Posts by ThomH

Re: Slightly schizophrenic review (@Fuzz)

I think the QWERTY debate is still up for grabs. Even if the probably apocryphal story were true and the layout was invented so that English speakers were more likely to follow a key press somewhere on the left with one somewhere on the right (i.e. to avoid typewriter jamming) that just makes it well designed for two handed typing.

Recent academic literature, such as that cited at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1069950, has tended to conclude — as that does in its abstract — that:

"... we find virtually no evidence to support a view that QWERTY is inferior to DVORAK. Instead, using records of typing experiments, studies by ergonomicists, and examining the historical record of competition among different keyboard designs back when QWERTY first became dominant, we conclude that QWERTY is about as good a design as any alternative."

That article makes reference to contrary modern claims by Paul David and Brian Arthur but their article takes it as given that QWERTY is inferior so as to argue economic principles about the value of popularity. The link I've given is also to a citation for an economic piece, essentially making the point that the David/Arthur conclusion isn't justified by the evidence given because the basic assumption is false.

Re: $US1589bn?

Per the author, all Google has to do is drop from first to second next year and it'll be rotting.

In 2011 Oxford topped the Times University League Table. In 2012 it had dropped to second place. In 2013 it dropped to third. So, yeah, that was the end of relevancy for Oxford for all time.

Re: Might consider this

Honestly, I think the article touches on this by mentioning the Motorola and that the AC that mentions needing to apply suitable selection criteria is correct: the low end of Android has included some dreadful handsets. Usually the problem has been underpowered hardware and software thrown together by someone in middle management according to a list of the network-specific and third-party "extra functionality" that needs to be incorporated to get all available subsidies. That's classic landfill Android. There have been good, cheap Android phones about for years — the Orange San Francisco and its successors jump most immediately to my mind — but also plenty of awful ones.

In the last few years Google has done a lot of engineering to make Android a much better fit to modern hardware, with proper use of the GPU as of 4.x being a massive win. So the less powerful hardware is more responsive. In any case all the hardware itself has naturally become a lot cheaper. Users have started to become smarter about shovelware and, regardless, if the hardware itself is cheaper then manufacturers can more easily hit the psychological price points without it.

That's why the article talks about the new Nokia not having as clear a run at the market. The cheap end of the Android market is getting exponentially better every year.

Re: but i still want to play in monochrome wireframe

... or you could use your Google-fu to find 2001's Elite: The New Kind* and play a direct C translation of the original 6502 code on your Windows PC. In wireframe or with the filled polygons of the future.

* I forget whether this was converted from Bell's publishing of the original source code or by disassembling the commercial release; legal action ensured that it was withdrawn.

If this is history repeating itself then things are looking pretty good for Apple; the gap between the original Mac and the iMac is pretty much the same as the gap between the original iPod and now — both 13 years.

The gap between the iPod and iPhone is also pretty much the same as the gap between the original iPhone and now — six years and seven years.

The gap between the iPhone and the iPad? Pretty much the same as the gap between the original iPad and now — three years and four.

Assuming history is a pattern and not, as people like me think, just a set of events that happened, we're overdue for Apple to find a major new revenue source and I'd advise buying stock right now.

Re: Wii U = slower than a very slow thing... (@asdf)

The down votes could be because there's no reason to think Apple ever evaluated the cell. Just because there was a PowerPC in the middle doesn't mean Apple were interested, any more than that they considered adapting whatever is specifically inside the XBox 360 or the GameCube. Apple went to Intel because nobody was delivering fast PowerPCs that were usable in laptops — the processing improvement curve from after somewhere around 2001 was well below the industry average. With the Core Duo and the Core 2 Duo coming soon Intel had a fantastic roadmap.

Dear Anonymous Coward

You can have a Dell Venue 8 Pro for around $200, running Windows 8.1 on a 1.33Ghz Atom. Will that do?

It seems to be available quite widely at that sort of price. eBay at $200: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Venue-8-Pro-Atom-Quad-Core-1-33GHz-32GB-Windows-8-1-Tablet-w-Dual-Cameras-/360916342222?pt=US_Tablets&hash=item54084a55ce ; Amazon at $220: http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Venue-Pro-Tablet-Windows/dp/B00FEE7B1I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1399497617&sr=8-1&keywords=dell+venue+8+pro

Re: Stop this madness now

You mean until they decide that colours, corners and obvious buttons are too distracting and turn it into a discreet 8x8 pixel monochrome button that shows up only if you mouseover?

Re: .. biting the hand that feeds your supply chain .. @henrydddd

I think you might mean the opposite?

Re: Ugh...

I like it but as a computer scientist might; now that I'm used to it I appreciate that the lack of chrome fits more things onto the screen. Maybe Apple knows something I don't about overall computer literacy but I still don't see how it's smart for newcomers or those slightly confused by technology. "Oh, that word is obviously a button because it has a chicane next to it and is in the top left" is somehow less convincing than "... because it is printed on a box that looks like a button".

Though I guess people have no difficulty finding hyperlinks so I'm probably being an old timer?

Re: Alternate article title @JCitizen

Just plug them in to charge with certain third-party chargers?

Re: The Facts..........

I think that's probably the key: _some_ of the other MP3 makers supplied terrible devices and none of them gained critical mass. Apple supplied a simple device and had enough baseline recognition that the perception stuck. So when presented with a choice the logic went: the Apple is definitely simple, the others are probably simple but maybe I'm thinking of something else and anyway who wants to take the risk? I'll just pay the extra £15 and skip the hassle.

If you were a Mac user then that's doubly so because iTunes was essentially built in. If you were a Windows user you'd probably have to be reasonably literate to understand that buying into iTunes could be not described as reducing hassle without quite a stretch of the imagination.

Re: Research

Do we know that they can yet though? I notice that the story refers to a filed patent and the linked US government web site refers to it as a "United States Patent Application".

I don't pay that much attention but surely this is the stage where people with prior art are meant to come forward and say so?

Of course it's the US patent office, so, yeah, they'll get the patent regardless.

Re: Which versions of iOS are affected by each issue listed? (@Bullseyed)

Actually they said "we haven't updated the bundled OpenSSL since 2011". They did not say that any of their code actually uses it.

Apple's code uses its own Secure Transport. Secure Transport does not use OpenSSL. None of the issues fixed today is known to affect OpenSSL.

For those of us that actually read the stories, this was underlined by goto fail, when Apple managed to engineer a bug into its SSL code that didn't affect anybody else.

Re: Old OpenSSL (@Bronek)

That's an interesting link, thanks. Highlights for those that can't be bothered to read it:

"The problem is, as I said above, that OpenSSL does not have a stable ABI ... if you made an OpenSSL dylib and people expected it to work, uh, you know, with dynamic linking, their code will break. ... We talked to the OpenSSL people and noted that we really needed to be able to be able to make and ship dylibs, and asked if there was anything we could do to help. ... OpenSSL rebuffed Apple and I gathered that the rebuff was actually insulting. It probably wasn't literally, "why don't you go back and make lickable buttons" but that would have given a similar result. One thing I know that OpenSSL said was that the unstable ABI was a feature, not a bug, and that anyone who really cares about security should statically link OpenSSL ...

Thus, OpenSSL is intrinsically not supportable in system that likes dylibs. We had to fix that underlying issue. So what fix? ... [we chose] what you see now. OS X still ships OpenSSL 0.9.8y (or at least that's the version on my laptop), and the entire system is as it was in 2011.

I think that someday, someone's got to give OpenSSL the decent burial. That OS X ships with 2011 OpenSSL command line tools and dylibs is a bug. ...

Heartbleed isn't a crypto problem. It's a software engineering problem. ... Apple's decision to chuck OpenSSL was also a software engineering decision, not a crypto decision."

Re: Robotron!!!! Most insane game

I think it's iOS exclusive but Minotron is Jeff's own work making Llamatron even more crazy — El Reg loved it: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/20/review_igamer_llamasoft_minotaur_2112/

It's iCade compatible but, honestly, I found that the touch controls worked quite well.

Re: It was the battery life wot won it

I prefer to think it was the games. What was good on the Lynx? Shadow of the Beast and probably Battlezone 2000. The Game Gear? If anything it suffered from being a Master System with a smaller screen — 80% of the games seemed to involve you needing to have premonitions about what was coming up because you were effectively playing a crop of the original.

... and that's without discussing whose mascot was the better fit for the pre-TFT LCD technology of the time. It certainly wasn't the one known for fast moving graphics.

Re: As a Sanmsung S3 and then Note 2 user

But then does 4.7" go far enough? The S3 was 4.8" if my Googling holds up but both the S4 and the S5 are 5.1". Those are linear measurements so, assuming the same aspect ratios all around (the iPhone's just a rumour, so who knows?) then both the current and previous Galaxies have about 18% more screen surface area. Though I guess the correct thing to compare that to is the whopping 63% more they offer versus the 4" iPhone?

Re: Laptop resolutions... (@Pascal)

You're disingenuously conflating density with resolution.

Ars: "The story is different on the desktop, where Microsoft has long supported scaling but developers have rarely (if ever) taken the time to implement it properly. [...] The point is that Windows' desktop scaling, through no fault of Toshiba's, is still pretty bad. Since most Windows usage on laptops is still going to happen on the desktop, this is something you'll definitely notice as you use the Kirabook. It's not just that applications are often blurry, but that the way scaling is handled can vary so much from application to application. It's difficult to get a consistent experience, and settings that look fine in one program may look terrible in another." (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/review-high-dpi-toshibas-kirabook-takes-on-the-retina-macbook-pro/2/)

Digital Trends: "...the Ultrabook suffers from a serious problem: scaling. Most software is not designed for a high-resolution display, which can make it difficult to use. Windows tries to solve this by scaling up the size of windows, icons and other interface elements, but the process reduces sharpness and isn’t reliable. Some applications don’t scale at all, or scale poorly, which results in undersized icons and text that’s difficult to read." (http://www.digitaltrends.com/laptop-reviews/toshiba-kirabook-review/)

Engadget: "Depending on the content, anyway: many of your favorite desktop apps won't look right at that resolution [...] Things just don't scale properly, so you could end up with tiny buttons, tiny search fields or web pages that don't gracefully scale to fill the whole screen. And when objects do fill the screen, they sometimes look blurry and stretched out." (http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/17/toshiba-kirabook-review/)

pcmag.com: "CONS ... May have to adjust zoom or screen resolution for apps. [...] While the screen is brilliant, you may have to fiddle with zoom and screen resolution settings on older games and programs: they may not display correctly scaled up to 2,560 by 1,440." (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2418968,00.asp)

Re: Hmm

Could Unified Memory not be a step intended to buy Nvidia better heterogeneous computing options in the future, especially on smaller systems? I'm thinking of things like smartphones where you've got GPU + CPU + RAM in a single module, with the memory actually physically addressable equally by the different components. It'd be good to have naturally parallel things scale automatically between appropriate cores on those, wouldn't it? GPGPU isn't going to be exclusively for the HPC niche forever.

Re: They're coming but they're not selling (@Don Jefe)

If value were "totally irrelevant" then people would use smartphones exactly as much as they currently do, even if data were still 60p/megabyte. I'd suggest that (i) they wouldn't; and therefore (ii) value has _at least some_ relevance.

In wearables terms, if it were a choice between one phone with no associated watch and one with a watch for, say, £50 more, I can see people going for the watch even if they not only then never actually wear it but also if they made exactly the same choice last year and never wore that one either. If it's a choice of paying an extra £300 in a separate transaction for a watch then I don't see that happening.

Re: Working with dates is hard, and financial guys believe it is not

I misread 'finance' as 'fiance'. The story still sounded familiar.

Re: Does...

I don't think so. But Microsoft was found to have violated antitrust law thirteen years ago now; Apple was found to have violated less than a year ago. The watchdog is there for the one specific purpose of monitoring compliance concerning book pricing.

Re: Rotatable?

To be contrary, it sounds fully rotatable to me. The article mentions lenticular displays, which can't be rotated, but seems to say that the rumour is that Amazon will use a regular 2d panel and present the illusion of 3d through eye tracking. So the vector from the centre of the screen to the user's eyes is really all the phone calculates with; rotation doesn't matter.

It's the same thing as those c.2007 videos of the guy who reversed the Wii remote control (infrared sensors on his glasses, Wiimote static and pointed at him).

But how many years did it take for web-enabled phones and tablet computers to get over the hump?

Re: Wrong. @ThomH @Neoc

As noted, it's EU law, not US, but I'd argue that what Apple has done is "potentially illegal" in the same sense that your post is "potentially written in Portuguese".

Although law in the US and UK is often known for being obtuse, that's often because the statutes were written hundreds of years ago so the words have either a historic meaning or have has their original meaning slowly winnowed by years of case law (see e.g.: malice aforethought in Lord Coke's definition of murder, which essentially means "intention, at the time"; spontaneous mercy killings are murders).

EU law doesn't use the precedential system (i.e. case law doesn't affect what the law subsequently is, it merely directs you as to how it has previously been interpreted — the latest judges may agree or disagree) and is always read in terms of the wrong that was intended to be addressed rather than exactly the words on the page (because it's translated into so many languages and because that's how most of the European national legal systems operate anyway).

The attempted precise technical language still tends to put people off, and there are other barriers like the way the articles all get renumbered when a new treaty requires it, but the net effect is that EU law is probably the easiest to read a little of.

It's Articles 101–106 for competition law. If you're curious then check them out.

Re: Fixated on Apple

These are historic documents, but not by a lot — though Samsung has started name-checking companies beyond Apple in its effective but slightly disingenuous* adverts. So I think someone there is aware that if they continue to focus all guns in one direction then a competitor is likely to leapfrog the both of them.

* in which the market leader tells people they're sheep if they buy from a competitor.

Re: Eegads imagine the price! (@Bullseyed)

That's what the posters inverted commas around 'first' were meant to indicate, I think.

Apple's modus operandi has always been to spot a nascent market (e.g. home computers, GUIs, MP3 players, web-enabled phones) and leap in with the first second generation product to become the early market leader. If unable to keep commanding control of the entire market (i.e. in everything except MP3 players) then the retreat is into the high end niche.

I cannot imagine that Apple could succeed in televisions.