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Comment: Incorrect title : not "court ruling" (Score 1) 138

by ihavnoid (#46063249) Attached to: South Korean Court Rules That Phone Bloatware Must Be Deletable

This may be nitpicking, but the title itself seems to be incorrect: this isn't a court ruling.

This is a guideline released by the government authority who is in charge of telecommunication policy. It's an agreement between the agency, three biggest carriers (SKT, KT, U+), three Korean phone manufactures (Samsung, LG, Pantech, etc.), and Google (Curious why Apple is missing). Probably not legally enforceable (How can you define "bloatware" in a legal term?) but at least it's a good starting point.

Yes, I RTFA'd, and I can read the press release written in Korean. :)

Comment: A little bit more background (Score 5, Informative) 137

by ihavnoid (#42159775) Attached to: Samsung Sets New Guidelines For Alcoholic Beverages






Comment: Re:Workaround (Score 2) 243

by ihavnoid (#40770171) Attached to: Samsung Galaxy S3 Stripped of Local Search

The problem is that there are many cases the "workaround" will not be acknowledged as a proper removal of the feature. You better have a good reason why you left a backdoor, and how come it was unintentional.

Remember the GTA hot coffee mod? They disabled the part of the game that was considered inappropriate for minors, but it didn't count as a proper removal, so they had their age ratings change until they completely removed it.

Comment: Re:Who cares... (Score 1) 563

by ihavnoid (#40762071) Attached to: Windows 8 Graphics: Microsoft Has Hardware-Accelerated Everything

- Windows 8 is targeted to be a mobile OS that happens to be usable as a desktop OS.
- On mobile devices, transistors are cheap, clock frequency isn't. So yes, your mobile device will have all those graphics capability for that.

Now, think again whether what Microsoft did makes sense.

Comment: Reading the patent (Score 2) 306

by ihavnoid (#40683357) Attached to: Apple Wins Mobile Patent On Displaying Lists, Documents

What the patent seemed to describe was the thin vertical bar which appears when you touch the screen(which represents the vertical location of the current screen) and vanishes the moment you put your fingers off.

An easy way to circumvent this patent is to display the scroll location whether you touch the screen or not. The thin bar may have been a significant display estate on the good old years, but as the display resolution increase, it may be a better idea to display the bar continuously anyway.

Not sure if the patent is actually innovative, though. It seemed to have an awful lot of clauses to avoid an awful lot of prior arts.

Comment: Re:Why aren't capital gains taxed the easy way? (Score 2) 538

by ihavnoid (#40463705) Attached to: High-Frequency Traders Are the Ultimate Hackers, Says Mark Cuban

No, the problem is that the HFT traders are still trading de facto stocks, which looks like stocks, acts like stocks, but aren't stocks. Derivatives are tightly linked to the original stuff they are based on. The only difference is that they aren't taxed, but the broker takes a hefty transaction fee.


by ihavnoid (#40462875) Attached to: High-Frequency Traders Are the Ultimate Hackers, Says Mark Cuban


Good luck writing the tax code for every single financial instrument.

Actually, We in Korea have a small tax for every trade on the stock market. The HFT guys are running on the derivative market, where they merely trade the "insurance" policy which covers price fluctuations on the stock market.

Comment: Re:SPIN (Score 1) 105

by ihavnoid (#40347843) Attached to: 12-Core ARM Cluster Beats Intel Atom, AMD Fusion

Okay, I'll do some counteract to counteract the ARM FUD.


So, maybe it can be a Intel vs. TI issue, but it it certainly isn't an Intel vs. ARM issue. If you want to be fair, you should compare Intel Ivy Bridge with an SoC without the smartphone-or-tablet-or-whatever specific devices, which is manufactured in a recent-enough manufacturing process. Unfortunately, as of now, I fail to find any SoC intended to be used on datacenters.

Yes, you are an idiot to create a datacenter with an array of OMAP 4s. Maybe the Qualcomm S4 may be better (28nm process) but I don't think it is likely to beat Ivy Bridge for now (due to inefficient SoC-to-SoC interconnects - Ethernet wasn't designed to be used for close proximity high-speed/low-power communication). But claiming x86 is more power-efficient than ARM is a completely different issue that can't be resolved by comparing OMAPs and Ivy Bridges.

Comment: Re:How about a telex machine (Score 1) 200

by ihavnoid (#40050111) Attached to: Microsoft Wins US Import Ban On Motorola's Android Devices

If you compare the telex with claim 1, the telex machine doesn't have an application, not used for storing data on a remote storage, and certainly doesn't have a synchronization mechanism. Finally, telex machines doesn't seem to qualify as a mobile device.

If something doesn't EXACTLY match the description of AT LEAST one claim, it isn't an infringement. Actually, that's why many patents are quite easy to bypass.

Comment: Re:The patent (Score 2) 200

by ihavnoid (#40049889) Attached to: Microsoft Wins US Import Ban On Motorola's Android Devices

You are missing the point. It seems that many people on slashdot simply don't understand how patents work.

The abstract and the description of the patent doesn't mean that the patent owner "owns" whatever described on it. The description is there for the readers so that they can understand how the whole stuff works. It can contain whatever description you want.

The idea Microsoft "owns" is described as "claims", which essentially describes a mobile device which has a UI, can synchronize to a remote system, and can book meetings and blah blah blah. Since mobile devices which could book meetings were rare at 1998, it seems Motorola attorneys had a difficult time looking for prior art.

Comment: Re:Who shives a git!!! (Score 1) 225

by ihavnoid (#39299763) Attached to: Is Onlive Pirating Windows and Will It Cost Them?

Yes, maybe your client may say Google is okay if you asked, but that's gonna make the procedure god damn complicated because the client is also going to ask their lawyers, management, and whomever that needs to be alerted that the data will be shared with somebody else even if it is Google or whomever. The problem isn't that you can't trust Google - it is because adding another party into the contract will increase the complexity of any contract. (e.g., if Google somehow gets screwed and leaks the data, who will be responsible? it's possible that these things must be written into the contract)

I work for a semiconductor company, and since we need to handle a lot of customers' designs, our whole IT infrastructure is in-house, even though it is the crappiest service that I ever experienced.

Comment: Re:Not sympathetic. (Score 5, Insightful) 825

by ihavnoid (#39074233) Attached to: Obama Pushes For Cheaper Pennies

I'm not sure if you understand basic economics, but a world without inflation would be much worse. The main purpose of inflation is to encourage people to spend money, or at least, save it in a bank, rather than keep the money in your closet. Once there is no inflation, or even a small amount of deflation, it acts as a positive feedback - as the value of money increases, people tries to get hold of more cache, and that reduces the total supply of cash within the society, and it further increases the value of cash. Eventually, all spending dries up, jobs will disappear (since there is nobody who's trying to by ANYTHING), and the poor guys will suffer more seriously, since the rich guys (=people with lots of cash) will have their assets' value increase automatically without doing anything, while the poor guys have no job, no cash, and nothing to buy anyway. That is precisely what happened on the great depression.

What we need is a MODERATE amount of inflation - not sure how much is the right amount, but high enough to avoid the deflation spiral, and low enough to avoid hyperinflation.

Plus, what's wrong with government spending? The government is supposed to represent the people, and hence, the spending should be something for the people. If you find government spending to be evil, then you should have a better, more sensible government, and stop blaming the spending itself.

Comment: Why does it have to be geeky? (Score 1) 399

by ihavnoid (#38838369) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Techie Wedding Invitation Ideas?

Before trying anything, two questions:
First, is your soon-to-be-significant-other going to agree and feel comfortable with your idea? Remember that the wedding isn't about yourself, it's about you and your partner. If your wife is also geeky, fine. Go nuts. If not, I don't think your partner will feel comfortable with your idea, and I don't think the wedding will go well without both of you being comfortable.

Second, is your wedding guests be comfortable with your geeky invitation? When I got married, we had a fairly wide range of demographic ranging from 3 year olds to 80 year olds. There were people like my grandma who doesn't even own a cellphone, let alone a PC. My mom still doesn't know how to load new MP3s on her MP3 player, so I have to do that for her every couple of months. Anything with a URL or a QR code would be completely useless to people like them.

Well, what I did was printed out a bunch of invitation cards with the usual stuff, and added a URL with a hand-crafted webpage with a separate domain name specifically for the wedding. Maybe not so geeky, but I used my geek skills to impress my wife and the other non-tech-savvy people.

Comment: Re:Single point of failure (Score 1) 207

by ihavnoid (#37908622) Attached to: ASUS Running Out of Hard Disks

Great explanation.

The reason is simple : most of the large PC manufacturers write contracts with the parts manufacturers so that they can buy up to a given number of stuff at a predetermined price. Not only disks, but also DRAM (price known to fluctuate wildly), flash memory, capacitors, etc etc etc. These are the guys who are dating those 9 out of the 10 girls.

I'm actually quite surprised that ASUS didn't secure a stable supply chain - now they have to shut their business down simply because they can't get enough disks.
