Posts by cb7 282 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2017
It would be unprofessional if El Reg didn't give Apple the chance to present their side of the story.
The fact that Apple refuse to engage says more about their snooty attitude than anything else.
Yes, they will and do lose some repeat business once people realise how they get ripped off, but, Apple doesn't really care about those as long as fanbois/sheeple keep buying iTings.
Meanwhile over here in Blighty, in 2020, many industrial parks in the capital city of London are lucky if they can get anything faster than 6Mbps downstream and crucially for remote workers a suffocating upstream crawl of 0.7Mbps. All courtesy of copper ADSL.
Broadband running over 4G isn't much better. 20Mbps down and 10Mbps+ upstream when you first boot up the modem/router. Except it rapidly slows down til it can barely muster 1Mbps in either direction.
Some observations:
1. Usually, the chips with fewer cores clock faster. Here the opposite appears to be true. I suppose it's a way to encourage people to buy the higher end chip. Unless the lower end models can be overclocked easily. Time will tell.
2. No Ryzen 3 chips were announced. I'm hoping they'll come sooner rather than later. Not everyone can afford a $299 CPU. The trouble is, most gamers don't need more than 4-6 cores, so releasing Zen 3 Ryzen 3's early will no doubt hurt higher margin Ryzen 5 sales.
3. It would appear AMD has finally won the single core crown from Intel (at least according to the announced single core Cinebench score). Well done AMD.
The Cinebench score seems remarkable given that Zen 3 tops out at 4.9GHz vs Intel's 5.3GHz.
However, Intel's hitting those frequencies at 14nm whilst AMD's now on 7nm. I wonder what's stopping AMD clocking faster? And when (if?) Intel hits 7nm, there's a good chance they'll be on top again.
Nevertheless, it's a great time to be building some kick ass machines :-)
If the single core score of 1583 is comparable, it beats Intel's fastest 11th Gen i7-1165G7 which has a mahoosive 12MB of L3 cache, turbos up to 4.70GHz and pumps out up to 28W and achieves only 1474.
Apple clearly had a lot of faith in their ability to execute to go down this road.
And the best single core desktop chip only manages a score of 2000 currently, so it's not difficult to imagine Apple wiping the floor with Intel in the desktop space either.
I'm no Apple fanboi. I find the whole Apple ecosystem a bit stifling, claustrophobic and grossly overpriced. I won't even mention upgradability/repairability, so this is still unlikely to make me want to switch platforms.
"Apple, he said, doesn't want a secondary market for its devices because it's something the tech goliath can't control."
Oh boo the hoo. There's a lot of shit in this world Apple can't control. Tough titty. Get over it Apple.
Just because they made it, it doesn't mean it's still theirs once they've sold it. Jeez. Let people do wtf they want to do with their shit and stop meddling. Control freaks.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. The future is lower latency RAM. And stacked behind the CPU to minimise distance related latency.
Then there's no need for caches, prefetching, speculative execution, branch prediction etc. Just simple high speed in/out processing.
Assuming we're not all using quantum computers by then.
Not sure I can recommend Ionos. Used them temporarily a few months back and all users email addresses seem to have been leaked and the amount of spam they receive has gone through the roof.
When I tried to raise the issue with Ionos support twice, they cut me off straightaway.
I've got a good mind to report them to the ICO.
Only 2%?
Why only 2%?
Anyway, something's fishy. I don't get how the average pay packet for nearly 4,500 staff supporting UK operations can be £234,000.
Allowing Google to pay only 2.73% tax on £1.6Bn revenue.
Source: https://www.accountancydaily.co/google-revenue-hits-ps16bn-pays-only-ps44m-corporation-tax
Apple are saying that 30% cut enables them to maintain the checks etc that ensure iOS apps are free of malware etc. Whilst it also helps create additional profit, they carefully don't mention that.
Epic want an open structure akin to what has existed (and still does) in the PC/Windows world, although ironically Microsoft are trying to move to the App Store model.
Now we all know Windows isn't as secure as iOS but I can see how allowing a free for all on iOS could lead to "unsafe" apps.
Either Epic will manage to secure a lower Apple cut, or they'll have to suffer a humiliating defeat and carry on as they were (assuming they want to stay on iOS). I really can't see Apple agreeing to an open App Store. Though if they get forced into it, I'll eat my hat.
Face unlock on the S10e is so rubbish, my son, less than half my age, managed to unlock my phone by looking at it. And that's with slower "more accuracy" turned on.
I've had to go back to fingerprint unlock.
Oh & I hate the new on screen "virtual buttons". Especially when they don't stay on screen despite what the settings say.
"You can't own the entire thing from end to end, or else price fixing would/could be used to drive competitors out of the market."
You don't need end to end control to drive competitors out of the market. Amazon's already doing that with it's global volume buying power and own distribution network.
For an example just look at the prices of popular SSDs on independent e-tailers like ebuyer.com. They're having to price match Amazon every single day and still can't compete once delivery costs are added in.
So despite having invested to create a much better website, the only way they'll survive is through undying customer loyalty.
A large conglomerate I used to work for used Oracle for its finance systems. Oracle pushed to move everything off premises and into the cloud.
All whilst pushing its next gen all singing, all dancing "drill all the way down into invoice line items from a single figure on the P&L" wizardry.
Except even their fastest mega server couldn't really handle the volume of data. I left the company at that point.
After buying another large conglomerate that uses SAP, last I heard was, they were going to migrate the whole lot to SAP.
Either it'll all go Tits-Up, or they'll still be trying to merge the two in 5 years time, or they'll give up and will still be running the two side by side 10 years from now.
You heard it here first.
"You want redundancy? Go sign up for 2 ISPs and use one as a backup."
How many ISPs have their own core network? Heck, how many actually have their own edge network? Most of them simply rent the equipment off the incumbent and push the bill out to the customer.
And let's not forget, most of the access network is owned by only eg 2 companies here in the UK.
Why don't Google and Apple co-operate and develop the app and roll it out as a critical public safety update across the globe?
They could have done this months ago.
It would save countries across he whole world duplicating effort and going down rabbit holes. And think of the number of lives it could have saved / would save.
And the app would also work once international travel resumes.
They routinely push out updates that help them maintain their not so insignificant income streams.
They have the technological prowess to make it happen.
About time they did something that gives something meaningful back to the public.
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