Posts by JLV 2853 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
Hey, I’m an Apple user and I dearly wish they’d lower their price. No issues with El Reg poking fun at them :-)
The biggest gripe I have isn’t their base prices, because that could, by some, be argued to be due to exceptional this or that engineering (or the pleasure of not dealing with Windows).
No, what gets my goat is how extra we pay for each SSD or RAM increment. That’s _easy_ to compare with after market prices.
gotta say, for a mainstay of progressives (to the point where i find it cloying), the CBC here is colonized by hordes of nutwing Trumpy commentards.
they shut down commenting on stories involving Indians. each one generated a cesspool of racist comments, every time
post Trump win, I head there, expecting “woe on us, Hitler is nigh”, like from actual people here. nope, instead: “hey maybe that’s what we need here to shake things up”.
during our massive summer forest fires here in BC, Albertan comments: “screw those welfare hippies, serves them right for blocking our pipeline”.
anyway, to a lesser extent “eff them, take back control from lying Brussel”s a sizeable chunk of the Brexit comments I see on BBC. which given the site’s actual position seems odd. it’s not like CBC or BBC == Fox.
was just curious.
+1
But, no, you’d use 1700 napkins, just for the contract, so one actually working on the system, rather than the doc and contract, would have the time to become knowledgeable about the system as a whole.
Paperwork and CYA would trump working software. Agile it up to make it look good. Testing? Hah!
Truth is, between rapacious and incompetent consultants and indecisive and incompetent bureaucrats, I have no idea, after working in software all my life, how you could systematically bring even medium complexity gov projects to satisfactory ending.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-ibm-contract-union-pay-government-1.4295827
Thats certainly one way to view it. Another is the POV of running a stack with a dev name recognition really only equal to Stackoverflow (Joel Spolsky is a Net-stack guy btw). Costing little to run and with huge amount of potential goodwill.
Had I just paid (overpriced IMHO) 7.5B$, again IMHO, I wouldn't be sweating the limited free account stuff. OR effin up people with privacy grabs/fails. Bigger picture is running free and charging next tier/cornering a market/making MS cool again/shaping dialog around “a huge chunk of tech online interest”. Not that I am huge MS fan. Im not. But a mostly benign/hands off strategy seems best at this time.
signed: Mr. Naive
Yes, it was interesting to see the stock plunge. They well deserved it
Bitching about innovation isnt totally justified. Smartphones have reached a certain technological maturity. See PCs,, CPUs for examples thereof and no one company can reliably and repeatedly out-innovate everyone else at this point. Until the next inflection point. Not Apple’s fault, really.
But upping your revenues by increasing prices wo new value is a bit like stretching a rubberband. You’ll keep your customers. Until they leave and never come back.
Trouble is, APPL’s valuation is circa $100/ human being. That’s, roughly, profits expected pp, for everyone. Rich people, dirt poor 3rd worlders, 45 yr olds, 3 yr olds. Apple haters. Doubt they’ll get that selling the product lines they do, to their customer bases. How to move the needle?
They have phenomenal brand appeal, but they need to sell new things or new customers.
- cars. Well executed that’s a whole new ball park to chew up $100/pp.
- enterprises. Macos is almost a Linux. And Windows is bound to have upset more than a few.
- the 80-90% of people still running Windows PCs despite Win 10. Can’t do that w $3k laptops.
- product X.
- dividends???
I aint no marketing expert so certainly messing up. But they’ve reached peak capitalization unless they switch gears. $2k phones aint gonna do it. Nor will price wars with Android phones. None of the above options are risk free. Or necessarily even clever.
Bottom line: at this level of cap, I see them very much prisoners of their own success. And a bit of an indictment of capitalism’s expectations, much as I usually defend that system.
to be fair its fairly shit macOS 8.x didn’t help either. they’d failed, twice, at creating a new one (Taligent and Copland) and by then the poor thing was really showing its age to anyone else than the most uncritical fans or specialized industries.
i recall a Word resume-printing session with about half a dozen bomb icons in 30 mins.
yes and no. high margin low volume is the lifeblood of aspirational luxury brands like Hermes or Louis Vuitton.
but if you look at cars, most of the luxury brands are parts of consortiums now.
the difference is that old style luxuries do not require heavy R&D nor benefit greatly from economies of scale.
Apple can choose to sell exclusively to the 1% (ok, 10-15%) but its fixed R&D costs would then be spread on too few units.
to be able to innovate they need volume. selling lots of phones cheap in India is however not without branding risks and would not necessarily result in much profit either. even if investors want to hear it.
i suspect they will have to find ways to deliver better value to midlevel consumers at some point. but that is somewhat complicated by their products’ relatively long lifetime. media-wise they seem expensive and locked-in and, to me, deliver less value than in hardware. apps are good, but bound to hit saturation on existing users
tough having to justify valuation of $100/human.
J'ai besoin de partir, de nous donner de l'espace
J'ai besoin de partir, de nous donner de l'espace
Quelque part aussi beau qu'avant, qu'avant, quand on vivait
Quelque part aussi beau qu'avant, qu'avant, quand on aimait
C'est ta voix, c'est la voix, c'est ta voix que j'aimais
C'est ma voix, c'est ma voix, c'est ma voix qui te plaît
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JAOEo_sVRo0
>But politicians in general are the biggest liars of them all.
That is a totally unproductive and stupid attitude to have. Politicians's job is to get elected. If you've ever had to convince people of anything than you realize that you have to project some level of certainty in what you say. Some of it may very well be less than truthful. So, yes, it is a job where communication is highly scripted and has to fit the agenda. The agenda could be on the left or it could be on the right, but you will be getting political speech coming out.
Sometimes you get people who knowingly make a promise or a claim that they know in advance is wrong and it comes out later. It used to be that those politicians would get voted out of office.
But now you have people, like yourself, who actively hold all political actors as liars, all the time, regardless of their actual actions. That, to me, opens the gate to voter cynicism and stupid decisions. Why bother looking for a party with realistic policies? They all lie. Why bother assessing whether a given politician is honest or not? They all steal. Why vote for someone who proposes a hard road ahead rather than telling you what you what you want to hear? None of it means anything. Why vote out someone for underperforming? It doesn't matter, does it? Why examine
This level of angry irrational nihilism nurtures the kind of stupidity that has elected all sorts of losers and has the potential to elect many more. Syriza, in Greece, LePen in France, all the various incarnations of Putin in Russia. The biggest wanker of them all will remain unmentioned. It doesn't matter what you vote, as you long as you register your protest and anger, is your message.
You, and your kind, spend all your time telling how democracy is such a lie. And it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not (just) because of the politicians. But because too many people believe angry disillusioned cynical ranters like you and then abdicate any responsibility as informed voters to make wise choices. "We didn't really mean X, we were just angry".
Consider this to be a lefty rant if you want. It's not. The Republican party has in the past had great leaders. Some of the leftist populist politicians waiting in the wings would be as useless as tits on a bull.
But this persistent insistence that _everyone_ who considers public service is a scum is a plague. It is not what our societies and forebears have strived for, and sacrificed to achieve, over centuries. Since Americans respect the Founding Fathers so much, would you care to speculate what they would think of people with your outlook?
It is, truly, the Facebook level of civic engagement so it fits this article very well.
in my case of FB stalking i’ll privilege the IP cross-matching hypothesis
i created a burner FB profile for Tinder. new pix, slightly different name (same age (: ). my phone, a near death wifi-only Android never left home. FB app had never been activated on that phone before. i never surfed anywhere while logged into this FB on my browser. never friended anyone from it.
yet within days i had tons of friend suggestions for people i did know, but barely. somebody’s cousin or mother for example.
seems to me straight that’s this was IP matching. creepy though.
the more things change
the more they don’t. while FB is due for a nasty time on this, i’m willing to bet nothing will happen in the long term. no Friendster, no Myspace, no Friends Reunited
- FB is a classic example of a network effect. leaving it for greener pastures would mean being on a scarcely populated social network. many of you may think that would be a good thing. but that’s just not how most people, except for us, reason nowadays.
- no provider much respects privacy. so while Zuck and co may be pondscum, who’s going to be the paragon of trust and virtue that most people can switch to? (yes, i can see earnest claims about peer-to-peer FB clones coming up...).
the best _likely_ outcome would be a serious fine (GDPR?) and a credible and factual commitment to keep data in-house. FB has a niche and is relatively safe, as long as it doesn’t commit enough criminal acts to motivate a breakup it can’t lobby itself out of and doesn’t earn itself a nasty enough reputation to wake up the slumbering sheep.
i don’t much like FB - been years since ive used it and my router blocks DNS on it. but I am cynical enough to doubt much will come out of this, with the exception of a share price dip.
(and, yes, i’ve had the same creepy friending suggestions happen to me)
Haida Gwaai, a bigish island in BC, never had deer. The Canadian govt helpfully brought them in. But they have no predators there so they’re literally like rats, overrunning the whole island. Deer will jump over a fence and nuke your garden or farm quick as you please.
Next the Canadian govt wanted to bring in (also not native to the island) cougars to control the deer.
Thankfully the local Indian tribe had by that time enough say-so to give that miserable idea the boot.
But if you like deer hunting (im not a hunter) there is no place in Canada with freeer rules than Haida Gwaii ;-)
actually this brings up a good point.
when you buy a Dell, say, it comes with Windows. FWIW to you, I realize. that OS is yours as long as that machine, sold to you by Dell, but without MS being directly involved, still works
if MS moves Windows to a subscription basis, then what would be the contractual effects to all parties if the Dell basically becomes an expensive paperweight if you stop your MS subscription?
would they be held liable for that? an easy solution would be for Dell to make a Linux distribution available to take over. not good for MS.
another might be legal verbiage by Dell warning that their shiny won’t work without a sub. not good for Dell.
specious argument.
no one outside of homeopathists takes their claims seriously.
yes, climate scientists DO gain employment from climate change concerns.
but someone who managed to scientically debunk climate change, using good old science - i.e. a sound theory with reproducible results - would immediately achieve scientific superstardom.
and it’s not like there aren’t tons of people willing to bankroll that line of research. Trump and the US coal industry come to mind.
Or... there’s always the remote possibility that you are wrong. What level, if any, of proof would it take for you to adapt your worldview to new facts coming to your attention?
Germany’s fail is that climate change is too much of a problem to allow the Greens much say in solving it. We agree on that much.
For the rest, your ranty ramble is fairly content-free. If climate change is happening, something accepted by almost all scientists in the field, costs will be immense over time. Think of the effects on agriculture and losses from coastal real estate flooding.
All for what? To resist changing the way we generate energy? Yes, it will change economies and yes there will be losers, but people will end up being employed in the new jobs, new companies will grow and life will go on pretty much as before. If youve been paying attention you realize a lot of hardnosed capitalist corporations ARE increasingly banking on climate change being a problem. Because, well, the math and science add up. If it’s happening then it’s just a physical phenomenon, not a political one.
But, yeah, just keep on putting your head in the sand cuz it doesn’t fit your world view.
It also lacked quick access to a menu or a bookmark bar.
They might be there, somewhere, but I dislike Windows menu-lessness as much as its Ribbons. Firefox, Vivaldi, Chrome all recognize bookmark bars are key (and if you don’t agree, allow you to decide to hide them).
Changing the rendering engine ought to help MS render html standards. Won’t help with their lobotomized UI. The rancid ghost of Sinovsky lives on.
well then, if i was designing hotel POS systems, i’d
1. limit ID intake to strictly what’s _locally_ legally required.
2. upload to the relevant police db and delete
3. if 2 doesn’t exist, delete as soon as you reach end of locally legislated retention period.
fwiw, when I visit the US, it’s always just the CC# and car plate #. ditto within Canada. so that’s at least 2 countries not needing retention.
Might not be as big as Yahoo! but that info seems a lot more identity-theftable. CC# are easy: just get a new one, the rest is not.
Are passport and DOBs # globally mandated for storage? I know France had police-requested guest registration info for a while, maybe still does. But most of the time now CC# and license plate is all that’s needed. DOB? Why?
Security 101: if you don’t store it, it can’t be hacked.
Errr...
: the ability to see or be seen. : the quality or state of being known to the public. See the full definition for visibility in the English Language Learners Dictionary. visibility.
Visibility | Definition of Visibility by Merriam-Webster
Toutes mes excuses, El Reg. Je suis confus.
+1
and kickstarting interest by having real-life silicon, priced cheaply.
chicken/egg. not rocket science, is it, @john.jones?
wonder the performance/vm pricing tradeoff given this current benchmark?
and, how much is this going to increase ARM compatibility/interest in general across the commodity FOSS stuff like nginx, postgres, redis?
not good for Intel, in the long term. esp if it coincides with macOS moving to ARM as well.
pity the guys @ Intel in charge of 10nm. they must be getting tons of pressure internally.
its not node.js specific. could happen with any github-sourced code. in many cases the main code doesn’t even need altering, the underlying package install scripts (never looked at) can do the dirty. and those are not infrequently run under sudo.
In Python land, for example, that’s setup.py. Npm has active script install hooks too
:-(
Ouch. Clever, and simple, hack. Social engineering FTW.
How about an optional mechanism where an established github dev can be shown to have vouched for a new maintainer? A la web of trust?
Tons of holes, yes, but better than scammers just freely trawling the owners of no-longer-maintained popular repos.
Georgia, Moldavia, Chechnya, Ukraine, Estonia cyberattacks. Gay rights snafus. Dead Russian opposition politicians. bogus elections. MH 217. Magnetsky.
All funded by the EU.
Do go on, Herr Putain.
one thing I grant you, NATO-near-border is way too provocative, except for Baltics. But actually probably suits Vlad just right, more enemies abroad to sell.
don’t misunderstand me on this. letting in Eastern Europe was the right thing to do. 100% and if anything, Putin’s nastiness only reinforces that. For them, but also for the previous EU core.
i’m not even sure a 10 yr freedom of people movement moratorium would have been good. But it was a policy decision at the time and it did allow those 3 countries to build up their economies gradually, dialing down the motivation to seek better opportunities elsewhere in the EU once full liberalization was reached.
The EU is a great club, but, when reasonable, it needs to be more sensitive about national preferences and perception. Subsidiarity being key here.
Pressuring the Piss folk in Poland and Viktor Orban not to become lil Trumps against human rights? Good. Need more of that. Setting banana curvature? Bureaucracy gone amok and recruiting poster for big Borises. Getting Italy back in line on their budget, to avoid another Greek bailout? Much, much, needed because the risks outweigh national prerogatives.
As to Galileo, purely on military self-interest, the EU should have found a way to keep the most capable European army integrated. The rest of Brexit negotiations however? Well, they’ve got the leverage and very little incentive to cut a sweetheart deal encouraging future xxxexit movements. They got you by the balls.
Too bad the Borises and Ress-Moggs didn’t see that coming or just managed to pull wool over the eyes of the more clever Leave voters. Yes, they exist, and Remains need to gently convince that constituency to reconsider in light of all the hollow promises.
btw One brilliant thing the Federal government here did, late 90s, fought tooth and nail by the Quebec separatists, was to force future leave referendums to have a clear Leave or Stay question. They can’t just fudge something harmless sounding. Wasn’t the issue with the actual Brexit vote wording, but it sure was with previous Quebec referendums.
>investment banking industry
think again. I suspect a large part of the UKs attractiveness as a financial center is being an EU member. No doubt, the really big cheese won’t be suffering with the little people. But i’d be surprised if a large proportion of British investment bankers didn’t get shafted out of this. Yes, yes, they may not be all sympathetic but they pay taxes and spend money.
EU bankers can head towards whichever city takes London’s place. Probably a net loss for the EU, but nowhere as dramatic.
>b. We stop the process, try to salvage our dignity and resume trying to democratically influence the EU more towards the UK’s point of view.
As much as I am pretty relaxed about immigration myself, not everyone is. It bears remembering that, when Greece, Portugal, Spain joined the EU, in 1982, there was a 10 year moratorium on allowing full free immigration into/from those 3 countries.
In hindsight, it would have been more sensible for the EU to apply the same kind of transition period to Eastern European countries. Or indeed any new member with a sufficiently big GDP difference.
Didn’t happen. Brexit was a bait and switch but the EUs bureaucracy will need to reassess its our way or the highway attitude towards its _member_ states. The ratification referendums for the constitution being another clusterf***. Ditto the pointless insistence on metric system precedence. Or curly bananas.
Subsidiarity was a very useful UK-sourced principle, IMHO.
None of this really makes Brexit any less of a self goal 8-/
and so it continues. I really wish El Reg would let Tim Worstall re-explain his rainbows and unicorns once again in a guest article. Smart guy, but one wonders in this case.
Trump => 4 years (surely not 8?)
Brexit will keep on giving for a long time. Long past those who voted for it too.
I wonder if the - beneficial - aspects of the UKs traditional role in nuking some of the EU's more daft - usually French - proposals will be outweighed by its salutary inspiration on what NOT to do. Wonder what this spectacle will do for Le Pen's snake oil, for example.
Will it out-Greece Greece in that regard? I sincerely hope not, but this is certainly on track to be some massive foot machine-gunning.
and you know, I am A-OK with where the non-Pro iPad is at, a media consumption device. Bringing out the Pro model has dropped the base version prices a bit.
Where this article disturbs me is that my perception that Apple's thinking that iPhones and iPads are the future gettings-things-done devices is bleeding out onto their macOS devices. Their stewardship of the MacPro has been shameful, the Mini hadn't had an upgrade in ages until last month and the MBPs are really losing their Pro monicker in favor of thin and light. Prices are, Apple-high, as usual. too bad, I still rather like OSX.
If you believe that iPad Pros are "all the laptop you will ever need", then yeah, why not drop the ball on the rest?
