Posts by Mad Hacker

US Congress members push Gates's line on visas

We should discontinue all H1B visas for a year

and see what happens. I think you'll find there are plenty of skilled/qualified workers who can fill those jobs.

Microsoft denies Xbox 360 is Blu-ray bound

My XBOX 360 keeps rrod but fixes on power cycle

Ok, if I send my 360 in for repair will it get repaired? After about 10 minutes it gets the red ring of death, which MS said they will repair. But when I power cycle it, it usually goes away only to come back soon after.

If I send it in, will they power it up, say it works fine, not do anything, and send it back?

Apple fans roast Apple fans

Great Headline!

That's it, nice headline!

iPod Nano electrical discharge sparks new battery fear

Chances are actually 2 in 140 million

Well, actually since 140 million iPods have been sold, and two batteries have exploded, the chances are not 1 in 1 billion but 2 in 140 million or rather 1 in 70 million.

Flame icon, because when Apple sells another 70 million iPods another one will go up in flames.

Palm Centro smartphone

VersaMail must have improved since the Treo 650

There are some things I miss from my Treo 650 vs my iPhone. ToDo app, global search, copy and paste, and Notes syncing to my computer are most of them.

One thing I don't miss is VersaMail though. It had a lot of trouble with large messages, and may not attempt to format incoming mail messages. It also always seemed to have issues with attachments. It did manage multiple accounts, however, I'm currently managing 4 email accounts on my iPhone quite well too.

So my questions are this:

1) Did VersaMail change a lot?

2) In what ways is it better than my iPhone mail?

Thanks, honest question. Not defending the iPhone here.

NetApp changes name to NetApp

It looks like an "n" on an Atari 2600

Doesn't look like a gateway to me. Just looks like they couldn't hire an artist. Reminds me of the blocky Q Quark tried to use that was exactly like something in Scotland.

Man webcams butt in Burnout Paradise prang rage

@ The real question is

The real question is...

Anonymous Coward • Monday 10th March 2008 12:57 GMT

...should 12 year olds have access to webcams or webcam-enabled services?

Actually you are right, children should have their eyes removed until they are 18. How is a webcam different from seeing the world? Can you encounter mooning in the real world? Yes.

Cometh the hour, cometh the iPhone SDK

As someone who plans on developing free or at least cheap apps for the iPhone...

You bring up some points, but somethings seem misdirected. Ok, long comment begins...

You say:

in demanding monopoly control Apple may have taken a step too far.

Possibly. Let's continue...

You say:

Ken Aspeslagh of Ecamm Network <snip> told Macworld that "this is the first time a mobile phone company has provided this kind of capability," suggesting a breathtaking ignorance of Palm/Symbian/Windows Mobile devices.

You nailed that one. I find it scary for someone to imply that no one has ever released a cell phone SDK before. However, I will say the free SDKs available usually blow. I paid for the Metrowerks SDK the same day I bought my Palm OS based device even though Palm had something free (free = command line only, so developing a GUI left a lot to be desired.)

You said:

The iPhone kit is also Mac-only.

Sorry, I just had to ask, "Did you expect something else?" It's not like Apple was going to port XCode to Windows just for iPhone dev. Heck, I'd be happy it they'd just port iChat to Windows.

You said:

Apple is asking developers for a $99 annual fee if they want to sell their applications.

I originally thought this was a one time fee which didn't sound bad, however, I look at the fee as paying for a distribution channel. For example, I don't have to host the software, or process credit cards to sell my wares. Of course, since I am interested in distributing free apps, any amount of money does hurt. That's over 20 lunches at Taco Bell I'll have to give up. However, I'll ask for donations via PayPal and Google Checkout on my web page and as long as I get $100 a year, no problem (of course now I have to host a web page for my software, so the "distribution channel" I mentioned above still requires some infrastructure on my part.)

You said:

...the company isn't really interested in freeware, as it'll make no percentage distributing that.

True, but at least they are supporting it, even if it is begrudgingly. You know they don't want to but they did it because enough people wanted it (ok market pressure and politics.) Does Handango distribute free software for free (or for $99 or less annually?)

You said:

Applications can only be sold, or supplied, through iTunes (though they can be downloaded directly to the device), and Apple is going to take 30 per cent of the sale price. 30 per cent sounds like a lot, but the existing duopoly of Motricity and Handango take between 40 and 50 per cent, so it's a very competitive figure.

True and thanks for pointing that out. Initially I was comparing it to PayPal which only takes 3% of my money. Of course PayPal doesn't offer any distribution channel, so your comparison is much better than mine.

You said:

it's hard to see how smaller developers can avoid disappearing behind the larger application brands.

True. That's a risk I'll have to live with unfortunately. And since everyone and their dog is rushing to make something for the iPhone, my guess is there will be a lot of apps to dig through in to find the good ones over the noise. Although maybe with the rating system in place, they hope to smarten up the searches. It's interesting, they've singlehandedly led sites like VersionTracker and Softpedia to extinction.

You said:

The launch also provided some insight into what kinds of application Apple expects to see on the iPhone. When Steve Jobs was asked about VoIP software, he stated that VoIP over Wi-Fi would be fine, but any application that used VoIP over EDGE would not be permitted. So Apple isn't just going to restrict applications on the grounds of legality or taste (no pornography apparently), but will also refuse any which impinge on their business model, or the business models of their partners.

That surprised you? I sure wasn't aware of say an app for my Treo 650 that would allow me to do VoIP over Sprint's data network. If there is, let me know. While it may be annoying that Apple isn't going to let people use the bandwidth of the service providers however they want, it isn't really surprising, and isn't really *that* annoying when you take into account the reasoning.

You said:

It seems hard to believe that <snip> customers will be happy to only buy applications that meet the taste and brand approval of Apple

Wow, I thought people brought Apple products specifically for that reason. People feel Apple only endorses higher quality products. I bet there are a while slew of users who actually prefer that type of filtering. I know people who will only by Mac software if it is sold in an Apple Retail store. The reasoning is that Apple only would stock the "best of the best." Whether that's true or not is debatable but the truth is many target customers want that.

You made some good points. Some of your negative points didn't seem that negative to me. Maybe I concentrate too much on the technical. I'm more concerned by some of the technical limitations, such as, not being able to have your app run in the background, not being able to share memory space with other apps which may make data exchange difficult, and while I'm still going through the documentation, I haven't found anything about linking your app with Apple's sync API on Windows and Mac OS X to merge data from your custom app to/from the desktop. Those are currently my concerns.

Stroustrup and Sutter: C++ to run and run

C++x? Maybe all classes will inherit from a base class now?

I think one of the biggest shortcomings of C++ was the oversight of making all classes inherit off of a single base class. That would solve so many hidden complexities.

Also, my computer is fast enough for 2 pass compilation, so let's drop .h files. I shouldn't have to define my interface in two separate files.

Oh and give me native smart pointers that take care of garbage collection.

Lastly, add a GUI layer so I don't have to recode all the GUI code based on proprietary libraries for every target platform. In fact, include OpenGL in that layer for good measure.

Oh and a unified hardware library so I can access USB and FireWire devices on different platforms without modifying my code.

PCMCIA pitches USB 3.0-friendly ExpressCard update

Also to support FireWire 3,200?

So will they also support FireWire 3,200 which I believe will be out before USB 3.0?

Flame icon for FireWire!

Will the US 700 MHz auction be remembered for dismembering wireless?

Wow, a lot of good stuff in there...

Ok I agree with easyk, organization was a bit rough.

I am glad you wrote this article, and you bring up a lot of good concerns, some I had thought of many I had not.

So thanks for getting it out there. Right now, the article asks mostly unanswered questions which left me feeling a little like I just came out of a Michael Moore movie. But I'm glad we got the issues out there, and you indicate this will become a series of continuing analysis, so I am optimistic we will find answers to some of those questions raised.

I'd like to hear more about your thoughts of the 2000 European spectrum auctions you mentioned, as I'm not familiar with that (I thought we were the first people to hold a crazy eBay style auction for RF, of course, as an American, I'm compelled to think we were the first at everything.)

Palm OS-based Centro arrives in UK

iPhone Killer

Wow, once this baby hits the shelves, the iPhone will look pretty low tech.

You don't know disk about storage failures

Didn't have the money to replace a drive when an interconnect failed

Ok, so anytime I was presented with a downed server or storage device, I did not have the budget to just replace the hard drive without identifying the cause.

Yes, I've seen interconnect failure. More often I've seen power supply failure. And more often then that, physical hard drive failure, either the motor/bearing wouldn't spin the drive, click of death type thing (who knows where the drive head is but it isn't where it's supposed to be) or an actual head crash into the platter.

So someone who didn't have the money to just replace a whole drive mechanism when something went wrong can tell you, yep, other things can go wrong. But the majority of the time it was a physical hard drive failure.

Steve Jobs because his iHardDrives will never fail.

Tool makes mincemeat of Windows passwords

You don't use FireWire?

You don't have a camcorder?

I didn't know people like you existed.

US government forces military secrets on Brit webmaster

so the fact they are sending classified emails in cleartext isn't a concern?

Seems they are focusing on the wrong issue here.

Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia

@ DrXym

The Register tends to pick on anything popular.

They hate Windows and Microsoft. Generally they pick on Google. They used to like Apple but now that they are popular they dislike Apple and the iPhone.

Paris because she gets picked on because she is popular too.

Time for UML tools to evolve

UML tools suck more than they should

Ok, so first I've never actually seen round trip engineering work well. You can usually do it 1 full cycle. After that you usually start getting strange artifacts. For example, methods you removed from a class previously magically reappear. Types mysteriously change. Declarations are lost. etc.

Honestly the tools are not much better than in the early 90s when I used betas of Software Through Pictures on Sun workstations. Which really shouldn't be the case.

By now I should be able to define a set of interfaces, some data classes, and some sequences and have it generate optimized and parallelized code for deployment on a grid computer.

Oh Hypercard, why have you forsaken us?

Elonex £99 Eee PC rival to arrive in June

I am so not the target audience

As a person who thinks the Airbook is too slow for them, I cannot imagine using one of these. Do I really need a laptop on the beach (splashproof keyboard would imply that is a common use for this?)

No I don't. I just need an 8 core beast sitting on the internet that I can access anywhere and can be rendering my HD home movies at high speed.

Cool Rules for the FCC: In the Lions's Den

I have a solution so make me the head of the FCC

Only sell bandwidth you have at rates you can afford to provide service at.

If my gym signed up so many people you couldn't get in or use the equipment or they had to throttle people at the door, that would be unacceptable. Why is it acceptable here?

What they claim they are selling and what they are selling are totally different, and somehow this is obfuscating a rational technical debate on network management.

There are several unrelated issues here colliding. I don't think we should be discussing the technical one (as Comcast wants) before dealing with the issue of Comcast being dishonest with customers.

Wipe the floor with Space Invaders

LAME

So I'm a retrogamer. I think MAME is the best use of a computer ever. But uh, this is lame even to me. I figured at least you could shoot them by stepping in different areas or something. They just scroll across the screen when you stand there? Might as well scroll a message saying iPhones Suk or Pirates Be Here or something like that.

Apple optimistic it will sell 10 million iPhones by year's end

@ Neil Greatorex

quote:

Nobody actually. Spot on. It's about time we had a vote to ban mention of the iPhone on El Reg. It should go the way of "mobe" (sorry).

I certainly won't be part of the 10 million.

Hmm, ok fair enough, however, you'll probably be in the minority. Even tech minded people on El Reg will probably follow the general trend of making the iPhone the #1 smartphone. It may not have a majority of Reg users but I bet it will have the majority of Reg users over a single model of smartphone.

The truth of the matter is, for most smartphone users (a target demographic of The Register) the iPhone is a solid choice.

Not for you obviously, but I happily turned in my shiny Treo for an iPhone and haven't regretted it. BTW, in the U.S. the Treo is still one of the best smartphones out there (next of course to the iPhone.) I don't know why you over the pond have so many better choices for smartphones.

However, maybe The Register does need a poll regarding the iPhone?

Apple updates laptop lines

Should we wait for Centreno 2?

So Centreno is supposed to replace the Core 2 in record time. Is it worth the wait? Will we get quad core CPUs in laptops then?

Samsung laptop battery burns

Damn driver's fault the Pinto exploded too

If people hadn't gotten into accidents their Ford Pintos wouldn't have exploded either.

It surely wasn't a design flaw. I mean, it's common sense that if you are in a collision your car may explode, after all you are carrying 12 or more gallons of highly flammable fuel. It just makes sense that some cars will explode when in a collision. So it's the stupid driver's fault for getting into an accident in the first place.

Toshiba Portégé R500 slimline laptop

Why it is fair to compare hardware only...

Most people don't get to choose their OS, they use the one their company saddles them with.

Many Macs these days are running Windows in either dual boot mode or with a VM.

If you are simply playing a DVD the OS doesn't matter.

If you wanted to capture video via FireWire, the MacBook Air isn't even an option, so hardware does sometimes matter over the OS.

My real problems are: This laptop although light, seems closer in size to a regular MacBook. The battery time (7 hours) sounds like something you could sue over as you got at best 50% of that.

Judge greenlights lawsuit against Microsoft

Re: It ain't right i know, but it ain't gonna go away either.

Um, but we should all work to make it a better world so this sort of thing will go away.

Your attitude is like, "hey there is always crime, so why fight it?" This was blatant enough MS deserves some smacking around. In fact their whole 6 versions of their O.S. was pretty damn bad too. I mean, it really seems the only intention was to confuse users into maybe buying two versions or spending too much. Why 6 freaking versions?!!? Home Ultimate Thingy huh?

I think they should have two versions, Pro and Server. Vista Server isn't even out yet.

Why is Microsoft dancing with Danger?

Why doesn't Apple by RIM?

Why doesn't Apple just by RIM and be done with it.

If your phone does everything you need, you don't need an iPhone

Hey Danny, you said your current phone does everything you need, therefore you don't need an iPhone so stop asking why you need one.

I did need an iPhone because I needed a capacity larger than 4GB. I also needed good web browsing. I also needed good email where I can actually view/open attachments that are PDF or Word docs. I also needed a good mapping app like Google maps. I also needed the phone to be fast and reliable, and handle multiple email accounts at once. I also needed to be able to compose nice emails quickly.

My last smartphone that I paid a lot of $$ for when it first shipped was a Treo 650 (I think it was more than the iPhone costs today, but maybe it was the same, and that was with a 2 year contract with Sprint.) I'm used to paying that much for my phones, so the iPhone wasn't expensive in my opinion. Anyway the Treo 650 didn't do any of the above very well. So the iPhone did a lot my previous expensive smartphone did not. Are there other phones out there that do all that? Yes, but not as efficiently.

I've looked at a lot of smart phones, and aside from web browsing, email, and some of the UI niceness of google maps on the iPhone, yes other smartphones do that stuff too (the Treo 650 is a bit long in the tooth these days, of course with mandatory 2 year contracts on every phone in the US, you will always have old tech by the time you have the freedom to change phones.) I haven't found a smartphone that does it as well/efficiently/quickly as the iPhone. In fact, my friend recently got a top of the line Windows Mobile with 3G also from ATT. We both went to a website neither had been to before (so no cache could come into play) and my iPhone which only has 2.5G loaded the page in 22 seconds and his loaded it in 117 seconds and also didn't render it as nicely. So in the US at least, lack of 3G on the iPhone isn't an issue.

But the iPhone isn't for everyone. So chances are you are correct, you don't need one.

My favorite phone of all time BTW is the Samsung SPH-i500. Damn nice phone. Just wish there was something that nice with updated CPU and web browsing abilities. I bought that the day it shipped and spent about the same $$ with a 2 year contract as my iPhone. So my last 3 smartphone (including the iPhone) all cost about the same.

Intel rolls out Skulltrail high-end gaming mobo

I've been saving up for an 8 core PowerMac which is surprisingly similar to this

Although my intention is for video editing and encoding not gaming. Currently some of my encodes take 12 hours on a dual core CPU.

Not sure games (unlike video encoders) take all that much advantage of 8 cores. Also, I thought for things like games the Xeon architecture was actually slower per GHz. I guess we'll see if people end up with bragging rights, or just get laughed at. Gamers are a picky bunch, albeit with a lot of cash.

Redmond puts key Vista update on ice

Did it go to manuf. with the bug?

I have no problem with a beta SP causing issues. It's a beta people. I said the same thing when Apple released beta Safari for Windows and people kept complaining it wasn't 100%.

But my question is, if it has been RTMed then will the official SP1 still have the bug? I'd say that's a lot more serious.

Paris icon because she's never done anything without really thinking it through. Oh an where's my Britney and Lindsay icons?

MS showcases Red Ring of Death Xbox 360 at expo

16% failure rate... more like 130%

I have about 10 friends I can think of that own XBOXs 360s including me. All of us have had to send it back at least once, and three of us have had to send it in twice.

I'd kill for only a 16% failure rate on my 360.