"Second, all this talk of ipTV seems to ignore one BIG source of "ipTV": home networks!"
The main problem with that, is those who use home networks are usually marketing black holes.
You're never going to get any money out of them - all the media they consume, they've already bought (once only verses the "ideal" pay once per view model) and the ipTV supplier has no chance of getting anything.
We have a number of vehicles here in Australia that already have this "safety" feature on disabling the configuration of the built-in dash GPS while the vehicle is in motion.
The first thing I get asked when people find out I, ahem, "dabble" in electronics, is can I disable that interlock to make the GPS receiver useful again?
I wouldn't exacly say "poor girl's apology", she did after all name the wrong guy. But suing twitter?
Don't get me wrong, I hate twitter as much as the next bloke, but in this case, it's just shooting the messenger, and there are laws protecting against that - regardless of the "publisher" crap he's pushing...
So he's pretty much stooped to a lower level than her.
Congratulations Joshua Meggitt, you're now officially a Grade-A douchebag.
And no, don't bother with your libel crap on this one, it's not libel if it's a statement of fact.
Or maybe it is, either way I don't care, you're still a douchebag.
The core of it is: Is this a computer, or an appliance?
I thought about this when I was building my Media PC.
Done before of course, but it's still a full-blown PC none the less.
It came down to this, using a toaster analogy: If I insert a piece of toast and press the lever, is it acceptable for the toaster to say: "You have 28 updates to download, please wait approximately 23 minutes while they are downloaded, applied, then reboot half a dozen times before you can get your bread back in a blackened form".
Bascially, when you press a button, you expect a function, not back chat.
And that's the critical difference.
Sometimes that's easy to implement, sometimes not-so-easy.
"We'll be round shortly to fit a speed limiter on your car. You no longer have the right to break the law and face the consequences you will be prevented by every means, welcome to Minority Report."
I am quite sure this will *never* happen. The current course of action is to *monitor*, without contol. After all, if you're actively prevented from breaking the law, there's no payout for that. And this is a bad thing when the country or states' budget depends on this type of thing.
View the 130Km/h (~80mph) speed limiter on some cars. Plenty high enough for you to get a speeding ticket under any road conditions, while actively preventing the rare speeds that vehicle might be capable of. The 10+ Kkm/h over the limit is the number one moneymaker on the books.
Sigh, arguing for an Ethical Apple reminds me of...
...the last G20 summit meeting here in Australia, and the crowd of protestors outside chanting their chants and waving their slogan signs, then, when they break for lunch, with one hand they held a cellphone against their ear, while eating a mcdonalds burger with the other.
Nothing will come of this - as it shouldn't anyway - because those who whine the loudest have no freaking clue what they're arguing about in the first place. Those 40K signatures mean little when you have to rent the crowd to sign it...
Firstly, Dick Smith Electronics started heading downhill not co-incedently when he (Dick Smith) sold it to Woolworths.
It would also be fair to say that Woolworths alone, did a spanking good job of screwing it over, though I'm surprised it took them this long.
Thirdly, Dick Smith, upon hearing Woolworths planned on (originally) selling off the electronics chainstore to an overseas buyer, planned to rubbish his namesake in protest (he's very publically pro-Australian anti-overseas when it comes to ownership of business here in oz).
IPTV here in australia is still new, doesn't offer more than what you can get on free-to-air anyway, browsers in TVs have a tedious clunky interface, and support for AVI and other formats is strict and lacking.
I know a LOT of people who are self-confessed non-technicals (and a few tech-heads too), and even they've worked out that a Playstation or Xbox attached to your TV offers a superior service. And that's not counting those who have full-blown PCs attached (as I do).
Is there any wonder "Smart TV" demand hasn't picked up?
> No-one here using Noscript even noticed, did ya?
I *did* notice, in that I was *expecting* an outage, just never got it.
Their main page had an additional line of text at the top stating that it was blocked for the english version, and I was certainly reading english. Unless Australia doesn't count as english. Aside from that, it worked perfectly normally.
No idea if NoScript had anything to do with it (I never bothered testing that) but my first thoughts were, if you're going to block your site, at least you could ACTUALLY block it like you said you would. Adding a bit of java to disable things is a piss-poor effort IMO (if that's what they did).
"But I think PDFs can execute code (Javascript?) so it may depend on exactly what they exploit. It could potentially carry payloads for multiple readers, so obscurity is no real defence. On a Windows box one needs that AV running."
Yes, it can carry a javascript payload. It was intended to give PDF documents a bit of "smarts" to navigate to certain pages under certain conditions, or perhaps do other "basic" things where you need some scripting. But being java, you can pretty much do anything.
I'm not sure AV software can insure you against this (no idea, I don't use any myself), but you can configure even the dreaded Adobe Free PDF Reader to simply ignore any attached java, effectively rendering you immune to this type of attack.
True, this breaks things for PDFs where java would come in useful, but so far with me, I haven't missed or even noticed the lack of java causing issues.
People don't CD,DVD or BD players, phones, computers, tablets, toasters, they don't buy cars, trucks:
They buy numbers.
If this tablet has a higher resolution than THAT tablet (or laptop), then it's *obviously* better.
That class of resolution is arguably not going to be any more productive to a lesser (read compared to the closest competitor) box, but that doesn't matter anymore.
But the numbers are better, so that directly translates to better everywhere. Obviously.
"I'm just saying that Apple is starting to look like they're scared and asking the teacher to make the bully stop picking on them, and you've got to think that's making average people wonder why."
It's not even like that. This is more like the kindergarten classes where "everybody wins" by devloping games that have no goals, no winners, no losers and7 no-one inbetween.
Well, sorry Apple, you can't have that because real life doesn't work that way.
You don't have the right to forcibly restructure all the other busines's just because you're not wining today.
Suck it up and deal with the internals of your own company. And stop whining like bloody children because "that other boy" is always better with the soccer ball than you are. Wimps.
I'm presently effectively "blind" when it comes twitter and goggle+ finds.
Just the way I like it.
If something wanders into my field of view, I knock it out with a combination of Firefox addons.
If google wants to do some of this for me, all the better.
I don't know what families you're talking about...
Glue? Batteries?
Around here, the earlier it breaks or the earlier the batteries go flat, means the sooner the toy will stop making those infernal noises, or stop moving or stop projecting whatever projectiles.
You make it sound like you WANT that to keep the toys operational for as long as possble.
Even my parents had the right idea. They only ever bought two sets of batteries (months apart) for my favorite toy train, which blew a whistle and rang a bell. I went so far as to steal the seemingly endless supply of torch batteries my father kept, to force-charge the flat batteries in my toy train.
Back in the days when DOS was prime, and windows software was in the up-and-coming stage, I was testing some corporate windows (win16) software.
Under normal conditions, windows was run in the autoexec.bat, but I tried running the windows software under a DOS prompt anyway (I was bored and had time on my hands, so sue me).
Where I was expecting the standard "this is a windows program" message (forgive me for paraphrasing, this was a long time ago), instead, it went along the lines of "this is not DOS software you fucking moron".
While this may have been acceptable for shareware of the time, it wouldn't cut it for corporates on the off chance they want to have a "play" with their computer. These guys pay a rediculous amount of money for the software, and bucketloads more for the data feed. No really, the fees are just plain fucking scary. So no, callilng them fucking morons was not on, these guys have heavy duty lawers on the payroll for normal day to day work, so taking us to the cleaners for a "funny" statement would have been a breakfast snack to them.
I did report the "bug" to management. I suppose the programmer responsible who thought it was funny at the time, would still have a sore arse today. Whoever it was, sorry dude, but I can't let something like that slide. No matter how funny *I* found it. :-)
"Yes, it's easy to spoof a MAC but a MAC whitelist means your hacker has deliberately and consciously crossed the line into illegality. No longer can they claim they just switched their laptop on and Windows just connected automatically to your router."
Just because something is illegal, it doesn't stop anyone from doing it.
It only offers you legal recourse, and then only if you catch them.
Once they've sniffed your packets, logged into your network and sucked out your IP, they're gone - no need to hang around after all that.
Good luck with getting that horse back into the stable.
This is great news for Nissan, because it allows them to claim 100% customer satisfaction in their sales lies ^H^H^Hpamphlets, while still selling a piece of crap.
"If Samsung has hundreds of technical patents why are they scraping the bottom if the barrel with this?"
They're trying to piss Apple off?
Yes, there is significant prior art (if it is was I think it is, there's no patent numbers specified), but the same goes for Apple too.
This isn't about "you're using our technology" anymopre, if one side bends over and takes it, they WILL go down, so you retaliate with the like till the fight goes away, or one end up broke (whichever comes first).
For those who do know what they're looking at, the features on TV sets are fairly lame at best, even when compared to something like game consoles. When you're looking at media gate boxes, the gap is even further, and for those of us with full blown PCs in there, there is no competition.
Mind you, I'm in Oz, so considering there are a whole heap of older people who don't even have the Internet at their place, certainly aren't going to want it on their bloody TV.
So they're not really complaining that their tests were leaked, but rather, that where everyone had previously *thought* the tests were bogus, now all doubt was removed...
In case of world destruction, and I lose both my Palms (primary and spare), and the only phone left on earth is the iPhone, then I'd probably have more important things to worry about.
Sorta knocks my argument around a bit, but then again, I wouldn't have to stoop so low to use an iPhone - so I'm still happy.
"Not only can current versions of Office read files created in pretty much all previous versions, but Microsoft have released a compatibility pack for Office 2003 to allow it to read files created in more recent versions."
Future versions can *read* earlier version documents just fine.
But all bets are off if you expect all of the formatting to LOOK the same though.
Ditto for their official 2010 to 2003 document conversion utility.
Result is very messy, and that's not counting the painfully wrong formatting either.
Does anyone have to be reminded, that, for this app to be banned, it would have had to pass the super-strict apple application vetting process in the first place?
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471 posts • joined Saturday 16th June 2007 23:09 GMT
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"Now all carriers are required by law to unlock your phone if you actually own it"
Rest assured that while they *have* to, it doesn't mean they'll make it easy for you.
Expect to run through hoops during the 'unlocking' process before you actually really own the phone you merely think you own.
The RIAA is out, the new kid on the block is Apple.
Suing the elderly and dead has now become Apple's cup of tea.
Sure, Kodak isn't people (dead or otherwise), but the sentiment's the same.
Re: Two things I hate.
"Second, all this talk of ipTV seems to ignore one BIG source of "ipTV": home networks!"
The main problem with that, is those who use home networks are usually marketing black holes.
You're never going to get any money out of them - all the media they consume, they've already bought (once only verses the "ideal" pay once per view model) and the ipTV supplier has no chance of getting anything.
Does the button actually work?
As well as any lift that has a "Close Door" button.
Horror! Shock!
China cares about copyright infringement now?
Why don't they just patent a polished turd and be done with it?
Dammit.
Bah humbug
I have a NFC capable phone today, and in Australia no less.
I've gaffa tapped my credit card to the back of my phone.
And it doesn't cost me any extra.
And there is no advertising associated with it either.
We have a number of vehicles here in Australia that already have this "safety" feature on disabling the configuration of the built-in dash GPS while the vehicle is in motion.
The first thing I get asked when people find out I, ahem, "dabble" in electronics, is can I disable that interlock to make the GPS receiver useful again?
Re: Why not sue EVERYONE?
I wouldn't exacly say "poor girl's apology", she did after all name the wrong guy. But suing twitter?
Don't get me wrong, I hate twitter as much as the next bloke, but in this case, it's just shooting the messenger, and there are laws protecting against that - regardless of the "publisher" crap he's pushing...
So he's pretty much stooped to a lower level than her.
Congratulations Joshua Meggitt, you're now officially a Grade-A douchebag.
And no, don't bother with your libel crap on this one, it's not libel if it's a statement of fact.
Or maybe it is, either way I don't care, you're still a douchebag.
The core of it is: Is this a computer, or an appliance?
I thought about this when I was building my Media PC.
Done before of course, but it's still a full-blown PC none the less.
It came down to this, using a toaster analogy: If I insert a piece of toast and press the lever, is it acceptable for the toaster to say: "You have 28 updates to download, please wait approximately 23 minutes while they are downloaded, applied, then reboot half a dozen times before you can get your bread back in a blackened form".
Bascially, when you press a button, you expect a function, not back chat.
And that's the critical difference.
Sometimes that's easy to implement, sometimes not-so-easy.
Boo Hoo, some football suits have their underpants in a twist.
All because a small subset of their users are capable of skipping ads now.
"We'll be round shortly to fit a speed limiter on your car. You no longer have the right to break the law and face the consequences you will be prevented by every means, welcome to Minority Report."
I am quite sure this will *never* happen. The current course of action is to *monitor*, without contol. After all, if you're actively prevented from breaking the law, there's no payout for that. And this is a bad thing when the country or states' budget depends on this type of thing.
View the 130Km/h (~80mph) speed limiter on some cars. Plenty high enough for you to get a speeding ticket under any road conditions, while actively preventing the rare speeds that vehicle might be capable of. The 10+ Kkm/h over the limit is the number one moneymaker on the books.
Sigh, arguing for an Ethical Apple reminds me of...
...the last G20 summit meeting here in Australia, and the crowd of protestors outside chanting their chants and waving their slogan signs, then, when they break for lunch, with one hand they held a cellphone against their ear, while eating a mcdonalds burger with the other.
Nothing will come of this - as it shouldn't anyway - because those who whine the loudest have no freaking clue what they're arguing about in the first place. Those 40K signatures mean little when you have to rent the crowd to sign it...
Inability to spell? → #
So's the South Harman Institute of Technology (ref Accepted (2006))
Either way, I assure you, those words were hand-picked by a panel of marketing droids to maximise impact.
It would be fair to say:
Firstly, Dick Smith Electronics started heading downhill not co-incedently when he (Dick Smith) sold it to Woolworths.
It would also be fair to say that Woolworths alone, did a spanking good job of screwing it over, though I'm surprised it took them this long.
Thirdly, Dick Smith, upon hearing Woolworths planned on (originally) selling off the electronics chainstore to an overseas buyer, planned to rubbish his namesake in protest (he's very publically pro-Australian anti-overseas when it comes to ownership of business here in oz).
Who says you can't get a sore shoulder on a desktop?
It was a major issue at one of my old jobs. I called it "Internet Shoulder".
Owing to the vast amounts of time I spent wasting^H^H^H^Hresearching on the net...
Itchy And Scratchy Land Money....
...It's like real money, but more fun... And now worth nothing.
I was going to ask how anyone falls for this crap, but then again, if they can dupe Homer Simpson into it...
Anyone know first hand about image persistance/burn-in issues on OLEDs?
How does it compare with plasma?
It's essencially a non-issue with most LCDs since you can "excercise" the pixels as a preventative measure to stop anything.
But if they're at, or around how the early plasmas were, I don't think people have forgotten yet why they ditched their plasmas yet...
Agreed with other posters, plus:
IPTV here in australia is still new, doesn't offer more than what you can get on free-to-air anyway, browsers in TVs have a tedious clunky interface, and support for AVI and other formats is strict and lacking.
I know a LOT of people who are self-confessed non-technicals (and a few tech-heads too), and even they've worked out that a Playstation or Xbox attached to your TV offers a superior service. And that's not counting those who have full-blown PCs attached (as I do).
Is there any wonder "Smart TV" demand hasn't picked up?
I shudder to think...
...what the penalty would be for distributing illegal music and video files?
Nice little cash cow if they can get in on it.
From my experience, elecronic anythings get trashed in schools.
And the earlier you go into the education system, the more comprehensivly trashed they get.
Wikipedia down?
> No-one here using Noscript even noticed, did ya?
I *did* notice, in that I was *expecting* an outage, just never got it.
Their main page had an additional line of text at the top stating that it was blocked for the english version, and I was certainly reading english. Unless Australia doesn't count as english. Aside from that, it worked perfectly normally.
No idea if NoScript had anything to do with it (I never bothered testing that) but my first thoughts were, if you're going to block your site, at least you could ACTUALLY block it like you said you would. Adding a bit of java to disable things is a piss-poor effort IMO (if that's what they did).
"But I think PDFs can execute code (Javascript?) so it may depend on exactly what they exploit. It could potentially carry payloads for multiple readers, so obscurity is no real defence. On a Windows box one needs that AV running."
Yes, it can carry a javascript payload. It was intended to give PDF documents a bit of "smarts" to navigate to certain pages under certain conditions, or perhaps do other "basic" things where you need some scripting. But being java, you can pretty much do anything.
I'm not sure AV software can insure you against this (no idea, I don't use any myself), but you can configure even the dreaded Adobe Free PDF Reader to simply ignore any attached java, effectively rendering you immune to this type of attack.
True, this breaks things for PDFs where java would come in useful, but so far with me, I haven't missed or even noticed the lack of java causing issues.
The Streisand Effect working again.
If he didn't have much luck selling it before, he won't now!
Sigh. It's because people buy numbers.
People don't CD,DVD or BD players, phones, computers, tablets, toasters, they don't buy cars, trucks:
They buy numbers.
If this tablet has a higher resolution than THAT tablet (or laptop), then it's *obviously* better.
That class of resolution is arguably not going to be any more productive to a lesser (read compared to the closest competitor) box, but that doesn't matter anymore.
But the numbers are better, so that directly translates to better everywhere. Obviously.
"I'm just saying that Apple is starting to look like they're scared and asking the teacher to make the bully stop picking on them, and you've got to think that's making average people wonder why."
It's not even like that. This is more like the kindergarten classes where "everybody wins" by devloping games that have no goals, no winners, no losers and7 no-one inbetween.
Well, sorry Apple, you can't have that because real life doesn't work that way.
You don't have the right to forcibly restructure all the other busines's just because you're not wining today.
Suck it up and deal with the internals of your own company. And stop whining like bloody children because "that other boy" is always better with the soccer ball than you are. Wimps.
As long as you don't have to hold the device the "right way" to get a result, I can't see Apple being crabby with that.
Yes, yes, I'm going...
Am I missing something?
I'm presently effectively "blind" when it comes twitter and goggle+ finds. Just the way I like it. If something wanders into my field of view, I knock it out with a combination of Firefox addons. If google wants to do some of this for me, all the better.I don't know what families you're talking about...
Glue? Batteries?
Around here, the earlier it breaks or the earlier the batteries go flat, means the sooner the toy will stop making those infernal noises, or stop moving or stop projecting whatever projectiles.
You make it sound like you WANT that to keep the toys operational for as long as possble.
Even my parents had the right idea. They only ever bought two sets of batteries (months apart) for my favorite toy train, which blew a whistle and rang a bell. I went so far as to steal the seemingly endless supply of torch batteries my father kept, to force-charge the flat batteries in my toy train.
Hey I was 6, what else did you expect?
Nice, it looks like they've given up on even trying to hide their screwups.
Glad to see it still happens...
Back in the days when DOS was prime, and windows software was in the up-and-coming stage, I was testing some corporate windows (win16) software.
Under normal conditions, windows was run in the autoexec.bat, but I tried running the windows software under a DOS prompt anyway (I was bored and had time on my hands, so sue me).
Where I was expecting the standard "this is a windows program" message (forgive me for paraphrasing, this was a long time ago), instead, it went along the lines of "this is not DOS software you fucking moron".
While this may have been acceptable for shareware of the time, it wouldn't cut it for corporates on the off chance they want to have a "play" with their computer. These guys pay a rediculous amount of money for the software, and bucketloads more for the data feed. No really, the fees are just plain fucking scary. So no, callilng them fucking morons was not on, these guys have heavy duty lawers on the payroll for normal day to day work, so taking us to the cleaners for a "funny" statement would have been a breakfast snack to them.
I did report the "bug" to management. I suppose the programmer responsible who thought it was funny at the time, would still have a sore arse today. Whoever it was, sorry dude, but I can't let something like that slide. No matter how funny *I* found it. :-)
"Yes, it's easy to spoof a MAC but a MAC whitelist means your hacker has deliberately and consciously crossed the line into illegality. No longer can they claim they just switched their laptop on and Windows just connected automatically to your router."
Just because something is illegal, it doesn't stop anyone from doing it.
It only offers you legal recourse, and then only if you catch them.
Once they've sniffed your packets, logged into your network and sucked out your IP, they're gone - no need to hang around after all that.
Good luck with getting that horse back into the stable.
It gets better.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Nissan Australia is testing customers' suitability before allowing them to purchase one.
<http://smh.drive.com.au/green-motoring/buyers-must-qualify-for-leaf-electric-car-20111221-1p4vp.html?page=-1>
This is great news for Nissan, because it allows them to claim 100% customer satisfaction in their sales lies ^H^H^Hpamphlets, while still selling a piece of crap.
"If Samsung has hundreds of technical patents why are they scraping the bottom if the barrel with this?"
They're trying to piss Apple off?
Yes, there is significant prior art (if it is was I think it is, there's no patent numbers specified), but the same goes for Apple too.
This isn't about "you're using our technology" anymopre, if one side bends over and takes it, they WILL go down, so you retaliate with the like till the fight goes away, or one end up broke (whichever comes first).
What copyright?
If *anyone* retains copyright, it's Facebook.
Try reading the terms and conditions next time you click on a button.
Or doesn't the facebook generation need to read contracts because they already know everything?
Can't say I'm suprised.
For those who do know what they're looking at, the features on TV sets are fairly lame at best, even when compared to something like game consoles. When you're looking at media gate boxes, the gap is even further, and for those of us with full blown PCs in there, there is no competition.
Mind you, I'm in Oz, so considering there are a whole heap of older people who don't even have the Internet at their place, certainly aren't going to want it on their bloody TV.
So they're not really complaining that their tests were leaked, but rather, that where everyone had previously *thought* the tests were bogus, now all doubt was removed...
You're not paranoid if they really ARE out to get you.
So much for Carrier IQ's innocence, and anyone who uses them.
Yep, I'll take THAT smartphone please, the one that DOESN'T have Carrier IQ pre-loaded.
Not suprised really, Malaysia has been pretty hard on IT professionals.
Making them pay for their registration is just another way to kick them in the goulies.
I can't believe they offered this as an "option".
Perhaps it's just me, but if you're going to disinfect a box (or at least try), the *FIRST* thing you do is take it offline.
Bitdefender? Really? Your box is hosed to the point it can't connect and Bitdefender is going to save you? Good luck with that, as the saying goes.
"Mistake" my arse.
This is no "mistake", it doesn't matter what they're "distributing", they're attaching scumware to make a buck.
Yeah, no thanks.
iPhone? No thanks.
In case of world destruction, and I lose both my Palms (primary and spare), and the only phone left on earth is the iPhone, then I'd probably have more important things to worry about.
Sorta knocks my argument around a bit, but then again, I wouldn't have to stoop so low to use an iPhone - so I'm still happy.
When's the audiobook version being released?
Especially useful for those NOT in the 9-18 year old demographic that are capble of reading and waking, riding or driving at the same time.
Oh dear.
You know this can only possibly end badly....
This is why Wikileaks was created. No problems then.
No wait...
"vote with their feet and went from OOo to LibreOffice..."
There is a Bug^H^H^HFeature in LibreOffice Calc that removes gridlines if you change the cell background colour.
The original intention was to mimic Microsoft Excel.
Many people quite rightly argued that if they wanted to use Excel, they WOULD have used Excel.
The powers that be finally admitted the change was short-sighted, and revered changes for the next major release (v3.5)
We're still waiting. This is a year down the track, on a release that split from the Sun OpenOffice because they didn't like how things were going.
Sounds like the blind leading the blind...
"Not only can current versions of Office read files created in pretty much all previous versions, but Microsoft have released a compatibility pack for Office 2003 to allow it to read files created in more recent versions."
Future versions can *read* earlier version documents just fine.
But all bets are off if you expect all of the formatting to LOOK the same though.
Ditto for their official 2010 to 2003 document conversion utility.
Result is very messy, and that's not counting the painfully wrong formatting either.
I'm glad I live in Australia.
Where insulting our Majesty the Prime Minister is a national passtime.
Does anyone have to be reminded, that, for this app to be banned, it would have had to pass the super-strict apple application vetting process in the first place?
My kindom for an anti-apple logo.
A pear seems to fit the bill.
What happens when everyone votes with their wallets?
And moves to an ISP that doesn't babysit them?
It'll give a whole new definition to "customer churn".
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