The only way to win, is not to play.
Posts by Stuart Ball
71 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2009
Happy NukeDay to you! 70 years in the shadow of the bomb post-Trinity
Ex 'Tech City' chief Shields appointed junior Fun minister for internet safety
Nokia France leak: Windows Phone DUMPED in Microsoft Lumia revamp
Not so. I use MS account on my windows phone, and my android tablet. As I have setup Outlook as an account on the tablet, all my mail, contacts etc are available on both devices.
The same with Google, Yahoo, and iCloud on the Windows Phone.
Lock in is only there through lack of education and awareness.
Apps is a different matter though, but some apps are buy once, run agnostic, like MLB.TV. Where you pay for the service, not the app.
'Stop dissing Google or quit': OK, I quit, says Code Club co-founder
You can't herd volunteers, and organisations who make use of them should not try it.
Same happened to Scout Assoc when the Cub Leader who stood upto the Lee Rigby killers in the street advocated the death penalty in a TV interview. Something the Scout Assoc is against as an organisation. It chose, as I recall, to respect her views as an individual, but disagree with her on the principle.
Herding volunteers generates resentment and churn, neither of which most volunteer organisations need.
Dungeons & Dragons relaunches with 'freemium' version 5.0
DANGER MOUSE is back ... and he isn't half a GLASSHOLE
I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working
Tesco to tout its own smartphone – now THAT'S an unexpected item in the bagging area
That's right, MICROSOFT is an ANDROID vendor after Nokia gobble
Re: Crossing the Streams
Given that MS have decided to offer the WinPho 8 for free for smaller devices, and Nadella has said Cloud First, Mobile First, he didn't say "Windows first", and they are a devices and services company now, so they say.
The OS is a means to that end, rather than the ending. Expect to see Office 365 on Android soon, and better integration to their cloud offerings, both public through 365, and private clouds and internally managed Sharepoint.
We may be seeing a realisation that Windows is in a managed decline, and in order to protect core revenues of Office, and enterprise apps, cross-platform integration is essential. Microsoft won't care how you connect to their services, just that you do. Much like Googles approach.
WinPho, and Windows desktop are there to offer the tightest supported integration model to their services.
LOHAN preps Vulture 2 for hot vinyl wrap
Dell charges £16 TO INSTALL FIREFOX on PCs – Mozilla is miffed
'No, I CAN'T write code myself,' admits woman in charge of teaching our kids to code
Re: Some things should be left until big school
Sorry, I was picking up on the "lengthen the school day" rant of an earlier poster.
Basic programming principles of instruction sets, and process flows can be taught (without the obvious management speak!) using rover robots, or tools like Big Trak.
You can set up the skills in primary school to later use in a more formal programming environment. Even getting algebra a bigger focus to get the idea of using named variables.
Probably the most used "coding" skill I use at the moment is complicated formula in Excel, and SQL.
Understanding databases is taught in primary schools, but it could be done more.....interestingly.
<Caveat married to a primary school teacher>
Adding an additional 2 hours teaching per day, and going from an 0800-1730 hrs (in school plus 2-3 hours marking & planning per evening) to an 0700-1900 day for a teacher would MASSIVELY put up teaching costs, because you would need to have, certainly in primary education where most of the important skills are learnt, 2 teachers, and a doubling of teaching assistants, per class to cover the day.
Which would double your manpower costs to deliver primary education.
Also I have children aged 5 & 7, who do afterschool clubs at the moment because Mrs B and I both work, so they are out the house 8-1730 as it is, however the afterschool bit is time for them to socialise and play with "friends" who also go to afterschool club.
It's the last week before half term, and they are knackered, and need the holiday to blow off steam and relax. Formalising the school day to 8-1700 and you'd need shorter half terms to allow the children to manage.
At Mrs B's school they have afterschool clubs 3 days a week that parents pay for, which are sports clubs, massively oversubscribed. Mrs B is also (free) Clubs Co-ordinator for her school, and for every place that she manages she has 3 applicants because a large proportion of parents see it as free additional childcare.
We need to decide if we want schools to be a national childcare service so everyone can contribute to the GDP of the Nation, or whether they want a good quality education service. Private schools spend double per pupil that state schools are paid, the only way we will get a better education system is to spend more per pupil, if state schools are to be compared to private education institutions.
Microsoft takes InfoPath behind the shed, says successor will be better
Microsoft boffins test rival 'Google Glass' geek goggles, say insiders
LIVE, my beauty, LIVE! Nokia revives dead phone with LIGHTNING powered Frankencharger
Microsoft waves goodbye to Small Business Server
Zentyal/Zarafa
I've been looking to replace the email service at the Scout Group I run the web ops for as Lunarpages Shared Hosting server is having a hissy-fit at the moment, and I was told "It's a shared platform....deal with it" essentially...
Looked around for a collaboration bundle on a LAMP stack and came across Zentyal.com which is a small business in a box software stack.
It has a community edition which is free, of course, and comes with Zarafa which so far is looking like a good replacement for Exchange.
Zentyal is multi-role and is well worth the look based on my evaluations this week.
Nokia Lumia 925: The best Windows Phone yet
I have the Navigon software from Garmin on my HTC 8x and it does run hot, although they seem to have improved the consumption so that it doesn't consume power faster than it's getting from the charger.
Perhaps Garmin should ask for an override so that power doesn't go to the battery to charge it when Navigon is running, and just bypasses that "switch" into the circuit. (not tech engineer) that should reduce heat generated for that purpose.
Navigon does seem to generate a lot of heat in the phone, but it's got an awful lot going on. Not looked at a CPU trace whilst its been running to see.
However Navigon is by far the best GPS software I have come across for mobile phones. Not cheap, but very good. If they could sort out the heat.....even better.
Rogue Nokia splinter cell drops its Jolla phone A-BOMB
Rolling upgrade
If the phone comes in two halves, you could end up with a rolling upgrade "programme" whereby the front and backs are upgreadeable independently, so if you splash for the uber spec camera, you can upgrade the front processing unit & screen as and when you can afford it.
Interesting concepts.
O2 to turn your innocent nipper into Silicon Roundabout hipster
High-rollers’ shop pitches wallet-pounding, wall-pummelling MONSTER TV
Who's a Siri boy, then? Apple hoards your voices for TWO years
Sorry this doesn't ring true, and is possibly a lie. If they are an enterprise with an enterprise backup system that retains tapes off-site for longer than 2 years, it can still be associated with you if the backup is restored within that time period.
You would need to be able to guarantee the tapes had been destroyed to really be able to say your data is anonymised.
Nokia: OK, Q1 has been weak, but there's 'underlying' profit
Google's 'power to switch off the lights in Europe' has 'chilling effect' - rivals
If you take BT as comparison example. BT was split up into the platform (OpenReach) and Retail arms, and had to compete fairly with other retail providers of broadband products.
The same could be done with Google, with Google's competing services forced to be treated as essentially external customers to the platform.
No.10 guru: UK tech scene is AN EXPLODING CHEESE
Google: Our 'freedom of expression' should trump punters' privacy
Re: MASSIVE red flag here
I agree with you mostly, however the Common Carrier argument is lost the moment any processing is carried out on the stream to alter it in anyway. By censoring anything, even at the laws request, it is devoid of the moral high ground that pipe providers have, by injecting it's choice of adverts into the stream of results, it is not a common carrier.
IMO
Dell takes aim at iPad, uncloaks enterprise-level Win8 tablet
Tizen mobile OS releases v2.0 code
Tesco dials 999 after Clubcard vouchers are 'nicked' online
Sorry Dave, I disagree with you.
Ours were stolen from the November mailout, as was others, so its not just the Feb mailing impacted. the Register has an ICO article from November where Tesco is heavily criticised for its online security, the inference being that as forgotten passwords are emailed out in plain-text that there is two-way or n-way encryption on the password field in their database.
Online vouchers are available 2-3weeks before the voucher booklet arrives on your doorstep, I know mine arrived today, and we'd spent ours the day they went live online so as not to get stung again.

Our vouchers were spend instore, up near Burnley, and we never spend them instore and they were spent with a clubcard that wasn't ours! So the cashier didn't check vouchers matched the card, and nor did the computer system. I still have the mailed out vouchers in the In-Tray upstairs, so it wasn't Il Postino nicking them either.
There are reports also today that Pizza Express email voucher codes that have been converted from Clubcard Vouchers, have also been used in appropriately.
Suffice to say we've cashed ours in this time around before the mailout, as they appeared online a couple of weeks ago. Would hate to lose them again...and have the points rolled towards Mays mailing, we've got stuff to do!
LibreOffice 4.0 ships with new features, better looks

In my experience most teachers can barely drive Office to any reasonable degree. Making them cross train to LO just for the sake of pennies will dramatically decrease their productivity. Trust me, Teachers have enough to do as it is without wrestling with a new package.
Eeejit making sweeping assumptions!
Big Windows updates may ship this summer – and every summer
Re: Increasing the pace of global business disruption
And that is why Apple doesn't do Xserve any more I guess, consumers proved more lucrative to them.
Microsoft is in a position where it has to please both the server and infrastructure userbase, and consumers & company desktops.
Not an easy position. It would perhaps be better divorcing its consumer & business divisions, which should each have their own engineering sections with a common kernel developed by a separate division. Kinda of like I perceive linux distros. Common kernel fiddled about with to meet the needs of disparate customers.
Microsoft 'touches 16k shop workers' to flog Windows 8 hard
My Youngest was most put out that a cross platform painting programme she used on my Asus Transformer was not "Touch-Enabled" when using it on Windows, as her monitor doesn't have touchscreen.She point blank refused to use the mouse to finger-paint.
There is a danger we are missing the point in that Touch is not an interface for "our" generation, but those actually growing up with touch now. MS is laying the groundwork, possibly badly, for future markets.
However £400 for a touchscreen standalone monitor is a TAD excessive.
Dell finally takes Dell private - with $24bn and help from Microsoft
Comp Sci becomes 'fourth science' in English Baccalaureate
But that's what we used to do with computer magazines, the included the text to copy and run, because it was cheaper than including cassettes with the magazine.
I cannot create code from scratch, yet, but I can read VBA, some PHP, some ASP and Javascript to understand whats happening, and why.
Copying code is a good place to start learning good habits, for when you DO start to write your own fart apps..:)
Don't like your cell network? Legal unlocking ends TONIGHT in US
Review: HTC 8X Windows Phone 8 handset
I have an 8x primarily because Nokia faffed about with their Lumia 920 release. I really like the phone. I bought the Navigon Satnav software for it, which is good, but expensive.
I much prefer it over the Mrs' iPhone 4, although she is resisting upgrading her 4 to anything newer at the moment, even though it's out of contract.
App store is a little sparse, but I have what I need, and for games I still have my TF101. Coupled with an Xbox Music subscription who needs iTunes? or additional storage for music.
What I really want is a decent dock for it. non iphone accessories are still very hard to come buy despit ethe fact that micro usb is probably as populous as the iphone port.
Stu
Design guru: Windows 8 is 'a monster' and 'a tortured soul'
I got Win8 free with my HTC 8X phone, and I must confess to not fully understanding why all the negativity.
I'm sat here with the desktop open, pretty much doing things I always did, no live tiles present, Outlook is running, as is IE, and a citrix session connected to the corporate VDI platform.
All Metro is is a full screen start menu, I barely use it!
Ballmer: Windows Phone 8 'WILL ramp quickly', god dammit

Spoke to Nokia Customer Care today and tehy had no clue 9where I should really stop, but humour me) when stock levels would ramp up so you could actually buy one, let alone on a network you want it on.
HTC were unable to say when their O2 exclusive would run out, but its supposed to be soon.
So of the 5 phones on the Windowsphone.com website, you cannot actually BUY one with any degree of success, let alone in a colour you want (yellow in my case).
It's like someone forgot to raise the purchase order to manufacturing for the hardware part of the WinPho8 launch.
Nokia primes Lumias for Windows Phone 8 push
According to the Nokia Press release from yesterday:
http://press.nokia.com/2012/10/29/nokia-lumia-920-and-nokia-lumia-820-now-shipping/
They are in the "Channel" so it will be down to internal P4U supply chain on when they hit the shelves I would guess.
I want a 920 in Tweetie Pie yellow.....sad, i know.
WinPho 8 fans now able to order HTC handsets
Re: Weird, isn't it.....
It is an odd observation, but yes. Android and IOS are so prevalent that in order to be different and individual WP8 and HTC/Nokia colours is a way to express that individuality.
Apple is no longer cool IMO, it's common, mainstream, mass market. You cannot be a premium brand if every bugger you see has one. Samsung for example, never tried to be a premium brand, again IMO, they wanted mass market numbers.
So in order to be different, the only real standout differentiator is WP8, rightly or wrongly.