Posts by silent_count 627 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Nov 2011
I'll defend apple on this one.
If someone is careless enough to hand over a chainsaw or the car keys to their kid, the ensuing badness is not the manufacturer's fault. And I don't think that, "aww shucks. I never bothered to learn how to use it safely", would garner the parent much sympathy. Why should it be any different for a phone or tablet?
Don't get me wrong though, the people who make games which induce children to make in-app, cash purchases are scum and I'd be happy to see them dropped into the scorpion pit alongside the spammers.
Sure, rich countries could do something like putting a tariff on "slave" labour produced goods, ostensibly to raise the employment standards for foreign employees but, even if you or I were willing to pay 50% extra for our toys, it wouldn't work. There would be retaliatory tariffs and other side effects, not least of which is that the people we're trying to help would likely end up worse off.
So, an honest question. Is there anything that would materially improve the lot of the people who make our stuff? Simply whining that their lives should be better doesn't work in a world where everyone wants their toys cheap, and the market kills the product which costs a few dollars more than its competitors.
... when politicians want to raise taxes by 5% - they announce a 20% increase before allowing the persuasive arguments to convice them that a lower tax increase is more appropriate. Then the gullible punters are happy that it's only a 5% increase.
MS announces the 'phone home one a day' policy, the always spying kinnetic, and the 'no reselling of old games', only to allow themselves to be persuaded to back down on all three. So what's the "tax increase" MS is trying to get past the punters?
Does it really take netflix that long to send an episode to their UK servers? Perhaps they should learn from the torrent sites as they don't have any such issues.
I don't watch this show and I live in AU in any case, so this doesn't effect me. I do however think that having to avoid spoilers, in this world of instant global communication, is a frustration which paying customers can do without.
I appreciate that netflix is trying to get this right but this is a case where "nearly" isn't good enough. One friend's facebook update, one post in a forum, and the surprise is spoilt for an eager customer who pays to watch a show rather than torrent it.
Mr Shavers is going to jail, and he's only got himself to blame. He didn't think ahead. He should have made his Ponzi scheme more structurally complex, so it would take longer for the SEC to catch up with him. By that stage he could have greased a few politicians and, when it looked like collapsing, his scheme would be "too big to fail" and his victims' tax money would be used to bail him out.
If it is my responsibility to procure a 60¢ apple and I instead come back with a $100 orange, the fault is mine, not the fruit vendor's. It's not that IBM that should be banned from any future projects. It's the Queensland public sector who should be banned from procuring *anything*.
I'd also say that the previous, Labour state government was utterly inept but I think a 100X cost overrun to produce a system which doesn't work says it quite eloquently all by itself. And yet, people kept voting for them.
@jai
I agree with everything you've said but if projector tech gets small enough (to fit in a laptop/tablet/phone) and bright enough that it can do a reasonable image in normal lighting conditions, it'd be a killer app for whatever manufacturer gets there first. A phone or laptop projector wouldn't have to produce 16 ft by 10 ft image but say a 30 inch wide image on the back of the plane/bus/train seat in front of you would be a heap better than watching movies on a tiny phone or laptop screen.
I'll concede that the tech isn't anywhere near that level yet but I hope we'll get there one day.
PS: For a home setup, it takes a little forethought. You'd need a fairly long room (so you get the throw distance to make the "screen" BIG), which can be curtained into near-blackness, and which has a plain, white wall to point the projector at. I achieved this once with a cheap (by the standards of projectors) epson projector, and ended up with a very pleasant 7ft high "screen". Our Soul Caliber 2 contest were awesome! :)
"What happened to all the others?"
My bet is that they're not economically viable - expensive to make and don't sell enough to be worth the trouble of making them.
It's a technology that's not quite ready for the mass market (and maybe never will be), but I'm fascinated by its potential. For example, rather than a laptop having a screen, it just has an opaque plastic lid for the projector, built into the keyboard section, to display the desktop upon. Want to watch a movie? Fold the lid right back and point the laptop's projector at a convenient bit of bare wall.
Good to know that irrelevant things like homelessness and disease can be put aside to focus on the really important things like streaming video watsits. Just maybe if they put a little more effort into providing a good service to their audience rather than trying to find ways to prosecute them... nah. That'd never work.
*ring* *ring* Hello Constable Plod. As a concerned citizen, I feel duty bound to report that Mr Business Rival is involved in the possession and distribution of child abuse material. Oh sure, he'll say that his site was hacked but then the filthy pervert would say that, wouldn't he?
@AC 07:44Z 05-Aug-2013
"I really wonder whether anyone remotely sensible at Microsoft has sat down and just talked - no focus groups, no market consultants, no brand image people - to discuss why the Surface and Surface RT tablets are doing so badly compared to every other tablet on the market."
Forget the venom directed at Balmer. I suspect its the marketing and brand image people who are not only making the decisions in MS-land, they've completely taken over. If anyone dared to participate in a discussion without the blessing of the marketing priesthood, said discussies would find a bag popped over their heads before they get stuffed into the back of a van destined for a re-education camp
Don't forget the apple motto: Its not the quality of the product that matters, its whether the marketing department can con the punters into buying it.
That's what MS is trying to emulate except that MS is used to being a de facto monopoly and thus the quality of their marketing dept hasn't hitherto mattered.
Oh my gawd! Two people dared to down-vote my previous post. Didn't they know that the purpose of the internet is to provide wholehearted support of me and my ideas? I'm so crused and hurt.
Rather than utilise the wisdom about sticks 'm stones, I'll have a whiney sook instead. These down-voters are yet another example of the discrimination suffered by people of my $SEX, $RACE and $HAIR_COLOUR. Life's so unfair. Woe is me. Here's my blog at
http:// qqq. blahblah. wah/
Is something raspberry pi sized that can:
- be used to watch netflix, huhu, etc
- pull media of whatever network its on.
- plug in an aerial to watch terrestrial tv.
- wirelessly mirror the screen of your phone/tablet/PC with low-ish latency (good enough to play angry birds or write code but doesn't have to support twitch FPSers)
- record/time-shift any of the above to a connected HDD or NAS (I'm not trying to make big content happy, I'm trying to come up with a dongle which people will actually want)
What have I left out? I know that most (if not all) of the above can be done by a Linux/Windows PC but if someone were to pack that lot into a sub-US$100 dongle Joe Average can buy from Walmart, it eould rule the world.
Ok, This was amusing at first but now I've had enough. Its time to lock Mr Samsung and Mr Apple in a room together. And they only get fed on days when neither of them calls a lawyer. They are allowed to leave when they've demonstrated they can behave like grown-ups or, since that will never happen, in body bags.
On behalf of the Committee for Men, I propose the following: henceforth 50% of the internet shall be dedicated to porn, 30% to swearing , and the remaining 20% to porn and swearing. Any website owner failing to strictly adhere to this law shall be forced to attend every meeting of the committee for family, women and children (guaranteed to be a bundle of laughs).
I'd wager that the people who read El Reg are awfully good at bending technology to our will. In this instance, quickly and accurately slurping whatever content from the internet that suits our needs or desires. This isn't for us. I image that what Mozilla is working on will make it a little easier for everyone else - for the people who aren't as good at navigating the endless sea of stuff on the internet - to find what they're looking for.
For us, well, either Mozilla provides an option to turn this behaviour off or there will be an addon which does so within hours. I don't see the harm in something that helps others while costing us nothing.
“Going forward, Microsoft will continue..." -Eric Chapple
The phrase "going forward", used in this context*, has got to be the most completely, totally, without exception and without equal the most redundant phrase in the English language. It's use indicates that the speaker is either unfamiliar with the language itself, unfamiliar with time as it applies to humans, or is too intellectually limited to parse a sentence before it comes out of their mouth.
* I'm ok with cars going forward. Sometimes backwards too. Though hopefully not sideways because that usually results in people getting hurt.
I wonder if your internet bills will get cheaper. If you're paying £10 per month now, and the government filters seventy percent of the internet, will your bill be reduced to £3 ?
Personally I'm against any kind of cens [THE REMAINDER OF THIS MESSAGE REMOVED BY A GOVERNMENT WHO WANTS THE "WONT SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN" VOTE... ERR... FOR YOUR SAFETY]
I use Firefox on both my PCs and my phone. I like open source. And I wish the Mozilla Foundation well. Firefox OS however leaves important questions unanswered.
Why would people buy a Firefox phone rather than an iphone or android? They're both past the "immature OS" stage, with it's inherent problems, and both have a well stocked app stores. What does Firefox OS bring to the table which none of the others can do?
The only answer that I can find is that Firefox could offer better security and allow the user better control over their privacy but even then, given the popularity of facebook and similar, I don't think there are sufficient people who care enough to give Firefox a user base.
The problem. They've have become so focussed on what Microsoft would like Microsoft's products to do for Microsoft, they've completely lost sight of some unimportant, annoying people. Those people. You know... um...
XBox - We'll have it phone home once a day so WE can be assured they're not running unauthorised software and give US some handy usage data too. Oh and we'll kill the second-hand games market so people will all have to buy new games, which will make the platform more attractive to developers, who will write games for US rather than Sony.
Win8 - We'll force them to get used to OUR tablet interface so when it comes time to buy a tablet...
Surface RT - We've got this secure boot things so people can't use that evil Linux stuff or the accursed Android, and it won't run any existing Windows software so they'll have to spend money in OUR app store. Oh! We'll use ARM so it's cheap for US to make but we'll make the tablet expensive as all hell so WE get a decent wad of cash out of every sale.
... now what were those pesky people called? Them! The ones who clog up our helpdesk with calls.
This alliance is wasting their time. Let's imagine they get their wish. What would happen next?
The US government issues an annual report on the level of the NSA's spying activities... which nobody in the right mind would believe to be truthful and accurate. The tech companies would rush forth to tell world + dog how few customers they've sold out, and even then it was only under secret legal orders. And nobody would believe them either. They have an incentive to under-report the numbers for PR purposes (so their foreign clients don't go to more trustworthy competitors) and even if they wanted to be scrupulously honest, there's no way an outside observer would know that they haven't been compelled to falsify their report by another secret NSA directive.
When you deal in lies and secret, the price is that nobody trusts a word you say.
It's not so much the system which is broken - *if* the OEMs/phone carriers push updates, they'll get to people's phones just fine. The problem is that all of the OEMs fork the OS to shovel their brand of crapware upon their victims... err.. provide added value to their valued customers... and then have no financial interest in updating anything but their current models.
The obvious solution is for everyone to immediately root their phone and install stock android or CyanogenMod. Then they'll get updates as soon as they're released, and Google *does* have a financial interest in updating the OS which feeds them user info and funnels customers through their store.
However, rooting a phone (usually) voids the warranty and, even if it didn't, is beyond the technical ability of most users. I wish there were an easy solution but there isn't.
I'll concede that you're right about their council's advice but settling with the ACCC and the remedies imposed by supreme court are an unambiguous indication that HP, in common parlance, fucked up. Trying to spin it as otherwise comes across, to me at least, as incredibly childish.
Some 270 words from HP when 10 would have sufficed, "We're sorry. We f***ed up. We'll do better in future."
Would it really kill them to manage some kind of apology instead of contriving to make their statement about how wonderful they perceive themselves to be and that any wrongdoing on their part was merely the result of some unforeseeable fluctuation in the time-space continuum?
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