Re: Is this really news to anyone?

I would have thought the simplest solution would be DNS based, so only have one 'real' domain name pointing to a server, which serves plain content, but serving completely different content when requested under a different server name.

Re: I'm curious

3GS has a crap camera and is pretty slow - faster than the 3G, but that was super slow. The 4S is pretty quick, and has a much nicer camera.

I also don't understand the people who upgrade as soon as it is out. It's much better to just skip a cycle, eg I went 3G -> 4 -> 5 (probably, depends how happy I still am with the 4), and I've still got my 1G iPad, can't decide whether to go for the 3G iPad, might skip two cycles there.

Re: Hopefully now we can see some great closeups of....

Wombles obviously don't get to encounter many racehorses up close - racehorses love to race - in fact, all horses do.

It is kind of shitty when a horse breaks a leg in a jump, I'll give you that, but horses love the jumps as much as the riders.

If you ever get the chance, check out a point to point race - amateur horses and riders - and you will quickly see that if the horse doesn't want to do something, the horse doesn't do it. The horses that do want to do it love it.

I grew up playing (and buying) Spectrum and Atari ST games. Some of the games - I'm thinking Dungeon Master specifically - really did take me 3 months to complete (and then I continued to play it for probably another year, working out all the puzzles).

Another example, Speedball II, took me literally years before I won the 1st division league - its insanely hard. Yet another, Sid Meier's Pirates, I still haven't given up beating my score.

Move into the PC era, the original Half Life took me about 3 months to finish.

Nowadays, it is all about the graphics, and not about the gameplay. It's a cinematic experience taking you about 6 hours, and it's never insanely difficult.

If a game doesn't hook you into playing it for so long, why shouldn't you re-sell it? The designers should have spent more time making it addictive and replayable, with a longer play time.

Re: Samsung Bank

The chairman of Samsung, Lee Kun-hee, said this last year:

“Corruption and fraud at Samsung Techwin came to light accidentally but I think it is pervasive in the whole group,” Lee told reporters on Thursday. “This is a growing source of concern for me and I am going to take issue with it.”

This from someone who has been convicted of tax evasion, had to stand down for 2 years whilst he was investigated for bribery (not proven) and corruption (3 year suspended sentence).

I'd pass on Bank of Samsung too tbh.

Re: All in it together

Did you miss the huge jump in personal allowance, and the large rise in stamp duty on expensive houses (and much more importantly, the abolition of some of the tax crutches the rich use to avoid stamp duty).

Re: @ Facebook is not relevant to work

Facebook is so relevant to our company, that we block it. Along with twitter.

This response hasn't even appeared on the radar of most people - "I'm not on twitmybookspace".

Re: Try to understand the issue

Boris has claimed that the only person monitoring, responding and posting information on that twitter account was him, making it a personal account.

I think he was trying to do the right thing - he didn't want to be tweeting as @MayorOfLondon whilst doing campaign things, so renamed the account - but he fucked up the execution, it should have been a new account, which he should have announced on the @Mayor account.

Which is what he has now done. Storm in a tea cup, as opposed to what Ken's cronies like Lutfur Rahman get up to.

Re: Non-Discriminatory

If you read the article, what actually happened was that Apple said "Er, excuse me? We bought these chips from Qualcomm, who've already licensed them from you..". The Dutch agreed.

Moto do not usually cross license SEP patents for all SEP and non SEP patents owned by a company. Normally, you pay a few cents per device for SEP patents. Moto wanted in the region of $2.50 per device. It's discriminatory and not fair or reasonable for Moto to charge Apple $2.50 a device, and Qualcomm 15 cents a device - SEP patents have to be licensed FRAND.

What MS have got Android manufacturers to agree to pay for non SEP patents is irrelevant.

@Tim Parker

I specifically bought my tablet to watch films when flying long distances, so for me a 10 hr battery life is crucial.

Another use case is the long weekend camping, when I won't have any power for 72 hours. It would be nice if it lasts until I get home, with some usage each day.

Admittedly, these aren't every day use cases. Typically, I use it on the tube to and from work, it sits in a dock on my desk playing music at work, similar at home, and then to bed to read a book, or I use it as the remote control for my TV.

However, if it didn't have the long battery life, I probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place. It's like buying watches, do you get the water resistant watch, the 5m waterproof watch, or the 50m divers watch? I would hazard that the majority of people buying the divers watch do not spend all day diving, but would like the opportunity of doing so.

Re: Double standards-essential patents

Yep, thats exactly right. Where groups of companies come together to share a bunch of patents in order to make a standard that they can all profit from, then they all have to agree to license them to anyone for reasonable prices. This seem harsh to you, Jedit?

When it's not standards-related stuff, the first person who comes up with and patents the idea has first crack at commercially exploiting it. You're complaining that Apple keep coming up with stuff first, and its not fair?

Re: Bah! (Hardback/paperback/ebook)

Books are released in phases. First imprint is the primo hardback version, and costs a fortune. Some of that is due to the cost of it being hardback, most of it is to capitalize on the desirability of the book - it's the only option available, and hence if you want it, you got to pay.

Once they've made as much as they can from the hardback (read, sales dry up), the second imprint is made, this time in paperback. This is much cheaper.

So, when the book is in its hardback phase, the ebook must be of a similar price, or sales of hardback will suffer, and the publisher won't make any/enough money. Once the book is in the paperbook phase, the ebook doesn't need to be priced so highly.

tl;dr - If you want to read a book right after it is published, it's going to cost you.

Re: When the boot is on the other foot ...

@Jonathon

Why do you assume you cannot apply geographical restrictions within the EU? This ruling establishes that Sky/EPL cannot restrict Nova from selling into the UK, but it is entirely different to say that Nova must sell into the UK, or that an agreement between EPL/Nova to not sell in the UK would be illegal.

Yet another alternate way to look at the price normalization, is that the EPL decide that the small percentage of revenue they make from selling rights to non UK broadcasters is so small that they simply do not sell those rights, and charge more to UK residents to make up the shortfall.

Re: When the boot is on the other foot ...

@Jonathon: I agree with most of what you are saying. What the law says, and what the right owners think are clearly two different things.

If I can pull one thing out of your post:

"the Single Market is *meant* to work for the benefit of consumers"

What I'm arguing is that this ruling doesn't actually work for the benefit of consumers. At first, consumers will be able to use Nova to undercut the market price - what people are prepared to pay. This is a plus for the UK users.

Later, when the contracts are re-negotiated, Nova are told they have to restrict subscribers to specific countries, or alternately, they have to pay as much per subscriber as Sky do. Now UK users have no option to use Nova, and have to use Sky, or alternately, using Nova, which now costs the same as Sky. This is the current status quo.

How would that affect consumers in Greece? They would have to pay much much more to watch English football, which is bad for them.

Re: One born every minute

Do you not think Apple would like to sell as many as they can as soon as possible? Seems like that is the best way forward for a business.

If Apple waited until they had enough stock to fill the initial demand, they would either be stockpiling 'new ipads' for months before launch (pushing back launch), or they would have to pay much more to Foxconn to manufacture more in a shorter space of time.

Either way it is a balance between having an inefficient or an insufficient capacity to produce.

Normally it takes desirable Apple devices a good couple of months after a product starts shipping to become 'fully available' in the app store. If you assume that they have been running production of the 'new ipad' for 2 months prior to launch, then in order to meet demand at launch they would have needed either to delay the launch for 2 months, or to have had double the production capacity prior to launch.

So there are good technical reasons why a highly desired device will always be difficult to lay your hands on at launch. It's not necessarily an Apple thing - look at the RasberryPI - although I'm sure they do love the hype.

Re: Truecall

TPS only protects you from domestic calls. If I'm at home during the day, I get a non-ending stream of calls like this:

"Hallo Sir, this is Steve calling from Windows*. We've noticed you have a problem with your computer…"

I actually quite like that one, although I'm surprised they ever get any bites. I played along once, and said something like "Yes, what seems to be wrong with it?", which confused them a lot. After about 5 seconds I got a 'please hold sir", and then they hung up.

* No windows here.

Re: Laker principle?

Presumably Branson just did the exact opposite of whatever Laker suggested?

I flew once on Laker 2.0 (Laker Airways, vs the 80's 'SkyTrain') from Miami to LGW - flight was delayed from 11am to 'indefinitely', finally got a call at 3:30 am the next morning, got down to the terminal and both Laker and Laker jr were there apologising to the 30 or so unlucky sods who couldn't get on a BA flight.

They went titsup 3 weeks later...

No, absolutely

Especially given that the settlements founded by Eric the Red were abandoned in the 1500s when climate change forced them off - just like it did to similar Viking settlements all over (eg in the Outer Hebrides).

However he *was* a big fibber - Greenland was mainly ice bound - and the worlds first PR man.

Re: Next challenge: a more holistic view

Dirk Gently to expand into software detective work?

Re: @ Tom 38

How many disks you got in your servers meighty? I got 14,582.

Still don't trust me? Try another source?

http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/

Thank you, come again.

No, it was called Greenland in an early 10th Century attempt at PR by Erik the Red. Having discovered and spent a couple of years on Greenland, he sailed back to Iceland to find people to go and colonize it. He felt the name Grønland would encourage more people to go settle there.

@James Cooke

No. Or rather, it's a very ineffective ban as I'm still using it daily.

The only change is that to buy books, you must go to your browser and go to www.amazon.co{m,.uk}, where as before there was a button in the kindle app that took you to www.amazon.com (so it didn't put you on the right store if you were a UK user).

Re: So, to sum up.

My tablet has never made my lap uncomfortably warm.

Re: Popular for suits

I don't wear a suit - it's a condition of my employment, in fact - but I do use an ipad. Not whilst I'm developing software, that happens on a company laptop.

Perhaps Cook just got his language wrong. I certainly find that there are occasions when the ipad does replace an actual computer. Here are some use cases:

Sometimes when I come home from work, I have computer ennui, and I won't turn on my home PC at all that night. I'll still do stuff online, I'll just do it on my tablet.

When I go on holiday now, I often won't take an additional laptop with me, I'll just take the tablet.

Tablets are much more social devices than laptops or PCs. You can pass them from person to person, flip them around etc. It's a more engaging way to interact with technology.

At $JOB we do have a company tablet that the suits can book. We sell subscriptions to web content, and the suits like to use the ipad to demo our sites to small groups.

To me, it sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about people who wear suits and own ipads. Did your wife run off with a suit wearing fruitophile who ran over your dog?

Re: I just hope...

Everyone has their hard disk horror stories. I know different admins who will all swear against a different brand of hard disk - "Don't buy IBM/HGST/Samsung/Seagate/WD/Maxtor", delete as appropriate.

You should expect an annual failure rate of about 7% on consumer grade drives, so if you have 100 servers with 4 drives in each, you're going to be replacing a bunch of disks each year.

Re: an understanding of what is required culturally to work in a Chinese office

What an interesting hobby you have. I didn't see a single "squat toilet" in China.

If you compare it to a regular informant, say a group of bank robbers. An informant within the group may offer use of a premises to run and store the heist goods in, which allow the cops to monitor and observe everything. Would that be entrapment?

IANAL, but I think for it to be entrapment, the informant would need to suggest the job and provide the material assistance. If they simply provide assistance, then I don't think it is entrapment.

Re: Why always London?

Because the cost of running a startup in central london is exorbitant. A single room 'office' in a central location, like what Telefonica are offering, would put you back in the region of £2k/month. A tiny flat is in the region of £1000 pcm, and that is a long way from the business centre. In Merseyside, I would imagine that things are significantly cheaper.

London is also the financial centre of Europe (arguable) and the cultural and economic centre of the UK (distasteful but true), so you have lots of companies that may be interested in what you are doing (and hence you may be able to sell to), and you also have access to a diverse job market - London is packed full of young, well educated EU graduates.

Liverpool doesn't have the depth of talent and skills you can find in London. You're more likely to make a successful startup in London than in Merseyside, and Telefonica aren't doing this to be cool, or to be sociable, they're doing it to make $$$.

Spot on. AMD are trying to make out like Matt is a nutty weirdo doing crazy things with their processor. He's not, their processor has an errata. End of story.

Re: You are forgetting something

I forget, when did universal suffrage include Cisco, Qualcomm, Novatel...

All large corporations in San Diego, all whose business grows with the growth of internet traffic, all who have no desire to see traffic levels fall with a dropoff in piracy.

I'm not saying he's done a bad thing - it's good that we can read the unabridged text. He is not doing this because he's a super-cool guy on the side of the little guy though.