Posts by Dan 55 16863 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009
But given Apple's target market, I find it very hard to believe that there are many geeks who ask for the lowest RAM/HDD price and source their own RAM/HDD upgrades.
I suppose they've done their research into this to find out how much they're 'losing' on options, but did they research into how many geeks would be annoyed by non-standard RAM/HDD connections and how many computer sales they're losing? I'd say it's about the same.
Samsung have phones like the Galaxy Y and Ace which are still classified as smartphones yet are far cheaper than anything Apple has to offer, you even can pick them up on PAYG if you want.
So unless Apple have a radical change of strategy they can't do a thing against Samsung. You'd probably ask why Apple would want to change their strategy. They probably wouldn't, but that doesn't matter to people with lots of money who buy their shares.
Only Microsoft made the mistake of doing it all in one version, whereas Apple have changed 10.7 and 10.8 little by little and doubtless will do a little more in 10.9 and then by 11.0 people will wake up and realise what's happened, that their desktop machine has turned into some dumbed down full-screen vTech which only allows you to work on one task at once.
You're supposed to click on the window icon or if the program doesn't allow it, press Alt-Space when the window has focus, then choose Size, then press the right cursor key to choose the right side of the window, then hold the left cursor key to move the right hand side of the window, then hit Return.
This is so obvious and user-friendly that there's no need to include any visual cues to help you to remember how to do it, in the same way that the Charms bar is so obvious and user-friendly too there's no need to include any visual cues for that either. As these elements are so user friendly we can therefore summise that there's a clear improvement in end-user productivity.
Windows 8 is just a step between Windows 7 and Windows 9. Windows 9 will remove every single visual cue available, operate only in full-screen mode, and fully complete the transition the user over to shortcut keys, therefore making the next version of Windows the most productive ever yet curiously having a look and feel like Emacs.
If you can, wait till the mid-2013 iMac comes out, it's rumoured to be inspired from Toshiba's design.
After removing the DVD drive from iMacs, Apple's R&D are busily working on removing that pesky third option from Gatekeeper in 10.9.
The SD card slot's in a completely impractical place, that seems to have gone uncommented. Perhaps so that user testing can show that very few users use it so it can be removed from next year's model.
This the reason I suspect for confining Win RT to Metro, the online shop, and not providing x86 emulation (remember that most Windows desktop programs except games just wait for events).
If you could run Win RT in desktop mode, have as much freedom to load programs as you do with Win x86, and it could emulate the existing software base, Intel would immediately go down like the Titanic.
I think that at that time (until Windows 95 was launched), Windows was the red-headed stepchild of WIMP interfaces. RiscOS, Acorn, Atari, and Mac had similar, and by similar I mean usable, GUIs. The three-button mouse was RiscOS's little innovation at that time which is now considered normal.
Ashas are also classified as smartphones by Nokia, they've got the Evolve theme, look smartphoney enough, and some might even have a fairly decent spec (1Ghz ARM) but they're S40 devices and as such only have a Java API and limited multitasking.
The reason for this nebulous smartphone category is to hide terrible Lumia sales as they're in the same category as bucketloads of Asha sales in India and Symbian (even while it's being busily hacked to death),
As anecdotal evidence I know someone with a 2006 iMac with a hard drive that has died twice in its lifetime, I've got a 2007 iMac with a hard drive has just died, I know someone else with a 2007 iMac (the same as mine) with a dead hard drive, and someone else with a 2007 MacBook which a known overheating fault causing... dead hard drives. And now we have 2009 iMacs with extended guarantees for dead hard drives.
I'll keep fixing it until it finally gives up the ghost, but I'd need a lot of convincing to get another one which is a shame as I quite like the OS, well, Snow Leopard. After the Mountain Lion it starts getting a little too iOSy and the next version of the OS looks like it could easily get locked down should Apple decide to do so.
Once every hour is too much to fill a disk with a bunch of hardlinks and one or two changed files. Can I configure Time Machine run to once every day or some other frequency that better suits my needs? No, because Saint Jobs didn't want to. Hence I ran it manually when I remembered. Lesson: Dumbing backup software down to a big switch is not a good design decision.
Yes, using the Download folder was silly, however I got the new files off there, interestingly enough using the UNIX command line as letting Finder near it sent it into fits. I could do this because I picked up on the warning signs that the HD was on its way out.
No, I don't think RAID is backup storage, I do know what the initials stand for.
I'm a walking disaster area that's managed to keep personal files for about 25 years, converting formats from one to another as I go so the data is still readable. OTOH if I were your employee I'd be looking for another job anyway because a) I wouldn't be happy if this is how you motivate your employees and b) you're probably running your precious little company or profit centre into the ground while blaming everyone else underneath you anyway.
This article is timely, my iMac's internal hard drive is currently wheezing and clicking as I try to get everything off it.
Yes, I have a Time Machine backup. It's from 3 weeks ago and I've done a bit since then. There are a handful of excluded directories including the Download directory which somehow I've managed to start using as a temporary area for a fair few important files.
I've just got a NAS box with RAID and was going to get around to put everything on it this weekend.
You see, whatever you do, you're screwed.
By the way, six years for a hard drive isn't much, is it? I've still got a 10 year old laptop which works. I considered SSD hoping perhaps they'd be more resistant to the iMac's toasty warm innards but they're still fecking expensive.
Was about to say the same. Looks like they were heavily inspired by the N9, which is no bad thing.
Good points will be the UI and proper push mail/app notifications not hammering battery life.
Bad point will be it won't be as open as Meego or hackable as Android because its selling point is security, so it'll be locked down more than WP or iOS. So near yet so far.
"The biggest thing that changed when Stephen Elop began his post as the CEO of Nokia, was centering the business around North America. According to Elop’s views, the trends that originate from the US are the ones that will prevail in the entire world, as the iPhone and Android have shown. That’s why Nokia absolutely had to be able to compete in the challenging American market to be successful globally."
Flop proving once again that he's arse-about-face, for a change. Nokia was already successful globally, except the US. Solution? Decimate everything which was successful outside the US.
Scheduled recordings depend entirely on the stations in question supplying the right info in their guide. If they don't update the guide in realtime, you don't get the all the programme.
I've got a Humax Freeview box and I can't say I'm displeased with it. The UI seems responsive and I don't know about the Foxsat but with the Freeview box you can add as much padding as possible then edit recordings to cut off the start and finish of the recordings (previous programmes or adverts).
If stations don't update their guides properly then there's little more magic that the box can do to make it work. Sky have obviously decided that updating their guide is worth it because people will be willing to pay for it.
Nokia can't and/or won't support Symbian properly, thanks to Flop.
I've suffered e-mail on Symbian 3 since I bought the N8 and here we are two years later with Belle Refresh and Belle FP2 and e-mail support still doesn't work. IMAP IDLE support was dropped with Belle Refresh instead of fixed, POP3/IMAP polling is unreliable and still doesn't work properly in Belle Refresh, the only thing that works reliably is ActiveSync but you can have a maximum of 1 (one) account. E-mail notification is non-existent; just a beep and if you didn't hear it then you've missed it, there's no e-mail icon on the notification bar or screensaver and no flashing indicator light either which is a step back from Symbian 1. The phone also had Ovi Push Notification support for applications but Nokia's just knocked it on the head with the latest update too.
Meanwhile the Belle FP2 rollout for the newer Symbian phones has been stopped because it bricked phones.
I was a Symbian fanboy for technical reasons but Nokia's just butchered the OS. Nokia are have shown they're incapable of supporting it, and my next phone will probably be a Samsung.
Unfortunately they've got to do it as Windows 8 is bipolar and Firefox wouldn't appear when the user moves from manic (desktop) to depressive (Modern UI) and it'll cut them out of the x86 tablet market.
Maybe it'll even be able to share bookmarks between desktop and Modern UI and allow plug-ins to work on Modern UI. There's a reason right there for using it instead of IE10.
All you need to do is add icons for posts, fix the thing where images and embedded youtube content sometimes make the page cut off there (if it's not been fixed already, haven't seen it in a while), and make the cookie message not scroll but just appear as at the top as part of the page and make it instantly disappear with a click/tap.
Lonely Cat Games who do ProfIMail for Symbian phones allow you to change devices up to 20 times. Now that ProfiMail has come out for Android that includes Android devices so you can switch from Symbian to Android and bring your configuration and mail with you.
Then there's Steam where SteamPlay games work on both Windows and Mac as mentioned above.
18 downvotes, must be a new record.
I didn't say I agree with it, but that's the reality. I'm sure that some people do send it in a 'locked' PDF format, but if that format's not acceptable to the agency or company they'll get asked to send it in .doc format. Therefore pulling export in .doc support on Google Docs makes things that little bit more annoying for a real-world use case.
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