What would be useful is multi box

At the moment, I have dropbox for personal use, so that precludes me using them for work unless I have separate profiles for 'personal' and 'work' use on my computer (not going to happen.)

What I want is to be able to sign into half a dozen dropbox accounts, work ones, client ones, personal - then it would be useful for business.

I'm confused

Who has lots of partners? Was that the girl or Microsoft. I'd be concerned for the kid if Mum can't keep track of all her partners, doesn't need a phone, needs to see a councilor or a minister.

Steve said he was gore to retire after the win 8 launch last year, just people have forgotten already.

hmm - we use their online/offline payroll & leave tracking software

It is extremely average. The pc software is ancient relying on unstable pdf printer drivers and the online leave requesting software is slow, clunky and has had to be 'reset' i.e. completely re set up from scratch when one of their upgrades in the back ground caused a corruption.

It seems to me that cloud is synonymous with lowest common denominator, if you want the basics sold to a potentially huge customer base where everyone gets vanilla and no individual user matters, then its a perfect fit.

think it is the os not necessarily the hardware

Have upgraded an ipod at home and now experiencing wireless connectivity issues.

can you downgrade ios?

I'm still hurting

From the last purchase of HP workstations that have had continuous failures of their displayport to dvi dongles and a couple of 'high end' HP laptop graphics stations that simply must have been a lemon model that has caused lots of grief and downtime trying to get warranty support replacements.

We've had a lot of HP gear over the years, but I'm less convinced than ever of their quality.

So far all of the AIO machines I have seen do not offer adjustable height on the screen. Which is pretty important to me when ordering bulk machines for work. Don't want to risk OOS issues. Also if the computer is in the foot, then I suppose the yellow pages can't be used as a 'temporary' booster either.

I have a list

on my wall - rather morbid thing about dying and what people regret. The link is, seems to me that some one at MS in their old age has finally understood that making things that ordinary people find easy to use is a good idea and that presenting content well should be the priority. Perhaps its that final effort to relive the glory days.

On the other hand, I expect it is the same old MS that has always been. 64bit dlls go in the x86 area and 32bit in the x64 folder. Countless meaningless 'uninstall' and 'digital certificate for vba...' icons will still fill up the majority of tiles. MS paint will still be the same as will notepad. Email will be turned off and then come back later, programs like Outlook will consume more resources and still not be able to render basic html emails. File explorer will be even more neutered and peoples data will be splattered across the entire folder structure in a random fashion so that search will prove its worth.

And yet I am vaguely optimistic that things may in fact improve once the dust settles, maybe it will take till windows 9, on the other hand our windows xp workstations are now seriously old and most of our third party apps are still windows only, so inertia may again rule the day and keep MS on top.

My recommendations:

- Call them tile apps but make them a desirable alternative rather than rubbing poo all over the vast majority of software on the platform that will remain old school for the foreseeable future.

- Tidy up that mess of a file structure, get rid of active directory and joining domains etc it no longer makes sense. People use many contexts, home, work, cloud, offline. AD is a dog you've turned relatively simple configuration information into a rocket science for no good reason. If you made Microsoft live sign on business friendly then that could replace AD for smb companies.

- work harder at making developers building for windows understand physical hardware, life-cycle, support and good file and icon management.

- Give badges to companies that make quality software. Why is it that all UK software we've had the 'joy' of using is so antiquated, poorly supported, hard to use with stupid dependency issues.

- ditch the registry - the central database for everything the compost heap of knowledge.

- wrap all files in xml meta data. Search is everything types tell us to fire data anywhere in a projectile vomit kind of way - it is better than creating structure apparently. Only problem is that files often don't contain nearly enough meta data to ensure I get the right one back when searched for. I want to get the latest data not a file written years ago with the same name, and many similar issues. I note that the symantec web guys have been saying that of Search for years.

I thought I read that MS gets more $$ from every Andriod sold due to patents or is that an urban myth.

As official IT Manger of my household

I confer upon myself the title of Grand Poobar and A S S of the highest order. I'm also on several other lists. ;o)

I've seen fresh dog food before.

Such an apt description of what they do at Redmond.

Shonky John

FBI still took evidence from NZ illegally, NZ police still did a ganster type raid full of black opps and extra octane. If NZ politicians have their way, they will still be happily bending over for the US of A. Soon they'll sign the TPM free trade agreement and the US will be able to come over and do what ever they like.

I have no doubt the guy is morally bankrupt, that is the way to succeed in business and banking these days. It is just that some US companies that apparently own the US govt don't like the game when it is played against them.

So I hope he walks away with a huge cheque from the US for their trouble.

politicians

Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of nonsense that will get our nz politicians on there knees looking for the nearest US counterpart to kiss arse or worse.

Remember all politicians only care about what gets them the most ego points and maybe a vote in election year, they live for the instant and have little to no understanding of anything technical. Actually little to no understanding of anything at all beyond the very high level 'blue sky' board table thinking.

Practical, clear thinking, leave that to (quality) trades people. Get my picture with the US president, sure you can do anything you fancy. You will still respect me in the morning though, won't you?

MS eats its own dog food

Do they still say this? Seems spectacularly apt to me.

Dog food is made of offal right.

2 SE phones owned

Two bad experiences.

The last one was recommended on this site. Goes to show that relying on 'reviewers' that probably don't do much more than turn it on and read the box cover is a waste of time!

Can't wait for those new features!

Every day I'm typing away in word thinking I wish I could use Kinect and dance around on the opposite side of the room instead. (That was a joke) What would be really handy is Word recognising when I'm doing the fingers to the screen!

Actually no I do think Exchange needs a complete rebuild. Sure it works, but the lock in to the Active Directory mess and hardware locks to network cards etc makes it a DR nightmare. Unless there is a simple way to have a proper hot standby, we'll be going cloud and ditching that monstrosity next time around. (i.e when we finally do have to replace exchange 2003!

10% of customers got engaged

too each other? Just what was on that screen?

90% presumably already married or couldn't get near the dam thing.

Damm fault on the black

And the set goes to Alexandar Demtetri Schamozzacoff... what a night he is having...

landing fees

Not sure what it is like in other countries, but our airports are little monopolies that charge passengers for upgrading buildings, then revalue them at a higher price and then charge passengers more to land there. Another reason hub to hub sucks!

How about making phones that work?

After purchasing a SE based on a 'top ten review' on the register I am once again disgusted by the whole experience. The Phone OS regularly crashes forcing a manual reset that wipes all the text messages. Never going to buy them again. SE = POS

don't panic

Autodesk software is so fully of bugs that it will take them years to rewrite it.

Even though they release a new version every year, it is only to shift the menu items around and add new bugs, I mean features. They don't fix the oustanding ones.

It will also have autodesk stlye pricing, $500/hour sounds like them.

virtual me

Actually win 2k8 was a big disappointment for us, new faster equipment and new os = slower file and print and the yucky win 7 gui. (I prefer the old windows explorer). No need for virtual blah blah, we are a simple SMB with multiple branch offices. Sure we could put it all in one office and spend thousands on faster WAN. Glad we didn't choose chc as the central location. Wlg or Akl is much safer - oh wait.

Next replacement will be back to basics I think. Cloud email, samba file and print, commodity storage. I don't see the value in Active Directory for 100 staff. A pretty average database that is hard to maintain and repair.

"The opportunity is with Windows. Applications will run on all new Windows 8 PCs, laptops, tablets. Any Windows 8 PC is your target customer - so the market could be 400 million people on launch."

Errm if Win 7 has just got to 450 million people several years after launch, seems that the launch numbers are out by a factor of ten or even 100.

Be great to see some proper cleaning up of the messy interface and more importantly the messy underbelly, sadly I only expect more of the current trend of dumming down, build it for monkeys thinking. (There is a difference between treat everone as idiots (current programmer styles) and treat everyone as humans who learn, like to understand but can get confused with inconsistency and random behaviours).

Does this mean I can have an antigravity car? Or a star trek space ship with none of that silly floating around?

What an average design

Nothing but disappointment as far as I'm concerned, and no SSD - why would a business want anything else. Local hard drives are for the bloated OS and software. You do want to be able to work before its home time.

no one uses pcs anymore

oh, well apart from creating all the content, managing all the business, accounting, etc. But our boxes look so crap even tha mac rip-offs. Lets sell that division, then we can buy apples - they look so cool. We can then generate the same income with a fraction of the staff by being patent trolls. I hope the people buying the hardware don't realise that we'll ping them for our patent on black plastic boxes....

but what really concerns me

Rewriting applications is not necessarily a stumbling block for me, more the issue of potentially loosing control of the data.

What, Again??

Sooner we're rid of this proprietary XXXXX Microsoft Office nonsense the better!

yay thereg.co.nz!!

Keep up the biting of the feeding handses, just remember to keep chewing well as there is plenty o gristle about. :o)

Daryl?

Unfortunately, stunningly attractive Daryl is more interested in regaining his status on Halo 3 after his box RROD for the third time and some silicon valley nerd stole is live id.

Sounds like a ripper read - NOT!

they should seriously look at splitting the company up

And frankly stop waisting money on cloud 9.

Office has taken a huge hit and ribbon and the disconnect with the earlier versions may have been the tipping point for eventual undoing of the monopoly.

development stuff is still very good

Servers have been suffering the feature creap of desktop software with complexity breeding complexity. The common practise of seperating out services into their own virtual server sandbox says volumes about software that sprays like a male cat - a bit of stink everywhere.

The OS should be gutted with the original win api seperated into a sandbox to run historic apps and the replacment jetsonning all the turgid work arounds, joints and other backwards compatibility crap.

Sack all the marketing people, they are not very good at it. rebuild the websites so that they work or outsource it. Focus on making a few things well instead of lots of things poorly.

super extremely important secure just bung it in the bin over there...

what surprises me is why hasn't there been an investigation into why all the supposedly top secret stuff is bunked all into one silo that is trawlable by a bored low level operative. Hope fully the US doesn't keep all the nuke passwords or whatever with the same 'bung it anywhere and google it web 2.0' methodology.

Its all fixed in the new version

Don't have to worry about security in win7. MS fixed it. First they renamed all the folders and common locations to be other locations, then did that again two times for luck. Then they hid them so the bad guys won't know where the hell anything is. Oh and the 32bit stuff is under the title 64 and visa versa. (goes with those american backwards dates and 3am auto install setting I suppose).

So its totally brillant, most fantastic piece of software I've ever used. Every day I just get up and think wow yay for hiding all the useful stuff behind smokscreens, it is now super cool fantastic.

Of course

We all know that all of Gaul was conquered, apart from one small herd still holding out against the invaders.

Look at the new sparkly thing

The way I see it, there is some passionate people over in gaming, their doing cutting edge, its fun. There is the web2.0 crowd, off doing their thing - doesn't matter whether its actually useful, cause it is a hip thing. Then all those left that are burnt out or can't get promoted are left to put face paint on the os and office. No fundament improvements, just mid life nip an tuck.

There has been no improvement since xp and office 2003. Lots of change, maybe some new security that was previously handled by third parties anyway, but nothing else. Leadership, innovation, pride, momentum, it is all just backing up an ally.

OS or copperteenoh?

erm is that apple with 14.17% of the world wide market - putting them second to MS and far far an away beyond any individual company/ entity in third place... what was the issue?

the problem with microsoft

Maybe they have intelligent people working at MS, hard to say, certainly, by enlarge you can't tell 'by the fruits'.

The problem is execution. The marketing droids get wound up, the preachers get preaching, but no one has bothered to sit down and objectively use the 'thing', so out flows another pile of turd, so many 'if onlys' have been missed, I find it impossible to imagine what they actually do there apart from dilbert meetings and firefighting.

ITs always 1s and 0s insn't it - how about some less fuzzy logic.

So tedious listening to the debate. It's all cloud, its all social services, its all this, its all that.

A balanced view is that there is an area of growth in social services cause that is the 'thing of the moment', cloud has its uses and those will be enormously enlarged by goverments spending billions on fibre to the home projects - kind of a semi hidden goverment hand-out to that type of business really. Tablets and phones have their uses, as do TVs and all the other gadgets and junk we love to collect. But similarly PCs will also have their uses - maybe not one for every citizen any more, that makes sense. But there will still be clever people that want to have machines that can interface with the world, do tasks and report results. Then there is 'legacy' - business advantage is not paying twice for what you already have. So tired of the 'thats old and boring - everyone must chuck it all out for the new shiny thing mentality.