Posts by Sean Timarco Baggaley

Only global poverty can save the planet, insists WWF - and the ESA!

Re: @Lord of Cheese (was: Whatever.)

Been there. Done that. My mother keeps some hens for eggs, and she even raised a couple of pigs for their meat a few years ago. (Bloody hard work and, to be brutally frank, not worth the energy and resources. There's a reason why phrases like "economies of scale" exist.)

Mechanised farming is a damned sight easier and more efficient than doing it all the hard way, with oxen, carts, and wooden ploughs.

Also, the population densities around here are much, much higher than in the US; there are parts of the US where you won't see a soul for 300 miles. Ditto in Australia. In the UK, 300 miles is the distance from London to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, so good luck trying to find enough acreage for every single human being in England to become self-sufficient, 'cos it's just not going to happen. The last time the developed nations in the Old World were all completely self-sufficient, the global population was well under a billion.

Most communities, even in the medieval period, would trade with others in order to improve their local staple diets. Livestock would be driven as much as 20 miles in a single day to reach a good market. Money wouldn't have been invented if trade didn't happen.

If you have to barter or trade with others, you are not fully self-sufficient. That requires doing it all yourself. If you have to trust in others to help you meet your lifestyle needs, that's not self-sufficiency. That's just "farming".

US Supremes hammer final nail into Psystar coffin

Microsoft had a monopoly...

... Apple do not. And, if Tim Cook plays his cards right, they never will either.

The Standard Model for corporate CEOs is to aim for a monopoly. Apple's model is different: they target a small, but very lucrative subset of the total market, instead of trying to please everybody and spamming the market with "product".

Android has a greater market share than iOS.

Windows has a greater market share than OS X.

Apple therefore cannot be accused of having a monopoly in the home computer market, or the mobile phone market, as other ecosystems are much more widespread. That Apple's rivals also have substantially lower profit margins is utterly irrelevant when determining if a corporation is a monopoly: only market share matters.

Apple's Siri nominates Nokia as best phone maker

Re: Shittiest voice command system recommends the Shittiest Mobile OS.

Your real name is Richard Stallman and I claim my £5.

Next-gen MacBook Pro, iMac make benchmark site debut

"No to dropping firewire. How else am I suppose to backup / repair non-booting Macs for my customers without battling to remove the HDD?"

Using the Thunderbolt port, perhaps?

GbE can be handled by a suitable GbE-USB 3 adaptor if you need one on the road. Furthermore, given that GbE connections are for a cabled—i.e. fixed—network connection, it seems logical to assume you could just use the GbE connector on a Thunderbolt-compatible docking station. Or Apple's own Cinema Display, which happens to include a GbE connector on it, among many other ports—including Firewire.

Apple drops '4G' label from new iPad

Dear ASA,

I recently purchased a Bugatti Veyron, which was advertised on television, repeatedly, by a certain Mr. J. Clarkson, as being capable of speeds well in excess of 100 miles per hour. However, when I attempted to operate the machine at this speed recently on the M25, I was arrested by the police who informed me that the UK's national road infrastructure is incompatible with such speeds.

They also informed me that the only places I can drive this car at anywhere near its maximum speed are small, circular, privately-owned racing tracks, and on something called an "autobahn". Apparently, these are found only in Germany, and only some of them support the car's full feature set.

Why has the ASA not punished Bugatti for their flagrantly misleading advertising? Despite costing eye-watering sums of money for the privilege of owning one of the world's fastest cars, it turns out their vehicles are utterly unable to operate at full capacity on the UK's national infrastructure.

Bugatti should be required to state, very clearly, in all advertising, that their vehicles' "high speed" feature is only compatible with certain roads found only in Germany, and nowhere else! I demand, henceforth, that all road vehicles must only be advertised as being capable being driven at the national speed limit, and no higher!

Failure to do so will only continue to confuse people like myself, who will naturally assume that, just because a device is marketed as being capable of operating at high speeds, it must therefore be the case that the necessary infrastructure to do is actually available in a particular territory.

I remain your humble, etc.,

Col. Sir Steven Humpty-Dumpty, DSO, BAR, CAD, MCSE. (Retd.)

Re: Don't blame Apple.

Fine, define "4G" then. Preferably in a way that makes it possible to sell ANY mobile device with that label in every territory without confusing anybody.

No? Thought not.

Whereas 3G is a well-defined standard, "4G" has been reduced to an unworkable and idiotic umbrella term that can be applied to pretty much anything with a marketing department. Including networks using the latest HSPA+ standards built on GSM, not LTE or WiMax. (Which, incidentally, the new iPad DOES support. So if there's even a single network using such standards to support their "4G" network, Apple will be perfectly entitled to use the term in their own national marketing.)

Apple have been given a slapping for applying the "4G" label to their iPad, but I don't get the problem with it: many people in the UK, France, or Italy happily buy cars that are explicitly advertised—often on TV shows like Top Gear—as being capable of top speeds of well over 120 mph.

Why aren't these people also complaining that their car is sold as being "120 mph-compatible", but can only reach such speeds on Germany's road network, and not (legally) elsewhere in Europe?

Russian upstart claims BitTorrent-killer

Re: oooh

"The media needs to wake up and realize people who pirate this stuff have no intention of buying it legally, ever."

And yet these same people clearly feel a strong enough desire—and a clear belief in their entitlement to free entertainment made by others at great expense—to consume this stuff for free? Either it's shit and not worth paying for OR downloading, or it IS worth paying for, because you very clearly DO want it.

The media companies may not have the world's best brains in charge, but they DO have a perfectly valid right to be pissed. And no, whining about the high price of a cinema ticket is no argument; watching a movie in a cinema, on a massive screen, with full-on digital surround sound, (and, in some cases, 3D), is a collective audience experience. It's not the same experience you'll get from watching it on your own in a small, dark, room while eating a microwaved TV dinner.

As you point out yourself, if you don't want to pay that kind of money, you can just wait for the home video release instead. The media companies don't mind if you do that as at least they'll still get some money for the film. And with films now costing anywhere north of $200 million, you can't blame them for trying to make that money back as quickly as possible.

(For some bizarre reason, even if a film makes far more than its money back over a couple of years, Hollywood insist that only the theatrical release counts towards deciding whether a film was a success of a failure. Other markets don't count at all. They really have turned "short-termism" into an art form.)

But all this is only truly a problem if you're chronically impatient and can't wait a while for the film to appear in the bargain bin for a fiver, or even on the TV for free a year or so after that. Seriously: what's the almighty rush to have every new thing Right Now?

There's plenty of media available LEGALLY for free or cheap if you're willing to wait a bit. It's not that hard. I haven't even seen the inside of a cinema in nearly 10 years now and I can't say I've missed it.

That applies even to software. Save some money each month and you CAN pay for it. Or you could just buy a cheaper alternative. But no: you don't want to wait, so you just take it.

There really is no excuse for piracy. None. You can rationalise it away as much as you like, even trying to put the blame on the people making the stuff in the first place, but it ultimately boils down to: "I'm too impatient to wait; give it to me now! NOW! GIMME!"

Facebook co-founder renounces US citizenship pre-IPO

@NomNomNom:

The original flat fee approach was recently attempted in the UK, as the "Poll Tax". Poll taxes have a very, very bad reputation.

The problem with flat Poll taxes is easy to work out if you consider the issue of "disposable income". For the sake of argument, let's assume there are no other deductions, such as National Insurance:

Taxpayer 1 makes £20K / year. Poll tax is a flat fee of £1000. That leaves Taxpayer 1 with £19K after tax. Subtract the costs of living: a car (say £100 / month, including fuel), a mortgage (say £800 / month), two kids (say £500 for food, clothes, etc.) That leaves Taxpayer 1 with just £180 or so per month as disposable income to spend on anything else, including his savings.

Taxpayer 2 makes £200K / year. Poll tax is a flat fee of £1000. That leaves Taxpayer 2 with £199K after tax. Subtract living expenses: an expensive car (say £250 / month, including fuel; we'll assume he's into Chelsea Tractors); the mortgage will likely be quite high (say £2.5K / month). His kids, Quentin and Quentinella are spoiled rotten, so let's make that £10K / month on their private school fees, food, fancy clothes, etc.. That still leaves Taxpayer 2 with over £3900 per month as disposable income to put into savings and other luxuries.

Taxpayer 3 makes £2 million / year. Poll tax is a flat fee of £1000. That leaves Taxpayer 3 with £1999000 after tax. Subtract living expenses: a very expensive car (say £2500 / month, including fuel; we'll assume it's a mid-range Ferrari as this isn't a billionaire we're talking about here) ; an expensive house in a posh part of London: say £10K / month. His two kids, Kensington and Chelsea, will be asking for the same toys and fancy schooling as Taxpayer 2's, but XBox360s and a flat screen TV will cost the same, as will the private schooling, so that's another £10K or so per month, but let's add a live-in nanny as well: £2166 / month. That still leaves Taxpayer 3 with £141,000 / month. Or, to put it another way: he still has about £1.9 million to play with each year. More than enough for that yacht he's had his eye on.

(You can assume that the income is combined across two parents if you prefer, or you can assume all three examples are "single parent fathers". It's the total income that matters in any case.)

As you can see, the wealthier you are, the less you have to worry about living costs, taxes, etc, and the more money you have to spend. Once you reach billionaire levels of money, your basic living expenses become little more than a rounding error.

A flat fee may be the most logical solution, as you're really just paying for a service provided by the government, but it is perceived as being "unfair" because those at the poorer end of the scale feel like they're paying more as a proportion of their income than the rich. And they'd be right.

The thing is, as a proportion of their income, the rich are paying proportionately bugger all for pretty much everything, so this isn't a particularly compelling argument when viewed objectively. As you've pointed out, nothing else is charged according to your earnings, so why should the services provided by a large organisation (like a national government) do so? The wealthy can afford to pay for their own private healthcare, private pension schemes, private education and so on, so they're hardly a burden on the State; why should they be required to subsidise poorer citizens too?

Nobody wants to be a billionaire because they like staring at the Queen of England's, or Benjamin Franklin's, face. They aspire to wealth because it means they never, ever, have to worry about where the next meal is coming from for either themselves, or their family.

Proportional (i.e. percentage of income) taxation really is fundamentally Socialist. It exists—and is tolerated—because it feels "fair", but it's also a lot more convenient and easier than fixing the many other problems that make it effectively impossible to impose a flat annual fee instead. I can think of a few solutions, but they'd require some serious socio-cultural changes. (E.g. making public transport free at the point of use. And that's just a small part of it.)

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

Re: Being pedantic here .....

"because people are still too keen to sell their freedoms until it is already too late."

What "freedoms"? The ones the Church of Stallman invented out of thin air?

There's a damned good reason why that clichéd shepherd-and-flock metaphor keeps popping up in threads like these, and it's not what the religious think either:

It is impossible for a single person to know everything there is to know about everything. Therefore, people prioritise. Most people who have to use computers have no idea how they work, any more than most drivers know how to strip down and rebuild their car by themselves. In each specialism, only a few can be the shepherds. The rest will be sheep, because they have different priorities.

Stop wasting your time trying to teach sheep how to dance the polka as it only wastes your time and annoys the sheep.

Personally, if I'm going to give something I've made away for free, I'll put it in the Public Domain, thanks. I don't believe in attaching strings to my gifts.

Bollocks to the Church of Stallman.

Mozilla and Google blast IE-only Windows on ARM

"Of course you could just use an OS THAT DOESN'T TRY TO RESTRICT YOU !"

Why the hell does everyone here believe that the policies of GNU and the FOSS movement are universally applicable? What about MY choice to use an ecosystem filled with developers who don't just spam their software's user interfaces with every bloody feature under the sun, as well as the kitchen sink and a dancing bidet?

Choice for its own sake leads to a very poor user experience. There is very solid science behind the "KISS" design philosophy the more successful consumer electronics companies apply to their products.

It also explains why not one single, solitary, GNU / Linux distribution has ever made it big on the desktop, despite every year in the past decade being touted as "The Year of Linux On The Desktop!" The GNU ecosystem is so full of unusable shit and irrelevant debates over "freedom" that you've all lost sight of the fundamental purpose of computers: to improve the lives of ordinary people.

So don't preach to us about "restriction" in the IT field when you lot are the most conservative bunch of loudmouthed fanatics out there. Hypocrites, the lot of you.

Kelvin MacKenzie blasts 'footie rights warehouse' BSkyB

Re: £546 a year for Sky?

" i just feel sorry for people on the bread line who are forced to pay £145 for a couple of channels"

In which part of the UK are people "forced" to own a TV or a radio? Essex? TV and radio are luxuries, not necessities.

You could argue that TV and radio provide the basic information necessary to the democratic process, but then, the only TV broadcaster with an obligation to provide said information is the BBC. Which carries no advertising (in the UK; they show plenty of ads on the BBC News 24 and World Service channels out here in Italy) and must therefore be paid for somehow.

Also, it's a myth that the TV License ONLY pays for the BBC: Channel 4 is also partly subsidised through it, as are a number of other projects, such as the (government mandated) switch to digital, as well as rolling out rural broadband.

If you're reading this from a converted barn in the middle of a field in the arse end of Lancashire, part of the License Fee was spent on getting broadband out to your home.

So, er, that'd be syndication then?

That's how US TV programming is sold. It's even used for many strip cartoons carried by newspapers.

The advantage is that you still get that collective packaging-up of content, so you keep the fair distribution of money, assuming you package up each league separately. (Individual teams could still offer to show their own matches on their own website if desired; this is new territory, so theres no need to copy existing models too exactly.)

What you lose in the big exclusivity deals, you make back from sales to lots more broadcasters. It's a win-win.

US court tosses out Proview's IPAD trademark gripe

Re: read the article

"Remains to be proven, but the article states that "IPAD" was not going to compete with Proview."

Not this canard again: "IPAD" did NOT compete with Proview! And there's nothing in law to stop the new owner of what was once Proview's IP to then sell it on to another company.

As for not knowing who IPAD were, perhaps Proview's (apparently incompetent) legal team should have done two minutes' of due diligence by looking up IPAD on the Companies House website as all Limited Companies must be registered there in the UK.

Proview fucked up. The only reason this is dragging on for so long is that the government of China happens to be one of Proview's main shareholders and stands to lose a lot of money.

My suspicion is that Apple will eventually be forced to pay as they really need that Chinese government to help Apple defend themselves against copycats and clones.

The Pirate Bay cries foul over Pirate Bay copycats

@AlterEgo33, et al...

"In reality, TPB aren't bothered about the copying, they are bothered that people are being scammed out of money for access to TPB."

The point is that many users—mostly newbies—will be caught out by the scam sites. (And it's not actually that uncommon for some torrent uploaders to demand payment for encryption passwords either.)

TPB have no way to prevent this if they stick to their guns. How can you take down a website that is deliberately passing itself off as your own when you don't believe in the concept of intellectual property? All TPB can do is put up useless blog posts that those who are going to the scam sites instead won't get to see anyway.

TPB have become a victim of their own ideology. The article is merely highlighting the irony.

Dinosaur flatulence may have warmed Earth

Re: "...likely causes of anthropogenic climate change."

"That's an awful lot of words to make a weak point of pedantry."

Good science is about disproving a hypothesis. That's why scientists gibber on about "falsifiability" and the like. The more tests bounce off your hypothesis, the stronger it gets, until it eventually becomes an accepted Scientific Theory™.

Requiring that anyone who attempts to disprove a hypothesis must also provide an alternative theory is most emphatically not good science. Disproving the original hypothesis is sufficient as it still provides us with valuable new information: that the hypothesis is either completely wrong, or requires further work and refinement. This is still information worth knowing.

The disproving of a hypothesis—which is what most scientists actually do for a living—is therefore an entirely separate process from the proposal of alternative hypotheses.

Anyone who believes otherwise is not a proper scientist and their opinions may therefore be safely ignored.

If correcting your wildly inaccurate assertion is "weak pedantry", you really haven't met many pedants.

Re: "...likely causes of anthropogenic climate change."

"In science, the way one "hotly contends" a prevailing model is to provide empirical evidence that the model does not predict and to present a competing model that does predict it."

Not quite. All you have to provide is empirical evidence that the model does not predict. You are not obliged to provide a competing model as well.

None of the existing models can predict known changes in the climate that have happened in the recent past, for which ample data already exists, so there's clearly more work to be done in refining them. It's possible that the Earth's climate is, in fact, too complex for us to be able to work out what all the variables are, in which case only basic trends over long periods of time may be predictable; detailed forecasts that tell us exactly who or what is to blame, and in which proportions, might not be possible for decades yet.

The notion that humanity has some influence on the Earth's climate is a perfectly logical assumption, but the constant alarmism and doom-mongering is not justified. There is insufficient data.

WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo

@H4rm0ny:

"Yes, there is a v. small sector out there that really needs super-fast external storage, but it's really very small."

But I assume you're willing to admit that "really very small" is still greater than "non-existent", right? Ergo, there are people who will be interested in the combination of speed and capacity this device can offer.

The device in this review is very clearly aimed at such a "really very small" market, hence its niche pricing. Why do you (and so many other readers) have such a big problem with that? Nobody's forcing you to run out and buy the bloody thing! What the hell are you all afraid of that's got you on the defensive?

Greenland glaciers not set to cause disastrous sea level rises - study

Re. the "Deniers" insult.

That the climate is changing is not—and never has been—in dispute by anyone on either side of the debate, so referring to people like myself as "deniers" or "denialists" isn't just wrong, it makes you like like a wilfully ignorant, and thus rather stupid, six-year-old child.

The Earth's climate has been changing for the entire lifetime of this planet, so the issue of how it might change in the future has played a role in humanity's own history. In the brief period we consider as "recorded history"—some ten thousand or so years—entire coastal towns and villages have been eroded away by the sea, despite the fact that the Industrial Revolution only began in the late 1700s. So sea level changes can't be entirely be due to cars, farting cows and factory chimneys.

The real debate should therefore be about the following:

1. What do we know about how the Earth's climate actually works?

Some people clearly think that we know enough to make predictions about seven-metre sea level rises by the year 2100. Predictions that are already looking rather shaky.

2. Is there any need to panic?

The "alarmists" would (obviously) reply, "yes". Again, I, and many others, happen to disagree. We're not seeing "The Day After Tomorrow"-type changes so far, and even Lewis Page's article is only talking about sea level rises measured in mere inches over a period of eighty years. That's plenty of time, even when politicians are involved.

I believe the alarmist approach is actually counterproductive, precisely because of the lesson offered in the tale of "The Boy Who Cried 'Wolf!'" itself. Set off the alarms too often and people will start to ignore them. If, at some point in the future, a genuine cause for alarm should occur, the alarmists will have ensured that nobody will pay it the blindest bit of notice until it is too late. Brilliant!

*

Nobody has ever claimed to like pollution. It smells bad, causes health problems (that end up costing the public actual money), it lowers property prices, and, for factory and power plant owners, it's a very clear indicator of inefficiencies in their processes. The more efficient a factory is, the less pollution it creates. Therefore, there is already plenty of incentive to improve these inefficient processes.

I'm even in favour of building more nuclear power plants. Not in earthquake-prone regions, obviously; the French have the right idea, but I don't expect to see new nuclear power plants appearing in Italy or Japan any time soon. On the other hand, the Italians would benefit far more from solar PV than the British, although the latter would do well to focus more on solar heating panels.

Horses for courses. Right tools for the job. Etc.

Some of you fail epically at reading comprehension...

Here's Lewis Page's actual argument in a nutshell, explained quite clearly in the opening paragraphs:

"US government funded scientists have measured the speed of glaciers in Greenland as they move down to the sea over the past ten years, and discovered that - while the glaciers have speeded up somewhat - there's no indication that this will mean <u>major</u> sea level rises."

I've emphasised the crucial point: that Lewis Page was referring to the hyperbolic claims of "major" sea level rises made by the alarmists. Specifically, the flagrantly alarmist Greenpeace assertion:

"Just a few years ago, the fearmongering hippies* at Greenpeace were bandying a wild figure of seven metres about"

That's "seven metres". That assertion was very much made by the AGW alarmist camp. Unlike climate change in general, the fact that Greenpeace actually said that cannot be denied. There's incontrovertible evidence for it and both sides freely admit that the statement was made by that group.

(NOTE: That there are equally fanatical weirdos on the other side does not change the fact that, with friends like Greenpeace, the pro-AGW people really don't need enemies.)

*

Now, to the paragraph written by Lewis that appears to have confused so many readers. First, Lewis Page's point:

"In short, the study indicates that even the four inch prediction is now looking very much on the high side."

Read that in context with the rest of the article and you'll see it is perfectly correct. The subsequent quote is clearly not referring to the utterly disproved alarmist assertion that sea level would rise by "seven metres". It is merely asserting that if the glaciers continue to speed up, they could reach or exceed the "four inches" sea level increase. That's a handful of inches or so. We're clearly not talking about many feet or metres here.

As that Greenpeace quote makes clear, a four-inch increase was very much the low-end estimate, not the high-end.

That is what Lewis Page was saying. Clearly, the alarmists were wrong.

Some of you clearly need to work on your reading comprehension skills, because there really isn't anything confusing about the article.

SnapGuide

Re: How soft are iPhone users?

You, er, might want to take a closer look at the list of "supplies". Particularly, the last item.

'Oppressive' UK copyright law: More cobblers from IP quangos

Hmmm.

"Fair Use" exists in the UK.

Actually, no. You're confusing the US legal concept of "Fair Use" with the British one—which is rather more restricted—of "[b]Fair Dealing[/b]" The two are not interchangeable.

"Current copyright laws are killing innovation." (Ben Norris.)

Evidence, please? There is more content being produced today than there ever was. Much of it may not be to your taste, but that's true of every generation. I was no great fan of Punk when I was growing up in the 1970s. (I still don't think much of The Beatles either, come to that. I'd much rather listen to The Monkees. I'm well aware that many of the Monkees' songs were written by others, but so what? Good music is good music no matter who writes it.)

"Why is Andrew writing as though content creators are being victimised here?" (A.C. 18:38).

Because these debates invariably degenerate into slanging matches between freeloaders and "Old Media"—as if "Old Old" provided a majority of the world's content. Got news for you: most content creators are on work-for-hire contracts and you've probably never even heard of them. Who do you think writes all that incidental music and title music for all the TV shows cranked out every day of every year in every country?

Yes, "Old Media" do have a habit of re-releasing The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but that's because the next generation of musicians is having increasing difficulty working out what the hell it is those old dinosaurs can offer them. Increasingly, "Old Media" are relying on their back catalogue. Pretty soon, that back catalogue will be [i]all[/i] they have left. They're just desperately trying to ensure that catalogue will still be there to pay for their directors' pensions.

"Water is a necessity for living, but so is entertainment in today's society." (DavCrav).

Seriously? Entertainment is now considered a necessity on a par with [i]water[/i] according to you? Perhaps you should get out more, because I have news for you: it isn't. You can survive for an entire lifetime without entertainment. You can survive for about three days without water. See the difference there?

Also: if you consider entertainment so important, what's stopping you learning to play the piano, the guitar, or taking singing lessons? The existence of copyrighted works does not prevent the existence of free alternatives. You DO have a choice. You always have. There is no shortage of Public Domain works. The Gutenberg Project wouldn't even be possible without those. Why do people like you ignore all those works and insist on taking copyrighted works instead? Those copyrighted works must have [i]some[/i] value, or you wouldn't be trawling torrent sites to find them would you?

*

The original article quotes people as saying that many creatives will simply have to put up with not getting any money from their works. That they'll have to do it for the love of it alone.

Perhaps the ignorant buggers at A2K might want to look up the etymology of the word "amateur". (Here's a hint: it's a French word.) You'd better get used to hearing that term a lot, because it's going to be describing pretty much every creative work if A2K get their way.

*

Finally, know this: without the legal concept of intellectual property, there can be no "Copyleft". Those GNU Public Licenses, and all their merry band? Dead. Gone. Without IP, they have no legal basis as they're built on the exact same assumptions as Copyright.

There, that's got you worried.

HTC peeves punters with One X woes

What happened to the traditional appending of "-gate" to such issues?

From the list in the article, the media should be screaming about: "Burngate"; "Discolourationgate", "Flickergate"; "Sensorgate"; "GPSgate", and, of course, "Antennagate II: Payback's a Bitch!" (Apple have only been selling mobile phones since 2007. What's HTC's excuse?)

And that's just one phone, running the OS with the largest market share in the smartphone sector.

Double standards, much?

@Dazzza:

"HTC has been around a long time guys, and if we go back before Android was released the vast majority of their phones are solid as a rock"

Oh? The three TyTN II models I went through—In the end, I just told Vodafone to take the bloody thing away, give me a cheap Nokia, and refund the difference instead—say otherwise.

On two of the occasions I was there in the Vodafone showroom, I had to join a queue... of other disgruntled HTC handset owners who had come in for similar reasons. Which strongly suggests my experiences were far from unique.

Still, anecdata, eh? Like facts, you can use it to prove anything you like.

Nokia still has a patent business

Re: Interesting bit about Microsoft

They were making even shittier Symbian ones until very recently. I'd consider this a step up considering the state Symbian was in by then. Not even open-sourcing could save it.

Sad, really. Nokia still make some very good low-end and mid-range phones, but I don't think that's going to save them.

LG readies Dropbox, iCloud alternative

Re: Again ...

You really do need to get out (of your country / mother's basement) more often.

You do know what the "A" in "ADSL" means, right? My parents' ADSL connection is 8Mb down, and a whopping, er, 128 kilobits up. That's not much fecking use to me if I need to download some files from their network in a hurry; it'd be quicker for me to drive over there and copy it on-site.

(I have a business class connection that gives me 1Mb upload speeds. Still not brilliant, but cable isn't an option here. It took Telecom Italia until 2010 to roll out ADSL to the town I live in, so I'm not holding my breath for faster speeds over the next couple of years.)

'Apple will coast, and then decelerate' says Forrester CEO

Re: Assuming that...

No. It should be "style AND substance".

As Apple have proved, it is not necessary to have to choose one [i]or[/i] the other, nor should it be. You can clearly, demonstrably, have both. At the same time. In the same product.

Apple have been proving this very point since the late 1990s. They've barely had a dud quarter since 1998; even their Mac sales have been kicking the arses of giants like Dell and HP, quarter on quarter.

If, after well over a decade, you still don't understand why Apple's kit sells, you are not only missing the point, you are part of the problem.

As for "innovation": Where the hell were Nokia, Motorola and HTC when Apple released the original iPhone? Did they not have any similar products of their own in the works? No? Why the hell not?

And where were they all when Apple released the iPad and proved, yet again, that it's the whole user experience, not merely the hardware, that had been the problem with the form-factor up to that point? (To all those who claim that it's just "a big iPod touch": has the penny dropped yet? No, I thought not.)

Technology that nobody can work out how to use is a pointless waste of time, money and resources. If you genuinely want to help save the planet, stop making nasty unusable shit that nobody wants.

Re: Huh?

'Dont you mean "an organization that feeds off the gift of iDiots?"'

And you wonder why people can't stand Android and its users who endlessly try to justify their purchase by talking about how "open" it is? (As in "it opens all your data up to The Almighty Google"? Thanks, but I'll pass. As a 30-year veteran of the IT industry, I know a stupid idea when I see one, and buying into Google's anti-Apple rhetoric while giving them free reign over your personal data is as stupid as it gets. At least Apple have a privacy policy worth a damn.)

Also, "common people"? At least this iDiot can fucking spell, you self-righteous, ignorant little prick.

Re: Huh?

Little known fact: the Betamax technology was in use by pros right up until the rise of HDTV in recent years finally put paid to it. Ever heard of "DigiBeta"? Guess what its ancestor was. (They even used the same cassette form-factor.)

Can't say the same for VHS, which only ever gained traction as a consumer toy and got its arse soundly spanked by DVD in pretty short order in the 1990s. The Beta pro range has only recently fallen out of favour, but it lasted right up to the end of standard definition broadcasting.

As "failures" go, Betamax and its descendants did surprisingly well.

Apple claims Aussie 3G is so good it's 4G

Re: Ill buy that

So let me get this straight: sodding carrier under the sun is quite happy to con the public about their mobile data speeds, calling a measly 12Mb/sec download rate (as shown in the article) as "4G".

Some of these carriers aren't even using LTE, but are simply beefing up their old 3G HSPA infrastructure. And, yes, they're labelling that "4G" too.

So bollocks to the Australian government. If they're letting their carriers get away with blue murder, why the hell are they only going after Apple? Their new iPad DOES support 4G if it's the HSPA-based "4G" you're talking about. It'll also support 4G LTE (in theory) in countries where that technology has been rolled-out and the frequency range is supported, such as many cities in the US and even Dubai.

Most cars can shift at well over 100 miles per hour. The fact that a particular country's road network doesn't let you drive at that speed legally doesn't mean the car can't go that fast.

'I'm no visionary': Torvalds up for $1.3m life-changing gong

So ripping off MINIX and giving it away for free counts as "innovation" now?

Sheesh.

Linux is a mediocre UNIX clone that, over twenty years later, still cannot boast a GUI worth a damn. And it's not as if offering source code licenses was novel even back then.

Give the award to Dr. Yamanaka. At least stem cell research has the potential to save lives. Linux has only the potential to further hold back the IT industry even more than UNIX and its loudmouthed fanatics already have.

As for Git and all its bastard relatives: the programming fraternity has only itself to blame for the continued existence of a need for such tools in the first place.

Get your heads out of your fatuous arses and you'll discover that every other field on this planet has managed to evolve rather more extensively over the years since the late 1960s, with the rather pathetic and embarrassing exception of programming. Text files and a Babel of programming languages (that, for some inexplicable reason, are all aimed at English speakers) are YOUR goddamned fault and nobody else's.

The foundation blocks to resolve this problem have been around for decades, but you've done precisely feck all except repeat the same actions over and over again, expecting different results each time, and yet failing to learn the lesson when that desired result stubbornly fails to materialise.

Seriously, get over yourselves. UNIX is not the alpha and omega of operating system design, and everything does NOT have to be stored in endless sodding ASCII (or ANSI) text files. That's just stupid. Text file viewers are no less programs than any other viewer of data. It's all just bloody numbers, so there's nothing inherently more "human readable" about a bunch of data with a ".TXT" extension than one with another extension. If you're hairy enough to code, you're hairy enough to code a bloody file viewer too.

Now look what you've made me do! I've got flecks of foam and froth all over my nice clean keyboard! I'll have to stop ranting now.

Battlefield Earth ruled worst film EVER

Re: Slightly out of touch el reg readers?

" That means a lot of people paid to go see them. Have all of those people been fooled? "

A lot of people watch those glorified karaoke shows "devised" by Simon Cowell. So... yes. Yes, they have.

Ignorance is not only bliss, but also the default state of most of humanity. If that makes me part of a "strange crowd", then I'm fine with that.

Re: How many.....

For a movie to be voted "The worst movie ever", it must still be, recognisably, a movie.

Even the worst of SyFy's TV movies has made some attempt at including a plot, some characters and a premise that has at least a fleeting claim to plausibility. (As this is Hollywood, where the laws of physics bend freely around narrative requirements, there is a very low standard for that plausibility.) Something vaguely resembling "acting" is also considered a minimum requirement for such works.

"Waterworld" had none of these and is therefore not a movie in anything other than a purely technical sense. (Similarly, FOX News is only technically a news channel, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)

For all those complaining about the HHGTTG movie...

... you could at least do your research first: the screenplay was written by Douglas Adams.

Personally, I thought it worked pretty well for a movie. Even Douglas knew he couldn't squeeze a 3-hour radio play / novel / computer game into a 90 minute movie without some major surgery, so he didn't try to avoid that. It also didn't help that HHGTTG simply isn't that good a story. It's basically a series of comedy sketches nailed onto a very thin plot. (And that "guided tour" plot was already a cliché SF trope by then.)

As others have suggested, the problem was that the audience knew the original versions like Python fans know The Parrot Sketch and expected to see exactly the same thing, but on a bigger screen and with a decent budget. That does not make the film a bad one.

A movie isn't a sitcom; it has to tell a complete story, whereas a sitcom can coast along for a while before developing one or more characters a little to enable other stories to be told. (You can see that happening in "Red Dwarf".)

Watch it as a movie and it is still very funny. The set-pieces are still there, but they're played in a different key. It deserved a sequel.

Dad sues Apple for pushing cash-draining 'free' games at kids

Re: No sympathy for either side.

Oh look, 2 seconds in a search engine brings up these results. Short answer: RTFM. The facility to disable in-app payments (among many other things) is already built right into iOS.

1. iOS devices are single-user devices. That's how they're designed. If you give a device with YOUR details on it, the onus is on YOU to secure it and prevent unauthorised interactions.

2. It's piss-easy to set up restrictions on ANY iOS device, as the link above proves.

Ergo, any parent not using such restrictions when giving their child access to an expensive, multi-hundred-dollar piece of consumer electronics with built-in internet access and credit card details linked to it, is, quite simply, an ignorant imbecile and fully deserves everything they get.

Apple have no valid reason to unilaterally ban in-app payments in kids' software: some kids have very wealthy parents and I'm sure you don't mind if Apple relieve said parents of some of their disposable income. Why should their precious little saint of a daughter, Quentina, not be allowed to play her game of MoneyTreeVille on her shiny new iPad?

Hacker jailed for 32 months for attack on abortion-provider site

"I guess hacking has joined rioting as 'thought crimes'."

No. They're both just "crimes". Rioting has never been considered a "though crime" by anyone with even half a brain. Lobbing bricks through a 100-year-old, family-owned, furniture store before setting it on fire isn't "protesting". It's just criminal.

Regarding the News International case: remember that the hackers not only copped to the charge, but also gave evidence in court against their NI paymasters. This is likely to have made the judge a little more lenient towards them—after all, their victims weren't poverty-stricken single mothers, rape victims and the like, but (mostly) wealthy celebrities, politicians and successful businesspeople. NI is going to be slammed by a swathe of civil lawsuits claiming lots of damages once this trial is fully over; the time spent in jail by the hackers is a lot less important than how much money those hackers' victims are going to be able to squeeze out of Murdoch's empire. Hit NI where it hurts the most: right in the profit and loss accounts.

What this abortion clinic hacker did, on the other hand, was personal. It was like breaking into someone's home, making copies of all the files and smearing "I KNO WHERE U ALL LIVE!" on the walls in his own excrement.

If you wish to protest against abortion, there are ways of doing so that are a lot less damaging to all parties involved and, frankly, a lot more mature. Hacking an abortion clinic is NOT "debate". It is not "protest". It instils fear in the clinic's staff and their customers. It shatters their reputation for discretion and privacy—no mother goes around proclaiming how many abortions they've had like it's something to be proud of: it's painful, both physically and emotionally. As a result, that clinic may well have to close. Well done: more people unemployed in an already buggered economy.

This arsehole was a bully. An immature little child, throwing a tantrum, stamping his feet and demanding EVERYONE does what HE wants them to do, because only his opinion matters. Because only HE is right. And everybody else is wrong.

The sentence was more than justified.

"casually tossing others of similar age into a kidney dish, alive, for disposal."

"Alive"?

There's a reason for that umbilical cord, you know. It is the mother's right to decide whether she should continue supporting a life form inside her body.

It's her body. Her rules. Her choice. Nobody else's.

A foetus can only be considered "alive" if—and only if—it can survive without the life-support system provided by its host. Until then, it is not "alive" in any meaningful sense of the word.

After that stage in its development, abortions should arguably not be performed except under exceptional circumstances (e.g. a congenital defect that would effectively ruin the baby's quality of life—which does matter.) The baby may still be removed from the mother, but can then be offered up for adoption if the mother is unwilling, or unable, to look after it.

As this is pretty much what most countries support in law, I have yet to see any sensible explanation for why this should be changed. Those who have religious views on the matter can get lost: you don't get to impose your childish comfort blankets on everyone else.

It's not as if our species is verging on extinction anyway. A little less rutting by humans would do a lot more for our own ecosystem than any number of electric windmills and hand-wringing protestors.

If Google's only taking a COPY of your personality, why worry?

Re: Sorry, had to downvote... :(

"Copyrighted material is released to the public."

Er, no it isn't. Copyright applies to everything I create, including this very post. That's why El Reg asks me to give them permission to show this post on their website. Copyright is automatic, which is something many—particularly those who grew up in the US, where copyright is still generally assumed to require some form of registration—don't appear to understand.

Every company report I have written. Every manual for every industrial machine I've been hired to write or translate. Every in-house document I've ever had to create. It's ALL copyrighted. Every single bit of it. Even government White Papers are copyrighted to "The Crown" in the UK.

Many of these documents are most emphatically not intended for public consumption. Privately owned companies aren't even required to file anything other than their annual accounts at Companies House; everything else they produce internally is (a) copyrighted, and (b) private.

Copyright is not limited to novels, movies and music. It never was.

Yet another OSX/Java Trojan spotted in the wild

So, basically...

The only way to get hit by this piece of malware is to open a badly written email from a complete stranger that asks you to open up a Microsoft Word file.

And the source of this confusing press release is... ah! Suddenly all is clear.

Dear Kaspersky: exactly _how_ will your anti-malware application stop such problems? Will it nag me every time I open a file downloaded from the internet that it might contain something harmful to the computer? Because that'd be duplicating what OS X _already does_.

Also, Microsoft's Office suite for Macs already has an additional warning if the document contains macros.

So, that's two warnings the user's getting. If they still manage to infect their system, that's their own problem.

Hitachi spins up 'leccy fan motor sans rare earths

Re: Amazing that got so many downvotes...

"3" down-votes is "many" on your planet, is it? Who are you—Baldrick?

Publishing giants sue open textbook startup over layout

Re: but the suit isn't about content is it.

"No one has ever been granted a copyright on a layout."

There are a lot of graphic designers out there who will be more than happy to show you how spectacularly wrong you are.

This lawsuit isn't about just the layout anyway: it's about flagrant plagiarism. How would you feel if you studied bloody hard at university, spent months nailing your thesis to get a First, only to discover that your housemate did bugger all except wait for you to finish, before stealing a copy of your thesis and simply rewriting it in his own words (while retaining all the references, etc.) to get the same pass grade?

You did all the work, he passed-off his own plagiarism of your work as his own and got the same benefits as you, while only putting in about a week's work.

THAT is what these publishers are complaining about. Textbooks are expensive because (a) the market for them is small—you're not going to get as rich as Rowling by writing textbooks—and (b) you can't just make shit up: you have to research it all first, double-check your facts and so on. Then you have the unbounded joy of writing it all up in a format students will be able to understand.

That costs money. Textbook publishers rely heavily on reputation for the quality and accuracy of their products. Damage that reputation and all their sales may suffer. If a single major university switches its allegiance to another publisher, that's anywhere up to 20K in sales per year gone.

What this startup is doing is freeloading off the work of these publishers—much as Android has effectively avoided the need to spend millions of dollars on R&D because all they did was slavishly copy Apple's iOS. (And the less said about the GNU / Linux community's similar tendency to let the commercial companies do all the R&D before simply ripping them off, the better.)

R&D costs money. Fact-checking costs money. And you can't publish print textbooks without getting them properly sub-edited and reviewed for errors either. Whereas Joanna K. Rowling's publishers could simply take her tall tales and have them stamped onto leaves of pulped tree for a hell of a lot less money. A few typos in a novel are a lot less problematic than a few typos in an key formula in a physics textbook.

Cheap textbooks are possible. I've crunched the numbers. But what this startup is doing is flat-out wrong. Paraphrasing an existing textbook right down to its layout and pagination—the easier to allow your free version to be used as a 'slot-in' replacement for an established title where teachers already have key page numbers written down—is just cheap, nasty and unethical. It may or may not be illegal too, but that's what this court case will decide. Personally, I hope the startup loses. I can appreciate that textbooks can be expensive, but this is not the answer.

I'm planning to write and self-publish my own textbook and, yes, it'll be a lot cheaper than anything Cengage or Thomson are printing, but that's because my overheads are a lot lower: I'm writing about a subject I already know plenty about and I have friends I can count on to help me with the proofreading and fact-checking stages. (Also, it's going to be designed explicitly for the Apple iBook format initially. No trees to pulp, and I can send out updates if a typo or error is spotted after publication. I'll do an ePUB 3 version as soon as someone comes up with an editor for that format that doesn't suck.)

This is (c) jake.

Re: Copyright and morality

I've read some of my posts. I'm not sure "moral right" is the phrase I'd use.

Android spanking iOS in world's BIGGEST mobile market

Re: "The iPhone is a beautiful product "

Disagree.

I've used multiple Android devices. The problem is that each device is noticeably different. It has a different feel—often caused by different manufacturers nailing their own GUI onto the plain vanilla Android base.

I think the real problem with Android is the same one that has hit GNU / Linux: it's not the underlying OS most consumers care about, but the individual "distributions" of it. There's the Samsung flavour, the HTC flavour, the LG flavour, and the Amazon flavour—and that latter is a good example of what I'm getting at. Android is a great platform for manufacturers, but I think they're making a mistake in trying to attract developers to "Android".

"Google Play" is an attempt at a universal "Android" app store, but there is no such thing as a "universal Android device". And it shows in the app designs. Amazon are already headed down the same "gated community" path Apple have chosen, and I suspect this will probably help them win a lot of market share. Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. need to stop trying to sell "Android" and start selling their own damned devices. If they had the courage of their designers' convictions, they'd each produce one or two models for each market sector, and support those devices properly, with dedicated app stores that are curated to ensure said apps actually take advantage of the devices. Let Google keep their bargain bin store too for those apps that people need, but which haven't (yet) been adapted to specific device(s).

Basically, just as the debates over GNU / Linux have morphed into debates about Ubuntu vs. Mint vs. $DISTRO, so Android debates need to move towards "Samsung-flavour Android", "LG-flavour Android", and so on. This gives the manufacturers more leeway in differentiating their devices from their rivals. Samsung aren't competing with Apple here: they're competing with LG, HTC, Motorola, Sony and every other Android device manufacturer too. And the converse is also true for those other manufacturers. The market is big, but it is not infinite, and if they're having trouble competing with Apple at the high end, they're going to need to offer a full, branded, ecosystem of their own, each with its own design style and user experience.

Because it's the user experience that matters. Nothing else. Technical specifications are utterly irrelevant to the 99.9% of customers buying these things.

Re: Does it really matter?

"Yes, it matters. Find me a business owner who doesn't want more market share no matter how high their margins are."

Chanel? Gucci? Bose? Bang & Olufsen? Harrods?

I could go on. The fact remains, however, that market share does not equate directly to profit. Margins are how you make the money, not quantity alone.

As for the original article, its headline would have been better phrased as: "Financially challenged customers content to buy cheap knock-offs instead of real thing shock!"

This is hardly news. Street hawkers and spammers wouldn't still be offering fake Rolexes for sale after all these years unless somebody was buying them, so this phenomenon is hardly unique to the Chinese.

Apple aren't worried about Android mopping up the plebs. They're not interested in selling to people with little or no money.

Re: Usual fandroid FUD.

"I shouldn't have to do this to any device to make it work the way it should work out of the box."

So why the blazes do you morons keep blathering on about "rooting" your precious OS and overwriting it with "modded" ROMs and other firmware?

Either the ability to customise your precious slab is important, or it isn't. Which is it?

'Unibody' iPhone 5 said to debut in October

Re: 4G on an iPhone? I can't wait!

He's just trying to justify buying one of those phones running Google's OS.

You know: the one that rips off Apple's OS. The one built by the company that has made no secret of wanting to know [i]everything[/i] about you in order to sell that information to their [i]actual[/i] customers: advertisers. The company that has even [i]lobbied governments[/i] to get at your private data.

Google's endless attempts to peek and peer through the windows of the public scare the f*ck out of me a damned sight more than Apple's KISS design philosophy. Google make even [i]Microsoft's[/i] less than stellar past look downright saintly by comparison.

'Don't break the internet': How an idiot's slogan stole your privacy...

@ChrisM:

"Because of the pushing back of dates by Disney and others (life + 70 years now IIRC) any reasoned argument is set against it."

This is rubbish. Governments don't spring magically from the foreheads of previous governments. In most Western nations—the US included—they are ELECTED. By "The People". If the people really don't want such laws enacted, they are perfectly entitled to make their position on the topic known to their representatives in government.

Clearly they didn't give enough of a damn about this to do anything about it. Ergo, it's not unreasonable. 99.999% of the population of the USA have precisely zero interest in ripping-off Disney's characters, so why would they care how long the copyright on them lasts?

In any case, the Disney argument fails on one important aspect: technically, the "creator" has not actually "died". Disney are still trading. If corporations are people too, (as a certain Republican presidential candidate insists), then the Disney corporation is perfectly justified in demanding that the [i]company[/i] owns the copyrights, not Walt Disney himself.

Copyright law could trivially be rephrased to assert that the copyright is held valid as long as the "creating entity" continues to exist, with a time limit placing the copyrighted material into the Public Domain after an agreed period [i]after[/i] the creating entity dies or enters into liquidation. (You might even add a rider that such entities cannot transfer the copyrights to another entity after, say, 20 years from creation. That forces anyone who wants to buy up the rights to do so quickly. After that, the value of purchasing the entity falls dramatically.)

You could add an arbitrary time limit—e.g. 100 years since date of creation—to prevent companies from just sitting on their property rights in perpetuity, but I think the argument for such limits is no longer applicable: The purpose of these was to ensure that copyrighted content remains available to the public, even after the author and / or publisher has disappeared, as archiving was expensive at the time. The BBC famously wiped many of its early video recordings because archiving them cost so much. Today, nobody's complaining that they can't find a copy of "Steamboat Willie".

Re: Ownership of data

"The idea that we own every piece of data about ourselves, if taken to its logical conclusion, means that criminals effectively have a right not to be caught, if they refuse to sanction the use of data they own by the police to catch them." (A J Stiles)

In the US, this is actually enshrined in law. It is illegal to demand a suspect incriminates himself, (hence the phrase "taking the Fifth" in many US police procedural series). This is why search warrants were invented. You CAN search through a person's private property, but ONLY if you have prior permission first, and to obtain that, you need to provide valid reasons to the relevant authority in order obtain that warrant. You can't just go on a fishing expedition.

If memory serves, most Western nations have similar laws. So no, better enforcement of both personal and intellectual property rights would not break anything. Yes, the police might have to work a little bit harder, but nobody has ever claimed crime solving [i]should[/i] be easy.

HTC One X Android smartphone

Re: How come

Fans of the "Final Fantasy" video-game series have been avoiding a similar question for decades now.