Re: Doing What Jobs Urged Them To

@Steve Todd - I think you completely misread my post. Check out the following for full details of Apple's perverse approach to openness:

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1GWTMLjqQsQS45FWwqNG9ztQTdGF48hQYpjQHR_d1WsI

Re: UltraHD?

UHD comes in two flavours: 4k and 8k as featured on El Reg a few months including a video with some bod explaining the difference. SuperHD & UltraHD or similar could have been used but were rejected in favour of the industry tradition of confusing the customer in the hope that will somehow help (HD, HD-Ready, 1080i & 1080p, etc. ad Nauseam)

Re: The Other Guys and esolving limits

Nigel's right: we often confuse, and manufacturers and broadcaster peddling new things encourage us in this, resolution with other factors. The difference in codecs between SD and HD is probably what most people notice and think it's the resolution whereas it's largely artefacts caused by the codec and reduced detail down to lower sampling rates. But resolution is much more marketable than boring things like that hence the "retina" fad. Me, I'll take higher contrast and colour range over resolution any time, but maybe I'm just weird.

Re: Not just OS X

Linux distros often have lots of BSD stuff in them including, rather bizarrely, configuration utilities for things like WiFi. I think stuff never gets removed once it lands.

Re: 350,000 queries per second until...

You might very well be right. And there is nothing stopping you from proposing a fix and submitting a patch. Try that with Oracle.

I found "Learning Python" an excellent primer. Python is probably closer to Pascal than Basic so forget GOTO just give your subroutines names and call them functions and you'll be away.

Re: Quality? I recommended a colleague buy a Nokia Lumia 710

@JDX

The problem is that such products should be recalled because the problem is known about.

NB. the poster wasn't bitching about the phone just pointing out the less than stellar consumer experience. Not surprisingly this has led to someone jumping ship and while this happens to everyone all the time, it's not the sort of thing that Nokia call really afford.

Re: I loved OS/2

Wasn't NT 3.51 the last version that was actually a microkernel and, therefore, uncrashable? But it was slow - this was blamed on context-switching on x86 but OS/2 was managing it fine. NT 4 was was faster but achieved this by putting drivers into the kernel and hence all the BSODs.

Re: I still use ecomstation ...

Your timeline is off. Microsoft started doing the dirty on IBM re. OS/2 towards the end of the 1980s while they were contracted to work on OS/2 v2 & v2.1. Taligent was later and part of OS/2 v3 (Warp) and is the basis for most of our fully object-orientated, widget-based "homescreens". Taligent and OpenDoc promised real productivity ("let me add a spreadsheet to my document…") but most people are happy with widgets.

Hearing you mention MS' version of Unix (Xenix for x86…) makes me feel physically ill. Though, to his credit, Bill Gates was listening to the market. He did employ some great people to work on NT and copied many of the great ideas from OS/2 such as, hardware abstraction, extensible attributes and virtual filesystems. It's just a pity they were doing this a sort of trojan horse while still under contract to work on OS/2. Windows 7 is alarmingly close in many ways to OS/2 3 > service pack 17. And that after only 15 years!

Re: Looking forward to part 2

I agree, great article. OS/2 was/is fantastic - I think UPS handheld terminals are still running it as are numerous other embedded systems and ran in banks and airports for years - which was let down by the less than stellar performance of the PS/2 MCA systems (better than than ISA but in a "malaria is better than typhoid" way). Well, MCA was a major improvement over ISA but didn't bring enough performance and bandwidth to seem worthwhile. So we all got to suffer the abominations of EISA and, shudder, VESA, before MCA's heir PCI was able to triumph. But that was ten lost years. Had MCA succeeded IBM would subsequently have dropped the Neanderthal x86 chips… but they were too busy chasing the hardware monopoly.

A key OS/2 innovation was hardware virtualisation so not only could DOS applications run in complete isolation from each other they also got more memory allocated than they could standalone. Oh, and resources like printers and serial ports could be shared effortlessly across machines. OS/2 also came with a damn good scripting language REXX in which one of the first http servers wasn't written, if memory serves me correctly.

However, there were also downsides: while you couldn't kill the OS, the GUI called somewhat pompously "Presentation Manager" was single-threaded up until v3 service pack 17 (IIRC) which did mean that individual misbehaving apps could ruin everyone's fun. Still crashes came with detailed, numbered errors and stack dumps which I presume trained engineers understood. By far better than NT's BSOD.

Back to Microsoft - I think the article makes a good job of suggesting that the technical wizardry of which IBM was justly proud was, in the 1980s and 1990s matched by a bureaucracy destined to stifle innovation at every turn. The same happened to Apple a few years later.

Re: Opera and OWA

@Pierre you really haven't a clue - if the site was properly written it would "degrade gracefully" either by UA detection, which takes a lot less than 5 seconds, or by client-side feature detection (in action since HTML >= 3.2). Neither, however, would explain Microsoft singling out a specific browser. And neither has to do with "pushing towards more fragmentation"; done properly then detection provides the best possible experience for all browsers.

Applications like OWA are why the specs need to develop. I'm not sure that I'm in favour of turning browsers into runtimes but I'm also not going to play Canute.

Re: Opera and OWA

And this is Opera's fault because…? Not that it doesn't have issues but website problems in Opera are generally caused by servers sniffing for UAs as opposed to feature detection* and only letting their "friends" into the garden. This is sloppy coding and unfortunately unsurprisingly on the rise again.

* check out the support for feature detection with CSS in Opera. Even if you don't use Opera as your standard browser this feature will make site development easier and Opera offers a head start. To me, that's all good.

Got lots of PDFs? Get a Sony

Sony readers come with a special version of Acrobat which is really good at reflowing PDFs to fit the viewport of the device. Head and shoulders above the competition and yet, depending, on the layout of the PDF still often unsatisfying in comparison with a dedicated e-book.

AFAIK the Kobo is one of the few readers that swings both ways and lets you reader both epub and mobi files at the same time. Would have been good to see that covered in the review,

Re: XBMC not as scalable

I guess you've never heard of DNLA then. Works on my telly, phone, tablet, notebook, etc.

Re: That's what building codes are for

It's the same in Europe - sockets no more than 2m apart. But then Britain is famous for observing the law in the breach… difficult to beat us Brits for cheapskating.

Bout time someone mandated high-power usb power point on all sockets.

Re: Why they did it

So, don't use IE would seem to be a better solution.

The same export restrictions also applied to the other browser of the time: Netscape and there was no workaround for it at the time. So, the decision at the time was either use ActiveX and have encryption or don't use ActiveX and have no encryption.

There has since been plenty of time to start moving towards using 128-bit https encryption in the browser but changes like this have very high inertia: you have to maintain both systems while you migrate customers. And, once developers have got used to a monoculture they are even more resistant to change which, let's face it, is not required by the job in hand and is going to incur considerable costs. Of course, it is exactly to avoid this kind of lock in that people advocate open standards for.

'Tis true

Corporates are still moving to Windows 7 and while this means that users are moving from IE 8 to IE 9 they are moving to Chrome faster. Stats from a fairly typical corporate site look a bit like

IE 9 18 %

IE 8 16 %

Chrome 30 %

FF 28 %

Safari 8 % (mainly IOS devices)

In comparison, a year ago IE 8 was around 30 % and Chrome around 10 %

It's worth going back to the

first IE 9 preview release which promised a release early, release often schedule which the first IE 10 preview seemed to continue including availability for Windows 7. I seem to remember fairly firm release dates being mentioned but I may be mistaken.

IE 10 does seem to have got a lot of things right but it's also trailing from the word go. HTML 5 coverage is below the previous generation of the other browsers, and nice as the JS optimisations and hardware acceleration might be, users are more likely to notice and appreciate support for SPDY as companies move to adopt it for their servers now that more and more browsers support it.

In any case it doesn' t really matter. For Microsoft IE 10 is too little too late. For them to stop the possibly irreversible slide in the corporate space they need to release IE 10 for Windows 7 as soon as possible. Corporates are overwhelmingly skipping Windows 8 so the next version change won't be before 2014 by when IE could easily have been overtaken by Chrome, Firefox and IOS.

Re: Ribotro

I'm in total agreement with you about Ribbon - I have to use MS Office with Ribbon for a customer and even after more than a year I am not comfortable with it and I have used MS Word on and off for over 20 years - Word 2 which mixed toolbars and menus was the best I've worked with.

I think Metro has some great ideas which if used sparingly would be part of a great UI but basing everything around it? The tiles are great for pairing back and summarising information. This would be great in a notification centre but plastering the screen with them is counterproductive.

Don't know about Silverlight but I think this kind of animation has been around for a while in things like CD-ROMs, remember them?

It's certainly been in use on http://www.20thingsilearned.com/ since long before the patent was applied for so one slap for the submitters and one slap for the USPTO for approval of something for which prior art was a few mouse clicks away.

Apple should be fined % of turnover for this kind of abuse of the patent system.

Re: It's called competition

Indeed, though as Samsung is supplying the presumably higher margin Nexus 10 they are unlikely to worry too much. Anyway Samsung has announced the Galaxy Premier as a slightly cut-down version of the SIII.

@ Mr Cox - as desirable as "sold out" notices are for PR, most companies like to be able to keep on selling. Engineering shortages is against the law. The most likely thing is that Google still doesn't really know much about selling physical products: shipping, warehousing, etc. an may well have been genuinely caught out by the demand which does imply what many have been saying for a while: good Android devices are considered to be as good as I-Phones.

Re: They should clearly axe the obsolete standard

The sheer amount of wastage that would be caused by abandoning FM

What wastage would that be?

Re: RDS

Never understood why Radio 5 isn't also broadcast on FM

I seem to recall that at the time it was decided that the BBC would not be given any more nationwide FM frequencies so that national commercial radio would have a chance to develop outside.

Re: Then there is Radio 5

I think power of receivers is the only argument against the change.

The switch from analogue to digital TV has gone smoothly and, if my mum is anything to go by, people are generally happy with the result (time-shifting has become easier). The same would be true for radio. Of course, people would complain but then they always do.

AM does propagate further and require less power to receive than FM or DAB. Partly because of that there is more money in FM because it allows for a better carve up of the audience (radio is often very local) but there are limits on the number of stations that can run nationwide for the few stations that don't have identikit programming.

Anyway, FM propagation has its own problems: reception of the German version of Radio 4 varies from dreadful to shitty in my flat; it's not on LW and MW receivers are almost non-existent do DAB really is the only choice. I never listen to any of the other stations but then I never watch any of the hundreds of TV channels that are available either (more of the same old shit just at different times and in different languages).

As a society we have embraced digital broadcasting. DAB, or at least DAB+, is a good solution for radio. I suspect that, er, reception would improve if say mobile phones started supporting it instead of / as well as FM so that we could listen to it on speakerphone without having to plug a headset in.

The alternative, of course, given the popularity of radio of DVB-T might simply to extend that.

Re: Sheltered Life

I'm actually a mobile developer, and as such I have 4 iphones, a couple of ipods, ipads 2, …And yes, since getting the mini I find that's the first thing I reach for, and the thing I carry around with me

Two things: this puts you very much in the same camp as Mr Dabbs who openly admits his long-standing preference for Apple products; it is a more than tacit admission that Jobs was wrong to have launched the I-Pad only as a 10" device. The relative and steadily increasing popularity of the 7" devices such as the Kindle Fire really have forced Apple's hand here. Though, as usual, they have responded with excellent hardware. I'd tend to agree that for doing much other than just consuming 8" is preferable to 7" but then Samsung was there first with the Samsung Galaxy 7.7 which has GPS and now LTE.

As with other products Apple is probably going to sell a lot of these devices to existing owners who have so far not admitted that the I-Pad is actually a little too big and too heavy to be really mobile. And it will no doubt encourage a few non-owners to buy the "original" over the cheaper competition. However, as with the phones on a like-for-like basis the I-Pad mini really does have little to offer over the well-made droids who are only likely to become both cheaper and better and offer even more content and services on a par with Apple.