Posts by The Other Steve 1184 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2007
"but do people SERIOUSLY think that the tories are in it exclusively to f**k the rest of the country over? "
Yes, yes they do. One union rep of my acquaintance who IS very New Labour (actually cried when Gordon resigned, FFS) honestly believes that the plan is to fuck up the country and make everyone poor, because somehow by making the recession much worse on purpose, the evil rich tories will all make even more massive piles of gold. Because of Thatcher.
Sad, but true.
"The rate of VAT affects those on low incomes far more than those on higher incomes. Those below £10,000 a year pay £1 in every £7 in VAT whilst those on about £100,000 pay £1 in every £25 in VAT. See Office of National Statistics table 14:"
Well, yes, so it appears, but then ask yourself this, what is it exactly that the low income chappie is buying that is vatable as opposed to the high income chappie who seems to be spending his disposable wodge on things that are zero rated ?
Since the only things that are zero rated are essentials like food and children's clothing, you would expect that the low income group would be splashing most of their hard earned pennies in that direction. Only they aren't. Until you can explain that, this figure means nothing.
Unless of course, the evil rich are spending their ill gotten gains on food and clothing for their children, the utter bastards!
I like Apple kit, really I do, but seriously, get a life ! Here's how I bought my iPad, I walked into the shop the day after the release, bought it, and walked out. It took ten minutes of my life.
All this queueing and clapping stuff is creepy and wrong, my living will kicks in if I ever attend such an abhorrent ceremony, and I will be gently euthanased shortly afterward. It's really the kindest thing.
Bill Ray in understatement shock. Film at 11. Is your hyperbole generator in for servicing today ?
Its more than "More than a little alarmist."
Suggesting that you can derive a figure for "malware" purely from the list of permissions a sample of apps require to run is closer to, say, complete and utter bum gravy.
Really compass bearing ? Or ground track direction ? Pedantic I know, but they are different. I suspect in this application ground track bearing (indicating approximate direction of travel) rather than compass bearing (indicating the azimuth of the axis of the compass sensor relative to magnetic north, or which way the unit is 'facing',if you prefer) would be more useful.
"Who would ever be happy to be tracked night and day by a corportion and by who ever pays them for access to the same data?"
Probably lots of people, depending on what they get in exchange. And of course those that want no part in it don't have to play.
"I'm trying to judge where this comes on the Phorm scale of intrusions in to personal life. 8 / 10?"
Nowhere near since all apps that collect location data have to ask you, and you can turn it off.
Hope that's cleared it up for you, and you can take your tin foil hat off.
"sharp practise of the worst sort verging on monopolised corporate blackmail."
Well maybe not. Please continue drooling. But remember, it's only a matter of time before Steve Jobs gets around to harvesting your personal liver.
"How many of the fanbois would have signed up for the anti Phorm submission to the (last) government but are now heralding the IEquivalent as a great advance."
I suspect that's an empty set, largely because the two items are entirely dissimilar.
"As authorities around the world continue their abusive behaviors toward the populations everywhere this tracking tech in products shouldn't be tolerated."
RIGHT ON BRO! Those fucking authorities, I mean where do they get off, I asked them where my nearest branch of PC World and THEY ASKED ME WHERE I WAS! Fucking abusers !
Of course, anyone who disagrees with a drooling retard is a corporate shill. Right. This is becoming akin to it's own version of Godwin's Law among the less well balanced of El Reg's commentards. I shall dub it "The tinfoil asshat principle", being that as soon as anyone rebuts some tin foil hatter's ignorant misconception the probability that they will be accused of being a corporate shill becomes precisely 1.
The cognitive process behind these accusations can best be described thus : "I am so fucking powerfully right that some one is actually paying you to disagree with me."
How likely is that, really ?
With any OS update push, there will be problems. They are however occurring to a vanishingly small proportion of the user base. This is usual and expected and in no way is it unique to Apple.
Also not in any way unique to people who jailbroke their phones or fucked with the carrier profiles to hack tethering, but it is obviously hitting them the most. Those folks get no sympathy because they should have known better than to apply an OS upgrade to a device that has been - at any point in it's life - placed in a non standard configuration without first backing it up properly. If they didn't know better, hey, here is the first hard learned lesson, welcome, we've all been there.
Same old same old, but because it's Apple, and because somehow Apple have overtaken MS in the "things that ignorant wankers like to shout hate into the internets about" race, we find ourselves here.
The only surprising thing about this story is that it wasn't written by Bill Ray.
Oh no wait. Yes it is. Ludicrously low sentence, presumably because the CPS can't be arsed following up on the numerous CMA and RIP offences which must have by necessity been committed on the way to the fraud. Lazy bastards.
Fucker should think himself very, very lucky indeed not to have been properly prosecuted and punished.
Go on, knock yourselves out, I'm /made/ of asbestos, me.
Are what it's about. To attract customers, get apps. To get apps, attract developers, to attract developers, more than almost anything else you need a channel to market that can compete with the ease of Apple's offering, which means that devs can register and sell into an OS market from a single point of contact, and all users of that particular OS can easily access the store. They need to be able to start doing it from their phone on day one of ownership. Oh and customers, customers who are willing to part with cash. That helps.
Google are halfway there, they have the Android Market, but not yet the customers, everyone else is still playing catch up.
And as someone mentioned, fragmentation is an issue. Competition is a wonderful thing, sure, but there are what ? 4 models of iPhone out there, plus a couple of iPod touches and the iPad.
And single manufacturers are talking about having three times that many devices each in the market, each with slightly different hardware capabilities ? All either adding to the development time or subtracting from the market base for an app ?
Haters who are already reaching for the downvote button might pause a moment to consider why MS are copying Apple's business model so closely.
Windowsy tablets are already here, but in any case installing a linux system designed for the desktop is not likely to provide a better UI experience than windows, since the various linux desktop UIs suffers from all the same design limitations that the windows one does - not surprising, given that they are practically identical - which is that they are designed to be driven by a mouse and keyboard, require clicking precisely on small UI elements which you generally can't do with your finger because the contact patch is not where you think it is, require right clicks (which you can simulate with tap and hold, but then you lose some of your ability to drag stuff, or are forced into some quite dreadful workarounds)
And that's assuming that you can get drivers for your touchscreen and it's associated hardware frills like orientation sensors or buttons which sensibly ought to use HID, but quite often don't.
Efforts are afoot, naturally, to provide some of these drivers, so YMMV, but the desktop UI metaphor is sucky on touchscreen kit.
"No sign of Minority Report or Avatar swooshing and sweeping there!"
Give it time. It's certainly the case that much development time so far has been spent on converting people's cash cow iPhone apps to run on the iPad. This is partly due to the fact that (most) devs were working purely in the simulator and didn't get access to the hardware until the same release date as everyone else.
Note also, built in default gesture recognisers didn't appear until v 3.2 of the OS, the one that shipped with the iPad, so again devs haven't really had time to play with them properly. But they'll get there once they start concentrating on iPad only apps. Writing your own gesture recognisers, while not vastly difficult, is bit of a pain in the arse, and if you end up defining your own set and someone else defines another set, you can end up with a horribly fragmented UI experience. Users not unreasonably expect the same gesture to represent the same intention in all apps. A solid set of built-ins allows devs to follow the principle of least astonishment.
And it still aspires. And that's its problem. It isn't a professional trade body, and no one gives a shit about it.
If you can't manage that with 40+ years and a royal charter, you should probably give up and fuck off. I mean seriously, if I were them I wouldn't be calling attention to that charter at all, because the BCS have utterly failed in the 26 years they've had it to live up to any of the responsibilities made incumbent upon them by it. http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conMediaFile.372 [PDF]
Might I suggest that the cube jockeys and plug monkeys band together and form the Amalgamated Software Systems Hardware and Associated Trades union/umbrella group/trade body/coopertaive - delete so as to suit your particular favourite flavour of collectivism or acronymic punchline.
"Of course this will not happen any time soon because it will completely axe the ridiculous profit margins"
That's right ! Right On. Why pay for a 'service that would be dirt cheap IF it weren't run by a bunch of profiteering gluttons!'.
Except that O2's profit margin is currently a shade over 25%, which is considered to be reasonable, but by no means excessive. It is less than most Hairdressing salons, for instance.
So by the time that the iPhone 7 appears, I'll be able to control my Apple TV with it. And probably nothing else. This is the situation much as it is now, and I am currently predicting that the iPhone will get (for instance) a proper (official) BT stack about five minutes after Steve Job's cold dark heart stops beating.
Oh wait, no, fuck that whalesong, I agree with you. Two downvotes, fucking shocking.
"if i design a new bit of software with some clever algorithm that makes it way better than the rest , i want to capitalise on that. after all i spendt time and money developing it and at the end of the day there needs to be food on my plate and gas in my car. i can;t live off giving away stuff for free you know."
Fuckin A. Although I imagine you'll get some more downvotes for that. Largely from people who get their economic theory from reading summaries of novels they won't buy on slashdot.
"I can do that too, for example, If I were to define a smartphone as a phone that is genuinely able to do two things at once, then neither Apple or Android have produced a single one yet."
That's a pretty epic fail, even for a reg commentard. For starters, how do you think you can listen to your music while browsing the web on both OSes ? See that ? Two things at once. And what's happening in the OS while your doing that ? There are sure as fuck more than two concurrent processes running, including the ones that handle voice calls and SMS, for instance. So we're already way over "genuinely do two things at once" before we even do anything interesting.
What you think you mean is "able to run more than one app and have apps continue to execute in the background", but again, that's a fail. Both OSes could do this, but they don't. They constrain multitasking to preserve battery life.
Android, using the concept of a 'service', allows you to do as much in the background as you like [0]. Up until the more recent versions, iPhoneOS didn't allow third parties to do this sort of thing, now it does. iOS 4 offers it in a variety of different ways, all of which are more constrained than the Android model, and the misuse of which is going to be the next big story in App Store bans.
Regardless, your assertion that neither OS is 'genuinely able to do two things at once' is wrong at least twice for each platform. It would still be wrong, in fact, if you were cleverer than you look and were referring to the fact that a CPU can only execute one instruction at a time, because mobile phone processors rarely have a single core.
No, no, don't thank me, the fact that you no possess a clue is my reward.
[0]http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html
Ah iAd, the way to make ad supported demos even more annoying so that users who want the functionality will pay for it. And at the same time, potentially monetizing the free app as well. And of course, people with no iTunes credits can support their fave free app developers by clicking on the ads.
Unless you're a complete freetard, what's not to like ?
"So your argument is essentially, "Look at my wad !"
Indeed, I had originally titled it "Fucking paupers", but I thought that might get moderated.
"you're too poor, we don't want you"......."
More like "you are not likely to part with a sufficiently large chunk of your disposable income to be in the target market for any Apple branded products, and therefore your opinion on their usablilty - or otherwise - is essentially redundant. They aren't aimed at you". But the broad thrust is essentially the same.
"Don't forget that 500 quid only gets you the castrated less useful model too"
Depends how you define "useful" doesn't it ? For the scenario described above, viz slacking off in bed (or on the sofa) the base model is perfectly adequate.
"If they are not very careful, then apple's terms, which are so unappealing to developers"
To some subset of developers. Other developers see "play by our rules and get practically free access to a market place which just generated 2 million brand new app hungry customers in two months and who have generated 3.5 million app sales in that same period. A marketplace that generated around 1.5 billion app sales in 2009. A marketplace of (conservatively) over 20 million customers, the modal group of whom download >= 20 apps per week in 2009. Accounting for something like 99% of smartphone app sales in the same year" *
And they think "I want a piece of that". We can bitch and moan all we want, but with numbers like that why should Apple change it's behaviour just to pacify a few whiny fucktards ? If Google are telling the truth about activating 100,000 'Droid units per day, and that continues, and their app store generates a similar amount of revenue, and they challenge Apple's market share you might, just might, see some change of attitude from Apple, but I doubt it.
Of course, figuring out what the rules are at any given point can be tricky, but in all honesty I haven't seen an app pulled yet that I didn't look at and think "that's going to get pulled".
* Figures variously from AdMob and Gartner
So I see that the cube monkeys' main problem with the iPad is - still - that they can't afford it.
Let's say that I want to sprawl in bed on Sunday morning and surf the papers and trade press, maybe doing a little light research and some emailing. Maybe throw out some whimsical tweets or fire off a quick blog post.
Sure I /could/ do that on a shitty 199 quid netbook. But I don't have to. If you think just south of 500 quid is to much payola for being able to that in a much nicer way, then you can look away now. You aren't in Apples target market for the iPad, or indeed any of it's other products.
So you might as well all stop whining now.
"So the core values of Apple, (and I would assume by extension Steve Jobs,) are an extreme desire to control the flow of information, (as evidenced by this being such a Big Deal in the first place,) and a complete and utter inability to forgive."
And some other general control freakery and ass hattery as well, yeah. But you got the first bit wrong. It's the core values of Steve Jobs and by extension those of Apple.
Though I suspect that that there are many people in Apple who wish Jobs would just fuck off out of the way and stop making them look like dicks all the time by waving his vision about. Same old same old.
ISTR that it used to be the case that in ye olden days of dial up stuff that you did, in fact, have to register with whatever the regulator was before PPP (ICSTIS ?) in order to get a premium number.
I know this because I looked into the process of setting up a premium rate BBS service in the dim and distant past. You also had to fill in a form stating the nature of the content or service provided.
So what happened to that ?
"A person who loses a laptop may get their employer fined, and that might lead to their own dismissal, but the next person in line will not be permanently scared by that into being more careful."
Seriously ? You don't think that being told on day one that your predecessor was sacked for being careless with data would make you even little bit more careful ?
"He stressed that the watchdog would far rather work with organisations towards this than resort to enforcement."
So in fact what will happen is that - in the unlikely event of ICO stirring from it's sleepy Cheshire lair and actually going out to see someone who has breached the DPA - the offender will still be able to look forward to nothing more than a quick chat and a "bad show, chaps".
What would actually concentrate minds would be a preference toward enforcement, and a preference toward the top end of the fine scale.
For a long time we did all decry ICO as toothless, and they knew it was so and asked for more powers. Recently it seems that every time they get a new one they make a public statement to the effect that they'd, y'know, rather not use it actually.
Disband ICO, hand DPA enforcement responsibility over to the rozzers (where it properly belongs anyway), where the perverse incentive of 'detection' targets would ensure that an open and shut case like a laptop left in a car-park with a couple of cheeldren's addys on it would be prosecuted with the sort of enthusiasm one might expect of a murder case. Problem solved.
"People fail to realise that Google's and Facebook's customers are the advertisers, and the users are in fact the product they sell."
True 'nuf, as it goes, but OTOH you can't run a Facebook for nothing, and users disdain to pay for such stuff with anything so vulgar as actual money.
As a result, what they end up paying with is their personal data, an aggregation of which can be swapped for money.
In this sense, the personal data you give is the currency with which you pay for your 'free' stuff. If people didn't expect to get everything for free and everyone was prepared to pony up some actual currency to the likes of Facebook, they wouldn't need to be hawking your social graph out the back door in order to pay for their air conditioning.
"You're citing capitalist economic theory, and capitalist economic theory is a load of smoke and mirrors. It simply exists to make the rich richer. And no, I don't know an alternative, but there must be one."
There is, it worked really really well in the USSR, so much so that they were all able to retire.
"b) no calling other apis? really? isn't that common libraries out of the bloody window? they export APIs. Argue me calling a library you haven't written to do something that might interface with the iphone (i dunno opening a file or something) means you aren't calling an API. look up its definition on wikipedia."
Even if that were a proper sentence (or set thereof), it would still be wrong.
"d) objective-c. uglier than PHP,"
If you do it wrong.
"less easy to read than PERL,"
If you do it wrong.
"with all the drawbacks of C"
If you do it wrong.
"In this world of increasing laziness and resource sharing (look at cars for a good example) this is Apple trying to increase quality."
While your points w/r/t Amiga/ST are almost right - the issue was not code sharing, but which parts of the code were shared, which is not a problem with shared code per se but a function of rushing a product to market without consideration of the platform - this is not about quality, it is about Jobs waving his wang at Adobe.
Almost everything Apple does is about Jobs waving his wang at /someone/.
Because it's running WIndows. You'll note from the vid that we only see the camera 'app' and the photo 'app' fully (and even those look like mocked up shots) We see a very cropped shot of iTunes demonstrating the use of Win7 gestures, but that's all.
There are some good arguments outlined above about why windows is 'better', e.g. you can install anything you want, it can run photoshop, etc, but these miss the point. If I want to run photoshop or a similar app, I will need a mouse, and preferably a keyboard. Touch devices are not suitable for running these apps, so the comparison is largely pointless. You want those apps, you need a different form factor.
Stacking up like for like, you need to consider only apps that are good to use on touchscreens, and even with it's much vaunted 'touch readiness' Win7 fails hard at these, because it's core UI doesn't cut it with fingers.
99.9% of windows apps are designed to be driven by pointing at things with a mouse and clicking on them, about the only ones that aren't are a paltry few 'show off' items from MS that don't actually work very well, and the ones supplied by the hardware OEM, many of which also fall into that category.
The touch software 'ecosystem' simply doesn't exist on Windows, sooner or later - no matter how many shiny manufacturer supplied apps they come with - using a windows touch screen device becomes a pain in the arse and you need a keyboard or a mouse to make it work, or you have to reach for a stylus to click the close box on a running application, or whatever. This puts it in the same position as the iPad vis a vis running 'serious' or 'creative' or whatever the hell you want to call them applications. E.g. you can't, unless you shlep round additional hardware.
So really, at this point in time, the Windows based tablets have even less utility than an iPad and will remain in the doldrums until MS come up with a decent touch screen interface. Either they fork windows, which is about as likely as Steve Jobs giving Steve Ballmer a reach around on you tube, or OEMs go with whatever they spunk out under the new 'Windows Phone' banner.
By then though, Android tablets will have been on the shelves for a long time. I'm a long time Windows dev, and own several touch screen devices and tablets running various flavours of windows, and I am not betting on MS for the touch based future, although I am betting on the touch based future.
It's coming, get used to it.
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