Re: Are apple still going?

We don't.

But Apple could be doing something more interesting - such as usable, as opposed to silly, home automation.

And a wrist terminal for home control with media streaming to Bluetooth earbuds has more potential than a wrist terminal for messages and time-telling.

Then again, I'm not expecting much from Cook, so it will probably come in a range of garish iVesian colours and be dull and thin. (Like Cook.)

Re: Reading Books....

Or Philip K Dick?

Re: Proof?

By that logic 100% consensus wouldn't be credible to you because you.

Try again. You're obviously not understanding how this science actually works. There's nothing quasi-religious about increased flooding, increased drought, and increased weather damage, rising food prices[1], and all the other non-rhetorical effects that AGW is creating - and which (e.g.) insurance companies are already considering when they set their premiums.

[1] Not that market manipulation isn't playing a part there too. But still.

There is an economic argument based on the potential multiplier, and the fact that HS2 is a good old-fashioned bit of Keynesian pump-priming.

That's not the real reason it's being promoted - that's about profits for the corps who'll be building it.

But it's not a bad reason, all the same.

However - there's still the problem that if you're going to spend £x bn (x being a much larger number than is currently being discussed, in practice) you'd likely get more of a multiplier by rolling out fast fiber to as much of the UK as possible, including the rural areas, and perhaps providing extra seed funding for useful (i.e. non-Bong-ish) startups and research.

Personally I'd love to see HS2 happen in some form. But if Department of Choo Choo are trying to make an economic argument, it's a lot of cash to spend and - unfortunately - it's not obvious there aren't better and more rewarding ways to spend it.

So corporations get all of the benefits of corporate personhood, but none of the costs.

That's going to end well, isn't it?

Re: My chips are black, or modern slavery

Because the humans won't be using them, so they can pick up the spares cheap.

It's a big deal

because it fondles a couple of USian hero-fantasy neuroses - i.e. guns and 3D printing and fluffs them up with a large side order of techno-evangelism.

The fact that it's bollocks in any practical sense doesn't make any difference, because fake hero-bollocks from some imaginary bleeding edge is pretty much the definition of neurotic techno-evangelism.

If you want to bring down the gubmint and kill a good few people, you're not going to do it with a toy pellet shooter made out of [cheap plastic and/or starch].

You could certainly do it with other kinds of technology, but competence always loses to rhetoric with these topics. (Which is a good thing considering the damage a political movement could do if it had a clue about real science and was populated by people smart enough to use it.)

Re: Fear of Buttons?

"BEHIND YOU!!!"

Etc.

Re: At last

Er - are you quoting the Torygraph? Because if so, the stats are probably made up.

Even if they aren't, in controlled scientific tests astrologers and tarot readers consistently outperform the predictive abilities of bankers and economists - although they still don't as well as picking stocks at random.

Our economies are run by dangerous self-destructive morons. If they were run by sane people, there would be a lot more cash around for useful science, and invention, and bigger experiments, and that kind of thing.

It would also help if all the clever people concentrated on science instead of wasting their time as quants.

Re: That horse is dead.

Exactly.

Honestly, who gives a crap any more? Whatever the next big thing is going to be, we know MS are going to:

1. Suddenly realise they're years behind everyone else.

2. Release something stupid with obvious problems that no one wants.

3. PR avalanche - in a 'piles of dead bodies on the piste' kind of a way.

4. GOTO 1.

Watching MS trying to do 21st century IT is like watching marmosets trying to do tensor calculus with an old banana and a boiled egg.

Re: Irfanview?

No, they don't. Corel is where old software goes to die after being mauled by marketing morons. By the time they've added all the 'features' they want, you're left with something ten times the size of the original which does half as much and is horrific to use.

Sadly, there is no realistic competition to CS for professional users. It would be really, really good if competition existed, but taken as a whole, nothing comes close to CS - for now, anyway.

Considering the development cost, it probably never will. It's more likely CS will simply become irrelevant as other design techniques become popular. CS is basically still about editing for print. As code becomes more prominent, it will have less to offer.

But I'm not expecting that to start happening for at least five years, and more likely ten.

Re: The problem with older devs

Manudjment is usually a problem without a solution.

The best track for manudjment is over a cliff on their own, before they take everyone else with them.

How many managers have the same competence in manudjment that a mediocre rookie dev has in code? 20% or less?

Re: Proof

How about putting Congress under scientific oversight?

All economic decisions have to be modelled for outcomes, and the modelling has to be peer reviewed by people who know what they're doing. (I.e. not most politicians or academic economists.)

Re: Ominous...

Probably not, because you'd have to prove the metadata was being stripped knowingly with a view to commercial benefit, and not because of some technical reason - such as the fact that it's a bit of extra work to put metadata back into images after you (e.g.) resize them.

And you could make a case that even if the metadata was being stripped deliberately - well, so what? It's not actually illegal if the owner has given you usage rights by agreeing to your T&Cs.

None of this is good or moral, and - as an occasional semi-pro photog - I certainly find it offensive personally.

But clearly the answer isn't to argue the toss legally - it's to make sure that no one ever votes the wankers in again.

Re: Why?

Telly, shmelly.

Try 4K games machine.

With four in a square, you'd have a nice industrial VR rig.

Re: 30th anniversary of every man and his dog releasing a Spectrum-basher

But the interesting point is that *the UK had a consumer computer industry.*

The machines were designed and (usually) built in the UK, by British talent.

With the possible exception of the RaspPI, kind of, and a few app developers, there's no equivalent British consumer tech today.

Admittedly the sector turned into a classic bubble - first in, first out, blood on the dance floor.

But it's pretty much unthinkable now that we could field a market-leading British mobe, tablet, games console, 3D printer, laser cutter, toy robot. etc, etc.

What went wrong?

Re: Less is More

I'd pay money for a system with a UI for labelling the radio with buttons I can understand.

Re: No

So you get out for a piss half way up a mountain road with next to no mobile bandwidth, and the car finally lets you restart the ignition four hours later when the update finally downloads and installs.

Only it doesn't, because you've frozen to death.

On the up side, at least you'll be able to play Angry Birds while doing 80mph in the fast lane when someone roots this new toy and removes all the safeties.

So... possibly one or two teething troubles to be concerned about.

Re: $224,000??

Playing with a spreadsheet and cackling, at a guess.

Re: Where's the justice here?

Not many people understand that for most lawyers and judges, 'justice' is a procedural concept, not a moral one.

This surprised me when I found out, but according to people familiar with the matter that's how most of the profession sees it.

Re: Office 365's licensing model

Not yet. But who - outside Redmond - can't see that there's going to be a stampede towards Open/Linux/Etc on the desktop, with a good few exiles heading for the spotless radiant unicorn-arse uplands of Planet Apple?

Or at best, IT managers with desktops to IT manage are going to hang on to Win 7 until it has to be prised out of their cold dead hands with a crowbar, vaseline and WD40.

Re: Win8/Office365 driving customers away fromMicrosoft.

>Some people struggle with change and learning new things though.

Most of them seem to be in Microsoft management.

Re: lack of innovation

It's not just lack of innovation - it's negative innovation. (Is there a proper word for that?)

Final Cut Pro - once an industry leader, now a toy that sent former fans scurrying back to Adobe.

OS X Server - likewise. And supporting hardware was killed. (I don't think the Mac Mini counts, for non-toy users.)

iPhoto - features keep disappearing or being moved.

MobileMe - all your websites gooooone.

iCloud - the only cloud with data you can't share with friends and family.

Maps - dear god... To be fair it's getting better, but it's still way behind Google or even Nokia.

Apple TV - lolwut?

Mac Pro - not refreshed for a long time, and no longer available in the UK Mac Store.

So billing a thinner iPhone or a smaller iPad as the Best Innovation Evah - while Samsung run ahead with the S series - is the least of Apple's failures.

Apple in the 2000s produced a steady stream of consumer game changers - iTunes, podcasts, iPod, iPhone, app store, Macbook Air, iPad (just), and respected pro-grade software. So the current state of play is a sorry picture.

Re: I'm patenting the clenched fist

> aggressively patenting all sorts of gestures

But probably not this one.

Re: Beam me up, Scotty

Don't panic - it's just spin.

Re: To be fair...

No, to be fair you'd have to include the following quote from Steig, which is included in the original but inexplicably didn't make it here:

"The same is not true for the Antarctic Peninsula, the part of the continent closer to South America, where rapid ice loss has been even more dramatic and where the changes are almost certainly a result of human-caused warming, Steig said."

In other words this 'article' is just lies, lies, lies, steaming lies, lies en croute, lies in a blanket, lies on toast, lies with a side order of spam, spam and lies, lies in space, and lies a la mode from El Reg.

As usual.

Re: "resurrecting a dinosaur is out of the question"

And that's quite enough of the politics. [shudder]

"Frankly it doesn't matter even if it took 10 minutes to destroy a target, it simply cannot be evaded through rapid motion."

True enough for a single target. What about the other few hundred, skimming along a few feet above wave level?

Re: Respect !!

Instead we have

Thieving, lying, criminal bankers. Why are people still wittering on about unions when bankers have done so much more economic damage?

Rupert Murdoch in charge of policy. (Who voted for him?)

The monopolies and inefficiencies of giant corporates. (Tech support and competition? We've heard of them.)

And so on.

The list isn't endless, it just feels like it is.

And worst of all is that she did the opposite of everything she preached. She 'cured' unemployment by causing more of it, she turned right-to-buy into you-can't-afford-a-house-on-£30kpa, and she killed what limited social mobility the UK had clawed out of the pre-war establishment by the 70s.

Today, thanks to her, most people will be in the same class as their parents, and almost certainly earning less in real terms with lower job security - no matter how hard they work.

Fail. That is all.

Re: Some context ...

Physicists choose (b) because there's no experimental evidence for (a), and plenty of reason (e.g. Bell's inequality) for believing that hidden variable theories don't make sense. (The Bohm-ists have never been able to produce a complete theory that can be tested.)

In (b), there are no 'particles' in any classical sense - there are only probability distributions. Ultimately QM isn't about little bits slapping into other bits, it's about event probabilities.

In fact I suspect there's nothing but probability going on, and reality is just a fog of probability densities which look as solid as clouds do when you fly over them, but have no more substance.

If stop expecting QM to talk about physical things and start thinking about event possibilities, it stops being quite so weird.

Re: So umm.. Who decided to lend the money?

Well - the Gospel According to Worstall is that the City and its leather-faced troll minions never make mistakes, and are never wrong about anything.

So there was no fixing of LIBOR. No mis-selling of PPI. No creative reporting of capital reserves. Enron never happened - and if it did, it should be blamed on widows and orphans. Or SMEs, uncannily often run by people who have now lost their homes after remortgaging them as security.

Or something.

So if they did dodgy lending. it was the fault of the people who borrowed, not the people who lent - the old 'It's all the fault of people living beyond their means' bollocks. And nothing to do with the fact that income has been dropping steadily for most of the population as a percentage of GDP since the 80s, while inflation and unemployment have been raised deliberately - and immigrants imported - to keep pay down.

Bottom line is that dodgy lending is actually quite profitable in the short term. It blows up in the long term, but you'll have pocketed your bonus money by then, and you can always rely on someone like Worstall to come along with the party line about how it's not your fault, oh boo hoo.

Meanwhile, how about a share of that dodgy 32 trillion in offshore accounts? Let's not ask how that got there, shall we?

Politics of envy, old chap. Couldn't possibly be more to it than that.

Hey it's...

In the eventually irrelevant litigation stakes, this is turning into MS vs DOJ 2.0 from 1998 (or whenever the hell it was.)

Re: @ M Gale

'A bad worker blames his tools'

And that's why brain surgeons use chopsticks.

Re: Misplaced admiration

Jobs did marketing and branding. He was one of those very rare marketing people who really did have a feel for what the public would consider cool, and who understood that punters don't want hardware or software, they want a wanky thing that could be called the Total Ownership Experience.

So he set about creating that at Apple, then Next, then Apple again, with everything from the initial product announcement to the physical stores to the packaging to the advertising to the design to the technology carefully crafted to sell, sell, sell, and keep selling.

He didn't need to code. He needed enough technical skill to hire good engineers and give them goals and targets.

But engineering was just a small part of market design to him. It wasn't the main event.

He sounds like a nightmare in person. But I think it's unfair to day he did nothing at Apple or Next.

Re: Isn't that like...

More like "Although our ads contain only Prime Fact Fillet packed full of meaty tech goodness, they may also contain traces of distilled bullshit and moral decrepitude."

Re: There's no need for press regulation per se

Well - the upper piles of the British press are full of noisy little shits like Littlejohn, who bully the weak for profit.

And let's not get started on some the riper things that have happened elsewhere in press land.

As for 'freedom' - duh. What freedom do poor people have when someone like Littlejohn picks on them? Or when someone like Murdoch decides who's going to be the next PM?

The current situation is already as Orwellian as it gets.

Instead of telescreens, we have phone hacking, GCHQ, Facebook and Google.

Instead of Two Minutes Hate we have pitiful self-righteous 'crusades' against so-called scroungers and immigrants.

Instead of MiniTrue we have Campbell and Mandelson and Hutton, and Coulsoun doing PR for Dave from Marketing.

Freedom, you say? Really, citizen?

Re: Needs to be housewife proof

You could probably have that kind of thing installed as an add-on module, if you really want it.

Re: The ability-

There's bound to be an automated Assibo ass-wiper somewhere on a Japanese drawing board even as we type.

Then again - why not? A lot of people want home help, and robot aid would be an excellent thing for the infirm and bedridden.

Ass-wiping, cleaning, shopping, and chatting 'bots are the beginnings of the next tech boom, which should be happening in (checks watch...) about 10 years for the expensive early adopters and 15 years for the consumer market.

(Just don't give the robots access to the planet's defence grid. Duh.)

Re: Don't blame Apple for the price drop

""from just shy of $800"

Think the high was actually $702 - not sure that is really 'just shy' ??"

That's what happens when you hire quants. (...Spelling that last word very, very carefully.)