Re: Down under anyone?
Oz has been pretty bad this year too at least in my sector - I've been looking at things back in the UK.
5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007
Options are a result of componentisation and object orientation :)
More of an issue are things like ugly mail client windows; popping up "Please wait" instead of displaying and then updating later.
Having said that, suse and kde are my desktop of choice. XFCE if I need low-power or network boot.
> has given every mildly entrepreneurial bakery a chance to sell espresso-based coffee at ridiculous rates
Have they reached Melbourne prices yet? $3.50 is cheap - you're normally looking at $4.50 for a long black.
Mind you, they charge almost $3 (£2) for a bag of crisps or a marathon from vending machine.
>There is such a thing as off line maps you know, like what all those sat navs use...?
Do you really think apple want you to have anything offline - especially maps?
GPS + wifi is useful because, you normally use your phone as a hotspot (one 3g contract), but you may want a larger screen than your phone. Or you may want to geolocate photo's - perhaps edited in iphoto.
Or you may be on holiday in your hotel room and be planning your day's schedule. You'll use your phone on the move, but plan stuff on the bigger screen.
Also UFS to be MS friendly I think, though its probably more for TV usage than PC. Onboard HDMI means there's less need to pull a card and pop it in the TV.
You could use run a samba server when there's a ready power supply and talk over wireless.
Any news on screen quality & brightness rather than just resolution?
Metro->city
City->blocks (also seen on-screen)
"Blocks" != enables
Also, just a brief look at Prince's squiggle, I assume that its supposed to be a combination of ♂ and ♀ and a bit of something else. How very metro-sexual (I feel dirty just using that non-word).
Perhaps we should call the UI "Prince", though I feel TIFKAM would be equally appropriate in that context.
Indeed. The new features don't warrant a major version jump.
For me, the phone killer app (apart from being a phone and sms system) is cloud email and unified address books. I don't know if icloud does this, but I know my linux systems will talk nicely to google services. I'm unhappy with apple taking stuff off their kit (macs) and not actually replacing it with with anything better and its that attitude which somewhat scares me even if they did talk nicely with my suse desktop. I dislike being an advertising commodity but I dislike a lack of interoperability and function more. I also suspect apple wants to head down the advertising path and iOS will end up as bad as android games. My wife's free iOS card games certainly contain irritating adverts.
I'm not sure what phones could add which would be new and innovative. Apple could put a PSTN link back in the mac and allow your iphone to make landline calls. Decent VOIP? How about making time-machine hardware into a decent firewall/router or voip gateway or tv recorder (with icloud subscription covering the EPG tweaking) with your iphone as the UI?
How about making the iphone dual-sim so its usable for work and home?
> I thought there was a lot of evidence for an old earth, otherwise aren't we going to have to throw out these various ideas for a start...evolution, physics, critical thinking?
Are you seriously putting evolution and physics on the same level?
Physics you can play with and does stuff which can make your life better. Make a lever, put it on a pivot and see how much force is required to move an object, or use steam to drive an engine to move goods across continents. Evolution (in this context) can't be replicated and does nothing for the betterment of humanity.
If physics were as subject to revision as evolution (as this article notes) is, gravity would be all over the place and the speed of light in a vacuum would be revised every year or so. E would = M(x)C^y with x and y unknown. Evolution doesn't "develop," there is practically nothing "hard" about it, on which you can build. It just wibbles around in a constant stream of "oh look, stuff we thought was quite advanced and should appear later has shown up quite early on" (like the eyes in the article) and "oh look, stuff we thought was ancient has turned up in a fishing net quite un-evolved." Its less scientific than psychology. At least with psychology, you can repeat things and see whether they still hold true - you can act on the elements themselves rather assuming nothing has really changed over billions of years.
How many of the "common ancestors" between the major life forms on earth do we actually have evidence for? Is there anything that evolutionary scientists agree on, apart from the fact that "evolution happened"?
Who here would like the electricity supply to their house to vary as much as evolutionary "science" does? Who would like the electricity supply voltage to vary geographically according to the theories held by the local proponents of evolution? It would be chaos. What if the properties of steel and concrete changed in the same way that evolutionary "knowledge" changes? Try building a bridge with that!
We'll find eyes much earlier somewhere else in a year or two.
I don't need science which behaves like that. It isn't useful and doesn't extend my understanding of the real world.
> Thatcher ripped the soul out of this nation,
Perhaps. But the 1970's before Thatcher wasn't really a triumph of productivity or production quality. The end was coming anyway.
The problem with intangibles is that they are really difficult to police and unreliable as an income source. Just look at the write-downs the banks had to make when it was realised that the money owed them by sub-prime Americans just wasn't going to materialise.
Intellectual Property is a con because it conflates different things. Few people think copyright shouldn't exist. Few people think patents shouldn't exist, but few people understand how you can motivate someone who has been dead for 69 years to be more creatively productive. Few people see how moving an icon on a screen is an invention. Without the blessing and goodwill of the people (and I mean the populace, not the legislative) laws are ineffective and will be extensively broken. Try reducing copyright lengths and you might get more creativity and more goodwill from the people in keeping the law.
I simply don't believe artists become more creative when there is a guaranteed income stream for so long. Apple would not have picked a different way to unlock their phone if there was less chance of charging royalties on that particular method.
By pushing "rights" too far under the current regime, the "creative" corporates have created a backlash. Did I say "creative"? How many seasons of Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing, Survivor, X factor do we need? What is it in the "creative media" industry which is creative?
You jest, but if cores were cheap and plentiful and good at web2.0, things could be better. One of the problems is that current systems are just not fast enough for browser apps.
I'm sure there would be plenty of admins would would love the idea of not having to install outlook or Office on each desktop. If you could do those in a browser I suspect we'd have a lot more people running of linux images - which is why MS won't ever do it properly.
Perhaps some cheap & power-saving ARM cores could do it...
It doesn't have to be locked down if you provide the best buying/usage experience.
Apple need lock-in because while itunes is nicely integrated with your credit card and ipod/phone, it doesn't match the value for money, nor the breadth of products for sale that amazon has. You don't look on itunes for a new computer and it probably isn't the first place for books either.
It is much easier to say, "we have great stuff for you, use this device to get it," than, "We have this great device, please buy whatever we want to sell you through it and only use it for what we want you to."
True.
The exciting was that better tech arrived and got cheaper over time.
Now there is little appreciable benefit to buying a faster CPU/GPU/disk, for most people, except to run AV faster. We've max'ed out the number of colours we can see on the screen, I don't know of anyone who's considering 128bit cpu's. While a larger-than-27"-screen is possible, it isn't easy to fit on a desk and becomes a bit overwhelming for normal work.
We could get better GPUs for realtime photo-realistic rendering but that isn't needed by most people (at least, not to the point where they want to pay for it).
It would be rather cool to get minority-report style hand-movement recognition in lieu of a large touchscreen for the desktop, but a mouse/keyboard is probably faster and easier. Mouse/keyboard would also cause fewer problems if you're inclined to gesticulate while talking on the phone or have annoying colleagues/children.
Software is incredibly bloated. I downloaded MS' ATI driver the other day - 9MB. ATI's own download came in at 150MB and their "detect hardware" didn't work on an old X1600 system.
Now the excitement is in cheap, less capable things - ARM chips and putting things in new places - phones etc. Even GPS and motion sensors are old hat.
Google maps is an overlay to GPS.
Apple could have built up a decent maps db simply by tracking phone movement and speed and then aligning it with their road location data. They have enough of the phone market to do this, though Apple streetmap cars wouldn't have gone amiss. Apple have billions, it would have been easy to offer an "intern" program where car-roof cameras could be hooked up to an iphone and people get itunes credit for areas they map.
They should have done this (did do this?) while gmaps was being used until they could demonstrate that it was all working nicely.
While I wish them good luck, I can't help feeling that the laptop makers will start building their x86 laptops with a detachable screen and ARM chippery.
That assumes that a 13" or 15" screen would work. The problem is, it doesn't need to work well, it just needs to be very cheap - which it will be if its something they would have bought anyway. A thin bezel with the outer 1.5" of the screen deactivated on a 13" laptop would probably be about right for a 10" tablet.
If RT goes in on the same basis as OEM windows (paid for whether you want it or not, or bundled as part of an windows OEM license), it will smother the market for independent devices. Even if RT is a bit rubbish, there'll be inertia against jailbreaking, especially if its a work laptop with jailbreaking verboten.
This is where it comes down to whether MS can (ahem) strongarm Dell, HP and Lenovo faster than anti-trust action can be effective.
That's retail postage. Bulk business postage, by air and especially ship is dirt cheap. All the goods come from China anyway.
It also doesn't explain the pricing differential on downloads or the massive markup compared to the UK which has VAT at 20% rather than 10% GST.
Hello HP, I'm looking at your 1810g-24. I'm also looking at MS' Windows 7 Ultimate USD 289 from Newegg, or AUD 445 from Officeworks.
Completely off-topic but perhaps useful for home users:
A local proxy should increase performance for most internet web traffic because any retransmits come from your local proxy, not over your WAN link. Squid is easy, even on Windows.
Also handy is a gig-ethernet cable, optical, if you run it next to power-lines.
Note to Business: Proxies are also good at branch sites. Stop centralising them to three expensive bluecoats in the main data centre. These things should be cheap and side-ways scaling at all remote sites.
/off topic rant
W8 is there to seed the market with the Pane interface so MS can move into mobile. They won't lose much desktop market because of the W8 interface and once people are familiar with the design, they are more likely to pick up a windows phone, because its obvious that it will work with their computer, right?
MS need/want to get back to "windows is the only option" and that would be hard to do if they themselves introduced yet another interface in the phone market. The last thing MS want is a heterogeneous marketplace as that will suggest that Windows is not the only fruit and Other Things Are Possible. Things like ARM and Android and iOS follow each other into corporate IT and then comes Linux and other things which are Bad For Microsoft.
er, so the solution to possibly having something break and not be available is to definitely make it unavailable?
It's not the cost that's the issue, its the ugly extra lump on my previously clear desk. It's no longer an all-in-one I can use to rip music from my CD's to my iphone.
Because if the speed is faster, more people can squeeze into the broadcast medium, so its cheaper - more punters per second can serviced.
Hasn't anyone else noticed that you can get a good 7.5mb/s 3g link, but it can still be really slow? That's contention and faster links means better service.
But is it fast enough to be a proper desktop? MSOffice aside, can it power a decent spreadsheet system or cope with a 300 page tender document with resorting to vi and troff?
Don't get me wrong, I think trimslice is great, and the mini is overpriced, but I think I'd be inclined to run trimslice as a thin client to a remote desktop.
+1
I ran through mental pictures of some UDP service which could be gainfully used by spoofing your source address, but only came up with DDOS applications.
The VPN address is real and not spoofed any more than using your corporate internet connection in a multinational or your own NAT'ed address on your ADSL link.
While I like the idea in principle, I wrote to Bethesda and told them I wouldn't be buying any of their wares, despite the fact I could get family in the UK to purchase and gift it on Steam. There's no downside for a corporation if people use VPNs - they make money on the VPN-purchased items and they make more on the native sales. Why would they bother to stop the gouging?
> I do think they have a right to protect their business interests.
Possibly, but if they want to keep control over what they sell, after the sell it, they need to come out and honestly label the deal as the "rental" of a PS3 and fix them if they break over their entire lifetime.
It isn't really the cost (though that's annoying).
Its the fact that the DVD player becomes an ugly beast to have around your beautiful imac and you start thinking that your all-in-one was achieved by taking everything out.
Lots of people still buy on CD. iMac's sound is not great and if you want music in the Lounge as well as the study, you may not want to buy another computer & screen for there too. Yes you could do BT from your tablet, but that starts being a pain to pair and unpair devices all over the place when you really just want to put a CD in. I might actually wish to share my music collection with the proper hifi in the Lounge.
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Written on my desktop, with over 6TB of internal disk, a very nice Dell 27" screen, a nice 20" screen and an OS where focus follows mouse.
About them leaving/thinking of leaving the TV business because the margins make it not-worthwhile?
Note to any large corporate: you have to make sure your suppliers earn enough to stay in business if you want to stay in business. Being "more efficient" and "being cheaper" is not the same.
Get every intermediary to add a tag to show the path the call is taking, then they can be traced back and pressure applied to get the first in-country telco to vet their customers better. If you provide this along with caller id, you can decide if you want to deal with your local tax office, when the call originate in India (no matter what caller id says) and is routed through dodgytelco UK, to Virgin, to your cable phone (or whatever). Whatever false information might be previously tagged onto a call, once the info has arrived at a legit telco, you have a handle on who sent it and where it came from. Telco's keep very good track of incoming connections.
Even if this facility was only availble to voip/sip customers, it might drive SIP adoption, or you could put in a two-stage call pickup where routing info is given by voice if you hold "hash" down while you pick up. Or some such thing.
This doesn't help when calls are washed through IndiaTelecom but at least you can see that's where its coming from.
You could then tie in reputation points so that people can easily see dodgytelco UK has had a heap of complaints and you could block calls based on telco/exchange ids, just as things like ironport filter based on email and web reputation.
It ain't rocket science and rocket science is basically blowing things up.