Posts by Simon Wilson

What, no "only gay in the village" jokes?

Wow.

Contracts

I think the point people are making is that AT&T are not giving existing customers the option to extend their existing contracts by another two years. Most original iPhone owners have less than a year left, and the phones are rather fragile. If you break your iPhone, all you can do otherwise is get a cheap phone and downgrade your plan to remove data features. AT&T loses monthly income. It would make sense to lock people into longer contracts and keep them on the same plan.

Of course, people *love* to jump to conclusions and blame the people making the petitions for being whiners...

Atheists

Now all they need to do is let atheists join too, and I'll almost consider the founder to be a human being.

RISC OS

RISC OS is an example of prior art for most of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_bar_(RISC_OS)

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/10/road_to_mac_os_x_leopard_dock_1_6.html

As usual, software patents are a big FAIL.

iPod battery replacement takes 5 mins

I've replaced batteries on two portable devices that supposedly don't have user-serviceable batteries - a 3rd gen iPod and a Compaq iPaq. It really wasn't that difficult, and in both cases the battery was cheap and higher capacity than the original. So what's the big deal here? I am not an expert at battery removal, but both battery kits came with clear instructions, all necessary tools and took the best part of 5 mins.

I'd rather have it this way than make the iPods thicker/heavier just so users can replace the batteries in 10 seconds instead of 5 mins.

Toshiba had problems too

A similar thing happened with my old Toshiba 5105 laptop - there's an entire support group devoted to people who had their BGA chips desolder themselves due to heat damage.

The fix is indeed to run the fan at full tilt, though the unsoldered BGA chips have to be reflowed too.

Never saw any compensation for that, so I won't be spending my cash on nvidia mobile GPUs any more.