Posts by Andrew Baines

12?

A choice of 12 browsers? Surely not?

Paris cos she likes a choice.

And the story is?

Everyone knows that Apple are control freaks who don't view you as owning their device. If you don't like it, don't buy.

I'm sticking to my Windows Mobile 6.1, warts and all.

Without Nokia....

Symbian only has numbers because of the high-end Nokia phones. I'd bet most of those just get used as phones with a bit of email.

Last Symbian I had was too slow, the Exchange support poor. Now a happy Windows Mobile user (yes, I'm the one!).

But surely

Have the motor drive the front wheels.

Then have a generator on the rear wheels to recharge the battery as you drive.

Eternal free motoring.

Been a problem for a long time

Am I the only one old enough to remember using a milk tetra pak to keep a ZX80 cool enough?

Not what a camera phone is for

Camera phones are for two things:

1) Taking pictures of your car after an accident

2) Taking pictures of your arse to save wear and tear on a photocopier

Does it work as a phone though?

I have an 02 XD Orbit 2. Love it as a pocket computer, but as a phone, it sucks. The soft keys are too small to enter a number reliably (I have big fingers), so I have to use the stylus just to call.

As for Copilot - it keeps wanting me to leave the motorway, go round a roundabout, then back on at the same junction. It struggles with turn left vs bear left.

I thought about an iPhone, but needed to use a phone as a modem, and to connect properly to Exchange for email without using IMAP (don't want to rely upon data connection just to read email). So for now, I'll stick with the XDA, but look carefully when my next upgrade is due.

Who does the work

So, if they get rid of the contractors, who'll do all the work . The rest of BT are too busy having internal meetings and diversity trainig.

Good news for Capita

DSG going tits up soon - this saves Caputa the redundancy costs,

In the right direction

My wife had her tax record edited to some random address. No idea who did it, or how. Imagine if this data sharing had been in place - all her govt records would now be changed.

We need poor data sharing in govt just to stop them messing it up before we notice.

Java IDE next?

I like C#, I like Java, I like VS 2005/8.

But Netbean et al? No thanks. Java is fine server side, but client side sucks. I can type faster than Netbeans IDE does intellisense.

Someone let me develope Java in Visual Studio, deploying to Tomcat - I'll be happy.

Not until they're in colour

My wife reads a couple of books per week, but she'd never think of buying one of these - too easy to break, and too expensive.

However, she has to carry a couple of hefty text books around with her. Lots of essential colour pictures. She'd pay a lot if they would just release a colour ebook thingy.

Transcript?

How about providing a transcript. Then we can just skim through it without all the pain of watching.

Added Productivity

The old BBC Micro is the way to go - flip the switch, 2 tone sound and you're up and running. Not sure about network connectivity though :(

Why is this new?

If I'm using the web remotely, chances are it's on my phone. That already knows where I am - fire up google maps, off you go.

I can only see benefits for advertisments - main site asks for your location, passes it along to all those little adverts. No thanks.

One socket to rule them all:

Back in the days of the 486, we had multiple vendors using the same socket. Then, they saw competitive advantage to locking users in.

Suspended my account

The price just kept going up and up. I started off with 20p per click. Fine, few clicks per month. Then my ads were no longer served as my site's 'quality' isn't high enough. Google now want £2.50 per click. No thanks.

I have another search query on my name. Helps me avoid clashes with some Australian artist. Searching returns just 2 adverts - neither relevant, but my minimum bid still isn't good enough for Google.

So my choices for advertising are:

1) Google - too expensive and my ads don't appear much

2) Microsoft Live - nobody uses it

3) Yahoo - nobody in business uses it. Only useful for targetting low cost stuff to consumers.

Ah well.

Paris because she'll accept any bid.

Ciao visitors

I visit them maybe 5 times a month. All by accident because I'm not careful enough to avoid their results in Google. Quick backspace and I'm back to the other search results.

How many other visitors use them like this?

Paris, because she's never unwanted.

Why not

Just allow me to block all premium rate numbers from my BT line WITHOUT a monthly charge. Problem solved.

Paris, because I'm sure she's been on a premium rate number.

Java

They'll rewrite it in Java - runs anywhere, but soooo slooowly

Good for reference works

My wife has to carry 3 huge reference books with her from patient to patient. She'd love one of these, but not until they have hi-res colour photos.

And, I suppose the reference books won't be available for ages. And, she'd like the paper copy too for reference at home.

Can't help but think that a small laptop would be better and probably cheaper.

As for reading novels like, this - forget it!

Cuil's not

Results are even less relevant than those from Microsoft's dreadful search engine.

love it or loathe it, Google still returns the best search results. If you don't like the ads, just use Firefox and turn them off.

For the record, I recently stopped my google ad account - as a small business, I have to pay more for a good position in the 'auction' than my larger competitors. My minimum bid to be displayed rose from 20p to over £2.

And the question we all want answered

Just how long is the tape in one of these?

Nothing for me to worry about

The google maps showing my house are at least 5 years old, so should he safe for a while.

My AVG license runs out in January

and then I'll be looking elsewhere. Disabling stuff in AVG is painful, I didn't pay for a link scanner and I'm more than happy with McAfee Site advisor - I barley notice it until it blocks something.

I've been a paying customer of AVG for 7 years, but no more. I just want a simple AV, not all this other rubbish. Why is every anti-virus house determined to bundle umpteen bits of unwanted security stuff in each new release?

What about China

Far more people, let's have mandarin domain names too.

It's a Service Pack, not a feature pack

Why are so many people expecting something new and shiny - a Service Pack is meant to be a roll up of all the patches. SP2 was an exception.

When MS kept adding new stuff via service packs, people complained, now they don't people still complain.

XP is a good, stable operating system. You can add security yourself. I tried Vista, went back to XP. Let's not try and turn XP into Vista - it works as it is.

Accessibility

>>> With an Ajax site you can force it to change the colour scheme (e.g. high contrast) or increase the text size

So how does that help with a screen reader, or where a user needs to use TAB to move through the sections on a page as their vision is too poor to use a mouse.

As long as some developers think big bright text is all that is needed, we'll get inaccessible sites.

CV filling

Windows 2003 is common now, SQL 2005 less so as most are still on SQL2000.

The only reason to have a production system on the 2008 bleeding edge is to puff out your CV.

It's really not in the business' interests. Go and lie down in a dark room for a couple of years.

Could be useful

If all they want to do is test the UI of software - much easier than all those questionnaires and cameras watching users.

As with all this stuff, depends upon what you use it for.

NHS Database

That'll be next.

Google Earth

It's great - I can a hi-def image of what my house looked like 5 years ago.