Posts by JonHendry
117 posts • joined Wednesday 16th June 2010 02:25 GMT
Re: @AC: Why Apple and the PRC get all the hate
"Apple's margins are enormous whereas the margins for every other hardware company range from "paper-thin" to "razor-thin"."
That means the non-Apple companies
a) pass their savings on to the consumer, who is thus profiting from the immiseration of Chinese workers.
and
b) have incentive to pressure Foxconn for even worse working conditions to increase their slim profit margin, and no incentive to push for improvements that would cut into that profit margin.
Standard policy in China...
A report on the BBC World Service recently mentioned that Chinese migrant workers are semi-permanently tied to their home region. Say a person goes from Huizhou to Shenzen to work. Then they need healthcare. They have to go all the way back to Huizhou and seek treatment there.
This is probably where the Huizhou-vs.-Shenzen part comes in, as James100 alluded above.
I suppose the reason the worker has been treated in Shenzen at all is because of Foxconn, and perhaps because it was an emergency situation.
I think there's some kind of residence permit you can get that would move your official residence to the new location for these purposes, but they can be hard to get.
Re: Alienware
"The "equivalent" Alienware device is a 14" laptop: Alienware M14x for the cheaper model which costs you £1499"
I configured an Alienware M14x as close as I could to the retina-display MBP. Same CPU, same GPU, same RAM, hi-res option on the Alienware, 512GB SSD (no 768 GB option on the Alienware).
The MacBookPro was $2999. The Alienware was $2549.
$450 isn't a huge difference, given the MacBookPro has the 2880x1800 screen.
I bet that if Alienware offered a 768GB SSD, it might have even cost more than the 768GB MacBook Pro.
Re: no bluraydrive
"And it doesn't help that the 'portable' thunderbolt external hard drive (cost £400) isn't portable at all, because it requires an external power supply."
Then use a USB3 external hard drive.
Re: no bluraydrive
"Such a gorgeous screen, but no built-in bluray drive??? How are you supposed to play back high quality video movies?"
You watch what you just recorded on your moby-expensive HD pro gear.
Re: I remember a review ..
Rockwell had their own, similar micro, the AIM-65. Perhaps you're thinking of that one.
Re: I've never understood...
I take it you don't ever use a toilet or wipe, because that also allows plants to grow more vigorously.
But... but...
A guy who used to ride on boats wrote in the Register that climate change is nonsense!
How is this possible!?
It's because
"Why, then, is Apple the only company facing fierce scrutiny, petitions, and – yes – "dramatic license"?"
Because everyone else "passes the savings on to the customer".
Exploiting the workers is only bad if it doesn't save you any money.
Four freedoms?
Freedom from soap
Freedom from water
Freedom from fitness
Freedom from tact
Not at first
"however CompuServe gave you true internet access."
Not for the first however-many years it existed, before the web.
Borderline
Stallman is dancing on the razor's edge of becoming one of the muttering homeless people in Cambridge.
Why?
"Why would HP punk out?"
Apotheker's not a hardware guy, let alone a consumer guy. He's going to focus on his former customers, from when he was at SAP. The sorts of people who use Autonomy.
Just the bezels
It's obviously just the bezels. You can see through them to the styrofoam underneath. I assume these are going to be sent to another factory or factory area for use in assembling the phones.
Remind me not to hire you for your business skills
"That doesn't mean the model is wrong. It just means that deliberately limiting the range of goods you sell, for a variety of commercial, ideological, or, occasionally, down-right geeky reasons, is bad business."
Um, no. Limiting the range of goods is *essential*. What you describe, carrying *everything* regardless of quality, demand, redundancy, or relevance, isn't good business, it's more like *hoarding*. And your store would soon look like one of those homes full of 6 foot piles of old newspapers, pizza boxes, fast food wrappers, and dead cats, with barely enough room to walk.
If you think, you might recall that successful retailers tend not to look like flea markets or large car boot sales.
Posted in Note to Apple: Be more like Microsoft
Not sharing?
How many *billions* has Apple paid out to iOS App Store developers, Mac App Store developers? At WWDC, Jobs said they'd paid out $2.5 billion to iOS developers.
How much to the producers of the music, TV shows, and movies sold in iTunes?
How much money is being made by non-App Store developers, like VMWare or Adobe on Mac sales?
"Quit and discard windows"
If you hold down the option key when clicking on, say, the Safari menu, the Quit option becomes "Quit and discard windows". You can also press Command-option-Q to do this.
After doing so, the next restart of the app doesn't open any earlier windows.
As someone else noted, when rebooting or shutting down you get an option to remember open things.
It's per-app.
Resume is per-app, so if you quit TextEdit with some windows open, when you restart TextEdit it'll reopen whatever you had open.
It's also works across restart or reboot.
It isn't just dumping the memory contents to a file on disk and reloading that at boot. That's already done as part of the sleep process, so that if the power goes out or the battery dies during sleep, the system doesn't lose everything that was in memory.
Many apps will have to be updated to take advantage of Resume. But any apps that use the NSDocument classes from Cocoa, I think should get the new behavior automatically when run on Lion without even being recompiled.
They've thought it through.
They even handle the case where the changes haven't autosaved yet, but you use the Finder to copy the un-auto-saved file to, say, a thumb drive. The Right Thing happens.
Save as PDF ought to do it
Just save the final version as a PDF, and delete the original file. And delete it from any backups as well, unless you've stored it in a folder that isn't being backed up.
Or
Like George W. Bush saying "I'm the Decider" when everyone figured Cheney wore the big-boy pants.
Right.
Apple TV.
iPod Hi-Fi, the failed overpriced speakers for the iPod from 2006.
Friggin' iPod Socks.
Different kinds of sync
There'd be no point reading the kid's code. Apple's wifi syncing is tied into iCloud and whatnot, and thus will be using new iCloud-related APIs (plus new crypto APIs, etc) that the kid didn't have, and which have wider applicability across the OS and applications.
They superficially appear to do the same thing, but they accomplish it in very different ways.
Not exactly
"And the icon, the symbol for WiFi combined with the symbol for sync as used by 1990s Palm Pilot."
That's what I thought too, at first, but googling it revealed that the Palm sync icon was actually closer to a ying/yang symbol. The arrows arc around half the circle, similar to the Apple icon, but then meet in the center.
Could have been better, though
" Clearly it makes sense to use the button in this way this so they have given users this option. "
I think it'd be even better if they'd used the headphone remote's pause button. That way pressing the button wouldn't risk moving the phone and screwing up the shot.
You can probably use the volume button on the remote and get that benefit, but using one of the volume buttons seems imbalanced, like the other button should do something to the camera as well.
Of course, the phone itself doesn't have a pause button like the remote does, which is a flaw in my idea.
Eh. Pretty obvious functionality, name and icon
The name is purely descriptive of what it does, sync over wifi. The icons are pretty close to the pre-existing wifi and sync iconography. And it's not like nobody else ever thought "gosh, it'd be nice to sync wirelessly." Lots of people probably thought that the day the iPhone was released and didn't have wireless sync. This guy just went ahead and implemented it.
The case would be stronger if the guy's logo were more original, and if his software's name had been more distinctive.
I doubt this guy's implementation was the same as Apple's new one, because Apple's implementation is probably plugged into the whole iCloud infrastructure, rather than just connecting to your computer wirelessly.
Uh, iTunes movie downloads?
You forget that Apple's already serving apps, music, and movies every day to who knows how many people. Plus they've been ramping up their infrastructure for iCloud.
Eh what?
" My laptop has a much higher pixel density than either of the Apple's product lines."
I suspect that's a design decision, not a technological one. All the companies get their LCD panels from the same group of manufacturers. If Apple thought such high dpi in laptops was something they wanted to order, they could just order the panels. For whatever reason, Apple thinks 1920x1080 is too small for a 15" laptop. (If they can get 3200x2100 panels, they'd probably use them, with text and UI widgets scaled to the same size as on the 1600x1050 panels, but with better rendering. They're laying the groundwork for this already and the OS has support for very large UI widget image files, and automatic selection of the appropriate file depending on the screen resolution.)
Check your facts
>>>Gates was preaching the tablet before anyone actually wanted one
>>But only because he had seen the Newton that Apple was trying to sell, which only failed because it was a little too far ahead of its time."
>Yawn. Invented by Xerox, copied by Steve Jobs during one of the tours he was given of the facility.
The Newton wasn't a Steve Jobs project, it was John Sculley, and didn't happen until after Jobs had left Apple and was busy with NeXT and Pixar.
Being a Sculley project, I doubt it had anything to do with Xerox at all. Sculley wasn't at Apple during the famous/infamous PARC tours.
Eh. Low resolution
I checked my recorded locations stored during a recent weekend in Philadelphia.
The resolution is in terms of blocks. You can tell I was in Center City Philadelphia, and popped over the river to the University of Pennsylvania campus. But the towers recorded are farther south than I actually went, and one is farther west. (I stopped at 33rd street, but apparently my phone pinged a tower at 38th street.)
But it's still just the masts
Even if it's down to the second, it's still just the cell tower locations, which doesn't give much resolution. It's not going to be enough for someone to be able to tell you left the office, walked down the street a block or two, and popped into a hotel to meet your mistress or into a massage parlor for a happy ending or to meet your dealer to score some smack.
Posted in New double-barrelled Taser unveiled
Depends on the circumstances
People have been tased for the "crime" of experiencing seizures. They weren't following orders, see, to stop spazzing out. So the idiot cop tased the poor bastard. This has happened more than once.
Even if the head honchos at taser have let themselves be tased in the past, they might feel differently about getting it during a medical emergency.
Also, it's likely a bit different, getting tased by your coworker/employee, and getting tased by someone who isn't friendly, isn't on your side, doesn't mind hurting you, and wouldn't get in trouble even if you *died*.
I notice their website
has a long list of 'honorary members'.
Funny
The Register gives more skeptical scrutiny to a meaningless minor discrepancy between performance of Mobile Safari and 3rd party web apps, than it gives to what the nuclear industry says. Apparently butthurt 3rd party developers are more of a problem than future cases of leukemia and birth defects.
Actually, that's not funny. It's sad.
Lewis knows all about nuclear power
After all, he's ex-Royal Navy.
He's a master of Rubber Dinghy Rapids. That makes him an expert on nukes. Somehow.
Um.
"I couldn't believe my ears last night when no less an august body than the BBC in a Newsnight report described one of the reactors as a potential "dirty bomb". "
I don't see the problem. If a terrorist blew up a truck containing a few tons of spent fuel rods, that would qualify as a rather large dirty bomb. There'd be a huge mess of contamination to clean up.
If a load of fuel rods burns on its own, because it isn't being cooled, the result is effectively the same, and probably worse.
Well...
"Strontium weighs 2.6kg/litre, and cæsium about 1.8. I can't see either doing much floating..."
I hope you don't like sushi. Or fish. Because it's going in the ocean, where it'll likely be taken up by the bottom of the food chain and work its way up.
Posted in Fukushima situation as of Wednesday
Why is Lewis writing about nuclear power?
As far as I can tell, Lewis' Royal Navy career didn't involve service on a nuclear powered vessel, so it's not like he has a relevant background.
Posted in Fukushima situation as of Wednesday
About that MIT paper
Andydaws wrote: "in fact, the paper you complain about has been picked up by the MIT nuclear engineering department, and is now being recommended on thier blog site"
No. They rewrote it dramatically, without noting their changes, and even state that the disagreed with the original author's title.
They basically reused the structure and supportable basic facts, but discarded many of the original author's claims and conclusions.
Posted in Fukushima situation as of Wednesday
Concern about nuclear power isn't about immediate death
"A single death on it's own is a disaster. A single death when you've got 10,000 corpses on your hands already is hardly even going to raise an eyebrow."
The concern with nuclear power isn't about immediate deaths. It's about the long-term, lingering deaths of radiation poisoning, cancer (survived or not), sick or malformed children, etc. potentially for years.
That ex-KGB agent who was poisoned with an isotope of Polonium certainly died, but it took weeks.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if most immediate deaths that occur during nuclear accidents are not due to radiation but rather due to more mundane causes, such as burns, or like the guys in the SL-1 incident, two of whom were killed by a steam explosion, and the third who was nailed to the ceiling by a control rod launched by the explosion.
Talking about how many have died so far misses the point, and misses so badly that it suggests the whole matter hasn't been seriously considered at all.
VMWare and Parallels
VMWare and Parallels aren't in the App Store because they require kernel extensions, which the App Store rules don't allow.
Swedish movie has lots of Macs
Lots of attention paid to Salander's Mac. Lots of translucent Terminal.app windows, Remote Desktop screen sharing, and Expose.
I noticed that in an early scene, the wealthy industrialist who hires Blomkvist has a Lenovo box on his desk. He doesn't turn out to be a villain.
BRILLIANT
"Voyager is actually owned by his ex-wife, who's given up trying to flog the peculiar property."
So basically his wife owns the flat, but HE lives there, and she can't get anyone else to take it. So he's got a place to live, and she needs him to stay there.
That's brilliant.
Better way to go.
Buy a second, dirt-cheap, poor-condition, used copy of the book. Doesn't matter if it's ugly looking or stinks of cigars, vomit, and cat pee. Cut the spine off, and scan it using a flatbed scanner with a sheet feeder. Then recycle it.
The main problem is that you get the front side of each page, and then the other side of each page, and you need to collate them, combine the files, OCR them, etc.
Nope
"Apps go to apple as source,"
Apps go to Apple as binaries.
It'd be easy enough for Apple to enable cross-compilation, so vendors could recompile their App Store apps for ARM and Intel.
Contact with users
" This, in my opinion, is EXTREMELY bad for the mac platform. The app store is likely to become the main place to get software, meaning people don't search much outside, meaning few people will find all the great apps that are banned, and those apps will fade away."
An app in the App Store can have menu items that open the developer's website in a browser. Once there, the user can be exposed to other apps you have that aren't in the App Store, asked to subscribe to email updates, etc.
Why bother with the app store at any price?
Just throw it up on github or google code or sourceforge.
I don't see the point behind this flounce of yours.
I thought Apple was going to nix bad ui apps
A gallery of horrid Mac App Store apps: http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/
What's big about it
is that developers can make money. So there's a gold rush effect, like with the iPhone app store.
That's what's missing from Linux package managers.
Apps can be free
Mac App Store apps don't have to cost money. And the developer can simply opt not to write the code to check the "receipt" for their app, so the DRM pretty much goes away.
