Posts by Charlie Clark 13458 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
The biggest problem with the fused design, apart from adding to the size, is that it's useless for the vast majority of devices with insulated cases as it will never be needed.
Otherwise: cable always at 90° to socket and built-in protection against prying fingers are winners.
Take away the phone, though, and all that lovely high margin other stuff would disappear pretty quickly. But Apple has very loyal customers who like the value proposition (this is debatable but understandable) of the phone and don't mind paying over the odds for services and accessories in the generally misplaced hope that they will work better than other off the shelf stuff.
For me, the phone wars are over. Pretty much all the modern phones are fantastic and you now have to look hard to see the difference between Android and IOS – yes, I know there are some telltale signs but at a quick glance it does look they've achieved parity.
I was trying not to reveal my own thoughts about the current situation
But you did and you still do… especially concerning pros and cons of membership and all those potential free trade agreements waiting out there. Many of these are going to require alignment with EU norms not to invalidate existing agreements. The US being a notable exception, of course, because it does not yet have a bilateral trade agreement with the EU.
But, while I might be pessimistic, I don't know how things will turn out. However, as a citizen with dual nationality I'm now of the opinion that the EU should take a hard line in negotiations with the UK, which is increasingly the opinion of my anglophile friends.
Starts with Without particularly revealing my own thoughts on the matter and then In other words rejoining would not return us to the position we were in before 2016 - we would be much weaker and have less autonomy.
In other words conclusion based on speculation. No one really knows where Britain will be in 5 to 10 years or what the EU will look like, but we can assume the debate about membership will continue.
The Grauniad is annoying but, let's face it, it's not top of the lift of publications to avoid or are you going to pretend you can read the Mail or the Express without questioning the sanity of any who choose to read it,
And it's worth remembering by all that it was founded by a businessman to help uncover the Peterloo massacre. Worth remembering to those on the left that not all businessmen are bastards, and those on the right that free trade was once the cry of the working class.
I normally ignore the part entirely and moan to anyone who doesn't sent a proper plaintext part. But, for the purposes of the discussion, Thunderbird offers users the chance to read the HTML and this is a potential attack vector since the code is no longer being actively maintained by Mozilla. I don't follow forks like SeaMonkey so I don't know if the parser is being actively maintained.
They'll need to drop Gecko and much of the UI code if they don't want to take over maintenance of abandoned code and Gecko's important for handling of those awful HTML e-mails that people will insist on sending. It was this maintenance overhead that persuaded Mozilla to abandon Thunderbird.
I recently switched to MailMate on MacOS and FairMail on Android and pay for both: power users will generally be prepared to pay for a good e-mail client. After all, business users happily pay for a shitty e-mail client (Outlook)…
Non-power users don't seem to care because they mainly use messaging, where they'll need to reinvent the wheel.
Ads are probably more successful than you think, this group of commentards is probably unreprsentative. I mean, if they didn't work at all, El Reg would have closed down long ago.
Digital ads are generally compared with direct mail shots which have success rates of around < 5%, I think. Digital ads have success rates of around < 0.1 % for scattergun but this rises as targetting gets more granular, though apparently mainly for political ads (which might explain why many product ads eschew too much targetting), but digital ads only pay for succesfull clicks, whereas direct mail has to pay for all.
This is a simplified, and not wholly accurate view, of the situation that advertisers and content platforms use in their auctions (throw in some game theory as well) when deciding prices.
Mono? Is anyone still using that? Anyway, as it's apparently run by a Microsoft subsidiary I suspect the point is moot.
VS Code, which I don't use myself, has become very popular with developers on non-MS systems even though it isn't open source.
And anyone who insists on using the FOSS abbreviation is usually as much fun at parties as a vegan. Yes, we get the virtue signalling, we just don't care.
Yes, it's just an attempt by the FSF – sorry who? – to try and stay relevant. MS has actually already released a huge part of stuff as .NET Core. But the whole OS is probably asking too much. IBM did apparently seriously consider doing this with OS/2 and then they thought about all the licensed code in there and stopped.
As Windows becomes less of an OS and more and more a client for Azure, I'm sure we'll see more open source stuff dripping out of Microsoft's open source orifice.
Even if I believed the security scares about Huawei's routers, I fail to see why there is a problem with 5G all of a sudden. After all, technogically it's mainly just faster 4G but the marketing bods wanted a new label and most of the networks are already running Huawei kit and the sky hasn't fallen in yet.
There's also the problem of: who else can supply the kit? Huawei has working 5G kit, because the Chinese mobile market needs it and they've done the work and filed the patents to make it happen. They've already offered to license the kit so that others can make it, except those still won't be American companies because they lost the ability to make the kit years ago: China is just so much cheaper.. Regulators could always take them up on this and enforce "second-supplier" rules. Theoretically this might drive up costs, but seeing as no one but journos and orange wombata give a shit about 5G at the moment, it's not really an issue. I got my first 4G sim card this week and it's plenty fast enough for me.
For a phone it's possible to argue that dedicated chargers are a requirement for proper power management. But since everyone standardised on micro USB the number of peripherals that came with their own chargers has fallen off sharply. Many of them still come with cables though even these are being phased out.
In reality, of course, this means that manufacturers can save money by bundling less kit but the net effect is the same. Except, of course, for the fact that we all keep on buying non-serviceable gadgets and associated peripherals.
I regularly plug my phone in in the dark, nay problems so far. Though my phone doesn't have a nice aluminium bottom to scratch in the first place. And, it's in a case because, doing this sort of thing in the dark often leads to the thing falling on the floor when I miss my bedside table.
it's not unreasonable to assume a decent chunk comes from…
The licensing business. With proprietary connections (Lightning) and protocols (AirPlay) there's plenty of money in charging vendors for using it in their products and you can just watch the money roll in. Apple wanted to do this with wireless charging as well but, presumably because Jony and the strategy boutique spent too much time deciding on a name, they were too late to the party.
For one of my customers I only seem to get a request to complete the survey when it's a trivial problem that could be solved quickly. I know that some people's performance reviews depend on this, but if I get the feeling it's being gamed (not by the grungs but by bonus-chasing "managers") I bail.
Normally you can assume that if we don't complain we're happy or at least satisfied. If this is not the case, make it easy for us to say what didn't work, otherwise forget it.
or at least no worse than that of a battery.
Batteries have shit energy densities when compared with LPG or liquid fuels. These will not be replaced on a large scale by anthing that doesn't have comparable energy density.
Your electrolysis filling station is similarly whacko: all current examples are just there for the handouts. Machines may run on hydrogen but storage and transportation will be in another form.
Open source projects are generally driven by need or interest, unless they're being paid for by a company. So contributions will always be skewed by those who are the most interested in the work in much the same way in any volunteer organisation. Over time, they're likely to become experts on the project though this doesn't necessarily make them any more suited or talented than anyone else. The big problem with the approach is that code review isn't automatic and criticism is likely to be taken personally because of the investment.
Company projects are very different because you often don't get to choose what to work on…
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