Posts by John Lettice

Objection sustained. I didn't mean to suggest I bogged off immediately, and nobody was kicking me out. I actually did some work for them on the response to the ZD invasion around then, but I think they found my recommendations a bit too weird.

Re: Re: El Reg

It was PCN we worked on, you dozy git. How the devil are you, Nige?

Re: Bounty?

As Google is insisting that the hole is in somebody else's system, I do believe I'd have to go legal in order to get any money out of them.

Re: No Shit Sherlock!

Ah, you're guessing my expectations. Initially I didn't expect the iPad to be particularly useful to me, but I've found it comes in handy, and I think it has potential.

The file transfer stuff is however crud, and I don't know where you saw the adverts that said this. I just thought I'd get that out of the way prior to doing an assessment of it as a mobile productivity device. Which is next. Probably.

Re: lol crapple

Well, as I understand it Nokia does have some previous in the control department, but very little experience of selling 2 million tablet devices in a month or so (au contraire...)

Apple may well have problems in resolving the iPad's contradictions, but they'll be problems of success, nice ones to have.

Re: A bit out of date.

I'm not sure how that's relevant to the gripes that I was covering. But 'open in' isn't one of my favourite features either. Sure, I can open a link in Safari from Twitterific, but then I drop out of Twitterific and lose my place. Fix one problem by creating another, IMO.

Re: without the BBC the UK would suck

What does the UK export these days?

Well, there's The Register...

Re: An "edge case" though....?

Agreed, subscription probably is a hurdle for general news. But if newspapers do go electronic, then part and parcel of that surely has to be the ability to pay for a single day's issue. The iTunes store can contrive to charge me 59p for a low-cost app, it oughtn't to be beyond the wit of man to charge me £1 for today's Telegraph, if I happen to have an attack of The Blues one morning.

Re: WTF?

Oh all right. I'm far too old to have ever crossed swords with a proof of age card, so I bow to the superior knowledge of the younger lot.

Re: Passports for jobs

It was always intended that this be the case. When Blunkett first proposed them, they were to be called Entitlement Cards, the notion being that you had to prove who you were and what your entitlements were in order to claim them. So making employers liable if they employ illegal immigrants and forcing banks to impose tougher ID checks (you know the way your bank keeps asking you to prove who you are, no matter how long you've banked with them? - government's fault) forces people to prove who they are more often. Thus creating a greater demand for ID cards.

You could think of it as the New Labour ID Card Hamster Wheel System.

Re: ID card minister makes stuff up.

10,204. (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/meg_hillier/hackney_south_and_shoreditch)

The only thing that'll shift a Hackney Labour MP is the Hackney Labour Party. I did that once, you know... (-:

Re: Microsoft are not a success because they don't specify hardware?

That's not quite what I meant. Microsoft has issued quite detailed design guides for the PC over the years, and has effectively specified the hardware. But it doesn't absolutely dictate what's in the finished product, because it can't, if it's presiding over an ecosystem that is supposed to allow for a measure of diversity. So Microsoft left the hardware to others a bit, not a lot, but enough for it to make a difference IMO.

It seems to me that there was a point in Microsoft's history (warning - incoming crazy theory) where it could have built its own hardware. That would have been a tricky one to pull off without pissing off the PC companies, but MS could maybe have contrived it via some kind of consumer/multimedia closed box aimed at the living room, and/or a re-imagination of Xbox. Or it could just have entered the mobile market with its own hardware, and the hell with trying to replicate the PC model.

The advantage would have been that it could put out a stand-out consumer product without it being buried by similar, average partner products. The disadvantage though is you probably can't get away with owning one of the teams when you're running the playing field.

Re: Re: Game changing product? Reply

Well, they got a better deal from the operators than seemed rational at the time (to several of us on The Reg, at least), and it contrived to skim off all of the added value sales via the app store, leaving the networks to make their money off of voice and data. And it also managed to screw the networks by dumping a huge increase in data traffic onto them. But that one was more of a cheap gag they deserved than a seizure of power.

Remember that both networks and hardware companies have in the past tried and failed to set up their own revenue-generating walled gardens, one of the reasons they've failed being the argument over how the revenue gets divvied up. Apple has succeeded.

Remember also that the operators losing control is not the same as the users winning control. One to bear in mind as Google rides to the rescue of the US cellphone market, ahem.

Re: Game changing product?

In my opinion the iPhone WAS a game changer. Prior to its launch the networks and the hardware manufacturers were in a constant struggle for control. And the networks quite often won, even (notably?) against Nokia. Our own Bill Ray, discredited prophet of the iPhone's failure, yesterday made the point that "Back in 2006, Apple's lack of experience with operators proved its advantage: Steve Jobs pushed far harder than anyone else would have dared and the operators proved far more flexible than expected."

More fool them. Apple certainly did seize power from the operators, and it's an interesting notion that it might have done so because it didn't know any better. But Apple is run by a maniac, and the people who run Google are just creepy. So although Google also seems to want to take control from the networks, what it's got so far seems to me to be pretty feeble, and they're probably not vicious enough to push hard enough.

I'm with you on the phone that works in the sticks though, as is Bill.

Re: Who cares they don't make it.

Um, yes there is a whole bunch of stuff, aside from the case. I believe Apple has sent Nokia a list. (-: