Posts by SuccessCase 1046 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jan 2011
"I have been trying on and off for four hours and nothing happens."
It's Microsoft. You have to re-install your OS first. If you're lucky it will "take."
Oh and don't forget to delete/edit a few keys in your registry. I know it's a Mac, but they are bound to have installed one somewhere.
i agree the once a day charging issue, is far from ideal. It is in fact why bluetooth headsets threatened, but never quite made it to mainstream. There is the wireless headset dream, and then the reality of having another device to charge when worrying about ensuring one is charged is already more than enough (in my own experience things like laptops and tablets are far less of a worry because most of the time I use/need my laptop I'm at an outlet or on a planned trip where charging is part of the routine). This is why I'm predicting tepid success for the Apple Watch (a similar "adoption level" to bluetooth headsets with a significant dolop extra from the sports activity market - so say 4% of iPhone users after two years). For any normal company that will represent huge and successful revenue stream. But Apple that's going to represent a lot of management overhead for little extra gain. They are doing it because wearables are strategic, the category won't go away (a bit like Bluetooth headsets) and they will raise the bar at launch (but on a device where non sports activity users will find the marginal value entirely undermined by the inconvenience of a need for daily charging). Fail the value test, find power reliability an issue, and the thing will end up being left at home.
There will be a set of core users that love it of course (probably me included because I tend to like Apple kit). I was extrememly bullish when the iPad came out. But on this, far less so, but simply because of the battery charging issue.
Johnny Ive had come up with the ideal design when thinking about the need for charging, using the Milanese loop strap, or simple pressure-from-the-sides, clasp for ease and convenience in taking it off to recharge, but my worry is then a secondary one. It will be super easy to theive. I predict a return of pickpockets with the skill to take watches without the user knowing (invariably involves a distraction). This will be great for them. Almost like a pickpockets trainer bike with stabilisers. Hopefully Apple will already at launch have extended the device disabling tech that is reducing iPhone theft rates or that will very quickly become a big negative story for this thing.
No what you read somewhere was a clickbait peice written to sound like Apple are dropping some of the health measurement features when they in fact haven't done so and the watch contains the identical feature set as it had at announcement.
The peice was commenting on past features that were already dropped before the watch was announced and seemed to somewhat deliberately make an ambiguous use of tense to make it sound like there is a doubt over the watch feature set as it is now.
The Register might want to study how it was done, since their Apple bad-light machine seems to have become a bit patchy since they have so spectacularly crashed and burned with their oft cited Peak Apple fail.
This is extremely bad reporting. Really, do some fact checking El Reg. This is a "report" (it in fact isn't a report), its a badly disguised press release by a security firm who sell services to the PC industry. The database they have trawled is the US National Vulnerabilities database, which lists fixed reported vulnerabilities voluntarily reported by companies. There is no equivalence or assurance in terms of how comprehensive vendor reporting is, nor does the database try to pretend there is, all the reporting is voluntary. If a vulnerability isn't reported by the company it isn't reported. If a company reports more fixed vulnerabilities, it will have a higher count on the database, if a company has a ton of vulnerabilities and fails to fix them, it will have a low count on the database. If a company reports vulnerabilities on a precautionary basis but that were never exploited, they will appear on the database. In other words the database can tell you nothing about the relative state of security of OS A versus OS B.
The company that prepared this report, works for PC industry vendors. It provides a nice bullet point for PC marketing. There is nothing, nothing, objective or professional about it. Your half-hearted disclaimer in the last paragraph is hardly sufficient to claim objective reporting on this one.
Sorry selected the fail icon by accident. Though I don't agree with your comment it wasn't intended to be a reference to it.
Reposting here:
There's plenty of money in apps. The iOS Appstore alone in the US raked in more money than the U.S. box office. Additionally, very many apps are not made to bring in independent revenues, such as e.g. Starbucks/Costa loyalty apps, so any figures that divide revenues by number of apps published are somewhat misleading. Bennedict Evans, with some justification last year, estimated the iOS Appstore economy to be worth about 14 billion dollars per anum Google Play store about 6 billion.
This is a stealth patent. The diagram is but one, probably quite deliberately crap, embodiment. The claims are the important part and will be as broad as possible covering other uses such as VR. The point of a stealth patent is precisely that it covers a whole range of possibilities whilst not obviously pointing competitors to the possibilities. Indeed Google Cardboard provides the perfect example of how such a patent can be valuable. I think stealth patents are pretty underhand, because the point of the patent system is to make an invention obvious and documented as part exchange for the protection of the court, but The Register, always seeking to find the most negative angle has lead them to miss the fact that this stealth patent is precisely about VR. All companies engage in filing stealth patents by the way. It is simply to a companies advantage to do so. So by all means be negative, but the real negative angle story here is about the use of stealth patents. This is in fact far from a "crap" patent as the Register wish to suggest (though many would like to suggest all patents are crap, this view even seems to be spreading to hardware patents).
From the claims:
"The device of claim 1, wherein the optical subassembly is operative to adjust a resolution of the at least one image frame to compensate for how close the user's eyes are to the display screen of the portable electronic device. "
So one of the dependent claims, refers to an optical sub-assembly, precisely as you have in VR goggles. It refers to the assembly adjusting "at least one" image. That is the patent attorney making the claim as broad as possible whilst firmly ensuring it covers optical assemblies that can adjust TWO images - e.g. one for each eye, e.g. precisely what is done by project Cardboard.
That's how you need to read Patents. Don't read the words, they are frequently deliberately obtuse. Read the logic.
When The Register talk of Apple following Google, that is only from the point of view of what the public see (another thing The Register consistently fail to appreciate). The fact this patent was filed in 2008, if Google or Samsung haven't filed one earlier, it pretty surely means Apple R&D are already looking at this. Companies like Apple, Google and Samsung have teams of patent attorneys ensuring all patentable material the R&D dept are working on is patented. If this patent is passed by the examiner, then you can be pretty sure Google/Samsung submitted no earlier filings or they will be able to block it.
And in any case, even though Cook didn't say that, it would be ok to imply an activity monitor can help prevent cancer, because it appears sitting on your arse all day is a major contributing factor in the cause of prostate cancer, which actually is a major killer. Can't see it's too controversial or difficult to understand why that might be the case. Take the piss all you like El Reg, but getting up and moving around every 20 or so mins is a very good thing to do indeed.
@badvok
Well seeing as I have for most of my adult life worked as a consultant in the Digital TV industry and have deliver VOD services to millions of customers for a living, I think I know the meaning of the terms I am using and I most certainly and specifically mean OTT.
VOD refers to on demand service that includes programming delivered by dedicated closed TV networks; the economics of which are very different from OTT. The new world order in television is being driven by the fact service is OTT (which of course includes VOD service). The fact of VOD being available was not the key point. VOD service has been available for years and made no difference to the cosy relationships between the TV networks and the content providers. OTT is blowing the relationship wide open and is what enabled the likes of Netflix to deliver the service they have.
"Just because the next generation are not using it now, does not mean that their tastes, preferences and watching / listening habits will stay the same as they get older."
True, but what perhaps you don't appreciate is that it is literally dead in colleges. Many younger adults are getting out of the habit of watching it entirely and that has never before been the case. They will grow used to an almost exclusively OTT world. I've been monitoring this because it is my industry. I deliver TV services and software solutions. New habits are being formed and IMO they are unlikely to ever come back.
And when they come back to it, they find it patronising and dumbed down. The next time the BBC News is on, stand back from it and check the tone and level of the discourse. Intelligent people have been suffering from boil a frog syndrome. It is actually dumbed down to an almost unbelievable level. They speak with a tone of voice if someone were to speak to you like that in the street, you would find it hard not to punch them.
It is for good reasons with good intentions. Due to the public service remit, they strive to provide service meeting all needs, including viewers with low IQ and developmental challenges. But really the dumbed down one size fits all approach is no longer necessary. OTT can meet these needs more directly and in way that are more efficient or satisfying for the end user. Really next time you are watching the news back up and check this out for yourself and you will realise the extent to which what I am saying is true.
There is a huge degree of lock-in within the TV industry, with many projects funded through subscription rather than a-la-cart pricing. One of the big resource drains has been the need to keep TV channels filled up daily with content. With OTT, that requirement is simply going away.
The controversial point (in the UK anyway), is that this also removes the need for the BBC license fee model. The truth is the cost of the the high-quality (but increasingly rare) content we enjoy (costume-drama, news and nature) can can comfortably be covered by a-la-cart pricing when we are paying on a program by program basis, but don’t have to pay for the likes of Eastenders and day-time TV. It will simply be cheaper to buy just what we want than to pay the license fee. In my household we are already paying for higher quality production and choosing other, often higher quality, sources. I’ve been, in the past, happy to pay the license fee, but not now that it is less efficient and protecting lower quality production. Everyone will be different but I personally have not interest in it and it's clear this is true for many others as well. Especially not now my Netflix subscription got me Breaking Bad, Damages, The Good Wife, Dexter, House of Cards, Marco Polo, Archer etc.
The BBC model is out of date. The BBC is also dying. In schools and colleges up and down the country, students, the next generation, hardly touch it, preferring Netflix, Amazon Prime, iTunes and illegal downloads. The BBC are living in the past and think they are providing a world class service. The still do in very limited silos. But mostly they aren't. My investigation shows students are hardly ever watching BBC iPlayer in preference to other streaming services.
It would be more honest if The Register had reported the real news, that Tim Cook did anything but endorse Obama's agenda. He declined politely I'd course, but quite firmly. He stated how history has taught that to compromise personal privacy even a bit is a bad move. He pointedly referred to how the right to personal privacy trumps the desire for government to know. But of course, this is the Register writing about Apple, so we get anything than objective reporting.
"It just seems strange that they're jumping into this."
It's bold, but it doesn't seem strange at all. Apple made greater revenue last quarter than any other company in history (indeed they more revenue last quarter due to price fluctuations in the dollar, than Google made revenue last quarter full stop). Other world record revenue quarters have been held by companies from only a handful of other sectors; Oil, automotive and finance.
There is no other foreseeable tech product that will bring the scale of revenues Apple are realising with the iPhone. Watches certainly won't do it.
Automotive is undergoing a revolution where car production - as advanced as it is - has become commoditised. For years, the Ford Focus has been as good or a better vehicle than the Volkswagen Golf and the differences between manufacturers has been reducing, but the Ford brand has meant they aren't able to realise the Margin Volkswagen can. Now most of the innovation in automotive is focused on computing and navigation. Apple have so much cash-piling up they don't know what to do with it. They like to control the user experience top to bottom. With physical car production commoditised, they can do that, in a similar way to the way they control the experience on the Mac top to bottom.
So huge revenues: check
Capacity to control the experience top to bottom: check
Brand margin: check
Huge cash reserves to be able to move into an entirely new sector: check
To me it's obvious why they are jumping into this.
Tim Cook has of course just made a speech on this very subject which firmly didn't meet Barak Obama's agenda. Cook stated how history has taught that to compromise personal privacy even a bit is a bad move. He pointedly referred to how the right to personal privacy trumps the desire for governments to know and cited how being gay remains a life/career threatening private matter in some countries.
Also the Apple pay system stands out for the fact it doesn't track your purchase transactions, or even pass the details onto the retailer. Only the bank retain the record. Buy something using Apple pay, and you will have to separately provide your email address if you want the receipt emailed to you. None of the other contactless payment systems proposed by big Silicon Valley companies are the same in that regard
Would have been mildly funny if you picked a year when other companies were doing two factor authentication on all their services well, instead of plumbing for a year even before MS thought allowing JavaScript in email messages was OK, FTP was the system for transferring files across the Internet and even your local Web admin's password was very often just "password"
"Why not run along and try and add say an int to a struct then and see what happens."
Sheesh, exactly the same as will happen in OBJECTIVE C dumbass, y'know that pure superset of C, in which you use C ints and structs all the time and where your objects are dereferenced using pure C pointers and that you were just criticising for being weakly typed.
"Specifically it cannot be guaranteed that equality comparisons between the same apparent values will always work"
Yes you can if you use the same normalisation scheme before comparison. You do normalise your floats before comparison don't you? When dealing with colour of course, the loss of precision normalising floating point values (e.g. doubles in this case) is no problem whatsoever as as the imprecision of any output device you care to mention will be several orders of magnitude less than the the precision of a double (unless you are using scientific spectrogrophic equipment, but then you would be writing your own high precision software to run it). As for the reversibility of operations using floats, yes that can be a problem,... if you're the kind of dumb-arse who treats his views/display-output devices like they are the input source for the data-model data you are using for tracking app state.
@boltar
So your thought process was "damn, C is weakly typed and that's a what those grown up people use. He's got me there, I know I'll pretend his commenting on my basically wrong statement and not explicitly stating why it is so wrong, means he is presenting it as correct and therefore he is saying C is a dynamic like a scripting language just so I can throw a brickbat and an insult, because after all I am basically a bell-end."
"Expecting RGB values as floats rather than hex"
Criticism is fine. Criticism from ignorance is not.
Tell me which CIE calibrated colour value is #ff292728 ?
That's why iOS and MacOS use floats and not absolute natural numbers. The system has been design to ensure firstly the specification of common calibrated colour values.
Ha, myLongMethodNameThatHasTwoLinesOfCodeAndDoesBuggerAll()
The extent of contrivance you have had to go to to come up with such a bad example, is laughable and actually yes, using selectors like:
- (void)updateGridViewCellAtCoordinates:(Coords)coords withStatus:(Status)currentStatus
is reasonably self documenting so what on earth is wrong with that? You're so narrow minded you seem to think Objective C developers suddenly lose the ability to think "maybe adding some more comments here will help more" Or perhaps you think the same opportunities for considering how much commenting is useful as any programmer anywhere has simply don't exist for Objective C developers?
"Sorry, loose/weak typing is for scripting languages and amateurs" - and that statement sweeps in all those C "amateurs" programming OS kernel code then.
It rather seems you think there is a disruption in the space time continuum where "not my programming language" is on the cosmic hell side of the rift, and "my programming language" is on the side of sun and butterflies. Personally I think we live in a fairly normal world.
@dogged. Slagging off mature and capable languages is a child's game. Plus, of course, any language is just a tool, and if Turing complete and moderately efficient, can be used to build pretty much anything. The end user neither knows nor cares which language was used, so language choice is usually far less important than geeks like to think.
Objective C is quirky, I'll grant you that, but there are two well known sayings about development that illustrate the nature of the problem to be addressed:
1) software engineering is a constant struggle against naming
2) premature optimisation is the root of all evil
The first objective C addresses head on, with long descriptive selectors. In this age of auto-complete gone are the days of short cryptic names; and good riddance too.
The second objective-C addresses orthogonally (as indeed do all languages) by being now (through maturity and due to recent language additions) an excellent prototyping language. Loosely typed with dynamic selectors extensible at runtime, but where low level c is available if needed/warranted in a tight loop when it is time to optimise. Very very efficient for embedded devices due to the excellent use of ARC, it's evolved into being something slightly odd but remarkably effective and efficient for programming a mobile devices. More efficient than garbage collected languages or languages that compile to a CIL (though this last distinction becomes less and less significant and can bring other advantages). Structurally, in purist terms, odd and disjointed, but practically and pragmatically very mature and practical; quite possibly judged by most who use it and other languages, better than anything else out there for getting the job done (including SWIFT until it has more time to mature).
Seeing as last quarter, Apple made more in profit simply due to the fluctuations in the price of the dollar, than the entirety of Google's profit over the same quarter, and had an operating profit about eight times that of Samsung over the same quarter, and raked in greater revenues over a quarter than any company in history, it is pretty clear this is a company that can ride along with the view green renewables are cost effective, whether they believe the science or not. Whatever, it's a nice line for PR and politicians.
"Their normal tactic is to demand the right to be the one who writes the press release in which they trumpet how they've been "vindicated""
Only when up against a small player. When up against a company the size of Samsung, the dynamic is very different. Just as likely to be Samsung who requested the settlement be anonymous and Microsft agreed for getting the terms they wanted and avoiding further argument. We don't know because it's private and that's how they wanted it.
"So... no physical access required."
Sorry no banana. You've fallen for The Register's default setting of melodrama.
Read the next sentence after this one:
""we have seen one instance wherein a lure involving XAgent simply says 'tap here to install the application"
It says:
"That attack relied on Cupertino's ad hoc provisioning used by app developers to enable installation with a link."
So the attackers need to set you up in developer mode with an ad-hoc provisioning profile. They need access to your device to get the device ID and set-up a provisioning profile for the app.
1. Physical access is required (unless you go round emailing out your device ID, which you have no reason to do and, indeed, Apple have made it impossible to find by accident)
2. Provisioning profiles are for developers and are limited to 100 device ID's so, this is hardly a threat that can be scaled
3. Even if you write scripts to set up multiple provisioning profiles, you would need multiple Apple Developer accounts to do so. So it would cost a fair amount, again meaning it can't be scaled to a general purpose attack.
4. Assuming you have the scripts and the money to target many users, presumably as soon as compromised devices surface using your developer account Apple would disable it, so you would have to spend a lot of money and have sophisticated shadow credit card accounts
Conclusion. This is only relevant for professional targeted hacks where you can gain access to the device and only then iOS7. Yet again The Register's security reporting sensationalises instead of trying to present the truth.
So let's be clear about the magnitude of this threat. You have to have physical access to the device, and it has to be running a version of iOS before iOS 8 to be practically effective.
My assumption is already that a pro funded hacker with physical access to your device, is always, likely to be able to gain access to it. So for me, against that assumption, this registers a zero uptick on the personal threat-o-meter.
"The ability to 'hide' is something whose time is long past, and should be removed from all operating systems."
It is. The problem is computing devices are contain General Processing Units and software can be programmed to make a General Processing Unit do what the hell you want and your only protection against someone bad doing what the hell he wants is other software secure enough to defend the GPU and bug free enough it provides no means whereby other software can break it / trip it up. You can't have it all ways.
Think of it along the lines of this analogy. The system is like theatre where backstage is where system stuff that keeps the theatre running is done and where the offices which determine which shows can be shown is. Backstage is protected by security. Security is tasked with ensuring no bad actors can get backstage. But security is a bunch of people like any other. Now you can say, hold on backstage is protected by a security team, let's just lock that team in place and encase the whole of backstage, security team and all, in epoxy resin, so nothing can be changed and we can ensure there no bad actors can get in and change the show. Problem is (apart from the feasibility of this analogy as everyone would die - but assuming they wouldn't) then you can't ever change or upgrade how backstage works. So then you have no ability to upgrade your system or OS. So then maybe you say "well let's not encase all of backstage in resin" some of it should be modifiable. But hold on, then you have backstage system functions where security has to be tight and ensure no one can be replaced by a bad actor. So then you have the question "how much should be modifiable?" And when you really study that question you get to design a system pretty much as we already have them today. Flexibility wins over security, when for most people and most things they need to do, security is good enough and if it is found to be deficient you can patch it. If you have no flexibility, you have no flexibility and it cannot be changed (and also if there are any security bugs where bad actors can affect the "show" they also cannot be changed - a problem for some early devices on the Internet of things that have security flaws).
What I am actually pointing out is in the final analysis, security is a logical problem, you start this immensely flexible system running and you must provide no gap in operations where bad actors can slip in. No logical gap in a system running trillions of logical operations according to millions if not trillions of backstage security critical logical rules (it's not actually the number of operations but the logic of those rules; any human error can be fatal and there will ALWAYS be human error somewhere in the set. The question is if the bad actors can find and exploit those errors).
So the answer to your assertion is that, that is exactly what the systems builders are trying to do.
One note on the above, and one way in which what you say is right. I said above if you were to design a system from the ground up, you would get pretty much what we have. I said "pretty much" because actually historically computers and their general processing capability have evolved from systems that were completely and wholly permissive. Consequently these systems contain something that can be defined as "technical debt" to the permissive model. That is they contain a significant pile of tried and trusted logic from a time when system design didn't have the same approach to security as we have right now today. It's debatable however how big and how extensive this technical debt is. I doubt it's quite as great as many might suppose.
O2 have gone seriously off the boil. It's clear now they have been in wrap up for merger mode.
1. After getting a new business phone, and never within 2 days I was getting junk sales calls.
2. O2 themselves have been spamming me. They force you to have to phone and go through a ridiculously convoluted telephone unsubscribe process to stop receiving spam from them, then they ignore it anyway. I have now phoned twice to unsubscribe and just today received more spam, wholly unrelated to my business account, from them.
The Internet of things is becoming the Internet of surveillance and contextual services are turning into data rapists, always, always seeking either to find out more about you than they need to provide the service or than you are comfortable to give (if you are someone who understands the implications).
Where did it go? The same way as Jasper.
Notice The Reg lead on the confirmation of the Apple watch launch date. Humility abounds as always as El Reg towers. Tuck what for anyone with an ounce of humility, should amount to an admission of total analytical failure, behind a misleading headline.
Samsung have form when it comes to, ahem, flexed figures and always seem to have found clever ways to get around the SEC reporting rules (such as standing by and saying nothing when agencies they work with to drop exagaerated shipped numbers into conversation, which then get widely reported as happened on a huge scale when they first got in the tablet business).
Problem is when the business turns for the worse, and it's clear the bad figures are more than a blip, suddenly a bigger gap opens up than is easily explicable. Probably the figures haven't got suddenly quite so bad this reported year, it was probably already happening in the last reported year as well, but you can't sequentially hide the reality of double entry bookkeeping. The chickens have come home to roost.
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