Posts by Shonko Kid 446 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2007
Given the large surface area, the fact that these will generally operate above the cloud ceiling, and solar panels can now be made with lightweight plastic substrates, has anyone looked at making these things solar, or at least hybrid?
I mean, sure it'll add to the cost, but in for a penny...
What strikes me is that there was no lack of brilliant design and innovation at Sinclair in the 80s, but they seem to have stumbled because of the inability to bring just one of these designs to market - it may have been a very different story than the Amtrash slow decline we got.
Some of that seems to have been down to trying to over innovate, never sticking to a single plan, and some of it seems to have been Sinclair's dogged insistance on marketising failed technological experiments - the flat tube, the micro drive, wafer scale. While the FTV-1 is a thing of beauty, not just industrial design, but in terms of technical design, you only have to use it to see it as a technological dead end.
And just looking at that picture of the Microdrive takes me back. I would have (and still would) totally buy a games console that looked like that!
That said, the Z88 was a true marvel, I used mine to death. A real shame it never lead to commercial success.
True, microdrive cartridges did tend to fall into two categories, those that would last about a week of usage, and those that would see out the heat death of the universe. The problem was that if you bought a box of ten of them, you'd likely only get one that was in the latter category, and it wouldn't be the one that you'd saved that important file on!
Can I vote all of them? I don't think it's a question you can actually answer, as the article shows, everyone has their particular favourite. But I think the strength of the show, and to the credit of the writers and actors, is that each has added a fresh facet to the character in a believable way,
Perhaps easier questions such as; which one have you seen enough of? and which would you have liked to have seen more? are the ones to ask, certainly for the purpose of trying to put them into some sort of popularity order.
Certainly the latest vignette has firmly put McGann into the 'would like to have seen more of' category. I remember after seeing the TV movie that I was a bit disappointed, probably due to _that_ kiss and they'd killed off my then 2nd fav, McCoy - not generally liked, but I enjoyed his dark, casual, genocide ;-)
That said, I think Tom Baker just _was_ The Doctor.
"I still think anyone who can put 4 cores and a larger screen* into a Psion5 clamshell is onto a winner."
To be honest, even just getting having the Psion 5 with modern networking options (Wifi/BT/3G) would be a winner. Who needs to fap on about screen size and number of CPU cores?
Acorn A305 - 8MHz ARM2, 512KB RAM, and 720KB discs (though 40MB Hard drive was an option) - And you can wear it on your wrist, instead of it taking serious desk space. How far we've come eh?
But, I can't see this flying without at least a week's usage between charges. That must surely be the usable minimum?!?
Nokia now have a stack of cash, and have finally disposed of what remains of the large and unwieldy NMP structure that was holding them back, and if I read the details right, will be able to start selling phones again in just a few short years, or perhaps they've already got another sector in mind.
And for whoever inherits Ballmer's broken chair, this must surely be MSFTs last chance to crack the moibile market, so they'd better have some kick ass strategy or a plan B.
I for one, look forward to Nokia do next.
I wonder if they could get another large corporate to pipe up about possible brand confusion, and thus disprove the case that enough people confused it with BSkyB, because sufficiently large numbers of people were confusing it with the other company, hence cancelling out the whole sorry issue?
Twitter knows that you're sending a message to someone, it knows what you're saying to them, and at the very least it has the IP address used to a) create the account b) being used to send the message.
Just how hard is it for them to spot such nonsense and bring up a friendly warning reminding the troll that they're probably not as anonymous as they think they are.
I think Sony are on the ball with this one, as AAA titles get ever more expensive to produce and purchase, the only thing that help the consoles compete with the mobile gaming scene is a vibrant indie dev scene. The console offers a far better gaming experience than the iPhone and that market is waiting to be tapped.
And Microsoft must have to buy special shoes, the number of times they've shot themselves in the foot recently...
That said, I'm keeping an eye on the Ouya which hit the shelves this week; trying to straddle console and mobile gaming.
It'll be an interesting few years as this plays out for sure, but I'll be too busy playing Mario 3D World :-D
"That the Mobile OS app market will be all but taken over by generic HTML5 seems a no-brainer."
I see your point, but it's seemed that way for a long time now, and gained little real traction. And the timing of Firefox OS is interesting, there's no reason why these devices couldn't have been launched 5, or even 10 years ago. Doing it now seems more like last ditch attempt at mobile relevance than coupe-de-grace for native apps. It's entirely possible that HTML itself is being threatened by the dominance of mobile apps - what if your Mac could just run an iPad app for your site rather than browse a web site in Safari? As tablets begin to become the primary browsing device, would it then make any sense to bother with a website when you can get much better customer engagement and UX using a native app?
I think the Native vs HTML battle is far from being a no-brainer for either side.
No one is going to drop $1000 on something just to see what the damn thing is for. It isn't an iPad. I was sold on the Pro right up to the point where they put the price tag on it.
If they do want it to be a thin client onto a back-office farm, then it needs to be priced as such, ie the revenue is from the maintenance of the back-office machines, not trying to force a 50% margin on the client device.
"Nothing that will convince a kid that's never worn glasses or a band to wear one"
Oh, I bet you a pile of polo-necks that if it's white and shiny enough, has the apple logo on it, and is priced eye-wateringly high, then people will buy and wear it. These people think it's OK to take holiday snaps with a 10" tablet.
is to bundle the browser on top of an off-the-shelf RTOS and rebrand it Opera OS, pitching to OEMs as a cheap smartphone-a-like, in much the same way as Mozilla are doing. All phones come with a browser these days, and very few people ever change the one that ships. Do the math.
"Samsung Apps is just too small"
But Samsung is quite big enough that it could easily go through the Play Store and offer the popular Apps developers a better deal on their own store.
And I think they'd be mad to release a Tizen device that didn't have Android app support.
Put those two together, and their reliance on Google for the Play Store isn't so certain.
One of the key failures with Microsoft's Mobile strategy as seen in CE and WinMo was the dogged insistence on a single Look and Feel. What was good about the Win95 L&F on a PC made no sense whatsoever on a mobile device, touch screen or keypad driven. And now they are seeing the failure from the other side, what makes for a usable touch screen UI on a Tablet, is a major annoyance when it flies in the face of over 20 years of using a mouse + keyboard on the PC.
Whilst the ideal of offering developers a single API and environment to code against is laudable, how can their product managers have not realised the simple truth that the 3 primary form factors they are targeting are used in very different ways, and need different user interfaces. Is the yes-man culture at Redmond so strong that nobody questioned the strategy that is so obviously wrong?
I've often seen Win7 boxes enter 'failed to start' loops after an auto update. If this CD actually fixed the problem (registry inconsistencies usually) rather than just uninstall a specific patch, it might be quite useful.
Of course, having the registry as a single point of failure is laughable system design in the first place...
While I was getting revved up to raise merry hell if you'd not included the ZX Spectrum, I too have to echo the above about a lack of SGI entry - or was it just that pretty much everything they built was sexy as hell?
SGI's look so good people even use them as housings for the mundane, look for the Onyx/Challenge Fridge, the rOctane, or my personal favourite, the Espressigo.
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