Posts by Kristian Walsh

Werner Herzog's latest film warns drivers not to text while driving

Re: rts games suck

I believe he talks of nothing else.

Cool cars, cat-crushing chronometers, cashmere ... is this your IT boss?

Re: Black card

I remember being told the story of one rather independent newspaper proprietor who hosted a large gathering at a country-club/golf resort place in Dublin years ago. Towards the end of proceedings, he beckoned the banqueting manager over, so that he could slowly hand him a matte-black credit card in full view of the assembled.

Somewhat spoiling the gesture, the manager came back with card and a frown. Brief whispers followed, and the flashy black card was replaced with a more mundane and negotiable VISA.

It's easy to offer no limits on a card that nobody accepts anymore.

Steelie Neelie finds phone calls are cheaper in Latvia than in Luxembourg

Re: Inconsistency in European policy

Their stance has not changed, simply because there is no ban on parallel importing within the EU. For over twenty years now, we've had quite the opposite in fact: the Single European Market regulations have made it illegal to block free movement of goods within the EU.

One example: prescription drugs are quite expensive in Ireland, so my local pharmacist sources stock from a company that buys the same drugs in Italy, Greece and Spain, where medicines are much cheaper, and re-packages them with English instructions. A grey import, but all legal and above board, and actively encouraged by "the Eurocrats".

Re: Economics for Dummies, Again....

Exchange rate fluctuation don't apply to the 21 countries in that survey that either use the Euro as their national currency, or have their currency exchange rates pegged to the Euro. And the biggest disparity between similar economies is between two Eurozone countries: Finland and the Netherlands.

Another subsidy effect...

Taking countries with similar spending power, Finland (6.1) is less than half of Netherlands (14.7), and significantly lower than UK (10.1). Of all the highly-industrialised, service-based economies with mature, competitive mobile markets and high customer spending power, Finnish customers get the best service rates .

One possible explanation: Finnish operators are notable for not providing subsidised handsets to customers as part of their contracts. You want that phone; you pay for it yourself - at full retail price.

So, not only is there no such thing as a free lunch, there's also no such thing as a free iPhone. But worse, people who can't afford the fancy plans with "free" phones get to subsidise those who do. It's time to end this scam.

Can't agree on a coding style? Maybe the NEW YORK TIMES can help

Re: and a word in support of oneliner ifs

My favourite idiom for "pre-flight checklist" code is to use a one-shot do/while loop, as follows:

bool passed=false;

do {

if (function() != Success)

{

log("function() fail");

break;

}

// line up ducks for function2()...

// ...

if (function2() != Success)

{

log("function2 fail");

break;

}

// etc, etc.

// finally, indicate success

passed=true;

} while (false);

This has the major advantage that any heap objects instantiated inside the do {} are properly disposed of (something goto can't guarantee), and if you use C++ and "Instantiate-to-acquire", you get your failure cleanup for free too. The major disadvantage is that the intent is not immediately obvious from the code -- hence my describing it as an idiom.

Moto X: It's listening to you. But can voice control finally take off?

Frame buffer corruption?

Dunno about you, but the first thing that that first press shot reminded me of was long nights years ago trying to track down a bug where a process would trample all over the display frame buffer.

Kids today with their memory managers and access protection! ... don't know they're born.

Re: flick the phone over twice and the camera function automatically starts up

Have to agree. I get sick of "hold on, hold on, don't move" while someone fumbles with their phone to launch the camera app.

It couldn't be too hard for them to just add a hard button and wake the phone into the camera app. (My wife's new Lumia 925 does this, and it's such a simple and brilliant feature)

Google Glassholes can't take long walks off short piers thanks to Merc app

Re: Best use for voice control in cars

All very well, but for your future reference: when you phone [phone] etc that the mobile operator already relays your position to the emergency service dispatcher. It's a network service, but it's based on multilateration ("triangulation" with more than three stations involved), so you can get down to about 10 m accuracy - certainly close enough to visually spot a crashed car anyway.

All US operators provide the service (it's in their licence terms), and most Europeans too.

Basically, any dumb-phone dialling system would work here - Thankfully, when something is really important, we still try to make it available for everyone, not just those who can afford Apple products.

Music licensor seeks to block Pandora from running a radio station

Why shouldn't streaming services pay more?

The service is of higher value to customers, so why do they expect to pay less for the input materials?

A single song played on a radio station has a limited geographical reach and uncertain audience - not everyone who can receive it does receive it, and there's no way to know. That uncertainty is why radio stations get discounted rates. But in a streaming service, you know exactly how many people could hear the song, and the nature of Pandora means that the people who did hear it are more likely to have wanted to - that's a higher value to the customer, and it reduces the chance of that customer buying the song if they can hear it as often as they want on the stream.

Let's turn around one of the standard arguments on this subject for a moment:

If Pandora aren't able to make money in the reality that's in place, they should look at other streams of income: Promotions, placement, advertising. After all, it's what musicians have been told to do in response to diminishing royalties. Why doesn't it apply to businesses, too?

It'd be nice if the usual suspects looked past "The Man" being involved, and examined the situation a bit more rationally. The royalty payment in question here is for the songwriters. Many songwriters rely entirely on royalties for their income, and because "songwriter" is not the same thing as "performer", the option of going on tour or selling t-shirts isn't open to them.

Okay, a higher royalty means more money skimmed off by the collection agency, but it's only a small skim in this case, and it means more money for the person who actually wrote the song.

To take an example of a different creative endeavour: Why is okay to give Google or Apple 30% every time you buy an app from a developer, but not okay to give the collection agency 1c every time the songwriter gets 10c? (and you didn't even have to pay that 11c!). In both cases, you're paying middlemen, but both are providing the service of collecting and distributing revenue for the creators. (That 30% isn't paying for hosting; most of the costs in running an appstore are in user administration, accounting and payment processing.)

T-Mobile US: Go ahead, PAY NOTHING up front for any device

Re: Stupid clueless US customers

Gene, T-Mobile's plans are different: Service and handset are separated. The $20/month is the repayment for the phone. After 24 months, if you don't want to get a new phone, your bill goes down by $20 every month.

Other operators are nasty, however, in that they don't let you drop back to a SIM-only plan at end of contract. Instead they push another "free" phone on you and keep the high monthly charge in place.

T-Mobile's scheme is pretty much the way Finnish customers have always bought their phones: service plan, plus a low-interest loan on the handset, and this clear separation is common in other Nordic markets. The UK leans towards the US model of "flat monthly fee", but at least the pricepoints are more flexible, rather than being multiples of $50.

But the real reason for the horrible pricing is simple: The US mobile market is highly uncompetitive. Taken as a whole, there are apparently four major operators, but when you get to a regional level it's a patchwork of effective monopolies: there are large areas where only one operator provides full coverage, especially for people who need to travel outside of major metropolitan areas. The CDMA/GSM split exacerbates this, as you can't even roam on a competitor network to fill in the gaps (a strategy that has been used for rural service provision in several European countries). This limits customer mobility between providers, thus allowing the operators to charge more.

Nokia flops out its 4G, 4.7-inch WHOPPER: The Lumia 625

Re: Now this is just going to get confusing

It's way more logical than it used to be:

price_band = model_number / 100

generation = (model_number %100 ) / 10 # i.e, second-last digit.

The last digit is to differentiate carrier models and other slightly-different-but-equivalent models (920/925/928 or 820/822 for instance). So...

610 came before 820

820 is same generation as, but cheaper than, 920, 925, 928 and 1020

1xx, 2xx and 3xx are mobile phones and featurephones; 5xx and higher are smartphones. There is no 4xx - look up "Tetraphobia" to find out why. "Lumia" = Windows Phone. "Asha" = Series 40.

Apple MacBook Air 11-inch 2013: Netbook with next-gen tech

Re: Connectivity is a deal-breaker

"If you're doing that, the macbook air really isn't the computer for you, regardless of how you're connecting to the LAN."

How about grabbing a few different cuts of your commercial before you fly out to the client? The Airs are great computers if you do a lot of presentations in your job. In fairness, 1Gbit Ethernet is a luxury on something like this (although Toshiba manage to put it on their Ultrabooks, and undercut Apple by 100g too)

In any case, no other new Apple laptop offers Ethernet either. The Pros dropped it earlier in the year. I'm willing to forgive the Air dropping this, but to lose it on the Pro is the worst kind of style over substance. People will say "Oh, when Apple dropped serial, and adopted USB it was the same whining", but it isn't. Firstly, Thunderbolt isn't getting anything like the industry traction that USB did (A year on the market, and still nobody but Apple is shipping devices with it; even Firewire had better adoption!), and serial interfaces on Macs were both non-standard (RS-422) and not heavily used.

Re: Connectivity is a deal-breaker

"Do you actually need gigabit ethernet with 802.11ac?"

Not the original poster, but the simple answer is "Yes" in an office setting. 802.11 has to share its bandwidth between each client; on Ethernet, if your server's up to it, each client can get their OWN 1Gbit/sec pipe.

Funnily enough, there's a high crossover between people whose job regularly involves shunting enormous files through production workflows, and people who have traditionally bought Apple kit. Apple have other markets on their mind these days, it seems...

The other reason not to use Wifi is security, of course, and many workplaces simply forbid wireless networks for this reason.

Pure boffinry: We peek inside Nokia's miracle cameraphone

Re: pureview 808?

Despite the headline spec similarities, there's no common part between the 808 and the 1020.

The 808 has

- a slightly larger sensor (1/1.2" rather than 1/1.5")

but 1020 has:

- a back-side illuminated sensor for better light gathering, lower noise.

- a wider lens aperture ( f/2.2 rather than f/2.5 )

- mechanical-optical stabilisation (808 uses software stabilisation for videos, and no stabilisation for stills)

- a six-element lens for better overall image sharpness (808 is a five-element lens)

The HAAC microphones are the same, I believe. The 808's fantastic sensor overshadowed its class-leading audio recording ability: subsequent Nokias used the same technology, in mono, but the 808 had true stereo recording.

Nokia tears wrapper off Lumia 1020 monster imaging mobe

Re: Lovely hardware engineering

"This phone will win Nokia some sales, but it's not likely to turn their fortunes around."

It's not intended to. This is a niche model, but it's a niche that can command a good price. The two models that will do the business for Nokia financially will be the 925 and 520.

"Also interesting to note that Nokia have effectively forked (fragmented) Windows Phone today with their custom imaging SDK (deep hardware integration) which they released along with this phone. I bet Microsoft are loving that (not)."

They didn't "fork" or "fragment" WIndows Phone. They provided a better imaging SDK than Microsoft's, and one that will work on any Windows 8 device. Windows Phone 8 has a small set of supported SoCs, so this isn't a difficult task: Nokia's differentiation is in sensor and optics, not in the image processing hardware. The quality of the images might be better on Nokia devices because of Nokia's better hardware, but the capabilities offered in the API will be available on all devices. And I'd imagine Microsoft are pretty happy about this - it's development that they now don't have to do, and it makes their platform more attractive for people wanting to write camera or video applications. It's a level of co-operation that Google have yet to show their partners: they'll let you fix their bugs, sure, but just try getting a new feature in...

Gadgets are NOT the perfect gift for REAL men

Reminds me of the story where Bill Shankly (legendary former manager of Liverpool FC, for non UK readers) was seen in the stands at a football match with his wife beside him.

Catching up with him later, a reporter jokingly asked: "So, did you bring your wife to the game as an anniversary present?", to which reply was: "No, it was her birthday. Do you honestly believe I'd go and get married in the middle of the football season?"

Samsung Galaxy S3 explodes, turns young woman into 'burnt pig'

@Don Jefe

Good tip. Thanks for going against the norm and actually providing useful information in the comments section of a Reg article about phones.

Mastercard and Visa block payments to Swedish VPN firms

Re: Perspective, please

I'm not confusing anything, and I don't know where you're dragging in Pirate Bay from. TPB is not an anonymisation service. A selection of Swedish anonymisation services had had their card-payment facilities withdrawn, not TPB.

Anonymisers ARE used for criminal purposes - yes, as well as other, legitimate purposes, but if you think the criminal users aren't a significant fraction, you're deluded. (And to be clear I'm not talking about stuff like peer-to-peer sharing, which is at best a licensing infringement; but undisputed crimes like fraud, illegal pornography, and distribution of stolen personal information). But those criminal users are very likely to use stolen cards to pay for their service. Can you accept this?

Now, the next step needs a little bit of background about how card payment works, so bear with me.

Card payment has many intermediaries. In this case, Payson is an acquirer: a company that takes the card number, puts cash into the merchant's account, and then later asks VISA/Mastercard for the cash (who then ask the card's issuing bank for the cash, and the bank then asks the cardholder for the cash). A company like Payson pays VISA or Mastercard for this service (and charges the merchant more - that's their profit), but the amount they pay depends on how much fraud they have overall, because everyone is insured against fraudulent use of cards (the cardholder can't be expected to pay, and the merchant who has supplied goods or service for that money can't be either: once they comply with the rules the acquirer has given, they're in the clear). Higher fraud means either higher fees from the card companies, or the acquirers having to implement more onerous (and costly) security and reporting procedures, or bearing a higher part of the fraud losses. All are bad for a company like Payson's business.

Okay, so If the company got into this situation, but an internal audit revealed that the bulk of the fraudulent cards came from just five customers, then tossing these overboard fixes the problem at a much lower cost.

No conspiracy theory needed.

Move away from the Internet and into the real world of shops and retailers: here, it's not at all uncommon for merchants to have facilities withdrawn if they accept too many stolen or faked cards. Why is the Internet special? (hint: it's not, you will get your card acceptance service withdrawn if you don't deal with fraud properly)

In the Tesco example, its as if VISA withdrew services to Tesco because a disproportionate number of cards that Tesco presented to them were stolen or fraudulent. (Tesco is, however, a bad example, they're big enough that they talk directly to VISA/Mastercard and the banks, so they find themselves in the role of Payson in this story).

Re: Perspective, please

But nobody said anything about being ejected from Tesco for being black until you tried that little trick. But Tesco in that example would have every right to ask you to leave if you've been caught stealing from them on repeated occasions, or if you harassed other customers, or damaged their shop.

" Said otherwise, if a company advertises a product or service, and they do deliver that product or service to some customers, they can't refuse you that same service without judicial justification."

I hope you don't work as an IT contractor if that's how shaky your understanding of contract law is. The card companies' advertising is an invitation to treat, not an offer. Their offer, when it is made, is made subject to terms that are entirely of their choice. You decide to accept those terms or not. If you don't accept, and they want your business, they can revise their offer. That's all there is to it. All ongoing service contracts will reserve the right for either party to change the terms later, so if they decide that you're too much hassle as a customer, they can drop you.

"Hassle" means lots of things, but my guess is that a high incidence of stolen cards being used for service payment is the most likely reason why this happened. After all, who's going to be dumb enough to use their own card to purchase an anonymous connection?

In any case, VISA has put the blame for this back at the acquirer service, Payson: "[VISA Europe] has not been involved in this matter in any way, and has not made any such stipulations to Payson or to any other organisation.” (http://torrentfreak.com/mastercard-and-visa-start-banning-vpn-providers-130703/) Maybe, but I'm guessing that Payson just got fed up of administering all the chargebacks and called it quits.

Re: I'm confused

Yeah, let's advocate murder of people who don't agree with your right to watch shit without paying for it.

Re: I'm confused

"Illegal porn, dodgy pills and dangerous goods don't have the RIAA and MPAA chasing them down with a large axe"

Well no, a music publisher's organisation and a film studios association generally wouldn't involve itself in policing of pharmaceutical regulation or child abuse... In much the same way that I wouldn't immediately call FACT if I found an suspicious device under my car one morning.

Perspective, please

Nobody has blocked VPN traffic. Not even the VPN traffic from these services has been blocked.

The payment card companies have prevented people using their cards to buy services from a small number of companies that they suspect (with some good reason, by the way) to be instrumental in the collection and distribution of stolen card details. Like it or not, but they're free to make this choice.

Nobody is stopping you from using any of the many other anonymisation services out there, or from starting your own. And nobody is closing those Swedish services either. All that is being "denied" to you is the convenience of paying for those particular services using a credit card (an easily traceable instrument, incidentally).

I think the situation in a regime like China may be slightly more serious than this...

Irish gov refuses to haul Google, Apple into MPs' tax inquiry

Re: Good on them

You've hit the nail on the head. Every government whining about Ireland has an easy way to fix the problem. The US, the UK and the Germans can pass laws to close the loopholes in their tax codes. The US particularly could very easily address the incorporated/headquartered loophole that Apple are exploiting. (Irish tax treatment of multinationals is based on where a company is headquartered; in US law, it's by where it's incorporated. By incorporating in Ireland, with headquarters in USA, one of Apple's ghost companies becomes resident nowhere and thus not liable to tax anywhere)

Compared with other countries, Ireland's company tax code is simple, transparent and applies to all businesses from a two-man plumbing outfit all the way to a multinational services company. You calculate your profit, and you give the government 12.5% of that figure. End of.

Re: I wonder...

That's just subliterate gibberish that happens to be composed of Italian words... perfect for Starbucks, then.

Windows 8 apps pass 100K, Windows 8 passes Vista

Re: Can I bee the first to say.....

I suspect that this post was not an honest expression of its author's own views on the subject. It is a neat summary of the comment thread of every Windows8 article, though...

The future of cinema and TV: It’s game over for the hi-res hype

Re: It's not what you see that counts

I admire the author's work in video compression, but I think he's being unfair on the benefits of higher resolutions. Higher framerate suits some types of material, but not others; ditto higher resolution

Shooting a film with the kind of set detail, costumes and production of Anna Karenina [ http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/still/anna-karenina-image09.jpg ] at 48fps would add nothing to its visual appeal, but viewing at 4k rather than 2k or SD certainly would. The scenes move slowly, and your eye has time to take in the opulent settings which are a major part of the experience.

On the other hand, would 4k or higher really make Fast and Furious 6 [ http://www.kickseat.com/storage/fast-furious-6.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1369451408637 ] much better as an experience? A fast-moving, quickly-cut film like this, though, would certainly benefit from higher motion fidelity than 24fps offers.

Re: 24fps

I remember a documentary about the development of IMAX that included the history of this. The arguments against faster film were primarily that running fast increases risk of damage - the studios at the time were always looking for something to increase the realism of their productions, and a faster frame-rate would have been the next best thing to full colour.

It also noted that the film companies were doing viewer experiments at the time, and these determined that the minimum frame rate was around 22 fps for smooth motion perception, and that beyond 70 fps there was no noticeable improvement in motion perception.

However, 24fps, or more accurately 18 inches per second, was as fast as 1930s projection equipment could run reliably without the risk of mangling or damaging its film. The film strip moves only during a very, very short time (the shutter blackout period), and needs to move completely into place with no slippage or mis-registration. The time that the frame was displayed for gave the mechanism a chance to settle and self-calibrate before the next frame had to be pulled into place. Increasing the framerate meant increasing the chance of the mechanism jamming or losing synchronisation entirely.

It's interesting that IMAX projectors don't use traditional sprocket driven projection. Instead they create a "rolling loop" in the film that flicks the next frame into place because even by the early 1970s, a sprocket driven system couldn't shift the larger film frame into place fast enough during the shutter blackout period.

Re: Mains

Beating from filament bulbs isn't a factor, as there's very little luminance variation across the AC supply cycle: the filament of a domestic tungsten bulb takes a half second to cool to darkness; studio lamps ran even hotter.

However, noisy loads on the receiver's mains supply could add spikes that interfered with the incoming signal. Spike resistance is the reason why B&W television uses negative modulation (zerol-level signal = peak brightness) the spikes would appear as dark spots within a light background, and halation and/or poor beam focus on the display tube would cover them up.

But, interference from heavy motors in the home (a/c units particularly in many parts of the US) would produce a more regular interference pattern, but at a 60 Hz frequency. If the scan frequency and AC frequency were far apart, this darkening of the image could flicker over the field, which is far more distracting than a darker band that slowly crawls up or down the image.

On refresh rate, there's one problem with high-refresh for cinema... it's not cinematic. Viewers report the video-like refresh rates of 48fps as being "cheap", because normally, only video-originated (and so, cheaper) productions display this trait. Conversely, TV dramas are shot on digital video, but at 24/25/30 fps progressive to achieve a more "filmic" look. Although in one instance, when a music awards ceremony was broadcast live at 720p/30fps, viewers complained that it wasn't live, because mentally they associated the low frame rate with drama.

Sure, 24fps isn't very realistic... but neither was monochrome vision, or for that matter giant gorillas hanging out of the Empire State Building, long-lost lovers meeting by chance in Morocco, or farm hands rescuing princesses on route to destroying the greatest threat to freedom ever constructed. If you notice the frame-rate, someone has failed in their job.

Apple reveals payouts for parents of in-app purchase nippers

Re: Chest of Gems

His kids probably didn't realise they were spending money at all.

Lots of games let you "buy" stuff, but with points or other worthless currencies. I remember games where just going to a particular place would allow you to acquire items. That's not very different to the mechanics of emptying mum's credit card on in-game trinkets - The insidious bit of these in-app purchase schemes is that they piggyback on this idea of "game money" and replace it with actual hard-earned cash.

They way some games treat their users, parents would be better off giving their kid a cup of coins and stool next to a slot-machine...

Galaxy S4 way faster than iPhone 5: Which?

Re: Title

nope. It's pretty much a CPU benchmark. I'd expect it to be about 10-20% faster than iPhone, but still much slower than the Samsungs.

The lightweight UI is the reason for Lumia being faster.

Can DirectAccess take over the world?

Re: Who is the Eadon Fellow and why does anyone care what he says?

Well, it looks like like all his posts have been modded away. Thank fuck.

EADON MINDLESS TROLLING FAIL!

Nokia Lumia 925: The best Windows Phone yet

Re: I love mine but..

Nice pic. Interesting how the lens-flare actually adds to the image :)

When Apple needs speed and security in Mac OS X, it turns to Microsoft

Re: Eh?

Whatever about finding them, MacOS X performance on SMB shares is appalling, and has been for a while. About 3x slower than AFP. I remember this performance used to be better, so it's interesting to learn why it has happened.

As for the author preferring NFS, it really doesn't work for a fileshare, on MacOS at least: when you write a file to the remote store, your numeric UID is what gets applied to the remote filesystem's inode, which makes the file unreadable by anyone else unless their UID magically happens to be the same as yours. At the time there was no way to fix this (it's a client issue), so it was straight to AFP (for performance reasons outlined above).

Hey mobile firms: About that Android thing... Did Google add a lockout clause?

"more people listen to music/take photos with an iphone"

I heard one of those ads and couldn't help but notice that the sentence is incomplete, because they want to imply something they can't legally claim.

What they want you to think is " ... than anything else", but that's not true, so they omit it and leave you to think they've said it instead.

What they have actually said, though, is worthless as a recommendation. Yes, "every day more photos are taken with the iPhone", but this will remain true unless everyone who has an iPhone suddenly stops using it forever. It's also true if you substitute any device for "iPhone", even obsolete products whose user-base is declining. Try it with "Box Brownie"...

Nokia, WIndows and Android

This case is about bundling and abuse of market position. Google Search is not a requirement for Google's Calendar or App Store to work, but licensees are forbidden from replacing it (you can put something else on the phone as an app, but you can't replace it). In the same way, Internet Explorer was not essential to running the Windows OS, and yet licensees were forbidden from replacing it. Microsoft's sins don't become virtues just because it's Google committing them.

Nice to see the everlasting "Nokia should have used Android" comment is still doing the rounds. Actually, Nokia's negotiations with Google back in 2010 are illuminating for this case, even though they didn't involve search.

Contrary to some conspiracy theorists, Nokia did negotiate with Google before dumping Symbian. During these negotiations, Google made it very clear that Nokia could adopt Android (or more correctly, join the Open Handset Alliance), but what Nokia could not do was use their own mapping and navigation service in place of Google's. (Same for Nokia Music, which is at similar level as Google's music store, and had cost a lot of money to set up, and was generating good revenues)

They could of course just port Android to their hardware without OHA membership, but if they wanted to go their own way like this, they would be barred from access to Gmail, Google Calendar and what is now the Play Store: they'd have ended up with all the downsides of Android and none of the benefits, plus the extra costs of duplicating Google's services (as Ovi showed, this was exactly what they wanted to avoid).

As a "concession", Google offered to buy Nokia's mapping and location division from them. That would not only have been a bad deal for Nokia, but would have sucked for consumers, as Navteq/Nokia is Google's largest competitor in mapping software.

In contrast, when Nokia went to Microsoft (already a Navteq customer, incidentally), MS were prepared to concede the mapping, allow Nokia to add their own services to the OS package, and MS offered discounted licences and marketing support.

That's why Nokia did not, and will not, make an Android phone. Google's terms gave Nokia very little value.

You can look at their choice of Microsoft as bribery, or even betrayal if you're the sort of person who emotionally invests in legal constructs, but it's nothing of the sort. Nokia's purpose is to do what is best for Nokia's shareholders. Just as Google's only purpose is to do what is best for Google's shareholders, and Microsoft's purpose is to do what is best for Microsoft's shareholders. In this case, Microsoft and Nokia were able to create an arrangement that benefited both; Google's offer benefited only Google.

Nokia, Microsoft put on brave face as Lumia 925s parachute into Blighty

Re: @Kristian Walsh

Well, I started by knowing what the fuck "working life" actually means, if you'll pardon my French. Working life is how long the device is expected to remain fit for purpose. It has nothing to do with how many owners it goes through, or how often you personally toss your current phone and get a new one.

The first principle is that if other headline specifications are kept equal, a device's Mean Time Between Failures will be proportional to its component cost. Longer-lasting components cost more: always have, always will. In other words, the more expensive devices don't wear out as quickly.

Second, cheaper devices have lower headline specifications. Lower specifications within a product family mean that it will run out of support updates sooner than a device with more storage, faster CPU, more RAM, etc. Again, the more expensive device lasts longer, in that they remain able to do more of what the latest devices can.

This has nothing to do with how long you personally keep the device, but for how long the device remains usable to somebody. (I was also referring to using it for applications, because any smartphone is still usable as a phone/email/calendar long after it can't run new apps.)

The fact that you can sell a top-end smartphone on eBay three years after launch implies that someone is willing to buy it, and then use it. So that's your three years of use, plus another one or two from the next owner. That's what I mean by a longer working life.

It's a lot harder to sell a low-end device for the same kind of percentage return, which implies that there are fewer buyers for it, even at the lower absolute price, and the primary reason for this is that the device would be of less use to them.

@Big Van Vader

"It had 8.4% of SALES from March to April 2013, this is NOT the same as having 8.4% of the overall UK Smartphone market which your post suggests."

Actually it is the same thing as he suggests. Market share is the share of the products sold in the market in a period, so rather than refute the assertion, you've just restated it. A "market" of anything implies sales, so devices that were sold last year are not part of this year's market.

The measure I think you mean is installed base, how many of the products are still in use. Over time, high market share contributes to high installed base, but it's not a straightforward integral of sales: products with a short useful life will drop out of installed base more quickly than those which provide longer service.

Despite its death-notice in 2011, it is still Symbian that's the third-most-used OS, and iOS only overtook it in late 2012. Android has been #1 since about 2011. A lot of those Symbian devices are very old, however, so don't contribute to the "app economy" which is the main reason why a rational person would even care about whose phone OS is most popular. By that measure, iOS had an early lead, Android has caught up, but not pulled away. Or in other words, one can prove any pet theory with statistics just by framing the query.

Anyway, these WP8 devices are at the higher end of the market, which implies a longer working life, so if MS/Nokia can keep this share up, they will have a viable userbase before too long. I think that's good. A monopoly or even a duopoly is bad for customers in the long run: it just breeds complacency.

Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++

Re: C++

Counterexample to back up your assertion, please...

Interwebs taunt Sir Jony over Apple eye candy makeover

Re: Ives?

I'm no Apple fan these days, and really not a fan of Ive's (actually Jobs's I suspect) fetish for 1960s Braun designs, but he did design the 1998 iMac, which was iconic and clever, and not based on previous work. Also, the G3 desktop with it's handles/stands at the corners and the very clever (in terms of "actual design") door at the side for access. The last black clamshell Powerbook G3 series (1998 to 2000) was also a very good design.

On the G3's door, I remember us getting our hands on a late engineering validation prototype one of these (full enclosure plastics, but not in correct colours/textures), and needing to take the HD out, we started to undo the allen bolts on the corners that held the plastic cover against the metal enclosure. It was only after we'd taken all four off, and stood the machine up to better lever off the cover that someone said, "Hey, what's this little ring for", pulled it, and the side door opened. D'oh. The production unit's coloured plastics made it a bit more obvious....

Also, the original Powerbook G4, with its titanium enclosure. That's a design that I hadn't seen anyone do before. The following models were just refinements on the theme of "make it a round-rect", but that model was fresh.

The G4 Cube was an interesting product, but I feel that was Jobs's brief, and the engineering team made it happen with Ive left to dress it afterwards, and by this time, we're starting to see the Rams influence creep in.

However, I will concede that his current output has got itself stuck in a rut. If I were him, I'd cash in my options and move somewhere new, where I could do something original again, without being smothered by the weight of what is expected of an Apple product.

Re: People forget: Icons should be iconic!

"I've never understood why the Safari icon depicted a compass overlaid on a map of the world when I'm not actually travelling anywhere."

... And then when Nokia used a simplified compass icon for their Map application ( http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hLiYEZf4Ox0/TxhqHECjLwI/AAAAAAAAA4g/OOwlwtwg5X0/s1600/maps+icon.JPG ), one of the Tech Blog Superstars™ claimed that it was a bizarre and confusing choice, as a compass should mean "the web browser". (This despite Apple using the compass motif twice in the same context for two different functions: web and, er, compass)

Personally, I have always hated the use of the 3.5" floppy icon for "Save" (it's not as egregious as "Yes/No dialogs", but it's in the same list). It's confusing because in an interface, the icons are objects, and thus nouns; an object cannot be a verb. As soon as you start trying to convey an action using a static object you're distracting the user with stupid rebus puzzles.

Re: That all the worlds got? @Moeluk

"The greater the negative reaction from Fandroids is an indicator that the iPhone has hit the sweet spot again."

So you're at a restaurant, and you see that guy you hated at school in the far corner. He orders the Chef's Special, takes one bite, spits it back out and runs to the toilet where he's violently sick.

Obviously, when the waiter comes to ask for your order, you ask for a double helping of the Chef's special.

Facebook turns on frigid Swedish ice-maidens in new data centre

"Arctic"

While it is cold in the Winter, Luleå isn't in the Arctic. It would need to be another 100km North for that.

Apple at WWDC: Sleek new iOS, death of the big cats, pint-sized Mac Pro

@Charlie, Re: Innovation?

I saw this and thought "Nokia" too. Both from Windows Phone, and the Harmattan/Swipe UI of the N9 and the new Asha phones.

The slide-in control panes, on-off toggles, messaging UI, and the toolbar controls are straight out of Nokia's Harmattan/Belle/Asha UI, which stem from the Harmattan UI of 2011's N9. The rest is remarkably like WebOS. Incidentally, there's a theme here: Peter Skillman, once lead designer of WebOS, now works at Nokia and did the lead design on N9 and the Asha 501.

Icon design is an improvement, but I think the use of layout grids looks neat, but will make the icon shapes too regular and indistinct from each other (think of how tiring it is to read those typefaces that are constructed on rigid gridforms). I also think that Apple have missed a trick by not using key colours to subtly bind core apps together into function groups, as Nokia do (reference: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Resources/Library/Asha_UI/#!style/colour.html ).

The problem with this kind of icon design for third-party app devs is that it's deceptively difficult to do. A bit of photoshop monkeying can hide a poorly drawn design with surface treatment and patterning, but a flat, typographical UI exposes bad draughtsmanship mercilessly. Windows Phone suffers from this, and now Apple are putting their devs in the same boat. I foresee an uptick in sales of Adobe Illustrator... ;)

Also, looking at the icons in this UI particularly, I suspect Jonathan Ive may have some level of colour-blindnes - like his other work, it uses "colour" as a decorative element (and it works well in the selected icon highlight), but there appears to be little thought given to colour harmony: the icon colours are bright, but they clash with each other. On his hardware designs, there was only ever one bright accent colour, and I think he should have stuck to this for the icon sets.

So, who else contributed? Well, I think they lifted the most of the new phone UI from Microsoft, the task-switch UI from WebOS, and the use of a single UI "mood" colour (and drawing it from the wallpaper image) is from Jolla's "Sailfish" OS. I don't see much Android in there, tbh: what there is that's similar is just stuff that was lifted by both Apple and Google from WebOS. Imitation, flattery, etc.

Oh, and the use of Helvetica Light for black-on-bright text is a usability mistake. It looks "clean and sharp" if you've 20/20 vision, but if you don't, or if you suffer from any degree of astigmatism, the legibility degrades badly due to halation (glowing) of the surrounding white areas obscuring the letter strokes. Windows Phone does use thin type, but predominantly as light-on-dark, where halation "thickens" the strokes, improving legibility. (An example of this phenomenon, known since the late 1950s: UK road signage uses a heavier weight of type for white-backed signage than for the green or blue signs to reduce this effect).

Tab UI for Safari is nice, and as far as I can see is the only new bit of UI in the whole mashup. However, at least the iPhone's UI matches the device now.

Re: Well

"OTOH, this might just force peripheral makers to come up with some TB devices."

Or, as happened with Photoshop and Illustrator in the 1990s, it'll force the software writers to look at Windows or even Linux instead.

Good to see Apple are looking after the niche industries that kept them in existence in the bad old days...

Elon Musk pledges transcontinental car juicers by end of year

Re: I don't understand all the hostility

The principal objection to Elon Musk is that he portrays himself as a champion of capitalism, yet his business requires large amounts of tax-payers' money to operate. Take away the money that the State of California gives to every purchaser of a Tesla Model S (these are people who can already afford a $50,000 car, by the way), and you find that Tesla is losing $10,000 a vehicle.

And how did Tesla turn a profit? They sold environmental credits to traditional auto-makers. The money for these credits came from... taxpayers again.

He's fattening up the goose, sitting back, and waiting for someone like Ford to buy it. Typical Silicon Valley "business" model, just applied to a new sector.

Living with a 41-megapixel 808 PureView: Symbian's heroic last stand

Re: Lots of Symbian users still out there...

The Nokia Store also serves Series40/Asha devices (and Maemo/N9 too). S40/Asha accounts for the bulk of downloads, but it's true that Symbian users are still downloading more apps than you'd image.

Re: Broadcom GPU

As the author of an app that does large downloads, that wireless bug is a thorn in my side. It's only on some devices, and only with some WLANs. My wife's N8 on carrier software doesn't exhibit it; mine, on UK Generic software, does. Go figure.

That alone is an indication of why it wasn't possible for Nokia to continue with Symbian. Some design decisions, perhaps taken nearly a decade ago, have made the codebase so complex that qualification and bugfixing became an endless nightmare.

Ruby on Fails: Zombie SERVER army built thanks to Rails bug

Re: force a vulnerable server to download, compile and run some C code

If you're using RoR, you already haven't thought enough about separation of development and production platforms as it is.

"apt-get install build-essentials" (other package management systems are available) is just too tempting when you're trying to hotfix a production problem. It's absolutely the wrong thing to do for so many reasons, but again, if you're using RoR, you already haven't thought enough about...

4G LTE: Good for tweets and watching Dr Who. Crap at saving lives

Re: Imagine

The US is resistant to TETRA because it's a. not an American system, and b. requires central management. Point (b) is more significant, because there can be significant fragmentation in US agencies, with Federal, State, City and County funded law enforcement (to which you can add Transit and Highway Patrols in some states). Just deciding who should be responsible for operating the network would be a major political headache.

But I think the problem is that they're trying to compare apples and oranges. TETRA is a voice network, and while voice is still by far and away the major requirement for emergency respnonders, there's been an increasing demand for data services too (nothing fancy: just basic mail and web; all those live telemedicine demos that the equipment companies wheel out with the emergency room doctor hanging on the other end of the screen are largely fantasy)

TETRA can do data, but not fast data, and it comes at a high cost relative to other solutions. LTE and 3G are useful for the data part of the solution, but not for the strategic voice comms. Mobile can do voice, but not at anything near the level of reliability or management you need for incident communications.

Basically, it's better to have two good tools that can each do one job well, rather than one tool that does both badly.