* Posts by ThomH

2913 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

'Occult' text from Buffy The Vampire Slayer ep actually just story about new bus lane in Dublin

ThomH

How about "The All New Magical Evil Willow and Friends, In Colour!"?

Bloke thrown in the cooler for eight years after 3D-printing gun to dodge weapon ban

ThomH

Re: @ Bush Rat ...But Background Checks Don't Work!

Surely it's a but for question? That the crimes tend to happen with illegally-obtained firearms doesn't prove much about the effectiveness of gun laws — you'd need some magical like-for-like way of comparing quantity and expected outcome of crimes with and without such gun controls as exist?

Otherwise you could have a law that, also magically, eliminated 99% of gun crime. It'd still be true that 99% of guns involved in crimes were obtained illegally. But that wouldn't mean that the law was ineffective.

'This collaboration is absolutely critical going forward'... One positive thing about Meltdown CPU hole? At least it put aside tech rivalries...

ThomH

Re: Why don't people patch?

I'm probably being ignorant, but as I understand it, Meltdown and Spectre arise because the processor speculatively executes code that would not be permitted to execute, with observable side effects.

So I don't think that particular issue has any motherboard-level ramifications. And neither did the OpenSSL issue. So likely this story doesn't cover motherboard manufacturers who, for all I know, have never been forced to work together?

I may be failing to think of the proper angle.

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

ThomH

Re: Hmmm...

I think we're also supposed to complain about the dynamic range compression that is now usually applied to digital audio prior to mastering, as a way of arguing that CDs don't sound better.

I'm probably the last person who should comment though, as at this point I don't even still own a CD player, let alone anything more involved.

Ever yearn for the Windows 95 shutdown sound? TADA! There's an Electron app for that

ThomH

640x480 "for that proper old-school DOS feel"?

640x480 is 480% as many pixels as Doom had in DOS!

At least Sony offered a t-shirt, says macOS flaw finder: Bug bounties now for Macs if you want this 0-day, Apple

ThomH

Re: just sell it

I think there's quite an ethical leap between using a bug you found to shame a company that (significantly) lags the others in its inducements for bug reports, and seeking to profit from knowledge of a bug by other means.

Assuming he hasn't tried to sell it by any other means, good for him.

Is this a wind-up? Planet Computers boss calls time on ZX Spectrum reboot firm

ThomH

Re: No money but lots of paperwork

The serial offences point somewhat towards an overt intent which is to be condemned, but I will say this of the practice of going into receivership only for the same leadership to form a new venture and buy the assets of the old shorn of liabilities: it allowed Miles & Gordon to invest a couple more years of effort into the Sam Coupe as SamCo after MGT's failure.

So I'm not entirely opposed. In the abstract. For people without Levy's track record.

Court orders moribund ZX Spectrum reboot firm's directors to stump up £38k legal costs bill

ThomH

Re: Two words for you ...

The Spectrum Next team shipped their board-only machines quite a while ago, they just seem to be suffering with the keyboard. And one gets the sense of too many cooks in the kitchen, as the hardware spec for the extended modes mutates every ten minutes but remains consistently overwhelmingly undocumented — though being an FPGA machine, that at least doesn't have manufacturing ramifications. They also post an update every two weeks, full of pictures and dates and so on.

So that's reassuring enough, at least for now.

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

ThomH

Re: PUB Underflated Inflation ALERT

In 1983 a loaf of bread cost about $0.65. Nowadays it costs around $2.40. A stamp cost $0.20, it's now $0.55. A gallon of milk has risen from around $1.90 to $3.80.

Let's be absolutely clear about this: ShadowStats alleges large-scale international governmental data manipulation. It's basically climate change denial for economists.

Due to its frequent citing by Fox News et al for a period, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has taken the time to lay out its methodology at length, and debunk many of the specific allegations made by ShadowStats, such as that they substituted hamburgers for steaks in the inflation basket (spoiler: they didn't).

So it's up to you: have all the governments joined in a massive conspiracy so that inflation since 1983 has been around 1370% but, ummm, bread, milk and stamps have somehow only gone up by an average of around 250%, or is the US government, along with those other governments that track the US economy, right to say that inflation has been about 250%?

ThomH

Re: Multi-tasking..as a matter of interest..

It could be a result of those voting actually having read the documentation? Here's a quote directly from the Process Manager documentation that you linked to, to substantiate your claim that "MacOS had full preemptive multi tasking from System 7 onwards":

This chapter describes the Process Manager, the part of the Macintosh Operating System that provides a cooperative multitasking environment.

As mentioned by several others, the classic OS wouldn't go anywhere near pre-emptive multitasking until 8.6 in 1999 via the Multiprocessing Services. To quote the engineer that actually wrote the thing:

I rewrote the nanokernel in OS 8.6, adding multitasking, multiple address space support, fully protected memory, multiprocessing support, a high performance scheduler, enhanced power management. ... The upper layers didn't exploit much of that support in 8.6,

So people are probably reacting negatively to your post because it's counter-factual.

ThomH

Re: Multi-tasking

Swift doesn't implement garbage collection any more than C++ does, so that may be your issue.

For automatic handling of heap objects, it uses close logical equivalents of std::shared_ptr and std::weak_ptr, but elevated to being the default semantics and therefore obviating the syntactic burden. Classic Apple stuff: the way they want you to do it is easy, the other ways are absent.

ThomH

Re: ' by 1998 there was no actual need to buy a mac for DTP. NT4 was excellent'

I believe Quark, then commanding 95% of the market, essentially bet the house on the statement that "there is now no actual need to buy a Mac for DTP" (see here).

Today they've got a market share that can be reasonably approximated as 0%. So that went well.

Googlers to flood social media with tales of harassment in bid to end forced arbitration

ThomH

Re: "requires employees to waive any rights to sue or appeal"

In America you can famously be fired for your political beliefs, even if you express them no more strongly than merely having a bumper sticker (that's the 2004 story of a Kerry supporter fired by her Bush-supporting boss).

ThomH

Re: "requires employees to waive any rights to sue or appeal"

I don't think the US law is all that different from the UK; where a contract requires arbitration, that process will be required to be completed first, and grounds for overturning an arbitration finding are (1) fraud or corruption; (2) partiality; (3) misconduct in selection of evidence; (4) straying outside of the bounds their powers, by either going too far or failing to reach a conclusion.

If you've the time and curiosity, compare and contrast the Federal Arbitration Act and the Arbitration Act 1986.

I think the Google employees are reacting to a system that in practice appears to have allowed malfeasance by million-dollar employees to be swept under the carpet, more than necessarily a principle of law.

We're two weeks into 2019, and an email can potentially knacker your Cisco message box – plus other bugs to fix

ThomH

It's two weeks into 2019, and El Reg is still not witty enough to come up with better headlines.

You can blame laziness as much as greed for Apple's New Year shock

ThomH

Re: Never mind China

Similarly, re: Apple's failure to expand beyond the phone, I've been an avowed Mac user since 2004 and an iPhone user since 2008 but when it came to replacing my activity tracker a year or so ago I looked at the Apple Watch and concluded: too expensive for the likely lifespan, allowing for OS updates and battery degradation. Especially the latter if it lasts only a day at first purchase.

So, an ordinary appliance-esque Garmin it was.

For as long as it is usable as a development machine, I'll never give up my Mac; I'm definitely keeping my current iPhone 6s until its bitter end, but then we'll see. I mean, it'll probably be another iPhone but I've effectively cut the usual price of an iPhone for myself by just spreading it out over a much longer period of time. And I don't think any other Apple products are currently for me, even where the company is trying to get itself into new categories.

Found yet another plastic nostalgia knock-off under the tree? You, sir, need an emulator

ThomH

Re: F/A 18 Interceptor

Pro tip: it was ported to DOS as Jetfighter, and Jetfighter 2 is a direct enhancement. As in, it could be the same game but for the addition of 256-colour VGA graphics. It works well in DOSBOX if you don't turn the emulated speed up too high (that makes the floor flicker terribly, for some reason), but alas doesn't seem to be available through GoG or elsewhere.

Um, I'm not that Gary, American man tells Ryanair after being sent other Gary's flight itinerary

ThomH

Re: It'll never happen...

I'm in the same boat as Gary re: possessing firstname.lastname@gmail.com; only once so far has a European company been so persistent that I felt the need to invoke the GDPR, and even then all it took was a fairly passive "I'd be interested to know how you think your failure to respond to my notification that I am not the intended recipient of these emails and do not wish to receive them is consistent with the GDPR" to resolve the problem.

I've also had a couple of times when bills went past payment for which somebody had given my email address as a PayPal destination to invoice; in both cases I let the companies know but in only one did they seem particularly interested. I often receive council meeting notes for a particular other person with my name, but they seem to come from America where the notes would be a matter of public record anyway.

No incorrect contacts via my alternate address, firstname.lastname@outlook.com, yet. Quelle surprise.

Dutch boyband hopes to reverse Brexit through the power of music

ThomH

Re: Slightly wrong.

Had David Milliband not been stitched up by Ed and the disproportionate power of unions* in selecting the Labour leader, I dare imagine we wouldn't have ended up with a Tory majority in 2015 and hence the referendum, or with the embittered old man Corbyn so far of step with his members that there's no mainstream anti-Brexit party despite 48% of people feeling that way when last asked. But, you know, down with Thatcher!

* I've no problem with unions in general, I should add. At least, not in the abstract.

Do not adjust your set: Hats off to Apple, you struggle to shift iPhones 'cos you're oddly ethical

ThomH

Re: Have to agree.... @Tim99

To one-up you, hopefully not to your disappointment: my 6s was similarly affected — charging slowly devolved from remembering to put the cable in at the proper angle, to wiggling it about a bit until charging started, to wiggling it about a lot and then putting the thing down very carefully. I tried compressed air, I tried a vacuum cleaner, I tried sufficiently-miniature tooth-cleaning products. I believed the thing was done for.

I booked an appointment at the Apple Store that I pass every day anyway, to formalise the bad news and to ask about trade-in prices but they did quite the opposite: the assistant tried cleaning it with a specialised small brush, to limited effect, then peered in and confirmed that some of the pins looked like they'd ended up bent a little too far to retain their necessary springiness.

Then she took the phone into the back room for about fifteen minutes, used an unspecified machine on the thing, and brought it back good as new. Cables click into place and the thing always charges and no longer randomly disconnects when I'm using it in the car for directions.

So, ummm, Apple's service, even for well out-of-warranty products, has cost them at least one phone sale. I wouldn't expect the same outcome with a competitor just because they don't have the High Street presence, so you can't just walk in and get the diagnosis right there. At best there'd have been a whole extra level of phone queues and service requests and posting things back and forth, but likely there'd have been nothing.

I'm not averse to a new iPhone as for my money wireless charging undoes the loss of the headphone socket and I still don't understand the notch controversy, but I was always fine with the Office ribbon too so I may just be a poor representative of tech news comment posters.

Great Scott! Is nothing sacred? US movie-goers vote Back To The Future as most-wanted reboot

ThomH

Re: Bah! @bombastic bob

The flag is in the film. The sequence is shown in first-person and Armstrong is shown to plant the flag. There's no long shot or big slow-motion dramatic planting, just as there isn't a long shot or slow-motion lift-off or landing, or anything else.

There's no cutting-room floor footage featuring more of the flag; it's a standard-issue culture war manipulation storm in a teacup.

Per a joint statement from Armstrong's family and the biographer (emphasis added):

Although Neil didn’t see himself that way, he was an American hero. He was also an engineer and a pilot, a father and a friend, a man who suffered privately through great tragedies with incredible grace. This is why, though there are numerous shots of the American flag on the moon, the filmmakers chose to focus on Neil looking back at the earth, his walk to Little West Crater, his unique, personal experience of completing this journey, a journey that has seen so many incredible highs and devastating lows.

... and as if it weren't clear enough to you yet what the real motivation for the chicken-in-a-basket controversy were, they add:

In short, we do not feel this movie is anti-American in the slightest. Quite the opposite. But don’t take our word for it. We’d encourage everyone to go see this remarkable film and see for themselves.

Which I might paraphase as "they're not the real Americans, we're the real Americans, you should give us some of your money to prove it".

ThomH

Re: Post-America Hollywood

Today's films are made for the same reason as films have always been made: to obtain money from audiences. There's really no ulterior motive.

Nowadays that means: a lot of action, because it's language agnostic, and a fairly simple plot, because that's closer to being language agnostic. And if you're doing action then you're in a CGI horse race, so expect an entirely desensitised audience.

The reason they didn't make anything like Citizen Kane last year is not that they're worried about offending sledge owners. The reason that they didn't make The Godfather is not that they're worried about a Twitter shame campaign by horses. It's that neither film would be likely to turn a profit.

The idea that political correctness motivates anything doesn't really have any evidence behind it; films are less likely to be e.g. racist now, but they're also more likely to include mobile phones. Are you worried about Hollywood's mobile phone agenda?

ThomH

Suggestions for the putative BttF remake:

Give Marty more of a back story. Lots of intoning about how he was born for greatness, destined to be a saviour.

Up the stakes a little. He should be trying to save the entire universe from complete destruction across all time, not just his own family.

Also, the payoff needs to be larger. Don't just have his family be rich while Biff's are suddenly subservient. Make him president or something.

The Doc is too old to be hanging out with children. Replace him with a wise-cracking tweenager. It'll open up a whole new demographic.

Obviously he's not going back to the 1950s now, he's actually going back to the 1980s. So his dad can't be a nerd because everybody thinks nerds are cool now. Make him more like Bender from Breakfast Club but, you know, not 30. Actually, get rid of him altogether. In this movie Marty has to become his own dad.

With no dad to play off, maybe give him a robotic dog as a sidekick?

88mph is too slow, and we can't really be doing that light-hearted stuff with terrorists. In this version he has to base jump and reach terminal velocity. He first goes back in time because he's an extreme dude whose bungee cord fails. Probably somewhere in China, to hit that demographic. Actually, make the robotic dog Chinese. We know some guys who can do Chinese accents right?

Also it's way too long until he actually travels back in time — something like the entirety of act one is set in the present day. Let's just open with him already back in time, and leave whether he gets back to the present for a sequel.

Also, this Marty guy doesn't seem very interesting. Maybe make the robotic dog the star?

Is Google's Pixel getting better, or just more expensive?

ThomH

I've a Nexus 5x that has yet to encounter a boot loop, and have previously had 2013 Nexus 7 on which the screen remained firmly bonded, an iPhone 4 that never dropped a call, and an iPhone 6 that didn't bend.

Either I'm the luckiest consumer in the world, or these issues become newsworthy as soon as they affect a decent number of customers rather than every customer.

Did you hear? There's a critical security hole that lets web pages hijack computers. Of course it's Adobe Flash's fault

ThomH

Re: GOAT?

Surely some sort of error? As we learnt from the Adobe CEO's 2010 interview with the WSJ, all Adobe Flash crashes on the Mac are the fault of "the Apple operating system". I'm sure Adobe would use the same bullet-proof code on its other platforms too.

ThomH

My organisation's computer annual security training required all employees to enable Flash. It's all contracted out, and I suspect its developers haven't yet discovered an HTML5 way to prevent users from skipping 20 minutes of video per topic of people ostentatiously failing to be either informative or funny prior to taking a quiz approximately as difficult as a weekend television phone-in competition.

A new Raspberry Pi takes a bow with all of the speed but less of the RAM

ThomH

Re: New supplier required

Re: switching SoCs, I'm more concerned about the GPU having been essentially in stasis all this time; it still supports only OpenGL ES 2 doesn't it?

I suspect I'm way out on a fringe for caring about the specific version of OpenGL, but it prevents support for the latest WebGL and, well, you know web developers. Something new and shiny through which they can reconstruct less accessible versions of what's already built-in? Yeah, go for it!

Sudden Windows 10 licence downgrades to forced Xcode upgrades: The week at Microsoft

ThomH

Re: Kaizala? @Stuart Castle

I think you've probably hit on the real target audience for Microsoft and Google's annual new chat platform: middle-managers in HR departments, trying to be seen to be doing something.

They're not all independently missteps — my current employer is presently extricating itself from Facebook Workplace, which can only be a good thing — but the churn is tiresome.

ZX Spectrum reboot scandal firm's original directors rejoin

ThomH

The next part of the story should be more interesting

As, the money being gone, it sounds like three out of four board members just want the legal ability to throw the fourth to the wolves?

ZX Spectrum reboot scandal man sits on Steve Bannon design tech shindig committee

ThomH

Re: Absolutely

Yeah! E.g. it's only the far-sighted policies of Bannon et al that have finally saved 94% of those farmers who were exporting soy beans to China from having an income. After a terrible half century of international economic progress and relative peace, Bannon has come to save us!

ThomH

I feel like there's a Woody Allen joke to be found here.

ThomH

Were it not for the unreliability of tapes and the homework-doing opportunity offered by their loading speed, I suspect I might have exited my childhood essentially uneducated.

iPhone XR, for when £1,000 is just too much for a smartmobe

ThomH

Re: "when £1,000 is just too much for a smartmobe"

It's absurd even if you limit yourself to only the other things you could buy from Apple for £1,000 (or thereabouts):

* for £1,049, a complete 21.5" iMac;

* if you already have a screen, the new Mac Mini with £200 in change;

* at £969, the comically-oversized 12.9" iPad (with its fancy 120Hz display);

* two watches with change to spare — give one to your significant other and it'll be twice as likely that maybe one of you can find a use for the thing.

Wow. Apple's only gone and killed off Mac, iPad, iPhone family... figures for units sold to fans

ThomH

Re: long lived phones @ Voyna i Mor

> Not when the bloke is conflating the OS it's running, with the manufacturer.

Something which he notably doesn't do: "I will never buy an Android device again ... and it's Samsung's fault, they made the Android phone which so thoroughly annoyed me"; that's a condemnation of Samsung for a bad phone and for scarring him as to a platform, not a generalisation.

ThomH

Re: long lived phones @ Voyna i Mor

The story appears more to be:

Poster had bad experience with phone manufacturer A. Decided to try manufacturer B. Had very good experience with manufacturer B. Decided to stick with them for the next purchase.

You don't think that's logical?

ThomH

Re: Sustainable

I don't know about that rose-tinted view; I had a Nokia 6600 in 2003, which other than the better form factor was almost indistinguishable from the Nokia 7650 of 2001, or the N70 of 2005. They stopped innovating a long time before the wheels fell off. The issue is whether anybody else comes along to mount a challenge — Nokia was fine until Apple and Google arrived.

Applying the same test of "essentially the same UI and features", I don't think either Apple or Google has done all that much in at least the last five years. But neither has anybody else.

US Republicans bash UK for tech tax plan

ThomH

"Representative Kevin Brady (R-TX), chairman of the influential House Ways and Means Committee"

... very likely won't still be chairman of the Ways and Means Committee by January.

In the US system, the chairpeople are nowadays always from whichever party has the majority in the House of Representatives (i.e. the part that's a bit like the Commons), which is statistically unlikely to be the Republicans after the election on Tuesday; historically the president's party almost always takes a whipping at the first mid terms and this president seems to be going out of his way to motivate the opposition.

That said, I was wrong in my expectations as to votes twice in 2016.

Mourning Apple's war against sockets? The 2018 Mac mini should be your first port of call

ThomH

As I proved recently on another forum, for the same price (of all the models available) I can get a PC that out-performs the Mac for a-half-to-a-third of the price - and that usually a laptop with an HD screen to boot!

By coincidence, I just disproved this, ummm, on another forum. With my girlfriend, but you wouldn't know her, because she's from Canada.

Bomb squad descends on suspicious package to find something much more dangerous – a Journey cassette

ThomH

Re: Escalation

Instead of the usual bomb disposal expert they'd have used the bomb disposal evil robot?

Roughly 30 years after its birth at UK's Acorn Computers, RISC OS 5 is going open source

ThomH

Re: Vector drawing

In their defence, the classic Mac OS natively supported PICT files — a merely serialisation of QuickDraw API commands, and therefore usually considered a vector file format — from day one, and it was expected that applications would be able to open and use them anywhere an image could be placed. It just didn't come with a decent editor.

Microsoft did much the same thing in WMF, but not until Windows 3.0.

ThomH

Re: Observations

I can't speak confidently as to the others, which is going to make me sound like an apologist, but I know that macOS née OS X spends modern-scale processor cycles on:

(i) using the full set PDF primitives for all desktop drawing;

(ii) the dynamic dispatch that underlies its approach to UI building;

(iii) contrasted with Risc OS, the various context switch costs associated with preemptive multitasking and a full implementation of protected memory*; and

(iv) various things that were historically optional: the file indexing that goes into Spotlight, the background backup of Time Machine, the remote syncing of iCloud file storage, etc.

* if memory serves, Risc OS protects applications from each other, but doesn't protect the OS from applications.

Do you necessarily want these things? Tough, you're getting them.

SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God, and not kill, commit adultery, steal, curse...

ThomH

Re: Not the first piece of absurd preaching to come from the SQLite team

The FAQ doesn't attempt to scope its verdict on threads to SQLite; it does however state an advocacy position, contrary to the norm, citing only a single decade-old paper. Being persuasive is, at best, a fleeting consideration.

But on the whole implementation thing: after the hard stuff of statement parsing SQLite's underlying store is just sorted lists for binary search. So this feels like exactly what readers-writer locks are for: there's a simple, robust, well-documented, well-informed told, widely-implented solution. And then there's just proclaiming a deeply-held conviction.

ThomH

Not the first piece of absurd preaching to come from the SQLite team

To quote the FAQ:

(6) Is SQLite threadsafe?

Threads are evil. Avoid them.

SQLite is threadsafe. We make this concession since many users choose to ignore the advice given in the previous paragraph.

After I've realised why it's evil not to throw away 75%+ of the processing power available to my application, I'll worry about the other strictures emanating from the SQLite team.

Happy 60th birthday, video games. Thank William Higinbotham for your misspent evenings

ThomH

It has: two player objects, either of which can be stretched or automatically repeated a few times. Other moving objects are two missiles (one for each player) and a ball. There's also a background, for which the programmer supplies 20 bits, for repetition twice or so that the right side is a mirror of the left. If memory serves, the player objects can be triggered multiple times in a line. All in a glorious 128 colours (in NTSC, anyway).

The programmer is perpetually racing the beam, i.e. generating state changes in the graphics hardware during the active display to effect immediate changes. Think of the Amiga Copper, or the Atari 8-bit computers' ANTIC but all directly on the 6507. It's not quite as hard as it sounds, as there's an address you can hit to sleep until the end of the line and thereby restore your phase with the frame; you don't need to come up with exact-cycle loops if you don't want, just make sure they're short enough, that you wait at the end, and that you remember to signal vertical sync. Horizontal's automatic, but vertical is up to you.

So Pong is a use case they had directly in mind, as is Combat. Pitfall is starting to get pretty clever, with the actual player, the other player image being the scorpion, alligators and logs, and the sprite and missiles filling in for ropes and ladders, while altering the background every line for the trees and ground. And Solaris is just plain wizardry.

The thinking was obviously that the main thing that defines a video game is, you know, the video part. So the programmable component can do the stuff they used to design circuits for in terms of arranging bits of video. Then there's some time in the border for gameplay. Obviously life gets easier once there's enough storage and bandwidth for a static data structure to describe the display rather than requiring a function that produces it, but there wasn't in 1977. It's actually a pretty brilliant design for the era, all constraints considered.

Like many of us, Pacman may have been a bit of a duffer but his missus was a lot more attractive (albeit slightly less so in that example, where the emulator author or video capture card has decided that the best way to resample a high frame rate is, ummm, to throw a bunch of them away).

GitHub.com freezes up as techies race to fix dead data storage gear

ThomH

Re: Cloud based services

For GitHub consumers this is one of the lesser cloud deployments since cloning a Git repository by default involves making a full local copy, and all operations are performed locally and then merely synced to remote.

Git doesn't even enforce any sort of topology — e.g. an international company that used GitHub could have local copies of all repositories that act as remote for all local developers and which sync up to GitHub from that single point; GitHub would then be the thing that permits cross-site work, and the authoritative copy.

What you lose is GitHub's additions to Git: the pull requests, the issue tracking, etc. Or, in this case, I guess you can still see slightly historic versions of those things effectively in read-only mode.

So I don't think I'm ready to jump on the cloud-is-a-bad-thing bandwagon in this particular use case. It's slightly more of an adjunct rather than a full solution, but the downage needn't be an absolute stop to work like it would be if, say, you were in the business of modifying and reviewing legal documents, and were just keeping them all on One Drive/Google Drive/DropBox/whatever, which vanished from sight.

So, ummm, just think about what you're paying for and be sensible?

Finally. The palm-sized Palm phone is back. And it will, er, save you from your real smartphone

ThomH

Re: Nothing like trashing a product

My name's Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate!

Does Google make hardware just so nobody buys it?

ThomH

Re: Another theory

Apple's failure to use any anti-competitive practices to expand its tablet market probably helps too.

Except maybe that time it took part in an illegal monopoly in book pricing. Which was investigated. And led to appropriate penalties.

UK space comes to an 'understanding' with Australia as Brexit looms

ThomH

@Jess Re: does the landlord refund you all the money you gave to pay the rent?

Per the "purpose of annexation, degree of annexation" Holland v Hodgson test, I don't think the law would give you the right to repayment for a bathroom you fitted as it's very hard to believe that a bathroom is a chattel and not part of the property.

Of course, in the case of Brexit the UK is taking part of the property with them, so possibly that's another analogy that's fallen apart upon closer inspection.

Commodore 64 makes a half-sized comeback

ThomH

As per the article, this wasn't crowdfunded. The only people who contributed to the project were paid employees. The C64 Mini went on sale in early 2018 as promised, is widely available, and you could order one from your usual online retailer today if you wanted.

Android Phones are 10: For once, Google won fair and square

ThomH

That's kind of a limited view; as per the article Android started from nothing in a mainstream market dominated by Nokia and various Windows Mobiles, both already smart enough to offer browsers and cameras and apps. It then won because it was better than Symbian or Windows Mobile.

Apple was never number one by sales volume, and never will be. The 90% of the market that isn't Apple has just evolved from flip phones to Android smart phones.