Posts by Giles Jones 2536 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Dec 2006
Apple won't compromise too much on performance. While the original Air wasn't a powerhouse, the CPU was at least custom made by Intel for the Air.
Apple using Intel is a big thing for Intel and so they're keen to help Apple when designing an ultra portable with rather challenging size constraints.
They won't do a 'netbook' simply because netbooks are cheap and poor quality on the whole and Jobs has maligned them in the past.
Oh come on. Apple has the product iPod. People are sticking Pod on the end of product names to cash in.
If Microsoft can stop people using anything that sounds or looks like Windows, then Apple can surely do the same too for their trademarks.
Microsoft stopped a Linux distribution being called Lindows and that is a different word and a made up one at that.
Nobody buys shares for the dividends. They buy them cheap and sell them at as close to their peak as they can get. Then buy something else and repeat the process.
Microsoft only started paying dividends to get people to buy their shares. They're having to increase their dividend to attract more investors.
So lack of dividend suggest confidence as you're not trying to provide incentives for buying your shares.
We need decent standards that everyone adheres to, All in one is not the solution.
When putting together the best seperates hifi it was always the case that you really needed to buy from different makes to get the best sound. Not every brand did everything well.
Having standard connections and interfaces made this possible.
In IT there are standards, but there are plenty of people who won't stick to them. They have to contribute some of their own ideas that aren't in the original standard.
Obviously Microsoft are one of the people who just can't stick to a standard, there's just too many examples to list.
Is it really so hard to come up with good network protocols that everyone can implement and enjoy?
FTP, HTTP, SMTP, DNS and so on are all well known network standards and protocols. Why can the Internet have such great connectivity but when you connect to a LAN it all goes proprietary and inoperable?
At least this PM can use a computer.
Blair was famously technophobic, probably why so many government websites were IE only to start with, no clue of how to implement web access for all. He just asked the most famous person in IT he could think of for help.
So obviously if you ask Bill Gates to come over and advise on web sites, obviously you're going to end up with Windows/IE only websites.
Many people judge audio quality using the stock headphones which are pretty rubbish.
If you're bothered about sound quality then you'd not listen to MP3. Lossless AAC or FLAC would be better.
Advances in sound quality went out years ago anyway. People have generally decided they prefer convenience to quality. Being able to have gigs of audio on tap in a small device is much more desirable than lugging around a CD player and CDs.
Not to mention being able to purchase music on the device and have it download (on smartphones anyway).
Super audio CD and DVD Audio never took off, even though they would have offered 24-bit 96Khz playback (even 192Khz), which is on average what people record their music at.
Seems pretty crazy that blu-ray films have better audio quality now than dedicated music players.
Blu-ray can do 16, 20 or 24-bit range with 6 channels at 192KHz sample rate, 8 channel at 96KHz or 48KHz sample rate.
So even the lowest quality Blu-ray audio specification (16-bit 48KHz) is in excess of CD which is 16-bit 44.1KHz.
Christ, some companies have really poor support and call centre staff who can take anything up to 20 minutes to pick up the phone and she moans when an email to the CEO doesn't produce the results? She is lucky to get a reply at all. He could have ignored or deleted it.
Exactly, using back-doors or using a list of default PINs is not hacking. Hacking is circumventing security. So if you enter the correct password you're not hacking. Hacking would be gaining access without entering any password.
I guess technically if they were brute forcing the pin by going through all the possible combinations then that would be comparable to picking a lock.
As people always say (especially when privacy is invaded) you've nothing to fear if you're law abiding.
I've seen plenty of announcements for competing devices and they seem to suffer from one or more of these problems:
1. They're really cheap and have very low quality.
2. They have 7 inch screens, too small.
3. They have an x86 processor and run Windows 7 (poor battery life, poor touch screen usability, slow start up times).
Only an Android tablet with 10 inch screen and decent build quality can be called a competing product. Everything else is designed by people who have missed the whole point of a tablet computer.
As for phone calls on a tablet, who seriously wants that? are you really going to keep swapping your SIM card over from your phone to a tablet and then back again. You're not going to go into a nightclub or office and take calls on your tablet, you'll look like a right geek.
Sales and marketing people aren't very good at demonstrating how simple and nice to use something is. They want to talk about features and how product X has a feature that the competitors product doesn't.
Also, companies that listen too much to customers end up adding lots of spurious features and buttons that just clutter up the product. What use are features that ruin usability and are only used by a minority?
Take Microsoft Office for instance, it should come in two versions. Home and beginner edition and Professional edition. That way the interface for Home and beginners can be stripped back to the basics. I wouldn't mind using that version myself as there's way too much clutter in Word.
But of course, some people are obsessed with features and having what the pros use, so they would end up buying the pro version.
I think the transputer was more akin to what the Cell processor is.
It was way ahead of its time and was solving a problem which in the end didn't appear. Early 32-bit processors weren't delivering the speed gains that chip designers had hoped for. But eventually the speeds picked up.
We've a long history of doing great things in this country, they either flop or get sold to the Americans. It's pretty amazing the ARM processor is such a success, although Intel are trying to kill it with their low power x86 chips.
Development costs money.
Not to mention having to develop the hardware around all the patents Nintendo and others have on the motion technology. This is why the Go looks so ridiculous.
I suppose you think a CD should be 2p since that's all it costs to make? but forgetting wages, recording costs, promotion costs, wages for everyone involved and so on.
The study of efficient user interfaces is called Human Computer Interaction. I'm guessing Microsoft feels that their users aren't human?
Anyway, once you've designed the perfect UI the sales people will be begging you to change it all so they have something to sell. Even if it means ruining it all, the fixes to usability can be in the next release then.
I do wonder why they do so much work on the browser, just when they've started to fix all the bugs and security holes they introduce more code to exploit.
It's funny, since USB3 is a big pile of CPU hogging rubbish compared to Firewire, yet when people talk about proper DMA controllers and doing things correctly they get shot down on here.
Most PC clone hardware is cheap mass produced junk. Most motherboards still have a BIOS that should have been consigned to the dustbin when PnP came out.
By buying the CD you are buying a licence to listen to it. There is a growing trend now (in software) for non-transferable licences. Autocad is one of these, you are no longer allowed to sell on an original copy of Autocad to someone else.
I don't think DVDs, CDs and so on are going to be that far behind. The second hand market will die and people will get shafted.
As a previous owner of a 9110 and 9210 I think this just looks dated and way behind everything out there now. The GUI animations looked slow and unhelpful.
I got my 9210 in 2002 and this shows very little development for 8 years.
White text on a black background looks poor and unclear from a HCI perspective. How can you tell what is clickable and what isn't?
Email client looked dull, messaging app looked dull.
HTC are Taiwanese, not Chinese. There is a slight difference.
As for the phones. I drew a mock up of what a device with a 4.3" screen would look like in terms of footprint and it was huge.
There's plenty of people who think an iPhone is too big. A HTC Desire HD will be un-pocketable for some,
Also, I feel sorry for all the Desire owners. As is typical for HTC your phone is now obsolete and won't get any big updates.
Probably because HTML 5 is more than just video.
Have a look at CSS animation, it basically allows for CSS values to be altered over time. So the browser is continually rendering the page.
Of course there will be few sites that are using this and if anything people are more likely to only add support for it if it works well in Firefox and IE.
I keep hearing how bits of hardware will revolutionise the computer world, but it's largely untrue.
These are just minor iterations and speed increases. In effect it's just comparable to the day they added an FPU into a processor.
The addition of an FPU made certain operations faster, but unless you were a ray tracer you probably didn't notice. The processors were that slow back then (25Mhz) that a dedicated floating point unit made sense. Processors are much faster now.
So will a GPU inside a CPU really make that much difference? maybe it will be cheaper. A single fan for the CPU and GPU. But what about multiple displays and dual cards linked for performance?
I think the only revolutions are in computer form factor and software. The hardware used is largely secondary.
I keep hearing that Microsoft brought the computer to the common man. But look back to the early 1990s. A Wintel box was running Windows 3.11 and cost many times the price of an Atari ST or an Amiga. I found a price list from about 1997 listing a PC for about £1399.
So if anything, Microsoft killed off the cheaper friendlier and more reliable home computers. Later on in the decade people started to want the computer at home that they used at work, mainly because they were new to computing and wanted to practice or improve their skills.
It's funny how things change though as some people now are so sick of what they use at work that they buy a Mac or use Linux. I've heard it at my office quite a bit, "when my laptop dies I'm getting a Mac".
It's pretty annoying how some of these giant companies pay their top brass so much when all they do is copy what others do.
If another company moves their call centres abroad then they all follow suit as it is seen as staying competitive.
Did they not realise that poor customer service and data security would suffer? so much for the "talent" that needs so much pay to be attracted to these management jobs.
In this country especially we have pedestrians who listen for traffic instead of looking for it. So the plugin in their earphones and then can't hear the traffic, but forget to look.
It's no use listening as there are fast cyclists and even electric cars around that make less noise.
The big problem with blu-ray is all the security and restrictions. You have to implement many things like resolution drop when not using HDCP. All manner of things to prevent copying.
In the end all these security options create instability, result in extra complexity and just annoy users.
Not to mention all the licence fees.
I have a HD TV but rarely watch any HD footage. I have a blu-ray player but find that there's bugger all I want to watch in HD.
Except that you can choose your browser, you can choose your search engine, you don't have to use Android. You don't have to use any Google products at all.
Go to a computer retailer and try to buy a computer (non-Mac) that doesn't have Windows on it. You won't be able to do so! This is why Microsoft is the monopoly and Google isn't.
Google are dominant in search, but there are plenty of alternatives and switching to an alternative is as simple as changing your homepage.
It's built into iTunes, therefore anyone with an iPod can join it by clicking a button.
There are a lot of iPod owners out there, lots of iPad and iPhone users too. So that's a lot of people with iTunes installed who can just click a button and use it.
As we've seen with Internet Explorer, if something is there and you don't have to do much to use it that many people will. With social networking you have all the hassle of signing up.
That said, I don't like the iTunes store navigation (which is what Ping uses), it's slow and a web version would be so much better.
What use is an accelerometer on a small mp3 player that you wear jogging, the screen would be spinning around all the time, wearing the battery down (transition fx use cpu power).
Plus if it is clipped to your clothing then you will want it upside down, so you look down and lift it up to look at the display.
Honestly, think a little before you are critical of something :)
Tablets are here to stay. It is a market that existed but nobody had approached it right.
Technophobes can use an iPad or similar tablet as they are very simple to use.
There's usually no filemanager and more importantly no technical things to worry about like "format" functions, defrag and so on.
It's truly a device you could hand to a computer beginner and they would work out how to use it while not being able to destroy it too easily.
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