Posts by Andy

Jailbreak ahoy?

"It's considered possible that the exploit might also allow miscreants to load and run code on the handset"...

Here's hoping. Would be useful to have an exploit like this for jailbreaking purposes. The way 1.1.1 was jailbroken involved a tiff exploit, of course - which was then patched as part of the process. Perhaps this will lead to a similarly easy way to get 3rd party apps onto the phone unofficially. Although, it's probably harder - both for well- and ill-intentioned exploitation - now that applications don't run as root.

@ Jonathon Green:

Pretty huge. There will even be official ones, soon. ;)

You obviously missed the point of my comment, though. The device has so much more in common with other "smartphones", particularly in the philosophy behind it and the way it works, than it does with other "dumb" phones; you have to be a moron, a pedant, or just flamebaiting to try to claim it's not a smartphone.

Jon Winter: Ouch. I think Nokia's build quality has been steadily dropping over the last ten years. Every phone I've had from them has broken more quickly than the last. To the point, in fact, that my N80 had 5 repairs in under a year, including a complete rear-section replacement (which was misaligned inside so none of the buttons worked); finally it was replaced, with a factory-fresh model sporting an incorrectly connected screen which cuts out if you touch the wrong place or hold it at the wrong angle. I haven't even bothered to ask for another repair.

Two people?

That actually *is* pretty crowded for an O2 store, at least it is here in Derby!

Tiscali are bandits

Their customer service reps will lie to you repeatedly; even the England-based staff further up the chain are happy to mislead you.

Was with them last year. I cancelled my direct debit to them well before the end of the contract. They've been too inept to follow up so far; it's been 9 months.

I'd be interested to see...

...the sales figures for individual models. Didn't Apple say they wanted a 1% share in the market?

Tiscali are bandits

Stay well away! Was with them for months. Essentially, visiting a site like YouTube - which has moderately high bandwidth requirements - between 6 and 11pm warranted a warning letter about overusage... on their 'unlimited' packages! Not to mention the ~3 months of tech support pestering to get them to reconnect our service - during which time they were quite happy to charge me the full service cost.

3G? Meh.

The iPhone's EDGE connection is faster than any 3G phone I've ever owned (this is not an exaggeration), because of a combination of a piss-poor 3G network over here, slow phones that can't render pages at anything above glacial speed, and possibly the number of handsets on the network (seeing as the iPhone pretty much has the EDGE network to itself). Anyway, the iPhone has wifi too...

Couldn't give a damn if you like the iPhone or not (though it sounds like most of the people bashing it haven't tried it - it's really not about the feature list, it's the software, stupid) but can we please stop pretending 3G is some kind of network nirvana? It's slow at best.

Sigh...

Haven't people learned that this particular money-"earning" trick doesn't work? This has been tried too many times...

Not to mention that to stand any chance of working, it needed to be done before iTunes and other stores began selling DRM-free tracks, so it's a year too late. Retard.

Surprise surprise

This almost certainly will be worthless to the hacking community anyway, as it will simply involve using the handset's unique unlock code - the infrastructure for this has been in place since day one.

This is kind of a dead end, and doesn't change anything at all for those of us without €999 spare; though no doubt there will be no end of brainless stories and comments suggesting that this changes things for better or worse.

Bitrates:

Current Freeview is offered as mpeg2, a technology that's decades old and ridiculously wasteful of bandwidth. While we're mucking with TV standards so much mpeg2 should be dumped, to go with H.264; that could deliver 720p at ~6-8Mbps, 1080p at ~10-12. That's 2 or 3 current channels, respectively, and with considerably fewer blocky/smeary compression artefacts than on current Freeview.

My fear is that although H.264 is supposed to be the eventual aim, the size of the installed base of current-gen, incompatible Freeview boxes will mean that the move will be resisted and "delayed" indefinitely by the authorities, meaning we actually benefit virtually nothing from the move to digital.

This sentence tells us all we need to know:

"While the iPhone's corrective text feature helps, this data suggests that iPhone users who have owned the device for a month still make about the same number of errors as the day they got it."

It takes a week or more to get used to the iPhone keyboard. You make so many mistakes on the first day that it's virtually unusable. I'm as quick as I've ever been with other handsets, now. And the autocorrect feature is scarily accurate - in fact the only time it's got anything wrong for me is when "bugger" became "bigger"... Obviously those Yanks aren't used to proper English, eh?

This study seems to be very poorly constructed, as by the sound of things it doesn't allow any of the handsets to perform to their full potential. Not to mention, of course, the stupidly small size of the study.

Awesome

Now I can stop lying awake at night thinking about it.

@Abdul:

That'd be Boot Camp, mate, not Boot Cap (whatever one of those is). Your last paragraph is hilarious.

So, let me get this straight: the idea is to trick users into installing malicious software? Wow, that's genius. People have been doing that for years, to Mac and PC users alike. This is news when it can be done without my knowledge.

Mistakes corrected:

"Even the 'DRM' free stuff has the 'convert to mp3' menu item blocked." - this is simply wrong. I just converted an iTunes Plus track to verify.

Also, the price drop does apply to the UK. Please learn to read press releases.

What I'd like to know...

...is why the image in question wasn't reproduced here? Surely the world deserves to see the truth!

My word.

"Apple's Macintosh - arguably the ultimate in closed and proprietary systems"

Quite a feat, seeing as how Xcode, the Apple-designed, best-in-class development environment for OS X, has been completely free, for anyone, for many years. Macs have always allowed 3rd party development. Please don't post crap like this.

The fact that anyone can see this is rubbish leads one to assume it's simply flamebait. Congratulations. I'll await your retraction (ha ha).

Deja vu

Did he just heard about the Romanian convict who sued God, too? (I read that story yesterday - to be honest, it's much funnier than this loser.)

To the fellow having N80 troubles:

I feel your pain. Worst phone I've ever owned. My first model had a recurring problem with the speaker - which came back every time it was repaired - so I couldn't make calls, whoops. The second model was entirely misaligned internally, which meant that half the buttons didn't work. I finally picked up yet another N80 this last week, and the screen has loose connections so that it continually loses power or the video feed from the handset. Shockingly poor design.

Of course, they're trying to screw you.

The likely reason is that Apple's original contracts specifically excluded selling songs for ringtone usage, and they have now had to negotiate additional contracts to sell ringtones. That would fit with the fact that only a limited catalogue of songs are available for this new service.

But why make a sensible analysis when you can make a sensational one, eh?

Anyway, I rather wish they charged $99. The fewer irritating hip-hop ringtones people are allowed to have, the better.

Just what we need:

... more thick kids with babies they're too inept to bring up properly.

@ John PM Chappell

There are so many things in your post that suggest that not only are you an idiot, but you can't read.

- Noone was talking about "God" being a proper noun - it was "Christian", which is derived from a guy's name. Not only that, but "God" can be a proper noun - in Judeo-Christian religions - because it refers to a single entity; it can also be a common noun, for where it could refer to more than one entity.

- Yoga is spiritually-derived. Sorry, but history isn't going to change just to fit in with your argument. Whether idiots who take part in it these days see it as spiritual or not is really beside the point.

- Church halls funded by the state? Well, it's all been said. Plus, if the money is given in full knowledge of it being a church hall, then it's given to the church, and they still have absolute legal and moral ownership of it, and get to decide its use. It's only a public building in the sense that the church allows the public to use it; no more. If it's a village hall - well, it depends whether the church owns it or not, doesn't it? I suspect it probably does.

Grief, I hope you're not a Torygraph reader, as someone suggested. I'd hate to be reading the same newspaper that someone so hard-of-thinking as yourself does.

@Ian Davies:

What a fantastic title to your post.

I wholeheartedly agree: and I am not directing this post towards Cade, but to the Master Vultures, whoever they may be.

The strong criticism that is becoming ever more apparent in comment threads really ought to concern you. The sensible reaction is not, "Good, we're generating controversy, we must be doing something right!" - because it's not controversy; it's genuine revulsion. A better reaction would be, "My God, long time readers are starting to hate us! What's going wrong?"

The rest of the internet takes the piss out of you guys, and it's painful. They used to take the mick because *you* took the mick, and that was great - they were the good days. The days that gave birth to BOFH, and black helicopters, and that fantastic JOKE gif... I was even sad enough to own one of your t-shirts and wear it with pride! Now, you're just bad journalists, and the contempt in the rest of the media feels too right on occasion. I'm sorry. I keep hoping I'll wake up, and everything will be ok again.

@Stu:

You appear to have the naive assumption that this site is up so that they can listen to the views of the public. It's not. It's so they can *appear* to listen to the views of the public. As such, it doesn't matter what petitions get started there because they're pretty much ignored anyway - and some lackey writes a non-committal response.

@Will Leamon

You read the article, right? Sounds to me like the iPhone is 'cool' for most people, not just Mac users.

I have no idea what the official definition of a smartphone is, but stuff like its video playback beats basically any smartphone on the market; and I think more people find that useful than a spreadsheet app - hence the sales figures.

"At ease?"

Sounds like they worded the survey very cleverly. If you actually explained it to people, I suspect most would be horrified.

What's the big deal?

My laptop batteries - from Macs, but I assume the same applies Windows-side - have had perfect charge readings for at least half a decade. I've always assumed that the fact phones don't show such reliable readings was due to the manufacturers cheaping out on components, not because the tech wasn't there.

Hurray!

Everyone loves censorship.

Someone actually got paid to do this.

Also - why on earth did the BPI feel the need to respond? Was their spokesman just bored or something?

Actually, Alex -

We do have the dubious pleasure of being able to buy TV content from iTunes in the UK now. Not that I'll pay that much for my shows.

Sadly I think the point on which you're wrong is that "if people stopped buying videos from iTunes due to price then the price would come have to come down". That would involve rational thinking from the content providers. Taking their cue from the music industry, I'd expect to see price increases to screw the few remaining customers out of as much money as possible.

To all those who are being rude about students:

Remember in the old days, when you got grants? THEN, it was just about possible not to get into debt. Not any more.

Law makes the point fairly crudely, but it's true - there is no way to avoid debt, unless you're relatively wealthy to begin with and you spend large amounts of savings. The student loan (yes, LOAN, not grant - some people apparently still don't know the difference) will just about cover accommodation. That's it. If you want to eat for three years, you have to use your arranged overdraft. There's absolutely no choice in the matter.

Whoops.

Many's the time I've used the activity window to grab something I want to watch offline. Very useful feature - and as you said, a timely reminder that stuf on the net is pretty much public. Having said that, though, if you want to pinch the music it'd be pretty much as easy to grab a torrent.

Well.

Apple/iTunes will not be unseated until someone comes up with a way of putting music onto iPods which is just as straightforward. Do you see that happening? Nah, me neither.

My previous comment never made it past moderation - it criticised the source, is that not allowed? Here's hoping this one made it through.

Would you employ this woman?

I wouldn't, after that. Sounds like a really serious misjudgement on her part.

Y'know...

In fairness, the amount of heat that goes towards warming you up vs. the amount of heat that heats straight into the atmosphere is tiny... Patio heaters pretty much are a complete waste of energy, and I think if they were more widespread the issue would be noticed. That's not to say it's worth knickers getting twisted, but they're pretty irresponsible.

Whether you're a believer or a sceptic when it comes to climate change - I'm a sceptic, myself - it really doesn't hurt to play on the safe side. Anyway, exhaustion of fossil fuels is a very real situation; and wasting energy, whether by using patio heaters or leaving all your lights on constantly, doesn't help that much.

Sean Thompson, I wholeheartedly agree

The fact that this ad is _seen_ as racist is the biggest problem here, not the ad itself. The colour of those dudes shouldn't matter.

Corrupt? Strong word, but... Perhaps.

History tells us that this is one major way in which Microsoft works - make it easy for people to fall into your traps and end up delivering software dependent on your proprietary systems. Maybe the BBC have just been naive, but then again - if they've got a big ex-MS guy in there, maybe it's deliberate?

One thing I didn't know is that this system is IE-based. There's absolutely no need for that, even if they do use WM DRM. Just build your own front end. So one begins to suspect that they *want* to tie themselves to Microsoft...

uPnP, eh?

Apple have never really seemed to like uPnP anyway. They have their own technologies which they prefer. So I guess it shouldn't be hugely surprising... Though you wouldn't usually see a company just abandon a feature, even one as little used as this.

I really wish El Reg would stop this!

Stories are getting more biassed, facts are getting twisted, positions misrepresented... Journalistic standards are going down the toilet recently.

The Register used to be loved for not taking itself, or anyone else, seriously. That often involved cheap shots and biassed articles, sure; but never blatant untruths or such lazy reporting. It happens with such regularity these days, it feels like there's seething anger and horrible jealousy behind about half of the content. This article is far from the worst, but it's typical or the general background malice towards any kind of success. Seriously, what's going on? I used to love you guys!

Be very careful....

...when you lets your writers do pieces on other peoples' mistakes (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/26/symbian_symbain/). It means you're kinda asking to be called on any little slips that occur over here!

Workarounds eh?

From what I heard, there was that amazingly difficult workaround of enabling IMAP support in Exchange...

Good luck to anyone wanting to get their company's IT department to accept the iPhone. It'll be the same attitude as to any other new technology: ban it and stubbornly pretend it doesn't exist, isn't possible or will break all manner of things. Of course, if you're high enough up the chain you make your own rules.