Posts by GrantB

Re: All at once or none at all - or maybe only a few?

Hundreds of cars? Meh, guided missile cruisers and other military systems such as AWACS have been able to track and target hundreds of objects in real time and 3 dimensions for many years. That includes incoming threats moving at supersonic speeds.

Even on a busy round-about with 5 or more roads merging, you are probably only looking at a few dozens cars at any point in time being a threat or which the system needs to exchange signals with.

Compare that with meat bags currently driving vehicles in busy traffic; I occasionally ride through a complex round-about system with inner and outer lanes and 5 entrance/exit points. Even a ZX81 could navigate it better than some drivers I see failing to cope.

Should be pretty obvious from the road toll in most countries that extensive driver training and enforcement does not work that well.

Re: Has anyone tried...

" large volumes of lukewarm water "... once nice use of otherwise waste heat from a local geothermal plant is a prawn farm;

http://www.hukaprawnpark.co.nz/history

There are other agricultural options such as hothouses growing orchids or similar as well.

If somebody really is looking for a data centre somewhere with a bulk supply of 'leccy on tap, I would suggest Manapouri - underground, vast amounts of cold water flowing through and 800MW on tap would power a lot of ARM server blades. That power is currently mostly going into a smelter, but that is looking like it could be shut down, leading to an excellent lair/data centre for evil genius types.

( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manapouri_Hydroelectric_Power_Station)

"Company's like Apple should be Made to pay the FULL TAX in the country where the profit was made. (BEFORE THEY MOVE IT OFF SHORE)"

Yeah, about that.

How do you decide how much profit is made? What is the correct <FULL TAX> amount is?

The issue is this. Profit = sales-price (ex sales tax) - cost of sale (the wholesale/build cost of the idevice + overheads).

Now the country (UK in this case) does in fact grab the sales tax. The consumer is paying of course, but Apple are collecting it and handing it over to the government. No problems there - hence governments moving increasingly to load up on sale taxes despite customers increasing ability to buy overseas making an ever increasing loophole.

The real problem with your plan is that the cost of sale is whatever Apple claim it is. So if the overheads of rent, power and wages is £1 per iDevice and the theoretical ex-VAT price of device happened to be £100, then all Apple have to do is pay £99 per iDevice to their Irish supplier. Result no profit in the UK, but the £99 goes back to pay the actual £10 build price of the device in a low taxation country. In actual fact Apple and other companies tend to bury the costs not in hardware costs but in brand or IP payments which are relatively intangible.

To challenge the profit being claimed, you would have to have a massive governments department to determine if every transaction claimed as a business cost was valid - and given that the transactions could be anything across any number of countries, this would be a near impossible task. How would the the tax man determine if the Apple brand (i.e. a payment made from Apple UK to Apple mothership) is worth £1 or £1 billion?

"Then if the company chooses to move profit to another country the country it moves the profit to has the choice to tax the incoming transferred profit"

Which means double taxation. And again 'moving profit' - how do you define that when you see a $1 coming into a company in Country A, is it profit, refund, payment or just another transaction?

Re: And who in their right mind puts a BMS on the Internet?

Used to play around with smart-card access control system for a building I worked at.

At the time, I thought getting it hooked up to the net would be a neat idea - could feed in things like public holiday and daylight saving changes, (main doors were unlocked by default during business hours) and being able to log in remotely and say turn on air-con ahead of time for people working over the weekend, or unlock doors in a loading dock when a courier driver turned up late etc.

In the end we decided that keeping an air-gap was not so bad. Users could copy across the odd update on CD or USB stick during regular maintenance updates, but surprising thing to me about this story was any system like this connected to the net, security was an obvious concern up front.

QNX should be secure enough (most RTOS have security backed in at a low level, so the fault must be with some very dodgy DMS software and lax firewalls.

Part of the problem in my experience is that maintenance teams looking after these systems tend to lean towards old-school sparkys, alarm technical or locksmiths who have migrated to a new IP connected world in which firewall configuration is a required skill and cutting keys from brass no so much. Don't get me started on HVAC maintenance people though...

Reinjection

Geothermal plants can be more efficient than this, but total energy conversion efficiency is not usual the primary aim, as the energy comes for free once the plant is built. Hence things like total cost of plant (and whether there is multi-stage turbines/heat exchangers factor in to it - i.e it might be cheaper per kWh to get 10% of the total resource energy rather than extract more and get 15%.

Haven't read up about this particular plant, but suspect most of the energy not turned into end-user power, will be reinjected into the ground to keep the plant running for a long period of time and to avoid having to dispose of geothermal fluid after it is used to drive the turbines.

Oh, and I suspect PV cells are not that efficient either if you are comparing total recoverable energy in an area to 'end-user power'. Geothermal is a great way of providing base-line power overnight. Would be interesting to see a mixed plant though - i.e. boost geothermal fluid temperatures using a solar furnace during the day.

Re: Now i hate apple....

Should not respond to trolls, but rather obviously there is metadata associated with every query; location, date/time stamps and user ID/device history etc that is used to give a suitable response.

After dropping the user id (and location?), purging old records using the date time stamps is a one line SQL delete command.

Developers working on voice recognition would love being able to replay millions of voice samples before and after algorithm tweaks, but given that storing the data has some cost associated with it (and diminishing returns adding more data), I would imagine Apple are keen to throw it away after a 6 months.

Re: I need help...

I'm from NZ as well.. but think I understand the point of all this.

The GCSB are/were not allowed to spy on New Zealand citizens. Makes sense - most countries have similar rules (such as the CIA not able to operate internally in the US). For internal threats, you use the police who are kept inline by the justice system. Spy agencies have no oversight except for the (political) government, so you don't want them doing whatever the PM feels like - i.e. go dig up some dirt on <political opponent X>

It turns out when looking at 'who can the GCSB spy on', that there were other grey areas. For instance they can't tap a NZ phone line or cell phone calls without a warrant, but apparently it is OK to ask telco's where a cell-phone was or what calls were made to/from to a landline. If the cell or landline belongs to a NZ citizen are they able to spy? God knows in the case of Kim Dot Com where one house might have 4 people, half are NZ citizens, half not.

I think John Key is going the wrong way here in response. If the agency you are responsible for is found to be breaking the law, failing to do their job, the answer is probably not to simply make a law change and make it legal, but to fix the problem.

If Kim (a NZ citizen) was breaking laws in NZ, then let the police handle it. Why the hell is a spy agency who are supposed to be looking at threats to NZ from external forces, getting involved with helicopter raids for somebody who at worst has committed or helped with copyright violations in some other country? And if the GCSB was getting involved out of boredom or whatever, why did John Key either not know or approve of it?

Re: Android, but not sure which

I am pretty agnostic on the Apple iOS vs Android debate*, but you just picked up on real issue that annoyed the hell out of me.

I had a ~Gen 1 iPod Touch and it was great to fire it up, and check Wifi reception around the office and house etc. When I upgraded quite a while latter, I went to download a wifi scanner and found that they had all gone. No problems, right.. just needs app writers to use the official API... except for some mysterious reason there doesn't appear to be one that app writer can use.

The default Apple handling of Wifi is not great (only showing a few of the available spots) and it loses connection to my work router and randomly won't reconnect, so would love to be able to dig deeper.

*IPad and ~3 iPod Touches of various gen's at home, but Galaxy Nexus phone and Nexus 7 tablet.

There are pros and cons for both - I found my IOS devices were better out of the box - just having a familiar book reader, calculator and notes apps etc all installed and ready to go makes upgrading so easy - plug in new device, sync and iBooks opens on the last page I read, Podcasts are all there etc.

On the other hand, having set up up the Nexus devices fully over time, I find that I get very use to widgets and the swype keyboard.. so somethings are definitely better on Android devices.

Overall, I think for me it comes down to price for my next purchase. An SIII and iPhone 5 are similar prices here in NZ, but something like a Nexus 4 or similar is significantly cheaper and operates much the same as the Nexus 7 I use everyday... so that is probably where I am going next.

Re: RSVP in Dream Speak. Always Transparently Clear of Fab Intentions with Great Inventor Engines ..

Pretty sure that amanfromMars is on the brink of becoming self-aware.

That or committed to a safe and secure facility.

Hard to say, really, but I do like his posts for putting a bit of crazy back in to the internet.

Re: LENR emerging soon

"...Long wait list of customers starting this April..."

Yeah, right. Same nameless list of customers who were going to get a device last year.

I think Ian Bryce has nailed the trick used in these demos, so surprised people are still trying to push this version of the old cold fusion/perpetual motion scam.

His report can be found linked from here:

http://www.skeptics.com.au/latest/news/cold-fusion-at-energy-conference/

Seems like a reasonable explanation, at least without Rossi fronting up with more evidence, a simpler explanation than cold fusion magic.

Re: Techology and Faith

No, just you that are not right. Had to face palm at the logical fallacies in your post.

Newtonian physics hold up just fine given the scales and speeds we tend to operate at in daily life. Apples still fall down the same as in Newtons day. String theory is interesting, but right now the best evidence we have is for exactly one universe which has the same laws applying everywhere. The Higgs-Boson seems to confirm that the standard model still hold as our best explanation of the universe.

Atheism is not a faith - look it up and try to understand. Holding the null hypothesis, which is that you don't believe in god/gods in the absence of evidence is correct and always will be. You can't be wrong if you change your world view in the face of evidence.

Just get your god of choice to chrome plate the moon over night as a demo of there ability and I for one will take another look at your claims.

Re: it must be late

Look again; it does.

Although whoever created the graphs did a poor job, changing colours and time period scale between graphs which did not help make it clear.

Interesting how smooth the graphs are though; the 2 year contract approach in the US, obviously works to smooth the peaks and troughs of iPhone/Galaxy model launches.

Re: I , for one, am fascinated with this

Any big multi-jet airliner, including the 787 is not a reasonable comparison for the reasons given in my original post. Any theoretical electric powered airliner will have to be radically different

Sure the first commercial airliners carried about 20 passengers and flew much slower, but there descendants are still in operation world-wide. I recently flew (commercially) on a 19-seat Beech 1900D turboprop. (http://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/seat-map-beechcraft-1900d). That flight was one in which a 787 would have been less than efficient.

In other words, many smaller, slower commercial airliners have their niche.

>However, the modern traveller won't go back to that!

Yes they will if the price is right.

30 years ago people could travel faster in airliners like the Concorde. People overwhelmingly choose flights on slower, cheaper aircraft. People also choose to take a cruise on a ship rather than fly, or simply don't have a choice on some short haul routes such as island hopping where small turbo-prop aircraft are the right choice. Jeremy Clarkson lamented that ships and aircraft generally travel slower these days as cost, fuel economy and emissions become more important than speed in getting from a to b. Teleconferencing is always going to be faster than business travel.

Banging on about airport capacity misses the point - when your take-off speed is closer to 50knots than a few hundred knots and massive runway required for a 787, your air-port requirements change a lot. I am sure, Airbus 380's and the like will continue to haul big groups of people across the Atlantic in bulk for a very long time, but for island hopping, many airports are far from capacity, and near silent, slower electric aircraft could fill in gaps nicely.

>And would you be happy for the transatlantic flight times to double as well?

>Not to mention that transatlantic at low speed also requires that these aircraft can still fly at night...

Wouldn’t worry me.

I live in NZ and of the last few dozen commercial flights I have flown with various airlines , non were across the Atlantic and most were relatively short ranges during the day.

Given a significant proportion of a ticket goes on fuel, I would be happy to save some money and fly a slower, greener, electric aircraft if airlines had them. Would love to fly on a modern air-ship the size of the R101 on day rather than being packed into another 737 or similar.

I can’t imagine seeing a purely solar powered aircraft in commercial use the near future either, but some small steps like taxiing an A380/B747 via a few KW of electric motors driving through the undercarriage, rather than using big turbo-fans (~5MW at taxi speed). In the longer term, who knows; but it won’t look like a 787.

Re: Great . .

WTF just isn't enough when you get stupid responses like this.

Those 'hours of darkness' cover the off-peak period of 23:00 to 07:00, (when I get reduced rates) as that is when lowest usage occurs. Not much solar needed then.

This might of course change if we get more electric cars plugging in over night, but for now appliances and lighting (LED/Compact Fluoro ) used at night are becoming more efficient, and less people are using electric ovens to cook meals at home. Looking at overall demand (not just residential), business peaks tend to be during the day with the cost of refrigeration and air-con.

The study I linked to in an earlier post, shows that in Australia and in other areas like the southern US, air-con is the biggest draw during the day. By the time dusk comes and PV energy drops to nothing, transition should be smooth to baseline hydro/geothermal etc + gas plants which can spin up quickly and meet any shortfalls, but the gas plants you want to run them for as few hours as possible - and mass, distributed PV helps that, as well as reducing peak air-con load in summer.

Re: Yawn...

"80% or 90%" of the market?

Reference please.

From what I recall, Symbian was the market leader in Smartphones until set alight by Mr Elop.

Before the iPhone, Windows Mobile held a significant market share percentage, and then RIM.

The key point in any analysis is that Apple created and hold a large percentage of the very profitable top end of phone sales, and that 20% of 2013 market would be in absolute numbers probably more than 50% of the market in 2007. They seem to be growing sales, if not marketshare, by retaining that the old interface.

Competitors that replace their OS during the same time period (RIM, Nokia, MS) don't seem to be doing so well.

Re: despite Microsoft offering customers deep discounts on Windows 8 upgrades

Pedantic and wrong.

Terminal Services is the.. service (the hint is in the name) that Microsoft give to the service which accepts remote connections.

'Remote Desktop Connection' application from Microsoft (sitting on my Win7 task-bar right now) is the application that makes connections (the hint is in the name) to a machine running Terminal Services via the Remote Desktop Protocol.

So the original poster was quite correct. They RDP'd to a box in the same way we FTP files - using a File Transfer Protocol. The actual client and server details are unimportant, compared to the protocol being used.

And while I haven't had to RDP to a W8 box yet (on the basis that I am actually yet to see a Win8 box actually being used), I can just imagine it would indeed be rage inducing.

Re: Geothermal for cooling?

That building has "... a ground loop system of 350 pipes to use the Earth as a heat sink or heat source".

That sounds like a ground source heat pump (http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Generating-energy/Choosing-a-renewable-technology/Ground-source-heat-pumps)

Storing heat underground is not what I would describe as geothermal (in which the heat is not created above ground), but then my experience is with high pressure and temperature systems generating MW not trying to cool buildings/computers with that.

Re: Good idea....

Yes, they already sell a smaller cheaper phone - the IPhone 4.

Not a huge amount more you could strip out of the BOM for that to make it significantly cheaper other than profit margin - and why would any company do that unless they happened to have warehouses full of unsold kit?

I guess by the time the iPhone 6 comes out, they could package the '4 into a coloured slim case (like the newer iPod Touches) with a minor refresh like newer connector and strip any cost they can from the design (even if it only saves a few cents). Would look newer and less professional (and be a couple of generations behind flagship models) so could be sold as a lower end product.

Still can't see it happening anytime soon though. Will be more interesting to me to see if Apple go the other way and try and take on Samsung at the high end with much bigger iPhone 6. Not really a lot more you can add onto current gen smartphones in features, so screen size and resolution seems to be the limiting factors to hero phones.

Re: "...men get a third of the pay women get for the same films."

Er, I think there is at least one more big requirement from the men rather than just being stupid.

Re: Sorry, Billy, You blew it with Windows CE ....

I agree with much you say = CE was close enough to the Win32 API to help development for Windows developers like me back in the day, but MS moved away from classic Win32 API into .NET which didn’t help.

I used to do development with Windows CE 1.0 and 2.0, then got buried in a world of slightly incompatible versions like Pocket PC/Handheld PC versions across a range of different processors, form factors and manufactures. I remember one client ordering Phillips Pocket PC's for a vertical market application, (after we had tested our code on it and certified the device), then Philips withdrawing entirely from the CE device market. Switching to other handhelds (Sony or Toshiba from what I recall) through up new bugs in the firmware and OS layers which meant starting again with certification testing.

So Windows CE always had issues, but found a decent niche as a relatively light-weight OS that was relatively easy to develop simple graphical applications for and could run on a range of specialised devices.

Problem I always saw was the name. Windows CE was never ‘Windows’ that could run full Windows apps, but they still pushed many devices to look like Windows complete with start menu and ‘Pocket Office’ that was near useless. Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT continues this to a lesser extent. As you say, all the disadvantages of the desktop version without the advantages of running Windows apps unchanged. Software repositories for CE devices used to have something like a simple Chess game available in lots of different versions – consumer had to know the exact version of CE and CPU to buy the right software. Apple simplified this – I remember getting an iPod Touch and finding a big range of cheap apps that mostly just worked – compared with Windows Mobile app stores at the time, it was a revelation.

I don’t think MS could have done much else though. NT kernel was too big for low powered devices back in the day and did not support all the odd ball processor variations that CE did. x86 emulators were also never going to run MS Office apps on a low power ARM or similar devices given the hardware available until a few years ago. It is only recently with WP8/W8RT that MS have had multi-core ARM variants and devices with enough memory and CPU to run a NT core and Office apps – even then, the RT devices are packing more memory than iPads or Android tablets from a few years ago.

Re: And what about power leads?

I like IEC plugs/sockets (jug/kettle plugs are properly called IEC_60320 C13/C14 or high temp versions) and USB for all its faults is finally a very common standard for low power supplies.

If I was building or rewiring a house, I always thought if would be nice to be able to select say IEC sockets throughout the building and perhaps have USB power sockets scattered around the place for low-power devices to help avoid the spread of ugly lumpy transformers sprouting from sockets and power adaptors

Thing is that despite international standards covering many things, and the success of USB, despite the plug orientation thing, we are a long way from international standards on something as basic as power supplies. 50 vs 60hz is becoming less important but the 110 vs 240 difference between countries and of course a random array of incompatible plug types does not inspire confidence in international standards winning out over the long term..

Re: Yes and no.

"But there's no real scarcity in digital storage. Online purveyors of artistic content need keep only one copy of each item, because it's copied rather than removed when sold. They can use sales records to determine the popularity of a song, but lack of scarcity and remnants of the flattened-value mode mean they generally don't use this to change the price. Price difference online becomes primarily a reflection of the novelty of the content"

Looking at iTunes, there is variability in pricing (new popular songs costing more than the average price) which probably reflects the price of promotion and the 'novelty factor'.

The problem with a bit locker like iTunes or similar is that people can't really deal with nearly infinite number of songs or apps on the shelf. I have experienced going to buy a song and finding 20+ versions of it - the remixes, covers, live versions, remastered, album vs single, censored radio release / non-censored extended etc. Something I have heard described as the 'Tyranny of Choice'

Ultimately the most significant cost of music, apps, even movies appears to not in creation, storage or distribution but simply making people aware of it. Some random Icelandic band might have just created the best album of all time that I will love and be very willing to pay full price for, but if I am never made aware of it I will never hand over my money. And to make a jaded world-wide population aware of some artistic creation that is bombarded daily with vast amounts of advertising is getting increasingly difficult.

I remember Snow Crash from 20+ years ago discussing the problem; in a VR world, land is infinite but like the real world, some land in inner cities is worth more than the same amount of land in some Mongolian desert.

In the iTunes world, having the Album cover on the front page or in a top 10 list must be worth vastly more than having it simply sitting in the iTunes catalogue.

Re: I wonder where they are planning to use them?

I would guess they are looking at using it for featurephones where it would replace Bada and whatever OS my old Sammy dumb phone used. Probably talking about phones under US$100

Makes a lot of sense: development is relatively cheap, runs on a range of cheap chip sets, and I bet they will work hard to avoid any royalties or patent payments to Microsoft or Google. Saving just a few dollars per handset will be enough to trim the price for people who really want a basic phone and not a smartphone. Don't need 100,000 apps either - just the ability to throw some basic games and Facebook/twitter clients on the handset. Tizen will do that.

Re: Elop said that usage of its map products is now 75 times higher than this time last year

I believe the critical point is that Nokia mapping was not 'Eloped' unlike the Nokia smartphone platforms.

Its pretty clear that anything Elop has turned his attention to seems to burst into flames. Whereas Nokia's other divisions not 'improved' by Elop (feature phones, mapping and networks) seems to be chugging along OK.

Earlier this year I wrote a post suggesting that a relatively small investment from Apple into Nokia would pay off in a couple of areas:

. Mapping

. Patents / radio expertise

. Expanding the range of phones and/or brands - i.e. Apple iPhone vs cheaper Nokia Nano version for developing markets

. Better retail and telco support

. Causing Microsoft to spend billions to purchase Nokia / develop there own phone infrastructure / Ballmer to spontaneously combust

All positives. :-)

I think Apple are now big enough (and need to) produce a range of phones besides the iPhone 4/4S/5 to compete with the massive Android range. Nokia still design reasonable phone hardware. At least for now.

Sinclair Basic

Ok, so it wasn't BBC Basic, and Procrustean strings... but there was also the odd nice feature...

Let cyan = 5

Let magenta = 3

Let red

PAPER cyan INK magenta: CLS : PRINT AT 10,10; FLASH 1;"Hello wold"

And streams seemed pretty elegant at the time....

Re: There are no 'killer' Windows applications any more

About that total deal breaker:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_for_Mac_2011

Seems like it supports VBA on a Mac.

Office for Mac is probably largely built built with a common C++ core as the Windows version. So if MS can't read/write files without breaking stuff between Mac and Windows versions, that would imply to me that you should not rely on any future versions of Office on Windows opening documents without breaking stuff. OfM is probably more compatible than things like Office on WinRT at the moment

Re: They really shouldn't be holding their breath

Yeah, but its a dry kinda cold, inna it?

Reading up on this issue, apparently cold is least of your problems as although the liquids around your body will boil off, vacuums are a pretty good insulator so you won't freeze immediately.

You will however be unconscious in seconds (10 - 15) and dead within a minute. Unless by astronomical odds, a passing spaceship....

Re: He would say that./

"...all iPad applications actually run at 1024x768 anyway"

So confidently stated and yet so wrong:

http://appadvice.com/applists/show/apps-that-show-off-ipad-retina-display

But being a troll for MS, you wouldn't know about apps would you?

And as for ClearType magically giving the equivalent of 4x more pixels, you might want to look again:

http://www.osnews.com/story/25710/ClearType_dialled_back_in_Windows_8_s_Metro

Re: The Surface works with a trackpad or mouse.

Really? Your first post and you seem to be claiming that iOS and Android tablets can't use keyboards and other pointing devices?

I don't actually own a Asus Transformer, but only yesterday was using an Android device with mouse and keyboard attached.

Never felt the need to attach a keyboard to my iPad, but lots of choices including a keyboard reviewed on The Register right around this story.

Office is fine on my work laptop, but I use LibreOffice on my home computer and Keynote for presentations on the iPad (though the office is starting to use google docs/drive more).

Huge advantage ? Not so much.

Re: Nokia fanboys

"I posted on another forum a few weeks back that, with the stumbling of the iPhone 5 and the favourable reviews of the Lumia 920, Elop might have to be re-evaluated"

Wrong.

Even if miracles happened and the Lumia 9nn started outselling everything else, it would be despite of Elop and not because of him.

And judging from sales of the Lumia brand to date, I very much doubt the Lumia will outsell anything much less a ‘stumbling iPhone 5’ or SIII. Remember that Apple have probably sold more iPhone 5’s in the last couple of weeks than the total numbers of Lumia’s sold by what was the world’s largest cellphone company with billions of dollars in marketing support from Microsoft.

"Result: flaming, down-voting, the odd abusive email. But this report from Finland actually suggests that Elop made the right decision for Nokia. It was clearly a very dysfunctional company with a skunkworks, a vested interest group (Symbian) and internal politics to make the Chinese Communist Party look like the Electoral Reform Society"

It was all that.

So they needed a CEO to get implementation and delivery of projects to work. Make the hard calls to fire anybody not moving forward with the Nokia smartphone OS (Meego) and a low end OS for feature phones like the Asha range. Get stuff shipping rather than infighting and analysis indecision wanting to have the perfect UI.

Maybe once that was sorted, take a look at a partnership with MS, Google or Apple to work on a range of Nokia phones running Windows Phone, Android or iOS (yeah, I know the latter won’t happen but interesting to speculate)

“It looks like they left him little choice, and he was right not to go with Android and try to compete with Samsung”.

Right, so he didn’t go with Android where they could have competed successfully with 2nd tier players like HTC, and instead went all in with Windows Phone in which they get to compete with Samsung, HTC and maybe Microsoft – who control the OS they are now 100% dependant on.

If you think Lumia 920 will be good (and remember we don’t know how much it will cost or battery life details etc), then running Android it could have competed well. Running W8 – a new, untried OS (at least on a phone) that doesn’t even have a finished SDK yet, it still has to compete in the market place with the iPhone 5 and SIII, but not running the OS that people have indicated (by handing over dollars) that they really want.

“In the exceedingly unlikely event that I ever meet Stephen Elop, I'll buy him lunch and tell him I admire his willingness to do the right thing despite knowing it would be hugely unpopular”.

It’s not just that he did the unpopular thing, it’s that he did it badly. So badly people suspect malice rather than just pure incompetency.

The burning platform memo killed the Symbian market overnight, before they had a competitive replacement in the market. If they had got the N9 shipping and supported, then introduced a new range of Windows or Android phones, I suspect they would have been in much better condition than now.

Looking at the failure of WP7 and WP7.5, I suspect they could have extracted a lot more from MS right now to ship a decent range of W8 devices if they had held off.

Re: Windows

Except its pretty clear that 'Windows 7' is on the dev job spec in order for it to be a top 10 requirements.

I suspect it has more with Windows 8 being too new to be a requirement (often they want people with X years experience in Y) but still, if I was looking at Devs to port apps to WinRT etc, I would certainly be wanting programmers who are the sort of people to be running W8 beta's/previews