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User: jrumney

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Comments · 6,163

  1. Use mutt on GA Tech: Internet's Mid-Layers Vulnerable To Attack · · Score: 1

    Evolution always seemed to be too like MS Outlook to me, this article just seems to confirm that, judging by the odd intelligible snippet I can make out from the overuse of metaphors and confused language of the summary. But fear not, mutt does not suffer these problems, and nor does Thunderbird if you need your middle layers of the internet client to have pretty icons.

  2. Re:Reactions from other Android Manufacturers on Google To Acquire Motorola Mobility For $12.5 Bill · · Score: 1

    notice anyone missing?

    Not really. Perhaps it would help if they were more noticeable, but in my local shopping mall, its all Samsung and HTC these days, with Motorola a distant forth behind those two and Apple, with Blackberry and Nokia still hanging on in some dusty corner somewhere with Sony Ericsson and LG.

  3. Re:Airprint on Patent Applications Hint Apple Wants To Eliminate Printer Drivers · · Score: 1

    I may be corrected, but either all ePrint-compatible devices (iOS, WebOS) have native PDF-PCL5 drivers, creating the illusion that the printers are driverless or ePrint Printers can also receive native PDF code, resulting in a pure driverless printing system.

    My money is on the latter, since the investigations into getting AirPrint working on CUPS have centered around getting correctly crafted mdns entries to advertise the PDF capabilities for printer queues. There was also application/urf, but that turned out to be unnecessary, and unused even when it was added to the mdns advertisement (a good thing, because the only known filter for it is an OSX binary that was released with some beta versions of OSX before Apple and HP made a deal to make AirPrint an exclusive feature to sell HP's latest line of networked printers).

  4. Re:Flawed on What's the Carbon Footprint of Bicycling? · · Score: 1

    Oh noes. Guess I better stop riding and turn into an obese blob for the sake of the environment.

    You forgot the food energy cost of becoming an obese blob. But its OK, I'll let you pay your carbon credits directly into my bank account.

  5. Re:Cant compete, but sue. on Sale of Samsung Galaxy Tab Blocked in the EU · · Score: 1

    What's unusual is that the Galaxy Tab looks and acts far less like an iPad than the Galaxy S does an iPhone. It's weird that they're gunning so hard after the tablet.

    Not really, as Samsung has a predecessor to the Galaxy S from 2006 which also looks the same as the iPhone (apart from the square button) which wasn't publically unveiled yet. They don't however have a predecessor to the Galaxy tablet, so Apple hopes to con a jury into thinking that it was Samsung doing the copying.

  6. Re:Well, there's one brand I'll never be buying ag on Nokia Killing Symbian and S40 In North America · · Score: 2

    Only a shill would interpret this statement...

    He tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world's biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners

    ...to mean

    Blackberry, HP and Google told him to take a hike so the only credible option left was WP7.

    The arrogant attitude of expecting to have a built in advantage as the biggest player in the industry is exactly why Nokia is failing in the market, and that the new CEO holds this attitude is the reason why they will continue failing, whatever OS they choose to put on their phones.

  7. Re:What makes the writer think no N9 for USA? on Nokia Killing Symbian and S40 In North America · · Score: 1

    Perhaps the "focusing exclusively on Windows Phone" was a clue?

  8. Re:What countries? on Why Some People Don't Have Fingerprints · · Score: 1

    Among Asian countries, at least Japan, Thailand and Malaysia require fingerprints from non-citizens to enter.

  9. Re:Rugged Prius on Google's Self Driving Car Crashes · · Score: 1

    A more likely scenario based on the damage in that photo is that the four car chain reaction happened in front of the Google car, with the Google car unable to stop in time to avoid joining the pile up from the back (whether manual or auto driven, though in auto mode you'd hope that it would keep sufficient following distance to stop safely in these circumstances).

  10. Re:Wildly misleading headline on Google's Self Driving Car Crashes · · Score: 1

    Or, (c) Human attempted to test a nose-tail collision avoidance feature which was supposed to kick in even in manual override mode.

  11. Re:next gold rush? on Rare Earth Deposit Discovered In US · · Score: 1

    There's also the fact that the Australian company that is sending Australian mined minerals to South East Asia for processing by cheap labour is refusing to take their radioactive waste back to Australia where they have a huge fscking desert to hide it in, instead leaving it to overpopulated Asian nations to find somewhere to put it (nothing a bit of money under the table won't solve in this part of the world).

  12. Re:Missed the point on The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake · · Score: 1

    Furthermore, if they chose a one-byte length, as the article so casually suggests as the correct solution

    To be one byte larger than the NUL terminated version, as the article states, it would have to be a two byte length, still arbitrary limiting the length of strings, but to 65535 characters, not 255.

  13. Re:Much better anyway on Apple Removes MySQL From Lion Server · · Score: 1

    It gets a bit harder when you need to share a database between two or more users. As well as the database and tables themselves, there are a bunch of other internal things that you need to grant privileges on before things work smoothly. Security by default is of course a feature, however, not a flaw.

  14. Re:It's not really Emacs... on Emacs Has Been Violating the GPL Since 2009 · · Score: 1

    They could always get it from the same git repository the emacs developers would, and failing that a polite message to emacs-devel@gnu.org would have the emacs developers passing it on fairly promptly, so they could remain in compliance.

  15. Re:Goes for cameras too. on Why Your Dad's 30-Year-Old Stereo Sounds Better Than Yours · · Score: 1

    I think these two factors are related. Where before, the average consumer might not be enough of a photography hobbiest to justify owning two cameras, and they don't always want to lug around a bulky and heavy SLR so they go with the compact, now they have a crappy camera on their mobile phone for the occasions where they don't need quality photos, so they are more likely to choose a DSLR for their only real camera.

  16. Re:Need better downsampling? on Public AAC Listening Test @ ~96 Kbps [July 2011]. · · Score: 1

    The CD sounds good but on the vinyl, you could hear the solo violinist breathing through his nose and you could hear string noises that were absent on the CD, swallowed up by poor audio resolution I suppose.

    That was the first time you listened to it. How did it sound after the needle had worn the groove a dozen or more times? Most mass produced vinyl especially from the 1980's when record companies were becoming accounting driven, had a terrible dynamic range compared to CDs.

  17. Re:Not being overprotective on Can a Playground Be Too Safe? · · Score: 1

    I fell off a full sized horse when I was about 7 or 8. I don't remember the fall hurting much at all, only the horseshoe on my hand.

  18. Re:Bluetooth sucks on Apple Adopts Bluetooth 4.0. Could It Reject NFC? · · Score: 1

    I think what you really mean to say is that Windows (and Linux, in my experience) Bluetooth stacks suck. Like you observe, the PS3 is able to handle Bluetooth smoothly, as are other devices and operating systems.

  19. Re:The Apple solution on 8% of Android Apps Are Leaking Private Information · · Score: 1

    The other part of the solution is to run a closed market, and be picky about what apps you allow. If the developers of security software have nothing to sell on your platform, they won't go blabbing about the security holes to try to sell their product.

  20. Re:7 billion? No wait, 8? 9? on Earth's Population To Hit 7 Billion This Year · · Score: 3, Informative

    Suffering and mass death has a lot of precedent in human history. Why do you think it took so long to reach the first billion?

  21. Re:Software patent implosion on Company Claims Ownership of Digital Messaging · · Score: 2

    "The software you are suing over predates your patent. Do you wish to continue?" If you answer "Yes" to that question, you should become liable for triple the damages you are claiming upon losing the case.

  22. Re:Not prior art on Apple Patents Portrait-Landscape Flipping · · Score: 1

    A can be used to do X. B can also be used to do X. A can also be used to do Y, since Y is a very similar application to X. Isn't it then obvious that B can also do Y?

    Also, the test for obviousness is not that others have done it before, that is called prior art. The main reason for no one having done this with accelerometers before that, is that accelerometers were bulky and expensive before widespread adoption of airbags made them into a high volume commodity item. Apple, and other manufacturers that were adding these to their devices at the same time, were taking advantage of the new availability of cheap, small MEMS accelerometers in the market.

  23. Re:Not prior art on Apple Patents Portrait-Landscape Flipping · · Score: 1

    Nokia N95 was released 3 months before the original iPhone and iPod Touch, and used accelerometers to tag the orientation of photos taken using its camera. So the use of accelerometers to detect orientation has prior art, as does the use of sensors to orientate the screen (from Radius monitors, and the HTC TyTn which predates the iPhone by over a year and used a switch that detected whether the keyboard was slid out to decide that the screen needed to be landscape).

    The combination of these is obvious to anyone skilled in the art.

  24. Re:Not prior art on Apple Patents Portrait-Landscape Flipping · · Score: 1

    Ah yes, the novel extension of being portable. That makes all the difference.

  25. Re:Looks like the old telegraph maps on Undersea Cable Map Shows Where The Data Pipes Are · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure if those telegraph lines from Sydney are going to nowheresville in the South Island or Wellington, my money would be on the latter, as routing the lines over the Southern Alps to the population centres in the South Island would not make sense, and they are too far North to be going to Greymouth, which is about the only notable population centre on the West Coast of the South Island. Interesting that one of the internet cables from Sydney is shown approaching Manukau harbour but labelled as landing in Takapuna. Historically New Zealands first internet connections landed in Manukau harbour and were routed to a data centre in Waikato University. Nowdays it is all commercial, and the gateways seem to have moved North to Takapuna and Whenuapai, but I'd have expected some redundancy to at least Wellington, and maybe Christchurch (in case of Cook Strait cables being knocked out).