Posts by ThomH

It's not going to win the developers though

Barnes and Noble operate in the US only. Amazon operate worldwide, making it a reasonable bet that at some point the Kindle Fire will become available worldwide. Even for those developers that are willing to import hardware, the sales figures alone are likely to become a compelling reason to put greater effort into making your app run well on the Kindle than on the Nook.

That's even before considering how far Amazon's fork of Android may end up straying from Barnes and Noble's.

Figures seem to be about total sales revenues though

So a 99p game needs to outsell a £30 game by more than 30 times in order to swing the cited statistics in its favour.

If we're playing that game

The Atari Lynx port is fantastic and runs in just 160x102.

My knee-jerk response...

... was to make some sort of joke about already having 100% of the utility of Siri on not only my iPhone 4 but on every single object I own, including hawks, horses, robes, etc.

That said, Siri isn't voice recognition. It's artificial intelligence with a voice recognition interface, just like Safari isn't a touch screen but rather a browser with a touch screen interface. Bog standard command-driven voice recognition is a long-standing feature of the iPhone, like it is of every other major platform.

I think the popular confusion shows just how interested anybody really is in voice recognition, especially on a device they primarily use in front of people, in noisy environments. Even if it could recognise and understand everything I said perfectly, I've no interest in announcing every single thing I email or look up to everybody nearby. Besides anything else I'm sure they'd prefer not to have to listen if given the choice.

It's about browser adoption, probably

Mobile phones have a fast turnover rate and you can be pretty confident people are using something close to the latest browser. Flash has also failed to gain any momentum for mobile sites owing to the quality and availability of the plug-in.

Conversely, Internet Explorer's older and extremely non-compliant versions have held the rate of development on the desktop back and will continue to account for a significant proportion of users.

You also tend to see mobile sites and desktop sites developed almost separately anyway, owing to the big difference between how they'll be consumed. Plus the disparity whereby mobile users seem to like dedicated apps (per the AIR route) but desktop types are much happier doing everything in the browser. The history of non-existent or extremely lax sandboxing on the desktop combined with certain OSs that entrust all uninstallation tasks to the software being installed probably contributes.

So, yes, the world would be better with HTML5 everywhere but as a web developer you're cutting off a significant chunk of your audience if you assume it right now. I imagine Adobe will wind down desktop Flash eventually but don't feel that the time is right.

Same here

Indeed, it's probably smart for owners of all types of phone to connect via Google Sync's Exchange route rather than IMAP since it gets you push email.

You're looking at it the wrong way around. This guy allegedly assaulted several innocent people.

I appreciate what you're saying: that because his only motivation was to help, the cumulative total of his positive effects should be weighed against the cumulative total of his negative effects. Or, in short, he made a simple honest mistake — he acted without malice so he isn't morally culpable.

I don't go along with that because I don't think it's a sustainable piece of logic. Assuming he did the alleged act, he intended to perform an assault and he performed an assault. So he performed a crime because he thought it was of social benefit.

So you're endorsing individuals deciding that they have earned the moral right for the law not to apply to them.

I see no distinction between him and, say, someone who (genuinely, not just as a lazy excuse) justifies benefit fraud on the basis that they deserve to get something back because the government bailed out the banks and they've supported themselves and paid appropriate taxes for the twenty preceding years.

OS X Lion isn't so bad

You know, unless you actually like knowing where you are in a document. Though people can finally stop complaining that there's no 'maximise' button, especially as Apple ramp up the 13" laptop production.

I don't think so

If it's an anti-competition probe it'll be looking at whether Samsung have agreed to licence these things under FRAND terms and then either declined to do so or else put up unfair barriers. So the decision will either be that Samsung did something wrong or that they didn't — this investigation sounds like it doesn't have the ability to find against Apple, and a finding that Samsung didn't act anti-competitively doesn't necessarily mean the court considering patents and the like will find against Apple.

In summary: I think it's just a precautionary thing. Someone in the office read that there's some dispute over whether Samsung are playing by the FRAND rules and thought they'd better ask for some additional facts.

I doubt this will go anywhere much.

Sadly it was profitable

Sales were very disappointing but it still managed to make a profit for the publishers, Take-Two Interactive, per their earnings call. So I guess they'd fund a sequel since it couldn't possibly cost as much to make as this one must have.

It's more likely to be about control

Apple are big supporters of WebGL but the technology is hard to get right from a security point of view as per the comments of Microsoft. iAd content is HTML based but Apple get to vet it before sending it out. So enabling WebGL only for iAds gives them an opportunity to test their implementation in a controlled fashion.

I think it's safe to assume the measure is temporary, as per the faster Javascript engine that was rolled out across the OS only in small steps a few versions back.

Good call!

Even now just look at all the post-Geometry Wars stuff; if that isn't a riff on the Tempest 2000 aesthetic then I don't know what is.

Not really dodgy action

Apple paid some money to acquire the rights to a product. As part of that the previous owners agreed to surrender their right to sell it. Apple then decided to charge the consumer for the product.

Google have pretty much killed any realistic prospect for competition law challenges to Apple, just as Microsoft did in the PC realm — the actionable offence is abuse of a monopoly position, i.e. taking advantage of your standing so as to manipulate the market. It's a protection for consumers, not for other companies. Because Google have a much larger share of the relevant market (I think it was 50% versus 21% worldwide during September), Apple's actions aren't sufficiently damaging for the market as a whole.

Personally I find it really difficult to be upset either way given that the product is rubbish. I think of it like one of those Ask Jeeves-style question-based search engines. In the 80s the idea may have sounded really attractive but the simple fact is that we're more efficient at just using a keyboard and typing our search terms in a Google-friendly way than at formulating a proper question, especially when keeping the sentence structure suitably simple and trying to focus on annunciation.

@Bullseyed

That's such a trivial straw man argument that I have to wonder about your motives in citing it.

I argued that Jobs' actions were predicated on his belief that he was creating better products as a result.

You use the word 'con' which imports an idea of deception, i.e. you state that my argument is that Jobs was consciously trying to trick people into buying worse hardware.

The conclusion that you've deliberately misstated me is impossible to avoid and it's difficult to believe that the upvotes you've received come from anyone objective.

@Steve Evans

One of the handsets I've tried in the last year or so (having a professional interest) was the Nokia N8. The GPS was possibly a little slow but the battery life was excellent and I don't recall having a problem with any of the other hardware features. So I essentially disagree with you on the suggestion that Nokia's rudderless drifting had led to a general deterioration in hardware quality. But then again I never used an N97.

No. They didn't.

The idea of 'a player for MP3s' wasn't original to Apple or to Creative Labs. The unique aspects of the iPod were the scroll wheel, which most obviously descends from Microsoft's mid-90s addition of a scroll wheel to the mouse, and the Firewire interface for super-fast synching. Firewire is a very Mac interface that has never been big in the Windows market that Creative Labs were most interested in.

Having lost the market, Creative Labs sued Apple in 2006 over a bunch of interface patents, notably including using a hierarchical menu for navigating music and requesting an import and sale ban. The companies ended up settling, with Apple paying a licence fee for the relevant patents. So I guess that's where the story derives from.

So a bit of a hypocrite is probably right, but I wouldn't have agreed with you if you'd used hypocrite without qualification. Apple ended up having to pay licence fees for patents it infringed and it now asserts that Samsung et al are infringing patents without paying licence fees.

While specifically not approaching whether there's a distinction between the similarity of an iPod to Creative's preceding products and Samsung's arrangement of Android to the iPhone, there is a difference in the overall markets. With the iPod Apple entered a vanishingly tiny immature market and popularised it. Both the iPhone and the Android handsets that followed it have entered mature and profitable markets. The net effect is that — supposing for argument's sake there was any wrong against Apple whatsoever — Apple's actions increased Creative's sales, Samsung's decreased Apple's.

Possibly nothing, who knows?

Supposing the savings paid for the risk by already adding more than the cost of the delay and the rebuild, especially when you allow for relevant insurances and premiums, then it's quite possible that nothing went wrong.

After all, nobody was hurt and hard disks remain generally available.

They're out in force in central San Francisco

And it's a well known fact that you're never more than two metres away from a large DNC supporter in San Francisco.

Not really

Assuming we take Jobs' attributed desires at face value and as company policy then Apple's plan is actually quite different from Microsoft's — Apple wants to kill Android, Microsoft wants to profit from it.

Ballmer has said he intends to kill Android but that he'll do it because Android handsets are too technical and Windows Phone 7 is therefore more attractive to consumers. Agree with that or don't, it's a very different way of seeking to kill the competition.

Of course, I've not read the Jobs biography yet and Ballmer's statements aren't always completely tied to reality...

Check the sales figures

The cold hard objective fact is that if you break the market down by handset then the iPhone is the gold standard. It massively outsells every single other individual handset. This isn't an article about operating systems or applications or even just user experience more generally, and the various other market factors that contribute to the iPhone handset totals - even those that a balanced journalist would likely argue relate to Apple's negative aspects - aren't relevant.

Accusing the journalist of bias is classic pot and kettle stuff.

Quite possibly

The Kindle's HTML5 app uses one of the new browser extensions that allows a local SQL database to be used for persistent offline storage. So it's using a local persistent store (that is probably backed up to iCloud but that's an orthogonal issue) but is doing so through an open API that Apple doesn't have a veto on usage of.

When Apple says "you should use the local persistent store only for things that can't just be downloaded and cached when required", the obvious implication is that if you use it for things that can be downloaded again then Apple may use their discretion to reject your application.

Obviously when it's an in-the-browser standard Apple can't really dictate the acceptable uses. So Amazon can use the persistent local storage to store whatever they want.

Given that native magazine apps tend to be dressed-up PDF viewers so as to fit the tools publishers already have and that, in my experience, the artificial release schedule dictated by Apple's approval process tends to push clients towards piling on feature after feature and only months later asking "why haven't we shipped yet?", I fully expect Amazon's solution to become normal for all published content. Besides anything else, answering that a feature can be added and pushed into production completely orthogonally from all the other features being worked on rather than holding other features up or having to wait while the other features you just submitted are picked over is a massive win.

The strategy isn't so bad nowadays

Windows Phone 7 is an extension of the Zune interface, so we're five years into it. Windows 8 takes essentially the same interface and ports it to the desktop. So Microsoft have seemingly settled on Metro as the strategy, and did so several years ago. And for my money the interface is distinctive and works very well on phones, though I'm not sold on scaling it up to the desktop.

Not fair comparisons

Does it really still need saying that CPU megahertz isn't a good measure of system speed? Modern computing systems, including mobile phones, distribute a lot of work to the GPU (another component with a megahertz number attached, although no more relevantly) and are heavily dependent on RAM and secondary storage bandwidth, including network bandwidth for most user experience purposes. You should benchmark this phone against other Androids and, if you care, the iPhone before making a judgment.

Similarly, 5mp often looks better than 8mp since the real determiner once pixels are small enough is the optics system and, all other things being equal, cramming an 8mp sensor into the same physical space as a 5mp sensor just makes it proportionally harder to expose each pixel to enough light. You usually end up with exactly the same sharpness when you zoom in but each little soft portion of image has e.g. 64 pixels in it instead of 25.

No review or article I've seen suggests anything Siri-like is included. Siri is an artificial intelligence project that happens to have a voice interface. Both Android (first of the two by a considerable margin, I think) and iOS have had basic command-based voice recognition for a long time.

My feeling is that the screen on this one is just plain too large. The 4" on the Nexus S is a lot more sensible.

Fact check

iTunes is not required for the 4S or any iOS 5 handset. iCloud is accessible from any web browser.

@Swarthy

Apple's counterargument rests on the chip suppliers having acquired the licences, I think. I'm not sufficiently aware of the facts to have much of an opinion on that though.

There are obvious exceptions but courts generally don't order mediation as a remedy since that would usurp them as the final word on legality. What's likely happened here is that the court has said that the points Samsung have raised are the sort of thing it thinks should first be discussed reasonably outside the courtroom. If so then failure to mediate before making it a court issue wouldn't affect the legal outcome but the court would be much more likely to signal its displeasure by ordering a token remedy — like finding that Apple must pay Samsung total damages of £1 and that Samsung are liable for costs, for example. Though it's a safe bet that won't happen here because Samsung will act appropriately; I'm not meaning to suggest that Samsung have or will act in any way that the court considers inappropriate.

I quite agree

Goldberg & Robson's Smalltalk-80 book is the only other thing I can think of that even comes close, but K&R is the gold standard. Ritchie did tremendous work bringing elegance to the internal structure and organisation of computer systems and deserves every compliment already posted here and a million more.

The votes establish one thing

Specifically, the balance of rationality amongst El Reg's voters.

Not entirely accurate

Sure, it's an obtuse pile of crap but — even if we ignore the pedantic point that it predates even the iPod — it was written to simply people doing basic things with their devices. Put the CD in and the music is ripped and stored somewhere appropriate automatically. Connect your device and the music is copied over automatically. Those are the actual basic things: getting hold of the music, getting the music onto the device. iTunes not only doesn't prevent either, it completely automates them.

iOS 5 and iCloud are probably the real answer to how iTunes fits into the canon though: it doesn't. iTunes needn't be part of the loop at all unless you want it to be. Which is good news.

OS X has its own precedents though

Dial the clock back to 1999 and look at Apple then. The difficulty is remaining relevant and providing a computer that can attract developers and do anything useful while Windows has 95% of the market and desktop applications are much more relevant than now. So Apple did the smart thing to stay alive: they embraced the open source community, combined what they perceived to be the best parts of the then competing platforms and the one they'd bought (ie, UNIX underneath, NextStep as the basis for the UI and for applications, get Microsoft on board to supply Office and Internet Explorer), published quickly and updated often.

That set the precedent from which OS X can't easily retreat. It's build in a certain technological way and it'd be neither easy or particularly desirable to start swapping major underlying parts in and out now. It's a much better idea to continue to build upwards.

Conversely, skip forward to 2007 for the iPhone and you've got a company swimming in iPod money and more able to dictate terms. So they ban Flash, close off as much as possible and a year later when they start doing apps they insist on being the single source and — for a while — being the only company that can even supply development tools.

So Stallman's judgment of the company is probably better measured against the iOS experience, which is Apple at its most confident doing everything it thinks is right, than then OS X experience, which is derived from Apple trying to remain relevant and to attract users.

I don't think that's quite the issue

The comments have mostly been quite balanced — see the large number of people saying essentially "great man, but his flaws stopped me from buying the company's products". Those struggling to be heard are the predictable pack of dogmatic knee-jerk critics, jumping on the death of a human being as another opportunity to pull out their soapbox and preach.

Adulatory comments aren't hard to come by but at least here they're by no means in the majority.

The MSX was poorly implemented though

Video contents had to be posted off via port IO (ie, a very costly form of data access) to the dedicated video chip, which didn't support a hardware scroll. As a result, the first specified version of the machine couldn't smoothly scroll in any general sense. Compare that to the hardware video abilities of a Commodore 64 or the stuff a machine like the Spectrum with the video contents right there in RAM could do and you had a machine consumers just didn't want. Specifications were improved in later versions of the standard but it was too little, too late for most of the world.

Android has a few issues here and there but no huge roadblock of a problem like tying everyone to an uncompetitive hardware design.

@AC

The 4S isn't behind the Galaxy S 2, though you're right that it's very hard to imagine it'll still look good on numbers a year from now.

The new iPhone has a significantly faster GPU and a higher resolution screen; the jury's out on relative CPU speeds since Apple haven't supplied sufficient details but parity is likely. The S2 is also slightly hampered because Android used the GPU only in a very limited fashion (ie, for games and for composition but not for normal painting) prior to 3.x, which has yet to make it to phones.

Conversely the S2 has a significantly larger, OLED screen and a whole bunch of other features that sound a bit silly one by one but add up: a memory card slot, an FM radio, a replaceable battery, etc.

Even ignoring whether anybody actually cares, I'm not sure you can say either has the better hardware without a vested interest in reaching that conclusion.