Posts by Sean Timarco Baggaley 1038 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2009
"Hardware limitations - at least in the first iPad, the performance of rendering text was actually slower than for graphics, so people just converted text to graphics."
What the...? The web browser seems to render text just fine, and that's just HTML in WebKit. I can read ePub and PDF files without any problems too.
I have an original iPad, not an iPad 2 or iPad v3. I also have a subscription to Popular Science magazine. Said magazine crashes with such annoying frequency that I haven't bothered reading any issues for a couple of months now. That's Adobe's damned fault, not Apple's. Text may render a little slower than graphics, but it's not as if you're animating it.
Good bloody god, Adobe, you used to be [i]good[/i] at this this. What the hell happened?
As for the fonts issue mentioned elsewhere: pay the damned license, you tightwads! If you're too tight to do that, I have to wonder what you're paying your writers. If it's peanuts, that means you're selling us the ravings of monkeys. (Which would explain the contents of many publications.)
Buy subscriptions to a couple of font foundries, so it's a fixed sum. Tell your artists that those are the only sources they can use for fonts. This guarantees the foundries will produce more fonts for you to use, as well as ensuring this unloved, unsung work actually gets the remuneration and recognition it deserves.
(All this is ironic given that one of the few college courses the late Steve Jobs did attend was on typography.)
Er, Apple aren't maintaining Java for OS X on their own. As your own article states, Oracle are involved in this release too.
Apple are no more interested in keeping Java limping along than they are in supporting Flash on iOS. Both are obsolete technologies that have lasted well beyond their Use By date.
Different reporters have different views on the topic. The Register itself is (or tries to be) neutral.
Don't equate Andrew Orlowski or Lewis Page with the entity that is known as "The Register". They are not the same thing.
Interesting article though. My personal stance boils down to "insufficient data" as the media fog has not yet thinned sufficiently for me to make a decision. (I'd get a Ph.D. in the topic myself, but time—like life—is short. The news media's job should be to inform and educate, but they've lost the trust of many, including myself. A surfeit of circuses, but insufficient bread.)
"Game of thrones features some walking undead, a couple of eggs that hatch eventually, and a whole lot of men. Not an elf, orc, troll or dwarf in sight, other than normal human mutant Tyrion."
Whatever. I watched the first 10 minutes. I thought it sucked. At that point, my interest and commitment to researching this series ended; I see no point in debating the exact details of its fantasy universe; I know it's got dragons, it's magic, and the clichéd Medieval Costume Drama setting. That it's swapped orcs for some zombies is hardly anything to get excited about. Tolkien's Orcs were much the same thing anyway.
As for the trolls: referring to that tired old codswallop as the best tele-fantasy ever is trolling. Especially as it is well known that "The Clangers" > *. There's more charm, character, wit and—above all—originality in the first 10 minutes of that low-budget children's TV animation than I saw in the first ten minutes of "Game of Thrones".
"you may have missed the part where they had to avoid going through the *very large open gap in the hills* where the main trade route went on the grounds that the big enemy army held the fortress in the middle of it. You may have seen the battle in the second film with the Ents recapturing it, it was fairly prominent."
Riiiight. Because, of course, mountain ranges only have one end, going on forever and ever in the other direction. And going around the other way therefore wasn't an option, despite—you know—having access to horses. And elves. And Gandalf's flying friends. (You know: the ones who rescued him from Saruman, and the two Hobbits from the side of an exploding volcano at the very last minute like some wingéd Deus ex Machina.)
Or did the mighty Gandalf the Chromatically Challenged not consider any of those options?
Granted, the guy's only a 2000-year-old wizard. Maybe he had dementia.
This.
I tried to watch the first episode, but got bored and switched off after 10 minutes.
This was unoriginal Tokienian rubbish. If this is the best George "Ronald Ruel" Martin can do, I'll pass, thanks. If I want to watch a bunch of Shakespearean thespians chewing the scenery like an overacting Doctor Who villain, I can always watch Doctor Who.
Why in the name of buggeration do so many people equate "fantasy" with "orcs, elves, dwarfs, trolls, dragons, etc."? It reveals a distressing lack of imagination—not least because the very first recognised English novel* was not only a fantasy, but was also rather more original. It's bad enough that readers do this, but the sheer number of writers cranking out these undisguised rip-offs of Tolkien is astonishing. (And it's even worse in the games industry, where every feckless twit seems to want to make an MMORPG with the same damned list of highly unoriginal tropes.)
Tolkien wasn't as good a writer as his hagiographers make him out to be. He was an academic at heart, and it shows in his writing style. Pacing is all over the place. The plot—such as it is—wanders wildly. The protagonists don't act, but react to events that just happen to them. Gandalf is killed and resurrected for no adequately explored reason**. And, worst of all, his characters all sound very similar; he clearly didn't have the same ear for dialogue as many of his peers, like Wodehouse or Christie.
Meh. Wake me up when HBO spends their money on something a bit more original than a western, a cop show, or a Tolkienesque fantasy novel.
* "Gulliver's Travels", by Jonathan Swift. Terry Pratchett is arguably the closest modern equivalent, using his fantasy settings to send up Tolkien and society itself. Pratchett's earlier novels are very much straight parodies, but his later novels have cranked the satire lever all the way up to 12. And Swift was a lot more original about it too.
** The only way to get to their destination was to go through a dangerous disused underground citadel, full of nasty creatures? Presumably no trading was ever done between the two regions on either side of this mountain range.
Go cry me a river. Do you think moviemakers get annoyed when a rival releases a very similar movie just days before your own is about to hit the cinemas?
Software is already protected by Copyright. Software patents serve no logical purpose other than to make lawyers fatter. In case you hadn't noticed, the EU doesn't recognise software patents, and for good reason. Strangely enough, the software development industry over here has failed utterly to implode as a result of this policy.
If it's algorithms you wish to protect, I have to ask: Why? From a programming perspective, an algorithm is merely "an idea". Everyone can have ideas; you can only copyright an execution of that idea. Why do you consider it fair to prevent any other companies doing R&D in the same field from benefiting from their work? If you're that reliant on R&D alone, you're doing it wrong.
Apple didn't invent the tablet form-factor or the basic concept of a smart phone, yet they're creaming most of the available profits in both those markets. Why? Because Apple sweated the user experience—all those fiddly little details most programmers look down their nose at as being beneath them. ("Real men use a command-line!") And which most of Apple's competitors still—despite the mind-boggling amount of ignorance this demonstrates—don't appear to have grasped either.
Details matter. Implementation matters. Execution matters. An idea is only ever as good as its implementation.
The purpose of patents and copyrights is to provide limited monopolies. A full-blown monopoly is dangerous. It kills the business sector, razing competitors to the ground, despite the merits (or otherwise) of their offerings, leaving it a desolate, barren desert of a market, with no choice at all.
Technology moves so quickly, it's idiotic to waste time buggering around with the slow purgatory of patent lawyers and the USPTO. By the time a mere software algorithm has been formally filed, accepted, challenged, defended in a courtroom, then lost through a prior art demonstration, the market will have moved on. Meanwhile, the lawyers (and USPTO) will have all been paid their fat fees and commissions.
Software patents do not exist for the benefit of businesses. They exist solely for the benefit of lawyers. They are an obstacle to business.
"but this is the Olympics, it's two weeks every four years"
So, just like the Winter Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, and plenty of other glorified sports days. What makes these Olympics so bloody special?
That it's being paid for by British taxpayers this time around is just a smack in the gob in addition to the knee in the unmentionables. I wouldn't mind the Olympics if its own damned fans would bloody well pay for it too, instead of demanding it be paid for by people who are already having trouble making ends meet and who have precisely zero interest in watching a bunch of goons running in circles around a field, throwing spears, and jumping into sandpits in order to beat some high scores.
Also, it's not just "two weeks". It's FOUR weeks. Or have you conveniently forgotten the Paralympics?
That's a whole damned month of even worse public transport than usual. And Zil lanes. And Boris "Bloody Stupid" Johnson mugging at the cameras and claiming all the credit. (And probably screwing up the opening and closing ceremonies too.)
Even the so-called "Olympic legacy" is a farce. There's no reason whatsoever why that bit of Stratford couldn't have been regenerated without the mammoth additional expense of running a major world sporting event there first. It's an idiotic argument to claim that it would never have happened otherwise: yes it bleeding well would. Maybe not right now, but eventually.
The 2004 Olympics damned near bankrupted Greece. I, for one, hope the IOC collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy and corruption before the next one. It'll do the entire planet a favour.
"Just go on holiday if you're really that bothered by it."
So, people who don't agree with you should f*ck off out of the country for a month? Nice.
RTFA. Apple have been offering non-glossy displays for their laptops for years.
As Apple sells a lot more laptops than desktops, it's hardly a big shock that they've not bothered trying to confuse their smaller desktop market with yet more SKUs than they already offer. People who want fancy monitors can always buy a second display tailored to their exact needs. (Or they could always just buy a Mac mini or Mac Pro instead, depending on their requirements. iMacs are specifically aimed at consumers, not professionals.)
If Apple are going ahead with their "retina display" push to all their hardware, it makes more sense to specify an anti-glare coating option at the same time, given that it would require some changes to the panel manufacturing process anyway. So it makes sense to introduce it with a new model. Always assuming this is more than mere rumour and speculation. Which it probably isn't.
@Pete 2: If you're using your own device for work, its purchase could well be tax deductible.
I agree with your sentiment on the one hand. On the other hand, IT admins tend to have a "one size fits all" attitude towards employee equipment: everyone gets the same Dell kit, regardless of whether they're a graphic designer working for Marketing, or a spreadsheet wrangler down the corridor in Accounting.
This same attitude is why so many employees have been saddled with ageing BlackBerry devices. It's what the IT folks like, because it makes _their_ lives easier, as opposed to making the rest of the company's employees lives easier. Naturally, the IT Admin team's requirements trump those over every bugger else. (And then they wonder why everybody else treats them so badly.)
"Still, people only committing suicide at lower the rates. What kind of moron would use that sorry excuse as a valid reason for treating people like shit."
The much-publicised suicide incident was at a factory making stuff for Microsoft. (You've heard of the XBox360 games console, I assume? Guess which well-known Chinese manufacturer makes them! That's right: Foxconn!)
Apple do not own Foxconn. Foxconn's employees are the sole responsibility of Foxconn and Foxconn alone. If you don't like China's labour laws (and their minimal enforcement), complain to the Chinese government.
As has been repeatedly pointed out: Chinese workers are queuing up to work for Foxconn, because they're offering better deals than any of their competitors. And there are lots of competitors.
If people really gave a gnat's chuff about Chinese workers, why are so many of them STILL buying stuff that's stamped "Made in China"? Foxconn also make stuff for Dell, Nokia, HTC and many, many others. Apple aren't even their biggest customer by volume; they're just their most famous customer.
@Kyoraki:
"permanent damage caused to what's probably the greatest film triogy of all time."
Seriously? The first film was originally only intended as a homage to those old 1940s-era "Republic" serials. And it shows: The sequels changed the central love triangle of the first movie into incest.
And let's not get started on that first movie's slavish adherence to the Vogler's "Writer's Journey" structure. You can literally tick off each element in the exact same order they're covered in the book! This is despite Vogler's explicit instructions not to treat his distillation of Joseph Campbell's books on mythology as a simplistic "formula". Way to go, Mr. Lucas.
Furthermore, two of the three films have the same damned plot: "The Empire has a Death Star! We MUST destroy it!" Never mind the sheer expense and logistics of building two such mammoth artificial planets within the same characters' lifetimes, but why the f*ck would you not at least ensure the Mk. II Death Star you've just spunked trillions on constructing lacks a convenient weakness the rebels can exploit once again? I don't care if it's still under construction: your enemy is clearly nowhere near your level in terms of equipment, so sufficient protection for the work site should be trivial.
And Yoda was over 800 years old, had mastered The Force, and risen to the top of the Jedi hierarchy, yet he *still* couldn't speak the most common language properly? What the hell? It's no less grating than Jar Jar's speech difficulties, but at least the latter's actually made sense given the character's background.
Greatest film trilogy "of all time"? Please! It's been hyped out of all proportion to its merits and George Lucas has been coasting ever since. Not that he ever rose to any great heights to begin with: his two most successful film franchises were both "homages" to old "Republic" serials. Originality clearly wasn't his strong point.
And, yes, I did go to see the first movie as a kid in the late '70s. It was a good kid's movie, but that's all it ever was. It certainly hasn't deserved all the praise people have been piling upon it ever since.
/rant
Didn't ANY of you bother reading the article?
The ITU defines the various "G" states by speed, not by technology. As long as the operator can squirt data to your phone at the speeds defined as "4G" (which are NOT set at "100Mbs mobile / 1Gbs static" any more, please note) it CAN be called "4G". Yes, this includes some HSPA+ variants. The ITU changed its mind on what "4G" means. Deal with it.
And, yes, the new iPad can connect to those faster HSPA variants, so yes, it IS fucking 4G-capable, as defined by the ITU!
As defined by the ITU, 4G does NOT require LTE.
"Personally I think that Apple's use of the 4G moniker is likely to backfire. Apple are aware that the 4G unit will ONLY work on Verizon in the USA and a few networks in Canada (even then, I believe that you have to use one of their SIMs, ie not via roaming)."
It'll work with AT&T's flavour of LTE too. In fact, the US is (unusually) ahead of much of the rest of the world with LTE rollout. You cannot blame Apple for that. LTE has been such a cock-up, it's unlikely to ever be much cop for roaming until someone designs a fully tuneable LTE + GSM + 2G transceiver chip suitable for mobile devices. I don't expect anything like that appearing before the iPad 4, and even that is pushing it.
Nevertheless, the new iPad does have built-in LTE support where available. Apple aren't responsible for the EU's sluggish adoption of LTE, nor for the fact that 4G is currently only available in North America and parts of the Middle East. (I've heard reliable reports that Dubai has adopted the same LTE frequencies as the US carriers, so yes, the new iPad's LTE features do work there as well.)
LTE is generally accepted as a "4G" technology worldwide. (Note that there is no standard for what "4G" actually means. It used to refer to systems capable of higher speeds than current LTE installations, but this requirement has long since been dropped.)
"The debate is about whether the changes are natural, or due to human activity."
You state this like it's an either / or question with a simple digital answer: "Nature did it" or "Man did it".
The most likely answer is that it's going to be a bit of both.
However, if Climate Change is mostly natural—and, given the past few million years' worth of evidence, that would seem to be the most likely—I'd like to ask another question: "Should we do anything about it?"
If we interfere with what is primarily a natural process, we would, by definition, turn it into an unnatural process. From that point on, the responsibility for the entire climate of this planet rests on our shoulders as we might divert it too far from its natural course for it to return there on its own without serious consequences during the transitional phase.
I have no quarrel with reducing our species' footprint on this planet wherever possible—pollution isn't exactly fun to breathe, but it is also an indicator of inefficiency in a process. Good businesses generally abhor process inefficiencies and try to keep them to a minimum, so a focus on these aspects makes far more sense than the endless cries of "Wolf!" (Note: probably NSFW).
We don't need these extreme exhortations to get things done. It's incredibly patronising and wins you no friends.
I have poor vision: both strong astigmatism and myopia.
I have never walked into a glass door, window, or anything else. There are these things called "glasses". You might want to try some. They're awfully good. (I still stub my toe against low furniture on occasion as I need different glasses for close vision and distance vision and don't usually wear the latter pair indoors. Even so, it's pretty easy to remember where stuff is and avoid hitting it again next time.)
If your vision is so badly impaired that not even glasses can help you function in the outside world, I suggest you invest in a white cane and / or a guide dog. Either that, or find a better optician.
"Anyone else remember having to drag the CD icon to the Wastebin icon in order to eject a CD? And there being NO other way of doing so should the computer fail?"
Er, no. Apple's optical drives had small holes you could poke a (straightened) safety pin—or something of similar size and shape—through to open a stuck drive. You may not have noticed, but the exact same holes could be found on PC optical drives too as a backup for the usual eject buttons. Optical drives are an unusual example of a "soft-eject" design on a standard PC component.
Whenever possible, Apple will always opt for a software eject mechanism for all external storage media, including floppy disks, so that the user is never, ever, faced with a "WTF? I was WRITING to that medium, you idiot! PUT IT BACK!" -type error message. You know: the same message you get when your parent yanks out a USB flash drive or memory card without first 'ejecting' it in the OS first. This is, incidentally, why the iPhone and iPad are unlikely to ever include support for removable storage like SD Cards: a motorised software-controlled SD Card ejection mechanism would simply take up too much space.
*
As for the case of "83-year-old chancer Vs. Glass door": this store has been on that site for some years now. It's also in New York, a city in a nation not known for its excellent, clear, street design, let alone shop fronts. (Seriously: I've been to a couple of US cities and both looked like they were vomited out of a planning office on a Friday afternoon. You couldn't have made San Francisco look visually messier if you tried.)
Apple are hardly the only company to have ever used all-glass frontages. This is not "design over function". Applying force to a glass door will open it, just like any other door. If the door fails to move, you're supposed to stop pushing. Not simply hurl your entire body at it. Most people these days know how doors work. Especially 83-year-old people who must have visited many, many shops in their lifetimes.
Here in Italy, at the Apple Store in Rome's RomaEst shopping centre, not only is the frontage all glass, but there aren't even any stickers or notices on them. They're still not that hard to spot. Even the clearest, glare-free-est of glass frontages has some reflections that will give you the visual cues you need. And there's also the small matter of the gaps between each pane. Both elements are clearly visible even in your linked photograph.
Ergo, the woman was either an imbecile, or she is blind / vision-impaired. Neither is Apple's problem. I have lousy eyesight, but that just means I have to spend money on glasses. What I don't get to do is demand the world bows to my (minor) disability: I'm in a minority here. It's my responsibility to ensure I am capable of interfacing with the real world. It is not the rest of the world's responsibility to ensure it is capable of interfacing with me. That way, only madness lies.
What Red Bren said.
I live in a small apartment in an Italian village; the gas option is actually more expensive as it's priced on the assumption that most demand will be for families and businesses. Small apartments in cheaply-converted 400-year-old structures aren't really worth the faff of digging up the cobbled streets for.
So I have a 40 litre electric heater—essentially a kettle nailed to my bathroom wall. This is plugged into a €7 timer bought from a local supermarket, which, in turn, plugs into a standard 16A socket. It's set to switch on in the morning and evenings for 30 min. each, with a 15 min. 'top-up' around 1300 hrs. as otherwise I tend to run out of hot water for the washing-up.
This is in a country that imports almost all its energy supplies—fossil fuels included—as it lacks natural reserves for production of same. Italy gets about 70% or so of its electricity from the French and the Swiss. (Ironically, almost every village around here proudly announces its "nuclear-free" status on their boundary signs.)
And, yes, that "cellphone masts = CANCER!" bullshit appears to be here too, albeit only in the smaller, more isolated, areas. There are quite a few dead spots as a result. None of the morons responsible for that appear to understand how cellphone technology works: the further apart your masts are, the more power your phone needs to use to reach them, thus negating their entire argument: by refusing permission to build more masts, they're exposing themselves to more RF energy, not less.
Ignorance seems to be easy to find in the countryside, where techniques for working the land haven't really changed all that much in generations. The horses have been replaced by large, noisy machines, but these machines are performing functions any farmer can recognise; the only thing that's changed is power source, which used to be organic, but now has the name Ferrari* stamped on its sides. It's that newfangled "electricity" stuff they're still struggling with.
* (A pretty common name in Italy, so yes, there is such a thing as a cheap Ferrari, as long as you don't mind it having a large, noisy, diesel engine, no doors or roof, and a top speed of roughly 30 mph. In green.)
Took itself far too seriously.
The Asterix translations by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge were top-notch—it's very difficult to translate humour at the best of times and they really went that extra mile to nail the spirit of the original French. (In one interview, Uderzo even goes so far as to admit that some of the character names Bell and Hockridge came up with were better than the originals, which were usually puns that rarely had anything to do with the characters.)
There's no contest, really. Tintin is just a straightforward "Boys Own Adventure"-type serial, with Tintin a very obvious precursor to the "Indiana Jones" character that Harrison Ford would make famous some decades later. Except it's very po-faced. There's a little humour, but mostly, it's played very straight.
Asterix, on the other hand, is parodic and satirical in nature. It is, to the comic medium, what Terry Pratchett has become in the world of fantasy novels. Unlike Tintin, which has dated badly, the Asterix stories have remained timeless. They're as funny today as they were when they were first published.
Asterix > Tintin. The end. Cue the traditional banquet under the stars, with Cacofonix tied to a tree in the foreground.
Unfortunately, if you read about the project, you'll discover that most of the script was written by... Douglas Adams himself. (Yes, even the "Humma Kavula" scenes, and those 'spade-in-the-face' visual gags on Vogsphere. Douglas Adams himself really did write those.)
I rather liked it myself. It's far from perfect, and relies heavily on a very British cynicism to make any sense out of it, but it's a pretty good attempt to squeeze a six-episode radio play / novel / TV series / text adventure (all of which differed substantially from each other, remember) into a mere 90 minutes of medium-budget movie.
The original radio series was extremely episodic in nature and had very little by way of plot. It really is a rehash of the classic 1940's-era science fiction story template of "some guy gets a guided tour of the future / an alien world / etc. before being returned home (eventually)." That was already an SF cliché by the 1950s.
Douglas Adams was very fond of chopping and changing the original to fit each medium. He was also very much a comedy sketch writer at the time, and it shows in the early Hitch-hiker novels; it wasn't until a couple of books into the series that he finally worked out how to plot. And I think he made the mistake of trying to shoehorn a plot into his screenplay. It meant cutting out lots of set-pieces and sketches in favour of moving the plot along, and this is probably why it doesn't work as well as it could have. But it's a pretty decent stab, all told.
I'd have preferred the effort had gone into a TV miniseries instead as there's just too much material for a single 90 minute film—and Adams himself claimed to have been unsatisfied with the original BBC TV series, so a remake actually made sense. (Zaphod Beeblebrox's two heads proved impossible to create on-screen with the technology of the day, so we were left with a very obviously fake animatronic head that couldn't even move its lips and eyes realistically. CGI makes that sort of thing so much easier to do.)
Adams' later "Dirk Gently" novels lent themselves rather better to the movie format, I think.
"then you have got a movie like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, It tried so hard, but the original was such a classic that a remake had a hard job to live up to"
Er, no it didn't. All it had to do was bear more resemblance to the book than that godawful Technicolor version. That saccharine "Disney Lite" 1970s excrescence was an insult to both the eyes and the intelligence.
The remake was a lot closer to Roald Dahl's original book, which, like all fairy tales, was supposed to be dark and twisted! About the only thing Tim Burton added was the 'flags of nations' gag and the Willy Wonka back-story with his dentist father. It makes the character more likeable. Tim Burton and Roald Dahl were a very good fit.
(I could have done without Johnny Depp playing Wonka though. He doesn't have much range as an actor.)
I think the "No Troma films" rule should apply to these too: The Asylum has even gone on record to point out that they made a deliberate choice to produce cheesy movies.
Even so, I do have a soft spot for anyone who can, hand on heart, hear a pitch for a movie like "Megashark vs. Giant Octopus" and say, "Wait: did you say that the giant shark jumps out of the sea for absolutely no reason at all to take a big bite out of a jetliner flying above the clouds? That's... that's BRILLIANT!"
And they were right: it's an exceptionally silly movie. Frankly, if you watch a movie with a name like "Sharktopus", you can't really complain that it lacks elements of good movies that it never claimed to have in the first place.
Cheese is itself an art form. I suspect The Asylum's TV movies will gain some serious cult followings in the years to come. They're so bad, they go out the other side and become watchable for the ridiculous premises, the pathetic effects and—possibly deliberate—bullshit "science" exposition sequences. Some of them are actually quite decently scripted all things considered—they often have fewer plot holes than certain big-budget blockbusters I could mention.
I can't get enough of them, me.
My nomination for "worst movie ever" goes to... "U571". Not only because it was a massive slap in the face to the original (British!) submarine crew who actually did that for real, but because it's not as if there was a shortage of research material available on the subject at the time. So the producers and director clearly made a deliberate decision to fuck up such a crucial, foundational element of the story.
(Part of me would like to put "Independence Day" on the list too for its dire script, but, to be honest, I do enjoy watching the kind of over-the-top video game cut-scenes full of special effects set-pieces that his films are full of. I'm a fan of most of Gerry Anderson's oeuvre for much the same reason: if there's lots of shit being blown up, I'm there! Calling me "shallow" is an insult to puddles.)
"In the middle ages the vast majority of people believed with all their hearts that the world was flat and you could fall off the edge if you travelled far enough."
No they didn't. Seriously. This myth was bruited about during the 1800s and has long since been discredited: the ancient Greeks already knew the Earth wasn't flat. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that anyone in the Middle Ages believed the Earth was flat. The evidence that it isn't is easy to find: just go stand on the coastline and look out to sea. See those ships rising over the horizon as they approach port? That. See how the cliffs and mountains of your home port drop slowly below the horizon as you head out to sea? Again, that.
That there are people in this thread arguing on both sides who appear to have fallen for this myth hook, line and sinker makes me suspect the quality and level of debate here.
Even so, I don't understand this fixation on "the scientific consensus". It's a blatant Appeal to Authority. Unfortunately, this "authority" has variously supported Pholgiston, Aether, Miasma and other equally discredited theories—London's Victorian sewage system was constructed because of a firm belief in the Miasma theory. It was successful despite its original design intentions, not because of them. And it took the better part of a generation for "the scientific consensus" (for which, read "the scientific establishment") to accept Plate Tectonics.
Granted, the establishment isn't always wrong, but it's clearly not always right either. And, when they are wrong, they can clearly be spectacularly wrong on a staggering scale, so what the establishment happens to believe at any one point in time is an utter irrelevance. They are no more an indicator of truth than my brother's pet cat.
Finally, a scientist doesn't simply accept the status quo as dictated from on high. A scientist works to disprove a hypothesis. Only by doing so will we chip away the unwanted lies to reveal nature's truths. When large groups of powerful vested interests in the status quo insist on supporting one hypothesis over another, that process becomes much, much harder as funding becomes more difficult to find.
This is wrong. It is not how science is supposed to work and is why I take a very cynical view of the "Anthropogenic Climate Change" camp's politics and media exposure. The science in this field is clearly being deliberately skewed in favour of supporting a preferred political stance. And that is unacceptable. It is bad science.
There is no way in hell that Climate Science can be considered old enough and mature enough to be able to have such a consensus in place already. We have barely a century's worth of solid, reliable temperature readings (and even that's a stretch), whereas the Earth's climate has an age measured in millions of years. Our evidence for global temperatures beyond the 1800s is fragmentary at best. Most of it is conjecture at best. We can measure tree rings, we can measure ice cores, we can look at core samples taken from various geographical locations, but these are just the equivalent of archaeological test pits: we're only getting a tiny, tiny glimpse of the full picture at each site. We have no idea of the full context of each sample.
(This is a problem which plagues archeologists too. Anyone who's ever watched a few seasons of "Time Team" soon realises that there's an awful lot of guesswork and conjecture going on. The evidence often throws up surprises that can completely change the context of a site.)
Anyway, the point is that I'm just not satisfied that the science is there yet. This article points out some context-changing evidence. Granted, it might just be that the MWP only affected northern Europe and a few other unusually specific sites, but this new evidence suggests that it may well have been a global event. (Yes, there are some qualifiers in the original paper, but note my points above about the stifling effects of an "establishment" view. There are political repercussions involved here too.)
"And if you have a problem with the music itself, rather than a problem with what people say about it - which, it seems, is really what you dislike - at least learn about it, and get a better cross-section than a few of the poppiest examples."
You might want to try doing that yourself. Most of what you credit "The Beatles" with is actually the work of their producer, George Martin. The 1960s was the era of the producers, despite what the Baby Boomers would have believe. It was the era of Joe Meek, Phil Spector, and Brian Wilson (the latter was one of the Beach Boys, making him one of the few examples of a performer / producer.) Back then, producers were not considered part of the band—you couldn't reliably replicate Spector's "Wall of Sound" technique in a live performance, so live sets tended to use a different, simpler, arrangement—so you don't get to give the credit for Martin's (and others') technical feats to the groups they were used on.
The BBC's Radiophonic Workshop was producing multi-tracked sound effects—and even complete musical pieces—in the late 1950s. Today, they're mostly associated with their work on "Doctor Who", but before that, they were used heavily by Spike Milligan. (One of their most famous 'works' is "Bloodnok's Stomach", which is a multi-layered, multi-tracked sound effect created for The Goons in 1956. This easily predates The Beatles. Also, note that George Martin worked for the BBC's Music Lbrary prior to moving to EMI, so he would have been very familiar with the Radiophonic Workshop's Musique Concrète approach.)
So, no. The Beatles had sod all to do with any of that recording technology. They just happened to have a good producer who knew about it. Read about how Delia Derbyshire and Dick Mills produced the original Doctor Who theme, using multiple manually synchronised magnetic tape machines, with tapes stretching down a corridor to get the loops the right length. That is what producers and musicians were already doing by 1963, when The Beatles were still singing trite pap like "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!"
The Beatles' main contribution was the Lennon-McCartney songwriting duo, who wrote a few gems, but also cranked out an awful lot of shallow, utterly forgettable crud. They were good, but they weren't that good.
The problem with The Beatles (and many other bands of the era) is the Baby Boomers. This generation, like every other before or since, genuinely believes that only the music recorded for their generation truly "matters". Every other generation believes that "their" music is also the best, but the Baby Boomer generation easily outnumbers the others, (although, mercifully, that won't be the case for much longer). The Baby Boomer generation's influence has become seriously unhealthy: everything has to stand up to their standards, to the music of their childhood and adolescence. As a result, the music industry has become obsessed with re-releases, recycling and band reunions and the like.
The Beatles' main claim to fame is as the first group to be so self-contained: they wrote all their own songs, performed them, recorded them, and played them live. This was not common practice at the time: most groups were much more open to playing songs written by other songwriters, and to hiring session musicians. It wasn't unusual for the same song to be covered by multiple performers and released at the same time, often in very different styles. (Just ask Neil Diamond.)
Even so, The Beatles hired in musicians for their later psychedelic albums as they couldn't play all the parts themselves, so they weren't an exception to that particular rule either.
However, the result of The Beatles' in-house approach is that songs on the same album would generally sound very similar stylistically—there'd be some of Lennon's more abstract pieces, and some of McCartney's more realistic works. And that'd be about it. They might demand that George Martin recreate a sound or effect that they'd heard on another album—the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" was a major influence on their later work—but it would be George Martin and his fellow engineers who made that happen.
Give credit where it's due: to the engineers and producers. The unsung heroes of the 1960s music industry.
"Everything they currently do is annoying me and they just fob us all off."
Speak for yourself. If you want to see what "dumbed down" really looks like, I suggest you spend a few hours dribbling your brain cells out of your ear courtesy of Italy's "Mediaset" channels (which were originally owned by part-time politician, Silvio Berlusconi.) Not that the state-owned channels are noticeably better, but at least RAI does still produce the occasional drama.
As for the BBC losing Formula 1: if you love it so much, you can bloody well pay for it.
I consider all professional sports to be equally pointless, so this isn't just F1 I have a problem with. The less the BBC shows of the more highly-paid sports, the better. Let the commercial channels buy those. It's not the BBC's Licence Fee payer's job to subsidise the FA or Formula 1. Both are commercial entities, so they should damned well act like it.
I have surprising news for you: quite a lot of countries have TV licenses.
In Italy, not only is the license fee higher than that of the UK, but the TV channels it pays for still carry ads. (And don't get me started on the quality of the programming. You wouldn't think it would be possible to pad out the "Deal, or No Deal" game show formula to nearly two hours, but the Italians have found a way.)
I have a subscription to the BBC's iPlayer Global and I'm not regretting it at all. Speaking of which: iPlayer Global also appears to include shows that originally aired on C4 and ITV, including "Father Ted", "Black Books" and "Primeval". This is one advantage to having so much content produced by outside production companies. In effect, iPlayer Global is getting very close to a "UK Gold On Demand".
Greg Dyke never claimed the BBC would make everything free. Only some of it; names, the stuff the BBC actually have the rights to give away for free. Which isn't as much as people here seem to think.
Prior to the invention of the VCR, nobody at the BBC considered the possibility of a home video market—hence the infamous recycling of many old tapes of Doctor Who (and others)—so they naturally didn't bother to include clauses regarding future digital distribution in the contracts of those they were hiring to make these programmes either.
Which means they're going to have to pay for an awful lot of lawyers while they sort that stuff out too.
"Except in this case the user is paying for it to be produced in the first place."
No. The License Fee covers a small proportion of the BBC's expenses and—here's the crucial bit everyone seems to have missed—the BBC are REQUIRED to use external production houses for a set proportion of their output. (I forget what the exact percentage is, but it's somewhere in the range of 40-60% bracket, I think.)
"Spooks" is therefore NOT "owned" by the BBC. They merely paid to license it. The BBC may have fronted up some, most, or even all, of the up-front costs—for which they got the rights to have first dibs on broadcasting the show. The BBC might even have finagled a distribution contract deal through their BBC Worldwide arm too, so they get a bit more money out of it.
But remember that for every success like "Spooks", there's at least one utter failure like "Bonekickers" which disappears without a trace after a single season. And usually rather more than one. The BBC needs to balance the books, so every hit ends up paying for a bunch of misses.
The BBC's former Director General, John Birt, is also responsible for the second greatest f*ck-up in privatisation history, (second only to the privatisation of British Rail). He literally forced every single department—every producer, every studio, etc.—to "compete" with each other for work! This farce is named "Producer Choice" and means every show's producer must choose whether to make a show in-house, or farm it out to a third-party service provider. As a result of Birt's blinkered stupidity, a shitload of BBC employees suddenly found themselves working as freelancers and consultants... for a hell of a lot more money than they'd have made if they'd stayed in-house. John Birt is truly the heir to the throne to the Kingdom of Idiot.
The upshot of all this is that, no, the BBC often does not "own" much of what the public think it does. Look at the closing credits of "Red Dwarf" and you'll see that the later series were produced by "Grant Naylor Productions". Every single episode of "Have I Got News For You" was made by "Hat Trick", and so on. (Ironically, there are even programmes in the BBC's archives produced by the remnants of Thames Television!) And the same is true for a lot of radio productions too now.
Take a good close look at the end titles of a lot of BBC programming and you'll be surprised at just how many hit shows are actually made outside of the BBC.
The BBC are also well aware that they may not be able to rely on the TV License fee for much longer. (Never mind that the same fee is also paying for the rollout of rural broadband and a bunch of other projects; the BBC doesn't get all of it anyway.)
... nobody seems to mind having their nuts roasted by cheap laptops. Odd, that.
Also, would this be the same "Consumer Reports" that implied that the laws of physics apply only to the iPhone 4, and no other phone sees signal attenuation, ever, regardless of how it's held? I ask only because my particular iPhone 4 appears never to have received their memo.
@The Man Who Fell To Earth: Yes, we heard you the first time.
Nobody cares.
Seriously. Nobody cares.
if they did, there would be no market for the cheap electronic goods manufactured in their factories. But there is, so clearly nobody actually gives as much of a shit as the media would like us to.
I suspect people are finally learning to 'tune out' all the endless exhortations to take on the responsibility of entire foreign populations for no other reason than that their living standards aren't quite the same as our own. And this is a Good Thing. Every Western nation went through a process of revolutions, civil wars, etc. There were no major superpowers or "developed" nations back then to give us a helping hand in the form of misguided charity. So we had to do it ourselves.
And we did. The early Victorians thought nothing of sending small children up chimneys to clean them. The later Victorians, on the other hand, thought nothing of building entire new communities, with decent housing (for the time), decent infrastructure—even running water!—and more. And then there were the schools, the creation of a national health service, of free education, of even package holidays. Our ancestors did all that. They built it all, from nothing, by investing wisely. They debated every move. They argued. They chained themselves to railings to obtain female suffrage, and much more.
Yet now we believe that a nation of 1.6 billion people cannot do this on their own? That they "need" our nannying? That they "need" our help to guide them?
Stop being so bloody patronising. They're human beings, just like us. They'll work it out. They'll tread their own path and come out of it far stronger than they would if we continue to interfere blindly with their societies. We need to leave them alone to get on with it.
(Yes, this means some blood may be shed, but Iraq and Afghanistan haven't been exactly bloodless interventions. Neither was the UN's attempts to stop the former Yugoslavia's breaking turning violent. And that's before we get to the likes of Israel and her fractious relationships with her neighbours.)
Rubbish!
The only reason companies "need" access to source code is either:
1. Because the business processes are too closely coupled to the original software;
2. You have important data stored in the software in a proprietary format.
(1) is a management incompetence problem that has nothing to do with the software and everything to do with your company's management, who have clearly failed to identify this rather obvious single point of failure. Placing so much responsibility for your business' continuation on the shoulders of a third party is never a good plan. Managers need to be asking just one question to avoid such situations: "What happens if [$ENTITY] is wiped out overnight by, say, flooding, fire, or being hit by a bus?" If the answer to that question is "Oh sh!t, we're f*cked!", you need to do something about it. Now.
(2) Is an Open Standards problem. Store your data in a standard format for which adequate documentation exists.
Note that in neither case is the correct answer: "we need access to the source code!" If I'm relying upon the services of ISVs, why in blazes would I keep expert programmers on my payroll? If I get source code access, what am I supposed to do with it? Print it out and use it to decorate my offices? Give it to another ISV and just go through the same dangerous cycle again? If the software were that important to my business' core operations, my business deserves to go under.
Businesses are a form of machine and require good design and engineering just as much as any software does. Any component of your business that is fundamental and crucial to its continued operations requires one of two approaches:
1. Do it in-house.
2. ONLY if there is a healthy market with multiple suitable ISVs, so that you always have the option to just switch to another ISV, should you opt for a third-party solution. Even so, a key element in the contract should be that said ISV supports open data format standards, so there is no vendor lock-in.
It's not that hard.
Corporations have dedicated PR and marketing teams. They put out press releases every day that sites like The Register then regurgitate. (To be fair to El Reg, most of their rivals don't even bother to scratch off the serial numbers first; they just copy and paste the press release onto their site / newspaper unchanged, and often with no editorialising either. This isn't "news", it's "advertising".)
A charity like OLPC should most emphatically not have large PR and Marketing teams dedicated to this process. Therefore, I suspect this was all the information The Register has. I'm certainly finding it hard to locate the same story on the OLPC website.
... I suspect a substantial chunk of cash will be spent on building more data-centres.
Philanthropic gestures are what businesses do to reduce their tax bills. It has bugger all to do with being nice to others and everything to do with getting away with paying as little tax to the government as they can get away with—a policy generally enforced by shareholders of every major corporation. So, don't expect a "Jobs Foundation".
Besides, charity is not a panacea: it's been 28 years since "Band Aid" and Ethiopia still has trouble feeding itself. You need viable societies first and foremost, but many African nations are still riven by tribal conflicts. You can't just buy a new society. The will has to come from within, not be imposed from without, or you just end up with a nation of willing victims who grow up to expect the West to intervene whenever they make mistakes.
(Personally, I'd only ever give money to organisations involved in education, or information dissemination. New schools, infrastructure and supplies for same, independent journalism, etc. If we want to "spread Democracy", we need to remember that a democracy requires an educated and well-informed population. Neither is an optional extra.)
Paying dividends may be a possibility, but seems unlikely given that Silicon Valley have never been keen on that. Apple are far from the only ones; Microsoft also never paid dividends while Bill Gates was in charge.
Gates is often credited with starting this trend. The problem with this approach is that there's little incentive to keep the shares for a while and take a long-term view; you lose the interest of people who actually have a clue about what it is the company does and who could therefore spot management bullshit a mile away. Today's shareholders only ever take the short-term view: "Fatten the goose, so I can sell my shares on at a profit!" Shares have become surrogates for money. Nothing more.
Would that be the same Java that isn't even included with a default OS X install any more?
I haven't even bothered enabling Flash, let alone Java, in years. Neither are endorsed as standards by the W3C, so any website that cannot be viewed without either (or both) of them is clearly not standards-compliant. Such sites should be shunned until their developers get a clue.
(In the interests of not feeding the anti-Apple trolls, I should probably mention that I also use Windows and, yes, Flash and Java are both absent from my Windows 7 partition too. I haven't missed them.)
If you do get hit by this malware, you're holding the internet the wrong way.
"A creator is not someone who steals from the singers and musicians. That is a definition of a music company."
Right. Because record labels have never, ever, done anything other than steal from musicians. Sheesh! Gimme a break!
Middlemen have existed throughout history, usually for good reasons. Record labels provided up-front funding—risking their own damned money—for recording studios and marketing. That last is crucial: an unknown musician has no hope of ever making a living out of music if nobody ever learns of their existence. Hence marketing. Hence concerts (which were originally just glorified adverts for albums. Hence most of them having titles like "The [INSERT ALBUM TITLE HERE] Tour".)
If you're spectacularly brilliant at writing music, then you may—if you're lucky and have a tailwind—break into the industry entirely on your own. That's a lot easier to do today, with social networks, the web and so on. But those are relatively recent technologies and there are still billions of people out there who don't even have hot and cold running water at home, let alone broadband internet access.
You need to get your name out there. You need someone with the skill and contacts to publicise what you do and build up an audience for your work.
And THAT is where the record labels come in. More successful musicians and groups tend to have managers rather than agents, who perform similar roles and leave the label with just the publishing work to do. But even they'll want 10-15% of whatever you, the musician, earn.
Record labels are also the curators. The gatekeepers. They're keeping out the seriously shit stuff—the Rebecca Blacks—and trying to ensure that they offer something of quality. (Or, at least, something people might actually want to part with their own money to hear, which amounts to much the same thing in a capitalist society.)
Some of the more media-savvy musicians may be more than capable of handling their own careers. But that's not true of all. Record labels do serve a purpose.
That purpose is changing, granted, but this notion that record companies "don't do anything" to deserve their slice of the royalties is a strange one. Just as Hollywood doesn't tend to advertise how many of the movies they've funded tanked massively, so the music industry isn't in the business of telling the world how many lemons they've advanced money to in order to pay for them to write their album, pay for an album cover artist, pay for point-of-sale publicity materials, TV and radio spots, distribution of physical media (CDs, concert DVDs, etc.), get them onto radio playlists, all sorts of other marketing drives, not to mention paying for the mastering of the album by an expert...
... only for the album to sell three copies in total—two of them to the artist's own family.
So, yes, you're damned right they take a big chunk. They're risking a shitload of their own damned money. Why shouldn't they get a decent return on their investment when they finally hit pay dirt?
If musicians want to go it entirely on their own and cut out the record labels entirely, nobody's stopping them! Seriously! There's nothing to prevent you sending your tracks directly to Apple, Amazon, etc. (Of course, the iTunes Store and Amazon's own music stores also take a cut...)
And yet... we still hear about artists being signed to recording labels. Clearly there must be some benefit in doing so, or they wouldn't keep doing that.
IP is not a strange, alien concept. It's been around in some form or another for nigh-on two centuries now. You can't just claim simple ignorance: if you're that thick, you probably shouldn't be running a pub at all.
The pub was in the wrong here. They took a massive gamble and damned near lost. That they managed to "win" this case with the aid of an equally ignorant internet crowd is just blind luck; legally, they didn't have a leg to stand on.
The law is very clear here: it is a legal obligation to protect a company's intellectual properties. The company lawyers don't get to pick and choose: if a violation comes to their attention, their default response is to sue for damages.
It's really not that hard to ask permission to use someone else's property. In my day, we called it basic manners.
"Macs are still a single-digit market share and it's not going to change anytime soon, people are not flocking from Windows 7 to Macs regardless of what Apple-wet fans are thinking."
(sigh) Not this bollocks again...
Don't trust the "market share" statistics unless they've separated out the "Consumer sales" numbers too. If they haven't their numbers aren't worth a damn, because they'll also include every single PC in every office, every storage cupboard, every server room, every data-centre, and so on. None of which are even slightly relevant to Apple's target market.
Apple do not target the corporate sector. They've even canned their server range! They don't mind if businesses decide to buy iMacs, but they're that bothered if they don't because their primary market is—and always has been ever since Jobs returned to the company—the consumer market. As businesses are starting to move away from rigid IT infrastructures and towards the fashionable and trendy "BYOD" approach, we'll hear more about them buying Macs and iPads too, but this really isn't Apple's core strength.
Big Corporate is where Microsoft tends to shine, but Windows 8 isn't ready yet, and they're probably not expecting much uptake before Windows 9's release anyway. (Windows 8 may be a big hit, but past performance suggests it'll be Windows 9—or whatever they decide to call it—that gets the big sales, given that Windows 7 is still being rolled out in many companies.)
Apple have an installed user base of over 58 million OS X computers. That's Macs, not "all Apple devices". Just the Mac range. To put that into context, that's not far off the number of XBox 360 consoles sold in total around the world (the most recent figure I can find is 53 million by March 2011).
So, yeah, their market share is small. As "small" as the most successful games console currently on the market.
Fine, I'll give you one reason: show us the "photo frame" that has a 2048 x 1536 pixel resolution display with excellent viewing angles. And which can also double as a general-purpose tablet.
No?
Thought not.
You are certainly entitled to your opinions, but we are not obliged in any way to either respect them, or their source.
After all, you're the one who persists in trolling comment threads on Apple-related stories. At least those queuing Apple customers are outside, not sitting in their mother's basement having a smug sneer, while crying inside over your lack of social skills.
If this sort of this is what your entire life has come to, I pity you. Maybe you have Aspergers. Maybe you're just a dickhead. Either way, you're a sorry advert for whichever "cause" you think you're on.
"'Then one boy cried out "The Emperor has no clothes on, and the crowd gasped, then one by one they all cried "The Emperor has no clothes on" and they laughed at how foolish they had been'"
This, from the country that not only worships "reality TV", but played a rather large part in making that genre such a staple of Western entertainment today?
Also, say what you will about Apple, but at least they're up front about their aim: to make a profit. They don't "accidentally" steal your personal data while claiming to be doing "no evil" either.
"So what if it's 1 meter of sea level rise that inundates 2.3 million homes or 60 cm of rise that inundates 1.7 million homes? It'll be a huge disruption."
You make it sound as if all these homes will be wiped out within hours of each other, but the sea levels won't suddenly rise a metre or so worldwide overnight.
What'll actually happen is that the sea levels will creep up, ever so slowly, year on year (as they have been for some time, in fact).
We'll therefore find that some areas are unsuitable for building houses on as a result, so we'll build them further away. Or we may build "floatable" homes. Or homes on stilts. Or something else entirely. (We can now counteract wind sway and earthquakes in tall buildings by fitting them with mass dampers. This is a relatively recent invention. Who knows what other techniques we'll have invented by 2100?)
But this is the US of A: home of the disposable house. Most homes there are built out of old planks, some string and bits of plasterboard, before being painted to look like something you'd want to live in. Many have lifespans measured in a handful of decades at most—if that.
It's only the really chunky, expensive, city core structures that will have a longer lifespan. (And even then, it's not unheard-of to hear of redevelopment projects that involve demolishing structures that are less than 30 years old. Witness the proposals for Marco Polo House in London's Battersea district.)
There is, as Lewis Page—and many others—have pointed out repeatedly, absolutely no need to panic. We've survived far worse. New Orleans is still there, despite a fair chunk of it already being below sea level.
"If you had only short licenses then the network operators wouldn't be able to invest the money to setup the networks in the first place, since they don't have the guarantee of being able to operate it for a long time."
Ah, but bandwidth is a national resource that could—and, I argue, should—be built and maintained by an infrastructure company similar to Network Rail. Thus the various operators become like train operators: leasing bandwidth from "Network Cellphone" as needed. (I'd also like to see traditional wired broadband infrastructure handled the same way, but by a separate entity. Let's call it "Broadband Telecom". Note that this entity would also own any cable TV infrastructure laid by the likes of Virgin Media too. Again, the service providers simply lease bandwidth on the infrastructure provided.)
This has a number of advantages:
1. "Network Cellphone" and, in its turn, the Treasury, is thus assured of a regular annual income from the operators. Granted, they'll lose the massive windfall lump sums that an auction can generate, but this also means the operators have more capital to play with, so we can charge them accordingly for new infrastructure. Those costs gradually fall over time as new technologies appear and are rolled out.
2. The operators no longer need to worry about the hassle of building competing networks and can simply let "Network Cellphone" take care of it.
3. "Network Cellphone", being effectively owned by the taxpayers, will be required to provide truly universal coverage, as BT does. This increases competition with Broadband Telecom's own broadband internet services, so Network Cellphone will also have an incentive to improve their offering in turn.
4. With no need to spend staggering sums of money on stupid auctions of what is, essentially, thin air, there's less need to gouge end users, so "unlimited" may finally mean exactly what it says on the tin.
5. The UK is currently in the throes of upgrading some truly ancient physical transport infrastructure. The government will soon realise that it's going to be a lot cheaper to solve some transport problems by simply eliminating the need to travel in the first place. This is particularly true of office-centric industries such as banking, insurance, etc. Many of these industries can easily move towards a more telecommuting-friendly setup. So there's plenty of incentive to keep investing money into Network Cellphone's infrastructure projects. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to build some new masts than it is to build a brand new high-speed railway.
I think governments should nationalise infrastructure instead of supporting wasteful duplication of it. Why buy four plots of land for four cellphone masts, when you could just build a single, slightly bigger, mast instead? Why dig up the roads multiple times to lay cables when you could just dig it up the once—ideally while giving the electricity and gas infrastructure alongside a quick inspection and a bit of TLC.
Competition only makes sense where it is logical to have it. Money spent on unnecessary duplication of infrastructure is money that would be better invested elsewhere.
Forgive me for asking, but exactly how much do you think people care whether a tablet runs for 10 or 12 hours? The iPad manages the former without a kludgy external battery nailed into a keyboard. (To be fair, the latest Transformer models can do 12 hours without the dock, but you don't claim to have one of those.)
Unless you really do spend more than 10 hours doing nothing but working on your tablet all day, every day, without respite, meal breaks, etc., it is a bit of a stretch to claim that 12 hours' life is any more useful than 10. You're likely to be charging it up every day regardless.
The chargers for these devices aren't exactly big and heavy either—most will easily fit into a jacket pocket—and most will also charge your smartphone too. (The iPad's charger will also charge my iPhone 4, so no need to carry two chargers around. Ditto for most devices that sit in the Android camp: most of them all use micro-USB sockets for charging, although there are some exceptions.)
And, yes, that screen really does make a difference. The more pixels you have, the less power you need to piss up the wall dealing with the various cheats and kludges needed to render text properly. No need to go mad with anti-aliasing, for example, when the resolution is too high to see aliasing in the first place.
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