Posts by TheOtherHobbes

Re: Gallium arsenide has been talked up for decades now

Indeed. It's been around so long - I remember it being talked up in the 80s - that if it coud have been productised it would have.

The issue isn't resolution, it's yield and cost.

Re: No, Miss Koh, you are not.

You should phone the PO and tell them to stop.

Re: Another possible reason.....

A moment of silence please for all those poor CEOs and their cash hoards.

What a tragedy that an entire generation of Randian heroes - like Apotheker, Fiorina, Ryan, Ballmer, Blankfein and co - will see their hard work and towering genius destroyed by some guy who realises they're really just dangerously self-important morons with entitlement issues whose contribution to the real economy is somewhere between zip, fuck all, and exterminate.

Re: Not exactly much he could do...

Nonsense. Last time I looked it was the financial industry that crashed the economy in 2008. Fat Gordon was always there to shill for them. But if he hadn't been on their side, he could have done a lot more to avoid the crash.

Spending more on nurses and teachers was never an issue, and still isn't today - not to anyone who knows real economics, and isn't just parroting the usual bollocks.

As for Osbo - he could tax mansions and land. He could tax corporations and executive pay. He could get all Keynesian and invest money in useful infrastructure, creating real and useful jobs and lifting consumer spending.

He does none of these things because all he cares about is getting wages down and paying people who do real work less and less, so his Etonian chums pocket more and more cash.

Don't believe me? Check out the 27% increase paid to FTSE-100 execs, sourced from that well known far-left Trotskyist rag the Daily Telegraph.

Funny how 'we're all in this together' has become 'but some are more in it than others.'

Re: "Windows 8 is dirt cheap to buy at the moment"

Ignoring Win 8 is free.

Re: Compliant with the law?

Actually you get health care, roads, public transport funding (of a sort), public education, defence, a working judiciary (of a sort), arts funding, libraries, technology R&D investment, aerospace investment, and one or two other things.

It's certainly true that government is corrupt and not very good at IT projects.

But 'governments only waste money, unlike private corporations' is one of the biggest outright lies there is.

Private corporations mostly give money to upper management and shareholders.

Upper management and shareholders spend it on 'luxury' tat, like shiny watches that can't keep time and two-grand handbags.

The smarter ones spend it on property, which is why a crappy one-bed in an arse-end-of-nowhere part of London costs more than a quarter of a million now, or around four or five times median income.

So if upper management and shareholders had less money, that would hardly destroy the UK economy.

As for VAT - duh. Maybe you should learn how VAT actually works before claiming 'they have to pay VAT on the goods they sell.'

And if Starbucks put up coffee prices for their customers - well, that would be a shame, wouldn't it?

The rest of us will be down the old coffee shop having real coffee, and probably a spot of lunch too.

Re: EDITOR, please take Mr Lewis off, it is seriously damaging the Register's cred!

"Tosh! Lewis brings contrary argument to the table."

No he doesn't - he regularly selectively misreports, misrepresents, or distorts the science - as in this piece of nonsense where he's distorting the conclusions and (let's be generous) misunderstanding what the paper actually says.

There's no problem with fact-based debate. But using The Reg as a pulpit for faked-up bias pieces that misrepresent reality is dishonest and disreputable.

Re: Must...buy...iPad...

You can buy the real thing for £70 from Tesco.

A version on a 10" tablet with handles so small you have to twirl them with very small body parts is pretty much the definition of 'This species is not one of evolution's better moments.'

Re: In parallel..

It's depressing how little innovation there has been in software, and especially in OS design.

The beginnings of Office, the Mac, the PC, UNIX, Windows, the early Internet - all there by the mid-80s, all still around today.

Meanwhile it took maybe ten years for Apple and Microsoft to catch up with what the Amiga was doing in 1988.

Hardware is a thousand times faster and/or small enough to be packed into a phone. But - with the possible exception of the torrent networks - there have been no game-changing developments in (say) distributed processing or shared storage, or even in clever UI design.

Physical computing is progress, but the model is still a box you poke your fingers at with information inside it, not something more open and unrestricted.

Re: I wonder...

Those are grave markers for all the good ideas that went to Apple to die a horrible, lingering death by minimalist brushed aluminium and skeuomorphic UI design.

Apart from that, it looks quite nice. If you look closely you can see the iJobs glass booth where a projection appears ever year to steer the company ever onwards, like a turtlenecked Hari Seldon.

Would be even cooler if it was an actual spaceship though.

Re: The one advantage that physical retail has..immediate availability

So if they had 25 models on display and 3 stock units for each, that's 75 dishwashers out the back.

Repeat for fridges, cookers, and the rest, and multiply by the number of stores, and that's an entire warehouse of stock per store, with the cost of rental space, credit for the stock, and possible losses on items that never sell, just on the off-chance someone wants to take away a big item.

How often do people do that? Not often, I'd guess.

Reality is the delivery items are kept at the manufacturer's stock depot, which may not even be in the UK. Or they're built to order.

Which means that unless you want to prod before buying, you may as well shop online, because delivery times will be similar.

White goods stores are basically a catalogue you can walk around in. It's really, really hard to imagine how they could be more than that now.

There's possibly a small market for high-end domestic consultancy[tm] where stores provide a complete kitchen experience[tm]. But most people buy on price, and stores are currently a good way to destroy value, not add to it.

Re: I've been using Linux since mid-late 1993 (Slackware).

Indeed.

The biggest benefit of Linux is that it keeps command line nerds away from proper consumer computing, where they could do some real damage to the industry.

Re: Jumping the Shark

Consistency was a damn fine idea in theory, but totally beyond the technical reach of a poorly-managed dinosaur corporate like MS.

The people who could have made it work were doubtless culled and rejected from the political tarpit years ago.

A smarter approach might have been a modular OS with proper MVC, so devs could keep the core features separate from the UI, and redesign the latter to suit the platform. But I'm not even sure that was ever possible with Windows, except perhaps with a total rewrite.

Meanwhile Linux has never succeeded on the desktop because with so many distros it's impossible to market it properly. Geek word of mouth doesn't count for much in the consumer market. And MS/Apple have always been stronger at marketing than tech.

But there has to be a basic level of functionality to make a marketable product, and there also has to be an attractive USP.

Win 8 has neither. If the very best and most generous consumer perception of a product is that it's 'not as bad as everyone says' the marketing and reputation are already a disaster.

Forced?

Someone forces you to watch teevee at gunpoint?

Don't be ridiculous. The Hobbes household has been free of TV since 1994, and the idiot box isn't missed here.

Thing is though, the BBC also produces rather a lot of news coverage and other reporting. And it's also the one thing standing in the way of Rupert Murdoch and the other members of Club Idiot, all of whom would dearly love to extend the tabloid monopoly on stupidity in all possible directions.

Knowing a number of Beeb-people it's like any other corporation - management is often clueless or evil, grunts on the ground are often talented and hard-working.

Taking down the BBC would remove one of the few remaining sources of indepedendent-ish journalism in the UK.

It's true that the reporting isn't nearly independent enough a lot of the time, and promising 'inconvenient' pieces are often taken down from on high for purely political reasons.

But the alternative is too horrific to contemplate.

As for the usual Orlowski hit-piece on 'warmists' - I'll leave that to the people I know who study these things for a living.

If they had a news channel of their own, that would only be a good thing - not just because it would put creepy and morally questionable self-important poseurs like Orlowski out of work, but because people need to know what's really happening, and the bought-and-paid-for meeja are doing a predictably bad job of explaining the truth to them.

Re: I can't understand why Nokia don't sell nokia maps on other OSes

Having played with Nokia maps in desperation during the crap map app flap rap, I was impressed by how much better the core mapping is than either Google's or Apple's technology.

The dataset is still some way behind, especially the satellite/aerial photography. But the vector graphic map is really rather fine.

Re: Windows to make own phone

WinPhoPho to us techy types.

Since Elop is probably going to be out of a job by the end of 2013 as Nokia burns around him, Sinofsky could do worse than take a post in Finland to do a dustpan and brush job on the smouldering ashes.

Or he could head to Apple to take over from Scott Forstall.

Baseless speculation by journalists - it's like rocket surgery without the rockets.

Or the surgery.

Re: Overpriced Apple LCD TV for the rich?

Unless it includes an iMac, and costs the same as an iMac, and has a touch screen, and you can hang on it on a wall. And iTunes suddenly sprouts a App Store-like shop front where amateur and semi-pro content makers can sell their content for cash.

But no - the major networks don't care. So Apple either has no TV, or it has to Think Different (for a change) and invent something new.

I'm guessing the former. But it's going to be interesting if I'm wrong about that.

Re: Ballmer said...

He prolly mipselled 'Ook'.

" it's perhaps not a very good theory."

Or perhaps it's not a very good universe.

Re: you forget an important thing

'Taste' is the key word there. Jobs made computing stylish and tasteful.

Everyone else makes appliance IT. Apple makes lifestyle IT. And for better or worse, buyers love that.

Or at least they used to. The taste has faded after Jobs, because Cook doesn't get style - he gets thinner, smaller, lighter and Retina, which are not even close to being the same thing.

Sculley also didn't get it, which is why Apple bombed after Jobs was ousted the first time. The Macs became boring beige boxes and Apple was on the ropes until Jobs brought OS X and the iMac. OS X 1.0 was a technical disaster but iMacs looked so cool everyone stuck with it.

And so on.

Ive may get it, but no one knows how much he depended on Jobs in an editorial role to steer his contribution. If he can create the magic on his own he could eventually replace Cook.

Either way it's going to be interesting to see if he can rescue iOS and make it fresh again. I'm not convinced yet, but I'd be happy to be surprised.

Re: Maybe, but ...

" it would only really be a big issue if everyone was chucking hundred meg files around at the same time and everyone was on wireless and everyone used the same access point."

Such as an office full of Mac users all trying to download the latest OS X and iOS updates?

It's even worse in the dev tank when a new beta of iOS and Xcode arrives.

Re: Wishing into existence

So if I hack into your PC, copy the videos of you having sex with [insert favourite sex object here] and upload them to Usenet, you're perfectly fine with that because you still have the original files?

Or if by some miracle you happened to have the secret of eternal life on your hard drive, it makes no odds if it's copied because it's just bits and bytes?

Duh.

Anyone with at least a little working grey matter should be able to work out that the value of copyright isn't in the mechanical process of copying, but in its ability to control and benefit personally and professionally from access to the material that is copied.

Specifically, creative people do not create binary blobs. They create experiences (the arts) or practical insights, tools and solutions (science and engineering.)

A video of you poking your Westminster MP into a red snapper isn't just a random collection of binary information - it's a thing which has social, personal and perhaps (you'd be lucky...) commercial value. If someone copies it, *you* lose the benefit of that value, whatever it happens to be - even if it's just the value of being spared the social embarrassment of porking something you shouldn't. (Ask the recently former head of the CIA if you're not sure what that means.)

And... if you know anything about military history you'll know that the property rights you're so proud of creating really do exist because of government fiat, and not just because you want them to.

In war they're the first thing to go, and your famously independent ham sammich isn't much use to you if you have a hungry soldier billeted in your house and they want it more than you do.

Re: Such modesty

My guess is 'well into three figures' modest.

Does anyone know anyone who bought one?

Re: Nokia Communicator, anyone?

And another vote from here.

I had three starting with the 9110, and they all paid for themselves. I bailed for an iPhone around the time of the E90.

Expandable memory, IR, micro-Office clone s/ware and a decent-sized hardware keyboard (relatively...) made the last couple unexpectedly convincing as pocket laptops.

Who remembers that version of Nokia now?

Re: Several g is about 2g if HD40307g has the same density as Earth

So you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Then again it might make any hypothetical inhabitants more inventive.

Re: "I expect the volumes on Windows Phone to really ramp quickly."

He didn't say which direction he expects the ramp to slope.

Re: What's bothering you Lewis?

I'm pleased you think that all we need to do to get 5-6 billions human living in perfectly sustainable colonies off-planet is to mine a few spinning rocks.

Most people who work in the field know there might be one or two extra stages. But apparently you've solved all the hard problems already.

Congratulations. You should email them and let them know. I expect they'll be delighted and will be more than willing to shower you with fame and riches.

Wait - did I say 'perfectly sustainable'? Oh dear. That must make me exactly the kind of long-haired eco-hippy Page hates so much.

Yes indeed - we seem think nothing of trashing one habitat so we can build our own SuperSpaceHabitats[tm] to remind ourselves why trashing those is a bad idea.

Nice.

Hey - we could even import gas and oil specially to make ourselves feel at home, instead of using solar.

Because something that makes perfect sense up there can't possibly make sense down here, can it?

Re: "Dreaming of a fix for the crap Maps app?"

Maps is now showing road numbers in the UK for A and B roads and some errors close to me have been fixed - one town particularly has moved from the side of a hill to its real location.

There are still some bad spelling mistakes and weird location names in London. And of course no street view. And the vertical location data and OpenGL mesh rendering still looks strange and squishily Dali-esque in most places.

But it's getting close to being usable.

Problem is devs still can't use turn-by-turn because if we do MapKit kills our apps and opens Maps instead.

Re: Welcome to 1980

Of course Apple could do something innovative like using AirPlay to display Mac content on a (larger?) iPad, with touch events fed back to the Mac as trackpad or mouse events.

They could even call it something like - hmmm - how about "VNC"?

Empirically

...the nearest prostitutes are often to be found in the company of high-ranking Party leaders and their business chums - not unlike in Rest of World.

They probably didn't want the competition.

The giveaway is the fact

that the desktop version is called OS X and the tablet/phone version is called iOS.

So - here's the clue - they have different names, and they're designed for different things.

If iOS had been called OS X RT users would have confused users too.

But MS is shackled to the Windows brand, so anything OS-like has to have the W word in it - whether or not it intersects with a normal person's concept of common sense.

It's likely to confuse developers too, because it's not clear how much of Windows is in Windows RT, and how trivial/easy/hard/impossible it is to port existing code to the Wapp Store.