Posts by chr0m4t1c

Too true

What tends to get forgotten in all the climate change debates is that climate change almost certainly won't destroy the planet, it *might* make it uninhabitable for *us* and a fair chunk of other "higher" lifeforms, but if we're wiped out by it then the planet and something like 90% of life will continue on quite happily - probably much more happily than it is at the moment.

Still, it'll finally put the Apple vs Android vs Samsung debates into perspective.

Doubtful

If Vista didn't drive users away completely, I doubt a slightly annoying ribbon will.

Ahem

<Looks at top of page, notes colour of Register logo>

I know El Reg is short on boobies & sport, but it makes up for that in many other areas - particularly opinion columns masquerading as factual pieces.

What gave you the idea they weren't a red-top?

Oh, BTW, your mother is expecting you at around 6.30pm on Friday - they say they're sorry & they deleted that message by mistake.

Fauly conclusion

Apple have /sold/ 30 million iPads, Samsung have /shipped/ (i.e. may not have sold that many) 2 million Tabs.

Samsung gearing up their offerings: Yes.

Consumers have more to chose from: Yes.

A lot of people don't want iPad: Only proven if you are the chairman of Acer.

Even if Samsung have sold all 2m Tabs, that's still an order of magnitude fewer than Apple have shifted, I would agreed that 2m people is "a lot", but not relative to the ~40m that make up the whole market as it stands.

So....

*Why* are people buying the iPad eight times out of ten? You can't categorise all of those people as "sheeple" or "iDiots" - because if you do, what does /that/ say about all the other manufacturers failure to sell to them.

If you can't sell to idiots, who can you sell to?

Come on people, we need some proper ideas instead of the name-calling we've fallen into. No-one cares why you don't want an Apple product, they need to know why other people *do* and it better be a proper reason.

So close

>Other hardware companies invented MP3 players, but only Apple invented the evangelism needed to sell the iPod as a desirable concept.

Not quite, Apple worked out what message to give people, the evangelism followed from it.

Here's what was being sold before the iPod:

"MP3 player, 4Gb. Comes with software to rip your CDs. A three-minute song is approximately 3Mb (3000 bytes) when converted at 128kbps."

Here's what Apple sold:

"1,000 songs in your pocket."

@MooseNC

Hate to burst a bubble, but Apple had Xerox PARC engineers help them create their GUI because Xerox invested in Apple as a start-up venture capital thing.

For better or worse, Xerox decided that they didn't want to be in the computer arena at that time so they put their money and expertise in a number of start-ups, Apple being just one of them.

Not that it has any bearing on this case anyway.

@FUD

>and tell me again, with a straight face, how these patents don't help.

If they're already licensed to the competition, they won't help.

You only get to take someone to court if they use your patent without your agreement, which may or may not be free.

So (for example), HTC may well have a license with Moto to create phones that use a sensor to disable touch-sensitive controls when the phone is held up to the face and that license is probably not limited by the OS installed on the phone.

If Nokia go after Moto or Google for infringement of a patent but have already licensed all the relevant patents from Moto for their own devices, then Moto don't have any leverage and will have to duke it out in court.

I know that may not be what you want but it's how it *is* and downvoting everyone with a more realistic view won't change that.

@Nya

Interesting thought, if you couple that with Google's recent purchase of Motorola you have the very real prospect of gPhone + gPad and mPhone + mPad from the other two 800lbs gorillas on the scene.

I know Big G has said they don't plan to do anything with Moto, but I can't quite bring myself to believe that - because, well, what would be the point in spending all of that money? I think they're just making sure the likes of HTC and Samsung don't immediately jump off the Android ship before they can get some hardware developed.

Nokia and HTC could be the biggest losers in all of this, HTC has never had its own OS to fall back on, they would almost certainly have to fork Android and Nokia are in the middle of putting theirs into the recycling bin, their best bet might be to see if they can get all of the crumbs and old teabags off Meego.

Comprehend much?

The bug wasn't that it tracked the phone, that was deliberate functionality - same as Android, same as WP7.

The first bug was that it did it when it was supposed to be turned off and the second bug was that it didn't clear the cache often enough.

Both bugs were fixed by an update put out around 2-3 weeks after the story broke.

In neither case was any data sent to Apple, the data was on the phone and any backups. Note that this is in contrast with Android and WP7 which both send data back to the respective motherships (who both say they only use the data anonymously), but at least they need location services turned on.

Overall, all three systems are now back on roughly the same level as far as this functionality goes.

If it helps your perspective, imagine someone trying to sue Google *now* for a bug in Android 1.6 because they happened to be using it at the time, even though it never gave them a single problem.

Eh?

XBox360 S 250Gb RRP ~£200

Sony PS3 160Gb RRP ~£200

I'd say that was more or less in line, you're swapping 90Gb in storage for a DVD->BluRay drive upgrade.

You'll probably get better bundles or deeper discounts on the XBox on the interwebs, but I'd expect that anyway from console that's a year older (and probably a year closer to refresh).

Maybe.

But how many parents will spend £230 instead of just giving Jr their old smartphone when they get their nice shiny new one under contract?

There are a lot of pretty powerful phones coming out of 18 or 24 month contracts in the next six months and they're probably already loaded with games for the kids that were used to keep them amused for the odd random five minutes. *And* they have the advantage of the games not costing £30+.

I'll be surprised if this sells to anyone other than hardcore gamers, TBH.

@Thomas 4

I think the point is that a lot of the not-Apple tables are being built by companies who have no idea what they are for or why people buy them (or rather why people buy the iPad). As a result you get products that can feel a little half-baked or directionless.

Take the Playbook, for example, RIM is famous for BBM and push mail. So, what do they bring out? A device that does neither (unless you have a BlackBerry to pair it to).

Great, now I can buy a tablet that does Flash, but is useless for something somewhat more important unless I also change my phone. Remind me why I would want one? Oh yeah, it does Flash. I can see all of the internet. Except my mail. Maybe I'll just buy a netbook instead.

(etc.)

There's some other factor at work, though.

Switzerland (for example) has a higher percentage of homes with guns than the US, but half the number of gun deaths per 100,000, Canada has around a half the ownership, but a third of the deaths.

There is a correlation between gun ownership and the death rate, but there must be some other factors that put the US so far off the curve.

I suspect it's social and economic, but I have no proof.

Fixing the problem may well be pretty much impossible because there are some very powerful people who see anything other than rampant capitalism as communist - and the "C" word pushes a lot of voter buttons.

The 1970's called

>Putting the punks away for awhile, would be a better solution.

What do you have against the punks? All the morons look like classic hoodies to me.

No

>... why it's the stones that got to make the windows sound!

That would be Brian Eno you're thinking of, the Stones were paid vast sums for the right to use a few bars of "Start Me Up" in the adverts for Win '95.

Who's website?

Digital Rev are a Canon reseller, they're not Canon.

Old adage

In the land of the jobless, the one-shift man is king.

Or something like that.

The biggest problem

Is those big meaty peripherals that are always taking control of the computer.

I'm not sure that having the computer take control of them would be the best solution, though.

The BSOD would take on a whole new meaning.

"Destruction of NOK right on schedule."

So what's in it for M$?

Nokia and M$ don't have much of an overlapping product set, the only place they were really competing was in the ropey phone OS space, but still in different segments.

I can see that Elop would chose WM7 over Android having just come from M$ because it would be something he was familiar with and being entirely non-technical it would have looked to him like a 50/50 choice.

I don't like the idea of Nokia being a WM7 only house, but I see a lot of people claiming that Elop is still in the pay of M$/Balmer and I can't see a single reason for it.

Yes, Elop owns M$ stock, but he's getting rid of it as fast as he is legally allowed to and he's not allowed to buy Nokia stock himself because of insider trading restrictions - although I do expect he'll have stocks eventually as a result of his contract like many of his contemporaries do.

So, I'll ask again: What's in it for M$?

Yep.

But since backing up using Time Machine to a NAS is an unsupported configuration** that requires an amount of hacking about to get going in the first place, I'm surprised that the author expected it to work in the first place.

As a general rule of thumb when using unsupported configs, you should make sure you have plans in place in case a patch breaks it and remember to only kick yourself when it stops working unexpectedly.

When I used this in my own environment I made sure the NAS could also be connected up using a USB cable, meaning I could still access my backups in the event of a problem.

**Except for Apple's own Time Capsules, naturally.

@Steve

No, I think the problem with Wave was that they just turned it on for everyone with a Google account and when you logged in proudly announced that "Wave was going to make it easy to share everything you do - we've turned it on for you now!".

So the first thing I did was to start looking at how to turn it off, because it really wasn't clear *what* it was sharing by default and because I didn't want to share anything anyway.

I did eventually turn it on for a couple of tech sites that used it, but then turned it off again a few months later because they only published about one in ten stories through it and RSS was a much better way of keeping track.

IIRC you had to have a GMail address to use it, which just created a further barrier to take up, no-one I know will bother with a service that needs another e-mail address, they already feel they have too many (A home one & and work one! OMG, how will I cope?).

Ultimately, Wave didn't offer anything special that would encourage people to switch. G+ has this interesting grouping system which will make it easy to share stuff with the right people rather than the "no-one", "everyone you know" and "entire world" model of existing services - yes I do know that most services do offer finer control, but they're a massive pain to operate.

Yes, let's focus on the important stuff

>This is nothing new, though. Mac OS has mostly been last to the party in terms of major

>technology changes like implementing pre-emptive multitasking or moving to 64bit.

Yeah, being first is the most important thing.

Presumably you drive an 1982 Daimler and your personal computer of choice would be the Berkeley Enterprises "Simon" that you built yourself from the original 1950/51 plans or maybe the Intel SIM4 if you prefer a microcomputer.

Or maybe first and last don't matter that much after all.

Re: Yep

I have Flash on my N8, but I still find it difficult to believe that so many people prefer an online gaming experience to a native app.

In fact I have found that flash apps often don't scale properly to the screen and either look terrible or don't work at all; that's not a criticism of Flash, it's just rubbish development.

I got no indication that the OP was a fanboi, I think you're being overly sensitive. Or do you work for Adobe?

The fundamental problem

Is that management always want to put in short-term fixes for long-term problems.

There's never enough time or budget to do it right, but there's always time and budget to do it again.

I expect

The developers set the sale price for their apps, so I expect they've also had input on these price changes.

For example, a £0.59 app would have bagged the dev £0.34 once VAT and Apple's cut are taken off, at current exchange rates that's $0.55, which is a good chunk less than the $0.69 they would get from selling the same app at $0.99 in the US store.

Raising the price to £0.69 changes the figures to £0.40/$0.65.

I guess the choice is down to a number of factors, but ultimately Apple only set the price points, the devs pick which one they use.

@Wolker Hett

Yeah, but you'd find your life sooooo much richer if you had some friends instead of just a bunch of fans.

Maybe you need a hug.

Er...

Not this one again.

The F700 was previewed *after* the iPhone and if you have a look for reviews still knocking around online you'll find many of them comment on how much it looks like the iPhone. The dates on that website for the F700 are wrong by 12 months and can be debunked with a tiny amount of research.

See here for Slashgear's preview from the *2007* CeBIT.

http://www.slashgear.com/slashgear-at-cebit-samsung-f700-hands-on-154328/

Not that we want any facts to get in the way of a good Apple bashing.

Wilful misunderstanding?

Also available free on most networks on contract, which is how most people buy their phones.

Because of the unique way The Register is funded I should point out that other smart phones are also available for free on contract or for stupid money SIM free.

Who for?

I don't think it's impossible to do that, but who would you sell it too?

Yes, there are probably a huge number of geeks (myself included) who would like to be able to try out different phone OS flavours before picking one, but beyond us who would care?

I think any manufacturer would struggle to sell more than a couple of hundred thousand of such handsets, so it really isn't worth the development time.

Plus, of course, you'd need a patent and royalty free standard for the HAL API before the third-party OS writers (Google, MS, Nokia?) would even consider adapting their OS to work with it anyway and suddenly you're talking several lorry loads of work for no return.

Feel free to try and persuade someone to do the hard work, though. I'd like this capability :-)

If I recall correctly

Sony specified that MD was not to be used as a data storage medium, presumably because they're also a music publisher and they feared piracy.

I agree that they almost certainly missed a massive opportunity to replace floppy disks in the 90s and slow the take-up of the various mp3 music players into the early 2000s.

Not that Sony would have been the first big company that kneecapped one of its own emergent products to protect a different established one.

Possibly not

The factory installed system in my car has additional sensors that allow it to track the vehicle quite accurately even when there is no GPS signal (e.g. in tunnels and car parks) or before the system has a GPS lock when I first start out.

So it's not beyond possibility that this car will have the same capability.

I'm not sure how it would cope with going up and down the various levels in a multi-story, though.

@Established Cycle

Are you sure about that?

First: iPhone (aka iPhone 1)

Second: iPhone 3G (aka iPhone 2, because iPhone 1 didn't do 3G)

Third: iPhone 3GS (aka iPhone 3, souped up iPhone 2)

Fouth: iPhone 4 (no need for an aka)

Not that much of a pattern yet, just a sign that they painted themselves into a corner by using the number "3" in the name of the second phone.

It is possible that the internet rumours will turn out to be true and the new phone will called a "4S", but that does seem like a silly idea now they've managed to align the numbers correctly again.

Mind you, it still makes more sense than any of Microsoft's product maps:

1->2->2.1->3->3.1->3.11->95->98->ME->Dead

or

3.1->3.5->3.51->4->2000->XP->Vista->7

or

3.1->3.5->3.51->4->2000->2003->2008

I suppose that do at least appear to have settled on what naming standards they are going to use from now on.

Too late

While I agree that Anna looks like it'll be a nice update, it's 8 months later than promised and is, in fact, the OS that the N8 should have launched with. And the N8 should have launched two years ago instead of the N97.

It's nice, if somewhat annoying, to see that Nokia is finally getting Symbian sorted out but if they'd done it all that time ago (when it mattered), then they probably wouldn't have had to do the Microsoft deal.

As you said, Anna is just meant to be a building block for the next version (Belle); the preview videos look good, but then so did the Anna ones 6-7 months ago and TBH I'm not waiting any longer. My contract is up in September and I'll be ditching Symbian phones and Nokia, probably for good.

And that really irks me because Nokia was always my "return to" brand that I went back to after making the mistake of trying another phone brand and now they're actually the mistake brand that I want to get away from.