About time

Let's look for some of these preserved in amber.

Needs warning lights

My Alfa did this to me once in Italy. It got confused when I braked hard with the nearside wheels on a gravelly verge while the others stayed on the road. It was kind enough to flash up some interesting lights on the dash, so I turned it off and back on again and all was well. Had your traction control/DSP/whatever light been flashing while you were driving along at 20mph on a straight city street you might have been inclined to try the same. I wonder why your car didn't do that; every so-equipped car I've driven puts up lights when those systems activate (which is quite often when you drive over ice or mud or gravel in the country; I'm not a tail-happy boy racer by any means.)

Still, it's pretty bloody stupid to drive a broken car across a railway line, don't you think?

I don't understand Apple

This screen is clearly aimed at rich, cool people who live in quasi-industrial penthouse lofts in once-rough-but-now-quite-posh city quarters. Why, then, make it so shiny that it's only of real use in a nerd's windowless basement hermit cave?

Could it be because Tarqin Trustfundington and his artisinal yoghurt-eating chums on the top floor actually just use it as a mirror? The proof will be whether it tilts back 90 degrees so you can do a line off it.

Well, they *trialled* proximity tickets

They didn't work very well. Two or three seconds on average to register a tap from my NFC debit card. The trial ended last year. Magnetic strip Metrocards are currently the only way to get through the barriers.

The problem *does* exist, in the USA at least

The problem is a two sided coin: price and adverts.

Pay TV in the USA is ruinously expensive and, excepting sports and a few stand-out series a year, completely shit. Customers pay through the nose to receive a broadcast stream of utter garbage, then gratefully pay a little bit more for the right to record the good stuff. It's like panning for gold, only we have to pay for access to the river, then the water, fox pee and mud in it and finally for the rent of a sieve. Of course adverts mean that each tiny nugget of gold is almost 33% manure anyway, so we have to keep on refining it even after we've fished it out of the river.

A universal, pan-network, on-demand, over-the-internet streaming TV service would make an almighty killing while saving the consumer a small fortune. I built one myself. While it's not completely wife friendly it's not actively abusive towards her; it aggregtes Netflix, Hulu Plus and some other network-specific streams and it cost me one Mac Mini and a broadband line. TV is so expensive here that it had completely paid for itself within six months: it saves me over $120 a month. I miss out only on some American sports ($120 a month buys a lot of beer in the local bar though), deafening, over-compressed adverts and half-hour infomercials for dubious exercise equipment.

I would absolutely love to wrap a slick UI around it and have access to everything in one place. The fact that my wife prefers to use VNC to control it from her laptop (and learn all the different channel's interfaces) rather than pay for Time Warner Cable and one of their godawful DVRs tells me all I need to know about how shocking the American TV experience is. Even my doughy, cable-loving friends with their 'man caves', Bud Light fridges and enormous plasmas get interested when I explain exactly how much I'm saving.

Back in the UK, Sky+ did the job perfectly well. It was good enough and the price was reasonable. Here, entrenched monopolies, rampant greed and a public ignorant of any better way conspire to keep TV a really crappy rip-off. It's a pity, because the good "content" is very very good indeed.

There's easily as much room for Apple in this market as there was in telecomms.

Too many developers

That's it, really. The company has far too many programmers on staff. They needed the army during the ramp-up phase, but not anymore. The platform works, supports nearly a billion users and does everything it needs to do. Now those under-utilized geeks have solved all the hard problems and are spending their days hacking away on cool new ideas. These inevitably end up in the product, over-burdening it with ever more complex and pointless things.

My John Harvey-Jones fix: bin 90% of the programmers (pay them a million each), keep a small team to maintain and slowly extend the core, and leave it at that. After all, once your house is finished you don't keep the builders and architects on retainer, but you might hire in a decorator once in a while. Lots of those laid-off, rich hackers will start new businesses around the edge of the FB ecosystem, strengthening the platform with optional features while leaving the core intact and lean.

Won't happen while Zuckerberg is in charge. He's a hacker himself, at heart so he won't kill his own kind. He also seems to combine the greed of a Lucas with Job's need for control.

A business school case study in the making

I don't see how this will end well for Netflix. It's fun to watch though: two Coke Zero moments in less than a year. MBA students will enjoy ripping this one apart in 10 years. They'll learn how an idiot CEO with no stock in the company managed to squander a decade of unbelievable goodwill with a one-two punch to his loyal customers' nuts. Reed can take his place in the hall of shame alongside Gerald Ratner.

In my house use both streaming and DVD. They complement each other nicely. Do their figures really suggest that we are in a minority? It's how everyone I know uses Netflix. The shitty streaming library practically forces it.

Up until my bill (first post-hike payment today, and it hurts), the only annoyance I had was Silverlight: we use a Mac Mini as an HTPC and f'ing Silverlight updates once a week with a stupid dialog box that pops up only when you hit play, instead of a polite background auto updater like every other program in the world. But I blamed Microsoft's cluelessness for that, not Netflix.

Now they're separating the companies. No integration, no single queue to manage, not even a promise they're going to add this. Two accounts to maintain. Two streams of emailed spam. Two sets of customer service. Two more opportunities for some cracker to steal my credit card details, and the worst company name I've heard since the first dot com boom.

Had they announced this by saying, "We've put all our DVDs on Instant Watch! The library is huge! But, if you still want DVDs, you have to get them from our sister company," then I think people would understand. As it is though, they've cocked it completely.

An alternative

What if you sealed the business end of the rocket inside a condom or balloon at sea level, thus ensuring the rocket was in an atmosphere of the correct pressure at ignition time? The rocket exhaust should very quickly burn through the balloon once it fires. The balloon would swell as it ascended into thinner air and I suppose explosive burstage might be an issue if not designed for, but those sound like surmountable challenges.

If your pressure test fails then maybe you could consider moving the mountain to Mohammad, as it were.

Ugh

I moved to the USA last year and the wife and I were shocked at the ridiculous price of cable TV. A basic package and internet (crappy contended 10mb) was over $150 a month, and I had a choice of exactly one provider. Cable TV here is dying. There is no doubt in my mind about that - the product stinks. Where the programming is good it's rendered almost unwatchable by deafening advertisments. Mostly, though, the standard is appallingly low. Why on earth would I choose to pay a fortune for a load of crap with the odd diamond in it when I can pay a fraction and only get the diamonds? The history of capitalism doesn't suggest a bright future for traditional TV.

So, I cut it off and now we stream everything. Time bastard Warner still get my money for internet (again, no choice) but it's a third of the price. Still too expensive for what we get - I had 20mb uncontended for £18 in London - but there you go. Since we started streaming we watch less TV in total, but we only watch stuff we want. Choice has gone up, hugely, and quality has gone up too. It's a genuinely entertaining and informative device now, rather than an expensive way to get shouted at by Billy Mays.

$8 a month for Netflix streaming and DVDs has been great for us. Mrs. gets her tripe on a plastic circle and I get quality nerd stuff any time I want. I'm not thrilled that they're doubling the price but it would have to go up twelvefold before it cost as much as we used to pay for an inferior service, so I'll grumble a bit now but I won't be cancelling.

Sounds like a *real* pilot to me

"Climb inside her and take her to heaven and back three times a day. Woof!"

Coordination

It's a bit bloody complicated isn't it? I mean, you're not really supposed to leave the pub if you're still able to make such involved dishes. Is this the result of immersion in that European "cafe culture" we heard so much about when 24hr drinking was introduced in the UK a few years ago? Have you gone native, Lester? Very good work by your kids, though.

I tried to cook post-pub once. I wanted a pizza, so I stuck the oven on and put in a cold slice from the box in my fridge. I awoke on the kitchen floor at daybreak lying on a large, sharp knife with a cloud of cheesy smoke wafting overhead. The pizza was half the size and black. I ate it anyway.

Good luck!

You must have really been losing your mind with all the 'tard-wrangling if Silicon Roundabout counts as an escape.

May your options vest fully and your VCs visit rarely.

Zuck

Good on him for this, but is anyone else worried that he's turning into Vladimir Putin?

Easy solution

Just go to Christiania. The hippies will have set up a dozen cafes selling Marmite on toast by now.

DVI?

Did you try plugging in an HDMI to DVI adapter (like Apple's own, that comes with the Mac Mini)? You mentioned perhaps delivering presentations from an ipad. A DVI cable would be useful for this. VGA works too of course, but DVI is pretty widespread now.

For product demos, say, an ipad equipped with gotomypc or webex would make a back-friendly alternative to lugging around laptops to prospective customer's offices.

Some kind of scam, or possibly scamola

This story's existence on the Reg is probably an elaborate punishment for Sarah Bee. "Forgot the donuts again? Right. Moderate THIS."

Nothing as English as seaside postcard innuendo

He should open up a tea room called 'The Buttered Muffin.' And a higher-class version up the posh end of town, 'Tasty Crumpet.'

Tensions

Capitalism always, but always, forces change when there is tension in the market. iOS has succeeded because there was tension between consumers who wanted easy-to-use multifunction phones and device manufacturers who were unable to provide it. Apple stepped in and resolved the tension, making a pile of money in the process.

iOS and the App Store ecosystem has worked well so far because there is little tension. Developers get apps to market without building a payment system, consumers buy them from one place, and apple takes a cut of first-sale revenue. Everyone more-or-less wins and the net effect is lots of people on iOS devices and lots of developers writing programs for them. They appear on tables in business meetings, in yummy mummy's handbags and schoolkids' satchels.

Now, with Apple demanding 30% of subscription revenue, there is new tension. It is not commercially viable for Salesforce to give up nearly a third of their subscription revenue to get an app on an iPad, just as it would be silly for a health club (suggested earlier) to do the same so that their clients can schedule training sessions from the bus. Without that key corporate SaaS app the businesswoman may be a bit less likely to buy herself an iPad to use at work and won't work as hard to make the case for her employer to kit out the sales team with iOS kit. If the policy stays the same then Apple will sell fewer iOS devices. It is inevitable.

This new tension creates an opportunity: for a competitor, in the long term and for Apple in the short term - if they listen and change. That subscription clause •will• change, but not because of pressure from enterprise SaaS, not from moaning gyms and especially not from little developers. It'll be because Apple see that they're on to a losing proposition. Many things are true about Apple, but they are not short-termists.

My guess? There will be some sort of primary service clause which removes the obligation to share subscription revenue when the majority of the value of the subscribed service is delivered outside of the iOS sphere.

Infrastructure

What you need in order to make electric cars widely useful is the ability to replenish their store of potential energy as quickly and conveniently as you can with a petrol car.

Rather than faffing around with odd polymers to get to a manageable two hour charge, what about using replaceable batteries built to a common standard? Drive up to the services, remove your depleted battery and swap it for a full one from the giant, high-amperage charging rack.

I'm confused

I read the story and thought it was a nice, silly idea; a bit of cheerful whimsy on a cold Friday. Then I read all the comments and all the conflicting opinions have made me scared and tired. I've been at work for an hour and done nothing except think about the Christmas no. 1 in endless, excruciating, recursive fractal detail. I feel unpleasantly stoned. Worse, I don't know what to think at all now because I've got Surfing Bird and Make Me Smile going round and round my head.

The article was like a delicious plate of oysters infected with a comment thread of norovirus.

He could have been a night shift worker

Doesn't have to be a chap who likes his cornflakes with a dollop of onanism.

Oh, and if we're doing this: Bone Her, featuring a climactic chariot^h^h^h^h^h^h^h wheelbarrow race (filmed at Walthamstow dog track.)

Alternative

I have ClickToFlash installed. It is excellent. I see placeholders for all Flash content on the webpage, then if there is one I want to see, I click on it and it starts playing. Consequence is that pages load quickly, CPU usage is dramatically lower and nasty Flash ads don't intrude. I still see all the nice non-Flash ads on the Reg, of course.

Isn't this Vulture 1, here?

http://aprs.fi/?call=G6UIM-12&mt=roadmap&z=11&timerange=3600

Bit of a trek from the ground car.

If not, what is that?

For work

Widescreen laptops aren't ideal for business use really; every paper I write is usually taller than it is wide, so I end up wasting a ton of screen space (and battery) on useless white pixels containing no information. Same with coding.

A numeric keypad though, now that's useful. This could be a very workable compromise for people who spend all their time in spreadsheets.

Of course it was fiction

Sorry to be really quite dull and adenoidal, but there is no airport security when you're flying on your own plane, which is just one of the many nice things about it. Customs yes, but no scanners, wands, pat-downs or queues.

I was rather hoping the imaginary airport security guard had said, "just mail them back. Not that big of a deal," but it was still an amusing story.