Posts by Kristian Walsh 1817 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
... between the length of time people use watches for, and the length of time mobile phone APIs are supported for.
Some of the highest-priced watch models are more heirlooms than gadgets, but even a £100 watch will give you five to ten years of use. So, cast your mind back ten years in the mobile phone industry, and think of what "future-proof" OS choice a device maker would have made then. Now, go buy a phone running Blackberry, Symbian or Windows Mobile 6 today...
Horseshit. If your "better mousetrap" involves exposing its users to higher risks so that you can make it cheaper, then you're not competing, you're cheating.
Taxis started out as unlicensed businesses in every part of the world. Why is it that nearly every part of the word imposes strict regulations on who can operate a taxi?
Predatory criminals haven't disappeared just because some super-entrepreneur has invented a JSON API or whatever techno-flimflam argument is put forward. Human nature is pretty much constant. Technology is only an enabler for what's already there.
Libertarianism is just as stupid an ideal as Communism. Both assume that people only act rationally, and in the best interests of society...
United States vs Microsoft Corporation was settled in 2001, three years after the case was brought. But lets stay in this century, shall we?
As the events of 2001 are so relevant now, let's run though what other things were news in 2001: well, beleaguered computer manufacturer Apple launched its portable music player "iPod", and the first release of OS X, its BSD-based replacement for MacOS 9, to very mixed reviews. Also the Linux kernel 2.4 was finally released. Windows had no releases that year, so you had "2000", "98" or "Me", as MS-DOS had only just been discontinued (last release in late 2000). Phone giant Nokia also launched the first phone to run their new Cross-platform OS, called Symbian.
Online, recent tech startup Google was continuing making a name for itself in search, with many predicting that even after just three years it might outdo AltaVista and Lycos in share of searches. Netscape continued its slow self-destruction - we'd still have to wait another two years for Firefox, the only good bit of the horrible Communicator package, to be made available.
For people who produced the stuff that hadn't yet been labelled "content", you could still get a GeoCities account back in 2001. There were no "blogs" by that name. YouTube's trip to the zoo wouldn't happen for another four years. Facebook was three years away, Twitter five. If you wanted to watch video online, you downloaded RealPlayer first. The Dot-com bust might have been over by then, but some players lingered on: If you lived in the selected metropolitan areas that it served, you could still buy your groceries from WebVan.com until the end of the year. If you were rich, you could get a T1 or ISDN Primary Rate line into your premises and reap 1.5 or 2.0 megabits of throughput. Mobile was GPRS at best, with most of the telcos too broke to roll out 3G after overspending for their operating licences.
So, lots there that's still relevant to today's computing industry, I'm sure you believe. Well, except that 2001 was also, like every year this century, the year when Linux on the Desktop was going to make it big.
"David" has paved the way for an outstanding legal career!
I suspect this was always his goal. Rather than working with an Irish-based group, he absolutely insisted on being funded to go and live in Ireland for the duration of the action...
That's not to say I think his case is wrong...
You might read the actual text of the GPL licences sometime. It'll stop you accusing people of violation when all they've done is read, and followed, the conditions that are actually written in it, not the ones you imagine should be in it.
Curiously, your list of evildoers did not include Google, whose entire business is based on modified GPL software.
I'm not saying that Google is in violation of the licence terms, only that, just like those companies you don't like, they got a legal advisor to read the licence and tell them how they could remain compliant with it without needing to give their source-code away.
Personally, I would never release anything under GPL - the default clause of "or any later version" makes a mockery of the agreement, and allows for restrictions to be placed on the use of my works in future solely at the whim of whoever writes the next GPL.
Copying a song, book, or using a patented idea doesn't hurt the creator in any way whatsoever.
As an obvious expert on the concept, can you describe for me how a person goes from having an idea in their head to having a song, book or patent that is of use to other people? If you could identify the exact point in time at which the person gets some money to feed themselves during this process, that would be great, thanks.
You might also ask yourself how we ever got to the situation where you get to read a book that took its author two years of full-time writing to complete for less than the price of two shitty Starbucks coffees when it cost the author a hell of a lot more in lost wages to write it, even at minimum wage levels.
You wanted the work enough to obtain it, so why did you then make the conscious decision to obtain it in a way that gives its authors nothing in exchange?
And "exposure" comes under "nothing in exchange". There's no number big enough to turn zero cents per reader into a living wage.
To be fair, it is innovative since nobody else has designed such a thin light laptop yet
This shows a shocking lack of knowledge of what the industry outside of Apple is doing.
Microsoft's like-priced Surface Pro3 is thinner, uses a more powerful CPU (Core M is optimised for low-power consumption), includes touch and is lighter if you attach a touch cover. Screen density is comparable, and personally I prefer the 1.5:1 ratio to 16:10 (Ideally, I'd prefer 4:3 for a work device, but nobody does that) If Apple are supposed to be the greatest hardware designers of our age, then why are they being outdone in "innovation" by what Microsoft did last year?
MS does stiff you for a keyboard accessory, but you do get a full-sized USB 3 port, and you can charge the thing, drive a display and use a peripheral at the same time without another easy-lose dongle. (If you think that's not important, you've never given a presentation - a major use-case for MacBook Airs, by what I see)
ASUS will do you a traditional laptop with a 1920x1080 screen display (not as sharp as the MacBook or Surface's 1440-line display), at the same thickness as the MacBook. ASUS mustn't have got the memo from Cupertino about what's possible on small metal enclosures either, because they also include multiple USB ports shave another millimetre off the thickness (12.3 vs 13.2 for Apple), and the whole thing comes in a US$699, or just a shade over half of the Apple product's price. [ Zenbook UX305 ]
I'm not telling you that you shouldn't be buying Apple - it is your money to spend, but do so knowing that what you're getting is not any better than anyone else's offering, just more expensive and less capable.
I currently use a MacBook Air for my laptop. I won't be considering this thing as a replacement for it. Had it offered three USB-C connectors, I could live with its other problems, but as shipped, this is nothing more than a $1200 Facebook receiver.
I disagree: one of the things that I have found to be very handy about Windows Phone is the alphabetical listing of applications. Visual memory is easily confused by creating many identical "spaces" with different contents.
Maybe I'm just used to using terminals, but for stuff I don't use, it's a lot quicker to tap on a letter heading, choose the first letter of the app I want, and then launch it, rather than spasm through twenty screens of other crap to visually locate it*
I also launch applications by name in both Windows 8 (Windows-key then start typing its name), and in MacOS X by using a DragThing dock filled with the thirty-or-so things I'll ever use (DT supports type-to-select, and unlike Finder, its implementation is not brain-numbingly stupid).
(* Yes, I know iOS has a search-by-name function by swiping left from the app panel, but by the looks of it, I'm one of the few who does)
Comic Sans is of great use to me socially. If I meet someone who claims to be a graphic designer, I ask them what they think of it. Then I ask them about Helvetica.
If they claim Comic Sans is irredeemable while holding Helvetica up as the flawless pinnacle of type design, I change the subject entirely - life's too short to listen to second-hand dogma.
"Given the fact that it is a high profile device which will have wide adoption, "
That's a pretty big claim to just take as a given. How many BYOD iPhone users could have spared the retail price for their current phone, up front? Only people with that disposable income are in the market for an iPhone accessory that costs the same as a high-end SIM-free phone.
(The claimed parallels with iPad are specious. iPad was and is a product that could exist independently of other Apple gear.. I know several people who own iPads and not one other Apple product)
French press = one of these: http://www.brookstone.com/webassets/product_images/700x700/750746p.jpg
To use: 1. Boil water, then LET IT COOL for 2-3 minutes; 2. Pour water over coffee to cover grounds; let stand for 10~20 sec. (grounds should foam a little) 3. Fill to full level and stir. 3. attach plunger top and let stand for 1-2 minutes. 4. Push down plunger and DECANT the coffee into a flask or jug.
If you use boiling water at step one, you'll burn the coffee and it'll be bitter; if you don't decant it you'll stew the coffee and it'll be bitter.
Regarding plastic-pod espresso, I much prefer the Lavazza "a Modo Mio" pod system - they've got more coffee in each pod than the smaller Nespressos.
I also like the Aeropress - I've had coffee from one several times, but I don't own one (I've so much coffee gear it's hard to justify getting more). I'm also a fan of good-old fashioned pour-over with filter paper: Chemex make some beautiful jugs to go with their filter-paper system...
Well-informed political activism is the exception, not the rule...
Personally, I support the engineers' view of Net Neutrality, the one that most pro-NN posters here espouse, where performance differentiation within a given service class is forbidden.
... but I'm against the kind of Net Neutrality we'd actually get, the one that most anti-NN posters here describe, where differentiation between service classes will be forbidden too.
According to the usual factory hobby-photographers, there's also a larger M9 on its way. Also, not a hardware change, but it's been widely "leaked" that this phone will be sold in a version running Windows 10 Phone when that OS becomes available later this year.
Not surprised they didn't change much. First, HTC aren't exactly swimming in money, and second: M8 was already a beautiful phone - especially the design and engineering of the antenna and rear casing, which makes Apple's later efforts with the iPhone 6 look clumsy by comparison.
Scandinavia comprises the countries of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Historically, that included Denmark as one-time possessors of Skåne (roughly "skaw-neh") in Southern Sweden, the region after which the peninsula is named. That little "å" in the name Skåne is a good signifier: if your language uses it, you're Scandinavian; if not, you're not.
(Wikipedia tells me that by this rule, Bavaria is in Scandinavia, which goes to show you shouldn't try to reduce things down to single rules ;) )
Based only on the views of people I've met, the Finns do not consider themselves to be Scandinavian, although the large minority of ethnic Swedes in the country may differ in that view. Icelanders consider themselves of "Scandinavian descent" rather than being Scandinavian per se. I've never met anyone from the Faroe Islands to ask them.
"So, at a stroke, their tool has been rendered useless even before it's been used...."
It's feasible to build a space elevator. It doesn't mean we've got one, or that it'll be cheap or easy or likely to get one.
As it says in the article, the tool works precisely because current malware authors do not extensively use polymorphic code. Modern malware is far more complex than the kind of 1980s viruses that used this technique, and unlike back then, virtually all malware is written in high-level languages, with little visibility of where the machine instructions lie in memory.
What this technique does is make the job of making malware unidentifiable an order of magnitude more difficult: re-packagers can no longer rely on a simple change of their delivery script's obfuscation technique. Making malicious acts very hard to perform is the essence of computer security.
If you made a panel that could convert squally drizzle to energy, Ireland's the place for it, but solar? no...
Wind is the only readily available renewable/"green" in Ireland, and that's not stable enough for a data centre. Power to serve the facility's base-line load has to come from somewhere, so I'm curious about whether they'll surprise the world and have their contractors address this reality with a technical solution (there are a few storage options, but they're expensive and untested at this scale), or go with routine and deploy the usual eco-hogwash of compensatory planting, carbon credits and technology funding.
I also can't help but think that when you scale applications up to the point where they're burning a Terawatt-Hour of electrical power every year to run, there's scope for optimising software to conserve energy, not just time or storage.
I wonder where they're going to find the generating capacity for this centre. The projected consumption will be equivalent to the current domestic demand of the Greater Galway area (about 160,000 people).
Ireland does not have a lot of spare generating capacity, and despite what you might think if you've ever "enjoyed" a walk along the Cliffs of Moher, the wind doesn't blow 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, which rules out the most available "green" option in this country.
I expect Apple to be sold pretty much all of the little "green" energy that's produced here, while the providers buy in nuclear-generated power from France and UK to meet the resulting shortfall. (I have no issue with nuclear power, btw; just find it ironic that this will be the likely outcome).
The Liverpool supporters' song has different lyrics, and its chorus substitutes "Anfield Road" for "Athenry", so no...
However, you only need to assemble around ten Irish people at a sporting event involving Ireland before the probability of the original version of this song being sung reaches 1.
I suspect that's more to do with the description "Italian radio pioneer".
I still agree, though. The reverse-snobbery of the tech industry when it comes to personal appearance is depressing: reacting against the "corporate" suit-and-tie has just resulted in Technology becoming its mirror-image where anyone who looks after their appearance more than is "necessary" is judged to be shallow or incompetent.
Raspberry Pi is a British company, whose computers are made in Wales, a country that is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Amstrad is a British company, whose computers were manufactured in Taiwan, a country that is pa— um, actually, let it just suffice for me to say, "is not in the UK", rather than get into that particular minefield.
But it won't have an Apple logo
...You know that even the real Apple watch doesn't actually have an Apple logo on it?
I think this, not the price, and not the battery life, is the product's Achilles Heel. Without the conspicuous Apple logo, how is everyone else sitting in Starbucks going to know that you've got a real one?
That's who Apple seems to emulate on the conspicuous consumption spectrum.
Apple's marketing and retail owes much more of a debt to Chanel or Dior than to BMW.
Sadly, past experience tells me that I now have to explain that I don't mean this as a put-down: when it comes to marketing what is a fairly everyday product (again, relax - "smartphone" or "tablet" is an everyday product) and achieving a high retail price for it, there's nobody to touch the cosmetics business.
The one thing the UK government could do to undermine Ireland's attractiveness to American companies would be to join the Euro.
It's not just a tax-wheeze that these companies are looking for. They want a base in a major trading zone, where people speak English, and there isn't so much veiled hostility towards the USA.
(That latter point was made to be more than once by American colleagues about why they didn't like travelling to the UK, but I'd say it counts for more than any amount of tax schemes...)
Polygamy is irrelevant in a discussion of coupled relationships. But at least you didn't mention bestiality, I suppose.
Personally I support marriage reform because I want governments to recognise relationships that are consensual, stable and mutually beneficial to those who form them, regardless of whether they're male-male, male-female (like mine) or female-female.
I don't believe that real polygamous relationships meet the standard of being both "mutually beneficial" and "stable". To put it a different way: in any relationship of n people, happiness is an O(n) function, but trouble is O(n2).
For phone apps, the store submission script is where you'd enforce version capabilities.
Also, the phone store doesn't have to serve the same app binary to every user. You can submit different packages under the same "application", and which one the user sees is determined by their device and/or locale.
My experience is that maintaining two branches of an application is far less messy than having all the possibilities encapsulated in one source-file, or worse: all in one executable.
Another RT 2 user here. Chosen for the same reasons: light weight, small form factor, long battery life SEPARATE USER ACCOUNTS (hello, Apple) to be kept in the living room for email, casual browsing and Netflix/YouTube video watching (hence 16:9 display being important).
The "Phone" branch of Windows 10 is getting previewed soon, and that may give more clarity on what happens for ARM devices in general. I don't think "full" Windows 10 really works on a screen of 10" or less, but the market often wants things that sound better than they really are in practice (c.f. Netbooks)
Not bollocks. Note that it says "£1.53 per call and £1.53 per minute". How short can you make a call? Just connecting and hanging up will incur the "per call" charge.
(Phone billing systems always show a completed call as being at least 1 second long even if it's shorter... customers complain if they see themselves being charged for "00:00:00" durations on their bill)
There are two parts to a phone call charge. The first is the setup charge: the amount you pay just to have the connection established. The second is the duration charge, levied per minute. Either of these can be set at zero for a premium number (but not both, obviously).
Some services charge extremely high setup charges with no duration charge - e.g., voting lines for those TV "talent" shows: your call might be only 5 seconds, but you're charged £1.00 for it.
This is often presented in the advertising as "calls cost no more than £x.xx from a BT Landline".
Because these numbers are short-duration calls (the remote end plays you a canned message and then hangs up very quickly), they're ripe for automated-dialler scams.
Some credible sources for "nigh on a billion" would be welcome considering that total cumulative sales for iPhone from 2007 to date are around 600 million (the discussion of how many iPhone 4 and earlier are still actively working is perhaps better left for another day)
Now, I didn't think that billion high-rollers would be so stuck that they'd need to share their phones with each other, but maybe there just aren't enough iPhones to go around. And it's odd how so many of these world's wealthiest consumers would need to queue up for unemployment benefit every week, or shop in discount supermarkets, or still be in school, but who am I to question the ways of the super-rich - I don't even have an iPhone.
@Loyal Commentator - No problem. I used to be one, still know some, and Apple employees are just like any large company's, except that there are fewer Apple fanbois: what Bismarck said about sausages holds true for iThings.
You need to grow a thicker skin. A news site picking on a multi-billion-dollar corporation shouldn't get to you as much as it does.
We've seen "Peak iPad" already from those sales figures. iPad was meant to be insurance against a failure of iPhone revenues, but it's not going to work out like that: cycles are longer for tablets, and people buy them with their own money, up-front, which makes them more price-sensitive. Now Apple is once again dependent on a single product line for most of its revenues.
You don't want to base your future on a one-trick pony, no matter how good the trick is. Ponies don't live forever.
In Apple's case, the biggest possible threat to iPhone revenues would be any reform of consumer law in Japan or US that would reduce or remove operator handset subsidies.
Actually, here's an surprisingly enlightening map, showing the ethnic plurality (i.e., who makes up the largest slice of the pie) for every county in the USA. Not so much a "melting pot" as a mixed grill, and it's an answer to why you don't often see black faces in the South Bay Area:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States#mediaviewer/File:Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg
The MacBook Air is cheaper because you're getting less.
The Surface Pro matches the Air's CPU, RAM and SDD, but adds touch+pen input, a higher display resolution (2160x1440 vs 1440x900), and is significantly lighter (just under 1.0 kg with the keyboard, versus 1.35kg for the Air).
The MacBook Pro "Retina display" is more expensive and heavier again - not really in the same class of device as Surface.
(I currently use a MacBook Air when travelling, but I'm seriously looking at how I could work with a Pro3 instead)
": it's seemingly impossible to forward an image from email by text or any other medium;"
Step by step (takes much longer to read than to do):
1. Tap the image in your email. It will open full screen
2. If no toolbar is visible at the bottom of the screen, tap the image once to reveal it.
3. Tap the leftmost icon in bottom toolbar ("Share" - the one that looks like three tadpoles swimming in a circle)
4. Choose the method by which you want to forward the image from the many, many choices. For MMS, choose "Messaging".
5. (Optional) Compose your message text
6. Tap the send icon.
The only way "Messaging" would be absent is if your network operator forgot to provision your SIM for MMS - in this case, you won't be able to send any other picture messages either. Request the settings from them.
You haven't even looked at the code, have you? There is no C compiler in existence that can compile the projects I cited. That is because they are written in C++.
For the record, there's is also a difference in the output of "C code compiled with a C++ compiler", and "C code compiled with a C compiler". If something is written in C, we will use a C compiler to compile it, because that preserves the other assumptions about C code (particularly symbol naming, but there are other, more subtle differences).
Ha! Does your voice get muffled when you sit down, jake?
We mere mortals don't have your custom build of K&R that can compile namespaces, the 'this' keyword, variable instantiation within sub-scopes, default-value initialisation, function calls using the dot and pointer operators, and templates.
"Uh ... no. Show me real-time code that is written in C++."
Uh ... yes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian
Hey, here's two more that you can see the code for:
http://scmrtos.sourceforge.net/ScmRTOS
http://miosix.org/index.html
Whether a kernel is C or C++ depends more on when it was started than anything other factor. C++ is a superset of C; anything that needs C for "efficiency" is just as possible with C++ code.
"You can write OO code in any language if you are perverted enough."
Ah, you've used glib GObject, then...
At this point, I'll have to confess to writing quite a bit of OO code in 68000 assembly, although I didn't recognise it as such at the time. (I even had vtables)
@Dan55 above on C being "faster". It's not. C++ code runs exactly as fast as the equivalent C code - C++ actually offers a good compiler more optimisation opportunities. Non-virtual method calls are simply C function calls, in-function variables are allocated on stack just as in C, and exceptions/RTTI can be disabled if your module doesn't require them. (Just specifying throw(); at the end of your method declaration removes the overhead of exceptions in that method even if the rest of your code uses them). C99 borrowed a lot of its nice features from C++ (it's a shame that C++ took so long to take "null"
Just because C++ lets you quickly write inefficient code (like copy-by-value parameter passing for superlarge types), it doesn't mean that C++ is itself less efficient, just that some people don't know as much about programming as they think they do. (The small consolation of such dumb behaviour is a. it's less likely to cause bugs than naive use of pointers is, and b. you can optimise the problem away later.)
I'm happy to accept the argument that C++ leads developers to use less speed-efficient data-structures like the STL containers for tasks where a hand-rolled equivalent would be superior, and that C++ code can thus be slower as a result. But that's trading dev-time for run-time. Unlike a hand-rolled data structure, the STL version will work reliably straight away; and in general, I heed Dr Dijkstra's warnings about premature optimisation...
Yes, BSD's kernel is written in C.
If Apple had acquired Be rather than NeXT in 1997 (i.e, if they had made their decision on purely technical grounds, rather than on who the CEO of NeXT was), then their kernel would now be written in C++.
(Haiku, and it's now Open Source, if anyone is curious)
As it is, Cupertino's current device driver and I/O layer is written in C++, and so are many of the low-level libraries unique to OS X.The remainder are C, or Objective-C for less performance-critical ones.
This illustrates only that competent developers use a variety of tools. OS X was not a clean-sheet design; it was actually something of a rush-job as Apple had fallen far behind Sun and Microsoft in OS capabilities and desperately needed to catch up: you have to remember that even in 2000, Mac OS was only co-operatively multi-tasked; so one bad application could often kill your entire system. OS X as released was an amalgamation of many different sources: each was chosen because it was a proven, viable subsystem, not because it was written in the One Holy Language.
But, going back to kernels: The reason why the BSD kernel is written in C is because AT&T's UNIX kernel was written in C, and that was because C was the language that K&R developed specifically to allow their UNIX OS to be portable across AT&T's various system architectures.
@Halfmad, Apple is an unlikely candidate, as the company doesn't sell into those markets too much. Apple does have a small "enterprise" market, but those customers are in the design and media industries (print, tv, cinema, web) - all very much 2-dimensional (with the half-exception of cinema stereoscopy).
In industrial product design, biomedical research, architecture and what used to be called CAD/CAM, Windows is the predominant OS.
You have completely missed the point of the glasses. They're a tool, not a toy. Nobody will wear them outdoors ... unless they're doing work that requires them.
I was sceptical about this when I saw the presentation, but today I can think of hundreds of applications for this in industry.
What this can do is provide a standard interface and API for 3D visualisation, one that allows anyone (Autodesk, for example, or SolidWorks) to add holographic modelling and manipulation to their product. And there's a mass-produced client device to lower the cost of using the technology to the point where small practices can afford it. If that doesn't sound interesting to you, you're not in an industry where showing people things, in 3D, that don't actually exist yet, is important. Here are some examples:
You're an architect, and you're trying to show a client what you mean about moving a ceiling, or you're a surveyor, and you're trying to perform an initial layout of a building site on the ground. Or you're a car designer, and you're trying to get a feel of your work in three dimensions. Using this is a hell of a lot cheaper than clay modelling, and your engineering department can see the changes you make, and can work remotely with you as if you're all standing around the same life-scale model. When you're done, your brand manager can have a look, and even if she's in Michigan, Turin or Paris she can see how the design is progressing, "walk" around it, and make informed comment.
Outside of creative tasks, how about maintenance of industrial equipment: the glasses can provide you with annotations in real space showing you the assemblies that you need to repair, or an X-Ray view of the equipment you're servicing.
Speaking of X-Rays, this kind of technology is already very useful in medical training: there are exisiting surgical training systems using VR; this product lowers the cost of delivery of these, allowing their use in teaching to be broadened.
All of these applications are possible now, but the barrier has been that there's no common API or client device specification, so my 3D visualisation system might not work with your CAD package, for instance. More important, nobody mass-produces the equipment, so it's horrendously expensive. Microsoft's product and adding the APIs to Windows makes both of these adoption barriers smaller.
(The iPhone did not create the idea of mobile applications, what it did was lower the barriers to developing and selling mobile applications)
Google's failure was that there was no actual need for Glass - it basically gave you a smartphone that you didn't have to take out of your pocket. Glass was a consumption device, not creation. Glass was expected to be worn all the time, rather than when there was a need for it. Very different usage models, very different capabilites, and very different applications.
Cortana isn't just voice recognition. It's actually very smart at determining the context of your queries based on your previous questions.
Also, and most important for a desktop/enterprise system, you can drive it entirely by text, where it becomes a kind of free-form CLI, for want of a better analogy.
I can imagine a lot of people not wanting all of their stuff in US clutches once they understand what this implies.
I'm surprised you missed one of the biggest ongoing data-privacy cases of 2014, but here's a summary:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/23/microsoft_vs_the_long_arm_of_us_law/
tl;dr = Microsoft won't store your private data on servers under US jurisdiction.
"The better solution would be to broadcast from a transponder that, nominally at least, only covered the UK and Ireland"
Yes, and it'd be even better if not for the fact that the UK and Ireland are not the same country. This leads to the situation where Irish TV-licence payers are unable to watch their own channels on Astra without paying Sky a subscription.
The alternative, of Free-To-Air broadcast on Astra 2A, would have the effect of increasing the Irish broadcasters' reach by a factor of 16 (from 4 million to around 64 million viewers). Sounds good? Well, no, not for a public broadcaster it isn't - the cost of live events and other bought-in programming would now also go up to account for the larger addressable viewership. It wouldn't matter that 90% of that market have no interest in watching: in TV, you pay for how many people can view something, not how many actually do.
(Yes, there is a free satellite system in Ireland, but it uses Ka-band, so is incompatible with the Astra Ku-band receivers that most people own, and is only intended as infill for areas that cannot receive DVB-T signals.)
But broadcasting is one part of the media market where it's harder to make a clear-cut case for a single, flat market; there are valid societal reasons to not force broadcasters in small countries to play at the same scale as their larger neighbours.
However, when it comes to direct sale of digital media to customers (Amazon, iTunes, Qobuz, etc) it shouldn't be so difficult to fathom: the EU Single Market rules mean that a publisher cannot stop me buying a book from Germany/Hungary/Slovenia/wherever. But if I try to purchase an eBook of the same text, from the same EU seller, I can't. Because now, suddenly, it's not a good anymore, and they don't have a right to sell me it. ?? But... if there's something that's only available on eBook, that they cannot sell me, I can ask them to print it out, and then ship me the hard copy, and now suddenly they're allowed to do it again. That is madness.
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