Posts by Dan 55 16877 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009
It's Windows as far as the eye can see.
If someone in Marketing had had the brains to call the tablet version something else we wouldn't have had all this nonsense because there would have been no customer expectation of the desktop or Win32 apps.
But no, now the phone version is Windows too. Imagine if you could take your phone to a presentation and plug it into an external screen and use a Bluetooth zapper. Or plug it into an external screen with mouse and keyboard to work on the train. But it's not that either.
If they had managed Ubuntu-style support for every device form and input including external screens they would have probably cracked it and it could deservedly be called Windows on everything, but they haven't done that. It's still very different under the hood.
What's wrong with checking if there is ActiveX etc... on the page and if so silently switching to the old rendering engine and adding that site to a list so it's rendered with the old engine straight away in the future. Also all local Intranet sites are rendered by default with the old engine.
You can tell it's MS, they never quite manage to get it right. It's always just a bit too fiddly.
Exactly, Office itself is free on three mobile platforms and two desktop platforms. Office is supposed to be there whatever devices you're using at the moment, that's what they think is going to make people buy a subscription.
There's more competition on Apple devices as iWork is free, many people might be perfectly happy with that. Locking out suits with Galaxy Notes/Tabs doesn't make sense, it only weakens Office.
Oh, and there was Word for Xenix once upon a time.
Has to be one of the stranger articles I've read recently.
Samsung have stuck with SD cards and removable batteries. Probably not huge selling points but if they were really cutting costs they'd have got rid of them by now. Maybe they should do more of a marketing effort about them.
CyanogenMod support is above average, which is nice.
They really need to cut a layer of fat off TouchWiz. Sony have managed to stick the Google apps out of the way on the homescreen yet comply with Play rules and make their own apps lightweight and fit into Android's style.
Doubt people go through third party access or power of attourney nonsense, technology has rendered it practically useless. Cards have a PIN and children apply for Internet banking on their parents' behalf to run their accounts. Offically it's the parents doing all of this. The banks don't know.
The update method should be as open as AOSP otherwise it's just a stick to beat OEMs into line for Play certification and make non-Play certified devices very difficult to maintain (you've basically got to do your own copy of Play Services - only Amazon's really managed it, not even Samsung's been able to).
If they really wanted to address the problem they would have made AOSP modular and updatable by operators and phone manufacturers instead of shoving everything into Play Services and making it closed source.
What Google want to do is take back control of the platform because making Android an open source project has served its purpose.
I've just imagined one of those medieval line drawings with a moustached gentleman in a strange hat setting fire to a witch and a devil watching from his dark cloud.
Would it be wrong to focus on Lord King and tar them all with the same brush though? If the rest don't know much about technology, at least they know when they're being sold snakeoil.
What we're supposed to do, our jobs properly. Just the right amount of logging, https, keys on the client if possible.
If someone's knocking up a PHP site or mobile app which leaks data like a sieve then they're doing it wrong.
Justify the time spent by quoting Sony and Target till the cows come home.
Yet they seem to have more idea about what a western democracy is than the political parties.
Now it's up to the electorate but unfortunately the only party that can probably be trusted on this issue is a minority party (although the Greens won't be as much as a minority as the yellows will be after the elections, which serves 'em right).
Nice one the Lords.
Lately they seem to be targeting low-end handsets and forgetting about the high end so they'd be silly to make a phone OS that only plays well with high-end hardware. Probably the first generation of Lumia handsets will get left out.
It seems if they can drop an architecture they will (e.g. ARM tablets) because it's too much work to get Windows 10 to run everywhere. Remember it's just Windows (Phone) 8 with a coat of paint. If they start launching Lumia phones with Intel SoCs then they're in full retreat from Windows 10 for ARM devices.
RT was only an anacronism because it was so nobbled in the first place. If they didn't lock it down and instead let it run proper desktop apps on ARM (instead of some bodge for Office RT) then it would have sold more. If they had put some kind of emulation layer on for simple apps that use the GUI and wait for input then it would have sold a lot more.
They've only got Windows to go everywhere by dropping ARM for tablet devices and relying on Intel to subsidise Atom. Intel's subsidies aren't going to last forever though.
And it's proof that under the hood it's as much held together by rubber bands and paperclips as Windows 8 is. If it were otherwise they could press a button and have yet another build to go alongside Windows 10 for Atom tablets and Windows 10 for ARM phones.
That's marketing for you.
It means that if you hit the download button from a Windows 7/8/8.1 machine and the date is between the launch date and the launch date + 12 months then it the cost is $0. Otherwise there will be a price attached.
"We will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device" - just like XP/Vista/7/8/8.1.
If you think it's going to lock up after 12 months and ask you for your credit card number like Cryptolocker then you're barking up the wrong tree. It's just not legally possible to do that, the Windows you've got now is yours and can't be taken off you.
What they may possibly do is charge for updates after the initial support period is over, like many people said should have been done with Windows XP when it was EOL'd.
XP isn't getting a free upgrade because of hardware specs and there's still real money to be made with updates and support contracts.
What about people with Vista though? It's practically Windows 7 once the Platform Update has been installed, the install base isn't that high, yet MS still can't resist giving them another poke in the eye.
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