Posts by ThomH 2913 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
Since coming to the US I've been required to submit fingerprints: (i) in order to apply for a visa; (ii) every time I wish to enter the country; and (iii) in order to get a driving licence. The last one applies equally to US citizens, and is the general norm for official agencies.
To my native UK I've been required to submit fingerprints: never.
So I suspect Americans have already come to terms with giving their fingerprints away.
I think this may be what is happening:
When the MaBook has better battery life, people who want better battery life buy it. They say they like it because it has better battery life.
When the MacBook is lighter, people who want a lighter laptop buy it. They say it is better because it is lighter.
When people imagine there's some sort of pro-Apple cheer leading squad conspiracy, their mind just assumes that any pro-Apple comment must have an ulterior motive.
Per CNET, Apple wanted $1/port circa 1999. Licensing is now handled by everyone's other favourite, the MPEG LA, seemingly for more like $0.25/device but I can't find any confirmation of when it was handed over and therefore when prices became more reasonable.
AnandTech reports that there's no per-port fee for Thunderbolt so it looks like the cost is just whatever the actual chips cost from Intel.
So a fairly obvious prediction: Thunderbolt will take off if and when Intel incorporates it with whatever other silicon so that they're offering it for free if you buy whatever the modern equivalent of a centrino is.
No, I stand corrected. Based on a component costing over at Tech Insights, the key physical components in an iPhone 5 are:
• the A6 processor; probably fabricated by TSMC or Samsung;
• RAM from Elpida;
• antenna switch and wifi/bluetooth wireless chips from Murata (incorporating a Broadcom component);
• a Triquint power amplifier;
• an Avago chip for LTE/UMTS/CDMA;
• four separate parts from Skyworks for power amplification;
• a Dialog Semiconductor power manager;
• a Cirrus Logic audio codec;
• accelerometer and gyroscope from STMicroelectronics;
• further Broadcom components for the touchpad controller;
• Qualcomm chips for further LTE stuff, DC-HSPA+, EV-DO, GSM, CDMA, etc and power management thereof;
• a Texas Instruments touchscreen controller;
• SanDisk flash; and
• an RF Micro Devices antenna.
How many of those companies are suing Apple or is Apple suing?
I'm aware of the precedent — people completely failed to sell any tablet computers for more than a decade before that market really opened up — but the Sony smart watches are mature, inexpensive at around $100, and they work with Android phones so they do email alerts, Twitter, Facebook, whatever else your phone does. Yet nobody is buying them.
As mentioned above, it's unclear what proportion of the market the sub-$300 bracket accounts for and therefore not technically clear that Chrome is gaining traction. It could easily be that there were basically no sub-$300 laptops and now there are some, but most of those on offer run Chrome.
That being said, if you couple this with the statistic that more than 90% of laptops costing more than $1,000 sold are Macs it does start to look like Microsoft may be about to suffer a bit of a pincer movement.
Based on the unwieldy 808 I expected the phone to fall uncomfortably between two stools — lacking both the convenience of any other phone and the image quality of a full camera*. It seems they've resolved the first issue. Good work, Nokia.
(*) having been asked to cite sources on my previous assertion, here's one: http://www.dxomark.com/index.php/Mobiles/Column-right/Mobile-rating — "However, the PureView’s small exposure troubles in high contrast images, and its very slight color casting and color shading flaws in outdoor settings illustrate that the smartphone is not perfect – cellphone and tablet cameras still have a lot to accomplish to meet the quality of the best DSCs."
"What's the correct phone shape? A 5.5" Galaxy Note?"
Candybars seem to be the preferred shape. Candybars with bits poking out not so much.
"Says who?"
DPReview, DxOMark, pretty much all the objective reviews. It's the best camera-in-a-phone on the market by a healthy margin but it was found lacking compared to the modern compact cameras. It's a small sensor and a tiny lens. Nokia can't beat physics.
"First you're saying it's not as good, now you're saying it is better but no one cares - which is it?"
You failed to comprehend the point I attempted to make. It's worse than a dedicated camera. It's better than other cameraphones. But it's less convenient than other cameraphones, and the lesson of MP3s is that convenience trumps quality.
You don't gain large files; the large number of megapixels are processed to produce an ordinary resolution output. So what the device primarily gains over an ordinary 5MP sensor is colour resolution, for better post processing.
I guess it's easier to make photocells more sensitive (as is necessary to make them smaller because they'll receive less light) than to give them a greater overall range?
So it's not really conveniently shaped as a phone and its photos aren't as good as a real camera? I can't help feeling this is like producing an MP3 player that can output 400Khz audio or something like that — yes, most people could tell the difference in a blind test but, no, nobody is sufficiently bothered about it to put up with the inconvenience.
So I guess it's just supposed to help attach better-than-usual photography to the Nokia brand and not actually to sell?
This is a risk with all lithium-ion batteries; Apple uses the same chemistry as everyone else.
Assuming external chargers are available then technically this is a reason to pick the Samsung over the Apple — the S3 (and indeed the S4) both have removable batteries so you could keep the phone next to your bed in case of emergencies on one battery while your other charges in some other part of the house. Charging tends to heat batteries so therefore is an occasion when the risk of combustion very slightly increases.
"Um, unless you have a number of cameras arranged spherically around a given point of interest capturing the subject simultaneously, the image captured - whether using a lightfield camera or not - will always be from the point of view of the camera."
An ideal light field camera captures every ray of light hitting a surface as direction + colour. An ideal screen would reproduce those rays. So the hypothetical reproduced image is the same as looking through a window at the original scene.
I don't know about you, but I would consider the view through my window to be 3d, even though it doesn't project anything into my room and I can't move it.
Lightfield displays* have been invented for true 3d images, they're just beyond realistic mass-market manufacture and there's no content whatsoever.
* if implemented in an artificially ideal capacity they would capture every ray of light that hits a plane — recorded as colour plus direction — and reproduce those later. So it's the rays of light that are reproduced, not a projection (or two projections) of them; you're free to focus for yourself, to tilt your head however you want, etc. They're achieved that with an array of micro-lenses in front of an image plane, so at each point that would be a single pixel on a traditional screen is a lens and which of the inner pixels you see depends on the angle between your eye and the lens. But that means multiplying up the panel resolution by a very large number and then producing and aligning the microlenses with sufficient quality.
The Lytro camera does this in reverse, which is why its photos can be refocussed after the fact and also why they're so low resolution compared to the output of ordinary 2d sensors.
Apple invented drag and drop, pull-down menus and lots of other things we consider now fundamental but it did so only after paying Xerox for access to its work and in an environment where the fundamentals had already been established by Engelbart and others.
So the revisionists that claim that Apple invented the GUI, mouse, etc, are way off the mark but since they tend to end up in arguments with [lower-order] revisionists on the anti-Apple side it's not worth holding your breath for a balanced view to emerge.
But it's currently selling for a third below its usual price on Amazon US and only 12% below its usual price on Amazon UK.
The US price is ordinarily $75, which is £47.98 at today's exchange rate. The normal UK price is £47.99. Once you add some tax, it ordinarily costs more in the US.
The competition is embeddable cores. Samsung, Apple, et al pick the ARM core, the GPU and everything else, lay out the silicon (or let a computer do it) and hit print. It's very mix and match. As a result, competition is healthier than it has been in years. ARM is likely to persevere both on momentum and because you don't have to go begging cap in hand any time you want a custom fabrication.
At least in iOS 1–6, you just long press the letter and a popup shows the options. Slide your finger to the one you want and release. Options for the long press on a are aàáâäæãåā. The copyright symbol seems to be available only on the emoji keyboard as far as I can see, @ is accessible on the symbols page and I failed to find a superscript but that doesn't mean it isn't in there. I'd have been unlikely to guess that § is paired with & for example.
The Metro interface was so named because it was modelled after the design language of mass public transit systems, specifically including the King County Metro that serves Redmond and Seattle amongst others. So it's a little disingenuous to give credit to any of these computer company upstarts.
The Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum were amongst those using ULAs — a bit like write-once FPGAs you bought off the shelf, a custom step imprinted your logic and then they were delivered. So they were custom in all reasonable senses. Acorn used the same method to shrink the BBC into the Electron.
But surely that still allows it to be too big?
You cannot fit an SLR into a smartphone. So you're going to have to accept lesser image quality. In that case why is something bulbous preferable? A lot of people would argue that it just falls between two stools — it's not compact enough to fit well with a mobile phone and it's not large enough to do all that much better than what does fit in other mobile phones. So it's too large for anything people want in a phone.
It's the same sort of logic that allows people to conclude that e.g. a 6" screen is too large for a mobile phone.
Samsung are probably most explicit with their adverts full of 'haha, these people are sheep' (ie, thoughtlessly following the prevailing fashion) or 'of course they use an iPhone, they're old' (as old is the antithesis of fashionable per advertisers), but that's only because they explicitly want to put the negative association onto the competitor. Apple's adverts are just as much about fashion — the iPhone is sleek and modern — but less explicitly because it doesn't work if you just stand up and plainly claim to be fashionable.
The Kantar figures you're citing are for the USA only — see http://www.kantarworldpanel.com/global/News/news-articles/While-Android-Leads-iOS-and-Windows-Are-Growing-At-A-Faster-Pace — and show Android ticking up a little year-on-year, iOS ticking down a little and Windows Phone eating BlackBerry's share.
Gartner run the figures worldwide and, taking smartphones in isolation, report a 69.7% share for Android and a 20.9% share for Apple. If you include all phones then Apple's share drops to 7.5% so I guess the Android number would fall proportionally (source: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2335616 ).
Possibly also of interest, Apple's absolute sales figures are up by almost 50% year-on-year totalling an increase of 40m and Samsung's are up more than 20% but that's about 70m. Nokia managed to lose a bit more than 20% of its custom during 2012, RIM about 33%.
So duopoly is questionable but it's obvious that both iOS and Android are relevant and neither is going anywhere any time soon. Can you confidently say the same about the other platforms?
The EDL is considered, rightly or wrongly, to be far-right because of its deeds rather than because of its words. On several occasions, the EDL has planned a protest only for it to descend into hooligans who self-associate with the EDL smashing up private property. People like those caught on video here: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=794_1369521652
The public perception has therefore become that EDL marches are likely to descend into hooligans destroying private property. People also generally associate hooliganism with right-wing sentiments, probably because of the serious problems football has had with both hooliganism and with racism, tying the two things together in the public imagination.
Even taking your argument as accurate, and starting from the premise that the connection is a misperception, EDL supporters like yourself further cement the conclusion by blaming it on "the liberal left wing". Where is a group that despises the liberal left wing most likely to be on the political spectrum?
To a much lesser extent there's the 'English' in 'English Defence League'. Where do groupings that explicitly reference England, Britain or the United Kingdom in their name tend to fall on the political spectrum?
Those are the reasons that the EDL is perceived, and continues to be perceived, as right wing. If, as an EDL supporter, you want to shed the label, those are the problems you want to address.
Here's a test: I strongly dislike the EDL. From that statement in isolation, where would you assume my political beliefs lie?
The problem with guaranteeing free speech is that you can't hold it up as the be all and end all while simultaneously saying that the EDL have the right to say anything they want but Anonymous don't have the right to say that person X is a member of the EDL.
At some point you have to balance the rights of one group against the rights of another. In this case I think the defamation angle is the right one to follow. If Anonymous has misidentified anybody then those people will likely be subject to a heavy adverse reaction. It's the rights of those individuals that should properly restrict the right to free speech.
So, yes, I'm against what Anonymous has done. I'm also against the EDL but that's neither here nor there. But I disagree with what's happened not because I think free speech is an absolute right but rather because I think that limitations are justified in specific limited cases.
I'm not so sure about gamers — it could go either way. Without a middle tier of people that don't care if they play at 20fps with low-quality textures to pump up the sales, there's just not all that large of a market. So then what are people going to buy the high-end computers for? It'll become an ever shrinking niche.
Another way round of phrasing it: 90% of games are going to be developed for tablets and similar devices. Those games are not going to scale well. So why bother spending the money to try?
If this is really the way the conversation is going, it's pretty easy to rattle off the systems that were technologically superior in many respects to Windows 3.0 in 1990. Off the top of my head: The Amiga Workbench, RISC OS (both as already mentioned), NextStep, OS/2, NeWS, X + e.g. OpenWindows.
Of those, NextStep, OS/2 and NeWS are probably the ones worth singling out for special praise. All three are preemptive, use a protected memory scheme and provide the sort of user-land libraries that we now usually consider to be part of an OS.
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