ideal for programming its actions in advance and then observing the results.
Children like inventing and designing things, look at computer-game inspired 'fan art' or new levels drawn on paper.
What is programming? Just a formal way of expressing "if X happens, then do Y". If car leaves track on left, steer right.
What young boy could watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ErEBkj_3PY 'Robots that fly... and cooperate' without going 'Wow!'?
I'm having trouble separating programming from other 'tech' orientated disciplines, such as CAD modelling and 3D printing (Design an action figure, print an action figure. Add motors, sounds and actions) in the education space.
The enemy of these creative activities might be the polished nature of pre-made video games and branded toys.
Being able to solder is a useful skill.
The government is trying to get more men to become primary school teachers. The government is also trying to recruit more Design and Technology teachers of either gender. By law they cannot offer bigger grants to men studying to become Primary school teachers, but they can and do offer a bigger grant for Design and Technology (as well as for Science subjects). Why is this relevant? Just look at the gender make up of Reg readers... ...it would seem more of us men have an interest in these things.
I haven't got around to BluRay yet either, but then I haven't got a big TV to make it worthwhile. Watching movies round at my mates' look better for BluRay, though some of them are well enough served by download or streaming video services.
As a back-up medium, the blank discs are about £2 each (25 GB), so about £80 per TB... so don't work out cheaper than external HDDs, and more hassle too.
For shunting big projects (such as raw video footage) between locations, a few USB thumbsticks will do the job nicely.
>rhinos have evolved to be baddasses for a freakin' reason you neutered freaks!
This is an example of sexual selection [of randomly occurring mutations] driving evolution. Male rhinos have become 'baddasses' because if they didn't they would lose out on the mating game to males that have. It's an arms race of sorts. Before humans caused the number of rhinos to drop, the level of collateral damage in the mating game was sustainable... after all, they are not as vulnerable to predation as some herbivores. In fact, counter-intuitively, deaths amongst females and young helped secure long term survival of rhinos, because it reduces the chance of population spikes (which tend to lead to population crashes by means of exhausting resources, a weak point at which a slight change in their environment can then be catastrophic for the species). For similar reasons, creatures that find themselves on remote islands without predators tend to breed slowly (see the Kakadu parrot). However, rhinos' current situation is one in which they are preyed upon upon- by us - and limiting a population spike is not currently a concern.
Taking this male out of the game probably won't affect the species too much; if he's that old and tough, he's probably already contributed plenty to the gene pool. It might be distasteful to shoot him for money, but that doesn't change the nature of the game.
Okay Khaptain:
If he's not in the same field as a female he can't breed naturally.
If you're going to use artificial insemination (good luck with that... at either stage of the operation) then you can freeze it for later use.
Park Warden: Well, animals are not like people, Mrs. Simpson. Some of them act badly because they've had a hard life, or have been mistreated. But, like people, some of them are just jerks
I think the desire to have the mouthpiece near your mouth is mostly psychological- multiple microphone noise cancellation does a pretty good job these days.
Still, I really liked the ergonomics of some 'slider' phones: Slide open to take a call, slide shut to end it.
>That said, being curved in this plane makes more sense than the Samsung version!
I dunno, the Samsung will fit against the thigh if placed in a front trouser pocket in 'portrait' orientation.
>Not just that - SLRs also have a sensor worthy of the name.
Fair enough, but it's a sliding scale of image quality vs portability. That sweet spot on the scale will depend on the individual user, and some people will get more from either a larger or a smaller camera.
It's worth noting that much of the bulk of a DSLR isn't to do with image quality per se, but with enabling phase-shift auto-focus and enabling an optical view finder. You can get an APS-C sensor in pocket-friendly (okay, a jacket pocket) cameras such as the Sony RX100, (The trade-offs are not being able to swap the lens, no optical viewfinder, no phase-shift AF, possibly compromised manual controls...).
A nature photographer, walking for day in the wilderness, might choose a micro 4/3rds camera, since its 200mm-equivalent zoom lens won't be as big and heavy as its equivalent for an APS-C DSLR.
Some people will even benefit from using a medium-format camera, which can make a DSLR look positively compact by comparison! Again, its a sliding scale; a studio-based photographer won't benefit from having a more portable camera.
The images I've seen independent reviewers produce from the Nokia PureView are damned impressive for its size. Each pixel might be small, but the thing is designed to interpolate the small pixels together, unless you're using the 'zoom' (read: crop). Since a lot of zoom photography takes place in daylight (holiday snaps of landmarks etc) each tiny pixel receive plenty of photons. The '42 mega-pixel' claim might be technically accurate, but is missing the point. Refreshingly, the last few generations of 'premium compacts' largely settled on around 10 mega-pixel sensors - their target market understood why.
> she asked what the 'disk' icon for save was supposed to be.
You should have then told her that computers in your day had actual waste bins in them...
My 2010 laptop has a light above the keyboard to indicate HDD activity... the shape of this light? A drum!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory
>that displayed characters in perfect copper plate writing all driven by a 'Heath Robbinson' contraption.
Okay, having 'joined-up' writing (copperplate) is a whole extra level of complication, as we know from computer fonts... that's just showing off! However, automatic 'hand'-written text has been around for a long time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUa7oBsSDk8
- clip from the BBC programme Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams, Professor Simon Schaffer examines a clockwork creation of Pierre Jaquet-Droz ((1721–1790))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Jaquet-Droz
The recent Martin Scorcese film 'Hugo' contains an automaton based on Jaquet-Droz's.
For the purposes of having a display unit that can be reset, a wax tablet could be used, and a sharp point in place of a pen. You could delete the display by heating it from below- the surface would be horizontally mounted, and displayed vertically by means of a mirror just like an old PacMan arcade cabinet. Obviously the mechanism would be constructed so as to output 'mirror writing'. )
>Strange how you make a link with Oscar Wilde on reading the article.
Well, Oscar Wilde was a part of the Arts and Crafts movement by virtue of being a critic, and an advocate of 'Honesty of Materials' which has filtered through the decades to influence designers such as Dieter Rams. Not only that, but Wilde once descended upon San Francisco and criticise the aesthetic choices and craftsmanship of the residents:
AMERICAN BARBARISM
The Apostle of Estheticism Exposes Our Sins.
INARTISTIC CRIMES OF COMMISSION.
The Aristocracy of Minna Street
Gratuitously Insulted by a Disquisition on Mortar.
-http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist5/wilde.html
But yeah, what Wilde's view of fox hunting have to do with Apple I'm not sure.
Why is it that these smart-watch articles - either here or elsewhere - never mention connected time-pieces from Citizen or Casio? True, they don't have colour screens, but they do provide notifications and have the benefit of looking like normal watches (Citizen's like a motor-racing style chronometer, and like any other G-Shock in the case of Casio).
There is going to be spectrum of functionality in smart-watches, from just doing the basics (incoming message alert) to the silly (side-loading normal Android apps onto the dual-core Galaxy Gear), and the chances are that any widely adopted solution will fall somewhere between the two.
Selective Laser Sintered titanium parts have very respectable mechanical properties, hence their use in aerospace and motorsport applications.
Still, there isn't enough detail in the article to inform me as to why this workflow is better than taking impressions (in clay or whatever suitable material) of the horse's hooves to create a mould.
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