Posts by David Lucke

Leasing too pricey

Leasing should be the solution to the battery fade problem, but at £50 a month, its about the same price as I'm spending on fuel anyway, which gets rid of the operating cost savings that are supposed to be the ecar's big strength. 2 steps forward, 1 step back, honestly.

I'll be sticking with GoodReader, thanks. Excellant app, easy to use, with annotation and reflow, and fully integrated into various cloud storage, including dropbox. And, crucially, not made by that pisspoor excuse for a bloatware factory, Adobe.

Oh, random piece of trivia I noticed when googling Macromedia Flash: CEO of Macromedia when it was bought by Adobe in 2005 was a Mr Stephen Elop, whose name you may have noticed in other contoversial strategies recently...

To me, the most interesting part of this announcement was the android stack that allows them to run android apps. Granted, they'll probably run dog slow, but this sounds like it might be a viable option to get around the near total lack of BB developers. Tempt some android users over who like the idea of decent email and messaging (and haven't heard about the outages), whilst still being able to use their old apps.

Its not just a matter of having a bunch of astronauts ready to go when the funding starts. Its a matter of passing on the actual knowledge involved and keeping that alive. If all the current astronauts are dead or too old to fly when the mars mission starts gearing up, there will be no one who can train the marsnauts. Its the same reason we keep slowly building new subs we may not really need, any why we're going to have so much trouble ramping up nuclear reactor construction, a lot of this stuff is very dificult to get from book learning, not least because its not written down, or written down assuming other knowledge that isn't written down because "everyone knows it". If you don't have live people to pass it on, the knowledge gets lost.

DAMMIT!

I realised heard they were discounting them and assumed it would be like 2-300, still too much for something I don't have a real need for. <100?!!?! That's a ridiculous price. HP just doesn't have a clue. I would have got one like a shot if I'd realised they were that cheap! Dammit, dammit, dammit!

Doesn't say anything about FTL

All this experiment does is confirm that the optical precursor to a photon is still limited by the speed of light in a vacuum. No method of time travel or FTL travel has involved exceeding that speed in any case for decades - from pure fictional hyperdrives to seriously proposed topological methods (alcubierre "warp" drive), they all propose dodges to avoid needing to break light speed in the first place, and they are all still just as likely(or unlikely) as they were before this research was published.

A salutory lesson

If you don't control the servers, its not your game and you can be shafted at any time. A lesson on cloud computing in general, I feel.

Hmmm

Interesting. I tried opera on my original iPhone, and found it unusable because of the rubbish pan and zoom. I shall have to give it another try.

Cheap, but limited

Very unimpressive review, the critically important fact that this is cloud storage system for any data was casually tossed off at the end of the article, after the whole rest of the article kept going on about how it was for music. Poor show Reg.

Regarding the service itself, looks like a fairly basic, no-frills online cloud storage. Pros: Price is good - comparing to dropbox, which I use currently, storage costs less than half as much, 2 1/2 times the free storage,plus you can get as much as a 1TB, where dropbox maxes out at 100GB; Looks like a competent, simple access and management structure, with an undelete option. Cons: No frills - no automated folder syncronisation, no sophisticated backup or differential changes. No sign yet of whether they'll be publishing an API for third party programs to work from the cloud drive directly.

Overall, will probably be very successful. I won't be using it myself much, since the lack of 3rd party API means it won't be accessible from the iPhone, and I prefer to avoid giving Amazon money when I can, due to their evil, but these won't affect most people.

CloudPlayer looks a bit pointless to me. On a home machine, I'd rather download the mp3s and use a player of my choice, though YMMV, and as other's have commented, streaming is not workable over most mobile contracts these days (thanks for that helpful suggestion to change contracts whilst only 6 months into a 2 year contract, to a contract that isn't available for my handset).

Can't think of a title. Its too early on a Monday

Charles Stross posted this about writing on an iPad last year - its a bit out of date now, but its a good starting point. But to summarize, DocsToGo seems to the be the app of choice, with Pages a good competitor. Not sure about Word compatability, though.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/ipad-writing-stuff.html

Can't say I'm that tempted really

I'd love to see what this 3D macguffin is really like, but there's nothing very tempting in the release games, and the handset seems a bit limited. I suspect the next version will be more polished, but there will probably be alternatives by then. Will this be another Wii - an innovative and ground breaking technology demonstrator, but soon to be copied and surpassed by the competition?

Devil or the deep blue sea?

So, the only hope of competition to an arguably evil company is another arguably evil company. So I should be cheering for who now?

Amazon, after all, is often described as the Wallmart of bookstores for its many dodgy practices, most recently screwing publishers over ebook pricing, whereas Apple is screwing over content providers, including ebook publishers with its new in-app policies.

A pox on both their houses.

PEBKAC

As has been pointed out, the problem here is the perennial one of people clicking past popups. Training people to not do this remains one of, if not the, biggest security problems there is.

How's this for a possible solution? Treat it like any other emergency, and have semi-regular unannounced drills, as you would with a fire drill. Add a little something to the OS where every week or so a typical click-thru popup pops up, and if the user clicks through and ignores it, put up messages along the lines of "YOU HAVE FAILED THE TEST! IF THIS WAS REAL YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN ROOTED YOU LUSER!" (or words to that effect), and log it for the manager. Fail it 3 times and its gross negligence and you can be fired.

The timing of a week or so is an attempt to find a middle ground between "so many it infuriates users" and "so rare its useless", and may well need tweaking.

Possible extras:

Have this default to on in the OS, but have it turnable off, with difficulty, on a user by user basis - if home users can work out how to do it, they probably don't need it - but log that for the manager as well, so they can forbid it in a work environment.

Randomise the look and feel of the popup, with regular updates through Windows Update so people can't tell just by looking at it that its a popup drill.

I'm sure this will never actually happen, but can anyone see any obvious flaws (other than Microsoft will never do it)?

What are you people gibbering about?

"Jobs insistence on selling "the song" not the album."..."Steve's World provides no place for "The Dark Side of the Moon", "Wish You are Here"..." etc.

What the hell are you on? Search on itunes for the album, returns a list of all the songs in the album - hell, search for songs by an artist, returns a list of songs, with a column showing the album, and the songs ordered by album! Buy the songs from an album, stick'em on your ipod, and the default heirarchy is artist->ALBUM!>song. Tada! Now you can listen to your album! FFS! Its EASY to buy albums from itunes, its just you don't have to if you don't want to. Which given the utter trash filler in most albums, can only be a good thing.

Ad for JBJ, and his bullshit about the thrill of taking a risk...Many moons ago, before mp3s happened, having discovered and liked his early 90s stuff, I risked buying 7800 farenheight his second album, without having a chance to hear any of the songs first. It wasn't a thrill, it was a massive disappointment, not just no good songs, no even average songs, worst album I've ever paid money for. That's the kind of "thrill" I and every other consumer can do without, thanks.

@Steve X

"Does anyone really need more than 1or 2 Mbit/s at most from a phone?"

Wrong question. Its not just phones that use the mobile networks for data - tablets and laptops use 3G these days, and these definitely want more than 1-2 Mbits if they can get them.

Meh

This may or may not replace consoles, but it certainly isn't going to replace high-end PC gaming unless they add a mouse and keyboard control option.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits

Well, I guess his question was answered, then. That would be a 'yes'.

Interesting comparison choice here

Would have prefered more, or indeed any, comparison to the previous title, to be honest. That's certainly what I'll be comparing it to.

@ AlexS

Good grief. A few weeks worth of pointless rumour mill articles, and you pick the one with solid, reliable and, above all, *useful* information to have a whinge about.

Useful for a bit more than 3 years

You appear here to be assuming that despite the massive delays to the eurofighter meaning it won't be at full operational readyness until 2018, the f-35 will turn up as scheduled in 2021. I would submit that its quite likely that the f-35 will also not turn up for another 5 or 6 years later than expected, giving the Eurofighter nearly a decade of full service, or will be cancelled completely some time in this parliament or the next (along with the mothballing of the rest of the navy - after all, why would an island nation need any kind of fleet?) leaving the Eurofighter as the only aircraft option until we get the next generation of UAVs in. Say in 2100. Or 2200.

ITS GOT THUMBSTICKS!!!!!

Well, if you define the casual gamer as someone satisfied with Angry Birds, then yes, they'll not touch the NGP, because they've already spent hundreds of pounds on something that will satisfy their low aspirations.

On the other hand, if you want a proper gaming experience, iOS has yet to produce anything aproaching a workable FPS, driving game, or indeed any kind of game that you'd want to control with thumbsticks, because the touchscreen equivalents (and the gyroscope) are just fundamentally rubbish at controlling games. The original PSP was also pretty poor at FPS's with only one thumbstick, but the NGP has 2 and that is a potential game changer on portable gaming.

So, yeah, the NGP is probably only going to sell to the hardcore gamers, because apparently most sheeple are satisfied with the mini-game pap that floods the app store. Bitter? Me?

(on a related note, where the hell are all the god games and rpgs on the iPad? Command and Conquer? Baldur's Gate? They don't have to write new, just port the old ones! The damn thing could have been made for Black and White, for chrissakes! Civ:revolution is not enough!)

Sanity

Glad to see someone in the eCar business is talking some sense. If your object is to get a lot more people driving greener cars, perfectly eco-optimised £30,000 cars that are otherwise identical in function to a £12,000 familiy car is clearly not going to work. Only the very well-off, very green people will buy it. For the average person to buy an electic car, its got to be able to replace their current car *at the same price* or you might as well forget it.

There's also the whole range issue, as well, or course, but that's been chewed over enough already, I don't see the need to add to it.

Title

I'm not particularly convinced by all this linguistic analysis, dictionary searching crap, but Apple's "if you can trademark 'Windows', we can trademark 'App Store' " argument does seem pretty compelling.

Lucky escape

I was planning on giving Virgin a ring and start the upgrade tonight. Then I read this...

Best to leave it a few months, I reckon.

Memory?

"8GB of memory, which you can’t expand"

Yeah.

Next!

Hang on a minute, though - "So far, there’s really very little difference between WP7 handsets – they’ve all got broadly similar functionality and features"

I haven't really been paying much attention to the WinMo7 phones (whacking great blue or orange squares everywhere, god that inteface is ugly), does this mean they all have fuck all storage and no expansion? And they're really expected to go head to head with iPhone and Android? Not going to happen, not at the high end.

Data Protection Act

I wonder if Google has heard of the DPA? One of the requirements for storing data covered by the DPA is that is has to stay either in the UK or somewhere else that works with it. So it can't be stored in the US. How's that gonna work with Google's data shredding, server spreading wonderfulness?

HOW MUCH!!?!??!???!?!??!

THREE FIGURES for FUCKING HEADPHONES? Are you having a laugh?

In the real world, <£20 is cheap and nasty, £30-£50 is decent quality, but you're paying for it, >£50 is very good, but pricier than I'm generally willing to go. £330? £550??!!??!! You'd have to so rich that price tags have literally no meaning to you or stark raving insanse!

Meh

Oh dear, Apple's rubbish ebook reader is now even more rubbish. Boohoo. More users for the much better Stanza, then.

News at 11: Apple continues to shoot self in foot

@Turtle_Fan

"If we have a 30-day money back regime why shouldn't the Poles and Hungarians (to name a few) enjoy this too?"

The problem is that isn't necessarily how it would work out. Instead, we might end up with "hamonized" laws that gave no one a money back guarentee. Lowest common denominator = rubbish. Right now, we have a really good set of consumer protections, much better than a lot of places, and any one size fits all version is likely to be a compromise that gives far less to our consumers than they current get. Or at least, that is what they're concerned about.

Re: So.. exactly the same then

"Video calling.. meh." ... "With no other changes, I'm not seeing the point in the update."

Granted, we've not exactly seen anything to set the world on fire yet, but don't discount the bit about it being thinner. Thinner = lighter, and one the big stumbling blocks in using the original iPad as an eBook reader has been weight. This change will make it a lot more usable in that role.

Its worth noting, incidentally, that the increase in resolution doesn't need to be as good as the iPhone 4 to look the same. The whole point of the Retina display is that at 10-12 inches viewing distance, the typical distance for the iPhone, 300ish DPI means the human eye can't distinguish individual pixels. Because the iPad is typically used at around twice that viewing distance, you can get that same inability to distinguish pixels with a smaller DPI. How much smaller, I haven't a clue, but whilst the new iPad won't be shooting for 300, it may well be shooting for that smaller magic number, and thus may well look just as shiny as the iPhone4.

Jumping the gun again

The more I hear about this, the more convinced I am that a mountain is being made out of a molehill here. All we've had is some vague statements from Sony that the eReader has been refused because of inApp purchasing issues. That's IT. All the rest is supposition, speculation, inference and good old-fashioned making shit up.

Apple requires that it gets 30% of in-App purchases. Just like the apps themselves, this is its charge for providing a service, namely the interface and connectivity to make it work seamlessly and easily, the server storage for the thing being purchased, and the payment processing, none of which are easy or cheap to do. One might quibble over the percentage, but that they are providing a service that it is fair to charge for doesn't seem to be in doubt (though I'm sure many will disagree...)

Amazon has chosen not to go this route, and instead provides a link to their website where people can purchase their ebooks from instead. That means that they do their own storage, their own payment processing, and their own transport mechanisms, off their own back, and the prices for all that are figured into the cost of the ebook. This makes sense for them, because they have to do most that anyway for their non-iphone customers.

The key thing here is that nothing that Amazon is doing is costing Apple a penny, and so Apple has no reason to kick up a fuss. For that matter, all the other ebook readers (there's loads of them out there people, iBooks and Kindle are the johnny-come-latelys) do much the same thing. Apple has never had a problem with them either. Sony could equally well have done it too, but they tried to use Apple's service instead, without paying for it, and got told where to get off. Probably they will now go and use Amazon's method too.

NO ONE connected with this has so much as whispered that Apple is going to clamp down on anyone else, and start banning other means of getting ebooks onto their hardware. All they've said is if you want to use the inApp purchasing framework, you gotta pay the fee. That's it. Everything else has been knee-jerk Apple bashing. There's plenty of things that they've actually done to bash them for, without having to invent stuff because its a slow news day.

How very odd

I'm dubious that this is to do with buying the books in-app. That would rather fly in the face of the recent changes to allow people to buy stuff in-app - whats the point of adding functionality then booting the apps of anyone who uses it?. Also, whilst Kindle redirects to the amazon website, there are other ebook readers that have their store built right in - the txtr reader, for instance, seems to be able to buy books straight through the app. Of course, txtr is very much a bit player in the reader stakes, but having different rules for app developers based purely on who they are and how big they are, rather than app functionality, seems tailor made for massive lawsuits.

I'm thinking there must be something else going on here, the statement from Sony was pretty vague, and surely even Apple wouldn't do something that will open itself up to yet more lawyer attack quite so blatently, and from massive new companies as well as the usual suspects to boot?

Yes, I know, cue millions of people responding that Apple are indeed that stupid/arrogant...

If you build it, they will come

Clearly, what we need here is a clip on accessory that adds a couple of thumbsticks and some triggers to an iPhone. Its never going to be competition for PSP or DS without it, gyros and touch screen buttons just don't cut it.

Avoid tired eyes with tablet ebooks

For the love of god, people! Its not that hard!

Switch the reader on the tablet to have white text on a dark background (as can be done with every single reader on the market). No more tired eyes (and if you eyestrain after using your monitor for too long, the same thing fixes that).

Page turner

OK, have they finally fixed the slow update thing with eInk screens? Or are all the Kindle fanbois just very tolerant?

My wife bought a Sony eReader about 18 months ago, and I spent about half an hour trying to read on it. Fortunately for my marriage, I was able to resist the repeated urge to hurl it against the wall in frustration at the slow page turning times. After spending the best part of 10 years getting used to instant response on PDAs, and latterly an iPhone, I find eInk displays are just unusable (she gave up on it too, its been gathering dust on a shelf for over a year)

Oh, regarding the eyestrain thing? If you change the colours to white text on black background, that problem vanishes. In the words of a certain anthropomophic meerkat: "Simples!"