Re: London not on the list
It's not about feelings. London isn't on the list for the same reason 80/20 fibre availability in London is inversely related to the number of legacy leased lines.
It's about money.
967 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2006
Imagine someone using it with a bluetooth mouse, keyboard and headset, the screen mirrored to a 100" TV via AppleTV, Dropbox, iCloud or GDrive taking the place of a USB thumb drive etc.
It's the same thing they've always done, dropping technologies that are on their way out even though they're still in use, if you can live in that wireless future now then its perfect, if you can't then it's not like it's the only laptop they make is it.
Apple cars seem more likely to hit the streets than apple eyewear, automobiles are in the process of switching to fully automated items, the tech is ready and there's plenty of places to unobtrusively hide it in a car.
AR tech on the other hand currently dominates prototype headgear and needs another 5 years or so of miniturisation before anyone can make a pair of AR sunglasses indistinguishable from ordinary sunglasses, that's when Apple will release a product*, and to be ready for that moment of course they're going to have to test ideas and concepts with the bulky tech of today.
*Actually they tend to go ahead just a shade before the tech is ready, to the point that generally people agree that the second revision of a product is the one that fully realised the potential, eg: iPhone3G, iPad2, Macbook Air, Apple Watch II.
But those phones and watches are going to sell like fucking hot cakes.
My personal opinion: the side on view of the 6 reminds me of surface tension, I don't like the look of the bands on the back but I think the attention to detail is going to be way beyond what most people have experienced, that may seem irrelevant but at this point smartphones all do pretty much everything, the subjective quality of an item that you're literally going to carry around for the next couple of years should be taken into account. The watch seems like a good match for the 5" phone, less so with the smaller phones.
I like some of the watch combinations, I expect most people will like some of them, for a new untested product line there's a staggering degree of customisation. Like the phones, this looks like a device you can't properly appraise until you've held it in your hands. A lot of features are designed to work between watches, I'm pretty sure I can't afford one for the wife as well, and certainly not the tiny gold one she would pick.
OK, so assume you've brute forced the targets username and password, log into iCloud.com and... there's no access to the photo stream or device filesystems.
No problem!, just set up one of your devices to sync with their account details, and voila! a flurry of modal alerts are sent to every device attached to your targets account warning them that a new device has just signed in to their account. All these celebs ignored those alerts?
If OFCOM are accepting the networks 'disconnected mid call' statistics rather than 'unable to call' there's a heavy incentive for the networks to only connect the calls that they're almost certain will complete and basically ignore any new call attempts when the network is reasonably busy, which anecdotally is pretty much what I've been noticing.
BTW, if anyone fancies a break with no distracting internet or phone calls, I can recommend Sandy Bay holiday park in Devon, it's actually quite liberating after you resign yourself to being off the grid.
I once managed to lock the keys in my TR7 at a petrol station, I asked the bloke filling his van next to me if I could try his keys, he passed them to me with a 'you'll be lucky mate' look, I didn't need luck, I just needed something vaguely key shaped.
Still locked it every time I parked though.
With automated turrets on top just in case any terrorists try to damage them, also the super safe land inside would be the ideal spot to build thousands of megablocks to house the hundreds of millions of americans who are going to lose their jobs and homes to automation over the next few decades.
Obviously with such a high population the Justice system would need to be streamlined, maybe merging policing with the judiciary?
Well, for starters, it does all the stuff they claim it doesn't do, local or network backups, versioning, restore everything including the OS, restore to a new disk or mac.
It's not pretty under the hood though, and in my experience, less reliable than say, superduper or carbon copy cloner or Chronosync or Rsync. It is effortless though.
The sim ejector paper clip things they've been supplying for many years are made of the stuff, it doesn't change.
It does bend though, they're ridiculously stiff for the size and weight and feel like they would shatter if over stressed but the one on my keychain is now kinked.
By throwing a lot of resources at Tor they can correlate enough traffic to make some sense of it, but the more people use Tor the less effective and more expensive those resources become.
Whether Tor would even work if everyone was using it is questionable, but assuming it would, making sense of the traffic at that point would become impossible.
This keeps being mentioned like its a bad thing, how about owning property abroad? Not the same? Money then, should the US be able to annex assets abroad without regard?
This is a land grab, they're granting themselves access to personal data wherever it is, with little to no oversight and retroactively applying US laws to it.
The old parabolic mirrors making something appear to float in the air thing, given the limitations of this design, tiny rendering area compared to the size of the device and limited viewing angles, this looks more like it would be used for an indicator or control interface than a main display.
Repro images at >2400dpi, but what they're imaging is a load of dots at ~200 lpi, which bearing in mind the added issue of having to image each colour at a different angle, and the wanky cmyk colourspace is on par with or inferior to a 200ppi display if you're comparing images.
Solid colour text can go way higher, to whatever the paper can support, because you can use the whole 2400dpi to draw the outline, but if it's tinted then you're back to rendering dots at 200lpi again.
Design patent, did you miss that? do you know what it means?
Design patents cover the details of designs, they're intended to prevent someone else copying the trade dress of your product and packaging to cash in on your goodwill, R&D, Marketing etc.
Design Patents are why you can't sell overly similar wheel designs to those made by Ford etc, it's not because they've patented the wheel*.
Apple sued Samsung because they ripped off their trade dress:
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--BqnlKS1Z--/18kyi1lip9a6pjpg.jpg
Using the same corner radius was just an element in extensive list of infringements.
*YFR
I've often remarked to my kids that one thing that's changed since the internet is stupid arguments, I'd explain that when I was their age it was common for people to hold wildly opposing views about a subject and argue the point relentlessly whenever they met because checking a fact involved bumping into an expert / authority on the subject or going to a library to research it yourself (which was never going to happen).
These days of course checking a fact is easy, pull out your nearest connected device and there it is, argument over.
And yet, here's a comments section of an IT website, filled with presumably computer literate people, a number of which apparently still believe Apple sued Samsung over 'rounded corners'. wtf.
Is a debug log, the things you are thinking about right now have already happened, you are finished with each thought before you become aware of it.
Human Intelligence isn't special, it's certainly not magic, it's just a shitload of algorithms running in parallel with a human readable log. The current AI efforts aren't failing because they haven't replicated 10^10 neurones, that's like saying that transistors can't replicate the valve based monsters that preceded them, they're failing because the mix of algorithms is really fucking complicated.
We're taking tiny steps towards AI and it can seem like it's never going to happen, but (prediction), it will occur suddenly, in a single great jump from barely started, simply because someone changed a parameter or made a minor tweak to an algorithm. Machine AI is inevitable.
/side note: In my youth I worked in print, I remember a manual we printed for a 'Red Baron' WWI flying ace game which contained background info on the main protagonists, the aformentioned Red Baron, an English chap I can't recall, and an American, Eddie Rickenbacker, born 1890, died 1973. Eddie was born before powered flight and died after man had stepped on the moon. I was blown away by the progress this man had seen in his lifetime, and for a long time it's seemed like it was an aberration, fuelled by three wars, two hot and one cold, but I'm starting to think the changes wrought in my lifetime will blow away a mere trip to the moon.
A bunch of different religions all staking their claim on a new world sounds like a recipe for disaster, but then I remembered that this endevour is supposed to be funded by reality TV sales, so they're definetly going to want to stack the deck for drama.
Don't be silly, you don't just divide the £200m total cost of the scheme by the number of iPads and say woah, those are pricey.
I'd guess somewhere around 10m for Apple, 7m for accessories and insurance, 15m for 3 years of mobile for 15k plods, say 6m for app development and maintenance, another 7m for the datacenter and backend, 1m for training, the remainder spent on studies, consultants, project management, data analysis, paperwork, boats etc.
I feel a tiny bit sorry for him, he had a great thing going with Fake Steve, then he gets a call from a trusted source at Apple saying basically, let it go, Steve's dying.
So he does, and fuck me, Steve doesn't seem to be dying at all, and no mention of any illness. it must have seemed like they played him exactly the way his own Fake Steve would have done, so he becomes bitter and adopts a hateful relationship with Apple that sours his writing and puts off a lot of Apple happy Fake Steve fans.
Years later Steve dies and it turns out they wern't lying, it's just pretty hard to predict exactly when someone's going to kick the bucket because Doctors tend to er on the pessimistic side. Dan seems to have mellowed since, I'm hopeful we might see a return to the wit and insight from those old days again.
I have come to the conclusion that Total Surveilence only really becomes a problem for democracies when it's abused by those in power, and that being the case, the greatest threat to our society would be from corrupt politicians, therefore it stands to reason that the most scrutinised UK citizens should be those that are in government or that aspire to it.
Due to the potential danger these individuals represent, their every activity and thought should be analysed and recorded for the public record, they should be held to far higher standards of integrity and honesty than the general public and any evidence of corruption or abuse should be punished severely.
Or we could scrap the whole thing, I'm easy either way.
1) Make existing shops uneconmical to run by undercutting them with an online shop that runs at breakeven, or a small loss.
2) Somehow manage to patent distribution warehouses.
3) When all the shops are closed, add a 'showroom' and 'collections desk' to each local warehouse, which by now are the size of a small moon.
4) Somehow manage to patent the shop.
5) Jack up prices 100% a year.
6) Rebranding, new tagline: 'where else can you go' with new line art logo: 'JB gives you the finger'.
Syncs across iCloud, I can load tabs from my phone, desktop and laptop onto my iPad here in the freezing garden.
What I'd like to see: built in jquery style functionality so we're not loading the same libraries for every bloody site, and some sort of universal roadmap for javascript, someone steering that boat.
Whether this was a shrewd move to expose WP to an indifferent market or a big fucking money pit will only be revealed when they raise the prices back up and those punters stick around or jump ship to another cheap phone.
In the meantime its just buying customers.
EDIT, lol I'm back on the naughty list.