Posts by Rolf Howarth
380 posts • joined Wednesday 13th June 2007 14:01 GMT
Re: There is only one thing a text editor needs
Sorry, DECWriter not ASR33, but same principle applies.
Re: There is only one thing a text editor needs
You don't know how true your statement about vi running everywhere. I was won over by vi when I absentmindedly tried launching it to edit something when logged on via an ASR-33 teletype..... and IT STILL WORKED !!
Ok, so it had switched to ex mode and was printing out one line at a time, but all the commands and shortcuts worked as normal and it was completely usable. Quite brilliant I thought (especially as I'd never used ex prior to that, or probably since either).
Posted in Apple refreshes MacBook Pro range
Get the old one
Luckily they still have the old version available, so I shall be getting one of those before they finally disappear. 1680x1050 yes, but retina display? My eyesight is no longer good enough to tell the difference. I do want the option of HDD though (even 768GB SSD isn't really enough, and the price is prohibitive), plus I still use CDs and DVDs, FireWire, and Ethernet, all of which you need an extra adapter for on the new one.
Re: So what?
I saw UltraHD in action a few years ago and it does look quite stunning on a huge screen when you can see the faces in the crowd at a football match or whatever, but will it work at home? Unless you're going to sit with your nose 6 inches away from the TV set you'd need a floor to ceiling screen and it still might not be big enough!
Successive refinement...
As the article points out, someone else already has a patent on the basic idea of wireless charging. In order to be able to do anything in that area without paying exhorbitant licensing fees Apple therefore has to try to refine and improve on what the other patents say and patent that improvement, however minor a detail it might address. They can then use their patent when negotiating cross-licensing deals with the other patent holders. Effectively it just gives them a bargaining chip to sit at the Consortium for Wireless Power table, it doesn't mean they're planning a patent war.
RFID?
Good for her, but why do they need RFIDs? All they need to do is install a bit of equipment to track the mobile phones that all the kids at school have these days, and they'll be able to track them outside school as well :-)
Evil?
"Anyone who views Apple as anything but another evil company needs their head examined."
Certainly, it's another company, with shareholders and the objective of making a profit, but so are ALL companies.
The companies that are evil are those patent trolls that never invent or make anything of their own but just buy up obscure patents and then make a living by blackmailing companies who can't afford to defend an expensive lawsuit, whether or not there's any merit in the claims.
Apple isn't remotely like that. First, they clearly do invent their own stuff, and manufacturer it, so are using patents in the way they're intended. They're the victm of infinitely more patent claims from people who see a big fat cash cow, and just see dollar signs lighting up in front of their eyes, than they are the aggressor.
Just think how many CDs he could have bought for $675,000!
Re: Typical journo rubbish
What you say about P/E ratio makes no sense. That the P/E ratio is low is good isn't it? It means that the value of the stock is based on actual performance, not an inflated hyped up value that has no bearing to reality (compare with Facebook with a P/E of 111, even after its embarassing price drop).
Put it another way, if Apple were as hyped as Facebook, their share price could go up another 7x or 8x what it is now, even without any increase in revenue. Or put it another way still, most investors are rubbish at judging the true value of stocks.
Interesting. I have the X100 and it's the best camera I've ever owned. Glad to hear they fixed the too-easy-to-nudge exposure compensation dial but it's a shame the camera is a little bigger and is all black now, looks too much like other cameras out there.
Posted in Trekkie pays £45,000 for rusty shuttle
$70000 is a lot today but think what it will be worth in 200 years time when we're landing on foreign planets in something that looks very similar and it's stuck in a museum back on Earth as being the original protoype...
Re: Sigh...
>Bank stops possibly fraudulent transaction: Bank is in the wrong
>Bank allows possibly fraudulent transaction: Bank is in the wrong.
Disagree completely. If they reject a payment, it's you the customer who is emabarrassed or inconvenienced. If they pass a fraudulent transaction, it's the bank's problem, not mine.
My bank makes thousands each year out of me and my company but I swear the next time they reject a £20 card payment at the station that means I missed my train home I will close all my accounts with them (or insist they pay me a £150 "administration fee" for the inconvenience every time they incorrectly refuse a payment).
Brand not product
Remember they're talking about the value of the BRAND, not the quality or price of the product or the company. In other words, to what extent will people base their next purchase decision on the name of the label rather than on the product itself.
You can read that two ways. You could argue that means that there are a whole load of stupid fanbois who will buy whatever rubbish Apple produces at whatever price, just because it says Apple and they were fooled by the marketing. Alternatively, that there are a lot of extremely happy customers who were so satisfied with their previous product they're sure they'll buy Apple again next time. Either way, it's an enviable position to be in.
Re: Of course APIs are copyrightable
"neither the functionality of a computer program nor the programming language and the format of data files used in a computer program in order to exploit certain of its functions constitute a form of expression. Accordingly, they do not enjoy copyright protection."
How does that contradict what I said? I didn't say programming languages, file formats or the functionality of a computer program enjoy copyright protection. Of course they don't. I said that the class and method signatures of your program do. If you're a C++ programmer, your header files are just as much part of your copyrightable source code as any files you write.
Of course APIs are copyrightable
Of course APIs are copyrightable, just like any other non-trivial body of text is. If you break an application down into fine enough components and give all your classes and methods nice descriptive names, ie. self-documenting code, then the class and method signatures encapsulate your entire design and represent a sizeable chunk of your entire code base. How can that not be protected by copyright? Otherwise it would be like taking a novel, keeping the title and character names and chapter names and plot the same but rewriting all the paragraphs, then claiming it as your own original work.
Posted in Sony optical disk archive
Long term...
As several people above have commented, I think the key goal here is LONG TERM archive. The caddy system may be Sony-proprietary but the discs themselves are standard ISO Blu-ray images, so even if Sony as a company are long gone 50 years from now it should hopefully still be possible to find a drive that plays the individual discs, just as any computer today can still read audio CDs using a 30 year old standard. Or so the theory goes.
Perhaps in 50 years time we'll all be using quantum holographic cubes or something, and the only place to find a spinning platter (or tape!) of ANY kind will be in a museum, but until then I guess a system such as this has as good a chance as any of succeeding as a reasonably long term archive.
Isn't the point that Apple should be praised for allowing non-App Store apps to be signed? The alternative to Gatekeeper is that App Store apps can be installed without a warning, and *all* other apps display a "warning, this application is from an untrusted source, are you sure you want to continue?" message. How is that better?
The question isn't whether it's possible to commit cross-border crimes but by whose standards you ought to be judged, your country of residence or the country where the offence was supposedly committted.
Let's say you post a humorous pornographic email to your mate who just happens to be working overseas in Saudi Arabia at the time, are you saying it's right for you to be extradited so you can be publicly flogged?
Why???
Why oh why do manufacturers keep insisting on ramming "improvements" down our throat whether we want them or not? It's getting increasingly difficult to find USB wired keyboards and mice these days, even though in most situations they are *vastly* superior.
Sure, there are some situations where you want a wireless mouse and keyboard (eg. for the Mac Mini connected to the TV in my lounge) but apart from the obvious battery problem a wired set up is just so much easier. If you have a lot of computers, both Macs and PCs, you really don't want to mess about with pairing and unpairing and dongles and installing drivers and all that crap. Just plug the damn thing in and it works.
Best of all you're very unlikely to lose a wired mouse! Just tug one end of the cable and you've got it, even if it's buried under a pile of papers or fallen off your desk (or liable to go "walking" of its own accord from a busy office or trade show floor).
Except it's, you know, a spy plane. The implication it was flying over Iran and therefore they'd have been quite entitled to do what they want to it, including shooting it down. Plus of course there's no way of knowing if this really was put out by the Iranians or is misinformation spread by the USA, as someone else has suggested.
Posted in Java's 'Steve Jobs' moment in 2012?
I'm far too busy making a real living writing real apps in Java to have time to post on any discussion forums. I have very little interest in new language features that may appear at some time in the future given that Java already provides everything I need and more, and has done so for years. Why do people feel they have the incessant urge to fiddle with things that are already ideally suited to doing the job?
I didn't mean the expected annual income. I can work that out myself from my latitude and the roof area and the angle of the roof. I meant the cost of the panels, the cost of installation, and the annual cost of maintenance (if any).
I'm 100% with the original poster on this. I tried searching the web and phoning quite a few suppliers to get an idea of the costs of installation and NONE of them wanted to give me that information. Instead, they all insisted they had to send someone round to do a survey (even though I had the exact dimensions and angle of the roof etc. to give them and just wanted a very rough ballpark price to decide whether it worth pursuing or not). The one guy I did let come round and do the survey wasn't an engineer or surveyor but a salesman, who came out with a VERY heavy sales pitch trying to get me to commit there and then on the spot.
Before
This is what the Android phone looked like before the first iPhone was released
http://daringfireball.net/misc/2011/08/white-android-prototype.jpg
Enough said :-)
Trojan
It's a trojan, not a virus or a worm. In other words, you have to download an app from an dodgy web site and enter your admin password to authenticate when it tries to install itself... and then bad things might happen? I'm shaking in my boots with fear at the mere thought of how dangerous my world has suddenly become.
Actually they did ratify it, about five years ago, it just took them a year or two longer than the UK.
The point isn't whether he committed an offence or not, but by whose standards he ought to be judged. If somebody and hacks into a computer in the UK, stupid as it is, they might expect a suspended sentence (certainly at the time the offence was committed), not to be locked up for 25 years to life as a potential terrorist!
Think through the implications. Let's say you forward a funny pornographic chain email to your friend who happens to be working on an oil rig in the Gulf, should you be extradited to Saudi Arabia? You post on a blog about Tibet and get extradited to China?
Posted in Ten... Freeview HD recorders
EPG
I bought a Fox T2 earlier this year and had to return it because the programme guide was unusable. Just shows the first two or three letters followed by "..." for all the programme names!
Did the firmware date fix that and finally provide an EPG with a vertical time axis?
Posted in Ten... Freeview HD recorders
Programme guide
I don't care about features like Bluray or internet connectivity or subtitles or 5.1 sound.
The killer feature for me, which I'm still looking for to replace my now sadly defunct Topfield, is a decent programme guide. I bought a Humax Fox T2 but had to return it as being unusable because it ionly has the traditional "horizontal" program guide, where you end up with lots of helpful information like "Sp... T... In..." because there isn't room for the full program title. Utterly, utterly useless!
What you could do on the Topfield is switch to a single channel at a time "vertical" view, so each programme appeared on its own line with a vertical time axis, and you could scroll down to see the entire week's schedule for one channel, deciding what to record.
If any of these PVRs has a usable programme guide I'll buy it in an instant.
Where do Apple go next?
Apple will cope fine without SJ. Although he was was very heavily involved in the product development lifecycle, he didn't personally invent everything Apple did, you know. What he did do is surround himself with good people, motivate them, and know how to pick a winner. Those people are still there. Most importantly he taught them the value of design and not to accept compromises.
Apple is defined not so much by what it releases as what it doesn't release, namely crap. Sure they have some flops, like MobileMac, but for every product that's released there are dozens of internal prototypes that are developed, almost to completion, but then dropped because they're not good enough. What makes Apple different is having the courage of its convictions to maintain those standards, even in the face of all the pundits telling it what it has to do. (Remember everyone who said Apple just had to bring out a PDA? They ignored them and waited until they were ready, then came out with the iPhone and changed the world.)
Steve Jobs is gone, but the company he built that epitomises those values still exists, so there's nothing to suggest they won't carry on producing great products just as they have in the past.
The size or nature of the participants in the case should have no bearing on the outcome. Imagine it was the other way round and an individual had compiled some data through lots of hard work and then some organisation like Apple or Google came along and decided to appropriate it for their purposes, claiming it was for the public good. Everyone's sympathies would be with the original developer.
Really, we need a lot more details on the claim before we can pass any sort of judgment.
Posted in Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is dead at 56
His achievement was having a keen eye for design and aesthetics and being a perfectionist, and having the charisma and arrogance to get his way, and usually (not always) being proven right. He knew what consumers want and he gave it to them.
Only possible outcome
Effectively what Psystar were doing was buying an upgrade liicense for some software, removing the copy protection, and reselling it as the full product. When you buy a retail copy of Mac OS X it is by definition an upgrade license because it requires an existing Mac to run it on, and that's the only way to get hold of a "full" license.
More interesting would have been if Psystar purchased and gave away a Mac with their offering, rather than just including the retail upgrade discs. They could then have argued they were just letting you run software you already had rights to on different hardware, but they didn't do that.
Posted in Ten... all-in-one inkjet printers
Ink jets are crap
If you genuinely do print loads of photos then maybe an inkjet is for you but for most home or small office use a laserprinter is far, far superior.
I switched to a Samsung all-in-one about 18 months and never looked back. I've only just replaced the original low capactity toners it came with with a rainbow toner pack that cost me £100, so on that basis it will keep me going another 5 years before i have to buy any more toner!! In the same time I'd probably have gone through the cycle of stripey prints, clean jets, stripey prints, buy complete new set of cartridges, ok for a month, then stripey prints, clean jets, stripey prints, buy complete new set of cartridges, still stripey, throw away printer and buy a new one, ok for a few more months, etc. After doing that a couple of times and realising that the overall real running costs are actually about 10x that of a laserprinter you're left with the conclusion that as a technology, ink jet is fundamentally crap and the sooner it's banished to oblivion the better.
The thing that really persuaded me though was how hard the manager at Staples tried to persuade me that an ink jet would be much better for my purposes. What does that tell you about where they make their money??
???!!!!
I can't believe the number of people who took RCH's post at face value and blindly downvoted it or rose to the bait. It's so obviously meant ironically, and at several levels, it's one of the best comments I've seen on the Register for a while, especially once you see how people responded to it. Sadly it seems RCH is right and most people are totally unable to think for themselves.
What do such a disparate group as Jews in Nazi Germany, people labelled as paedophiles, MPs filing their expenses, and Brian Souter all have in common? Hint: it has nothing to do what if anything they are guilty of. The interesting question is how uniformly the populace responds. It seems that most people like nothing better than to see a good lynch mob! Doesn't matter who the target is, just as long as there's someone one to vent one's anger and frustration at and you've got the crowd on your side.
Bingo!
DrXym hit the nail on the head "They incited serious crimes and AT LEAST ONE OF THEM turned up for the riot he was inciting."
In a nutshell, it's the tarring everybody with the same brush element of things that encapsulates my concern at our sentencing policy. If one of them posted a time and place and turned up in the expectation there would be violence, and the other posted something stupid for a laugh, then had seconds thought and took it down and didn't follow it through, why have they both got exactly the same sentence?
Or the guy who stole a bottle of water. If 5 minutes earlier he'd been throwing bricks through car windows and burglary is all they had photographic evidence of then fair enough, 6 months is the minimum he deserves. But if he was just a more or less innocent bystander, who happened to pass an open shop front after the rioters had left, reached in a grabbed a bottle of water, then it isn't obvious why he should be punished worse than a shoplifter just because other people that night happened to be rioting.
Precedent
Let's hope this doesn't set the sentencing precedent the next time someone tweets about blowing Nottingham airport sky high!
IT angle?
Presumably the judge or magistrate could order a defendant before them to remove their veil, and order the police to arrest them and lock them up for contempt of court if they didn't. Once arrested, they could forcibly remove the veil and confiscate it as evidence.
@Ken Hagan
"*most* code needs to run faster than it does at the moment"
I would say "some" rather than "most". If computers are too slow it's only because we continually push them to do new things which weren't previously necessary until they break, in which case they will ALWAYS be too slow by definition. I mean, I'm sure it's very clever that I can write a Unix emulator in a Javascript interpreter running in a browser running under Linux running in a virtual environment running under Windows running under Mac OS X, but really, that's hardly something we NEED to be able to :-)
I'm continually amazed at how fast Java is these days. You can do quite serious graphics or scientific programming in Java and effortlessly have it run faster than a heavily optimised native program only a few years previously. My favourite adage is still that CPU cycles are cheaper than developer cycles!
Overpriced sexy products?
AC asks why people are happy paying for overpriced sexy products? Well, duh, isn't that obvious? Forget your blinkered look at commodity lowest price technology products and look around you in real life. Why does anyone pick a Rolex rather than a Casio watch, an Armani suit rather than one from C&A, a Mercedes rather than a Chevrolet, Prada sunglasses rather than Boots own brand, a Sony TV rather than an Alba, a house in the posh end of town rather than the run down end?
They're all sexy overpriced products and collectively we all LOVE to spend our money on them, or aspire to them if we can't afford them now. Why should consumer electronics products be any different?
Re: Hindsight
Where pundits got it wrong was assuming Apple were competing with Microsoft, or competing for platform market share. That's only really in the mind of fanbois on either side. Apple and Microsoft are in different (but related) markets. Apple is primarily a hardware company, Microsoft is primarily a software company.
Apple's focus is on making good quality hardware, providing a good user experience and making a good profit. Giving Mac OS X or iOS a large share of the OS market may be a step on the way to achieving those goals but isn't a goal in its own right.
That's why Apple are relaxed about you installing Linux or Windows on your Mac (you've bought their hardware) but are dead set against you installing Mac OS on other hardware (they don't care about software market share, they do care very much about being able to differentiate their hardware offerings from the competition). Also, what's the point of having 90% of the market but making 5% at most of the profit? "We're making a loss on each unit, but at least we're making it up in volume". I think not. Much better to have 5% of the market and 90% of the profit, surely?
Apple's competitors 10 years ago weren't Microsoft or Intel but were PC manufacturers like Dell and HP and Lenovo and Sony. 5 years ago it wasn't Microsoft but mobile phone and MP3 player and portable games console vendors. Now Apple's focus has shifted again and they're into digital goods and advertising and their main competitors are Google and Amazon, but again, Microsoft is a relatively minor competitor.
Who?
Apple, or the posters on this forum? :-)
Posted in Apple admits scareware problem, at last
Oh dear
The quality of comments in these forums has declined dramatically in recent months. There's so much misinformed crap on here I don't even know where to begin.
1. This isn't a virus, it's a trojan. Any platform which lets you install software is susceptible to social engineering attacks. Just like Windows, you need to enter your password to confirm you want to install and run software you download from an untrusted site.
2. Four or five days to fully investigate an issue and come up with a clear statement, rather than rushing out something misleading or incomplete, doesn't seem particular tardy, nor does telling support staff not to do or say anything that could make it worse until the investigation is complete seem particular irresponsible.
3. Only someone stupid or misinformed would claim that Macs *can't* get viruses (though sadly forums such as this are ample proof that there's no shortage of either). I believe it's still true to say that while Macs certainly could be susceptible to a virus, the number of actual viruses out there in the wild *currently* that pose an *actual* threat is approximately zero. Nada. None. (A few proofs of concept, or cross platform Java or Flash exploits that have either long since been patched or never properly targeted the Mac, but no serious live threats). This means that *currently* there is little or no point anyone with a Mac should buy AV software. This could all change in future of course (and lots of people, from credit card thieves to Mac bashers through to AV vendors would wish that to be the case, so you'd have to be very naive to be too complacent).
4. Ditto for malware, there is little or no serious malware targeting Macs at present. That's why this one is news, after all. Again, that doesn't mean there might not be more in future, especially as the Mac's market share continues to increase, or that Mac OS is technologically superior to Windows. If Windows is more susceptible to malware then that's only because most PCs come with so much demoware and crapware pre-installed by the manufacturer and alerts popping up from software they've never heard of that users are preconditioned to clicking Yes when a strange message pops up telling them they need to install something.
Apps
Of course people sometimes used "app" short for application, but there wasn't anything like a uniform app buying experience before Apple introduced their app store. The closest would have been the section in PC World selling boxed software titles (and it would have been called "Software", not "Apps") or a separate online store for each vendor.
And even if the words have generic meanings on their own, that doesn't mean that it can't be a trademark when combined, eg. "Carphone Warehouse" is a trademark, even though everyone had heard of both carphones and warehouses before they were formed. No one talked about "app stores" before Apple announced they were introducing one.
Excellent
It's Thunderbird 2 !!
Posted in The Sandy Bridge Hackintosh
It's NOT legal
Good grief, are people still arguing that this is all legal and above board? They sell you a disk, and you're right, you own the DISK and can do whatever you want with it (give it away, turn it into a frisbee or whatever). What you can't do is COPY the data off that disk unless the copyright owner grants you a license to do so, and that license may come with conditions attached.
If it helps, think of another example, say Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop. You can buy a student edition or an upgrade for a fraction of the price of a full version, but that doesn't mean you're legally allowed to use a student version for commercial purposes, or an upgrade without having an existing license, does it? Does it??!
Whether or not the software stops you, and whether you think copyrights and patents are evil and all information wants to be free or not, is irrelevant - the question is what you're allowed to do legally. And installing it other than under the terms of the license is not legal.
As it happens, Apple couldn't care less whether you buy a copy of Mac OS X to install on your Hackintosh PC. If anything, they're probably quite happy, and they're certainly not going to sue you. You get to try out their software and become familiar with it, and if you like it you might even go out and buy a Mac next time you upgrade your machine. Just because they let you install Mac OS X on PC hardware doesn't mean you have a legal RIGHT to do so however (and don't be tempted to produce and sell Hackintosh systems commercially, because if you're stupid enough to try that then they certainly will come after you).
Posted in Is iPhone data collection legal?
But it's not personal data
" It is an offence to disclose or use any information relating to the content of a communication, services supplied, or any user’s personal information"
I don't see the problem here. Recording the wifi SSID of a network you happen to see is no more personal data than writing down the house number of a house you see from the road. Recording that a particular phone saw that SSID at a particular time *is* personal data, but if the data is anonymized so there's no way of linking the SSID/location to the phone that reported it then it's *not* personal data.
In any case, you did give permission through the EULA. Whether EULA's are legal or not I suspect has a lot to do with whether a court thinks it "reasonable" or not. If the small print in some software click through EULA says you agree to sacrifice your first born on some altar and pay 50% of all your income for the rest of eternity into some account then no, that's not enforceable. If it's the EULA for a mobile, location-aware data device and it says the device will create and use location data then that's hardly unreasonable and you'd have a hard time proving otherwise.
