Posts by Jonathan 29
72 posts • joined Tuesday 10th November 2009 12:29 GMT
No LED
There is no recording LED light at least not on the current Explorer edition.
duplication
I have only used Samsung Androids and suspect I would like a Nexus, but I have found that if you replace the browser, launcher, messaging app, email app and maps app it is a pretty decent experience. I suppose it is good I could, but bad I had to. I remain undecided about my next phone, but it will definitely not be Samsung.
I doubt Apple are just going to make a plastic iPhone with less functionality. It is after all hard to imagine what they could leave off. GPS and cameras are so standardised now it would be odd not to include them. I rather suspect that just like the shuffle and nano, they will seek to completely redesign the phone into a new form factor. Cheaper, but with the same mass appeal. If this turns out to be the watch or iPhone nano I will not be surprised.
Re: M & S considered "posh" and "high end"?
I am sorry if you work there or have shares, but the quality in M & S has been on the slide for years, clothes, food and the rest.
Neither
Pretty sure these are both fan art. Microsoft is going for a more unified branding across products and these don't fit.
My broadband isn't particularly reliable at the mo (damn you Sky), but I don't really care about always online. If I buy a new console it will be the one offering something new and interesting. From what is rumored from MS and Sony so far, it might be a Steam box with an Oculus Rift.
7% QoQ
I had to look it up, but the 7% is Quarter on Quarter not year on year. They increased 7% from last quarter. Their year on year is closer to 50%. That compares to Apple's 11% year on year.
Huh?
I don't really understand this article. Clearly Jobs was right. Tightly focused spending is vastly more profitable than throwing money around. I am sure that Microsoft Research is full of great stuff, but it seems like it rarely makes it past the tiers of management unscathed. Google on the other hand seems more concerned with fulfilling geeky dreams (driver-less cars and x ray specs) than with profits.
Re: Must stop commenting on Apple articles
Incidentally if you think $400 is high type - berkshire hathaway share price into your favourite search engine.
Re: Must stop commenting on Apple articles
It does also suggest to me that they have a lot of confidence that the new products are going to generate some big hype/revenue/profits.
Must stop commenting on Apple articles
Just on the share buy back. I always find this a bit confusing, but Warren Buffett explains it quite well.
'I would run the business [Apple] in such a manner as to create the most value over the next five to ten years. You can’t run a business to push the stock price up on a daily basis. Berkshire has gone down 50% four times in its history. When that happens, if you have got the money you buy it [stock].
When Steve called me, I said, Is your stock cheap? He said, yes. I said, Do you have more cash than you need? He said, a little. [laughs] I said, then buy back your stock. If you could buy dollar bills for 80 cents, it’s a very good thing to do.'
Posted in British bookworms deem Amazon 'evil'
Re: What sort of cretin buys a Amazon Swindle anyway?
The quality of the books available to borrow from Birmingham Central Library is pitiful. I can't speak of other regions as in this global interconnected world I cannot borrow from them apparently. The ability to email books and web articles to the kindle however is a god send.
Re: currency meltdown
This is my biggest fear too. The system is supposed to incentivise miners into keeping the system running rather then acting maliciously, but it could be done. Only recently one of the mining pools had to self scale back their hash rate to avoid getting >50% of the network hash rate. Even shadier the price can be controlled with just a few million dollars selling furiously to induce panic. I sort of assume these price attacks are usually done though to buy cheap coins not to destroy the idea, but long term volatility will destroy Bitcoin for sure.
Re: Limited
It is frustrating to see that just 2 years ago Bitcoins were valued in cents. Certainly a few people are millionaires, but you would have had to have some mighty big balls to hold from $0.10 all the way to $260. The recent downward trend has resulted in a lot of selling and distributed the coins more widely. This should continue for a while although I accept there is still a tendency by some to hoard.
Re: Limited
One Bitcoin is divisible down to eight decimal places. There are really 2,099,999,997,690,000 (just over 2 quadrillion) maximum possible atomic units in the bitcoin design.
The value of "1 BTC" represents 100,000,000 of these. In other words, each is divisible by up to 10^8.
As the value of the unit of 1 BTC grows too large to be useful for day to day transactions, people can start dealing in smaller units, such as milli-bitcoins (mBTC) or micro-bitcoins (μBTC).
- Bitcoin myths
Digital cash
I find Bitcoin interesting. The original paper is very well written and worth a read if you have a few minutes. In all these discussions though, I find that the thing that interests me most is often ignored, that is that Bitcoin is designed to work without the need for a trusted 3rd party. There is no payment processor charging transaction fees for verification or negotiating disputes. The lack of chargeback is a very useful feature that has no digital equivalent I think. It is pure cash and doesn’t need to be deposited in a bank and this makes transactions much cheaper. I don’t think you would want to pay for your next TV or car in Bitcoin, but in a future where micro payments for software services and applications is becoming more common and accepted it is a technology that has a lot of potential.
10 minute wait
'It is true that transactions can sometimes take tens of minutes to become confirmed. Despite this, retailers can accept unconfirmed transactions with very little risk by simply 'listening' on the network for a double-spend transaction, or partnering with a company that provides this service. After a head start of merely several seconds, the original transaction would reach so much of the Bitcoin network that a fraudulent double-spend transaction would almost certainly be fruitless. An attacker would have to commit easily-detectable fraud, in person, several hundred or several thousand times, before one of these low-value double-spend attempts would likely succeed.
In short, the 10-minute wait for confirmation is only practically necessary when delivering goods of value that significantly exceed the block reward an attacker would have to risk to perform an attack and where recourse after delivery is practically nonexistent, such as money transfers.'
from Bitcoin myths
Re: What can I say
Paypal is fine for consumers, but horrible for small sellers. Their chargeback system and fees are the work of the devil. Bitcoin is lacking some infrastructure currently, but this will change providing we see some medium term stability.
Re: mostly harmless
Like I said 'ridiculous speculation' driven by fear of missing the boat. It is a bubble, but that does not make it worthless.
mostly harmless
I don't tend to view Bitcoin as a future reserve currency, but rather one that could facilitate a lot of online payments and removes all the problems with fluctuating foreign currencies, sort of like the Euro, but without the bureaucracy. I would certainly rather pay for stuff with Bitcoin than Paypal, but unfortunately all this ridiculous speculation could kill it before it reaches the critical mass adoption it needs. For the record I have never bought anything illegal with Bitcoin, unless vpns are declared illegal.
Posted in Review: Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2
wedded to the Modern Interface
Unless I missed a memo, it is not called Metro and it is not called Modern. Tifkam is fine by me or use the Microsoft terminology - Windows 8 store application style.
Witricity
Screw the health concerns I want my devices charging in my pockets or any enabled surface. I am hoping Apple is thinking along these lines and does a deal with MIT.
pathetically dependent?
I suspect you know that MS is also pathetically dependent on Windows and Office. MS has a greater PE number than Apple, but I know in my mind which has the brighter foreseeable future.
WIll I be the first to say 'Bitcoin' ?
Cutting Visa and Mastercard off at the knees is surely a good reason to start accepting payments in Bitcoin.
It bothers me that it has been announced less than 8 weeks before Android 5 is released. We don't know what is going to be baked into Key Lime Pie, but you can be sure that it will take months before Samsung have a version of TouchWiz compatible with it and longer before it comes to UK carriers.
I understand that Samsung wants to differentiate their handset , but I would be more likely to buy it if they gave me an option to install the latest OS. The iPhone 6 running IOS7 will likely be out before the S4 gets 5.0.
Re: Unfairness?
That is of course true, but salaries for all the professionals have been heavily squeezed by the amateurs, free sites and subsequent decline in DVD sales. You could easily see the Adult industry supporting a move to restrict and censor the non credit-card authenticated sites.
logs don't lie
The data on the Tesla blog clearly proves Broder is a lying scumbag.
Bored
I too am bored to death with Android and all its issues. It is telling that just about every app in Play has a series of reviews telling you that it works on X, but not on Y. I don't like all the ads and the poor carrier updates and the locked down OS that requires a root to remove carrier apps. I can't help wondering how many others will be looking for alternatives when their contracts expire.
Re: Damn.
"IT departments are going to be all over Surface Pro as it can be fully managed, domain joined, locked down, Bit Lockered, etc"
I suspect you may have inadvertently stumbled over the reason so many people bring their own devices in. Fancy being able to install the productivity software you like that helps you do your job. A plague on your locked down, Bit-Lockered, Internet monitored house.
Apps on SD?
I was led to believe that you can't install apps on an SD, certainly not Metro apps anyway and if you can they would be much slower to access. Surely the problem here is that you are going to run out of room very fast for apps after installing Office and your favourite Windows progs and thereafter will be totally crippled when you want to install new apps. External storage for data is not an issue on any tablet. I tend to use wifi storage and streaming mostly, but I did jailbreak my iPad so I can use SD card data on it too should I ever need to.
Re: Win 8 is a grower
I would recommend anyone retries Office without the ribbon. I was quite amazed at how easy it was to find and use functions on Office XP compared to the usual hunting and cursing I do with Office 2010.
Re: 60,000,000 minus 2
Agreed, bought it whilst it was cheap, but highly unlikely to use it until it is less buggy.
Re: It's no the lack of start that's the problem
I appreciate HyperV is probably better, but I still use WindowsXP mode a lot. Losing it means finding a legit copy of XP somewhere.
Android Porn
I have to say the quality of the porn apps on Android (alternative stores too) is equally disappointing if not downright rubbish and I have tried, Where is the innovation in this important field?
Re: Waterproof means no user changeable battery.
Two batteries and a wall charger has long been my preference with modern smartphones. Just replace the battery when getting low on juice - no need to remember to fish the phone from the wash bin to charge or find the dammed lead which you were sure was in the bedroom, but is now nowhere to be found.
Re: Mini is 'just for Xmas'
The retina won't happen for a while. The manufacturers are not making much profit on the complicated new mini screens and i doubt will commit to a new line until they have some margin.
Re: Who are Nokia?
You might want to check out who their major sponsors are this year.
Posted in A valid use for Windows 8?
Me too
I too thought the big tiles would make for a perfect Media Centre Interface. I upgraded on Day 1 full of enthusiasm and almost no concern about its special new interface.
Problem 1.
I installed everything I needed including Sickbeard, SABnzbd, Wild Media Server and XBMC, but soon discovered there was no way to make the big tiles look pretty. I thought I would be able to resize and change the appearance. Maybe there will be an app for this one day.
Problem 2.
Strangely I wanted my desktop to stay in Tikfam mode, but because XBMC is a desktop application that is where it opens and when it closes it stays in desktop. That means I now have to either put shortcuts on the desktop or bounce back to Tikfam with the special mouse fling each time to launch something which rather defeats its intended purpose. I wanted to avoid using the keyboard.
Ok, no insurmountable issues yet and carrying on.
Problem 3.
I only used a 40GB partition as I did not intend to install anything other than a few apps, but now I am running out of space. It turns out that where Windows 7 used a 3GB page file, Windows 8 is using 12GB on the exact same machine. A swift change and reboot fixes this.
Problem 4.
I always have my low power HTPC on and when I returned to it a few days later I find that runtime broker is using 90% of the RAM and terminating programs left and right without asking. A bit of investigating and I find it is a new Windows 8 bug and is fixed by uninstalling an affected program.
Still trying, after all I persisted for almost a year with Vista.
Problem 5.
Tried to link up to my Pi box. Still no NFS server in Windows 8 Pro so I have to use SMB. The email account I used to login does not work nicely with shares so I have to change it to a local account. Changing this should be easy, but the user admin stuff is split between Tikfam and Desktop. Very irritating.
Everything is now setup, but it doesn't seem faster, spends most of the time in desktop and I can't help feeling that at any minute Tikfam will do something annoying. I defaulted the dual boot back to 7 and haven't touched 8 in 2 weeks.
My personal verdict is that it offers no advantage at all over 7 and many ugly problems. Will retry maybe after SP1.
Re: budget phone?
That is the first time I have heard of the 8s. Doesn't seem to be on any carrier, but Amazon have one for £240. That is not too bad. Cheers
Retina Mini
Sounds like my hopes for the retina version will be dashed by manufacturers and their darned need to make some profit. Can I wait till next Autumn ? Hmmm.
budget phone?
I was looking at Windows Phones recently. I think the tiles make for quite a good interface for a simple smartphone. They just need to being some good budget Win8 phones to market. I think the premium end is a bit ambitious really and it is a shame they missed Christmas because now I have bought the wife an Android phone.
Re: Linux version if people would buy it
Because they are living in the past and they would rather lose millions in revenue than admit it.
I have been using Office 2010 for a few years now, but happened to have to use Office XP last night to do a few things. I was honestly amazed at how fast it was and how easy everything was to find. I had totally forgotten what a nice clean interface it had that didn’t get in the way.
My vote goes for keeping them completely separate and kicking the Office team from here till next Christmas until they release a proper touch friendly version for iOS and Android.
Re: I can predict an Angry Birds port..
I hope you don't have chrome installed on your pc:
http://chrome.angrybirds.com/
I still don't get it
I am warming to Windows 8, but it seems to me that allowing desktop apps to run on a tablet will only discourage active software development on the metro side. For example, Adobe has quite a nice touch friendly Photoshop product on iPad which it charges £7 for. It is a nice companion for the main product, but what purpose would this serve on Windows 8 pro when you can run the proper version. All you do is risk driving away revenue and debasing the value of your main product line. I will be amazed if we see many big name companies willing to sell cheap versions of their more established desktop products.
Indie devs will have a better shot at making money from touch based games, but if you are developing a Windows game, wouldn't you try to support everyone who has Windows 8 installed, including the vast majority on non touch desktops and laptops? Factor in the millions of high quality Windows freeware that already exists and you are going to struggle to find an area that offers much potential. I suspect the future of metro is a lot of lazy ports after all the cash has been made off of iOS and Android.
Obviously this does not apply to RT, but then why buy RT when you can do so much more with Pro.
Posted in Microsoft Surface priced up for Blighty
Re: Full blown OS
Well Metro apps do still use the registry. Nearly 20 years old and going strong.
