Posts by Giles Jones

Proprietary lenses

There's no way someone should go for a system where you spend loads of money on lenses for a mount system that could be dead a few years later.

You'll lose more money than buying a high end BMW and selling it on used.

Adobe

"Apple is crazy-innovative in terms of hardware and software design, but I can count the total number of software engineering advances they’ve made on one hand."

And what have Adobe ever done for software engineering?

Did they create a parallel processing engine and then give it away? Apple did.

What have Adobe given to the open source community?

Wifi

At least there may be a wifi fix by the time it gets here. Personally I think it will be the multitasking which will be worth waiting for.

Caution

Google have to be careful not to be too greedy. Once the quality of the service starts to swing towards making them money and not providing a good user experience then people will look elsewhere.

It happened with Vista, Microsoft lost the home user to add DRM and features for business.

Too expensive

It is a bit too expensive when you contrast the price against the dull generic plasticy rubbish that HP, Dell and others produce.

It you look at how it fits in Apple's range then it makes more sense.

It's pretty obvious that if you produce a new category of product that many people won't get it. Such people had no interest in computers until the Internet arrived.

It's a device for people on the move who want more battery life than a laptop, more screen real estate than a smartphone and the convenience of a very long standby time (near instant switch on).

HP

While it's nice to dream that a HP tablet will be good. They've not made a decent PDA or mobile phone in years.

This tablet will be some quick bodge using a design they've had sitting about. It will be ugly, inefficient and there will be no software for it. It may run existing WebOS apps, but scaled up. It will be a while before a tablet version of the OS comes out.

Dim.

With an image that dim you'd be better carrying a large magnifier around.

So?

How many phone models does Nokia have? quite a lot. Apple have two (3G and 3GS).

Nokia phones are cheap.

Ford sell more cars than Porsche.

Specs

Was reviewing the specifications and it was ok until I saw "Stylus".

Argh, who in their right mind produces a phone with a stupid stick these days?

Price

Contrast the price of the 3G version at £529 with an unlocked iPhone.

E.g

http://www.superetrader.co.uk/apple-iphone-3gs-32gb-ukblack-sim-free-mobile-phone-p-4308.html?gad=CMDIu8kDEgg-s_Nh2Zr1URiY3OT-AyCY9p4z&

£787!

Or with a PAYG iPhone:

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone?mco=MTAyNTQzMTI

£449!!!

I think the iPad is pretty cheap compared with a sim free mobile. It is more powerful in terms of CPU and the screen is higher res.

Just shows

Browser plugins cripple the advancement of HTML and the web. If something isn't possible in the browser without a plugin then propose a standard, let people review it and improve it.

This is how the net used to work, people put out an RFC and others commented, it was then implemented.

POP3, NNTP and SMTP all started that way.

Adobe

Adobe are second only to Microsoft in churning out lazy minor evolutions of software and charging a fortune.

Who in their right mind pays £640 for a graphic tool? I bet 50% or more of Photoshop users are using a pirate copy.

I really hope Apple produce a rival to Photoshop at half or less of the price. I remember buying Logic Audio for about half RRP on Ebay thinking I had got a good deal. Then Apple released Logic Studio for less than what I had paid (approx £319) and they dropped the USB dongle, I upgraded for £129. This for a professional audio tool used by all manner of recording artists.

Contrast this with Cubase which was over £500 at the time. Now Cubase Studio 5 can be bought for £299!! So competition is good, it's about time Adobe had some competition so they can't charge their extortionate prices and release lazy bloat-ware.

Have a read of this

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/why-steve-jobs-hates-flash.html

It's why HP wanted a tablet OS. They dropped their Slate product using Windows 7 as the future could be small lower power devices accessing data and services in the cloud.

Right to be cautious

Given Apple tends to get targeted by patent trolls it's better to be cautious.

Look at FAT as used by Tomtom and how they're having to pay money to Microsoft.

No software

Microsoft simply doesn't have an OS to install on it. Apple has iPhone OS, Google has Android, Microsoft has Windows Mobile which was designed for stylus use or Windows Phone 7 which is a bit limited (I'm sure version 8 will be better) and social networking centric.

Gnome

It still uses Gnome, I never liked Gnome. Even Linus has been critical of Gnome in the past.

KDE was always my preferred Linux desktop.

No amount of slick GUI and desktop software will hide the fact that behind the scenes is a monolithic kernel. If your hardware isn't supported then you can forget downloading a driver and installing it, it's time for a new kernel or hope there's a compiled module for your exact version of the kernel.

Years ago rolling your own kernel was pretty easy, these days there are just way too many options in the configuration screen. Menus and options for everything from embedded devices, to phones to washing machines (I'm joking, but if the Linux kernel team accepts it then it'll be there as an option).

Didn't he call Apple?

I remember reading he called up Apple and they refused to believe he had the phone.

If he didn't response to the letter from Apple then that's his own fault.

Hahah

This Nokia guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

Image sensor sizes will need to increase dramatically to produce the levels of noise that SLR users find acceptable.

Nokia will have to implement 45 point autofocus, selectable focus points.

People like the large lenses, they provide nice big tactile focus rings and zoom rings.

Large lenses have lens hoods, soft focus filters, polarising filters etc..

How are Nokia going to implement tilt shift lenses which are extremely good for taking photos of buildings without the inevitable perspective distortion.

Many people like through the lens viewfinders. They also allow you to check depth of field by pressing the depth of field preview button.

Camera phones triggering and syncing with pro flash guns? yeah right!

Strobe flash for capturing motion? I don't think so.

The list is endless. SLRs and mid format will never be replaced with a camera phone. You would look like an idiot if you pulled out a camera phone in a photo studio.

Look at video cameras used by news teams, they're still massive even though you can shoot HD with a small handheld video camera these days. There's a good reason for this!

Amiga games

Many Amiga games were crippled by the code being shared between the Atari ST version and the Amiga version. If it was an arcade conversion and the original code was 68k ASM they would use part of the original arcade game code.

As a result the Amiga version didn't take advantage of the custom chips properly and was on par or even inferior to the ST version.

The moral of the story? cross compatibility results in a product that can only be as good a lowest common denominator. Cross compatibility only affects development, a product properly coded for the target platform will be better and the end result will be happy users and a good product.

In this world of increasing laziness and resource sharing (look at cars for a good example) this is Apple trying to increase quality.

Big iPhone

People may think it's a high price, but it's only a bit more than an unlocked iPhone would cost you and this device is more powerful and costs more in materials.

Those who are saying you might as well get a laptop are missing the point, where's the ultraportable laptop that has 10 hours battery life and near instant switch on?

I'll wait to see the real price, I think these prices are a bit high.

USB port

I own this set, paid £500. I didn't want to pay £1000+ when I know that a few years down the line I will probably be upgrading again. I paid £779 for a 32 inch LCD a few years back and kept that for about 3 years.

The USB port can be enabled in the service menu. It requires downgrading firmware, applying the hack and once enabled you can upgrade again.

Obviously this will invalidate your warranty.

http://lgusb.wikispaces.com/

Demos

I've sat in on a few Gold Partner sessions and found them a bit lacking. There's simply no practical examples of the new features. When the presenter starts talking about the Start page and how you can hide it then you really wonder why you're bothering sitting through the presentation.

Moving on, at times I think there's great ideas and developers at Redmond, they're just managed by complete idiots. After all, who else would withdraw free mobile development tools only to reinstate them due to the success of the iPhone.

RRP

They probably judge their losses based on RRP and selling a copy to every citizen in the country.

How can you judge if someone will buy music or not, are you really telling me they can guestimate the popularity of a film or music artist?

It's all part of a deception to earn more money than they would make doing it the hard way by selling, marketing and distributing music.

Why bother making a CD/DVD, selling it and waiting for a few pounds profit to come back when you can sue a pirate for £100,000?

Hollywood itself was formed by people fleeing to get away from paying patents for film equipment to Edison.

http://www.kobobooks.com/content/Hollywoods-Pirate-Legacy/sc-QdXz_ZORlEur56WfnQdMWA/page1.html

About time

It's about time the 2G was left behind. It nearly three years old now, nobody who has one will be on a contract. It's had a good run, OS 1.0 all the way up to OS 3 (and patches). What other handset makers gives you *two* major upgrades?

With WinMo you're lucky to get a few bug fixes, you can only get the latest features by buying a new phone or installing a homebrew ROM (breaking licence agreements and invalidating your warranty).

You don't really want development held back by an older device.

Firewire

"Audio interfacing has always tended to be rather unpredictable on computers, especially laptops."

Not on a Mac with a Firewire audio inteface. I have an Echo Audiofire 12, 24-bit 192Khz 12 channel audio with MIDI. Never had any trouble with it at all.

USB is simply a waste of time for pro-audio, even USB3 will suck, why? CPU load!

Watch the iAd demo

iAds can be much better than some rubbish banner or text ad. It is like a mini promotional tool, there are already many of these for films and other things. It's an interactive application, not some annoying video.

Why should consumers give a toss?

Consumers like software that is compact, runs fast, doesn't suck battery life, doesn't crash, is designed well for the platform and so on...

Developers are obviously more interested in cutting corners, writing one game that runs on many platforms. This is hardly in the interests of the end user. It's about time someone made a stand against the increasing bloat and abstraction in software.