Re: Biggest change
Did you miss the word "default"?
Posts by Steve Todd
2645 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007
Page:
New iPhones: C certainly DOESN'T stand for 'Cheap'
Seagate parades spinning skinny model to oust flash from fondleslabs... almost
Tuesday 10th September 2013 16:59 GMT
Re: One really has to ask
On the contrary, you CAN access your whole music collection (and more), plus your whole video collection and anything else that you can think of PROVIDING you are in range of a decent Internet connection. If you are out of range you are limited to the size of your local cache. This is plenty good enough for the vast number of tablet users.
Tuesday 10th September 2013 12:40 GMT
Re: One really has to ask
Welcome to the forums Mr Edge Case. You can always find someone who needs a particular set of technology (and even campers tend to get close enough to civilisation to download enough media to keep them going in the wilds for a few more days). Does that make you a big enough market for such a device to be built? I suggest not.
Tuesday 10th September 2013 11:02 GMT
Re: One really has to ask
Firstly anyone with any smarts transcodes the DVD rip to h.264 anyway (better quality and less storage space needed than MPEG2), so your DVD quality movie space requirement drops to a little over 1GB per movie, call it 20GB tops for 14 movies. Secondly unless you are in the back end of beyond you can keep at least some of those files on the cloud.
As for HD, I find a 4GB 720P rez file is just fine, and again you can keep those on the cloud also.
So when I say NEED, I mean in what circumstance does a 32GB tablet not have enough storage capacity to hold the media that they cannot access other than locally.
Tuesday 10th September 2013 10:08 GMT
Re: One really has to ask
But how many people NEED 500GB of storage in a tablet? I'm quite happy with a 250GB laptop for serious mobile use, and that includes virtual machines. For tablets two things are happening. (1) Flash memory is getting cheaper (I can see entry-level memory moving to 32GB for example) and (2) as the Internet becomes more pervasive people are storing their stuff for mobile use on it.
BING! Microsoft plants Xbox Music flagpoles in Android and iOS
Tuesday 10th September 2013 14:56 GMT
Re: whose lie?
You've missed the point completely there. The majority of sales are to corporates, who immediately rip off Windows 8 and replace is with Windows 7 (or even XP in some shops), so Microsoft get to double count their number of sales.
Secondly many home users are buying Tablets rather than Windows PCs, if you include those in the sales numbers then Windows has a less than 50% market share.
Tuesday 10th September 2013 10:15 GMT
More to do with the way the companies do business
Google makes money advertising to you. Finding out more about you to more directly target advertising is valuable to them. Android helps, but so do apps on other platforms.
Microsoft make money selling software and/or subscriptions. Making at least limited applications available on other platforms helps push the subscriptions.
Apple make money selling hardware. iTunes etc are minor sidelines designed to make the hardware more attractive to buyers. It's unlikely they'll provide any of these services on other platforms unless it helps them shift more hardware (for example iTunes on Windows let them sell iPod hardware to Windows users).
Google Nexus 7 2013: Fondledroids, THE 7-inch slab has arrived
Monday 9th September 2013 17:58 GMT
Re: Razor thin margins - @AC
You DO realise that manufacturers make parts to varying price and quality standards don't you? Parts that fail one level of quality testing get bumped down to the next level and so on. Your assertion that they are all the same is far from true, and that's even before you start to assemble them into a completed whole.
Monday 9th September 2013 12:31 GMT
Re: @ Steve Todd
For a limited value of "released" that is. It isn't an automatic OTA upgrade yet, and I have heard of people who still have problems so it isn't a 100% fix.
I'd have expected that the issues be mentioned, even in the negative (like the author saying that he'd tried to provoke them and had seen no sign of these problems). Again, rose tinted glasses.
iPad 5, Retina iPad mini with 'A7X' chip home for the holidays – report
Friday 6th September 2013 15:52 GMT
Re: Just buy the cheap iPad2 16GB....... all very dull new products
First question: who else in the tech industry is doing more than just iterating (bigger and smaller versions are just iterations BTW).
Second question: how long do you think it was between major new products when SJ was in charge? (Hint: iPhone 1 -> iPad 1 was about 3 years)
Third question: have you actually tried an iPad 1 and iPad 4 side by side? The 4 is a much more usable product (which is what you'd expect any tech company worth their salt to have done). You don't need to convince the owners of the last version to upgrade, you need to convince (1) new users that this is a better product than the competition and (2) owners of iPad 3's and older that the upgrade is worthwhile. We won't know how well they've done here until they've actually released it.
Friday 6th September 2013 10:17 GMT
Re: Just buy the cheap iPad2 16GB....... all very dull new products
Again, you know for a fact that all these devices have is minor spec bumps before they've even been announced? What, for example, if they include the same fingerprint recognition hardware rumoured for the iPhone 5S also? How about making them much lighter and thinner? We don't yet know if they will include some feature or features that will make them an attractive upgrade to existing users.
Smartwatch craze is all just ONE OFF THE WRIST
Friday 6th September 2013 12:31 GMT
Re: The big thing about digital watches - @Cliff
I think that says rather more about how cheap the watch was. Even cheap quartz crystals are easily accurate to 50ppm (parts per million), or about 4.5 seconds per day. A Swiss quartz, to be certified as a chronograph, needs to get down to a little over 2 seconds per month.
Friday 6th September 2013 11:13 GMT
Re: I remember watches - @Denarius
Your point was? I've got a modern digital/analog hybrid that is powered by sunlight, glows in the dark, is waterproof to 100 meters and resets its self from the European radio atomic time base overnight. It's over 5 years old and has never needed servicing.
People get what they are prepared to pay for, not what technology is able to provide.
Friday 6th September 2013 11:07 GMT
The big thing about digital watches
was that they were MUCH more accurate than the mechanical devices of the time. You'd be lucky (or rich) if your mechanical watch kept time to better than a minute per day. They were crap to read and quartz analog, when it became available, ousted digital models but they did only need resetting weekly or monthly to stay on time. With modern watches able to keep time to better than 5 seconds/month and able to reset themselves from radio time signals or the Internet people forget about the ritual of listening for the BBC radio time pips to set their watches.
Jury reckons Motorola wasn't 'fair and reasonable' to Microsoft
Thursday 5th September 2013 15:15 GMT
Re: M$ would never extort money out of other businesses in this way.
The difference is that those "antiquated patent laws" allow Microsoft to charge whatever it can get away with in licence fees for *NON FRAND* patents that it holds (don't forget that it holds patents in standards like h.264 which have been committed as FRAND, and for which it gets very little money).
When a manufacturer gets involved in setting a patent they commit to following FRAND rules for any of their patents which are included in the standard. FRAND doesn't mean that they must charge near nothing, but they DO have to prove that the rate they offered is the same for everyone else (and if they wanted $4bn from MS for one device then they'd have been pulling in trillions from the rest of the market).
Microsoft, Nokia and the sound of colliding garbage trucks
Thursday 5th September 2013 12:54 GMT
Re: Android
Microsoft has patents on things like the FAT32 file system, THATs what it is getting payments from Android manufacturers for (and before you start FAT32 is a fundamental part of SD/MicroSD so no, they can't do without it), not "look and feel". They are being paid for very real technology that the other manufacturers and their lawyers looked at before coughing up.
It's the software, stupid: Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch bags big apps
Windows 8.1 to freeze out small business apps
Thursday 5th September 2013 11:43 GMT
Re: Not really an issue -@nematoad
Except that Apple :
1) don't lock you in for desktop apps. You can install them from anywhere without giving Apple a cut.
2) Companies can install custom iOS apps without going through the app store also. It costs you a flat $300/year and includes all the dev tools to make it work. All you need to enrol in this is a DUNS number, which any company can get for free.
Microsoft are trying to do this for (1) and limiting the possible customer base for (2).
Campus Party: Did it start Silicon Britain or let 5,000 geeks sleep together?
Thursday 5th September 2013 09:43 GMT
Re: @ Ragarath...
Techno god? Basic overclocking isn't much beyond pigmy level. If you want to move to exotic levels like liquid cooling then maybe a little higher, but well within the range of anyone who can use Google.
There is however much less demand for it now that processor manufacturers are making CPUs that overclocking themselves automatically based on load and thermals.
Ministry of Sound sues Spotify over user playlists
Wednesday 4th September 2013 14:17 GMT
About the only thing that MoS can do is complain about trademark infringement, and that's weak as it isn't Spotify that is naming them. The idea of a playlist of hits predates them by quite some time (the Now That's What I Call Music series of compilation discs date back to 1983 for example), I suspect that this is another example of an industry killed by the digital revolution but yet to work this out.
But it's only wafer thin: Skinniest keyboard EVER is designed by Camby biz
Apple to accept iPhone trade-ins at US Retail Stores
3D printed guns are for wimps. Meet NASA's 3D printed ROCKET ENGINE
Thought the PC market couldn't get any worse? HAH! Think again
Wednesday 28th August 2013 15:32 GMT
Re: Surely it's becoming apparent
"getting your home network up and running without a PC is a faff."
I don't know what you've been using, but most modern WiFi routers come pre-configured and need no more than a web browser to adjust their settings. You surely don't need a full PC for that. Tablets will also happily print to WiFi enabled printers (HP seem to have patents on making this REALY easy, but its not much harder for printers from Samsung et al). The only missing bit from your equation is typing letters, and Bluetooth keyboards take the pain out of that. For your average home user the point where they can happily exist with only a tablet is already here.
Star Wars revival secret: This isn't the celluloid you're looking for
Amazon spaffs MYSTERY private Wi-Fi waves all over Apple's orchard
Flash! Ah-ahh! Saviour of the universe? It'll save every one of us?
Thursday 22nd August 2013 09:53 GMT
Hybrid really isn't the way to go.
What you want is an OS that understands about heirarchical storage and moves stuff between fast flash and slower but more copious disk depending on usage. It has a much better idea of what is or isn't needed than any hybrid, and the user can independently size each part of the storage subsystem depending on their needs.
Bank man: System's down, let's have coffee. Oh SNAP, where's all the CASH?
Wednesday 21st August 2013 22:19 GMT
Re: Unless these banks were complete idiots
No, SWIFTNET is intra-national as well as international. As banks get charged per message they try to route as much as possible through their internal and local banking networks, but all of these are very private, going nowhere near the public Internet.
Wednesday 21st August 2013 16:46 GMT
Unless these banks were complete idiots
The wire transfer system should have been on a completely different, private interbank network (SWIFTNET) and managed by different teams. Also interbank funds transfer messages don't TAKE any money from client accounts, they get messages from other systems instructing transfer messages to be sent, and pass inbound messages to the appropriate system (SWIFTNET handles everything from advice messages to file transfers these days)
UK micro pioneer Chris Shelton: The mind behind the Nascom 1
Wednesday 21st August 2013 10:12 GMT
When what they were trying to do
Was run the software on cheaper, faster processors then no, the basic idea wasn't flawed. As usual for British companies it was their attempts to market it that failed. If they HAD managed to sell the design to a manufacturer then the resulting machines would have beaten Intel to a pulp, being both cheaper to produce and significantly faster. What it looks like they were lacking when it came to their sales pitch was a software stack (compilers, OS etc) that would alow simple porting of the IBM/MSDOS world's main packages and some sort of agreement in principle from the software houses to produce versions for it.
Apple to replace wonky iMac graphics cards
Tuesday 20th August 2013 15:01 GMT
@AC 12:51
I guess you didn't read the following post then. That "huge design flaw" turns out not to be an issue for most users. They are still selling the iPhone 4, unmodified and without a free case, and no one is complaining. It was blown completely out of proportion by the press and, I suspect, folks like yourself.
Tuesday 20th August 2013 09:57 GMT
*Sigh*
This is always misquoted. A user emailed SJ complaining that, if he held his iPhone 4 in a certain way, the signal strength dropped. SJ emailed back "don't hold it like that". How many other CEOs would even bother to answer a direct email? Users were subsequently offered a free case (which fixed the issue) or a full refund. Not many people went for option B.
Kiwi jetpack gets all-clear for manned tests
Monday 19th August 2013 14:42 GMT
Re: Do not want.
BRS has its limits also. The first is that you have no control over where you land. Again student pilots a drilled in selecting the safest landing zone, away from trees, power cables etc. The second is that you tend to come down quite fast, faster than a normal parachute. You can right the aircraft off using one, and seriously injure yourself to boot.
Monday 19th August 2013 14:32 GMT
Re: Do not want. @M Gale
As it happens I have flown IFR in clouds. Just like fog the visibility is variable. At one extreme you have dozens of yards of visibility, at the other you can't see the prop spinning in front of you. Either way one of the first things that happens is that your windshield gets covered in droplets of water which, wearing a crash helmet, makes reading instruments on the far side of the visor tricky. Fitting a horizon, turn/slip, altimeter, VSI, DI,and ASI into that limited space and expecting it to be clearly legible in those conditions is, at best, optimistic.
As to the folks who say "just don't fly into cloud", its a nice theory but in practice it happens, which is why student pilots are taught the basics of how to fly back out of it.
Monday 19th August 2013 07:54 GMT
Re: Do not want.
I think you answered your own point there. Most civil types can make power-out emergency landings or, in the case of twin or more engines, can continue on to their destination. Power failure on one of these is going to result in a crash unless they have some type of BRS. Add to that there doesn't appear to be space for instruments so if you lose your ground reference you are likely to emerge from a cloud upside down.
Fanbois taught to use Apple's new killer app: Microsoft Windows
Monday 19th August 2013 14:07 GMT
Re: Wow
Show me the equivalent PC for £300. You can buy *A* PC for £300, but it won't be directly equivalent. You'll also find PC manufacturers selling AIO models like the iMac for about the same money as the iMac.
It's your money to spend, but don't pretend it's the same exact thing you are buying,
Fear the JOBZILLA! 150ft STATUE of Steve planned 'lest fanbois forget'
Monday 19th August 2013 07:02 GMT
Re: They'd be pushed to create a life-sized statue
"The project budget is based on quotes for a life-sized statue.", so there isn't a plan for a large statue but "However, if the campaign raises enough capital - more than what we could conservatively hope to raise - we'll aim for Statue of Liberty and Colossus of Rhodes proportions :)." so even they don't think they'll hit that size. They are however claiming that they'll size it based on the funds they collect.
Given current funding I'm not sure they'll hit the target for life size.
Volvo V60 Plug-in Hybrid: Eco, economy and diesel power
Card-cloning crooks use 3D printers to make ever-better skimmers
Friday 16th August 2013 15:59 GMT
Anyone who knows anything about the 3D printing process
Knows that the Create it Real blocker is trivial to sidestep, and likely to be ineffective anyway. The kindest thing you could say about it is that it's a publicity stunt.
Give people tools and some of them will use them for illegal purposes (cars to get away from the police for example). Find better ways of catching them and move on. Don't try to ban the technology, it's out of the box and people who do want to use it for illegal purposes aren't going to be worried about it being banned.
Peak Apple: Samsung hits DOUBLE the market share of iPhones
Thursday 15th August 2013 09:47 GMT
Re: Druthers
Apple aren't a volume manufacturer? 35 million iPhones sold last quarter would argue otherwise. They only sell iPhones? What about all those iPads, Macs and iPods then?
There's a difference between volume and market segment. The upper end of a market may support millions of sales, the lower end tens or hundreds or millions. The upper end is still were the big money is to be had, providing you can convince the public that there's extra value in your model compared to the run-of-the-mill.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
