Posts by ScottME 133 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Aug 2009
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
Operators naturally dread becoming just a commodity pipe through which anonymous data can flow - but that is in fact their natural position. For a mobile operator or ISP to charge different amounts for network traffic dependent on what its origin or destination is equally absurd as it would be for your water supplier to charge different amounts per litre depending on whether you use the water for cooking, washing or watering the garden. It just doesn't make sense, except in the wild fantasies of operators and the network equipment vendors who would love to sell them the hardware to make this rape and pillage of customers possible.
IBM has a relatively piss-poor fork of OO.o underpinning its Lotus Symphony offering. Perhaps they could be persuaded to adopt and sponsor the mainstream project. It should have some appeal as a relatively simple way to irritate Larry, given that Oracle and IBM probably see each other as their main rival.
Alleluia - someone is starting to understand this! It's not just an issue for mobile Internet though. I couldn't care less whether my broadband runs at 2mbps or 20mbps if I'm limited to a miserly 4GB a month. High speeds only make sense with a high (or ideally unlimited) data allowance.
The primary motivation behind IBM's WAS CE is to have something that's equivalent to (and they would argue superior to) JBoss. When existing or potential WAS customers mention JBoss as a possible alternative, IBM will introduce WAS CE as having the same characteristics: open source, no per-server license fee, but with the option of first-rate (paid-for) maintenance.
It seems pretty inevitable that as the basic JEE server function becomes a commodity, the main market for WAS and WebLogic will be as the platform for stack products, like portal servers, process engines, etc.
OO.o is able to do all that most users would ever need and more, but the inertial mass of all those MS Office installations means that people are reluctant to go out on a limb. Same way they'd vote Liberal Democrat if only they thought there was a chance of them getting elected.
For most people in a final salary pension scheme, the pension provision would have been a significant factor in taking the job in the first place. The pension is a form of deferred remuneration, after all. For companies to tell employees who have given them years of loyal service that they intend in effect to rob them of even a part of that deferred remuneration is just that: robbery.
In many cases the only reason that these pension schemes are "unaffordable" is that the companies chose to take extended contribution holidays while the economy was booming and stock price inflation looked like it would more than cover their pension liabilities. Predictably this has now come back to bite them in a big way, but due to weak legislation they are able to simply push the pain onto their employees.
It all stinks.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
