Posts by Simon_Sharwood_Reg_APAC_Editor 43 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2012
Sure. I personally find Android's mix of Apps and Widgets, combined with customisations from manufacturers, means I need to spend a good 15 minutes customising Android handsets so the interface is to my liking. And my liking is for a very consistent and clean experience.
That's NOT me saying everything should behave like iOS. Rather it's a statement that I feel Android is a little untidy and inconsistent.
Dear Mangrove,
I chose to discount overseas students in order to test Dalton's assertions under the most favorable possible circumstances (for Dalton).
But I agree - anecdotally plenty of overseas students stay on, or return.
On the matter of "there are X students, that proves our teaching is awesome", I wasn't saying our teaching is awesome. But it is good enough to attract 18,000 people to spend at least a year here and pay tuition of a few tens thousands a year. If we assume 18,000 students each pay $20k a year, IT education is a $360m a year industry. Which is a rather nice sum.
S.
Andy, I wasn't trying to suggest that Microsoft is being evil or devious or even merely naughty.
It just seemed odd to me that with free desktop virtualisation software out there for the taking, it's chosen a paid package for this promotion. Sure it makes a better incentive. But it also means Microsoft doesn't nourish any serious competitor, given Parallels is such a small outfit in the virtualisation world and hardly a threat to anything Microsoft does.
Simon
PointCast rocked. In about 1997 I worked for a small business where we each had dialup internet. It was frowned upon to stay online all day, as doing so was expensive. PointCast made it possible to suck down a decent lot of content and access it without needing to be online.
I think it's also worth mentioning in the context of FlipBoard, a product that surely owes some inspiration to PointCast.
Studley, you do indeed seem to have coined TIFKAM 9 days before I used it in this yarn http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/23/classic_shell_gives_windows_8_a_start_button/
You'll have to take my word on this, but this was a Newton/Leibniz simultaneous co-invention-without-prior-Knowledge thing, but I am happy to cede the honours.
Don't laugh.
I recently bought an e-book here in Australia. It's sequel is not sold as an e-book in Australia. The third in the series is.
I bought the second in the USA, ON A PLANE using free Wifi access to Amazon.
So yes, it seems some perfectly normal files aren't suitable for Australian use, thanks to the moronic nature of territorial copyright.
It's even worse in NZ, I understand, as it is such a small market publishers can't be arsed prepping stuff to e-publish there.
Alex,
we got the post-launch launch video up as soon as we could find and process it. FWIW the NASA embed code didn't play nicely with our CMS, so the few minutes it took to get it into YouTube (NASA offered a download link) added to the amount of time required to get you the best possible content after the launch.
My brother used to put me down as a geek by mentioning the Stainless Steel Rat. Little did he know Slippery Jim would lead me to this forum, today, among this fine company, we band of brothers ...
I'll be tucking into a porcuswine burger today in memory of Harry.
John Scalzi may be his spiritual descendant as a writer, IMHO, for those in need of a similar read.
Bad Taste is indeed magnificent. I liked the brains best. The sheep was pretty funny.
His next project, IIRC, was a Muppets parody called "Meet the Feebles." The student 'paper I worked on at the time interviewed him and asked if he would like to work with puppets again. His answer was yes he would, but puppets have said they won't work HIM again.
Here all week ....
REAMDE is a good READ. But it is hardly SciFi - all the tech in it is modern, almost nothing is imagined.
I've read it twice, but then I am a bit of a Stephenson fanboi.
As for Dickens, Hugo, etc, Stephenson did have a waft at that model of writing in The Mongoliad, which was cracking fun. I do hope foreworldsaga.com eventually gets fleshed out ...
Thanks for pointing out my error, MadMalc. It was an editing mistake. I've made the changes to the text.
And FWIW IBM says density was 100 bits per linear inch http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_1415bx26.html. A 1200 foot tape therefore had 1,440,000 bits, or about 175k by my reckoning.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. I'm working hard on my proofing - we work without a net here in the APAC eerie. For those of you who wanted more detail , I'm sorry if the story is a little light-on. The story had to be vetted and the deep technical details weren't available for predictable reasons, but I felt the story worth a go anyway.
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