Posts by Charlie Clark

Sure, Europe. Here's our Android suite without Search, Chrome apps. Now pay the Google tax

Re: Ignore and continue as usual

It'll be like the browser choice fiasco

What's Internet Explorer's market share again? This, and even more the unbundling of the media player from Windows did provide the framework for more consumer choice. Otherwise by now most online video would probably be DRM'd WMV or MOV.

The judgement doesn't have to mean the demise of Google, just as the ruling against Microsoft meant the demise of MS; in fact it's earning more than ever and that's despite fucking up mobile internet completely.

So, what we need are more rulings against such vertical integration. Roll on alternative app stores, music players and browsers for IOS devices…

Re: Or the fourth option...

buy shares in apple.

Sure, because once this is through there is no chance that a similar case could be brought against Apple for restrictive practice…

Re: Or the fourth option...

"Sod it, we won't license Android for use in the EU."

This is a silly strawman: AOSP is already out there and won't be going away. Not sure that such a restriction would stand up in court, but it's irrelevant. Google has, however, been moving components, including OS updates to Play Services and there is not yet a reliable replacement for this yet. A marketplace might be interesting but, of course, API compatbility would be crucial.

I think Google might stand to benefit from competition here, it does provide some top-class services and I can see an advantage in getting out of as much direct interaction with consumers as possible: don't run the app store but provide the infrastructure (including code checking) for one.

Google Cloud chief joins Saudi shindig exodus over journalist's worrying disappearance

Re: Catch 45

It's like a catch 22

Not really: No one in Trumpland really cares about some foreign Washington Post shill. So saying nothing would be fine with the base.

If there was a working State Department and he could be bothered to listen to briefings* he'd know the situation and would have either a prepared statement or the notes to make his own remarks. Reagan demonstated amply that you don't have to know much to be a popular and, ahem, effective president of the US.

* But Fox & Friends seems to be the briefing of choice…

Follow the money

Saudi money, via the Softbank fund, has been acting as a backstop for Silicon Valley investments hence the recent bailouts investments in tech failures champions such as Uber and WeWork. Plus, any hint of Saudi oil production being throttled and the oil and petrol prices will spike enormously.

I'm just wating for the Orange one to suggest that MBS shouldn't restrict the purging to the Washington Post, I'm sure he's got the names of a couple of journos over at the New York Times or whistleblowers who'd benefit from a quick chat at the consulate*.

* Yes, I am making this up, but the scary thing is it doesn't sound too outlandish any more.

Samsung’s flexible phone: Expect an expensive, half-bendy clamshell

Re: I still think a bifold device will be a market failure

Because they're usually held vertically (in portrait configuration), and the aspect ratio an iPad uses is closer to that of paper

The majority of time spent on any tablet, except perhaps the I-Pad Pro, is for media consumption, particularly video. The larger screen size makes is much easier on the eye because you still get a reasonably large picture at 70cm. Apple got this wrong, just like they got the size of the I-Pad wrong, initially. However, it's not a deal-breaker so they still sell I-Pads (still great kit), just at not as high a volume as they did initiallly. My guess is that most people who bought them for media consumption have replaced them with disposable, no-name Android tablets. Certainly, that's what I've seen recently among those people I know with them.

Re: Typical Samsung

The sales volumes would suggest that they did learn.

Re: I still think a bifold device will be a market failure

people spend a LOT of time watching video on their phones

Some do, others don't at all: it's a big market.

For some uses the bigger the screen the better, but also the more portable the better. This is why the hinged designs for notebooks has been so successful. This patent is a big vague but I can see some field workers drooling at the thought. But the execution will have to be perfectly tailored to the use case otherwise it'll be just another notch.

Shortages, price rises, recession: Tech industry preps for hard Brexit

Re: And all we can do...

Nobody complained.

Except for all the people going: this is a bloody stupid idea…

David Cameron, when he was elected as head of the Tories said that it was time to stop fighting over Europe, eventually decided the only way to end the bickering was to offer a referendum, which didn't even stop the bickering…

Re: Ha Ha

I'm glad the CTA will allow me freedom to work and travel inside the UK while my passport

Except the cluelessness of the UK government is putting the CTA itself in jeopardy.

Re: And all we can do...

yeah, anti-Trump'ers

Please don't highjack this article with addled nonsense about yet another dumb US president. FWIW Clinton easily won the popular vote in America, which would be the comparison to make with a referendum. And, if everything is so rosy, I assume you haven't seen the size of the US public debt recently…

That 'Surface will die in 2019' prediction is still a goer, says soothsayer

The simple fact is that the Surface line is profitable

So you're privy to numbers that MS itself doesn't release?

Re: Microsoft should stay with Surface.

Microsoft needs a similar halo, even at a loss.

No it does not. Loss-leaders only ever work for temporarily to grow market share, or because, like Amazon's spybots, you're using them to drive services. Neither applies to the Microsoft's Surface.

Re: So the logic is

An iPad Pro is only a substitute for the five Surface owners who actually use it as a tablet.

Have an extra upvote for this. Also, while Apple does make a tidy profit with the I-Pad Pro, it doesn't sell that many of them.

one of the few hardware successes for Microsoft

Seeing as they're not releasing any details about whether they make any profit on the line, you're just guessing. You need huge volumes of these prodiucts to make money which is why Canalys (and this is the CEO and not just a Gartner monkey) is making the call: the volumes don't justify the investment.

In the PC market margins are traditionally very thin and the market itself continues to shrink.

Samsung: Swanky hardware alone won't save a phone maker

Re: Samsung bait and switch

Sounds like they updated stuff based on GDPR in which case there really is no way around it. But they could do a better job of explaining it.

Otherwise just stick LineageOS on it.

Re: Samsung/Huawei

All these companies are doing is fracturing the market further

Here it's known as segmentation and it doesn't matter which one you buy, as long as it's a Samsung, ie. as long as you go with the brand. This is the norm for consumer electronics: look at the huge variety of TVs they all produce with really minor differences and price points,

Re: Better than Apple...

https://download.lineageos.org/star2lte

Samsung Galaxy A9: Mid-range bruiser that takes the fight to Huawei

I faced in 2015 with my £500 S3 "flagship"

Which was three years old in 2015 and no longer covered by any warranty. Actually, consider yourself lucky because back then Samsung only really bothered to provide updates for about 18 months, safe in the knowledge that most people would want to move to something newer and shinier. That said, I think the reason for deprecating the S3 would probably be down to the lack of hardware encryption.

However, it looks like LineageOS for the S3 is still being maintained: https://download.lineageos.org/i9300 and if 14.1 is available, 15.1 (Android 8.1) and later should be possible because it means Treble runs.

But at £549 I'd expect a 8-series Snapdragon or equivalent.

Return of the PC go faster stripes! The CPU probably doesn't matter for anything other than gaming. Some of the other goodies 6GB, storage and all those cameras, SD support (add £200 and it's an unexpandable I-Phone) are pretty nice to have. The memory especially will probably make it faster than faster CPUs with less memory.

Re: No Thanks

Always annoying but you should be able to disable them. Otherwise root it and delete them all. MagiskManager will you hide the root so it's all good.

Get all techy and install Lineages OS and hope that all the hardware features still work

Which, partly due to the popularity of Samsung devices, is pretty likely; apart, perhaps from an FM radio (if the phone has it) and some of the camera features. But always check before you buy.

That is first of all illegal because the phone doesn't really work without, so as far as I can tell you're looking at what in the UK is termed an unfair contract

So the contract is invalid and unenforceable. Samsung make great phones with, apart from the camera app, shit software. Fortunately, it's normally pretty easy to root them and install something over which you have more control.

Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

Re: Developing in sometimes difficult... who knew?

Gecko died a few versions back and was replaced by Quantum/Electron wasn't it?

Never bothered with live bookmarks but a preview of the feed is easy to do and the libraries for parsing RSS are pretty robust and safe. I guess, if they're talking about podcasts, the problems will be with any kind of embedded media / HTML.

Apache OpenOffice, the Schrodinger's app: No one knows if it's dead or alive, no one really wants to look inside

Re: Reminder for macos users

For $29.95 how does it compare to the free versions?

It's basically skinned. But that isn't the comparison I would make, how does it compare to other packages that also cost money, such as Softmaker? Haven't tried this myself but the reviews I've read have all praised this cross-platform Office, especially for its support for the OOXML files, something which neither OpenOffice nor LibreOffice excel (no pun intended) at.

Re: The only reason it is popular...

If you believe most people care about The Document Foundation political stance

I know a couple and fortunately they're not all idiots. Unfortunately, some of the idiots did deliberately sabotage work paid for by others that was supposed to benefit both OpenOffice and LibreOffice so that the relevant code couldn't easily be integrated into OpenOffice. And then there is that fecking awful, child's crayon LibreOffice UX.

Re: The only reason it is popular...

Sometimes office software hits on something new and useful.

Indeed, but it's largely a solved problem and, while there are numerous programs that would let you do what you're doing, I can understand why you prefer it being part of the suite. MS Office 2013 is otherwise pretty meh but Office 2016 has significant performance improvements and is really the only serious option for mobile devices: a real opportunity missed for LibreOffice.

Re: The only reason it is popular...

Or find OpenOffice more stable than LibreOffice. I certainly do.

Office suites are largely a solved problem. Yes, the code could be updated and cleaned up but it does all I need it to do.

Re: OpenOffice NOT LibreOffice

The article does make that point. LibreOffice might be more active but it also provides buggy releases and and a degraded UX.

Does Google make hardware just so nobody buys it?

Re: ChromeOS Pyrrhic victory

Many Chrome OS devices run on ARM.

Yes, but this one is an Intel and that means emulation for Android for ARM apps. And that's assuming Intel is maintaining the transpiler.

ChromeOS Pyrrhic victory

ChromeOS isn't really going anywhere. Given that it runs on Intel I wonder if this started life as an Intel project that Google agreed to brand: Intel is even worse at selling to consumers than Google.

I assume the Android team is letting them have their glory, while companies like Samsung work on stuff like DeX. It's the apps that will matter for this kind of device.

Google now minus Google Plus: Social mini-network faces axe in data leak bug drama

Re: "sunsetting" ... lol!

They tried to force everyone with a Gmail account, Android sign-in or Google login to have a G+ account many years ago.

Google + was a effectively a side-effect of the single sign-on that Google developed and has since, successfully rolled out. While it did have some loyal groups, it was never going to be able to replace Facebook, because for people already using Facebook it didn't offer anything really new, and it was unlikely to appeal to those who didn't want to use a "social network".

In other news: messengers have been replacing networks for the last couple of years. But no one in the West has really figured how to make money from them. Google has, again, developed usable but lacklustre apps (Allo and Duo), but more importantly worked on the infrastructure (WebRTC and Messages) so that Hangouts for G-Suite makes sense for corporates.

Watch Series 4: What price 'freedom'? About as much as you'd expect from an Apple product

Re: Kinda nice

Well, the MK 1 iPhone, MK 1 iPad and MK 1 iPod

Except this is MK 4 and still basically a rich boy's toy. In that it's more like the Apple TV, which still sells reasonably while failing to set the world alight.

Re: Kinda nice

Sales of Apple watch greater than the entire watch output of Switzerland.

And I would hope so, too. This is a consumer device albeit a chuffing expensive one, Swiss watches, at least the ones with Swiss innards, are luxury items.

Apple is making a tidy profit and a lot of the people who have them, love them. But the rest of us have seen and largely ignored wearables as the solutionist wet dreams they mainly are for anyone who wants more than a fitness tracker.

Re: Kinda nice

Total sales are still tiny but enough for Apple to continue to invest in the product. But most of the world has moved on.

On the seventh anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, we give you 7 times he served humanity and acted as an example to others

Re: He said what everyone else was thinking regards Adobe Flash. We're all better for it.

He said what everyone else was thinking regards Adobe Flash, called it out for what it was (and still is). 'Utter shite', bug-ridden code that shouldn't be on any device.

He had no idea about the quality of the code – any why should he when he wasn't a programmer – but he was worried that the ubiquity of Flash would give Adobe power in the digital media market and he wanted to cut them out. So he pushed engineers to make Webkit good enough for the App Store and I-Tunes and joined the relevant patent pools. As soon as this particular mission was accomplished work on Webkit was essentially dropped until the notch arrived and non-Apple software got frozen out of the hardware acceleration on the mobile devices.

Dell Tech: We have a plan B for bog standard IPO

Re: Silverlake's exit strategy

but maybe they don't intend to pay down the debt?

Almost certainly not, hence, the exit strategy. Incredible that the bonds issued with those duration and yields (what was it? 8% for thirty years or something even more ridiculous?) were even given a rating other than YHL*

* "You're having a laugh". Just made it up but probably makes as much sense as most of the ratings that the are issued by Standard & Poors, Moody's and Fitch…

Silverlake's exit strategy

US bond yields are now over 3% so it's going to be hard to pay down the debt just from cashflow. Much better to stiff the chumps who bought the VM Ware tracking stock. If the holders won't do this as part of the IPO they can probably be forced to do it in a subsequent reorganisation*

* including selling off and spinning off all the shit that Dell bought when it when private.

HMRC rapped as Brexit looms and customs IT release slips again

Re: no surprise

no evidence to support this, but it's a reasonable hypothesis

It isn't and your arguments cherry pick their strawmen. After the referendum no one bothered to do the necessary consultation with the electorate to work out what it actually wanted outside the platitudes of "taking back control", "no more foreigners" or "more money for the NHS". Instead we got even more meaningless platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit" and time was wasted with value-signalling instead of serious political debate.

But to return to your hypothesis: in 2016 the refugee crisis of 2015 was still fresh in the minds of many, as was the fear of mass migration from the Middle East (UKIP even had a poster suggesting millions of Turks were just waiting to come to the UK) and Africa, ie. migrants from outside the EU. For many the EU was, and remains, too abstract a concept but they were angry about their standard of living and apprehensive about the future and the referendum gave them a way to express their anger and apprehension, however vaguely.

Re: no surprise

I can't imagine Italy, or Hungary, or for that matter, even Germany going along with such stuff, because: it's fantasy

For the record, the most recent example of QMV ("qualified majority voting") — over refugee quotas — was a massive own goal that highlighted the key problem with modern politics: the failure to engage sincerely with the electorate and thus ceding ground to the populists.

Re: no surprise

Don't forget those of us who didn't think it was easy

I don't think he did. Still, it was a naive position to adopt considering how close proceedings have been to some of our predictions, starting with the inability to provide a coherent interpretation of the referendum before officially requesting to leave.

you're not really going to change anybody's mind, are you

Over something so fundamentally ideological that was never likely to happen, was it? Statements like ever-more centralised single state of Greater Europe are hardly likely to bring pro-Europeans like myself round either.

SNAFU

The whole thing reveals the oxymoronic approach of many politicians to IT systems. They love to play down the complexity of real life – any extra work after leaving the customs union is a bit like Christmas post and solvable by employing a few minimum wage grunts, while at the same time handing out contracts for poorly specified and horrifically complex systems to the usual suspects. Because, obviously a system that can handle VAT can also workout whether the driver is potentially and illegal immigrant.

The secret history of Apple's Stacks

Re: OCD

My computer desktop is almost always covered by application windows. It's never felt natural to replicate on it the "nearest available surface filing system"* I have on my real desktop and I get really annoyed when apps default to storing stuff on it like MacOS does with screenshots.

ML works well when it has easy to understand principles, it is after all just an extension of a rule-based approach. For example, the photos app does a good job of creating automatic retrospectives of trips even if it seems to hammer the CPU when running it.

* A Pratchettism, of course.

Apple macOS Mojave: There's goth mode but developers will have to wait for the juicy stuff

Re: News App

The choice of apps reminded me of Microsoft's AOL clone that was released with Windows 95: toy apps that nobody needs.

Re: "Unified" apps are unlikely...

As Andrew notes, QT has a pretty good story when it comes to the different environments.

Re: Wow!

If you are on High Sierra I would definitely upgrade as you will have a much more bug free experience after doing so.

This is really bad advice. First of all, High Sierra isn't very buggy. But, more importantly, every MacOS upgrade over the last 10+ years has come with exciting new bugs and breakages and Mojave won't be any different. Particularly dropping 32-bit support is likely to cause some annoyance, even if it does make a lot of sense.

Re: "I blame The Matrix for starting all this off, by the way."

CRT's used to write green/orange depending on the phosphor. Fine for mononchrome. We didn't really get black on white until colour screens were developed. It's debatable* but I've always found black on white on colour easier to read. Except on my phones, where at least for OLED screens, using a dark theme makes sense because it saves a lot of power. Apple shoehorning this into MacOS might prelude some MacBooks with OLED screens next year.

* Apart from the subjective aspects, I think the issue is focussing on luminescent characters.

Re: Thanks for the review

Don't you still have to run it on Apple hardware?

Yes, you do need Apple hardware to run it legally. But it used to be artificially restriced to MacOS server. It allows you to try before you upgrade.

The GUI is okay in High Sierra, as long as transparency is disabled. The clusterfuck of forcing Helvetica on every machine in Yosemite or Mavericks was rolled back as it was unreadable on normal displays. But if you're used to XFCE then I'd stick with what you've got.

Thanks for the review

Apple does indeed seem to have released Mojave for the sake of the deadline more than anything else. This is probably why it is only being promoted in the App Store instead of being the usual nagware. Don't think I'll look at this again before January.

Fortunately, I think it's been possible/legal for a few years to try more recent MacOS versions in a VM.