Posts by monkeyfish 513 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2012
I've got an s5 mini, which isn't exactly mini either. I miss the size of my old HTC with a 3.7 inch screen, but for all the choice you get with Android, it's basically just choosing between one nearly identical phone or another. Flagship 4 incher, yes please. Hopefully Samsung will fire up the copy machines before I want a new one.
Have they done anything to make using it on a widescreen monitor any better? With 2007/2010 you either have the choice the ribbon taking a ton of space from the top, leaving a letterbox for you to work in. Or you minimise the ribbon and then have to click click click to go through it. When maximised it allows you to scroll through it with the mouse wheel, but it doesn't work when minimised. Ideal ally I'd like to put the whole thing on side where I lots of unused space, but minimised and opening each tab when hovered over would work ok.
They will be “universal” apps, running both on Windows Phone and as Store apps on full Windows. Their release “is tied to Windows 10”
Ha, does this mean that I will be able to get the latest Office apps on any iOS/Android device from the last 2-3 years, but if I had winpho I'd have to have one running 10..?
The Japanese lingerie maker is best known for its bra that allows the wearer to become her own source of renewable energy via a detachable solar panel - providing much-needed support while simultaneously supporting the environment.
What? Solar panel to charge phone, ok. But how on earth does the bra come into it? It is heated or something? Does it light up? For what possible reason does it require solar panels..? This issue may require more research at home.
I've played a lot of the Ticket to Ride games (and expansions). I'd say Europe with Europa 1912 expansion is the best for 3+ players. It can be a bit dull with 2, but the Switzerland map is good for 2-3 (and can be had on the back of India now, which it wasn't when I bought it). Africa, Asia, Nordic, and the other misc addons are ok*, but don't add that much over those 2.
* Please note that I don't own all of these, just happen to know a lot of people who have bought various expansions.
I also enjoy the Small World series by the same publishers, even my wife (who is not normally into fantasy games) will play it!
I agree, a non-IT person goes with the default, Bing. Unless they accidentally installed Chrome (which given the way it leaches onto other downloads is pretty easy).
On the other hand my dad (who is vaguely IT literate) actively installs the Yahoo toolbar! It's the first thing he does for whatever reason, and no amount of arguing can dissuade him from it. Not that he ever changes the default IE search from Bing, mind. I guess he stopped being an up-to-date IT literate around 1998?
I wonder what the list would look like if it was based on books purchased rather than given away like a breakfast ceral toy.
The bible would be at the top still (in the UK at least), but none of the others would be even close. Note that the bible is not included in the bestseller lists as it would win every year.
Case in point: Honeywell make lots of products for the high reliabilty sectors (think missiles, medical equipment, space, oil wells etc.). They recently revamped their website. It is now very pretty. Much prettier than before. Unfortunately they have made it nigh on impossible to find useful information on their products. Data-sheets and application notes have been shoved in a pretty-but-useless scrolling thing, so you have to wait for the right one to come round to be able to click on it. It used to be a boring but functional drop-down menu. grr.
Though not quite as bad as renaming Hotmail to Outlook. I mean, at least Outlook Express had a slight naming variant. Now you get people asking questions about Outlook-the-webmail on Outlook-the-office-mail-program forums, and you can't blame them, it has the same frigging name!
For that matter it is now completely confusing to search for problems with the latest (any?) version of Chrome, FF etc. How do you search for an issue that applies to versions 21 through to 38? Ridiculous.
/Rant
They already exist. Last time I had to return something to Amazon I took it to a local newsagent. They charged me a small fee to return it for me, and I got the reassurance that having given it to them, it was 'returned' to Amazon already (i.e. I was not responsible for any shipping loss/damage). Since then the local co-op has started doing it too.
I just switched my in-laws over to IE because it works, and it works well these days. Had originally had them on FF, but has since slowed to a crawl and crashes too often (notably on the Money Saving Expert site, which they use all the time). Thought about Chrome, but the UI changes too often. IE is easy, and since 9 has actually been pretty good.
<troll>
Would Chrome have its market share if they didn't push it every time you used their search engine, or downloaded anything with an 'automatically install this too' dialogue? Or would Safari have any significance without being bundled on macs and iOS? Monopoly positions are useful, see.
</troll>
More likely the fact that we're not dying soon enough. Remember, when the final salary pension scheme was invented, and the retirement age set at 65, the average life expectancy in men was about 68. In most counties in the world you have to work to eat, so the retirement age is never. Basically, expect to retire not long before you're dead.
The counter argument to this is that it is much more difficult and expensive to build a machine to churn out something new than it is to get a person to build something new. Since the design of our tat has to change constantly in order that we buy the new tat instead of keeping the old tat, it still cheaper to get humans to do it. Even if you say that 3D printing will spit it all out, someone is still going to need to assemble all the pieces together, and that someone will be in the poorest/cheapest place possible.
But the failure isn't just bad news for the company itself. It's much, much worse for those researchers and scientists who had cargo aboard the rocket. Some of these experiments have taken years to devise, obtain funding for, get accepted for the mission, and then package for orbital transfer. All that effort is now destroyed.
Given the likelihood of rocket failure, you'd be pretty dumb not to build at least one backup of your equipment, surely?
I think the issue of incumbents vs newcomers in the mobile market is largely the same as lots of other electronics industries. For about 100 years the electronics industry had been about hardware. Make your hardware better, and your product is better. All the incumbents were/are hardware companies. But the last 10 years has been all about software, and the hardware only has to be good enough to run it. So it's no wonder that hardware companies are struggling and software companies have prospered. Sure, the hardware has to work, but beyond that it's mostly irrelevant, and difficult to differentiate on. It's no good bleating that Nokia had better hardware than Apple, when Apple killed them with software.
Don't forget that the government itself is forced into short-term thinking because if they actually do something with long-term benefits, the other lot will likely reap the reward. I actually thought the idea of a coalition would solve that to some extent, but sadly not. Of course, what other option is there? A dictatorship? A 15 year gap between elections?
So then why did the iphone, with it's glued in battery and no SD card, outsell the competition that made bulkier devices with those things? Why did the iphone 4, with it's glass back and don't-hold-me-wrong case sell better than the iphone 3? If people wanted the old design, they would have bought the old design. If and when Apple have a vista/8 moment, they will know about it when their sales drop off a cliff.
The modern calc (or a note taking app) could actually be useful if they let it dock to the side, and use the width afforded by wide-screen monitors. Little details like that would make for nice features in a tablet too. It's annoying to have to constantly switch apps just to use something simple like a calculator. I'm aware that Samsung allow this on their tablets, but if baked into win10 it would almost be a USP.
I always thought I would but one some day, they were way too expensive when I built my win7 machine 5 years ago. Probably not looking to spend as much as £100 though. I assume the ~£30 ones are still going to be miles faster than a HDD for booting etc. Files can be on the HDD, so only need space for the OS and well used programs. Any recommendations (for or against) any particular make?
As another has already pointed out above, you could indeed have multiple (up to 4) workspaces with XP. You just downloaded the relevant XP power toy. I used it once, before deciding that my 384MB of RAM limited laptop (that was the maximum upgrade!) could barely handle one desktop. I miss the XP power toys, the calculator was the best, and was disappointed to find they had not been carried over to 7.
And, frankly, all of you are thinking too small anyway. Maybe I want myself to be delivered to a destination as the crow flies (for some this may cut a great deal of congestion/fuel usage). I mean, how else am I going to get the flying car I was promised in the future? I'm not going to pass a pilots licence any time soon.
I wholeheartedly agree! I was about to post a new and much larger version of the Moto G smartphone *sigh*, yet another gigantic phone that I don't want to put in my pocket.
If I want a bigger screen, I'll use a tablet. If I want a even bigger screen, I'll use a desktop computer. If I want something portable, I'd like it to be small (think 8310).
What I actually want is a small phone with a decent enough camera, a reasonably good audio output, an SD card or space for ~20GB of music, and a screen just big enough to read a few emails when necessary. Everything else turns out to be fluff. If there were an otherwise dumb phone with these feature I'd happily snap it up.
In the end we gave up and got them an ipad mini. At least support calls are few and far between, and they can't break it with some dodgy app. Not that they ever downloaded any apps. Turns out facetime and a browser is about all that was required. I put all the apps they were never going to use in a single folder, and left them with one page with around 6 apps on it. Job done. Expensive, obviously, but job done.
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