Posts by Rolf Howarth

@one0on @kpharck

"Oh yeah, no vested interests at all..."

You're right, everyone has vested interests. But if you take a random bunch of successful people who have already achieved their main goals in life and let them discuss an issue and come to some agreement among themselves then you have eliminated at least *some* of the vested interests that can cause so many problems (eg. politicians making populist gestures to appeal to the tabloid press, which in turn have their own vested interest in selling more papers).

"the elites do much more good by Educating the general public"

Right, but isn't that where we are now? There's no shortage of blogs etc. where everyone and their dog is trying to educate everyone else to explain their own particular viewpoint or insight onto the world's problems. The problem is information overload. You simply can't expect to fully educate *everyone* on *every* issue. The only possible solution is to delegate some of that decision-making responsibility.

No doubt a committee of the great and the good making decisions would introduce its own set of problems, but I'm not sure they'd be significantly worse than delegating all the power to one individual whose main strengths lie in successful schmoozing up to the party machinery, manipulating public opinion, and looking good on TV.

Lockerbie

One could certainly make a case that the Lockerbie bombers should have been tried in Germany, yes.

With the internet you have to VERY careful about letting laws in one country apply to actions you commit while in another. Let's suppose you're sitting at your desk at work in the UK and decide to forward a funny pornographic email to your best mate from college, only he's currentlly working on an oil rig in Saudi Arabia. Are you saying you'd like to be treated as if you committed the offence in Saudi Arabia?

Style over function

I thought it was the other way round. Personally, I think the aerial on the outside looks ugly, but it was put there to increase the room inside the case for a battery, which is why the iPhone 4 has by far the longest battey life of any phone in its class. In other words, designing it that way was a victory for function over style.

Actually, that's ok

That's actually there for your benefit. Photos and videos you take include location information, so by extension, if an app accesses your photos and videos it can access your location information. If it didn't check for permission that would be a security hole (though maybe you could argue the check should be refined, so if you don't give an app permission to use Location Services you can still access photos that aren't geotagged, rather than blocking access to all your photos or videos).

Number of returns

That will indeed be very interesting. There's obviously a huge furore about this antenna issue, but one suspects most of it is from people who don't like Apple, rather than from users actually experiencing any problems. Assuming what was said at the press conference was true, Apple have an awfully long way to go to catch up if their return rate is 1.5% versus an industry average of 30%.

As that annoyingly catchy song says, "If you don't want an iPhone, don't buy it. If you bought one and you don't like it, bring it back."

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Consensus of people testing it seems to be:

- if you hold it right and are in a weak signal area reception is much, much better than the old iPhone 3GS

- if you hold it wrong and are in a normal signal area it's still better than the 3GS

- if you hold it wrong and are in a very weak signal area then it's about the same as a 3GS, but people are worried because they notice a dramatic change in the number of bars depending on how they hold it

So, for most people in most situations, it's much better than their old phone, and if you're not happy or it doesn't work for you they'll give you your money back. How is that grounds for a class action suit?

Coppers riding on the pavement

You do know that the police are specifcally permitted to break motoring laws (red traffic lights, no entry signs, speed limits, etc.), don't you? (Though only if they need to as part of performing their duties, and they do still need to give way and not drive dangerously)

Re: Curious

True, but the converse applies too. When Apple do something that every other company out there does all the time without comment, you also see a large number of people rushing in to loudly criticise them. For whatever reason, Apple evokes very strong feelings among people. People either love to love Apple or love to hate them.

Laser printer?

That's interesting, when I tried to buy a laser printer at Staples recently they tried very hard to sell me an ink jet instead. The harder they tried the more convinced I was that a colour laser was the right choice... no more clogged heads, gallons of ink wasted in pointless attempts at cleaning, and almost new cartridges being thrown away because they stopped working, yay!

I agree though, Staples are a much better bet than Currys or PC World for most purchases.

Re: Respect

"The problem with most of these stupid laws is that because no-one cares about breaking them it starts to creep into thinking that other laws are also stupid and can be broken - this just breeds disrespect for the whole thing."

You say that like it's a bad thing??

There ARE an awful lot of stupid laws, brought in as as kneejerk reaction to some particular horrendous event, never mind the effect it will have on perfectly decent law-abiding citizens. Legislate in haste, repent at leisure.

People SHOULD therefore be a lot more sceptical about the mass of laws and regulations out there, and the people enforcing them should be given a lot more discretion to decide whether a particular case is worth pursuing or not, EVEN IF THAT MEANS MISTAKES WILL SOMETIMES BE MADE.

Right now people the authorities are so overwhelmed with things like performance targets and mandatory sentencing guidelines and what have you that they have no choice but to investigate and prosecute things like this to the maximum, no matter how trivial or well meaning the transgression is. If you don't believe that, try taking a locking penknife blade with you on a camping expedition because you don't want it to slip and injure someone and see how far you get when the police stop you and question about carrying an offensive weapon.

Google = data

The whole essence of what Google is about is data. ALL data is useful to them, no matter how irrelevant it seems to us. They can read cookies and see what web sites are being accessed. Even if you use SSL they know what hosts are being connectd to.

It's not about whether there is enough information to target any one individual. Google don't care about individuals. Just a snapshot of a cross-section of the populations browsing habits broken down geographically is incredibly useful for data mining and statistical analsys. And it's not just web traffic, which they probably already understand pretty well. This is everything: email, chat, peer-to-peer, which VPNs people use, which shows are most popular on iPlayer, etc.

They must have thought collecting all that data when they're driving up and down the streets was too good an opportunity to miss so it's difficult to believe it wasn't a deliberate decision.

A commodity item?

I use my MBP all day, every day for work. I probably spend more time on it than I spend driving my car, waching TV, in the kitchen, using my camera, listening to music, etc. - combined! Getting a machine that does what I want, that doesn't constantly frustrate me and that I enjoy using is therefore absolutely vital. For the amount of use I get out of it compared to other things I spend my money on the cost is utterly inconsequential.

Soap is a commodity product. Toilet paper is a commodity product. Memory sticks are a commodity product. My computer isn't, is far too important for that.

Why did they access the networks?

They collect the SSIDs of WiFi networks, secured or otherwise, and link them to a specific geographic location to implement a basic geolocation service in Google Maps for devices that don't have a GPS. Yes, if you move that will confuse things slightly for a short time. If you go to the Skyhook website you can manually request changes. Not sure if Google and Skyhook use the same database or are competing with each other.

"Unlimited"

Unlimited just means no limit has been applied, it doesn't mean infinite. Think of a lorry with a 60mph speed limiter fitted. Removing that limiter so it's "unlimited" doesn't mean it's suddenly going to travel at the speed of light!

It's perfectly reasonable to sell different versions of the same software, perhaps that supports 5, 10 or an "unlimited" number of users. That doesn't mean you can put 100 million billion users on it and expect it to run as fast as when there only one or two though.

joojoo?

I can't work out if you're being serious or facetious. Isn't the joojoo the tablet that sold a grand total of 90 copies, of which 15 were returned by dissatified customers? (That's 90 TOTAL, not 90,000, or 900,000...). Weighs nearly twice as much and has nearly half the battery life and half the speed of the iPad. And costs exactly the same as the iPad anyway?