
"The long one, that password that you place…is this the password? "
"Yes, sir."
"What a drag! It has symbols and things."
We've all been there, every one of us.
304 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2007
Aside from lengthening the product cycle, I can see two engineering fixes:
1) Make phones exciting again. Make week long battery. Make as huge gains as (say) between the 3 and 4 and make world class industrial design.
however, that sounds quite hard so:
2) Make obsolecence great again!
If my 3 year phone works so well I can't see the point of an upgrade, well, they can change that quite easily.
Hope they don't go for step 2. would be a lot easier though, no?
Big difference between mortgage brokers and travel agents, though.
People often book flghts / hotels now, so are confident in doing so. Plus, if you screw up, you've screwed up 2 weeks maximum.
When it comes to things with huge financial risk, and which are not done frequently, like mortgages, people are happy to pay 200 quid for peace of mind. Same as why I think estate agents still exist. What do they do? Take worse photos than you or i, with their iphone, apply no artistc thought to them, stick a listing on rightmove and get someone else to show you around? Yet I will probably use them if I ever move again, because, wankers that they are, I would rather use their expertise than mine
I used to love Apple, Macs, specifically. Having to work with terrible Dells, with tiny trackpads, crummy software loaded on XP, cheap build quality and just an overall air of 'eh, this will do', it was a pleasure using a Mac instead. The ascthetic of the mac pleased me every time I noticed it.
Not so much nowadays. I am totally indifferent to them. I am typing this on a MacBook pro, but only because it is closer to hand than my thinkpad. The build quality is excellent, and I don't care about the price anyway, as work pays for them, but my thinkpad is also excellent, and while the touchpad isn't as good, the keyboard is better
I keep watching youtube videos about how you can use the iPad pro as your main daily driver. But they all focus on editing video. What about software development? I would love to run Apache / Sublime etc on an iPad. I can't see what Apple is doing which will impress developers. Maybe we don't matter anymore?
I disagree.
My wife uses Internet explorer. If that wasn't bad enough, to open gmail, she types in google.com, then searches for 'gmail'. Just typing that out infurirates me, but what can you do? Anyway, the point is she is most definitely not an IT user, does not care about tech news etc. But she doesn't use FB anymore because of 'this privacy stuff c4 news keep going on aboout'
I know, of course, this is anecdotal evidence. But nonetheless I do think it is having a huge effect. A final straw when you think it's full of ads and sponsored content anyway.
I think the bigger problem is neither of my teenage kids have any intention whatsoever of using it; it's for old people.
the sooner fb dies, the better. An absolute stain on humanity. Happy Christmas Mark.
why do i like xmas jumpers so much?
why do i want that jumper in particcular?
I'd love to be all hip and cool and sneer at it but I think it is great.
what is wrong with me?
last year we had our xmas meall in a really facy restaurant and I rocked up in this bad boy
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71vZ0HO9iLL._UX679_.jpg
was a bit awkward.
I remember the days I used to buy new handsets all the time, back in the day. When new cameras and features came out. Nowadays, I find the efforts to persuade me to upgrade laughable. 'We have 4 new pixels', 'We have a new chip which makes browsing 2% faster'. Big deal. Hard luck carphone warehouse.
You must have hated the smoking ban!. Saying that you don't have to be that subtle these days: I was in a conference room once where the owner of the company came in, left her mobile and notepad on the table and left. Unfortunately, she had unlocked it so we could she she had called in from her office line and we were on speaker. my collegue suddenly and uncharacteristically talked in excrutiating detail about his sex life. Completely coincidentally, the owner came in about a minute later, pretended she'd 'forgotten her mobile', and left, not looking at my colleague once.
I still think WIndows Phone had hte best UI. I was so bemused something so beautiful and functional came from microsoft. then I bought a 1020, and with every update something was removed. Bemused I was no more, and so I bought an iphone
Live tiles still haven't been copied properly. Or people, where I can see a list of my friends and get updtes from their twitter and facebook without having to use facebook's awful app. of course, MS killed that, too
I do remember that, yes. And I still think it is a good thing.
Anything which lowers the barriers to non technical people creating content on the web is good. And, in my opinion, 1000 functional websites with awful code is better than 1 website, say, facebook, with 1000 beautfilly efficiently coded pages.
I saw an advert for the Nokia watch on the tube the other day, and I was surprised at how sad I still felt about the decline of Nokia. The reporting of the decline and fall is perhaps El Reg's greatest legacy; I find it fascinating to read about and the details you have uncovered are still interesting.
Thanks to the authors for the PDF. A great article.
I have got 2 ace jobs because of it. Not sure why people are so vehemently against it tbh. Its just like any other social media tool, there are costs and benefits and if you think the benefits aren't worth it, don't register. I have noticed that people who post 00s of times on this forum seem to hate any form of social media at all
Facebook have terrabytes of useless data: people checking in to restaurants or liking posts to win prices. MS have something much more valuable. I do worry about what they will be able to do with the world's CVs, but for me, the benefits outweigh this
A colleague was at a IA conference at NASA when some NASA bod stood up and caused some consternation by saying if they were told to fly to the moon tomorrow, they'd have to start from scratch because every appollo mission used different procedures and nothing was written down, it was all in the head of retired engineers*. The thing is, this is a known, old problem, and we have basically infinite storage and matrure solutions. It shouldn't be such a big problem.
*Mainly cos they didn't actually go in the first place .
Some fantastic books
Author of some of the best while simultaneously also some of the worst recent Scottish books. The crow road, Complicity and the wasp factory were amazing. I remember reading the wasp factory, it was like being part of this secret gang who liked this 'pretty fucked up little book' while a lot of the media railed against it. I loved the way he put all the negative reviews into the later editions.