Posts by DrXym2166 posts • joined Wednesday 18th July 2007 13:08 GMT
Toshiba is proposing dropping netbooks, which cost £200 or thereabouts and selling ultrabooks which cost £800 or thereabouts. And they think people who were previously going to buy a netbook will splash 4x as much out on an ultrabook? More likely they'll just buy a netbook from another manufacturer.
People set timers on their ovens usually to take something out, or to put something in, or to start something after so many minutes. I really don't see a huge benefit from putting an app to do this since you will be standing by the oven anyway.
I suppose if someone absolutely wanted to start warming the oven 30 minutes before they got home or some other fairly tenuous scenario then it might be of use. Given how hideously energy inefficient AGAs are, perhaps this is more relevant than it would be for conventional ovens. It still seems like a pretty pointless gimmick though.
I just wonder how much the results are skewed by the fact that most Android phones are going to be pointing at Google's search engine, not Baidu's.
It's kind of like Microsoft coming out and trumping up the probable fact that Windows Phone users represent the largest % of Bing mobile hits.
940MB sounds a lot but games and apps are getting increasingly chunky and you'll soon fill it even if you know how to move app data to SD card.
Knowing HTC they probably bundled apps and assorted crapware like Facebook, Dropbox, Flash etc. into their phone's readonly firmware. What that means is that when an update arrives for these apps, which it will, you eat up double the space for the app. The update resides in flash and masks out the one in firmware.
"That doesn't mean that the model is broken ... it means that it doesn't operate the way you think it should and that people are ignoring the safeguards put in place. Nothing broken about it."
It is broken if people are ignoring the warnings, and the system provides no further safeguards once an app is installed. You can't ignore human nature in this sort of thing.
It could be fixed in a manner such as I suggested. Cyanogenmod already features functionality to override services on a per app basis. It just needs to be implemented in the standard Android build so it can percolate out into all devices and become the default behaviour.
Android's model is broken because once you install you have no second chance to modify the permissions. It's obvious some people do not read the permissions or do not understand the dangers of leaving them open. It's likely too that people trust Angry Birds / Cut the Rope not to use those services maliciously any way.
What Android desperately needs are trust zones. Apps that don't come preinstalled should be regarded as untrusted by default. Any time they perform an action which could cost a user money such as send an SMS or make a call, a popup should appear on the user's screen asking if they wish to grant that access. Users who don't like these popups can dig into their app settings and mark the app as trusted.
Android should also permit what the playbook does where you can revoke permissions of an app even after you have installed it.
In other words secure by default.
And probably various computer and telecommunications related offenses.
Anonymous is just engaging in some post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. They found some weak site, hacked it and after the fact came up with some pathetic excuse for justifying doing it. They'll engage in more faulty reasoning to justify whatever their next target happens to be.
I personally believe Facebook is way overvalued but that doesn't mean that Facebook or their underwriters can say X about their books and the reality is actually Y or that investors have no legitimate grievance to sue somebody over when the truth emerges. It is clear here that there were issues about how the IPO was managed which meant it was not conducted in a way which was fair or transparent.
The problem here is that the rules of transparency concerning the IPO were not followed so the picture painted to potential investors was untruthful.
You don't need to program to a GPU to benefit from a GPU. If your desktop windows are rendered into surfaces they don't need to be repainted every time some other window is dragged over them. This reduces the amount of repainting and context switches which results in a more responsive desktop.
I studied the screenshot and it's powered by a WM8750. According to the spec sheet for that it supports OpenGL ES 2.0 *and* 1080p.
http://www.wondermedia.com.tw/en/products/platform/soc/wm8750/
Why this Via says 720p only is a mystery. Maybe it hasn't the VRAM for any higher.
Even as a media player it could be okay. Not everyone has 1080p content. It might also be capable of downscaling 1080p to 720p. Really depends on what GPU is in there, the size of the VRAM and how much hardware acceleration it offers.
More memory, onboard flash, more USB ports. I'd be worried about the 720p output though. What's that mean for the GPU / hardware decoding capability of the device.
Sounds like they divvied him up just in case (as happened) rockets failed. Makes you wonder what will happen to the rest.
I don't have a Galaxy S phone. I have an HTC desire which has a really crappy sticky notes widget that transforms writing into illegible scrawl.
I think it would be nice to have something built-in. Nothing fancy, just functional.
Our company (back when I worked on STBs) had Android running on a 256MB MIPS SOC complete with mouse and keyboard support. I think you'd probably get the 2.x branch working relatively simply. It doesn't matter if Google support it or not since the community would maintain their own clone of the source and release their own binaries.
Nor is it hard to get the Google apps and once you get them you gain access to the marketplace and all the other apps. Any apps with native code (i.e. most games) are very likely to be filtered out though.
As to why do it at all, I think it would be useful for a couple of reasons. First because Android is rapidly becoming ubiquitous and therefore there are a lot of useful apps and widgets. Second Android is more lightweight than a desktop OS and is therefore better suited to the hardware.
I also mentioned Meego (or Tizen) being other alternatives. Basically something that doesn't overburden the hardware but makes it graphically useful for something.
Doesn't have to be much, just something you can type or scribble in. That would probably suffice for 90% of people.
"You'll have to make sure all your video is h.264. It doesn't support anything else outside of software. "
This is quite common for SOCs. The hardware might be quite capable of running h264, vc1, DTS etc. but they're individually disabled unless you buy software tokens which are installed at the factory which enable the functionality. Even if they are enabled, it doesn't help much if the APIs to get to them are undocumented or proprietary.
I imagine that most people would choose to encode their content with h264 anyway so perhaps it's not such a big deal. MPEG4 ASP could probably done in software if its not hardware enabled, at least for SD content.
It's more than sufficient to run a web server, or to run a few discrete apps such as a media server.
Once you pile a desktop on though it probably does suffer. It has a fairly underpowered CPU and a brick wall of limited physical memory. The only place to go is to cut the desktop to the bone and / or enable swap. Swap would have to be on the flash or USB neither of which is going to be very fast.
The issue is compounded somewhat because X11 is a context switching bloater. I think Raspberry Pi would benefit a lot when Wayland appears since it cuts the memory bloat and context switching right down. Wayland is even built on top of OpenGL ES so it would be hardware accelerated. It still wouldn't be a good desktop but it might be tolerable.
The Raspberry Pi is far better suited to running apps like XBMC. This is more or less how most set top boxes function today - an embedded Linux supporting a single foreground app. It was fairly predictable how lacklustre desktop performance would be, at least to anyone who has programmed set top boxes or used a comparable memory constrained environment such as Linux on the PS3.
I don't think the box would be suitable for a desktop unless someone ports Android, or Meego, or Wayland appears and cuts out all the X11 bloat. I think Android or Google TV would be particularly attractive if someone could get it going.
I think you've used a few too many elastic bands to secure your tinfoil hat. Anyone with secrets to hide or who simply values their privacy can do so just by not using Facebook or similar tools. Or if they do they exercise a little thing called lying.
FB shares took a crap today. Looks to me like many investors chose to offload them quickly because they didn't rise after their IPO. All that selling and no underwriter caused the price to slump. Facebook does have value as a business but it seems to have been substantially overhyped.
Hopefully they won't become another Groupon with extremely volatile shares going up and down like a yoyo but trending downwards all the time.
Waterstones is selling a device whose sole purpose is to lock owners into Amazon's online store. What possible reason has Waterstones for selling it? Every one they sell is a customer lost forever.
They should have released their own ereader, or formed an alliance with WHSmith, Tesco and others to produce a brand of readers that ran over an open platform so that each of them could run their own stores and benefit from a shared ecosystem..
... that the only way to install apps is through their store? Because that would be an awfully shitty thing to inflict on users if its true.
But Iran's attitude is not. It's a really stupid argument over a large expanse of water that Iran does not control. If consensus amongst countries in the region were to change the name, then the name should be changed. If the name continues in dispute then I see no issue in calling it Arabian / Persian Gulf until some international body sits everyone down and resolves the issue.
I'm not sure why Google should give a shit about which of either name is right. They certainly shouldn't try very hard to molify Iran given their obsession to isolate the entire country from the internet.
It is shitty behaviour but I'm also sure that virtually everyone in the same situation would be as quick to do as he did. There was a loophole that let him save a lot of money and he took it.
The loophole is for a guy holding citizenship to renounce it and more or less carry on as normal but with many more millions of dollars in his pocket. The loophole could be closed by requiring former US nationals to continue to pay US taxes if they hold a US work permit or reside within its borders for X number of days over the next 5 years.
Basically make it so if they want they money they can get the hell out of the US and not come back any time soon.
He did was the US financial system allowed. Instead of senators bitching about people using loopholes like this, they should be legislating the loopholes out of the existence.
I think the author also misses the point that if GM doesn't know whether it's advertising was working or not that maybe Facebook was charging too much for too little in return or doesn't have the tools to demonstrate that the advertising was good value. If GM didn't think they were getting value for money they were perfectly within their rights to pull the advertising.
"It said PRIMARY school. Kids can get to grips (no pun) with a touch interface much more intuitive than mouse+keyboard... a 2-3 year old can learn how to navigate an iPad to find which video they want to watch (a friend's kid had an obsession with Toy Story and Cars)."
If I really wanted my kids to use a tablet, I could buy one for 1/3rd the price of the base iPad they could play with, e.g. Archos Child Pad or EasyPad etc. That way when it gets covered in yoghurt or goes smashing to the floor (as it will) I won't feel so mad about it.
I also don't see what the problem is with letting them learn on a computer. My eldest kid is six. He has no problem using a mouse, keyboard and even the web. He begun using the computer at the age of 3 with software such as Learning Ladder.
Using a tablet won't teach you the basics of computers. It will teach you the basics of using a tablet which is as hard as putting your finger on the screen.
Go hang around schools in Scotland because there are some 12 year olds you can beat up for a free iPad.
Seriously what a stupid shortsighted idea. iPads are expensive, proprietary devices. Kids will drop them, they'll be stolen, they don't significantly add any benefit to the classroom. And even if someone could make the case that tablets were a worthy addition there are far cheaper, and even kid friendly tablets which would be far more suitable.
Ladies have handbags to stick a massive phone into. Men have to shove it in their jeans or coat pocket. Make the phone too big and it won't.
I think its more likely that every change Apple makes in the next 5 years will be accompanied by some BS that Steve was personally involved and approved the final design.
Sort of like how Gene Roddenberry managed to be credited for some (awful) TV shows long after he kicked the bucket.
So I give them £80 so they can vandalize property? What the hell is the point of that?
I can easily support an eco charity which is working in some constructive way, e.g. promoting energy efficient businesses, or prosecuting polluters, or planting large amounts of trees, or lobbying government to strengthen legislation etc. But if it's to fund a bunch of "direct action" campaigns (i.e. attention whoring) then I'd rather keep my money in my pocket.
Make the screen too small and it becomes fiddly. Make it too big and it doesn't fit in your pocket. I think 3.5" is too small. I have a 3.5" display and it can be very fiddly at times especially some games which require a precision which touch on the phone cannot support. The sweet spot has to be between 4.0" and 4.5" but other factors like the size of the bezel also need to be addressed.
I see a lot of activity for the things I take an interest in and the user interface beats Facebook by a mile. To be honest I don't really see the point of most social networks though and I wouldn't be surprised if lots of people do give it a try, don't think much of it and never go back. Is Facebook really that different? I doubt it? Bet there are lots of dead accounts and people who only post messages privately and therefore aren't measurable.
That's probably why it's score is so low. In a vacuum it's a good phone. But compare it to the competition and suddenly it's not that great.
You probably don't need more than one core if you use your phone one app at a time and don't intend to play high performance games or whatever. However if you want to run more than one app or play a game which is physics heavy or whatever then you do.
I've also written apps where a worker thread has done something compute heavy and having two cores means the worker can do its own thing separate from the GUI reducing the time for a result to appear.
The problem with Windows Phone 7.5 is that you CANNOT run more than one app at a time even if you have a good reason to and the kernel does not support more than one core anyway. So even multithreading doesn't yield much in the way of benefits.
So the phone hardware is limited because of the OS. My understanding is Windows Phone 8 (Apollo) will support multi core but the same gimped "suspend in background" behaviour is maintained at least for Metro style apps. Supposedly native app support may appear so who knows, maybe multitasking will be available in some form.
Tiles look tremendous until you realise you have exactly one set of tiles arranged in a long vertical list. The only customisation you have is to reorder them around. Some tiles offer feedback (e.g. saying you have 3 new messages) but you can't interact with them. If you have too many tiles you can look forward to throwing the list around to reach the ones at the bottom.
It's just primitive compared to an Android phone where you can have multiple screens and you can place buttons, shortcuts, folders and widgets in any way you please on them.
Don't know why you got voted down. It does have 2 year old specs. It's a single core device in a market where dual core is common place and even quad core is coming along. Windows Phone 8 supposedly supports multi core devices.
The Lumia 800 has a stupid little flip hatch covering the USB port which was just bad design for something that needed to be used at least once a day for charging. The mini sim slot was easy to break too. Sounds like the 900 has fixed the most grevious issues in the last model, at least from a hardware perspective.
I assume Windows Phone 7.5 hasn't changed in any way which really impacts on the device's ability to compete with other modern handsets.
"But for everyone who likes the idea of a regular tv with a bolt-on box, there's the existing AppleTV and the world of competitors for it. For the people who can achieve the same thing using a PC,"
I didn't say PC, I said box as in set top box. i.e. I could buy a device such as Apple's "Apple TV" box, plug it into my TV and get almost identical functionality. It would probably cost me hundreds less than an integrated television set too. And in a few years when Apple produces a new version of the box I can swap out the old one for minimal expense (even relegate it to a bedroom) and enjoy all the new functionality with the same TV.
Putting everything in the TV essentially means your TV is going to be obsolete in a few years, whenever Apple or app providers decide to pull the plug on the service. It also means you're tied to Apple for your content. If Apple decides (as it's done in the past) to screw rival services then you're screwed too. If they decide to start charging for EPG listings, or for VOD or whatever then you're screwed too.
This isn't some anti Apple sentiment, the same applies to TVs which are integrating Google TV, or some other proprietary "smart" offering. It's cheaper and more future proof to keep the brains separate from the display.
If everyone has their own opinion why is Siri even answering subjective questions like this?
If Perfect10 charged money for these pictures, how is it that Google's spider app was able to index them? Sounds like they didn't do a very good job of protecting them.
If I spent this much money on a computer I'd want far more storage than a 128GB SSD provides. Why aren't manufacturers sticking hybrids drives into their computers. It would allow them to significantly lower the price of their machines without affecting profits and allow customers more storage with minimal impact on battery life. It would be a win for everyone.
I really wonder who these people are who preorder games. It's not like the game is available for 1 day only, or only available in a limited number of copies before being gone forever. I suppose there is some merit in doing it if the price were attractive, there was no money down and you could cancel if you wanted but that's not the case at all for the likes of GAME.
You're right there should be complaints about Apple too. By tying their platform to their store and deliberately stomping on apps which "compete" with their own they are acting as an abusive monopoly.
