Posts by itzman

Re: Wow. NFC *finally* finds an actual use.

shoulkd be no need for error connection and what matters in terms of crosstalk is the nearets of te intended receiver to the farness of the unitended

It is simply a (chip) cored transformer.

What it cant do of course is nramsmit DC, but that needn't be an issue - a simple 'in phase with master clock' is a one state and out of phase a 0 state etc etc.

Plenty of encoding technologies like NRZ or Manchester can use an 'AC' transmission medium to transfer 'DC' states.

Re: Surprised by RC's statement!

Exactly. 0.3C is the sort of temperature rise that gets alarmist rushing for the klaxons.

Its about the size of the entire so called global warming to date.

Re: what about over discharge ?

I have to repeat. Its not just the fact the battery gets HOT its the fact that the electrolyte is highly flammable.

That turns a bad situation into a disaster

Re: what about over discharge ?

No: what over discharge does is cause overheating. Overheating typically causes puffing BUT it wont cause FIRE unless the electrolyte catches, and in this case presumably it wont.

Re: If they have to buy a whole new machine...

There are more exceptions than that.

DTP ain't up to the Adobe/Quark level yet, and 2D and 3D CAD and creative drawing ain't up to Corel, Autocad, Rhino3D etc etc.

Then there are the millions of little apps that people use. Sage accounts for example.

If you are smart enough you use virtualisation or Wine, if not you buy windows.

Re: Not a Dos/DDos attack but

At which pint you backup the phone and call the supplier, saying 'someone has just threatened to brick my phone' and they send you another one.. or another sim card or something.

Re: False sense of achievement maxed out...

Y'know that is so weird that it may be true.

I was playing an online game and generally expressing some dissatisfaction with some players when the guy I was talking to said 'you shouldn't do that: In real life they are a gang in LA and they could find out who you are'

My character (a gorgeous enchantress), replied. 'in real life I am a sixty year old bloke living in England, do you really think so?'

I think a lot of kids who would otherwise be on the streets are into their consoles. It probably isn't the best thing they could be doing, but its probably a ling way from the worst as well.

Re: Important change

You seem to want to actively lock out Linux.

In fact your whole demeanour suggest a mindset where 'software by decree' is how you see organisations as necessarily being run.

I don't see it that way at all. It is simply allowing departments the flexibility to choose what suits them the best, without having that choice enforced on them by a de facto proprietary standard.

Shall I tell you about the time a circular letter came out to a group containing an unreadable Word document (to most people). I managed to read it with the latest libre office version and send a PDF back to the grateful originator so that all those MICROSOFT WORD users who could not read it, now could?

When even a proprietary vendor is no guarantee of interoperability, small wonder that sane people are looking for an open standard of document distribution.

One of the reason PDFs work, is because the standard at least was published, adhered too and readers made free.

Everyone has a PDF reader.

Re: Somebody put it far better than I could...

Fry isn't an idiot, but he doesn't know the difference between being an actor and an authority.

He relies on researchers and they are plain crap.

His job is to add gravitas to their ramblings. Not his fault if they are sloppy and biased.

They are after all generally BBC employees.

Re: as consumers have generally stopped buying PCs

It is that, but it's more. These are gross generalisations, forgive me, but they are 'approximately true'

1/. domestic users aren't buying uprated PCS. They are overwhemingly buying tablets, e-readers smart TVs and smart phones. PC's are dull boring and old hat.

2/. Corporations are not buying new PCs either. This is an interesting point I will expand on. Because I used to be one of those business owners who did buy new PC's every year. With windows on.

I bought new because the old either wore out, (4 years was good going for a PC) or simply were not up to the task of running the new and better versions of the applications we needed to run a business.

But at a given point, both the PCs and the applications were simply 'good enough' to run, essentially forever. I have bought the 'budget motherboard' from my favourite clone supplier for almost 20 years now. Both as a corporate buyer and as an end user, and what I have noted in the last few years is that the same money no longer buys me more than it did 4-5 years ago. In fact I cant get a machine at all quite as cheap as I used to, and it is very little faster. OK SSD and a bit more RAM helps, but program load times and the ability to have many programs alive at once is not an overwhelming issue.

So we are running to the end of Moores law it seems. No longer is there an implicit guarantee that today's PC will be 4 times faster than a four year old one.

And now look at the applications in teh enterprise. Overwhelmingly what people were using in my company were:

- interface to a database. That used to be telnet into a Unix box, today its a browser into an SQL server.

- mail and contacts and meetings, word processing, the spreadsheet for some.. In other words MS office.

- specialist job related apps. Graphics for the creatives, IDEs for the techies, and so on.

Now it is probably true to say that actually all these applications are fully mature. There is no NEED to develop them beyond bug fixes. And that is why millions of copies of XP are still running with a 7 year old office suite or later, and running old and still very usable versions of mature specialist apps. Its good enough.

In short, in the corporate marketplace, computerisation has at the applications level reached full maturity. There is no need for more 'features'.

Likewise the hardware has reached a plateau.

Students of marketing theory realise this is symptomatic of when a given market sector moves from 'rising star' to 'cash cow' phase, and then perhaps even beyond it to a 'maintenance replacement and support ' phase.

Corporate buyers are ultimately driven by ROI. If buying this years PC with this years MS offering offers nothing they can't do on XP, they will stay with XP until the hardware gasps and dies. I am still running an ageing copy of XP in a VM together with three Windows apps, all equally venerable, simply because they are GOOD ENOUGH for my needs.

And money is tight.

This is I think the key to understanding the issues that face Microsoft. The hardware and the software is mature, in the corporate environment. There are no more productivity gains to be had. My brother in law who manages big IT transitions, says that the activity is overwhelmingly happening in the server room,. where multiple divisional servers are now virtual machines in a few large blade type platforms. and the new server side apps are Linux based.

Microsft and windows have to transition from a 'more sales every year, guaranteed' to a 'fewer sales every year, and replacement and support' mentality.

Or find a new pond. They are too late to dominate the new consumer devices and there is no new pond in corporate sales, or its shifted in emphasis from machines on desktops to network and server technology - an area they have always been weak in anyway.

That is Microsoft has done the job we wanted it to do and needed it to do: provided a standardised operating system interface on cheap hardware to allow the proliferation of single user applications throughout business. Thanks, but now that's done we don't actually need them to do it any more.

They are sitting on a cash pile of epic proportions, but they have nothing left to spend it on.

If I were they, I'd be buying back shares as fast as possible and getting ready to privatise the thing in order to be able to take it in a new risky direction, if that's what the directors wanted.

Otherwise what faces Microsoft is a slow decline in significance until its basically broken up and sold for scrap as is the fate of so many players in the game.

Re: What the Phone/Tablet numberts show

Conversely if its expensive crap it won't sell at all.

Re: The issues is the future

And not only are they apart from the Xbox a pure enterprise player, but enterprises themselves are moving away from desktops a lot too, with portable devices and cloud servers offering the corporate platforms.

I make a point when i go into a bank, or an office, to notice not what operating system the back office are using, but what they are doing with it. spreadsheets, word processing, the odd custom application that is dedicated to their business usually written for windows, BUT which could actually be written for javascript/HTML just as easily against a web interfaced server... or even delivered as a full 'cloud' service.

I note that old bastion of the PC, Sage accounts, now offers an online package...

Oh it wont be rapid collapse, just the death of a thousand cuts..And the tablet/smart phone revolution has put the idea in the minds of everybody who isn't especially tech savvy that there is a world beyond MIcrosoft, and when you come to sell a desktop system based on Linux, you will merely have to say 'oh, its the same as Android really' and suddenly everyone will relax...

Re: "Windows phone = loser"?

"Until they accept they no longer a monopoly and the market is swimming away from them and that its now MS that are the small fish in a big pond they will never regain respect or a decent share at the middle and top end."

If I were to search for a definition of Microsoft's woes I could not better that sentence.

Way back when CP/M was king, and PC-DOS was a POS that survived solely because IBM put its weight behind it, Microsoft was a lean unethical marketing company, hungry for financial success and able to use aggressive marketing tactics in a world infested my naive techies, such as myself.

But that was decades ago.. Having achieved a de facto monopoly of operating systems in the desktop arena, Microsoft entirely forgot how it had done that thing, and its failure to diversify away from that market apart from the X box marks both the secret of its success and its ultimate likelihood of failure.

It hasn't got the creative genius of an apple, the dedicated engineering expertise to churn out volume low cost hardware,, nor the courage to abandon its 'windows;' brand and embrace android.

Nor yet the courage that Apple showed when OS-X was introduced, based firmly on a *nix core. A move which invalidated all of its legacy OS9 software at a stroke.

Now it has found a market in which it was not the early mover, but late to the game. It cannot respond, because it has none of the tools to respond with. Its tools are those of a dominant organisation crushing inferior competition, not those to do battle with a superiors and established player, like android or IOS.

Users don't want desktop PCS much any more. Tablets don't do word processing or spreadsheets - the applications that arguably drove the PC onto the corporate desktop. Dedicated consoles drive the games. And the internet IS the operating system now. A browser and a mail client and a half a dozen other net enabled apps don't care what operating system they have. The internet protocols become the new API for app develoepers, not the operatings system.

Linux and android are free of license by and large, adequate to the job in hand, so who needs Microsoft?

A dwindling number of corporate desktops that actually do more than read data and add a very small content to it.

And how long before the applications they run are 'cloud services' rather than loadable pieces of software? at which point the desktop workstation operating system also becomes supremely irrelevant?

Or the code writers start to get together and say 'well actually, if we pick a single Linux distribution, and port our applications to that we can still make money out of the application, even if Microsoft doesn't'?

Windows has long been an operating system nobody really WANTED, it was just that they had no choice if they wanted to write word documents and power point shows, or use a spreadsheet...or run some heavyweight desktop application.

Now increasingly they don't want any of these things, they have realised that not only do they not really want Windows, they don't actually need it either.

The moment a PC vendor or a big apps company breaks ranks and offers a Linux version either a basic workstation or of Corel, Photoshop, Quark, Autocad, Solidworks*...is the moment that Microsoft's whole existing business model really starts to collapse, not just decline.

Because inertia and the 'de facto office suite' are simply not enough to justify spending money with Microsoft when Linux is cheaper and Libre Office is arguably as good as, if not better.

*these merely being examples of heavyweight apps that the author knows need windows or OS-X to run on. Readers will know of others.