Posts by Paul Osborne

Raspberry Pi Foundation releases operating system for PCs, Macs

I reckon the point here is to allow a consistent environment across Pis and other devices. It doesn't matter that there are other Linux distributions that you can make do your own thing. Pixel by default is the same as that which runs on the PIs and so there is no faffing around to achieve the same user experience.

Power cut crashes Delta's worldwide flight update systems

Boom!

I am told by a friend who works in the IT infrastructure team for Delta "that a power board in the main data center went BOOM! Not my doing this time.".

El Reg drills into Office 365: Email migration

Having just migrated 36K accounts for a University into O365 via the IMAP import process, I can happily report that it was almost uneventfully boring - as it took just over a week doing them in batches. There was more effort involved in managing the user experience and ensuring they knew what was going on than in the actual migration. Just hope that it is equally painless when the day comes that we migrate the users back out of O365 when they start whacking us with a bill as at the moment O365 is free to education. Exporting out will be a right pain though as they now have 25GB of storage instead of 100MB - not sure we can afford that for 36K users....

Poll confirms Brits believe Jesus Phone salvation too costly

Cautiously raising hand in the air...

I have to be honest here, I do have an iPhone and I love it.

Having used various phones over the years from elderly Nokias, Windows based SPVs and my just replaced Sony Ericsson W800i, I can honestly say that I find that the iPhone is a much nicer phone to use. It works, it works incredibly well - the UI is intuitive and does what I expect. If anything it is probably the best phone that I have ever used. It is also about the only phone that I have ever used that does sync the address book and calendar without butchering the bloody things. Getting the data to sync between my Palm and W800i and Outlook or Apple's tools has been a nightmare if I wanted the data consistently correct and not corrupted and/or duplicated.

It is not perfect - it does not have 3G - I don't need it, GPS built in would be nice - but it is a phone. The camera is not great but it is a phone. I would like it to have more space for music - oh hang on its a phone.

Other smartphones that do everything are all well and good, they may do everything but be honest how well do they do everything? The GPS on the N95 is a joke, a friend half way up a mountain in Canada was most impressed that it took 15 minutes to get a lock. Storage is limited to memory card size so thats umm oh 8GB. They may have better cameras but lets be honest if you want a good camera you buy a camera not a phone.

What the iPhone does do it does incredibly well, when the SDK is released I would not be at all suprised if at the same time Apple releases a software update for the phone with extra features that probably should be there (bluetooth to GPS unit for Google maps would be good, IM (via iChat but that covers google talk as well) would be good) now but are not - and yes that is a fault.

The iPhone is not a perfect smartphone, but then I have yet to come across a smartphone that is a perfect phone.

Rant over.

Paul