Posts by Law 1132 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2007
I'm not sure what you think it's doing is actually what they are doing.
It's just disabling amazon ads/offers on the screensaver isn't it? Ads within apps you download will still be able to display ads, and as far as I know this is the first time a manufacturer of an android (albeit it a fork of android) comes with ads baked into the OS features. Android itself is ad free... it's the crap people put on top that starts shovelling ads at you.
"Equally the habit of illuminating the screen when ever the touch screen is touched in case you want to 'unlock it' is a vast waste of power - especially if you keep the phone in your pocket"
Every touchscreen phone I've ever seen has a dedicated lock/unlock button at the top or side... THAT enables the screen, THEN you slide/pattern/pin/move to unlock the phone.
"do the phones keep the screen alive to show you some nasty music video or whirly mess on the screen"
I think in the past the screen would stay alive on my old iPhone 3G if it was playing music on the dock (but then it'd be powered, so that makes sense). Otherwise the screen is off. On my sony phone you can turn on visualisations (the wavy music thingies) if you want - but by default it'll lock/turn off the screen as normal with music playing in the background. Most phones work that way. If you click the lock/unlock button the screen will turn on again, with shortcut music controls. That was the same on my HTC, iPhone and Sony phones so I think it is a standard thing.
"The problem, as you've no doubt suspected, is that WP8 -- like Android -- sucks down enormous amounts of power while playing music, thus rendering it a poor replacement for a dedicated music player."
Hmm... odd, because my Xperia S has been my dedicate work music player for months (and I listen to work for about 6 hours at work, to shut out the distractions while I write software) and it rarely consumes 2% of my entire days usage.
Granted, it's all 320kbps mp3s, not flac or anything, but that's using the standard sony music player on the phone over Android ICS. I had no issue with my Desire doing the same either before this, but that was using an custom AOSP-based rom (not HTCs sense stuff).
Problem is it'll get hard to avoid money being kicked back up to apple now as I'm assuming android device manufacturers accused of infringing apple patents will rather take the tens of dollar per unit licensing terms from apple that than risk being raped of legal fees,bad press, import bans and a settlement fee of over a billion dollars in a US court.
I'm going to make every effort now to avoid apple products though, not that they'll notice.
Then instantly get take down notices by his label and/or riaa*. It'd also be fun getting sued for infringing some copyright somewhere. It's genius!!
Having said that, this could be the push I needed to dust off the old guitar and finish learning it... again. :)
* I am sort of joking, guessing it's actually free to perform the song yourself on youtube, but not to redistribute the sheet music or lyrics right?
Doesn't matter what country you live in, what company you work for, or the reason for being made redundant... one thing is almost always true.... it sucks balls.
Been there myself and despite coming out of it better off after getting a better job elsewhere, it was a crappy 3 months going through the consultation period.
I do think they are a little luckier than what could have happened though. Under previous management I'm guessing their severence pack would be next to nothing, and had android not started selling motorola phones again, and google not sniffed around them for a year their jobs would have been gone a lot sooner. I doubt that brings them much comfort right now though.
I'll never buy a mobile on eBay... a friend used to do this regularly, until he got a phone that had its imei blocked within a week. eBay wouldn't refund him, the seller denied all knowledge, and police wouldn't get involved. In short, he'd spend several hundred on a brick.
Having said that, I've sold phones on eBay, and I am not a scammer, I know the majority of people on there are honest enough, but I wouldn't take the risk myself.
"you completely failed to notice that the "guy" is a she"
Actually I had read it and recognised that it was in fact a woman, it wasn't a failure of not reading it properly, just me rushing a casual comment at the end of my half hour lunch break and accidentally tapped guy instead of gal.
But since you also spelt along as "allong" I'll assume you also don't proof read or spell check your comments on el-reg before hitting Submit.
"iCloud wasn't the sole datastore here, just backup. The problem is that access to this backup also grants access to delete the primary store."
I have a primary store (my mac), an offsite backup (livedrive) and an offline backup (removable hdd backup timemachine). Once a month I'll back up locally using my ext hdd, the rest of the month livedrive syncs.
My main worry is my gmail account which I do attempt to export occasionally. That basically has all my live drive details in it, any software serials, contacts, calendars, and god knows how many years of my emails with random info on there.... if I lost that, I'd be pretty screwed.
"Dropbox has admitted spammers got hold of its users' email addresses"
Translation - emails were stolen
"after an employee reused their work password on a website that was subsequently hacked"
Translation - the hackers only had one password, the employees, who had the file.
So... no passwords of users were stolen, just a silly employee who reused their work password... a big no no.
Don't be an idiot - I'm mid 30s, develop in C/C++/MFC - have experience in both .NET and Java - I've essentially done it all (and well). I pick the right tools for the right job, and to insult others for picking their tools because their tools don't suit YOUR needs is stupid and childish. Grow up.
"Hmm... I know people love these machines but I just can't see why - after not quite a year of ownership I have come to loathe the damn thing..."
Mines a late 2008 macbook pro and it was really just bought as the best spec'd laptop on the market at the time (was cheaper than a similarly spec'd Alienware at the time too at half the size).
At that time, they were essentially a thinner nice looking "normal" laptop - no unibody, no odd Psion 3a styled keyboard keys, or oversized glass track pads, or glued in batteries. I'm sure for alot of people they'll be well worth the cost, but I won't be getting another one, even though I'm more than happy with my current one.
I thought I was out of luck too (MacBook Pro late-2008 model)... then I checked Apples website and it turns out MacBook Pros can still be upgraded from mid-2007 models onwards.
Full list is:
iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
Xserve (Early 2009)
"Both stalwarts are now in head-on competition with their customers, having launched their own-brand tablets, rather than the software for other people to make tablets."
Google's been doing this for years, I think their "customers" knew what to expect in the tablet space based on what happened in the mobile space... the only difference is they're selling it at-cost to try and give android a foothold in the tablet market. You also failed to note that it is one of their "customers" that is making it.. if it was a big deal, asus wouldn't have made it.. it's even got their logo on there.
As for surface, I think MS have done something fairly decent with it (if not a tad expensive).
"Amazingly, Google is actually competing with itself, as Google's new $12bn Motorola devices division wasn't involved in designing its new Nexus 7 tablet."
Again, not really that crazy, since they've only just bought motorola. Plus it only took them (asus) 4 months to spec/build the Nexus 7 when Google asked them to build a decent low end tablet at cost for the nexus brand.
"And if Google's own employees at Moto think they've had a kick in the teeth"
Which I assume they won't... since it's in their interest to get decent android products out to customers. If android was failing, google wouldn't have bought motorola in the first place. It also stopped them going under before google even begun sniffing around them, motorola was failing badly until they adopted android.
"imagine waking up as a Samsung planner today. You've bet big on Android and helped it become a huge platform - and Google rewards you with with a tablet that it sells at cost price."
They bet big on android because their software previously sucked (I know this from experience). Using android would have been cost effective... it's not because they were helping google out of the goodness of their heart like the picture you're painting, only to be stabbed in the back. I
"And each time, after 20 minutes, I've put it back in the box confident I'll never want to touch it again. Pricing issues seem irrelevant if they can't persuade me to use one for free."
The point is, you didn't go out and buy it to fill a need. Most people buying tablets will be filling some sort of need. Be that as a web browsing device, commuting device, ebook reader, media consumption, gaming platform. Which brings me to my next point...
"Without stuff to do, Tablets remain as the forgotten niche of computing - the Kindle and the iPad being the exception because of their close relationships with the content production sectors. And without content, neither Microsoft nor Google have much of a story."
Total bollocks. You can buy most music via a whole load of download apps on android and windows (amazon being one of them), just as easily as iOS. You can buy books via the kindle, kobo, sony, and a million other apps. Hell, they even have the same book/page whisper sync you get with the kindle. Netflix and Lovefilm have apps too. I don't see how Microsofts/Googles relationship with content providers is a problem when they have 3rd party applications for syncing this content for them.
"Microsoft has Xbox games. But neither YouTube nor Xbox access make a tablet indispensable. And "access to stuff" is simpler and easier on a Kindle or iPad than on either Surface or the Nexus 7."
Explain to me why access to stuff is simpler and easier on a kindle or iPad. It seems crazy to me that you even wrote that. The Nexus 7 isn't even out, but it'll sync books as well as a kindle... music/videos/pictures on my android phone syncs just as easily as my iPhone used to, if not a little better, because it'll sync down from the device too from 3rd party sellers in the app stores. Also, if I've plugged it into another PC, it won't wipe the device. The surface hasn't even been released yet, you've go no way of saying how easy that is to access anything either.
"Of the two losers, Microsoft's Surface looks a slightly cannier bet, because it's really a laptop - and you can still use it as a laptop replacement. Is there something I'm missing here?"
Again, both aren't even released yet - and you've already branded them both losers. I'm actually shocked at how poorly thought out and biased this non-article is, even for you this one is a bad one. :(
"and clearly set up as an attack on the iPad"
I think it's aimed more at the Kindle Fire than the iPad - otherwise it'd be more expensive with higher storage capacity, larger screen and a 3G option, hopefully that'll be a Nexus 10 model! :)
ICS is every bit as slick as iOS 5, if not slicker - I've used both, iOS feels very 2009 now. The ICS UI team recently won design awards for their hard work.
I wouldn't mind a Surface to be honest - looks like a nice bit of kit, but at the price they're asking I'll probably just buy an AIO desktop from Dell and a Nexus 7.
"Games are cheaper"
Are you high?? Walk around any Game or Toys R Us... Xbox and PS3 games that came out 6-12 months ago are around the £15-£20 mark... Zelda OOT, Mario 3D and several other games are still costing upwards of £30.
I love my 3DS, but the price they charge for the games in shops and in their online store is well more than I'm willing to pay for a download handheld game now. Been seriously considering selling it and getting a tablet instead.
Grey-scale images these days normally range from 0-255, which is usually represented by 8 bits per pixel. I say normally because you can really do whatever you want - like upping the bits per pixel to 16 and having a finer set of intensities, or having 1 bit per pixel for a binary image.
If you had 0 bits per pixel you'd have a blank screen since you couldn't even represent white/black or whatever a 0 and 1 would equate to in your display (green/black?).
I've no idea how it was done in these machines though, I was only a wee lad when I was playing with Lander at primary school and being blown away by it.
Wasn't there a weird doctor who game for it two? Side scrolling platformer with a mad-scientist looking guy in it?
Relying on El-Reg as an impartial and reliable source of information... that was your first mistake! ;)
Quite happy with my Xperia S (despite lack of ICS update still). Having said that, had the Lumia 900 been out at the time on the same contract terms I got on o2 (£20 a month for decent mins/data/unlimited text + free phone) I'd have seriously thought about giving WM 7.5 a try. I'd have opted for one without the batman logo though.
I'm in my 5th month of the 6 month premium free trial (via Virgin Media).
I've not had any of the problems described here but I have had the same problem as EddieD - alot of music I normally listen to isn't there, and the stuff that was there 3 months ago is now removed. It seems like if you're into older and new pop music then you're okay - but if you want something other than pop it's pretty hit or miss.
It's a shame really, because of the library holes (and random withdraws) I don't think I'll convert to a paying customer. Will just go back to downloading via Amazon MP3 or whatever, and syncing between devices again.
There is an open source IDE called SharpDevelop - I was actually using it as a professionally developer in my last job because they were too stingy to pay for VS.
It's mainly for C# development - but supports other languages too. Take a look, it's decent and fast.
http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/
"You simply call your bank from the petrol station (they are required to be able to let you call) and query the refusal, it's then accepted, this takes a matter of minutes"
A matter of minutes - not to me it didn't. Had the same thing happen with my Visa debit card.
In Ikea - queue mounting behind me, card kept getting refused - they then put me on the phone with Santander and it took forever for their side to pick up - then we went through the usual stuff of confirming who I was etc. Turned out they put a block on my card because of an "unusual" transaction. That transaction was me ordering a once every 5-10 years TV... online... delivered to MY address... and they'd blocked my card for over a week without telling me.
They also couldn't let the current Ikea payment go through for 24 hours until they unblocked the card. My wife then had to pay with her card, which was for the same joint account.
Up until that point I never carried credit cards or cash - now I make sure I've got at least 1 backup payment option.
I bought a couple of EA games on android once - it was a small download - which then kicked off a larger installer which downloaded the majority of the game to the SD card (along with some DRM crap I'm sure). I think originally this was required because there was an app size limit imposed in the market place, but Google has since increased that limit - but I bet they EA don't change the method of delivery.
I'm now left wondering how long before these games that don't actually require any servers to actually play the game stop working because they don't have servers to check in to for updates at the start.
Needless to say, I'm not buying any more mobile games from EA.
"siphon the kids bathwater into a waterbutt for the garden during the summer months, etc."
Do you let them wash with soap? For some reason I see bubble-bath, shampoo, soap as being bad for plants. Is that not true? If not, I may consider a similar thing - ours has a bath every other night - we aren't metered, but I limit baths to every other night because of the cost of gas heating a bath full of water.
This is essentially the same as what I did back in 2008 - problem running Windows for my 2008 Macbook Pro were:
Windows drivers for the GPU weren't up to much, running the GPU hot at idle (metal case = burnt thighs too). Disabling Aero for Windows 7 didn't help any.
Bootcamp took a good few updates to get any sort of mutlitouch enable for the trackpad. There are some issues I have with sleep meaning the laptop actually goes into some sort of hibernate mode - so when you open the laptop it goes through a minute long boot before becoming usable.
Not to mention the fact that Apple don't fully enable all features in the bootcamp drivers for things like auto-dimming the screen, brightness of keyboard lights, etc. The keyboard layout is different too, the " and @ are in the wrong place for UK keyboards etc.
Having said that, the hardware is great and the one time I've need support (replacement faulty battery) they've been really good, swapping for new no questions asked in store. But from my experience Apple really don't want you to have the best experience you can have with Windows installed on a macbook pro, even though if they spent time on the Windows drivers you could.
My next laptop will probably be an XPS or Alienware laptop... don't know enough about the current specs to recommend one for you though. Sorry.
There are 2 distinct points in my life that I remember thinking how much I liked tinkering with computers.
1 - a teacher in primary saw I was eyeing up the bbc micro in the corner of the room and set me a task - write a program (BASIC) that asks you what flag you want, and then displays that colour flag for you. Then he left me to it, occasionally coming over to see how I was going on, praise me on progress, help me on bits I was stuck on. I was about 9.
2 - playing with LOGO and something similar to the the big track thing (looked more like a turtle though) - this was again primary school.
Secondary school it all went down hill. I got taught that computers worked by having little men sat inside the keyboard, and they run up and down the wire shouting at people inside the monitor to change picture.
I also got banned in secondary school from using the bbc micros and (when they eventually got them) the early windows PCs. Why was I banned you [didn't] ask? For changing a couple of strings in menu system on the BBCs, and for changing screensaver text on a windows machine. Apparently it took them weeks to figure out how to change them back (honestly), they didn't trust me to change them because they didn't understand what I was talking about when I described how to do it.
Seems like with the right teacher you can get inspired and learn alot - with the wrong ones they will punish you and hold you back. I eventually regained my love of tinkering in college, and work as a dev now. :)
"You’ll also need a pair that are comfortable to wear for long periods and which don’t cost the earth"
£120 for a pair of occasional use headphones is "costing the earth" as far as I'm concerned - I know you can get more expensive ones, but there are also perfectly reasonable cheaper ones that do the same job.
I'm far from an Apple fanatic, but their customer service in the Trafford Center (Manchester) store is pretty awesome.
I had a macbook pro battery that randomly stopped working, it would die after half hour running off battery. They diagnosed and replaced it no questions asked (even though I'd stupidly booked the appointment in the wrong store).
Another example - my mother-in-law managed to turn their battery cover the wrong way on the wireless keyboard once - it wouldn't open. She took it into an Apple store to see if they could open it, when they said they couldn't they asked how old it was.
"3 years... " she replied.
"Ah... it's out of warranty then - but it's obviously faulty.. here, have a new one on us."
Can't fault that.
Unfortunately though the one time every few years I might need decent customer service doesn't outweigh the cost of the products for me now I have kids, plus I don't like the direction OSX is heading in now.
I'd agree with that. I've had similar experiences, playing with strings when I'd begun working in .NET was always an interesting one. :)
The optimisation point about it being the last 10% - I've seen that in larger teams. It had a lot to do with getting the logic in place first, then refactoring - rather than spending time optimising code that might not make it to final product. Shifting requirements and dropping features through lack of time and so on.
""You really don't know how software works."
Explanation, please."
Okay... my explanation of my comment (driven by the insinuation that I as a modern developer am lazy) is this:
"In the old days, programming had to be *massively* optimised to eek out as much functionality as possible on hardware with, by todays standards, exceptional limitations."
Software also had very limited requirements in the "old days" - simpler hardware, lower expectations on what software could do, less support for multiple devices/setups. The nature of the languages at the time often required the developers to be working at a lower level than alot of today's developers anyway. I say alot, because those types of developers still exist. As embedded developers, driver authors, and many other roles you're not really thinking about.
"These days, the era of optimised code seems to have been shelved."
Not true, though it may seem that way from your casual desktop/smartphone user. Every place I've worked in there's been a drive to optimise anything they could, be it UI for desktop software, processing of data on embedded devices running ucos, or whatever. I worked for a manufacturer who built their own processors, and as a result could control and eek out every last bit from the chips.
"Instead, we have frameworks on top of frameworks, all geared to making a developers life easier, at the expense of raw processing power."
Frameworks on top of frameworks help separate complication, encourage code-reuse, and let people deal with higher level problems without the need to get into the nitty gritty. So in a sense, it does make a developers life easier - that doesn't mean their work is easy, or that raw processing power is lost. If processing power is lost, there is either a very good reason for it, or as you suggest they are terrible frameworks.
"I recall a similar outcry with newer releases of iOS running on older iOS devices - my now aging touch 2g was spankingly fast until I upgraded to iOS 4."
I'm assuming they added features, bug fixes, support for new features (that probably arn't available with your old hardware) - that doesn't come for free in terms of processing power really. It's the same on android, it's the same on windows. The more services/complication you add to the setup the slower things get. If it was that slow they should have warned you, or given you the option to downgrade.
"It's a continuous hardware upgrade cycle driven by software - sure, that's always been the case - but I can't help feeling modern programmers have got really lazy ..."
The hardware upgrade cycle isn't driven by software, it's driven by companies trying to sell more devices, or meetinf the demand from consumers for faster/cooler/smaller devices that exceed the previous devices specs/features. If anything the software is driven by the hardware cycle - software has been struggling to keep up with the hardware improvements. Multi-core development, the thousands of devices with different specs, the call from people using new phones that they want support for their device - while people using 3 year old devices demand the software also works for them still.
But, thanks to those "lazy" developers and frameworks all that is possible.
I'll probably get torn apart for a very "boo hoo, we developers are hard done to" style post... but I've had to quickly smash the post out in like a minute before I leave - so I'll have said some silly things... probably. :)
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