Posts by Stuart Duel

Aim those pitckforks...

...at Adobe - they are the kings of price gouging in Australia. Apple's prices are consistent with allowing for the small differences required for localisation, taxes and shipping small numbers of boxes into a small market sitting on a huge and sparsely populated continent.

Adobe has no excuses for their blatant rip offs especially the price of their downloaded software - no packaging, no localisation, no media, no local hosting and no local support staff.

Apple's testimony should put Adobe in a tight spot.

When you've gotta go,...

…you've gotta go.

While we're at it...

...could we get rid of that dweeb who currently plays the doctor too?

Bill Gates...

…is no Steve Jobs.

WP was King

I used Word Perfect from DOS days through Windows 3.1, 3.11 and 95 in the admin jobs I had at the time. I absolutely loved the script writing ability of WP - you could simply and quickly write mini-programs to deal with fiddly tasks such as filling in fields to print on pre-formatted form paper instead of writing it out by hand.

I worked for the Housing Commission (public housing provider) where we had to manually write out an initial five rent deposit slips for the new tenant to use until their printed book arrived. There were six fields to complete on each slip - name, address, account number, reference number, and a couple of others i can't recall. The fields were small, so it was a time consuming, diabolical tasks to do 30 times a day x 5. Then I wrote a WP script (took me about 20 minutes to write it and get it working perfectly) which allowed staff to type the info up in 20 seconds to have 10 slips printed in about the same time, down from the 5+ minutes to hand print 5 slips and eliminating the hand cramps everyone complained about. That was the power of Word Perfect.

Word Perfect was a better program. It was a more powerful program and as noted by someone else, had a reveal codes function which actually revealed all the hidden stuff, allowing you to quickly identify and remove unnecessary formatting codes that were causing a document to not preview as expected.

I currently use Pages and occasionally MS Word 11 but if Correll released a new version of Word Perfect for Mac, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

They're applying to make it a STANDARD

As such, it would need to be transferable and open to every operator/manufacturer to adopt. If it is a standard, how could it possibly be a lock-in?

It makes sense to me - the SIM only holds data after all, and a pitifully small amount of data at that compared to the capacities of today's phones. Why not have the data sitting on the internal storage and do away with the SIM altogether?

It would also allow multiple accounts on the one phone without the need to physically change over a SIM, auto-switching between providers as required, and even have multiple user accounts on the one phone with each different user having a different network provider if needed and without any fuss.

Oh, and also means reducing the weight and complexity of the gizmo. And we all know how compulsive-obsessive Apple is about 'thin'.

Seems like a win all the way around to me.

Or a software problem

It could be some odd interaction between some Apps and the OS or perhaps Apps which need to be updated and should have been updated three updates ago that are causing the problem.

Flash is crap

Unless you're a web developer. But for the end user, Flash is useless, annoying, buggy, intrusive crap. It is only a matter of time before it dies on the desktop. And good riddance.

As the saying goes...

The only good cat is a dead cat.

Use common sense

I know there's nothing so uncommon of course…

But anyway, it's fairly easy to avoid these things on the Mac anyway.

* Don't visit dodgy websites and download things from them.

* Dodgy email? Delete, delete, deleeeeete! (said in my best Cyberman voice).

* Have some anti-malware software installed - the Apple supplied one, ClamXAV, etc and run them occcasionally (and every time you get a memory stick or disc of unknown virtuousness.

* Turn off all but the most essential things on your social networking tools/accounts.

There may be no Mac OS X viruses out in the wild but as someone else said - never say never - and hopefully you won't be sorry.

Re: Another leftie fail

@ Chris 96

Not another "leftie fail" at all. Just another mouth hired by Microsoft to push their interests in the guise of "better public policy".

Cost of stupidity

Whatever the cost of periodically stabilising the orbit, surely it has to be an order of magnitude cheaper than building a new space station of that size from scratch and putting that in orbit? Far from having money to burn, the various space exploration outfits currently need to pinch pennies until they bleed.

Aside from that, the ISS is massive. How could you possibly have any guarantee of control over how it breaks up and where all those big chunks will splash down - or crash land.

I can just see it now:

"Authorities have ordered the immediate evacuation of the Australian city of Perth and the South African city of Cape Town after the controlled re-entry of the ISS went awry.

"We're not exactly sure how many cities are at risk, at least two for sure, but we're currently tracking a half dozen pieces of the ISS which unfortunately have not followed their intended course and pose a major threat if they crash into population centres", stated NASA.

"We've scrambled fighter jets to intercept the debris, but we can't be sure we'll be able to destroy it before it hits the city. It's simply outrageous that they could have allowed this to happen at all - what were they thinking?", the Australian Defence Minister said. The minister refused to comment on whether the Australian Government would demand compensation from the United States and other ISS partners for any deaths and damage.

Won't happen, can't happen? It almost did once before - remember what happened to Skylab.

Power corrupts

Now if this had been any other company, any non-media company, engaged in such corrupt behaviour, their offices would have been raided and executives arrested. What is even more extraordinary is that even after reports Murdoch's minions were frantically destroying documents and deleting email records, still no raids have taken place.

Best to not kick the dog too hard I guess. Especially THAT dog!

Before; BEFORE?! You're living in the past Marg, quit living in the past!

The original code base for FCP was written back before 1998 by Macromedia. For this type of software, where the technology surrounding it has advanced considerably, you'd have to say 13+ years is a pretty good run but you reach a point where it is too long in the tooth and you have to start over. Remember, this software was released before OS X was on the scene, so bear in mind the jump from OS 9 to OS X, Carbon to Cocoa, PPC to Intel and the jump from 32 to 64 bit (CPUs and the OS), so there would be all sorts of legacy crap gumming up the works after jumping through all those hoops. It was no doubt impractical, inefficient and/or impossible to bring the existing code base to 64bit goodness without further bogging it down.

It should come as no surprise that it would, at some point, need to be completely rewritten from the ground up. It is also reasonable to expect, with such a major exercise, the release of this rewritten app would be missing a lot of features present in the previous version.

Sure, sometimes you just want to slap someone at Apple. There's times where you think they're just doing things to deliberately piss people off. Sometimes they're so anal they risk disappearing up their own orifice. Keyed USB extension cables designed to ONLY connect with their own keyboards/mice comes to mind. But sometimes they do things, however inconvenient, because they simply have to. I think FPX falls into the latter.

It's not like FCP has suddenly stopped working.

If you're so keen to be on the bleeding edge, then you'll probably get a bit bloodied yourself. Me? I tend to sit back and wait for the dust to settle before venturing into the unknown. Maybe they will make a complete pigs breakfast of it, but it's a little early make that call.

Treated water in an OPEN reservoir?

Are they completely nuts? What is this, the third world?

Note to self: Do NOT touch the tap water if I ever visit Portland.

I have the original...

...Mac OS 9/X release of this game.. I'm not really a game player, particularly if there are a gazillion button combinations to remember, but this is one I still play from time to time.

I look forward to the Mac version for this latest incarnation.

Non-Apple branded computers

We may not be permitted to run OS X on non-Apple branded computers, but Apple is free to run OS X on any hardware they feel like.

But it might not be OS X. It could be some other Unix, heaven knows there's plenty to choose from. But it won't be Linux and certainly not Windows.

So what...

The guy created an application which activated functionality Apple had, up until WWDC, decided against including in the iphone for whatever reasons, including security.

The guy "created" a logo by combining the Apple icon for syncing (the chasing snakes) with Apple's logo for Airport (the radiating wave).

He accessed APIs or used them in such a way which was not permitted, and unsurprisingly had the app rejected. He then sold this rejected app in an "renegade" store in defiance of the agreement entered into with Apple.

And in the wash up, he has made a bucket of money, but now the sun is setting on that particular little venture.

Don't look for any sympathy here.

Question...

If Richard Branson can knock up a sub-orbital reusable space plane in a few short years, how could it possibly take so bloody long for NASA to design, test and build what is essentially just a very big rocket?

Nutters, the lot of them

"Plague of US preachers falsely claim to be Navy SEALs

Well, at least it's not the other way 'round."

I'm pretty sure you'd find a plague of current and former Navy SEALs, and other military types, proudly proclaiming at the very least their religious nuttiness, since a disturbingly high proportion of Yanks can be defined as religious nutters. Which is a large part of the reason much of the west + world views the U.S. with a high degree of suspicion, concern and distain. The other part of the reason is the obscene mixture of capricious, fundamentalist capitalism with absolutist Christianity to form the U.S. state religion which the U.S. insists on imposing on others at every opportunity.

Soundsticks

I'd really like to see Harman Kardon update their gorgeous Soundsticks system with 7.1 digital surround sound, remote and wireless speakers. I'd pay a $1k for that!

Outrageous Price!

I looked at some titles on the iBooks store but was turned off by the outrageous prices the publishing houses are forcing Apple (and I imagine others) to charge.

Take away the cost of printing, storage and distribution of a physical book and the price should be significantly lower for an ebook.

Sometimes I'm faced with the same choice when buying a music album.

For an extra couple of bucks, I'll just go to my local book store until they get real on the price.

What the majority of uses need

Apple gets it right by offering the right mix of features that the majority of everyday users need. Their products aren't just slapped together, an enormous amount of thought goes into absolutely every minute detail, right down to balancing the weight of the device so it sits and feels comfortable in the hand.

Where other manufacturers get it wrong, is to offer everything under the sun, regardless of whether the majority of users will ever use those features. They stick in a video out port, USB ports, SD slots, physical buttons here, there and everywhere. They add complexity, just because it's a way to differentiate or to add bullet points to a spec sheet, and the result is more weight, more things which can go wrong and more things which can break. They also produce multiple models which quickly get superseded and dead-ended by the latest version, resulting in poor support for owners of the previous models. People really don't want a bewildering array of models, as championed by the likes of Dell in the traditional computer space, each with only minor or incremental differences between them but wildly different physical designs which add no value to the product and no real benefit to the end user.

More complexity means more support costs to the manufacturer and less money for R&D, testing, fine-tuning and divining the optimum user experience. Ultimately this leads to a poor product for the end user.

I guess the questions are...

...what does MS actually mean by "native HTML5" and what are they actually up to?

I'm can't answer the first question, but I think I can answer the second question: No good if history is any guide.

Not just emergency services

It is my understanding that the new national railways wireless communications network requires a dedicated chunk of this spectrum. There has already been considerable good work and expenditure testing and preparing to move the current fragmented railway communications systems to one national standard but this is now at risk because the Government is listening to the wrong people about how to divvy up this new money pot.

slowly winds down??

What alternative universe are you getting your information from Lewis???

That's entertainment!

nuf said.

Hello, Earth to U.N.?

Isn't about the the U.N. put a complete stop to this nonsense before it all ends in tears for humanity?

sink without a trace

A few years back the slither photovoltaic solar cell developed by the CSIRO was to revolutionise solar energy production, as power is still generated when more than 90% of the cell was shaded whereas a traditional cell cuts out after a small percentage is shaded. It was also flexible rather than rigid, used significantly less materials and therefore cheaper to produce, and could be coated onto almost any surface including the glass panels of high-rise buildings whilst still allowing significant light to pass through. The only hurdle at the time was the need to hand cut the slithers, which was to be achieved with large scale automation.

This would have proved to be hugely disruptive to the traditional power generation industry. Needless to say the technology, which was bought by a large coal burning power company in Australia, sank without a trace. The last reference to this technology is from 2006.

Cue large traditional power generating company with a promise to develop this technology to large scale deployment, and quick as a flash, this artificial leaf technology will also disappear without a trace.

There he goes again!

Mr Page taking at face value without blinking every reassuring utterance issued by the discredited, secretive, dishonest, and deceptive disinformation campaigns of the Japanese nuclear power plant operators and government regulators. It's all been carefully stage managed and has been for so many years that the people have little faith in what they are being told anymore.

There was sufficient evidence even before this accident that the extent of "damage control" activities undertaken by these bodies was first and foremost aimed at shoring up the public perception rather than the physical risk to the people and the environment.

It's worth noting the independent nuclear watchdog in Japan hasn't been allowing to say a thing. Now why do you suppose that is?

Offensive to a large group

It would, of course, be offensive to the GLBT community, but also to the supportive parents, siblings, relatives, friends and colleagues and offensive to the vast majority of health professionals who find such "gay cure" nonsense dangerous to the well being of vulnerable people this app is aimed at.

Thank you Apple.

@ Andy Christ

Actually, Snow Leopard was originally slated for both Intel and PPC G4 and G5 processors above a certain GHz rating and with 2+ cores or physical processors but all references to Snow Leopard on PPC were mysteriously pulled. No doubt an infuriating situation at the time for relatively new G5 owners and after Steve Jobs' promise of supporting PPC for "many years to come".

I have no doubt that Snow Leopard was meant to be the last hurrah for PPC and would have given this platform a mighty boost in performance. Someone decided otherwise unfortunately. We are left to imagine what could have been.

The Power Mac shown on Page 2 of this article, is from the same family of machines I'm using right now, the "Quicksilver" (mine upgraded to a dual 1.73 GHz G4 processor), almost ten years old now itself, still going strong and still running rings around my three year old Dell XP desktop at work.

You'd have to drink a lot of water

But humans DO drink a lot of water in a year. Not to mention the fact water is a major component of practically everything we eat and drink.

What was your point again Mr Page?

I vote for a trilogy...

...directed by Peter Jackson. I'm sure he would do the story justice so long as he doesn't try to make it "family friendly".