Posts by Stuart Gibson

Taking a first bite out of Wolfram Alpha

Knowledge gaps

Doesn't know what to do with "Northern Ireland", so they haven't even manged to load all the countries of the world into their knowledge engine.

Paris, because her geography probably isn't great either.

Is Twitter actually making money?

It is what you make it

Meh, I'm going out on a limb here and assuming I'm the only Reg reader in the world that actually likes Twitter and will answer why it's useful for me.

If the only people you follow are the "I'm eating breakfast", I'm talking a crap" crowd then of course it's going to be useless and it's your fault for following such boring people. If, however, you follow people with the same interests and who are, more importantly, local, you are making contacts with real people you have a chance of meeting and who you might like.

Since I stopped following the "Twitter Elite" and started almost exclusively following people who live within 25 miles of myself I have made several good AFK friends, been to a number of excellent dinners, hooked up with like minded developers (first apps will be going to the iTunes app store soon) and taken on half a dozen well paying contracts from people I met through Twitter. I've been in town and found myself with half an hour to kill and posted "I'm at ***, anyone want to grab a coffee?" and within 10 minutes been sitting with 3-4 people having a chat. None of these would have happened without Twitter.

Maybe it's peculiar to my particular area, but most geek social events, meet-ups and even conferences are organised almost exclusively through Twitter. Twitter is only as good or useful as you make it. Complaining that it's all self-serving irrelevance is like condemning business network events if all you do is stand in a corner listening to some dumb sales rep tell you for two hours about this chick he fucked.

Jobs, Apple out of Macworld Expo

Macworld timing

Let's face it, the timing of Macworld for a company that is getting more and more consumer electronics focused is terrible. Thousands of people, and those who look to them for advice, hold off to see what will be announced, which means they're holding off buying on the run up to Christmas.

Apple clearly see the expectation that they will make big announcements at Macworld (and the resulting stock dip when they don't) is tying them to a schedule they don't want and costing them money.

We can assume there will be more media invite events at Infinite Loop for Apple to announce new products on a schedule that suits them, costs them less and generates just as much attention.

3G iPhone not ready for the enterprise?

Someone's maths is broken

OK, so to date a friend has paid £80 more and will be getting a phone for free. In three months time they will have paid £110 more for their contract and you will have paid £100 for the new phone. Considering you are signing up for a further 18 months they will pay £260 more for the contract than you so you're saving £160. Assuming you don't need the extra minutes/texts you're making out like a bandit.

Paris, because numbers are, uh, hard.

Apple under the gun to master the iPhone's 'second album'

Plagiarism - Oh, Wait

I was about to complain that you stole the Pam Grier joke from Andy Ihnatko's Twitter feed and then noticed the author.

Made the second half all the better imagining it read it your dulcet tones.

Snap Sun decision launches Java at iPhone

How will they get around the SDK agreement?

Apple iPhone SDK Agreement: “No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s)… An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise.”

The only way I could see is that every Java app would have to be distributed with the JVM built in. Maybe someone with more experience in this matter would care to comment?

When the music costs nothing, why do freetards prefer to leech?

Not leeching, maybe even paying

I used the torrent to download the whole album after attempting all day to download from the provided link after spending $383 getting the Ultra Deluxe version sent to the UK. Due to the hammering the NIN site was getting downloading through the "official" channel was impossible.

However, the point that everyone seems to be glossing over is that the whole album is released under the Creative Commons "Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike" license, allowing it to be freely distributed for non-commercial use (taking the salient point from the license).

Certainly you could argue that for $5 you should support Trent's work and the big "up yours" to the recording industry, but there is no justifiable complaint about people sharing the album on torrent sites.