Posts by Al Jones

Built in camera might be a good selling point

A webcam seems like the most obvious accessory that you'd want with an internet connected TV, so it's typical of the shortsighted approach of all the other major TV manufacturers that you can't have one at a reasonable price - $150 for the Logitech TV Cam isn't exactly an appealing option for something that you might only use occasionally. Building a camera into the TV might help people convince themselves that they need this TV, even if they end up never using that feature.

The price is high, but not outrageous for the label conscious, and they'll have no problem selling enough at that price for the media to gush about how Apple is redefining the TV.

duty to the Court

If a barrister has "an overriding duty to the Court to act with independence in the interests of justice", can he also have a duty to defend his client?

Define Success

If Apple sells 100,000 TVs, the media will hail it as ground breaking success that will change TV watching as we know it.

If exactly the same TVs, with exactly the same technology, were released by any other company, they'd only be covered in the specialist AV press and they'd have almost zero impact on the man in the street.

Apples power to influence our world is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy - the same products, released by somebody else, won't have the same impact.

Power Hungry?

The EnergyGuide labels on TVs in the US show costs of ~$15-$20/year for a 47" screen, running 5 hours a day. Even if the calculation is based on an unrealistic 11c/kWh, you can't sell a $1000 screen on the basis that it'll save you $10 a year in electricity

Anyone used the multi-user video chats?

That's the only thing in g+ that might make me sign in, but even that hasn't been sufficiently compelling for me to try it out yet.

VOD functionality probably more likely to be actually used

Video on Demand clients, like the iPlayer in Britain and Verizon's recently announced XBox Live service in the US are probably much more likely to be used on consoles than full on DVR functionality. (Except for the fact that Microsoft won't allow the iPlayer on the XBox, because they don't want any any useful add-ons to be available unless the end user pays for a subscription).

Did RIM fire all the people who could code?

I've been pretty satisfied using a BES connected Blackberry for years now, so I've never needed to install the Blackberry Desktop software, but about 6 months ago I tried to install it to transfer settings when I got an upgraded handset. Every time I try to use it, it grabs 100% of one CPU core and locks up. A search on the web indicates that this is a very common problem, but nobody has a reliable solution. I installed the software on another desktop and it worked OK, so there's some sort of a conflict, but the Blackberry software doesn't give any indication, it just locks up.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I got a call from someone who has a BIS connected Blackberry, who needs to use Desktop Manager to sync contacts and Calendar. But the Sync fails with a complex error message. After tip-toeing around this thing for a couple of hours (I didn't want to break the guys e-mail setup), I found a post that explains that a contact that has an address in the e-mail2 field, but a blank e-mail1 field will cause contact sync to fail. Sure enough, we find and fix a contact with exactly that problem, and the synchronization goes a bit further. More searching turns up an explanation of how to modify a .ini file to turn on verbose logging, and then scrolling to the end of the 11MB log file (about 40K per contact), deleted the last contact listed in the log file, and now sync completes OK.

Seriously - instead of saying "Can't synchronize John Q Smith - corrupt e-mail address", it says "Sync failed". It knows which contact it was working on when it encountered a problem. It knows why it couldn't synchronize that contact. It just refuses to tell the end-user that information until they edit a hidden setting file in a hidden directory.

3D in a PDF document

FFS, is it any wonder the thing has bugs!

Why not just make a version that doesn't include this "optional" crap that a tiny, tiny number of customers are even equipped to use. In the long run, Adobe would be doing themselves a favour if they provided a "Reader Lite" version that supported 99.9% of the real world PDF documents, and let the people who need Universal 3D support install the "full fat" version with all the bells and whistles.

Price

Price will be the major factor in whether Win8 succeeds on tablets. If Win8 tablets are priced in the iPad range, they probably won't sell - if you're going to spend $500-$600, you might as well go for the "safe" option. At $250-$300, they'll have to offer some significant advantages over Android tablets.

Homegroup integration with smooth virtual application presentation from the existing Win7 machines that most people already have, that "just works" at the level of technical knowledge that most users have, but Microsoft would have to do a much better job of communicating that functionality to potential customers than they usually do.

pwnload.com

'nuff said.

What's up?

An article that mentions Microsoft and Open Source in the same headline, and nobody has commented on it after 8 hours?

(Or has the moderator just filtered out the typical, and utterly predictable, anti-Microsoft spew from people who either haven't actually read the article, or haven't understood it because it doesn't conform to their biases? Pity they couldn't moderate out the bias in the article itself, but then it wouldn't be El Reg, would it?)

FFS

Get over yourselves - it's an updated version of a QR code on a Charity poster. You don't complain that Oxfam is dystopian because they put up posters in Tube stations, rather than importing real live starving babies from Africa when they do a famine appeal, do you?

Charities are already soliciting donations by SMS short code, (even though the service provider will take between 30% and 70% of the donation) because there's an audience that will make an immediate donation that way, but will never get around to signing up for a pledge any other way.

There's nothing particularly dystopian about the example in the Microsoft demo - it's an example of how mobile technology allows a user to react at the point of solicitation, rather than wait until later when they may have forgotten or been distracted. Whether having an "interactive" poster will actually make passers-by more or less likely to donate is something that we won't know until the technology is more commonplace.

259 million POPs?

Huh? Where they hell are they finding 250 million of them?

US Cable-Cos now required to support customer installed cable-cards

Up until recently, most cable companies in the US required a technician visit to install a cable-card, and the charge for that service could be $50-$100, plus time off work while you waited for the technician to turn up.

Earlier this year, the FCC ruled that cable cards had to be supported in exactly the same way as the cable-companies own DVRs - if the customer could pick up a DVR at the store and install it themselves, the company had to allow the customer to pick up the cable card themselves, and call in whatever activation numbers were required to get it working.

This has been a boon for the hobbyist who wants to use the Ceton InfiniTV or SiliconDusts HDHomerun Prime, cable-card receivers with 3 or 4 tuners, but it must also make it easier for Tivo who had been calling for this change for years.

"Groupthink takes over, and evidence to the contrary is shunned"

An excellent description of the deniers.

You're really out-doing yourself today, Andrew.

complete with very preachy appeals

Talk about the Pot calling Kettle black.

Price pressure

“The unfortunate thing is that price pressure means you're going to [build meters] with chips that cost about a half cent,”

Given that the meter is useless until you spend $50 in labor to install the thing, there's a definite asymmetry to building it weak just to save $0.005.

Most americans don't OWN DVRs

They rent them from their cable companies.

That's a big difference, because a DVR "only" adds $10-$15 onto your monthly cable/broadband/phone bill of $130-$150 (yes, Americans really do pay that much).

That just indicates that price is still an issue with tablets.

I wasn't even aware of this project until I read the article

So perhaps it's not surprising that it wasn't "successful". I mentioned it to my brother-in-law who has an interest in genealogy, and he found issues of a local paper that stopped publishing in 1871.

That's part of the problem with this particular type of content. The number of people who would pay for access is relatively tiny, whereas the larger number who might find it interesting occasionally probably won't visit quite often enough to generate advertising eyeballs.