Posts by James Cooke 102 publicly visible posts • joined 4 May 2009
And who maintains that server for you? If you get cheaper hardware but then end up employing a sysadmin to manage it you've almost certainly lost. Not to mention the level of service. You couple of grand is not going to provide a fault tolerant service across a couple of data centres.
Serverless is not magic and it is not necessarily cheaper but it is not as if there are no benefits.
I don't believe it for a moment. This seems to assume that in China and India there is no demand for local developers. Perhaps eventually there will be a greater supply of devs which will drive down wages but it looks to me like demand is increasing at a far greater rate than supply.
Programming while perhaps not the most difficult of the engineering disciplines still requires a reasonable degree of skill and intellect if you want to be any good at it which is going to limit the number of good devs you can end up with.
Been there done that. Now however almost all my workload is hosted on AWS I've ditched the home servers. The skills are still useful though and transfer well to AWS and other cloud services. Be glad that the young ones have no interest in doing the same because setting up large secure cloudformation templates, subnets and VPCs is all extremely valuable in this world. Your skills are probably now much more valuable than before if you can leverage them correctly.
The Nexus 5 has magnets around the coil to aid correct positioning - you can easily use these to hold the phone to even a vertical surface.
I have a phone mount - sadly without the Qi charger - that you just slap the phone on without having to fit it into a cradle or between arms and it is so much more convenient add in wireless charging and it would be perfect.
The article is pretty much spot on in how I see the utility of the cloud. It works very well for new applications that have been designed for it - spin up smallest possible instance for new web service X and now you've got a much cheaper platform than you could build yourself.
Data costs are a red herring - if they are growing in the cloud they would be growing locally too. Whether the cost is too much depends on how much you want to store and what you have infrastructure wise. Amazon S3 is $85 per TB per month. Depending on your scale thats either a lot more than you pay locally or not a bad deal. Got no infrastructure then you have to buy a server, maintain it and power it. If you already have a server then another couple of disks for your RAID array is much cheaper but that might not suit your workload.
Paying in bandwidth and computing power? You are aware that you "pay" this for any internet based mapping solution whether it is "free" at the point of use or not? I can't imagine that even if I just used google maps all day every day that the cost of bandwidth for adds would ever add up to a measurable amount.
I'm not disputing that the cost for almost all of googles services is your information and eyeballs infront of adds just that in any way that Google adds which aren't animated flash horrors add in any appreciable way to the cost of your bandwidth.
I would agree with some of that - the martian one that is just a fancy notification light (albeit with vibration too) seems a bit pointless.
On the other hand I use my pebble all the time and find it very handy. Most email I find is junk or circulars so the ability to glance at my wrist and dismiss unwanted messages is great. On top of that it works as a sleep monitor (wakes you up at the right point in your sleep cycle), bike speedometer and running monitor (how fast/far you have gone).
I'll be the first to admit I could live without my pebble but you could say that about a lot of tech and for me it fills a niche.
This is also confusing me. Do they not sell or somehow block unlocked handsets in Canada? Could you not buy the mentioned Moto G or a Nexus 5 or something? According to a Japanese friend they do that with iPhones in Japan - it's like the bad old days for would be fruity fondle phone buyers in the UK where you can only buy it from the telcos for very inflated prices and there are no native unlocked options.
"Depending on the manufacturing process. It could be cheaper to install windows than it is not to install it."
I'm not convinced about that (blank hard drive vs an imaged drive) but it certainly could be more expensive to install a free OS than windows and given the amount of shovelware that comes with most new PCs I imagine that the cost of Windows ends up pretty negligible.
I agree though Microsoft have done far more harm with internet explorer than Google. We still have to optimise for crappy old IE versions and even those as recent as version 9 are woefully behind internet standards.
Google have an awful lot of power and influence but honestly I'd pick a Google monopoly over a Microsoft one any day. Google may want to harvest my data and shove ads down my throat but at least they provide me with very good services for a low low price in exchange.
I was looking at this laptop to replace my ageing 15" Core 2 Duo laptop which is basically the same size but fatter. Everything looks great, full hd res, backlit keyboard, suitable graphics chip, plenty of ram, upgradeable ram + hard disk I even forgave it the fact that it's 15" rather than the 13-14" I'd really like but then the processor.
WTF not even the better specced dual core offerings? Surely a chassis of this size can fit in something better after all the regular 13" Macs manage it. I think I'll pass until they upgrade the processor as I just can't see it lasting as well as my 5yr old current laptop.
"So remind us, what was the point of Neelie Kroes again?"
Three have always been the most competitive in coming up with things customers actually want. You could probably say they saw the writing on the wall as it looks like Steelie wants pan EU roaming at local costs but 3 should be applauded A) for getting in well ahead of the competition B) extending it out of the EU
The key weakness for Pebble imho. These changes are great and needed but they should have been out already not "later this year". We still lack magnometer access and an app store so there can be easy installation and updates for apps. Crucially though I think they need to either make a few good apps to fill obvious niches like fitness tracking or pay someone to do it for them.
They got off to a reasonable start with Runkeeper and Freecaddy but they need more apps to drive demand.
The comparison to Microsoft seems a bit harsh. Its not as if it is particularly hard for anyone to switch to another search engine or maps provider. Heck even Android is open source and can and has been forked by competitors.
The reason they are successful is because their products are at the very least quite acceptable and often the best available. Where they aren't such as Android offline mapping its very easy to just install another app or on the desktop use something else.
But what will they win? I can't see them winning the consumer side largely because the public have never warmed to their online services and stores the way they have with Apple and Google.
The risk to MS is that someone like Blackberry or any other over the top vendor can do the integration with MS infrastructure on Android and iOS. Its not like these products don't exist already.
As has been said before Office is their biggest draw - if I wanted a tablet for business use where I was dealing with a lot of Office documents Surface would be the only real option. For everything else its last in the lineup.
There isn't anything wrong with copying with attribution an explanation.
There is a problem with copying without attribution or your whole work being copied with attribution and sold. The former is unethical which is frowned on in doctors, the second falls under copyright laws I believe and is probably less of interest to the GMC.
I doubt this will be flying off the shelves. I really want that screen res on my next laptop but at £1000 for Chrome OS you're having a laugh. I'm writing this on a Samsung ARM chromebook and I love it - I can even dual boot into Ubuntu (goodness knows how the Reg reviewer found it hard to do). The thing about the Samsung CB is that its cheap, has no fans and a very respectable battery life. The Pixel has none of these and that screen doesn't make up for it.
In that regard I have a nice watch that I use when I wear my smart stuff - purely mens jewellery in that regard since when I wear it I probably don't want to pull my phone out to tell the time.
The pebble is my day-to-day watch, it looks good enough for that and will hopefully serve its purpose well.
Maybe they will be niche articles maybe not. The $10M+ that pebble have received in backing shows there is at least reasonable interest given that the device wasn't even out when they got that.
I've got to say that the increase in phone sizes probably adds to the reason for wanting these. They start to not fit all that well into your jeans pockets without creating unsightly bulges so I stick my phone in a less convenient jacket pocket or bag. I've ordered a pebble so I can glance at my watch to see if its yet another junk email/ PPI claim text or if its something I might want to pay attention to. Not to mention being able to change the music volume/track without having to pull my phone out perhaps when I'm cycling.
I'd certainly give RIM a better shot than MS. The playbook talks directly to Exchange so hopefully the new BB10 handsets will do with the Blackberry server stuff optional. If they have some guts they'd turn BBM into a skype competitor too they just need to cross platform it. No-one else seems willing to compete with them but RIM with a still large install base and relatively enthusiastic following could.
When you run a store with staff who know nothing selling overpriced goods?
We were replacing our fridge last year and looked at one with an inbuilt water dispenser and a big label on the front that says "pure filtered water" (or words to that effect) so we ask a chirpy store droid whether that includes limescale removal.
Cue a 5 minute trip to ask someone.
"No it doesn't just impurities"
"Oh like what?"
Cue an expression on her face that suggested we should know that our water is horribly impure and should always be drunk filtered.
"So do the filters need changing"
"Oh yes" she beamed "we have a subscription plan to sell you a years supply of filters so you don't need to worry about running out for £x" a horribly inflated price.
To top it all online they had the same fridge as a "special online only offer" with a slightly different product code for about £200 less. Are you surprised you're out of business when you treat customers like mugs?
Probably because Microsoft made the sensible decision to license Activesync widely and not lock out any competitors. RIM was free to become a licencee but didn't and required their own propriety solution instead. They didn't licence their solution and only came up with a free SMB server once the shift away from them was well underway.
If they had announced they were licencing BBM to other manufacturers and systems 12 months ago (think BBM to your facebook buddies) they might have had a viable business model going forward but the value of BBM and its social network is shrinking along with its userbase.
Not a bad idea in some cases - I like the school use case as they are genuinely somewhere with potentially big storage needs and a lot of PCs. What happens though when you need a file after 5 and everyone has gone home and turned their PC off and the one thing you need isn't cached? How do you get that file do you have to turn on the whole schools PCs?
A bit of gesture control would be a very nice feature - far more appealing than touch for desktops and some laptops. Most of the time I rest my hands off the keyboard when reading things on the screen and being able to just air swipe to scroll down, change tabs etc would be nifty if it worked. Not so great if the recognition is spotty and has lots of false positives.
"The fact that us Westerners don't see porn with the same illegality is irrelevant"
That would be because apart from some types it isn't illegal.
Thats not to say that a kid who is watching so much porn they aren't doing their school work isn't having problems but that probably falls under the title of being a teenager
RCJ may be somewhat misguided but I firmly believe real programming should be taught at an early stage alongside other staples such as the sciences and maths and english. Not everyone will go on to take it at GCSE/Standard Grade level but without any prior exposure surely very few will?
Case in point my 12 YO cousins recently produced apps for android at school. I'm pretty sure this was done through an app builder but it got her really excited about the possibilities. She could well go on to do CS at GCSE where hopefully she would actually be taught some real programming and some of the theory behind CS.
I love the idea and it's getting close but still too expensive given that you can get a Toyota Aygo a year old for that price and £45 would more than cover the petrol costs for the distance you are planning in a Twizzy plus you have a car with windows.
Maybe its more attractive on HP but where it really seems to be lacking is that it has most of the disadvantages of scooters - no windows, low speed and in this case low range combined with missing one of their big benefits of lots of available parking.
Battery tech is a big problem here - at £6k without the extra battery charges and upping the range a little the equation would probably start to change a lot.
Really I don't see where you get personal use as part of this. Regular PCs can offload things like h256 to their graphics card for decoding and similarly mobile devices have specialised decoders.
Maybe pro video editors will be wanting their CPU/GPU doing something while they're watching video but the rest of us will be quite happy without that extra cost.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
