Here in England you do suffer from brutal temperature extremes, from as low as 2 centigrade in winter to as high as 16 or 17 in the summer, plus you can be as much as a strenuous fifteen minute walk from the nearest shop.
True, but if more than 6 flakes of the wrong kind of snow fall and the M1 grinds to a halt you can find yourself marooned in a wilderness of gridlocked cars, and the local shop will be selling 250ml bottles of water for £10 each.
...more and more implicit or explicit class warfare crap in the news. I suspect it's not coincidence.
Pretty sure that this is all a bit of theatre by governments to detract from other unpopular spending cuts and tax rises. "Hey, don't blame us - look at all these big evil corporations avoiding tax!"
If the government actually wanted/was able to stop this they'd be changing the law and having friendly closed-door discussions with big corporations to determine how much tax they could tolerate before they packed up and went home. Instead they drag in a few household names for a public slagging off which will be forgotten in a few months time. I've no sympathy for corporations that avoid tax, but the UK Public Accounts Committee came over as a witch trial to which nobody had brought any matches.
I'm sure that for every Amazon, Google and Starbucks there are half a dozen You Haven't Heard of Us But We Own the Company that Owns Your Bus Company's Inquiry Line Corps playing exactly the same game.
.
coming on Slashdot to blame the victim. Dozens and dozens of lock-step victim-blaming posts. Shocking. Great marketing campaign, Cook & Co. Hint - next time train your shills to use more variety in their posts so I can't see through your campaign so easily. Or quit using bots to do your posting for you.
Relying on a GPS to the extent that it overrides common sense is silly enough. Relying on a particular navigation App, which has been publicly lambasted for its failings is silly with extra bells and whistles. Relying on any App primarily designed to find coffee bars in big cities to navigate in a country big enough and hostile enough to make getting lost potentially fatal - sorry, that's Darwin Award material.
If you want an example of Shilling, try saying "using Apple Maps could get someone killed" when you mean "driving into the wilderness without having a clue where you are going and without proper precautions could get someone killed".
I carry a blanket, a bottle of water and a dead-tree road atlas when driving around England for fuck's sake.
You obviously haven't driven in Australia much.. Google maps [google.com] See how you are driving through national parks and farmland before getting back to an urban area? Well Apple maps just takes you through a different national park and dumps you there. 45C is also 113F. And there is no phone reception or water.
Personally I haven't driven in Australia at all - I've only been there once. However, even as an ignorant Pom I'd assume that, when venturing outside of a city, its the sort of place where you take carrying water and emergency gear, keeping your car maintained, carrying reputable maps and planning your journey carefully rather seriously.
Methinks someone who takes the attitude "Its 1000 miles to Wongamonga, we've got half a tank of gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it's dark, we're wearing sunglasses and we've got GPS - hit it!" is an accident waiting to happen.
Unless it has changed in the last half hour, that article doesn't say what you think that it says. What it actually says is:
[Moore] condemned the Liberal Democrats, stating that he believed that they could alter their position radically and "would happily join up with the BNP or the Socialist Workers Party... if [by doing so] they could win a few extra votes."
(BNP and SWP pretty much representing the two extreme ends of the UK political spectrum) and...
he remained a supporter and patron of the eurosceptic UK Independence Party until his death.
Note that UKIP is not the same as the BNP. Now, I don't support UKIP, don't like UKIP and am certainly not going to defend UKIP's immigration policies but they're an awfully long way from being the BNP.
Put simply: if someone I knew joined UKIP, I'd argue with them. If they joined BNP I'd avoid them.
Also, summary missed out one of his other great TV appearances : as 'the gamesmaster'
He also played a mean xylophone!
However, if you were into space or astronomy as a kid, Moore's books were essential reading. I don't know how well known he is internationally, but in the UK. I can't think of anybody who has done more to not only popularise science, but to show how people could contribute without needing a PhD and a white coat. Plus I believe he made some pretty useful contributions himself, especially with his work on lunar mapping.
Right, then you have to login to some service from another computer....
If it's something that is really high security, Don't Do That Then (and you certainly shouldn't be doing it using a password).
For normal "domestic" security, carry a USB dongle containing your private key and enough processing power to encrypt challenges. For 'belt and braces' add a PIN, password or fingerprint reader needed to unlock the device. For belt, braces and really thick underpants have a second PIN or password checked by the service you are connecting to.
(Of course, this needs someone to establish a standard ).
In the UK and EU we've pretty much gone over to that system for credit/debit cards - the card has an embedded chip that can encode challenges, locked by a PIN. Most businesses use this for 'cardholder present' payments and my bank supplies a card reader for home use (needed for some online banking operations - in addition to a regular PIN and password for the website). NB: whether the banks are capable of implementing such a system properly is another matter.
Of course, there's the danger of losing the device (but I'd say most people cope better with their wallet and keys than they do with password) but you should weigh that against the dangers of using a password-only system on an unsecured computer, and also the likelihood that people faced with stringent password requirements will carry them around on a handy bit of paper.
Couldn't the jury rule that the patent is invalid then?
Only if one of the warring parties presents them with enough evidence to do so.
When both parties are huge patent-holders, don't expert them to do more than nit-pick the specifics of the opposition's patents. Presenting more general arguments about the absurdities of the patent system might backfire undermine the value of their own portfolio...
If Apple did NOT know about it, then it's absurd for them suggest that Samsung should have.
If it turns out that Apple knew that the juror had a possible grudge against Samsung and said nothing then they might be in trouble - but it wasn't Apple's responsibility to go out and hunt for reasons why the jurors might have a grudge against Samsung. That was Samsung's job, and they should be in a better position than Apple to know who they and their partners have sued over the years...
If the connection between Samsung and this guy is so tenuous that he wasn't in their Little Black Book then its harder to suggest that he'd be biassed against them.
Meanwhile, remember that the jury also threw out some pretty silly patent claims by Samsung. There are no "good guys" in this case, so if you fancy a retrial, be careful what you wish for.
The rover has located traces of aromatic plant extracts, sugar, honey and lemon. The Martians are coming back and this time they've brought Mentholyptus! We're doomed!
The thing is, the CBS show ("Elementary") feels a lot more Who-ish than the BBC show.
Really? I thought the BBC's Sherlock was awfully Who-like (the character was maybe less likeable - but then I think Sherlock Holmes is best portrayed as a bit of an arsehole). The actor would make a great Doctor.
No Moriarty (The Master) so far
Again, I thought the BBC's Moriarty had a lot of similarity to the New Who's Master: they've both moved from the classic, scheming evil genius to the tormented madman model.
It looks like finding out about Irene (Rose?)
More like River Song (without the timey-wimey paradox stuff) in the BBC version...
Pity - we could do with more than 3 eps of Sherlock a year, but I believe that Watson has been down under shooting some 2-bit indy flick about people with hairy feet.
Or maybe it just shows that Sherlock Holmes was one of the many influences on DW.
I haven't seen the CBS show but I assume that it's inspired (officially or otherwise) by the success of the BBC show - which is written by Stephen Moffat (Current showrunner of Dr Who) and Mark Gatiss (who has also written a couple of Dr Who episodes). I'd certainly agree that the Sherlock character in that comes over an awful lot like the Doctor with a mobile phone instead of a sonic screwdriver.
OK, so the BBC didn't go for a female companion, but there's a running joke in the show about people jumping to conclusions about Holmes and Watson's relationship.
The whole "companion" thing is an ages old plot device: their role is to ask questions so that the main protagonist has an excuse for exposition. The only variable is whether they're also responsible for sex interest and getting rescued, although in the post-[i]Alien[/i] world female sidekicks are expected to kick ass and do a lot of the rescuing stuff themselves.
If you allow a crime to go unpunished that will be abused.
OK, so lets arrest everybody who's ever made a mix tape/CD or ripped a CD to their iPod (may be OK in the US under 'fair use' law, but it is definitely copyright violation here in the UK*, possibly also in Germany where this story comes from). At a ball park estimate that's about 100% of the population (maybe 99%, but the 1% will probably have sung 'Happy Birthday' in a public place so it doesn't make much difference).
On second thoughts, no, let's not risk the total discredit and collapse of the justice system.
(* Seriously - although even the recording industry in the UK isn't sufficiently batshit insane to try and enforce it, if you build a CD ripper you'd keep quiet about it in your advertising).
But what if a kid steals, gets into a fight or robs people? Who will be liable?
What's that got to do with this? Those are serious crimes that result in real people being injured or deprived of their hard-earned property. The only "damage" in the case of copyright violation is the slim, hypothetical possibility that, if the kid hadn't been able to get the material, he'd have paid for them and the artists would have got a thousandth of a cent in royalties.
Wake me up if the kid was running a large-scale illegal download site shipping ripped-off content to sufficient thousands of people to make a difference. Even then, the sensible thing for the content owners to do would be to shake him down for some free advertising space and punt gig tickets, t-shirts, action figures and premium-rate SMS services to his customer base.
Just visit Microsoft Research and you'll realize that Microsoft has always been more innovative than Apple.
No, what you'll realise is that Microsoft publicises some of its research projects, including things that will probably never make it to market, whereas Apple keeps things secret until they're ready to announce them as a product.
Has Apple really ever invented anything?
Innovation !== Invention. Inventors can churn out as many bright ideas as they like, but unless someone gets behind that idea, builds it into a viable product, gets it to market and markets the hell out of it, no innovation will happen.
Apple didn't invent "retina" LCD displays, but the rest of the industry had stuck at ~100ppi for years and it was getting increasingly rare to see anything over 1080p.
They didn't invent tablet computers - but outside of a few niches nobody wanted one before the iPad came out.
They didn't invent smartphones - or even touchscreen phones - but if you don't think that the iPhone galvanised the smartphone market you never tried to use a pre-iPhone smartphone.
They didn't invent Unix, but every year from 1980 to 2000 had been touted as 'the year of Unix on the desktop' before Apple actually got a Unix-based desktop os into the mainstream.
They didn't invent the GUI, laser printer or local area networking, but Xerox didn't know what the hell to do with these until Apple came along and put them into affordable boxes (not that Mac/Lisa OS was quite the clone of the Xerox Star that some people claim).
Apple didn't invent the personal computer (nor did Woz) but they were among the first to come up with one that you could use if you didn't own a soldering iron and a punched tape reader.
Simplified version: IE and Netscape were both descendants of NCSA Mosaic. Microsoft bought in Mosaic-derived code and developed it into IE [i]after[/i] Netscape had become popular.
Accurate version: go read it up on Wikipedia because it is really, really tangled with a full chorus of buy-outs, defections, rewrites and lawsuits.
What monopoly? Are you from the bizarro universe where there was no Commodore/Amigia, Atari or Apple?
Are you living in the bizarro universe where those were widely used outside the home/games/hobbyist market? The IBM PC owned the large/medium business market and when the cheap clones appeared, apart from Apple's niche in media production and education, the market share of anything non-PC was reduced to rounding errors. By that point, IBM wasn't doing so well out of it, but the clone makers and Microsoft were.
NB: when people say "monopoly" they really mean "dominant market position" and the PC certainly had that in spades.
Peh. I trust the BBC about as much as I trust Pravda. They like to memory hole stories [bbc.co.uk] that don't fit their agenda
Pro tip: if you want to claim that [insert name of news organisation] has suppressed a story, linking to that very story on [insert name of news organisation]'s kinda sorta undermines your claim.
has voluntarily resigned over a BBC program that featured 'poor journalism'.
Or, instead of The Guardian, you can read all about it on the BBC website.
Yes, you read that right - the BBC are reporting on this and not pulling too many punches. In fact, one of the last straws for Entwistle was a difficult grilling by a BBC interview on their flagship radio news program. That goes to show why, although some heads need to be cracked together over this screw-up, the BBC is something worth keeping.
Couple of other points:
Newsnight accused a prominent Conservative MP and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Lord Alistair McAlpine,
Actually, they didn't name him, just described the accsued as a "prominent Thatcher-era conservative politician" but in the process they leant a lot of credibility to internet tittle-tattle which did name him.
This example of an important media chief 'resigning voluntarily due to bad journalism' is interesting, because many TV, Web and Print journalists make 'serious mistakes' in their coverage at some point or the other, and quite often no heads roll whatsoever as a result."
Its worth putting this in the context of the BBC's current predicament - they've been accused of dropping an investigation into sexual abuse by the formerly-much-loved celeb, now deceased and discredited Jimmy Saville. Of course while, with hindsight, that investigation was right on the money, had their evidence not panned out then there would have been an uproar, so close to the star's death. This looks awfully like an attempt to over-compensate, and not spike a story that should have been spiked. However, that this should happen when the BBC management knew that they were already under scrutiny does not look good.
When you get an email account from your ISP, even if the email is stored on their servers, they don't get a right to the content.
Despite this, they DO actually manage to make backups, run the email servers and all that jazz.
So, where's the problem here?
ISPs aren't responsible for the actions of their customers in the same way that a company is responsible for the actions of its employees.
Of course, ultimately, the problem is caused by a growing, parasitic legal system, 'legislate to fix everything' governments, and large corporations with large legal departments who are happy with the disproportionately chilling effect of compliance regulations and defending against endless stupid lawsuits upon their smaller competitors.
In effect, when Apple went to negotiate iPhone terms with the carriers, they could point to the ROKR, and say "we tried it your way".
I think that one fails Hanlon's Razor. More likely, Apple were terrified that the availability of music players on mobile phones would trash sales of the iPod and tried to do something about it in a hurry. Also. maybe they got something useful out of Motorola in return.
Anyway, if you make an Epic Fail on purpose does that really make it a Huge Success? Risking the iTunes brand like that was a pretty stupid thing to do, and last time I looked Apple were still shifting useful numbers of iPods despite every phone under the sun doing music.
The only major failures I see there are Ping and the Rokr.
The rest seem like toes in the water that were probably worth a punt at the time.
The QuickTake camera was one of the first "affordable" digital cameras on the market. What was important to Apple was that people used Macs for digital photography and the QuickTake helped them play a role in creating that market. By the time it was dropped, big names in photography were producing consumer digicams - it was probably sensible for Apple not to go head to head with names like Nikon, Olympus and Fuji, or even Sony (who already had a name in video).
Bet you 50 Internets that the Poker app was withdrawn because they started getting negative publicity from the anti-gambling lobby. Meanwhile, i'm sure the news that iPod socks failed to set the world on fire will bring Apple's share price crashing (NB: they [i]were[/i] meant to protect iPods - TFA makes it sound like Apple was trying to break into the hosiery market!)
I own an iPad, an iPod, two Android devices and a Nexus 7 is on its way in the mail. I still haven't purchased anything from any app store.
On the Android devices, do you use Google search? Google maps? Google Mail? Google Drive/Docs? Google+? If so, you're supporting Google's main business - advertising and consumer data-mining. I'm sure Google would be more than happy for you to buy an iPad provided you still used Google services - the whole Android/Chrome thing is their hedge against Microsoft or Apple trying to lock them out of their OSs.
Apple clearly has aspirations in the ad-funded-service business but they are still mainly a hardware/software company. Apple need to watch it - Google are better at doing hardware/software than Apple are at doing services (Google Drive vs. iCloud anybody...? yeah...).
(OK, there was that 'what were they thinking' AppleTV-non-killer from Google a bit back, but at least they wised up and killed it with fire fairly quickly).
...when announcing that Version X of something is released, to actually spare 3-4 words in the summary to give us readers a clue what the flying fuck the "something" you're talking about is, so we can decide whether we want to read further?
Even TFA manages to avoid saying what 'Diaspora' actually is or offering a link back to a descriptive page.
(To save others the trouble of Googling it's either an open-source social network, a freeware Battlestar Galactica game, a migraine-inducing SF Novel by Greg Egan or something to do with Jewish history... By a process of deduction, I'm going with the former...)
Come on guys, the point of a news site is to tell people things they don't know,.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in England you do suffer from brutal temperature extremes, from as low as 2 centigrade in winter to as high as 16 or 17 in the summer, plus you can be as much as a strenuous fifteen minute walk from the nearest shop.
True, but if more than 6 flakes of the wrong kind of snow fall and the M1 grinds to a halt you can find yourself marooned in a wilderness of gridlocked cars, and the local shop will be selling 250ml bottles of water for £10 each.
...more and more implicit or explicit class warfare crap in the news. I suspect it's not coincidence.
Pretty sure that this is all a bit of theatre by governments to detract from other unpopular spending cuts and tax rises. "Hey, don't blame us - look at all these big evil corporations avoiding tax!"
If the government actually wanted/was able to stop this they'd be changing the law and having friendly closed-door discussions with big corporations to determine how much tax they could tolerate before they packed up and went home. Instead they drag in a few household names for a public slagging off which will be forgotten in a few months time. I've no sympathy for corporations that avoid tax, but the UK Public Accounts Committee came over as a witch trial to which nobody had brought any matches.
I'm sure that for every Amazon, Google and Starbucks there are half a dozen You Haven't Heard of Us But We Own the Company that Owns Your Bus Company's Inquiry Line Corps playing exactly the same game. .
coming on Slashdot to blame the victim. Dozens and dozens of lock-step victim-blaming posts. Shocking. Great marketing campaign, Cook & Co. Hint - next time train your shills to use more variety in their posts so I can't see through your campaign so easily. Or quit using bots to do your posting for you.
Yes, because normally when someone suffers death-or-humiliation-by-GPS, everybody on Slashdot is brimming with sympathy for the victim.
I don't think so.
Relying on a GPS to the extent that it overrides common sense is silly enough. Relying on a particular navigation App, which has been publicly lambasted for its failings is silly with extra bells and whistles. Relying on any App primarily designed to find coffee bars in big cities to navigate in a country big enough and hostile enough to make getting lost potentially fatal - sorry, that's Darwin Award material.
If you want an example of Shilling, try saying "using Apple Maps could get someone killed" when you mean "driving into the wilderness without having a clue where you are going and without proper precautions could get someone killed".
I carry a blanket, a bottle of water and a dead-tree road atlas when driving around England for fuck's sake.
You obviously haven't driven in Australia much.. Google maps [google.com] See how you are driving through national parks and farmland before getting back to an urban area? Well Apple maps just takes you through a different national park and dumps you there. 45C is also 113F. And there is no phone reception or water.
Personally I haven't driven in Australia at all - I've only been there once. However, even as an ignorant Pom I'd assume that, when venturing outside of a city, its the sort of place where you take carrying water and emergency gear, keeping your car maintained, carrying reputable maps and planning your journey carefully rather seriously.
Methinks someone who takes the attitude "Its 1000 miles to Wongamonga, we've got half a tank of gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it's dark, we're wearing sunglasses and we've got GPS - hit it!" is an accident waiting to happen.
He was at one time a BNP supporter (British National Party - racist) [snip] Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Moore#Activism_and_political_beliefs
Unless it has changed in the last half hour, that article doesn't say what you think that it says. What it actually says is:
[Moore] condemned the Liberal Democrats, stating that he believed that they could alter their position radically and "would happily join up with the BNP or the Socialist Workers Party ... if [by doing so] they could win a few extra votes."
(BNP and SWP pretty much representing the two extreme ends of the UK political spectrum) and...
he remained a supporter and patron of the eurosceptic UK Independence Party until his death.
Note that UKIP is not the same as the BNP. Now, I don't support UKIP, don't like UKIP and am certainly not going to defend UKIP's immigration policies but they're an awfully long way from being the BNP.
Put simply: if someone I knew joined UKIP, I'd argue with them. If they joined BNP I'd avoid them.
Also, summary missed out one of his other great TV appearances : as 'the gamesmaster'
He also played a mean xylophone!
However, if you were into space or astronomy as a kid, Moore's books were essential reading. I don't know how well known he is internationally, but in the UK. I can't think of anybody who has done more to not only popularise science, but to show how people could contribute without needing a PhD and a white coat. Plus I believe he made some pretty useful contributions himself, especially with his work on lunar mapping.
A huge loss.
Right, then you have to login to some service from another computer....
If it's something that is really high security, Don't Do That Then (and you certainly shouldn't be doing it using a password).
For normal "domestic" security, carry a USB dongle containing your private key and enough processing power to encrypt challenges. For 'belt and braces' add a PIN, password or fingerprint reader needed to unlock the device. For belt, braces and really thick underpants have a second PIN or password checked by the service you are connecting to.
(Of course, this needs someone to establish a standard ).
In the UK and EU we've pretty much gone over to that system for credit/debit cards - the card has an embedded chip that can encode challenges, locked by a PIN. Most businesses use this for 'cardholder present' payments and my bank supplies a card reader for home use (needed for some online banking operations - in addition to a regular PIN and password for the website). NB: whether the banks are capable of implementing such a system properly is another matter.
Of course, there's the danger of losing the device (but I'd say most people cope better with their wallet and keys than they do with password) but you should weigh that against the dangers of using a password-only system on an unsecured computer, and also the likelihood that people faced with stringent password requirements will carry them around on a handy bit of paper.
Couldn't the jury rule that the patent is invalid then?
Only if one of the warring parties presents them with enough evidence to do so.
When both parties are huge patent-holders, don't expert them to do more than nit-pick the specifics of the opposition's patents. Presenting more general arguments about the absurdities of the patent system might backfire undermine the value of their own portfolio...
If Apple did NOT know about it, then it's absurd for them suggest that Samsung should have.
If it turns out that Apple knew that the juror had a possible grudge against Samsung and said nothing then they might be in trouble - but it wasn't Apple's responsibility to go out and hunt for reasons why the jurors might have a grudge against Samsung. That was Samsung's job, and they should be in a better position than Apple to know who they and their partners have sued over the years...
If the connection between Samsung and this guy is so tenuous that he wasn't in their Little Black Book then its harder to suggest that he'd be biassed against them.
Meanwhile, remember that the jury also threw out some pretty silly patent claims by Samsung. There are no "good guys" in this case, so if you fancy a retrial, be careful what you wish for.
Are a million to one he said...
The rover has located traces of aromatic plant extracts, sugar, honey and lemon. The Martians are coming back and this time they've brought Mentholyptus! We're doomed!
The thing is, the CBS show ("Elementary") feels a lot more Who-ish than the BBC show.
Really? I thought the BBC's Sherlock was awfully Who-like (the character was maybe less likeable - but then I think Sherlock Holmes is best portrayed as a bit of an arsehole). The actor would make a great Doctor.
No Moriarty (The Master) so far
Again, I thought the BBC's Moriarty had a lot of similarity to the New Who's Master: they've both moved from the classic, scheming evil genius to the tormented madman model.
It looks like finding out about Irene (Rose?)
More like River Song (without the timey-wimey paradox stuff) in the BBC version...
Pity - we could do with more than 3 eps of Sherlock a year, but I believe that Watson has been down under shooting some 2-bit indy flick about people with hairy feet.
Or maybe it just shows that Sherlock Holmes was one of the many influences on DW.
I haven't seen the CBS show but I assume that it's inspired (officially or otherwise) by the success of the BBC show - which is written by Stephen Moffat (Current showrunner of Dr Who) and Mark Gatiss (who has also written a couple of Dr Who episodes). I'd certainly agree that the Sherlock character in that comes over an awful lot like the Doctor with a mobile phone instead of a sonic screwdriver.
OK, so the BBC didn't go for a female companion, but there's a running joke in the show about people jumping to conclusions about Holmes and Watson's relationship.
The whole "companion" thing is an ages old plot device: their role is to ask questions so that the main protagonist has an excuse for exposition. The only variable is whether they're also responsible for sex interest and getting rescued, although in the post-[i]Alien[/i] world female sidekicks are expected to kick ass and do a lot of the rescuing stuff themselves.
If you allow a crime to go unpunished that will be abused.
OK, so lets arrest everybody who's ever made a mix tape/CD or ripped a CD to their iPod (may be OK in the US under 'fair use' law, but it is definitely copyright violation here in the UK*, possibly also in Germany where this story comes from). At a ball park estimate that's about 100% of the population (maybe 99%, but the 1% will probably have sung 'Happy Birthday' in a public place so it doesn't make much difference).
On second thoughts, no, let's not risk the total discredit and collapse of the justice system.
(* Seriously - although even the recording industry in the UK isn't sufficiently batshit insane to try and enforce it, if you build a CD ripper you'd keep quiet about it in your advertising).
But what if a kid steals, gets into a fight or robs people? Who will be liable?
What's that got to do with this? Those are serious crimes that result in real people being injured or deprived of their hard-earned property. The only "damage" in the case of copyright violation is the slim, hypothetical possibility that, if the kid hadn't been able to get the material, he'd have paid for them and the artists would have got a thousandth of a cent in royalties.
Wake me up if the kid was running a large-scale illegal download site shipping ripped-off content to sufficient thousands of people to make a difference. Even then, the sensible thing for the content owners to do would be to shake him down for some free advertising space and punt gig tickets, t-shirts, action figures and premium-rate SMS services to his customer base.
Just visit Microsoft Research and you'll realize that Microsoft has always been more innovative than Apple.
No, what you'll realise is that Microsoft publicises some of its research projects, including things that will probably never make it to market, whereas Apple keeps things secret until they're ready to announce them as a product.
Has Apple really ever invented anything?
Innovation !== Invention. Inventors can churn out as many bright ideas as they like, but unless someone gets behind that idea, builds it into a viable product, gets it to market and markets the hell out of it, no innovation will happen.
Apple didn't invent "retina" LCD displays, but the rest of the industry had stuck at ~100ppi for years and it was getting increasingly rare to see anything over 1080p.
They didn't invent tablet computers - but outside of a few niches nobody wanted one before the iPad came out.
They didn't invent smartphones - or even touchscreen phones - but if you don't think that the iPhone galvanised the smartphone market you never tried to use a pre-iPhone smartphone.
They didn't invent Unix, but every year from 1980 to 2000 had been touted as 'the year of Unix on the desktop' before Apple actually got a Unix-based desktop os into the mainstream.
They didn't invent the GUI, laser printer or local area networking, but Xerox didn't know what the hell to do with these until Apple came along and put them into affordable boxes (not that Mac/Lisa OS was quite the clone of the Xerox Star that some people claim).
Apple didn't invent the personal computer (nor did Woz) but they were among the first to come up with one that you could use if you didn't own a soldering iron and a punched tape reader.
IE was never a clone of Netscape.
Simplified version: IE and Netscape were both descendants of NCSA Mosaic. Microsoft bought in Mosaic-derived code and developed it into IE [i]after[/i] Netscape had become popular.
Accurate version: go read it up on Wikipedia because it is really, really tangled with a full chorus of buy-outs, defections, rewrites and lawsuits.
What monopoly? Are you from the bizarro universe where there was no Commodore/Amigia, Atari or Apple?
Are you living in the bizarro universe where those were widely used outside the home/games/hobbyist market? The IBM PC owned the large/medium business market and when the cheap clones appeared, apart from Apple's niche in media production and education, the market share of anything non-PC was reduced to rounding errors. By that point, IBM wasn't doing so well out of it, but the clone makers and Microsoft were.
NB: when people say "monopoly" they really mean "dominant market position" and the PC certainly had that in spades.
Peh. I trust the BBC about as much as I trust Pravda. They like to memory hole stories [bbc.co.uk] that don't fit their agenda
Pro tip: if you want to claim that [insert name of news organisation] has suppressed a story, linking to that very story on [insert name of news organisation]'s kinda sorta undermines your claim.
has voluntarily resigned over a BBC program that featured 'poor journalism'.
Or, instead of The Guardian, you can read all about it on the BBC website.
Yes, you read that right - the BBC are reporting on this and not pulling too many punches. In fact, one of the last straws for Entwistle was a difficult grilling by a BBC interview on their flagship radio news program. That goes to show why, although some heads need to be cracked together over this screw-up, the BBC is something worth keeping.
Couple of other points:
Newsnight accused a prominent Conservative MP and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Lord Alistair McAlpine,
Actually, they didn't name him, just described the accsued as a "prominent Thatcher-era conservative politician" but in the process they leant a lot of credibility to internet tittle-tattle which did name him.
This example of an important media chief 'resigning voluntarily due to bad journalism' is interesting, because many TV, Web and Print journalists make 'serious mistakes' in their coverage at some point or the other, and quite often no heads roll whatsoever as a result."
Its worth putting this in the context of the BBC's current predicament - they've been accused of dropping an investigation into sexual abuse by the formerly-much-loved celeb, now deceased and discredited Jimmy Saville. Of course while, with hindsight, that investigation was right on the money, had their evidence not panned out then there would have been an uproar, so close to the star's death. This looks awfully like an attempt to over-compensate, and not spike a story that should have been spiked. However, that this should happen when the BBC management knew that they were already under scrutiny does not look good.
When you get an email account from your ISP, even if the email is stored on their servers, they don't get a right to the content.
Despite this, they DO actually manage to make backups, run the email servers and all that jazz.
So, where's the problem here?
ISPs aren't responsible for the actions of their customers in the same way that a company is responsible for the actions of its employees.
Of course, ultimately, the problem is caused by a growing, parasitic legal system, 'legislate to fix everything' governments, and large corporations with large legal departments who are happy with the disproportionately chilling effect of compliance regulations and defending against endless stupid lawsuits upon their smaller competitors.
In effect, when Apple went to negotiate iPhone terms with the carriers, they could point to the ROKR, and say "we tried it your way".
I think that one fails Hanlon's Razor. More likely, Apple were terrified that the availability of music players on mobile phones would trash sales of the iPod and tried to do something about it in a hurry. Also. maybe they got something useful out of Motorola in return.
Anyway, if you make an Epic Fail on purpose does that really make it a Huge Success? Risking the iTunes brand like that was a pretty stupid thing to do, and last time I looked Apple were still shifting useful numbers of iPods despite every phone under the sun doing music.
The only major failures I see there are Ping and the Rokr.
The rest seem like toes in the water that were probably worth a punt at the time.
The QuickTake camera was one of the first "affordable" digital cameras on the market. What was important to Apple was that people used Macs for digital photography and the QuickTake helped them play a role in creating that market. By the time it was dropped, big names in photography were producing consumer digicams - it was probably sensible for Apple not to go head to head with names like Nikon, Olympus and Fuji, or even Sony (who already had a name in video).
Bet you 50 Internets that the Poker app was withdrawn because they started getting negative publicity from the anti-gambling lobby. Meanwhile, i'm sure the news that iPod socks failed to set the world on fire will bring Apple's share price crashing (NB: they [i]were[/i] meant to protect iPods - TFA makes it sound like Apple was trying to break into the hosiery market!)
I own an iPad, an iPod, two Android devices and a Nexus 7 is on its way in the mail. I still haven't purchased anything from any app store.
On the Android devices, do you use Google search? Google maps? Google Mail? Google Drive/Docs? Google+? If so, you're supporting Google's main business - advertising and consumer data-mining. I'm sure Google would be more than happy for you to buy an iPad provided you still used Google services - the whole Android/Chrome thing is their hedge against Microsoft or Apple trying to lock them out of their OSs.
Apple clearly has aspirations in the ad-funded-service business but they are still mainly a hardware/software company. Apple need to watch it - Google are better at doing hardware/software than Apple are at doing services (Google Drive vs. iCloud anybody...? yeah...).
(OK, there was that 'what were they thinking' AppleTV-non-killer from Google a bit back, but at least they wised up and killed it with fire fairly quickly).
Any politician knows you don't need a camera to lie.
Yeah, but it is harder to tell with a camera because you can't see its lips moving.
...just give me a load of birds and a catapult, then.
Or maybe some moles and a big hammer.
...when announcing that Version X of something is released, to actually spare 3-4 words in the summary to give us readers a clue what the flying fuck the "something" you're talking about is, so we can decide whether we want to read further?
Even TFA manages to avoid saying what 'Diaspora' actually is or offering a link back to a descriptive page.
(To save others the trouble of Googling it's either an open-source social network, a freeware Battlestar Galactica game, a migraine-inducing SF Novel by Greg Egan or something to do with Jewish history... By a process of deduction, I'm going with the former...)
Come on guys, the point of a news site is to tell people things they don't know,.