It's pretty hard to prove a negative like that... that's why snake oil salesmen like to trot out the old 'prove it doesn't work'.
Of course science doesn't work like that. You prove it works. Then you tell others, and they do the same thing in exactly the same way you did. If and only if they can do the same thing does anyone have any right to start using the word 'proof'.
There's a big difference between animal's reactions to earthquakes which is observable and repeatable to finding the ghost of your dead auntie in the cupboard, which isn't either of those.
Note the qualification there - observable - by others *not* just the one person who happened to be pointing a camera in the right direction at the right time in the middle of the night. And repeatable - given the same circumstances, the same thing is going to happen.
Throw enough random results around and you'll get people that appear to buck the statistical odds, like people who seem to win a lot of lotteries.. they're not special - 'luck' is not an inherited gene... they're just at the extreme end of the bell curve.
It's more than a blacklist.. it's a kill switch. If a phone receives a validated kill signal from the provider it bricks - if you're very lucky the phone will boot after that but for the most part unless you're into JTAG you have to throw the phone away.
The providers worked out long ago that blacklists don't work - criminals don't care that it's illegal to change an IMEI.
I can be a git if you find the phone after reporting it stolen - there's nothing anyone can do. It's 'un-stolen' but there's no signal or anything that can be sent to revive it.. you've gotta get a new phone.
The stupid thing is the admin account isn't admin.
UAC would be great if it only applied to the user accounts but it also applies to the administrator. Who wants to get things done, dammit.
So what happens is UAC gets switched off.
Also the confirmation box is stupid. What do you do to enable the nefarious application (normally loaded by 'rundll32' so you don't even know what it is?). Hit return. Loads of security there.
Managed code tends to leak because the garbage collector only runs when it has time to do so - if you have a tight loop doing something you can leak hundreds of megabytes very quickly.
I saw a java app once that could do that (at a place I used to work) - they had converted the c++ core to java and the memory usage went from running fine on 512kb to burying a 4gb server.. we worked out that if you didn't call gc() regularly it just grew until most of the memory was in swap. c# may be a little more efficient (I sure hope it is) but it seems inherent in the design of garbage collected systems that they'll use gobs of memory to do stuff.
Yes you can get a desktop in about 30-40 seconds on a fast machine.. but use it? The services etc. take about another minute to come up and you can't click on anything in the desktop until it's fully up.
Nope. iphone bluetooth is pretty crippled... it's limited to headsets and only a certain number of those.. oh and you can't listen to music through them.
The iphone frequently makes things *worse* by changing your word to a word it thinks you meant.
This made worse by the fact that the UK iphone speaks US English and can't spell perfectly ordinary words like 'colour'.
I have hell with my initials.. the iphone thinks I mean something completely different and keeps changing them, and I have to back up and put it back. Passwords are even worse - there you can't *see* it's changed it and it's only about the 30th attempt at entering it you realize what's going on.
Whilst I'd agree that checking malloc should always be done, in reality on a modern OS malloc almost never fails (unless you do something silly and ask for 8gb on a 32bit machine) - all you do is drive things more and more into swap until the entire machine slows to a crawl.
I'd go further than that - Apple have *increased* the hold of the carriers.
In Europe no carrier would have dared release a phone that could not be unlocked, due to the regulations covering it. Apple did.. It's a clear attempt to bring the US style 'shaft me up the arse' mobile phone model to Europe.
Pity apple didn't follow through on this... the SMS app is a trainwreck.
Open SMS app. Greeted with a *blank screen* with a button on the top left marked 'edit' (edit what? why is this button even there let alone enabled?), and a strange modified square thing in the top right, that may or may not be some kind of logo.
I've given the iphone to people to see if they worked it out. They didn't. Even took me a day or two to get used to it. Still not sure WTF the square thing is supposed to really mean (other than 'New message' but why didn't they just say that?)
Developer certificates *are* free. For anyone. You only start paying if you want to distribute a signed application.
You pay for the certificate if you want to start distributing commercial apps. That's no more cost than you would pay for a signing certificate on Windows for example and if you can't recover that cost how are you paying your devs in the first place? You do *not* have to submit the app for testing once your company has a certificate, as the signing application is part of the SDK. We actually have one, although the project that was going to be used for it got shelved.. the cert. is there though and I could use it if I wanted.
Even many independent applications distribute signed because it's easier on their customers. At the free end the more common model is to distribute unsigned and sign it yourself using a dev. cert. - and that's just a tedious extra step (pity they made it mandatory.. optional was far better).
That hardly counts as 'hostile'. Windows mobile needs signed apps, you can bet the google OS will have similar requirements and the iphone definately will (if they ever release the SDK to non-approved developers, which is looking doubtful).
1. If you're making commercial software then paying for a proper certificate is a very minor cost - even independent devs do it. 2. Free developer certificates work fine.
You don't have to get your app signed by a 'test house' you sign your apps yourself using your companies' cerficicate.
Plus you can access files and use the network and other stuff like GPS with a standard developer certificate... heck I've even written stuff that does that myself. What you can't do with the dev certs is mess around with the OS itself - that requires a special certificate - but 99% of applications will never need that.
Most 3rd party symbian *signed* apps cost about £5. They can sell that cheap because developing for symbian is dirt cheap, and anyone can do it.
If you think 'crashes constantly, buggy SMS, no MMS, crappy Bluetooth, 2-3 clicks before you can even get to a screen where you can use it as a damned phone' better than everything then you haven't seen many phones.
Apple are newbies at the phone game and it really shows. They'll improve I'm sure.. there's nothing really wrong hardware wise with the iphone (battery life is poor but you can work around it).. its just needs a v2.0 software with all the bits they screwed up the first time around.
Google will probably go through the same learning curve.. IMO their project is doomed anyway - without nokia support they've lost 90% of the phone market to start with.. and apple will certainly never run googleOS they'll never be in the 'sexy expensive' phones.
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It's pretty hard to prove a negative like that... that's why snake oil salesmen like to trot out the old 'prove it doesn't work'.
Of course science doesn't work like that. You prove it works. Then you tell others, and they do the same thing in exactly the same way you did. If and only if they can do the same thing does anyone have any right to start using the word 'proof'.
There's a big difference between animal's reactions to earthquakes which is observable and repeatable to finding the ghost of your dead auntie in the cupboard, which isn't either of those.
Note the qualification there - observable - by others *not* just the one person who happened to be pointing a camera in the right direction at the right time in the middle of the night. And repeatable - given the same circumstances, the same thing is going to happen.
Or... 6 got lucky.
Throw enough random results around and you'll get people that appear to buck the statistical odds, like people who seem to win a lot of lotteries.. they're not special - 'luck' is not an inherited gene... they're just at the extreme end of the bell curve.
See http://www.audioholics.com/reviews/cables/diy-speaker-cable-faceoff
Great site.. separates bullshit from fact.
Basically if you're cabable of working with it, use CAT5, otherwise there are a number of cheap solutions.
I learned from there that gold has a higher resistance than copper, so the only reason for gold plated connectors is that it sounds expensive.
What would be the point? You can get weather and stocks from lots of places.
As others have pointed out this works on the ipod touch too so it doesn't *need* to send the IMEI at all.
The app *does* work on the touch though, so that argument doesn't work.
It's more than a blacklist.. it's a kill switch. If a phone receives a validated kill signal from the provider it bricks - if you're very lucky the phone will boot after that but for the most part unless you're into JTAG you have to throw the phone away.
The providers worked out long ago that blacklists don't work - criminals don't care that it's illegal to change an IMEI.
I can be a git if you find the phone after reporting it stolen - there's nothing anyone can do. It's 'un-stolen' but there's no signal or anything that can be sent to revive it.. you've gotta get a new phone.
I don't know about you but I tend to have the microphone pointing towards me when I'm making phone calls...
The problem is the IMEI allows for SIM cloning, which is why you should *never* give it out.. it's unique to your SIM and used for billing etc.
So iphone broadcasts it unencrypted via wi-fi.. and you're not bothered?
The stupid thing is the admin account isn't admin.
UAC would be great if it only applied to the user accounts but it also applies to the administrator. Who wants to get things done, dammit.
So what happens is UAC gets switched off.
Also the confirmation box is stupid. What do you do to enable the nefarious application (normally loaded by 'rundll32' so you don't even know what it is?). Hit return. Loads of security there.
Managed code tends to leak because the garbage collector only runs when it has time to do so - if you have a tight loop doing something you can leak hundreds of megabytes very quickly.
I saw a java app once that could do that (at a place I used to work) - they had converted the c++ core to java and the memory usage went from running fine on 512kb to burying a 4gb server.. we worked out that if you didn't call gc() regularly it just grew until most of the memory was in swap. c# may be a little more efficient (I sure hope it is) but it seems inherent in the design of garbage collected systems that they'll use gobs of memory to do stuff.
Define 'boot'.
Yes you can get a desktop in about 30-40 seconds on a fast machine.. but use it? The services etc. take about another minute to come up and you can't click on anything in the desktop until it's fully up.
Nope. iphone bluetooth is pretty crippled... it's limited to headsets and only a certain number of those.. oh and you can't listen to music through them.
The iphone frequently makes things *worse* by changing your word to a word it thinks you meant.
This made worse by the fact that the UK iphone speaks US English and can't spell perfectly ordinary words like 'colour'.
I have hell with my initials.. the iphone thinks I mean something completely different and keeps changing them, and I have to back up and put it back. Passwords are even worse - there you can't *see* it's changed it and it's only about the 30th attempt at entering it you realize what's going on.
Whilst I'd agree that checking malloc should always be done, in reality on a modern OS malloc almost never fails (unless you do something silly and ask for 8gb on a 32bit machine) - all you do is drive things more and more into swap until the entire machine slows to a crawl.
I'd go further than that - Apple have *increased* the hold of the carriers.
In Europe no carrier would have dared release a phone that could not be unlocked, due to the regulations covering it. Apple did.. It's a clear attempt to bring the US style 'shaft me up the arse' mobile phone model to Europe.
Pity apple didn't follow through on this... the SMS app is a trainwreck.
Open SMS app. Greeted with a *blank screen* with a button on the top left marked 'edit' (edit what? why is this button even there let alone enabled?), and a strange modified square thing in the top right, that may or may not be some kind of logo.
I've given the iphone to people to see if they worked it out. They didn't. Even took me a day or two to get used to it. Still not sure WTF the square thing is supposed to really mean (other than 'New message' but why didn't they just say that?)
iphone won't... so there's clearly no law.
But it's killed the format anyhow. They promoted it.. they supported it.. now they're gone.
ODF will continue to be supported by openoffice but it's the end for any hopes of it becoming any kind of standard. Deal with it.. game over.
N800 is basically the same but a bit smaller and with a phone.. Linux based and very hackable.
Developer certificates *are* free. For anyone. You only start paying if you want to distribute a signed application.
You pay for the certificate if you want to start distributing commercial apps. That's no more cost than you would pay for a signing certificate on Windows for example and if you can't recover that cost how are you paying your devs in the first place? You do *not* have to submit the app for testing once your company has a certificate, as the signing application is part of the SDK. We actually have one, although the project that was going to be used for it got shelved.. the cert. is there though and I could use it if I wanted.
Even many independent applications distribute signed because it's easier on their customers. At the free end the more common model is to distribute unsigned and sign it yourself using a dev. cert. - and that's just a tedious extra step (pity they made it mandatory.. optional was far better).
That hardly counts as 'hostile'. Windows mobile needs signed apps, you can bet the google OS will have similar requirements and the iphone definately will (if they ever release the SDK to non-approved developers, which is looking doubtful).
1. If you're making commercial software then paying for a proper certificate is a very minor cost - even independent devs do it.
2. Free developer certificates work fine.
You don't have to get your app signed by a 'test house' you sign your apps yourself using your companies' cerficicate.
Plus you can access files and use the network and other stuff like GPS with a standard developer certificate... heck I've even written stuff that does that myself. What you can't do with the dev certs is mess around with the OS itself - that requires a special certificate - but 99% of applications will never need that.
Most 3rd party symbian *signed* apps cost about £5. They can sell that cheap because developing for symbian is dirt cheap, and anyone can do it.
If you think 'crashes constantly, buggy SMS, no MMS, crappy Bluetooth, 2-3 clicks before you can even get to a screen where you can use it as a damned phone' better than everything then you haven't seen many phones.
Apple are newbies at the phone game and it really shows. They'll improve I'm sure.. there's nothing really wrong hardware wise with the iphone (battery life is poor but you can work around it).. its just needs a v2.0 software with all the bits they screwed up the first time around.
Google will probably go through the same learning curve.. IMO their project is doomed anyway - without nokia support they've lost 90% of the phone market to start with.. and apple will certainly never run googleOS they'll never be in the 'sexy expensive' phones.
because it costs a fortune to get development licenses
Bulshit. The development certs. are free. The SDK is free.
There are many, many thousands of symbian developers and many many thousands of independent symbian apps.
Because symbian sucks? The comment about developers is rather funny, considering that symbian is downright hostile environment for developers.
Uhh.. what?
The SDK is a free download. How is that hostile?
You can program in standard C or C++. How is that hostile?
Compared to some platforms it's positively open.