Posts by Andrew_b65 69 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Sep 2011
You have to admit that the current UK government does have a track record of announcing policies before thinking them through, then quietly shelving them a few months later.
They seem to treat their policy announcements more like 'sounding boards'. See what the public / press response is, get a few ideas of how implementation might work, then revise / retract accordingly.
Maintaining ubiquity requires being everywhere all of the time. Google appears to be making itself increasingly less relevant in the desktop world. They already killed iGoogle homepage this month. They're making it easier and easier to live a Google-free life with each amputation.
Whilst XP and IE9 may not suit some admin-orientated readers from a security point of view, plenty of average Joe consumers are still happily running much older versions.
VAT is paid by consumers, not businesses. It's a sales tax.
These large multinationals need to be taxed on the profits they make instead of being permitted to hive them off into tax havens with fake accounting practices. They are literally siphoning money out of our economies with impunity. To make it worse, our UK government further aids their profitability by topping up low wages with tax credits and housing benefits. I advocate at least sending large corporations invoices for tax credits paid to their employees simply in order to make ends meet. Either that, or put the minimum wage up to £15-20 per hour or something.
Most businesses expect to make too much profit. We're in a recession, but they continue to make high margins by raising prices and freezing wages. In their actions, they prolong the recession and compound the misery for anyone earning a living.
and...
"in his strategy, Nokia would have to get much smaller before it got bigger."
Nokia didn't let go of their brand for smartphone manufacturing after the deal goes through in early 2014 and they will only be contractually restricted from manufacturing smartphones until 2015.
A few months from now, Nokia won't be able to make any profit building Lumias in the rapidly expanding low cost smartphone market (which is where the only growth is likely to come from for a fledgling OS) due to impending OS licence fees with Microsoft.
It could turn out that Nokia are the winners in this buyout deal, and we see new smartphones from them in just a few years time. Jolla are basically ex-Nokians backed with Nokia money, beavering away at Meego and new hardware. Plan B looks to be alive and kicking.
The question is, will anybody (other than geeks) be interested in a new smartphone from Nokia with an unknown operating system and no apps in two years' time, even if it can 'sort of' run Android apps?
Nokia is a good brand in the mobile arena...
...but only in the rest of the world
It means virtually nothing in the US, which is the only market which seems to matter to Ballmer & Elop. MS could quite conceivably drop the Nokia name on phones quite quickly. This would be a very bad move for the 'rest of the world' market.
The cost of Apple devices usually has no direct link to the cost of parts and manufacturing, so why would a 'plastic' shell make a new phone model any better value? What we call a cheap phone could be as much as £300 sim-free in the Apple universe.
Apple would likely hobble a lower cost phone in some way so value in the full-fat models can be maintained.
@ downvoters
I posted with my username not AC. It's humour, you eejits. I can see the queues forming outside the stores already.
I knock about with plenty of wealthy types that fill up on any new Apple gear without even considering what they'll be doing with it, or if they even need it. The previous years' models are languishing in the kids toyboxes. They buy a new car every year and throw out more food every week than you eat in a month. Despite peak Apple claims, there is a massive army of buyers out there willing and able to jump on anything they put out.
So, in the 1970's when we Britons were being chastised for generating acid rain from our industries and destroying all the forests in Scandinavia, we were actually helping hold back global warming.
Who new? We needn't have turned our economy to the financial services sector and consequentially allowed it to have an inadequate manufacturing base to cope with the current depression after all. Oh well.
I recall going through one of their tests, which was supposed to be measuring some level of education/intelligence or something, but quite a few of the multiple choice questions contained insufficient data to determine a correct answer with 100% certainty and the only appropriate response should have been 'Don't know'. Were they actually asking the subject to spot that these questions were nonsense, or were they just crap questions?
This isn't an actual question, just the kind of stuff they were asking:
It rained for one hour on Monday, two hours on Tuesday and four hours on Wednesday. How many hours will it rain on Thursday?
a. 5
b. 6
c. 8
d. Don't know
1500 is a pretty low sample. How many were 'in contract' and how long before their phone was 'due for renewal' Amerkin style? These US consumers live in an entirely different world compared to the EU when it comes to mobile phones and contracts.
If their phone isn't due for renewal any time soon, they may not even be thinking about their options yet.
In all, this would seem to be a positive for Nokia and Blackberry because there appear to be a lot of floating voters. All you need do is bribe the carriers more than Apple/Samsung and you get sales come renewal.
The Reg posted a story a few years back highlighting research that found harder to read serif fonts resulted in better memory consolidation than san serif fonts. It concluded that if the brain was having to 'work harder' to decode the text, then it was better able to comprehend and remember the content.
Extrapolating from this research, it's reasonable to consider that students witnessing their old-skool lecturer's handwritten scrawlings gradually appear on the board are going to have to make an effort to read it and quite possibly be using their brain to anticipate what is being written. Both of these activities are likely to improve comprehension and recall.
Anything which gets these lazy powerpoint lecturers actually doing some work once in a while has to be a good thing. Lead by example.
I offered my kids the low cost Win8 upgrade licence that came with my puny netbook which I bought last year and they turned it down because of the 'too different UI'. One of them uses a Nokia Lumia WinPhone. They like new things, usually.
They discovered the Windows key +D combination last week and are now kicking themselves.
Perhaps Microsoft DO need to point out that Windows 7 is still there, kinda. I think this will be putting a lot of people off. Average Joe Public doesn't think about walled gardens. The kids thought the Metro Start was 'too simple' and wouldn't offer them the flexibility of the familiar near twenty year old desktop experience.
I bet the software engineers envisaged the Win8 Start screen as an introductory bridge to the Metro UI, which was clearly designed for touchscreen devices, so that they could have the same look and feel across phones, tablets and PCs. The marketing people probably just decided to go all in for Metro and neglected to point out that Windows is still there for proper computers and real working environments.
HTC will struggle to sell their flagship phones while they continue to fit potatoes instead of camera modules.
HTC's marketing department can claim what they like about their cameras, but year after year, the back to back tests show time and time again their imaging capability is utter shite.
On the positive side, at least the build quality on this new model might actually see out a two year contract for once.
Skimming through the version history for iOS, it would appear that the support/update cycle for any giver version, i.e. ios3, ios4, ios5, etc. is a little over one year with Apple too. If you bought an iPhone 4 on day of issue, Apple expected you to upgrade the OS to the next version as it was released and didn't continue to support the originally installed version beyond 13 months if you didn't bother to upgrade to iOS 5.
iOS 4, released 21/06/2010, end-of-lifed as iOS 4.3.5 25/07/2011
iOS 5, released 12/10/2011, end-of-lifed as iOS 5.1.1 25/05/2012
iOS 6, released 19/09/2012, probably not long to go now before final update released either
If iPhone users are getting on okay with 'roughly' annual major version upgrades, why is it not going to be okay for WP users? I think this WP update cycle story has spread around the 'net without due consideration and I expect to be reading an official statement from MS on this in the next few days.
If MS don't clear this mess up with a statement, they're idiots and deserve to have consumers thinking that their partners are selling phones with an unsupported, obsolete OS, like the stories try to implicate.
Hey Barclays, how about you actually try to make some money through adding value to products and services instead of just swindling it from everyone else? You might only be taking a penny here, a penny there, multiplied by ten trillion, but the money you 'make' doesn't come from nowhere.
Every casino banking market manipulation gain is a loss on a balance sheet somewhere else. False profit from ill-gotten gains. The only loser is everybody except you.
The TPS is able to act only on unsolicited LIVE 1to1 calls. Pre-recorded messages are not covered by the scope of the TPS which is why it is completely crap and useless. Have you noticed how most of these unsolicited calls start with a recorded announcement with a list of options to speak to an operator?
The TPS is perfectly fine with this activity. Their remit needs to be changed to encompass recorded messages.
Me too. Retired my first gen MSI Wind last August for an end of line Acer Aspire One 753 @£240. A few more pixels on the display, and the slightly better gpu can now handle HD video with HDMI out to a TV if I need it. Figured I had better get it before netbooks ceased to exist. Not Win8 compatible, but who cares? Best of all, it's still too puny to run Minecraft so the kids won't touch it.
Maybe Apple won't buy their own shares back because they think they are a risky purchase? Didn't they announce that they intend instead to spend a fair wedge of their cash reserves on trying to develop something 'new'? Perhaps portrait TV sets for iPhone-captured video?
Personally, yeah, I think the Apple bubble looks like it's finally ready to burst, or at least is getting like an old saggy balloon with all the helium leaking out. Apple is beyond boring now. They've benefited from being 'in' for long enough. Hopefully they'll start to return to a market share more representative of their actual usefulness as a manufacturer of technology products for users who don't like to think too hard and can take them into a shop on the high street for 'repairs' when they unwittingly f**k them up.
...that fails to keep an eye on his enemy.
Asked for his thoughts on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, the search supremo replied: “I have not used it.”
The arrogance of this man. Perhaps in a few years' time: 'All of your Googlephones are belong to us' while his back is turned, ignoring the feeble and irrelevant competition. Seismic shifts have happened before, Yahoo!, Apple.
These tax-dodging multinationals could at least be sent a bill for tax credits paid out by the government to their underpaid workers. Why should the UK government subsidize their wage bills so they can make bigger profits to be hived off into an off-shore tax avoidance operation? Low pay means less tax & NI revenue for HMRC and more tax credits payouts. It increases our budget deficit.
Corporation tax should be paid to each country in which these companies operate according to the ratio in which revenues are generated. The current regime allows these multinationals to leach money out of economies which are active, spending, and generating revenues, causing a distorted picture of the balance of trade. There is no upside to our economy in allowing the current system to continue. Countries which balance their books by offering tax-dodging facilities should be held to account.
I will not be rushing to trade in my iPhone - no shit, Sherlock.
A.
"Yet as a camera, the complete lack of grip and the protruding lens so close to the left edge makes handling as uncomfortable and unsafe as any other phone. On the plus side, you can fire off the camera from a large button on the edge. In fact, once you turn the phone horizontally to use it as a camera, it is a pleasant surprise to find that commands such as the shutter release and the zoom lever are exactly where you expect them to find them on a compact camera."
Despite being a professional snapper, this chick instinctively holds a phone in portrait when taking a photo like all those other gormless iphoners.
I'm willing to bet my full cooked English breakfast that Apple have a different team working on litigation than the one that works on spotting new technology and ideas coming into vogue so they can be 'invented' as magical new things for their followers to behold.
I can't be sure which team is the larger and best funded, however.
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