Posts by hitmouse 521 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Dec 2008
The AUD is stronger than the USD and still Australians pay more in relative terms than in the USA for song tracks and apps. Apple can't even be bothered making a lot of song stock available in its Australian iTunes store.
So many online vendors sell song tracks to anywhere in the world, but Apple's fixation on delivering bits to the country where your credit card number is domiciled is so dumb.
"When Microsoft finally gives me what I really need instead of what it thinks I might need, then I might consider upgrading."
Aside from giving you out of 100 million people what you personally want, if Office 97/2000/whatever still works for you, why even bother to comment. If a new camera/car/TV is released and the old one works fine, do you leap in and say why you're not changing?
Your complaints about the file system are with Windows not Office. And having worked in this space myself, what you ask for is a) harder than you'd think, and b) everyone will complain anyway because it's different to what they had before.
If you have brilliant designs for this stuff yourself, I'm sure everyone would love to hear them.
I don't think a month goes by when I don't get an email listing all recipients from an organisation that should know better. Beyond a doubt the worst must be the University of Sydney which runs so many of its public talks through distribution from various administrative officers' email addresses as a more-or-less ad hoc affair. There's no point trying to educate one of them, as temp staff often step in and repeat the same mistake the following month/talk.
I have a lot of high quality AVIs I've made myself. In the cases where I've ripped my own DVDs for use on a multimedia hard drive, almost none of these support m4v/H264. Ditto for DVD players with USB input - pretty much every $40 DVD player on the planet supports DivX/XVID but almost none support H264.
I too have VLC on my iPhone but you have to go through somersaults to get the video onto the device because iTunes won't just pick up these files in a video-sync.
Despite what were actually pretty good reviews for hardware and software Microsoft never released Zune outside of North America, so it wasn't ever going to get global lift-off.
It's also only in the last six months that the Zune marketplace for Winpho users has been available outside of the US, and even then most places with hardware availablility do not have the marketplace to tap into. Microsoft just doesn't seem to be able to get it together for online distribution/sales outside of North America.
"Nokia seems to be have been run on the concept of internal conflict - that each group would be semi-autonomous and almost in a state of perpetual war with other groups, and that somehow this would cause the best products "
Microsoft has been like that for years, especially with regard to database, indexing and search technologies, but application frameworks also come to mind. It's just as much a headache for internal Microsoft product groups to navigate these warring factions as for customers, as those groups may sink or swim based on their technology choice.
That said, the biggest competitors that Microsoft often has (NB I didn't say "always") are internal, so by the time it squeezes something out the door, it can have faced down some pretty tough alternates.
I don't know if they looked at what media companies - producers of books, music, movies, video games etc have been getting away with in Australia for years.
Even with the AUD at parity with the USD, iTunes charges up to 65% more than it does its US customers, paperback books are the cost of hardback in the UK and US, a visit to any suburban cinema costs more than going to a central London theatre. Many alternate online purchase vendors (Amazon etc) do not sell to that part of the world, and I wouldn't say that the ones who do are well-stocked. That includes iTunes - plenty of UK and US material is not available there at all.
The commercial TV networks have been making it impossible to watch or follow most overseas series because of the way they play with the timetables or in fact just discard a series altogether. Finally because Australia and NZ are region 4 for DVDs all sorts of pricing and release-date atrocities are inflicted on the local market, so everyone has a regionfree player and imports what they can afford postage-wise. When you see region-4 NTSC DVDs dumped in Australia you can see that the video vendors are hardly taking the market seriously.
As a result I think most Aussies have leapt at the only consistent avenue of supply available given the contempt and greed of suppliers.
I'm sure that if BBC iPlayer were made available for subscription in Oz that it would be popular. BBC may do that but they're only going after the US iPad-owner market now.
The bureaucracy within Nokia seems to have been known to everyone but Nokia itself.
I was casting around for R&D jobs about 7-8 years ago, and a senior recruiting agency told me quite bluntly that the Nokia culture was so suffocating that they wouldn't even put it on a list for consideration. I would have been further depressed if I'd found myself working for the company that made the N80.
The article neglects the inconvenience to travellers to the UK who try to use their own credit cards at these high street stores and are denied because the card is not issued by a UK bank, has no chip-and-pin, or the chip-and-pin system is not the same as that used in the UK.
Exemption rules for such have been in place for 5 years and are still routinely ignored.
http://www.chipandpin.co.uk/consumer/index.html
A number of iPhone apps conveniently present the information and services of a number of web applications which can be run safely in Safari or any other modern browser.
However, Apple's puritanical and inconsistent policies over the content viewed through such apps changes the nature of those applications. You are not allowed to view the *same user-generated content* through those apps as you may through the browser. This forces some of the creators of such services to impose the same restrictions on Android apps as exist in the iTunes store, so that an iPhone user cannot see adult content generated by the user of another phone.
The consistent follow-through for Apple would be remove Safari.
Australia doesn't have the virtually unlimited download options that are common in the USA and Europe, so these can quickly penalise the innocent who are not aware of Flash blockers and the like. The internet is not only outrageously slow in Australia, but outrageously expensive per MB.
These users also get hit hard by large updates from Microsoft, Apple and Adobe (which can't be easily consolidated across multiple machines in a single home).
One also notices many UK sites with internal search engines or site maps that are so poor that you can find things on those sites faster by using Google. In the case of Transport for London, I didn't even have to use the site-specific syntax to find what I needed.
That said, I don't agree with everything you wrote (spelling issues aside) - Google don't do a good job of listening to their customers. They're still a company with a highly US-centric view of the world, and they have no real organised way of capturing customer feedback. Spend some time posting bugs on their forums, and you'll realise that the forum has been created and abandoned years before.
Half of Google's top engineers come from Microsoft anyway. Everything people hated Microsoft doing they do at Google much more aggressively and everyone loves them for it!
It's all part of the great merry-go-round of engineers between Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle etc.
Given there are tens of thousands of Windows programs, from thousands of sources, how do you propose this works? The industry already conspired to minimise Microsoft's control over its desktop - does it now want to hand it back, along with the myriad new problems that have surfaced as a consequence.
Who is responsible for the quality and frequency of the patches?
Apart from Adobe and Apple's horrific "replace everything", invalidate old shortcuts and "spray the desktop with new shortcuts like a horny teenager" practicises, the worst stuff is the crapware installed by the OEM and driver suppliers. Most of that stuff needs to be ELIMINATED, not repaired.
Frankly given the size, frequency and intrusiveness of Apple and Adobe patches, I don't want to run them too often. Not everyone in the world has unlimited free download bandwidth to cope with all of these.
It's not a Netbook, it's a tablet computer with a 30GB SSD, wth a capacitive touchscreen that's larger than an iPad with pen support and it's also ruggedized for military use.
As for comparisons with an IPad, it's got USB and SD support and much more built in. It's much more powerful and feature-laden than an iPad.
I had a Motion M1300 slate about 8 years ago. Fantastic quality tablet. I'm looking for something of similar screen size to use for sheet music (since an iPad is too small for this).
There are many places where Google will just switch away from such language settings or present URLs with no language parameter whatseoever. I tried to download a Chrome developer build and it kept switching things to French, as it also does with Google Maps, Panoramia, Picasa, Calendar, Blogger and almost every other google service I can think of. Even when I am logged into my Google account with stated language and location preferences that duplicate all my browser and OS settings, it will always try to trump these with IP-based settings. If you're using an iPhone-based web-app then you won't even get a URL to play with - the buttons on the app will just turn to another language, you'll get unreadable EULAs etc.
I've watched people at computer terminals in hotels and airports start weeping with frustration when Google switches languages on them. Some European hotel chains run all their networks from a gateway in the country of their HQ which causes endless frustration. So Google not only doesn't give you your current language, but it's not even working in the language of the country you're physically in.
Lastly, consider the idiocy of localizing every language name in the search Options screen to the current language. This means if you can't find the word for English in another language or alphabet then you're hosed trying to switch back - especially if you're one of the 99% of people who couldn't edit a URL if their life depended on it.
If you aren't operating in Californian temperatures, Californian timezone and hemisphere for alarms etc then you are operating outside the expected operating range and test environment for half of Silicon Valley products.
It's like travelling to a new country and having at least half the Google UI (including on the iPhone) switch to another language because it doesn't recognise any of the parameters for browser or UI language.
I interviewed for a US software firm for a couple of years. It was so difficult to find American college graduates with half a clue or indeed any interest in actually building a career. They might turn up to interviews and go through the motions, but their practical knowledge was very poor compared to overseas graduates _of the same age_.
You'd have to invest five years or more completely retraining the locals.
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