But that they were

Cheap that is.

Repealing would require an explicit act though

As the title says. The courts have recognised a category of 'constitutional' law, the difference being that you can repeal it only explicitly. So while a normal act may be implicitly repealed in part or in whole later on when another act says something contradictory, the HRA overrides subsequent legislation unless the subsequent legislation explicitly overrides the HRA (or is itself also constitutional).

Key difference is that if they even if they have crazy backbenchers running around wanting to ban gay people from B&Bs (yes, yes, a gross exaggeration of the facts, bear with me), and they manage to slip a few provisions to that effect into the parliamentary roll, it doesn't mean anything unless they go the whole hog and spend a great deal of political capital on doing it properly. Though in practice, with the way the tabloids are, they could pass the exact text of the HRA and get applauded on the content, just provided they didn't admit anybody else had written it first.

Not sure I'm with you on the Strasbourg point, could you explain exactly what you mean? Obviously Strasbourg isn't the highest authority for e.g. criminal law, but I'm not sure exactly what area you're applying your argument to.

Labour have a 4,787 majority here

In 2005 they received 45% of the vote, with the Liberal Democrats in second place with 26%. Our MP is a former cabinet minister (and was in 2001 and 2005). I suspect that whoever I vote for, my ward is getting Labour.

Judging by their desktop browser...

... they're running around now half-implementing controls that look a little like the OS's built in ones and writing their own duplicates of any OS-wide services that people find helpful, so that they can claim full integration in whatever press release space they have spare between their ongoing complete reinventions of the web.

There's an SD card reader coming...

though obviously it pushes you ever further from your ideal $200. And, being Apple, I expect it won't work exactly the way you want it to.

Probably I should have said: pretty much my mother uses her computer for email, web browsing and listening to podcasts (no, really). She does sometimes email out, but much less often than she receives email in.

Her actual laptop suffers from the same maladies as most computers run by ordinary, normal people; it gets a tiny little bit slower every few months as the OS and most of the built-in software automatically updates itself and dramatically slower about once a year when the anti-virus software updates itself. In this context, Apple's approach is actually a benefit: it's a fixed hardware platform so new versions of all software are explicitly tailored to the device she is holding rather than an ever-shifting notional average machine and Apple's micromanagement of permitted software saves her from the anti-virus vendor school of software sales that involves trading on fear and misinformation and coming up with ever more inventive ways to shove slow, bloated junk deep into your OS, whichever one it is.

I really think this thing's going to be a hit with the casual audience.

I agree entirely

"The health system is a social service, not a company selling services in a market place."

Yes, I was making the point that when the coward said "I want to give my money to a monopoly who we know are a monopoly, not one that does monopolistic practises but never gets slammed for it" he or she clearly wasn't saying what he or she actually meant. You've been willing to take a guess at a distinction that might have been intended, I wasn't willing to.

It's the same as WebOS

Your multitasking app gets woken to deal with events that it has an interest in, but isn't allowed to run constantly. I'm sorry that's insulting for you, but isn't it how every well-behaved GUI application is written?

I guess probably you mean the list of specific events is too restrictive? You want to be able to use software that while invisible does something other than (i) produce audio; (ii) provide location-aware info; (iii) provide voIP functionality; or (iv) alert you to something at specified intervals? That's definitely some limitations and restrictions, but hardly a ton — I bet it covers 80% of the software you want and 99% of the software that an average user wants.

There's nothing illegal or inherently wrong with being a monopoly

The NHS is a state monopoly. Does it upset you that they have monopolistic practices but never get slammed for it?

I'd suggest you mean a monopoly that is using its weight to artificially suppress competition.

True, except that PageMaker was an Aldus product at the time

And Aldus were bought by Adobe only long after they'd started losing in the marketplace to Quark.

Not that Jobs is in the right as a result.

Adobe would lose too much by walking away from OS X

I'm sure I read somewhere that more than 50% of CS sales are to OS X users. I'm sure Jobs calculated that Adobe can't afford to walk away from OS X before embarking on his anti-Flash crusade. Say what you want about his methods, but his history with Microsoft suggests that he's willing to swallow his corporate pride — when he returned to Apple they took a huge wedge of money from Microsoft in return for an IP cross-licensing deal and a five year commitment by Microsoft to provide Mac versions of Office and Internet Explorer. Safari appeared only after Microsoft announced the winding down of IE for Mac development and Apple quietly put Appleworks out to pasture, implicitly accepting that Microsoft own the office market.

That said, Adobe have done a lot to lock out the competition, especially since buying Macromedia and killing Freehand. About ten years ago Corel tried to reposition CorelDraw as a Photoshop/Illustrator rival, rolling in a photo editor and rebranding as "CorelDraw Graphics Suite".

I think the calculation ends up being that if Adobe walk away from OS X they lose more than 50% of their customers in the short to medium term and in so doing they at least open the door to rivals. Even if it made Apple lose 100% of their desktop customers that's less than 50% of their income stream. So if Adobe walks away there's a real risk it'll hurt Adobe more than Apple.

It's not a technical barrier

It's a licensing barrier that, per El Reg's other story, stipulates that "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs". So if you originally write an application in ActionScript then submit it to Apple, they can reject it for not being originally written in Objective-C, no doubt by looking for other traces of the Flash runtime support stuff rather than at the quality of the application itself.

Without actually knowing US law, I wonder how enforceable it would be if it ever came to trial given the sort of things that tend to matter in legal systems about the proportionality of a measure compared to the relative bargaining power of the parties involved. In practice I wouldn't be surprised if it is actually legal and, in any case, whether anyone will ever even bother to take it to court. I guess there's an anti-competition angle since Apple could in practice be distorting competition in the wider market by using its iPhone platform to limit software support for other platforms (in that Objective-C is Apple specific in practice and in any case has no ANSI or even K&R-style definitive spec), but it's probably a bit vague for a government body to actually step in, given that you can just write 90% of your cross-platform app in C++ and use Objective-C just for the front end.

You're singling that out?

It's a substantial step up the conversational ladder from Slappy's effort.

At a guess...

... the older devices have less RAM and a much slower SSD, which would likely make anything they may have done with virtual memory unusable (or, at least, within their own criteria of not slowing the device down substantially and not killing the battery). The devices themselves have a virtual memory system but no swap file — so you generally have to write your program to fit in the available memory, but can memory map large files that are already on the SSD.

At least, that's my charitable interpretation.

Though apparently not yet

I've just tried it on one of the iPads here in the [London-based] office — iPlayer is returning the standard website rather than the mobile one and then complaining about the lack of Flash. Hope they'll fix that before the UK iPad launch, to give an iPlayer experience at least as good as the iPhone.

It doesn't require Flash

It also supplies ordinary, industry-standard H.264 MP4 to iPhones and iPod Touches. No doubt it'll do the same to iPads.

Great argument

I'm sure you'll win the world over with your fantastic argument that Apple products aren't better just because they have rounded corners.

Agree and disagree

I'm sure these phones and Microsoft's motivation to produce non-full OS phones will vanish into the aether leaving no lasting impression whatsoever, but they did quite well shouldering into the games business, didn't they? So it's not completely beyond them to add new competences.

Me? I'm an iPhoner. Sorry.

At the time of replying

It's 11 upvotes to 4 downvotes. Could be a perception issue at your end?

That's not really true

Unless you also intend to licence your fonts, code your own scrollbar, etc. To my knowledge, both of the significant commercial OSs ship with H.264 decompressors which can be leveraged by applications to whatever end they see fit.

Opera the company are too aggressive

Probably they've earnt it though, seeing as how they reinvented the Web last June (see: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/12/opera_freedom/).

How so?

Microsoft fell foul of the EU for using their existing dominant position in one market in order to distort competition in another. They used money from the desktop to push the price of browsers down to zero, killing Netscape's primary revenue stream, then pushed them from the market completely through bundling.

How is that like this at all? It may be morally equivalent, but factually and legally it's not even slightly similar.

Could be an Apple/Microsoft distinction?

You know, with Apple having a historical willingness to switch hardware architectures and aggressively dump old APIs and OSs, possibly it just doesn't look as bad when someone says that supporting a five year-old Apple OS is a lot of effort as it does when they say that supporting a near-decade old Microsoft OS is a lot of effort?

I miss that too

But on the other points raised in this article, at least now Android makes it easy to write native code that calls out to OpenGL, games being the single most popular type of app on consumer mobile phones. It looks like Microsoft haven't learnt that lesson. Is it possible they nailed down the Windows 7 Mobile feature set somewhere before whenever iPhone OS 2.0 was?

Could just be a burden of proof thing?

Again only really if he hadn't previously admitted to sending the message, he could just be pleading not guilty to make the point that the prosecution has the burden of proving guilt. Does anyone have any idea whether it's a strict liability offence? I wouldn't be surprised if so, but if not then maybe he could also be making the point that nobody could reasonably interpret what he did as intending to be an actual threat?

Re: the games only

You're completely wrong about the games. For that one segment of the audience, the iPhone is a much better buy. See, for example, Street Fighter 4, Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, Driver or Rayman 2. Major mobile games companies like Gameloft (who licence a lot of the 90s properties for iPhone ports — they're responsible for Driver and Rayman at least) were scaling back their Android involvement at least as recently as November (source: http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/44758-gameloft-chooses-iphone-over-android).

You're right about all the other categories of app though. I guess maybe it's just that supporting multiple device configurations is harder for games, which puts Android into an artificially worse position than mere OS market penetration would suggest?

It does a lot more than that

Try starting a song in the iPod app, then doing absolutely anything else. Or starting a page loading in Safari, doing something else sufficiently light that Safari isn't evicted from memory (eg, run Mail), then heading back in there. It seems likely that most of the bundled apps can run alongside one another.

And from a pedantic point of view, third-party apps can't take part in multiprogramming as everybody means when they say multitask nowadays, but they can multitask in ye olde sense in that the full complement of threading stuff (Cocoa and POSIX) is available. Which is helpful if you're a developer who is porting code or trying to keep the GUI thread responsive.

That's what lawsuits mean

It's like that time I sued my neighbours for continually parking their car on my lawn. Because I couldn't compete.

Could be true

Vista the flop will have created pent-up demand, and the international discounts for early ordering, the bumper European discounts* and it being the first major launch since Macs started running Windows too (actually, probably not so relevant, but the reason why I personally purchased a copy) will have helped.

Not relevant, but I like it a lot more than XP but still less than OS X. Though I'm possibly just being conservative and preferring what I already know.

* ie, it was originally announced that the full Internet Explorer-less version would be shipped for the price normally reserved for upgrade copies; when the non-IE idea fell by the wayside everyone who had ordered non-upgrade E copies at upgrade prices was bumped to full copies at the upgrade price.

Could be an OS difference

Flash is substantially better on Windows than on either of the others. On my Core Duo 2.16 Ghz Mac, Flash takes 55% CPU (ie, 55% of one core) to play http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R8JMIAWS20&feature=grec. If I join the HTML5 beta, causing the video to play through Quicktime, it costs 25%.

You don't understand competition law

Microsoft have a monopoly in the OS space. Per the judgment of the EU, they used that monopoly to create a separate monopoly in the browser space. The illegal act isn't having a monopoly in any one space, it's using one to artificially create another. And the people that suffer are the customers in the second market — so in this case, it's internet users and publishers that suffered. In practice, I guess they mean that customers suffered through the lack of innovation or progress after Microsoft shut down active development on IE after version 6 and publishers suffered from IE's buggy rendering and, ummm, flexible approach to adhering to standards.

Does the absence of a browser ballot on OS X create a distortion of the market? No. Does the absence of a browser ballot on the iPhone create a distortion of the market? No.

You've obviously got a chip on your shoulder and are desperate to distort any news story that comes along to that end.

I think Canvas/whatever is their IPTV solution

They'll stick to Flash in the browser (and MP4 for the iPhone if they absolutely have to), but give most people IPTV through custom boxes. They'll probably even stick to the faintly ridiculous idea of broadcast listings for deciding when content is available for, ummm, another 30 years.

(untitled)

If you put a product in the public domain and a nasty proprietary company comes along, makes a little change and re-releases it under a proprietary licence, that does not give them any sort of ability to remove your product from the public domain. You're fundamentally wrong on that point.

It's not PPC vs Intel

10.5 works on sufficiently fast PPC machines (G4 867Mhz per Wiki; nothing shipped below that since April 2004) and the original Intels shipped with 10.4.

I'll guess that it's a lot easier for Firefox to work with whatever APIs Apple added as of 10.5, them being much more in the habit than Microsoft of replacing and deprecating their own stuff.

I think the opposite

It doesn't need to be cheaper or less proprietary, judging by top-selling gadgets such as the iPod and the Wii. However, it's also not a terribly nice idea.

Give Lotus Symphony a try!

The 2008 onwards IBM reuse of the name version, obviously, not the ancient thing from forever ago. I think it's an Eclipse (not so that you can tell) + OpenOffice mashup internally, but regardless of that I find its interface to be a great improvement on OpenOffice. It's a tabbed document interface that relies primarily on inspectors for context-specific operations, with only a single line of toolbar icons by default. So I guess it tackles the same interface overload problems that inspired Microsoft to move to the ribbon, but ends up at a completely different solution.

And my tip is: don't worry about putting in a garbage email address when downloading — the next screen is the download page no matter what you put in.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Killing Flash on the Mac would make it unavailable to the designers that produce much of the world's Flash content. The Mac is still the predominant platform for creative uses.

I've had the same DAB for five years

An intempo something. It was a gift and I've had good reception of a bunch of stations in Nottingham, Cumbria and here in London.

That said, I expect an FM radio would last five years and give me good reception of a bunch of stations in Nottingham, Cumbria and London. So, no, I can't justify the cost or the change.

Has to be pretty bad?

You'd imagine it's got to be pretty bad if they actually have temporarily shut down production. I'm typing this on one of the original 2006 MacBook Pros that got a lot of bad press for being weirdly noisy, and though I've had no problems all I remember was Apple publicly denying the problem while quietly admitting to it on a warranty-by-warranty basis.

Plus GCC, LLVM, Bonjour, Grand Central, CUPS, Darwin, Mach...

All contributed to or originated by Apple. They've also worked the OpenCL spec through Kronos.

I disagree

I respectfully disagree with your assessment. In my opinion you are reacting to the tendency of some to deify any Apple product by unreasonably exaggerating their negative points.

Quite a few, I expect

You know, while content producers want DRM and patented encoding techniques advance more quickly than those that are unencumbered.

Slight aside

I understood that it was significant R&D at Fingerworks, which Apple then swooped in and bought - the whole company, not just the IP. So the inventors are being heavily rewarded and are now Apple employees but the actual original work was performed elsewhere.

Not sure if that makes the conversation more palatable to the usual brand aware but otherwise braindead rabble or just plays into their hands. But I would imagine that whoever funded Fingerworks would have been unlikely to do so if there was no way of owning the IP.

I'm definitely anti the "a device for applying the colour red to text upon demand"-type patents, but this doesn't feel like one of those.

Try reading the article again

"Woolley was lucky to have already downloaded Jive Media's Pocket First Aid & CRP, and was able to treat his wounds with torn clothing"