Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26107 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
Wanted - new graduate with experience in $A$ package that only runs on Mega$$$ server that you could never have used unless you already worked for us.
Not interested in people with years of experience (too expensive) or people who only have experience of Windows or Linux (not enterprisey enough)
>They agreed the price when they bought it,
They agreed a price for a product that would have a warranty, apps, content and ongoing support.
Suppose you bought a sky dish and next day sky announced they weren't doing satelite TV anymore do you think you might have a reasonable case for getting a refund?
You are confusing reality with HP.com
You are the worlds most respected maker of test and measurement products. So you rename that bit to something that sounds like a skin cream and flog it off.
You are the famous name in pocket calculators so you stop making them.
You buy up every other minicomputer maker but still have them compete internally. So you have competing offices selling HPs with NT, HPUX, VMS, NonStop, Tru64 but not Linux which is all anyone wants.
You are the worlds largest maker of PCs so you decide to get out of the PC+server business. But then make a bunch of contradictory announcements that you might or might not.
You signal your launch into being a services consultancy by suing the maker of the most popular DB for not supporting the PCs you are abandoning to become a services consultancy.
I think somebody has been drinking the inkjet ink
Pocket calculators are still popular, it's nice having real buttons to press rather than waiting for the virtual keyboard to pop up then watching it to make sure that it registered your button press.
My HP is still close on my desk even though I have Droid48 on my tablet - and a copy of octave on my PC
Is a real pain doing business in the US
If you sell to a government body you have to prove you haven't sold to anyone else for less - so no discounts to schools, universities etc.
But every government sale costs you 2-10x as much as a regular sale, there is a mountain of paperwork to do, a big list of approvals to get and it takes forever to get paid.
Then you have 10x as many support calls because their systems are so badly configured or locked down that they can never install anything, then they turnover staff and admins so often you start again in 6months with the new batch trying to use it.
The you have a set of users who are 'government employee grade' IQ
That's why the government ends up employing so many consultancies - because nobody will deal directly with them anymore
Early android (<1.6?) coded for a single screen res, now there are sizers which will stretch the screen out for higher res but it doesn't always look pretty.
Then apps that are designed for a1024*800 10in tablet aren't going to be great on a 340 pixel 3in phone so you are recommended to write different versions for each product
A WM8650 based tablet, Android 2.2 , genuine market + flash, webcam and 800x480 resistive is $75 delivered from HK
Yes it's going to suffer running advanced fluid dynamics simulations but it plays angry birds, does youtube and reads ebooks and PDFs for the price of a night out
A system where rioters choose to send their location and confession directly to the police automatically and the government were thinking of banning it?
It could lead to a whole new cockney rhyming slang though.,
Originally that was supposed to defeat police spies from hearing what you were planning - now if you text "I'm going to rob currys" you get 6months, so now you will have to text if you text "I'm planning a shrubery at a branch of Ruby"
Autocad - 20 years ago it was the only choice - the alternatives were paper or a mainframe.
Now use the free clones or proper parametric cad - pity that the free ProDesktop dissapeared.
We looked at moving one of our survey apps to the iPhone when it came out. It used to run on a 1500quid ruggedised WinCE machine but all the customers had iPhones.
Apple didn't seem interested in anything but iFart apps. You couldn't sell to corporates without going through their store and they took 40%. Great for a 99p iFart - but annoying on a 2grand survey package. And there was then no date for when the store would be available outside the US.
And the approval process was all about how it looked. They didn't care about what our users expected of a field survey package - if it didn't use the Apple one-true-style correctly it would be rejected.
>But have a look where Motorola patents' strengths are: radio engineering and design.
Who is to say there isn't a patent saying something like "making a telephone without wires"?
that with a few continuation filings could still be valid.
But more importantly it's a good-ol American company from Illinois, that will look good to a judge in Easty Texas - which is all that matters in business today.
>Are universities now accepting students on a 'first come first served' basis rather than based on results and interviews??
In clearing - yes.
Having your results a week earlier than everyone else - if you are shopping for a backup course - is about as useful as having the lottery results a week earlier.
It doesn't matter. Since you only find out the worth of a particular patent in court - at the end of a $10M battle the actual patents and wording are pretty irrelevant.
Just having 27gazzilion patents from one of the inventors of cell phones to threaten people with is enough.
Tablets don't replace computers.
Tablets replace TV/Books/Magazines - it simply happens that before dedicated tablets people used a PC to watch videos and browse websites
If internet connected TVs had come along 10years ago - we would be saying that tablets would replace TVs.
PCs replaced typewriters, minicomputers and to a lesser extent mainframes
OB Yes minister quote:
Now, suppose he argues that unemployed young people are, at the moment,
unfit, unorganised, undisciplined and untrained,
but that conscription will eventually release on to the streets an army of fit young people, all trained to kill.
>This is what the Japanese did untill the 70's, copy western tech and produce a lower priced and usualy crappy imitation
You do know that Samsung design and build most of the iPad?
Apple license the ARM core from the UK, have the Koreans design and manufacture all the chips, copy a free BSD operating system and then Foxcon assemble it cheaply in China.
The packaging and clever marketing is all Apple have - that's why they need to defend it.
Apple are sueing over a 'trademark and design' patent - which is allowed in europe.
You can patent the vague shape of a device which a person would associate with you - so a coke bottle shape is obviously coca-cola and apparently a slab shaped tablet with a screen on the front is so obviously Apple that it must be infringing!
Now if only IBM had the sense to file a design patent on having the keyboard in front of the screen - they would have been able to block all subsequent PCs
Abolish the USAF.
Do we really think 1000 bomber raids of B52s heading to Moscow/Beijing are likely?
The only target we need a stealth fighter for is to escort the above.
The only point of stealth is to make it hard for other fighters to detect you, do we think korean war era dogfights over the skies of Iran are likely ?
It turns out that stealth isn't really all that stealthy - even Serbia managed to shoot them down with old Russian radar, so I'm assuming Moscow shouldn't have too many problems. China already has the blueprints so ought be able to find a way
So replace the airforce with a bunch of cruise missiles, a few drones and some Awacs converted from old 737 and you save a few $100Bn
Closely following coverage of the riots I have noticed that the majority of these young miscreants are wearing trousers, and along with the infamous hoody, it seems that trousers have been a necessary component of every major riot and disturbance since the french revolution - with the exceptions of a few uppity scots and that unfortunate fracas at the transvestite ball.
I call for the immediate banning of trousers in public and commend this idea to the house
General D Mail-Reader (retd)
>But you fail to mention that the flag was on a war memorial, which makes his actions all the more reprehensible.
A memorial built to all the people who died in WWI so we could live in a free country and protest all we want. Rather than live in an authoritarian state, ruled by a few well connected Junkers, presided over by a German monarchy and with a militarized police.
