Posts by ThomH

Re: Highly Likely

Mavericks is a no-brainer only if you assume Apple still has any interest in showcasing it. Mountain Lion was announced via their web site, and its release date was unveiled as part of the Q3 earnings call. Mavericks managed to ascend to the WWDC keynote for its announcement but the Q4 earnings call is on Monday the 28th so they might easily just upload it to the App Store and not comment until then.

Re: The dogs bark; fact check @Andy Prough

Apple marketshare in Q2 2012 was 18.8%, with 28.9m shipments. As of Q2 2013 share had dropped to 14.2%, but shipments were up to 31.9m. Source: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2573415

So, Apple: marketshare down 25%; shipments up 10%.

Between Q2 2010 and Q2 2011, RIM's shipments increased from 11.6m to 12.7m. Share dropped from 18.7% to 11.7%. Source: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1764714

So, BlackBerry: marketshare down 37%; shipments up 4%.

I couldn't find Q3 2013 figures, but the quarter ended less than half a month ago. I picked the quarter in which RIM performed best.

By Q4 RIM were, year on year, at 40% marketshare decline and an 11% decline in shipments. So if your comparison is correct then Apple's fortunes should decline very quickly.

However by using Q3 numbers, I have completely overlooked any effect the iPhone 5S/C may have on Apple's fortunes. So I'd suggest that Apple's decline isn't going to mirror BlackBerry's. Q3 and Q4 will probably show significant shipment increases if reports so far about the 5S are correct; the question is how deeply sales will dip in the middle of next year when the bump of a new product launch fades again.

@AC 06:31

Android should adapt relatively easily — the vast majority of apps run through the Dalvik virtual machine so all it takes is for someone at the centre to port that and those apps will take advantage of whatever ARM64 mode offers without any per-app reengineering.

The NDK apps will run because a backwards compatibility mode is present in current designs. They won't run as well as if they had been recompiled.

Although most Android devices are ARM based, there are a few that use x86 or MIPS processors. It's the Dalvik VM that mostly enables that.

Re: Only just this morning I was reading this... (@2nd AC)

I think the downvotes are more because the Linux kernel and its team are actually pretty good at security, and because Android implements Java via its own Google-specific virtual machine, using none of Oracle's code and therefore shouldn't be tainted with the same brush.

Re: Stop press! Newer phones outsell older phones! (@SuccessCase)

This news story is Canaccord Genuity stating that the new iPhones have outsold the Galaxy S4. In June Canaccord Genuity stated that the Galaxy S4 was outselling the old iPhone.

Here: http://www.informationweek.com/mobility/smart-phones/samsung-galaxy-s4-outsells-iphone-5/240156177

The Radio Times is no longer owned by the BBC

It was sold off in 2011. It's an independent publication now, likely no more connected than El Reg for this sort of story. They're likely doing the same as everybody — reporting that a tabloid reported than someone not connected to the BBC heard that the discovery had been made.

Re: GitHub & businesses

The good thing about git repositories is that checking out is cloning. So everybody has their own fully functional git repository, and the remote is backed up quite well even if you've no formal process.

If GitHub vanishes temporarily, pick any local machine to be the new central repository, and remember to push from there when GitHub comes back up.

Re: A good example ?

Not criminal, as it turns out, but definitely a good example of something. Not something I like.

Re: To be honest

Top tip: in 10.8 and above (so, I assume also the pending 10.9 though I haven't used it), hold down 'option' while the file menu is open. The hated 'Duplicate' will turn back into 'Save As...'

If your hands are up to it, shift+option+command+S is the appropriate keyboard shortcut.

Re: Down with Unicode (and UTF-8)!

Being a 1997 attempt to fix the problems stemming from a belief that "[t]he Unicode standard is a fixed-width scheme ... [that] uses 16-bit encoding", it was immediately irrelevant because UTF-8 had been presented in 1993. It's also modal, so lacks self synchronisation, and complicates things by defining character sets by language. As the paper acknowledges, 'a' is present separately as an English character, a French character, a German character, etc, etc, with the intention being that all those different 'a's are mapped back to the same thing after the fact.

Per the Ars article, it's a software hack. Samsung's build of Android spots when popular performance tools are being run and turns everything up to 11. The device couldn't run like that ordinarily without significantly shortening its lifetime, both per charge cycle and in general.

What Ars did was to create two versions of the benchmarking tool Geekbench — one that the system could identify as Geekbench and one that it couldn't. The code remained identical.

When it was identifiable by the system as Geekbench, the code ran up to 20% faster.

Re: poorly designed OS creaking at the seams (@TFM)

If the phone doesn't lock when paired with a hands-free device then the phone of anyone with a bluetooth headset is permanently unlocked. So as soon as one of those people leaves their phone on the bus, on their desk, is pick-pocketed, etc, the story would be that a security vulnerability had allowed their contacts/email/the rest to be accessed.

I also think Siri is Apple's attempt to integrate calendar, dialler, maps, GPS, etc. I'm don't think it's a good implementation but it's an attempt, at least.

Regardless, answer this: are there — as the poster suggests — any grounds whatsoever to conclude that because one of the supplied, first-party applications displays information when we as users wouldn't want it to, the operating system must be "creaking at the seams"?

Re: Standardised connector

I'm not sure everyone here has quite kept up with the news.

This is Apple's solution for shipping EU-compliant chargers: http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MD820ZM/A/lightning-to-micro-usb-adapter — micro-USB goes in one end, the proprietary lightning comes out of the other.

There's no bad news for Apple here. They'll put the one very small external thing inside the box instead of the other.

Re: Sod the Macbook Pro

The 2013 Nexus 7 replaces the 16:9 screen of the original with a 16:10. So it's not just Apple and not just expensive devices.

Personally I'm a fan of 3:2, as on the old titanium Powerbooks, amongst others. But I don't think that's likely to make a comeback any time soon.

Re: Oh, Grow Up! (@BillG)

Saying "this person also deserves criticism" with the implicit point being that blame doesn't divide along party lines isn't really an indicator of political leanings.

Conversely, trying to frame any criticism of Bush as necessarily liberal propaganda does suggest somewhat of a bias.

My interpretation of events since 2001 — the terrorist attack, not the change of administration — would be that these agencies have spiralled beyond anyone's control. The whole point of the constitution is that it creates competing interests and no single actor has control of all powers. Trying to pin all your national problems on this president or that party is inaccurate and unhelpful.

Re: "Windows 8 fans out-enthuse Apple fanbois"

Yeah, with their 162 computers.

Re: As a point of fact (@Hombre sin nombre)

I fact checked myself and had my numbers confused: it's 58% that would support greater gun control now! almost a year after the event. So I think probably the main point to be made is: it's no more accurate to paint America as a land of gun-obsessives than it is to paint it as a democratic panacea that European nations should aspire to. Americans are extremely diverse and likely just as many of them have a negative opinion of someone shooting up consumer electronics for YouTube as do Brits.

(aside: as a Brit currently resident in the US with interests back home, I'm currently part-funding both governments)

Re: To coin a phrase

Yeah, ignoring the Apple side of things entirely, would Samsung even be on the list if it weren't for Google? Therefore do they really deserve to be above Google?

Re: I'm a Law Lecturer - FAIL (@Nicho)

... but the HRA provides that public institutions, including courts, may not contravene ECHR rights. Which has been used in cases like Campbell v Mirror Group Newspaper to import additional criteria onto existing civil wrongs — once you've established standing for an action and are in court, the argument goes that the court can't act so as to contravene your convention rights and hence those rights themselves become enforced against a third party.

You'd therefore expect that, if the professor was making a threat at all, he was meaning to say that he'd go to court on contractual grounds and, once there, could likely use the HRA to bolster his argument.

What it actually sounds like to me is not so much that anyone was disputing the right to free speech so much as that the Easyjet employee tried to divert the conversation and failed miserably.

They restricted Android testing to only the interface that has really succeeded in the market in order to test only the feature arrangement people actually seem to like enough to buy. They tested only one major version of Android because there's been only one major version of Android on the market for the last year or so.

They tested two major versions of iOS because the one segued into the other only last week.

So the circumstances are different. This particular feature of the study does not suggest bias. Though based on the comments other people have made re: sponsorship, if true, it feels moot.

Re: I don't mind

If you're running an i5 at 4.5Ghz then you probably also have a freezer down there to cool the thing? Though Google says you're not alone in pushing that clock speed.

I'm happy I can buy a Mac but I'm also happy you can mix and match and overclock, and optimise for whichever of price, performance, noise, etc, you value most.

Re: Apple users in a nutshell

Yeah, next thing you know those sheep will want search engines to order their results so that those other people think are more relevant appear closer to the top. The mindless fools should click through every result and make their own mind up.

Re: 40% gross margin

I think they use it to counter the argument that Apple's future is unsteady due to the huge figures being racked up by Samsung et al — i.e. the company is very profitable. It won't close soon.

I don't think they use it in their role as surrogate salespeople.

Re: Absolutely Ridiculous

I think the point isn't so much muggings as ordinary thefts. But even then if you leave your device on display then thieves are probably still going to grab it since it might not be updated or attached to Find my iPhone; if they get it without seeing what it is first (via pickpocketing, stealing a bag or whatever) then they're unlikely to come and give it back.

Re: OMG

They confirmed that a well-known way to fool fingerprint scanners fools a particular brand of fingerprint scanner — I don't think anybody was seriously expecting it to take that long.

I guess the best advice is: if you can't be bothered with a password then the fingerprint scanner is better than nothing.

The iPhone 5s introduces integrated Nike Fuelband. The Nexus 5 introduces integrated time travel.

Re: Apple copying Google again

If it's just track, wipe and remote message, and you want to reduce everything to 'copying' then that's Google copying Apple again — it's been available on iOS devices since 2010. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_My_iPhone

As to what the article is actually about, rendering a device permanently locked, regardless of reboots or firmware reinstalls, or having it always display a message,under the same criteria, that's not currently possible under Android and it never will be. The freedom to reflash cuts both ways.

Hackers will likely circumvent Apple's measures but it's now an arms race. The Android audience hasn't been welcoming to devices that are actively built to lock you out so the same thing likely won't happen. Which is not entirely a good thing or entirely a bad thing.

Re: Again with the server overload rubbish...

App deletion is not the norm — the Apple updater doesn't delete apps. If the employee thought it was normal, maybe that's because he specifically did a clean install?

I doubt Apple would switch to a staggered release because it would ruin their PR. The boast is always "best launch ever, <whatever>% of users updated on day one, <huge number of> downloads", trying to draw a distinction with Android in the minds of developers.

Re: Motives?

You think Apple hired a crowd... of two? They must have bought into the idea of decline.

Then don't use iTunes. It isn't required.