Re: Missed the point by a mile, I'm afraid.
I rather don't think he has missed the point at all, and neither has AO.
Google on who Spiked! are, and who James Woudhuysen/James Wood is.
Posts by EWI
65 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Nov 2008
Drilling into 3D printing: Gimmick, revolution or spooks' nightmare?
Greenland ice did not melt in baking +8°C era 120k years ago
Hold the chips: Apple axes Samsung RAM order for iPhone 5
'This lawsuit is not about patents or money, it's about values'
Cook's 'values' memo shows Apple has lost its soul
Saturday 25th August 2012 21:00 GMT
Re: A moralist predicts the future
"One li'l example: USB was adopted as an alternative to Firewire. Why? Because the royalty that Jobs wanted for it was exorbitant."
Not so. USB and Firewire are two very different technologies. Firewire is better in a variety of ways, but USB is cheap'n'cheerful.
"planned incompatibility and no interoperability, proprietary formats and hardware specs."
MPEG-4, MP3, USB, HTML5 etcetc. are all non-proprietary, and have all been supported by Apple for a long time. And you may want to look at the technical specs of all Apple computers since 2006.
Saturday 25th August 2012 19:49 GMT
This is just a disaster of an article
"Based on the evidence yes, Samsung copied both the design and the style of Apple's products, in the same way that Apple always has. The company itself got its start from copying the GUI system developed at Xerox PARC."
Apple got a guided tour of the research secrets at Xerox PARC in return for allowing Xerox to take a stake in the company pre-IPO (from which they made a profit). There was no misunderstanding between Apple and Xerox as to the consequences of showing off stuff like the GUI (in fact, the PARC researchers delayed and obfuscated, but ex-PARC employees on the Apple side knew exactly what to ask for, and Xerox head office passed the order down to show everything).
There was no 'stealing' involved, just shockingly bad management at Xerox who had no idea of the potential value of the ideas at PARC.
Apple TV: Rubbish, you don't like documentaries – I'll just flick to porn
Apple seeks whopping $2.525bn Samsung patent payout
Monday 30th July 2012 00:40 GMT
Re: So explain to us once more`
"How many different sensible enclosures that Samsung/Sharp manufactured rectangular touchscreen might be enclosed in."
FFS. Not that I think it'll penetrate, but let's go on the merry-go-round for the umpteenth time:
http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/18/tablet-design-before-after-the-ipad/
Wednesday 25th July 2012 21:19 GMT
Re: Lost profits?
Go into your local CrapWorld and hover around the tablets section, waiting for an average punter to come in looking for an 'iPad' that their child/sibling had shown working like magic to them and they want one too.
One of the little bastards working on commissions in these places will try to pawn whatever CrapDroid is currently being promoted off on them, with vague promises about how it's "an iPad, only much cheaper". The gamble pays off if the effort barrier to returning this steaming turd is too high - as it usually is for a technophobic public. This is the Android model, just an evolution of the old crap PC clone one (Packard-Bell etc.).
Wednesday 25th July 2012 21:19 GMT
Re: "Innocent" Samsung
"There's a little thing called competition and they obviously can't hack it."
This isn't competition, it's plagiarism. This is like Ford coming out with a VW Beetle clone.
"The hype and cattle excrement created when a new Apple product is released is unbelievable and calculated to put the fanbois into a frenzy - "I want one!" is the cry, when, in reality, the product is grossly over-priced and something cheaper would probably do the job just as well."
Except in the real world no-one has done so, have they? Why is that, do you wonder?
Tuesday 24th July 2012 19:06 GMT
"Innocent" Samsung
Oh, give it a rest. Samsung are the world's most barefaced pass-off merchants. They copied the iPad right down to the very distinctive charger. They've done the same in the past to other companies, too.
I for one would welcome their getting both barrels on this, might teach them not to be so lazy and actually do some original design work of their own.
Cameron's attempt to cram a robot arm wearing a Rolex into his pristine bottom
Pacific nation prepares to flee rising seas
Fat margins squeeze Apple against Android
Melting Arctic leads to snowy winters
Tuesday 28th February 2012 02:13 GMT
Re: Well that seems all a little strange.
"Didn't we read recently reports claiming that the Arctic ice is not vanishing as fast as had been alleged? Or am I simply confused by all the conflicting reports/arguments?"
I think you're referring to this:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm
I have the full list of GWPF donors!
Drew's Cookie Jar - psst. want a forum upgrade
Apple slaps mega-solar panel field on new ENORMO data centre
Activist supplied illegally obtained docs to DeSmogBlog
Why I'd pay Apple more to give iPad factory workers a break
Tuesday 31st January 2012 22:02 GMT
@ Matt Asay
So, you want *Apple* to do this, but you're pretty much indifferent to all the other tech giants doing the same thing?
Illuminating.
And for the lazy sod who claimed this: "I would imagine Apple have a pretty hefty markup on their goods. "
If that were so, the PC clone manufacturers should be able to apply their one and only business model and undercut the iPhone and iPad on price for the same quality and specs. So where are these devices, then?
Microsoft's master stroke: Pay store staff per WinPhone sold
It's the ALL NEW FUTURISTIC WEAPONS Black Friday Roundup!
Sunday 27th November 2011 18:50 GMT
Reminds me of the old 'Ethical' machine guns argument
""I could see a whole squad carrying it," said Specialist Brandon Smith of the US Army, having participated in the trials lately, meaning that all soldiers would have such firepower in their personal weapons, not just specialists. "You would own the battlefield.""
'Cos God knows nobody else could copy such tech. Arms manufacturers, eh?
Global warming much less serious than thought - new science
Friday 25th November 2011 21:27 GMT
Scientists mis-represented by El Reg - oh my.
"Q: Does this study overturn the IPCC’s estimate of climate sensitivity?
No, we haven’t disproven the IPCC or high climate sensitivities. At least, not yet. This comes down to what generalizations can be made from a single, limited study. This is why the IPCC bases its conclusions on a synthesis of many studies, not relying on any particular one.
While our statistical analysis calculates that high climate sensitivities have very low probabilities, you can see from the caveats in our paper (discussed further below), and my remarks in this interview, that we have not actually claimed to have disproven high climate sensitivities. We do claim that our results imply “lower probability of imminent extreme climatic change than previously thought”, and that “climate sensitivities larger than 6 K are implausible”, which I stand by. I do not claim we have demonstrated that climate sensitivities larger than 3 K are implausible, even though we calculate a low probability for them, because our study has important limitations.
It is rare that a single paper overturns decades of work, although this is a popular conception of how science works. Many controversial results end up being overturned, because controversial research, almost by definition, contradicts large existing bodies of research. Quite often, it turns out that it’s the controversial paper that is wrong, rather than the research it hopes to overturn. Science is an iterative process. Others have to check our work. We have to continue checking our work, too. Our study comes with a number of important caveats, which highlight simplifying assumptions and possible inconsistencies. These have to be tested further."
http://newscience.planet3.org/2011/11/24/interview-with-nathan-urban-on-his-new-paper-climate-sensitivity-estimated-from-temperature-reconstructions-of-the-last-glacial-maximum/
NASA tells Voyager 2 to save its strength
Stallman: Jobs exerted 'malign influence' on computing
Monday 10th October 2011 19:05 GMT 
Please...
"And like the chief of any other such company, he used the products his company produced plus a healthy does of hardball to give consumers what he thought they wanted"
Jobs famously didn't care tuppence for what users wanted, unlike the everything-to-all-men PC cloners.
"His business model was built on closed hardware and software, and when Jobs championed the open web, he did so in a way that reinforced Apple's control over its share of the internet – as was done during Jobs' boosting of HTML5 over Adobe's Flash."
Right. Black is white, and an open standard like HTML5 is somehow evil in comparison to closed, proprietary Flash.
Well, don, El Reg...
'Missing heat': Is global warmth vanishing into space?
Four illegal ways to sort out the Euro finance crisis
ICO orders release of (mostly useless) weather station data
Tuesday 28th June 2011 22:38 GMT 
Pass the fainting salts, please
""OH FUCK THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.""
I'm failing to see how this doesn't reflect what most of us have said at one or point or another. Perhaps St. Orlowski can show us the contents of his own email account?
Would putting all the climate scientists in a room solve global warming...
Pandora's mobile app transmits 'mass quantities' of user data
Wednesday 6th April 2011 23:17 GMT 
"No... there is another"
"Veracode's report made no reference to that app, presumably because of the closed nature of Apple's iOS. ®"
Or maybe, just maybe, because it's against Apple's rules for apps. Apps:
"cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user's prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used."
Dig deep! Radio asks taxpayers for blank cheque
Ex-UK spy boss says WikiLeaks sparked Egyptian revolution
Cloudy iTunes rumors juiced by music mogul talks
Sunday 6th March 2011 18:20 GMT
Not the whole story
"Services such as those, however, will struggle to survive at all after June 30, when Apple begins to enforce its 30 per cent cut of any subscription-based revenue pulled in by content-delivering apps sold through the iOS App Store."
This just isn't true, and I wonder at the Reg for reporting it as such. Apple have simply told the publishers that a subscription service available through other means must be *also* be available in the app (nobody's forcing users), for which Apple take their usual cut for providing the platform. The crux of the publisher's real problem seems to be that they're no longer able to harvest user details for junk marketers:
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/04/paypal-customer
NASA's Glory climate-data sat crashes into Pacific on launch
HBGary chief exec resigns over Anon hack
Wednesday 2nd March 2011 00:49 GMT
HBGary story all about Wikileaks/Anonymous?
How about that they were actively soliciting (along with their associates) the US Chamber of Commerce for running dirty-tricks campaigns against unions and Democrats, up to and including leaking fake documents to later discredit the Chamber's enemies? How about covering that?
Dear US gov: Stay the hell out of Silicon Valley
Anonymous pwns security firm that probed its membership
Friday 11th February 2011 00:15 GMT
More to this story is coming out...
"The e-mails ThinkProgress acquired are available widely on the web. They were posted by members of “Anonymous,” the hactivist community responsible for taking down websites for oppressive regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and American corporations that have censored WikiLeaks. Anonymous published the emails from HB Gary Federal because an executive at the firm, Aaron Barr, was trying to take Anonymous down. Barr claimed that he had penetrated Anonymous and was hoping to sell the data to Bank of America and to federal authorities in the United States. In response, members of Anonymous hacked into Barr’s email and published some 40,000 company e-mails.
It is widely believed that Wikileaks has sensitive information about Bank of America, and plans to expose it later this year. This revelation prompted Bank of America to hire the law/lobbying firm Hunton and Williams, which in turn, according to the e-mails posted online by Anonymous, hired HB Gary Federal and other firms to go after Anonymous and supporters of Wikileaks. For instance, one proposal from HB Gary Federal and its associates proposed targeting Salon reporter and Wikileaks-supporter Glenn Greenwald with “actions to sabotage or discredit” him."
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/10/lobbyists-chamberleaks/
Jackson's Hobbit movies back on track
Wednesday 9th February 2011 00:53 GMT 
Off-stage dwarf-elf action
@ Graham Bartlett
The Elves and Dwarves were engaged in battle with Sauron's armies in the upper Vales of Anduin during the War (it's detailed in the Appendices to the books).
Jackson, by the way, originally had Arwen (Tyler) doing action stunts at Helm's Deep. And no, I don't think it an improvement - less is more with fantastical characters, as Tolkien at least was well aware.
Tuesday 8th February 2011 14:12 GMT
Where characters are...
The timeline for this period is:
200 - Arwen born
2931 - Aragorn born
2941 - Bilbo sets off with Thorin et al ("The Hobbit")
2951 - Aragorn told the truth of his heritage, meets Arwen for the first time
2956 - Aragorn meets Gandalf for the first time
2957-2980 - Aragorn's 'great journeys', proposed to Arwen at the end
3018 - Start of the War of the Ring ("The Lord of the Rings")
Tuesday 8th February 2011 12:49 GMT
Great. Philippa "Improving Tolkien" Boyens strikes again
@ JDX
Horrific travesty, given who will likely be writing it.
Given the US-centric reframing of the Jackson films, expect the second film to be about Aragorn going off to be part of 'regime change' in Near Harad on the basis of reports of Rings of Mass Destruction there (there's acting work again for both Viggo and Liv!).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
