Posts by skwdenyer

Re: Not a bad start

Who do you want to do that verification?

Re: Scaled Composites not mentioned?

In a class action lawsuit against VG it was stated that VG severed the relationship with Scaled after the test flight crash, and that “Scaled Composites never provided The Spaceship Company with “accurate or reliable engineering drawings” for either the carrier aircraft or Unity.”

https://casetext.com/case/kusnier-v-virgin-galactic-holdings-inc

Re: Who are their lawyers?

“It's virtually impossible within the EU to strip someone of their citzenship once granted, unless malice aforethough, fraud, etc. can be demonstrated.”

That’s simply not true. Never mind Brexit; the many cases of UK & other citizens stripped of citizenship show otherwise. Including citizens from birth.

Re: I

Some of us don’t believe the EU ruling is a positive. Browser choice, for instance, gives me in round terms nothing I want or need beyond potential interoperability issues. As a developer, being able to target a single browser engine for all iOS users is a tremendous benefit, not an issue, delivering great gains for users. The relative success of iOS and Android in the app space suggests to me that Apple’s strategy has delivered enormous gains for all parties. Degrading the Apple experience to match Android’s is hardly progress in my view!

Re: SAP rollout delayed

As a good friend and senior PM said to me years ago: “the first 80% of the work takes the first 80% of the time & the first 80% of the money; the second 80% of the work takes the second 80% of the time & the second 80% of the money…”

Didn’t the USSR use similar technology to power remote weather stations / beacons?

Re: Not if they were made by Sinclair.

The ZX Printer wasn’t a thermal unit. It was a spark printer, that burned away aluminium oxide from the black paper underneath the coating.

How does the firm invoke the Law Enforcement exemption? They’re not processing data as agents of foreign law enforcement agencies. They are processing data as a private company, that then (for now) offers services only to foreign (and maybe domestic) law enforcement agencies.

The database doesn’t “belong” to those foreign law enforcement agencies.

Did the ICO have especially poor lawyers on this one?

Whilst this may well have been true, if they can find more actionable acts by Lynch and co, they get to play liability top trumps: “I may have been stupid, but my stupidity wouldn’t have caught me out if it hadn’t been for those over-inflated statements you made.”

*If* Lynch is guilty, his downfall was seemingly to be too gung-ho with his pitch. If he’d referred all due diligence questions to Autonomy’s lawyers and auditors, would he still be in the dock?

Re: If you live in the UK

It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not; the law already exists :)

Perhaps retailers might start buying insurance to protect themselves, and/or insisting manufacturers do likewise.

Product liability isn’t a new concept. But tech sometimes just likes to hide behind a “software isn’t guaranteed to be bug-free” line somewhere & we’ve all-so-readily bought into the idea.

Ouch, 100-120% these days? In my day (err, 25 years ago), the university I worked in charged 30% overhead, and we thought that was pretty bad!

Which version of Outlook on MacOS are you using? I run a rock solid Outlook on MacOS connected to an on-premise Exchange server.

Indeed. In what was is allowing Blink to take over the iPhone a good thing for the world?

Tell me how app discovery works in a multi-store world.

Re: Twitter Still Free to Use ?

Debt repayment aren’t P&L revenue expenses; they don’t contribute to a loss.

Twitter was already losing lots of money.

Re: I get why change is necessary

How is that otherwise-intelligent people post this stuff?

Do you seriously think Apple would keep supporting phones for as many years as they do, if they weren't making app store revenue to pay for that? The app store model is a huge win for consumers, and has revolutionised the devices in our hands.

Otherwise, they need to increase handset churn significantly - which means fewer updates, shorter support, and so on. Just, in fact, like the major Android vendors who have no skin in the game of long tail consumer revenues.

And never mind device stability - we really don't want Windows on our phones. Who's going to support those?

Developers love to moan, but, really, where was the revenue model before the Apple app store came along? And where would it be without a well-supported base of phones with a current OS?

iOS was responsible for 63% of total app revenue in 2021, despite only 15% of the installed base. That's what the ecosytem delivers for developers - a huge addressable market of well-supported devices with a stable development target.

The only logical result of this idiotic destruction in the name of principle is a race to the bottom - worse phones, worse software, worse support, shorter lifetimes, and so on. 5-6 years of support with the latest OS is great (not just patches to an old OS).

Customers already have plenty of free choice. They can choose not to buy an Apple device. They can choose not to buy an Android device from a major manufacturer (with customise software and few updates). They can side-load apps onto Android devices. There's just no evidence to support the idea that customers are genuinely harmed - as opposed to a few zealots wanting something Apple don't want to sell to them (their company, their rules).

Surely nobody seriously believes there'd still be $83bn to share out for iOS developers if we fragment to a dozen competing app stores, do they? Has nobody got a proper long-run view of history?

Re: Insane

Optane would have revolutionised the workstation space in the 1990s. At a time when we were experimenting with writing code into FPGAs to get orders-of-magnitude speed gains, running with persistent primary storage could have been a phenomenal additional tool.

Ironically the place that Optane might score in the modern world could be in things like phones - modern devices just don't boot fast enough - they're still booting devices, not instant-on appliances. In fact, a whole class of embedded devices could operate this way and, by doing so, be powered-up just when needed and then put immediately back into a zero-power state.

A *very* long time ago now, we set up a test implementation of Citrix running over ADSL in North London. We were pitching the idea to VIdeo Networks, who later became HomeChoice, the grand-daddy of all the modern streaming services. So we had the servers running at Staples Corner and the user terminal in a house a few miles away.

The plan was to offer customers remote desktop sessions on a fully managed high-spec PC instance for a small monthly fee, along with streaming gaming. It worked really well. The thin client hardware was cheap and required effectively no maintenance, the terminal and monitor could be upgraded every few years within the subscription, we could provide limitless data backup, disaster recovery, anti-virus, burstable performance, and so on.

We were just far, far, too early to the party - by at least 15 years. So were VNL / HomeChoice. But we weren't alone - Apple and Oracle went on to spend many orders of magnitude more than we did trying out "network computers" before reaching the same conclusions.

As the old saying goes: never be a pioneer, as the earliest Christian encounters the hungriest lion...

But in the context of the OP's problem, latency via satellite would have been a killer. Customers really don't get on well with their mouse inputs lagging, delays whilst scrolling, etc.

In the U.K., we have a “Registered Design” which serves a similar purpose.

A “Design Patent” applies only to the specific article described. A general patent protects an idea and multiple embodiments of it.

Re: Absolutely ourageous

The problem I have is the asymmetry here. Were Lynch to be American, and HP a UK company, it is beyond belief that Lynch would be extradited to the UK to face trial for acts committed on US soil.

The US, IIRC, is relying upon its catch all "wire fraud" statutes, coupled with this idea that any offence alleged to be committed using US dollars is inherently of US jurisdiction, both of which are tenuous at best.

cf the Natwest Three, extradited to the US and found guilty of committing offences whilst in the UK, offences which were not in fact offences at the time in the UK.

Re: Patent madness

With respect, you misunderstand patents. The fact that Sonos have in fact created a mechanism for altering volumes on multiple devices in multiple rooms from a single app/controller is wholly immaterial. The patent expresses only to the *idea* of this being done.

For something as obvious as this, the only surprise is (a) nobody had patented it before, (b) there was no prior art, and (c) it wasn't declared "obvious" and therefore unpatentable.

I absolutely support inventors being paid for inventive steps, but am pretty sure there were commercial (rather than consumer) systems around long before Sonos that would do what is being described here.

Top terrorist tip: get a US mobile phone :)

Re: Missing a few key points here

That post from C4 seems to suggest that there were no functioning backups, never mind functioning backup hardware. If so, that's pretty extraordinary.

Re: Judge found Apple is not a monopolist?

So you're defining "phone" as "smartphone" - why? If you want to encompass all battery-powered portable general purpose computing devices then why not include laptops? If you want to encompass only phones, why limit it to Android and iOS?

Even if you accept your own definition, why not include all the non-Google Android phones?

This is the problem IMHO. People try to define the market to suit their own point of view.

My first "smart" phone was an Ericsson R380s - Symbian-based, no 3rd party app support. I've ridden the wave for a long time. Platforms have come and gone, not through market abuse but because of market forces.

Those same market forces have determined that a walled-garden / single app store approach is attractive to consumers. How many Android users side-load apps? Or, to return to the definition, how many people are truly happy to use a non-Google Android phone with a third-party app store?

An abundance of choice of app store is not the sign of a healthy platform IMHO; time and again, in fact, consumers have eschewed fragmented or poor app store experiences in favour of the very things you rail against.

Is it really so hard to believe that informed users might make informed choices to buy into a walled garden because that's what they want?

Re: I agree

It has nothing to do with him not declaring tax? :)

Re: They won't get any traction

The key issue is that the trade used US Dollars. The USA routinely claims jurisdiction over any transaction involving its currency.

Tip for the future: don’t use USD :)

Re: Missing the point

At launch in 2017, the Samsung Galaxy S8 was £699. A comparable iPhone 8 at launch in 2017 was £699.

The S8 has just gone out of support after 3.5 years - there will be no more updates. Meanwhile, the iPhone 5S (launched 2013) is still supported with updates.

By your logic, the S8 should still be supported for another 5 years, "amply paid for by the hugely inflated prices consumers pay for these phones."

You know and I know that isn't the case. The difference between Apple and others is that Apple *does* continue to support devices for many years, In turn this ensures there's a huge market for app developers to tap into.

Consumers benefit from this relationship. As do developers.

I have not yet seen anyone explain how *consumers* would benefit from a fragmented app store market (and it is consumers Epic is claiming to champion here).

Likewise, how will small developers benefit? Epic are in danger of applying the same "pull up the drawbridge" logic that got us, for example, the European Super League...

Re: Blackmailed

Surely Boris' latest shenanigans with Northern Ireland will put paid to any trade deal?