Posts by Kevin7 116 posts • joined 4 Dec 2009
Isn't the other problem that ultimately the advertising dollars are going to run out? They reckon advertisers spend more money per household to get eyeballs than we spend on broadband itself yet online advertising is incredibility ineffective. Eventually this bubble is going to burst when advertisers realise how little value this spend is realising?
Has anyone been in the Photo department in Boots or any supermarket recently as people stand trying to make shitty Smartphone pics into shitty paper photos? There were queues and queues of people over Christmas shoving their iPhones in and waiting (possibly for weeks) as the photo kiosk tried to work its way through thousands of terrible camera phone images that have never been backed up or downloaded?
These self-service kiosks are pretty much ubiquitous and instant to use. Between Kodak and Fuji I can't see anyone else getting much of a market hold. It's an area where brand name doesn't really count but convenience and cost do.
Looks gorgeous and Mountain Lion is a delight as OS X generally is. However the price of entry is becoming eye-watering and I say that even as a user of Mac computers. Nearly all the functionality I want these days I can find with Linux on a Intel-based PC for a about a third of the price. I'll admit I'll miss some things in Linux but I'm being priced out the market. I think though not being able to replace the hard drive is the real deal breaker as these things do fail within the lifetime of the product and I'd prefer to replace it at home in about 5 minutes as have to return it to Apple.
For donkey's years there's been a suggestion that you get rid of corporation tax and take a share in profits instead. Say you were taxed at 20% of your profits then benefit from success and then don't tax you as heavily in the lean times. The problem is, there'd be just another new wheeze to show the richest companies in the world weren't actually making any money...
"Employing People Educated in the system. : NI; PAYE; not to mention the fact that the employees are not a drain on state resources."
No, actually. National Insurance is protection from sickness, unemployment and old age.
Pay As You Earn is a general income tax that contributes to all public services. Unless you earn approximately £25,000 employees actually *are* a pull on State resources because you are not a net contributor until you reach that level.
If you're only going to run this as some kind of media server you're wasting your money unless you have some kind of fetish for Mac OS X. You could probably build your self a Linux based machine for about half the cost. Even though my main home machine is a Macbook Pro I've given up on the Apple ecosystem for a media player. I mean if this is going to be used as a computer rather than a media player you might be able to justify the cost but it seems bloody pricey to me.
Security - you could also say other OSs are more secure by design so they have less vulnerabilities in the first place.
TCO - isn't this really just a marketing term?
Functionality - wholly subjective. There's plenty of people who'll say working in a shell is more productive and efficient that any GUI.
Performance - How many of the world's HPC clusters run Windows? As for being "the world's fastest fileserver" doesn't actually measurable performance rely as much on the physical I/O of the box as it does the OS?
The time might be ripe for another mobile phone platform: iOS is starting to look dated, Android is nothing particularly extraordinary (I have a Galaxy SIII and it's ok but not much more) and everyone else seems to be dying on their arse. The problem with mobile phones is it seems to be dominated either by novelty or status and Windows Phone seems to impart neither. May be Windows Phone was even too early in coming out before iOS and Android started to lose their sheen?
I've seen millions of kids with horrible, natty £100 PAYG BlackBerrys. Who in Christ's name would want that as their growth market? Selling millions of bottom-end devices to consumers with no money clogging up your infrastructure because they can sit on BBM all day for nothing? That doesn't like a business, it sounds like a wound.
Having been a member of MobileMe I would never again touch Apple's cloud offering. You have to wonder if Apple truly appreciate how catastrophic any failure of iCloud is when they put it at the centre of iOS in all those very expensive/glossy adverts. I still can't believe that iCloud is limited to only 5Gb of space unless you pay more and it makes you wonder how serious they really are about it.
Surprised this hasn't happened earlier - in the two Apple stores close to where I live it looks mostly like a playground for 13 year old kids messing about with gadgets they will never possibly afford. Given also that most non-Apple products can also be found cheaper elsewhere I'm amazed its succeeded at all.
Most other calculators give £2,330.00 using the retail price index. When I've tried http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html I get £2,532.00. Compound inflation since 1989 is approx. 110% which pretty much substantiates the doubling of price.
I can't help but feel there is significant price inflation on Digital SLRs compared to 35MM SLRs and it runs counter to prevailing economies in that they should actually get cheaper. From a business point of view the depreciation seems to be accelerating; the old 35MM Nikon "F" series were current for about ten years before replacement, the gap between the D3 and D4 is only five and the D3S was only three years ago.
For as long as I can remember Nikon's professional cameras have been just about unbeatable; the Nikon F3 was a big leap forward in 1980 when it was no longer an all manual camera; they did it again with the F4 in 1989 when they brought autofocus and built in motordrive to the range. Now to me the problem is cost of the D4 is putting it beyond the range of many pros unless they work for a big agency or national. The F4 in 1989 was about £1200 or about £1900 today. More than five grand for the D4 seems astronomically expensive - there's no doubt you're getting the Rolls-Royce of professional equipment but the return on that investment strikes me as being extremely difficult to justify.
You can't depend on any company being around long enough to safeguard your pictures and videos. I use Flickr for sharing, not long term storage. I also think having monolithic storage systems. like NAS, at home is probably not much better as you've got a lot of vendor lock-in and a single point of failure. Over the years I've stuck to using my files in their most basic formats (jpg) and arranged in folders. I back these up using rsync to whatever is mainstream media. 15 years ago it was Zip disks. Once they became obsolete I moved to CD, then DVD and now to commodity USB hard drives that I rotate. Eventually they'll become obsolete and I'll move on again. I learnt from Zip disks to avoid as much proprietary technology as possible so the files can be read on any device. Ultimately this is a problem not even people like the British Library have been able to solve - the best I think you can do is to keep your storage current, move to new formats when old ones are dying and don't depend on companies to do it for you.
Hmm look really nice and probably sounds better. However 300 quid for 32Gb sounds extremely expensive, you can get a 64Gb iPod Touch for that and a Samsung for much, much less _and_ has a SD card slot. Sony have made great sounding kit for years but have never seemed terribly competitive - I don't think they'll shift many at this price.
Ever since the financial meltdown of 2008 we've been hovering around the event horizon of a decade-long depression. Both businesses and individuals have become accustomed to wringing much more life out of computers than they ever did - replacement cycles look like they're slowing to anything up to 5-6 years, especially on PCs and laptops. There's a lot of truly ancient kit out there, I've seen loads of businesses still using Windows XP with no real plan to updating. Also, as has been said many times before, all growth is finite.
It's one of those things where the responses to the reviews are far more useful than the reviews themselves. I've always suspected that these pseudo-luxury brands are overpriced shit and the responses seem to confirm it. They have saved me a great deal of money and that the people who buy them are gullible, vain tools.
I don't think I've ever seen many ads on telly for laptops that cost more than 400 quid. They're cheap and cheerful and get thrown away in about 4 years. They rarely do anything more than surfing the Internet and running Office. They've become the PC people can have on their knees while they watch EastEnders. Ultrabooks will never touch this market.
It looks like the kind of rangefinder design that professional photographers used to use in the days of film when Leica was the rangefinder of choice. It looks ideal for reportage and discreet shooting being smaller and easier to handle than a DSLR. Stunning design, I have to say.
Making decent TV is really expensive and lowering the bar to entry guarantees some of the worst TV ever seen. It strikes me that hyper-local TV is about 30 years too late when having a monopoly on distribution guaranteed eyeballs. It strikes me there is really no demand for it - channel M died the death and even local programming on the BBC and ITV has most people looking for the remote so they don't have to sit through tedious crap on local issues so peripheral they're laughable. Does anyone remember L!ve TV? Because that's what we'll be getting. Epic, epic fail.
Making an observation that companies peak and trough sounds incredibly obvious. It happens to all companies and Apple will be no different. All companies are just one dud product away from decline and the more iconic the product the easier this can happen. Apple is also at risk of indifference, the cliche about "familiarity breeding contempt" seems very true in this case. They'll ultimately be hit with inertia - they'll saturate their own market and there'll be so many i-thingys in circulation the market peaks. Putting out more devices with small iterative changes is also I think a pretty dangerous ploy.
Every idiot knows that proper cartography is both extremely expensive and extremely valuable and there's no cheap shortcut to providing it. Trying to provide mapping on a global scale is well outside the resources of OSM - sooner or later Apple will have to start paying for mapping if it intends to keep on providing it. The irony is that Nokia had the best navigation of any phone manufacturer, world-class mapping on your phone that didn't even need a data connection to work.
Apple believes in profit, not market share. The world is littered with economic disasters that are built on assumption what matters is market share, not profit. Market share alone never kept anyone in business. Nokia went after market share and look what happened. Android will ultimately become a cannabalised market in which you have too many phones chasing too little money (see Nokia).
Not surprised really - I bought one of the first Samsumg Galaxy Tab's and it was shit. On paper it should have been better than the iPad, had cameras front and rear before the iPad, had expendable memory, could be used as a phone and was cheaper than the iPad. But in actually use it was just beyond awful - the version of Android used just didn't scale to being a tablet, the usability was dreadful and OS polish just wasn't there. You add in Samsung's custom skin and their dismal bloatware and the thing was stillborn. It's no accident that my next tablet was an iPad.
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