Posts by Thomas 3 9 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
But God bless them for this. If they'd promise to revert pretty much everything the Home Secretaries since about Blunkett have done, I'd be a lot happier. Have you seen the current standard for admitting past convictions to criminal trials? They might as well just say "past convictions may be admitted where it is politically expedient" and be done with it.
Contracts tend to be black and white about the obligations on either party; clauses that establish penalties for failure to abide by the obligations are binding only if they amount to a genuine preestimate of loss.
Apple had an agreement that clone manufacturers would have access to all releases of Mac OS 7. They rebranded Mac OS 7.7 as Mac OS 8, meaning that they didn't have to give clone manufacturers any access. I guess the clone manufacturers saw the potential loophole but simply didn't have the bargaining power to dictate more reasonable terms.
I don't think the value proposition was "this app alone justifies the purchase price of the phone". The article makes it clear that features like current tube line status and finding your nearest tube station make the app worth 59p. Your £100s is a straw man that makes it look like you've got some sort of chip on your shoulder.
Re: "iPhone download in 'ruddy useful' shock" — there's quite a few of useful ones. That your publication's barrel scraping policy on slow news days has led to you mainly covering laughable novelty apps has probably confused you.
Surely either:
"Microsoft was fighting against a programme it was already offering across The Pond."
Or:
"Microsoft was fighting against a program it was already offering on this side of The Pond."
?
More relevantly, I think Microsoft may have correctly judged the court of public opinion on this one. See the many outraged comments to The Reg's earlier story.
... for successfully killing an innovative development in the market that threatened their bottom line. Again. Though they looked slightly pudgy on this one. I would very much like ARM netbooks with well-integrated, tightly written software stacks doing the main things that people want to do to dominate the market like some sort of modern Amstrad PCW, but I'm just no longer idealistic enough to believe it could actually happen.
This has nothing to do with Apple, as is obvious if you bother to read the article rather than skipping straight to the comments page to post your prejudices. I suggest in particular you read this bit:
"Microsoft's tying of Internet Explorer to its operating system broke EC law on abuse of a dominant position - you're allowed to monopolise an industry in the EC, but being in that position brings special responsibilities."
Do Apple have a dominant position in the operating system market? Is the browser market substantially affected by Apple's decision to bundle Safari with OS X? The same rule applies to all parties: you may not take advantage of a dominant position to distort competition. Apple are subject to that just like Microsoft are, but are not currently distorting competition. And my understanding of general legal principles is that legislators tend not to pursue parties on account of believing they probably would do something illegal if they had the opportunity.
That was the Jupiter ACE, which Fab mentioned. It's hardware compatible with either the ZX80 or the ZX81 (I forget), but supposed to be an independent design. By some former Sinclair employees.
As for me, I wasn't born until the 1980s so I missed out on PCW being relevant. As with many of the other posters, I'm mostly aware of it as a late 90s 500 pages of adverts publication with the occasional article thrown in to tell me why the new processor being 100 Mhz older than the old one is likely to revolutionise everything.
I don't think it's just that. I think they've spent however many years adding features, and are now taking a moment to consolidate. Microsoft are doing the exact same thing. The rumoured complete rewrite of fuggly Quicktime should also help; my interpretation of it now being "fully hardware accelerated" is that it'll be one of the first things to use OpenCL and offload large chunks of processing onto the GPU. Probably raw OpenCL code is larger than raw Intel or PowerPC code, but bits like having the multi-resource scheduling (ie, a task scheduler that can manage multiple cores and GPUs) at the OS level probably dramatically cut the amount of self management that goes into other frameworks?
Apple had been obsessed for years with separating out multimedia stuff so that it can be processed by whatever black art the OS wants so as to be able to utilise Altivec and make up for the otherwise podgy progression of PowerPC processors, I guess now there's a more unified system, a bunch of things will naturally shrink.
Oh, and then the other 5.5gb is probably saved by not installing all the printer drivers or something.
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