Posts by Adam Nealis
123 posts • joined Sunday 8th April 2007 10:05 GMT
The laws of physics will be different in the encroaching bubble.
I think.
Posted in Apple refreshes MacBook Pro range
Re: Please stop moaning about transat differences
+1
The price disparity topic has been done to death many times over.
Re: pictures
Nice link.
From the article (my emphasis)
"Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, noted that this calving event marks a retreat of the Petermann Glacier “farther back than historical calving fronts.” A comparison of this event to the 2010 event shows that this iceberg broke off the glacier tongue farther upstream. The crack along the southern margin of this new iceberg, however, has been visible in satellite imagery for several years. That rift was first identified in 2001."
I wonder how far back "historical calving fronts" data go?
Why not football pitches and Olympic swimmimg pools?
The latter for volume of course.
Re: If a 7" device is not an iPhone and not an iPad - what is it?
"But I'm guessing the 7" device is an iPod."
It might just be the remote control for the iTV
Re: An extremely pessimistic article this
"So what you're saying is that Google and Microsoft will never be able to catch up with the iPad and therefore should just let Apple have free reign in the tablet market?"
I don't think AO is saying that Apple should have free reign. He is just saying that surface and nexus 7 don't pose a threat.
"You say that the reason the Kindle and iPad are successful is because of their content market - a point I agree with. But content does not grow on trees - device first, then the content grows. Expecting a device to launch an iPad-equivalent amount of content available is foolishness."
What content exclusively requires a Kindle or an iPad?
What have Apple to do with it?
All the author has to go on viz apple is that they only denied once that they don't do 7".
So all the author has to go on in terms of facts is that Apple are competing in the 7" space by not having a product in that form factor.
NFC = "No F@cking Chance"?
WTF does NFC stand for?
Re: Why only 6.5M entries?
Maybe change it again unless you're sure the change now has added salt.
Posted in Touchscreens to get finger friendly
Re: I know it's a bit gimmicky but...
I don't think it's gimmicky at all.
If it works as I expect, when applied to tablets it should reduce the need for a separate keyboard and therefore a track pad.
Re: Oracle Gobbles Upstart Facebook
I think you got it the wrong way round.
It sounds like Larry, not Zucks is doing the sucking.
Which would make Larry the bitch.
Not much will change.
In the grand scheme of things.
The first parallel programming language I can remember is/ was OCCAM, introduced in 1983. That's nearly 40 years for parallel programming to take over and it hasn't.
I am not aware of any cross compiler that is generic enough to optimise for an arbitrary architecture. So to optimise, people are needed. People are the most expensive part of the bangs to the buck equation. There's a fine line between parallelise and paralyse.
Most software is "optimised" by upgrading the hardware it runs on.
Intel will win market share with MIC because it is a big company, because of the ease of porting code to the class of performance problems that can be addressed in this way without expensive rewrites but deliver nice performance multiples.
It will be interesting to see how Nvidia penetrate the various scales of the supercomputing market. But how big is that market in terms of shipped units? But to the investor in relatively small Nvidia, it might be higher earnings per share than MIC for Intel.
Errr... they bought Visio
And to my mind promptly gutted it of a lot of useful add-ons.
Droves.
"All of which leaves Microsoft in a quandary: consumers are leaving Windows Phone in droves"
Er, was there ever as much as a whole drove of MoPho consumers in the first place?
no clear indication... that the glaciers will stop gaining speed
That sentence stood out to me too, and did not seem to accord with the thrust of LP's latest uninformed rant.
Jones Crusher
Deadly jaws
Better get the gauze
...
She can push, she can shove
'til it's just a nub
Re: So many words...
"Just because you don't understand the words, doesn't mean it's "wankword bingo"."
But is isn't a paradigm shift either based on the original Kuhnian meaning of the term.
OTOH it may just be "innovation". But as an innovation is supposed to be a significant improvement, the "improvement" part is so far subjective.
Watching the Fanboi queues form.
If only google maps were in real time.
http://g.co/maps/87hap
We need a BOFH to hack into the nearest police surveillance cameras and make it a webcam.
Posted in Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet
Re: Typo
While you're there, can you arrange to move that sodding "report abuse" button to the right of the optional picture? It takes up far too much space.
Posted in Melting Arctic leads to snowy winters
Re: that is scientific theory
Ah, the Andrew Orlowski approach.
Re: I always seem to find the "don't panic about peak oil" arguments circular...
Any serious discussion of "Peak Oil" should talk about depletion rates, and how long the stuff is likely to last at such rates. Peak Oil is not even defined in the Citigroup paper.
Most cornucopians will, when pressed, admit oil is a finite resource. Then cognitive dissonance kicks in and they will wave their hands and say "but we don't have to worry for N decades" and revert to behaving as if oil was infinite.
Conventional economists may refuse to answer yes or no, but insist that somehow price will force oil to be created.
Go to here
http://dieoff.org/page185.htm#_ednref18
Search for "#5. Economists are trained to believe" and read that section.
Economists as a class have very unphysical models of the world. In some areas these models are useful approximations. In others, not. If economics was a science, there would be be a lot of soul-searching going on in the profession as they struggled to understand why the major market crashes of this century occurred, and why they missed them, and why they don't know what to do about their aftermath. So in my eyes they are a profession with no more integrity or moral standing than estate agents, politicians or investment bankers.
The point is, the authors of the report cited by AO was produced by Economists working for an Investment Bank.
"Resurging North American Oil Production and the Death of the Peak Oil Hypothesis", I'm not sure if the Citigroup paper takes into account the recent significant downward revisions by the US GS of the amount of shale gas/ unconventional oil estimated to be under the ground in the mainland USA.
In these articles, we hear how a separate group of analysts at a bank (Barclays Capital) reach the opposite conclusion:
http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/02/17/the_weekly_wrap_feb_17_2012?page=full
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/has-the-united-states-beaten-peak-oil-not-so-fast/2012/02/17/gIQAhFbAKR_blog.html
Re: Re: Re: Re: can you say class action ?
"Well done to Tesla for now building in a system to tell them when the car is neglected and the silly irresponsible customer needs a slap to remind them to plug it in."
Yeah. Very 'Merikin. Akin to McDonald's having to put "this is hot" warnings on their pop tarts.
Re: Interesting Arguments
The simplistic economics argument as put forward os largely unphysical.
It assumes infinite supply (as if the cost can magically make oil appear).
It assumes infinite substitutability (e.g. synthetic oil for "real" oil).
It ignores the energy cost of mining a unit of energy.
Some economists are actually intelligent, yet they don't realise their ideas don't always apply properly. So one can forgive AO for not thinking too hard about it either - especially as to do so would hurt his cornucopian proclivities.
Since the stuff is finite, it will run out.
Peak Oil will be a supply problem first, irrespective the amount stil in the ground, known or unknown.
Re: EIEO
In terms of EROI, you are saying EROI = 1 = EIOI ?
We're not quite at 1:1 yet. It would become uneconomic to use oil as an energy source before we got to 1:1. Unconventional oil is reckoned to give you a 5:1. Conventional oil is a bit less than 20:1 these days.
AO is a cornucopianist. His reasoning is often clear. But he doesn't really understand, or chooses to ignore, all the salient data. As a journalist he is not very objective.
Re: Do The Math
I would have mentioned it, but you got there first.
There's also "Without Hot Air" http://www.withouthotair.com/ by David McKay.
There's clearly two seperate markets...
Logical.
Sort of an iPod nano, but the TV version.
TSA
Not that I agree with it, but I would rather my Oyster data be scanned than be subjected to the occasional "special investigation" by your Constitution-upholding TSA brutes.
And economics is an exact science, is it?
Economics is given far more credence in political circles than, say, climatology.
I thought they promised no more restarts after add-on updates.
Maybe I got it wrong, or confused that feature with another browser.
Annoyances that still remain:
1. Go to the Add-Ons screen. There is "Get Add-ons", but once you get an Add-On, it becomes an "Extension". Why two name sfor the same thing? And WTF are "Plugins" for anyway?
2. This dialogue box has always been broken. Else I carry round some Add-On/ Extension/ Plugins that are messing it up:
http://www.learningally.org/SiteData/images/screen_tro/a66a2ee8104c488d/screen_trouble_03.gif
So suppose one checks "Do this automatically" and downloads, the next time, "Do this automatically" is checked, but I still get the damned dailogue box and I still have to click OK. Is this PICNIC or is this "Windows Automation" at work?
*MPAA suffers collective heart failure*
*MPAA suffers collective heart failure*
I live in hope.
Make tea. Hold your nose while drinking. Apparently.
The psilocybin is not active until hydrolysed. Stomach acids do this. Hence the 30 - 60 minute delay before onset of "symptoms" and the feeling of having been ripped off if you didn't pick them yourself but bought them. Allegedly.
Apparently if you boil them in water, this will hydrolyse the stuff for you, so when it is imbibed it gets to work right away.
My friend tells me someone he knows would pinch his nose and drink the lot in one go. That way you only taste the last mouthful after you let go of your nose. Even Vimto doesn't render it palatable. Supposedly.
P/E, PEG, P/B
82 versus 420 is a lot as an absolute value. As a ratio it's not too bad.
Why would Apple start to issue a dividend before they run out of steam growth-wise and their stock price flatlines or goes into a stage 4 decline?
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL+Key+Statistics
I don't think yesterday's figures are incorporated.Still
P/E is still about 15, which is considered by many to be fairly priced.
PEG is 0.64 is pretty low.
Price/Book 5.10
Benjamin Graham thought that if the ratio of (P/E) / (P/B) < 22.5, then the company represents reasonable value.
For AAPL that is 15 / 5.1 = 3
Re: [Written with 6 years of experience of this in the UK and EU]
Do the toll barriers not accept cash?
And next month's tablet is...
Wonder how it stacks up against the Toshiba Excite?
Naive.
So can you please post the address of the webcam in your bog at home so we can watch you having a shit?
"Quantum Leap" Indeed!
You do know that a "quantum leap" is unimaginably small, don't you?
Maybe, maybe not. MS can play a long game.
XBox took a long time but it is starting to get there.
Windows 7 ticks a lot of boxes for a consumer OS. Possibly their best effort on current hardware at least.
I don't know how the mix of phones, tablets, IBM or Mac PCs running Linux, Windows, QNX, Android or Mac OS X will look like going forward. So I don't know how much growth in tablets, say, will come at the expense of desktop/ laptop sales. Will people convert, or end up with more than one type of device?
MS might have time to get Windows 8 or its bastard children right before it's too late. I'm not aware of any serious challenges to Windows on a desktop in the corporate space. I have some mad ideas about it, but then again I don't have to engineer it, test, sell it to upper management and try to get directors to agree to use it.
MS's WinPho is possibly going to gain traction if Nokia can sell their smartphones to upgrading users. I doubt they'll ever lead, but they'll outlast RIM.
"At lest [sic] with Windows I know when the thing that I hate doing is going to arrive"
I suppose that's some consolation. But the constant, anticipated patch stream is not a sign of quality, is it?
And it's nice you an Monbiot can agree on something.
Irrespective the realities of Climate Change and Peak Oil, the Solar Panel and FiT idea does make those who don't install PV contribute towards the income of those who do. This is inequitable.
But when I offered to install PV on the rooves of my two brothers and sister, I wasn't thinking "Ha ha! Now I get to screw the poor!". I saw it as a way for them to attain some independence from the unregulated predatory pricing behaviour of the UK energy suppliers.
What is also inequitable is the poor are more likely to have a card-operated meter at home for which they pay a higher price per unit than someone who does not. It is also inequitable that one pays progressively less for energy the more one consumes.
It is in kind the same thing as tax payer's money going to special industrial interests and unelected "think tanks" and quangoes. This too is wrong.
Yet I'd rather individual citizens got a bite of government largesse than the usual case where subsidies are fed directly to unaccountable commercial interests whose executives often take a disproportionate slice of this "success".
The only difference is one of degree.
So get some time on the ground
Is it your implicit assumption that it is EITHER mosquito nets OR non-lethal light beam?
Both can co-exist.
Looks like I'm the first to mention this
http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria.html
Oh no! A third option! I only do binary!
What about impregnated versus unimpregnated mosquito nets?
Oh God! A fourth option! My brain's exploding!
I won't mention the recent release of sterile male mosquitos in a secret experiment. Or the research into using certain bacteria that attack the malarial parasite inside the mosquito.
How about the problems in getting people to maintain their nets? They don't believe that mosquitos transmit malaria. They think everything causes malaria.
Posted in Apple shouldn't bother with TV...
What's wrong with my telly?
Perhaps not the TV per se, but as for the general activities around watching TV...
I loathe the Sky and Sky+ remotes. Too many buttons. Not obvious how to use them. Difficult to use in a darkened room. The pause/ rewind etc. is good but not unique now. For me, a context-sensitive touchpad on a display like an iPod touch/ small Android tablet/ smartphone would be an improvement...
As for the TV broadcast standards, it is sad that there still is apparently no seamless way to make sure the correct picture aspect ratio is correctly applied. Why isn't there a place for this information in the standard? Maybe there is, but it is not implemented very well by either TV sellers or set top box sellers or the broadcasters.
Do the standards allow the BBC to interleave different streams of their own (video and audio channels)? Why not?
Or the end user to do the same? Why not?
Since I get lots of TV channels and radio channels through the same pipe to the same set top box, it would be nice to be able to set up a test match with TV video and the BBC Radio commentary.
Why can't I do this?
I expect it's the same lack of awareness of what customers want (even if they don't know it yet) exhibited by the Windows boys, Linux boys and Nokias of the world.
Posted in Apple iPhone 4S
@Tony: Nit picking
"Its now 8Mp, which is good but not exceptional" - There's a lot more to a camera than the number of Mega pixels. Looked at the test shots int he review and the one of the wellies looks awful round the edges.
"It can still do a lot. Say Text my wife and it will. First time, of course, you have to tell it which of your contacts is your wife" - I think (not 100% sure) that you can set up relationships in the address book. Maybe not on the iPhone itself, but you can in Mac OS X. But it is neat that you can set up "wife" in the way you did.
So live within your means.
Once a month, take the 0.5% of the money you would have used to repay Apple, and instead of giving it to Apple sell calls or puts on Apple stock.
e.g. Right now:
Sell 1 AAPL Call, expiry October 22, strike $ 430 to bring in $ 405, or 0.94% return.
Sell 1 AAPL Put, expiry October 22, strike $ 340 to bring in $ 357, or 0.97% return.
Not the same thing.
There is nothing to stop you (in principle) from installing a different OS than intended on these systems.
The difference in this is case one's kernel must be signed, and the signing key recognised by the BIOS.
RHEL != Unix
Linux is not Unix.
If you had said FreeBSD you would have been closer.
Posted in RIM profits nearly sliced in half
I'll plug this article again.
<http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-wrong-with-blackberry-and.html>
RIM are screwed.
Posted in RIM profits nearly sliced in half
Oops!
http://www.google.com/finance?q=rimm
Pre-market: 23.49 -6.05 (-20.48%)
Sell OCT11 28 Calls!
Posted in RIM profits nearly sliced in half
Share Price Fell Sharply?
I couldn't find any evidence of that on NASDAQ or TO.
