Posts by Undergrid 12 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2011
In the middle of a pandemic when people have time on their hands, they are probably going to reach for full episodes of whatever they want to watch, not cut down 10 min max clips ment to be watched when commuting or grabbing a coffee at the local coffee shop.
Especialy when a lot of that content isn't designed for the format but are larger episodes cut into 10 minute chunks.
"... some key MP3 patents have been allowed to expire ..."
Uh, no it doesn't work like that. Even if the Fraunhofer Institute wanted to keep the technology under patent, there's a point where the law says that just not possible. Patents allow the holder to benefit from their work for a period of time (licence fees in this case) and when they expire anyone can use that innovation.
So is MP3 dead (like The Register's headline on a recent article claimed)? Hardly. Billions of devices, services, operating systems and applications out there support the format and now it's patent free (and thus license free) anyone can add it to their devices or software at no cost.
MP3 may not be the best audio codec (and I'm pretty sure no matter which one you claim is, someone is going to disagree with you) but it's good enough for many things and it isn't going away any time soon.
I still don't get why Apple Pay is such a big thing. I've been using Proximity payment for probably over a year, both with my (non-apple) smartphone and with bank cards, so it's not like Apple is doing anything new. And with the extremely short list of banks that are actually supporting this technology right now, there are probably going to be more iPhone users not able to use it in the UK than able to.
This isn't anything new, this is simply Apple once again taking an idea that already exists and implementing it in a way that is incompatible with pre-existing standards.
So wait... You have to pay them so you can host their hardware in your building and then they will turn around and (I assume) sell time on those systems (whether hosting or cloud compute) to others? In my experience it's the people that want hardware hosted somewhere that do the paying, not the other way around... Who's going to fall for this one?
If your producing a product which many people are going to end up using anyway, whether they like it or not (because lets face it they are a monopoly and most new PC's sold at retail come with the latest and "greatest" Windows), ignoring people requests for a choice is very bad form.
Considering the old start menu is still there and can be returned with a registry hack, just how difficult is it to give people choice between the two?
Their claim that its "perhaps not the best way to have a dialog leading to a new product" is all well and good, but its really not a new product and its an important one. Forcing a fundamental change on how you interact with it isn't going to do gown well, easily or quietly.
I'd agree, many Android tablet makers have fallen for the "If Apple can sell at that price, so can we" and produce devices at the same price or higher that arn't as "good" as the iPad resulting in people looking at them and going "If I'm going to spend that much, I might as well get an iPad".
Unless your device is definatly that mythical "iPad killer", your not going to get away with pricing it the same as the iPad. Simple.
The recent Touchpad firesale shows people are interested in alternatives if you get the price right, though I think HP went too low in that case. But produce a good quality tablet, and it doesn't have to be an iPad killer just something good, for between $300 and $400 and you could gain a large market share.
And Amazon might be poised to do just that..
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