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Comment Re:About time! (Score 2) 306

+1, accurate.

One of my peeves with IPv6 is that in v4 I had over 16 million legal loopback addresses out of only 4 billion addresses; now in v6 I have exactly one out of a much larger pool. It is not often useful, but it isn't always useless to use more than one of the loopback addresses on a host.

I would have preferred loopback to be a /64 rather than a /128 in IPv6: it's not like the address-space is too small to afford it.

Comment Re:Yeah? So? That is how life works (Score 1) 246

You are conflating ignorance of the law with ignorance of the facts (and you appear to have copious amounts of both).

A pre-existing patent is not law, it is fact. IBM advises its employees to remain ignorant of other patents while working on products because if those products are later found infringing then their liability is reduced.

I was a Master Inventor at IBM before I quit in 2010 and we absolutely did check for pre-existing patents before filing anything new. Occasionally this would lead to wasted effort within IBM because a proposal would get further through the process than it would if the inventors had looked for relevant patents before starting work.

Comment Re:more stupidity (Score 1) 109

It will probably stream OpenGL commands, not rendered images.

Doubtful.

If you can stream one rendered image every 16ms you can display 60fps. If you send OpenGL commands you will be better-off on a lot of frames but it will stutter every time you need to send a texture larger than a rendered frame (and most textures are larger than a rendered frame).

The game is to make the peak frame latency 16ms (or whatever your target is), not to reduce the average.

Comment Re:Missing the point (Score 1) 134

A very reliable rule of thumb is that if there are N possible hash values, then you should expect 0.5 hash collisions after hashing N items.

No you shouldn't. You should expect 0.5 collisions after hashing N/2 items. Trivially you are guaranteed at least M collisions when hashing N+M items.

I don't actually know off the top of my head how many collisions you should expect if you hashed N items.

Comment Re:Prior use (Score 4, Interesting) 354

the GSM spec contains a special call type 'emergency' which is meant to be triggered when you press that, or dial 112 or 999 (or presumably 911) so the digits really don't matter to the network. The idea was that those calls could kick someone else off the network if it was congested, for an emergency. I don't believe it was ever implemented though.

It was implemented. In the UK at least if you call an emergency number when you have a weak signal it will dramatically improve for the duration of the call as the cell tower reconfigures itself to use up to its maximum power and, as you say, drops any other call that was interfering with the call placed by your handset.

The towers are smart enough not to drop any calls or boost the power unless it will help.

Comment Re:We are the 30% (Score 1) 724

I agree that a 30% cut is a bit too much...

b) When a company sells digital software themselves, they don't get to keep 100% of the sale price. They have to pay for hosting, bandwidth, marketing, sales processing, manhours involved in all of this, etc., etc., etc.

I own a small business selling apps on the iOS store and I agree that 30% is a reasonable price for what they provide.

Apple do nothing to market or promote your apps, so you should not have included that. You missed a relatively important factor in that they test and validate the apps they sell which gives consumers more confidence to purchase than they have on competitor's app stores.

Comment Re:Sounds reasonable (Score 1) 338

This sounds reasonable to me - the telephone company has no business filtering phone calls, so it should not filter text messages either. Subscribers may choose to employ a spam-blocking service, which could be provided by other people than the phone company.

I agree with this in principle, but I would add that it is a matter between the subscribers and the telephone company; I do not see that any third party has grounds to interfere in that relationship.

If the telephone company's scheme is optional, subscribers are given a clear choice, and subscribers may change their choice at any time without penalty then I would say it's fine. Failing that, if subscribers have a choice of telcos and at least one of them offers an unfiltered option there is no need for any regulator to get involved.

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