Posts by Sean Timarco Baggaley

Re: all for a retail price of $300 (£191).

Assuming no major changes to the USD:GBP exchange rate, I'd be more inclined to expect a £250 price tag.

US prices are always quoted without any sales taxes included as those vary from state to state, so most US citizens are paying more than the headline $300 figure.

Microsoft will also want to ensure the natural exchange fluctuations don't bite them too hard. Given the state of the Euro, I wouldn't blame them for adding on a generous "F*ck-Up Factor". The UK's economy has some strong ties with the Eurozone, despite not being in the Eurozone itself, so if the EUR does go tits-up, as many seem to believe, the GBP will very likely suffer some collateral damage too.

Also, the UK now has a 20% VAT rate, not the 17.5% one it had before, so a £250 price tag seems logical to me: £40-ish of that would be VAT.

Re: No mobile broadband

Strange. Apple seem to be having no trouble at all selling these, despite their being so "useless".

Your name is Larry Page and I claim my £5.

Re: ZTPAD

And your point is...?

An Ethernet dongle using a USB connector? They make no mention of USB 3 compatibility, so...

... it's definitely NOT a Gigabit Ethernet dongle!

@Jeebus:

How old are you? Six?

Re: Professional video editing... on a laptop?

No, the IBM T22x monitors don't get anywhere near "close". Their refresh rates suck. The highest they can do is 48Hz, which is useless for video work. 24Hz is only of use for 24Hz 1080p video, but that's a niche within a niche.

And that's before you start looking at the connections.

The whole point of the new "Retina" MBP is that you can see full 1080p video while you're editing it, and still have plenty of room for the editing timeline and other gubbins. I've been editing videos myself on my 2010 17" MBP and I ended up replacing the HDD with an SDD (Crucial M4 512GB) last year to cope with the workload.

I, for one, would cheerfully sell my own family to the Soylent Corporation to get one. But I'm happy to wait until they start coming down in price instead. The SSD upgrade has added a good year or two to the life of the current laptop, and even the first MacBook Airs were over $2000 at launch, so I doubt we'll see Apple sticking to those high prices for more than a year or so. Expect the Retina version of the MBP to become the de-facto MBP model by 2014. Possibly even sooner.

@Jeebus.

[CITATION NEEDED]

Proof please, or fuck off.

^^^ This.

If musicians are so evil in wanting to be paid for writing music for a living—and the vast majority of musicians are NOT multi-millionaires! Madonna and her ilk are the exceptions, not the norm—why the hell would you even want to download their music?

Why download a movie at all if you think it sucks?

Why download a TV series if you think it's formulaic?

On what planet is giving anyone 100% of fuck all morally "better" than giving them 10% of something?

If you consider yourself a true rebel, there are far better things to rebel against than an old business model that was always going to change anyway. Why get all worked up about musicians and artists when there are politicians, televangelists, spammers and many other parasites far more deserving of such vitriol?

Re: Was it only me.....

This.

Turns out some people just can't distinguish between "reportage" and "journalism".

Strange how we named our own species "Homo Sapiens", yet so few of us seem to understand the meaning of the second word.

Re: [$application] is a Metro app.

Good. The WIMP-based desktop metaphor is an anachronism and the mouse has been a pain in the arm (literally) for decades now.

Also, forget using Windows 8 on a traditional desktop, because traditional desktops haven't been selling in any great numbers for years now. The vast majority of computers sold today are laptops, or related form-factors.

Windows 8's Metro on a laptop fitted with a decent multi-touch trackpad makes a hell of a lot more sense than Windows 7's ageing lipstick-on-a-pig WIMP system does. As others have pointed out, Windows has a major issue with focus-stealing—that's one of the reasons I eventually gave up and made the switch to another platform. I hate that focus-stealing.

Furthermore, every f*cking Windows application seems to insist on adding yet more icons to the system tray so it can notify me whenever it's done something right—"Hi! I'm your anti-virus scanner! I've just finished scanning your drive and slowing down everything else! I hope you don't mind my interrupting your 'flow' by making this utterly pointless announcement!" Shut the fuck UP! I'm WORKING you arrogant, incredibly annoying bunch of bytes!

Every bloody program insists on using its own updating framework too, so every goddamned time you open a PDF, or view a website with a Flash element, or open a Word file, or start Open/LibreOffice, instead of just letting you get on with it, the damned thing insists you install the latest update. And then it makes you wait while it does so.

Would it kill developers to have their application offer to quietly download and install these updates behind the scenes, so when you next start the application, it's already bloody updated and you need never, ever be nagged again?

And people wonder why Apple's App Store model is so popular: it unifies the updates too, so you can see if any are available at a glance from the icon in the Dock—a "pull" process—without the nagging, and you can choose to install any, or all, of them at a time of your choosing.

But I like Metro. Seriously. I've used it on Windows Phone 7 devices too and it works even better there. It still has a v1.0 feel to it, but even the first versions of iOS and Android had their rough edges. As a first effort, I think it's a good one. It's certainly more original than Android.

Re: Virgin Media doesn't have boxes everywhere, why does BT need them?

BT have to provide a universal service. That means they have to maintain wires into every single home in the land, even down small cul-de-sacs, mews, etc.

Furthermore, there's a lot of old crap still on their network, including many old phone lines, fax lines, Telex lines, ISDN systems, and so on. The last major 'upgrade' of the BT network took place when they made the switch to electronic exchanges that could support the newfangled "touch-tone" dialling. This was around the time the GPO was privatised and BT was born.

In older exchanges, many old, unused, wires are still in place. We can miniaturise electronics as much as we like, but an electrical wire isn't going to get noticeably thinner any time soon, and an exchange box can easily service a thousand phone lines.

Virgin Media don't have this universal obligation.

I lived in SE London for a few years in a residential area. Every surrounding street had cable, but the short crescent I lived on didn't. And still doesn't. You'd be surprised at how much of London still isn't connected to cable. (But, if you're British yourself, probably not all that surprised.)

Some of BT's older exchanges were originally built underground, rather than in roadside cabinets. You can see the old GPO inspection covers everywhere, and I can't be the only one here who remembers the days when GPO engineers would set up a stripy red-and-white tent on the pavement to protect them and the equipment from the weather during maintenance.

Another week, another moron uses the phrase "climate change denial".

Here's a hint: nobody believes the Earth's climate isn't changing. The ONLY argument is about how much it's changing, and what—if anything—needs to be done about it.

Some people are running around crying "Wolf! WOLF!"

Others are simply asking, "Where? WHERE?"

It really is that simple.

Welcome to the Internet...

... where everybody else is always wrong.

Re: MS will be forced to refund extorted fees

Because, of course, no other company is throwing their patent lawyers around at its rivals, right?

Corporations are OBLIGED to defend their IP. IT IS THE LAW. THEY HAVE NO F*CKING CHOICE.

Lawyers are not programmers. They are not engineers. They have no idea how "obvious" a technique may be: their default position is to attempt to patent everything, because the patent lawyer who screws up is going to lose his job.

The USPTO simply cannot afford to keep up with the white heat of technological progress, so they operate a reactive, not proactive, system. Yes, they'll perform a cursory search, but the USPTO's lawyers are ALSO not programmers or engineers! They have no more clue what half that stuff means than your Auntie Gladys. They'll punch in some search terms into their database and make an educated guess as to whether whatever turns up is a close enough match to deny a new patent application, but if they were good enough to spot obviousness, they wouldn't be doing this job in the first place.

And that's why patents like these get through. It's a systemic problem. A fundamental design flaw. Railing at Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Motorola, etc. helps precisely not one whit. You need to change the laws.

If you can't be bothered to do at least that much and prefer to just rant pointlessly about mere symptoms in thread after thread, the problem is you, not Microsoft.

Re: Just search for what I entered

"And there speaks a geek. The problem with your approach is that you have to talk to the computer in its own language."

As opposed to real life when an American or Brit has to talk to a Frenchman in French? It's just another language, and not even a particularly difficult one. Humans—particularly young humans—are very, very good at learning languages.

Computers do not speak English, or any other natural language. Until programmers grok this and realise the problem is that the computer needs to be taught to understand natural languages properly, instead of these half-arsed attempts at "semantic webs" and whatnot, it'll be us humans who'll have to do some of the heavy lifting.

Either program the computer to understand natural language properly, or stop trying to pretend you're doing anything other than papering over the gaping chasms in your user interface's design.

Wolfram Alpha may not be perfect, but it's much better at parsing natural language questions than Google's engine.

Re: Agree

I agree with Lord Howe's basic assertion: that the UK's current system of using both Imperial and metric is just stupid. It makes far more sense to standardise. You get the benefits of much easier calculations for a start. No need to remember how many barleycorns* to the foot, for one thing. Everywhere else except the UK and the US uses the Metric system. Yes, it was popularised by the French—although first proposed by a >Briton, so you don't get to use the nationalist card.

The Imperial yard and the Metric metre are so similar, many road signs have been positioned at the equivalent distance in metres, not yards, specifically with a view to easy conversion to metric.

Nobody's suggesting replacing every existing road sign right away either: you can just slap vinyl stickers over the existing signs to update the numbers and units. Everything else stays the same. All you need is a printer who can print adhesive vinyl stickers, and those aren't particularly hard to find. They're not even all that expensive: given the quantities you'd be ordering, and the bulk discounts the printing firms would offer—there's plenty of competition too—you could probably do London's signs for about £200K or so. Not free, certainly, but it'll keep some people in gainful employment. That's quite a good thing to do during a period of recession.

Yes, you'd see a lot of signs saying "Charing Cross 1600 mt." instead of "Charing Cross 1 m", but it's still metric and the actual distance hasn't changed. It's a damned sight cheaper than the typical "Can't Do" attitude of folks here who seem to believe every single sign in the country would need to be re-sited right away for some unexplained reason.

There's nothing in UK law that requires every sign to be exactly a multiple of 1680 yards, or 1000 metres, from whatever they're pointing at. They're only there to tell you how far away something is. You can move them about later, during ordinary road maintenance cycles, when you'd have had to spend the money on replacing the signs anyway.

See? Not difficult, is it?

As for the whole "pints vs. litres" bollocks... please! If you can understand litres of petrol, why can't you understand beer sold in litres too? Instead of asking for a pint, you'd ask for a "half". Instead of asking for a half-pint, you'd ask for "a quarter". Not rocket science, is it?

And, yes, unscrupulous pub landlords and supermarkets will doubtless not drop their prices slightly to take account of the changes, but so what? Inflation and taxes will have wiped out any differences in very short order anyway; this is an utter non-argument.

There are very good reasons for switching to the Metric system. There are no good reasons whatsoever for sticking with two inconsistent systems, one of which, like Microsoft Word's file format, isn't even consistent with itself.

If you're against full metrification because of the "we manage today with the existing complexity and inconsistencies", you cannot possibly have any problem with merely having to cope with bigger numbers on some signs, and ever-so-slightly-smaller beer glasses.

The French, Germans and Italians have been using the Metric system for generations. It's not hard. It's incredibly easy. That's the whole bloody point of it!

* (British shoe sizes are still measured in Barleycorns. Presumably, the US Barleycorn is also slightly different from the British one.)