Posts by hitmouse

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.

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.

Re: Knees?

Sorry, Apple has patented them already. It was their most successful attempt at putting competitors out of joint.

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: 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.

Re: Confusius he say

Are you in Portmeirion? Sounds like the plot of The Prisoner.

Re: jobs

It's swings and roundabouts - lots of high street bookstore jobs lost.

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

Re: Pay

"The Doors' "The End", I meant. I know someone's going to pick up on that..."

Usually it's a sign of the apostrocalypse

Re: It's called a DESIGN patent for a reason...

Sorry you can't play any cards. Apple is holding all of them.

Yeah, and I hate to have a baker or pastry-chef to be making my bread or cakes.

Re: Tiled? Updating? Selectable?

Going back in time there's Windows Active desktop, and Windows 1.0 itself which wasn't much more than gigantic icons/tiles. And also DesqView task-switching environment.

Re: Once again the EU fail to understand the meaning of competition

But if Luxembourg decides that its sole product is low taxes then that is to the detriment of all the other EU countries where tax revenues disappear and are no longer available to provide services across the board.

Re: Seriously?

More pointedly millions of people don't know what a browser is. They don't know the difference between software and hardware, let alone subtleties about what comprises an operating system, an application, a browser.

Anyone reading or commenting in here is so far along the asymptote to the right of the bell curve, they may not even aware there is such a curve back there.