
Hear Hear
Very well said, Michael C.
76 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Aug 2007
The millions and millions of people out there that this device is directly marketed at along with the numorous other millions that buy Apple products in general.
I.e. 99.9% of the population that will buy one completely oblivious to the rumours floating around on tech websites.
Consider yourself enlightened.
You're on an IT website that's being read principally by people working in the IT sector.
You don't seriously expect them to advocate 'choice', do you? Half the people here probably get kicks out of telling their staff what they can't do, rather than what they can, and there are few types of people on this earth more set in their ways than those in IT. 95% of the replies here are either for or against.
Just saying.
Google used to be the equivalent of freshly squeezed orange juice. Simple, clean and good for you.
Everyday, though, they're rapidly becoming Sunny Delight. Increasing crammed with obnoxious additives and other shit you don't need that isn't good for you.... presented in nice colourful packaging to appeal to the kids.
Maybe I'm just getting old but I do sometimes wish the young, social mediacentric web 2.0 whores being allowed to make decisions like this would just fuck off back to where they came from.
I came across this guy recently when a friend of mine was asking me for help finding the owner of a domain name that he wanted. Like this example, the name was a generic object and not a particular trademark.
One can argue that this chap has made a legitimate business from purchasing thousands of domain names containing everyday words that don't automatically fall under trademark or copyright... but if you really want to see into the mind of the man doing all this, go to NAmedia's homepage and read the guff on it.
Trust me, nothing will prepare you for the sheer amount of self-satisfied smug that's there.
1. Go to jailbreakme.com on your iPhone.
2. Jailbreak iPhone.
3. Load Cydia.
4. Install PDF Loading Warner.
Hey presto, jailbroken phone and a pop-up confirmation each time Safari tries to automatically open a PDF. Takes 3 minutes instead of 30, no need to reset, no need to restore, no need to re-sync. Job done.
Does a better job than 4.0.2.
You not noticed that for the last couple of years both the Reg and Inq have largely obtained page impressions by pitting large portions of their customer base against each other?
Facts? Detail? Good Lord, I mainly visit these sites now to skim a vitriolic article or two and spent the remaining 95% of the time with a bowl of popcorn reading the resulting slagging mach that occurs in the comments section.
... because FIrefox's built in password manager is laughably insecure if anyone gets direct access to your machine. The bookmark sync facility is great though and I swear by it.
For passwords, LastPass is my choice. Works across ALL browsers, doesn't store anything locally and works on mobiles without needing any app to be installed. It's very clever.
Oh, unless you're running one of those cutting edge broswers like Opera that still hasn't got the ability to support even rudimentary add-ons.
"Why don't you fanbois get it? People don't dislike the iPad because Apple made it, they dislike it because it serves no real use for which one would be willing to pay the asking price."
See, if something was of no real use to me I'd ignore it. If it was of use to me, but too expensive to justify, I'd ignore it or look for a cheaper alternative. I would not be provoked into a "dislike" for it.
Unless, of course, I secretly wanted one but couldn't bring myself to justify the price and ended up all bitter and resentful of my stingy, sensible outlook on life, repeatedly telling myself it's just an expensive gimmick and a waste of money. All the people in those photos holding their new toys looking fabulously thrilled and delighted? Yeah, that would piss me RIGHT OFF.
Christmas must be fun in your house, mate.
Android, eh? Nerds put up with countless near-experimental iterations of it and wax on / wax off about how it's going to change the world, the public at large generally pick something that looks passable and familiar, and those that specifically want a half decent, dependable user experience get an iPhone.
Funny that. It's ALMOST like the Linux / Windows / OSX debate isn't it?
You, sir, have hit upon the one thing that has seemingly crept up and bitten Google on the arse without the great majority of people realising how all these dynamically created spam pages are hitting the top 10 search results. Google is feeding our search parameters to other websites to process and feedback as they wish.
I only noticed this about a month ago when I hit a page that had absolutely no relevance whatsoever to my search but specifically stated "you came here looking for <search criteria>".
You'd think that a search "intelligence" such as Google wouldn't need to rely on third parties providing the relevant pages, wouldn't you?
If SSL gets rid of that then I'm all for it.
My thoughts on your example website:
* It requires a proprietary plug-in,
* It's visibility cannot be controlled by colour schemes,
* It's incompatible with screen readers,
* Text cannot be copied,
* Links cannot be copied,
* It takes 15 seconds to load,
* High bandwidth and memory requirements,
* It cannot be transcoded for low bandwith proxies,
* It resizes at about 2fps,
* It's slow,
* It's clunky.
* It's SHIT.
If that's your definition of the future of website design then I politely suggest that a) you seek immediate help and b) Flash cannot possibly be killed off quickly enough.
They must be out of their minds.
I'm with Vodafone, presently sat in a small building on the outskirts of Westbury surrounded by fields and sheep, and am getting 5 bars of 3G.
Where I live in central London I'm lucky to get 2 bars, and my iPhone spends most of its time trying to work out whether it should use 3G, EDGE or GRPS. Walking 20m down the street can make the difference between full strength 3G and no signal at all. It's absolutely appalling and when I do get 5 bars it's like Christmas has come early.
Why on earth would I want to pay £100 extra and then £20/month for such a patchy service on top of my iPhone contract? Let's face it, most people buying these already have an iPhone and I'll guarantee that there's bugger all way to tether it.
What it means is that, technically, you'd have to buy them over 3 days instead of all at once.
Although to be honest in this case that's probably a good thing. You could use the extra time to contemplate why the f**k you're spending over $2,500 on five identical devices for your entire family.
It seems there are, understandably, two divided camps on just how good this first released is.
One the one hand you have a browser with blazing speed and some nice, useful functions that make intensive browsing significantly more pleasant. The speed alone makes it worth having purely as a backup for times of weak signal strength and the bookmark syncing is a god send.
On the other hand, though, the aethetics and ease of use just clearly aren't there yet. Scrolling isn't as smooth, it certainly isn't as sensitive to the actual direction your sliding in and when in doubt tries to lock to the side of a frame yet continue scrolling on the remaining axis.
However, from mine and a few friend's opinions, there are two major dealbreakers. Font and image rendering when zoomed out is appalling and a pinch merely results in a toggle between fully IN and fully OUT. You can't even pinch in a little bit just to see the read the part of the page you really want to zoom in on. This isn't a pleasant, sensitive or intuitive experience at all and in all but the most rare of cases it's this experience that most iPhone users will miss the most. In effect, it's little different to Opera Mini on any other phone which is precisely why Safari is so popular.
Aside from pure speed, everything that makes Safari so good for day to day use on the iPhone is everything that's missing from Opera Mini. Having a bunch of great features and awesome rendering speed is all well and nice in certain circumstances but if actually finding and reading what you want on a web page is in any way less easy or intuitive then it's always going to be in second place.
I sincerely hope they improve upon it, and I'm sure they will. It's a superb first attempt, it's a reasonable alternative and for that alone it should be priased... but there's a little way to go yet before it replaces Safari as my browser of choice.
I couldn't agree more. It's blindingly fast and a valiant first attempt.
It's not all sweet, though. Font rendering when minimised is unreadable (check out BBC News) and pinch just toggles you between max zoomed in and max zoomed out with no points inbetween. On Safari you can pinch just a little bit to see what part of the page you really want to zoom in on, whereas on Opera you have to zoom right in then scroll around a giant page.
Oh, and double tapping to zoom to the frame / column is one of THE best things about Safari, and I've already noticed the lack of scripting (The Register's headline carousel for example).
Like I said, though, it's a bloody impressive first attempt and I'll definitely be keeping it installed for when I've got crap signal strength cos it's astonishingly fast. In terms of usability, though, it's no threat to Safari just yet. As The Hawk says, it's literally a first attempt conversion that doesn't yet take advantage of the iPhone's abilities.
Fingers crossed they keep on making it better.
That's an interesting point.
I'm a long standing Apple hater who has taken more of an aversion to the smug, arty / designer / thick idiots brandishing Apple gear with an air of superiority rather than Apple themselves. They are, after all, just trying to flog their gear in whatever way works, and there's no denying, it DOES work.
However, with the recent Google privacy antics and a slow but subtley increasing level of concern with Google having so many fingers in so many pies, I've suddenly started to realise that I prefer Apple's transparency on certain things.
Yes, they charge more. Yes, they market themselves as a lifestyle choice. Yes, they lock you in to their way of doing things. Frankly, though, a meagre amount of research and you can't help but conclude that all Apple want to do is bend you over, pull your pants down and take you up the wrongun whilst rifling through your wallet.
To be honest I'm more up for that approach than Google's holier than though approach to seeping their tendrils into just about every aspect of the modern internet and the absorbtion of all your data. Even the Borg would shit themselves looking at the way Google is operating at the moment, and the amazing thing is that so people seem to see it.
Trust me, all you Android advocates are going to realise sooner or later just what you're contributing to. At least Apple are quite open about what they want from you and how much it's going to cost. You've no idea how much you're all about to pay for trusting Google.
One less thing for the angry, nerdy mob to complain about. Outside of the pimply tech community and the media few people give a shit.
But they will give a shit when their already crap battery life halves and they have to spend most of their time managing some kind of task manager to figure out why.
Oh but Android does it! Well, the only people I've met who own Android devices are a) nerds, b) the same kind of twats who'll battle against the forces of hell with Ubuntu for six weeks to bring it up to the functional level of Windows XP and c) always moaning about their shit battery life.
Thanks guys, really needed this. Why not do us all a favour and just f**k off back to your tweak town alcove. The rest of us are quite happy with what we've got.
He doesn't mention he's running the latest beta. He doesn't mention he's running it on his production machine. He doesn't claim to work in a production environment and he doesn't claim to work in IT. In fact your comment is about as off the mark as it's possible to be.
What he does claim is that running an update on Ubuntu bricked his machine and I, for one, acknowledge this as do Cannonical themselves. Most people would agree that "human beings" shouldn't have to install their OS on a spare drive inside a virtual machine on a separate box because it can't be trusted.
Free advice: Next time you want to make a comment, word it in such a way that doesn't make you come across as a 17 year old idiot with no grip on reality. You're singlehandedly responsible for all of the Ian McNees around the world just having their CVs thrown in the bin.
I agree they shouldn't have allowed these apps to start with, but stop for a moment and imagine a world in which Microsoft, for example, were able to exercise this level of control over the applications published for Windows.
Apps that refuse to run correctly unless you're an admin = barred.
Apps that hardwire Docs & Settings locations instead of using system variables = barred.
Apps that use custom GUIs that don't render correcly under Terminal Services = barred.
Apps that don't correctly support multi-user environments = barred.
Apps that update system DLLs instead of using local versions = barred.
Apps that use undocumented APIs = barred.
Doesn't sound so bad NOW, does it?
Nobody cares about flashy adverts, few people care about flash games and lots of people get thoroughly annoyed with slow, clunky and monstrous flash-only websites that take 4 minutes to load.
There's only one real practical use of Flash that your average user truely cares about and that's video. Sadly all you have to do is look at the Vorbis / H.264 arguments going on at the moment to realise that we're still a long, long way off from defining a standard for HTML5, if there ever is one.
Firefox and Opera can't support H.264 due to licensing costs unless it's given away. Apple will never support OGG due to patent uncertainty and the amount they've already invested in H.264 for Quicktime and the iPhone. Meanwhile Google sits on the fence supporting both, rubbing their hands together knowing damn well that whatever they switch YouTube over to will most likely become the defacto standard overnight., and it's not going to be Vorbis.
It's going to be H.264, which keeps Apple happy and by extension will have to be omitted from all open-source browsers derived from Chromium, making them effectively useless and unable to compete whilst still portraying Google as being all nice and open-sourcey.
Just playing devil's advocate for a moment here... anyone remember a time before Flash when for video / streaming media we were having to rely on Windows Media Player, Quicktime and (HORROR) RealPlayer? Software that did nothing except largely fail to work correctly through corporate firewalls, rape your system and continuously battle over file extensions?
Slag Flash off all you like. It's far from perfect but what it did do was more or less standardise embedded video playback for the web and I for one am thankful for at least that.
So many blinkered people here judging a book by its cover, and usually I'd be the first to slag off Apple. This is the hardware, people, most likely announced prematurely cos of a) hp & ms and b) rumours.
If you lot can't see this as a huge, hardware precursor to a iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch v4 OS coming imminently then, I'm sorry, you all need your heads examined.
Without knowing much about Android... if multitouch is hacked into the OS won't all the apps for the phone need to be rewritten to support it correctly?
And if so, isn't this just going to result in patchy multitouch support, repeated pinching trying to figure out IF an app uses it, hours of searching to find one that does and then inevitable frustration with an inconsistent interface?
Sorry, the phrase "all or nothing" springs to mind.
Many people here seem to be assuming that Google is one gigantic enormous company and operates a fully managed, top-down network infrastructure. Over a decade they've grown, they've expanded, they've moved into other countries and cultures and they've aquired many other companies. They're absolutely massive.
To talk of "Google" as a single entity in an operational sense is probably being overly flattering given that behind they scenes I suspect their desktop and domain infrastructure is probably just as bollocks any other company that's endured a lot of aquisitions. They simply must have, by their very size and nature, many more possible attack vectors than smaller companies.
This is being spun into the most awesome and innovative hacking attempt of all time to disguise the fact that they've simply been caught with their pants down running out of date or unpatched software. They're one of THIRTY, twenty-nine of which are keeping their mouths shut and taking it on the chin.
That example is patently ridulous. There's a 'slight' difference between violently attacking someone scarring them for life and having a rummage around somewhere you're not supposed to be. It's precisely this kind of paranoid, overdramatised wailing that's dragged this nonsense on for so long.
If he took something that didn't belong to him, that's theft. Breaking and entering when there's literally nothinig to stop him walking in, that's called trespassing. None of which warrants this kind of attention.
Extradition? Terrorism? Everyone promoting his extradition needs to get their f**king heads read and get some kind of realistic perspective on what actually happened here.
Hidden containers in Truecrypt volumes are placed in amongst random data and have no signatures that can be used to prove their existence. Thus you can prove there is one big encrypted volume on a hard drive but you can't prove there's another one inside it.
In this case Plausible Deniability is when "the very existence of an encrypted file or message is deniable in the sense that an adversary cannot prove that an encrypted message exists". - WikiP
The fact you're opening the top level archive that has a few photos of your cat is enough to demonstrate co-operation. Any suspicions of further hidden volumes cannot be categorically proven. This bloke just wasn't encrypting his files properly.
I recently bought two Samsung NC10s for myself and the missus, and put Win 7 on mine and installed XP Pro on hers.
Booting side by side, clean installs with appropriate drivers and tools, by the time her XP was at the desktop and online I had to wait another 10 seconds for my desktop and another 10 seconds for the WiFi to connect. Win 7 was using 450+ MB of the 1GB of RAM whilst XP was using about 150MB, and that was with as many Win 7 services disabled as I could get away with. A rough estimate put the battery life about 15% shorter running Win 7 which on these babies is about an hour less . I wasn't impressed.
Now I absolutely love Win 7 and really wanted it on my notebook but I'm sorry, XP blows it out of the water on netbooks in all the ways that matter: booting, speed, responsiveness, memory utilisation and most importantly, battery life. All said and done there's bugger all you'll be doing on a netbook that seriously justifies putting Win 7 on it.
They now both run XP.
You're spot on there, mate. Doing anything other than listening to music on an iPhone / Touch kills the battery in record time and then gives you 6-7 pop up warnings each and every time the battery's capacity fluctuates past 20%. The DS meanwhile seems to run forever...
And playing any moderately touchy game on the iPhone just ends up rubbing the oils out of the end of your fingertips making the screen increasingly difficult to slide your fingers across... so then you have to start alternating fingers. And unless you've got fingers the size of toothpicks there's just no way you can get close to the fidelity of a stylus for accurate gaming.
No, the only thing Nintendo should be worried about is the ridiculous price of their DS games cos in that respect the app store blows them out of the water. It still amazes me that a 32MB DS game can go for £25 when collosal PC titles encompassing massive development costs go for £35.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. For Chrome to get anywhere it's going to have to support extensions sooner or later. However...
Currently there's nothing to stop you bypassing Google's ads completely on GMail using either POP3 or IMAP access from your favourite mail client. Picasa web albums and Google video can easily be embedded in other pages, again bypassing all of Google's advertising.
The trick is to keep the vocal minority happy by giving them the means to bypass the advertising if they have the inclination to do so, whilst the average computer user doesn't know any different and provides the bulk of Google's revenue. It's a very clever strategy and keeps everyone happy - providing 90% of the population doesn't go installing Adblock anytime soon.
As mentioned above, this is exactly what Apple did with the Bluetooth chipset in the 2nd gen Touch. Not only had the chip been there all along and been effectively bought and paid for already, you then had to PAY for the software upgrade to turn it on. Then you discover it only connects to Bluetooth headphones.
So expect to pay a tenner for the iPhone v4 software to enable something you already have but only let's you listen to the radio stations Apple want you to.
Fools.