Posts by Paul 128

Vodafone phone and mobe biz service goes titsup

It's not so much the failure...

...more the fact that it was almost impossible to get any information about it. I was lucky(ish) and only spent 15 minutes on hold to Vodafone OneNet customer service, to be told that they had a problem and no idea when it would be fixed. I did suggest that in the 21st century putting something on their website might be the done thing, or otherwise contacting customers paying good money for a dead (premium) service to let them know it was belly up. But they're all the same these days - it's like when BT have a network outage their tech teams have to go through so many hoops to be allowed to actually put up a network outage notification on the service status page that by the time they get approval (if they ever do) the outage has probably been fixed already. Wouldn't it be nice if infrastructure service providers would actually communicate with their paying customers instead of looking for ways to spin it so they aren't liable for anything...?

Apple to 'vigorously' fight Nokia patent pout

Surely most of this stuff is down at the component level?

Do Apple actually make the underlying electronics (i.e. fab the chips) for the iPhone, or do they buy them in from component manufacturers? I was under the impression that most of the bits which make a modern mobile phone are bought in from other companies which physically fabricate e.g. a GSM radio module, or a LCD including its backlight. Apple just did the overall product design and integration. Surely, then, the people Nokia should be chasing aren't Apple, but the companies who supply Apple with the infringing parts? Of course it's much easier to go after a big, profitable high-profile target when patent trolling than dealing with myriad smaller companies the public has never heard of...

Philips waves farewell to point-and-press remote controls

So what about ...

...my 83 year old father in law, who has advanced Parkinsons which makes it incredibly frustrating for him to use a computer due to hand shakes, and only just manages with a normal remote because it allows him to steady his hand on something while using it? He's bad enough with standard buttons, with something like this he'd never manage to switch the TV on let alone tell it what channel to switch to!

Vetting database shows suspicion and spying are the new trust

Whatever happened to...

..."innocent until proven guilty"?

Just sayin'...

Windows XP Mode digs deeper into Windows 7

Sad that MS obviously don't know how to do this right.

I run XP in virtualisation - using Parallels on a black macbook under OSX. Core 2 duo, 2GB of memory, nothing special these days; PC world is selling machines with better specs for 400 quid. So why, when I can happily run virtualised XP, several Win apps and a handful of Mac apps all together on a midrange machine - and get better performance out of XP than I had on my old laptop running it native - can MS not get XP to run without shedloads of resources in virtualisation under their own flagship operating system? Come to that, why bother with Windows 7 at all?

Apple nabs 90% of all 'premium PC' dollars

Sensible people just use whatever does the job best...

I'm typing this on a macbook (a black one which is a couple of years old). It is running Leopard. It has a virtualised Windows XP installation running happily under Parallels. I'm using it to connect (using the PC version of Citrix client because it's better) to my office as I sit here at home doing work. At the office I have two XP boxes, which are used for everything from documentation to software development in various languages. The database servers at work are running Oracle on some flavour of Linux. All of this is perfectly simple to deal with. I used to use a WinXP laptop (which was 5 years old when I retired it) and the major reason for moving to a mac was that at the time Vista had just arrived and I just didn't want to waste large chunks of my precious time dealing with the sort of hideous messes which were being reported with Vista. Life is just too short.

Since moving to a mac I've found that it really is (in my opinion anyway) a slicker system to use, with very few of the annoyances that Windows inflicts. But I can get work done with either, just as in previous stages of my life I've got work done on everything from CP/M machines, through various flavours of DOS, Windows from 3.0 onwards, real computers running flavours of Unix, PDP-11s running all sorts of weird OSs, VAXen running VMS, etc etc. At the moment the setup I described above gives me the most flexible, irritation-free computing environment which fits my needs, and for that reason I'm perfectly happy that I spent something like £1300 on the macbook a couple of years ago instead of going for a cheaper PC laptop.

As for people who build their own PCs... In my youth I used to get involved in a bit of car maintenance - I know how to adjust the valve clearances on a BMW small six engine, or adjust the idle speed on a stromberg carburettor. Now? Life is just too short - I take the car to the garage and get someone to service it and pay them some money in exchange for doing so, because I am no longer interested in the nuts and bolts - I just want a machine with 4 wheels which gets me where I want to go with a minimum of fuss. It's the same with computers.

People need to get over their prejudices and just use what they find most comfortable. If that involves spending a bit more money to get a better experience then it's down to personal choice.