Posts by Pahhh 211 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2010
Pathetic lawsuit from Apple who as far as I am concerned have done very little innovation. They do however do a lot of great designs.
In case you think I'm another Apple hating pundit, then yes you are right. However, I do like their devices and own several iPhones, iPads, Apple TV (that is actually shit), Mac, 4 of their WiFi boxes, iTouch.
The company is still despicable.
Ah yeah....
Remember one time struggling with one case and wondering why everything seem a bit slippery in the case. Perplexed how a liquid got in until i realised I've been bleeding like a stuffed pig and inside of the case looked a set from Dexter.
At that point I decided I wont by super cheap cases anymore.
My iPhone wish list:
- Waterproof phone - I would have LOVED if it they made the device waterproof. THAT would have been special and useful.
- InfraRed sensor/emiter - Handy so you could convert the phone into a generic remote control
- Ability to use phone as a USB stick without 3rd party software - you have up to 64GB of memory, shame you cant easily use it as a dumb memory stick.
- Contractless payment - if they had done it, more likely it would be widely adopted. I would use it for sure.
- Contactless recharge - be nice to dump the phone a tray to recharge rather than having to plug it in.
Those would compel me to upgrade from my 4G.
Well pinch and zoom was on a Mistibishi device DiamondTouch as well as the concept in the film "Minority Report", all pre-dating the iTouch.
Apple largely use other people's ideas and package them together in a fantastic way. I am sure somewhere there is some innovation but really what makes their product great is the execution, how well they have put all the ideas together. For instance Apple obsession in making a great interactive device ensured that there was a great refresh rate so that when you swiped it would keep up and feel super smooth. Thats good engineering and I applaud them for it. So much so that I bought lots of their devices.
Apple = Great design + great engineering but there is a little innovation there.
Take your modern Ferrari , I think you will find there is little innovation that makes a material difference to the car, but there is fantastic design and engineering.
I think their devices are great and will keep buying them. Although the recent hardware on the Samsungs is now better than Apple's , I think the general experience sucks and I wont buy one.
That actually is a great idea. Unfortunantly at the moment the honus is the defendent to prove a) he isnt infriging b) its a valid patent. a) is generally straight forward. b) however is a nightmare as the legal weight is that the patent is valid.
Yes, I am quite aware its a design patent but rounded corners on devices that all have rounded corners is not clever design.
Coke bottle analogy is a good one as the bottle is somewhat iconic. The Apple design isnt. Rounded corners is too broad. Its like Coke saying the general shape of a bottle is unique. It isnt.
Interesting point....but with issues.
There are effectively four types of intellectual property, Patents, Copyright, Trademarks and Trade Secrets.
Trade Secrets arent legally unforcable. It just says they we do things in a certain way and we not going to tell you how. Case example the Coke-Cola or KFC chicken formula.
Trade Secrets are fine when its difficult to copy a design or reverse engineer the product. With food the process and ingredient (and quantities) determine the end output and its obviously very difficult / impossible to make identical copies.
You could however reverse engineer software and hence the process.
So there is logic to the usefulness of software patents. The problem is the review process does a piss poor job of deciding what is an invention, loosely defined as "non-obvious to someone skill in the art". Thats problem 1. Problem 2, is it not affordable small entities.
"Secondly, Apple is a real innovator not a patent troll."
Yeah... really? Give me some examples?
Apple's products are a natural evolution of modern material, increased battery life and increased processing power. They are however great designers.
Apple and Steve Jobs in particular (god bless his soul) is one of the biggest exploiters other people's ideas. ref Xeroc PARC. Sony produced an MP3 walkman before the iPod. It was very nice too. The concept behind the iphone isnt new.
Don't get me wrong, I got an iPod, iPhone 3 and 4, iPad 2. I like their devices, they are beautifully designed but innovative no. You misunderstand the term.
And yes they are patent trolls. Rounder corners ffs.....
Ok , firstly, full disclosure, I have patents with my name on it. I have a bunch that are filed and pending examination.
So do I believe in patents? Yes / No. My patents are software related patents and that is one area that I think that patents are not helping innovation but hindering it.
I’ve had to create patents for two reasons; one as a measure of innovation to investors and so that in a case of a patent dispute they are a bartering chip.
Patents in other industries are useful and necessary. In the pharmaceutical industry there would be no point investing 3 years of research and the cost of getting the drug through medical trials if someone could just copy the final product for pence on the tablet.
Software however is different. We are now at the stage where many things that are invented are natural evolution. In truth, good software is less about innovation but execution, how well the stuff was written.
There are some industries where big companies create as many patents as possible. In my industry I would hazard that every product is probably infringing on some other company’s patents. I know having done some recent reviews where someone asked me if a particular bunch of patents were a problem for us, it turned they weren’t but I know of least 3 other products for which they were.
The problem is creating these patents costs money , a lot of money. You can easily spend £5k+ per patent. If you are a small company you cant afford to do many. What is more you also certainly cannot afford to check that everything you do isnt infringing on someone else.
You can easily spend years working on a product and find that as soon as you may some headway in the market and someone pulls a patent that says you infringe. The problem is you may not even have the funds to fight the case even if you are in the right.
I am now at the stage where after this particular venture, I will never start a small company again. Or if I do, it won’t be in software.
So any comments on how software patents can help innovation is naïve.
Disagree. It totally depends on the light.
On my 5D MkII , in good light at high ISO speeds there is very little noise. But in low light levels, like dusk etc , even at ISO 200 there is plenty of noise (obviously even worse at high ISOs)
But that dusk shot on the Nikon has no noise which I think is impressive.
Yep. I got a Canon 5D MkII , so not too shabby but the level of noise on that Nikon is rather good and leave my 5D standing.
In low light conditions, regardless of the ISO, noise starts to get pretty noticeble on the 5D. That dusk shot on the beach at 200 ISO is increndibly clean. Perfect even. Impressed.....
"digital has extra costs related to post-production that can be difficult to sell to a client,"
To be honest thats a ridiculous statement. There is no reason why you need to do post processing on digital any more than you do on film. The reason why you tend to do post processing on digital is its easier and cheaper giving you the ability to give a photo a big lift with 5 mins of work while you probably wouldnt have bothered on film.
Well you just going to have to get the cheaper model then arent you. Canon 1D counterpart isnt cheap either.
The question is whether you need or want it. The 11 fps shooting is amazing but it depends to what type of photography you do. You wont need it for portrait, landscape, weddings , etc. Journalism , sport and animal would of course benefit . So grab the D800?
Ha ha.... the old, Apple wont let you put things on your device comment.....
Which is fine if it wasnt patently untrue. I've got Apps (ok 1 App actually) that I've written myself and put on my phone and my iPad. It's not jailbroken either. Apple have never stopped you installing your apps on the phone.
"I assume when you say "its still reliiant of a reasonable power supply", you're talking about converting the Pi into a portable machine?"
It kind of depends what you got connected to it. I know with the RS 1200 mA power supply it wasnt impressed powering a USB keyboard and something else in the USB connector. My findings however arent very scientific. Plus I also overlocked the CPU (but not changes the CPU voltage).
Still thats a reference point , 1.2W to power the RaspPi and whatever low powered devices you got connected. So totally in the realms of battery with solar pannel recharge. No experience in this but I would assume that if you would need around 5W of solar panel output on the assumption of 8h of day light. Sure someone in the know will chime in ( and probably a few dozen than dont).
Anyhow the RasbPi is all about giving it a go.....
Whats the frigging point.
Android is for portable devices. As small as the RaspPi is , it just aint that small or have an applicable screen / interface.
Ok I'm speaking from the perspective of someone that has one in a Lego box on a 50" TV but trully regardless I dont see the appeal.
I've now got my RaspPi standalone again (with the aid of a WiFi USB card) , but its still reliiant of a reasonable power supply.
Its a fanstastic hobbiest machine. What it isnt is a computer thats suitable for everyday tasks. Even with the minimilst web browser, the dang thing is SLOW. Ok so I've not got the latest OS which uses the FPU but I dont imagine a world of differences.
I am NOT putting the device down. I own one and will get another. The fun part of the RasbPI is how could can use low powered , reasonably priced computing to different tasks. It aint a replacement to the desktop though,......
Hence my comment on a Steam Linux.
Modern Linux releases are as easy to install as Windows. All they need now is making it straight forward to download the games (via the Steam portal) and then run the games. Appart from adding some update system ( remember Linux has that already anyhow ) but tunned for gamming , ie drivers for hardware thats all that your average 13 year old cares about.
If I were Steam, I would contemplate making a distribution of Linux for Gamers. Linux still scare a lot of people but if a version is created that is tailored to the needs of the gamer it could attack a lot of new users.
There isnt a lot that needs doing either but just a few extra apps so that a total novice can install the OS and download and run a game without knowing anything at all about Linux.
They alreay got the download server so they can make it easy too for people to download the latest display drivers etc.
Oracle have a contract to HP which they need to abide too. End of story.
HP have a server that is dead. There is absolulely no reason why anyone in a sane mind would consider it.
This is sad to some extent in that a company A put a lot of money in the technology B produced, the fantastic product X. Company B said that product X was the way forward.
Unfortunantly product X tanked big style. It seems completely fair to me however that company B shouldnt be left in the lurch. Reality is product X is dead but company is B has obligations.....
Wasnt that keen on the machine being a BBC owner myself but it was ok. The 6509 was a lot better processor than the 6502 if you did things in assembly.
In truth in that Golden Age of computing it didnt really matter which machine you had, it all seemed quite magical.
So happy birthday.
Good Design is NOT the same as invention. In the middle somewhere is innovation.
Apple stuff is incredibly well designed. Designs that cover both hardware and software. But as much as I love their products, I dont see any invention.
I would argue also their stuff isnt even innovative. Just about everything Apple has ever done has been an evolution of an earlier idea. Yeah, Apple made the idea work better than other companies but I'm at loss at where the innovation is yet alone invention.
All in one devices that run apps been around since the Palm. What Apple did though is create a device using better materials, displays, batteries, processing power, etc. Tablets are not Apple's invention. In fact I just can't think of anything worthwhile that Apple invented. From the earliest days Steve Job plagerised from other people. The Apple Mac with its WYSIWYG and Windowing system was an idea stollen from Xerox research lab. Steve J is the biggest IP thief there ever was.
Apple can take these ideas and commoditise them like no-one on earth. Sony I think are probably the only other company that consistantly been able to do this type of stuff but the problem with Sony their products are mared by poor software. This is where Apple wins.
Saying that Android is like iOS is pretty pathetic. It misses the very thing that makes iOS special, which is a consistantly uniform and predictable interface. Apple Nazi like control of the Apps helps this and for that I thank them.
So I'm an Apple gadget fanboi. I do think their devices are game changing because of the effort they have made to make them sleek and for their use of latest technologies.
But is the iPhone / iPad innovative ? No, it isnt in the same way that Aston Martins are not innovative but they are incredibly desirable. The difference though Aston Martin arent proclaiming they invented curvy sports cars.....
Unfortunantly they are all shite.
I wont part with my iThings as I like them very much but I do find it depressing that I dislike Apple so much. A company thats had an incredible ability to make nice things without any ability to actually invent anything.
Why can't Apple be happy with their ability to make better designs without the bogus claims.
Well first hand experience of 2x Vertex 3 and 2 x Vertex 4 which have been ok. And one shitty Vertex Plus (i think thats the model). Attached to a variety of machines.
Yes very small sample still but I thought I would state my experience with them in light of a sweeping statement that stated that they all got reliability issues.
No doubt you used several too and got first hand experience of their unreliability. Or maybe your mate has one, or you friends friend. Or possibly you read it somewhere on a forum.
Ive got a bunch of OCZ SSD products so can speak from first hand experience.
The Vertext 3 is fine once I upgraded the firmware and its been my boot drive for 6+ months without a hitch.
Ive also got a Vertex 4 and although i've not used it as a boot drive looks pretty damn fine. The winning aspect of the Vertex 4 is the speeds are uncompressed. So the performance you get from Crystal disk is actually the performance you get. Have one in a production machine at a customer site.
I've also got at OCZ cheap drive. Its a complete piece of s***e. It formats, you can put an OS on it, but 1-2 week in it craps out. I've tried to use it as a disk for booting VMs. It cant do that reliably. Its actually useless.
So I can vouch for the Vertex 3 and Vertex 4. I think they are great products. I would on experience by hesitant using their cheaper SSDs but I could have been unlucky. Have an older Intel SSD too which is fine but nowhere near as quick as the Vertex.
As a major Apple device Fanboi, owning iPad and iPhone, I absolutely love the devices but hate the company.
Apple have over the years innovated almost nothing. Ok, maybe the pinch to zoon and some other the other gestures is new and different. There are problably a few others but by and large everything Apple has ever done has been a natural evolution of you can expect from new materials, more compact electronics, better battery technology, faster processing.
Steve Job (bless his cotton polo necks) was the biggest IP thief of them all. He raided Rank Xerox to produce a computer with Windows, mouse, ethernet, postscript, laser printer, etc.
Sony has an MP3 player before the iPod. The iPad is a tablet. The iPhone is a touch screen phone. It wasnt the first all in one-in-one phone either.
Apple just made them and marketing them better than anyone else. They invented precious little.
I do love the devices, but real innovation is completely different to Apples ability to make things shinny......
FYI
Dropping tapes is often pretty terminal. Problem is though is you unlikely to know until you try to restore a specific bit of data.
Dont know where you got the concept of "bent pins" as a a real world problem but as people dont transit disk for offsite media generally (offsite disk storage is achieved by sending the data offsite, not by moving the disk), who knows...
Tapes actuallly have LOADS of error correction built in and have done since at least 8mm helixal formats. DLT and LTO have massive amount of not just CRC checks but CRC correction. Consequently there is absolutely no point in putting that stuff in software as the hardware does it already in a fraction of the time.
Indeed, if you want to verify the intergrity of an older backup, just check to see if you can read the tape. If you can , it means that its passed the CRC checks / correction.
Yep, EMC have always been like this with tapes. I was told to my space in 2000 from a high up EMC guy that "Tape is dead". So I asked him how he gets back something that was lost a year ago, long outside the retention of their RAID snapshots (BCVs or whatever they called them) and he mumbled something about using tapes lol.
One thing is certain though, is tape is no longer the primary backup device. Disk has overtaken tape everywhere except in super high volume or legacy setups. But of course you still need some offsite backups. Disk can be used for this too but it really depends on your change rate. Disk to Disk over WAN works if your change rate isnt huge. Removable disk which are robust (like RDX) are only suitable for small volumes. This leaves you with good old tape.
Pretty naive summary of why tape is cheaper. Did I say naive? Actually I meant to say piss-poor.
Tape prices are no longer so compelling when you do the price per MB because:
- Tapes require more management , hence people time
- Tapes require more hardware maintenance
- Tapes can actually store substencially less than disk because a whole tape is often not fully utilised and you need to keep duplicating data on tape where you dont need to on disk (unless you want ridiculous restore times).
- Tape backups are less reliable
Now, I'm not writing tape off. The fact its cold storage is still a big deal although spin-down disk system can provide similar benefits. Where you have long retentions and massive data sets, tape is still the cheapest way of getting offsite backups.
10 years ago there was a 100x-200x price difference between disk and tape medium. Now they are darn close.
Thinks its a pretty good round up. I do think KoTR should have made the list as a lot of you commented.
Pleased to see a mention of Star Wars Galaxy (SWG) by another poster which actually was a fantastic game until they decided to dumb it down and make it like WOW. It had a few issues (like medic + anything was too powerful) but it really didnt matter.
My son is a Star Wars fan from early years. At the age of around 6 he was playing Battleground which to this day still brings a smile on my face.
Empire Strikes back also brings back fond memories. Not that actual game but Jeff Minter's parody game, "Revenge of the Mutant Camels" on the C64.
I see they omitted the other Star Wars arcade game, "Return of the Jedi". Actually its fine they left it out as it was pants.
I posted earlier how Webfusion havent failed me.
Unfortunantly in an attempt to protect themselves from DDOS they just blocked out Asia. So got complaints from China, Taiwan, Australia and Japan that they cant access our web site. We host our own DNS server too.
Just spoke to a support guy and apparently they just lifted the restriction so hopefully our Asian customer base will now have access again........
We got a hosted service through Webfusion (2 dedicated servers). Their email response leaves a lot to be desired but amazingly their telephone support is extrodinarily good. They seem to really know their stuff and in the 3 or so years we been with them, the turn around to resolution from initial call has normally been within 1 hour.
Now this may not have any relation to the 123 service but I have nothing to complain about concerning the service. Our website is mostly accessed internationally and they seem to have excelent links to some core internet infrastrure with good download speeds worldwide.
The price was also substencially less than Rackspace too.
I'm only a customer and other than that not affliated with the company but thought it was fair to say not everyone is displeased with Webfusion.
They were the Xbox of the 80s. Incredibly unreliable. I used to work in a computer shop so had first hand experience of them dying. Plus I personnally killed a few.
Wasnt just the first generation either. Problem was the add-on hardware. If you dared moved the computer you a fair chance the add-on would come away slightly and short out the connectors taking the ASIC out.
I did though do one of my most epic soldering jobs on a Speccy. A friend was reporting that his machine was dying after a few minutes of being turned on. I didnt have any freezer spray so I told him to put his finger on some ice for a few minutes and then we went about diagnosing which chip was causing the problem. Turned out it was the Z80 which I happen to have a spare off. I desoldered the CPU and replaced it. The real tricky thing with those boards is if you put too much heat on them the tracks would lift - it was a really nasty motherboard.
Of course, as a BBC B owner, you wont find me saying anything nice about the Spectrum. :P
Good times though. (I remember the Jupiter Ace. Bizare machine it was....)
In all fairness, I really did want to set out to the usual arguments made against the iPad. I wanted to get them out of the way. I'm not even disagreeing with them. I'm fed up of reading the same old arguments.
I recognise the "issues" with Apple and its devices. I'm not even an Apple fan, but hey... I like the devices. I am happy with the compromises. Completely understand why people may prefer Android based stuff too.
I agree. The price hike does seem over the top.
The only benefit i can think of the internal only memory is you dont have some of the strange limitations that Android has where some info has to be on the onboard memory and other data can be on the external memory. Which can mean that you dont have enough memory to install an application even though you got tens of gigabyte of space on the SD card.
This is overpriced and soon you will be able to an Android tablet with the same display (they made by Samsung after all). With Android you wont be contrained by Apple's fachist restrictions. The only reason you will buy a new iPad is if you a fashion conscious pleb thats just wants the latest shinny thing that Apple offers even though all they provided is a better display without any meaningful new functionality. If you get the 4G one you even a bigger idiot.
Fully disclosure: I recieved my new iPad (non-4G) on Friday. I love it every bit as much as my iPhone. I thought it best though to save the Apple haters some valuable time by posting on their behalf.
For those that dismiss the new iPad because its just a display improvement , you are morons.
I don't own a previous iPad but awaiting delivery of the new one today because and ONLY because of the display. Thats the only thing that held me back in the past. The display wasnt quite good enough to web browse amongst other things. At least to my liking. They seem to have completely over cooked it now on resolution but thats ok.
Also, if you think that the new Samsung etc tablets are good enough and prefer them to the Apple product, thats fine by me. We dont all have to like the same thing and I respect your choice. But for the love of god, keep your mindless anti-Apple rants to yourself.
I think although the assignee is Symantec it was probably a Veritas patent which in turn came from the Seagate Backup Exec acquasition.
To my knowledge, Acronis havnt done anything original.
On a different note, the '086' patent (7,093,086) is a very very broad VM backup patent dating back to 2002. (About the only VM stuff at the time was probably the IBM z-series I think). That patent looks like it would effect just about anyone using vmWare vSphere stuff , including vmWare themselves.
Its all a crock of shit of course ... oh well, will be fun viewing.
This is high end physics / chemistry and the whatnot and but as I almost got an O'level in physics, I think its time that I point out their errors and also how graphine should be used and how those pesky scientist are doing it all wrong.
See, the molecular shape of graphene is such that blah blah blah, and they should have thought of that, blah blah blah. I would have blah blah blah and then under normal room temperature we could have blah blah blah blah and that could then be used for blah blah. Remember that I'm a little rusty of course. Now for those of you without my understanding, what this all means is blah blah blah blah and thats really important and useful, IF they listen to my advice.
Even though I'm not an acknowledged world expert, I really think they missed a trick that any schoolboy would have spotted.
Well no surprise you got downvoted. Saying at anytime that "pirating stuff is bad" awards you instant downvotes.
I often download hookie music and if I like it I buy it. I have a sizable CD collection. I also run software that is plain too expensive to own personnally and under no circumstances would ever dream of paying for it due to its price. But I dont use any of it for commercial purposes although I have bought the same software for work because I am familiar with it.
I am justified? No I'm not. Both your points are valid.
Bottom line is its up to the owners of the software to decide how content is licensed and distributed. The fact its often an ineffective method is really not the point. Piracy is wrong even if I am a hypocrit.
I however feel that dreconian measures for tackling piracy are futile and overreaching. I have sympathy for putting the toerag DotCom behind bars as he is a leach on society. Unfortunantly, that particular criteria could be extended to huge sway of the business world so where would it end......
PS Good on you Aggellos for being brave and using your ID instead of going AC too.
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