Posts by Charlie Clark
1688 posts • joined Monday 16th April 2007 14:57 GMT
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Posted in Is Apple readying a MacBook redesign?
Sounds more like Pro than MacBook
Aluminium, etc. Probably an update for the Pro to keep the high-(sp)end users happy.
MacBook users like me want a Mac but cheap. Time for Apple to rerelease the Pippin before we move to laptots.
@Chris
"The copper who comes round tonight best be fit..."
So not just a love-in in Hamburg then? ;-)
Isn't it weird that we had all those doom and gloom stories as the A380 was (inevitably) delayed and the journos seem to be chewing a lot of felt now that they're going into regular service especially as Boeing seems to be struggling to birth the Dreamliner. The A380 really is an amazing plane but I think you really have to see one to grasp the scale of the change. It more than tips its hat towards improved efficiency whilst primarily "democratising" air travel - whether this will be getting more pilgrims to Mecca or more football fans to watch Arsenal remains to be seen.
Incidentally it's probably only a coincidence but Ryanair, who today released fucking awful quarterly figures today because they bet on falling oil prices, are big Dreamliner fan boys. Where's the icon with Michael O'Leary as the son of the devil?
Interesting approach, not sure about the conclusions
Is this going to end up as a feature with a limited area of application because it turns out the implementation is an optimisation for particular cases?
Anyway whatever it is that chip XYZ does better than the rest this does not mean that customers will automatically migrate to it. It's a nice headline but companies won't be migrating from Oracle to MySQL anytime soon just because of better locking performance.
Keep the swearing coming.
Copying the Sun
The argument doesn't get better if you oversimplify it:
"With vanished nukes replaced by dirtier, non-combined-cycle gas plants"
Gas plants produce CO2 which while a greenhouse gas is certainly cleaner than nuclear waste. As for the connection issue: it works fine in Germany where wind now competes with gas on the energy market. As for subsidies: guaranteed minimum price is not actually a subsidy. Anyway anything the renewables get pales in comparison to the subsidies handed out for nuclear over the years and that doesn't even take the decommissioning into consideration. Power produced by nuclear fission is so expensive that it only survives when backed by state guarantees.
@AC
Fuck! Why didn't think of that.
@El Reg Graphics Dept: NEW ICON NOW!
Posted in Vodafone shares tumble on interims
Exchange rate
is pretty important here as VF accounts in pounds: US revenues have been hit by dollar depreciation but European revenues (apart from Spain) are artificially buoyed by the pound's depreciation against the Euro although declined in real terms. Data traffic is up but there is no mention as to whether data revenues are up.
"future product transition which I can't discuss today"
10:1 it's the Apple laptot catchup. Although they probably want to drop the mini they can't recycle so how about Apple reinvents the wheel and releases the MacBook Go?
And in other news today...
Steve Jobs was sentenced to ten years in prison for heinous embezzlement and another three for bad parking. Asked what he thought as he left the courthouse he said, "it didn't matter because he'd already forgiven himself". Meanwhile crowds of iPorn owners could be heard yelling: "Steve, have some more of our money!"
Looking forward to OS X on the new Acer!
@Daryl
Check out the G700 and G900 Excellent devices in the tradition just had miserable press coverage,
@Andy Enderby - Wot he said
Works for Steve Jobs all the time. Yes, the fanboys moan and groan but they still line up like lemmings to buy the latest gadgets. Actually never seen lemmings buy anything let alone gadgets.
Got to go - mine's the one with "Add *.google-analytics.com/* to your content blocker" on the back.
@Alex Worm
It's not necessarily the viewers who are infringing on the copyright but YouTube/Gobble. The logs merely demonstrate that the copyrighted material has been viewed without permission and that, therefore, copyright has been infringed which as everyone knows it has. Gobble may just be trying to get a figure on how much it will cost them to stream anything from Viacom's archive but I say close down YouTube and hang 'em high! Flash video is now ubiquitous and the copyright holders now know there is a market on the net for almost everything they have,
Nice to negawatts doing a good job
The sad thing is how long it's taken:
http://www.ccnr.org/amory.html
A paper from 1989 for fuck's sake!
Posted in Ryanair begins screen-scraping lawsuit
@Chris Priest
Allegedly the time out is a "feature" (for Ryanair at least) which allows them to sell you a higher fare because you end up starting again and all of a sudden the fare has gone up but you proceed anyway just to get it over with.
Posted in Ryanair begins screen-scraping lawsuit
Grey area
I think any case hinges on whether Ryanair is able to restrict someone else from selling their flights. Technically they own the data and the form in which is presented and this copyrightable in an electronic form. It might, however, be difficult to claim a restrictive copyright over price information. There have been similar cases for telephone books - electronic copies are illegal but copies made manually are perfectly legit.
Personally I hope the tax parasites lose as it will be a case of the biter bit: Ryanair's business model is based on sucking up state subsidies and fooling the customer rather than efficient practices.
Paris, because she's more intelligent than Ryanair's web site.
AJAX is utter crap
Can we please move on to SSE or Flex?
Posted in Segway CTO scoots to Apple's design team
Unfair comparison
As a Bluetooth accessory wearing knobhead I must protest most strongly about the comparison with crash helmet wearing wusses who can't even walk without mechanical aid desoite fully functioning bodies and nervous systems. Got to be politically correct on this shit!
Mine's the one with the copy of "How to get a Life" in the pocket. That's the one with the heavily thumbed copy of said book.
Posted in 3 calls foul on T-Mobile price promise
@Pie -must try harder
"which is why I am switching my companies mobiles to them."
Company's or companies'
It's obviously this lack of grammatical accurarcy which is encouraging global terrorism!
Where's the red pen icon? Mine's the white one with the long arms...
Posted in 3 calls foul on T-Mobile price promise
@Andy Hards
"Means I can talk absolute shite for hours without thinking"
Whar about? How much you save on your phone bill? ;-)
Load of hot air
As others have noted, wind power can only be part of the mix. While high pressure generally means less wind in the area this is usually combined with clearer skies and, therefore, better solar collection. Yes, you do get cold, foggy winter days in North and Western Europe so auxilary sources will be required. Plus, of course, the high pressure zones are not endless. Anybody watching the football recently will have noticed that Switzerland and Austria have a different weather pattern - they belong to the same metereological area as Poland and the Ukraine according to German television. So while the wind patterns across the North Sea might be constant, things will be different further South and East. So we'll end up with a co-ordinated European energy policy. Which is why the Commission is so keen on separating the energy transmission networks from the energy producers.
Where's my hippy badge!
Trade is the best form of defence
As the European Coal and Steel Federation has shown to great effect. Contracted opium production in Afghanistan and fair trade with North and West Africa will give us the peace and security we need at a price we can afford.
Now as for military spending itself: yes, it's ludicrous and never value for money. It's arguable that much of the benefits are ancillary in that much of the costs are actually R&D which the civilian economy benefits from: GPS is an obvious current example. This is why Boeing and EADS and the rest do both military and civilian products. Having some form of competition even if it's systemic (our machines have to be better than their machines) rather than market does improve the product. But basically it's expensive because it's considered a necessity and not a luxury.
Where's the flower for this bearded and bespectacled, peace-loving, sandal-wearing hippy?
@jubtastic1
Title should be: "Clueless idiot gets paid to start another iPhone rumour". x86 in phones. For feck's sake.
Like the nickname.
Premiership can be copyrighted?
Fucking hell. They'll be copyrighting things like "register" next.
Right, best be off then. Mine's the one with "one law for the rich and one for the poor" on it. Ta, muchly,
Posted in AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6
Missing the point
Only about two comments have any sense: the first highlighting the privacy issues surrounding log files in general (they may even become illegal in Germany); and the second more pertinent that the very service that AVG intend to offer could be turned against itself. This will probably cause AVG to rethink the product.
Too right Tony
These younguns don't know what they're missing. Servalan, Avon, Orac and Servalan! :-D
Posted in Europe acts on mobile charges
@Simon Rockman
You make it sound like the operators are champions of fair play! In fact the point you make is irrelevant. The operators knew full well that there was likely to be European regulation at some point - many of the business cases were in fact predicated upon pan-European operations and, therefore, pan-European regulation (at some point). And of the 22bn you'll find that a nice part of that was clawed back through taxes not paid due to "losses" incurred.
The commission is highlighting the discrepancy across Europe and how this is a barrier to competition and as such needs to be regulated. If lower connection charges mean that operators stand to lose money (not that any of them do) then they will have to increase the cost for owners - either through the monthly fee or offering to pay to receive. Customers will then have more of a choice.
Where's the Viviane Reding is an angel icon! ;-)
@Rick Leeming
Learn to write. Sentences. And use. Adverbs correctly: What. is "pretty secure?"
"See, the thing is. OSX stems from FreeBSD, a Unix. As such is should be pretty secure."
Unix is not inherently more or less secure than other operating systems. It comes with a lot of mechanisms for providing security but that itself does not provide security. Apple has a somewhat cavalier approach to security and an obsession on eye candy and ownership (DRM, EULA).
It's called capitalism
Doesn't really matter what the business model is, buying something to sell it at a profit is how our economy works. There can be all kinds of restrictions, particularly with plane tickets because of the "security" considerations but the grey market is the place to sell extra capacity. I can't believe that Easyjet is connected to Amadeus, et al. Of course, relations between direct sellers and channel can get a bit tense. Selling via screenscaping probably does count as a breach of the T&C's and can probably be referred to the Office of Fair Trading (or whatever it's now called). I'm sure they'd be interested.
Posted in Farewell then, Symbian
It's not over til the fat lady sings...
The Symbian based phones that are now coming out are, as noted above, amazing devices. I've struggled with the usability (I much prefer Ericsson's approach) and responsiveness of my E65 for the last 10 months but there's no doubt it is a technoogical marvel crammed with applications, the most impressive of which is TomTom but Adobe's Acrobat is very impressive if only sadly lacking in the tagging stuff on the Palm version which means I still use my Palm m500 to read books. And, of course, Opera works great as well. NB. all of these apps can be running at the same time while music is playing and the battery will only get really hammered if I keep Opera in the background to be able to keep up with the cricket. In all the iPorn euphoria most people forget to mention that it runs *one* application at a time. A restriction that isn't going to be lifted with iPorn 3G. An Ericsson G700 for me it is. Now where's the symbol for wanking over my gadget?
Disappointed
that no one has gone for the obvious iPorn moniker. And we thought it was just because you could adjust the vibration level. Casts Jobs new "mobile.me" in a whole new light...
When's the next show? Oh, fuck that I'm off. Mine's the one covered in cocksnot stains.
@bankers
I've got a Nationwide account - I'm proud they're still a building society - but it's security is a bit of a joke. It will not work without cross-site cookies enabled and has no transaction level security. Partial credentials don't do it for me. I'm more, but not entirely impressed by my German bank which has a less sophisticated but highly customisable login: I can change both my user and my passphrase. But more importantly I have to sign for each transaction using a TAN. I believe the security model here is "know one item, hold one item". Not unbreakable (there have been attempts to the attacks have relatively small windows) but not too bad.
Mainly spot on
"Browser" security is difficult to achieve - should the browser be responsible for the plug-in being exploited?
Most users do not seem to understand how important security and privacy are in the online world. That is until they are themselves directly affected by abuse. Until then functionality is all they're interested in. Opera 9.5 had an extensive alpha and beta period and an extremely communicative developer team. User feedback on the weekly builds was dominated by people obsessed with whether Opera worked with one site or another (Google mail being one of the most common) and whether how many ACID tests could be passed; it maybe worth noting that there is no security test suite. Releases which introduced new security features such as extended certificates were largely ignored. Given such a climate it isn't difficult to understand why developers also put security second.
@JasonW
Cross-border bank charges should, in theory, already be a thing of the past as long as the transactions are denominated in Euros, so unfortunately not at cash machines. This is part of the commitment to self-regulation by all banks in the European banking area (it's called something else but I can't be arsed checking). My experience with IBAN transfers to the UK in Euros is that this is the case. Of course, the UK banks usually don't have scoobie when it comes to IBAN transfers and talk about SWIFT instead even if both systems are actually one and the same.
Making use of the Sahara
Interesting article. The problem with nuclear fission is still safe disposal of the waste. Until this has been solved the costs unlike the risks are unknown.
Fortunately this is already starting - solar *and* wind power is being adopted in the Maghreb as a way to reduce electricity imports from countries like Spain. In addition to the direct economic benefits this has added social benefits because it requires a skilled local labour force to maintain the generators. Providing employment is one of the key ways to reduce social tension which is at least partly responsible for political radicalisation and emigration. The Sahara including the mountain ranges is easily big enough to generate enough electricity for the local countries and Europe and will require co-operation on both sides to be successful.
Testimony from a satisfied customer
I've been using <insert product name> for years and am supremely satisfied with it. My whole family is also using <insert product name> and it has revolutionised our life. We are happier, more productive and richer because of <insert product name>.
I wish them luck. We all know that the x86 architecture is very inefficient and we'd all like mobile devices with longer battery life.
More utopia
Just like net neutrality a silly idea proposed by those who put marketing before engineering. As if our future happiness is dependent solely upon oodles of wireless internet bandwidth. We already have tried and tested technologies for wireless internet (satellite, UMTS and possibly even WiMax, WiFi itself is pretty shitty - no conflict or power management) that doesn't fuck up other systems. If you want them across the country then licensing is pretty much the only way to ensure this is done properly as with any limited resource. NB. this doesn't mean I think the current system of allocation is perfect but it's probably better than a manufacturer driven land grab. Oh, and for the security paranoid - how do you expect the spooks the trap the terrorists if they make effective use of unlicensed equipment?
Mine's the foil-lined one with the tin can phone.
@AC
"Hmm okay may it is a loss of civil liberties BUT how would you feel if the law hadn't passed and some "brainwashed" fundamentalist came along and blew up your office / town centre and killed innocent people and it emerged that hmm we could have gotten him if we had more time, we kept working and proved it but too late to prevent this..."
You are a moron.
Detention without trial does not prevent people blowing things up; it just turns the state into a terrorist. In the UK it was introduced as an attempt to deal with terrorism in Northern Ireland. Some of the terrorists in Northern Ireland were funded by Americans - NORAID - which made them "freedom fighters" to some people. "Freedom fighters" such as the "contras" are okay as they are not brainwashed or fundamentalist and the relatives of any they kill are bound to understand. Neither are the twats who think it's fine to blow up doctors who carry out abortions. Now, hand over your weapons and leave the rest of the world in peace!
Don't be so narrow-minded.
The congestion charge in London is deemed to be successful ostensibly as a way of reducing traffic but most certainly as a source of funding for the council. Pollution in Manchester is way above the acceptable level and must, by law, be reduced. Central government effectively controls the purse strings of every council by the way it allocates grants so councils always look for new sources of discretionary income. Of course the revenue won't all go public transport but 3 bn to Manchester after repeatedly renegging on the funds for the tram extension (promised for the commonwealth games and again after that) is still a drop in the ocean after the Metrolink act - limited public funding on expansion and required that it put out to tender so the Tory party friends get to cream off the profit. Thatcher had to privatise Manchester's buses twice to get what she wanted. All British cities need massive investment in public transport after decades of neglect and shitty privatisation.
Anyway 3 bn to Manchester and how much to London for the fucking Olympics? Will they go over budget? And how?
The great British public - wants the best of everything but not prepared to pay for anything.
Posted in Acer punts £199 Linux laptop
Yummy!
Might have to get one of those once some guru posts the *BSD install instructions - I try and keep the Borg out of my stuff. But this is obviously just the start of these devices. Bet Sony the's first to release one with an OLED screen for around €500
Is WiMax really ready?
No, it isn't. There's a lot of hype from infrastructure companies hoping to get a slice of the pie but this time the networks know the score.
But actually that doesn't really matter. As the article points out: consumers are not prepared to pay much for mobile broadband and so the networks won't throw money at the licences unless they can integrate them into their current offerings and that, whatever the technical merits or shortcomings, means LTE.
Of course, when the bidding does finally get underway you can expect the networks to try push prices up to keep out any networks. What they pay in licences one year, they offset against tax the next.
@TC - common not popular
I don't think IE is popular in the way that other cultural icons of Western decadance are popular - cola and hamburgers - but it certainly is common which is why so many "useful" sites such as online banks or travel site were written especially or customised for IE.
Fortunately over the last couple of years most developers have moved to relying on CSS for layout so that as the sites get updated for features or even just prettified they get better with the browsers getting better as well. Sort of chicken and egg with Microsoft pretending to play catch up.
I suspect Microsoft is really addressing those customers who bought into the ASP stack and did everything for IE. It's really a prelude to selling the same bunch Silverlight which is probably the main reason for updating the browser/runtime anyway.
"like a twat with a glowing blue ear"
Great article and a great strap line should the El Reg every consider a Nathan Barley style rebranding when upgrading to the Scatternet!
Bluetooth's biggest failing was probably not getting put into TV's and remote controls.
Posted in Sarin quits Vodafone
Not a surprise
Everyone I know has been waiting for Colao to take over for nearly the last two years. I suppose Sarin has done a reasonable job given what he inherited from Wide Boy Gent. Colao has been the driving force behind all the cost-cutting.
As if that were the only problem with iCal
it's got really slow recently - quite happily takes half-minute to update a postponed alarm or add flight times (Lufthansa have finally started to send .ics files when you book a flight).
Jobs is probably too busy working on the DRM for the next version of the iPhone to give a toss for customers who've already paid for the stuff. I really like some of the under-the-hood improvements to Leopard but attention to detail, lads. Please!
A stick to beat Symbian with
My understanding is that Nokia isn't happy with the progress that Symbian is making on implementing what it needs for high-end devices so it's using Linux to encourage them get the work done. Buying Trolltech gives them the excellent QTopia stack and would make usable Linux phones a distinct possibility. Wonder if they'll ever think of merging the two?
@Omer
Oh, well. It's a shit term anyway!
It's illegal
Under pretty much every form of legislation in Europe - as it is listening in to private radio transmissions. Probably wouldn't stop net neutral webiots (just coined this one) signing up for their right to be snooped upon.
Bluetooth analysis is probably a lot more effective and legally less of a problem - if you leave Bluetooth on and discoverable (most people seem to do so) you are giving permission to be discovered.
Pirate because I'm still smiling at my home town's place on the BSA naughty list.
Posted in World economy group gives IPv6 big push
It's not the number of addresses, stupid!
IPv6 brings QoS, better routing and improved security. I wonder if the delayed rollout has anything to do with government peeping toms upgrading their snooping equipment and rolling out IPv6 Echelon.
Posted in Intel: future iPhone to be Atom powered
Architecture versus budget
Apple went with Intel for Mac stuff because IBM said "fuck off, we're too busy with orders for PowerPC and Cell" and not because it was the better architecture. Intel said "Of course, your Jobness and we'll also do the motherboard design and help you with the ASICs so we can both bask in the media hype".
Intel doesn't and, since it sold the XScale business, probably never will do SoC for mobile phones and that's what the market is which is why the iBrick is ARM. Most of the mobile phone stack is pretty hardware specific which is why a cross-compile doesn't really cut it and why emulation isn't an option. Not sure how ARM versus Intel shapes up in the small device world: Nokia's tablet thing versus the EEE but that's certainly somewhere the Cupertino junkies will want to be. ARM is by far the better architecture on a bangs per buck base but Intel have the best process engineers who will wring every ounce of performance out of the hardware. Be fun to watch and it will probably be very nice kit but I for one would love to see Apple embrace ARM - 20 hours battery life for a MacBook ARM? You bet.
Google is off the mark again
Anyone know why Google thinks the Toulouse airport website is infected?
