Posts by hitmouse
246 posts • joined Monday 15th December 2008 14:38 GMT
It's a pity that most of the US and UK indie labels rarely put their music on other country's iTunes/Spotify stores, thereby denying an opportunity for most of the world to buy music that they enthusiastically market globally via social media etc.
Re: "The Frenches on the other hand all drive badly"
" they don't even keep driving on the left side of the road!"
You've obviously never driven in France after lunch.
The French might make more from their cultural products if they exported them. If they didn't have such reluctance to put English subtitles on their DVDs (even where "official" subtitles already exist) they might recoup more money than their domestic/Quebecois audience limits them to.
Having the slowest release schedules for music etc in Europe can't be helping them either.
Even one of France's own ministers of culture has pointed out how irrelevant French culture is becoming globally because it's so inward facing.
Re: End of the Road
learn the difference between phase and faze?
Many form-factors please
There is no too small, too light or too heavy - it's all relative to the user. Children and small-framed adults have a completely different perspective on all these factors to me as a tall adult who finds that an smart phone easily disappears in a pocket.
The word "upload" is not mentioned anywhere in the document, so there is no indication or benchmark of return capacity.
Posted in Ten Windows tablets
Re: Overpriced.
Having real file-system access to external cards and drives makes the Surface devices more than competitive against an iPad. Each platform has its strengths, but ease of use with files is not one of iOS's.
Reminds me of a Chinese takeaway in Brentford that tried to charge me £1 to cover merchant card fees on a £10 transaction. Because their own 1000% margin on boiled rice wouldn't cover it.
Same strategy?
The analyst is clueless if he thinks that access to the app store is a big issue for Surface Pro, which DOESN'T NEED special apps.
Re: MS kills netbook market
Please give me the ordering details for this "something that does exactly the same job " at ~$US250. I will buy it now.
Re: They charge too much...
The Surface RT is more like $500. It's the Surface Pro that's over $1000.
Re: Samsung Win 8 slate
What are the RT machines like for talking to cameras and the like?
I just haven't found any useful scenario-based documents or videos for RT except for the "I like sliding coloured tiles around like an ADD crack-addict" scenario.
Can one purchase and download music from the net?
Re: Samsung Win 8 slate
I hadn't heard of these devices, but the reviews indicate that it's limited to 2GB RAM and the processor is rather limited.
I'd probably want the more costly Pro edition (4GB/i5/64GB) to compete with the Surface Pro and then the price differential starts disappearing.
Re: Ok, fine so far
"but on a 32GB iPad I have more free storage then on a 64GB Surface Pro and with Windows 8 I need much more storage for programs compared to apps on Android or iOS."
You've got that the wrong way around. Most files can't be shared between applications on iOS so you if you're working on a compound document or producing something for the web etc then you need one copy of the file per app.
A few doing solitary in every department store
The only Surface tablets I've seen in the flesh have all been sitting on glass cases inside department store tech departments. No label other than a 12pt price tag, no view of a box, no floor advertising, and no way of trying it even if you can locate someone with a key for cabinet.
It's several rungs of unwantedness below the shelves of ultrabooks and Windows 8 laptops that are all stuck on the login screen or which have had the desktop disabled, no internet access and the usual list of sales presentation problems that we've all seen for decades.
Re: paradigm shift
"The engine ended up as the JET engine in Access, which is why MS bought the thing in the first place."
It was Fox's Rushmore query optimization that got added to Jet, which already existed when the two companies merged in 1992. There was probably a lot of code merging after that while ODBC was being created.
Re: "The only issue..."
"The sad thing is that 20 years later Excel *STILL* can't cope with cells that contain dates or "
It's even sadder that that is trivial to address and you haven't worked out how in 20 years.
Security! Escort this cat off the forum.
Re: 3-2-1.... Eadon.
"using it as a feckin' database "
You obviously haven't encountered people using Word tables in multiple documents as a relational database.
People learn one tool and try to apply it everywhere. Get training? No, a computer science education should be in the help file shouldn't it???
Complacency
"Lotus got complacent. They stopped innovating, or fiddled while Rome burned, or made stupid decisions. "
Not just complacent but the head of the company was IIRC the highest paid executive in corporate history while these stupid decisions were being made. The US$20M he was taking home as salary in the 80s would probably in one year be worth more than the max $200K pa that Bill Gates got as salary throughout his entire tenure. (I'm not counting stock options for either, just salary).
Not long after Ashton-Tate produced the enormous fail that was dbase IV, and Borland began funding Philippe Kahn to make vanity music discs. Not hard to see why I ended up skipping from Lotus 1-2-3 to dBase III to Paradox/Pascal and then on to Microsoft products. I loved each and every one of those other products until their managements started competing in a shark -jumping olympiad.
Re: Looked good...
I could use more than 4GB for photo and video processing, while I need to do while travelling. The iPad world just doesn't cut it in terms of file handling and storage
A Surface Pro is a touch enabled laptop. It is a PC.
Re: Windows 8 FAIL
@Eadon " Furthermore, MS are competing on an unlevel playing field, MS don't have to pay licence fees for their OS. And they can use API's for their own kit that they may make unavailable to OEMs. They can tweak Windows to give their own kit an unfair advantage, in terms of speed, features, training their own developers, etc."
I guess they're competing with Apple's similarly closed OS and API arrangements.
Re: Windows 8 FAIL
@Eadon: Ummm let me see Microsoft makes prototypes of tablets back in 2000 which the OEMs use. It puts out a tablet-enabled version of Windows XP in 2002 while Apple and Dell are triumphantly telling the world that no one wants tablets.
MSN Search is older than Google, and was rebranded as Bing. A fair chunk of Google's top brass are ex-Microsofties.
If you want to make these accusations please lay out the design trail between Microsoft, Apple and the OEMs. I'm sure the courts would be interested in your *cough* theories.
Re: Microsoft's conceited arrogance...
" This time Microsoft are so arrogant that they make not the slightest concession to people used to their "old" way of doing things."
While I agree with this to an extent, there reality is that a) for most of the PC era, the market for new users has exceeded the market of current users, and that is where the design specs are targetted; 2) PC users have shown themselves willing to dive into foreign mobile interfaces on iOS and Android, plus on home media centres.
The biggest markets for the old style interface are mostly in huge corporations where special install images are generally made to lay down a custom version of Windows and approved programs.
Re: Windows 8 FAIL
For many years Microsoft has had more hardware designers than most of its OEMs put together. I imagine that after the OEMs did such a bad job of designing early grey boxes, that Microsoft wanted to provide some thought leadership.
You're doing pretty well compared to me in a quite comparable environment in France, where up to 2.5MB is promised by Orange and less than 0.7 delivered. My upload speed is often less than 0.1. Horrible latency means that video streaming of even crappy quality YouTube or Skype is not possible. We got fibre-optic to the exchange recently but that made zero to negative difference downstream.
However from my window I can see my neighbours who have no option but very expensive satellite.
Mostly posting due to the "worst in the world [except in other countries]" headline.
Sheet music
2 x A4 pages side by side, sitting on piano stand. Want, now.
Acer Travelmate
I had an Acer Travelmate tablet/laptop in 2005 that wasn't so different. The C204TMi, which I bought in the UK and used for several years had a screen that slid forward over the keyboard to get into tablet mode.
It probably would have last a bit longer if Acer's sales & support weren't so rubbish.
Security
One problem with these companies that collect registration information is that they are either the ones with the worst security OR they're liable to getting bought and your details transferred to more serious spammers.
I tried to get Specsavers to stop sending me physical mail (actually to someone I used to live with who was getting deluged with it) and returning the mail for two years made no difference. When I contacted their data people they actually had the hide to demand more personal details about me than they already had in order to verify who I was.
Not just lyrics
There are so many music tracks on the net where a misattributed authorship has spread widely. Even where a YouTube poster seems to have been corrected hundreds of times, they don't fix the error e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BydBT6pEqz4 which has repeated misinformation to over 2 million viewers.
You then see people writing (again and again) - oh I've always loved X's music, when there is no resemblance between X's music and the track posted.
Mind you, with the dominance of iTunes where the composer of music no longer matters, the error pages start to win out.
Re: Knees?
Sorry, Apple has patented them already. It was their most successful attempt at putting competitors out of joint.
I make candles while living in a small shoebox box in t'middle of t'road
Re: @hitmouse Paperwork
My French photo-ID driver's license for an address within a few hours drive of the store was not enough to back up my Chip-and-pin card in Spain.
Carrying around a passport for simple shopping everyday is a sure fire way to get it damaged or stolen.
hurry the heck up their approval for the Google Maps iOS App?
Which will still not suffice unless you can specify it as the device default map handler.
Until you can click on a contact's address, or use an app with location-serviced to bring up _the map of your choice_ then the broken Apple cart-ography will still make a mess of everything. This is especially true in a vehicle where fumbling with copy and paste of addresses to a different app is especially problematic.
Re: Was it?
Except they've mostly abandoned them to chase the ageing religious right. The yoof have all gone to the Greens.
"We'll only have gay marriage over my dead body ... and I'm taking everyone with me".
i went on a two-week hike and road-trip and came back with 6GB of photos and video just from that.
I started losslessly digitizing my CD collection about 12 years ago, and doing archival scans of photos and documents. I really do have TB of accumulated data even before adding in video from recording friends' musical and theatrical performance events.
Re: @hitmouse Paperwork
San Sebastian, Seville, Salamanca, Cadiz, and some other city. Visiting Orange, movistar, CarPhone warehouse and another telco whose name I forget.
And that's how it worked. My memories are very fresh.
I tried to buy books and CDs from FNAC in Spain last year and they wouldn't allow my visa card without my passport.
Re: Apples and Oranges
"The Surface Pro is a tablet, so of course it's going to be compared with an iPad."
I might have expected a more refined capability of distinguishing categories on here. What next, let's compare mainframe computers with pocket devices because they're both computers?
" that users are prepared to replace desktop PCs with tablets -"
Microsoft tablets are essentially touch-laptops. They're not desktop computers and they're not stripped down single-tasking items like an iPad.
" It's OK for short periods or very small amounts of data entry, but nothing more than that, and that's where the whole concept of a tablet-desktop-replacement falls down. Hard."
If you want to use a touch interface to do a lot of data entry in place of a desktop then that's as sensible as those folks who attempt to use Word tables as relational database tables.
On the other hand having a full powered laptop (which happens to have an additional touch interface) which allows me to do do MUCH more than an iPad, and work with data from USB and SD card sources without doing backward flips through iTunes - now that's something.
Apples and Oranges
Just because they're flat doesn't mean that an iPad and a Surface Pro are in the same device category.
This article hasn't done much but create confusion where there was none.
Re: Boot on the other foot
From my travels I would say that outside of the Anglosphere, Android devices vastly outnumber iPhones. They don't get drowned in Apple's reality distortion field so easily.
Re: @hitmouse Paperwork
I was in Spain in September, and went through this in five cities from top to bottom of Spain trying to get just a SIM card for my vacation. I tried 3 or 4 different telcos and CarPhone Warehouse.
The queues start forming outside the telco doors at 10am, and then it's telenovella discussions between most of the staff and customers (up to 10 in a conversation). While they tried to be helpful, it was at least an hour of copying details from passports, filling out form after form, getting approval numbers and then being told it would take 2 days before activation!!! At about that point they'd discover they didn't have any SIMs in stock.
When the doors close for lunch, there is still usually the end of the queue waiting inside from the 10am arrivals. after that you have to wait till they reopen at 4 or 5.
Re: Confusius he say
Are you in Portmeirion? Sounds like the plot of The Prisoner.
I thought it was the necessity to stand in Spanish telco offices all morning filling out volumes of paperwork just to buy a SIM card that was robbing them of customers.
Re: jobs
It's swings and roundabouts - lots of high street bookstore jobs lost.
Most likely his managers pushed for something he could never deliver, and so it was scapegoat time.
Meanwhile Tim Cook insists they are doing "everything", except the twin technically-feasible and customer-satisfying solutions of allowing alternate map-handlers or reversion to a previous version of iOS.
It's the season
As easy as it is to ascribe this to malice or incompetence there are two good reasons why the company may be dragging its heels. 1) a major release has shipped so a lot of people denied holidays for a long time ate taking them now, and 2) it's US Thanksgiving so not much gets done at a lot of US companies. It's basically silly season from Thanksgiving till New Year. Don't count on max efficiency from a lot of companies who aren't in retail.
Re: Excel is not even the best spreadsheet....
This all started before Excel was commonplace, using Lotus 1-2-3, Multiplan and their brethren.
However you can point the finger further back down the path at simple failure to grasp arithmetic basics. When an entire room full of highly paid credit analysts can't follow a simple interest expression because they don't know that multiplication/division operators take precedence over addition/subtraction, then you have a world of hurt waiting to be set down in spreadsheet cells.
#yes_i_saw_it_with_my_own_eyes
