Posts by Tim 11 515 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jan 2010
Sure there is plenty of badly written code about in the wild, but let's not forget that the type of code you'll find in academia only has to meet nice clean invented requirements; not real world ones. A lot of the complexity of real-world code comes from meeting real world users' needs and from working round flaws in existing real-world code.
only when you actually use it for a while do you fully appreciate that trying to make something that's a laptop and a tablet at the same time is just never going to work
I think they've probably done as good a job in the execution as anyone could have done with the aims they set themselves, but the whole concept is pointless
All these big companies have one corporate strategy - make as much money from your customers as possible. The technology (whether hardware, software or services) is just a side-effect of that.
They may have slightly different ideas about how to do it but most of them employ similarly talented people educated in the same universities coming up with the same ideas and all just trying to think of ways to lock users in and differentiate themselves from the competition.
If apple's or google's or microsoft's business model was naturally superior to the others, everyone would have adopted the same model; the plain fact is that there's just a big pile of luck involved, not some kind of mastermind visionary strategy that only Jobs or Zuckerberg could possibly have come up with
Like most reg readers I detest and ignore/block all adverts regardless of the medium and how carefully they have been targeted at me. Advertising is basically trying to sell you something you don't want to buy which is scamming.
If this change makes advertising less effective, companies will have to rely less on advertising and start to think of sensible business models instead which is fine by me.
If this change means we need far more adverts to make people pay attention, that will just make more people hate adverts more and again will hasten the demise of adverts.
hmm, I was just bemoaning the inability of my android phone to sync the calendar with my gmail account and wondering about switching to apple, thinking "well it's expensive but at least the basics would work seamlessly"
So maybe I'm better off sitting where I am and waiting for android to get better. What I really want for android though is an app that makes it work as a mobile phone - that's the thing Nokia always understood and I miss it like crazy.
The last printer I bought was a cheap brother inkjet. I bought it because the printer and the inks were cheap but it periodically cleans itself when not used so it will use up a set of cartridges in 6 months if you leave it on standby even if you don't print a thing. If you don't print very much, the cost per page is v high.
You could unplug it from the mains when not using it but then it does a full deep clean when you power it back on, so if you do that every week you're no better off.
I suspect the author of this piece isn't fully buying into the "new world order". Everything you do from now on will be stored in the cloud and manipulated by scraping your greasy fingers around on the tiny screen of your phone. This is the way of the future.
Anything else you did before is "legacy", and Microsoft doesn't give a shit about it.
Exactly - the "Disjoints within the business" section paints the picture of IT striving to cope with unrealistic demands; in my experience the reality is usually of IT departments empire building and holding their users hostage rather than giving business users the tools they need.
I drive a dell precision laptop - it's got a full HD screen, numeric keypad, 1.5TB of disk, 8GB RAM (I think it can go higher). It's possible to buy one with a wide-viewing-angle screen. I can't understand why these aren't more popular because I agree that most of these things are necessary for many IT people to work effectively
what would I change? I'd have a proper block of cursor and home-end keys (probably instead of the numeric keypad), and I'd have a proper macbook-style multi-touch trackpad which really does do away with the need for an external mouse
When I was made redundant by the .com vapour-ware company that bought us out, I made sure I had copies of everything I had been working on. When they came back to contract me to do some maintenance, surprise surprise they had no idea where their "master" copies of anything were, they had lost the lot.
Also don't forget that e-reader sales will naturally be much slower than tablets. You *have* to buy a new tablet each year because last years model is hopelessly out of date. An e-reader is already pretty good at what it does and I can't see myself buying another one for maybe 5 years.
by tying its whole future into the doomed windows 8, microsoft would alienate it's users and ensure its own demise. the question is, given the massive incompetence of MS recently, are they even capable of shooting themselves in the foot any more? I suspect they couldn't find their own arse with both hands
Nokia is still a very strong brand, they have been through some hard times recently but they are well respected and people will forgive them if they start to produce decent phones again.
The latest edition of windows phone may be better than previous abominations but it's too late, it's already tainted by association with previous versions, and indeed just by association with the words Microsoft and Windows.
Erase the windows name from phones completely - keep quiet about Microsoft's involvement and just make the whole thing strongly Nokia branded.
scenario 1: a company employing X number of people reinvents itself to meet the changing market and thrives.
scenario 2: a company employing X number of people fails to reinvent itself and goes bust; somewhere else another company employing X number of people forms to meet the new market.
poh-tay-toh, poh-tah-to
1. When doing business with someone, make sure there is some kind of implied or explicit contract;
2. if the terms of the contract are not acceptable to you, don't do business with them;
3. if the other party fails to honour their side of the contract, sue them;
4. if you expected the other party to deliver something that wasn't stated in the contract just to be nice to you, you are an idiot and probably shouldn't ever do business with anyone again.
not exactly rocket science is it??
It's interesting to note that as a dictatorship, MS has unilaterally added a lot of really nice features to C# without getting stuck in a lot of 'democratic' bickering about the best way to do things and without forcing C# developers into decisions as to which unofficial add-ons to work with.
I'm not a fan of MS and their practices by any means but it does illustrate that there is a downside to the "community" approach to standardization.
for people who aren't doing loads of illegal downloads, a 1Mb connection is probably fine.
I work for a small IT company and in our office we have a domestic quality DSL broadband connection (5Mb) shared between 8 people. very rarely is downstream access a problem. We could certainly use more upstream bandwidth but as we're an IT company we're not typical in that respect.
