Posts by Jeff Clarke 14 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Feb 2008
That paint job is a standard issue for most prototype cars (it's used in one form or other by BMW, JLR, etc) - I understand it's designed to make it difficult to perceive the actual outline of the car, thereby providing some sort of protection for the outside design/appearance.
why don't you all come back and tell us what you think when, in 2/3 years’ time (may be longer or may be sooner), you want to move to a device with a different OS, on another locked in app store.... I'll bet there will be annoyance/hesitation/an outright give up when you realise you have invested in potentially £100's worth of apps you don't want to lose or buy again....
On the console front, there aren't shiny new consoles with totally new, or significantly better hardware constantly coming out every 6-12 months - if anything, this gen (xbox 360/ps3) has been one of the longer generations so far, at least for me. Not least because the major innovations are plug in additions, like move/kinect. Not something you can do with a phone so easily. Consoles also don't suffer battery wear, physical damage, being lost on train, you being mugged for, etc, etc type issues that mobiles devices do.
and remember the general annoyance when the ps3 lost backwards compatibility? – a similar issue really.
having said all this, so many people are quite happy to spend another £40-£60 on a rehash of unreal tournament (i.e. another FPS), that it might not matter. money has to be spent on something to make the world go round...
as for the comment "If you can afford a smartphone ... the cost of a few apps shouldn't enter into it" That is a little short sighted. Let's take a parallel - 'if you can afford to buy a car, the extra 20p/litre petrol shouldn't enter into it' - well, not many would agree with that statement, would they? Spending a lot of hard-earned cash on something does not equate to not having to care about the on-going costs of running said item. And no one likes to pay for the same thing twice, unless it is a service or outright consumable like food. Put another way - things add up!
The code from a previous purchase idea is perfectly doable, technically. But commercially it is dead in the water, as this lock in is what the OS vendors love, and where is the app store cut going to come from?
Eventually, I think something similar to ‘Microsoft having to release the code/details of the windows APIs, so others can play nicely with them’ type thing will happen. i.e. the powers that be (EU commission) will step in to make things more portable.
Diatribe over.
Tony,
I am going to have to put my patent attorney hat on here...
your colloquialism based analysis is not quite correct
Flash is a form of EEPROM, where the final M stands for 'Memory', much like it does in RAM
As it happens, all memory is a form of storage.
thus, HTC can legitimately call the issue a lack of memory, allbeit Read Only Memory, not Random Access Memory.
that is all.
I have just ordered a free upgrade to the Samsung Galaxy S2 for the bigger screen and dual core goodness, and as a side effect, I am getting gingerbread too. No amount of support is going to rectify those hardware issues, so the lack of RAM to run GB (another hardware issue) is kind irrelevant.
But then, I am a bit of a tech junkie, with a large hand me down queue behind me, so there is no wasting of the still rather good Desire.
I am sure others will do similar, and HTC knows that. I might be starting a so called flame war (or whatever), but I am not sure how many will really care about being able to upgrade the Desire to GB. Many will want a new phone with new HW features anyway, and many will not give a jot and be happy with what it already does – as many have said, if you are not happy with the phone when you buy it (wrt firmwares, etc) don’t buy it (and I think may do do that nowadays).
Also, you have all seen this before with the original good Android phone (Hero?) - Don’t expect to run the latest and greatest SW on the previous gen of hardware.
I do believe they are hamstrung by the Ram limit, and it is not just an excuse to force upgrades – the Desire was only £400 sim-free, and at that price, something has to give.
The bigger issue, perhaps, for all Android phones (or just some… if you know more, please enlighten me) is that the phone runs out of memory fairly quickly as you add apps – because a little bit of each goes into the limited RAM and then you cannot add any more. I know you can root the thing, but that is complex - does anyone know if the Samsung G2/GB gets over this problem?
This is one thing the reviews did not mention, and I only found out about it a while after getting the Desire – it did not matter too much in the end as the app store for the android is rather lame/dangerous, and I have the IPad2 for apps anyway. I just like having fast internet access whilst commuting, for which the desire was just fine, and a bigger screened newer android will do even better.
In light of the above, please bombard me with your thoughts! – especially as the Samsung G2 is cancellable, in favour of the Atrix (it has bigger Ram, so might be better for apps?) or something else entirely….
Doing this sort of thing.. I.e., being able to easily and quickly respond to things on the web at a pace similar to a desktop, but in a go anywhere package. I have sat and surfed the register for over 4years on th strains to work using an n95, onmnia, htc desire, and had never bothered responding to such things, as it was a pain to go through all the text in put kerfuffle. Here, I am just typing fast and loose, and getting a very good accuracy rate. You can see some corruption of my words earlier on in this response, and yet the rest is ok. That's is the point. Bring the fluidity of the desktop world into the mobile one. Oh, btw way, as of sat lunchtime, the local tmobile stored still had good stock of ipad2s so they are probably still avialbel as a walk up and whim purchase in some areas...
I'm hoping that the inclusion of a forward facing camera on the iphone will instigate free video calls being included in most calling plans, much like the original Iphone/3G iphone pushed operators to include bundled data plans. - before iphone there was precious little bundled data plans available here in the UK (except W'n'W, as far as I remember).
At the end of the day Video calls are considered useless and only a fringe thing because you have to pay 50p/min for them. Once the are free, or at least "no more expensive than voice calls" then we will see an explosion in their use - if there is interest in inane home shot video (youtube prooves there is) then there will be interest in realtime inane home shot video.
What do others think?
Whilst it could be as simple as 'they only just noticed' there are a plethora of other potential reasons why they only sued now...e.g.:
maybe the infringement came with the latest model/firmware/etc from RIM/Iphone
Until a big market is provable for an infringement, why bother suing... hence they wait for the iphone, or whatever, to rack up (even) more sales. So then they can prove value of patent to infringer is high (i.e. sold a lot of devices that incorporated the patented technology), hence losses to them are high, hence damages can be high too.
A patent is for 20 years, with some limitations on time between when infringement begins and the patent owner sues without loss of damages, so why not do things later in the day. In fact it usually means you get more money, as real potential losses have racked up, etc, as opposed to theoretical ones. What you DO NOT want is an early judgement/ settlement level based on certain projected sales levels, and then it turns out it sold 100x more than expected... E.g. even astute contributors to this very website wagered the iphone was going to be a fail... but look what happened there! humble pie eaten (and respect given to him for doing so, and not spinning it in some other way, a la Labour stylee.- we all get things wrong!). I guess this boils down to: do you think they will get more damages (if they win) now, after millions of iphones sold, or on the first day the iphone went on sale? Methinks the former.
Corporations move slowly in these areas at the best of times - they are known to have been in licensing talks with other companies before hand, they are known to have notified apple/RIM about the infringement (which takes time to do, and would have to provide a reasonable time frame to respond/comply), so it is reasonable to assume that they have seen how otehr patent disputes on these matters have gone with the otehr companies before taking on even bigger ones, plus have probably been in a patent licensing dispute with apple/RIMfor months, if not years, which have not gone the way Kodak wanted, so they sue now. It called business tactics. They are long, protracted, and costly.If they weren't, anyone could do them, and the world would be utter chaos.
Patent (indeed any civil litgation requiring a lot of disclosures, etc) cases can take a long time to get going, so maybe this case was started earlier than you think. Just because elReg did not comment on this before, does nto mean it did not exist before today. BTW, yes, a tree falling in a wood that nobody saw fall, still made a noise when doing so!
When pennies are freely available, people get on with picking them up (i.e. in a growing/steady economy, everyone makes hay while the sun shines). When the pennies are tight, everyone starts to take the pennies off one another (i.e. fighting over what revenue there is, is more common in a recession). This is basic human nature, and the reason why humans will wipe each other out over water/food/land/etc when ever it is scarce and in contention.
I shall stop there.
cheers
it would not be a good idea to make such a law - we don't need any more meddling that aims to replace common sense thank you.
Oh, and btw, what would you define as 'up to date', and how would you police it?
is a daily update to your AV s/w up-to-date? is hourly? is secondly? see where I am going with this? if not:
for example, in theory as soon as a new vuln (technical or social) is found, a new virus/malware could be out to exploit it within hours, and hence that person is ciminalised by your new law, even though they updated a day ago.... replace hours with minutes, and day ago to hour ago, and it's even worse....
there are many more hypothetical situations that would make a mockery of this sort of law - face it, you are at the top of the IT game (i'd hope so, given that sort of comment - or are you of a social class constantly looking for more ways to voluntarily attend 'her majasty's' pleasure centres in order to get a decent meal and free sky TV ;), and others will not match you IT ability. So virii will spread. If the heaving masses did have your ability in such areas, you and many readers would be out of a job, so get over youself, while I get over myself, and let's go have a fun weekend instead.
as for policing it..... i think the police have enough on their plate without having to deal with this too.
anyway, enough short (ish), sharp (ish) putting down... it's Friday, and a rather warm one to boot, so mentioned above, I'm going home RIGHT NOW
Regards
my only comment is that the apple standard headphones may be good enough for you, as the intended listener (i won't go into details, but you are wrong - you get what you pay for in the low end, i.e. sub £100, audio area, headphones are no exception) but they sure piss off the people in your locality - they are horrendously audistically leaky - you can hear a very bad tinny redition of the latest and not so greatest pop tunes from any white earlobed applite.
apart from the many many other good reasons (explored in various ways above) not to allow this change to 'pay to recieve', no one else seems to have noticed that if/when these changes take place - what happens to all the existing mobile contract terms? - I for one will not accept being locked into a 18 month contract I just took out to get , say, 400mins/month, only for the rules to change, and most of those go in receiving calls instead.... also, all existing contracts will be based on the old scheme so the contracted calling rate would be too high, etc (since a primary reason to do all this, in Ofcom's eyes, is to reduce the costs of calling generally...)
For these reasons, I would have thought that any rule change will have to include provisions to null and void all contract terms, otherwise its completely wrong.... and think of the pandemonium if every mobile contract user is able to suddenly change providers - And I bet top dollar that the mobile phone companies would not like having to null and void all their existing contracts - it would lead to a customer scrabble, whicc is never nice.
I also think this is a bit like going back to the old ways when we had to pay more to call other networks.... we all liked it when we could call any network on our free mins - and I see this as a form of going back to the old ways.
At the end of the day, the current system homogenises our call costs across the board, including the cost of the handset. Whereas, in the US, and other places "with lower calling costs" they DO NOT subsadise the handsets.
As usual, 'they' in power are cherry picking bits of other countries life and assuming we can slot in the benefits without the problems - Life just doesn't work like that - its a hugh complex multi variable 'equation' where small changes can have large impacts... think cane toad in australia
if we move to the US style of calling, why don't we:
start using US $;
have a chimp for a master;
or go the whole hog, and become the 52nd state;
get the rights to have a gun;
get petrol at approx 50p/litre, etc, etc,
Oh, I know, 'cos we're british and have gone our own way...
Having said all the above, the sick part of me, in a way, wants to see this rubbish forced through, then when the world falls aparts (due to scores of people giving up on the mobiles, etc, hence a down turn in mobile telcoms = another dot com bubble bursting, etc), the authorities are forced to undertake another massive U-turn, which it is the Labour way (and although Ofcom is not labour directly, it was born of this labour theoryied time, and has shown to be just as incompetant). I.e. the authorities are shown to be the short term gain mugs they are.
must stop ranting...its bad for the health
To many people here are questioning the point of HD having never seen it properly. They also seem to be only thinking about how it would look on smaller TVs (byt his I mean below 40").... as you go up in TV size, you progressively need HD more and more. FOr example, when you are looking at 50"+ tvs, it is worth it. If you have a 7foot 4" HD projector (as I do) it is frankly a must. and remember that TVs are only getting bigger. If you don't plan now for HD, we will end up in the silly situation of SD wall sized TVs. Not pretty!
Saying we don't need HD is shortsighted (as much so as forgetting to account for HD when freeview was under design)....It's like saying we don't need an airplane, because we have a horse and it gets us to canterbury just fine. Try getting to New Zealand on a horse.
enough said
@TimBiller
in addition to forgetting about VAT, You also conveniently forget about import duty for the particular goods in question (about 3% for DVDs, for example, probably similar for electrical/ electronic goods). You also forget that you earn in £'s which means, currently, you earn 2x the amount an american does. Hence you can afford twice as much/pay twice as much.
All things being equal, what is sold for $x in US should be roughtly £x - since staff costs, marketing, etc will be paid for at UK prices. You also forget the US is a FAR bigger market, hence more volume sales.
While it is nice to get things really cheaply from america, it is a bonus not a right.
I'd love to know what you do, and what you would say if someone said "I'm only paying you 1/2 what you are asking, 'cos that's how much it is in the US". I wager you would say something along the lines of "F@#k right off, I'm in the UK".
Regards Jeff
P.s. - this is being sent from a train doing about 125mph, for free. Which is nice.
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