Posts by Merefield

Bitcoin is ‘disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization’ says famed investor Charlie Munger

I agree, it's a grotesque Ponzi scheme masquerading as revolutionary technology.

There are so many silly arguments held up in its defence, the best being "it's (way, way way) better than FIAT".

The silly thing is no-one sensible keeps significant wealth in 'FIAT' anyway, it's just a means of valuation and exchange, so the comparison is totally bogus.

If you hold a fundamentally quality, tangible asset like a nice house, you don't care if "FIAT" devalues, because it's value will just climb. And luckily if you decide to sell, you can barter in Pounds or Dollars quite easily and don't have to worry if the value of it just moved by 10% in the last hour! (HODL!)

The fact is there are is now a gold rush to buy up valuable GPU's, for no other reason than to exploit the exponential stupidity of the greater fool, whilst burning more and more carbon and driving up electricity costs (and GPU's) for everyone.

First Coinbase, now Basecamp: Should workplaces ban political talk on internal corporate platforms?

My Dad and his brother, up to no good as young boys, once looked up funny names in the phonebook, only to call up Mr. Smelly and ask him "Are you smelly?" ... I loved that story!

Re: Well done Basecamp

Actually, I disagree, psychological stress can have very real physiological consequences.

Lovely website you got there. Would be a shame if we, er, someone were to sink it: Google warns EU link tax will magnify media monetary misery

But wait!

Article 11: The link 'previews' that are usually generated on the 'aggregators' are set by the publisher in their web page meta tags.

So I believe use of this content constitutes 'fair use' with an implied licence - after all Facebook iirc actually invented the open graph tag so if someone is prepared to fill it in that's implying they want facebook to consume and use that data ...

IBM bans Dropbox, Siri and rival cloud tech at work

BYOD does NOT mean use insecure services

Wait a second here - proper corporate use of BYOD is via secure client apps which never store corporate data on unauthorised external entities and allow the user to connect to internal data storage and services such as corporate email using secure communications.

It is common sense to discourage or prohibit employees to store company data on personal cloud space, send business emails to personal webmail account, or pass company information through external services.

This is not new - staff of large companies have been told not to use Google translate for business purposes for years!

This has nothing to do with BYOD, its about having a proper security culture and the right tools in place for staff to be able to work full within the boundaries of the companies systems.

BYOD is a healthy revolution, but you have to do it professionally and right!

The iPad: Unsubsidised, unaffordable, unloved?

A little unfair

No love? Apple doesn't need to subsidise it, they are in fact struggling to meet demand at the current prices!

The 16G model with 3G is just a little bit more than an unsubsidised smart-phone, which seems about right to me given the screen size.

Also, the pounds performance on the FX markets is not Steve Jobs fault! Although perhaps if the UK had more world class companies like Apple we'd be seeing a better exchange rate! Get used to this, because the pound may fall even further and all these toys are going to cost us more relative to our income!

The ipad is a very elegant device and its integration with the best application store in the industry is a killer feature.

If you feel it's too much, sure, get cheap netbook and miss out on all the excellent cheap software on the appstore, deal with the cramped keyboard and try and pretend touch interfaces are a gimmick.

Take your choice, it's a free country!

Nokia's N97 flagship to sail in this month

Nokia is really losing it

A poor entry into a market that has moved on significantly. What a great phone the N95 was when it came out, but it can't compete now in a world with iPhone sophistication. With iPhone's 3.0 imminent release they will be really lagging behind, and will no longer be able to sit on their laurels claiming superiority on features to make up for the lack of a modern user interface and input efficiency - where's the fast, slick capacitive touch screen model??

Canon Digital Ixus 980 IS compact camera

14mp on a small sensor - thank the marketing department!

"I can't really think of a reason to have a 14mp compact with a small sensor" .... totally agree with Ashley here, it sounds impressive but there's no way the lenses will be up to it. Pointless overkill and only there to compete for the attention of the average consumer. Even the Canon DSLR's with small sensor's couldn't take advantage of this resolution ....

Apple prices iPhone at $666, says analyst

I don't see why i should be forced to Jailbreak

... just to get good SMS. It should be fully featured out of the box as its a basic must have of mobile phones. If someone sends me a business card via bluetooth or SMS on my N95 it pops up in my messages and i can add to my addresses. If i get a picture via SMS in an MMS message i should be able to add it to my photo gallery. If i get a meeting invite via SMS i should be able to add it to my calendar .... all these things i can do on a phone several years older .... and you just cannot assume people want to interact with you over email for these things. Not everyone is restricted by the iPhone!

How about adding proper support for SMS at the same time

...including vCard support, multiple recipients, picture messaging ... etc. etc.

Yeah, Google Earth is very cute, as is the website zooming, but please, get the basics right! I think they should get the iPhone to walk before they try running with it ...

The iPhone App Store - a classic protection racket

While the sun shines

Come on!

Whilst its good to maintain a healthy level of cynicism and critique of the big computer firms, I think this article goes to far.

If the market can bare Apple taking 30% good luck to them. In the current economic climate they’ll need a little help whilst consumers cut back on re-assuringly expensive laptops and designer desktop computers.

As it has been pointed out the successful developers have also been doing quite well, and show me a consumer that complains when they get a good piece of software for relatively little money.

Its interesting that they can get away with such a high margin though. If you look at consoles they reportedly get less than 10% for each game sold, although I’m not sure if that figure goes up for “hosted” games, e.g. ones on XBOX Live for example.

There are other areas where the app store may more reasonably come in for criticism, e.g. the way some developers have been accused of "drip feeding" small upgrades to milk their consumers ... but these might be growing pains and you can't have a go at Apple for having a good go