Re: Freeview

As the article points out, you're more likely to see H.265 used to broadcast Freeview HD than Freeview 4K as you would be able to fit twice as many channels into a Freeview multiplex. In fact, the terrestrial TV broadcast frequencies are so valuable for mobile applications, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the 2019 row in your table was:

2019: Freeview switch off, viewers migrate to FreeSat.

Re: Geography is a bit screwed

I think the author is being confused by a Google maps cock up.

I'm pretty sure that Camputers were in the top floor of 32 Bridge Street (Cambridge wine merchants occupy teh ground floor nowadays) which is just next to Magdalene bridge. Google seems to think that this is in fact Magdalene street (wrong side of the river) and it places 32 Bridge Street on the wrong side of the road in St Johns College. Use Street View to look at the bridge and turn to face the wine shop. I'd insert a google link if I knew how.

I used to work for an educational software publisher that moved into the offices that Camputers vacated - there was a fair amount of Lynx detritus left behind. We spent quite a few years there developing software for the BBC Micro. I seem to remember that SOS Children's Villages were on the floor below and I don't remember who occupied the retail premises on the ground floor.

Vidiots is a perfectly good portmanteau word that I have been using since at least 2004 to describe those people who believe that because they watch kitten videos on YouTube, they know everything there is to know about digital video.

Re: £4 per month discount (After the contract has expired)

@ AC 10:18

T-Mob will effectively give you £20/month discount if you switch to their full monty SIM only contract, currently £16/mo unlimited calls/texts/data. When I recently looked at contract phones vs SIM only + unlocked phone it was hard to find any great difference between any of them. With a contract phone you may have the convenience of an automatic upgrade, but SIM only gets you an unlocked phone from the start.

@ Jan Hargreaves

I imagine that once your songs' pages get to the hundreds of millions of views, you may be able to negotiate a higher fee per view from Google. You can bet that Google will charge more for adverts on the popular pages.

@baffled

The reason for not showing lower-case key caps is probably because of Scott Forstall's adherence to skeuomorphism - the virtual iOS keyboard is made to be as alike to a real-life keyboard as possible. In the real world key caps don't change when you hit shift-lock so the iOS virtual keyboard doesn't change key caps either.

Just saying - not trying to defend it or anything.

Re: Hmmm

Isn't the point of this standardisation to make sure that you can use a single charger with any data enabled phone and not to ensure that every phone has a uUSB connector? God forbid that uUSB is the connector technology that any standards compliant manufacturer must now use forever.

Every iPhone I've had comes with a charger with a USB type A socket on it - I can use that charger with any phone designed to use the EU common external power supply by using the relevant cable. This seems more sensible than having a charger with a fixed uUSB terminated cable.

In any case, as far as I can tell, Apple comply with the EU common external power supply standard as long as they provide a cable that will connect the iPhone to an EU EPS, which they do.

@ AndrueC

You obviously never write code that implements standards or interacts with the outside world.

Of course it shouldn't be necessary to write a comment to explain what a line of code is going to do, but I often find it necessary to write comments explaining why it is doing it. I may need to refer to a standards document or another source that I used when writing the code. Sometimes it's one sentence in an entire standard or reference manual that's important - what should I do, hope the future me remembers or that someone else is psychic enough to find that reference?

Re: Can I just say

Because the fat cat lawyers get fatter?

How do any of these software patent cases benefit the end user of any device?

Re: Not impressed with your review. @ Captain Underpants

That's the second comment where you have mentioned soldered on DIMMs.

To avoid any possibility of FUD there is no iMac with soldered on DIMMs. Look at the iFixit teardown (http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+EMC+2544+Teardown/11936/3).

I can barely hear the recorded whistling from the article with the volume set to 11.

Re: Not just the power supply

+1 for modem mode. Works well for me, I've often see >100Mbps download speeds.

I use mine with an Apple Time Capsule (802.11n WiFi router and NAS backup). Whatever you think about Apple, this has been the best router I have used and I have used many Netgear (incl. blue boxes) and LinkSys routers over the years (with Apple/PC/iPhone/Kindle & Android WiFi clients).

Re: It's weird how Apple get all this flak... @ Sean Timarco Baggaley

You know you can submit changes to Google Maps?

http://www.google.co.uk/mapmaker

Apples & pears

UK price is £499 including VAT. US prices excludes all sales taxes.

$599 + 20% VAT = $719, or £449 at $1.6=£1

So there's a 10% difference. Not great, but also not the $200 you quoted.

Re: What would I do if I was running Apple's TV project @ bigiain

It's telling that the comparison that you make shows Sky as having a better UI that your telly. Sky (UK) is a closed system where not only do they mandate the UI for a Sky (UK) STB, but they also control the broadcast and are able to include private data in the DVB SI stream.

When you compare a Sky box with a generic DVB-S/S2 receiver, there is a world of difference in usability. I have both a Sky+ box and a Humax FreeSat box. The Humax box is interesting, but it's slow and complex. It also has basic problems like I have to read small text on the remote control to be able to operate the UI - that means I need my reading glasses to see the remote, but I don't need them to see the screen.

Apple's philosophy of removing flexibility from their devices in favour of usability follows exactly the same model as the Sky box so I'll be very interested to see how well they do. Especially as in my day job I have to try and create user interfaces for network based DVB receivers.

@ Neil

Upvote for actually reading the article. It seems reasonable to be in profit by your second quarter to me and presumably, if they don't like losing money they will just stop making the parts.

Re: "unfriendly" European hi-fi gear?

The DIN connector is the poor man's crappy chinese counterfeit Neutrik XLR.

Fixed it for you.

Re: £120 to replace a 1Tb hard drive

And they charged me £99 to replace my ATI Radeon HD4670 256MB graphics card. Including labour and VAT. At the same time they replaced my (working) Seagate 1 TB drive because they had issued a recall for them. This was my three year old iMac - not under any warranty of any kind.

I was amazed, I expected to come out of the Apple store minus an arm and a leg.

Re: Wrong Luton

Mine went to Luton with the airport, but I'm near Cambridge.

HERE's satellite imagery of my current location is completely pants so I don't think I'll even try it on the phone.

Re: errrrr there's more to a patent than its title.

I've just looked at the patent claims linked in the article.

They relate to a system where an order is remotely sent to a processing system that then records data to a CD-R and prints an address label.

1. I wrote the software for just such a system back in about 2001, the patent claims could be taken from the proposal we wrote for the customer.

2. At the time this 'method' would have been obvious to anyone with the barest glimmer of wit. It would never have occurred to me that I had invented something worthy of a patent.

3. This system (recording to CD-Rs) is now obsolete.

Ergo, these patents are ridiculous.

Re: its really easy

It is only easy if the law is changed so that the multinationals can't claim that, for example, royalties for the use of intellectual property (a brand - Starbucks) are a legitimate cost of sale.

That will not be an easy thing to change. My company licenses copyright software to a Canadian company and clearly they need to be able to offset the licensing costs against the tax to their government. If the tables were turned and my company licensed software from Canada, how easy is it going to be for HMRC to distinguish that legitimate cost of sale from the 'immoral' Starbuck's cost of sale?

Just saying that it ain't easy - I for one don't agree that Amazon should be able to operate within a different tax world to John Lewis.

Re: angry much?

There is some weird shit on this website.

Re: Bleurgh

I think that you have missed the point.

These companies claim that their profit on billions of pounds of sales turnover is non-existent. If that were true there would be no problem. However, it appears that they use slippery accounting procedures to export the profits that they do make to tax havens. Because they hide their real profit margin, the only way to comment on this or for El Reg to report on it, is to look at the tax paid as a proportion gross revenue.

If you generously assumed that Starbuck's EBIT was 15% of gross revenue, then they would need to be paying more like £90M in tax on revenues of £3.1B.

Eh?

It seems obvious to me that the point is to spend hobby time writing a BASIC interpreter that will no doubt be used by some for fun.

In fact, that's exactly the kind of thing that would stand out on a CV from an application for the developer positions I am try to fill.

other countries' treaties

I have no idea what the US rules for Canadian residents are, but for the UK they are different to your description.

From the London US embassy website (http://london.usembassy.gov/vwp3.html) about the visa waiver program:

You will qualify for travel under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) if you are a citizen of the United Kingdom,

...( clipped for brevity)...

[travelling] for business, pleasure or transit for less than 90 days. Visa-free travel does not include those who plan to study, work or remain in the United States for more than 90 days;

I think that there is a distinction between business and 'work' - I can sell a service to my US clients and visit them legally. These visits include meetings, training, setting up equipment, debugging software I have sold, etc.

I don't think I could go to the US and take wages from a US employer visa free (e.g. go and work as a stage performer for a theatre). That would be 'work' and that seems not to be allowed.

I am in two minds about your post, I hope you never apply to work for me on the one hand, but on the other, I think that you may be confusing waste of space recruitment companies with the actual employers.

The last person I employed was told by his friendly recruitment agent not to discuss the salary that he wanted with us in the interview. When _we_ pay the agent a fee based on the salary of the new recruit, you can be pretty sure that we expect the recruiter to work on our behalf. Unfortunately a lot of recruiters seem to be young people struggling to get their next bit of commission who are ignorant and sometimes dishonest.

Does Paris actually classify as an aircraft?

Undoubtedly!

I was also wondering why the altitude was also provided in metres - over-zealous sub-editing?

Re: missed the poll

"how many people actually know or state their clothes sizes (waist/chest/inside leg, etc) in cm?"

My wife and daughter for two - they can convert from any sizing system to their own dimensions in a couple microseconds.

Re: Interesting...

It's the same with sheet film formats for view cameras, Yanks say 4 x 5 and Brits say 5 x 4 (inches of course), same for 10 x 8, 7 x 5, etc.

"three metres of four-by-two"

Most places I buy timber (in the UK) sell it by the metric foot, i.e. 0.9 M, 1.2 M, 1.5 M, etc. Therefore 'three metres' would be perfectly acceptable, but any other whole number of metres not divisible by 0.3 would not.

Seems like a good compromise for the Imperial apologists.

Re: Re: How effing much?

I think that it may be reasonable to assume that salary is the largest component of most IT company staff costs.

@Bakunin

+1 for "time and date are notoriously difficult to get right".

Re: gov.uk still a POS

Well spotted.

I wondered if I was right when the DirectGov website gave the same answer, but I still couldn't see my mistake.

The calculation they show on the page is still wrong though.