Posts by OffBeatMammal

wow. the ad server discovers it's hard to run a real business

I just feel sorry for business that believed the ads sold by the ad serving company and switched from something reliable, robust and enterprise capable, like, oh Notes or Exchange, and trusted their communications and documents to this.

Remember a while ago a company (now part of Oracle) claimed "The Network is the Computer" but everyone laughed because the network sometimes is offline. Looks like Google didn't dig into their cache and learn from history.

The Cloud is a nice place but only if I have a local cache to work on when I can't see the sky

Is this about Android, or Sense on top of Android?

the article doesn't specifically mention Android as being where the patent lies. Remember HTC create theor own software - Sense for the UI (on both WinMo and Android powered phones) as well as other add-ons

rather than assume this is MS attacking Android perhaps this is about features/funtionality in Sense (Exchange Sync for instance)

Lost

wonder what the flight number was...

Navizon and Skyhook

both Navizon and Skyhook do this already, and commercialize the database purely for geolookup

I guess if you subscribed to their service, knew a SSID or MAC address you could request the location - assuming their peer-to-peer war-driving efforts had found it

maybe Going Google wasn't a good idea

so, after running ad campaigns encouraging users to "go google" to avoid service interruptions, lost documents etc.... Google have a series of service interruptions and then start degrading or removing functionality.

I don't know about you but I don't live in a world of always-on, high speed internet so I like to have a local copy of a doc I can work with on my notebook.

Imagine. There you are at 45,000 feet (or on a train in a tunnel, or an old school cafe with no wifi). You want to check where your next meeting is, or reply to that urgent email or finish a presentation.

Option 1/ You fire up Microsoft Office, use Outlook to check your calendar, compose a witty and well worded response to the email and file it in the outbox to send as soon as you have connectivity and put the final polish on the presentation you're giving in an hour

Option 2/ You stare at the "connecting" screen for a minute, realise that you're screwed and play patience until you can get a connection to the borg again

For all that Google likes to pretend it's the new Sun (all but claiming "The Network is the Computer" I think we're a way off that reality

wonder what they'll charge

for lugguage...

not just iPads and iPhones...

my Mac Book Pro has similar issues. When it works... it's rock solid but sometimes getting it to try and reconnect in Starbucks to their WiFi (either in OSX or Bootcamp'd into Win7) requires toggling wifi on and off.... and it sometimes drops what seemed to be a perfectly good connection

(BTW the Mac Book Pro is a pretty awesome Win7 machine after some additional keyboard remapping)

destroy "un-free" software

so, um, how do developers working on writing the apps that hold the world together feed their families?

was that a camera or a smartphone review? :)

okay, so a full page given over to photos and no word about if it supports full Exchange sync (calendar, contacts and email, security policies etc) or what the real world battery life is like.

looks like a really nice device though

next generation Polar devices?

I notice this bears more than a passing resemblance to my Polar FT80 ("training computer" aka heart rate monitor connected watch)... with the addition of built in RF (rather than the NFC that Polar use with a dongle) and accelerometers (for pedometer? inertial mapping?) this could make an interestign next generation device

don't forget the user interface

sadly most corporate UC solutions fail to offer the same user experience or capabilities of typical consumer products... so are not especially compelling for non-deskbound workers anyway.

Skype for instance offers a pure VoIP client that (used to) run on a wide range of cellphones. It offers video calling and Outlook integration

Digsby supports cross platform/service IM and Video

Google Voice, Ribbit or Line2 offer proper VoIP on mobile, call forwarding, hunt groups, automated (though sometimes laughable) speech to text message taking

Apple - with the iPhone - proved very clearly that an Enterprise solution today needs to take a long hard look at the user experience before simply mandating technology that looks good on paper otherwise you'll end up with work-arounds and departmental deviations that will just cause trouble down the line.

In some cases that means Skype or similar is a better fit than an Enterprise UC product ... so those vendors need to lift their game and quickly if they want to justify their price point

better than HP support forums

at least MSI admit to manning theirs and interact with customers.

HP seem to think that a "f--k you" is the best way to deal with consumer support (marignally better for corporate contracted support) - http://bit.ly/HPSupport

sad now

I was in Vegas last week (for the MIX conference) and didn't go on said balloon ride... thought... Oh, I'll be back in a month or so and make some time then.

now... I can't :(

I blame global warming. If it happened in Cardiff I could have blamed the rift but I didn't see a TARDIS either

I use Bing to google the web

I've been using Bing as my default choice when I want to google, sorry, search the intertubes for something.

On the whole I find it to be much less spammy than the monolithic upstart - more of the results I get are for real content not rubbish re-post and serve some ads sites.

annoyingly there seem to be a bunch of hard to discover options in queries to make Bing even better but MS are not very good at making them visible

wow - BT is stone age

gosh. while I'm not a huge fan of many things here in America the options around the phone systems are a lot better.

I can do things like block (with a message) any number withheld caller, and selectively route callers based on caller id and time of day to voicemail or another number

For instance at home we have

- all withheld numbers blocked

- any call between 10pm and 7am routed to voicemail

- override for the wife, daughter and our parents to get through any time

how much money has been flushed down the crapper?

.... while people are actually ill and dying

Oh, and the money came from taxpayers not found under some mystical rainbow

where the f--k is the outrage that should accompany this? the serious papers up in arms and the TV exposes?

Why not just hand the whole patient records thing off to Microsoft Health Vault and pay a fraction of that to deploy and spend some real money on nurses?

shame really.

I liked SpinVox and found a lot of their implementation better than Google Voice.

Sure, they may have been cheating a little on transcriptions and having humans do it but for formatting and delivery of text notifications of voicemails was far superiour to the Mountain View efforts.

Oh well. Google continues to grow at the expense of quality... but at least it's free (as long as you don't mind them knowing even more about you)

seeing that Aus has outsourced everything else....

... that they used to make to China they now need to stake a claim on what little of the Interwebs the Government will allow them to see to maintain a foreign trade balance

Much as I love the country... this is just another dumb move

accident or test?

hmmm.... wonder if they sell more or less of their security bloatware because of this accidental slip....

"well, we obviously knew about the problem so if you were a customer you'd be protected anyway..."

stop with the 600px high screens already

600px == too much damn scrolling and dialogue boxes that assume >= 720px high screens become unusable.

Let's draw a line under it here and now. The damn iPad can have the 600px market to itself because apps really are written for it, but .... just try using anything on one of these piddly screens and drive yourself mad. Even Farmville doesn't fit properly!

Oh, and the next "modern" machine I see with a modem needs to go in the blender - waste of space and power

Dead, but still owns 20% of the market

I think the wailing and gnashing off teeth may be premature.

IE6 is still tracking at 20% of the install base (just behind IE8, and ten times the market share of Opera!)

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2

Where is the fourth estate?

not picking on El Reg - because they don't seem to have a political axe to grind - most of the press these days are aligned to one or other of the viewpoints and simply churn out predictable stories with the relevant bias.

Back in the day it was the role of the press to actually act as a collective voice and memory - to quote an Australian media outlet "keeping the b@stards honest"

Living in the US these days I just have to look at the alignment of Fox and CNN to the two political parties and the total lack of independant thought questioning the constant trough grubbing that happens here and I fear for what Britain will become

how hard is it...

.... to just take the LCD off a Netbook and call it done?

why would they do this?

I'm really confused by this. I've been happily using Skype for a year or more on my WM phone with no issues (I use a bluetooth headset anyway). Luckily it still works but the moment I have to hard reset my phone I'm stuffed.

So... looking for an alternative