Posts by ScottME
63 posts • joined Wednesday 12th August 2009 18:57 GMT
Re: Two years baby
I don't see that happening. I have a Samsung phone, but that's because it's currently the best hardware to run Android on - definitely not because of the Samsung software, which I hardly use at all given the superior free alternatives.
Of course it could happen, but if it did, I'd be surprised if anything like a majority of their customer follow them into their walled garden.
It's very sad what's become of Nokia
Nokia clearly still have some first-rate engineering skills, it's just such a shame that they have hamstrung themselves by allowing their business to become locked to MIcrosoft.
Re: I wonder how much of the opposition matches mine?
"If you want to leave the country, ok, you need a passport." -- Oh no you don't.
I think you will find that you can get out of the UK any time you like with no identity documents whatsoever, so long as you choose your means of transport appropriately. For example you can get into France without a passport, 99 times out of 100, from a ferry or a Eurotunnel shuttle and from there you can travel to almost any country in mainland Europe (within the Schengen area) entirely unimpeded: you just sail through the borders without needing to present any identity documents.
The one time you will certainly need your passport is when you want to get *back* into the UK.
This reveals the fundamental broken-ness of the UK Border Agency, or whatever they are calling it today. They count everyone in, but they count no-one out.
I've always wondered why we in the UK have such pissy little cellphone masts compared to the huge great f**k-off towers you see all over the USA.
Can I just say...
...HA HA!
Re: Password management
Your mistake was to use "ThinkVantage Password Manager". You've entrusted your vital secrets to a piece of proprietary, Windows-only code whose quality and fitness for purpose you can never know, and which runs only on your ThinkPad, i.e. one of the systems you should have a password to access. A bit like storing your house key in a locked box inside your locked house.
You'd do much better to use an open-source, free, cross-platform password manager such as KeePass. Even better if you use cloud storage such as Dropbox to keep the strongly-encrypted KeePass database in sync across all your machines.
Just a bit of friendly advice.
Re: 55 percent?
There was a spoof corporate directive circulating in IBM about 20 years ago on the subject of password standards. It started out OK, then degenerated into a series of ever more ridiculous requirements and restrictions. The punchline was something like this: "Compliance with these rules means that there is only one possible password. Employees should see their manager to be issued with it."
Coverage is still piss-poor across much of UK. It's many years since I noted getting substantially better service in the essentially unpopulated Moroccan Atlas Mountains than I get in prosperous rural Hampshire, and yet nothing much has changed in the interim. Improving coverage and eliminating "not-spots" should be the mobile providers' priority, not continually pandering to and competing for the revenue from those who already have an embarrassment of choice as to where they get their high-speed Internet access.
Aint gonna happen though, not this side of the revolution.
Simple - "want" does not imply "are willing to pay for". These people wouldn't object to their emplyers buying them a Microsoft tablet, but they sure as hell aren't about to spend their own money on one.
MS can't win
MS did actually make quite a number of early attempts at tablets - stylus based, keyboardless PCs & the like. They were of course too heavy, too restricted in what they could do, and the keyboard/mouse oriented user interface didn't really work too well without either.
Now in the Surface they have made a device that's light and portable, has a decent touch-screen user interface, and people won't buy it because it's largely incompatible with the non-tablet Microsoft systems that they have become habituated to.
They are essentially victims of their own earlier successes, having themselves sown and nurtured the seeds of their eventual destruction. I don't say any of this out of sympathy - I have none for them, and I hope the company continues to decline.
Why not just evacuate the drive
Rather than faffing around with helium, surely they could just pump out all the air and leave a vacuum in drive housing - there would be no resistance at all then. Must be possible. I have one of those radiometer things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer) on my windowsill and the lack of gas in the globe certainly lets the vanes spin pretty damn fast.
Re: Chicken or the egg?
The logic is supply and demand. You can run Unix on just about any hardware vendor's kit, so there's no way anyone would choose to run it on a mainframe unless doing so was price-competitive. However the only readily available hardware that will run z/OS is an IBM mainframe CPU, so IBM can charge what it likes for that.
Who still runs Windows?
Oh, you do? Well, can't say I'm surprised that you get infected with malware.
Vote with your feet, people!
No-one forces you to "upgrade" to the latest version of Windows (well, not for a few years anyway), and if it's all really so bad, there are flavours of Linux that will feel far more like home than the latest brainfarts from Redmond. I just don't comprehend why folks bother to take issue with what Windows has become.
I haven't used it for anything productive in over three years, and I absolutely don't miss it. No way would I go back.
Posted in 20 years of GSM digital mobile phones
Re: Ahhh...
The E51 was a pretty good successor; same size, 3G connectivity, decent software, titchy screen though.
Re: What's the point of 4G...
I saw a segment on TV that said at full rated 4G speed, you'd burn through your basic 500MB data allowance in less than 5 minutes. Even 8GB would only last an hour. And that's your monthly allowance? GMAFB.
Posted in IBM slices UK GTS contractor rates
I'm sure the whole point of this is to allow IBM to reduce the rate it charges its customers for services, thus making it more competitive and allowing it to sign some new contracts for a change.
Re: Now here's an idea
Hmmm, let me think... are there any operating systems that work that way already?
Well yes, I believe there is an OS called UNIX (though it's little-known among devotees of Windows) which I am told has lots of derivatives, some of them even completely free, such as GNU/Linux. I understand that the UNIX GUI is generally an easily substituted layer atop a network-enabled display server ("X") which, so I have heard, lets you "run the GUI on one machine and the actual application on another."
Who'd have thought it?
Still, let's wait for those clever Microsoft engineers to invent something not quite so mature or versatile, so we can spend our money on that instead.
Re: Already looking
Have you considered Eclipse as a VS alternative?
Back to Debian, I suspect
I've been using Ubuntu for about four or five years now, and to begin with it was great. I have always been quick to install the latest release, and have lived with 12.04 since it came out. I've been feeling increasingly disappointed with recent releases, and I realise I'm just not all that happy with Ubuntu any more. I really don't like Unity, and I sure as hell don't like the sound of the Amazon Lens, so I will most likely pass on 12.10. 12.04 is a long term support release so I'll be OK to stick with it for a while but I reckon in due course I'll probably just head on back to Debian, which is where I came to Ubuntu from. It's always been a safe, if boring, choice but I now appreciate that boring is good for something like an OS.
Re: Just as towns are discovering that free parking
Don't mention Reading. Not only are the car park charges extortionate, but the town's traffic planners seem to really have it in for motorists in general, if the design of the town's junctions, one-way systems and traffic light phasing are anything to go by. Avoid the place at all costs!
Did I work it out right? It would take about a day and a half (32.5 hours) to completely fill one of these cartridges, writing raw data at full speed. Is that practical?
Why announce it now?
I really don't understand the timing of this. 'Nokia wouldn't reveal prices or launch dates, except that "selected markets" would get it in Q4.' So with potentially months to go before anyone can buy one, there's still something the vapourware about it. And we don't get full details of its capabilities because MIcrosoft want to have their own hullabaloo at some later date.
Thus by announcing it this week, Nokia ensure that that this pretty nice bit of kit gets cast into the vast shadow of next week's iPhone 5 announcement. I guess the clueful marketers in Nokia must have jumped ship already.
Re: Prices
Errm, people who want to read books rather than play games, who want a daylight-readable screen, and vastly better battery life? There's definitely a market there, and the price of these devices is getting down to the "what the hell, let's just buy one" level. The biggest threat would be if they leave the numbers on the price stickers the same and just change the currency symbol. £1=$1 has always been the curse of gadgetry in the UK,
Once was enough
I was stupid enough to buy a mobile phone from Pixmania maybe five or six years ago. I received a "grey import" without even a UK adapter for the charger, instruction manual in Mongolian or something, and it was a total nightmare to get them to take it back. I didn't realise they were part of DSG, and perhaps they weren't at that time, but I will never buy anything from them ever again.
Just imagine the accessory potential
If this ever makes it to a product, I predict there will be a ready market for screen protector protectors.
Re: OpenID
I can indeed say "single point of failure", and I can also maintain two, three, four or more OpenIDs, with different providers, to mitigate any failure of my primary authentication provider. It's still a far cry from having a separate ID on every site I'm registered with (and sharing passwords because it's too hard to keep them separate).
OpenID
How about letting punters maintain a single online identity with a chosen agency, and let other websites obtain authorisation via that agency? OpenID does that. See http://openid.net/
I honestly believe that online identity could be a solved problem, were it not for greed and ignorance. Most sites either don't realise they can do authentication via a third party such as OpenID, or else they have motives (usually financial/marketing/NIH) for insisting on maintaining their own user databases.
Bloody good idea
About time the human race got serious about exploring and exploiting the mineral and other resources under the oceans.
I'll definitely be looking to buy only hardware that has an option to disable secure boot. I require to be able to run whatever software I choose on hardware that I've bought. Perhaps they could put a flashing red light on during the boot process to warn me that I'm booting unsigned or self-signed code, so long as I can ignore it I'd be happy.
Not worth it
I definitely don't relish the thought of being forced to sit through an hour and quarter of mind-numbing, soul-destroying advertisements just to get a measly 500MB of wireless data, and I really wonder who would sign up for that.
There are far better deals. On my Three PAYG SIM I get a month's supply of data (up to 2GB) for a fiver. I'd far sooner cough that up than watch ads.
Re: Surest way to watch people leave quickly...
But that is surely a large part of the reasoning behind the pay freeze. The more people who leaver voluntarily as a result of actions like this, the less redundancy payouts or unfair dismissal claims they company has to stump up for.
Re: Link? List?
http://community.plus.net/blog/2012/06/26/openreach-announces-98-new-fibre-locations/
Re: KeePass is your friend
...which doesn't matter because they can't break the encryption KeePass uses.
Re: KeePass is your friend
Keep your KeePass database on Dropbox or Goodgle Drive, then you can get to it wherever/whenever you need it.
What ads?
I do quite a lot of consumer surveys and they often show you some ads and say "have you seen this?" Invariably I haven't, and I tell them so. They ask how the ad changes my impression of the product or brand: it doesn't. I really don't see the point.
Compaines would do much better if they invested their marketing budgets into improving their products, or reducing their prices. Word would get around pretty fast, and the best products would sell on their merits.
Yes, I know most consumers are dumb. I still think it would work.
That is where the microphone sits. I never knew microphones could catch fire.
Posted in Asus-made Google pad set for June debut
but I don't want one measured in inches!
What is the basis for continuing to measure displays in inches anyway? I reckon I could manage with a tablet of around 200mm - yeah, that's be about right.
Re: Just not interested
Well sure, if you're a gamer, and you're addicted to PC games (though actually I think you'll find they are Windows games, not specifically PC games), then you won't be a happy bunny running Linux. But game developers will likely to come up with Metro versions of their stuff, so Redmond's brainfart won't be such a pain in the ass for you.
The kind of everyday, Joe and Jane Public user who's going to get royally hacked off with Metro, on the other hand, might find that for most of their purposes there are "good enough" Linux alternatives which are open source, and free-as-in-beer as well as free-as-in-speech, so as well as getting a more familiar UI, they can stop bleeding cash on proprietary software.
Just not interested
I'm glad to say that all this fuss over Windows 8 is simply passing me by, merely causing some slight amusement as it goes.
Moving to Linux three years ago is looking more than ever like it was totally the right thing to do. There's been some whining from my fellow Ubuntu users recently, bitching about the Unity interface, but that is going to be utterly overwhelmed by the wails of anguish from Windows users when they're faced with Metro.
The good news for anyone who thinks they won't be able to put up with Windows 8 is that just about any WIndows box will most likely run Linux, and I can promise you that it'll feel a lot more like home than Metro.
Re: If it's Plusnet...
... why wouldn't you buy the same service direct from Plusnet, for less money? In my experience they're pretty good, and while I am fond of John Lewis, I don't see them as a credible ISP and I fail to understand what value they are adding to justify the markup they are charging on this.
Posted in Belkin Power Pack 4000
A product for the unsophisticated?
No doubt this will sell like hot cakes in the airport branches of Dixons. Personally, I'll pass, as it'd make much more sense to me to have a simple battery case that I can fill with standard, cheap AA rechargeables or alkalines.
What problem is this trying to solve?
I must be misunderstanding something. Personally, I would not want my devices to automatically connect to a random WiFi hotspot that happened to be available.
I actually quite like the control I have by exercising a choice to join an available WiFi network. And all my devices are already perfectly able to remember the necessary sign-on credentials and are already able automatically to (re)connect to networks I've previously chosen.
So I don't see what benefit this "innovation" would offer.
Perhaps it's trying to simplify the business of choosing and presenting credentials for that first time use of a "new" network? In which case, can anyone explain why the new technique is superior to, for example, 802.11x certificate-based authentication?
Posted in Ten... mono laser printers
Another vote for an old LaserJet
I bought a lightly-used HP LaserJet 6MP off eBay for £50. That was five years ago, and I'm still on only the second toner cartridge - they cost ~£30 and last at least 15K pages. OK, it doesn't do automatic duplex (but you can re-feed the paper!) and I had to invest another £20 in a s/h JetDirect network adapter but I reckon you can't do much better. It'll be a sad day when mine turns up its toes, but on its performance so far I think it might just outlast me!
Not just Vodafone
They can't spell Telefonica either.
Too little too late I suspect
If any mobile phone manufacturer could make Windows Mobile attractive, it would be Nokia. Sadly, I don't see it happening. The world is too focussed on iPhone and Android.
So long Microsoft. You had your decades in the sun, you had several attempts at mobile, but now it's time to move over.
They should make it customisable
People should be able to build their own channel lists and order the channels how they want them. I know some sets allow lists of favourites, but the custom ordering is what would be key for me.
Posted in Nokia market share dips below 30% in Q1
So long Nokia, it was good knowing you
It's sad that it has to end like this. Nokia got so much right in its time, but in the end it failed to keep innovating. Still, it's disappointing to see it ending up in thrall to Microsoft, which in its turn is sitting on the biggest cash cow in the industry and desperately casting around for something, anything, to extend its franchise. No doubt in time MS too will go the way of Nokia.
Posted in Pure Contour DAB/FM and Internet radio
Poxy pixel displays turn me off
Pure don't seem to have moved on at all in the last 5 years on the user interface front. A couple of lines of scrolling text are completely inadequate for searching out and selecting an internet source. So you're locked into their proprietary web interface and they track you everywhere you go.
Come on, manufacturers, where are all the neat touch-sensitive colour LCD & OLED displays? You know you can do it.
OpenID anyone?
I have a couple of OpenID accounts/identities which I would be delighted to be able to use more frequently. Seems like a simple solution, if only more websites were willing to delegate authentication.
