Re: OK as a proof of concept...
Are you under the impression that it uses GPS to actually keep the car in between the white lines of the road and stop it crashing?
Posts by Daf L
170 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Apr 2010
Driving a car? There's an app for that
US appeal dismissed in Dotcom case
Lone config file in Mac OS X SIGNALS DEATH OF THE DVD
Patent troll Intellectual Ventures is more like a HYDRA
Monday 13th August 2012 09:04 GMT
Re: Ban Hidden Patents
You missed something out -
4: True Innovation
A patent should only be granted for something that would make peers of the inventor or those in the same field think "Wow" that is a great product/invention/solution.
The patent system already has a clause for obviousness but it doesn't seem to be applied properly (at all?)
Maybe it should be more like a peer reviewed journal where patents are first published. The editor has the first say as a broad overview of that industry and then peers debate how obvious the patent. Maybe it starts with the problem being solved being published first and a list of responses from peers are then submitted - if the solution really turns out to be a unique one (and not just an obfuscation of a solution someone else would likely come up with) before finally having the patent itself presented with a final check of obviousness.
I'm guessing the problem is resources, however some like-minded people with, hopefully a big reduction in applications, could make it work. If Wikipedia can reach a bazillion user generated articles I'm sure this Patent review system could.
SCO keeps dying, and dying, and dying
Humax YouView DTR-T1000 IPTV Freeview PVR review
Lords call for the end of TV transmissions
Wednesday 1st August 2012 15:16 GMT
Re: I'll be damned...
"Multicast programming will still involve schedules."
Yes, but will they persist with multicast and schedules. In broadcast TV they have to have schedules and play a stream of TV on each channel. However this doesn't need to be replicated in IP if the bandwidth is sufficient. They have the programmes and every morning they can release the day's programming to the CDN, or even a whole series at once if need be. The idea of having scheduled programmes becomes irrelevant.
Anyone who watches very little actual TV and relies on their PC and iPlayer, or TiVo users will be used to this already. there is no need to know what time a programme is on and set aside a time to watch it. You just watch it when you want.
This may be a paradigm shift and also has implications for current social media based group watching but it is probably the way TV will emerge if it goes IP based in the coming decades.
Wednesday 1st August 2012 11:56 GMT
Re: I'll be damned...
"You talk about multicast and then use this as justification for getting rid of scheduled TV in favour of on-demand"
Nope, two different subjects I just couldn't be bothered to start a new post. My point about multicast was replicating the current system and stating it doesn't need to be unicast, however I was saying that this may be a moot point as I can see the point of scheduled broadcasts becoming less relevant.
The justification for keeping scheduled broadcasts could however be multicast and bandwidth issues. It just depends on whether we're all 1Gbps FTTP by then or not.
Wednesday 1st August 2012 11:21 GMT
Re: I'll be damned...
"Usually, but not today. TV is broadcast, so why do it point-to-point?"
You do know that IP can be multicast? There is even specific IP Ranges reserved for it ( 224.0.0.0 through 239.255.255.255).
Does it work? - well at the moment I'm currently streaming up to 60 SD channels of TV and Radio to 300 devices with no perceivable loss of quality and it hasn't exceeded 36Mbps at the distribution point.
It makes you wonder what the point of scheduled programming will be if this persists. There will certainly be a battle between on-demand and scheduled in the future. In which case it has greater implications for niche and less popular programming which might currently only exist because "there's nothing better on".
@UnSteveDorkland Twitter satirist faces 4 charges in US court
Monday 30th July 2012 14:41 GMT
Anonymous?
Could it be the case that the information could only have come from someone who works for the Daily Mail Group (or perhaps someone in the industry) and this is an attempt to uncover who that person is so they can be sacked or get revenge...
Perhaps the trial isn't really the end game - it's more of a fishing expedition?
Santander's banking website craps out
Wednesday 25th July 2012 08:36 GMT
Re: Strange, new use of "soaring"
There might be a new meaning to you - rising rapidly. If the temperature in the Antarctic goes from -40 to -5 in a day then the temperature could be described as soaring. Therefore maybe you are mistaking the word for "scorching" or another word meaning a "very high temperature"?
Therefore as the weather in most of Britain has been pretty shocking lately it might be an exaggeration but not entirely without merit.
Also the comment about 40C is a little meaningless without context to your location. You could be sat in the middle of the Lut Desert.
USB charges up to 100 watts
Tuesday 24th July 2012 14:50 GMT
Re: Going to make ultrabooks look stupid
Who said anything about making a 5W USB charger smaller - this is about making a standard power brick that is already pushing out the required Power to run the Ultrabook smaller. With standardisation and reference designs you can expect better quality and more efficient transformers.
You also might have the ability to use existing charging sockets, or share devices amongst a power hub, hence making it only necessary to carry the relevant cable - and therefore much smaller.
Monday 23rd July 2012 09:40 GMT
Re: Going to make ultrabooks look stupid
Eh?
You already have a heavy power brick with your ultrabook - have a look under the desk. With USB charging it should be capable to make it much smaller and you may have many places where you don't even need to bring power with you as you'd just be able to plug in to a universal USB charging socket. There's no reason why chargers would have to become bigger.
Samsung SMACKDOWN: US appeals court keeps ban on Galaxy Tab
Microsoft pops preview of 'biggest, most ambitious' Office yet
Monday 16th July 2012 22:10 GMT
Re: Why am I not finding any of this remotely interesting?
Agreed, but err... you have been reading about Windows 8/Metro, haven't you? There's your answer right there, screw over the business users and go after the consumer tablet market.
I can't help feeling Ballmer is after Elop's crown as the worst CEO ever - destroy a company as quickly as possible.By getting paranoid and playing to your fears rather than your strengths.
I think the whole Kodak thing has got these, once (/still) massive, companies running scared.
Watch out, Apple: HTC ruling could hurt your patent income
Wednesday 11th July 2012 10:43 GMT
Re: Hear, hear!
It would have been a lot saner to declare that these are software patents and therefore de-facto invalid.
It is not good to see that software patents have managed to creep under the radar and get accepted into the UK patent system.
The fact that it was ruled that software patents are acceptable on mobile devices will probably bring a cheery smile to Apple and others, rather than the fact that some were deemed invalid - all it has done has raised the bar a little and so new court cases will be based around "but it took millions of $ and thousands of man hours to perfect this function".
Judge: Patent litigants behave like animals
Friday 6th July 2012 11:12 GMT
Re: Some exceptions
That would seem to suggest that you wish to extend patent coverage to be a whole program as you have spent a long time writing it and the overall idea is a good one? That's madness.
I've done plenty of big programming projects lasting years and replacing multi-million pound off the shelf systems. I've spent months trying to figure out how to accomplish something and the algorithms involved. The end result was pretty impressive, imho...
However, should I get a patent on it? No of course not or any part of it. There was months of problem solving but it is not patentable. Should people be able to open up my source code and copy it? No - but copyright covers that.
Should the look and feel be copied exactly - nope, copyright again.
However, the process - the result. Well go ahead - create the same. By the time they have the next iteration will be released with even better features -the basic idea was based on the propriety software (which didn't fit our needs).
For patents, even if they 'must' exist in software, you should be thinking wow, the guy who invented that is a genius. That's been a problem that people have had for a long time and this guy has managed to crack it.
Patents should not be awarded just because you are the first to do something. Everyone will be the first to do something; So you've encountered a problem first and solved it (maybe extremely easily, maybe took some time) - does that mean you should be eligible to patent it? Someone else comes up with the same problem a year later, they have never heard of your patent, they solve their problem a similar way - bang patent lawsuit.
Thursday 5th July 2012 23:22 GMT
Re: Some exceptions
The software development is not the patent. Are you saying that the development project you did over the course of years was entirely patentable, all of it - even under today's standards?
Look at all the software patents that have recently arisen - they are for a tiny little bit of the software that would take no longer than a few hours to a few days to complete. Bear in mind that a patent isn't awarded for artistic design or ideas just the functionality.
Look at the iPhone for instance - it might have taken them a couple of years or so to produce but they only patented a few little things (slide to unlock) and some old patents from a different era (hyper linking from recognised patterns). There was no major innovation that they toiled over and patented or the iPhone itself was not patented.
In, for instance medicine, the end product is the wholly patented part - most often. The chemical construction to the testing, trials and administration is for that - not for the bit of packaging it comes in. The development work was all to create the patented result in most cases (Whatever you think about whether the drug should be patentable in the first place)
Oracle accepts a nice round number in damages from Google
Thursday 21st June 2012 23:34 GMT
Re: Serves Oracle right @AC 14:33
I'm not sure if you are the same AC that has filled this thread - so hard to tell with ACs!
But note that Wikipedia browsing is not useful for a convincing argument...
"You seem to know a lot, so I ask again, why are you deliberately confusing the *virtual machine* JVM - effectively a virtual processor executing the byte codes - with high level APIs such as J2SE and J2ME?" - what do you mean 'high level APIs', how are they high level? They are part of the JRE and I presume by JVM you were talking about the runtime environment - they kinda go hand in hand and the thread was talking about APIs, J2ME etc. You can't sensibly decouple the JVM away from the specification.
"2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way" would not be relevant if talking about the JVM.
"...successfully used the Java VM" - as I asked what is "the JVM"? Danger wrote their own.
"we're obviously talking about the application layer." - er no, nothing to do with the application layer.
"The difference was Danger had a licensed JVM implementation, which ran J2ME with hiptop extensions. Which is an important fact: Hiptop apps weren't limited by MIDP/J2ME restricted functionality, but still ran on a standard JVM." - eh, this doesn't make any sense at all.
Danger, Apache whoever could look at the JVM specification and make clean room implementations of it. Java was pretty open. However, you seem to be claiming that Danger not only got a licence for their JVM/JRE and passed the TCK and were still able to run the J2SE implementation on a mobile device? Really, that reference I would like to see.
Do you not think that maybe they licensed the J2ME compatibility of their JVM? Kind of make more sense in the context? I don't know but maybe start here Danger Brings Java to Hiptop
"So what's up with the JVM unsuitable for mobile devices claim?" - what JVM? Who's - Sun's? With which class libraries?
"..and if anyone had doubts about it, Danger actually proved that years before." ... by making a cleanroom implementation of a JVM with a subset of JavaSE class libraries, extensions and J2ME compatibility for MIDP & CDLC specs.
"JVM and Dalvik are ver similar in concept, only different in implementation. One favours the stack the other registers .. oh dear.
Thursday 21st June 2012 18:11 GMT
Re: Serves Oracle right @AC 14:33
" successfully deployed JVM on a mobile device"
Which JVM? They deployed their own JVM, which was a subset of the J2SE API and had extra API calls. This is the same as Android - they have used a subset of the J2SE API (37 elements) and added their own extensions to create their VM.
Danger did not extend J2ME they extended a subset of J2SE - same as Google (albeit via Harmony).
Danger also, later, added compatibility for J2ME, however this doesn't really have any point for Android.
The point is the Danger JVM is pretty much the same as how Android did it. J2SE is unsuitable for a mobile phone and neither Danger, nor Android tried to use it on a phone. J2ME is too limited for a smartphone adn neither company tried to use that either.
Neither company took the code from Sun/Oracle for the JVM and used it for their phone OS.
Thursday 21st June 2012 16:03 GMT
Re: Serves Oracle right @AC 14:33
The Danger OS was a subset of JavaSE with it's own extensions - sound familiar?
The Danger OS was made J2ME compatible (you have the quote). So that J2ME apps could also run on it. You've made a massive leap from making an OS compatible to that being what the core of the OS is.
Using an emulator I can make my PC compatible with programs for a ZX spectrum - doesn't mean the ZX Spectrum ROM is suitable for running a modern PC.
Check out http://developer.danger.com/site/faq for the reference you so anxiously desire.
More references - try out a phone with J2ME and see what it is capable of. Read the developer's guides - then consider using it for a complete smartphone OS.
Thursday 21st June 2012 13:00 GMT
Re: Serves Oracle right
Google had decided not to use Java - Sun said in trial they probably would've paid Google to use it. Google didn't want to .
JavaME is no good for smartphones -it barely scrapes by on featurephones. Java SE is too bloated and has too many restrictions it would need to be scaled down and the licensing changed - to something like Davlik.
Sun never refused to license Java to Google, they just couldn't agree on the deal. therefore they would be unlikely to want to do any sort of deal now as there would be no advantage.
Google to ICO: We had no idea Street View data slurp was happening
Tuesday 19th June 2012 15:42 GMT
Data Capture
It still wouldn't account for why they actually captured and recorded data that was being sent by any users of the WiFi access point.
In reality nothing that was too confidential would have been captured and the capture so brief as to not provide anything meaningful. Which makes it all the more bizarre that it was captured in the first place. I can only think that there was an excitable young engineer who was adding more and more features to the smart bit of coding he had done and went a bit over spec.
The idea that it was a pre-meditated idea and a feature requested seems far fetched due to the extremely limited use of the data and the risks involved.
EU gives Google till July to offer fix for search dominance
Friday 15th June 2012 16:10 GMT
Re: Me neither
1. Mirror.co.uk
2. Ahram online
3. IrishCentral
Are all fed from Google News - not direct organic searches of their website.
Whether You Tube is the largest video sharing site in the world and deserves to get top billing, or Google Maps or Google News is what the case is about. I'm not saying they shouldn't or they should. This is why there is an investigation. No-one has been found guilty of anything yet.
If, for instance Google can prove that the Maps, News and You Tube teams have no access to the search engine's secret algorithm to affect SEO and that the fact they are top results in Google hasn't unduly affected their pagerank in the past then they would walk away scott free. If their results are planted at the top and any competitive services are buried simply due to them being a competitor then they will walk away with fines and sanctions.
However, it is most likely to be somewhere in the middle and that's what the investigation will look at.
The overall point was - read the claims of the EU to see what they are investigating, try out some tests to see if Google stuff tends to appear top and consider whether that could be cause for concern - the Ireland examples weren't a result of trying 100 different searches to prove the point they were both the first thing that popped into my head.
Ten... Sata 3 SSDs
Saturday 9th June 2012 09:35 GMT
HP server SSDs...
"Increased competition and cheaper NAND prices have combined to force prices well below the magical £1 per gigabyte ceiling"
I wish someone had informed HP -> HP 200GB SSD
Apple-Moto patent gripe almost thrown out the door
Friday 8th June 2012 16:28 GMT
Re: Without Prejudice?
Do you not presume that perhaps the author has since changed that particular paragraph in the article?
Do you really think that rather than copy and pasting from the article I re-typed it by hand accidentally changing the word "with" to "without" in the process to make a point about the article claiming it was stating that it didn't make sense to issue an order without prejudice?
Friday 8th June 2012 13:52 GMT 
Without Prejudice?
"Judge Richard Posner has issued a tentative view that the case should be dismissed without prejudice, which would mean that neither of the companies could bring up their whinges again, and cancelled the beginning of the trial."
If it's without prejudice then they can just relaunch the same suit immediately, hopefully it is with prejudice otherwise it's meaningless.
MoneySavingExpert.com founder flogs website for £87m
Wednesday 6th June 2012 09:18 GMT
Still independent
See the above link for the editorial code that is part of the contract of the sale. It's pretty robust. Seeing as moneysavingexpert.com went to great lengths to be independent and up front it seems little point in buying the site if you were planning the opposite. I would expect the real worth for moneysupermarket.com is the visitor tracking data. Where are the visitors going, what are they looking at, what are the trends, who can moneysupermarket persuade to give them higher commision based on it,etc.
Microsoft forbids class actions in new Windows licence
Tuesday 29th May 2012 19:52 GMT
But...
It now takes one person to be able to afford a long, expensive case with not a certainty of winning and be able to pay for a lawyer through appeals for years.
If they looked like losing they could also then settle out of court with a gagging clause and every person following would have to risk another full blown trial.
Hard disk drive prices quick to rise, slow to fall
Tuesday 29th May 2012 15:58 GMT
Market Trading
Profiteering... Well unfortunately it's business 101. Supply and demand, been around since ancient times and isn't likely to go away. Bare drives are just a commodity, same as fuel. Demand outstrips supply prices go up, supply outstrips demand (the stockpiling before the floods had happened) prices are low.
This is how Opec regulate their prices for Oil.
The prices will only go down, if and when demand for them reduces.
As for the price of packaged, external drives. Well these aren't seen as much as a commodity, they have fixed retail price and the supplier had hold of the bare drives a long time before the floods to create their end product. They don't have so much of a fluctuating price as standard components which can change price daily.
A week after the flood I quickly bought up a 30TB array as the price was still list price compared to the already soaring HD prices.
Why Zuck will go soft for Facebook Phone - and rebrand Android
Tuesday 29th May 2012 12:49 GMT
"FB OS please"
"If Facebook can get a few punters walking into shops and asking if phones will run the new "Facebook OS" then manufacturers might decide Facebook is a more comfortable partner than Google."
Really? I can't ever see this happening - it's not as though punters walk into a shop and ask for a phone that runs the "Android OS" or the "Symbian OS" etc. Either they will be techy enough to know what phone runs what or they will just go in to browse and get the one that suits them most or know which phone they want as their friend has it.
I would hazard a gues that the popularity of the Samsung Galaxy SII isn't due to the fact that it runs Android per-se but so many people have them.
GPS rival Beidou will cover Asia Pac by end of the year
Thursday 17th May 2012 11:06 GMT
Re: enlighten us..
If you have a GPS receiver that can simultaneously interpret the signals from more systems than the standard GPS then you are more likely to get an accurate fix due to the higher number of visible satellites.
However, it might affect processing time for the first fix as it calculates the geometries etc from different systems especially if you can't use AGPS.
Partial victory for Oracle in Java case
Monday 7th May 2012 23:21 GMT
Partial Victory?
Not sure what Oracle won - this part of the trial was really about whether Google had fair use of the APIs. It didn't deny copying the (cough) SSO of the API - this was just deemed to not be subject to copyright previously and the question of whether it is is still to be decided.
The judge asked the jury to consider it copyrighted and therefore, basically, told them to tick the first box.
Do you mean the partial win was because they copied rangeCheck? Really?
This article seems to be a cobble together of the BBC and ZDNet articles and seeing as Rachel King seemed to be lost in a world of her own, I'm not sure the ZDNet articles should be used as source material.
Google Street View Wi-Fi data slurper named
Wednesday 2nd May 2012 13:48 GMT
Why do this?
I can't see any reasonable reason why Google would want to capture a very brief glimpse on unencrypted WiFi traffic. Even looking at some weird conspiracies to think that they are some subversive underground organisation which has malicious intents it seems very strange.
The only possible reason I can come up with is that they would be able to capture an IP address in the WiFi traffic and therefore associate a rough location with that IP address.
However, that still wouldn't make much sense as you would expect most WiFi access points to be encrypted nowadays and I would guess public hotspots make up a large amount of unencrypted spots then the location would only correspond to a user's temporary location.
This wouldn't be anywhere near enough to run a project based around targeted advertising based on location as the hit would be too unreliable.
HTC peeves punters with One X woes
Google wanted Java 'partnership' with Sun
Thursday 26th April 2012 13:17 GMT
Re: Do no evil?
They don't and never had needed a licence for Java, they don't run Java.
Just because you've read a headline on a website doesn't mean that Oracle have any sort of case to sew.
If you had looked at any of the details of this case then you would see that Oracle are now resting their case on trying to say that APIs are copyrightable. In fact not just APIs but only these specific Java APIs, simply due to the fact that there are so many and they are arranged 'artistically' - yes it is as crazy as it sounds.
They have already lost nearly all their patents and there is the case of the 11 files that weren't every used in Android that were in it's test environment.
Oracle are not suing Google for not paying for a licence. They are not saying that Google should have bought a licence or that they are using Java.
The idea that a 'simple' solution would be for Google to just give Android to Oracle to stop them being annoying is like suggesting that Apple should just give their iPAD division to Proview - after all the iPAD isn't critical to Apple's business - Absurd.
Wednesday 25th April 2012 10:49 GMT
Re: Do no evil?
"Maybe Google can't just walk away from Android, but could they give it away to Oracle as part of damages?"
What friggin' planet are you on?
Just give away one of their most important technologies since search to a bunch of ambulance chasers that don't have a cat's hell in chance of walking away form this bogus lawsuit with anything more than their bus fare home.
Oracle v Google could clear way for copyright on languages, APIs
Tuesday 17th April 2012 15:22 GMT
This whole trial is flawed
Oracle are completely clutching at straws with this. Their case has been blown out of the water along with the billions they were hoping to scoop in damages. Just go back to the first stages of this lawsuit and see what Oracle were claiming and the money involved.
The Judge seems extremely clued up. There is so much to this case that it is hard to explain all the failings in Oracle's argument but suffice to say the author seems to have only scratched the surface and taken a sniff.
The comparisons between SCO v The World are startling and the coincidence lies with the lawyers representing the antagonist - BSF.
Just remember that Sun were all for Android, celebrating its launch and the positive effects for the Java community, to have another system that allowed developers to write and learn Java. A few years later after Android has become extremely successful a new owner decides it wants to monetize its Sun purchase and this is the result - nothing about morals or IP or Copyrights.
'As seen on TV' claims can't be made about unbranded props
Friday 13th April 2012 08:40 GMT
Re: 'Award Winning'
In the slightly earlier days of the internet (although I'm sure they still exist today) you could go to a site and ask to be considered as a nominee for their award e.g. "Tech Superior Web Gold Award". Sometimes you'd have to pay for the nomination, sometimes you'd have to pay to be considered for the'gold' nomination often they were free to be nominated.
The point being you would always get a reply back a few days later saying something along the lines of "Our editor has reviewed your site and are please to award you their Tech Superior Web Gold Award". You could then display that on your site.
All a big 'harmless' con, and each party knew it, but it could raise your profile as an "award winning" site. The developer could tell the CEO that their site has won an award.
Facebook to acquire Instagram for $1bn
Monday 9th April 2012 18:46 GMT
Re: Smells like... the dotcom years again!
Truly astonishing price, for sure. But the value might not be of the company itself but of the anti-value it may pose to Facebook.
It is a social network started from nothing that has gained popularity and a devoted following quickly - an inkling to investors that another social start up can become popular so quickly might cause the forthcoming stock price of Facebook to wobble.
If Facebook can prove that they can own the competition then it might give investors more confidence.
Ofcom calls for end to 0800 charges on mobiles
Monday 9th April 2012 10:16 GMT
Re: Amazing,....
Quite passive aggressive there?
You can make revenue from 0845 numbers if you have enough calls. I've used them and have -only 0.5p per min but it all adds up. A quick search shows that is still possible to get at keast 0.25p per minute.
Your original remark said "At my company, we use 0845 numbers so that if (and it has happened a couple of times) there is a problem with the local number, it can be easily diverted elsewhere"
and now you state that my comment I have no clue because obviously "One of our 0845's has 14 different numbers behind it, depending on time of day, day of week and if there are any faults on the line. Oh some of those are international numbers.".
Quite different from your original post. You obviously don't use 0845 numbers for diverting a call if there is a problem with the local number you use it because you have set up a multi-number gateway, so your original comment is not true.
So maybe you comment should be "people commenting on stuff when they have no clue how our company specifically runs" - which would be true, congratulations.
Thursday 5th April 2012 12:59 GMT
Just add some numbers to the calling plan.
I don't need 0800 numbers to be free. Just allow 0845, 0800 and similar to be part of the calling plan and not charged extra.
This would stop the calling card services that operated on 0800 that caused the free 0800 numbers to stop in the first place, but it would also allow users on contract phones to have them taken out of their standard minutes.
I know it's not as ideal as having 0800 be free from mobiles but it would be better than the current situation.
Thursday 5th April 2012 12:55 GMT
Re: Have you all forgotten? They USED to be free...
Not quite. The problem was that a lot of companies started offering to connect you through to another number for a small fee by dialling their 0800 number.
Therefore - in the days before lots(any?) of free minutes, instead of paying your mobile company 25p per minute to call a number , you would ring an 0800 number and pay them 5p a minute. Of course the mobile company had to pay for the infrastructure and any other associated costs while the 0800 company profited.
The mobile firms would then shut down the 0800 services one-by-one, but in the end (with Orange being one of the few left) they gave up and charged for all 0800 calls except some charities.
SO unfortunately it was some mobile users who spoilt it for everyone as it was innevitable that it was going to happen.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
