* Posts by ArkhamNative

28 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2010

Apple, Beats and fools with money who trust celeb endorsements

ArkhamNative
Childcatcher

Water is wet?

As one of the ~1% who would have still read the article with a less deceptive headline, I'll comment the obvious: 'Digital' has always been less about fidelity and more about squeezing things into smaller spaces for convenience and profit. If you're looking for high fidelity, you won't find it streaming/portable/mass market.

Also, the evolution beyond "CD quality" may finally have arrived with uncompressed "pure audio" on blu-ray. Let's hope so. It's been a very long 30 years.

For the 99% who came for dirt/rants on Apple: well, clickbaiting happens, especially here. Hope you learned something. :)

Microsoft 'touches 16k shop workers' to flog Windows 8 hard

ArkhamNative
Facepalm

Re: "Confusing software and expensive hardware doesn't sell" shocker

The last thing we need is more hand-waving, or "UI"ercise.

:-)

Apple still top for slab-fondlers despite FLOOD of Xmas tablets

ArkhamNative
Headmaster

Market Share

Pedantic note: Market share *is* sales in a given time period. If there are 100M tablets sold prior to Q2, and in Q2 I sell 1M and all others sell 2M, I have a 33% market share for Q2.

My top tip for Microsoft: Stop charging for Windows Phone 8

ArkhamNative
Gimp

You left out...

Your first chart is 33.2 percentage points shy of 100. Given that the question was "which of these 5 is showing mobile leadership", and that BYOD started because of iPad & iPhone, I'd guess the #1 answer was pretty much "none of these 5" for whatever reason

The report also showed ~80% were "very interested" in developing for iPhone & iPad. Android devices did place second, at 64% for phones and 52% for tablet, but being the first to mass-market mobile devices and flood into IT, Apple remains at the top of the heap, at least for 2013 (according to this survey).

Yes, hundreds upon hundreds of websites CAN all be wrong

ArkhamNative
Devil

Ugh, lyrics sites

Yes, the same errors "lifted" and copied everywhere. Even worse is the pop-over ad: "Click here to get <song> as a ringtone." Woo! 1994 lives! (ftw: Google preview -> cache -> text only version.) Small smile for the sites that add the line "Lyrics by <site>" to the centre of the lyrics.

Yes, the Internet is a cesspool, from wikipedia to forwarded emails debunked by snopes.

Disney buys Lucasfilm, new Star Wars trilogy planned

ArkhamNative
Gimp

Finally, Eps 7-9!

I loved the KotOR universe, too, but I've been waiting for the three trilogies since I heard about them over 30 years ago. And I hold out at least some small hope that the last 3 won't be done as horribly as the first three. I look forward to hearing their selection of a good director.

Borderlands 2 review

ArkhamNative
Meh

Agreed, but once defeated, the boss areas aren't exactly the same as before. For example, you can just run through Boom Bewm's area to the next one. (The barrier is no longer there.) But yeah, definitely annoying to have to re-traverse 3/4 of a zone. I thought it was a bug when I didn't start at save/respawn points I logged off next to.

Top admen beg Microsoft to switch off 'Do Not Track' in IE 10

ArkhamNative
Big Brother

Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.

All the huff and puff about DNT is good, but we're still giving them all the data that makes them money, and then hoping they see the little "DNT" flag and throw it all away.

It's not just about ad targeting. 3pes are rampant, too. All the "follow us on twitter" buttons and "facebook social" comment sections report back to those companies, and include your username, too.

I like Ghostery which lets me choose if and how much the trackers get fed. It just needs a simpler interface for configuration.

Apple: I love to hate, and hate to love thee

ArkhamNative
Mushroom

Apple's biggest fault

I suppose Apple's biggest fault is spending lots of time and money to package so many eye-catching features together in unique combinations. They release them all at once in a new product to receive two reactions: consumers swoon and competitors copy. Some, like unwise Samsung, copy so much, so closely, and leave a paper trail documenting that that was their intent all along, that a jury of self-described "PC people" and Samsung feature phone owners found them in violation in record time.

Which is what I don't understand about this "threatens to impede innovation" claim. How is innovation served by copying, not just a feature or idea here or there, but whole suites of technologies, behaviors, and styles at once? In other industries such products are called "counterfeits", "fakes", and "knock-offs". If these ideas were so obvious, why did no other company release products with even a fraction of these features before Apple did?

Surely it must anger even Apple haters that most mobile phones and tablets so rapidly switched to look and behave like iPhones and iPads? At least now, with the release of Microsoft's new phones and OS, consumers will finally get the chance to vote with your pocketbook, both against Apple and for a new, innovative mobile experience.

Meet the company that wants to destroy Twitter. It's Twitter

ArkhamNative
Facepalm

Pitch Ineptitude

I really want this to succeed because I'm really tired of the "we own all you freetards" mentality of the "social media services," but AppDotNet seem to have focused their pitch entirely on disgruntled twitter client developers. There just aren't enough of those to fund such an endeavour.

Even the tech-savvy social Internet users are wary of paying for something that's not even a vague promise of a product (just a tech spec of a protocol in-development for others to build products on). I seriously wonder if AppDotNet think this ever had a chance. Even the video made me want to tune out after a 15 seconds. It comes across as too extemporaneous and selling "not something", or "something else we'll have to figure out what it is first".

iOS was SO much more valuable to Google than Android - until Maps

ArkhamNative
Big Brother

FWIW, the under 20s (and many 20somethings) avoid Facebook, too. It's also full of parents (and grandparents).

Fake Angry Birds app makers fined £50k for shock cash suck

ArkhamNative
Holmes

"65 per cent of all threats are aimed at this platform"

... and the other 35%? Why, that would be Symbian, Symbian 3rd Ed, and Java ME, according to McAfee's Q1 2012 threat report.

Apple logging passwords in plain text

ArkhamNative
Unhappy

Old-timer Mac Fan despairs

This perhaps is a rookie mistake and perhaps affects only a few, but Lion itself is full of odd design and rookie mistakes. From the dropping of scroll arrows and scrollbars from the UI, to features that don't work on the OS's still-supported still-built-in software raid system, to the VM system that swaps out active RAM pages to give the content indexing system a 7th gigabyte for disk buffers...

Some may be small issues but the floor is littered with them. It seems as if the good programmers have left, were dragged off to other projects and not replaced, or are just "sittin' fat & happy" on stock options and collecting paychecks.

I can only hope that this will spur improvements to regaining a strong core OS. (...though I'm reminded that hope was one of the things contained within Pandora's box).

Vote now for the WORST movie EVER

ArkhamNative
Devil

Re: I have plumbed new depths!

Manos: Hands of Fate. It was my #2 worst of this list (of films I've seen). It's the only film that ever "defeated" the MST3K crew, it was that unredeeming.

Sugar content now to be measured in Cadbury Creme Eggs

ArkhamNative
Big Brother

Deprived...

I *knew* it! I purchased a US "Cadbury Creme Egg" and found eating it a much lesser experience than in the UK. Damn Hershey to Hell.

Of course Kraft now owns Cadbury, which moved its factory to Poland, so... I don't know why anyone bothers calling them "Cadbury" any more.

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

ArkhamNative

Re: Well, you did ask

Earthstorm is one of those, you know, "SyFy Original Movie" films. They really are absolutely ire-inspiring.

ArkhamNative
Paris Hilton

Re: The new Hitch-Hiker's Guide film

I kinda liked it. Maybe it was because the cast was stellar (Zooey Deschanel, Martin Freeman, Warwick Davis, Helen Mirren, Simon Jones, John Malkovich, Bill Nighy, Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman, ....) I leave Mos Def to last only to highlight a brilliant casting decision to show that aliens from outer space don't always look like "us". ;-)

ArkhamNative
Alien

No TV Movies?

Because "worst" easily could be any "original movie" made for the née SciFi Channel (now renamed to Syphilis or something).

They hire a retired former TV/Sci-fi star, actors who look similar to recurring-role TV actors, and then hire "director" and crew from the local day laborer workforce. They're so bad that you really don't want to watch them to see how bad they really are. Honest. Not laughingly bad, but insultingly bad.

ArkhamNative
Trollface

Re: What about the clasic

IMHO once a film has been celebrated as a "worst ever", it sometimes becomes a "cult classic". Plan 9 reached this status. It even had a film made about its making. LOL.

Warp drives are PLANET KILLERS, Sydney Uni students find

ArkhamNative
Facepalm

Epic poor choice of words.

“The importance of relativity continues to grow - every GPS enabled mobile phone contains a relativity corrector to ensure it takes into account the time difference between the ground and satellite...”

This is inaccurate and misses the whole mind-blowingly amazing relativistic relevance. What is really happening is that "it takes into account the different rate at which time passes on the satellite and on the ground."

Popular gamers 'should play for free' – Valve boss

ArkhamNative
Thumb Down

Gabe goes splat

I thought he might be serious until he mentioned the jerks and $100. Gabe more than anyone (because he runs STEAM) should know that there are more than enough jerks with $100 to completely overwhelm his whole network, and with lawyers to recover that money 1000-fold should they get banned for violating ToS after paying $100 to be exempted from certain clauses in the ToS.

But for the discount part, how does he plan to rate players? Any metric he can devise can be gamed, especially by rabid gamers. The mediocre/casual/solo may find their prices going up just by attrition.

Microsoft resuscitates 'I'm a PC' ads to fight Apple

ArkhamNative
Headmaster

Doesn't get it

I still can't help but feel bad for MS when I see people say, "I'm a PC". It just screams "Microsoft doesn't get it." In the Apple commercials, Long and Hodgman aren't consumers, they are personifications of the devices that run Mac OS and Windows OS, respectively.

After the "I'm a PC" ads came out, Apple even drove the point home by bringing a consumer into one of their ads. Long greeted her, saying "Hi, I'm a Mac". She responded: "I'm a Megan."

From messiah to pariah: The death of open source on mobile

ArkhamNative
FAIL

FSS FAIL

FSS and GPL seemed to pull a big fail IMHO when they tried to open the iPhone platform by hitting Apple over the head with the software license. To me "open" always meant code and what I could do with it as a developer. It never promised free hardware, free development software, or free licence to access the SDK. And on the iPhone, it never guaranteed access to the App Store, root access to the OS, or a code-signing certificate from Apple. Those are completely separate issues.

In that vein, if I write an OSS app and put the code project on my Web site, that should satisfy the license. If I go through the process of creating a binary and getting it posted to the app store, I have not violated any license -- the source is available for any developer to do the same.

Watson? Commercial – not super – computer

ArkhamNative
Terminator

SkyNet. Human GIGO.

2 things:

"Watson is the best recent example of a machine crossing over the divide between human and machine-style thinking." -- Horrifically scary if true, but what I think you meant was "...best example of humans creating algorithms that bridge the divide between human and computer information processing."

“There already are humans kept as pets by machines - they're called ‘iPhone owners!’” - very cliquish and droll, but iPhones are nothing compared to our true overlords: television.

iPad TWO: What, already?

ArkhamNative
Jobs Horns

What are the chances

Murdock's US biz rag is publishing rumors and leaked info on an unreleased Apple product? Will Steve get mad and pull their new "The Daily" iPad app?

I know, probably not. But one can dream...

Google axes Jobsian codec in name of 'open'

ArkhamNative
Alert

Royalties? Spotlight!

If Google *does* have to pay to include H.264 in Chrome, that's a huge point that the article should have included.

On the other side, this moves Ogg even more into the spotlight, and H.264 owners have already said they suspect there may be some patent violations there. With Google backing Ogg, H.264 group may now see a pocketbook it can pick, as well as an adversary it can weaken. (FWIW I think the whole patent corporate wargame thing has gotten way out of hand, but it happens.)

Anti-virus skulduggery - upgrade licence clock shock slammed

ArkhamNative
WTF?

Another skullduggery? Tsk...

I thought this was going to be about another Symantec practice: Every year Symantec offers to let its antivirus customers conveniently renew online. The problem: it's routinely £10-£20 *more* than buying a retail box at PC World or other retailers, which often offer free shipping.

Apple MacBook Air 11.6in sub-notebook

ArkhamNative
Terminator

Awesome laptop

OK, I'm an Apple "fan", so of course I like the 13" version I have. However the first thing I did was install Windows 7 64-bit and Final Fantasy XIV on it. I was pleasantly surprised that the game runs well enough to do some solo stuff, despite CPU & GPU being quite a bit below the game's minimum specs. (This game has insane recommended graphics specs.)

As for SD slot, the 13" does have one built-in, but of course it's slightly bigger, slightly faster, etc. Neither have wired ethernet, optical drive, DVI, VGA, ...floppy drive... etc., but peripherals and adapters are available. One I really like is a "Mini DisplayPort to HDMI *with audio*", great for those of us who watch some TV off the Internet, but are still avoiding "set-top boxes".

Lastly battery life: Your benchmark results say the MacBook Air was doing twice as much work as the average, and almost 4x that of the "lasted twice as long" battery life winner, so I don't see how to draw any conclusions from that.