Posts by Giles Jones

Cry babies

It's the same old "whos phone do they think it is" yet people buy a PS3 or XBox 360 when they know damn well its locked down.

At least the iPhone app store has free software, you don't see free games for consoles.

Tacky

Looks tacky and vulgar with its gold trim. The combination of Microsoft, Armani and Samsung can't produce something attractive?

Apple manage to design a nice looking phone without needing fashion designers.

128-bit

128-bit support could be anything from bus width to data types (128-bit floating point).

Personally 32-bit Windows runs fast enough, Microsoft just needs to work on keeping Windows running fast and not slowing down as the cruft builds up. Windows is a very messy OS and needs too much maintenance, it's like a messy child.

Weird imagery

Seems like the fashion world are keen to promote images where the body is that of an adult but the body is that of an adolescent.

@ A/C Elephant room?

>So is SQL server worse than MYSQL? I think not.

You're comparing the wrong products, compare the consumer database product to MYSQL and yes the MYSQL product is better. Microsoft Access is awful.

>You see (and I was an Atari fan boy well until 98 came out). Without MS we'd

>a) either be using Mac's costing £5000 or be stuck in Unix CMD line hell.

Don't you remember OS2 Warp? it did proper pre-emptive multi tasking and was much nicer than Windows.

IBM were seen as the monopoly early on, hence Apple's '1984' style advert directed by Ridley Scott.

Eh?

Putting FreeBSD kernel into Debian?

Surely it is easier to put APT and their installer into FreeBSD?

@It all makes perfect sense #

>Clearly the speed limit for my car should be a bit more than the 4x4

There's some sense in the argument for limiting 4x4s more than other vehicles. Especially when these are the sort of vehicles we need to slow down and they're just the right width to roll over speed bumps.

Personally I'm up for the idea of variable speed limits on the motorways (up to 100mph) but making most other roads 40mph.

Not here

I have one home built computer and that runs Linux (Mythbuntu).

There's nothing I really need Windows for. I could probably limp along on Linux to be honest, but OSX is an easier life than either.

Yaaaay

12mp camera, except half of the pixels will be chroma and luma noise.

Once you've scaled the image down to SVGA resolution for Facebook you'll probably wonder why you even bothered with 12mp.

@Superfail!

You are missing the point, it's a tiny little player for jogging and the like. Are you really going to faff with a screen and buttons when running along? maybe if you like treading in dog dirt, running into lampposts or getting run over.

Immature networks

Don't forget in the US that GSM style networks are still a pretty new thing. So 3G isn't really that mature over there.

Why the fuss?

Are you telling me this isn't possible on Windows Mobile or Android?

All the major smartphone OSes apart from Symbian allow this:

Windows Mobile

http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2004/11/28/271110.aspx

Android:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/TelephonyManager.html#getLine1Number

@Apples and Oranges?

You're forgetting something, the competition tried to beat the iPod but guess what? when any mp3 player is being tested the iPod is still the benchmark.

Sure, plenty of other players have more features, many of them sound better but where is the alternative mp3 player that has an established hugely popular application store?

One store gives you TV and movies (purchase and rental), lots of useful applications and games, plus lots of music. Nobody else has the same amount of selection in a easy to use package.

Even if you don't buy anything or download anything, you still have an music and media player that is one of the best to use.

Apple won't roll over and let Orange ruin the iPhone, I suspect the reason Orange took so long to get the iPhone was due to Apple holding out on them until they agreed not to mess with the software.

It's about time someone stood up to the greedy mobile operators.

Multi gesture

It's a terrible bit of marketing to market a multiple gesture phone as multitouch.

TouchFlo

The fact that TouchFlo causes problems all goes to show that mobile phone makers should not be allowed to mess around and add their own interfaces.

They've been doing it for years with WinMo, mainly because WinMo needed these extra hacks. But I always preferred a clean WinMo install for stability reasons.

Now they're screwing up Android instead.

I'll stick to the iPhone for now. Perhaps someone other than HTC can produce a stable Android phone?

Email doesn't change much.

Given the nature of email and the fact email technology doesn't change that quickly, why would anyone upgrade a working 2007 install to 2010? Ok there's some collab functionality like meeting requests, but 2007 has all that.

Sure, there's support and security fixes, but this sounds like Microsoft are forcing people to upgrade.

Can't they do anything right?

Microsoft seem to have their fingers in too many pies and just can't give people a simple life. Why have WinMo and another incompatible Zune OS? why buy a service, then disconnect many users of it?

Apple are control freaks but they give people the simplicity they desire.

Games consoles

Nobody seems to mind the locked down nature of games consoles. Why bitch about it when it is a phone?

At least you don't have to buy expensive specialist development hardware (well, if you're a Mac owner that is) to develop for the iPhone. Games consoles are another thing entirely.

There's no free open mobile OS

Except maybe OpenMoko but that hardly took the market by storm.

Google want it both ways, open source hype and commercial benefits. But it's hard to know where you stand with Google.

At least Microsoft's licence is pretty clear and you know that with Apple you have to tread carefully with your application.

Palm's best option

Palm should licence their OS to other makers. There simply isn't enough handsets with their OS on it around and they need a good number of users to get the OS established more.

They don't really have the fan base Apple have to make it a goer alone.

@Dangerous Driving

>As for the bleating of the two-wheeled-tards; once they start having to pass a test, paying >tax and insurance, then they can have an opinion. Until then they can shut up; they are >simply free-loading off everyone else.

What tax would you like us to pay? We pay the appropriate level of VED (vehicle exise dury) tax for the emissions we produce, ie. None!

Roads are funded from income tax and council tax. 'Road tax' as some of you drivers like to call it was abolished in the 1930s. Roads are not funded directly through VED, VED is a tax on the amount of CO2 your vehicle produces.

Insurance? why would we need it, it is more likely your car will destroy our bikes and you kill us and our bikes damage your car. Members of the CTC are automatically insured.

Anyway, non-motorists subside car drivers, simply because they pay for road construction and repair out of their taxes and don't use or cause wear to them. They are also not contributing to the traffic on the roads and therefore not contributing to the delays that cost industry billions each year in lost productivity!

Also, here's a thought, if you find congestion is a problem on the roads then the answer is simple, ration your car use! It's not rocket science!

You're the 'tard since you don't know the real facts!

Price

You compare the price of the camera to the EOS 1000D, yet the DSLR won't perform to its best unless you stick a good lens on it. So the DSLR price point is much higher than just the price of a body and a (very average) kit lens.

All about the adverts....

Both companies are so focussed on ad revenue and aren't providing a compelling reason to switch from Google to their search engine.

People use a search engine to find things, not to be fed adverts.

He's a criminal

But he's just exploiting poorly designed systems that make this possible.

They should be using these guys as consultants to make things more secure.

@Speaking as an inexperienced

Why? it is much easier to secure a Linux box with Apache than Windows with IIS.

There are server distributions which are hardened and there's plenty of advice on the net on hardening installations. A hardened install is not substitute for hardware protection, this should be the first line of defence.

With Windows you're stuck with the default state Microsoft ship Windows with.

Herbie

Did Disney ever produce Herbie toys? they're basically a VW Beetle. VW could have sued?

Of course the difference is the Herbie toy wasn't a drivable car.

Where are the Windows fan boys now?

Doesn't matter if it's Linux, Windows or OSX, all operating systems have flaws. Software is written by humans and humans make mistakes.

Simple reason why they don't understand..

Quite simply they have their heads up their own behinds and they have way too much belief in their products.

Ballmer bans his kids from using an iPod or iPhone, probably any other competitors product as well, PS3, Wii etc...

How on earth do you expect to learn anything if you never experience anything outside of your own product range?

Does he even try any of Microsoft's products? if he compared WM6 with an iPhone I'm pretty sure he would be fuming at how backwards it is.

@free

Anything copyrighted can still not be downloaded free legally unless the author has made the software available for download.

Of course, it can be hard to find the originals now and I would argue that sharing the games at least prevents them from disappearing due to bit rot.

The iPhone C64 emulator seems very lacking in games. I think the modplayer for the iPhone has the right idea, build in a web browser so you can download the files into the software.

Great choice of material

Why not use glass and maximise the fragility of the battery?

Java? big deal

How many times have you downloaded a rogue jar file and double clicked on it?

How often do you see Java applets on websites? facebook's photo uploader is about the only one I can think of.

Other operating systems aren't automatically updated with Java patches anyway. Apple supplies their own Java SDK as they tweak the look of Swing/AWT to look like a native application.

Many products supply old JVMs and don't automatically update. Oracle being one of them. Eclipse IDE and so on...

Tip for Microsoft

Concentrate on the product, a good product will sell with very little promotion.

It saves having to devise even more stupid ways of promoting your lame product.

Killer features?

Where are the killer features? video calls seem to be the only thing they have over the iPhone.

But given nobody has ever asked me to make a video call despite having owned handsets that have it, I don't see that it is much use.

Many businesses hate cameras on phones, they're even banned in some organisations. So having two cameras is even worse.

It's news

Why would they sack such a pathetically small amount given the bad PR it would generate?

Just shows they're desperate.

Flashblock

What kind of a berk lets flash run without permission anyway?

Install Flashblock plugin for Firefox, job done.

Once, just once in a while...

Could you do an OS comparison without mentioning any business applications?

Lets face it, if you want a business OS then you go for the dull clunky Windows platform and pay an array of tech support guys to keep the old banger going.

If you want to do anything creative, render 3D, edit video, write music, author a DVD or website then you will have less pain on a Mac.

If you could at least compare say Cubase on Windows 7 with Logic Studio on Snow Leopard then you might have a more useful comparison of how the OSes truly compare.

I'm pretty sure the out of box experience with Cubase on Windows 7 will be fun, lots of feature disabling, disabling services and tweaking the OS to make it run stable.

I've never had to tweak a single OS setting on OSX to use Logic. I even forgot I had a Linux install running in a VM in the background once.

OEMs

OEMs should not be able to install a single thing on the computer. The OS should be an unchanged version of Windows.

The only people who should dictate what the OS should have is the law makers of the country where the computer is sold.

At least with a Mac you don't get all these stupid wranglings over the default browser. Such bastardised OEM OS installs ruin the user experience.

Lazy

It's because people are too lazy to get out of their cars and discover the pleasures of walking and cycling.

Also because of the modern way of working where you simply can't buy a house near your workplace and work there for years and get a promotion. Instead you have to keep moving jobs to move up the ladder.

PC World

Having gone to the Wednesbury store on Monday it's no wonder PC World are struggling, the store was in disarray due to some refurbishment or something. Made the shopping experience rather difficult.

They sell Macs but no Mac software ?!? I certainly couldn't see Snow Leopard for sale, despite it being the current 'must have' for Mac owners.

Eye of Sauron

The Eye of Sauron is so firmly focussed on the web that it has been missing what has been going on in the mobile world.

Why it is Microsoft can't seem to produce multiple products at the same time?

IE, Zune and WinMo seem like pet projects that get started and neglected. In fact the Zune is probably for the chop.

It's a no-brainer that Microsoft should have build Zune on WinMo and updated the interface. They could have then sold the Zune and sold the OS to be used in phones. Of course the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.

Consoles

People buy and love games consoles, they have the same restrictions and approval process. Why is it a problem when you use a phone? (which is also subsidised).

Commercial business applications

Linux is fine for many things. But you will have a hard time convincing large organisations to switch if there are commercial Windows applications they rely upon to do their work.

@Mac....

Bog standard underpowered?

When Vista was first released a Macbook pro held the record for the highest performance rating.

http://gizmodo.com/317060/macbook-pro-is-the-fastest-windows-vista-notebook

The fact that the Mac doesn't use the crappy BIOS in PCs makes them different. Sure, the chips are all off the shelf parts but who in their right mind develops their own custom chips these days?

Apple has had chips designed for them, the CPU in the first Macbook Air was designed specifically for it. So you can't say anyone else was using that part.

@Looks Nice But

Where's Logic Studio, Aperture, Photoshop, Final Cut, Microsoft Office for Linux?

If you want professional quality applications in a no fuss, no glitch environment you use a Mac. If you can be bothered to tweak the hell out of Windows and put up with audio glitches then you can use Windows by all means.

If you want to spend most of your life debugging config problems, installing additional libraries and setting up property files then sure, use Linux for your professional creativity needs. But Linux on the desktop isn't much cop in terms of responsiveness.

I just want to run an application and work, not spend time figuring out why the audio keeps pausing or my MIDI keyboard isn't working. OSX gives me this. When I used Windows the applications would glitch or crash, I would then give up writing music for the evening as there's nothing more of a killer to creativity than losing some good work.

PCs

I've had the power supplies die on three PCs now, perhaps it is because people know that PC hardware is so rubbish that nobody complain about them? And no, they weren't cheap, one was a Shuttle PC and the other power supply was a very expensive fan-less PSU.

An Apple failure is only newsworthy due to the brand and price.

Computers can fail for numerous reasons, mains spikes, extreme conditions (dusty smokey rooms, too hot, too cold). People expect 100% reliability but won't pay for it.

Workaround for being cut off

Go out and buy a PAYG 3G modem and you're back online in seconds. Sure, you won't do much downloading on one of those, but it shows that you won't keep people off the net.

Doh!

Microsoft can't even code a website which works safely on their own flagship browser?