Posts by Tyson Key

Re: Damn

It shouldn't do. After all, a certain Andrew Huang (AKA "Bunnie") developed/discovered a technique for injecting content overlays into HDMI streams, without decrypting them for his NeTV box project.

I'm assuming that other CE manufacturers are just using a variant of that.

Re: I have always found "BigCorp's" paranoia when dealing with customer complaints very.......

Meh, don't forget the "iScratch Nano" fiasco.

TETRA works somewhere around 390-395MHz (with 10MHz/channel gaps for uplink/downlink), within the EU.

Besides, given that it's a digital, trunked radio technology, you shouldn't be able to hear anything in terms of audio as interference. (Same deal with GSM, modulo trunking; and UMTS/W-CDMA has its own high-pitched whine - although you can't hear it, unless you tune into a UMTS frequency using an SDR).

Re: Stupid Luddites

Good point.

I've found that one also has to disable the use of their insufferable proxies that break mobile sites using complex JavaScript, or cookies, in order to do anything useful on their pre-paid data APNs. Using Opera Mini also sometimes helps, as a workaround.

Re: Accenture won't do the job properly.

You've got some great ideas - but I'd just thought that I'd point out that Symbian has supported SMP for ages; although it seems that few OEMs have actually decided to implement it in their handsets. I remember seeing an early video demonstration of it on prototype hardware, eons ago - where it seemingly outperformed Linux's SMP implementation.

Re: App details

If you've got a PCSC-compliant smartcard reader (you can obtain contactless-only ones for ~£30 - and contact-only ones are even cheaper), and access to a (virtual) machine running Linux, then you can easily read data from EMV cards using extremely easy to find Open Source tools.

Obviously, the EMV specifications are freely-available to the public; and all EMV-based cards will happily provide at least some plain-text data related to what's embossed or printed on the face of the card.

Re: I read here once

Nokia have already commercialised a line of Bluetooth-enabled audio devices (a headset and a desktop speaker) that utilise NFC for pairing - and I think that the appropriate data structures have either been documented at the NFC Forum, or are in the process of being so.

Blame the marketing people for such ridiculous conflation. They're the same folks who're lazily trying to make people think that SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) isn't an acronym, too...

Re: The "Unlimited" Limit

If I vaguely remember correctly, that was changed from either 100MB or 200MB (according to their verbal T&Cs on the "Bolt Ons info" IVR section) to something ridiculously low (either 10MB or 50MB) , a few months ago - presumably as a result of people abusing it for streaming media.

(I'll admit that I used to use Mobbler quite heavily over UMTS, whilst commuting to university, after I figured out how to tune its bitrate settings, so that tracks didn't play at twice their proper speed).

So....

Exactly. They're just putting old wine ("thinner-than-usual/average" laptops) into a similar bottle with a different label on it.

We've been through this before with "netbooks", "subcompact laptops", and "ultra-portable notebooks".

Fail icon - Because you can't pull the wool over my eyes *that* easily.

Re: Accolades/Curly Braces

Just use a text editor/IDE that colour codes each pair - that way you won't get lost in a sea of them. :)

There *is* a FAT-free alternative...

It's called the Universal Disk Format (UDF), and it's supported by Mac OS X, modern Linux distributions *and* Windows Vista/7.

It happens to nicely solve the problems of storing incompatible forms of metadata (e.g. NTFS streams, Mac OS X's extended attributes/forks/other trinkets, and a baseline version of POSIX semantics); in addition to adding some nice features such as "streaming files", too.

It's just a shame that Microsoft decided to sabotage efforts by others to adopt it for years, by delaying a full, read-write implementation for all media types (optical, magnetic and Flash) until Windows Vista - so that they could coast off collecting patent royalties for FAT variants; ensure that proprietary software developers managed to produce incompatible, half-baked implementations; and generally retard progress for everyone.

Now if only consumer electronics companies would implement it in their products; and older versions of Windows would die quietly...