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Comment: Re:Fly me to Mars or even to the Moon. (Score 1) 376

by Bogtha (#46498225) Attached to: NASA-Funded Study Investigates Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Frankly, I think this is useful.

Sure, but that doesn't mean NASA should be doing it. Get some other government body to do it. Or set one up if there isn't anything suitable already existing. Don't use money allocated for space research for something other than space research.

Comment: What's the issue here? (Score 1) 58

by Bogtha (#46462183) Attached to: Large DDoS Attack Brings WordPress Pingback Abuse Back Into Spotlight


From the description of the issue, all that seems to be happening here is that an attacker makes an HTTP request to a third-party blog that supports Pingback, and that blog makes an HTTP request to the target. As stated, there's no amplification, so all this appears to be doing is masking the source of the attack.

To what is he referring when he says that it amplifies the "scale and reach" of the attack?

Comment: Self-censored? (Score 5, Insightful) 66

by Bogtha (#46453385) Attached to: CanSecWest Presenter Self-Censors Risky Critical Infrastructure Talk

Since his lab is under supervision of the French government, he was required to review his findings with authorities. [...] They told me that this presentation was unsuitable for being public [...] Filiol said his research is now classified.

I know he says that pulling out was the moral thing to do, but describing this as "self censorship" is a bit of a misrepresentation. He showed every tiing ahead with it until the French government got involved, and if he had wanted to go ahead with it, the French government would have stopped him.

Comment: Re:Airplay mirroring with touch to in-dash display (Score 1) 198

by Bogtha (#46388579) Attached to: Apple To Unveil Its 'iOS In the Car' Project Next Week

Why have I never seen any combination of iDevice, AppleTV, and any TV that can scale the smaller screen to the 1080p screen?

I don't know, why haven't you?

This is a solved problem that Apple has gratuitously failed to fix for years now.

This was never broken. Go back to the first devices and the first version of iOS that implemented AirPlay and write an application yourself to test it out. The functionality is there. If you only use applications that don't support varying resolutions, that's not Apple's problem.

Comment: Re:Parasitic Rentiers (Score 1) 258

by Bogtha (#46386241) Attached to: Inventor Has Waited 43 Years For Patent Approval

What value has this man added to a single piece of equipment sold in the last 40 years?

Zero, and that's precisely the problem here. The patent system is designed to encourage inventors to publish implementation details rather than keep them secret. While the patent is active, the holder of the patent can capitalise on their temporary monopoly. Once the patent expires, everybody is free to use that implementation as documented in the patent, thus adding value to the world.

The alternative to patents for most companies is not publishing everything freely, it's keeping them as trade secrets, which never expire. The patent system is an attempt to convert trade secrets into something that is eventually freely published.

This mechanism failed here. What should have been published a long time ago and free for everybody to use a long time ago was locked up and kept secret in the patent application. This invention hasn't benefitted the world because the patent office sat on it. Saying that he hasn't contributed to the industry shouldn't be considered an attack on him, but an attack on the patent office that held up the publishing of this patent.


by Bogtha (#46382333) Attached to: Apple To Unveil Its 'iOS In the Car' Project Next Week

Android apps can cope with different/changing screen resolutions and aspects. iOS may have a problem though since it is designed for a number of fixed resolutions and screen sizes.

Don't mistake what's common for what's designed in. There's very little about iOS that is resolution dependent. While applications generally make assumptions about resolution, iOS and its UI frameworks are fairly flexible. In fact, you've been able to develop iOS applications that use varying screen resolutions for years now - AirPlay lets you set up views on external displays.

I just hope they are not iOS specific and can support Android as well, because there is no way I'd want to lock myself into owning an iPhone for the lifetime of the car. Hopefully wireless charging will be included too, so it can be a true no-cable solution.

These two are very unlikely. Apple's general MO is not inclined towards interoperability. The last major move in that direction was to support the iPod and Safari on Windows, and that was when they were very much the underdog. Since then, they've been moving away from interoperability. Wireless charging will require handset support and they've indicated the technology isn't there yet to do it to their high standards yet.

Comment: Re:Bullshit (Score 1) 255

Because just a little over 5 years ago, the cash cow was... iPods. Now iPods sell even less than Macs.

Because everybody who used to buy iPods now buys iPhones instead, which does everything an iPod does and more. They didn't lose sales, they moved their customers over to a more expensive product.

Are you saying that Apple have a product waiting in the wings that's an entire replacement for an iPhone but earns them more money? If not, what's your explanation for the idea that they want to move away from iPhones and iPads?

Oh yeah, 5 years before THAT, the hot cash cow was Macs.

It still is. Their Mac business is growing, and it's growing even better than investor predictions - they just had one of their best quarters ever for Macs. They sold 4.1m Macs Q1 2013, investors predicted 4.6m for Q1 2014, and they sold 4.8m. The fact that their iOS business eclipses their Mac business is simply due to the sheer magnitude of their iOS business. It doesn't mean that their Mac business is hurting.

The impetus is on Apple to find a new cash cow because it's obvious that iPhones and iPads aren't going to be generating the profits they used to.

Apple's profits are growing and this is mostly fuelled by iOS devices. Apple sold more iOS devices in the past quarter than in any previous quarter. People have been saying that the iOS business is drying up for many years. iOS device profits continue to rise regardless. If the fact that they've just set a new record for number of iOS devices sold in a single quarter isn't enough to convince you that that the iPhones and iPad business isn't "drying up", what would?

Comment: Bullshit (Score 4, Insightful) 255

the company's deep desire to move away from iPhones and iPads

iPhones and iPads make Apple an obscene amount of money and they are in a controlling position in the market. It should go without saying that they don't have "a deep desire to move away" from them. Add new product categories? Sure. Move away from iPhones and iPads? Nope.


Growth is a bullshit metric. A company with one customer can grow their user base 1000% by getting to ten customers. A company with hundreds of millions of customers can't grow like that. Growth naturally slows as a company gets larger. Only bullshit artists looking to get page views or prop up a stock price blather on about how Apple need the next big thing to continue growing. They don't need to continue growing. They are raking money in faster than just about any other company. Trying to grow at the same rate as they have done in previous years is not only a ludicrously unachievable expectation to place on them, it's probably bad for business if they were stupid enough to try. Apple's core strength has always been a small, focused product family.

Comment: Re:Not sure what they're doing (Score 0) 62

by Bogtha (#46264601) Attached to: Apple's Hiring Spree of Biosensor Experts Continues As iWatch Team Grows

It's Apple. If they use their normal strategy, the product they release will not have every feature that everybody wants. It's going to have 80% of the features that 80% of people want, but done in a very nice way. There will be fitness features, but they will be aimed at the average slob who keeps telling himself he needs to get fitter, not experts. Fitness buffs will complain that it doesn't do X, but they'll end up using it anyway because it's convenient because lots of other things will start integrating with it.

Comment: Re:FTP still? (Score 2) 51

In case anybody thinks you are exaggerating: FTP was designed back in 1971. These companies are using a protocol with terrible security because it wasn't designed to be used on the public Internet - because the Internet wasn't even invented back then.

Anybody who seriously suggests FTP in this day and age needs to be told in no uncertain terms that this is an obsolete, pain in the arse protocol that should have died a long time ago.

Comment: According to..? (Score 4, Insightful) 73

by Bogtha (#46215727) Attached to: Godot Game Engine Released Under MIT License

according to Phoronix, it's about as featureful as the Unity engine

From the article:



Comment: Re:The Guidelines are still confidential (Score 1) 387

by Bogtha (#46046547) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: It's 2014 -- Which New Technologies Should I Learn?

In order to get onto the App Store, one has to stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an entrepreneur

This is nonsense. You don't have to "think like an entrepreneur", you just have to pick an idea that hasn't been done to death.

I fail to see how it isn't secret.

Anybody with $99 can see it. The cost is the only barrier to seeing it. That's not a secret, that's charging money for something.

So how would one go about refuting that rant without violating NDA?

Why don't you compare the review guidelines it links to with what it claims those review guidelines state? It misrepresents the document it links to. One of the bullet points even admits that it might be wrong, but they don't know because they don't have all the information.

No, you don't have to spend over a thousand dollars buying a Mac, an iPad, and a certificate just to see the guidelines. You just have to have a paid developer account, which costs $99.

In other words, you are claiming that one should buy a paid developer account, read the Guidelines, and then buy a Mac on which to run Xcode and an iPad mini on which to test an application. Do I understand you correctly?

You're not even attempting to understand me, you're trying to ignore my point and push one of your points instead.

You claimed you had to spend more than a thousand dollars to get your hands on the review guidelines. That's clearly absolute bullshit. My point was that your claim was utterly false. Your response to that is not to hold your hands up and admit what you said was untrue, your response was to try to push another point while ignoring the fact you got caught in an outright lie.

You aren't arguing in good faith, so it's pointless continuing. If you would like to argue in good faith, then you can start by admitting you dishonestly inflated the cost of obtaining the guidelines by over 1000%.
