
Why even have windows?
They have to have an OS, did you think they were going to put Linux in there? :)
174 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2012
I use an airfryer, cooks the sausage meat and breadcrumbs beautifully without getting it all greasy.
Much safer (and less smelly) than deep fat frying.
Oh, and organic Black pudding from a Black country farm, (much better than the northern efforts I've tried), mixed half and half with organic sausages from the same source.
Yes, Live tiles, Active desktop, 3D films, Video phones, all "cool features" that offer little except additional visual noise and rapidly become irritating.
I haven't used Microsoft software at home since 2008.
At work, I support Win, Lin and Mac.
Try using over a hundred applications with stupid manufacturer based names.
Search just doesn't work, because lots of them start with the same 8 or 9 characters, and TIFKAM was just a mess.
A nice hierarchical menu which I can customise is just easier.
I expect that the next thing will be Windows watches with step counters in them.
They are probably the same people who complained that an iPad was not a PC, and that Tablets wouldn't catch on.
There was a lot of iHate around on PC forums when the iPad launched.
What they didn't get then, and won't get now, is that like tablets, Chromebooks are are not popular just because they are cheap, but because they aren't PCs.
I use my tablet more for leisure than my Home PC, for those who can't cope with a touch interface, a Chromebook is way better than a PC for web, email, simple games and social networking.
Microsoft have always strived to be a one OS company, and charged more for anything over basic.
Trouble is that the code base still does not scale well, and MS are still missing the point(s)
Chromebooks aren't just selling because they are cheap, it's because they are very good at what they do.
ARM Tablets aren't just selling because they have touch, it's because they very good at what they do.
Android and iOS phones aren't just selling because they are shiny, it's because they are very good at what they do.
Windows is a multi-purpose OS, not particularly good at any one thing, and the archaic and convoluted licensing deals are what will kill it.
Voice control is useless in a noisy environment, like your average office.
Drawing would be pretty useless without a large digitiser and hand editing a CAD drawing freehand is not a good idea. Writing legibly is harder work than typing.
What else? Oh.yes gesture.
So instead of sitting at a desk we should just sit and wave at our PCs.
There is a reason that voice, gesture and other analogue inputs are not really suitable for work in a business environment.
They are by nature imprecise.
Bought an import a while back.
Didn't with my XperiaZ, or my ground floor AP.
When I got it working with my Android tablet, the only thing that worked properly was Youtube.
Netflix and Plex are of no interest to me, and iPlayer wasn't available at the time.
Tab casting didn't work from Chrome on mobile either.
Sent it back.
Streaming is still in its infancy, and it shows.
I dropped Netflix after the free month because the content was so poor (unless you like American TV, which I don't) I only actually watched 2 films in that month, and the second was so bad I turned it off halfway.
Lovefilm was better, but most of the stuff I wanted wasn't available to stream , and can't be bothered waiting for a disk.
These days I use Blinkbox because I don't have to shell out a monthly sub, when there is so little worth streaming.
Cool. so I just type kmnet on my laptop and I get 12 apps, none of which looks any different from the others, because it doesn't show the whole n.....
I have well over a hundred specialist apps for dealing with equipment from several different manufacturers, none of whom use a sane naming convention, most of the beginning of the name being some made up corporate label.
Maybe they should make the search field black with green lettering......then we can type an entire string just to launch what used to take 3 mouse clicks (if, of course, we can actually remember exactly how to spell it) like "stupidlylongmeaninglessname.exe"
I also want multiple windows open at once, and default settings that are consistent.
It may be OK for some, but to be honest I just don't like it, and I don't like it because I have no choice but to spend half a day configuring the desktop, and then show someone else.....
People are complaining because it is a huge waste of time, ugly, unwanted, unnecessary, and achieves nothing.
I actually dislike Mint, but I think that may be because it is a lot like WindowsXP, so XP refugees should feel at home with it.
I prefer Unity, but I use Lubuntu on older kit, mainly with Intel Gfx, that can't support Unity.
Apparently the Ubuntu installer now expects PAE support in the CPU, whereas Lubuntu doesn't.
Not what I meant, but of course you knew that.
If people are allowed to post lies about others with no comeback, no proof required, and no checking, that is not free speech, it is an open invitation to defamation, and possibly blackmail.
Likewise good reviews should be subject to checking or traceability, simply to prevent shills.
I never pay much attention to these sites, but some people do.
If you are going to say something bad about a person or a company, there should be no right of anonymity.
Free speech does not mean "tell lies about anyone you like with no comeback".
Tripadvisor is another scam website.
Hotels have been blacklisted for trivial reasons, and with no real evidence, (apparently often after they choose not to advertise),
These review sites are a scam, and a waste of time.
I block and ignore ads where I can as well.
In fact if an ad is particularly irritating, I make a mental note never to even think about buying that product.
A bit like Spam, I think "Really? despite me installing spam filters in my firewall, setting junk filters in my mail program, you manage to get past them and expect me to even hesitate before hitting delete?"
Advertising does work with some people, but not me.
I do have a TV, but I never watch anything in real time, I always record it so that I can skip the ads.
(I used to use MythTV's Auto ad skip, but the channels do everything they can to block that, so I just use the skip forward button).
We went to France in May, went over on the Plymouth-Roscoff overnight ferry, free wifi, the apartment had a wifi router, 10meg broadband...Heck even the Boulangerie's cafe and the Hypermarche had free wifi.
And it's useful, we could check out local restaurant menus, reviews, prices, through L'internaute or their own websites, Google maps and street view to check out routes, even tracked down the Vineyard where our favourite Grolleau Gris came from and bought a few cases.
Windows embedded has been haemorrhaging market share for some time.
WinCe was the last real version with market share, XPe never really took off.
In the MFD market as an example, there are to my knowledge, only two companies still using Windows embedded, and their products suck (and they are based on XP)
Toshiba, Ricoh, KonicaMinolta, Kyocera, Samsung, Panasonic, all use a flavour of Unix, Linux, NetBSD, or their own Unix-like RTOS.
Or telephone systems, Windows is almost non-existent again.
Entertainment devices? Bluray players, Video cameras, NAS boxes, streaming devices, mainly run BSD or Linux, although some are now starting to run Android.
Oh, and of course, mobile phones.........
The whole point is that this will be cutting edge hardware, with cutting edge software, in a limited edition release.
Canonical expect to break even at best, manufacturing costs are going to be high for a short run product, Development costs will likewise be high, and the product will have a lot of experimental features.
The mobile phone companies won't finance something like this because the bean counters will nay say the risk.
Yes, the Chipads are quite poor in general, although things have changed a lot in the last couple of years, heck in the last couple of months....
I have a Chinese GoogleTV stick that has turned my TV into a smart TV for £50...
At work I use a laptop in the office and a tablet in the field (I can fit all the manuals, firmware and drivers for our devices and software on a 32Gb MicroSD card). At a pinch, I can even read manuals on my phone (XperiaZ)
I take the laptop, but it has mostly stayed in the car boot for the last 3months or so.
At home I use a tablet, as does my wife.
I have actually written a couple of articles on a Samsung 10" tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
The consumer market is going to tablets, phones and smart TVs etc.
The business market is following for some users, the rest are clinging to the remaining windows7 desktop PCs and their trusty notebooks (paper type).
Chromebooks are doing surprisingly well, win8 tries to push the cloud at every opportunity.
MS isn't dead yet, but the writing is on the wall.
I deal on a daily basis with many levels of IT, from SOHO to Education to Local government to Enterprise.
We sell and support MFDs and associated software, installing them on customer's networks.
There are wild variations in capability and attitude.
What is fairly evident is that usually, the bigger they get, the less flexible they get, to the point where they become an obstruction to the smooth functioning of the organisation.
Outsourced IT can be even worse, sometimes to the point where they refuse to accept direct communication of any sort with us, insisting it all has to go through the customer, with large additional charges for even minor work.
I have bought my wife gadgets that she likes.
A digital photo frame, later replaced by a wall mounted PC in the kitchen, which is used for recipes , music, and as a digital photo frame.
A Netbook, recently replaced by a Nexus7.
I have also bought her gadgets that did not go down as well..
Best present I ever bought her was a holiday to Nantes, which included a trip on the Sultan's Elephant at the Machines de l'ile. (mega gadgetry!)
She in turn has treated me to a food mixer, and more recently, a baking stone, a baker's peel and a grignette amongst other farinaceous gadgetry....
In the past I have had expensive Olive oil and a large container of Saffron...
But mostly, these days we just buy ourselves what we want, it's easier.
Businesses I visit regularly are running XP, 7, Mac, and Linux, roughly in that order, XP is declining, the others are rising. (not to mention tablets, they seem to be rising as well, but they certainly aren't running Windows)
Server 2012 is actually more common than windows8.
The other side is that Windows as an OS is now overpriced, hence the rise of Chromebooks.
BSD is one of the most widely used OSes for embedded devices.
Ricoh MFDs for example, have been using NetBSD for the last 10 years or so. As do Sharp MFDs more recently..
Some manufacturers run Linux, notably Toshiba MFDs, Sony use Linux for some of their Blu-ray players and Video cameras,
There actually a handful (mainly wide format or separate RIP units) that run XP embedded.
The only ones I've seen are pretty dire to support.
Problem is that the start screen replaces the start menu.
It's just a kludgy shortcut to making a new UI
The substitute start menus I have seen disable TIFKAM.
So it looks like bringing the menu back back means that TIFKAM won't work unless they actually code it separately.
(I could be wrong, not seen all of them)
As mentioned above, word on the street is that Win8 is a pile of doodoo, and Joe public will be hard to convince otherwise.
Chromebooks are apparently selling well, however.
I have a desktop, a laptop a netbook and a tablet.(and an Android phone). I don't own a TV.
These days I only use the laptop for work, and the tablet at home.
Although screen mirroring may be useful, I doubt that using a huge screen with a phone will be a useful way to work.
Not everyone wants a screen in every room.
I doubt that the tablet will go the way of the netbook, but it may evolve.
What nobody has mentioned here is that less and less people need a PC at all.
It isn't just Tablets eating the PC's Lunch, it's smart devices, TVs, Bluray players, even Android media streamers.
I can web surf, email, FB(if I actually wanted to) or watch HD video on an Android TV stick, dual core A9 processor, Mali GPU, 1GB of ram and about the same size as a disposable cigarette lighter.
Or I can do so on my Bluray player, or my Tablet, or my TV, or if I want to wait for it to boot up and watch the lights flicker from the power draw, on my PC.
Recently been experimenting with Android as a desktop.
Don't laugh, but it works better than TIFKAM.
Running on a 1.7Ghz dual core arm processor with 1gb memory, 40gb storage (expandable) HDMI> 1080p monitor, powered from the usb port on a TV. Watching iPlayer now, comes with an office suite.
Cost me less than £50