* Posts by Kristian Walsh

1817 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

HTC One M8: Reg man takes spin in Alfa Romeo of smartphone world

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Alfa reliability:

Rather than rely on "bloke down the pub" information, let's look at what people who actually own Alfa Romeos experience. These are MOT failure rates for Alfa and its competitors ( Figures from the very useful MOTAngel: http://www.motangel.co.uk/discover-mot-fail-rate/ ). Lower is better.

Failure rates for 2011-registered cars, C Segment:

FIAT Bravo: 28.21%

Skoda Octavia: 21.22%

VW Golf: 20.2%

Ford Focus: 19.88%

Opel Astra: 18.68%

BMW 1: 18.11%

Audi A3 : 17.55%

Honda Civic: 16.48%

KIA Cee'd: 15.05%

Mercedes A: 13.85%

Toyota Auris: 10.5%

Alfa Romeo Giulietta: 7.89%

.

B-segment cars (2011 reg):

Mini Cooper: 60% (yes, sixty)

FIAT Punto: 22.22%

Ford Fiesta: 19.77%

VW Polo: 17.72%

Skoda Fabia: 13.08%

Alfa Romeo Mito: 7.89%

Is this photo PROOF a Windows 7 Start Menu is coming back?

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: @ Kristian Walsh (was: @AC (was: Whatever.))

"Nor did I ever claim otherwise"

*cough*

Explicitly, no... I'll grant you that. But making a claim to have done something without also crediting the many others involved could be taken that way.

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: @AC (was: Whatever.)

Slackware? I thought you single-handedly wrote BSD, Jake. Why the defection?

Back off, Siri! Microsoft debuts Halo beauty Cortana

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

In the preciously seen builds there was a setting that allowed you to choose male or female voice.

As the only use I'd have for voice control is to send texts to people while driving, I'll get interested when it does something intelligent with the Irish and other non-English names in my phonebook. "Intelligent" means asking me how to pronounce them when it doesn't know (or gets it wrong). This is a problem that can't be solved by just evolving the backend, as that can't discern cases of the same written characters having different pronounciations like "MarIE" and "MARie" (I know one of each); "LAUrence" (Male English name) and "LaurENce" (female French name); "Jan" (Dutch, male) and "Jan" (English, female) and so on..

Partner firms: Microsoft kept Surface from you for YOUR OWN GOOD

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Go grab market, kill competition ....

Stuart, that's what they did. The write-downs were on Surface RT, and the Surface RT was heavily discounted in the run up to Christmas. Surface 2 is much more balanced in terms of supply and demand (i.e., demand is slightly higher, but more importantly, MS didn't build piles and piles of the Surface 2 models in expectation of really high sales).

Most of the Surface (1) RT models have now been sold.

The Surface Pro models were, if anything, under-orderd by MS. Low sales were mainly supply constraints for the Intel-powered units.

Improbable: YOU gave model Lily Cole £200k for her Impossible.com whimsy-site

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

It's good to be rich

I'm reminded of something a friend of mine once said:

"I want to be a millionaire, not because I want loads of money, but because when you're a millionaire people give you stuff. Not useless stuff, but stuff that you'd have bought anyway. And they give it to you for free, just because you're rich enough to be able to buy it if you wanted it! It's brilliant!"

It was true then, it's true now.

Vote now for the top reader Limerick limerick

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Scansion

Nick Bunyan's entry also scans correctly, and is a Limerick to my ears.

Eight hour cleansing to get all the 'faggots' and 'bitches' OUT of Github

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Yes, because if we don't say its name, it'll go away...

"because we are an enlightened group of super-smart people who see through people’s exterior characteristics and judge them solely on the quality of their mind. "

Oh. Come. On. If he actually believes that, he probably believes that removing the word "faggot" from a code comment will make its original author less homophobic. Personally, I don't believe that any word is in itself offensive, and I have a strong opposition to such blunt "thought police" tactics as a result. But: you lose nuance and tone when you write, so you have to know your reader very, very well before you can confidently use words that are considered to be insults.

Unfortunately, for "enligtened groups of super-smart people", being unable to place oneself mentally in the mindset of another person is a classic failing of such people, no matter how good they might be at writing code.

But, as observed above, lazy insulting language in code comments is a bad code smell in the first place. If this guy has a problem with "bad" language in code, he should remind the coders that if they put projects on github, potential hiring managers can see that code very easily. Something peppered with non-descriptive and (to some) offensive words like "bitch" or "faggot" isn't really going to make you look like a good hire.

... unless you're going for a job in Github, of course.

Elon Musk slams New Jersey governor over Tesla direct sales ban

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Allow me to comment on another country's practices

"The other problem with Tesla, and electric cars generally, is there is no servicing - so no profit for the dealer, so they only way the dealer would make money is if Tesla wholesale the cars at 40% discount."

Um... you know that there's a lot more than the engine in an internal-combustion-engined car, right?

And what about non-service items. If your Tesla's steering or suspension starts to play up. Where do you get it fixed? Your local Ford dealership? Good luck.

There are two equal sides in this argument. A nearby dealer network is also of benefit to customers, just like a direct-sales model is of benefit as much (or more) to Tesla than its customers.

Apple iOS 8 'will put end' to crap map app rap flap misery

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

You seem to be lost. The Guardian tech section is that way...

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Unique public transport features?

Nokia has real time public transport routing already. Or maybe it's 'unique to an Apple product', as usual..

Galaxy S5 launch parties to fizzle in Samsung's back yard

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

In response to the original question: iPhone is not popular in Korea, so no. It might be "#1 foreign brand", but it accounts for only about 4% of smartphone sales (note, smartphone, not "all phones"). Koreans buy Korean - it's a national pride thing.

Agree with Bob G: subsidies are corrosive and bad for the customer. Only Apple is benefitting from the current setup, but those "free iPhones"? your aunt, your grandad, and everyone else with a plain old voice phone is paying for them... that can't be right.

Microsoft's battery-boosting Surface slab cover to ship soon

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

"You have to love how they mention 60% more runtime and 70% more runtime but don't specify what that runtime is supposed to be. This leads one to believe that once again the Windows based tablets are power hogs and require bulky and/or extra batteries. "

No, that's not how logic works. You can only reason from facts, not prejudices.

Logically, the only things that one can be led to believe from that statement are:

1. that the batteries in the Surface, and Surface Pro are of different capacities.

2. the battery capacity of the Surface Pro is larger.

And indeed, a quick use of the internet reveals this to be true: 42 Watt-hours for the Pro, and 31.3 for the ARM-based 2 model.

And if you actually cared, you'd find the runtime figures here, but just like other makers' figures, these are single-task tests, in controlled circumstances:

Pro 2 (Intel): 7h video playback;

2 (ARM): 12h video playback.

( http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/overview )

Neil Young touts MP3 player that's no Piece of Crap

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

@King Jack ... Re: 4th primary colour?

See Vic's link.

As you asked so politely: the fourth primary is between the normal red and green, so is perceived as orange or yellow..

The test is to give a subject a Red/Green mixer control and ask them to match a monochromatic orange or yellow light source. Trichromats (those who have three primary colour receptors) can do this task easily, because we perceive colours like orange or yellow as a combined red and green stimulus; tetrachromats struggle to achieve the correct mix of red and green because they see the orange lamp as a mix of red, green and another, separate, primary colour, as different to red or green as blue is..

Studies into Tetrachromacy show that it is also more common in the mothers of red-green colour blind males than in the general population, which makes some sense as some of the genes for colour vision are carried on the X sex chromosomes.

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Is it that time already?

When making analogies, it's always good to do fact checks...

There are people, about 2% of the population, and nearly all female, who have tetrachromatic vision (the ability to discern four primary colours of light). For these people, an increase in "bandwidth", in the form of encoding a fourth primary (or more than the current three) would provide an obvious increase in colour fidelity. Colour fidelity is a tricky problem with video as it is, given that the primary colour response curves are averages, and as averages, they will not look right to some people.

But back to audio, the reasons for using 192kHz are simple, you move the negative effects of the anti-aliasing filtering way beyond the upper limit of hearing. CDDA's 44.1 kHz sampling rate (chosen for compatibility with U-Matic video recorders used for mastering, rather than based on any physiological concern) is too low. 96kHz is getting there, but 192 is preferable for two reasons. First, it's what the studios use anyway, and with lossless compression, it's only a few percent bigger than 96. Second, 192 is the native sample rate of most modern DAC parts, so using that rate for replay removes the possible negative effects of upsampling by the replay equipment.

The use of 24-bit shouldn't be contentious: it exceeds the generally accepted average of human hearing, and also mitigates the errors introduced by non-linearities in the recording and conversion of signals from analogue to digital and back.

The argument about reproduction equipment is outdated, as there are indeed speakers with high-frequency-range tweeters, and those speakers that don't now provide low-pass filtering in their tweeter filter to remove intermodulation.

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Golden ear set again

There's no snake-oil about Class A amplifiers... it's still the best way to design an electronic amplifier if all you care about is output quality. But, it's not the most power-efficient (quiescent current, the current flowing at no input signal, is half of peak current)

I've little time for fancy cables, but a lot of time for correct termination of said cables (and use of balanced signal links where possible).

The old "modern music is so distorted anyway" has been made since the days of Motown, and it's still not true. The idea of a good reproduction system is to reproduce the noise that the recorder put there for musical effect, without adding any additional noise.

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

The best full-range floorstanding loudspeakers that money can buy are also useless when there's background noise to contend with, as anyone who experienced the Harrods Hi-fi section would attest (never has a quarter of a million pounds of equipment sounded so bad). And besides, headphones are a much easier load to drive than a floorstander. With a good headphone amp on board, you'd be amazed at how good those "cheap" headphones sound.

Who claimed that this was intended for use in "a decent sound system"? In Mr Young's world view, people who own such things only listen to vinyl albums. Pono is to address the lousy quality of portable players.

If it gets more albums out in high-resolution audio, I'm all for it. (I don't like modern soft Jazz, and that rules out about 70% of all high-res releases, I find...)

Tim Cook and Israeli PM commune with the GHOST of Steve Jobs

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: SJ already has an icon

Story here- http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Steve,_Icon.txt

Susan Kare went on to work with Microsoft on Windows 3.1, where she designed that OS's standard icon set too, and so she probably has the strongest claim to have defined the visual language used in computer interfaces. Wonder why, even now, you have to click a 3.5" floppy disk icon (or now, just a rectangle with a snipped corner) to save what you're doing? Thank Ms Kare.

(She also designed the "classic" Solitaire card deck on Windows).

Psssst. Don't tell the Bride, but BBC Three is about to be jilted

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Repeats...

"Maybe I'm missing something, but if you have a STB that does series linking and recording why do you need it repeated?"

The comment below yours is one reason (too many simultaneous programmes, which is another problem with broadcasters - everything worth watching is on against everything else worth watching).

The other situation, that I really had in mind, is when you stumble upon a series at episode 4, discover that it's actually really good, but now you can't find episode 1,2,3 repeated anywhere. A "Catch-up" broadcast, even late at night, would be very handy for this situation, especially as TV producers are so in love with series-long story arcs these days.

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

The idea of a "BBC Netflix" is quite tempting, but it would destroy DVD and foreign syndication sales income.

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Repeats...

A BBC repeat channel would actually be very useful for people who get BBC but don't have good enough internet access for iPlayer (yes, there are. A lot.). Especially in conjunction with a PVR/Satellite box that does series linking.

Or, in other words, you might thing BBC does lots of repeats, but they don't: the "another chance to see" stuff is now shunted to iPlayer. What they do do, and what this won't change, is string out popular properties like Come Dancing into endless spinoff and side shows that clog the schedules, but they're not repeats, just repetitive.

I can't remember last time I watched Three, but BBC Four (TV) accounts for about 50% of my TV consumption, so long may it continue.

Dashboard Siri! Take me to the airport! NO, NOT the RUNWAY! Argh!

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

There already is a standard...

It's called MirrorLink, and has been available for three years. Android already supports it, and so did Symbian. Windows Phone and iOS don't, but it can be implemented in user-space (which some sat-nave apps on iOS and WP did).

I suspect Apple, being Apple, have taken this, added a proprietary discovery and control layer above it and rebadged it as their own technology.

Personally, I wouldn't specify an iPhone interface in my car. Even if I did own an iPhone, predicting what kind of phone I (or my wife who would also drive it, or anyone who might want to buy the car when I'm done with it) would be using in three years is asking a bit much.

Nice try, Apple, but there are too many non-iPhone users out there. Adopt an open, published, standard, or fuck off.

Steve Jobs statue: Ones and ohs and OH NOES – it's POINTING at us

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Their mistake: they let an artist do it.

Actually It pleases me no end to think that Jobs himself would have absolutely hated this statue's organic, sloppy style with such obvious signs of the maker's hand all over it.

Something in smooth-polished Carrara marble or alabaster, inlaid with titanium or platinum would have suited The Leader's tastes a lot better. Yes, such a style would perhaps evoke an unwanted association with the public art of totalitarian states throughout history, but that cap definitely fits Apple under SJ.

But given my choice, I'd prefer to see Clarus back grazing beside DeAnza Blvd just once before Apple ups sticks and heads to the Great Glass Grommet.

Nokia launches Android range: X marks the growing low-cost spot

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Forking from the inside.

The thing is, apps use those APIs because they do useful things. e.g. facilitate in-app purchases, piracy detection, deliver advertising, integrate with game features like achievements etc. and they're supported by the vast majority of phone devices.

That's fine, but Google don't include them in the Open Source Android. That's Google's decision, not Nokia's. Nokia are providing equivalents that plug into their services instead (as Amazon do for the Kindle Fire); it's not like the functionality isn't going to be there, but the devs will have to access it differently.

It's very easy to harumph that apps use proprietary APIs for those things, but almost all APIs for those things are proprietary.

True, but you're talking about perhaps less than 100 lines of code different between the two versions, and it's code that will be concentrated in maybe one or two methods in one or two classes.

Secondly, if an app developer wants to support Nokia's device they'll have to build and maintain two separate branches of the same product and build, package, test and upload two versions of it.

Java is quite good at hiding this kind of difference from other code. It shouldn't be beyond the wit of any developer who's able to make an app in the first place.

This is an odious burden and many apps simply won't bother - or if they do they'll jack up the price Nokia's app store to compensate for the effort.

"Odious" is taking things a bit far. Unless you're not able to code at all, it's very easy to isolate the differing parts of the codebase (for example, make a generic "make in-app purchase" interface, and two or more implementations, one per store backend); full multiple-backend testing is only then required when that specific code is touched. For minor updates that don't touch those APIs, in-depth test isn't required on every possible device.. or do you think that small devs test their apps on every Android model right now?

There is nothing that would have stopped Nokia getting itself certified to ship with the Google apps and services except they chose not to.

That's not what happened, though. It's well documented that Nokia approached Google in late 2010, but Google's licence terms would have prevented Nokia from using their competitive mapping and music stores - properties that Nokia had invested a lot of money in, and which were (and are) generating good income. Basically, Google's rules for Play are simple: you take it all or you get nothing. You cannot pick and choose from its services: if you want to have the Play Store, you must use Google Maps and gCalendar, etc.

In effect, this is just like when Microsoft insisted that if you wanted to ship Windows 98 on your hardware, you also had to ship Internet Explorer, and couldn't replace it as default browser. Google have taken it further to include more services, but they are using the same lame excuse that MS did: that mapping, browsing, in-app purchase, etc. is now an intrinsic part of the OS, rather than an application library, and thus can't be separated without breaking Android. The existence and success of the Kindle Fire's app market gives lie to this claim.

Whether people want or like Google's services is immaterial. Lots of people also wanted Internet Explorer when they never got to see what the alternatives were like...

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Dual SIM

Nokia X devices are Dual-SIM. The on-stage demo showed switching between SIMs.

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Forking from the inside.

If 25% of apps won't work, it's because they use Google-specific APIs that are not open source.

There are two layers of Google Android. The Free Open Source core has basic functionality, and then there are the Google Play APIs, which are closed source. Google has moved more and more functions into the latter, closed source, part of the OS, with every release. Often, the original open-source API for something is deprecated, and a new framework is introduced, but as part of the closed-source Play.

From a Free Software perspective, Google's Android is not any better than Nokia and MS's fork (or Amazon, Nokia and MS's offering on Kindle Fire).

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Lack of coherence?

The "Landfill" Android phones are called that because they receive no post-sale support from their manufacturers, and are cheaply built with lower-cost components. Both factors seriously shorten their working life.

Nokia, on the other hand excel at making durable phones, even at low prices, and they have a policy of supporting their devices for a long time after sale. (In the markets these phones are aimed at, handsets are bought SIM-free, so the problems of carriers having to sign-off on updates is sidestepped entirely).

As for why this could be different to, say, SonyEricsson, HTC et al... Those other Android licensees didn't have the engineering resources to offer the cloud services that customers expect with their phones now (cloud storage, mail, IM, mapping, app stores, search, music streaming), so they ended up in the no-win position of being vassals of Google. Nokia and Microsoft between them can offer every service that Google does, and that makes it possible for them to use the pure open-source Android as a platform, and supply their own services and systems apps in place of Google's

It's more choice, so it's good overall for customers, and although operators' shops won't carry these, you're bound to see them at your local budget mobile phones and accessories shop. (Although the likes of Tesco Mobile could pick them up).

Facebook adds 50+ gender options: Stalking your 'Friends' just got more LGBT-friendly

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: WTF!

" how do you explain major differences in the roles sexes play in different cultures? ... "

Well that's a three-pint conversation, and certainly not something that's suited to being conducted in anonymous text boxes.

Personally, I think that gender roles are the expression of a number of mostly biological factors and gender is loosely coupled to sex and sexuality, so I must respectfully disagree, but with the emphasis on "respectfully".

It is, after all, the weekend.

Microsoft's new CEO: The technology isn't his problem

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

@RIchard, Hardware standardisation

I'm not talking about MSDOS - the heyday of MSDOS was long before Linux even existed.

The PC System Design Guide specification series (PC 97, PC 98, PC 99, and PC 2001) from Microsoft and Intel significantly reduced the complexity of PC i/o and device drivers, even as the capability of that hardware increased dramatically, and it made the job of getting Linux to run on "any PC" much easier than it was before. Mac hardware at the time was far more varied, because Apple didn't need to run their software on anything but their own hardware - this diversity plagued efforts to get PowerPC Linux into any kind of shape, even with support from people within Apple.

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

I don't know a lot about the company's technologies, because I primarly work in MacOS or Linux, but off the top of my head, XMLHTTP was a Microsoft invention that has been pretty significant. Your USB keyboard also uses the USB Human Interface Device protocol, developed by Microsoft.

If you were talking about products, then there's a lot there: Exchange, Windows NT, Excel (the first usable spreadsheet), Kinect were all groundbreaking products.

One thing that Microsoft did do was standardise the PC hardware market. Until you've tried to get Linux onto a new ARM SoC, you won't appreciate how important the Windows Certification process was in making everyone's PC or server so similar that installing Linux was a breeze. That was work done by MS and its OEMs, and it's the number one factor in the wide adoption of Linux today.

Language-mangling Germans fling open Handygate to selfie-snapping whistleblowers

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

@DIVIDeD: Re: "Handy" - WTF

Simple: "Handy" is a new noun made by abbreviating the adjective "handtragbare" ("handheld").

AT&T takes aim at T-Mobile with $450 cashback lure

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

A free market? In the United States? Gosh...

Verizon and AT&T aren't losing their fancy high-end handset customers to T-Mo, because T-Mo isn't luring these customers. Why? Because taken individually, a customer with an iPhone 5S or Galaxy S4 actually costs you money, money you have to recoup from other customers.

So T-Mobile are poaching the the ones who use a basic voice phone, and pay way too much for their service; the ones who use a budget Android or WinPhone, and don't use a lot of data, yet still pay too much for their service -- basically, T-Mobile is luring away the customers who've been propping up the whole house of cards.

AT&T and Verizon are tied into contracts with Apple regarding iPhone that only work if both operators can offload the costs of those phones onto non-iPhone using customers. This was fine for as long as "the other guy" was playing the same game (heavy handset subsidies, paid for with lockins to expensive monthly charges), but T-Mobile has broken formation, and it's hurting them badly.

Biggest loser, long term, is Apple. Their high pricing depends on a sales model where the customer never sees the real price. If the rest of the US carriers follow T-Mobile's lead, it's good for Samsung and Nokia/Microsoft, who have a range of mid-price and budget phones, but it's a disaster for Apple.

Blame Silicon Valley for the NSA's data slurp... and what to do about it

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: @Andrew Orlowski

"Copyleft was invented to subvert copyright. I don't think the originators of that license would care too much if "intellectual property" as we know it completely ceased to exist."

That, I'm afraid, is nonsense. You need to read Stallman's original article on GPL, rather than the projections of other people's Marxist fantasies onto it. Copyleft is an exercise of the intellectual property right of copyright, not a replacement for it.

Without copyright, GPL works would be no different to Public Domain works... there would be absolutely no legal comeback against someone who breached the copyleft terms of a Free Software licence.

Google and Apple in DRAG RACE: It's fanboi Mercs VS fandroid Audis

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Nokia Terminal Mode

"I thought the idea was that it would connect to any "smartphone" not just Nokia."

It was, and it does. It's now called "MirrorLink", it works on WindowsPhone, Android, Symbian and even iOS (but only at an app level; the OS doesn't support it).

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: typical analyst

Actually, I think you'll find that a car is already a "mobile" device. Always has been.

The (British) English use of "mobile" when talking about portable phones is a hangover from when those phones were fitted to cars, and thus were made "mobile". Every earlier use of the term "mobile" refers to something on wheels.

British Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing receives Royal pardon

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: The man in the high castle

To add another, C.J. Sansom's "Dominion" has the most realistic and plausible depiction of a United Kingdom operating as a puppet Nazi state following a German victory that I've read.

Inside Steve Ballmer’s fondleslab rear-guard action

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

"... and Chromebooks?"

Really?

There's a lot of bluff about Chromebooks, but channel sales surveys put their cumulative (i.e, since launch in 2011) sales comfortably below a million units. After two years on the market, it's telling that Google have yet to announce either sales or users figures for ChomeOS, especially when you consider how they played up Android activations when that platfrom was taking off.

Android is ChromeOS's biggest problem: you can get a good Android tablet with hundreds of thousands of available apps for the same price as a Chromebook. Why would you bother?

Independently-sourced usage figures are interesting for Chromebooks in that sales of the hardware does not convert into measured usage of ChromeOS. Either people are trying them briefly and then abandoning or returning them, or, as I think is more likely, people in the know are buying the Chromebook hardware and putting Linux on it right away. Either way, it's not a sign of a rosy future for the platform.

Apple bests Dell for first time as preferred US consumer PC choice

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Apple is shiny and overpriced, true

Be aware that refurbs from all sources have warranty cover, but with exclusions, and they can often be systems which had multiple faults, only one of which was fixed before sale. Ask me how I know...

I agree on the monitors, though. Dell's current high-end is superb, and on any objective measure they are better than Apple's offerings - particularly on colour rendering, which to me is the only important thing on an LCD display (I don't play games, so transition time is something I don't care about now that all displays offer acceptable levels).

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

The article hasn't claimed that Apple have beaten Dell in PC sales. Only that for customers considering a PC, Apple is top of the list of brands they'd consider buying, whereas Dell used to be.

As the article rightly states, there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, or to put it another way: wanting to buy a Mac is easy; actually paying Apple's prices for one isn't for many people. I'm still the "Mac guy" in my social circle, and my non-techy friends often ask me about getting a Mac. I go through the pros and cons, and they're enthusiastic right up until they see the prices, and then they ask me what the best Windows laptop is...

Essentially, this is a survey of brand awareness, not sales. Look at the "tablets" list: Google aren't even on that list, even though they produce the best Android tablets, and sell quite a lot of them. What will happen is that someone considering a Samsung tablet will go to a retail store to try it out, and while there they'll see the other options. Similarly, while it's heartening news for Microsoft to see that the Surface line now has good brand recognition, their sales don't match this awareness yet.

You make an interesting inference that people are looking at Windows 8, not liking it, and thus buying Macs. However, the various OS usage figures paint a different story. OS X is more or less static at 8%, Win8 and 8.1 together have about 13%, Windows 7 and XP have between 30% and 40% each, but even a year after the launch of 8, Windows 7's market share is growing much faster than Win8's. It's far more likely that people are buying new hardware and installing Windows 7 on it, or upgrading Vista systems to 7 than abandoning Microsoft entirely and jumping camp to Apple

Brit-boy Bates is Silicon Valley's pick for Microsoft's CEO

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

The Valley...

...is notable for not including Redmond, WA.

I wouldn't trust the hunches of anyone labelled a "Silicon Valley Insider" when it came to succession within Microsoft, because I don't believe that any of them understand how large businesses operate outside of that strange parallel universe of the Bay Area. In the Valley, Microsoft is defined (and vilified) as being Not One Of Us.

My equally uninformed hunch is that it'll be Mullally, who I expect will carry out a major restructuring and streamlining, then hand over to a new candidate three years from now.

REVEALED: How YOU PAY extra for iPHONES - even if you DON'T HAVE ONE

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Message to mobile operators

"now Russians customers buy their iPhone unlocked directly from reseller instead meaning the operators lost the iPhone margin and the lock in on the clients."

Let's be clear about this: there was no margin on iPhones for the networks. None. It's a subsidised sale. The operator loses money every time a customer chooses an iPhone; their only hope of recouping it is to keep that customer on contract for as long as possible. As for lock-in, you're more likely to stay with a service plan for longer if you're not being pushed to change your handset every 18 or 24 months - subsidies work against lock-in benefits, because they actively encourage the customer to either take another phone (whose cost the operator must recoup again) or go to another provider whenever the renewal comes up.

In Russia, the operators are now prohibited from subsidising phones, on the grounds that the practice is against the interest of the consumer (I tend to agree).

So, the Russian operators are actually benefiting: they get the monthly data plan fees, but don't have to spend a penny in subsidies to get it. Customers also pay less for service because they're not repaying handset subsidies (often on other peoples' phones). People who can afford iPhones now have what they always wanted: an exclusive device that poor people just can't buy. I'd call that a win all round. Oh, except for Apple, but maybe they've enough money already to see themselves through this trauma...

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Message to mobile operators

O2 UK have been downplaying iOS devices for a while now. As a launch carrier for iPhone, they got burned more than anyone. Go into their smaller stores now, and you won't even see an iPhone, and on a recent TV campaign, the associated app was available for Android only.

Remember the adage: you're not the phone-maker's customer. Apple sold the iPhone to its customers, the mobile operators. Apple told them that it was so hot that people would switch networks to get it (something that in hindsight did not happen in UK/Ireland - Vodafone ended up making more money from not having to sell iPhone than O2 did by selling it), and reeled them in.

Personally, I want all subsidies gone, and replaced with an interest-free loan to buy the handset you want. This model is used in Finland-- a country that also has the lowest mobile phone bills of any comparable EU economy: there's no such thing as a free phone...

Microsoft Surface slabs borked by heat-induced DIM SCREEN OF DEATH

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: This is why people should have bought the RT version

I don't know where you got the idea that Windows RT doesn't multitask. It does. Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ODZ928qke8

In fairness, I also thought RT was mono-tasking initially... It's a sign of MS's bungled marketing on these devices that such a genuinely useful feature got next to no exposure from Microsoft.

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Thermal management is a software function

It's not overheating, but rather the software is taking overly aggressive measures aimed at reducing the heat inside the enclosure. It seems that these measures are being taken when the internal temperature isn't persistently high enough to warrant them, hence the promise of a software fix.

The screen backlight is a major source of heat, often more so than the CPU, and keeping the temperature down is paramount when your enclosure has little or no ventilation, and you've got a heat-sensitive Lithium-ion battery in close proximity. (Excessive heat will permanently reduce Li-ion battery capacity, which will shorten the working life of the device)

Microsoft wields turkey knife, slices Surface to $199 for Black Friday

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Surface or Surface 2?

It's the Surface RT, sans 2, I believe.

Still, though, for $199 you're getting a lot. Forget the app store for a moment.. In terms of core, out-of-the-box functions, it's actually pretty hard to beat Windows RT. I'm not talking about bundled apps like Office, but stuff like driver support, a desktop-class Flash-enabled browser (and one that is now, surprisingly, standards compliant), multi-user accounts and the two-up multitasking view.

I'd buy one. But then, I'll be picking up a Surface 2 soon, so I've already decided I can live with having fewer available apps in exchange for a more capable device.

Sysadmin job ad: 'If you don’t mind really bad work-life balance, this is for you'

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: ..I don't need to apply..

"Honour and recognition in case of success."

That is what makes Shackleton's offer appealing, and it's a marked contrast to IT jobs, which offer only "Blame and humiliation in case of failure".

They're not even paying well, saying they prefer to put the money into "making the offices a better place to work in". Oh, so you'll be incarcerated in a nice prison cell? Well that's all right, then..

Thai man reportedly dies clutching his scorched iPhone 4S

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: How is this even possible?

If he was in bare feet, damp concrete would suffice.

The problem with a live phone housing is that when electric current passes through your hands it causes the muscles to contract, which causes the hand to close, as the grabbing muscles are stronger than the ones that open the hand. The result is that your grip tightens on the very thing you need to let go of.

This is why firefighters feel their way in dark buildings with the back of their hand, not their fingertips - if your hand should touch something live, the muscle spasm will pull it away from the object, rather than gripping it.

Not exactly Apple's fault - but it shows that a design choice that has no problems when used in affluent countries can become problematical where there are less stringent controls on its operating environment.

Supermodel Lily Cole in Impossible partnership with Jimbo Wales, YOU

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Supermodel ?

"absolutely nothing intentionally sexist in my remark"

Okay, imagine the story was about a famous footballer setting up a social media site. Would you have questioned whether he was giving blow-jobs to get the funding, or would you have just stated that someone thought that having a famous person behind the project was worth £200k of support?

Try hire a well-known figure to do publicity for your company, and you'll see that 200k isn't a lot of money. In the UK, where Cole has a very high profile, this is a good deal. The simple fact of her involvement will get the company the kind of broad-market press coverage most media startups can't dream of.

The question of whether someone should be given £200k of taxpayers money for something like this is a different one, but governments give business startup grants to all manner of lost causes... much like VCs do,

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: Supermodel ?

"People sharing things for free, I doubt it. Most altruistic ideads end up dead in the water or surrounded by scam artists."

Can I use this quote when Future You shouts about how Android is brilliant because it's Free Software?

I rarely downvote posts, but I made an exception for the nasty implication that the only way a woman can obtain money is by sleeping with a rich man.

iPHONE 5c FACTORY SHUTDOWN: Foxconn 'halts' mobe rebrand op

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Cygnet

The Cygnet was an effort by Aston Martin to reduce their "fleet CO2" emissions, in order to not fall foul of EU legislation on this. Without that legislative pressure, there's no way in Hell they'd have emnbarked on rebranding a Toyota iQ like that...

But to stay with cars for a moment, the 5C is like Maserati doing an entry model of the Quattroporte for £10,000 less, but doing so by dropping the alloy wheels, metallic paint, air-conditioning and leather interior. Yes, it would be a "cheaper" Maserati, but that's only relatively, and if you can afford to buy this one, why not spend the extra for the "real" one.

Here's the problem: The gap in pricing for the iPhone 5C and 5S isn't big enough for the 5C to be considered "low cost", and the form factor and materials used invite an unfavourable comparison with something like Nokia's 520 and 620 Lumia models which are genuinely "unapologetically plastic" in bright colours, but unlike they 5C they come with an unapologetically low price to go with it (around £150 and £200 respectively SIM-free as opposed to £400+ for the 5C).