David Hamilton

David Hamilton

42p

62 comments posted · 0 followers · following 0

12 years ago @ Technologizer - Who's Using What to Vi... · 1 reply · +1 points

Your bizarre comment about IQ aside, I would like to thank you for (unwittingly) correcting my error:
Apple were, of course, the first to ship a Postscript Laser Printer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript

I'd conflated the two in my memory (they have become so closely associated), so thanks for helping me get my point exactly right.

12 years ago @ Technologizer - Who's Using What to Vi... · 3 replies · 0 points

Sigh, back to the trolling, eh?

Apple developed the first commercially successful GUI and laser printers, which became the starting point for other companies' versions (and also coincidentally kick-started the DTP industry). Those are historical facts.

Not a fan-boi at all, just very disappointed at the level of innovation displayed by other companies. Most companies are scared to death of change for fear of damaging their existing revenue streams. A good example of that is Polaroid, who developed some of the earliest digital cameras but then supposedly backed away from the market once it showed signs of directly competing with its existing instant camera range.

12 years ago @ Technologizer - Who's Using What to Vi... · 0 replies · 0 points

Arguably, without Apple you'd still be using command-line computers, dot-matrix printers and phones with keypads. Without doubt the arrival of GUIs, laser printers and touch devices would have occurred a lot later.

The touch-obsessed future technology videos released by Microsoft and RIM this week showed beyond doubt the transformational effect that the iPhone & iPad have had on everyone's thinking about the future.

Had they been made 5 years ago, they would have looked radically different, and, like it or not, there is only one place to look for the thought-leader behind that change.

12 years ago @ Technologizer - The Pros and Cons of t... · 0 replies · 0 points

The population of the US would have had to have dropped by over 50 million in 5 years to make your per capita numbers work.

Tell you what: you post some numbers that back your point, or I'll assume that you're just some teenager who is trolling.

12 years ago @ Technologizer - The Pros and Cons of t... · 3 replies · -1 points

Heraclitus: I notice that (as usual) you haven't posted any data to support your 'fact'.

According to this in depth report, only evening newspapers have been in decline since the '70s. http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/newspapers-essay/...
If you look at the numbers for the section "A 20-year slide in paid circulation" (ignore the title and look at the numbers) and exclude evening papers you find the following figures:
1990 -> 103.9m
2000 -> 106.2m
2004 -> 104.7m
2009 -> 86.5m

In other words, circulation in 2004 was actually higher than it was in 1990, but then started to plunge by 18m over the next 5 years.

I rest my case.

12 years ago @ Technologizer - Is the iPhone 4S a Bat... · 0 replies · +1 points

Update: I've found that with Store Automatic Downloads and Setting Time Zone disabled I'm getting pre-upgrade levels of battery life.

Modified Settings:
Store Automatic Downloads - Settings > Store > Music: Off, Apps: Off, Books: Off
Setting Time Zone (+ iAd Location detection) - Settings > Location Services > System Services > Setting Time Zone: Off, Location-based iAds: Off

12 years ago @ Technologizer - The Pros and Cons of t... · 5 replies · +1 points

Max: you've got me completely wrong if you think I am arguing for more profits to the huge corporates. Quite the opposite, in fact, as I believe huge companies to be the enemy of capitalism, reducing jobs and choice and making everyone except themselves poorer.

What I was arguing for was a mechanism that allows everyone with anything unique to share to make reasonable revenues from the Net, without being forced to effectively give away their intellectual property.

The entertainment industry is most definitely not the only the only one being undermined by the internet. The newspaper/media industry is being literally decimated every year (i.e. losing 10% circulation per year) by the shift to (free) online news.

I agree that they have been slow to adapt to the internet, but that is the core of my case. That the lack of a mature revenue model for the Internet has led to people either giving things away for free (and hoping they can get some scraps through Google Ads) or to avoid the medium completely.

The music industry is an area close to my heart as I know a number of professional or semi-professional musicians. And the truth of the matter is that the Internet has sucked all the money out of recorded music, and returned the industry to the state it was in the 1930s, with musicians scraping a living from live performances. (That's not to justify the amount charged for recorded music by the record companies, which was unjustifiable, as was the fact that they only gave artists around 14% of the money made by their CD sales.)

And please don't tell me that Spotify is the future for musicians. It is estimated that an artist needs over 4 million plays per month to make US minimum wage - http://ht.ly/76gzT

Finally, I think you're confusing Open and Free. Open systems encourage competition and help create healthy markets. Free, unfortunately, does nothing of the sort. For example, look at how Microsoft, with Internet Explorer, and Google, with Android, have used or are using Free to try to create a monopoly, sucking profitability out of a market sector.

For the difference between Open and Free, think of those who charge to design and build websites: Their designs are Open to be seen by everyone (i.e. you can look at the HTML/CSS source), but (hopefully!) they're not creating them for Free.

12 years ago @ Technologizer - Is the iPhone 4S a Bat... · 0 replies · +1 points

According to this article - http://www.idownloadblog.com/2011/10/27/tip-cure-... - it is (at least part) due to a bug in iOS5 that keeps location services permanently alive.

Personally I have also turned off automatic downloads (from the Store) and Twitter, and am now getting much better battery life on my 3GS (which was dying regularly at 9pm after the iOS5 upgrade).

This whole issue underlines the tradeoffs that are inherent in a mobile device. With more and more always-on internet services being built in to mobile OSs, we will have to be much more careful about the ones that we enable if we want the devices to have the type of battery charge life we require.

Mobile devices are definitively a tradeoff, and I am deeply afraid that Apple might allow itself to be sucked into an arms war with Android over CPU, Screen-size and internet services, all of which result in reduced battery life.

Creating a mobile device is about saying 'No', something which Jobs was famously good at. Let's hope that a post-Jobs Apple can remember to say no.

12 years ago @ Technologizer - The Pros and Cons of t... · 1 reply · -1 points

One major omission:

The lack of a proper website revenue model (e.g. micro-cash payments using built-in secure wallets allowing pageviews for 10 cents or even less) has not only been highly destructive to web commerce but also has spread, like a cancer, to destroy existing business models (such as recorded music and newspapers).

Our entire economy is based on persuading people to move money around - to pay money to buy stuff that is largely unnecessary (which is why the fashion industry is such a brilliant flag-bearer for capitalism!). It is the rate of flow of money around society that makes us all rich, not how much money that actually exists.

The web's enforced habit of giving things away for free not only risks directly destroying many established industries, but in the long term threatens to destroy our entire economy by undermining that circular flow of money.

Free may well end up making us all poor. And the lack of a proper revenue model for the Internet will ultimately be to blame for that.

12 years ago @ Technologizer - Fake Battery Apps Inva... · 0 replies · +1 points

Am I wrong in believing that that 'curation' is still only done retro-actively, initially trusting apps and only removing them once they have been proved to be malicious?

Am I also wrong in believing that users need to grant specific permissions even for apps from the Marketplace? Apparently there are 22 (22!) different permissions, and I note that Google autosuggests 'Android Permissions Explained' as the top completion when you start to type Android Permissions, which is a real warning sign - a sign that this is something people don't understand.

I also note that the explanations contain comments like "Unfortunately this permission seems to be a bit of a mixed bag" and "You will have to be very careful with this setting and use your judgment" as part of the permission explanations - http://techpp.com/2010/07/30/android-apps-permiss.... Also, according to this study over 30% of apps request permissions that they don't actually need (and, presumably, are happily given them by the users).

It is deeply ironic that Google on the one hand have so little trust in user's judgement that they force Chrome to auto-update (not on my computers it doesn't - ha!) in the name of 'security', and yet on the other they push complex and nuanced security decisions into the hands of the users.

The last 20 years has shown trust and the internet to be a lethal cocktail. I wish the Android market good luck, and hope that it doesn't need it.

Sidebar: I do find replying using the 'reply' link against the specific comment to be very helpful when holding a conversation, as they get notified of your response, and the comment area doesn't get cluttered with overlapping threads!