Posts by Dennis 6

Sony set to axe 5,000 workers worldwide as it flings PC biz overboard

Sony were always to be avoided

When I managed IT we had a consultant who repaired computers. He told me that Sony do not supply spare parts. He had a customer with a Sony laptop with a defective keyboard, and discovered that Sony would not supply a keyboard. Normally, for a customer with a keyboard problem, this consultant would buy the keyboard, collect the laptop late afternoon and return it the following morning. Job done. In the case of the customer with the Sony the customer had to send the computer back to Sony. The computer was away for three weeks and when it was returned it was clear from the labels that it had been to Belgium and back. None of the customer's data was still on the machine as the hard disk had been reformatted.

I subsequently I had a friend with a Sony laptop with a broken keyboard. The letter 'F' come off. I told her this story, But she had a "man" who she called when she had a computer problem. He said he couldn't buy a replacement keyboard and he looked on eBay, and found one with the missing 'F' key! No help there. She subsequently made do with a PS2 plug-in keyboard.

I think that a company that cannot build a keyboard has no business making computers. Getting shot of their PC division is a wise move and will make the world a better place.

BlackBerry ends write-off of a year with $4.4bn write-down

"Yet there's still all those corporate and government users who really, really care about security and have nowhere else to go."

LOL Now we all know what government security means - the back doors are in place and and everyone and their dog has a key.

Notebook makers turn to Android in face of Windows woes

Re: Poor M$

I started to loath M$ when I learnt how they deliberately rigged Windows 3 so it wouldn't run on DR DOS, and wasted days of people's time by generating confusing and meaningless error messages which basically meant 'Gotcha'.

Poor M$

I spent all my professional life loathing Microsoft and always its works. I never thought I would start to feel sorry for them. It is really amazing how huge corporations can screw up so badly.

Nearly a quarter of all books sold in US in 2012 were ebooks

eBooks still have to make much progress before I prefer them

The worst thing about ebooks is you don't own them and can't pass them on, so they need to REALLY cheap.

The normal life-cycle of a book I own is:-

1) Buy the book

2) Maybe read it

3) Maybe become enthusiastic about it and lend it to a friend

4) Maybe give it away, probably to Oxfam

eBooks allow only activities 1) and 2). With these disadvantages they need to be much cheaper than the paper version.

When I want to buy a book I go to Amazon Market place and buy it as cheaply as possible, often second hand, and often costing £2.81, nearly always much cheaper than the ebook, even if it is available.

I have a hardback book I'd really like to get read, but I don't want to be carrying it around all the time, but won't re-buy the Kindle version just to get it onto my ereader; I'd have bought it twice then. When one buys a paper book the Kindle version, if available, should come bundled with it. It probably started out in electonic form, anyway. The book publishing industry needs to get real or they will go the same way as the music industry.

Spring launch for Apple OLED TV with Siri, says retail mole

Plenty of people hate it even before they know what it is!

It's amusing to see how many people in this thread are saying how they don't want the features the Apple TV will offer before they even know what they are!

Having seen what effect Apple's arrival had on the music industry, digital music players, tablets, netbooks and laptops, and mobile phones, I imagine TV executives are not sleeping too well at the moment. This is the lull before the storm for them. This is not a good time to buy a TV.

Smart meters: Nothing can possibly go wrong, says gov

This BBC Valves.

I'm not an electronic engineer, but I can't believe that there is valve equipment that can't be replaced by solid state. Where there's a will there's a way....

Microsoft exec departs after tweet about Nokia phone

When we are talking about smartphones it's the apps that make the difference

I guess there are quite a few people who buy a smartphone because it's cool, and don't care about apps, but their numbers must be shrinking as their more tech-savvy friends start demonstrating apps to them.

It's hard to imagine how players in this market who woke up too late to what Apple has been doing since 2007 can ever get into a competitive position. Apple have a good OS, very good design capabilities, good build quality, a phone that most people find a pleasure to hold and to use, confidence in what they are about, half a million apps, and many happy developers. The old ways of the phone industry have been so shaken up by Apple that the older players still don't know which way to run - like the proverbial rabbit in the car headlights. The old ways of pumping out plastic tat covered in buttons doesn't wash any more and vendors who don't have good hardware design, a belief in quality, and an thriving ecosystem might as well pack up and go home now.

MS/Nokia have a real uphill struggle in front of them and there is no evidence from their past performance that they will be able to outplay Apple, which, apart from its huge ecosystem, now has significant supply chain and infrastructural advantages. People say Apple products are expensive but that isn't true, one has only to read about the squabbling between Intel and the laptop makers trying to make a competitor the the MacBook Air, and the pricing of the inferior iPad competitors to see that.

We live in interesting times.

Nissan Leaf electric car

Electicity for cars won't always be as cheap as it is now....

Using the current price of electricity in running cost comparisons isn't really realistic. If electric cars ever start to sell in larger numbers the government will do something to recover the lost fuel duty by applying a duty to the electricity we put into cars. They might put a purple dye in it, or something.... They will certainly do whatever they can to make private motoring expensive, even if they can't quite manage to make it as expensive as public transport.

UK probes ebook pricing

The life cycle of a book

- buy the book

- maybe read it

- maybe become enthusiastic about it and lend it to a friend or two

- take it to Oxfam

When ebooks permit that life cycle, and are priced to reflect the fact that no physical manufacturing, no distribution on big lorries, and no shops with heating, rates, employees, etc, are necessary, then I might consider buying ebooks. Until then it's second-hand and charity shops, Amazon Marketplace and Abe Books for me. Also, I'll never need an ebook reader; reading books on my phone is a very good experience and one gadget less to carry around.

O2 to upgrade southern UK network

Pity they can't do something about SMS delivery reports....

....while they're at it. I get fed up with typing *0# at the front of every message.

Withings Wi-Fi bathroom scales

How accurate are they?

Bathroom scales are a measurement device, so their most important property is their accuracy. I once looked at all the bathroom scales in John Lewis, ranging in price from about £13 to £120 and not one stated its accuracy, and not one offered a recalibration service. They might be quite decorative but they are not serious pieces of equipment, more random number generators than scales. How accurate are these?

DVLA off-road system seriously off-message

The support of motorists???

"We say that staying complaint should be made really easy and there should be tolerance of small mistakes. If the authorities lose sight of this they will also lose the support of motorists."

I think that, in choosing whether they want the support of motorists, or as much money as they can possibly trouser, they have decided that the readies are more useful. Just to speak to them on the phone one has to dial a high-toll 0870 number, and the latest figure I saw was they made £8.7 million this alone. Good will?? Ha-ha.

Broadband boss: 'The end of freeloading is nigh'

Why can't we just go on receiving TV through the aerial?

I agree that data consumption will increase with the increasing use of smartphones and the migration of so much of out lives, such as reading newspapers and shopping, onto the Internet; but I don't see why all of TV consumption needs to be migrated to the Internet. I have an aerial on my roof which gives me all the TV I need, apart from the odd programme that I missed and watch later.

Microsoft cuts out paste

It's a good job that Micro$oft...

...actually exists because no-one could make this stuff up. An OS launching in 2010 with no cut and paste! Wonderful!

Freeview HD EPG debuts on iPhone

Does it have radio schedules?

In nearly all of the discussion of TV schedule apps radio schedules are rarely mentioned, yet I spend far more time listening to the radio than I do watching TV. Logically an app for Freeview schedules should have radio schedules. It would just be nice to know.

Inside Microsoft's innovation crisis

Windows is a dog's dinner

They've been on the case for nearly a quarter of a century and it is still unstable and a pain to use. Which Windows user here hasn't shut down their computer to go to bed and come down in the morning to find it asking if it should terminate some stupid process, or hasn't gone to use their PC that has been lying idle all morning to find they must wait for 30 seconds of hourglass and intense hard disk activity before it will respond?

Palm fishes for devs with $1m lure

I mourn for Palm...

I've been a loyal Palm user since their early days but now I have an iPhone. Palm have screwed up royally, failing their community of users and their community of developers. I still have a Palm T3 for navigation duties in the car an a TX with the apps I can't migrate to the iPhone. I had to replace the screen on the TX, and the on/off button only just works, so I don't have much confidence in their build quality. The Palm Pre doesn't appeal to me at all, with its dire keyboard and lack of memory expansion. I can't expand the memory of my iPhone, but it has 32Gb. I think touch screen keyboards that appear as and when needed are the future. It is the slow pace at which Palm are unrolling their products and app store that amazes me, while Apple and Android are collecting users and developers, and I don't think Palm will make it. I mourn for them because I really liked them once. The best hope is that other more capable manufacturers will adopt WebOS.

Sony Reader PRS-600 Touch Edition

I don't get eBooks, either

I was a long time Palm user and read many books on it. I loved the way the text would scroll and I could read without having to do page turns. Now I have an iPhone and last night I was reading Edith Wharton as I came home on the London Underground. The book was free and the gadget I carry around anyway.

I never had any problem reading books on the Palm or on the iPhone. I don't understand why one would want to spend so much money and carry an extra gadget just to read books, unless one needs to take notes, which is not my case. My Palm had good dictionaries and so does my iPhone, and if I did occasionally need to take notes I might be able to do that anyway using a notes app. The smallness of the Palm|iPhone makes it ideal to get out in a crowded train. When I stay with my daughter I sleep in a bed without a bedside light. That is no problem with the Palm|iPhone, either, as the screen is backlit. I don't know whether readers like the Sony can be used in the dark.

Hacker frees iPhone from Jobsian tyranny (again)

I don't see much evidence of quality approval in Apples's App Store

I have paid for App Store apps that were just terrible and really didn't do what they claimed to do. Just look at users' reviews. There are quite a lot of apps like that. If Apple's reason for controlling access to its app store is to maintain app quality then they are doing a very bad job.

The iPhone is very good in some ways and terrible in others, and has glaring admissions. Amazingly, there is no missed call alert, and nothing, without interrogating the phone, to show that a new text or email has arrived . There is an app on Cydia to fix this omission (Intelliscreen). You pay for it and it works. You can try before you buy. Why isn't there one in the App Store?? Also, why the hell doesn't Apple provide some way of putting apps into folders, instead of flicking through page after page of icons?? There's an app on Cydia to deal with this (Categories). I used to have three pages of icons, now I have one. These apps just make a good phone better; there's nothing wrong with that. I also have an app for conveniently switching bluetooth and wifi on an off as I need them (SBSetting), without drilling down into the Settings, and I use it all the time. I need bluetooth only when I'm in the car and wifi only wnen I'm using it, and as battery life is an issue with the iPhone it is very useful to be able to do this conveniently. The mere fact that in the app store you have pay for software before you can try it is for me a justification for jailbreaking.

I have quite a lot of music files ripped to Ogg-Vorbis. with my previous Palm there were several music players available and it was easy to choose one that suited me. Why are there NO music players in Apple's App Store to use as an alternative to the provided one??

I can't see why anyone should object to unlocking a phone. Objectors should be objecting to the fact that phones are ever locked in the first place. There's nothing sinful about needing to use on various networks a phone that you have bought and paid for.

Apple unloads 47 fixes for iPhones, Macs and QuickTime

iTunes 9 Needs a Fix Pretty Quickly!

I stupidly installed iTunes 9 on the day it was released and I'm constantly having to 'Force Quit' iTunes or reboot my MacBook, and I've now found long forum threads reporting similar experiences.