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Comments Distressingly-named Los Angeles law firm Kabateck Brown Kellner is suing Apple for "deceptively" marketing the new 20-inch iMac. This provoked a spray of Apple spittle from readers, and a bit of a tussle:
Apple is a corporation. The entire goal of any large corporation is to rape customers just enough to make the most money possible. A little bit of marketing and smooth plastic shouldn't be enough to confuse people about that.Nearly every Apple release is accompanied by lies and half-truths.
"We switched to Intel because they're 4 times as fast" really meant "We make 4 times as much profit selling you cheap Intel chips, and you're all too ignorant to notice that the first few generations of our kit will be slower than the last PPC hardware by a huge factor."
I could go on, but it's pub o'clock.
Nexox Enigma
I have been an apple user for my entire working life on computers and every year they get more shoddy than the last.It is now becoming damn near impossible to say that Apple machines are rock solid, perfectly engineered machines that do what you want when you want it.
It's unfortunate that they seem to think that people will put up with badly designed products just because they are branded with an apple logo.
I for one am going to investigate building my own machine next time I'm ready to upgrade and make sure that all components are 'Rock Solid' from the beginning.
Signed
A very unhappy 2007 iMac 20" user....
Anonymous Coward
If you really need or want a Mac then buy a Mac Mini and stick a monitor of *your* choice on it, not the rubbish that Apple want to peddle. The same thing goes for buying PCs, don't get the 'free' monitor that Dell et al. bundle with the machine.Anonymous Coward
Damn right people are complaining. For 800 quid it's entirely reasonable to expect a full colour monitor - especially as it can't be changed, and because it is what Apple reinforces its machines are supposedly good at.Also, given Apple's target market ('it just works') they shouldn't be trying this sort of crap.
As to respondents here having crappy monitors - well, the TFT at work is probably crap, but then again it's not used for image editing. The CRT at work, the CRTs at home and the TFT at home render colour properly (yes, I checked before I bought).
Peter Kay
It turns out that BT secretly profiled the web browsing of 18,000 users without their consent in 2006 using ad tech provided by Phorm, which was then known as 121Media. Phorm itself has emphasised a commitment to privacy. When we stopped laughing, we questioned Phorm on this, and the company responded by calling us unethical. Us? Unethical? That's like saying we have no integrity.
Firstly, given your reportage to date, I accept this is not an April Fool story ;)The important point here is that BT deliberately sought to hide what it was doing. It cynically deceived its customers and was knowingly sailing close the wind in legal terms.
BT cannot be trusted to tell the truth. The company has lied about this issue consistently; why should we accept anything BT says now as true?
Furthermore, BT has shown no signs whatsoever of backing away from Phorm nor from the concept of traffic interception for commercial gain. At least both Carphone Whorehouse and Virgin seem to be re-evaluating their commitment to Phorm.
As to Kent (with a 'u') Ertugrul and his PR people's spin:
"We think it is unethical of the Register to seek to undermine a technology..."
Bloody gall! Pots and kettles. How *dare* they accuse anyone of being 'unethical'
"... that enhances online privacy..."
Bollocks! In fact, it does exactly the opposite as K(u)nt well knows.
"....Phorm's system ensures that ads are served with no data storage ..."
Storage is irrelevent, a red herring. You bastards are intending to intercept my packets and spy on me.
"... something that will benefit readers of the Register and other websites."
No it won't. Not in the slightest. Not in any way imaginable.
This whole sorry saga needs and deserves the widest possible media coverage. El Reg has done a sterling job so far but, sadly, ninety-five per cent of DSL-using Joe Public is technically illiterate and doesn't read The Register. A lot more coverage such as The Guardian's and the BBC's is needed to generate the deluge of complaint that BT so richly deserves; and wallet-voting by switching ISP is the best way to reinforce the point.
Phuck off, Phorm. Do not want.
Sceptical Bastard
The deeper we get into this the worse it gets. Even I never saw this coming and until the end of the second page I was beginning to believe it might be a very clever April Fool but now I am left staggering.I submitted a petition on the PM website on Friday evening to call for the PM to demand the Home Office initiate criminal proceedings against BT for the 2007 Trials which they recently admitted to and was shocked yesterday to find out it had been rejected for unfathomable reasons.
You can see the petition text and the email I got from the PM web team on the following link:
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/34518506-post1951.html
I am also currently investigating the possibility of filing for a High Court injunction to prevent Phorm technology being deployed in the UK with any of the 3 ISPs under RIPA; anyone who has any feedback they wish to give on that please contact me.
And in closing, Wow.
Alexander Hanff
PS.. You need a Gobsmacked icon ElReg
Alexander Hanff
COMMENTS
Flight control software april fool
Peter Mellow wrote:
"A few years after that, I broadcast my own story that Airbus had subcontracted the maintenance of the flight control software on the A320 to a third-party support firm. I had just just returned from a meeting in Copenhagen, and said I had seen the story in the Danish magazine "Godaj" ("Hello" in Danish). I said that the head of the third-party support firm was Wolf Larssen (the villain of "The Sea Wolf" by Jack London) and quoted him as saying that he was not worried that the original developers of the flight control system would not give him the source code, since his employees could download the binary and de-compile it.
At least three experts in safety-critical avionics were totally taken in and expressed their concern to the discussion group on which I had broadcast the story. I was still receiving concerned enquiries 5 years later from people who had read it in the archives, and hadn't noticed the date on it.
Moral: Make the spoofs believable, but perhaps not *too* believable! :-)"
I'm not surprised it was believed because that actually happened, admittedly not with the flight control software, but for the cabin systems (air conditioning, smoke alarms, reading lights, passenger call, etc).
Years after the A320 went in to service and gained a reputation for the flakiness of some of these systems, Deutsche Aerospace decided it might be a good idea to check the code against the design, so contracted this out to a 3rd party who disassembled vast quantities of 68000 code and wrote analysis tools to compare it with the design pseudo code. After finding hundreds of defects in the 33% of systems in the first tranche, they promptly cancelled the contract for the remaining 66% of systems, and those bugs probably remain there today.
At least for the next generation of the A330/A340 aircraft, the software was written in C and properly certified before flight, it still ran on ancient 68000 processors though.
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