Posts by Wibble 817 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Mar 2009
A new weather website could be developed at any moment and you could start using that any time.
However, you won't ever get an alternative metro-weather app -- it's too much effort for MS to update, and it's too specialised a market for an application developer when compared with developing an HTML5 website.
For such an expensive case, it doesn't even match the colour nor style of my MacBook Pro!
Personally, I'd be more interested in a naked case so I could stuff in a Crucial 960GB at £350 and could finally use it for online backups of virtual machines (which are big).
Hopefully there'll be more like this to market soon.
There's a big government programme to introduce "paperless working".
Thinking this through a bit, Office (et al) is only half of the problem. What about all the data stored in assorted databases across government? There's case working systems all over government, most (all?) are completely proprietary.
Goodness knows how you'll get at this data in 50 years. Heck, even 5 years hence.
> What is the solution though? to admit defeat in tablet and ditch Metro or to tweak it further?
Simply stop trying to force the touch metaphor on to a *non* touch-oriented desktop. Touch, including Metro, has a place, but not on a sodding desktop. Everybody knows this but for some reason MS have resolutely refused to listen.
It's like Microsoft want to commit corporate suicide. What's the point in moving from XP if there's no suitable replacement and Windows 7 is considered as dead-end technology
Some JS is desirable, however the extreme cruft of a typical "modern" website is just excess and bloat.
Wouldn't it be nice to block certain types of pointless add-in JS such as UI style fiddlers (I know what a <select> looks like, I don't need you to style it and certainly not in 100KB), horrid scrolling galleries which suck CPU (and battery), and pointless animations.
It's astounding to think that the move to 5MB home pages is considered OK by some idiot designers. Oh, and before you add the "it's not that big when cached", you still have to download the bloat in order to cache it.
> As a Chromebook owner, I know I've got a lightweight, cheap, awesome little web browsing device that will never be able to effectively edit a single office document or spreadsheet beyond the most basic, juvenile-looking level
Errm, therefore you're saying that for a *work* device, the Chromebook's not particularly effective, whereas a full-fat MacBook Pro with it's full suite of development and creative tools is effective.
How could Google eat their own dogfood when it doesn't meet their *needs*? It's like you're saying that Sony should be using PS4's for their company computing devices (or Microsoft using Xbox RT Slablets)...
Proof of bloat:
VM running Windows XP is between 3 and 5GB
VM running Windows 7 is between 10 and 15GB
VM running Windows 8 is between 14 and 20GB
Most of this is due to the laugh-a-minute WinSXS directory.
Installed Visual Studio 2013 on a new Windows 2012 server install. This is now 55GB - and has never been fully used in anger. Whereas the Windows 2003 server running Visual Studio 2005 for the last five years has only grown to 22GB.
Conclusion: later versions of Windows are bloated.
> I do fancy a Genghis Khan heading Microsoft though - as long as he directs his beheadings to his own personnel.
> What ? You don't want to put a proper Start Menu on Windows 8.2 ? <thwack!><thud><roll> Okay, anyone else opposed to that idea ? <silence> Good. Next point : porting DirectX to Linux as an open source project . . .
Thanks for the image. Made my day:-)
Just missing the "Now bring me the guy who came up with the Ribbon idea - and make sure he brings a silver platter"
3-2-1 back in the room...
You may know, but the User Interface doesn't expose this. There are principles of User Interface discoverability which TIFKAM drives a horse & cart through.
Which is the point: Microsoft seem to be like a little dog with a bone - we must get the tablet market back. But they're completely ignoring their massive user base which will couldn't care less about touch screens: those people who use a computer at work. TIFKAM on a large screen is ridiculous. Then reading "swipe up from the left" when I'll never have a large-scale touch screen is just ignorant.
Vision or arrogance? More like ignorance and infatuation.
> replace the rather weird start menu
Unfortunately with something that completely distracts one and looses one's context in the task at hand. The Start Menu may have been weird, but was functional. The start page with all it's irrelevant flashing nonsense is utterly unusable and is downright unproductive. IMHO.
> ALT+F4 to close a TIFKAM app
How the fuck am I supposed to know that? Worse still how on earth is *everyone* supposed to know that? You may as well have told me to run ps -ef 'poxy_app' | kill -123 What's wrong with a [X] in the upper right-hand corner? And why can't I run these damnable apps in windowed mode?
Jeez
Never quite understood whether the new user interfaces being foisted on us are because *we* (the punters) lack vision to understand it, or *they* are just being arrogant and treating us like cash cow cattle.
It does seem that Microsoft's corporate culture is stuck in the past; we won the browser wars (yes granddad, but you lost it all in the end).
And project management. Deployment. Solutions architecture. Enterprise architecture. Test design and development. Documentation. UI design. Network design & build. PC support. Team management. Systems analysis & design...
Coding is just a a little part of the grand scheme of things.
Munich seemed to have finally broken free of the Microsoft shackles and their world hasn't come to an end.
Should I suffer the slings and arrows and dig out an outrageous fortune to help Apple's balance sheet or not?
My 64Gb 3G iPad 1 still works. I can read, check emails, browse the web, read books, kill pigs... In fact pretty much everything that a later version will do. Sure, it'll be a bit faster and the screen will be better, but hey-ho, forking out the £659 quids (plus another case) seems a lot to get slightly better text rendering.
Hmm, that's an awful lot of Meh.
Having been a member of LinkedIn for years and a moderator of a busyish forum, I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that it's just not worth a carrot. It is infested with spammers and self-publicists and recruitment agencies trying to slurp your contacts.
The forums are pointless, mainly as it's related to your "real" persona, so one has to be really careful with everything said on pain of career repercussions later. Unlike here where one can say anything:-)
To be honest, I'm really wondering what would happen if I said sod it and killed the account. Sod all I should imagine.
> I see nothing ridiculous about it. Most PC workers are not glued to the keyboard/mouse - certainly not the keyboard.
Oh perrlleease... If you're sitting coding, writing documents, planning projects, analysing data... you know, work, you're spending the day with your hands rested on the desk, fingers on the keyboard and using a mouse to move the various windows around the screen and focus on the *accuracy* you need to point at elements of a high-res screen.
Sod your idea of a mouse free interface; you'd end up with arms like Popeye and aching shoulders by elevensies. It's bad enough trying to raise your arms to point at the screen without the additional issue of *accuracy*. Then there's the issue of "resetting" your hands back to the keyboard: with a mouse, one moves one's hand to exactly the same place on the desk and use your fingers to manipulate the mouse, therefore one gets "muscle memory" to return your fingers to the keyboard.
OTOH, if you're flinging birds at pigs then there's no doubt a touch screen is better, 'cos Angry Birds is crap on my 27" Mac screen. But I suppose Angry Birds is designed for touch.
Oh, as in lift my hand off the desk or laptop it's resting on, move away from the mouse or touch pad, lean forwards and poke the screen with my fingernail ('cos the screen's at the wrong angle)? That's such an odd thing to do on a laptop; fine on a tablet, ridiculous on a desktop.
This touch-centric trend is just a fashion. Thankfully Apple have moved through the "one interface fits all" trials and have two optimised interfaces; one mouse-centric, the other touch centric.
Microsoft, on the other hand, are yet to learn that touch-centric operations on a desktop/laptop is sub-optimal to put it mildly. But hey, Microsoft aren't interested in listening to their customers as, apparently, Microsoft knows best.
They get rather expensive to purchase when one cannot upgrade anything in them; the memory's soldered to the motherboard and the "disc" is proprietary. Over the life of, say, three years, it's not uncommon to replace at least the "disc" with something larger/faster. Not in this case.
Very nice, but all the costs are up-front. A fully-specced 15" is £2800. Ouch.
Like laptops, when you compare like-with-like, the iPads come out pretty well. Arstechnica have a tablet comparison chart which is very interesting:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/the-ultimate-tablet-comparison-chart-with-the-new-ipads/
In the laptop arena, there's a ton of cheapo plastic grot on sale which are just plain awful when compared with high-end MacBooks. Same for tablets; even my old iPad 1 works better than many cheapo plastic grot tablets which inhabit the low-end of the market. Incredibly, that iPad 1 is probably still worth more second-hand than one can buy a new low-end tablet.
My point is that when you compare like-with-like -- retina display, computing power and speed, build quality, user experience -- there's not much which can hold a candle to an iPad, especially the new retina iPad Mini.
BTW have you ever used a tablet with a plastic screen? It's horrible!
I don't suppose you have the FACTS to back that assertion? Such as comparing like with like?
Many of the Apple devices cannot be compared with other companies due to the unique attributes that Apple create, e.g. the operating system and application ecosystem. You can't get iOS on non-Apple devices. You can't get OSX on non-Apple devices (no, not hackintosh).
When looking at Macs, please show me the *equivalent* device from another major manufacturer. Sony, Dell, et al, where equivalents do exist (e.g. screen resolution, performance, weight, size, CPU, etc.) are *always* more expensive than Macintosh. And you have to run that Windows shit.
Some of us are very happy running Apple kit. It works. Sure there's issues, but generally the benefits way way outweigh the drawbacks.
Now go and do some research to back up your opinion then share it with us.
A bureaucratic solution to a bureaucratic problem with a liberal dose of additional process thrown in.
Small businesses don't have spare capacity hanging around to fill in forms for the box-ticking procurement process. Big companies do and they certainly charge for it.
Contract awards are now being held up as the procurement process grinds on. What a great way to start a project: late. Not because of some technical issue, but because the contract wasn't awarded in time. Of course smaller companies can't just swallow these delays.
Is it little wonder that only the big boys are playing.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
