Posts by Sean Timarco Baggaley

Charge of the Metro brigade: Did Microsoft execs plan to take a hit?

Re: What would Apple do?

Let me put it like this: I have a Microsoft mouse that I used to use all the time with earlier versions of OS X.

Since I installed OS X "Lion" last year, said mouse has been relegated to the status of "game controller". I haven't plugged it in more than a couple of times this year—both were when I had to work in my MacBook Pro's Windows 7 partition for work. Once you've gotten used to the multitouch trackpad and its power over the GUI, the reason for Apple's GUI changes in Lion make a hell of a lot of sense. And Apple sell rather more laptops than desktops these days, as even Apple themselves will tell you.

The Window market is also moving away from desktop boxes and towards laptops. Some Windows laptops are also fitted with similar multitouch trackpads. In that context, Windows 8's "Metro" also makes a lot more sense. (Also, let's face it, the Metro UI is just another change to the Windows Start Menu. This is an element of Windows that has changed, sometimes quite dramatically, with every major release of Windows! It's a launcher on steroids, not the end of the bloody world!)

As for your assertion that the Mac is a "niche product" compared to Windows: you might want to look at Apple's market share of the consumer PC market, as that's the only market Apple have traditionally cared about. (They're more than happy to let Microsoft deal with the big corporates.) Apple's share of the consumer PC market is a hell of a lot more than the 10% usually bandied around by the usual stat-munchers, because their statistics invariably include all those PCs rusting peacefully in every office block on the planet, rather than separating out the consumer sector from the corporate sector.

Quite how they've gotten away with this deception for so long escapes me, but I suspect Apple don't really care: as long as they're making all the profits, they're more than happy for the media to think they're still the "underdog".

Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer

So, let me get this straight...

On the one hand, we have an operating system with over 20-ish years of history and development behind it, that consists, essentially, of a kernel derived initially from MINIX, onto which a ton of services, tools and applications have been piled on. These were cherry-picked from the likes of BSD and its peers over a period of 10-20 years, without much effort put into making them play nice with each other.

None of these applications are particularly consistent in how they interact with the user and his preferred shell. One tool will return a simple value, or a string. Another may return text file in its own peculiar format. Another will return a text file in yet another format. So I need to write glue code that parses these files and processes them before handing them to a third tool for further crunching. On top of that, these tools and applications are rarely consistent. Some might prefer one escape character system; another might just require everything be in quotes. A third might accept regular expressions, while another does not. Some might support Unicode at the CLI level, others might not. Or the CLI itself might not do so properly. So I have to jump through a bunch more hoops to get it to recognise, say, an IDN-compliant domain name.

But, hey! That's what scriptable shells are for, right? Who cares if it takes me more time and effort to get things done?

*

On the other hand, I have a server that provides me with tools, services and applications that all work seamlessly together, with a single, standardised textual user interface.

No need for extensive glue code: you just point one tool at another and they already know how to communicate properly. PowerShell supports Unicode too, so no worries there regarding localisation. (Note to UNIX fans: not everybody speaks US English. Nor should they have to.)

Nor do I need to keep a stack of reference docs to remind me which peculiar formatting quirk or command-line parameter sequence each tool requires. Learn one and you've learned them all. All these tools just work together, as if they'd been crafted by the same mind, instead of by a thousand different minds over a period of 20-odd years—in some cases, while clearly either drunk, or stoned out of their minds.

*

Microsoft has done an Apple on their server by aiming for a consistent user* experience. Seriously: this is exactly how I'd have expected Apple to design OS X Server, if they hadn't already bought in a BSD-derived OS as their starting point. It's absolutely spot on. I wish I'd had this when I was administering a college network ten years or so back.

Incidentally, .NET is an industry standard. Last time I checked, the Common Language Infrastructure was a full-on ISO standard. You can claim some tinfoil hat shenanigans if you like, but I'm afraid that doesn't change the fact that it really, truly, is an honest-to-god ISO standard. Deal with it.

* (By which I mean the server administrator, not end users at the far end of the chain.)

EC: Apple claimed Motorola demanded ALL ITS PATENTS

Re: Apples unclean hands

"When the EU analyses the anti-competitive complaint, Apples often stated aim of killing Android will be considered. "

Why? It's perfectly normal business practice to try to try to thrash the crap out of the competition. That's the whole point of competition! All businesses in a market are in a race to vacuum up all the profits available, so they tend towards attempting to attain a monopoly. Microsoft damned-near pulled it off, and the legacy of that is still being felt today.

This is why we have "anti-trust" and "anti-competitive" regulations: government's role is to act as moderator, refereeing this game and ensuring fair play. The rules we have that constrain businesses are there precisely to avoid a repetition of the bad old days of Microsoft at their worst.

The problem is: Android's market share is bigger than Apple's in mobile. Microsoft still has a greater market share of the traditional PC market. So Apple are not dominating a damned thing. Yes, they're making most of the profits, but it's not Apple's fault everyone else has chosen to enter a different race that leaves them with wafer-thin margins.

The only market sector Apple can be said to dominate is the tablet market, but that's unlikely to continue for much longer, but not because of Android-based rivals. Windows 8 is far more likely to be the better fit: its split personality design is not an ideal choice for consumers, but it has a lot of benefits for corporate IT buyers. (Imagine an Asus Transformer that can run the full-fat version of Office on the traditional Windows desktop when plugged into a keyboard dock, but which runs the Metro GUI when undocked. Furthermore, it comes with all Microsoft's IT support tools that have made them so successful in the corporate IT field. Microsoft are far more interested in selling to that sector than to consumers. Windows 8 itself might take a while to settle in and catch on, but Microsoft are used to playing the long game.)

Encyclopaedia Britannica nukes print edition, goes digital-only

Re: They'd sell more if they did the digital one properly

My dad once got a full set of encyclopaedias a few years ago. They were dated 1956 and still defined "computer" as: "A man who computes."

Where did it all go wrong?

Re: Sales will continue until the stock is depleted

Printed encyclopaedias are radioactive and have half-lives.

(Or so it says here, in Vol. 9, P.1129, para. 8.)

Apple slams hard-up Proview for conning the courts

Why?

Just curious. Apple do tend to buy up the rights to trademarks before using them.

That's why the Apple TV isn't called the "iTV": because there's a broadcaster by that name in the UK that has been around for a lot longer than Apple has, and ITV has a very strong brand presence in the country.

And, yes, Apple did pay Cisco for the rights to use the name "iOS".

They can still cock things up occasionally—there are a lot of countries on this planet and they all have their own quirks—but the suggestion that Apple would be stupid enough to deliberately use someone else's trademark without permission is ingenuous at best. Apple have no more desire to spray money at lawyers than anybody else.

Sony intros Xperia Sola with no-need-to-touch screen

Dear Samsung,

See, this is why Apple are suing you, not Sony. Sony are using a popular design technique called "not just slavishly copying everything Apple does to the extent that your own corporate lawyer can't tell the difference between an Apple iPad and your own, rival, product". The technical jargon for this technique is, "innovation".

Granted, the GUi in this Sony phone could use some more tweaking—hovering a finger over a hyperlink should probably do something a bit more visible than merely adding a thin underscore, for example—but it's a genuinely useful technical user experience innovation that could provide Sony with a unique advantage over Apple.

Something you, Samsung, have singularly failed to do.

Yrs, etc.,

Me.

iPad 3 benchmarked

Re: Of course its just the screen thats better.

Also, what about the new camera? What about the improved GSM support, which now handles more of the HSPA range of protocols? Don't those count as "better" too?

Re: Yes

How strange. I've had my iPhone 4 since a few days after its launch in Italy and, er, it not only spanked the crap out of my old Nokia 3310 in the reception stakes, picking up signals where the Nokia couldn't even find anything at all. No matter how I hold it, it still completely and utterly fails to drop a call.

Yes, cupping it my hands and surrounding it in flesh does attenuate the signal slightly, but my Nokia 3310's signal is also attenuated in the same way! As did every other mobile phone I've ever owned! Short of rewriting the laws of physics, there's no way to get around this effect: the human body isn't fully transparent to electromagnetic waves. If it was, X-rays and CT scanners would be utterly useless!

This is first-hand experience with a phone I have absolutely no desire to replace any time soon. It is, quite literally, the best mobile phone I have ever owned, bar none. And this is from someone who's owned a Nokia Communicator 9500, a Nokia 3310, and a SonyEricsson P900.

And I'm no Apple fanatic: I've used Windows and (*BSD) UNIX too, and maintain the family's Windows machines. I even quite like Windows 7 and keep it as a pet in a small VM. My favourite OS is the combination of TOS and GEM on the late, unlamented Atari Falcon. It was a dream to code for.

The media, lacking the will to do any research at all into how phones and radio waves actually work, simply believed whatever they were told by that paragon of truth and veracity, "the internet". So, no change there then.

Re: Of course its just the screen thats better.

"Count me unconvinced that they really care about being at the bleeding edge of tech, they only 'really' care about the $."

Well, duh! Did you only just work this out today?

Last time I checked, caring about the "$" is how you run a successful business! It's the whole damned point of it all! Apple have never claimed to be a charity, or into donating money to good causes to improve their reputation. (Google seem to like doing that shit, but it doesn't change the fact that they're an advertising company with an increasingly terrible search engine.)

Apple have never claimed to be into bleeding-edge technology either. Their not-so-secret sauce is design. It's all about the integration of technology to provide a high quality user experience. That's it. That's all they've ever done. They couldn't give a shit about the technology inside their products, because their customers don't care about it either. All they care is that the stuff works and is easy to use. Check out their customer service sometime as well; Apple tend to top the charts for customer satisfaction and customer service as well, because it's all part of their holistic approach to user experience design.

But, yes, it's fundamentally all about making pots of cash too. Oddly enough, it seems to be working rather well.

Could tiny ebooks really upset the mighty Apple cart?

Who cares about the publishers?

They had their chance. They could have kick-started the whole ebook thing years before Amazon and Apple finally got the ball rolling in a big way—it's not as if there was a shortage of ebook readers before the Kindle appeared—but no! They had to wait for companies with absolutely no interest in preserving the present publishing model to come up with viable channels for their products. And even then, they resisted.

Why the hell should an author have to pay a cut to multiple middle-men, when they can just go to direct to the last one in the chain? Sure, publishers also do marketing, (although its quality and effectiveness can vary greatly), but a savvy writer can do that too.

This leaves traditional publishers with precious little of value to add. I'm sure they'll continue to sell dead tree versions, but these are eventually going to become niche "collector's edition" affairs, rather than mainstream products.

What we're seeing is the death throes of an obsolete industry model. New models will appear to take its place. I'm more than happy to deal with Apple, Amazon and their ilk directly, for example.

Publishers could do a lot worse than set up their own ebook stores with the advantage of "factory outlet" prices: they wouldn't have to pay a cut to Amazon or Apple for purchases made directly from their own stores, but the down-side would be a smaller selection as rival publishers would have their own such stores. That would leave Apple and Amazon in the position of having to add a margin to those "factory prices", but customers would have the lure of a much wider selection of books available to them. (The two major US comic book publishers already do something like this; each has its own iApp, but they also offer comics directly through Apple's own store.)

I'm not sure how this transitional period will pan out, but it's certainly going to be interesting.

New Yorker sues Apple: 'Misleading and deceptive' Siri ads

Re: Siri...

The problem is, they weren't lying at the time the ads were made. There's evidence to suggest that Apple's data centres are simply unable to cope with the demand and they're having to throttle it, which does have an effect on the quality of the results returned.

What are Apple supposed to do? Magic a couple of massive server farms out of thin air overnight? Those things take a hell of a long time to plan, design, build and fit-out, and Apple are, in fact, already doing precisely that. There's no instant fix, however.

Regarding Siri's beta status: it's plastered over Siri's webpage on Apple's own website in a very visible orange label. If that's what some of you consider "small print", I suggest you go visit an optician. Apple aren't hiding this.

No, they're not going out of their way to make it clear it's a beta in their TV ads, but then, Google never bothered with that nicety either, and some of their features were in a beta phase for years. And they've tripped up a few times as well: remember the brouhaha over Google Buzz?

Not everyone has a clear speaking voice, so Siri was never of interest to me, and I've had no better luck with Android's equivalent, or even with my occasional tests of Nuance's Dragon Dictate engine (which is, I think, the same engine powering Siri). Anyone who expects a machine to be better than a human at understanding spoken language needs their head examined. My own family have trouble understanding me at times, so how the hell is a phone supposed to be any better?

As for the naïve notion you have that there's no lying in adverts, two words: "unlimited broadband". Now that is a flat-out lie.

(There is, however, one thing the iPhone 4S does offer that the previous model didn't, and which isn't subject to a "Beta" label: Apple are finally offering a 64GB iPhone model. That is of far more value to me than any form of speech recognition.)

Walking through MIME fields: Snubbing Steve Jobs to Star Trek tech

Re: Does any intelligent person see jobs as a God/Guru?

No.

Most owners of Apple kit are well aware of Jobs' character flaws, but some of those flaws—particularly his near-OCD perfectionism—were also exactly what a design-led company like Apple needed.

Jobs also had the vision and the force of will to get things done properly. There are plenty of anecdotes from Apple employees about Jobs' willingness to send a design back to the drawing board, despite the fact that such decisions would cost Apple plenty of money. That takes serious balls in this day and age of pathetic, mewling, spineless managers who recoil in terror at the merest possibility of annoying one of their team of beancounters.

If Apple are such a terrible company, how come NOT A SINGLE ONE of Apple's rivals saw the iPhone and iPad coming? How come NOT ONE of Apple's rivals managed to create a viable, legal, digital music ecosystem before Apple?

And, if design really doesn't matter, as some of you walking geek clichés here seem to believe, how come Mac sales have been rising, continuously, year on year while the likes of Dell and HP have seen their sales in recent years dropping off a cliff? (Hint: Apple don't give a toss about the corporate sector. They're a consumer electronics company. Their market share in the consumer market is a lot higher than you probably realise.)

Clearly, you are wrong. Design does matter. Because a feature or technology you cannot work out how to use is of no interest to anyone except people like you.

You were the one who knew how to set the clock and timer on an old VHS VCR, while the rest of your family simply let theirs flash "12:00" at them all day and night. Ever wondered why? Technology for its own sake is not what 99% of people want.

If you've ever wondered why GNU/Linux distributions have never managed to gain much traction outside the geek community, just look in the mirror. You, who call those 99% of non-geek consumers "sheep" or "morons" or "idiots", have absolutely no right to act all surprised when those very people you've insulted and derided and sneered at so often consider you a huge, egotistical, self-centred prick in return.

You, and people like you, are the old guard. The has-beens. The past. Technology is there to be used. Mere existence is not enough any more.

LYING iPhone 4S mobes claim 4G connection on 3G network

Re: GET REAL

Says a poster who clearly didn't read the comment he replied to properly.

FYI: He was being sarcastic.

Apple wants ebook price class action suit thrown out

Re: publishers have right to set price for "their" books

"That's certainly possible these days, however who is going to fund book writing?"

What "funding" are you talking about? I personally know five published writers, and not a single damned one of them was given money up-front for their first novel! Almost everyone already owns a computer with a word processor on it. You don't need anything fancy: as long as the word processor can give you a word-count, you're fine.

As with music, the vast majority of published books and novels out there were written in someone's free time, not by full-time authors. Only three of the writers I know do it for a living all day, every day now. The other two continue to write in their free time while holding down a day-job.

Being able to earn a full-time living income from writing—especially fiction—is extremely rare. You need to be pretty damned good just to get noticed. Terry Pratchett and J.K. Rowling are exceptions to the rule.

So, no, publishers shouldn't be "funding" books. Not most of them anyway. Some markets are exceptions however, such as media-heavy coffee table tomes, or complex textbooks for educational markets (especially if their ebook versions include animations and videos). But for most simple books and novels that are just plain text? There isn't a reader on these forums who lacks the requisite tools to write one of those should they wish to.

FSF fandroids fight to 'free' Android from Google's forepaws

Re: Stallman's definition of "truly free"... - To help your understanding

Thanks, but most of us understand it just fine.

Stallman's notion that software should be free to be modified by all and sundry made some sense way back in the late '70s and early '80s, when computers were strange beasts that only an enlightened few could actually work out how to use. But those days are long gone.

99% of computer users not only wouldn't know what "source code" is, but would genuinely wonder if you'd lost your marbles if you insisted that having access to it was in any way remotely useful. Far, far more of those users care a damned sight more about open standards than open source and the bizarre notions of 'freedom' Stallman seems to have.

Personally, I've yet to see the benefit or advantage in having access to source code that may be written in one or more programming languages—languages I'd have to be familiar with, naturally, or the source code would be worthless to me—by people who may, or may not, be any good at design and / or programming.

Note that the mere possibility that I might have to modify said code to make it suit my needs often implies that the authors of said code are probably not much good at design. And, most likely, programming too. Having once spent 15 months in the mid-90s doing nothing other than debugging a certain very well-known PC sports management simulation (and getting a nervous breakdown out of it), I'd much rather walk barefoot through a flooded sewage farm than look at any bugger else's code ever again.

You can keep your damned source code. All I ask is that your software is well designed and supports open file formats and related standards. Do that and I'll be your customer for life. Hell, I'll even pay you money for your work!

Citrix drops Rush Limbaugh over 'slutgate' slurs

Re: I am not a Rush fan

RTFA. Again.

Rush's target was a student lawyer who was trying to explain how contraceptives can have genuine medical health uses. She was citing the case of a patient who lost an ovary because she was denied contraceptives that would have prevented the damage! Limbaugh appears to be wilfully and deliberately distorting the story to present it as "This student wants to have lots of sex!" instead.

The student lawyer herself was merely providing testimony on behalf of someone else.

Get it now?

Metro breakdown! Windows 8 UI is little gain for lots of pain

Re: sub-pixel addressing

Very well, I'll meet your anecdata and raise with an "I don't see why a legal approach would work any better. I have myopia and strong astigmatism and am perfectly fine with Windows 7's fonts."

People who are having issues with this may form such a tiny minority that Microsoft simply doesn't feel the need to worry about losing their custom. There's a limit to how far you can go to accommodate edge cases before the money you're spending becomes greater than the likely benefit.

Besides, if even computer display resolutions increase to "retina"-style levels—which appears to be a distinct possibility over the next year or so—this becomes a moot point anyway.

Apple: We never said Siri would actually work in the UK

Re: I should think it reasonable

No, it's not an Alpha.

The application itself appears to be working pretty much as advertised. It's the back-end databases that need the work. There are roughly 3000 languages on this planet. How many would you expect to be supported from day one of a beta release?

Siri relies on third party databases and application to do its stuff—that's kind of its point, and why pointing at "Evi" and the like misses said point like a blind man trying to shoot a goose with a water pistol.

Wolfram Alpha's servers are clearly playing a major role in its ability to answer many questions, of the "What's the weather like in [X]?" variety. Try typing "Che tempo fa a Roma oggi?" into their search engine and see how badly if fails to cope with anything other than English. That question is Italian for "What's the weather like in Rome today?" Wolfram Alpha clearly attempts a translation, but fails to give any useful results. Ask the same question in English and it works fine.

At least in the UK, Siri is able to understand what you're asking it. Until the Italian language support is rolled out (this year, apparently), Italians don't even get that much.

Re: I should think it reasonable

See that bright orange "Beta" icon right next to the damned name?

I'd say it's perfectly unreasonable to demand that a BETA release of a feature support absolutely everyone and everything perfectly, right out of the box, right this minute.

Apple was pretty bloody explicit about this during the iPhone 4S' official launch event. It's not their fault the media couldn't be arsed to mention that this was pre-release software, and still is. They've made its Beta status perfectly clear on their own website.

Anonymous web weapon backfires with hidden banking Trojan

Sorry, no.

I've been running and maintaining Windows machines (and Macs) for decades now. I've never had a virus, trojan, or any other form of malware on either. It is perfectly possible if you've read the f*cking manual. (Yes, there are plenty of docs for Windows. Just tap F1. Then read.)

There is nothing any OS designer can do to combat simple ignorance. Not even the various *BSD distributions are immune, let alone GNU/Linux. Even Apple's OS X is based on a heavily customised version of a *BSD core, so that, too, is no better at keeping an idiot away from a trojan—that's why Apple are using the only options they have open to them: a gated* ecosystem.

You see, the whole point of trojans is that they use social engineering, not flaws in your OS.

* Apple's ecosystem is a gated community, not a "walled garden". You are perfectly able to leave if you really, really want to, so it's not completely enclosed, but Apple have made it clear that you're on your own if you do decide to unlock that gate.

A truly "walled garden" system would look suspiciously like the CompuServe or CIX systems of yesteryear, which didn't even support TCP/IP natively until well into the 1990s.

Compare and contrast Apple's approach with, say, Ubuntu's own app store equivalent. Try installing an application that hasn't been listed on their store and see how easy it is. Both Microsoft and Apple make this process much easier, even if you don't choose to go through their own channels.

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet

Re: *choke* $80 keyboard?

@PXG: I can plug my iPad into a Novation X-Station keyboard just fine using Apple's Camera Kit adaptors, one of which includes a standard USB .connection. You can connect any USB keyboard to it this way, but most sane people will just use the Bluetooth option. I've used a Microsoft USB keyboard with mine in the past, but I prefer Apple's Bluetooth keyboard. (I also have an Apple Keyboard Dock, but it's not one of their best designs: I prefer a landscape display orientation.)

iOS includes Apple's audio APIs, including some very good MIDI support. iPads are surprisingly good at music creation for this reason as developers get a lot of audio APIs out of the box.

New forum Wishlist

Re: A curved arrow indicating replied post?

I think the problem with the curved arrows is that they're pointing the wrong way: I'm replying to an existing post. The functionality of the "This is a reply to another post" symbol is to take me to the post to which I replied, so the arrow should be pointing back "up" the thread, towards that source post.

In the "Threaded" and "Oldest First" views, the arrow should therefore be pointing away from the reply posts, not at them. It's supposed to be a visual cue.

Only in the "Newest First" sort order should the arrow change to one pointing away from my post and downwards instead.

Either way, the current arrow is wrong.

France: All your books are belong to us

No Shit, Sherlock. (Was: Re: Thomas Jefferson and copyright and patents...)

That's why the relevant laws refer to "Copyright"—i.e. the Right to Copy—and not "Burglary" or "Theft".

Only morons refer to copyright infringement as "theft". The correct term is counterfeiting, and is frowned upon for the same reasons we're not allowed to slap £100 notes into a photocopier and use the copies to pay our bills.

'Kill yourself now' - Torvalds throws openSUSE security tantrum

@Linus:

You do know Novell aren't pitching OpenSUSE to consumers, right? Their primary market is corporate IT.

What OpenSUSE is doing is exactly what it should be doing for a corporate rollout. Business PCs need to be locked-down.

Also: what vagabondo said. You get to pick how you want SUSE to behave both at install time, and post-install if you cocked it up.

Finally, on what planet does ripping-off MINIX and dumping the resulting barely-working kernel into a public forum for free make you a "genius"? Having a knack for getting in the tech news (often for all the wrong reasons) only makes it clear that you're wrapped in a cult of personality. It doesn't make you anything other than an arrogant egotist.

The hypocrisy of the FOSS is truly a thing of mystery and wonder given how often they've accused the late Steve Jobs of displaying the exact same character flaws.

Ancient Iceman murder victim was lactose-intolerant, sickly

Re: Nutrition is nutrition

If you think that's bad, consider that humans consider giving the genitalia of plants to females "romantic".

In a parallel world, mobile, male plants are tearing off the penises and gonads off a bunch of those scary "humanids" and handing bunches of them to female plants.

iPad 3 launch news pushes Apple shares to $500bn high

Re: It's easy to mock if you still don't grasp Apple

I agree with you.

What's truly mystifying is that the exact same rules that underlie good good product design, HCI design, UI design also apply to good software design, engineering and more. In fact, if you're designing anything that involves getting one or more complex systems to work with each other, you're going to find the same fundamental laws apply.

Last time I checked, humans were complex systems too.

There is an above average incidence of Autism Spectrum Disorders in the "techie" community, which certainly explains a lot. Grokking computers is a lot easier than grokking people when you have an ASD.

CBOSS puts out operator bait: Dinner date with 'booth babe'

Meh.

I live in Italy. I can see near-naked dancing girls any time I want* by just switching to a Mediaset TV channel like Italia 5, or (depressingly) even the nominally state-owned RAI channels.

Why bother with the trip to a trade show?

(Yes, I appreciate there's an "opportunity to win a dinner with a dancing girl", but as not even CBOSS appear to have a fucking clue what they do, I can't imagine how anyone else will. A competition nobody can win is what I call "a cheap publicity stunt".)

Seriously, even the bloody games industry has finally grown out of this puerile adolescent "booth babes" crap. Women use computers too now, you know. It's not even considered unusual today.

* (I wish I were exaggerating for effect, but I'm not. Berlusconi's old "Mediaset" TV channels seem to have a deliberate policy of including scantily-clad women in every damned programme they make. They've even managed to pad out their version of the vacuous "Deal, or No Deal" game show format to two full hours by throwing dancing girls and other irrelevant rubbish at it. Anyone in the UK who complains about the TV License really needs to see what life is like elsewhere—the Italians pay a TV license too, and it's not only more expensive than the British one, but the channels they fund still have adverts.)

Younger generation taking 'sledgehammer' to security

"Most 21 year olds I know can't form a coherent sentance..."

... says an AC who can't even spell "sentence", or use a spellchecker.

Fat margins squeeze Apple against Android

Dear Mr. Asay,

"Race to the bottom."

Google it.

Bookeen Cybook Odyssey e-book reader

So...

"Bookeen boffinry allows it to update often enough to permit low-framerate animation"

So, someone's finally worked out how to do delta updates on Pearl displays then? They certainly took their time: the technique has only been around since (at least) the 1970s.

Mobile net kingpins v the world: 'Why should we pay the 4G tab?'

Re: Poor signalling

I call bullshit on this excuse.

Last time I checked—and iFixIt's teardowns appear to back me up—Apple's iPhones and iPads use the same damned off-the-shelf signalling hardware as every bugger else's kit.

The manufacturers of these components (e.g. Qualcomm) provide reference designs and tons of developer support too.

The problem with the iPhone is that it actually does what it says on the tin, so customers are actually using it to suck data over their 3G connections. Until the iPhone was launched, telcos were complaining that practically nobody ever used their "smartphones" for anything other than making calls and playing Snake. Nobody seemed to be using all that data they were offering.

Along comes Apple and—oh shit!—it's all going pear-shaped! Telcos were caught on the back foot with infrastructure that's simply unable to cope with the massive increase in demand.

I live in a town of some 4000 people and it STILL has no 3G infrastructure from Telecom Italia Mobile, or any of their equally feckless rivals. It took Telecom Italia until 2009 to roll ADSL out to my parents' place in a nearby village of similar size too. Even now, there are gaps in 3G coverage even in major cities like Milan and Rome. Sod next year's technology: Telecom Italia haven't even finished rolling out last century's yet!

Proview's Apple iPad rights war goes global, reaches ESSEX

Seriously, Proview?

You didn't even think to check with Companies House and perform some due diligence?

And IPAD were quite correct in claiming they weren't going to use the trademark to compete with Proview. But that's not a legally binding contract to ensure that they don't sell said trademark to someone who will.

Lots of companies use this trick to buy trademarks as, otherwise, it'd be like trying to buy a lapsed domain name from some shyster who can see its value to you and will try to gouge you for it.

Proview were clearly aware of Apple's existence at the time and the probability that they'd be interested in buying the rights to such a name. They have only themselves to blame for falling for this. It's Business 101: Trust Nobody.

It's unusual to see a Chinese corporation falling for one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it's great karma. I've dealt with Chinese businesspeople in the past and they're no strangers to stunts like this. Hell, they probably invented many of them.

IT staffers on ragged edge of burnout and cynicism

There's an obvious problem with this statement:

'Management may also be the problem, not the IT worker. "As an experiment," Corman said, "explain to your children what it is you're trying to explain to your chief security officer. If they get it and he doesn't, then the problem isn't with you."'

Children are wired for learning. They're learning new things from birth.

50-year-old golfing granddads who work to live? Not so much. 30 years ago, when those managers were still young, fresh of face, and naïve, a "computer network" was expensive and difficult. Most PCs were standalone machines and sharing a file involved throwing floppy disks around.

The problem is that learning requires energy: if a new IT paradigm comes in, you have to literally unlearn all the old, outmoded stuff, and that means tearing down your old mental models of how shit works and rebuilding them from scratch. The younger you are, the easier that is as your mental models aren't going to have as much detail and dependencies on other mental models.

It doesn't help that our education systems are designed to train children for tasks that are often obsolete before they've even left college. We need to teach them to learn throughout their lives. To be prepared to keep up with whatever life throws at them. Life-long learning needs to be hammered into children from the beginning; we should be teaching them how to learn, not merely what to learn.

Even so, as we age, the energy we expend on the learning process will reach a point of diminishing returns and there will come a point when we're simply not willing to invest the time and energy needed to rebuild a particularly complex foundational mental model due to all the knock-on effects it would have. This is why people tend to become more conservative with age. Change becomes something to be feared; instead of trying to keep up, we'd rather slow everyone else down.

Worryingly, our population is ageing.

Asus peddles three-in-one smartphone, tablet, netbook

Dear Samsung,

Learn, guys.

Instead of just copying everything Apple do, try coming up with your own ideas Baldrick Samsung. Having your own ideas is so important!

Huawei pitches 'first ever' 10in quad-core tablet

^^^^ This.

The playing field needs to be level for all teams.

Just because some particularly loudmouthed and opinionated people don't support the team that's currently winning, it does not follow that the rules are wrong. It's far more likely that your preferred team simply isn't playing as well as it should.

Stop whining about how Apple are spanking their competition and start whining at that competition instead! Supporting a team means criticising it when it's doing something wrong, and slavishly aping the market leader instead of differentiating your products is wrong.

Apple cannot possibly have the only good product designers on the planet. Others, equally as good, must also exist. So why aren't they getting the opportunity to compete with Apple on their own terms, instead of being forced to churn out endless "me-too" models by the dozen?

THAT is what people should be complaining about. I own Apple kit myself, but even I'm willing to admit that Apple produce their best work when they're faced with genuine competition.

Ford intros tech'd-up B-Max mini-MPV

Eh?

1 litre engines can put out a lot of power compared to ten years or so back.

My 14-year-old FIAT Punto has a 16-valve 1.2 litre engine rated at 86 hp. By modern standards, it's rather puny, but it has great acceleration and will pull me uphill at 75 mph. without complaint, even when I have two passengers and shopping for _two_ families in the back!

A 1 litre engine today can easily outrun it, without the need for that expensive, (and very inefficient), 16-valve equipment. My car barely manages 30 mpg on a good day, which is a pain as petrol is now at €1.85 / litre round these parts. I think I'll be trading it in for a diesel later in the year. (Assuming I can put enough money aside.)

I'd avoid a big MPV as they tend to give pretty poor fuel economy: they're about as aerodynamic as a brick when fully loaded and their engines are often small too. Just get a diesel estate car—I'd go with a Skoda Octavia or the larger (but more expensive) Superb. Good cars to drive, boot spaces measured in hectares and they've got VW behind them. The only down-side is that servicing can be a bit expensive: They're basically 'stretched' versions of Volkswagen's Golf and Passat models, so you're paying German car prices for parts and servicing. (I learned to drive in a Fabia, and owned an Octavia myself when I lived in the UK, so this is from first-hand experience.)

I'll say this for FIAT: their newer cars are built well, sip petrol daintily with their pinkies sticking out, while costing peanuts to maintain. It's only their older models that let the side down in the fuel economy department, but then, so do most rival models too.

Re: Re: "litres per 100km"?

Firstly, El Reg can't use miles per gallon as the US has only 3.5 litres (approx.) to the US Gallon, while the UK has 4.5 litres (approx.) to its own gallon.

The SI Litre, on the other hand, is an international standard.

As for interpreting them: to paraphrase El Reg's own most frequent image caption: "Smaller numbers are better". How hard is that?

Also, this: http://mpg.webix.co.uk/

(Seriously, how hard is it to use the internet? And you call yourselves IT people! Pah!)

Secret high-security Chinese shipments point to iPad 3 exports

Most people? No.

The (tech.) media? Yes.

It's easier and cheaper to just to a Google search every so often and rewrite random rumours on distant web sites than to actually get off your arse and do some journalism of your own.

Why spend time and effort working to make other people wealthier when there's a perfectly good pub right there across the street from your office?

Apple files patent for 'polished meteorite' keyboard

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: prior art?

This is also why airplane windows are small and have rounded edges. As de Havilland discovered the hard way.

Toshiba Portégé Z830-10N 13.3in Ultrabook

Re: You thought right.

"Apple might have the better software, but who cares when this whole market is aimed at fashion victims and show offs. "

How old are you? Six?

Re: Re: "Seriously, who the hell would buy this laptop?"

So Windows is magically "better" for work than a BSD UNIX-derived OS?

I can only assume you hold the same opinion of GNU / Linux distributions too, as anything those can do, OS X can do too.

I thought Apple was supposed to be the company selling "overpriced" kit?

Seriously, who the hell would buy this laptop?

Apple's cheapest 13" MacBook Air comes with a much better display, with a higher 1440 x 900 resolution, a proper unibody case that doesn't flex, a lid you can open easily with your fingers without the need for additional tools, longer battery life, a Thunderbolt connector that lets you connect to both an external display and a number of data connectors with just one cable (Apple's 27" display also includes a bunch of other ports, acting like a docking station), and Apple bundles software people might actually want to use, and which has a refreshing lack of endless, annoying, pop-ups.

Oh yes: you also get a 1.7GHz mobile Core i5, instead of the i3 in this pile of Tosh.

All for a whopping... £19 more.

Hey Commentard! - or is that Commenter?

Re: Re: Re: Re: ~2000 votes so far cannot be wrong, can they... can they?

"The number of people on this site who use noscript is surely greater than on most sites, why aren't they considered when you specify a voting form?"

Why would The Register give a toss what people who have deliberately disabled the advertising that pays their damned wages think? You're getting content for free. Until you start paying for it, you don't get a vote. Ever.

Re: offensive, no

"I don't find "Freetard" offensive, but I do find it irritating..."

How about 'Freeskate'?

Or, of course, we could just go back to using "miser".

Apple vs Bank of China in iPad Shanghai showdown

Re: Sort of like what Apple does? Change the rules to suit them?

You can install whatever the hell you like on your Apple kit. You always could. It is, in fact, perfectly possible to "jailbreak" an iPhone even today. Apple aren't suing jailbreakers, although they're perfectly entitled to make the process harder. It's their design, after all.

What you are not entitled to is Apple's support for tinkering with your machine.

If I were to modify a Ford vehicle into a "monster truck", do you think I'd be able to drive it into my nearest Ford dealership when it breaks down and demand they repair it under warranty?

RIP: Peak Oil - we won't be running out any time soon

Re: Unbelievably naive article... worst I've seen here

"This article marks a new low for the Register."

Hi! You must be new to this whole "news" thing...

This is The Register. It's staffed by journalists. It may have escaped your attention, but journalists are not scientists. Few are even experts. This is a news website, not a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The Register's staff's job is to report on what is happening, but they are not required to understand it all in the minutest of detail.

Andrew Orlowski's article is a report on a report released by Citibank. He interprets it as best he can, but given that this is a field that deals heavily with statistics, physics, organic chemistry, and more, it is idiotic to expect someone who works in an entirely different field to nail it.

As with all the other writers working for The Register, Andrew's responsibility is to attempt to interpret the information as best he can in terms readers can understand.

Journalists are writers. They are also people. All people are inherently biased. There is no point screaming "BIAS!" at a journalist. It's like shouting "MAMMAL!" at a rabbit.

(As for the "IT angle": IT usually requires electricity. That electricity has to come from somewhere, and where it comes from will have a huge influence on how much it costs.)

Woman spanked for dissing ex in Facebook snapshot

To all those who think it's the T-shirt that's the problem...

... it wasn't.

The problem was posting the photo online where the general public can see it.

Facebook: about as private as a beach in Hawaii during the summer.

iPad 3 chip leak squeaks dual-core tweaks

Re: Re: Re: mehPad (@hazydave)

"You GPU isn't doing any of the "grunt work". It helps on 3D games... "

Er, no. The GPU is used all the time on a composited GUI like iOS's. I think Android's is the same now, although it used to be entirely reliant on the CPU in older releases.

So iOS uses the GPU for all its rendering, even for the settings pages and home screens. It's a composited GUI built on "Display PDF" (an evolution of NeXTSTEP's Display Postscript engine). This is why both iOS and OS X have PDF support 'baked in' at the OS level; developers get PDF support for free.

As iOS is built on a task-switching design, there's little need for more than a couple of CPU cores for the vast majority of apps. The design favours frugal resource usage, improved stability, and increased battery life, at the expense of a feature few users appear to miss given the sales figures, so I'd say Apple made the right choice here.

Games, (and some apps, like "Elements", that rely heavily on rich media), really gain far more from GPU improvements than CPU improvements. Simply nailing on a couple more ARM cores really doesn't have as much benefit for iOS devices compared to Android devices. If you're going for full-on multitasking, those cores do come in handy, but you also need to throw in a lot more RAM too, both of which will increase your bill of materials.

That's also why, try as they might, Android device manufacturers are having such a hard time beating Apple's prices: Android does more, but this means it has higher minimum system requirements. Which means it will cost more to build an Android tablet than to build an iOS one. For now.

If the iPad 3 is coming with a Retina display, that means it'll be shunting pixels around a screen with a higher resolution than any currently available laptop. That's going to require some serious GPU power, not more CPU cores.

Activist supplied illegally obtained docs to DeSmogBlog

Re: @Sean Timarco Baggaley (@Audrey S. Thackeray)

My point isn't the science, but the media's reporting of the science.

That "Population Bomb" theory was all over the media like a rash for ages. I remember it. (I even have an SF novel based on the theory—"Population Doomsday" by Don Pendleton, and ironically, it has two full-page, full-colour ads for cigarettes inserted into the middle of it.)

Bird Flu and the Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK were instantly pounced upon by the media and cranked right up to 11 too, with parades of "experts" asked leading questions about it all, while MPs were browbeaten into massively idiotic knee-jerk reactions by said media.

"I don't think a constant cry of "No Wolf!" is any more helpful than repeated alarmism."

The opposite of "Stop crying 'Wolf!'" is silence UNTIL you have actual, incontrovertible and rock-solid proof of said wolf. Only THEN should you start ringing the alarm bells.

That's kind of the point of alarms: you only trigger them when there's an actual alarm state. You don't trigger alarms repeatedly when you think there might, possibly, be an undefined emergency at some undetermined time in the future. Maybe.

If you keep setting alarms off every ten minutes, people will simply learn to tune them out.

And that is what I'm trying to get at here. It's not about the Climate Change, or whatever fashionable clothing the Big Bad Wolf happens to be dressed in this time around. It's about the incessant overuse of alarmism and FUD to get people to react. It's the blatant psychological manipulation. I hate that.