Posts by Julian Smart23 posts • joined Sunday 9th March 2008 15:02 GMT
"Newton said that 20 per cent of the profits would go to the foundation, and anything left over after production and distribution costs would go to the organisation's charitable works."
Surely "anything left over..." constitutes the profit? So where does the 80% of profit go exactly?
Erm, what is the point, exactly? You lose the ability to (conveniently) use your phone while it's docked, and in this age of cloud services, surely it would be better to sync everything automatically so you don't need to physically bolt devices together? Weird...
"Architecting" is still not a flipping word.
More news to gladden the hearts of Nokia employees, developers and users.
Wow, the mobile market is in a sorry state at the moment what with Apple lording it over content providers, Nokia going evil, legal threats over Android, and Microsoft living up to their reputation. I'm glad I don't depend on mobile development for a living... yet.
Frustratingly, schools seem very fixated on Windows and MS Office. At a teacher friend's school, when they bought new machines, they took away the old, perfectly serviceable ones and left them with fewer PCs than before. Genius. Is this due to restrictive contracts, good old corruption, or just stupidity/intransigence? Who knows. But I bet if they spent less on Microsoft products, using open source software instead, authorities could afford a lot more machines.
(A RM 380Z was the first computer I used. As a student I worked as a RM technical author - and no, I wasn't stoned. I was however surprised to find that one of my colleagues was an ex-member of the Belle Stars...)
Crazy idea - what happens when you get a phone call? You need to undock or use a headset.
Also, phones tend to have a much shorter life than notebooks, so if you throw out your phone, you've got an extra paperweight to dispose of.
There has to be a better way of sync'ing a real notebook with a phone.
essays. Or tracts. Nowt wrong with a pithy communication, not everything has to be massive. I guess the 99-page iOS EULA wouldn't qualify. I wonder what the pricing is going to be; ebook prices are already in a race to the bottom, so selling these things isn't going to make many people rich.
Ah, I remember the good old days when things were just "redesigned". Thank goodness that their new technologies[1] have re-embiggened us all.
[1] Y'know, like woodwork, plastic chemistry or nanotech used to be technologies, and now you can invent an entire technology in an afternoon from the comfort of your desk. (ssh, don't tell anyone but it's just more lines of code...)
This song has 2 effects on me. (1) it makes me want to rip the person responsible for this music selection limb from limb, and (2) it without fail conjures up a huge elephant in the room, namely the billions of people who plainly _won't_ be having fun at Christmas, for whatever reason. So this piece of crassness doesn't bring any cheer whatsoever, it's just brainless and annoying. As it was probably meant to be. (On a par in annoyingness with Live and Let Die with the fabulous line "this world in which we live in". Why aren't people throwing rotten vegetables at P.McC. when he sings this crapulence??)
If "glossy screens are better for watching video", then why aren't TVs glossy? Or maybe some are? Anyway, glad to see matte screens are back. Now they just need to get rid of the ridiculous nano particles on the keyboard (assuming they're still there).
Very nice to see a quite different take on the netbook concept. However, I'm not sure the easel mode is very practical - one of the good things about a notebook screen is its adjustability, and in easel mode, you can't make the screen vertical, or it would fall over. OTOH you can still adjust it in normal mode. A touch screen would have been nice - or maybe it's not stable enough for poking at it in easel configuration? Still, the remote, wheel, viewing angle, synchronisation, UI, HDMI port etc. really sound like fairly radical steps towards consumer-friendliness, although seemingly at the expense of custom apps. It will be interesting to see how it fares, and whether they'll come out with an SDK...
Conveniently they've lovingly Photoshopped massive screen glare into the product artwork so punters don't have to look any further to know what a dumb reflection-magnet this is going to be.
Idiots.
...a glossy screen, and a who-knows-whether-it's-toxic-or-not nano silver keyboard.
Come on, a glossy screen on a netbook - it's bad enough on a relatively static notebook, but on something that's going to be used all over the place? I'd really, really, really like to hear the discussions inside computer companies when they make the decision about glossy versus matte. I'd like to know exactly why they think a screen that gives you eyestrain when there's a couple of photons of light behind the user is acceptable. We need some journalists to do a proper investigation into one of the most puzzling aspects of computer design ever! It's damned annoying when the choice of hardware is constantly whittled down, with even Asus starting to make their screens glossy (but confusingly not changing their model numbers so you have to look at the processor number to tell whether the screen is going to be glossy or not).
The hilarious bit is when you see publicity shots and there's a massive reflection lovingly reproduced across the screen, to make the punter salivate at the unutterably desirable shininess of it all. And then there are the product listings on stores such as Dabs that even say "glare-type display". Glare type. They are actually proudly announcing that these screens have glare, as if it's an acceptable feature. What next? Fail-type hard drives? Crackle-type sound cards? Clatter-type keyboards? Whine-type fans??
Microsoft had the right idea a few years ago in giving away WinMobile development tools, but now they apparently want to fail by making the tools expensive, and out of the reach of bright but poor independent developers. The sheer idiocy of this is astonishing. Whether the lure of WinMobile+free tools is now enough given its trendier competitors, I don't know, but they're not even giving themselves a chance to compete on apps. Perhaps with WinMobile 7 they'll bring back free tools.
Is this phone app mania just a short-lived fad? It'll be interesting to see whether apps are going to be a critical factor for people choosing their phones.
As somone who lives by copyright material, I quite agree with Lee and the verdict - I don't see why encouraging theft should be condoned in any way. They obviously knew they were stealing, as the name suggests. Still, I guess a lot of not very mature people won't like their illegal toys to be taken away.
If there's an utterance I hate more than "going forward", it's "architected". Do people mean "designed" by any chance? I suspect that this usage, along with IT Architect, is flannel to embiggen the ego.
I recommend netbooks to friends, and have a couple of Eee PCs, but with the ridiculous plethora of Eee PC models it's becoming easier to recommend one of the competitors, which have better keyboards while being cheaper than the larger Eee PCs. What's with the scattergun approach, Asus? You're confusing and alienating customers now.
The model I saw in the local Curry's (Princes Street, Edinburgh) had a very shiny screen - I can't stand laptops with built-in mirrors! No mention of this aspect in the review, so I guess the reviewer either didn't mind it, or is a vampire. The Curry's model was quite dead and I didn't wait around for them to revive it, but it looked quite stylish... apart from that pesky shiny screen.
Apparently we don't 'design' things any more, we 'architect' them. Is there a specific reason for using such an ugly word as 'architected'? (Especially if we not talking about architecture.) Ugh.
It's good to see engagement from a central figure in the controversy on these comment pages - a refreshing change from watching the PR drones on various forums! We have probably been a bit hard on Simon Davies and I totally sympathise with the frustration of not seeing financial reward for good works. As an open source software developer I and my colleagues are in a similar position - people like the product, but don't see the necessity of paying, when it's voluntary. Privacy is even less tangible than software so it must be far more difficult to fund.
Although the 80/20 report is about a specific issue of fact and so technically there may be no conflict of interest, I guess the problem here is the overall perception. When the BBC finally reported the story, the emphasis was on the quotation repeated on 80/20's web site: "We were impressed with the effort that had been put into minimising the collection of personal information." The tone was up-beat and in Phorm's favour, so the public comes away with the interpretation "privacy experts are impressed with Phorm, so we can all relax".
It may not be 80/20's fault that complex issues are simplified (combined with Phorm's massaging of the facts) but it still seems a bit like giving a glowing report to a terrorist's humane killing methods. I may be naive but I would expect a privacy expert to question the sanity of allowing this kind of profiling in the first place, especially given that it could never be adequately audited.
I think this is fascinating from a psychological perspective. What might be going through Mr Davies' mind, to compaign for many years in the public interest and then seemingly detonate his own reputation by association with a dodgy company intent on riding roughshod over users' privacy?
One, partial, answer comes from the rather sheepish admission from another member of PI that their funding isn't great and they have make ends meet (but that PI distanced itself from the 80/20 report). This was reported in another Register comment page.
Another factor may be the phenomenon that after building up a reputation, a person can begin to feel invincible - and is therefore confident that being wined and dined by this kind of company is fine and his reputation unassailable. He could be justifying himself by arguing that he has the chance to change what Phorm are doing for the public good; while forgetting what this relationship will look like to the outside world, and the fact that tweaking Phorm's processes doesn't remove the underlying dangers.
Another theory is that it's a cunning plan to actually undermine Phorm, at the same time as extracting a fee. The final report might therefore be full of surprises for Phorm.
No doubt we'll get answers eventually. I suspect there's a TV drama to be made out of it, with a healthy mixture of corporate greed, grass-roots campaigning and larger-than-life personalities. To complete the picture, someone just needs to turn up videos of some of the protagonists in compromising situations... happily, these will be much easier to find when BT, Phorm &co have flushed away the online privacy of the nation.
If the ISPs do go ahead with Phorm (and similar systems) anyway, I for one would contribute to the cost of full-page newspaper ads keeping the public informed about which ISPs are spying on them. With 7,000+ signatures on the petition, I think there's the motivation to keep up the pressure for quite some time - which would be necessary to make sure that sufficient numbers of people leave the ISPs for their bean-counters to start taking a different view.
"But what our research shows is that users worry about security online and prefer to have more relevant advertising... Our system gives you advertising that’s relevant to your interests without storing details on your browsing behaviour."
It's good that you're interested in what people want. Now you know that many many ISP users don't want your systems and that you are damaging the reputation of the ISPs involved. Hopefully this will inform Phorm's decisions (and those of the ISPs).
Do we believe that opt-out will be genuinely Phorm-free? It's hard to simply take something that important on trust given the contradictions we hear. But also you have got our backs up with your arrogance, greed and lies to the extent that opt-out may not be enough - we'll simply vote with our feet.
I just want to add my voice and express the fact that I will never ever go with an ISP that does this. The economic argument from the Telegraph and others is pathetic - just add a few quid to my bill, thank you. I guess the ISPs/Phorm are counting on the majority to be too stupid to avoid selling their privacy for a few measly pounds.
Totally disgusted by Phorm and the ISPs concerned. You must have thought we were all mugs. Now you know better.
