Posts by Richard Plinston

Re: Is this now the W8-one; or still the ARM?

> Or do we still talk the Windows-on-ARM debacle?

Windows on ARM succeeded in its primary task though it has failed as a product (RT).

Its primary task was to stop OEMs selling ARM devices with other OSes on them by creating a threat to the 'loyalty' discount on _all_ products. It worked for HP and WebOS.

However, now that RT failed HP has moved to Android for its tablets.

Re: Barking mad?

> What is the market - photographers who need a phone (and are prepared to put up with an appaling shape and bulk for no good photographic effect)

This is not a phone, it does not have an earpiece and mouth mic. It is a full size camera that has connectivity via WiFi and cell network, and the ability to be programmed. The fact that is can run phone apps and skype is irrelevant but may be marginally useful.

The communication and apps will make it able to be remotely controlled and will be able to directly and immediately upload to PC or an internet site. Phone users that take snaps may find it difficult to imagine why this would be useful but professional and semi-pro will understand.

I have a Panasonic FX-90 with WiFi (one of several Panasonics that can do this) that I can put up a tree and use my phone or tablet to control it from a comfortable position. No more hides up trees to get bird photographs. I can set it so that portrait photos are immediately shown on my PC or even a TV so that they can be evaluated on a large screen and retaken if necessary.

I have Canon that can be programmed using Basic or Lua thanks to CDHK. It can be programmed to do time-lapse, focus stepping, movement detection and dozens of other things.

This Android camera should be able to do all of that and more.

> there are loads of 808 photos on the Web. Why imagine what the picture quality might be like when it's so trivially easy to check?

The 1020 has a different sensor (smaller) a different lens (smaller) different processing hardware and different software.

Do try and follow what is going on.

Re: @AC 11 Jul 2013 10:45

> "I wouldn't recommend cloudy service to *anyone*." The use of the word "anyone" in this context is an absolute which might lead a reader to believe your opinion is that nobody should use cloud services.

His action was 'recommending'. 'Not recommending' is not the same as 'recommending not'.

Re: Disconnect between Redmond and Real World "cannot continue"?!

> But more and more will catch up with Redmond

Redmond has decided that 'the future' for them will be a one place market for hardware and software, subscriptions and accounts.

In the past Microsoft's customers have been OEMs and retail outlets. The users have not been customers of MS but of the likes of Dell and Best Buy. Microsoft's business model is based on increasing revenues and profits. They take over other business areas as these become profitable so as to be ever increasing in revenue. From the original languages and PC OS they moved into office software, servers, phones (WM), games consoles, and many other.

Now with PCs stagnating and MS's mobile not working they need to take revenue from others to boost their own. They are trying with Surface to take some OEM revenue, with Windows Store software to take revenue from application developers and retail. With Microsoft Shops to take it from retailers, with accounts to lock in revenue from users.

I believe that they have had plans to build their own XPC for some years but could not make the transition work well enough. They want to become more Apple like with more control over their users and a bigger proportion of the computer revenue.

TIFKAM was added to Windows 8 because consultants reported that WP7 was not selling due to unfamiliarity with the UI. The 'solution' was to make it the most familiar by forcing it down the throats of the users. Once they depend on it they will buy, nay demand, WP8 phones and WinRT tablets and fulfill Gartner's prediction of being bigger in mobile than Apple by 2013.

The future, as seen by MS, is that most computer, phone and tablet sales and software sales will be through Microsoft directly. Users will be tied by subscription contracts for the OS and Office 360 and their data and documents will be held for ransom in the clouds and in new incompatible file system formats on the servers.

Sensible businesses will live in the past and not move beyond 2008 and Windows 7. 'The future' is a place where there will be no escape.

Re: I want to say something new...

> I've invested a lot of money ...

I hate to disappoint you but that was not an 'investment' but was merely a cost.

Re: If car manufacturers were to do the same...

> There was a time when a competent person could do the maintenance

There was a time when an owner _HAD_TO_ do the maintenance

With my first car (admittedly nearly 30 years old when I got it) I sometimes had to pull the pistons out and get replacement white metal bearings cast onto the big ends. With others I got quite good at balancing twin SUs.

The car I recently gave to my son I had used for 11 years without much more than new tires and brake pads, plus the occasional oil change.

Much the same with computers. One that I work on has an uptime of 829 days because that was the day it was installed (but it isn't Windows).

Re: I think Apple owns Unix now anyway @lars

> Version 7 and earlier code has, since 2002, been published under GPLv2, granted by Caldera

It is also likely that 32v (the port to VAX) is in the public domain.

> BSD/Lite or later does not contain any AT&T code (or at least nothing that AT&T were prepared to contest)

USL were contesting that but when Novell bought USL outright it settled and agreed that it would not contest BSD after certain conditions were met.

But the real point is that Unix probably does contain code written at Berkeley - as well as code written and contributed by many other parties. The likelihood is that there are no protectable copyrights in Unix at least to the point where Novel sold the Unixware business to SCO.

Re: I think Apple owns Unix now anyway @peredur

You seem to have managed to get everything wrong.

> Yes Unix is a trademark but AIX or Solaris or HP-UX are not called Unix

> as nobody wanted to pay for the name and it was not necessary either.

From opengroup.org:

"""NEW UNIX 03 CERTIFICATION FOR IBM Corporation

We are very pleased to announce that on September 1, 2006,

IBM registered the following system as conforming

to the UNIX 03 Product Standard.

-- AIX 5L for POWER V5.3 dated 7-2006 or later

on systems using CHRP system architecture with

POWER(tm) processors"""

From Oracle.com:

"""Oracle Solaris 11

The First Cloud OS

Brings the reliability, security and scalability of the #1 UNIX OS to the enterprise cloud ..."""

They do 'pay for the name', and use it.

> AIX was written from scratch

Completely untrue. IBM had a licence from AT&T for AIX and paid royalties on every copy _because_ it was based on SVRx. Later they bought a 'fully paid up and perpetual licence' so that they no longer need to pay royalties. It was this licence that SCO attempted to cancel.

> No copied code was found within Linux and SCO left that claim years ago.

Not true. There is code within Linux that is similar, or even the same, as code within Unix. This is because they both have code from BSD (which is perfectly legitimate).

Re: Killing Linux

> SCO managed to kill off Caldera Open Linux

After Caldera purchased Unix (and UnixWare and OpenServer) from SCO they renamed themselves The SCO Group and sometime later ceased distribution their Linux distros. But software they wrote for Linux still continues.

Re: Oh you gotta be kidding....

> What?

Berkley started with an early AT&T Unix and contributed lots of code back into Unix. Later they created their own distribution.

"""Though these proprietary BSD derivatives were largely superseded by the UNIX System V Release 4 and OSF/1 systems in the 1990s (both of which incorporated BSD code and are the basis of other modern Unix systems), ..."""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution

Re: Oh you gotta be kidding....

> Hurdle No. 1: SCO does not own the copyright to Unix, Novell owns it.

That is rather simplistic and actually wrong. It is true that no copyrights transferred from Novell to SCO at the time of the sale. Since then any original lines of code written by SCO would probably be their copyright. Whether Novell actually has any protectable copyrights in Unix has not been addressed. The original Unixes are likely to no longer have any copyright due to lack of registering, at least one version was put in the public domain. Over the years there have been many contributions from hundreds of different parties who may have retained copyright on their code, or have licenced it in ways that allow usage. Determining the state of those is just not practical.

Re: Good to hear

> Windows Server has about 75% market share

The measurement of this share is by value (or cost to the buyers) of sales for machines built and installed with a 'server' OS, and of server OS sold without hardware. Windows servers on the same hardware will be thousands of dollars more than, say, CentOS.

Many large server farms will build their own racks and may even have their own Linux distro, this won't show up in the 'market share' as it hasn't been bought through the 'market'.

The best figures of numbers of servers shows that each of Linux, Unix and Windows has about 1/3.

Re: Nokia, WIndows and Android

> [Android] licensees are forbidden from replacing it (you can put something else on the phone as an app, but you can't replace it). In the same way, Internet Explorer was not essential to running the Windows OS, and yet licensees were forbidden from replacing it.

Windows OEMs _were_ forbidden to add another browser.

> Microsoft and Nokia were able to create an arrangement that benefited both;

It seems to have benefited neither. Nokia smartphone division is running at a loss and WP7/8 has not driven Apple into bankruptcy yet.

Another option that Nokia had was to follow the N9 with more of the same, complete Metemi for lower cost phones and possibly add Dalvik to both (as Blueberry has done).

Re: Google apps optional

> Nokia isn't locked to Windows Phone, they have other OSes, just not Android.

They have considerably fewer OSes after Microsoft paid them a billion dollars:

Maemo, Meego, Meltemi are gone. Symbian was strangled and but for the 808 has been killed. The only survivor is S40 in the Asha range and probably only because it is really a 'featurephone' rather than a 'smartphone' so can avoid the contractural killing by MS yet it boosts the 'smartphone' sales numbers so people think that WP8 is selling better than it really is.

Re: EOS

> using the same name would seem to conflict

I am still wondering why Panasonic have sued over LUMIA being almost identical to LUMIX. The Pansonic name is used for both cameras and phones.

Re: To be fair to MS...

> LibreOffice vs OpenOffice - no winners due to diluted development.

Actually not. Developments in either could be included in the other. They can be somewhat competitive in trying to outdo each other and that is a good thing, but in the end the code is available.

Same with desktop environments. It doesn't matter which one I use because applications will run in any of them (given I load the required libraries from the distro).

With, say, MacOS vs. Windows the choice must be made and stuck with. With KDE, Mint, LXDE, I can switch between them and not worry.

Re: The better solution would have been

> Still better solution would be to do hardware-assisted emulation of x86 on ARM-based device, like MS did with Z80 SoftCard.

The Z80 Softcard was not an emulation, it was a full real Z80 with its own RAM running CP/M, it just happened to use the Apple II case, keyboard and disks.

> They could design simple x86 coprocessor to share the same die with ARM cores and turn x86 coprocessor when it's not actively used.

Who is the 'they' ? I doubt that Intel would care to do this. AMD might, VIA perhaps. But I think that you are entirely optimistic because the OS would also need to run full x86 API on the x86 and RT has had much of this removed. It would probably have to run a complete Windows 8 _and_ Windows RT and the x86 would need to be as powerful (and costly) as the Surface Pro.

Re: iPad Linux

> The bundled MS Office license is the killer app for RT

Certainly _something_ killed RT ;-)

On RT Office is not the full x86 Office, it lacks some features. It is for personal use only, any business or commercial use requires a licence to be purchased. It will also require a keyboard for effective use.

> Without that license, the cost of an RT tablet could get low enough ...

You are mistaken if you think that you could subtract the shop price of Office from the price of a Surface RT to make it 'low enough'. The actual proportion of the OEM cost for RT to cover the supplied Office would be a small number of dollars, 30 perhaps.

> for installing Linux on it.

Surface RT (and all ARM RT tablets AFAIK) have 'Secure Boot' without the option to turn it off - deliberately so that Linux _cannot_ be loaded.

Re: As I understand it

> when you needed to do some serious work you clicked on the "Windows desktop" icon ...

The failure of that is: when you needed to do some serious work you attach the keyboard and find a nice flat surface on which to place the machine and then ...

Windows 'legacy' software, the stuff that does serious work, is designed around using a largish screen, keyboard and mouse. A 10inch screen with touch is completely inadequate, mainly because fingers are much bigger than a mouse pointer and the programs don't know that they should get their inputs out from under the on-screen keyboard.

And now they want to halve the screen area with a 7inch ? Will that have a 7inch keyboard or one that won't fit in your pocket ?

Re: Why RT

> the point is not to sell ARM machines but to try and stop others selling ARM machines.

It worked perfectly on HP ... for a while, HP are now seeing that the customers want Android not WebOS or RT.

Re: Redirecting V1s

> V1s are, apparently, somewhat rare. There is one mounted on a pedestal outside of the courthouse in Greencastle, Indiana, USA:

Is that an actual Fiesler Fi 103 'V1' or the American copy: the Republic Aviation-Ford JB-2 'Loon' which was built as an almost exact copy of the V1 after receiving crashed examples. 1,391 were made in America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic%E2%80%90Ford_JB%E2%80%902